Nick Holdstock

Ladies and gentleman, the Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck, 1434, in the National Gallery, London. It will be too small on your screen; you will need to click on it to see the carvings on the bedposts. The faces had me pretty much hooked, but then I looked in the mirror behind them, and it was like in a film when suddenly the focus of the image deepens and there is too much horizon. And then there is the green of her dress, its tumbled folds, the hat that seems about to swallow his head.

Please note the oranges.

Please enjoy.

David Lynch promoting Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.

Considerably more fun than this, where Letterman has clearly not watched Twin Peaks:

A fairly disapproving comment on postmodernism (from Arthur Kroker’s essay in The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics New York, St Martin’s Press, 1986).

We don’t have to wonder; we know just for the “fun of it.” We write just for the fun of it, just as we think, make love, parody and praise… we are having a nice day, maybe a thousand nice days. The postmodern scene is a panic site, just for the fun of it. And beneath the forgetting, there is only the scribbling of another [Georges] Bataille, another vomitting of flavourless blood, another heterogenity of excess to mark the upturned orb of the pineal eye. The solar anus is parodic of postmodernism, but again, just for the fun of it.

I was pretty much with him, until the ‘flavourless blood’. I think it is not entirely irrelevant to mention that Kroker was also one of the editors of the volume in which this appeared.

I was hoping Kroker had coined the term ‘solar anus’ but Bataille beat him to it. Here, in closing, is the sun itself.

From Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism, pub. 1904, and still pretty much on the money.

The care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the saint “like a light cloak, which canbe thrown aside at any moment”. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage… No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilisation never before achieved.”

David Means has a new collection out. It is called The Spot. It is probably awesome. I came across his previous collection, The Secret Goldfish (a Salinger reference) whilst in a bookstore in Ireland (Rep. of) and decided to check out ‘A visit from Jesus’. It is the only time I have ever stood and read an entire short story in a bookstore, and also the only time my parasympathetic nervous system reacted so strongly to a bunch of marks on a page that I staggered so much I had to grab hold of the shelf to keep balance.

Here’s a recent story of his from  The New Yorker.

Trailer for the new Michel Gondry movie, a personal look at the life of Gondry family matriarch, his aunt Suzette Gondry, and her relationship with her son, Jean—Yves. Michel examines Suzette’s years as a schoolteacher and her life in rural France.

Heaven knows when it will be out in the UK, but on the evidence of this it looks worth seeing- assuming you have any interest in the lives of actual people who are not vampires or tycoons with superpowers.

I haven’t been able to watch TV news in years, mostly due to the sterling efforts of Mr Chris Morris on programs such as The Day Today and Brass Eye.

But we all need booster shots, and here is one courtesy of Mr Charlie Brooker.

From left: Erik Ross, Lillian Ross, Matthew Salinger, J. D. Salinger, and Peggy Salinger, in Central Park.

The first rash of obituaries for J.D. Salinger seemed to add little to what we had known for years. That he had removed himself from the world (at least, the literary one) for decades, only emerging to defend his privacy, albeit sometimes at the cost of it. That he had been writing…  something during this time, but what this was, and whether we might dare to hope to see it, was no more certain than it had been for the last four decades.

However, now that the news cycle has moved on slightly (and perhaps also now that it is clear that this is not a hoax), people who had known Salinger are starting to come forward. Some of these are fairly minor, as one might expect from people who only had glancing, professional contact with Salinger (such as  Tim Bates, who corresponded with Salinger whilst working at Penguin, in the far distant days before he was my agent for a brief time. About this, let it merely be said that, like Salinger, I too remember him in my nightly prayers) whilst others are from people with a deeper connection, such as Lilian Ross of the New Yorker, who talks of his love for Emerson’s dictum that

“A man must have aunts and cousins, must buy carrots and turnips, must have barn and woodshed, must go to market and to the blacksmith’s shop, must saunter and sleep and be inferior and silly.” Writers, he thought, had trouble abiding by that, and he referred to Flaubert and Kafka as “two other born non-buyers of carrots and turnips.”

Ross’ piece is the first one to make me recall what I prize most in Salinger- not the talk of phonies and fakes, but the unswerving belief in innocence. What I would like to be able to call Goodness. There are whole clusters of feelings  we spend most of our adult lives avoiding, because of the risks they involve, because we lack the opportunity, or courage- these are what Salinger gives voice to. These are why it is worth reading (and re-reading) Franny & Zooey, Seymour: an introduction, and For Esme with Love and Squalor.

J. D. Salinger holding Lillian Ross’s son, Erik, and perhaps a little tiger too

There are now 80 (and counting) of these short interviews with ordinary people all over the US. Though I have only seen a few so far, each has the ring of the genuine. Each will only take 3-4 minutes of your time. I reccommend no. 67 (James Flory) as a place to start.

Wyatt Mason, whose Sentences blog for Harpers is much missed, writes in the NYRB about Céline, not least his anti-semitism, one of the more virulent strands of his misanthropy.

To read any single novel by Céline is to receive, in a bracing style, a hysterical primer on the abjection of being. To read them all is to register a unique species of racism: a hatred not of particular elements of humanity but of the human race as a whole. Thus Jean Giono said of Céline’s writing, “If Céline had truly believed what he wrote, he would have killed himself.”

Trailer for Win Riley’s forthcoming documentary about Walker Percy, appropriately featuring Richard Ford, who has spoken often, and eloquently, about the influence of Percy’s The Moviegoer on The Sportwriter.

Courtesy of the NASA MODIS Rapid Response System.

A long, rich, rewarding interview with David Simon at Vice.

I’m currently reading (and much enjoying) Frank Kermode’s (1967) The Sense of an Ending, which is about how narratives, both spiritual and profane, use their respective ends (often death, and the Apocalypse) to structure themselves.

The age of perpetual transition in technological and artistic matters is understandably an age of perpetual crisis in morals and politics. And so, changed by our special pressures, subdued by our scepticism, the paradigms of apocalypse continue to lie under our ways of making sense of the world.

There’s a piece on him in today’s Guardian, and he’s also giving a talk on ‘Shakespeare and the Shudder’ on February 8th at the British Museum. He has two new books coming out, one on E.M. Forster, the other a collection of pieces from the LRB.

A very enjoyable account of their conversation from The Rumpus:

Spiegelman has drawn Santa pissing in the snow next to a “Remember the Homeless” sign, Bill Clinton getting a blowjob in front of a firing squad. In regard to a published New Yorker cover depicting a Hassid kissing an African-American woman, Spiegelman says a girl wrote him a letter saying how nice it was for him to have drawn Abraham Lincoln kissing a slave.

The Guardian has a nice visual history of the London Underground map, including several pre-diagrammatic versions like the one pictured above.

A friend of mine, Erlend Clouston, has been writing a series of wonderful pieces for The Guardian about some of the less glamorous and yet most essential jobs in Scotland. I particularly reccommend the piece on the The Forth bridge painters and the one about a marine engineer on the Calmac ferries.

For some reason, these have appeared in the Money section of the Guardian, rather than in G2, perhaps because they have insufficient celebrity or scandal content. By putting them in a section which few of us read, the Guardian seems to be affirming the notion that these jobs, though essential, are better off unseen.

Cormac Mccarthy, mid-1960s

A rare, intriguing, and somewhat provocative interview with Cormac Mccarthy and ‘The Road’ director John Hillcoat at the Wall Street Journal.

I don’t find it surprising that he describes the ’800-page books that were written a hundred years ago’ as ‘indulgent’, though I cannot agree. McCarthy has said he has no interest in authors who do not ‘deal with issues of life and death’, but it seems to me that there are other, equally valid concerns for an author, some of which cannot be dealt with in a concise manner.