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.

From a review of the new Jonathan Safran Foer book about vegetarianism in the Nov. 9th New Yorker:

Correction, November 4, 2009: The number of chickens currently being raised in the United States is nearly two billion, not four hundred and fifty billion, as originally stated.

I like that no one noticed this- I wonder how many chickens it would take to fill the US- can someone please do the math?

The Dream by Pablo Picasso

When people ask me what my PhD is about (almost a weekly occurence), my current answer is that it’s on Thomas Pynchon and [blank]. At the moment I’m trying some different words in this space- ‘visions’, ‘utopia’, occasionally ‘time’. The combination of these words led me to Frederic Jameson’s Archaelogies of the Future, a book about the constructions and uses to which utopias have been, and might be, put. Though I have a passing familiarity with Jameson’s work from his reviews in the LRB, this is the first time I have been exposed to a book-length display of his erudtion. He quotes this passage by Freud about creativity as a kind of wish fulfilment:

You will remember how I have said that the day-dreamer carefully conceals his phantasies from other people because he feels he has reasons for being ashamed of them. I should now add that even if he were to communicate them to us he could give us no pleasure by his discolsures. such phantasies, when we learn them, repel us or at least leave us cold… The essential ars poetica lies in the technique of overcoming the feeling of repulsion in us.

Jameson puts this is in simple terms I think we can all relate to.

Anyone who compares the fascination we often feel for our own dreams with the boredom that suddenly overcomes in listening to the account of another will know what Freud means.

Art, then, consists of disguising and softening the egotistic content of such day dreams or phantasies, by bribing the reader, viewer, or listener with aesthetic pleasure. In my opinion, there is nothing that needs more disguising than a dream itself. But in their efforts to make the dreams of others interesting, most writers or film makers usually end up with too simplified a product, whose symbolism is too overt. The demons our heroine is pursused by are those we have already seen.

Today’s Guardian has a detailed profile of Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the LRB, which reveals that she was the person who came up with the title for Oliver Sacks’ book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. The Eitingons, a memoir of her family, will be out in November.

Very odd story about Philip Roth joining a tour of Philip Roth’s, Newark. If this were in one of his novels, no one would recognise him and he would be chased away from his old haunts, forced to wander through back alleys in dejected irony.

There’s a chance of me doing some reviewing in the near future, so I am of course paying particular attention to such pieces, especially the lead sentence. The following, from William T. Vollmann’s review of Philip Caputo’s Crossers, seems like it could be endlessly reused, with only the author’s name altered.

Once when I was so weak with amebic dysentery that all time not spent on the toilet was passed in bed, I found in my host’s house one book in a language I could read. It was one of those storm-tossed but ultimately upbeat women’s romances, a genre I had not yet sampled. I read it, then read it again and again, since there was nothing better to do. If I ever have the luxury of repeating such an experience, I hope to do so with a Philip Caputo book.

All I would need after that is a plot summary and a few sentences of mostly unsubstantiated opinion. That usually does the trick.

David Foster Wallace was a contributing author to the Oxford American Writer’s Thesarus. This is his note on the word ‘pulchritude’

A paradoxical noun because it means beauty but is itself one of the ugliest words in the language. Same goes for the adjectival form pulchritudinous. They’re part of a tiny elite cadre of words that possess the very opposite of the qualities they denote. Diminutive, big, foreign, fancy (adjective), colloquialism, and monosyllabic are some others; there are at least a dozen more. Inviting your school-age kids to list as many paradoxical words as they can is a neat way to deepen their relationship to English and help them see that words are both symbols for things and very real things themselves.

In the above clip, he responds to the use of phrases like ‘prior to’ and ‘at the present time’, and even finds time to take a swing at ‘utilise’ and ‘individual’.

WARNING: you should only bother watching it if you’re interested in, you know, words.

More on DFW and the Thesarus at Maud Newton

Canongate Tolbooth

The pleasures of travel writing are obvious. We visit places, and meet their inhabitants, with none of the trouble, expense (and sometimes, danger) a real trip might entail. There is no risk of missed connections, inclement weather, of being hurt or robbed (and even if these mishaps occur, it is not to us, which makes them enjoyable). Best of all, there is no chance of boredom, of knowing you are wasting more time and money than usual. In place of the meaningless sequence of events that make up most trips, there is always a purpose, better still, a narrative. In travel books, things are always done for a reason (even if it is only so they can be written about).

Consider then the added appeal of the out of date travel book (by which I mean those that are non-contemporary). One is transported in not just space, but time as well. One need not resent the author for showing oneself up by virtue of having gone somewhere, and done something, which one could easily have done, given enough nerve or imagination.

Edwin Muir’s Scottish Journey, based on his travels in 1934, provides all these pleasures, plus the added one of being about the place I currently live in.

The first sight of Edinburgh after an absence is invariably exciting. Its bold and stony look recalls ravines and quarried mountains, and as one’s eye runs up the long line of jagged roofs from Holyrood to the Castle, one feels that these house-shapes are outcroppings of the rocky ridge on which they are planted, methodical geological formulations in which, as an afterthought, people have taken to living… Perhaps it is the height of the houses, the great number and smallness of the windows, and the narrowness of the space in which one has to walk that give [a] sense of watchfulness and sinister familiarity. But there is in it, too, something of the terror of narrow rocky passes in savage and possibly inhabited regions.

Often, he articulates thoughts that have gurgled in my own mind:

Nowhere that I have been is one so bathed and steeped and rolled about in floating sexual desire as in certain streets of Glasgow and Edinburgh.

The joy of his book (for me at least) is that it is both familiar and strange (a contradictory combination that one, from habit, declines to believe is possible, until it occurs with particular force, from sentence, to paragraph, then page). One sees the city as it was, as it is, as it may perhaps shall be. There is an awareness of what has survived amidst the spill of change.

Edinburgh has a style, and that style was at one time, indeed as recently as a century ago, the reflection of a whole style of life. While the city itself remains, this style of life has now been broken down, or rather submerged, by successive waves of change which were first let loose during the Industrial Revolution, an event that has on a large scale swept from the great towns of Europe the character they once possessed. the waves have almost completely submerged London; but Edinburgh, being a high, angular place, is more difficult to drown. So it presents outwardly the face it had a hundred years ago, while within it is worm-eaten with all the ingenuity in tastelessness which modern resources can supply.

Hear, hear, one thinks, but does not say (after 9 years, still not feeling one has the right).

So although Edinburgh is Scottish in itself, one cannot feel that the people who live in it are Scottish in any radical sense, or have any essential connection with it. They do not even go with it. They look like visitors who have stayed there for a long time.

There is still this air of transiency, of people who were passing through but never made it out the other side. As I mentioned earlier this year, I do still (occasionally) try and move on. It may happen. It may.

One day, when I am too bloated with fame and adulation and the blurbs on my back-covers, I shall no doubt be comissioned to write 500 words on why I love Radiohead. Thankfully, for all concerned, that day remains far distant.

It is definitely much more fun to dance about architecture.

And to download (legally and for free) their new song here.

Seth Fischer writes a good piece about the continuing pariah status of the short story (in publishing, at least) at The Rumpus, a great site which I urge you to check out, not least because, along with sections on Art, Music, Books and Politics, it has the decency (yes, that is the word, I think) to have one for Sex as well. Peter Orner’s column is also particularly good.

Think there’s something in my eye.

Worth it for Garret Dillahunt (‘That boy looks hungry’) alone.

***You Tube seems to have stopped allowing me to embed this- you’ll need to click on the screen to watch it.

Salisbury Craigs

I am continually disgusted by my ignorance of Scottish literature, history, geography, poetry and art. Where once I had purposefully spent hours exploring, going down streets and alleys simply because I had not done so before, now it is a matter of getting to my destination as quickly as possible. The city has plenty of decent museums and galleries, but these days my knowledge of what goes on in them is limited to the posters on walls I glimpse as I cycle by. I have probably not been to an exhibition for almost 2 years.

By no means is this something willful. It is what usually comes of living in the same place for a long period of time (in my case, almost 7  years in Edinburgh). I am aware of this lamentable state of affairs, but it is too comfortable a rut to get out of. Only occasionally do I lift my head and look around and properly comprehend how rich and interesting it is to live here. Usually after I’ve read something like Neal Ascherson’s Stone Voices, which, in its tour through Scottish political history, makes many interesting stops.

For instance, whilst I vaguely knew that Edinburgh had been the site of some serious shifts in geological thinking, I did not realise how profoundly they had altered people’s thinking.

At the end of most streets in Edinburgh’s Old Town rises the crimson wall of Salisbury Craigs, a lesson in the unimaginable force and lapses of time which have gone to shape the world. The Craigs are a basalt intrusion, a fossil tide of volcanic rock which surged through the foundations of a dead volcano some 200 million years ago. Geology and paleontology, with their revelations of deep time and alien life-forms, towered up wherever nineteenth century Scots turned their eyes. The ‘testimony of the rocks’ threatened their moral universe, its narrative incompatible with a creation myth or even with a creator.

Equally powerful testimony exists less than a twenty minute walk from my house, on Blackford Hill, where there is a rock i have passed dozens of times (on which, now I think of it, there is even a plaque). As Ascherson says, “Here, in 1840, the Swiss naturalist and geologist Louis Agassiz arrived in the company of Charles Maclaren, the Scotsman‘s first real editor.” It was his observations of the horizontal scratches on the stone that led him to claim they were the work of stones carried by a moving force, in particular ice masses.

From the Scotsman, the entire British public learned for the first time that there had been an Ice Age in their own land and throughout the northern hemisphere. Conventional religion was faced with proof that much of the world had been overrun, buried and reshaped by an ice-cap and glaciers hundreds of feet thick- and at a relatively recent period. Here was a cataclysm which the Book did not even mention.

As it with the Aggasiz rock, so it is with the shaped stones that constitute the buildings of a city. These too have their plaques that speak of what was done and said within, usually before our time. Perhaps, when we occasionally pause to read them- when the bus is late, when she is late -we find nothing of interest, no connection to the person who lived there or wrote X while doing so. The fault for this is entirely our own. We must unblock our ears.

from Terry Eagleton’s piece in the LRB, 3oth April 2009:

During the Second World War, a woman was interned for five months when the authorities discovered an entry in her diary reading ‘Destroy British Queen. Install Italian Queen.’ She turned out to be a beekeeper.

These, and other images from the Codex, can be found at Fox and Comet. The text is in an imaginary language, which only makes the images more terrifying.

“Sometimes, he’d see people staring at him through the back window of the car, keep very still on purpose – and then, just when they were convinced he was a stuffed toy, he would very slowly turn his head and freak them out.”

This lion was bought (as a cub) from Harrods, then lived in a London flat in the Sixties. Eventually its owners had him released in Africa, and were then, even more improbably, reunited with him years later. If this all seems horribly cute, I’m sorry, it is Friday. Further details here.

Also, here is the sickeningly happy video when they are all reunited.

A D.F.W. gem from 2006, a  New York Times Magazine profile of Roger Federer.

Please consider the footnotes.