Sickening words

I can't forget Ted Hughes' private comments about how he believed writing prose had weakened his immune system. No matter how nutty it seems when the connection is made so plain, I can't help but imagine language has a physical power. A friend once referred to my *visceral* response to novels, the way novels are written; on a sentence-by-sentence level and by the framing - or lack of it - of the narrative. Visceral seems right. It's why I tend to stop reading literary novels after a few lines. It's also why I'm suspicious of genre fiction, because it relies on conventional elisions to maintain itself rather than by undoing the elision.

It's also why I've stopped following the news, if I can help it. The other day, the morning news headline on BBC Radio 5 was that President Musharraf of Pakistan had gone on TV "to explain why he had introduced emergency rule". So the story is not about his latest assault on democracy but whether or not he is right or wrong; that is, whether there is an "emergency" or not. Compare the respect and calm on this with the hysteria displayed when a re-elected leader removed a seditious, coup-plotting TV station from terrestrial availability.

There are examples daily. This, again from the BBC: "Civilians have often been the victims of the violence in Afghanistan - not only in attacks by insurgents, but also in strikes by the foreign NATO and US forces in the country." Of course, there's a subtle difference between an "attack" and a "strike", but not one the victims can detect.

Ankara, Anıtkabir'den Görüntüler

Ankara, Anıtkabir'den görüntüler, slide show.



Anıtkabir'den bir nöbet değişiminden video görüntüler:





Mustafa Kemal Paşa Samsun'dan Ankara'ya ne şartlarda ve nasıl ulaştı? Atatürk'ün Ankara yolculuğunun bilinmeyen öyküsü: Ankara Beynam Ormanları ve Beynam Atatürk Evi...
Kurtuluş Savaşı bu evde kazanıldı: Atatürk ve Fikriye Hanım'ın öyküsü...
Anıtkabir hakkında bilinmeyenler: Anıtkabir'in öyküsü...
Sakarya Şehitleri Anıtı ve Sakarya Köyünün öyküsü...

Fresh air from France

Lucy Dallas' wonderful review of five French literary novels published recently gives a enticing flavour of a parallel universe; so different from the stifling conservatism of the British scene. I wonder what the Booker committee would make of Louise Desbrusses's Couronnes, boucliers, armures? It tells the story of two sisters, neither of whom are named (which is a fine start):

The novel is structured round three main episodes ... during the course of a large family celebration. The narrative voice hovers around the two sisters and captures their thoughts; the language is richly worked and dense. Desbrusses inverts word order and uses repetition and rhyme, which gives the text an almost poetic quality. The claustrophobic, hostile nature of the family's obsessions and prejudices is revealed little by little...

The central subject of each of the ten chapters of another of the novels is "a discarded shoe". As the reviewer says: It may take only two hours by train from London, but Paris is still a world away.

Gray vistas

A friend has been reading John Gray lately, and has told me the book he was reading, while generally unremarkable, is also full of statements that are either fatuous or just plain wrong. An academic, I was told, should be ashamed of writing such things. Until today I hadn't read anything by Gray but wood s lot links to his review of a biography of John Cowper Powys, who has, he says, "an intensity reminiscent of Proust".

As in Proust, Powys's central protagonists are introverted, almost solipsistic figures, who find relief from the sense of being 'contingent, mediocre, mortal' in sudden epiphanies, which they try to preserve in memory. However, whereas Proust's epiphanies occur always indoors in a self-enclosed human world, Powys's were found in the open fields and coastal vistas of his native Dorset - a more-than-human landscape that frames his greatest novels.

So, we can only assume the car that nearly knocks Marcel down in the Guermantes' courtyard, causing him to step back sharply on the uneven paving-stones and to experience another epiphany, was driving indoors.

Individual acts of reckoning

When you consider how the work of bloggers echoes the more-or-less personal essays of Samuel Johnson, Charles Lamb, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, or Joan Didion, you can see how the individual act of reckoning the world through writing poses many of the same challenges as literary creation, and also provides a foundation for substantial political and philosophical debates.

Joseph Kugelmass expresses something I've long suspected. His post is part of a series on academic blogging, mentioning me along the way. He says I write "in a style reminiscent of the great literary reviews of the 20s and 30s". Which is nice. I've not yet read any reviews from that era! And I'm not quite sure if it is understood that I am not an academic. But I'm open to job offers ...

Anadolu Kavağı ve Ceneviz Kalesi

İstanbul'da Boğaz'da harika bir vapur gezisinden sonra Anadolu Kavağı'nda iniyoruz. İlk işimiz tepedeki Ceneviz Kalesine yoldan biraz tırmanışla çıkmak. Kaleden, Boğaz'ın ve Karadeniz'in görünüşü muhteşem.

Kale aslında tarihte Cenevizliler tarafından ele geçirilmiş ve onarılmış yalnızca. Bu yüzden Ceneviz Kalesi olarak anılıyor.

Tekrar Anadolu Kavağı'na iniyoruz. İskelenin biraz arkasında keşfettiğimiz salaş yerin terasında boğaza karşı nefis bir manzarada balık ekmek yiyoruz. Tabii ki üstüne de harika bir dondurma kahve ile harika gider...

Relating to another

In A world about to be lost The Existence Machine has followed up a superb post on the work of Gabriel Josipovici with a response to On Trust: Art and the Temptations of Suspicion, in particular the chapter on Shakespeare.

These links remind me that I should have posted one to Ismo Santala's review of Josipovici's novel The Inventory nearly 40 years after its publication! But it's more than a review; it's a call to the act of creation.

For a more recent work, the first issue of The International Literary Quarterly has a very short piece He Contemplates a Photo in a Newspaper. Among many others, there's also work by Lydia Davis and Daniel Gunn.

Finally, news has arrived that a play by Peter Handke - an author I happen to know Josipovici admires - is scheduled for its British premiere: The Hour We Knew Nothing Of Each Other from 1992 requires 25 actors to play 450 characters. Oh, and there's no dialogue. The director says:

The script is a long, beautifully written stage direction detailing life in a town. Handke's theory is that all stories are happening elsewhere. It's about how we don't relate to one another.