November 2013

Handmade chemistry

Colm Toíbín in conversation with Miquel Barceló.

Colm Tóibín: In The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, Hans Castorp sees an X-ray of himself for the first time, and it’s almost erotic, he sees what really his soul or his body, what the X-ray has done. There’s something about your recent paintings that have that element of looking at X-Rays. Could you tell me technically how the paintings are made?

Miquel Barceló: It’s bleached canvas. In the beginning, I used black paper or board and bleach and a little bit of white chalk.

We are in the world of Tristram Shandy

Virginia Woolf on Laurence Sterne.

Tristram Shandy though it is Sterne’s first novel, was written at a time when many have written their twentieth, that is, when he was forty-five years old. But it bears every sign of maturity. No young writer could have dared to take such liberties with grammar and syntax and sense and propriety and the longstanding tradition of how a novel should be written. It needed a strong dose of the assurance of middle age and its indifference to censure to run such risks of shocking the lettered by the unconventionality of one’s style, and the respectable by the irregularity of one’s morals. But the risk was run and the success was prodigious. All the great, all the fastidious, were enchanted. Sterne became the idol of the town. Only in the roar of laughter and applause which greeted the book, the voice of the simple-minded public at large was to be heard protesting that it was a scandal coming from a clergyman and that the Archbishop of York ought to administer, to say the least of it, a scolding. The Archbishop, it seems, did nothing. But Sterne, however little he let it show on the surface, laid the criticism to heart. That heart too had been afflicted since the publication of Tristram Shandy. Eliza Draper, the object of his passion, had sailed to join her husband in Bombay. In his next book Sterne was determined to give effect to the change that had come over him, and to prove, not only the brilliance of his wit, but the depths of his sensibility. In his own words, “my design in it was to teach us to love the world and our fellow creatures better than we do”. It was with such motives animating him that he sat down to write that narrative of a little tour in France which he called A Sentimental Journey.

Citizen of the Republic of Letters

On the occasion of publishing Susan Sontag‘s Essays of the 1960s & 70s, the Library of America blog talk to her son, David Rieff.

In Sontag’s view, who were the most important European writers undiscovered or neglected in the U.S.? Did she think of herself as a critic who bridged the intellectual worlds of Europe and America?

As an American, my mother was uncompromisingly engaged in the great political issues of her time — the Vietnam War, feminism, American power after the Cold War. But as a writer, and without denying or repudiating her “American-ness,” my mother saw herself as an international person, if you will, a citizen of the Republic of Letters — an idea that, while of course she knew it to be metaphoric, counted for her. So the idea that the U.S. and Europe were two separate and distinct worlds did not make much sense to her. That said, as someone steeped in French culture particularly, early in her career she brought writers like Nathalie Sarraute, Roland Barthes, E. M. Cioran, and others to the attention of New York publishers. Later in her career, my mother often offered to write prefaces to works she hoped U.S. publishers would have translated.

Sturdy piston

Nice little essay by writer and art critic Brian Dillon on fountain pens.

The pen is not exactly an object of nostalgia, because I have no memory of my father writing with it when I was a child. I found it after he died, when I was twenty-one; I must have been rooting in the wardrobe for life-insurance papers or a nonexistent will. I carried it around with me for about a year — I was wearing his watch too, but it slipped from my wrist on the library stairs — before it occurred to me to buy a bottle of Quink and actually use it. The pen would only suck up sufficient ink for a few lines at a time, but I spent the summer of 1992 writing an MA thesis with it, stopping every ten minutes to hook a fingernail behind the thin gold lever and get blue-black stains on my fingers.

By the time I took it to The Pen Corner on Dame Street to have it repaired — a supple new ink sac, an unclogged feed — I’d developed an anxious, OCD-ish, relationship with my father’s pen. It saw me fretfully through much of my drawn-out, half botched Ph.D. I wrote scraps of my first book with it, before I knew it was a book. It’s still the pen I reach for in the early stages of all sorts of writing, always with the intention — an obsessive displacement, for sure — of making it to the end of an article, essay or book with the little Craftsman still in my hand.

[Via @HamishH1931]

Best European Fiction 2014

By Jonathan Gibbs.

This is the fifth year of Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction and already it’s possible to see how the cultural ground has shifted under it even in that short time. In his introduction to the original, 2010, collection, editor Aleksandar Hemon felt the need to deny that a book of (mostly) translated (mostly) short stories was a “doubly lost cause”. You can’t imagine him saying that today – not with regards to the short story, at any rate: not with the increasingly high-profile prizes, the prestigious wins for Munro (the Nobel) and Davis (Man Booker International), and the beginnings of a real digital presence for the form.

The relationship of the English-reading world to the European scene, however, is more uncertain. Indeed, Salt’s yearly anthologies of British, and Faber’s regular ones of Irish short stories might be helping to shore the form up on these islands, but they are necessarily inward- rather than outward-looking. And the globalisation – or, more realistically, transatlantic shift – of the Man Booker, and the appearance of the Folio Prize, run the risk of turning us further from our continental neighbours, and the culture we share across our different languages.