A short review of mine can be found in this week’s The Big Issue. An edited version of the review is below.
The book? House of Holes, by Nicholson Baker. This book has received a flurry of press recently, primarily because it’s lewder than a room full of 16-year-olds hand-picked by Larry Clark, and unashamedly so.
My verdict? It’s completely unsexy, occasionally funny, and if nothing else, it’s unconventional and new.
A note: all the wordplay and puns and clichés in the review are intentional, even the ones I didn’t write on purpose.
REVIEW STARTS NOW:
Do not for one second be mistaken: this cockamamie, slapstick, oddball book is about one thing, and one thing only: bonking. Bonking, in all its mutations (heterosexual only however, which should be and is a big sticking point) is the sole focus here. Sex sex sex. Screwy, slurpy, lickerish sex. Yes, the occasional literary line limply pokes through, but for the most part poetics have been swapped for penises meeting pussies.
Although it seems that Nichsolson may fancy himself a present-day Bataille or de Sade, aiming at your gooey erotic centre, for the most part the relentless onslaught of nooky in House of Holes is less titillating, and more just a case of an agile wordsmith dickering around with smutty — albeit inventive — vernacular. In saying this, if downright surreal and silly sex gives you the tingles, then this book is for you. If you prefer sex to be a joke rather than an act of either carnality and/or sentiment, then there are plenty of suckers in this book to wet your whistle. It’s sopping wet: slathered on every page are blow-by-blow descriptions. If this sort of explicit specificity ticks your box, then you will get lots of bang for your buck.
In the style of a dog, Baker’s erotica grabs on and refuses to stop. So at least it’s relentless. Also, it is sometimes pretty funny in an unflinchingly risqué and slightly discomfiting way. At the end of the day, whether you love or loathe this book, it’s going to leave you in the same state as one of his characters: “bouncing up and down like a horse thief”.
Below is an excerpt from the introduction chapter in Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction by Keith Oatley:
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Representation of models in the brain
In 1996 a group of researchers led by Giacomo Rizzolatti made a discovery that set the world of neuroscience abuzz. It was of neurons that fired either when a monkey saw a particular intended action – picking up a small piece of food – or when the monkey itself performed the same action. The researchers called these mirror neurons. They provided evidence for a principle that had long been considered in the psychology of perception, called analysis by synthesis. The idea was that when we perceive some human – produced action, we do so by being able to synthesize the same action ourselves. The importance for reading and understanding of stories is that, perhaps, when we understand an action as we read about it in a novel, our understanding depends on making a version of the action ourselves, inwardly.
One cannot directly record the activity of mirror neurons in human participants; it would be totally inappropriate to implant electrodes in people’s brains. So, to study this possibility in humans, researchers have created what computer people call work-arounds. One work-around is to use functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), with which it has been found that when participants observed or read phrases relating to foot, hand, or mouth actions, there was activation of the regions of the brain that are used in making these same actions: A different kind of work-around has been to use a method called transcranial magnetic stimulation. Here, parts of the brain known to be directly responsible for initiating actions are stimulated briefly and gently (from outside the skulls of humans). For instance, the researchers stimulated the part of the brain responsible for making hand movements and when they did so they could record electrical activity of the muscles of the hand. They did the same for foot movements. What would happen now, the researchers asked, if the human participants were stimulated in this way and at the same time were asked to listen to a brief sentence that concerned making either a movement of the hand such as “He played the piano” or of the foot such as “He kicked the ball?” They found that when participants listened to sentences concerning hand movements, the electrical activity recorded in the hand muscles in response to the transcranial stimulation was reduced. This reduction did not occur when participants listened to sentences about foot movements or sentences that did not indicate movement. Similarly, when listening to sentences about foot movements, the stimulation-elicited electrical activity in the foot muscles was reduced as compared to the activity that occurred when listening to sentences about the hand or to sentences that were not about movement. The explanation of the reduction of electrical activity in the hand or foot muscles in response to the stimulation was that the parts of the brain concerned with initiating hand or foot movements were already occupied with understanding the sentences that concerned those movements.
Putting this another way, what these researchers found was that when we understand a sentence, as well as activation of the areas of the brain concerned with hearing and language there is also activation in the areas concerned with making the same actions ourselves.
The researchers interpret their findings in terms of mirror neurons. Recognition of an action in the imagination when we hear or read about it involves brain systems responsible for initiating that action.
In recent experiments, Nicole Speer and her colleagues had participants read whole short stories while they were in an fMRI scanner. When readers were engaged in a story, the researchers found that, at the points in which the story said a protagonist undertook an action, activation of the brain occurred in the part which the reader himself or herself would use to undertake the action. So, when the story-protagonist pulled a light cord, a region in the frontal lobes of the reader’s brain associated with grasping things was activated. When the protagonist “went through the front door into the kitchen, ”there was increased activity in a region that is activated when the reader views spatial scenes. The writer gives the cues, and the reader imagines a door, or imagines entering a room and seeing what it might be like. As I do, in this book, the researchers in this study describe reading as a process of simulation, based in experience, and involving being able to think of possible futures. These experiments indicate that, based on their experience, readers construct an active mental model of what is going on in the story, and can also imagine what might happen next.
An artist and musician named Amy Winehouse died a few weeks ago.
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Since then there has been quite a bit of noise about it. These are the words that seem to crop up most often: drugs, music, alcohol, death, cure, habit, shame, pity, talent, genius, addict, clean, rehab, therapy, media, pain, attention, scrutiny, suicide.
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Winehouse created songs and performed them, songs that really struck at people. She also had a penchant for addictive substances, and struggled to achieve an inner mental balance.
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One of Winehouse’s most lionised tunes is called ‘Rehab’. For all intents and purposes this song has been deemed and actually seems to be markedly autobiographical with its references to drugs, dependence and death.
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They tried to make me go to rehab but I said ‘no, no, no’ Yes I’ve been black but when I come back you’ll know know know I ain’t got the time and if my daddy thinks I’m fine He’s tried to make me go to rehab but I won’t go go go
I’d rather be at home with ray I ain’t got seventy days Cause there’s nothing There’s nothing you can teach me That I can’t learn from Mr Hathaway
I didn’t get a lot in class But I know it don’t come in a shot glass
They tried to make me go to rehab but I said ‘no, no, no’ Yes I’ve been black but when I come back you’ll know know know I ain’t got the time and if my daddy thinks I’m fine He’s tried to make me go to rehab but I won’t go go go
The man said ‘why do you think you here’ I said ‘I got no idea I’m gonna, I’m gonna lose my baby so I always keep a bottle near’ He said ‘I just think you’re depressed, this me, yeah baby, and the rest’
They tried to make me go to rehab but I said ‘no, no, no’ Yes I’ve been black but when I come back you’ll know know know
I don’t ever wanna drink again I just ooh I just need a friend I’m not gonna spend ten weeks have everyone think I’m on the mend
It’s not just my pride It’s just ’til these tears have dried
They tried to make me go to rehab but I said ‘no, no, no’ Yes I’ve been black but when I come back you’ll know know know I ain’t got the time and if my daddy thinks I’m fine He’s tried to make me go to rehab but I won’t go go go
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Winehouse passed away by herself, in her apartment, in her bed.
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An artist and musician named Elliott Smith died in October 2003.
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In the years since the same words that have been used to sketch Winehouse, mentioned above, have been used in just about any dialogue about Smith. Drugs, music, alcohol, death, cure, habit, shame, pity, talent, genius, addict, clean, rehab, therapy, media, pain, attention, scrutiny, suicide.
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Smith created songs and performed them, songs that really struck at people. He also had a penchant for addictive substances, and struggled to achieve an inner mental balance.
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My favourite Smith tune is called ‘King’s Crossing’. For all intents and purposes this song has been deemed and actually seems to be markedly autobiographical with its references to drugs, dependence and death.
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The king’s crossing was the main attraction
Dominoes falling in a chain reaction
A scraping subject ruled by fear
Told me whiskey works better than beer
The judge is on vinyl, decisions are final
And nobody gets a reprieve
And every wave is tidal – if you hang around
You’re going to get wet
I can’t prepare for death any more than I already have
All you can do now is watch the shells
The game looks easy, that’s why it sells
Frustrated fireworks inside your head
Are going to stand and deliver talk instead
The method acting that pays my bills
Keeps a fat man feeding in Beverly Hills
I got a heavy metal mouth that hurls obscenity
And I get my check in from the trash treasury
Because I took my own insides out
It don’t matter ‘cos I have no sex life
And all I want to do now is inject my ex-wife
I’ve seen the movie and I know what happens
It’s Christmas time, and the needles on the tree
A skinny Santa is bringing something to me
His voice is overwhelming, but his speech is slurred
And I only understand every other word
Open your parachute and grab your gun
Fall down like an omen, a setting sun
Read the part and return at five
It’s a hell of a role if you can keep it alive
But I don’t care if I fuck up
I’m going on a date with a rich white lady
Ain’t life great?
Give me one good reason not to do it (Because I love you)
So do it
This is the place where time reverses
Dead men talk to all the pretty nurses
Instruments shine on a silver tray
Don’t let me get carried away
Don’t let me get carried away
Don’t let me be carried away
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Smith passed away by himself, in his house, by stabbing himself in the chest with a kitchen knife. His girlfriend was in the shower.
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In probably his most well-known work, a book titled Suicide, Émile Durkheim wrote, “Not every suicide can therefore be considered insane, without doing violence to language.”
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Language is, for want of a better phrase, the best thing in this world. It is the bridge, the river, and the space in between. Both Winehouse and Smith were fluent in the language of music. Smith was also gifted in the language of words – evidence of this can be seen in the lyrics above, with its layers and its phrasing and its stark naked vernacular.
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It might be possible to do violence to language, but language cannot ever be entirely killed, and this fact is an affirmation of everything quotidian.
“If in fact, as we have shown, neurasthenia may predispose to suicide, it has no such necessary result. To be sure, the neurasthenic is almost inevitably destined to suffer if he is thrust overmuch into active life; but it is not impossible for him to withdraw from it in order to lead a more contemplative existence. If then the conflicts of interests and passions are too tumultuous and violent for such a delicate organism, he nevertheless has the capacity to taste fully the rarest pleasures of thought. Both his muscular weakness and his excessive sensitivity, though they disqualify him for action, qualify him for intellectual functions, which themselves demand appropriate organs. Likewise, if too rigid a social environment can only irritate his natural instincts, he has a useful role to play to the extent that society itself is mobile and can persist only through progress; for he is superlatively the instrument of progress. Precisely because he rebels against tradition and the yoke of custom, he is a highly fertile source of innovation. And as the most cultivated societies are also those where representative functions are the most necessary and most developed, and since, at the same time, because of their very great complexity, their existence is conditional upon almost constant change, neurasthenics have most reason for existence precisely when they are the most numerous. They are therefore not essentially a-social types, self-eliminating because not born to live in the environment in which they are put down.”
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—from Émile Durkheim’s Suicide: A study in sociology
(Translated by John A. Spaulding and George Simpson)
…illegally download an illegal torrent of some Durkheim’s books here, if you want to be illegal.
The collapse of the stellar universe will occur—like creation—in grandiose splendor.
—Blaise Pascal
“The words attributed to Blaise Pascal which preface my film Lessons of Darkness are in fact by me. Pascal himself could not have said it better.
This falsified and yet, as I will later demonstrate, not falsified quotation should serve as a first hint of what I am trying to deal with in this discourse. Anyway, to acknowledge a fake as fake contributes only to the triumph of accountants.
Why am I doing this, you might ask? The reason is simple and comes not from theoretical, but rather from practical, considerations. With this quotation as a prefix I elevate [erheben] the spectator, before he has even seen the first frame, to a high level, from which to enter the film. And I, the author of the film, do not let him descend from this height until it is over. Only in this state of sublimity [Erhabenheit] does something deeper become possible, a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual. Ecstatic truth, I call it.”
And New York Was Great And We Loved It All
And New York Was Great And We Loved It All
But Time Was Riding Fast Upon My Shoulders
What A Shame
What A Shame
What A Shame
The Nighttime Was Painted Black With Fun
The Nighttime Was Painted Black With Fun
But All The Time The Light Shone It Through It All
What A Drag
What A Drag
What A Drag
And In Bars Drunk We Knew It All
And In Bars Drunk We Knew It All
And Promises We Spilled Out In The Night
What A Trip
What A Trip
What A Trip
And The Stars We Plucked From Great Black Skies
And The Stars We Plucked From New York Skies
We Placed Them All In Front Of Us And Laughed
What A Trip
What A Trip
What A Trip
“From my grandfather I had acquired the habit of rising early, almost always before five. It is a ritual I still preserve. Despite the unremitting force of inertia and in full consciousness of the pointlessness of everything we do, the seasons are met with the same unchanging discipline every day. For long periods I live in isolation, isolated both in mind and in body. I am able to cope with myself by subjecting myself completely and unswervingly to my needs. Periods of absolute productivity alternate with others in which I am utterly unproductive. Subject to every vagary of my own nature and of the universe – whatever it is – I can get through life only with the help of a precise daily routine. I am able to exist only by dint of standing up to myself – in fact, of consistently opposing myself. When I am writing I read nothing, and when I am reading I write nothing. For long periods I read and write nothing, finding both equally repugnant. There are long periods when I detest both reading and writing, and then I fall prey to inactivity, which means brooding obsessively on my extremely personal plight, both as an object of curiosity and as a confirmation of everything I am today, of what I have become over the years in circumstances which are as routine as they are unnatural, artificial, and indeed perverse.”
People often think the word “fiction” means untrue, but this is not true. The word derives from the Latin fingere, which means “to make.” In the same way the word “poetry” comes from the Greek word poesis, which also means “to make.” Fiction and poetry are constructed in the imagination, and are different from something discovered as in physics, or from something that happened as in the news. Fiction and poetry are not false; they are about what could happen. (p. 7)
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In 1996 a group of researchers led by Giacomo Rizzolatti made a discovery that set the world of neuroscience abuzz. It was of neurons that fired either when a monkey saw a particular intended action—picking up a small piece of food—or when the monkey itself performed the same action. The researchers called these mirror neurons. They provided evidence for a principle that had long been considered in the psychology of perception, called analysis by synthesis. The idea was that when we perceive some human-produced action, we do so by being able to synthesize the same action ourselves. The importance for reading and understanding of stories is that, perhaps, when we understand an action as we read about it in a novel, our understanding depends on making a version of the action ourselves, inwardly. (p. 19)
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In recent experiments, Nicole Speer and her colleagues had participants read whole short stories while they were in an fMRI scanner. When readers were engaged in a story, the researchers found that, at the points in which the story said a protagonist undertook an action, activation of the brain occurred in the part which the reader himself or herself would use to undertake the action. So, when the story - protagonist pulled a light cord, a region in the frontal lobes of the reader’s brain associated with grasping things was activated. When the protagonist “went through the front door into the kitchen,” there was increased activity in a region that is activated when the reader views spatial scenes. The writer gives the cues, and the reader imagines a door, or imagines entering a room and seeing what it might be like. As I do, in this book, the researchers in this study describe reading as a process of simulation, based in experience, and involving being able to think of possible futures. These experiments indicate that, based on their experience, readers construct an active mental model of what is going on in the story, and can also imagine what might happen next. (p. 20)
“Machines always do just what you tell them to do / As long as you do what they say.”
- T Bone Burnett in ‘Zombieland’ on album The True False Identity
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GRH: “One of the things not being on social media promotes is not spending a lot of time thinking about yourself as someone who has a career. I think of myself more as like someone who has to go to a therapist six mornings a week in order to be able to do all the other things that are expected of one during the day, such as groceries, laundry, speaking to other people, etc. It’s just that my therapist happens to be a desk.
I’m actually planning to at some point to do a 180, for the purposes of research. I’m going to get all up on the Internet and really allow myself to become a person who can’t think for more than three seconds in a straight line. I want the narrator of the next next novel, the one after the one I’m working on, to be afflicted with that problem. But I can’t write that way now. I can’t afford to emerge from a day of work, spending many hours finding myself, and then after fifteen minutes of Internetting feel like I’ve lost myself in some way again. Which is a constant struggle. It’s an unfortunately big and kind of silly theme in my life.
TFT: I remember talking to you at one point and you sort of saying you had gone through an obsessive period of Internet addiction and you had to cut yourself off entirely.
GRH: Well, the story of all my addictions is that I sort of get just far enough down the road to see where I’m going and that if I take about two more steps, I’m never coming back. And then I manage to…my super-ego is powerful enough to step in. But it really is sort of like having someone lock up the liquor cabinet. My wife logs her computer out of the Internet when she leaves for work and, I mean, I can’t get to it. I can go to the library if there’s some full-on cyber-emergency. But after about three days of not looking at it, I find that even in the evening, when I could ask her to let me on, then suddenly I realize that nothing I would be looking at is as worth my time as reading a book would be. Or just being would be. There’s a kind of modification of consciousness for me that happens online that doesn’t feel the same as just being.
[...]
It’s like, when I choose to talk, I would hope the reason that I’m talking is that I actually care about the subject of my talking rather than what my talking says about me. And that, therefore, what I say when I choose to speak maybe gets taken a little more seriously. Whereas I think there are people – and I won’t name names, but I don’t think I have to – who actually have very serious things to say, but who also, if there is such a thing as self-promotional genius, have it. And who, therefore, might say things that get written off as mere self-promotion when they’re actually trying instead to say something that matters. It can get very hard to tell, if you’re not careful.”
My last blog post at Southerly is now up. (And already a certain ‘Charles’ is set against me, nemesis-stylez. It’s funny, he’s so angry, like I murdered his entire family using only blunt nail files. NAIL FILES, CHARLES.)
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What, me worry?
I have a friend in Melbourne who is a paste-up artist. Under the guise of the moniker ‘Drab’ he creates small and large scale pieces of art, prints them onto jumbo sheets of paper and—normally in the quiet post-midnight hours—sticks them onto surfaces in and around the city and its suburbs. For as long as I have known him and followed his work (we used to live in an old weatherboard together with a few other sharehouse denizens and so I was able to watch him from go to whoa) I have been jealous. Not because I want to be a paste-up artist (mixing the glue is labourious enough, let alone doing the actual pasting up, which requires considerable measures of dexterity, mettle and stealth), not because I wish I had a smeck of talent for visual arts (although I do wish it; I can’t draw; I’m one of those people who when asked to draw a cat or dog or horse will end up with something on the page resembling a mutant platypus) and not because I harbour secret guerilla-ish urges to skulk about at night doing things naughty (again, I do, but that’s irrelevant, for here anyway). I’m jealous of Drab because his creative toils, along with all paste-up’s elements of artistry and inventiveness, is so tangible, so perceptible, so hands-on. In the space of a day—or a few days for a larger/more elaborate piece—he is able to devise and produce something in the shelter of home or studio, on his computer or by hand, in silence, channeling his imaginative energies into image-on-paper, and then go out into the world and literally place it there, in that wider world, under the cover of a greater silence, knowing that people are very soon going to see his work and react to it. He can even go back there and watch people as they interact with his paste-ups. It’s so seeable, his work is, and corporeal, and finite. And the best bit: his paste-ups never last. They are pulled off or covered over or simply peel away over time, and then it is finished. What a lark, creating something whilst already having its death in sight.
Writing and publishing a novel is just about the opposite experience (or at least it has been for hundreds of years, but it might be morphing now). It’s not something you can fashion with your hands and then go out into public and stick it up and then it’s done. It can’t be assembled in a day or two or even a week (although of course there are exceptions to that rule, but they are exceptional exceptions, like Oliver Sacks, who wrote his first book Migraine in nine days, but only because he’d vowed to himself that if he didn’t finish it in ten days he would kill himself, and anyway, this was after a protracted period of trying to write the book, so the nine days was really a whole lot longer) and it’s not going to disappear completely within a few weeks at most. Writing and publishing a novel is a commitment to something, and it’s scary and long and shit a lot of the time.
I have another post up at Southerly. This one’s a bit higgledy-piggledy:
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Hans Fallada and being outside when everyone else is inside
It was my birthday recently—it’s okay, you weren’t to know—and as a gift my girlfriend’s parents sent me a copy of Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada. I had never heard of Fallada before reading this novel, and I found it quite a curious read in every meaning of the word curious (intriguing, strange, etc.). Published in 1947, the story opens in 1940s Berlin, in a Germany in the throes of National Socialism. Revolving around a couple’s humble resistance to the Nazis as they write and drop anti-Nazi postcards around the city, the narrative quickly spirals—either up or down, depending how you look at it—so that a myriad of characters are involved. It’s a little bit Dickensian (or for a more ‘now’ cultural reference, it’s like David Simon’s couple of TV series, The Wire and Treme) in that characters come and go, and you never know who is going to be central and who will fade away. And as such the most interesting element of the book is the realistic depth of these characters, in that not one of them is painted entirely white (good) or black (evil). Instead everyone is a slightly different shade of grey, and prone to change as the years progress, meaning that the maelstrom of grey people mixes and merges to create the hostile, jittery city that was the city of Berlin, then.
Despite my enjoyment of it, I’m not here to tell you whether or not you should read the book. You can figure that out for yourself. What I am here to share is the exceptional biography of the author. It is remarkable, and I only stumbled across it because following the end of the story is an afterword that gives some background on Fallada (birth name Rudolf Ditzen) and also a detailed overview of historical circumstances of the writing and publication of Alone in Berlin, as well as the rest of his previous ten or so novels. It is in this afterword that the novel is lifted another notch as we learn of just how the book came to be.
Early on the morning of 17 October 1911, eighteen-year-old Rudolf Ditzen and his friend Hanns Dietrich von Necker armed themselves with pistols, walked out into the countryside and fired on each other in the manner of duellists. Like many other young men in imperial Germany, Ditzen and von Decker had struggled to reconcile their developing sexuality with the prevailing social conventions, and were seeking escape in a suicide pact, but they staged it as a duel to uphold the honour of a young woman and to protect the reputations of their families. Von Necker missed with his shots, but he was fatally wounded by Ditzen, who then used his dead friend’s revolver to shoot himself in the chest. Remarkably, Ditzen survived, and he was charged with von Necker’s murder. However, Ditzen was declared unfit for trial on psychological grounds, and committed to a private sanatorium for the mentally ill.
I have a new piece up at The Channelling, an online lit mag about television that was created and produced in a week.
I wrote about this:
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Germany’s Next Top Model Final Episode Zwei Tausend Elf; or The Heidi Klum Show; or Skinny Deutsch Girls Try to Walk Good; or Ze Germans Spend a Pretty Pfennig On a Whole Lot of Not Much
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Okay, so I’m pretty sort of sure that I am writing this here piece for a website literary magazine gambit that I think will be called The Channelling. Actually, that’s all I know. I’m not sure why I have been asked to do this, but I think ‘why’ was expunged from the global lexicon in like 1995 or maybe 2001 or something, so I’m not worried. I think when N’Sync sung ‘bye bye bye bye (bye bye)’ so many times in that killer song of theirs, it was saying bye to why. I don’t know where I just came up with that. If this was the New Yorker I’d have a phalanx of researchers and fact-checkers, but this is not the New Yorker, it’s a fusty corner of the internet.
A friend of mine involved in this project emailed me a comprehensive briefing of exactly what he wanted me to do. Here it is, in its entirety:
watch an hour of German TV and review for it for me… or at least write about the experience of watching foreign TV…
On the 22nd of February of this year I saw a man on fire. He had doused himself head to toe in a couple of litres of petrol and had set himself alight. He flailed about and he ran straight, a human comet hurtling, looking like someone drowning in a private ocean of flames. It was like the movies and it was very much not like the movies. It happened on a wide busy street in Paris, France, in front of the main courthouse that sits next to the La Sainte-Chapelle, a tourist attraction with its beautiful stained-glass walls and gothic architecture. I was about fifty metres away, occupied with taking a carefully-framed photograph of a ornate Parisian streetlamp, when I heard a strange sequence of sounds, sounds that stood out from the backcloth of whooshing traffic and burbling hubbub of people milling about, sounds that—without wanting to seem histrionic—seemed to spear into my ears and demand my attention. Turning around to pinpoint the visuals to match the sounds I was hearing, I saw through a low moving forest of people a flash of burning orange, and then it was gone again. Above the tops of heads in the clear still air there was a dirty sluggish smoke, undulating slowly like dye in water. Despite the slivered obliqueness of these small sensory clues I think I had already somehow figured out what was going on, and my reaction was to run closer. By the time I was near enough to see anything, the man on fire had run across the street and thrown himself through the tall iron gates out front of the monumental courthouse, so that he was half lying, half crouched on the pavement, completely engulfed in flames. If he’d had any hair it was now gone, his clothes had peeled away from his body like how plastic blisters in intense heat, and his skin was orange and pink and spotted with large and small bubbles. He was moaning in pain. Two or three security personnel took off their jackets and started to beat the fire out. They succeeded much more quickly than I thought possible, although thinking back now I can’t say that time was behaving normally. A couple more men appeared with fire extinguishers and sprayed him white. Other people pulled out walkie-talkies and barked words in French. The whole time civilians had been swarming in and out of the scene, mostly smartly-dressed people, probably from the courthouse. They hovered about and pushed in closer like people do, trying to gain witness. They looked like blind puppies straining against each other to reach a mother’s milk, so desperate were they to insert themselves into the narrative. A mixture of security people and police started to form a cordon around the smouldering body, and in response to what I for some reason thought looked like a cover-up, I raised my camera and snapped a series of around ten quick photographs. I was overwhelmingly upset and indignant on behalf of this injured stranger: in my head at that moment was the belief that he’d obviously had a reason for doing what he did, and here was everyone else trying to draw a veil over the incident. In fact what they were trying to do was help, but I felt as if I was the only person out of hundreds there who shared his pain. I made it about me, and it’s embarrassing to think so now.
I’ve tried to write about the burning man in Paris on a few different occasions over the past five months, and struggled every time. The above passage is the first time I’ve finished an attempt, and though it’s my best go so far, I still don’t rate it. It’s not just the sensory nature of the incident that I find almost impossible to capture with text—although that is one part of it, as my memory is manifoldly more intense and detailed than words can ever be, and part of me wonders what the point of writing it down is when it’s never going to be as vivid or as graphic as what actually happened or even what is in my head—but more so is the dismay that I cannot even begin to encapsulate the feeling of those couple of minutes, the electrical surge that passed through that moment, the feeling that a giant someone was holding a giant magnifying glass over that particular stretch of street. And another dilemma that I’ve been fighting with myself over the writing the incident of the burning man in Paris has to do with something that I’ve tackled before: that the ‘real’ world, especially to the fiction writer, is more remarkable and momentous and thus relevant than most or all of what he or she can conceive of and construct. It feels to me that there is a real possibility that the event in Paris, in terms of drama and potency and believability, is beyond anything that my imagination could create if I wanted it to.
When I was young and getting really stuck in to reading, I thought Enid Blyton was a man. I’m not sure why, I just did. Sure, now I know Enid is a girl’s name, but to eight-or-nine-year-old me it wasn’t. I just never bore it in mind; it wasn’t important in relation to the enjoyment of the words. It’s not like the child me ever thought to take his nose out of the pages in order to dissect characters like Moon-Face and The Saucepan Man in respect of the accuracy of the representations of their sex, nor did I ruminate on whether the topography of the Faraway Tree or of Greatheart was in any way even slightly gendered, and I didn’t contemplate whether the language was masculine or feminine, as it was just words telling me about worlds that weren’t mine. Enid Blyton was simply Enid Blyton, the creator of wondrous stories that I liked to read. Indeed, it wasn’t until my late teens when in one of those unforgettably cringeworthy moments that are as indelible in memory as tattoos are on skin—I think we were having a nouveau-nostalgic and no doubt overly earnest discussion of childhood literary loves—that I used the pronoun ‘he’ instead of ‘she’ to wax lyrical about Blyton, and found myself the focus of smirking incredulity. Embarrassing!
Of course, a young kid today who isn’t sure what he or she is reading has all the information of the world at their fingertips; mysteries are disappearing. A young reader of Blyton now can just open their browser and type and point and click, and any unknowns quickly become knowns. If they want to break it down even further they can then take their e-reader and copy and paste a section of a Secret Seven or Famous Five book into one of the myriad gender tests available on the internet, like The Gender Genie, and, already knowing that Enid Blyton is a woman of such-and-such disposition born in this place with this-and-that awards, see if Blyton also writes in a feminine way. This particular test, inspired by a 2003 article in The New York Times Magazine, uses an algorithm developed by a university in Israel to predict the gender of an author:
‘…what the gender-identifying algorithm picks up on is that women are apparently far more likely than men to use personal pronouns — ”I,” ”you” and ”she” especially. Men, on the other hand, prefer so-called determiners — ”a,” ”the,” ”that,” ”these” — along with numbers and quantifiers like ”more” and ”some.” What this suggests, according to Moshe Koppel, an author of the Israeli project, is that women are more comfortable talking or thinking about people and relationships, while men prefer to contemplate things.’ (quote from here)
Now, I’m inclined to think that ‘tests’ such as this just add to the cacophony and confusion, especially when they want to separate female and male writers simply by the pronouns and determiners they employ. I think it widens the divisions and shines the spotlight onto writers, when it should really be focused on where the problems are: with publishers and the media.
All of a sudden, without warning, I’ve started blogging at Southerly. How frightening! For everyone!
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My first post looks like this:
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Freunde und Liebhaber, ich bin (k)ein Berliner
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Chances are the wizardry of your web browser automatically deciphered into English the title of this blog post, but in case not, it translates roughly as Friends and lovers, I am (not) a Berliner.
I’m a Melbourne lad, a writer and editor of sorts, born and raised by windy Bayside beaches, and right now I live in Berlin, Germany. There are several explanations I give to people who ask me why, and some of them are even true some of the time. But this here Southerly blog is not the place to muck about, so I’ll tell you the real reason: I am here in hiding.
No, I didn’t commit big crimes in Australia that required me to go all Christopher Skase-y or Tony Mokbel-ish. And no, I’m not like Lara Bingle or Naomi Robson or anyone else who is basically unemployable in Australia and scraping the bottom of the respect bucket to boot. I left Melbourne because I was having an increasingly hard time writing good words there, and writing good words is my favourite and chosen thing. So instead of confronting and defeating those demons of mine, I ran ran ran, and ended up in Berlin, one of the most famous cities of the past century.
There’s a David Sedaris essay that appeared in the New Yorker in August 2009, called ‘Laugh, Kookaburra’, in which during a visit to Australia he delves a little into his own personal history. It’s good. Towards the beginning of the essay he tells of a friend who asks him to imagine a four-burner stove:
“ ‘One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work.’ The gist, she said, was that in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.”
This is something I’ve thought about from time to time: whether a writer should sacrifice certain whole slices of the life pie in order to focus enough on writing. Maybe only for a few years? Perhaps for life? Or I could be wrong: for all I know doing so might turn out more detrimental than beneficial? I don’t know. Right now I have definitely cut off my family; we still touch base via email and Skype, but distance is distance. And to a certain extent I have secluded myself from my friends too, although I have great email relationships with many of them, and nothing makes you feel more epistolary than being on the other side of the world. But yes, I definitely feel refreshingly unencumbered here, and (perhaps) consequently my writing is going okay, too.
