The Republic of Dissent

Eternal damnation

Sugary excerpt of the day from Carole Enahoro:

If you write political fiction then you must expect complete strangers to grill you on any subject that crosses the collective transom. And if you’re carrying any African DNA, you’re doomed to read newspapers on a daily basis.
I noted this with the sad life of Wole Soyinka, Nigeria’s 1986 Nobel Prize-winning writer. His eyes are hooded with fatigue. For any incident on which every vital and important person in Nigeria has already commented, the media hurries off to Wole for a quick quote. He is the voice of progressive Africa, whether or not progressive Africans agree with him.

Projection and 'American racism'

Interesting bit from Bill Benzon's essay, the best thing I've read this weekend, on the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

European-Americans, some more than others, and some little if at all, have used African-America as a means of discovering and acting out aspects of their own desires and needs which they cannot deal with directly.  Such psychological maneuvering is quite common on an individual level.  American culture has made such projection a part of its collective culture.

The damage of Rambo

Telling Story from Jacques Roubaud (h/t: Lee Rourke) demonstrating that war movies and the media which glorify violence by making it seem as wars or violent acts were part of a video game can damage our understanding of history:

I met Primo Levi once. He was a friend of Italo Calvino, who was a member of the Oulipo. We were both at a meeting in Torino after Calvino’s early death; it was a few months before he himself died. He was a very nice man, very soft-spoken. At dinner he recounted a terrible experience he had just had. He had been invited to a high school in Rome to speak about his experience during the war, and he said that the students could not understand why he and his friends had not taken the Nazis’ guns and killed them. They knew only the Rambo movies. He could not make them understand that it had been impossible to resist. A few months later, I heard that he had committed suicide.

The world has changed...to believe it read my poem

Funny quote from Alice Walker who is so confident in the majesty of talent that she believes that her poem could make the people who had trouble believing in Obama's election believe:

With the election of a black man to the presidency of the United States, the world has changed. Such an event was unthinkable for many people until it actually occurred. For some, there is an unwillingness to believe this historic turn in North America’s affairs is real. They need a poem that reminds them that disbelieving in a new reality can mean missing it altogether; this would be a waste and a tragedy for those who could benefit from shifting their understanding of what America is or can become. I was asked by a newspaper, I don’t recall which or whether it was printed, to write a poem for the inauguration; my mind was very much on those who, from disbelief, could not rejoice.

I'm speechless !

The novel and absolute intimacy

Paul Auster on the novel:

a novel is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy. The reader and the writer make the book together. No other art can do that. No other art can capture the essential inwardness of human life.

Foreignness and the marketability of fiction

Astute observation from Russell Smith on the difficulties of naming local places and to sell books in America:

When situating fiction in your hometown, you risk relying on street names as a kind of shorthand, a code for those in the know who will immediately situate the characters and action in terms of social class and ambience. But that relies on what’s called extratextual knowledge on the part of the reader. I know Queen and Broadview as rather seedy, for example. I have done this rather lazily in my own fiction: I have mentioned Yorkville, a shopping district in Toronto, as shorthand for rich, which is a message lost to anyone who doesn’t know Toronto. I have had editors suggest I take out street names to make the city a less specific one: If you replace College Street with “a street of cafés near the large university” you sum up the atmosphere of the place in a way that’s accessible for a foreigner.
But then you also lose a certain amount of pride. Let’s be honest: We all know the primary reason for such erasures. It’s to make the book more saleable to Americans. We all want our books and films and TV shows to be published in the United States, and we know a large proportion of their entertainment-consuming population is not interested in looking beyond their borders. The story might be set in Ottawa, and it might be recognizable to Canadians as Ottawa, but if the Americans think it’s a nameless northeastern U.S. city, they’re more likely to buy it, so let’s not scare them off by naming it. Toronto in particular is a good stand-in for urban U.S. life anywhere, as we’ve seen in a thousand movies; you just blur out the CN Tower and you’ve got instant everywhere.
It’s pretty common to run into Americans, even at literary conferences, who love Alice Munro and who have not yet realized her Midwestern settings are in a foreign country. She doesn’t always identify her settings as Canadian, but one does recognize them if one is from here. It’s an extra layer of meaning that’s available to you, but you can be moved by the story without it.

I wonder whether what Smith is talking about with regards to American taste hasn't everything to do with the fact that Canada isn't exotic enough to Americans to read its literature and to be engaged by the foreignness of its context. Moreover, my sense is that for too many Americans, Canada is lesser America, a country that wishes it were the United States, in other words the main difference between Canada and America in the 'American' mind is power, which makes the most powerful nation, the better country.
I suspect that Belgian, Luxembourger, and Swiss writers who write in France have the same concern when it comes to their French audience which in my opinion would be more open to reading about London, New York or even Bamako than about Chaleroi or Berne. 

Freedom et liberté

Quote of the end of the afternoon from Jean-Paul Sartre:

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you

The intolerance of the liberal literati

Pertinent observations from Terry Eagleton:

For a long time, they were quite divergent politically: Hitchens was still some kind of socialist and Amis was vehemently anti-communist in an uninteresting, cold war kind of way. But they've since converged. And now they're old cronies backing each other up - instant responses to attacks on the other.
I'm interested in the way a whole stratum of the liberal literati (Rushdie, to some extent Ian McEwan, A C Grayling, obviously Amis and Hitchens) - the very people you'd have expected to be guardians of the liberal flame of tolerance and understanding - have, at the very first assault, rushed into these caricatured postures driven by panic. I'm very struck by how those who are making ugly, illiberal, supremacist noises about the superiority of the west are precisely the sort of literary and liberal characters from whom you'd expect more imagination, openness and sensitivity.

My opinion on the matter is that it's too challenging for the members of what Eagleton calls the liberal liberati to remain liberal all the time and to remain radicals, bold and fresh writers. It helps when you write to be angry and to feel the need to aim it intolerantly at somebody.

Nonfiction as something other than the real thing

I disagree with Rob Nixon on this:

Nonfiction has long been treated as the lutefisk on the literary menu, unlikely to be the special of the day. The genre emits a whiff of the déclassé, served (especially in literature departments) with a garnish of condescension. The problem starts with the word: Like "childless" (why not "child-free"?), "nonfiction" packs a lot of social judgment. Nonfiction may be real, but in matters of creativity, it's not quite the real thing.

I disagree with Nixon because it is my conviction that, although nonfiction may not be considered as totally literary , it has become in recent years especially since we are settled within the Me age as the real thing, as something that shows that a writer isn't just a self-indulgent recluse finding ecstasy within her/his imagination, but a real hard worker who just like a journalist investigates things and make sure that s/he describes what happened and not what s/he would like to have happened. All we have to do is to remember what happened to James Frey and others to realize that people hold nonfiction as the best category of literature because they believe that it is or at least ought to be truthful absolutely.

Loss, transition, tradition, and modernity

Deep thought of the day from Chaim Potok:

I think that the people who were in possession of the tools to move into modernity are gone

Trouver Derrida

Sugary excerpt from David Kaufmann's review of the latest biography of Jacques Derrida, Who was Derrida: an Intellectual Biography by David Mikics.

Derrida constantly took contrarian, if not outright rebellious, stances. He did not like assuming the protective coloring of his surroundings. When he arrived in the early 1950s at the most elite of French universities, the École Normale Supérieure, he chafed against the Marxist orthodoxy of his professors and refused to join the cult of Jean-Paul Sartre—a philosopher whose influence he called “nefarious” and “catastrophic.” Derrida did not follow the path of political engagement favored by his colleagues. Rather, by close and often inventive readings of major texts from the philosophical and literary traditions, he sought to blow up philosophical certainty.
But there were limits to his subversion. Mikics locates one of the major fault lines in Derrida’s thought in the philosopher’s prophetic tones, his “fondness for apocalyptic drama,” which works against his reluctance to imagine the apocalypse itself. According to Mikics, Derrida might have aspired to the end of Western metaphysics and he might have adopted the language and some of the practices of the avant-garde, but he could not run full-out at the future. He wrote like a radical in favor of the moderate.
Derrida’s split persona—revolutionary and ultimately conservative at the same time—goes a long way toward explaining his influence in the American academy. His insistence on close reading made him congenial for literature departments, and his pronouncements made close readings appear consequential. What is more, Derrida’s timing was perfect. His reputation in the United States grew at that point when being a hippie was not a political statement but a “lifestyle choice” and when many of the energies of the late ’60s had become merchandised or bogged down in economic stagnation. At a time of retrenchment, Derrida promised a kind of liberation that did not depend on ethnic or gender identity, a freeing of thought that was intellectually disruptive and could, if need be, serve politically progressive ends.

I have to admit that I have never know what to make of Derrida and Deconstruction because they never got to me. Reading Derrida's felt to me like watching Ingmar Bergman's movies, LI know that I'm watching something that is artistic and philosophical, but I'm unsure about the reasons why it should matter and therefore the question of relevance becomes both an obsession and a distraction. That said, I have always like watching Derrida's speak especially when he isn't given a lecture, because then one gets the sense of somebody who is totally caught up in his work and that must have been a great teacher. 

Camus, Sartre and Moral fetishism

In his indispensable article in the Philosophers Magazine  on the fetishism of morality, Jonathan Rée has a section on the quarrel that ended Camus and Sartre's friendship:

Exactly a hundred years after Mill’s attack on Whewell, Jean-Paul Sartre launched a similar assault on his old friend Albert Camus. His target was Camus’s book L’homme révolté (The Rebel, published in 1951), which argued that the “prophetic dream of Marx” had led directly to the creation of a “terrorist state”. As editor of the magazine Les Temps modernes, Sartre assigned the book to his colleague Francis Jeanson, who denounced Camus as a self-hating liberal “humanist” who wanted to substitute a lachrymose “red-cross morality” for serious political analysis. Camus wrote a feeble response which appeared alongside Jeanson’s hatchetry in August 1952, and Sartre weighed in by accusing Camus of a monstrous form of racism – the “racism of moral beauty”. Sartre was prepared, up to a point, to acknowledge the horror of the Soviet concentration camps – they were, he said, “a challenge for us all” – but unlike Camus he was not prepared to make common cause with bourgeois Commentators who were seizing on them with glee in order to “give themselves a good conscience”. Sartre was horrified by “the ease with which you handle your indignation,” he told Camus. “Is it my fault if these procedures remind me of the criminal court?” he inquired. “Perhaps you should have been appointed as Chief Prosecutor of the Republic of Beautiful Souls.”
Sartre’s belligerence is appalling; but when he talks about the temptation of casting oneself as “Chief Prosecutor for the Republic of Beautiful Souls” he surely has a point. And Camus, though deeply hurt by the attack, tacitly acknowledged that there was some truth in it. His late book La Chute is a first-person story of a drifter in an Amsterdam bar, who tells us how he fled in disgust from his former existence as a fashionable Parisian lawyer who specialised in the defence of widows, orphans, refugees and anyone else who gave off the sweet odour of victimhood. He had been offered public honours, but turned them down, he recalls, “with a quiet dignity in which I found my true reward”. He began each working day by giving alms to a beggar or two; then he would earn the gratitude of another fragrant victim with a heart-stopping speech in court, and in the evenings he would relax with his elegant literary friends, complacently denouncing “the heartlessness of the ruling class and the hypocrisy of our politicians”.
Gradually he came to be revolted by his own precious sanctity. (“Just think how many crimes have been committed because the perpetrator could not bear to be in the wrong.”) He gave up the glamour of human rights activism in favour of a chastened practice of forgiveness, describing himself as a juge-pénitent, a penitent judge or perhaps a recovering morality-fetishist. “I favour every theory that denies human innocence, and every practice based on the presumption of guilt,” he says: “I am, dear boy, a disenchanted partisan of slavery.” And when he gets to the end he turns to us, his listeners, and enters a gentle plea: “I hope at least,” he says, “that you are a little less pleased with yourself than you were.”
It was of course leftism that provided the context of this famous quarrel; and it seems to me that leftism, together with politics, has been a casualty of the fetishism of morality.

 I have been more of a Camusian than a Sartrian because that I have always admired the fact that although Camus agreed mostly with Sartre that Marxism was "l'horizon indépassable de notre temps" (the inescapable philosophy of our time), he was unwilling to get blood on his pen to defend it. He was also reluctant to forgive the left's moral contradictions by using the pretext that the end justifies the means and that since the ends of the left were just, it was free to use unjust means to achieve them. I believe that the reason that pushed Sartre to pick a fight with Camus after the publication of L' Homme Révolté was simply because it was his most moral work. In that masterful essay, Camus affirms that existence doesn't absolutely precede essence for some human tendencies exist before the beginning of one's existence that make the obligation to make moral decisions even greater and more fundamentally that makes it necessary to human being to refuse to be a God, to fetishize morality, to transcend it in order to accept to be people. Sartre wanted to be a God because he needed to be right absolutely.

Ayn Rand's demons

Cathy Young in the Globe and Mail on what she calls the darker sides of Ayn Rand:

(...) Ms. Rand's work also has a darker, more disturbing aspect – one that, unfortunately, is all too good a fit for this moment in America's political life. That is her intellectual intolerance and her tendency to demonize her opponents. Speaking through her hero John Galt, Ms. Rand declared, “There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.” She lambasted free-market theorists such as Friedrich A. Hayek for their lack of purity in allowing the government a legitimate role in alleviating poverty and its effects. In her novels, supporters of various forms of collectivism – moochers and looters – are shown as acting by stealth to take over and corrupt society and culture.
Ms. Rand's detractors have often branded her a fascist. The label is unfair, but her work does have shades of a totalitarian or dictatorial mentality. To refute this charge, Ms. Rand's defenders point to her explicit statements that force is acceptable only in self-defence. Yet her fiction sometimes seems to contradict this principle.
Particularly troubling is a passage in Atlas Shrugged in which bureaucratic incompetence and arrogance lead to a deadly train wreck. Ms. Rand sarcastically notes that many people would regard the dead passengers as innocent victims of a tragedy and then, in a series of brief character sketches, endeavours to show that they were far from innocent: All had benefited from evil government programs, promoted evil political or philosophical ideas, or both. Especially chilling is Ms. Rand's casual mention of the fact that one of these evildoers, a bureaucrat's wife, is travelling with her three young children.
Ayn Rand does not advocate these people's murder, yet she clearly suggests they had it coming. Both in Atlas Shrugged and in her nonfiction essays, political and ideological debates are treated as wars with no innocent bystanders.

Americans almost always have trouble accepting that the people they idealized can be complex figures instead of just being people whose purity would force the Vatican should offer them  up for sainthood. That said, I think that Young's point about war and innocence is both poignant and relevant because it may explain the reason why so many Rand's true believers are never troubled by the violent inequalities of liberal capitalism whitewashing them with the assertion that life is Hobbesian and there is nothing that even politics can do or should attempt to do. In any case, the point is that Ayn Rand's work is relevant, but also limited because she was such a defender for the market that she was unwilling to even acknowledge that its imperfections were great enough that it had to be addressed by society not just through charity, but politics and yes, Government. For after, having a Government who actually focuses on what it can fix instead of managing people's lives and making them happy cannot be proof of the beginning of the Apocalypse.

The origins of Romance

Sugary excerpt from Carolyne Larrington's piece in the Times Literary Supplement on Mediaval Romance and literature:

Romance developed first in French as a mirror in which a European warrior-caste saw itself reflected as a courtly and chivalric aristocracy whose pursuit of honour was tempered by attentiveness to women, ritualized fighting with members of the same class, and a determination to face every danger.

That is just so surprising !!!

The globalization of literature

I agree with Tim Parks on this  (hat tip : Amtava Kumar) even though the same realizations take me some place else:

As a result of rapidly accelerating globalization we are moving toward a world market for literature. There is a growing sense that for an author to be considered “great,” he or she must be an international rather than a national phenomenon. This change is not perhaps as immediately evident in the US as it is in Europe, thanks to the size and power of the US market and the fact that English is generally perceived as the language of globalization, so that many more translations go away from it than toward it. However, more and more European, African, Asian and South American authors see themselves as having “failed” if they do not reach an international audience.
In recent months authors in Germany, France and Italy—all countries with large and well-established national readerships—have expressed to me their disappointment at not having found an English language publisher for their works; interestingly, they complain that this failure reflects back on their prestige in their home country: if people don’t want you elsewhere you can’t be that good. Certainly, in Italy where I live, an author is only thought to have arrived when he is published in New York. To appreciate how much things have changed one only need reflect how little it would have dented the reputations of Zola or Verga had they not achieved immediate publication in London.

The key point here is that globalization has widened not only the literary market, but it has also  shrunk it in the sense that taste has been homogenized and diversity hollywoodized. "International" writers write thinking about what they hope would be the english translation of their work and their "foreign" audience. In the Time of Zola and of Verga, writers didn't have the pressure to sell and more importantly, they didn't have the example of some of their peers who became incredibly financially successfully and widely influential by giving the masses what they want: "fast literature."

Plagiarism as a disease

Mary Beard makes a thought-provoking point about plagiarism:

(...)Yes it is possible to plagiarise without realising that you have. And no, fear of plagiarism should not stop you talking to fellow students about your work, so long as you are sensible.
It all made plagiarism sound like a nasty disease you might pick up without knowing -- but one that shouldn't stop ordinary social contact (so long as you dont share a tooth brush or anything silly like that.
And after all, as one of my colleagues pointed out, "plagiarism" actually sounds like a disease; "cheating" doesn't.

What I'm wondering is how does one prove that plagiarism is unconscious or accidental, I have the strong suspicion that it depends on the status /social condition/likability of the "plagiarist."

Reading lousy books

Over at Language Hat, it's interesting to see that  there can be a point, for some,  to reading lousy books:

I'm reading a lousy Iraqi novel called Papa Sartre (a 2009 translation of the 2001 original); it's only 178 pages long but feels like War and Peace, and I'm skimming more and more as I zip through its repetitive and heavy-handed mockery of schemers, ne'er-do-wells, and fake philosophers. Why do I keep reading, you ask? Because I'm fascinated with Baghdad, as I am with all ancient cities, and it's rare to read fiction set there.

Reading to me is like eating, it is as difficult for me to get through a lousy book as it is to get through a lousy meal just to experience something else. I am reminded of American tourists who force themselves to eat frog logs or escargots just to say that they experience French cuisine, but who have to fill themselves with French wine to force their stomach to accept what they consider filth.

The age of Botulism

Scott McLemee whose writings are addictive has an interesting take on Bernard-Henri Lévy and the now famous Botul affair:

A friend who has read La vie sexuelle tells me that the author’s tongue is very conspicuously in his cheek. That BHL cited it as a serious work of scholarship would strongly suggest that he has an employee or two toiling in the erudition mines for him. If so, it is an interesting question whether the person who actually read Botul misunderstood the nature of the book -- or passed along the citation as an act of sabotage. Either way, it seems like a fireable offense. (Of course, nothing like that ever happens in the academic world.)
Finally,the incident poses an important question about intellectual history. Michel Foucault once said of Gilles Deleuze that his friend’s work was so important that one day the century might be known as Deleuzean. The convergence of judgments between Bernard-Henri Lévy and Jean-Baptiste Botul regarding Kant has important implication -- even in the United States, where BHL has, of late, been vigorously colonizing the media system. He is a regular guest on Charlie Rose, his articles appear at The Huffington Post, and Random House is publishing another of his books in a few months.
Doesn’t BHL’s prominence reveal something about the nature of the period? Are we not living, perhaps, in the age of Botulism?

The answer to Mclemee's last question is of course yes. BHL is going to be at ease and like a fish in water in the America media world because nobody will ever require him to show more than photogenic flair and frenched fluff. America doesn't really take intellectualism seriously for it always assumed that if it isn't accessible, it isn't worth much and that it is too elitist. The trouble with BHL is that his admirers are too in love with him to criticize his tendency to take up easy causes and to dumb down complex subjects and that his dandysm impedes his detractors from taking him seriously. That's said, BHL is being the emblem of our age of Botulism, he is nevertheless useful like a burger from McDonald's. What would America,  our world be without fast food?

The mediocrity of terror

Sugary excerpt from  Costica Bradatan's review of Herta Müller's The Appointment in the Globe and Mail:

Terror can be mediocre, even idiotic, yet omnipresent. Terror can be terribly banal, utterly un-Romantic, but never-ending. Terror is when the secret police persuade your best friend to inform on you; when objects start moving around your room in your absence; when the secret police interrogator tells you, right before you leave his office after a day-long interrogation, that “accidents do happen,” or when your friends start committing (poorly) staged suicides.
That's why Herta Müller's work is so important: It maps out, with surgical precision, this mediocre yet sinister face of European totalitarianism, which is something that has been largely unaccounted for. Her novels document the oppressive fears and anxieties of a world turned upside-down, a world where the secret police do not necessarily kill you, but mess up your life enough to make you lose your mind.

The intellectual appeal of Nazism

Quote of the morning from Max Dunbar's review of Emmanuel Faye's book Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy:

Writers and thinkers still alive after the fall of the regime were confronted with that ultimate question: what did you do in the war? Academic supporters of Nazism could see several ways to postwar respectability. They could plead indulgence. It must have be easy in the mid-thirties to get caught up in the propaganda whirl of it all: tomorrow belongs to me! Alternatively, one could plead cowardice or pragmatism. Many had to make compromises to spare themselves and to protect family and friends.
The mistake is to see fascism as strictly a yob phenomenon that addresses the short-term frustrations of the poor and ignorant. The mistake is to believe that it cannot possibly appeal to educated men and women. Yet even before Hitler’s takeover there were true believers inside the academy’s lustrous gates. No one now remembers Schmitt, Wolf and Rosenberg but Martin Heidegger continues to be read, studied and quoted.

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On Africanity and literature

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Chinua Achebe and his influence on "Africa":

As a university student in the 1950s, in addition to reading Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Coleridge, Achebe also read Joyce Carey’s "Mister Johnson," a novel set in Nigeria, which Time magazine had named the "best book ever written about Africa." Achebe disagreed. Not only was the Nigerian character in the novel unrecognizable to him and his classmates but he also detected, in the description of Nigerians, "an undertow of uncharitableness ... a contagion of distaste, hatred, and mockery."
There has been much written about Chinua Achebe’s "Things Fall Apart" as a response to Mister Johnson, and one likes to think that Achebe would have written his novel even if he had not read Cary’s. Still, the prejudiced representation of African characters in literature could not but have had an influence on Achebe’s development as a writer. He would, years later, write a famous essay about the portrayal of Africans in Joseph Conrad’s classic novel "Heart of Darkness," arguing not that Conrad should not have written honestly about the racism of the time, but that Conrad failed to hold an authorial rejection of that worldview.
The strangeness of seeing oneself distorted in literature – and indeed of not seeing oneself at all – was part of my own childhood. I grew up in the Nigerian university town of Nsukka in the 1980s, reading a lot of British children’s books. My early writing mimicked the books I was reading: all my characters were white and all my stories were set in England. Then I read "Things Fall Apart." It was a glorious shock of discovery, as was "Arrow of God," which I read shortly afterwards; I did not know in a concrete way until then that people like me could exist in literature. Here was a book that was unapologetically African, that was achingly familiar, but that was, also, exotic because it detailed the life of my people a hundred years before. Because I was educated in a Nigerian system that taught me little of my pre-colonial past, because I could not, for example, imagine with any accuracy how life had been organized in my part of the world in 1890, Achebe’s novels became strangely personal.

Adichie's assertions bug me. They do because she focuses on differences, which to her seem to be fundamental. Her use of the expression "unapologetically African" is problematic (it would have been less controversial is she had said used the word Nigerian even though the use of the word unapologetically would have remained a problem). Africanity doesn't exist. In fact, it has never existed. It wouldn't presumptuous to presume that Chinua Achebe is very different than his ancestors and that in fact, when he wrote Things Fall Apart he focused on his desire to be himself rather than on his Nigerianity or Africanity (although for him, being Achebe might have meant be a true Nigerian and African). What I'm trying to see is that people cleverly used Africanity to defend their individuality and unfortunately often to justify differences that reason and decency (due seldom to their lack of imagination and knowledge) cannot. The point is Achebe's greatest achievement wasn't the affirmation of an identity, but the creation of one, one, which was solely his. People who look like him or have commonalities with him don't have to embrace it, but solely to recognize and not to delegitimate. At the same time, those who do as Adichie shouldn't equate with Africanity as a way to argue that there is just the Chinua Achebe's way to show that one comes from Africa. Adichie conveniently ignores that issues of identity have plagued Africans precisely for the  reason that because they is no agreement on a definition, the focus is placed on  resentment, victimization, the colonizers, and the fact that Africanity means to "unapologically" be different than them and to confront their contradictions.
The reason why I have argued that there is not such a thing as "African literature" or even as "African writer" is simply those popular and narrow categories don't mean anything. I have the strong suspicion that writers from the continent have too many essential differences to be put in one narrow categories and that when they are not ideologues or marketers would acknowledge that neither their nationality nor the fact that they are from a vast and heterogeneous continent defines their writing.

For Women, it is always about love and pain

For some reason, Toril Moi's review of the latest English translation of Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxième Sexe in the London Review of Books bugs me . I shouldn't say "for some reason" for I know what it bugs me. It seems that the fact that Beauvoir is the author of Le Deuxième Sexe has given all of her biographers the manly obligation to prove that she was a woman first and foremost and thus very much guided by her womanhood, not her brain or any type of rigorous analytical enterprise. The presumption is that those "facts" should lead to the logical conclusion that her work is secondary to the one of Sartre because when she thought or wrote, she never stopped to be the Castor, a woman with a big derrière who sought love everywhere else even in literature and philosophy when he refused to give it to her. Outrageous excerpt:

The roots of The Second Sex are here, in Beauvoir’s realisation that her life had been affected in countless ways by her having been born a girl. This massive book was written fast: the first volume appeared in Paris in June 1949, the second five months later. But Beauvoir did not spend all the intervening time on her analysis of women’s condition. In January 1947 she travelled to the United States for the first time, and in 1948 she published America Day by Day, a deeply perceptive book about the experience. Moreover, she met Nelson Algren there. The writing of The Second Sex thus coincided with her discovery of America and with her passionate affair with Algren. It also coincided with Sartre’s transatlantic affair with the New York-based Frenchwoman Dolorès Vanetti, which caused Beauvoir much pain.
That much of Beauvoir’s personal experience went into the making of her investigation of the situation of women is beyond doubt. Judith Okely has drawn attention to Beauvoir’s ‘hidden use of herself as a case study’ in The Second Sex. The urgency of her style, the conviction that every scrap of evidence must be piled up to show the world the truth about women’s condition, surely comes from a sense that she was, after all, writing a kind of confession, offering the public intimate and unsettling truths about herself, and about other women.

Boy, women really do have trouble taking each other seriously or rather they have this disturbing notion that seriousness is equated to manliness and womanhood (I hate that word) is a particularity. I have yet to see Sartre's sex life been given the same dehumanizing and belittling treatment.

Spinster fear and sterile, but eternal musings

Before quoting Jessa Crispin's article on Elizabeth Gilbert and her two books, I have to say that I like Gilbert. I like listening to her talk because she gives good lectures. The trouble is that I just don't like reading her books because they make me want to slam my head against the wall while crying in a Nancy Kerrigan fashion "why? why?" What I'm trying to say is that we are in 2010, women should just get over the perpetual quest for self, perfection, candid feminitude, balance, and just embrace complexity and their imperfections while just living their life the way their want to without making excuses, without needing to bash others on the head with their deep, but sterile thoughts.  Here is the sugary excerpt:

These are the accusations against Elizabeth Gilbert I have read: treacly, annoying, feminist, insincere, spoiled. Then there are the more brutal ones: bitch, dyke, cunt. The most common, however, was "selfish." How dare she? How dare she leave her husband to travel? How dare she write a book about it? How dare she fall in love again? And with a Brazilian! How dare she... what? Attain happiness? Or at the very least, put a stop to her death wish? That bitch, that dyke, how dare she walk away from her man?! Doesn't she understand that this is the shameful masculine territory? It's just as bad when men do it — we're not saying it isn't! — but women are supposed to be above all that, all of that free will stuff. Really. How dare she?
Now of course there is the follow-up, a book examining the state of marriage after Gilbert discovered she had to marry her Brazilian lover for him to attain citizenship. As a history of marriage, Committed is a thoroughly unnecessary book. There are a ton of books on the market telling us that marriage is a raw deal for women. Men thrive in marriage, they are healthier, they earn more money, they are happier. These gains appear to be at the expense of women, as they do not thrive in marriage. Quite the opposite. There are the added hours of housework, a decline in earning power, the depressed libido. Then there are the rates of divorce and infidelity, that sticky statistic about the chances of a woman being murdered by her husband. We know all this, and we get married anyway. If this is the paradigm, why do we cling so tightly to it? And why do we freak out when someone rejects it?

Loss and blandness

The Times Literary Supplement has a review of Martin Amis's latest The Pregnant Widow, which left me wondering why Amis writes about love when he seems to feel the same about it than Christopher Hitchens feels about religion. In any case, here is a sugary excerpt of the review:

However, if the friction between the novel’s layers doesn’t always generate excitement, the conceit of layers does contribute to its greatest strengths. At the very beginning of the story, Keith in 2006 is described as entering “the great dig of London”, and The Pregnant Widow works best as an archaeology of the ageing body, an analysis of what Helen Small has pointedly described as “the failure of a preferential version of the future in which one’s own freedom was the overriding object”. In this regard, the novel’s multiple time frames give Amis the chance to measure Keith’s increasing physical frailty and stretchedness unsparingly against his younger self (“As you pass the half-century, the flesh, the coating on the person, begin to attenuate. And the world is full of blades and spikes”), raising the uncomfortable possibility that it may be worse for a man’s ageing body to be parodically recognizable than changed utterly.
Nor is this the only kind of wasting that sets Amis’s imagination going: The Pregnant Widow stands alongside novels such as Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach and Philip Roth’s Indignation as part of a contemporary subgenre, the elegy to wasted opportunity. As in McEwan’s novella, the last section of the story fast-forwards through the future lives and losses of some of the characters, a trajectory of unfulfilment and mis-fulfilment that is deliberately braced against the unsuspecting world of 1970, as if the sheer weight of narrative itself could somehow preserve the ghostly energy of what didn’t go on to happen.

I'm going to wait (well after after May 2010 when it gets published in the States) to read The Pregnant Widow. It needs to age because it is ready for me. I will eventually get to it as I know that I'll get around to eating more tofu just to have the illusion and the self-satisfaction that I'm a healthier and better person.

Degendering Writing

Claire Messud on Women, literature, and the need to degender writing so that they can be considered as writers, plain and simple and to give them the opportunity to be read.

Just over ten years ago, the Modern Library compiled a list of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century: only nine of them were by women, and Edith Wharton accounted for two books. Were there really only eight women writers of major significance in those 100 years? Not in my personal canon, at least. When, in 2006, the New York Times ran a list of the best American fiction of the past twenty-five years, Toni Morrison’s Beloved was pronounced the winner; but she and Marilynne Robinson (for Housekeeping) were the only women out of twenty-two titles (and that’s counting Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy and McCarthy’s Border trilogy as a single book each). Just last September, when the international literary magazine Wasafiri solicited responses from twenty-five global writers about the work that has most shaped world literature over the past quarter century, just four women—Elizabeth Bishop, Mildred Taylor, Toni Morrison, and Quarratulain Hyder—were on the list. And this is in a world where women account for 80 percent of fiction readers. See “Why Women Read More Than Men,” by Eric Weiner.
Here’s the deal: men, without thinking, will almost without fail select men. And women, without thinking, will too often select men. It’s a known fact that among children, girls will happily read stories with male protagonists, but boys refuse to read stories with female protagonists. J.K. Rowling was aware of this: if Harry Potter had been Harriet Potter, none of us would know about her.
(…)American literature is world literature. This is fiction for a global generation. Here are some fine examples of it, by a diverse group of immensely talented young writers who just happen to be women. I’d like to think that Elizabeth Bishop could not object.

Colonial arrogance

It is because of statements such this one that I have never been able to know quite what to make of Wole Soyinka (I have always thought that his writings were too restricted and restrictive, but that doesn't mean that he isn't a good writer):

England is a cesspit. England is the breeding ground of fundamentalist Muslims. Its social logic is to allow all religions to preach openly. But this is illogic, because none of the other religions preach apocalyptic violence. And yet England allows it. Remember, that country was the breeding ground for communism, too. Karl Marx did all his work in libraries there.(...) Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of accommodativeness. You take pride in your openness.

Why do I have the unsavory feeling that too many greater of certain epoch are incapable to accept that Africa got decolonized over 40 years ago because they cannot let go of a world were there has to be the colonizers responsible for all the ills of the world and the colonized, eternal victims of history?

Seeing something new in Shakespeare

Great stuff as always from Mark Thwaite at ReadySteadyblog:

(...) Heritage stops us seeing Shakespeare for the troubling and unsettling writer that he manifestly is: "The weight of this sad time we must obey; Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say." The times are ever-troubling; and it is always the time to speak in a heartfelt way against the present's deadening cant. These are not sane times; Lear is as untimely as it has ever been.
Shakespeare was writing when what constituted the written English language, what constituted the very tools which he went on to fashion into the best ever expression of those tools, was still particularly unsettled. And how he wields words seems to reflect a view of the self that suggests that what constitutes the self -- fashioned on the stage merely by the playwright's words, of course -- is itself ever-unsettled. Shakespeare’s language is an erratic, antic, fizzing brew which captures, and expresses existentially, a particular take on the non-fixity of the human state. He is a poet not of an age, but for all time because time is written into the ambiguity -- the play -- of his writing, and into the ambiguous, uncertain, unanchored, disarranged characters he sets before us. His language moves -- his characters move -- as we move as time moves...

As a Francophone, it was easier to like Shakespeare and to penetrate his writings in spite of their presumed and assumed difficulty and inaccessibility (the difficulty of a language or rather of the writing of an author is seldom an obstacle for a Francophone because French is an extremely difficult language to master) because I thought that he was a greater and more improved version of Corneille. I have always hated Corneille because I thought he made reading French an unnecessary unsavory experience despite having the best ingredients just because he must have thought that his works was too good be for the masses. In any case, I agree that Shakespeare's language moves. I would like to think that the reason for this is that like Balzac he could never really fall in love with his writing and therefore continuously thought of it as something that must not be allowed to kill his plays. The reason why there isn't a Shakespeare in French theater (Molière doesn't even come close) is that it is harder to make French move as characters do simply actions always overwhelms the language or language overwhelms the characters. Thus, it is not a coincidence that French theater needed Beckett and that it has been difficult for it to replace him.

Resfreshing silliness

Unlike some people, I love the fact that Martin Amis attempts to pick a fight with Coetzee by asserting that he has no talent. Coetzee is a big boy. He can defend himself. Writers don’t have to have a disingenuous deference to their peers. Hearing one saying that another sucks even when it comes out of bad faith, is refreshing and good for the writing soul. That said, I’m going to wait before I read Amis’s latest while enjoying Coetzee’s Summertime.

Sucker punching Arendt

Irving Louis Horowitz defends Hannah Arendt against Bernard Wasserstein's brutal and in my unfair and idiotic assault in an article in The Times Literary Supplement, which many others such Ron Rosenbaum continued in an article in Slate with neither much thought nor originality:

Arendt in no shape or form “blames the victim” for the terrible punishment inflicted by the Nazis. What she does do—in my opinion, correctly—is identify the extraordinary depth to which the Nazis went to exterminate a people. Sadly, a large bloc of German Jews felt that, if the Nazis could not be turned back at the gates of genocide, they could at least be prevented from carrying out their worst ambitions. An equally large bloc felt that that was not possible once the machinery of terror and the political order were enshrined in jurisprudence. The end result was a disaster for the survivors. Arendt’s bitterness was indeed focused on Jews who urged and even advocated compromise. In light of historical events, one might argue against her views on the Eichmann trial but most certainly not that the theme of banality reflected anything other than despair over the German Jewish community’s failure to recognize the pervasiveness of the system and the corrosion of the legal groundwork of its Nazi-infected mass movements.
Issues with Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem keep turning up. The theme of the banality of evil did not win favor with Arendt’s critics; psychological explanations of human behavior rarely settle matters. But Wasserstein has raised criticism of a possible loophole for disquieting personal behavior—a criticism introduced by Walter Laqueur many years ago—to a much higher level. Wasserstein condemns Arendt’s views as little more than using the Holocaust to “blame the victim.” The idea that such a grotesque reading can pass without evidence is difficult to entertain. Arendt, echoed by many in the German Jewish communities of the Nazi era, did not blame anyone but the Nazi state (at one level) and the German people as a whole for the Holocaust. What Arendt may have failed to appreciate was the enormity and the gravity of the situation, that she as well as others see as a failure of nerve and verve alike and to take appropriate measures and safeguards.

I'm reminded me of the vicious assaults against Irène Némerosvky justified by the pretext that she was a self-hating Jew. Critics are never as ferocious and unfair against people they believe should be a member of group and yet, are not representing it well or rather are irritatingly escaping categorization. I'm not a fervent admirer of Arendt, I just think that some have never forgiven for refusing to say that Eichmanm and the Nazis were uniquely evil as if the Shoah would stop being the greatest horror and in my view the defining moment of the last century if we didn't refuse to acknowledge that Hitler didn't have to be unique to kill over six million people and that that fact should weigh heavily on the collective conscience of humanity.

Fiction and Darkness

Chinua Achebe on Conrad's Heart of the Darkness and its racism:

I did not see myself as an African in those books. I took sides with the white men against the savages. In other words, I went through my first level of schooling thinking I was of the party of the white man in his hair-raising adventures and narrow escapes. The white man was good and reasonable and smart and courageous. The savages arrayed against him were sinister and stupid, never anything higher than cunning. I hated their guts.
But a time came when I reached the appropriate age and realized that these writers had pulled a fast one on me! I was not on Marlowe’s boat steaming up the Congo in ‘Heart of Darkness’; rather, I was one of those unattractive beings jumping up and down on the riverbank, making horrid faces.”

I've always wondered how much racism is acceptable for books who written in times when the prejudices which they transcribe were the norm. In other words, should we be able to read Conrad, Voltaire, or Céline without feeling not only guilty, but dirty? Can any work of fiction ever be equated to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or Mein Kempf ? My only problem with The Heart of Darkness has always been the chosen limitations, which Conrad placed on the story because he was aware on his superfluousness and the subjectivity of his experience in the Congo and of the fact that he needed to give his readers what they wanted. I would have love The Heart of Darkness to have been more graphic, that is for example for "the savages" to either eat the "whites" on the boat or for the "civilized" people to just massacre them.  What I'm trying to say is that fiction has a right to racist, grotesque, vile or whatever else, the problem is its infeudation to biography or reality, when it is asked to represent the world as it should be or even as it is. Achebe seems not to be able to accept the fact that racists or rather prejudiced people can be good and even great writers and that to me is disappointing.

African literature

Interesting thoughts from Aaron Bady:

(...) after all, what is African literature? The more one thinks about it, I find, the more it falls apart as a category. Which is to say, while it certainly exists in a phenomenological sense, trying to place that phenomenon in any kind of empirical context is a project of fast diminishing returns: the more seriously you attempt to group the literary production of an entire continent into a single term, the more you occlude the fundamental fictions of that categorization from your vision. I’m not going to go over all the different kinds of linguistic, cultural, historical, geographical, and racial categories that different critics have tried out in their search for a securely definable field of “African literature” (each of which is at least usefully wrong) but to treat any of them as anything but imperfect fictions is to naturalize (and thus sacrifice the ability to think critically about) those very discursive narratives.
If once wishes to wax Foucaultian, though (and “one” does wish, in this case), it does exist as a set of institutional practices that produce a coherent discourse. And if we are invested in thinking empirically about the basis on which the literary production of African literature happens, that institutional discourse certainly does exist as an expression of a commercial desire mediated by a particular messy set of critical taste-making devices. Which is to say, somewhere between the publishing industry’s attempt to create a product to market (and a market for their product) and the desire by writers and readers to have a relationship through by that marketplace we find the effort by critics of all sorts to make it happen, and concrete institutional structures through which they do it.

There isn't such a thing as African literature because there isn't such a thing as an African identity or even as Africanness, Africanity or an African citizenship. The fact is although there is a continent called Africa, there are no Africans and therefore African writers don't exist.There is as wide a gap between Chinua Achebe and J.M. Coetzee as there is between Philip Roth and Gabriel García Márquez. It might be worth our while to wonder why some are obsessed with defining non-whites by what sets them apart rather than by what they have in common with the rest.
Marie Ndiaye won the Goncourt prize yesterday and although she is very much a French writer, at the beginning of her career librarians wanted to classify her work in the African literature part of their bookstores because she had a Senegalese name and because she looks black since her father was in fact Senegalese even though she has grown up in France and never went to Senegal until she was an adult. Already the Los  Angeles Times literary blog has called her the first black woman (Americans have a problem with race and with the idea that métisse doesn't mean black and that black doesn't mean much) to win the prize even though she isn't black and doesn't describe herself as such (to the contrary of Obama who did for political reasons), which shows that she refuses to be defined by what  race conscious people perceived as essential existential categories. 

Great writers, huge egos, and blind spots

I agree with this even though I happen to enjoy immensely both Martin Amis's and Philip Roth's writings (Roth is one of the greatest novelists. He should have received the Nobel prize for literature if he wasn't such a acerbic manly man, which just proves the fashionable and consensual nature of such prizes):

When writers like Amis, or Philip Roth – who declared this week that novel-reading would be a fringe activity in 25 years – make their apocalyptic proclamations about the state of publishing, it seems apparent that their pessimism may in fact be rather strongly influenced by anxiety that their new work no longer carries the kind of cultural clout they have grown used to, not because people aren't reading novels, but because people aren't reading their novels. And part of the reason for that may be that with the bulk of modern consumers of fiction being women, the particular brand of literary writing in which a particular aptitude for fellatio suffices as characterisation for a woman is less interesting, or resonant, than it once was.

Writers and political ideologies

I just finished reading Enrique Krauze's piece in the New Republic on Gabriel García Márquez in which he discusses Marquez 's politics and its effects on his writing by focusing on Gerald Martin's biography. Unfortunately, I think that Krauze's piece suffers from its lack of conciseness and cohesiveness and its author's inability/unwillingness to just say or rather just write what he means rather than beating around the bush to cover his biases and partiality. This lack of conciseness explains why the sugary excerpt of the article is found in its conclusion, which has to merit to try to make a point:

Gabriel García Márquez is not a hothouse writer. He claims to be proud of his work as a reporter. He promotes journalism at an academy in Colombia. He has asserted that the news story is a literary genre with the potential to be "not just true to life but better than life. It’s as good as a story or a novel, but with one sacred and inviolable difference: novels and stories permit unlimited fabrication but news stories have to be true down to the last comma." How, then, to reconcile this declaration of journalistic ethics with his own concealment of the truth in Cuba, despite his possession of privileged inside information?
Eventually history makes both aesthetic and moral judgments. Aesthetically speaking, it is a little premature to say that García Márquez is the "new Cervantes." But in moral terms, certainly, there is no comparison. A hero in the war against the Turks, wounded and maimed in battle, castaway and prisoner in Algeria for five years, Cervantes lived his ideals, his tribulations, and his poverty with Quixote-like integrity, and enjoyed the supreme freedom of accepting his defeats with humor. There is not a trace of such greatness of spirit in García Márquez, who has avidly collaborated with oppression and dictatorship. Cervantes? Not by a long shot.
The beauties of the fiction of Gabriel García Márquez will survive the twisted loyalties of the man who created it, just as the work of Céline survives his passion for the Nazis and the work of Pound survives his admiration for Mussolini. But it would be an act of poetic justice if, in the autumn of his life and at the zenith of his glory, he disassociated himself from Fidel Castro and put his influence at the service of the Cuban boat people. There is no point in hoping for such a transformation, of course. It is the kind of thing that happens only in García Márquez novel.

Something bothers me about Krauze's argument and his indictment of  Gabriel García Márquez, it is the fact that the context is blurred or rather tainted by an unwillingness to consider the fact that politcs aren't science and that writers's ideologies cannot be examined without considered the totality of the circumstances of the times within which they live. It is misleadingly shameful to compare Márquez to Céline without explanations or even an argumentation and without at least trying to be logical to the end. What I mean to say is that if Márquez is Céline, and thus Castro is Mussolini or Hitler what does that make Nations and their leaders that have good relations with Cuba and with the Castro ? Is Sarkozy, Neville Chamberlain because he sends envoys to Cuba? What should we say of Lula ? The goal isn't here to clear Márquez of any responsibility for his political ideology, but to point out that a writer's political ideologies cannot be judged without a deep and complete analysis of the context within which he writes. Louis Ferdinand Céline was a vile anti-semite, but he was living in  time where being antisemitic was tolerated in French society to say the least; that doesn't excuse him  but it matters. Context here is key to have make an informed judgment, but I wonder if that what was Krauze wants more than to beat on Gabriel García Márquez like a drum for associating himself with Castro.

We are all Dan Brown

I agree with this:

Might our communal antipathy towards Brown in fact be a displacement of the energy that fuels the oft-unspoken but pervasive anxiety that the even attainment of longed-for commercial success is no guarantee that we are actually any good at writing? And yet would we keep writing at all if we didn't still have a shred of hope, deep down, that it might be possible that we might be brilliant? We are all Dan Brown. Except for the staggering wealth.

I have to admit that it is difficult for me to take somebody seriously who is devouring  a Dan Brown in the train, the Gym or wherever else because I make the snobbish assumption that they read just like too many Americans eat, just to put something in their mouth and to feel full.

Real people and literature

Sugary excerpt of the day from AS Byatt;

I know at least one suicide and one attempted suicide caused by people having been put into novels. I know writers to whom I don't tell personal things – which is hard, as these writers are always the most interested in what one has to tell. Now we have the blog and the facebook everyone is a writer, and everyone's idea of anyone else, kind or cruel, just or unjust, is available on the web, to be believed, or mocked. Blogs and facebooks, too, have caused suicides. Writers often realise the power of writing too late.

Attitude américaine

Falling out love with narcissism

From Andrew Seal's review of Midnight Children, Salman Rushdie's classic:

I guess I lost my taste for narcissism when I fell out of love with Woody Allen.

I envy Seal because I'm still stuck and lost in the wild jungle of narcissism. To talk about Midnight Children, I have to admit that it is one of the few Rushdie's books that I haven't been able to finish because I never got into it mainly because the magical realism felt too real to me, but never had enough magic.

L'héautontimorouménos

For me the summer isn't just hot, but cruel because I'm trying not to be too Baudelairian, not to be too much of masochist and poetically self-absorbed. It's a challenge. I'm reading a great book, which puts a lot of what matters at the forefront of my existence, it's Little Bee by Chris Cleeve. It's very well written, but what impresses me most is that Cleeve has found a way not to talk about Africa, as a place out there, alien, sub or non human, but as a place where things ought to make sense and where people, orphans, or whoever else are just people struggling the complexities of their humanity. So far, it's deliciously complex and it's a blast!

Traveling with a Nigerian passport

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in the Financial Times on the difficulties of Traveling with a Nigerian passport and getting an American visa:

I have many stories of travel on my own Nigerian passport. The immigration official in Copenhagen was convinced I was a prostitute, for example, because there had been a recent influx of Nigerian sex workers into Denmark and I was travelling alone on a Nigerian passport. I have learned to laugh at these stories, and to use them as dinner party anecdotes. Of the people who will potentially interview me at embassies and airports, I always hope that they haven’t fought with their lover that morning, that they don’t have a headache or a bad back or PMS, and that they have never received one of those poorly-spelled bank advance e-mails from a Nigerian pretending to be a government official because in my experience these, even more than whether I have the proper documents, will determine my luck.
Years ago, my mother, who had visited the US in the past, was inexplicably refused an American visa to attend my sister’s wedding; it was not at all likely that the mother of the bride would become a dependant of the American state as she had a good, long-term university job in Nigeria and her daughter worked as a physician in America. Her mouth still tightens whenever she looks at photographs from the wedding.
It is no doubt a difficult job to have to deal with so many visa applicants, some of whom must be obnoxious, but that a person can, by doing their job so poorly, cause the kind of aching sadness that has great emotional significance in people’s lives requires a greater sense of responsibility in some visa interviewers.
In the endless American public debates on how to handle illegal immigration, much has been made – and rightly so – about how important it is for immigrants to apply the right way and “get in line.” Perhaps immigration reform should also involve looking at the realities of that line, and should ensure that visa issues to people from countries on the economic periphery of the world are not based on the caprices of the visa officer but instead follow clear rules. Talk about one way to bolster America’s soft power.

Writing about sex

Jean Edelstein on the difficulty for women to write about sex:

It is true, I think, that some women find it harder to write about sex than their male counterparts – I know I find it difficult, and I'm pretty sure that it has a lot to do with the fact that readers are informed by the sexual double standard when they react to sex writing: men seem to be able to do it with impunity, as confirmation of their virility, whereas women who write well about sex are assumed to be somewhat loose living. I can't deny that this affected my decisions when it came to writing the chapter about sex in my book – and it took me twice as long as the other chapters, such was the challenge of hitting the right tone, neither prudish nor graphic. Perhaps I'd have been less sensitive if I'd been a man - but then again, perhaps the end result would have been less useful to readers, many of whom also struggle with the inherent ambivalencies of sex.

I'm wondering if the problem is that women aren't allowed to write about bad sex or rather to write badly about sex without it becoming a statement not just about their femininity (frigidity or wantonness) , but also their ability as a writer.

Taking the time to enjoy Sushi

I'm almost done reading L'Elégance du Hérisson. It is taking me an usually great amount of time because I have no free time and because I have decided to make the experience last a little while. I'm at the end of the novel, I'm wondering if I'm love, in lust or just hypnotized by something unfamiliar, too peculiar not to be more than alright. That's the only subject I'm allowing myself to ponder, for now... I will finish it this weekend.

Being a woman and a writer

Toril Moi on Women, gender, writing, and literature:

If I try to imagine a situation in which a man might say "I am a writer, not a man writer", I can only think of it as a response to some kind of provocation from a feminist. Even when they work in a profession dominated by women, men do not appear to feel compelled to deny their sex or gender. In the USA, I have discovered, a man trained as a nurse is called a "male nurse". (...) For writers who are women, it can be incredibly frustrating to be told that they have to write as a woman or like a woman. For what is this supposed to mean? That she has to conform to some stereotypical norm for feminine writing? (,,,)
Literature is the archive of a culture. We turn to literature to discover what makes other human beings suffer and laugh, hate and love, how people in other countries live, and how men and women experienced life in other historical periods. To turn women into second-class citizens in the realm of literature is to say that women's experiences of existence and of the world are less important than men's.

Personal taste

I'm ambivalent about this:

Criticising someone for their taste is plainly silly. Liking one particular cultural artifact over another does not and cannot make you a better human being than anyone else. We like what we like. Doesn't criticism takes that for granted? In the same way, we accept that e.g. football isn't the be all and end all of everything... and then we enter the fray regardless; and, on entering, at that point we believe with Bill Shankly that football is not a matter of life or death, but actually much more important than that. We cast off our neutrality because engagement is life. This is not too far from the view held by Alain Badiou when he argues that it is only through passionate allegiance to an event that we become authentic subjects...

Impatience and fear

I've just realized that impatience has a lot to do with fear and that sometimes, it is closely related to self-derogation. I just got a copy of Muriel Barbery L'Élégance du hérisson (The Elegance of the Hedgehog). I will read it tonight and probably finish it if it is half as good as the person who offered it to me says it is. In any case, I don't think I can get anywhere without patience, but at the same, what do I do with my quenching thirst for speed. My favorite song in High School was Let is Flow because at the time, I already knew that I had a problem with time, with letting go, with being Zen, may be that's why I liked my Judaism's class so damn much.

Wonder and the unconscious

I agree with this;

For many adults however, wonder is a guilty pleasure like reading comic books, singing karaoke, or eating Hostess Snowballs. It's something for kids — childish and beyond a certain age, vaguely embarrassing. Not something you admit doing if you want to keep your good standing in the Adult Community.
On the other hand, mention names like Murakami (giant talking frogs), Gogol (detached noses found in loaves of bread), Ionesco and his rhinoceroses, Jonathan Lethem (animal private investigators), the wilder short stories of Hawthorne, Julio Cortazar and his human axolotl, Goethe and Christopher Marlowe (Dr. Faustus, I presume?), and the literati quickly bow their heads in deference.What is more realistic than a bed? Where do we let our guards down more than when we slide beneath the sheets at night and say okay, I'm done? Then we switch off the light, expecting both us and this hour to fade to black.
But do they? What about that little engine called the unconscious that never stops working and never stops surprising us with its remix tape of our day? How many times do we wake up in the morning and the first thing out of our mouth is where did THAT dream come from?

Still Shakespeare

More from John McWhorter on Shakespeare and I have to say that I agree with his view point:

No one would expect modern English speakers to rise to the "challenge" of Beowulf (Old English) or Chaucer (Earlyish Middle). On the other hand, we figure that if the language of a Congreve play of 1700 is somewhat formal and dense at times for modern tastes, it is hardly unreasonable to expect people to just listen closely. Shakespeare is an intermediate case.
Many take as a given that the solution for this intermediate case is simply that one should have read the text beforehand. Certainly, reading, which is slow and allows backtracking and checking helpful notes, allows comprehension of the language.
(...) In the old days it was common for anyone with even pretensions of literacy to regularly peruse Shakespeare editions - Abraham Lincoln's fondness for such is often adduced. However, these are different times. We recede ever more from serious engagement with print / text. It is unclear that this powerful trend can be retarded.
As such, an expectation that one has read a Shakespeare play before seeing it will result, it would seem, in the current situation unchanged: a select few who pride themselves on having done their homework, while the majority sit through the plays genuflectively
Because Shakespeare is such imperishable material - something I am well familiar with despite the impression some seem to have that I must be deaf to poetry or unable to appreciate challenging writing - I see this as unfortunate, and perhaps even elitist. Countless Americans do not have access to the quality of education that allows previous readings of Shakespeare plays. Is Shakespeare only to be available to the hyperliterate?
I sincerely understand if some would say, perhaps ruefully, yes. However, my preference is that Shakespeare be more widely cherished than that, and that as such, the language be "translated" into the one we speak - available in assorted translations just as Beowulf and Chaucer are. 

The fear to be forgotten

I don't agree with John Sutherland on this:

The fact is, all poets – while feeling the spur in their buttocks – are haunted by a fear. They will be forgotten, with all those other Courthopes of literary history. Any laurel – however withered – is lusted after by versifiers, as straws by drowning men. It guarantees permanence, or the hope of it. But there are so few laurels that the faded leaves are fought over, ruthlessly. No trick is too low to get that coronet on your brow. (...)Poetry has never been a fair fight. It has always operated by clique and manipulation. Were it not for Ezra Pound pulling strings, TS Eliot's career would never have got airborne. That's how "schools" of poetry get started – cronyism. Padel's (unlicensed) cronies won – if only for a week. The record books will, forever, have inscribed on them that she was professor of poetry at Oxford – briefly. And that piquant detail will stimulate curiosity and, who knows, readers. In the long run, it will have been a good disaster for her. And as for Walcott – he's got the Swedish laurels. Two losers, two winners. Read on. Or, perhaps not, if it's poetry.

The Churchill Gene

Phillip Hunter on the Churchill Gene, the idea that drinking affects (positively) creativity:

Most people use alcohol as a social rather than creative stimulant, banishing cares with a potation or two after work; lubricating discourse rather than inspiring the intellect. Yet a number of our greatest writers, painters and musicians also seem to have relied on it as fuel for their muse. Winston Churchill claimed it crucial for The World Crisis, his six-volume memoirs, stating: “always remember that I have taken more out of alcohol than it has taken out of me.” Novelist William Faulkner drank more intermittently, but claimed not to be ab le to face a blank page without a bottle of Jack Daniels. Beethoven fell under the influence in the later part of his creative life. Among painters, Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon and many others liked a drop or two while working.
Such figures make alcohol part of the territory of creativity. An exceptional few seemed to thrive on drink, leading to the idea of a “Churchill gene”: where some have a genetic makeup allowing them to remain healthy and brilliant despite consumption that would kill others. Mark Twain endorsed this view saying: “My vices protect me but they would assassinate you!”
No doubt some real genes—especially those with a high expression of alcohol dehydrogenase and tolerance of alcohol breakdown products such as acetaldehyde, the “hangover” chemical—contribute to this theory. Yet until recently science has had little to say about alcohol and the creative process, confining itself to studies of damage, tolerance and addiction. Over the last few years, however, evidence has emerged that some have, if not a Churchill gene, then a creative cocktail gene.

Most people create/write better when they feel fearless and are able to disconnect themselves from the pressures of their environment. The desire to be carefree and to have no inhibitions explain the attraction, which writers /creators have toward narcotics or anything that gives them wings.

Censorship and bad fiction

The Guardian on Sherry Jones and her assertion that her book The Jewel of Medina about Muhammad and one of his brides,  hasn't found a publisher/distributor in the UK because of their fear of being targeted by Islamists:

Jones has now revealed on her blog that despite attempts to find a new UK distributor for The Jewel of Medina, "everyone, it seems, is too afraid". "Although the extremists lost in court, they have apparently won where it really counts – in the UK's book stores," she wrote. "The 'thugs' have accomplished their task — and freedom of speech, the first freedom to go when fascism gets a foothold, has taken a blow in the western world."
She called on "the people of Great Britain" to "speak out against those who are limiting their right to read, think, speak, listen, debate, discuss, criticise". "I hope the people of the UK can find the power, and the courage, to raise an outcry against censorship," she said. "Now it's time for the rest of us, including moderate Muslims and the press, who cherish our culture and our freedom, to raise a cry louder than that of radicals, so we don't lose that most precious, and crucial, of freedoms."
British publishers, however, disputed her claim that they were too afraid to publish The Jewel of Medina. "I've read the reviews and it sounds absolutely awful – beyond being offensive. If it were good we would actively consider publishing it, but an anachronistic bodice ripper – why would we be interested?" said Jon Wood, Orion publishing director.
Another publisher, who didn't wish to be named, agreed, pointing to the less-than-positive reviews of The Jewel of Medina in America, where the New York Times described its prose as "lamentable", and the LA Times said that it "suffers from large swaths of purple prose".

Finding Shakespeare in translation

I agree with John McWhorter on this:

The irony is that people in foreign countries often possess Shakespeare to a greater extent than we do, since they get to enjoy Shakespeare in the language that they speak. Shakespeare is translated into rich, poetic varieties of these languages, to be sure, but since it is the rich, poetic modern varieties of the languages, the typical spectator in Paris or Moscow can attend a production of Hamlet and enjoy a play rather than an exercise. A friend of mine has told me that first time he truly understood more than the gist of what was going on in a Shakespeare play was when he saw one in French!

I think that Shakespeare's poetry and verses are great in French for the simple reason that there isn't such a thing as English poetry. While translating Shakespeare's verses in French, an imaginative translator gets to rewrite them by focusing not on the words, but on images and on meaning, which make them new and fresh instead of just being translated poetry, which is what occurs when French poetry is translated into English. What I'm trying to say is that French deals better with Shakespearean complexity than English for the simple reasons that the French language loves difficulty and rigor.