Categories
Literary

Grappling With James Joyce

Grappling with James Joyce at the beginning of the 21st Century is similar to reading Shakespeare’s tragedies or even working your way through the Old Testament—you recognize immediately you are knee-deep in cultural source material. It feels less accurate to call Joyce a modernist than to say he was modernism, for it’s clear how much of our contemporary sensibility can be traced back to this peculiar Irishman.

I recently dug into the 1959  Richard Ellmann biography James Joyce. It needs little introduction: many people consider it the greatest literary biography of the 20th Century. I recently came across a David Foster Wallace essay on Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky biography where Wallace alludes to Ellmann’s great achievement.

James-Joyce-1918-photo
James Joyce in 1918.

And though I’m still reading about the young, unknown Joyce at this point, the book is still thick with memorable anecdotes.

In 1902 a young Joyce met the grand poet of Irish letters, W.B. Yeats, who was then 37 years old. Joyce was cocky during the meeting and reportedly talked back to Yeats, which both impressed and upset the poet. At one point Yeats mentioned the French novelist Honoré de Balzac:

“When Yeats imprudently mentioned the names of Balzac and of Swinburne, Joyce burst out laughing so that everyone in the café turned round to look at him. ‘Who reads Balzac today?’ he exclaimed.”

 

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize. --- James Joyce
Creative Commons License photo credit: UggBoy♥UggGirl [ PHOTO // WORLD // TRAVEL ]

 

Joyce, rather famously, was not a believing Roman Catholic from his adolescence onward, but he was (modestly) respectful of the Church’s traditions and a great admirer of the Jesuit order, whom he studied under as a boy. He once corrected a friend who labeled him a Catholic:

“You allude to me as a Catholic. Now for the sake of precision and to get the correct contour on me, you ought to allude to me as a Jesuit.”

There is also Joyce’s experience in Paris, where he was literally starving while failing to make ends meet with book reviews and English lessons. This is a letter from 1903 to his mother:

“Today I am twenty hours without food. But the spells of fasting are common with me now and when I get money I am so damnable hungry that I eat a fortune before you could say knife. I hope this new system of living won’t injure my digestion.”

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Inspiration

Merry Christmas

Categories
Film

What is a Real Work of Art?

“The creation of beauty is art,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1836 in a slim volume called Nature. The Emerson quote provides the perfect introduction to the subject of Roger Scruton’s BBC documentary “Why Beauty Matters.”

Scruton is a well-known British philosopher and author most recently of Beauty: A Very Short Introduction.

In the film Scruton tells us, “there is all the difference in the world between a real work of art, which makes ugliness beatiful, and the fake work of art which shares the uggliness it shows.” Please watch the video below:

Categories
Literary

David Foster Wallace & Lit’s Thematic Poverty

There will probably come a time when our current appetite for insight about David Foster Wallace ebbs, but I don’t see that coming any time soon. I just got around to reading John Jeremiah Sullivan’s fascinating review of Wallace’s The Pale King in GQ. Sullivan is a first-rate essayist and it’s great fun to see him write about Wallace.

In reviewing The Pale King, Sullivan got my attention by focusing on something Wallace wrote in his essay on Joseph Frank’s five-volume biography of Dostoevsky (which is collected in Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays.) Wallace wrote:

“[This new] bio prompts us to ask ourselves why we seem to require of our art an ironic distance from deep convictions or desperate questions, so that contemporary writers have to either make jokes of them or else try to work them in under cover of some formal trick like intertextual quotation or incongruous juxtaposition, sticking the really urgent stuff inside asterisks as part of some multivalent defamiliarization-flourish or some such shit. Part of the explanation for our own lit’s thematic poverty obviously includes our century and situation.”

I believe this “ironic distance” has become something of a default habit for many talented writers today.It is a shame that the “really urgent stuff” concerning the human condition is often pushed to the margins of novels today.

I recently went back to Wallace’s Dostoevsky essay and he mentions spending two months immersed in the world of Dostoevsky while preparing for the essay. I can only imagine what a delight a book-length treatment of Wallace thinking about Frank and Dostoevsky would be.

Categories
Literary

Full Stop For Book Lovers & Writers

While many people mourn the disappearance of Sunday book sections in newspapers across the U.S., the number of quality sites online—The Millions and The Los Angeles Review of Books come to mind— for high-quality book reviews, criticism and literary essays continues to grow. I recently spent time clicking through the excellent site Full Stop, which is finishing its first year online.

The website’s mission is to “focus on young writers, works in translation, and books we feel are being neglected by other outlets while engaging with the significant changes occurring in the publishing industry and the evolution of print media.”

writer-musician-alina-simoneWriter and musician Alina Simone.

In visiting Full Stop, I came across a number of intriguing articles, including an interview with musician and writer Alina Simone who had no intention of writing a book until an editor at Farrar, Strauss & Giroux heard her music. The encounter led to her collection of essays You Must Go and Win. She explains:

“…(the editor) really just heard me on Pandora. I don’t really know what he was thinking. Maybe in some way it was based on the lyrics to my songs? I’m guessing that he had some feeling that I could write. I don’t know really what that was based on, exactly. He insists it was just the music – he heard the music and thought I could write a book. You know? I don’t know, maybe editors develop some sixth sense about a person.”

 

picture-writer-george-saundersGeorge Saunders is one of several authors that chime in on “The Situation in American Writing.”

There is also a series on the website now called “The Situation in American Writing.” It’s based on a 1939 questionnaire The Partisan Review sent to a number of prominent writers. Full Stop updated the questions and writers like George Saunders, Kio Stark and Marilynne Robinson, who wrote the Pulitzer Award-winning novel Giliead, give their two cents. Robinson writes about the current state of literary criticism:

“For a long time the academy has been training people in a style of criticism that is marked by nothing so much as jargon, and by generalization that is pointedly inattentive to the character of any particular book. So there is a great breach between the persons of letters who would otherwise lead the public conversation about books and the vast majority of the reading public. No wonder they are so small a voice. It would no doubt enhance our awareness of the serious writing that does indeed go on if there were critics of the kind that used to introduce such writing to a serious readership.”

And then to the delight of a Japanophile like myself, there was a lengthy essay by Steve Vineberg about the new Criterion DVD release of the 1983 Japanese movie The Makioka Sisters, which is based on the novel by Junichiro Tanizaki.

Vinberg writes beautifully both about Japan and film:

“The movie — one of the most magnificent-looking ever released — is conceived largely in terms of wide, carefully composed long shots that emphasize the formality of traditional Japanese life; of the astonishingly graceful, flowing movement of the four sisters; of the sumptuous silk kimonos they wear, which glide and slither (and are never supposed to squeak), and in one breathtaking scene are hung and layered like screens for the set of a bunraku puppet play; and of the lyricism of the landscape, which Ichikawa and Hasegawa capture in different seasons.  (Intriguingly, the music Ichikawa chooses is western:  it’s by Handel.  But its stately classicism seems ideal for the material.)”

I would say Full Stop is worth adding to your RSS reader.

Categories
Literary

Writing, Making Money & Raising Kids – How It’s Done

There are times when I’ve found myself skimming through The Paris Review interviews and hoping the interviewer would stop being profound and ask the writers more pedestrian questions about their early writing life: How did you make a living in the beginning? What was your writing routine? How did you write every day and make time for your spouse, kids, etc.? Did you ever have to have a full-time office job?

Now there is a website with writer interviews, The Days Of Yore, that asks the practical questions all writers are obsessed with, including some that are simply fun and superfluous, such as what novelist Jennifer Egan ate in the lean years (apparently “a huge cup of coffee and a corn muffin every morning” from a NYC diner).

Novelist Jennifer Egan (photo by David Shankbone)

The editors, in their own words, write that the mission of The Days of Yore is to focus on that part of an artist’s life (they do not focus exclusively on writers) that delves into the…

“…floating, in-between time when we’re figuring out how to establish and sustain ourselves (and make money) doing what we want to be doing.”

From the perspective of a struggling writer, the interviews reveal how some successful writers have confronted the age-old challenge of creating art amidst the demands of every-day life.

Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit From The Goon Squad, says she worked as a private secretary for a time, which allowed her to write from 8 am to 12pm each day:

“I became a private secretary for this woman, the Countess of Romanones. She had been a spy during WWII…She now had a HUGE contract to write two more books and, you know, her life was spiraling out of control, so I was her private secretary. I worked from 1-6 only and she paid enough to live on. She was very difficult to work for, but I had from 8-noon to write.”

Read the full interview with Jennifer Egan.

website-days-of-yore

Paul Elie is the author of the book on American Catholic writers The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. He also has a day job (a rather nice one) as an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He spoke about working on his own writing while working as a full-time editor:

“It’s a strain for me to ‘be a writer’ from 10 p.m to midnight after a long day at work and with children, which is what I do most days now. But what makes it possible is that my writing is mine. Those two hours are the part of the day when I’m not working for anybody.”

Read the full interview with Paul Elie.

George Saunders is the author of the short story collection CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. He worked for years as an environmental engineer and actually welcomed the stability of a full-time job: “I found that I was much more comfortable being a corporate guy, with a steady income, who pushed the rules a bit, than I was being a sort of beatnik, not working, with two kids at home.”

As for his advice to young writers trying to make a living nowadays:

“I think the only defensible position is to sort of say to hell with making a living and put all your energy into making something new, that seems beautiful to you – that is, to try your best to push your work into a new/iconic place and let the chips fall where they may.”

Read the full interview with George Saunders.