C.R. Nº 6: "The Literary Website after September 11th
A Look Inside www.archipelago.org"
- Who is this unmasked man?
And yet, for all that, it's a strangely quiet city. With its vast avenues and squares, and its obdurately low skyline, it always seems somehow under-populated - in fact it really has no skyline. The sky itself is what dominates - the huge Russian sky. I often wonder what Walter Benjamin, had he survived the War and its aftermath, would have thought of the Berlin Wall. His brother's wife, Hilde Benjamin, later became-as Peter Demetz tells us-a "fierce state prosecutor" for the German Democratic Republic, appearing as a character in Le Carré's Spy Who Came in from the Cold. One would suspect that Walter, had he made it across the Pyrenees and eventually to Lisbon, would have been inclined differently. Inevitably the Berlin Wall would have marked the author of the 1934 essay on Brecht, "The Author as Producer," if not materially, then philosophically.
Benjamin tells us that Brecht's "epic" theatre - which for Brecht was a purging of the dramatic claptrap of 19th century theatrical traditions - "had to portray situations, rather than develop plots. It obtains such situations...by interrupting the plot." Life's "plot" would soon be interrupted by the War. For Benjamin the interruption was fatal, which only underlines his amazing prescience in this essay.
How would Benjamin have reacted to Khrushchev and his East German clients, who adopted a Brechtian strategy for the purposes of containment, a kind of "organizing function"? A statement he makes a few lines after the passage just quoted seems to anticipate things: "At the center of his experiment is man. Present-day man; a reduced man, therefore, chilled in a chilly environment." Oddly redolent of Le Carré, that. I remember my friend Ann, who used to unwind in her Paris loft - she was writing on Benjamin for a master's degree at the Sorbonne - by reading Le Carré. Spies and writers. In Berlin I was living on Richard Sorge Strasse, a figure whose name was somehow saved in the great shuffling of street names after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Perhaps this is because he was one of those rare heroes who appealed to one ideology and then outlived it to appeal to another.
Sorge, a devout, albeit "closet", communist during years when the Nazis rose to power, was a newspaperman turned spy. While reporting from Tokyo for the Frankfurter Zeitung during the war he was also providing Stalin with evidence of everything from Japanese troop movements to, ultimately, the news of Hitler's true intentions vis-à-vis Mother Russia. It was Sorge, as well, who informed the regime in Moscow that Japan would not attack along the Soviet front, but would move instead against the Americans in the Pacific, thereby releasing Stalin from the burden of defending his border with Japanese occupied Manchuria. Sorge was eventually found out and executed by the Japanese, but not before his greatest piece of intelligence was ignored by the paranoid Stalin, who refused to believe that a German spy could be anything other than a double agent, and that Sorge's information was not misinformation. Even with the massing of the Wehrmacht and the hardware of Blitzkrieg along the Eastern Front, Stalin continued to pursue the notion that this was just a diversionary strategy meant to hoodwink the English and the Americans. It is only after things happen that we discover the real prescience of certain neglected authors, how either their styles or what they had to say has embedded itself in our contemporary modes of reaction, often without out our even being aware of it. Like spies, they spend their years mapping the blind spots, the gaps in the official versions. By uncovering the secrets of their own history they tell us something about ours. Hubert Butler seems to have been one of those writers who combined uncommon prescience with the kind of prose style that is born of the urgency to tell things as they are.
Archipelago, now into the third number of its fifth volume, first published Butler in its second issue, an essay called "The Artukovitch File", written in 1970. This was accompanied by a "remembrance by the British novelist Richard Jones, who was acquainted with Butler, himself Anglo-Irish." I quote from Katherine McNamara's endnote of that issue. She goes on to reflect on an incident of editorial serendipity, which must be increasingly common among web editors:
McNamara's good luck in coming across the American poet, Chris Agee, who would, several numbers later, bring us Hubert Butler in the round, is a tribute to her particular generosity ("The more we read...the better..."), not to mention her Argus-like insight as an editor. Agee's contribution shows us, among other things, just what a web-published literary journal can do (in contrast, and not unfairly so, to, say, the New York Review of Books). I am talking about following up on ideas, expanding on them, creating out of them not simply a list of contributors but an ambience, an environment of collaboration. If Jones' approach is certifiably Belles-Lettres, and an excellent read in itself, it remains somehow scant before its subject. "The Artukovitch File" simply overwhelms the "appreciation"; it will take Chris Agee, several issues later, to explain why.
Agee is an American poet who (in his contributor's notes) says that he divides his time between Ireland, New England, and The Balkans. Through a deft blend of historical narration, scholarship and even the personal essay, he has rendered the ground for a new generation of Butler readers. In Archipelago Vol.5, No. 1, one has everything one needs to begin to delve, starting with Agee's own essays-models of articulate explication in themselves-which master the context and background, not only to Butler, but to the contemporary Balkan strife. That Butler is prescient, that Butler's description of Balkan bellicosity and religious blindness does, inevitably, hold a mirror up to Ireland's own, that Butler is Orwell's heir to clear-speaking prose are all truisms which, simply for being such, must necessarily inform our initial understanding of this writer. And Agee doesn't shy away from them. One of his principle virtues as a critic, and editor, is that he has managed to see beyond these clichés, not only by appreciating the subtlety of Butler's style-which combines spare and elegant prose with that brand of understatement that lets the fact, precisely summoned, do its own work-but by uncovering an exceptional narrative of ethical process in Butler's diverse and hitherto seemingly random opus.
Butler's survival into the present day has to do with the energies of houses such as Viking Press, The Lilliput Press, and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, all of which brought out essay collections in the late nineteen-eighties and nineties. Riding this wave of renewed interest, Agee wrests Butler from previous critical conclusions that link him to, as he says, "fashionable Irish literary agendas; for instance, that of 'the Protestant imagination'...Butler is a writer who begins with the East, not with Ireland." Agee is quite precise on how certain Irish writers in particular come to belong more to a tradition of cosmopolitanism than to what, for lack of a better word, we might call a national tradition.
These distinctions are important for they are precisely the ones that allow Agee to make his claims for the importance of Butler's work. He is, Agee says, to be compared to writers like Swift, or Orwell, "for whom the source of inspiration is what I have termed elsewhere 'the ethical imagination'." Agee's endeavor in part is to make, as I have said above, narrative sense out of just how that "ethical imagination" grew out of the harsh realities of Balkan conflict:
Agee bolsters his case (as though any bolstering were needed) by citing Joseph Brodsky's Afterword to In The Land of Nod. Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1996.
Brodsky's phrase, "European civilization", seems, though not entirely dated, somehow nobly inadequate. What is certain is that Hubert Butler would never have summed things so categorically. Misha Glenny, in his book The Balkans, 1804-1999 (Granta: London, 1999, 638-39) sets things straight, and sheds some light retrospectively on Butler's situation:
He goes on to describe how, blinded by Gorbachev's call for building 'the common European home', and the dismantling of the Berlin wall, in short, the beginning of the end of the cold war, the West (Europe as well as America) failed to discern the nature of the power vacuum that was resulting. The mechanisms by which former communists sought to hang on to power, or transform themselves into forms that suited the new zeitgeist, were unappreciated. "In Yugoslavia, aggressive nationalism was the trump card. Milosovec reinvented himself as a Serbian chauvinist, the sad addict of power finding a new drug." (Pg. 635) Secondly, the Gulf War further distracted Western audiences: how could a few correspondents from cities that most had never even heard of, compete with the likes of the "Boys of Baghdad", Peter Arnett, Bernard Shaw and John Holliman, narrating live for CNN the flight paths of cruise missiles as they zipped past their ninth floor aerie in the hotel Al-Rashid in downtown Baghdad. The Balkan's suffered an audience deficit. The best show in town was in the Gulf, and no-matter how acute the reporting, Balkan correspondents and commentators of the period, people like Glenny, or the historian Timothy Garton Ash, didn't have the pull. Nor could they have, for they hadn't been given the latitude to educate their readership in the arcana of the Balkan "cauldron".
One characteristic of the contemporary world is certainly that the ground is shifting constantly. Geopolitics has, in a sense, caught up with technology. The name of the game is flux, innovation, contingency, and dispersion, Benjamin's "interruption" codified. Eliot Weinberger-in one of the more cogent commentaries published in the first days after September 11th-begins by wondering, almost out loud, that
Butler, in the passage below might even be speaking to Weinberger's Americans-a generalized entity, a television audience:
Slowly, almost by design, everything has come together again. The pieces have again been fit into their slots. Names have been assigned, information packages coordinated, themes, derived from the usual sources (God, country, and market health), have again reasserted themselves in symbiotic linkages, dovetailing seamlessly with "the latest information" to rise from the smoldering front. If the President, with his cabal of ex-cold warriors, has not mastered the medium of catastrophe completely, at least CNN has. Commercials for tech-companies, and multi-national telecoms, were discreetly slotted back in sometime around day twelve of the new world order, and the weather has again taken up its non-ideological role as global buffer. One has the eerie sense that the media is one step ahead of us; while we are still in a state of numbed shock, they are already, ever so slightly, bored. A growing apprehension, that the ratio between new news and endless spin is reaching a kind of journalistic threshold in which the event itself no longer sustains the coverage allotted to it, can be seen etched in the tired faces of the commentators. The innocuous nullity of a media-manufactured sense of the real has been entirely restored, the stakes successfully raised, but the mode itself, gloriously unchanged. Seen by modernists like Eliot and Brecht as a strategy to de-familiarize the literary subject, and so the subjectivity of the reader, Benjamin's notion of Brechtian montage and interruption has continuously evolved in media methodology. Even as early as Brecht these strategies were not seen as native to the literary arts, but rather as something that was borrowed from "film and radio, press and photography." As literary strategy they worked marvelously, especially when this alien provenance was recognized, and the methods were combined and defused with traditional ones. Who could imagine the artistry of Delillo without its command of montage; or the surrealist segues and mastery of contextual interruption in Ashbery. However carried out programmatically (unmediated, as it were, by the non-ideological happiness of the artist), they were as much a disaster for American writers, as social realism was for Soviet ones. If the Language poets dug their own grave by following early post modernist theory to the letter, the techniques that Benjamin theorized are still very much alive in the media. Two days after the event, Eliot Weinberger would of course not attempt to close the case. And yet, one suspects that his conclusions were already there in nascent form, and that he would be unsurprised at how quickly, in subsequent days, the media did begin, as he implied they would, to "absorb and tame" the event. But this could not happen without the collusion of an audience. Hubert Butler's words seem as apt as ever more than half a century on.
Expedient is the relation to the profit motive that underlies the coverage of tragedies, especially when, with a certain collaboration by the media itself, the tragedy is the endlessly ramifying variety. In Benjamin's reading of Brecht, the "interruption of action...constantly counteracts an illusion in the audience." But what happens when life itself begins to behave according to the patterns of postmodern theory; when the masters of interruption, the cosmopolitan terrorist who inserts himself anywhere and uses the materials at hand to spectacular effect, an effect that is planned to play to, and through, the media, and which the media pick up with unfeigned relish; what happens when this is formatted with a simplified and formulaic discourse, endlessly repeatable in the form of sound bites and catch phrases, and crafted by spin doctors to combine with a "state of continual manufactured imagery", a brutal montage of endless interruption, endless repetition, to enforce the party line, and coordinate a mass emotional response-out of which all moral discussion has long been bleached; what happens when what is created in the viewer is a muddled and superficial familiarity with everything? And a knowledge of nothing? *** It would seem normal - even acceptable - to ask what a little magazine, and, by extension, literature in general, can do in days like these. The answer is no doubt to simply be itself, to not try in the bad times any harder that it might try in the good times to do the job it has always done. This is a job that simply refuses to be categorized, that has no "job description", no hiring policy, no stated aims, and no ambitions save its own survival, and that survival is predicated upon an exception. Literature exists outside the rules we apply to, and by which we condition, the survival of every other social artifact, in that it does not have to be useful. In fact its uselessness is its chief cunning. The closest we can get to knowing what it should do is to quote it, as though some sublime tautology were interpolating between it and us. As Shakespeare has it in his famous 18th sonnet: as long as we continue, poetry itself will continue, even though it is precisely poetry that causes us to continue. His whole argument in 18 is against comparing the elective subject to a summer's day, or anything else under the sun. Poetry is not a reflection of nature. It is another nature altogether. It does not think about the world, but re-invents it in the form of tone, of wit, and metonymy. That is why events such as the one that occurred on September 11th, for whatever else they might do, also end up reaffirming the primacy of literature vis-à-vis the world. And by "primacy" we do not mean superiority, or even independence. In fact literature needs the world more than the world needs literature. The world could indeed get by without great books, as it seems increasingly to be doing. We refer more to a modality, a form of operating. The world does not invent literature, it is literature that invents the world. Even terrible events like September 11th will eventually be invented - transfigured might be a better word - by the literary imagination.
As it invents the world, it also invents its own modes of survival, its authors, its critics, its editors, and all the technologies which enforce its material existence: publishing houses, little magazines, literary web-sites, broadsheets. In Soviet Russia - where writing things down on paper was often too dangerous - ways of thinking about, and storing poetry in the mind grew into an almost Augustinian sophistication in some. Nadezhda Mandelstam memorized all of her husband - Osip's - poems so that they would not be lost. The most creative critics, and the most creative editors respect this dynamic by letting literature itself invent the rules by which it should be read, how it should be presented. One of our very finest Portuguese critics, Eduardo Prado Coelho says the following:
Archipelago is one of the most intuitive sites I have come across. It seems to have no agenda, but rather to have created a context, an ambience, in which a real variety of literature can flourish. McNamara's skill as an editor is apparent in every issue, and each one is full of surprises. For instance, look at the harsh symbiosis she creates in Vol. 2, No. 2 between the German visual artist, Gabriele Leidloff, and the American poet Robert Kelly. (Cyber Rambler #3) Collaboration between the visual and the verbal arts has always seemed to reduce either the words, or the image, to the subservient status of the afterthought as image illustrates text, or the text itself comments upon the image. William Blake's haunting border illustrations of his poems rely on a return to the illuminated incunabula and the early bible. In our time, Leonard Baskin's powerfully scratchy bestiary seemed to claw at Ted Hughes' lyrics of natural selection, both image and word fighting each other for prominence. Two contemporary East Berlin editors, Maximilian Barck (Edition Maldoror- www.herzattacke.de, and Thomas Gunther (Edition Dcshamp) are the only ones I know of who are consistently getting it right. Their work, a form samisdat publishing, dates back to a period when GDR censorship, for once, produced serendipitous results. The secret of success here seems to lie in the medium of book making rather than in any attempt at collaboration between text and image, which often have no obvious connection to each other. It is the book-unabashedly bibliophilic-and its status as objet, or even fetish, that collapses the disparities of word and image by combining the linearity of the former with the synchronicity of the latter, and producing an artisanal frisson. McNamara gets an analogous effect through her use of digitized formats. The verbal visual chemistry of hypertext, everywhere apparent at the site, is, on this particular page, formidable. One of the felicitous attributes of the backlit crystal lithium computer screen is the way it brings a kind of inner luminosity to colors. Black, mother of all hues, works particularly well, taking on a kind of vibrating depth that it would never achieve on paper. Leidloff's radiograph of Goethe's "life mask" is haunted by the background black, out of which it struggles to swim. The "life mask" is imbued, already, with the nullity of the beyond. The hooded eyes, underlined with pools of that same iridescent darkness that frames the whole; the form of the face, egg-shaped and phosphorescent gray; the lips sealed, holding back, perhaps, a renaissance of words; the image, framed by its shimmering penumbra, seems to be changing before our eyes from "life mask" into death mask. Goethe's ironic anticipation of everything that must come after Goethe is not lost on us. But I think the essential power of the piece derives more from its conceptual energy. Without being labeled "Goethe" who would know? The word "Goethe", however, cathects all the terrible silence sealed in the skull-like image; the image itself amplifies the word, making out of it a kind of double metonym in which name replaces gesture, and the gesture itself-ordering a life mask to be taken-becomes an ironically self-conscious commentary on the oeuvre. Kelly's poem, "The Flight of The Crows" written, as the editor informs us, "in honor of" the artist, eulogizes a similar darkness, of life in death, and death in life. It, too, profits as well from being placed on the same black background, its luminous white print hovering somewhere between immanence and dissolution. Could Kelly have anticipated this choice of format? Probably not, but the music of his poem is delicate and fleeting, the lyricism subdued behind the flatly spoken, gnomic tone, breaking out occasionally in runs of rhymed lines and choral-like repetitions. In thematic terms, Kelly is, of course, not unaware of the tradition Corvus poeticus. "The Flight of The Crows" lingers somewhere between the dark sing song gothic of Poe's "The Raven", and the tensile duplicities of Wallace Stevens' aphoristic "Thirteen Ways to See a Blackbird".
What the narrator wants to learn is something of the nature of the voice. His conclusion: "And everything that can ever be said/ is said in the sound of anybody's old voice", reminds us again, as so many poets, from Wordsworth to Williams, have done, that there is something of the orphic in ordinary speech, in the language of the tribe. Holly Woodward understands this well, and the force of her unvarnished re-scripting of the Eros and Psyche myth in Vol. 4, No. 4 of Archipelago lies precisely in the frankness of her dialogues, and the street sense of her narrator. Woodward, we learn in the contributors notes, "writes stories, verse, essays and plays", and lives, at least part of the time, in Russia, where she studies at St Petersburg University, and has won a doctoral fellowship from Moscow University. She has won prizes for her fiction from both Story, and Literal Latte.
Her Eros and Psyche is a tale of love at loggerheads, and seems to owe some of its explicit kinkiness to Robert Graves' mythological compilations. Like Graves, she does not shy away from freely interpreting the old struggles, but she does it in a voice which more resembles the razory, plain speaking Raymond Carver. This has the effect of enlivening the amoral cruelty that often underlies desire. Her lovers, hoodwinked by fate, and often victims of their own blindness, blunder into tragedy, from which Woodward can extract her pithy truths, as funny as they are emasculating.
Gods imitate life. That is their chief attraction. The humanness of the gods is especially apparent when they behave badly, or are entrapped by their own innocence, or when their doubtful motives override omniscient reason, when they get into trouble, veer from benevolence to brutality and back again-or when they become reflective, sitting back in their big thrones, after a hard day of havoc and destruction, munching grapes, their sandaled toes lapped by cloud banks. Their effectiveness resides in their ability to "come down to earth". Sometimes they come down with such force that they pass right through it and go straight to Hell. And no one, not even a god, goes to Hell and back unchanged. Such is the case at the beginning of Eros and Psyche.
The material is familiar enough. It's the abruptness of the first sentence, with that awful verb of male sexual sway, "took", that repels, just enough to attract us. Hades is not so much all-powerful as he is brutish and vindictive, subject to appetites and impulses, a bit stupid and provincial in his pride. Aphrodite, delicate not only in sentiment, but also in body, cuts a lovely victim. Much of our pleasure in rereading the classics, whether it is in the form of mythology, fictionalized recreations, or modern translations - Grave's version of Apuleius's The Golden Ass comes to mind - or even the great epics, is in the density of content, and the lack of connecting tissue between narrative apices. We jump from crisis to crisis, drama to drama without any of the moralizing extemporization of contemporary art. With no notions of political correctness, or even the social consciousness of the great nineteenth century novel, classical art seems pithier, light-struck, its truths more angular. The effect of this is that, once immersed in the cut and dry world of the Ancient Greeks, our conclusions are more easily drawn, so easily that at times they seem to strike like the arrows drawn from Eros' ever-ready quiver. Woodword's device is to reinsert this consciousness, to overlay her bare-boned account with a degree of ironic vigilance. Yet her narrator is never tempted to elaborate upon the actions of her characters, and avoids daedal explanations that would shadow the harsh amorality of her tale. Instead, she is apothegmatic, biting, and funny, turning clichés on their heads, by dropping them so bluntly on the heads of her fumbling gods.
In Volume 4, No. 4, McNamara frames her Endnote by a passage from a Richard Darton essay published originally in The New York Review of Books, "Extraordinary Commonplaces", in which the author discusses the history of the commonplace book, the first noteworthy example of which was De Copia of Erasmus. It is possible to extract from Darnton's description an early model of interactivity. This is what I assume McNamara would have us do, for Darnton gives us an ideal praxis for millennial reading strategies, a way to look at books in an age of increasingly consonant technologies.
It is not difficult to imagine how some form of digital commonplace book might be created with Darnton's description as a starting point. Just consider all of the ways in which we read and reproduce text. Ours too "is becoming a very special way of taking in the printed word", storing it, splicing it, scanning it, combining it in files, mixing in graphics, transferring it to our handhelds, sending it between home and office, to friends, to sites. Like Darnton's description of the Elizabethan reader, we too can "rearrange the patterns while adding more excerpts." Our reading and writing are as well becoming "inseparable activities"; each notebook computer is potentially "a book of your own, one stamped with your personality", its means of production bundled with its means of consumption. Seen in this light, Darnton's paradigm might provide us with a way out of one of our central predicaments, which is really all about the collapse of the book as a coherent monument of moral repair, something designed for an enlightened public that no longer seems to exist. Katherine McNamara sees reading (historically one of the first markers of individual space) as a simulacrum for living. If a web site were a state of mind, this one would be suffused with the sepia-toned nostalgia of the solitary reader in her "continuous effort to make sense of things" in a "world full of signs", as she creates a book of her own out of a generous appreciation for modern and contemporary literature.
- One night back in February...
- Agee is an American poet...
- It would seem normal...
- Orphic companion in Poe ...
C.R. 1 | C.R. 2 | C.R. 3 |
C.R. 4
This column should have appeared in February, when it was nearly wholly written during a snowstorm in Berlin on Richard Sorge Strasse. In August I was again in Berlin, and spent the rest of the summer delaying a trip to New York. Finally, on the 5th of September I took an early morning train, direction Brussels. I am one of those people that prefer trains to planes, and this link-Berlin-Brussels-is a trip I am familiar with. It leaves Berlin through a wide stretch of farmland and, before it enters Belgium, wends its way through a series of river courses, and low lying hills. Leaving the city is not as dramatic as it must have been before 1989, but Berlin still has two distinct faces. Passing from Ost Berlin Bahnohf, through Alexanderplatz, and on to Zoo in the heart of West Berlin, and studying, as one always does from a train, the backside of life, we see one interruption-the collapse of the wall-overlaying another, which was the building of the wall in the first place. In Berlin, life's narrative is inflected by the interruption of an interruption.
"Here-in the principal of interruption-epic theatre, as you can see, takes up a procedure that has become familiar to you in recent years from film and radio, press and photography. I am speaking of the procedure of montage: the superimposed element disrupts the context in which it is inserted...The interruption of action, on account of which Brecht described the theatre as epic, constantly counteracts an illusion in the audience. For such illusion is a hindrance to a theatre that proposes to make use of elements of reality in experimental rearrangements...Epic theatre, therefore, does not reproduce situations: rather, it discovers them. This discovery is accomplished by means of the interruption of sequences. Only interruption here has not the character of a stimulant but an organizing function. It arrests the action in its course, and thereby compels the listener to adopt an attitude vis-à-vis the process, the actor vis-à-vis his role."
Germany's present predicament is of course a study in miniature of Europe's: namely, how to re-create what used to be known as mitteleuropa
"Ignorance rampaging with such assurance and harnessed to religious enthusiasm is like a runaway horse and cart. It must be stopped before serious mischief results."
"By celestial coincidence, the New York Review of Books, in the June 12 issue, has run a consideration of Hubert Butler's writings by the novelist and literary editor of the Irish Times, John Banville. The more we read of, and about, Hubert Butler, the better we are for it."
Through a deft blend of historical narration, scholarship and even the personal essay, Agee has rendered the ground for a new generation of Butler readers
"Indeed, one wonders if he ever had a literary career in the usual sense; there is something of the urgent Reuters report in all his work, as if from the thick of life and its pressing issues, in a posting far from the literary world, he had found time to dispatch another report from the ethical front."
"In fact, Butler is one of a distinguished line of Irish writers - such as Shaw, Joyce, Beckett, Aidan Higgins, Harry Clifton - whose sense of Irishness has been shaped by long periods of foreign residence, and so inflected by a cosmopolitanism that eludes, in part, the insular categories."
"Spanning five decades, the Yugoslav work is not, therefore, some Ruritanian spur to a more central Irish track. On the contrary, the Croatian genocide is firmly at the center of his corpus; it is not so much a limb as a backbone. To read the Balkan essays in chronological order is to become aware of the fugal skill with which he broaches and elaborates the matter of the genocide. Themes are introduced and outlined; later they are embellished and extended. He begins by writing of his Balkan time in the thirties, his postwar visits, and the wartime genocide; then the "Nuncio" controversy in Ireland intervenes; then he interlaces both perspectives. What emerges in the later essays is something more universal, transcending the particulars of either country."
"A man of immense learning, he was interested in this borderline zone, with its fusion of Latin and Slavic cultures, presumably because he sensed in their interplay the future of European civilization."
"In a report for the BBC filed in February 1991, I wrote, in somewhat lurid terms, that the leaders of Yugoslavia 'were stirring a cauldron of blood that would soon boil over'. My superiors reprimanded me for the piece on the grounds that it was 'alarmist'. This was the end of the 20th century, not the beginning, they told me, and there would be no war in the Balkans. When it came, news editors unfamiliar with the Balkans were surprised by the return of the Bosnian Question, and of violence between Serbs and Croats; politicians were completely unprepared. This myopia, which affected many among the elites of Western Europe and the United States, had two causes." (ibid, page 634)
If the President, with his cabal of ex-cold warriors, has not mastered the medium of catastrophe completely, at least CNN has
"It is, of course, impossible to know what the effects of yesterday's horror will be; whether it will permanently alter the national psyche (if there is one) or merely recede as yet another bundle of images from yet another media spectacle. This is clearly the first event since the rise of the omnipotence of mass media that is larger than the media, that the media cannot easily absorb and tame. If the media do succeed, national life, beyond the personal tragedies, will continue in its semi-hallucinatory state of continual manufactured imagery. If they fail, something profound may indeed change."
"I hope I have not appeared to diagnose in my Catholic countrymen a unique susceptibility to a disease with which we are all of us more or less infected. Speed of communications has increased, and we are expected to have strong feelings about an infinite series of remote events. But our powers of understanding and sympathy have not correspondingly increased. In an atmosphere of artificially heated emotionalism truth simply dissolves into expediency.
Looking for a reason, I can only conclude that science has enormously extended the sphere of our responsibilities, while our consciences have remained the same size. Parochially minded people neglect their parishes to pronounce ignorantly about the universe, while the universalists are so conscious of the world-wide struggles of opposing philosophies that the rights and wrongs of any regional conflict dwindle to insignificance against a cosmic panorama. They feel that truth is in some way relative to orientation, and falsehood no more than a wrong adjustment, so that they can never say unequivocally 'that is a lie!' Like the needle of a compass at the North Pole, their moral judgment spins round and round, overwhelming them with information, and telling them nothing at all."
"Speed of communications has increased, and we are expected to have strong feelings about an infinite series of events. But our powers of understanding and sympathy have not correspondingly increased. In an atmosphere of artificially heated emotionalism truth simply dissolves in expediency."
Even terrible events like September 11th will eventually be invented by the literary imagination
A grande dificuldade da crítica literária reside no facto de que qualquer obra importante não pode ser julgada pelas normas que já existiam antes dela, mas, pelo contrário, inventa ela própria a norma pela qual deve ser julgada. Donde, o crítico não pode tranquilament ir declarando que "isto aqui está bem", "isto aqui esta mal", porque o que ele precisa fazer é intuir a partir da obra no seu conjunto, ou mesmo do conjunto da obra do autor, qual é a ideia de literature que esse obra impõe e de que modo essa ideia institui a lei em função da qual obra deverá ser julgado. (O Publico, 20 October, 2001)
[The real difficulty for literary criticism resides in the fact that any important work cannot be judged by norms that existed before it, but, on the contrary, invents the terms by which is should be judged. From this place, the critic cannot go forward declaring tranquilly that "this is good" and "this, here, is bad". Rather what he must do is to intuit from the work in its entirety, and even from the entirety of an author's oeuvre, the idea of literature that this work imposes, and the ways in which this idea creates the laws by which the work should be judged.] (C.R.'s translation)
Gods imitate life. That is their chief attraction.
So the real question is what do you want to learn?
And why do I want there to be some living thing that moves
at its own will or whim across my world
and makes a noise and wakes me up
so there I go obedient as ever to
the oracle of crows.
Crow on right:
keep going as you go.
Crow on the left.
Think twice. Stop what you're doing
and reflect.
Crow behind you.
Turn back.
Crow ahead of you: follow, follow
walk towards the voice of the crow
no matter how far you have to go.
A word once spoken
becomes a whole world's sky
Hades took Aphrodite both times she descended to his underworld realm. The first trip she tried to get her love Hyacinthus back; the king of hell gave her a son, Eros, instead. Hades left the goddess of love in the mud after he'd gotten what he wanted.
"Serves you right, you stupid fool," Hades said, looking down in disgust at her Olympian-thin skin covered in filth. He thought he'd done a favor, giving her an education. "Don't you know the ones with flower names always die young?"
"With both gods of love trapped by Hades, few died on earth, fewer still were born. Though no one on heaven or earth missed Psyche, without the gods of love, life on earth became hell, and there was nowhere to tell people to go."
It involved a very special way of taking in the printed word. Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.
Some Notes on Martin
Martin Earl lives with his wife Luísa in Coimbra, a small city about two hundred kilometers north of Lisbon. He was raised in Duxbury Massachusetts and lived in New York City during the early eighties before moving to Paris in 1984. In 1986 he left Paris to live in Portugal, and has been there ever since. His book, Stundenglas, was published in 1992 in East Berlin by Edition Maldoror. His poems have been published in magazines in America and the U.K. Some of these include Conjunctions, The Iowa Review, Denver Quarterly, Metre and PN Review. His work has been translated into French, German, Portugese, and Swedish.