angus and tactics

A great blog post on this guy’s personal relationship to Tactics; a brief spot on the passing of Angus Douglas.

on wonder

a subject worth writing about perhaps.

For me wonder is a kind of joy; something that takes you away for a moment or more from where you were – the sudden appreciation of the late afternoon winter light on a clear day in Sydney; it is perhaps a bit like a Joycean epiphany but lacking the precise knowledge, or message or even portent of urpose of an epiphany.

De Beauvoir observes a state of wonder, perhaps, in Venice in the late 1950s, although it’s mised in with her (personal, political and perhaps even sociological)  animus towards the US at the time:

“[Force of Circumstance p 234] We’ve migrated from Harry’s Bar to Ciro’s, where a German pianist plays lovely old tunes. I was amused by two young Americans who sat side byu side for hours on end without opening their mouths, but with their eyes perpetually starry and smiles on their lips, as though they just couldn’t get over the fact that they’re alive, that they’re Americans, and that the rest of the world exists.”

age differences

I once attended a dinner party. We were six: in addition to the the host couple and I, there was a mutual friend and another couple some distance apart in age. She was perhaps 30 and he closer to 50 than 40. They’d been together quite some time, meeting when she was newly arrived in Australia from Croatia in  her very early twenties.. I don’t know what got into me but I made some negative comment about too large age gaps, influenced in part by a friend’s observations on the problems caused by a mere 10 ears age gap in a couple they know now in their 70s and 80s repsectively. She, at 70, still sprightly, he, at 80, a limit on her freedom when not positively a burden. The 30 year old Croatian woman at dinner ripped into me. What prejudice, what would I know. And fair enough.

Shirley Hazzard is a well educated, ambitious creative and insightful woman. Even in 1963, at the age of 32, she was destined for success; it was the year she published her first collection of short stories; it was also the year she married Francis Steegmuller, US writer and at the time 56 or 57. They stayed married until he died in 1994. Only then could she really work on the semi-autobiographical novel The Great Fire, a passionate story of the love of a 17 year old for a man 13 years her senior.

Scandalous as large age differences between men and (younger) women may sometimes be, the converse, seemingly much rarer, is of course even more frowned on (although logically more sensible given women live longer then men). De Beauvoir began her long relationship with the young Claude Lanzmann at the age of 44.

“While I was talking to him it never occurred to me that he was younger than I. Yet we were aware that there was seventeen years difference between us; but the gap did not alarm us. For myself I needed some sort of distance if I was to give my heart sincerely, for there could be no question of trying to duplicate the understanding I had with Sartre. Algren belonged to another continent. Lanzmann to another generation; this too was a foreign-ness which kept a balance in our relationship. His youth doomed me to being only a moment in his life; it also excused me, in my own eyes, for not being able to give him today the whole of mine. Not that he asked me for it in any case: he accepted me as I was, with my past and present. All the same, the harmony between us was not achieved all at once.” Force of Circumstance p 284,

viewing a country from near and far

Ccurious how countries are divided into ‘must sees’ – Ayres Rock, Bondi Beach – and the rest; a much too stark division.

“One of the places I had wanted to see most of all was Timbuktu, 250 miles from Gao. From Paris the distance had seemed trifling; even if there were no boats [they had arrived a few days after the river became impassable for a number of months], there were sure to be trucks making the journey. I inquired about it and was simply laughed at for my pains: in the present heat, the track-rarely used at any season-was impassable. I resigned myself to this fact with an ease that surprised me. The same thing happened again several times later on; a placed that had seemed to me, when we began our journey, the principal attraction of one of its stages, lost its importance when we got nearer to it. From afar its name had symbolised a whole country; when we got there, the country had many other ways of showing itself to us. in the market at Gao, along the banks of the Niger, I had already seen embodied, the images of Timbuktu I had previously conjured up in my mind’s eye.” SdB Force of Circumstance p 215.

Algren’s lament

SdB Force of Circumstance p 166-7

“When speaking at rallies for [US Presidential candidate George Wallace] he had fallen in love with a young woman, he wrote; she was being divorced and he thought of marrying her; she was in analysis and didn’t want to get involved in a relationship of that sort until the analysis was finished; by the time the letter reached me in December they had almost stopped seeing each other. But he explained what he felt in detail: ‘I wont have an affair with this girl, she doesn’t really mean anything to me. But that doesn’t change the fact that that I still want what she represented for me for the two or three months: a place of my own to live, with a woman of may own and perhaps a child my own. There’s nothing extraordinary about wanting such things, in fact it’s rather common, it’s just that I’ve never felt like it before. Perhaps it’s because I’m getting close to forty. it’s different for you., You’ve got Sartre and a settled way of life, people , and a vital interest in ideas…. The girl helped me to see the truth about us more clearly; last year I would have been afraid of spoiling something by not being faithful to you. Now I know that was foolish, because no arms are warm when they are on the other side of the ocean; I know that life is too short and too cold for me to reject all warmth for so many months.’

force of circumstance to second sex

I’ve been looking for Simone de Beauvoir’s Force of Circumstance for some time and found it I don’t remember where – on King St I think not so long ago. I’ve beeen reading it with an amazing but not unexpected pleasure, it is perhaps even better than the first two. Today she is in the second month of just copying in [parts of?] her diary. And just back fro mSwitzerland she explained how the idea of the Second Sex came to her – a seminal moment in c20 history?

Last night F suggested she only liked to read things that are ‘real’. She’s currently reading Blink (Malcolm Gladwell). I took her to mean that she won’t read fiction and I challenged her in relation to the films she sees. But films like Rainman or Wall St are real she says; they’re telling real stories.

What about de Beauvoir’s memoirs (a word which by the way seems far more appropriate than autobiography). As K points out they are carefully constructed, as is any re-telling of a true story.

But surely stories which are plainly not real – those in Delta of Venus for example, which are not only fiction but fiction where the author is exercising a certain absence of authenticity* – have something to say about the ‘real’. The meaning of things that happen in the real world is determined by the imaginery. The meaning of the execution of a nazi collaborator responsible for 100s of deportation to deathcamps: justice? a wasted life? an absence of mercy? It depends on you construction of the world. This is even more stark, perhaps, in the case of sex. They say the brain is the greatest aphrodisiac. In which case your lust depends on ideas, constructions created in your mind based on stimuli from the physical, the connotational, the intellectual, the emotional … and then the meaning of any intimate act, its resonance for the future and in the future, its value as history and as foretelling, depend in the end on a construction of our intellect.

None of which is what I sat down to write about. Reading Force of Circumstance I am struck on page 95 by SdB’s sudden appreciation – if you believe hertext, perhaps in the course of justone day – of the different situation of women. She had been gradually drawn to the question of herself as the subject of her writing – a question which would ultimately yield the four volumes of her memoirs, surely one of the major works of the c20. But as she has it she put that project to one side, unstarted, when, as she has it, Satre suggested that the fact that she was a woman was not just one question to be addresssed but really quite significant. Her initial view in conversation with Satre is that “For me you might say it just hasn’t counted.” “all the same” says Sartre, “you weren’t brought up in the same way as a boy would have been; you should look into it further.”  She goes on ‘I looked and it was a revelation. … I was so interested in this discovery that I abandoned my project for a personal confession in order to give all my attention to finding out about the condition of womain in its broadest terms.”

democratic revolutions?

Bad Elements

Ian Buruma’s Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing explores the views of Chinese dissidents through interviews in the US, Singapore, Taiwan, Hongkong, Shenzen and Beijing through interviews conducted in 1999 around ten years after the 4 June massacre in Tiananmen Square.

In the US he speaks with student leaders of the 1989 protests, the authors of the influential TV series River Elegy shown the previous year, and participants in the Democracy Wall movement of 1978 after the downfall of the Gang of Four*. Many have moved on, to become successful business, or the academy. Others monitor human rights in China, yet others crusade, impotently, for the conversion of the Chinese nation to Christianity. Buruma paints them as fractured and largely dismissive of each other.

In Taiwan (this part of the book a revelation to me) and Singapore he speaks to much less well known activists who opposed the freedom denying

Republican Roosevelt’s justification for regulation of corporations

From President Theodore Roosevelt’s State of the Union address Decmber 1901.

It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing business under corporate form, which frees them from individual responsibility, and enables them to call into their enterprises the capital of the public, they shall do so upon absolutely truthful representations as to the value of the property in which the capital is to be invested. Corporations engaged in interstate commerce should be regulated if they are found to exercise a license working to the public injury. It should be as much the aim of those who seek for social betterment to rid the business world of crimes of cunning as to rid the entire body politic of crimes of violence. Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and our duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions. The first essential in determining how to deal with the great industrial combinations is knowledge of the facts-publicity. In the interest of the public, the government should have the right to inspect and examine the workings of the great corporations engaged in interstate business. Publicity is the only sure remedy which we can now invoke. What further remedies are needed in the way of governmental regulation, or taxation, can only be determined after publicity has been obtained, by process of law, and in the course of administration. The first requisite is knowledge, full and complete-knowledge which may be made public to the world.

grotesque

My preferred cover

With two matter-of-fact murders of prostitutes  and a mother’s suicide Natsuo Kirino’s Grotesque is sold as a crime novel, at least in English, but she’s much more interested in crimes committed by families, and the Japanese education and class systems, as the more visceral attacks on human bodies.

The narrator – unrelentingly bitter, and unrelentingly unreliable – recalls only a few moments in her 40 odd years where she was happy for even an instant, and all but one of those celebrate nothing more than the cultivation of her single special skill, to manipulate.

She, and it seems most of Japan, is obsessed by the unfair power of beauty, realised for the purpose of the novel in the form of her sister, Yukiro, half Swiss, half Japanese. Our narrator shares these genes, perhaps, but not the resulting astonishing outward appearance. At around 11 years old she is forced to accept the power and disconcert of this creepy, awe-inspiring beauty. She decides her sister is a monster to be shunned, fled from, locked out of her life.

But slowly the reader is lead to suspect that the narrator is good at seeing monsters.

The cover blurb suggests that Yukiro and a high school classmate of the narrator later choose prostitution as a form of power. If so their choice – if ever that – is given declining rewards in a beauty-obsessed society.

[This is a post that ran out of puff .. there's a good review here]

sorrowful quotes

[an unfinished thought from some time ago]

Siri Hustvedt is one of those writers who sprinkle challenging aphorisms through her novels, rather like Shirley Hazzard, although Hustvedt’s prose is less intensely crafted than Hazzard’s, and she seems to have more trouble avoiding the trite (perhaps at times this triteness is her characters?)

‘People like me don’t go in for salvation. Crippled and crazy we hobble towards the finish line, pen in hand.’ 45

‘.. the way we organized perceptions into stories with beginnings, middles and ends, how our memory fragments don’t have any coherence until they’re reimagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense,’ 47