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.

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

The Limits of Control

Limits of control poster

I loved it. But I’m in a small group.

The NYT points out that a shot of Paz de la Huerta’s buttock’s is framed to evoke Brigitte Bardot in Le Mepris (Contempt; JL Goddard).

The SMH reckons it’s ultimately pointless.

And this Cineopinion blog pans it rather more viciously. Here’s what I was provoked to reply:

Most enjoyable film I’ve seen in years. Went back the next night to see it again.
I think the problem for

the danger of resolution

When I was younger I used to make resolutions, which I imagined were virtuous. I was less anxious to be what I was, than to become what I wished to be. Now I am not far from thinking that in irresolution lies the secret of not gowing old. Gide The Counterfeiters 296

are quotations the beginning or end of ideas?

The Counterfeiters, Andre Gide

Bernard: Laura, Laura you don’t love Douviers. You feel affection for him, pity, esteem, but that’s not love. I think the secret of your sadness (for you are sad, Laura) is that life has divided you; love has only consented to take you, incomplete; you distribute among several what yo would have liked to give to one only. As for me, I feel I am indivisible; I can only give the whole of myself.

Laura: You are too young to speak so! (p181)

Edouard (earlier in his journal): The man they (women) love is as a rule a kind of clothes peg on which to hang their love.

The Ancient Shore, Shirley Hazard

Neapolitans know that pleasure can’t be deferred for ideal circumstances. (p55)

The contemporary world grappled to its explanations, sets itself to ignore the accidental quality of our existence. (p14) (cf N N Taleb)

in or out of Europe

In Australia we have been trying to cut our last tie with Europe – our formal adherence to the English monarchy – for 15 years or so. In 1998 we temporarily lost our nerve, ostensibly over a squabble about what kind of republic to become. For a much longer time intellectual traditions on the periphery of Europe have conversely anticipated and often sought some kind of union:

For people like me , who live uncertainly on the edge of Europe with only our books to keep us company, Europe has figured always as a dream,  vision of what is to come; an apparition at times desired and at times feared. … A future but never a memory.  (Orhan Pamuk ‘Where is Europe’ Other Colours* 2007 p 190.)

What we share on the other hand is an ‘away from the centre’ consciousness. In an essay about Vargas Lhosa, Pamuk ascribes this, finding no other common bond, to Third World literature:

If there is anything that distinguishes Third World literature, it is not the poverty, violence, politics or social turmoil of the country from which it issues but rather the writer’s awareness that his work is somehow remote from the centers* where the history of his art-the art of the novel-is described, and  he reflects this distance in his work. What is crucial here is the Third World writer’s sense of being exiled from the world’s literary centers. [... an exile not cured by relocation to] ‘one of the cultural centers of Europe, for the writer’s exile is not so much a matter of geography as a spiritual state, a sense of exclusion, of being a perpetual foreigner.

No well-read Australian can read this without thinking of fifty years of cultural cringe, of writers hiding from, or playing to, their Australian-ness. For only a few Australian writers is it never an issue, an issue worn lightly or otherwise.

* The title is anglicised for the Australian edition but not the spelling inside..

narrowing choices (from 2004)

Susan Johnson Hungry Ghosts Picador 1997

He was of the generation that had indulged in a long, extended youth and which would have trouble coming to terms with the finite nature of life and its unfortunate habit of ageing the body and narrowing choices.

For Anne-Louise life was still a stream in which she was swimming upwards, bound for some unimaginable open sea. She supposed herself destined for happiness as if happiness were a beautiful landing where you stopped and got out, eternally harboured. (p 20)

It struck me that until this moment our troubles had been small, surmountable, that we suffered only bad tempers and yearning. We had possessed the arrogance of the lucky, believing misfortune to be something which happened only to failures, to the unlucky, people who had somehow rendered themselves powerless. I saw now that there was no such division between the blessed and the unlucky, merely life passing over us all. (p 128)

Good: yearning. Next sentence not so good – lucky and unlucky aren’t logical – the belief we are lucky and (others?) unlucky is a tautology;  she seems to hold it true while it is also the chimera she learns to un-know? I like this idea but think that it can be said better.

Same page:

… we were supposed to swim forever upwards, never intending to be swept down.   … this new unexpected diversion … The grief of life cleaved to me and I knew it had come for good, settling within me deeply, beyond light.

[These notes from 2004; the year my ever-progressing narrative definitively stalled! I've just found similar ideas in Simone de Beauvoir's account of her twenties]

seriously fragmented

As you’ll maybe know, I’m a big fan of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow; a magically serious book on the surface about late 20th century Turkey;  collusions as much as tensions between liberals and socialists and fundamentalists and lust and business and pride and history and isolation and fairy stories. It evokes many moods, two of them curiously like the fantastical plot twists of the Master and Margarita or the air of parallel reality in the scenes of the castle with beasts in Murakami’s Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

My last post was a celebration of Philippe Delerms’ celebrations of tiny moments of everyday life; and, perhaps related, I have been reflecting on – or rather justifying the brevity and idiosyncracy of -  my own miniscules,  these blog entries.  Comforting then to read Pamuk reporting his friend’s remark about Walter Benjamin: [His] oeuvre is, like life itself, boundless and therefore fragmentary, and this is why so many literary critics tried so hard to give the pieces meaning, just as they did with life. And every time I [Pamuk] smile and say, “One day I’ll write a book that’s made only from fragments too.”*

Fragments more than whole stories or argued essays are places from where sparks of association strike in the reader’s mind. Or in this case the author’s.

My first link is to the richness of Elliot Weinberger’s fragments -  An Elemental Thing for example – the text’s purpose being obscure, no plot or line of argument to guide it, the reader’s mind is challenged to make something of it but, if the challenge is accepted, free to move in many directions.

A second: one can’t help thinking of Taleb’s rails against storytelling/cause finding when we seek to mollify history and downplay the randomness of events.

* Orhan Pamuk Other Colours: Writings on Life, Art, Books and Cities p xi

the first gulp of beer …

Le Tour de France, c’est l’été (The Tour de France is summer) is one of 40 odd miniatures in Philippe Delerm’s collection La Première Gorgée de Bière et autres plaisirs miniscules*. In two pages Delerm brings together several ideas, feelings and moods around enervatingly warm and never ending summer afternoons in any household in any part of France. In the a background the television broadcasts monotonous scenes of cyclists in colourful lycra displaying the countryside, shot low down through buzzing wheels across fields of wheat stubble or from a helicopter as the peleton careens over village cobblestones between red-brown roofs. The buzz of the cicada outside the house, the ignored murmer of the commentators, the imagined rhonrohn of the bicycles’ tyres; all are in desultory harmony.

You may know, dear reader, that David Bowie’s Pin Ups album (on which you will find the hit ‘Sorrow’ with its shimmering  tremolo guitar-based production – not my favourite at the time but it stands up well in memory) is made up entirely of cover versions of a selection of songs from the sixties. The trick was to go somewhere away from London (rural France perhaps) and develop the arrangements without access to the originals, to give the recordings a chance to find their own new forms. (Marc Collin’s Nouvelle Vague travels a similar road – he makes sure that the singers of his bossa nova versions of 80s new wave songs have never heard the originals.)

It seems people have different abilities to remember things in books they read, different parts attract different people – some remember specific scenes, others quotes or aphorisms, some try to hang on to a mood from a story or book, some the storyline, others the intricacies of the argument, yet others the connections they saw then – and perhaps no longer can explain – with remote events, moods or phrases.

And so when seated last Tuesday on a stone fence in a tiny urban park on a balmy Sydney evening telling my friend about Delerm’s plasirs miniscules, the question is whether I was able communicate the mood by telling parts of the story, by describing the shape, by noting a phrase. In this varying attraction to pieces of the whole – better still when combined with partial memory of a work read long ago -  perhaps the reviewers’ originality can be found.

But that originality encounters and often succumbs to a stronger force: Taleb of The Black Swan makes a case that success in creative endeavours is pretty much chance, that the regard for a book, even the way in which it is understood and hence the audience it will likely find, can be set by the first few reviewers; later reviewers have trouble not to influenced by the original take – even if their point is to oppose the first approach.

And so the virtue in the Bowie/Collin remake approach; and the virtue in distance. But for some things the first mouthful is truly the most refreshing. Which is which?

* for a less idiosyncratic appreciation see eg http://alwaysthewit.blogspot.com/2007/05/la-premire-gorge-de-bire.html; or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Delerm.