the prime of life – the first 100 pages

Its not hard, after the first 100 pages of the Prime of Life, to see reasons why Simone de Beauvoir’s  autobiographical writing might be so well regarded. We witness the personal and intellectual development of a woman with a finely tuned self-awareness, a development marked by an inclination both to question and to oppose (the latter sometimes at odds with the former, as the older and wiser author implies from time to time about her younger self) and with a roughly focussed, and optimistic,  appetite for knowledge and experience. Places, people, books and films are celebrated for themselves but also for their impact on her seriously undertaken mission to think out her considered understanding of the world.

One dynamic is of her and Sartre developing their ideas, their persona and their personalities, and their being as a couple. She has strong sympathy, but not full agreement, with his unfolding project to

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.

story about Guernica

On the plane from HK to Sydney Qantas offered an episode of Simon Schama’s series on the power of art, this one on Picasso’s Guernica. I wondered how you could fill 40+ minutes on one painting. He didn’t, of course, he told a story involving Picasso’s life and work and Spanish modern history with Guernica as the central intersecting point.

He told the story from the middle out; something like this (the interludes being being background to the events of Guernica and not about picasso) – T2 -> T1a T1b T1c -> interlude -> T2a -> interlude -> T3 -> coda.

There were three themes through this – that Picasso had (apolitically) destroyed the main topics of traditional art – an anti heroic hero painting (boy and horse), a non beautiful, non sublime nude (Les Demoiselles d’Avignon) and then an unrecgnisable portrait (of his dealer – cubist); that Picasso had to both discover political engagement and return to the inspiration of old masters (Goya) to paint his greatest work, and, in the words of Schama on the program’s web site: “Picasso connects with our worst nightmares. He’s saying here’s where the world’s horror comes from; the dark pit of our psyche.”