The labyrinth of No, the urge of Yes

Updating Heraclitus: Can't step into the same litblog twice . . . . .
a.k.a. fleeting quality of thought, irreproducibility of time, nothing as permanent as change itself, etc.
Yesterday there was a link at Chekhov's Mistress to a certain Ms Snark (as I recall, not having found the link this a.m., the great river of blog links having flowed on and me not really wanting to revisit the posting itself) -- though not certain whether said Snark is a Boojum, which in itself connotes interestingly for cyberspace. The aforesaid Snark, in response to a purported letter from "a writer" inquiring about the advisability of writers having litblogs, cautioned said writer about the amount of time that would be devoured, pointlessly consumed, counterproductive anent the act of writing, in short: utterly wasted, by maintaining a litblog. There was a memorable metaphor about such activity  being akin to a whale sucking up vast quantities of plankton. I rather liked the Moby-Dick image, the vast ocean of time, and so on. But the metaphor is, shall we say, insubstantial or 'watery'?
"Time'" might be considered "wasted" variously -- let me count the ways: spending years doing a Ph.D. for little fun and no profit; commuting regularly into the city on the subway; sitting all the way through a film that one susses as pointless and boring after the first five minutes; watching television; shopping for clothes; being stuck every day in a job one hates. Everyone no doubt has a custom-tailored extensive checklist which would only be meaningful if "time" were indeed an actual Something apart from our experience. A non-renewable natural resource, say, or a commodity -- much the same thing in our culture. "Getting and spending, we lay waste our time" alas is how I seem to misremember the lines in Wordsworth's sonnet ("The world is too much with us").
Snark opined that publishers would not be likely to consider a writer's litblog: is this surprising, since publishers do not publish litblogs? and that litblogs are in effect a counter-irritant to the dominance of mainstream publishing's cosiness with mainstream media, with litblog writers bringing to view news about and reviews and estimations of writers and writings of infinite variety and the diversity of publications or writerly doings or sayings?
Yet I'm grateful for Snark's firm position, for it made me think about why I even bother to post, rarely as I do, and about this thing called time. I have an aversion to anyone who intones about "time management", "time is money", "you're wasting your time", or any such Taylorist, time-clock philosphy, and refuse to hearken to them. When I do sit down to compose a post here, as when I sit down to work on my novel, or to write long letters to friends, or to do anything (cooking, meditation, reading, being with my loved ones, enjoying conversation with friends) that seems to me fully engaging and meaningful, "time" is inconsequential. It ceases to exist, until I re-enter the world of clocks and cultural scheduling and begin my ingrained chastisement of self for "use" of time. Civilization and its discontents made manifest. Writing for a litblog is . . . . .writing. Is a response to. . . .the writing of others. Is a response to . . . . .the great world. Is the pleasure of using language.
My refusal -- my no -- to those who make time into a dictator of my actions, is inversely my yes, my Molly Bloom yes, to living my life as . . .my life.

Vila-Matas and the "labyrinth of no"
Reading litblogs is for me an extension of browsing, which I do regularly at news stands, bookstores, libraries, even craning my neck to see what the person near me on the subway is reading. The latter is often unproductive, admittedly, but has its pleasures, e.g. a long ago subway ride when an exceptionally beautiful young man chanced to sit adjacent to me and opened his copy of Antigone. He would doubtless not have been nearl so beautiful had he not been absorbed in reading Sophocles, reminding me of my own experience of the play. Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas (The Harvill Press, 2004; the first of his many books to be translated into English and that in itself a powerful reason for reviving my dormant Spanish.) The book was on display among others being paraded as "new fiction" at North York Central Library (it takes a long time for "new" books to manifest themselves in the library system), and though I hadn't heard of this author, was attracted by the title: Bartleby is for me one of literature's most intriguing characters.

The narrator of the novel, Marcelo, sets out to make a search through literature for all those other possible Bartlebys who, for whatever reason, have had the urge to say 'No', and with this in mind he has the engaging notion of keeping a diary and writing footnotes to an invisible text. His references to authors, both read and invented, provide the reader with extravagant doses of humour . . .. [etc] -- the inside flap of the book jacket barely suggests the import of this engaging and slender book. Reviews appeared shortly after the book's appearance chez Maud Newton, Conversational Reading, and The Literary Saloon, I was soon to discover when back at home hunting for more about Sr Vila-Matas.
(interjection re the above 3 litblogs: no, I have not bothered to link them here, for only someone new to the world of litblogs would not know these established and worthy sites, or someone utterly lacking in curiosity and basic search skills would need them, just as an experienced cook knows exactly how long and at what temperature to saute onions.)

Slender as novels go (at 178 pages in a small-format book), the book expands almost endlessly into a larger world of literature. Introducing footnote 54 on Juan Ramon Jimenez is this beguiling sentence: "The death of a loved one does not only breed lilacs, it also breeds poets of the No." The previous footnote is devoted to Henry Roth, whose first volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream I had chanced to buy the same day from a public library cart of withdrawn items (such status for this great writer in itself poignant)  .  And permit me, Vila-Matas, but this passage from his footnote 53 seems not only to capture the essence of Roth but is also relevant to my attraction to an aspect of litblogs:

The novel was written "to make dying easier". In it, artistic recognition is mocked in a very entertaining way. The best pages are perhaps those where he tells us of his experiences on the fringes of literature -- these pages, as you would expect, take up practically the whole book -- all those years when no-one knows if he wrote, but he certainly did not publish, all those years when he remained oblvious to the tributaries of the river of literature and was carried along in the rude stream of life.

Bartleby & Co. shares with the best of the litblogs the quality of being extended love-letters to writers, even and especially those who might not be in the "rude" mainstream of published life, and bringing them into our cultural memory.

Still reading . . . .
. . . .the Sept/Oct ''05 issue of The Bloomsbury Review with its excellent interview of poet and translator Richard Zenith in which he writes about his latest translation, Joao Cabral de Melo Neto's Education by Stone: Selected Poems (Archipelago Books) as well as his love of Fernando Pessoa's writing and translating Pessoa's inventiveness: "For Pessoa, writing a poem that merely tells what you did or thought yesterday wasn't worth the bother. To just present what is was too little for Pessoa."

In the same issue: a review of Adam Zagajewski's A Defense of Ardor, a new selection of George Trakl's Poems and Prose (transl Alexander Stillmark, from Northwestern) -- which latter book I will now order from A Different Drummer (Burlington) -- the consummate purveyor of literature -- having the others on my shelf in various stages of ingestion.

. . . .. Nuruddin Farah's Links, which the public library will let me have for another week. It continues to impress me: at the centre of unimaginable destruction is a character of profound humanity. Last night while reading, and noting the epigraphs from The Inferno (related to the protagonist's having studied Dante while at University in Padua), I wondered, "what if Dante came to suspect that his guide through hell might be a spy or in some way intended him harm, might abandon him in those pits of suffering?"

. . . .nearly finished re-reading Richard II, now considering it one of the bard's greatest plays, and coincidentally also (like Links) about another bloody civil war, here at its outset, though minus of course foreign invasions, the intervention of outside "advisors", and sophisticated armaments.

. . . thanks to The LitBlog Co-op and its posting of comments about Steve Stern's Angel of Forgetfulness, followed by Stern's own reponse, I bought the book (delighted to have found it at Nicholas Hoare) and have now finished reading Saul's first section, marvelling at Stern's magic in creating on paper a lost world and the unforgettable character of Saul's old "Aunt Ken". Saul himself, at this stage in the novel, seems to me to rather a nebbech, even possibly Keni's golem charged with a task of rescue, so now I'm curious to discover whether there will continue to be the element of bildungsroman regarding Saul's part.

. . . .The Best American Poetry 2005 (ed. Paul Muldoon), who seems in his selection to want to plumb the "great, many-chambered heart" of American poetry, eshewing the boundaries separating the usual clans to incorporate poems by some of the known and/or loved names like Ammons, Hecht, Simic, Snyder, Ashbery, Hejinian, Rich, Karr, Justice, Kinnell (and many more I read regularly) as well as poetry of current import: "[t]he body count from the Iraq war is a feature of much of The Best American Poetry 2005". Muldoon's brief introduction follows David Lehman's (Series Editor) lengthier assessment, including the perils of poetry ("poets tend to die younger than do other writers"), his invocation of Thom Gunn's words in support of the collection's avowed non-sectarian nature, and his news that "more people are writing poetry and going public with it" presented with a discomfort that much of it might be considered not worth publishing. "It is sometimes said with heavy tones of lamentation tha[t] in this day and age everyone's a poet. The criticism in Poetry [this a reference to Kleinzahler's now-famous trashing of Garrison Keillor's Good Poems collection in that journal] implies that on the contrary everyone's a critic. And criticism is too often the sound of a gripe and the taste of sour grapes expressed with all the sensitivity and thoughtfulness of a midnight blogger."

The first [  ] above indicates a typographical error in the text, supposedly only occurring in blogs, according to someone's (now-forgotten) diatribe against blogging.The highlighting of the last sentence is because I love the utter meaninglessness of its accusation, and that an otherwise articulate editor would botch his comments with a sarcastic slur that he does not both to illustrate with examples of such criticism. O the perils of poetry, that it can cram the mouths even of its supposed advocates with such poisoned verbiage.

. . .and so to lunch (for it's not midnight here) and I'm not a bibliophage:
There's more on my bibliographic plate, and I'm now conscious that I have "wasted" a good part of the morning in writing, when I could have been spending the morning . . . . Writing. As my favorite literary cat would say, "toujours gai kid, toujours gai." (Blame Archie or my memory re punctuation; don't know where my copy is.)

Comments

[Duende]

Dear Atalanta,

Thank you for coming back to your log. My other weblogging friend out here on the coast seems also to have experienced a recent time of uncertain silence, but she returned to posting on the holiday weekend (see http://entropyassociation.blogspot.com). This has made me even more want to do a radio piece on "blogging" with either or both of you.

Thank you for sharing your thoughtful words!
Duende