Read Jenny Bornholdt's The Rocky Shore (2008) in one sitting, laughing out loud, and when I'd finished surprised myself by having a proper cry, unusual for me, not sure why...
Her writing is without pretence. Clear and simple, like a child telling a truth, instantly evident. I have another seven minutes to say what is so good about it. Also I want to say that the word compression occurred in italics in the very first poem, Confessional.
...when people talk about poetry
they often mention compression - yes it can
be that, but it can also be a great sprawling
thing. And Kenneth Koch has died."
I don't know who Kenneth Koch is yet.
I'm always a fan of good presentation, and Jenny Bornholdt's book is pleasingly done, the inside of the cover is a pure pale green, the paper is the creamy, slightly rough paper which suits poetry.
I read from the book to the women in my sewing circle, just dipping in here and there for good bits, and I was worried about imposing this on them, so stopped early - then later I looked up and one of them was sitting with her nose in it. The reading was difficult - trying to speak the line breaks - that didn't work.
Some of her best bits are what other people say, she sets them up nicely in the poem, you can have fun with her. I felt that all the way through, invited into her thoughts, an honour, to share intimacy. Her appraisal of a builder or plumber who said "Smells of soup, have you got a bacon hock in there?"
The loss of her father, the fear for the child - those are in the background, touched upon, left for you to think about. I shall re-read it and discover what it is that made me cry - probably the writing about Nigel Cox. He came to speak to a class I was in. He knew then that he was dying - such a sad man - but we didn't, we were pleased he was there, in his beautiful foreign, brightly striped shirt. His youngest, a boy, was five when he died. After reading his diary from Berlin, Phone Home Berlin, I thought, he must have seemed like a mystery to the Germans, they will have liked his manner so much, the gentleness and ability to get things done without being authoritarian, very Kiwi. I've written about that book previously.
PS - Jenny Bornholdt has been a Poet Laureate of New Zealand, and this book won a Montana Award in poetry (2009).
PPS - From Wikipedia: Kenneth Koch (1925 -2002): American poet, playwright, and professor, active from the 1950s until his death at age 77. He was a prominent poet of the New York School of poetry, a loose group of poets including Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery that eschewed contemporary introspective poetry in favor of an exuberant, cosmopolitan style that drew major inspiration from travel, painting, and music.
Monday, 17 August 2009
Friday, 14 August 2009
Compression
No other writing beyond this blog yesterday.
Brought in an additional bookshelf to the room, now tidier. More tidying up planned today.
Nathan Englander in an interview: he works to compress - ninety years into eighty, eighty into seventy...ending with the book covering just 3 months. He compressed two children into one, got rid of a grandfather...P says loyally, I don't think you should get rid of your grandfather [in my book].
I am studying James Wood's book How Fiction Works (2008, Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The first chapter is about a style of writing which merges point of view and the type of speech expected from a given character - for instance, a peasant or a child having their own typical language and range of terms which they think and speak in. Free indirect style is the name he gives to this - maybe it is not just his name for it, maybe the rest of the world knows all about it and I don't. Choose the right vocabulary: it mitigates the need to explain that we are dealing with a child or a peasant, and leads to compression - that word again.
Study will be needed - everything works best when it happens unconsciously. Writing more succinctly was already the purpose of the poetry. Thinking of Penelope Fitzgerald's little books (less than 200 pp.), and of Frederik Uhlenberg's book about a German youth growing up, a slim masterpiece. I can't find it now, I hope I have not lent it to someone.
I have not yet looked at my MS. To re-read it now - a scary thought - or later, after I have studied some of the material I brought back with me. I have made room on my new shelves for the books and papers which are to be read.
At the moment am also reading a book by a NZ German born in the same year as my mother, an intelligent woman, who lived in Germany during WWII and whose father was a high-ranking officer. It gives me the shivers, but also provides background info, for instance about a festival in a Bavarian village, the kind of clothes the villagers wear, what they do. Grist to the mill. It is called Strawberries with the Fuehrer, a Journey from the Third Reich to New Zealand, by Helga Tiscenko, (2000, Shoal Bay Press). It has already been reprinted once. She manages to combine attention to detail and a good pace for the story, one does not feel bored. Well, someone like me, who wishes to write about that period, does not.
We decided to disconnect the phones in the mornings. A strong stance. I am about to reconnect my phone in order to ask someone a question which is bugging me. There you go.
Brought in an additional bookshelf to the room, now tidier. More tidying up planned today.
Nathan Englander in an interview: he works to compress - ninety years into eighty, eighty into seventy...ending with the book covering just 3 months. He compressed two children into one, got rid of a grandfather...P says loyally, I don't think you should get rid of your grandfather [in my book].
I am studying James Wood's book How Fiction Works (2008, Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The first chapter is about a style of writing which merges point of view and the type of speech expected from a given character - for instance, a peasant or a child having their own typical language and range of terms which they think and speak in. Free indirect style is the name he gives to this - maybe it is not just his name for it, maybe the rest of the world knows all about it and I don't. Choose the right vocabulary: it mitigates the need to explain that we are dealing with a child or a peasant, and leads to compression - that word again.
Study will be needed - everything works best when it happens unconsciously. Writing more succinctly was already the purpose of the poetry. Thinking of Penelope Fitzgerald's little books (less than 200 pp.), and of Frederik Uhlenberg's book about a German youth growing up, a slim masterpiece. I can't find it now, I hope I have not lent it to someone.
I have not yet looked at my MS. To re-read it now - a scary thought - or later, after I have studied some of the material I brought back with me. I have made room on my new shelves for the books and papers which are to be read.
At the moment am also reading a book by a NZ German born in the same year as my mother, an intelligent woman, who lived in Germany during WWII and whose father was a high-ranking officer. It gives me the shivers, but also provides background info, for instance about a festival in a Bavarian village, the kind of clothes the villagers wear, what they do. Grist to the mill. It is called Strawberries with the Fuehrer, a Journey from the Third Reich to New Zealand, by Helga Tiscenko, (2000, Shoal Bay Press). It has already been reprinted once. She manages to combine attention to detail and a good pace for the story, one does not feel bored. Well, someone like me, who wishes to write about that period, does not.
We decided to disconnect the phones in the mornings. A strong stance. I am about to reconnect my phone in order to ask someone a question which is bugging me. There you go.
Thursday, 13 August 2009
The proper study of mankind...
Several commitments met, worries resolved: now free, am able to resume a routine - writing in the mornings. Timer set to eight minutes. Started the day with 20 min free writing, superficial stuff.
Finished Goethe's Elective Affinities (first published 1809). An outcome: the discovery that Ottilie (portrayed as young, innocent and deeply wise) writes in her diary that 'The proper study of mankind is man'.
I was surprised to find the sentence here as a part of the text, not as a quote. Did it originate from Goethe? But - No. A search (among English-language sources, natuerlich) revealed the source as Alexander Pope (born 1688). (P thought Shakespeare.)
Phaedrus, an animator of the Quotation website, provides the following source: Pierre Charron, French philosopher, (born 1541) in his treatise Sur la Sagesse (1604). Charron says that reason is paramount, and juxtaposes it nevertheless reverently to faith.
Similarity to the writings of Galileo (born 1564) : watched a TV doco about him last night, where his great Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) is described: the dialogue is between a wise man and a fool. Unwisely, Galileo gave the fool the opinions of his friend Pope Urbino.
The Catholic Church banned the book - for 200 years, until resurrected by John Paul II (pun unintended) .
It seems that the quote will be attributed to Goethe in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, to Alexander Pope in the English-speaking world, and to Charron among the French.
In the 17th century as today, some intellectual people thought their way out of organised religion. Charron sees no connection between morality and religion.
Finished Goethe's Elective Affinities (first published 1809). An outcome: the discovery that Ottilie (portrayed as young, innocent and deeply wise) writes in her diary that 'The proper study of mankind is man'.
I was surprised to find the sentence here as a part of the text, not as a quote. Did it originate from Goethe? But - No. A search (among English-language sources, natuerlich) revealed the source as Alexander Pope (born 1688). (P thought Shakespeare.)
Phaedrus, an animator of the Quotation website, provides the following source: Pierre Charron, French philosopher, (born 1541) in his treatise Sur la Sagesse (1604). Charron says that reason is paramount, and juxtaposes it nevertheless reverently to faith.
Similarity to the writings of Galileo (born 1564) : watched a TV doco about him last night, where his great Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) is described: the dialogue is between a wise man and a fool. Unwisely, Galileo gave the fool the opinions of his friend Pope Urbino.
The Catholic Church banned the book - for 200 years, until resurrected by John Paul II (pun unintended) .
It seems that the quote will be attributed to Goethe in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, to Alexander Pope in the English-speaking world, and to Charron among the French.
In the 17th century as today, some intellectual people thought their way out of organised religion. Charron sees no connection between morality and religion.
Monday, 20 July 2009
Writing fast
Monday morning, a crazy week ahead, the entire newsletter to do from start to finish, (so am perversely writing this blog instead). It should be a record, especially as it is a Jubilee Issue, permission granted by the Board to splurge on full colour for the cover, first time ever in the 50 years of the newsletter.
This week-end, read Nathan Englander's The Ministry of Special Cases - an American writing completely believably about Argentina's disappeared and their families. (When an Argentinian aunt visited us in the early 80's, I asked her about those times: she shut me up with a single word - I almost looked over my shoulder, in my own home in safe New Zealand.)
The writer has succeeded in absenting himself from his book - you never think of him, in itself an achievement. The characters are absorbing and heart-rendingly funny, particularly if you are familiar with the inflections and rhythm of Yiddish.
At first the style seemed all magical realism: a graveyard digger named Kaddish, and his son Pato are in a Jewish cemetery at midnight, chipping off names from gravestones by torchlight, at the request of the wealthy doctors and lawyers whose parents were pimps and whores in a Jewish Mafia.
Slowly, the reader realises that this is for real. When Pato disappears without warning, he is suddenly completely absent from the novel, an eerie silence settles over him. His parents become isolated as if infected with the plague.
Kaddish, himself the son of a saintly whore from Poland, wistfully thinks back to when the older generation was alive - they would have had the nous to deal with the junta's murderous craziness. Kaddish is a great character, a failure by society's standards, by his loving wife's standards, by his own. And yet, when he lies down to sleep on the bench of the abandoned synagogue, and covers himself with the Torah curtain, he is the only person in touch with the truth.
PS Have just discovered a BBC interview with the author - http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A26677515
This week-end, read Nathan Englander's The Ministry of Special Cases - an American writing completely believably about Argentina's disappeared and their families. (When an Argentinian aunt visited us in the early 80's, I asked her about those times: she shut me up with a single word - I almost looked over my shoulder, in my own home in safe New Zealand.)
The writer has succeeded in absenting himself from his book - you never think of him, in itself an achievement. The characters are absorbing and heart-rendingly funny, particularly if you are familiar with the inflections and rhythm of Yiddish.
At first the style seemed all magical realism: a graveyard digger named Kaddish, and his son Pato are in a Jewish cemetery at midnight, chipping off names from gravestones by torchlight, at the request of the wealthy doctors and lawyers whose parents were pimps and whores in a Jewish Mafia.
Slowly, the reader realises that this is for real. When Pato disappears without warning, he is suddenly completely absent from the novel, an eerie silence settles over him. His parents become isolated as if infected with the plague.
Kaddish, himself the son of a saintly whore from Poland, wistfully thinks back to when the older generation was alive - they would have had the nous to deal with the junta's murderous craziness. Kaddish is a great character, a failure by society's standards, by his loving wife's standards, by his own. And yet, when he lies down to sleep on the bench of the abandoned synagogue, and covers himself with the Torah curtain, he is the only person in touch with the truth.
PS Have just discovered a BBC interview with the author - http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A26677515
Monday, 13 July 2009
Goethe's teachings
I didn't finish The Love of Impermanent Things because it didn't belong to the person who lent it to me, and she needed to return it. The person to whom it does belong is unwell. A greater need. Now I discover that I miss it and want it and shall order it soon for myself. There's a recommendation for you.
It is midnight and I am not asleep, nor am I working. The book I have to finish producing produced a nasty trick of its own - a third of the MS is missing in the Publisher version, a shock. As I go back through previous P versions, that third was missing all along. It is there in Word, though the actual physical manuscript has also disappeared. How can that be?
I stay calm for some reason and revisit the process of transferring from Word to Publisher and become absorbed in the editing and shaping and choosing of the place of each element - these are short essays that need to be linked somehow - similar topics grouped. I am learning to work with Publisher, becoming better at it. I show the book who is boss. I have a deadline to adhere to, but there is time: I put off attending a meditation retreat. It is put off - not abandoned altogether. If the first proof is done by Wednesday, I may still go - though I can't imagine myself there.
I have read Tender at the Bone : Growing up at the table, by Ruth Reichl, the American restaurant reviewer. There is a warning at the beginning - Reader Beware - to the effect that enhancements and embellishments and even some travesties of the truth are a necessary part of the telling of stories - even when they are entitled autobiography.
Here is one which was my favourite, until it became worn with the re-telling:
The maid enters the dining room carrying with the Beef Wellington and drops it. She scrapes it off the floor under the gazes of her horrified mistress and the surprised guests and as she leaves she says "Shall I bring in the other one, Ma'am?"
The book is well balanced - the wit and the love versus the painful growing up with a narcissistic, manic-depressive mother.
Now I've started reading - for the second time - a translation of Goethe entitled in English Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandschaften, first published in 1809 - that is 200 years ago!). This time round I progressed to read the first two chapters. The style is heavy, ponderous. He seems to tell and explain far too much.
Am choosing to read it for two reasons: One, my grandfather would have read it and I need to understand better the spirit of those times; two, Goethe is so greatly revered that
I am curious to know what he can teach.
Already I have learned something: at the end of the first chapter, the reading of which was akin to walking through long unkempt grass, which velcros itself onto one's clothes and restricts movement, long sentences with no space to breathe in. The last sentence - itself rather clumsy - spoke to me out loud and said a useful and practical thing, as if Goethe was in the room saying it, a word of advice about the act of correspondence:
"...In many cases it is necessary and a more friendly act to write about nothing than not to write at all..."
In the second chapter, a man described as an intermediary, a mediator, visits a mature couple - recently married, both for the second time - and he is irritated when they want his advice about a decision they must take. "Take whatever decision you wish," he says. "If things don't work out, then shall I be of use to you. But this decision must be yours."He cannot run their lives for them. It rings true psychologically, very satisfying. I am now involved - though more with the author than with the characters.
What big picture is he drawing? I have not read the preface nor any other writing about Goethe and his work: I shall enjoy them more when I've finished the book.
At the moment, this blog is all the writing I do. Not enough. No poems at all.
I did read one by Mary O'Reilly, entitled Passover. That was good.
It is midnight and I am not asleep, nor am I working. The book I have to finish producing produced a nasty trick of its own - a third of the MS is missing in the Publisher version, a shock. As I go back through previous P versions, that third was missing all along. It is there in Word, though the actual physical manuscript has also disappeared. How can that be?
I stay calm for some reason and revisit the process of transferring from Word to Publisher and become absorbed in the editing and shaping and choosing of the place of each element - these are short essays that need to be linked somehow - similar topics grouped. I am learning to work with Publisher, becoming better at it. I show the book who is boss. I have a deadline to adhere to, but there is time: I put off attending a meditation retreat. It is put off - not abandoned altogether. If the first proof is done by Wednesday, I may still go - though I can't imagine myself there.
I have read Tender at the Bone : Growing up at the table, by Ruth Reichl, the American restaurant reviewer. There is a warning at the beginning - Reader Beware - to the effect that enhancements and embellishments and even some travesties of the truth are a necessary part of the telling of stories - even when they are entitled autobiography.
Here is one which was my favourite, until it became worn with the re-telling:
The maid enters the dining room carrying with the Beef Wellington and drops it. She scrapes it off the floor under the gazes of her horrified mistress and the surprised guests and as she leaves she says "Shall I bring in the other one, Ma'am?"
The book is well balanced - the wit and the love versus the painful growing up with a narcissistic, manic-depressive mother.
Now I've started reading - for the second time - a translation of Goethe entitled in English Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandschaften, first published in 1809 - that is 200 years ago!). This time round I progressed to read the first two chapters. The style is heavy, ponderous. He seems to tell and explain far too much.
Am choosing to read it for two reasons: One, my grandfather would have read it and I need to understand better the spirit of those times; two, Goethe is so greatly revered that
I am curious to know what he can teach.
Already I have learned something: at the end of the first chapter, the reading of which was akin to walking through long unkempt grass, which velcros itself onto one's clothes and restricts movement, long sentences with no space to breathe in. The last sentence - itself rather clumsy - spoke to me out loud and said a useful and practical thing, as if Goethe was in the room saying it, a word of advice about the act of correspondence:
"...In many cases it is necessary and a more friendly act to write about nothing than not to write at all..."
In the second chapter, a man described as an intermediary, a mediator, visits a mature couple - recently married, both for the second time - and he is irritated when they want his advice about a decision they must take. "Take whatever decision you wish," he says. "If things don't work out, then shall I be of use to you. But this decision must be yours."He cannot run their lives for them. It rings true psychologically, very satisfying. I am now involved - though more with the author than with the characters.
What big picture is he drawing? I have not read the preface nor any other writing about Goethe and his work: I shall enjoy them more when I've finished the book.
At the moment, this blog is all the writing I do. Not enough. No poems at all.
I did read one by Mary O'Reilly, entitled Passover. That was good.
Sunday, 5 July 2009
Written about two weeks ago
Finished off the Bulletin - the newsletter that I publish for a local community. The fifth issue, I think, fun after the interruption of holidays, though also a worry whether I would remember everything I had to do...I ended up with too many pages - didn't realise I was sending off 21 instead of 20, so of course there was a blank page at the end, not good, but not terrible either. Worse was having left off the issue number and date from the cover. There was also a lot of good stuff, things that I'd found along the way that might interest people and added in. The difficulty is to carry on working instead of flopping afterwards.
Two Zen books are my bed-time reading, one Eloquent Silence which I bought overseas (a wonderful hour spent at Foyle's, bliss) by Nyogen Senzaki, edited by Roko Sherry Chayat, which is his commentary on the Gateless Gate a collection of koans, one every night, which is probably all wrong, I should read the same one over and over and see what happens.
The koans are familiar, Senzaki Roshi's commentaries are new to me, different emphases, for instance on the importance of not hesitating in action. The other was lent by a friend and is called The Love of Impermanent Things by Mary Rose O'Reilly.
Two Zen books are my bed-time reading, one Eloquent Silence which I bought overseas (a wonderful hour spent at Foyle's, bliss) by Nyogen Senzaki, edited by Roko Sherry Chayat, which is his commentary on the Gateless Gate a collection of koans, one every night, which is probably all wrong, I should read the same one over and over and see what happens.
The koans are familiar, Senzaki Roshi's commentaries are new to me, different emphases, for instance on the importance of not hesitating in action. The other was lent by a friend and is called The Love of Impermanent Things by Mary Rose O'Reilly.
Thursday, 18 June 2009
Henning Mankell
First day back at my desk after a long long holiday - no writing, lots of reading.
The latest book was by Henning Mankell, who is Swedish and writes great thrillers and absolutely bad novels. (There is more to him than that, you can look it up on one of the many fan sites.)
His detective inspector is a classic, getting old on his own, with an ex-wife he loves and a daughter he does not see as often as he would like to. The stories take place in a little town in Sweden, which reminds me - maybe wrongly - of a windswept Dutch town by the sea where I spent a holiday when I was young. I enjoy the Swedishness he describes, it satisfies my curiosity about that country.
The novels on the other hand seem to be all ego - one suspects that the central character in Italian Shoes is Mankell himself, in character if not in actual fact, living by himself on a remote island - the second time Mankell has used that setting. Mankell intrudes into his novels, both telling and showing. His female characters have no depth, they seem to differ only in name, despite diverse backgrounds and different ages. The interactions can be violent and unexpected - they don't always make psychological sense. In this book, the best-drawn character is the hypochondriac postman, I'd have liked to hear more about him.
Mankell overwhelms us with unnecessary detail - I suspect that he writes down everything that he sees and hears and that everything goes into his books, maybe because it is real. Real does not always make good reading.
If you read Mankell, stick to his Inspector Wallander stories, they are truly good. One of them was recently selected by a well-known US newspaper as a best-seller. And a film is being produced too.
Gotta go.
The latest book was by Henning Mankell, who is Swedish and writes great thrillers and absolutely bad novels. (There is more to him than that, you can look it up on one of the many fan sites.)
His detective inspector is a classic, getting old on his own, with an ex-wife he loves and a daughter he does not see as often as he would like to. The stories take place in a little town in Sweden, which reminds me - maybe wrongly - of a windswept Dutch town by the sea where I spent a holiday when I was young. I enjoy the Swedishness he describes, it satisfies my curiosity about that country.
The novels on the other hand seem to be all ego - one suspects that the central character in Italian Shoes is Mankell himself, in character if not in actual fact, living by himself on a remote island - the second time Mankell has used that setting. Mankell intrudes into his novels, both telling and showing. His female characters have no depth, they seem to differ only in name, despite diverse backgrounds and different ages. The interactions can be violent and unexpected - they don't always make psychological sense. In this book, the best-drawn character is the hypochondriac postman, I'd have liked to hear more about him.
Mankell overwhelms us with unnecessary detail - I suspect that he writes down everything that he sees and hears and that everything goes into his books, maybe because it is real. Real does not always make good reading.
If you read Mankell, stick to his Inspector Wallander stories, they are truly good. One of them was recently selected by a well-known US newspaper as a best-seller. And a film is being produced too.
Gotta go.
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