ReadySteadyBook - a literary site

k-punk on Virilio

Via ads without products, k-punk on Paul Virilio

The bringing to bear of what, following Veblen, we might call conspicuous force presupposes a second stupidity: the verminization of the Enemy. Before Gulf War 1 had even happened, Virilio saw the logic of verminization rehearsed in James Cameron's Aliens wherein the 'machinic actors do battle in a Manichean combat in which the enemy is no longer an adversary, a fellow creature one must respect in spite of everything; rather, it is an unnameable being that it is more appropriate to exerminate than to examine or analyse.' In Aliens, Virilio ominously notes, attacks on the 'family [form] the basis of ... necolonial intervention.' The teeming, Lovecraftian abominations which can breed much faster than we can are to be dealt with by machines whose 'awesome appearance is part of [their] military effectiveness.' Shock and awe.

more …

French Book News

Useful site, this, for the francophile: French Book News. The list of recent translations is handy, as is the list of recent France-related books in English.

Of William C. Carter's Proust in Love (warmly reviewed in the Guardian last week by Ian Sansom alongside The Memoirs of Ernest A Forssgren, Proust's Swedish Valet) French Book News say:

The acclaimed Proust biographer William C. Carter portrays Proust´s amorous adventures and misadventures from adolescence through his adult years, supplying where appropriate Proust´s own sensitive, intelligent, and often disillusioned observations about love and sexuality. Proust is revealed as a man agonizingly caught between the constant fear of public exposure as a homosexual and the need to find and express love. In telling the story of Proust in love, Carter also shows how the author´s experiences became major themes in his novel In Search of Lost Time. Carter discusses Proust´s adolescent sexual experiences, his disastrous brothel visit to cure homosexual inclinations, and his first great loves. He also addresses the duel Proust fought after the journalist Jean Lorrain alluded to his homosexuality in print, his flirtations with respectable women and high-class prostitutes, and his affairs with young men of the servant class. With new revelations about Proust´s love life and a gallery of photographs, the book provides an unprecedented glimpse of Proust´s gay Paris.

more …

Fight!

A recent spat on This-Space, concerning Steve's judgement of Ian Holding's Dylan Thomas Prize longlisted novel Unfeeling, has again highlighted how differently different readers read from one another. Steve was accused by one of those commenting on his post of being "out of touch with general critic's views" (something Steve rightly saw as an accolade!) "Prof. J. Williams, Kent" asked, "Don't you know that the book was widely hailed and got rave reviews when published?" And "Jane, Surrey" wrote, "The novel DID get rave reviews and HAS been highly praised for its literary qualities."

So, bang to rights, Steve is caught out: praised by other book reviewers, shortlisted for a prize, Holding's novel must be "BRILLIANT!" (Prof. J. Williams's word).

When reviewing books -- and I mean reviewing in the widest sense, for instance proselytizing about what you've just read to a bunch of mates in the pub -- the temptation (and one I'm certainly not immune to) is always to hyperbole. A book is often hailed as either "shit" or "great". This is why we turn to the best critics: for argument; for nuance. Sadly, we rarely get it. The most cliche-ridden novels, with the tritest of plots, are regularly hailed as "classics". Each week a "must read" book gets over-praised and the genre of literary fiction continues to spew forth mediocrity. In truth, a "must read" novel comes along very, very rarely. And whilst we wait for the next, we get work that exists along an arc of the undistinguished and prosaic.

What confuses the matter further is that the separation between fine writing and art (what I'd like to dignify as Literature), which seems to me to be Steve's central concern, is lost on many readers. Steve seems to have been condemned by his commenters (who really could have saved their energy by reading the very careful arguments about writing that This-Space has articulated over very many months) for not swooning, as they do, over a polished paragraph or a nicely-turned phrase.

Paradoxical though it may seem, fine writing is not synonymous with Literature. Indeed, it might be better to think that what is synonymous with Literature is paradox itself.

more …

August 4

Tom Jones, Henry Fielding & Samuel Richardson

On this day in 1749 Samuel Richardson fired another volley in his feud with Henry Fielding, in this instance the opinion that Fielding's popular hit, The History of Tom Jones, could only have been written by one "too prescribing, too impetuous, too immoral, I will venture to say, to take any other Byass than that a perverse and crooked Nature has given him; or Evil Habits, at least, have confirm'd in him."

Click here for full story

debouch

1. To march out from a narrow or confined place into an open area. 2. To emerge or issue from a narrow area into the open. more …

-- Powered by Wordsmith.org