Literary associations

Samuel Butler

Samuel Butler
Was a New Zealand suttler.
Nonetheless, his utopian novel was a hit in
Britain.

Three True Things

Mark tagged me for this meme: three true things you’ve read recently, from fiction. I’m taking a generous value of recently because otherwise it would all be Shakespeare.

Prince. I never did see such pitiful rascals.
Falstaff. Tut, tut; good enough to toss; food for powder, food for powder; they’ll fill a pit as well as better: tush, man, mortal men, mortal men.

William Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV 4.2.65-68

In youth, one day, in the Russian countryside, latitude of Labrador, a racket was given to me to play with the family of the Orientalist Gotovtsev, perhaps you have heard. It was, I recollect, a splendid summer day and we played, played, played until all the twelve balls were lost. You also will recollect the past with interest when old.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

Some ain’t need to be stoned in order to have strange cares.

Chris Onstad, Achewood

Passing it on to Rachel, Britta and Tom.

Reincarnations

J G Ballard

I can’t be bothered getting indignant at all the bourgie-wourgie tributes to Ballard because this kind of assimilation to the cosy is what the English always do with their writers if they survive to old age, no?

As Max Beerbohm hypothesised about another literary radical: “Byron!–he would be all forgotten to-day if he had lived to be a florid old gentleman with iron-grey whiskers, writing very long, very able letters to The Times about the Repeal of the Corn Laws.”

The class-ridden posturing and genre turf wars which are starting to spring up in the wake of Ballard’s death are not very interesting, but it is worth having a laugh when Martin Amis tells us  that Ballard “had no ear for dialogue”. (The war against cliché is going well, then, I see. My money was always on cliché.)

“Cardboard characters” is another one doing the rounds. One of the things I love most about Ballard’s writing is that he deliberately abandons the pretence that one set of puppets made of lifelike painted plaster, ears for dialogue, middle-class adultery and career politics are better or more well-rounded than those which he constructed from a sort of papier-mâché of scientific journal articles, celebrity magazines, pornography and surrealist art.

Currently reading through the two-volume Collected Short Stories, which I bought on Sunday; almost all of which I read as a teenager, but which I don’t own and haven’t revisited since. The early stories are mostly better than I remembered.

Showbag

This year I decided to avoid showbag envy so I took Grace’s Kit Kat bag off her hands after she changed her mind, only to find when I got home that more than half of the items were past their use-by dates. I suppose that’s one of the reasons showbags exist.  I feel a bit like someone who only just noticed that the apples used to make toffee apples are the low quality apples.

There were some attempts at adult showbags but they were all either dull or comically sad, like the FHM bag containing back issues of the magazine, beef jerky and an Easy Mac pasta meal. All of these were sponsored by magazines, which made me wonder if The Monthly should produce one.

3 x back issues of The Monthly
1 x back issue of Quarterly Essay
1 x Australia’s Best Political Essays 2008
1 x hair shirt
1 x poseable Robert Manne action figure, with fence
1 x lucky dip item – secondhand volume of poetry by either Les Murray or Clive James

On second thoughts, perhaps not.

The Disaster Area

18 January, 1977

The sky above the swimming centre was alive with sounds he had previously heard only on television: sirens in chorus and the thumping flutter of helicopter blades. The swimming lessons were cancelled and they were sent home with their parents. According to the announcements, the bridge had fallen down. He thought, “What bridge?”

The seabirds

Years later, he would visit the Granville branch of the council library on his way home from school, a short walk from the rebuilt Bold Street bridge. He borrowed copies of Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition and read them while he waited for the bus home. The concrete paving of the bus terminal was dazzlingly white in the sun, making him dizzy when he looked up from the pages of the book. Seagulls perched on the halogen streetlamps, drawn this far from the coast by the Parramatta River to the scavening grounds of suburban rubbish dumps.

Dead white males

“Since the death of Einstein in 1955, there hasn’t been a single living genius. From Michelangelo, through to Shakespeare, Newton, Beethoven, Darwin, Freud and Einstein, there’s always been a living genius. Now, for the first time in 500 years, we are on our own.”

- J G Ballard, 1930-2009

White vinyl

After yatima observed that Voss and the Vivisector  would be a good name for a post-folk duo, I noticed that most of Patrick White’s titles would make great band names, although the hypothetical bands which these imply are not always so great. Riders in the Chariot – hard rockers with a hotted-up purple Valiant as their “character car” (a la ZZ Top’s Eliminator) – are obviously fantastic, but The Solid Mandala’s brand of mystical psychedelic trance was already dated back in 1993, and the less said about Alan Parsons Project wannabees The Eye of the Storm, the better.

The louchely androgynous art rock of The Twyborn Affair still attracts the discerning listener, as do A Fringe Of Leaves’ combinations of reggae, New Guinea sing-sings and suburban field recordings, even if they are slightly earnest.

And while we’re on the subject, I’ve been offered Voss Mineral Water at two different Australian restaurants lately.

James Branch Cabell

I’m revisiting this writer – a poorly-remembered American fantasist – because I just read through all of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and it’s crawling with Cabellian allusions and intertexts, especially in the early issues. I wasn’t too surprised to find, when I looked up Jurgen on Amazon, that the latest paperback edition has a foreword by Gaiman.

I was obsessed with Cabell when I was a teenager, but all my copies of his novels were lost in the Great F&SF Purge of 199-, when almost everything on my shelves with a lurid cover got packed up and donated to the Metropolitan Community Church secondhand store on Broadway. The covers of the early-80s Allen and Unwin paperbacks were exactly the wrong sort of lurid for Cabell: panel-van swordsmen, a far cry from the drolleries of Frank Papé’s original illustrations.

What I’m most struck by in reading Jurgen again is the ways in which Cabell is a sort of mirror image of his contemporary, H P Lovecraft. The two writers are so different in style that any glib comparison is ridiculous, but they both were possessed by a vision of the wider universe as incomprehensible and hostile to humanity. The way Cabell’s characters usually deal with this unpleasantness is a kind of sniggering bawdiness, followed by heavy drinking and a resigned middle age. A much more congenial and realistic fate than the psychosis which lies waiting for Lovecraft’s heroes.

People take Lovecraft far too seriously nowadays; a 21st century in which an equal amount of critical attention were to be paid to Cabell is an interesting fantasy in itself.

An ABC of followup authors

Some authors are great to follow up. Chasing references in

W H Auden,
Jorge Luis Borges and
Italo Calvino

has either led me to read or encouraged me to revisit Chesterton, Stevenson, Dante, Cioran, William James, Henry James, Goethe, Shakespeare, Ernest Bramah, Manzoni, and Kafka, and probably more that I can’t think of off the top of my head. I don’t need to go further into the alphabet or I’ll run out of days in the week.