Zytglogge, Bern, 25 December 2010
— postgutenberg@gmail.com
H A P P Y C H R I S T M A S
for 25. 12. 2015
Posts by Cheryll Barron
Dispatch from a time-starved blogger: the bulge is p-G … and p-G is the bulge
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We were surprised to learn that the longest gap between entries in this blog has alarmed some regular readers. (… Sorry, truly …) Someone dear and close — though physically remote — wrote in a state of high alarm seeking reassurance that all was well with us, having forgotten the alert we posted a few weeks ago about the likelihood of other, more pressing demands making it impossible to keep to our old, loose timetable, publishing roughly once a week or every ten days.
There must be a blog visitor or two who thinks that the shock on which we pegged our last entry had turned our typing fingers into useless icicles exactly like the glassy fangs hanging over our front porch all last week. Oh, … and we did have every intention of returning promptly to expand on our exclamation, there, about A. O. Scott’s conception of Steve Jobs as no mere uber-entrepreneur-aesthete but creator of The All — The All-and-All, even. Yet no sooner had we posted in haste than we repented, realising that anything we said would only be repeating reasoning and revelations in earlier entries (on 25 October 2011 and 1 November 2011 ).
The New York Times, by the way, has just redeemed itself — or made up for its temporarily addled film critic’s hyperbole with a calm, well-judged analysis of the fate of the latest Jobs biopic in a Nick Bilton column. Its disclosures about Silicon Valley machinations related to the portrayal of a local hero are worth a close read. (‘”Steve Jobs” Flops at the Box Office and Silicon Valley Cheers‘)
… Has our post-Gutenberg (p-G to friends) hiatus ended? No. We see no change in the pattern of chronic upheavals — moving house, for instance, across hundreds of miles, over several weeks (nearly losing our marbles, every last one, along the way).
Naturally, other scribblers’ reactions to changes in environment and circumstances have been of keen interest, lately. Think back to our post starring Beatrice and Sidney Webb and the Maharaja of Chhatarpur. Presences, absences and surroundings have subtle effects on the most salient requirement, which Beatrice pinpointed in a lament about her inability to keep up her diary during a three-week sojourn in Scotland in which she and Sidney — her impossibly perfect campaigning and writing collaborator — were never apart:
When Sidney is with me I cannot talk to the other self with whom I commune when I am alone — ‘it’ ceases to be present and only reappears when he becomes absent.
She was of course referring to idiosyncratic writing from and of herself, and not the kinds that can be done in partnership — journalism, and (in her day) pamphleteering, or any other fact- and argument-driven nonfiction.
The financially uncompensated keyboard tapping that keeps p-G alive has become more difficult to justify with projects closer to conversations with ‘it’ starved for attention in the recent, seemingly neverending, chaos.
We can only promise to return unpredictably, when we can — though the pressure from inspiration about p-G-related topics fighting to get out and march in lines of text can be intense enough to make us feel for head bulges.
… That word, bulge. … From time to time it reminds us of the ecstasy of watching our elders-and-betters in a long-ago senior school production of Oscar Wilde’s most scintillating, deliciously subversive and wise play, beneath a witty-glittery surface — old even then, but treated undeservingly, now, as a dated Victorian comedy of manners, a relic. Who could ever forget The Importance of Being Earnest? … There is no point in summarising a plot that can be googled in instants, so we offer only a prod or two for the memory of anyone else who knows and loves it. … That brilliantly named governess, Miss Prism, who actually lost one of the characters, Jack, in a handbag at London’s Victoria Station — when he was an orphaned baby. … We cannot remember whether the drama includes the babyhood of someone else, a someone called Algy (Algernon) Moncrieff — any allusions to the time when he had yet to emerge, and wonder whether it was Oscar’s classic that inspired this poem-let as lovely as a tree by an unknown poet:
Algy met a bear,
The bear was bulgy,
The bulge was Algy.
Bliss.
A re-reading is overdue. We have downloaded the play from Project Gutenberg for our next nano-break … and hope to return sooner than later to let Algy …. oops! we mean, p-G, out to play.
The what??? of the year 2015 (hint: Steve Jobs has something to do with it)
The New York Times film critic A. O. Scott concluded an otherwise intelligent review of the new film about the life of the supreme computer designer and marketing genius with this incomprehensible pronouncement:
Whether or not we worship Steve Jobs, the world most of us live in is the one he made.
Really?
We can’t stop now, but will return to explain — for anyone who needs an explanation — as soon as we can … in a day or three.
Jonathan Franzen and the novel writing tradition that still has made-in-America stamped all over it
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Who says that the internet has homogenised taste — turned, say, novel-writing into cooking from essentially the same imaginatively and stylistically flaccid hamburger recipe on every continent where people write in English?
Somehow, the transatlantic gap in literary endeavour is as wide as ever. We have never seen American novelists’ tails tweaked as impishly — but accurately — as in a Private Eye review in September of a new book by Jonathen Franzen. Most entertaining about this delectable evisceration is that in several places, stylistic tics suggest that the critic could very well be American. The reviewer could also be Canadian: if not, we are ready to toss her — or him — a truckload of bouquets, since who is more lovable than the arbiter capable of (tribal) self-mockery?
‘Super-sighs me’
Oh dear me, Tallulah, the beetle-browed sedulousness with which these big, serious, American novelists set about writing their big, serious, American books. Even to pick up a copy of Purity, with its gleaming cover, the sobersided portrait of its proud yet faintly dishevelled author on the inside back jacket, the promise of its 562 infinitely worked-over pages notwithstanding, is to be instantly transported to what Ronald Firbank would call ‘the heart of a brainy district’, where everything is big and fat and fine and dialogue, description and moral engagement are as bloated as the Greek national debt.
Like many a mock-masterpiece from the further side of the pond, Mr Franzen’s new one comes pregnant with literary allusion and heavy-duty metaphorical freight.
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… Purity’s essential drawback […is…] that it rambles all over the place, over-eggs every pudding served up on the reader’s plate and drags out its conversations to such a length that they plummet into inconsequentiality, while leaving vital questions as the matter of the lost warhead, [and] what Project Sunlight is actually up to …in such long-term abeyance the reader almost begins to forget they are there.
And of course this is a big, serious American novel, decked out with rather painful stylistic flourishes (‘her short-term memory aching like an unmilked cow’, etc.) doffing its cap to the titans of a bygone era (Steinbeck and Dreiser are mentioned, among others) and harbouring a thematic palate that simply glows with the issues of the day. Feminism, internet activism, the state of the planet and data access are all much in evidence, each picked up with a pair of tweezers and advertised with such obviousness the reader yearns for an agenda that wasn’t quite so blatant, so clearly devised in advance of the people acting it out.
To be fair to Mr F, the second half does contain a handful of excruciatingly funny moments, most of them to do with the current state of the American literary marketplace. There is, for example, an hilarious account of ‘Charles Blenheim’ …obsessed with the idea of ‘the big book, the novel that would secure him his place in the modern American canon’.
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As to whom our man is sending up here, well the answer would seem to be himself. … The very best modern US practitioners, you sometimes feel, are writers like Annie Proulx or Mary Gaitskill, cool-eyed miniaturists who concentrate on smaller canvases and don’t see the point of trying to conceptualise worlds they have trouble understanding without a great deal of research …
post-Gutenberg 