Quotes - Speeches to worms

Jonathan Wateridge

Jonathan Wateridge interviewed for FAD:

I started the paintings in February of this year but prior to that there’s the whole process of conceiving the project and then set building; casting actors; doing the shoot etc. Once that’s all completed, I then edit through reference material before making a number of studies. So all in all, from conception, I guess the project has taken around 18 months so far. … My process for each project has been pretty similar for a number of years now. After a period of research and reflection on what it is that I’m trying to address with the work, I choose the location in which to set the paintings. That site is then constructed as a large scale set inside my studio. Actors are cast, costumes sourced and a film shoot is organised so that I can stage the performers or improvise with them in order to build up a body of reference imagery, from which the paintings are then developed. … I’ve never been particularly interested in addressing my own biography but I found myself thinking more and more about this connection.

The other factor was the growing tragedy of the migrant crisis over the last couple of years, and more specifically the sense of collective amnesia in the UK as to how these issues had reached this point. I realised that depicting elements of my own past could become a way of tangentially dealing with a wider set of issues concerning the west’s relationship to the post-colonial world. … Memory isn’t necessarily false but it’s certainly constructed. The idea of ‘constructedness’, of things being fabricated or somehow false, is a crucial part of my process.’

(2018-02-09)

Keats longed to find beauty in what was often an ugly and terrible world. He was an admirer of Shakespeare, and his reading of the Bard is insightful and intriguing, illustrating the genius of Shakespeare’s creativity. In a letter to his brothers, Keats describes this genius as ‘Negative Capability’:

‘At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’

– Keats’ Kingdom

(2018-06-16)

Quotes attributed to Morris Zapp in Laurent Binet’s The 7th Function of Language:

The root of critical error is a naive confusion of literature with life.

Hamlet is not about a man who wants to kill his uncle, it’s about something else.

Understanding a message involves decoding it because language is a code. And ‘all decoding is a new encoding’.

(2018-07-27)

‘Of course, I don’t believe this, but I like to tell these stories. I liked it when they were told to me, and it would be a shame if they were lost. In any case, I won’t guarantee that I myself didn’t add something, and perhaps all who tell them add something: and that’s how stories are born.’

– Tischler, in Primo Levi’s Moments of Reprieve

(2018-07-27)

On the one hand, these photographs sear us with the promise of their accuracy — as Barthes says, photographs are astonishing because they ‘attest that what I see has existed’: ‘In photography, the presence of the thing (at a certain past moment) is never metaphoric.’

– James Woods, in his introduction to W.G Sebald’s Austerlitz

I recently was handed a collection of photographs taken by my father — dead now for over fifty years. I looked at it, somewhat confused. I suppose saddened by the passage of time. Even though I am in the photographs, the people in them are mysterious, inherently foreign. […]

Who are these people? Do they have anything to do with me? Do I really know them? […]

In discussing truth and photography, we are asking whether a caption or a belief — whether a statement about a photograph — is true or false about (the things depicted in) the photograph. A caption is like a statement. It trumpets the claim, “This is the Lusitania.” And when we wonder “Is this a photograph of the Lusitania?” we are wondering whether the claim is true or false. The issue of the truth or falsity of a photograph is only meaningful with respect to statements about the photograph. Truth or falsity “adheres” not to the photograph itself but to the statements we make about a photograph. Depending on the statements, our answers change. All alone — shorn of context, without captions — a photograph is neither true nor false. […]

For truth, properly considered, is about the relationship between language and the world, not about photographs and the world.

– Errol Morris, Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

Now … that story about Richard Hammond is not true. But I feel that what it tells us about Richard Hammond is true.

– Stewart Lee, If You Prefer A Milder Comedian Please Ask For One

Her consciousness, at this point — she was forty-three years old — was so crammed full not just of her own memories, obligations, dreams, knowledge and the plethora of her day-to-day responsibilities, but also of other people’s — gleaned over years of listening, talking, empathising, worrying — that she was frightened most of all of the boundaries separating these numerous types of mental freight, the distinction between them, crumbling away until she was no longer certain what had happened to her and what to other people she knew, or sometimes even what was or was not real.

– Rachel Cusk, Outline

(2018-08-01)

In Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” the rooster Chaunticleer dreams of a threatening fox invading the barnyard, whose “color was betwixe yelow and reed.” The fox was orange, but in the 1390s Chaucer didn’t have a word for it. He had to mix it verbally. He wasn’t the first to do so. In Old English, the form of the language spoken between the 5th and 12th centuries, well before Chaucer’s Middle English, there was a word geoluhread (yellow-red). Orange could be seen, but the compound was the only word there was for it in English for almost 1,000 years. […]

But none of this actually gets us to color. Only the fruit does that. Only when the sweet oranges began to arrive in Europe and became visible on market stalls and kitchen tables did the name of the fruit provide the name for the color. No more “yellow-red.” Now there was orange. And, remarkably, within a few hundred years it was possible to forget in which direction the naming went. People could imagine that the fruit was called an orange simply because it was.

– David Scott Kastan with Stephen Farthing, On Color

This is one of the distinguishing marks of history as an academic discipline — the better you know a particular historical period, the harder it becomes to explain why things happened one way and not another. Those who have only a superficial knowledge of a certain period tend to focus only on the possibility that was eventually realised. They offer a just-so story to explain with hindsight why that outcome was inevitable. Those more deeply informed about the period are much more cognisant of the roads not taken.

– Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens

(2019-01-17)

On a sort of landscaped proscenium, immediately below the wooden rail amidst tree-stumps and undergrowth in the blood-stained sand, lie lifesize horses and cutdown infantrymen, hussars and chevaux-légers, eyes rolling in pain or already extinguished. Their faces are moulded from wax but the boots, the leather belts, the weapons, the cuirasses, and the splendidly coloured uniforms, probably stuffed with eelgrass, rags and the like, are to all appearances authentic. Across this horrific three-dimensional scene, on which the cold dust of time has settled, one’s gaze is drawn to the horizon, to the enormous mural, one hundred and ten yards by twelve, painted in 1912 by the French marine artist Louis Dumontin on the inner wall of the circus-like structure. This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.

– W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

(2019-01-17)

There’s an old saying, he said, about how the foreign journalist who travels to the Middle East and stays a week goes home to write a book in which he presents a pat solution to all of its problems. If he stays a month, he writes a magazine or a newspaper article filled with ‘ifs’, ‘buts’, and ‘on the other hands.’ If he stays a year, he writes nothing at all.

— Lisa Halliday, Asymmetry

(2019-11-25)

I can only encourage you to steal as much as you can. No one will ever notice. You should keep a notebook of tidbits, but don’t write down the attributions, and then after a couple of years you can come back to the notebook and treat the stuff as your own without guilt. … It’s very good that you write through another text, a foil, so that you write out of it and make your work a palimpsest. You don’t have to declare it or tell where it’s from.

(2019-02-07)

Christine admits that when The Emigrants came out she was annoyed by the way Sebald had stolen, without attribution, a version of the family’s history — his words often misrepresenting the people concerned — and particularly by the portrayal of her mother-in-law (Sebald’s Elli) who, throughout our conversation, she touchingly refers to as Granny. At the time of the book’s publication Christine’s niece was especially upset, and that made Christine herself take against Sebald. The passage of years, however, has softened that sentiment, and she no longer has strong feelings about the subject.

— Edward Parnell, Ghostland

(2021-03-12)

More and more, it had felt to me that in the things I wrote, the degree of artifice was greater than the degree of truth, that the cost of administering a form to what was essentially formless was akin to the cost of breaking the spirit of an animal that is otherwise too dangerous to live with.

– Nicole Krauss, Forest Dark

(2019-04-03)

In 2008, I came across a small graffiti in my neighbourhood in Cardiff, and it spelt Go home Polish. I dwelt on it for a while, unsure whether I really should be going anywhere or whether I already was home.

– Michal Iwanowski, introducing his Go home, Polish project.

(2019-05-20)

Far from home, at a video rental shop, rummaging around the shelves, I swear in Polish. And suddenly an average-sized woman who looks to be about fifty years old stops beside me and awkwardly says in my language: ‘Is that Polish? Do you speak Polish? Hello.’

Here, alas, her stock of Polish sentences is at an end. And now she tells me in English that she came here when she was seventeen, with her parents; here she shows off with the Polish word for ‘mummy’. Much to my dismay she then begins to cry, indicating her arm, her forearm, and talks about blood, that this is where her whole soul is, her blood is Polish. This hapless gesture reminds me of an addict’s gesture, her index finger showing veins, the place to stick a needle in. She says she married a Hungarian and forgot her Polish. She squeezes my shoulder and leaves, disappearing between shelves labelled ‘Drama’ and ‘Action’.

It’s hard for me to believe that you could forget the language thanks to which the maps of the world were drawn. She must have simply mislaid it somewhere. Maybe it lies wadded up and dusty in a drawer of bras and knickers, squeezed into a corner like sexy thongs acquired once in a fit of enthusiasm that there was never really an occasion to wear.

— Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

This is the thing about poetry. You don’t have to understand it. And this is, I think, what a lot of teachers get wrong. They think that poetry is a fancy way of saying something that’s really quite ordinary, and once you’ve translated it into simple English you’ve done the poem. But of course you haven’t, you’ve killed it, you’ve tortured it to death. Poetry communicates before it’s understood — I think TS Eliot said that.

— Philip Pullman, speaking on the podcast How I found my voice

(2019-05-20)

Cockle. The word rolled about in my head: round, hinged, opening and closing like the creature it described.

— George Monbiot, Feral

(2019-05-23)

Sometimes when there would be some interruption in their travel […] she would have to entertain her clients somehow. That was when she started telling stories. They expected her to. She took some from Borges and embellished them a little, dramatised them. Others came from the Thousand and One Nights, although even then she always added a little something of her own. […] They must not have listened to her too attentively because on the occasions when she would mix up some historical fact, no one ever pointed it out to her, until in the end she simply stopped bothering about the facts.

— Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

(2019-07-04)

They say, how does he dream, how does he think
When he can’t even speak, and he can’t even blink?
We’re all lost in the wilderness, we’re blind as can be
He came down to teach us how to really see

— Tom Waits, Eyeball Kid

It’s hard to believe that parts of one’s own body are discovered as though one were forging one’s way upriver in search of sources. In the same way one follows with a scalpel along some blood vessel and establishes its start. White patches get covered with the network of a drawing.

One discovers, and names. Conquers and civilises. A piece of white cartilage will from now on be subject to our laws, we’ll do with it what we will now.

— Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

(2019-07-23)

It’s not so much being seduced by a story. It’s the thrill of seeing in itself. […] No narrative continuity whatsoever, just the novelty of seeing these images moving. […] There’s an ontological impact, a reality to these images, that I still find tremendously moving.

— Dave Kehr, speaking in a Museum of Modern Art film about the early films of the Biograph Company

(2019-07-30)

I’ve touched a kidney and a liver that had been prepared in this way — they were like toys made out of tough rubber, the kinds of balls you throw for a dog to play fetch with. And the line between what is fake and what is real suddenly became very fine. I also had the rather unnerving suspicion that this technique could permanently transform original into copy.

[…]

So I also get out my notebook and start to write about this man writing down. Chances are he’s now writing: ‘Woman writing something down. She’s taken off her shoes and placed her backpack at her feet…’

Don’t be shy, I think to the rest, all waiting for our gate to open — take your notebooks out too, and write. For in fact there are lots of us who write things down. We don’t let on we’re looking at each other; we don’t take our eyes off our shoes. We will simply write each other down, which is the safest form of communication and of transit; we will reciprocally transform each other into letters and initials, immortalize each other, plastinate each other, submerge each other in formaldehyde phrases and pages.

When we get home we’ll put our written-in notebooks with all the rest — there’s a box for them behind the wardrobe, or the bottom desk drawer, or the shelf on the nightstand. Here we have chronicled our other journeys already, our preparations, our happy returns. […]

Who will read it?

— Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

(2019-09-17)

Hence the need for preservation. For by the time I reached my mid-twenties — though I never clearly articulated this at the time — I was coming to realise certain key things. I was starting to accept that ‘my’ Japan perhaps didn’t much correspond to any place I could go to on a plane; that the way of life of which my parents talked, that I remembered from my early childhood, had largely vanished during the 1960s and 1970s; that in any case, the Japan that existed in my head might always have been an emotional construct put together by a child out of memory, imagination and speculation. And perhaps most significantly, I’d come to realise that with each year I grew older, this Japan of mine — this precious place I’d grown up with — was getting fainter and fainter.

– Kazuo Ishiguro, from his Nobel lecture

I asked Maddie whether it wasn’t possible that she did not, in fact, recall the actual moment in which she asked these questions, but rather whether her mother had told her the story so many times that it had retroactively acquired the status of a memory in her mind. Eventually, Maddie would concede that maybe the memory had, in fact, been born in her mother’s telling. But she also said that she did not see what difference this made, if either way it was part of her story and she was not going out of her way to delude herself.

— Lisa Halliday, Asymmetry

(2019-11-18)

This is how I felt. But in the mirror on the other side of Sami’s new piano I didn’t look like a man teeming with so much potential. On the contrary, in my eleven-year-old jeans, a week’s worth of stubble, and a fraying windbreaker from the Gap, I looked rather more like the embodiment of a line I would later read—something about the metaphysical claustrophobia and bleak fate of being always one person. A problem, I suppose, that it is entirely up to our imaginations to solve. But then even someone who imagines for a living is forever bound by the ultimate constraint: she can hold her mirror up to whatever subject she chooses, at whatever angle she likes—she can even hold it such that she herself remains outside its frame, the better to de-narcissize the view—but there’s no getting around the fact that she’s always the one holding the mirror. And just because you can’t see yourself in a reflection doesn’t mean no one can.

— Lisa Halliday, Asymmetry

(2019-12-03)

How we feel about novels making claims to be true, over and above what we mean by imaginatively true, will tell us how we feel about novels altogether. It isn’t new for writers or their publishers to make such declarations. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was sold on the assurance that his “Life and strange surprizing adventures” were “written by himself” and therefore authentic. Moll Flanders the same. And that was 300 years ago. But the novel has evolved considerably since then and it hasn’t been thought necessary to assure us that Thomas Hardy based Jude the Obscure on a real Dorsetshire loser who wasn’t able to kill a pig. That we are returning to fact to justify fiction is the sure sign that the novel no longer commands the respect it did. Only when a story avowedly tells of something that really happened, it seems, are we willing to grace it with our credulity and tears.

— Howard Jacobson, writing about ‘Holocaust kitsch’ in The Guardian

(2020-01-24)

The logical consequences of the new viewpoint necessitated a reinterpretation of the higher-order human experiences that we call “freedom” and “will.” [Max] Meyer echoed [Max] Planck in positing that “freedom of action in the animal world signifies the same that is meant by accidents in the world of physics.” Such accidents are simply phenomena for which there are insufficient information and understanding. And so it goes with freedom. The liberal idea of freedom persists in an inverse relationship to the growth of scientific knowledge, especially in the field of psychological science. Knowledge and freedom are necessarily adversaries. As Meyer wrote, “The Other-One’s conduct is free, uncaused, only in the same sense in which the issue of a disease, the outcome of a war, the weather, the crops are free and uncaused; that is, in the sense of general human ignorance of the particular causes of the particular outcome.”

Decades later, this worldview would define the core of the controversial social philosophy espoused in Beyond Freedom & Dignity, in which [B. F.] Skinner argues that knowledge does not make us free but rather releases us from the illusion of freedom. In reality, he writes, freedom and ignorance are synonyms. The acquisition of knowledge is heroic in that it rescues us from ignorance, but it is also tragic because it necessarily reveals the impossibility of freedom.

— Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

(2020-02-13)

… I still read everything as novels, including history, memoir, and the newspaper. I think Borges is quite correct, all prose is fiction.

— Ursula Le Guin, Words Are My Matter

(2020-02-25)

We are so schooled, he said, in the doctrine of self-acceptance that the idea of refusing to accept yourself becomes quite radical.

— Rachel Cusk, Transit

(2020-03-06)

All writers, Julian went on, are attention seekers: why else would we be sitting up here on this stage? The fact is, he said, no one took enough notice of us when we were small and now we’re making them pay for it. Any writer who denied the childish element of revenge in what they did was, as far as he was concerned, a liar. Writing was just a way of taking justice into your own hands. If you wanted the proof, all you had to do was look at the people who had to fear from your honesty.

’When I told my mother I’d written a book,’ he said, ’the first thing she said was, “You always were a difficult child.”’

— Rachel Cusk, Transit

(2020-03-10)

Readers of Burmese Days will know how strongly Orwell reacted against imperialism in action. He was never sentimental or starry-eyed about the Burmese; that would have been totally out of character. But he could not accept that what he saw as Burmese racial weaknesses justified Burma’s relentless exploitation by Britain.

— Dervla Murphy, in an introduction to Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London

(2020-05-04)

A still from Béla Tarr’s film ‘The Turin Horse’

The thing about Turin, she said after a pause, is that it’s where … I know, I said: it’s where the shroud is from. No, Madison told me; I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking of that other guy, who went mad. What other guy? I asked. The famous philosopher, she answered. Kierkegaard or Schopenhauer or someone; the one who said that God was dead. Oh, I told her: you mean Nietzsche. Maybe, she said. I’m pretty sure it was Nietzsche, I said. Whoever, she replied; it doesn’t matter: the point is I found this out later — he saw a horse being beaten in a square in Turin, and he lost it. Can you imagine? After all the questions that he must have grappled with, the complex, universal stuff he’d thought and written about, it was a horse that did his mind in: a dumb horse. Its owner, driver, operator or whatever, she continued, was whipping it; and Kierkegaard or Nietzsche or whoever saw this act of cruelty and it wacked him out, sent him insane. He never wrote another book.

— Tom McCarthy, Satin Island

The concept of the film is simple: we wanted to follow the question of what happened to the horse after this incident. And although the film itself is not about Friedrich Nietzsche, the spirit of the incident lies over the film like a shadow.

— Béla Tarr speaking about his film, The Turin Horse

But nobody yet had been able to dig down to what was most captivating about her: this was the mysterious ability of her soul to apprehend in life only that which had once attracted and tormented her in childhood, the time when the soul’s instinct is infallible; to seek out the amusing and the touching; to feel constantly an intolerable, tender pity for the creature whose life is helpless and unhappy; to feel across hundreds of miles that somewhere in Sicily a thin-legged little donkey with a Shaggy belly is being brutally beaten.

— Vladimir Nabokov, The Defense

The scientists noticed that the flash of the bomb had discolored concrete to a light reddish tint, had scaled off the surface of granite, and had scorched certain other types of building material, and that consequently the bomb had, in some places, left prints of the shadows that had been cast by its light. […] (A few vague human silhouettes were found, and these gave rise to stories that eventually included fancy and precise details. One story told how a painter on a ladder was monumentalized in a kind of bas-relief on the stone facade of a bank building on which he was at work, in the act of dipping his brush into his paint can; another, how a man and his cart on the bridge near the Museum of Science and Industry, almost under the center of the explosion, were cast down in an embossed shadow which made it clear that the man was about to whip his horse.)

— John Hersey, Hiroshima

Yet, says Musil, it is still possible to keep one’s eyes open, while one lives and functions in the real world, if one maintains a certain attitude of reserve towards the real. One can live what Musil called in the subjunctive mood. One can live a hovering life, a life without ideological commitment. One can be a being without qualities. One can operate in the mode of irony… To enter this other condition, Musil believed, one must give up the model of scientific thinking and take up the model of poetic creation. That is to say, one must abandon logical thinking in favour of analogical thinking.

— J. M. Coetzee, quoted in London Review of Books, 4 June 2020

(2020-06-12)

I take photographs of food, she said, instead of eating it.

— Rachel Cusk, Transit

(2020-05-29)

From a review of Learning from the Germans: Confronting Race and the Memory of Evil by Susan Neiman:

Neiman seeks analogies between Germany’s experience and possible ways of recuperating the more or less unredeemed American past. What Nietzsche called ‘monumental’ history extracts from the past a particular great and worthy deed and uses it as a model: by showing that a thing was ‘at least possible once’ we see that it ‘may well again be possible sometime’. Neiman wants Germany’s way of coming to terms with its criminal past to be such an example. But Nietzsche also warned that monumental history caused ‘the individuality of the past [to] be wrenched into a general shape, with all its sharp corners and angles broken off for the sake of correspondence’. Neiman understands, of course, that ‘no two histories are ever entirely alike.’ The question is whether we can, without doing violence to the past or the present, usefully take lessons from the German experience. Do analogies between the two countries work? In one sense they do: it is possible to make historical redemption a national project. And the same moral principles ought to apply. But after we put back the sharp corners and angles, once we take the details seriously, it becomes harder to learn anything from this particular comparative history. The reason lies in the corners and angles. What Neiman regards as mere ‘details of difference’ are more significant than that.

— Thomas Laqueur, London Review of Books, 18 June 2020

(2020-06-21)

The translator was a woman of about my own age who lived in Warsaw. She had emailed me several times to ask questions about the text: I had watched her create her own version of what I had written. In the emails she had started to tell me about her life — she lived alone with her young son — and sometimes, talking about certain passages in the book, I would feel her creation begin to supersede mine, not in the sense that she violated what I had written but that it was now living through her, not me. In the process of translation the ownership of it — for good or ill — had passed from me to her.

— Rachel Cusk, Transit

(2020-07-10)

Malcolm Gladwell, talking to Jon Ronson:

You know, I sometimes fall in love with particular theories. And then you learn subsequently that it just wasn’t as neat and tidy as you thought. […] I would love to redo the chapter about crime in The Tipping Point just because I feel like we have learned so much more about crime now in the years since I’ve written that book. I think I was too in love with the broken windows notion. I was so enamoured by the metaphorical simplicity of that idea …

Broken windows is a criminological theory put into practice in New York in the 1990s under Mayor Rudy Giuliani. It holds that aggressive action by police on minor crimes results in a cultural change which in turn reduces serious crime. The drop in crime in New York in the 1990s was attributed to this practice, and Gladwell has been credited with popularising it’s success. Subsequent studies have concluded that there is no evidence connecting the reduced crime figures and broken windows policing. Critics say that a generation of New Yorkers suffered needlessly, that racial minorities were disproportionately affected, that tens of thousands of people now have criminal records for petty crime as a result. Broken windows has become a metaphor for broken lives.

(2020-09-15)

The Years begins and ends with a reminder of mortality, which is always the ultimate stimulus for every act of autobiography. The book opens with a prelude reminding us that ‘all the images will disappear’. After our death ‘we will be nothing but a first name [around a holiday dinner table], until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.’ And as the book closes, Ernaux thinks about how her own mother was plunged into the forgetfulness of Alzheimer’s before her death. She fears the same fate and urges herself to finish the book that we are reading. ‘Now’s the time to give form to her future absence through writing, start the book, still a draft of thousands of notes, which has lived in parallel to her existence for the past twenty years and is thus obliged to cover a longer and longer time.’ It will be a ‘slippery narrative’, meant ‘to save something from the time where we will never be again’.

— Review on the Vertigo blog for The Years by Annie Ernaux

(2020-09-24)

In a sympathetic reflection on Metternich’s political thought, Kissinger identified what he called ‘the conservative dilemma’. Conservatism is the fruit of instability, Kissinger wrote, because in a society that is still cohesive, ‘it would occur to no one to be a conservative.’ It thus falls to conservatives to defend, in times of change, what had once been taken for granted. And—here is the rub — ‘the act of defence introduces rigidity.’ The deeper the fissure becomes between the defenders of order and the partisans of change, the greater the ‘temptation to dogmatism’ until, at some point, no further communication is possible between the contenders, because they no longer speak the same language. ‘Stability and reform, liberty and authority, come to appear as antithetical, and political contests turn doctrinal instead of empirical.’

For all his undeniable gifts, Metternich is a textbook case of this rigidifying effect. His observation at the end of his life that he had always been a ‘rock of order’ captures his own sense of his immobility, not to mention isolation, in a world where everything was in motion.

— Christopher Clark, from his review of Metternich: Strategist and Visionary by Wolfram Siemann, LRB, 8 October 2020

(2020-10-04)

The pamphlet war lasted far longer than the deception itself: Toft’s story was exposed as a sham within seven weeks. We may wonder why it took even that long to unmask so implausible a tale, given how many surgeons and midwives were engaged in the most intrusive investigations of her body. One reason for the magnitude and intensity of the public response may be that 1726 was a bumper year for plausible duplicities, for stratagems that both invoked truth and cast doubt on every claim. The status of what purported to be fact was bound to seem up for grabs after the publication that year of Gulliver’s Travels, whose narrative ploy was so successfully deployed as to lead many readers to take it for a genuine account. St André took pains to emphasise ‘the Facts that I saw, and transacted myself’, but in the 1720s this was also the emerging language and idiom of what we now call the novel.

— Freya Johnston, reviewing The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and 18th-Century England by Karen Harvey. More about Toft and the rabbit hoax on Wikipedia.

(2020-10-16)

The desire to write a letter, to put down what you don’t want anybody else to see but the person you are writing to, but which yet you do not want to be destroyed, but perhaps hope may be preserved for complete strangers to read, is ineradicable. We want to confess ourselves in writing to a few friends, and we do not always want to feel that no one but those friends will ever read what we have written.

— TS Eliot, in a lecture on the letters of English poets

(2020-10-18)

I fell back asleep some time later on
And I dreamed the perfect song
It held all the answers like hands laid on
I woke halfway and scribbled it down
And in the morning, what I wrote, I read
It was hard to read at first, but here’s what it said:

Eid ma clack shaw zupoven del ba
Mertepy ven seinur cofally ragdah …

— Bill Callahan, Eid Ma Clack Shaw

(2020-12-2)

Yet even with hindsight no disquiet comes to me from these memories; they are reassuring, I can find shelter within them. Only later were we to become a phantom family — a host of lives lived, then unlived. The disquiet comes when I realise there’s no one left to help me reconcile the real and the half-remembered.

So, I must do it myself.

— Edward Parnell, Ghostland

(2021-01-01)

The atheist Le Guin saw the reluctance to accept death as the root of most evil. As her version of the Tao puts it, ‘To live till you die/is to live long enough.’

— Colin Burrow, LRB, 21 January 2021

(2021-01-16)

Memory is an interesting thing, anyway. The theory of memory that I think is probably most correct is that we reconstruct things every time we tell them. There is no ‘thing’ in our head that we remember. The same is true of stories.

— Percival Everett, speaking on the LARB Radio Hour podcast.

(2021-03-12)

I wonder if other people when they were children had this kind of image, at once vague and particular, of what they would be like when they grew up. I am not speaking of hopes and aspirations, vague ambitions, that kind of thing. From the outset I was very precise and definite in my expectations. I did not want to be an engine driver or a famous explorer. When I peered wishfully through the mists from the all too real then to the blissfully imagined now, this is, as I have said, exactly how I would have foreseen my future self, a man of leisurely interests and scant ambition sitting in a room just like this one, in my sea-captain’s chair, leaning at my little table, in just this season, the year declining towards its end in clement weather, the leaves scampering, the brightness imperceptibly fading from the days and the street lamps coming on only a fraction earlier each evening. Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long Indian summer, a state of tranquillity, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, towards the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.

— John Banville, The Sea

(2021-07-02)

Another of my earliest memories is of playing on the living room rug, pushing toy cars around, while my grandmother worked at her sewing machine; she would occasionally turn and smile warmly at me. There are no photos of that moment, so I know the recollection is mine and mine alone. It is a lovely, idyllic memory. Would I want to be presented with actual footage of that afternoon? No; absolutely not.

Regarding the role of truth in autobiography, the critic Roy Pascal wrote, “On the one side are the truths of fact, on the other the truth of the writer’s feeling, and where the two coincide cannot be decided by any outside authority in advance.” Our memories are private autobiographies, and that afternoon with my grandmother features prominently in mine because of the feelings associated with it. What if video footage revealed that my grandmother’s smile was in fact perfunctory, that she was actually frustrated because her sewing wasn’t going well? What’s important to me about that memory is the happiness I associate with it, and I wouldn’t want that jeopardized.

[…]

We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound.

[…]

Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.

— Ted Chiang, ‘The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling’ from Exhalation

(2021-07-23)

Language itself is not a technology: It’s native to our species. Our brains and bodies have evolved to speak and to hear words. A child learns to talk without instruction, as a fledgling bird learns to fly. Because reading and writing have become so central to our identity and culture, it’s easy to assume that they, too, are innate talents. But they’re not. Reading and writing are unnatural acts, made possible by the purposeful development of the alphabet and many other technologies. Our minds have to be taught how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. Reading and writing require schooling and practice, the deliberate shaping of the brain.

— Nicholas Carr, The Shallows

(2021-09-13)

“Do you dream in color?”

“I think everybody dreams in color,” I told her.

“Why do you say that?”

“I say that because before the mid-nineteenth century and the invention of photography, no one ever thought about anything being in black and white. There was no concept of the world being anything but color.”

“That makes sense,” she said. The way she said this made me think she at least believed she dreamed in black and white.

— Percival Everett, Telephone

(2021-08-21)

As mapmaking progressed, the spread of maps also disseminated the mapmaker’s distinctive way of perceiving and making sense of the world. The more frequently and intensively people used maps, the more their minds came to understand reality in the maps’ terms. The influence of maps went far beyond their practical employment in establishing property boundaries and charting routes. “The use of a reduced, substitute space for that of reality,” explains the cartographic historian Arthur Robinson, “is an impressive act in itself.” But what’s even more impressive is how the map “advanced the evolution of abstract thinking” throughout society. “The combination of the reduction of reality and the construct of an analogical space is an attainment in abstract thinking of a very high order indeed,” writes Robinson.

— Nicholas Carr, The Shallows

(2021-09-12)

Socrates was right. As people grew accustomed to writing down their thoughts and reading the thoughts others had written down, they became less dependent on the contents of their own memory. What once had to be stored in the head could instead be stored on tablets and scrolls or between the covers of codices. People began, as the great orator had predicted, to call things to mind not “from within themselves, but by means of external marks.”

[…]

[Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus believed] memorizing was far more than a means of storage. It was the first step in a process of synthesis, a process that led to a deeper and more personal understanding of one’s reading. He believed, as the classical historian Erika Rummel explains, that a person should “digest or internalize what he learns and reflect rather than slavishly reproduce the desirable qualities of the model author.” Far from being a mechanical, mindless process, Erasmus’s brand of memorization engaged the mind fully. It required, Rummel writes, “creativeness and judgment.”

[…]

Erasmus’s recommendation that every reader keep a notebook of memorable quotations was widely and enthusiastically followed. Such notebooks, which came to be called “commonplace books,” or just “commonplaces,” became fixtures of Renaissance schooling. Every student kept one. By the seventeenth century, their use had spread beyond the schoolhouse. Commonplaces were viewed as necessary tools for the cultivation of an educated mind. In 1623, Francis Bacon observed that “there can hardly be anything more useful” as “a sound help for the memory” than “a good and learned Digest of Common Places.”

[…]

The popularity of commonplace books ebbed as the pace of life quickened in the nineteenth century, and by the middle of the twentieth century memorization itself had begun to fall from favor. […] The introduction of new storage and recording media throughout the last century — audiotapes, videotapes, microfilm and microfiche, photocopiers, calculators, computer drives — greatly expanded the scope and availability of “artificial memory.” Committing information to one’s own mind seemed ever less essential. The arrival of the limitless and easily searchable data banks of the Internet brought a further shift, not just in the way we view memorization but in the way we view memory itself. The Net quickly came to be seen as a replacement for, rather than just a supplement to, personal memory. Today, people routinely talk about artificial memory as though it’s indistinguishable from biological memory.

— Nicholas Carr, The Shallows

(2021-10-14)

Two days later, she had walked into a mountain refuge and collapsed. No one understood how she had been able to walk with so many broken bones; it was an impossibility, yet she had undeniably done it.

‘I asked her how she thought it had happened,’ Linda said, ‘and she said that she simply hadn’t known her bones were broken. She didn’t even feel any pain. When she said that,’ Linda said, ‘it suddenly felt like she was talking about me.’

I asked her what she meant and she was silent for so long, slumped back in the booth with an impassive expression on her face, that it seemed she might not answer.

‘I guess it reminded me of having a kid,’ she said finally. ‘You survive your own death,’ she added, ‘and then there’s nothing left to do except talk about it.’

— Rachel Cusk, Kudos

(2022-01-02)

His mother had reassured him that these were problems to which he was capable of finding logical solutions, but he was aware that many of what appeared to him as rational challenges appeared to other people as metaphors, and he was always anxious lest a misunderstanding should arise. All his life his mother had encouraged him to read books, not because she was one of those people who believed reading books improved people but because she had pointed out that studying imaginative works would at least enable him to follow certain conversations and not mistake them for reality. As a child he had found stories very upsetting, and he still disliked being lied to, but he had come to understand that other people enjoyed exaggeration and make-believe to the extent that they regularly confused them with the truth.

— Rachel Cusk, Kudos

(2022-01-14)

Yet perhaps, he said, it is the very intentness of our own will that causes us to be blind to other realities. A few years ago, he said, some friends of his rented a house in Italy and chose to travel there by car, simply keying the address into their satnav and following its directions, which miraculously took them all the way from Holland — where they lived — down through Europe to this farmhouse in the remotest regions of the hot south. They spent two weeks there, marvelling at their own freedom and autonomy and the ease with which they had made this transition. When the time came to go home and they had packed up the car again, they found that the satnav was for some reason not working. They realised, he said, that they had absolutely no idea where they were — they didn’t even know the name of the nearest town — and since they spoke not one word of the language and were in any case in the middle of an unpopulated wilderness, they were forced to drive around and around this savage landscape on dirt roads, trying in increasing panic to find an escape route before they ran out of petrol and food. All that time, he said smiling, when they thought they were free, they were in fact lost without knowing it.

— Rachel Cusk, Kudos

(2022-02-28)

Early in March he went out on his first walk about the park, and saw an ugly, grey world again, full of decay and destruction. […] On a path in the park he saw a red, child’s glove sticking out of the melting snow, and for some strange reason the sight of it sank deep into his memory. Dogged, blind regeneration. The apathy of life and death. The inhuman machinery of life. […] The older Squire Popielski became, the more terrible the world seemed to him. A young man is busy with his own blooming, pushing forwards and extending the boundaries: from his childhood bed to the walls of the room, the house, the park, the city, the country, the world, and then, in his manhood, comes a time of fantasising about something even greater. The turning point occurs at about forty. Youth in its intensity, in its full force, tires itself out. One night or one morning a man crosses a boundary, reaches his peak and takes his first step downwards, towards death. Then the question arises: should he descend proudly with his face turned towards the darkness, or should he turn around towards what was, keep up an appearance and pretend it isn’t darkness, but just that the light in the room has been extinguished?

— Olga Tokarczuk, Primeval and Other Times

(2022-03-20)

There are people that think that type should be expressive. They have a different point of view from mine. I don’t think type should be expressive at all. I mean, I can write the word ‘dog’ with any typeface and it doesn’t have to look like a dog. But there are people that, when they write ‘dog’, it should bark.

— Massimo Vignelli, speaking in the film Helvetica

(2022-03-29)

The spring winds knocked over two walls. The living room in Stasia’s cottage changed into a heap of rubble. In summer nettles and dandelions appeared in Stasia’s flower beds, with brightly coloured anemones and peonies blooming despairingly among them. There was a smell of strawberries gone wild. Paweł was astonished to see how quickly decay and destruction progress. As if building houses were contrary to the entire nature of heaven and earth, as if erecting walls and laying stones on top of each other went against the current of time. He found this thought appalling. On television the national anthem stopped and the screen turned to snow.

Olga Tokarczuk, Primeval and Other Times

(2022-04-10)

The other day, I read that a museum in New York was putting on an exhibition of unfinished works. […] The person writing the article commented that contemporary art doesn’t offer us finished works, but only inconclusive ones for the viewer to complete in his or her imagination. This exhibition of unfinished works, he went on, actually described the way we look at art now, when the works themselves aren’t enough and we, the viewers, need a space, a fissure, a crack in order to complete them.

— Enrique Vila Matas, Mac & His Problem

(2022-07-12)

We come into this world in order to repeat what those who came before us also repeated. There have been supposedly significant technical advances, but as regards our human nature, we remain unchanged, with exactly the same defects and problems. We unwittingly imitate what those who preceded us tried to do. These add up to mere attempts with very few successes, which, when they do occur, are always second-rate. Every ten or fifteen years, people speak of new generations, but when you analyze those generations, which, on the face of it, do appear to be different, you see instead that they merely repeated, like a mantra, how urgent and vital it is to overturn the previous generation and, just to be safe, the one before the previous one, which, in its time, tried to erase the one before that. Oddly, though, no generation wants to position itself on the margins of that Great Path, but, rather, on the firm ground occupied by the previous generation. They must think there’s nothing else beyond that firm ground, and this belief ultimately leads them to imitate and follow in the footsteps of those they started out despising. And so it goes on, not a single generation has placed itself on the margins or has said, almost as one voice: we don’t like this, you can keep it. The young arrive, only to slink away the next day, no longer young, but old. In fleeing from the world, they’re destroyed: and their memories are destroyed and they die, or they themselves die, so destroying their memories, which were born dead. This rule knows no exception. In this respect, everyone imitates everyone else. As an epitaph on a grave in a Cornish cemetery says: Shall we all die. We shall die all. All die shall we. Die all we shall.

— Enrique Vila Matas, Mac & His Problem

(2022-07-23)

We soon learn that Baresi lost his Italian bride soon after marrying her, having discovered that she belonged, at least in her heart, to another man. We also learn that, for his part, Pirelli discovered on the island of Java, after twenty years of peaceful marriage, that his wife still hadn’t forgotten her first love, a young man who took his own life.

Baresi and Pirelli carry on sharing the details of their respective and almost identical sentimental failures, and you can see that, while Baresi delights in giving his monologue, embellishing his dreadful true story with fictional flourishes, Pirelli, narratively speaking, does the opposite, keeping strictly to the facts and inventing nothing. In other words, much as it pains him to do so, Pirelli tries to stay within the limits of what he deems to be the truth.

This turns the two lovelorn, jaded, and incurably lonely Italians into something more than two discarded old husbands. It means that one of them, Baresi, seems to embody the world of fiction writers — the world inhabited by those who believe that any work that tells a true story is an insult to both art and truth — and the other, Pirelli, represents those who think that reality can be reproduced exactly as it is, and that, as such, it should never be placed between quotation marks, given that there is only one truth.

Fiction and reality, an old married couple.

— Enrique Vila Matas, Mac & His Problem

(2022-07-26)

After reading an interview [Anthony] Burgess did with him, Graham Greene complained that ‘he put words into my mouth that I had to look up in a dictionary’.

— The Oldie Review of Books, Summer 2022

(2022-08-11)

Included in the television programme was the story of four young American Muslims on trial for planning an attack on Disneyland. During the trial the prosecution introduced a home video found in their apartment as evidence against them. The video was exceedingly amateurish. It included long footage of a garbage can and of the photographer’s feet as he walked. The prosecution claimed that the amateurishness was feigned, that what we were witnessing was a reconnaissance tool: the garbage can was a potential hiding-place for a bomb, the walking feet paced out the distance from A to B.

The rationale offered by the prosecution for this paranoid interpretation was that the very amateurishness of the video was ground for suspicion, since, where Al Qaida is concerned, nothing is what it seems to be.

Where did the prosecutors learn to think in such a way? The answer: in literature classes in the United States of the 1980s and 1990s, where they were taught that in criticism suspiciousness is the chief virtue, that the critic must accept nothing whatsoever at face value. From their exposure to literary theory these not-very-bright graduates of the academy of the humanities in its postmodernist phase bore away a set of analytical instruments which they obscurely sensed could be useful outside the classroom, and an intuition that the ability to argue that nothing is as it seems to be might get you places. Putting those instruments in their hands was the trahison des clercs of our time. ‘You taught me language, and my profit on it is I know how to curse.’