Ecrire, dit-elle - Marguerite Duras on writing

L’amant est le premier a entendre et a croire que la petite veut devenir ecrivain. La mere, elle, n’a jamais voulu y croire.

“Je suis tres seule. Je suis seule comme apres qu’on a fini d’ecrire et qu’on se sent l’envie de le dire et que tout dort.” (MD)

De la meme maniere qu’avec les restes de la veille, elle confectionne d’excellents ragouts, elle conserve ces pages dispersees qu’elle recycle plus tard.

Une mere peut-elle comprendre l’ecriture de son enfant?

“On a une vie tres pauvre, les ecrivains, je parle des gens qui ecrivent vraiment… Je ne connais personne qui ait moins de vie personnelle que moi.” (MD)

“Je dis du bien de moi. Il faut bien que quelqu’un en dise. C’etait extraordinaire, on ne me croyait pas. Je faisais quand meme la cuisine, les courses. Il y avait beaucoup de monde qui passait. Je faisais tout ce qu’il fallait pour qu’il y ait a boire et a manger. De temps en temps, je disais: je suis bien contente, j’ai bien travaille. Je me souviens qu’on me disait: tu fais trop de cas de ce que tu fais, trop de cas du fait d’ecrire. Regarde, nous on ne dit rien.” (MD)

“Faire quelque chose ensemble est un bonheur si violent que la creation solitaire parait une mauvaise habitude.” (MD)

“Les gens qui disent ne pas aimer leurs propres livres s’il y en a c’est qu’ils n’ont pas surmonte l’attrait de l’humilation.”(MD)

“Des fois on a peur de mourir avant que la page soit pleine.”(MD)

Le vrai probleme etant encore une fois celui des femmes, la recherche du sens par les femmes de la vie qu’elles menent et qu’elles n’ont pas desiree.”

All quotes from Laure Adler's biography, "Marguerite Duras".

Celebrate Earth Day!

My article about Gaia on Elsevier's blog
http://libraryconnect.blogspot.com
and Twitter
http://bit.ly/aOXM0d

Photo by Nora

Homework: emotions #3

Fear

She always hoped that he wouldn’t come back. That he had an accident. That he was dead or, at least, maimed. When the time came, she would start tuning in to the sound of traffic. She wouldn’t begin any new chore around the house, anything that would need her full attention. Anything that he would interrupt, or question. Soon, his wheezing van emerged from the background noise, more and more defined as he turned the corner into their estate, more insistent. For a few moments she still hoped that it was another car, that it was just using the cul-de-sac to turn around, that it would be on its way. When the sound stopped outside there was no doubt. Still, every time, without fail, her heart jumped. The sound of the key in the door.

Guilt

Everyone who has lost a parent knows the guilt. That thing you had promised to do. That word you never said. How many weeks you hadn’t visited. For me, guilt is an unfinished game of chess. I was a teenager, torn between the pressure of my boyfriend wanting to go out - to which unimportant event I can not remember - and the unconscious knowledge that the game would remain unfinished for ever. My grandfather waved me on. It wasn’t important, he said, we’d continue the game later. He didn’t die until years after this, but I was right. We didn’t finish that game of chess.

Photo by Carmel

Earth Week

As I write, three of my unfortunate colleagues are slowly making their way back from Amsterdam to Shannon by land and sea. I don’t envy them. I did my share of 2-day-journeys from the east of France to the west of Ireland, back in the days before cheap air travel. What doesn’t one do for love, when one is young?

Looking at the (much) bigger picture, Gaia, our planet Earth, which in Greek mythology and in the hypothesis of James Lovelock can be seen as a living organism, must be breathing a sigh of relief. Studies using the post-9/11 flight ban as an incidental large-scale experiment in end-of-civilisation-climate have shown that commercial flights have a marked influence on the atmosphere.

In a 2002 Nature article , David Travis and colleagues wrote: “The potential of condensation trails (contrails) from jet aircraft to affect regional-scale surface temperatures has been debated for years, but was difficult to verify until an opportunity arose as a result of the three-day grounding of all commercial aircraft in the United States in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001." I’m sure my colleagues are marvelling at the clear skies over the Autoroutes de France…

The flight disruptions caused by the ash cloud from the volcanic eruption in Iceland last Friday are compared to the scale of the post-9/11 flight ban. While the 2001 results have been disputed – after all, it is difficult to draw statistically significant conclusions from a single event – this year’s renewed experiment in a flight-free western world are bound to generate further studies, which should help to validate or invalidate the previous conclusions.

Happy Earth Week!

Photo by Lonan

Eco-friendly sex-toys

LOL! Eco-friendly sex-toys , what can I say, I just had to have a look! The reason I'm blogging about it is that by doing so I am hereby entering a draw to win one of the said toys. I realise that the last statement could be construed as just base greed, or alternatively as cowardice, and I shall cultivate the ambiguity.

So. Eco-friendly sex-toys? There is the wooden yoke, and gorgeously veined wood it looks too, although it's nothing that one couldn't carve oneself with the appropriate raw material and a pen knife. But silicon? eco-friendly? Not in my books. And solar-powered gadgets? Maybe in sunny California, but I can't see myself taking my pleasure in my chilly backyard too often, not too mention the family-friendly neighbourhood.

Ah well. I'll find a use for the thing if I win it. Recycling it as a kitchen implement might be in fact philosophically most appropriate to its nature...

The draw is organised by the Feminist Review at the occasion of Earth Day 2010 on April 22nd.

Photo by Fabrice

The great American misogynists

Reading Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, it occurs to me that I haven’t read the great American misogynists. So far. An omission I shall endeavour to remedy.

Yes, I’m leaning towards feminist ideals, but these were different times. These were times when American male intellectuals were misogynists, tinted with homophobia if needs be. For Mailer as for even my literary hero Jack Kerouac, a following of interchangeable groupies was indissociable from the status of hero of the mind, along with copious amounts of liquor and whatever drugs one could get one’s hands on. Men did the thinking and the hard playing, and complacent flower girls did the pleasuring. This was, after all, free love.

Does the passing of time excuse everything? Or course not. What excuses (nearly) everything is genius. If you’re going to be outrageous, then for God’s sake do it with confidence, humour, and above all, style. And Norman Mailer had plenty of it all. Humour to make me laugh out loud in bed on my own. Style to make me earmark my poor battered second-hand paperback copy of The Armies of the Night beyond recognition.

I have thought about points of view in the novel, and experimented with them. As far as I could see there were two main ones, each with their pros and cons. The 3rd person ominiscient was for phallocentric Victorian novels, and the 1st person internal monologue was for post-Joycean feminine writing. Fine. But what was The Armies of the Night? During the first few pages, uncomprehending, I had to keep switching over and back to the front cover, to make sure that it was the same Norman Mailer, the writer of the book, who had written an autobiographical account of an anecdote in the life of Norman Mailer. The dichotomy first/third person has never stopped people from writing thinly veiled auto-fiction, but that style necessitates at the very least a change of name. But no, there it was. Norman Mailer inside. Normal Mailer outside.

The device is simple and brilliant, but I had never encountered it before. The book's subtitle: "History as a Novel. The Novel as History" illustrates its Janus-like form. It allows one to be truthful, more truthful than with autobiography, because one can be both self-deprecating and self-agrandising at the same time without sounding pompous [See Doris Lessing quote]. And Mailer is totally and utterly truthful, every scratch, itch, cowardice, hesitation, compromise, alcohol-fuelled antics, subsequent embarrassment and pounding headache, is explored and laid out in delightfully obscene exhibitionist detail. And what gorgeous detail! If God is in the details, it certainly feels like some higher power was propelling Mailer on this Ulyssean feat of hilarious minute-by-minute recording of the events of these few days of anti-Vietnam war protest. It’s true, and it’s so human. We have all groped in the dark, drunk, for a light switch and ended up pissing outside the toilet bowl. Have you not? Ok so, it’s just me and Normal Mailer.

So what happens in The Armies of the Night? The book opens with a Mailer-bashing newspaper article from the Time, and proceeds to trace back the action as experienced from the eyes of our anti-hero Norman Mailer. It starts with an early morning phone call. “It was taken for granted that nothing respectable would come out of the day if the morning began on the phone, and indeed for periods when he was writing he looked on transactions via telephone as Arabs look upon pigs.”

The action proceeds, broken up by incongruous newspaper-type headings delimiting arbitrary sections, akin to Ulysses’s parody of journalism in the Aeolus chapter set in a newspaper office. The story can be summarised by borrowing again a random quote from this eminently quotable book: “The March on the Pentagon was an ambiguous event whose essential value of absurdity may not be established for ten or twenty years, or indeed ever.”

I won’t go on about what exactly happens in the book, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it’s great writing and a great story and you should get your hands on it. If I may borrow again a quote on writing to conclude: “Just as professional football players love sex because it is so close to football, so he was fond of speaking in public because it was thus near to writing.”

Photo by Lonan

Shallow Grave

Oh what a treat! An evening dedicated to Danny Boyle as part of the “15 British Films” cycle on Film 4! Yes, last night I added two others notches on my bedpost, with “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Shallow Grave”. I shall concentrate on the latter here.

Shallow Grave is a crime thriller inscribed in Boyle’s proud lineage of goofy-crime-thrillers-gone-wrong-with-Ewan-McGregor. In this series I obviously place A Life Less Ordinary (see earlier review), but also Trainspotting for its final psychological battle around the archetypal suitcase full of cash. In fact the three movies can almost form a trilogy, directed as they were in succession during the 1990s.

As usual for Boyle, the characters in Shallow Grave are awesome. What else is there to say about Ewan McGregor? But the main female character is again a stroke of genius. Kerry Fox’s charms can not be hidden for long beneath her desperate Lady-di haircut, impossible collection of patterned cardigans, and totally un-hollywoodian curviness. Like Cameron Diaz in the later A Life Less Ordinary, Fox oozes magnetic sensuality and perversity, her expressive mouth as if made for loving, and yes fellas, we do get a gratuitous shot of her plump breasts – but I digress…

To have a story, you need to make the characters interact. Throwing them together as housemates is one such devices, that can feel totally artificial in lesser chick-flicks like Catch and Release (why on earth would a newly widowed posh girl move in with her late fiance’s batchelor flatmates?). In Shallow Grave, the characters’ incidental relationships and their environment are exploited to their full potential, from the first lengthy exposition of the “interview” of new prospective tenants, to intimist, nearly theatre-like psychological developments, to horror at the mercy of the shy accountant turned voyeurist stalker entrenched in the loft.

The exposition part of the movie, the interview, is not only perfect to establish the characters, but also gorgeous, placing a cast of misfits auditioning for the coveted housematedom on an absurdly grand couch in the shabby chic apartment. Does it matter what colours the doors are painted or what cardigans Fox wears? Yes, because Boyle is a total filmmaker, a master of his art, in all its visual, musical, cinematic, photographic aspects. Everything matters, every scene, every chiselled diamond-like shot, every great song of his soundtracks which are classics in their own right.

Shallow Grave has been compared to Hitchcock’s films noirs. I see in it more the ultraviolence of Stanley Kubrick in a Clockwork Orange, down to the name of the main character, Alex. Do I dare saying that I prefer Danny Boyle to Kubrick? Well, every scene of Boyle’s films fills me with awe and glee, and I just want to watch them again. Not next year, or next month, but tomorrow.

Yin, yang and architecture

I shouldn’t complain about the barren cultural landscape of Ennis Co. Clare. I work best with limited choice and under constraint.

The yearly sale of books withdrawn from stock at the local library is a rare opportunity to stock up on culture, at 1 euro each for adult books or 2 kids’ books for 1 euro. There I buy books by the kilo. Some of these for genuine interest in the subject matter, others because they are simply too good a bargain to leave behind. “The Architecture of I.M. Pei” was one of them. A couple of kilos heavy, gorgeous photography, and a sticker at the back indicating an original sale price of £44.40.

I.M. Pei was not a totally foreign name. Although the first time I ever heard it, I was, like my French contemporaries, stunned. Why was this unknown Chinese man picked by Francois Mitterrand to build a glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvres? At the time, I didn’t know that he wasn’t a newcomer in the architectural world, nor did I question why the right-wing media were planting nationalist seeds in the public mind.

In the last month, I went through my loot of 1 euro ex-library stock books. If I left “The Architecture of I.M. Pei” last, it was because he’s a man, and I figured his subject matter rather sterile. I was wrong.

I fell in love at first sight. Not with the modernist blocks of concrete - I grew up in one - they seemed like a good idea at one time. I fell in love with his I.M. Pei's brain. The fact that I.M. Pei is eastern is probably why I discovered such a connection with his way of thinking and operating. Although he is a master, and a man with a vision, he has done his best work under huge constraints and controversy. Of course architecture is one of those areas where you don’t create in a vacuum. You have to consider not only your patrons, but building regulations, budgets, angry citizens and so on, not to mention the eternal tensions between the aesthetic and the practical.

Instead of bulling his way head-on, Pei has had to make an endless number of alterations, and about-faces, in some cases stretching projects to decades and moving them from site to site. To design a symphony center, he was paired with an “accoustician”. “… Johnson objected that the columns would interfere with the sound. The columns went in. Pei wanted carpet on the orchestra floor. Johnson objected, saying it would absorb too much sound. The carpet was abandoned. etc”

Pei was hugely skilled at people relationships, in the art of convincing and negociating, and was blessed with Zen-like patience and restraint. The most interesting insight in the workings of his mind however is how his creativity expressed itself under the multiplicity of constraints. The solution, the perfect solution, the one that not only solved the technical problem at hand but was also supremely elegant, would suddenly impose itself to him. But it was no compromise. It was in fact a better solution than the original one.

An example from his mid-career was the East building he designed for the National Gallery in Washington. His blank canvas was an awkward triangular site. His solution was to use triangles, and more triangles, and more triangles. And because you can’t hang paintings face-to-face in the sharp corners of a triangle, he simply walled these corners off and used them to put elevators, air conditioning conduits and other services.

Like women, Pei being a foreigner, of relatively humble origins and a not-too-forceful person by nature, has had to deal with and bow to an unending string of sometimes not-so-enlightened persons. The boundaries would close around him, he would concede, appease, and then find a way that would leave his opponents speechless, because it took into account their concerns, their rules, and turn them on their head. The ultimate way of thinking outside the box.

Photo by Nora

yes I said yes I will Yes

I admit, it wasn’t my idea.

But it’s sooo cool!

The other day, I came across the most elegant mix of science and art. In his preface, the editor of a collection of scientific presentations summarized the contents with one single image: a word cloud of the most frequent words that appeared in all the articles.

Beautiful, and clever.

Because it’s never easy, at least to over-analytical people like me, to describe the contents of a piece of writing. When people ask me what my book is about, my heart sinks. I did write a 300-word synopsis and duly sent it to a literary agent. How bad must it have been for even the literary agent (notice I didn’t say publisher) to not grace my efforts with a polite “thanks but no thanks”?

I know now what I’m going to do. I’m going to generate a word cloud. And send it to those rude agents out there. When I’m asked what my book is about, instead of humming and hawing, I’ll be able to say: well, it’s about X, and Y, and Z. In 300 words.

But I’m a bit nervous. What if all these bad words that I used come out in screaming bold letter? What if no words come out apart from the boring little filler words? Word clouds don’t lie.

So I’m going to start with Joyce’s Ulysses.

I used http://www.wordle.net, like that inventive scientific editor I mentioned. And here are the results: Chap. 18 (Molly Bloom's soliloquy) , the one that ends with "yes I said yes I will Yes", and Chap. 4 (Leopold Bloom’s first appearance), the one that starts with "Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls." I selected the same font and colour scheme for both word clouds, only changing “rounder edges” for Molly to “straighter edges” for Leopold.

Fascinating no?

Molly’s big huge like, dwarfing all other words. And the famous yes that closes the book is there too, in what looks like second place. Men apparently are less single-minded - who would have known? More anchored in time too, with their thoughts consumed with day, morning, now, back, old and time. Although the pleasures of the flesh are not too far away, with tea, and kidney…

So now dear readers, stay tuned for the word cloud of my novel!