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Jan-02-07
 | | jessicafischerqueen: Re biographies, auto etc.
<Della Croce>: "No one should undertake an autobiography before first reaching the age of forty." <Dostoyevsky> "It is in bad taste to live longer than forty." ??????
So what's an autobiographer to do? |
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Jan-02-07
 | | Domdaniel: <what's an autobiographer to do?>
Make it up. My Story, by Larry Alzheimer. Set in an eternal present of unchanging fortitude. Leaving the recondite literary and philosophical stuff aside for a moment, we clearly live in a society that prefers biography, whether of the auto- or the as-told-to- variety. 'True' stories embrace celeb culture. Making it up (as fiction) rather than making it up (as 'truth') is probably on the way out. Fiction, with its critically detached readers, was just part of the Gutenberg game. I still like it, of course. But I'm half fossil already. |
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Jan-02-07
| | Domdaniel: <Eyal> I know Abish was in the Israeli army, but was he also born in Shanghai? Like JG Ballard? I could easily be wrong, but I seem to recall that factoid from somewhere... Academic investigations and media profiling form a giant pincer movement. The Pynchonesque/paranoid response - willed invisibility - seems to be the most rational one. Although Kafka's strategy of actual anonymity had a lot to recommend it too. |
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| Jan-02-07 | | Eyal: <I know Abish was in the Israeli army, but was he also born in Shanghai? Like JG Ballard? I could easily be wrong, but I seem to recall that factoid from somewhere...> Almost right. According to Wikipedia, <Abish was born in Vienna, Austria (December 4, 1931). At a young age, his family fled from the Nazis, traveling first to Italy and Nice before settling in Shanghai [!] from 1940 to 1949. In 1949, they moved to Israel, where Abish served in the army and developed an interest in writing.> |
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| Jan-02-07 | | Eyal: <Kafka's strategy of actual anonymity> "strategy"? Hmmm... He didn't publish much during his life-time (though what he did publish was not anonymous), and he ordered Max Brod to burn all of his unpublished manuscripts after his death. Well, the first was mainly a by-product of his chronic difficulties to finish texts he had begun with, and the second turned out to be pointless, since Brod didn't fulfill his request (and Kafka probably knew deep in his heart he wouldn't - if you really want your manuscripts burned, better do it yourself and be done with it). So if it was a strategy, it was certainly a poor one - especially when you recall that among the manuscripts Kafka left behind him were his most intimate journals and letters. |
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Jan-02-07
| | Domdaniel: If you really want your manuscripts burned, leave them to your wife (Sir Richard Burton, among others). Friends, like Brod, lack the requisite sense of shame. Ballard was born in Shanghai in, I think, 1930, and interned along with his parents during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria/Manchukuo. So Abish, as I'd thought, was a contemporary, though I've never heard of either mentioning the other. Some of their short stories share some formal devices. |
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| Jan-02-07 | | Eyal: <If you really want your manuscripts burned, leave them to your wife> That's certainly good advice - perhaps Kafka should have considered it before breaking three engagements during his lifetime and dying single... |
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Jan-02-07
| | Domdaniel: <Eyal> ... and he seemed like such a nice young man, too. These biographies are positively dangerous ... Thanks for the Jstor info. Seems I've been away from the academy too long, despite living next door to a university campus. |
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| Jan-03-07 | | AdrianP: <Mack> <Eyal> How does one go about getting access to JSTOR - as a private researcher not affiliated to a particular institution. There are a handful of articles that I'm v. keen to get hold of. |
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| Jan-03-07 | | mack: <Adrian>
If you're connected with any of the following, then you should be able to get an account: http://www.jstor.org/about/individu... You can also get free access to jstor from many libraries; check locally. If neither of these routes is helpful, I'd me more than happy to save any articles you were interested in and email them to you. |
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| Jan-03-07 | | AdrianP: <Mack> Thanks very much for the above. I'm not connected with any of the institutions, but I'm not a million miles from the British Library - it was sheer laziness that prompted the above query. Thanks in particular for your enormously kind offer, but I have about 30 articles in mind, so I don't think you'd be happy if I took you up on it...! Btw, are you still playing chess down Borough way? |
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| Jan-03-07 | | mack: Thirty articles wouldn't be that big a hassle, if we did a couple a day or something. I could even just lend you my username and password, might be easier. I'm not entirely sure what the deal with libraries is, you'll have to see. Not sure if I've ever played chess down Borough. Been there enough times though. |
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Jan-03-07
| | Domdaniel: <Zebra>
What, about Elvish?
I don't speak any, but I learned the obscurities of philology from a guy who got them direct from Tolkien, which may give me hidden Elvish linguistic genes, or something. |
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| Jan-04-07 | | Eyal: <AdrianP> Ditto regarding <mack>'s offer (though the university I'm affiliated with actually has only partial access to Jstor's collections, so a place like the British Library would probably give you better results). |
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| Jan-04-07 | | Eyal: <Dom: Academic investigations and media profiling form a giant pincer movement.> Well, there are quite dominant academic traditions which are decidedly "anti-biographical", if that's the angle you have in mind. From the more commonsensical anti-"intentional fallacy" Anglo-American tradition, to the more fanatical and bluntly anti-humanistic French Post-structuralist tradition (Barthes' "The Death of the Author", Foucault's "What is an author?"). Literature itself can deal with this problem - as it can deal with any other problem - by turning it into its subject, and the anxiety which the problem you're talking about has produced can probably explain why it has become such a dominant theme in post-modernist literature. As usual with dominant post-modernist themes, Borges provides a concise paradigm ("Borges and I"). A very effective device in this context is the "author-character", where the author inserts a character somewhat-in-his-image into the fictional(?) world. Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" and Kundera's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" (especially the "Angels" part) are good examples of how powerful this device can be. In such cases the real author, so to speak, leapfrogs over the implied author, to appear as a trope in his own text, which makes it all the harder to identify the implied author's attitudes and values. (I hope all of this doesn't sound TOO confused - it's a very confusing subject, to be sure.) |
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Jan-04-07
| | Domdaniel: <Eyal> No worries. I was the post-structuralist barbarian at the gates towards during my academic interlude in the 1980s. Later I came across books like 'Writing Pynchon' which only repeated arguments I'd made a decade earlier. Not that I actually believe any of that stuff anymore. (Did I ever? Was belief part of the paradigm, even operationally? I forget.) I'm just a humble scientificist now. Evolutionary Psychology plugs even more gaps than semiotics does. There are no confusing subjects, only objects which have been insufficiently ravaged. |
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| Jan-05-07 | | Eyal: <Was belief part of the paradigm?> That reminds me of an old Jewish saying: "Everything is in God's hands [i.e. under God's control], except for belief in God". |
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Jan-05-07
| | Domdaniel: <Eyal> ... and the back of God's hands, presumably, unless She/He keeps them clasped in a four-dimensional knot, a sort of divine Escheresque hand-wringing brought on by human perversity. Not to mention the perversities of the 113 other sentient species in this galactic cluster which fall into the same deity admin division. The Bureaucracy on the Other Side, as Pynchon calls it. Several science fiction writers have had fun discourse-mixing between faith and various types of science. The mathematical physics and linguistics of god, usw. Barrington Bayley, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Sheckley, and Ballard himself come to mind. On Borges: he's probably my other main influence. Significant enough to own three versions of much of his work (Spanish plus different translations into English). His collected essays are magnificent. I'm interested in the essay form -- especially when used by writers, like Borges and William Burroughs, who are better known for fiction. And then there's the Burroughs cut-up technique. I did some research into the history of aleatory writing once -- anything with a randomized chance element -- and found various Qabbalists, plus some ancient Roman poets playing cut-up games about 1900 years ago. I've forgotten their names, though. I don't suppose we have an expert on classical Latin aleatorics in the house....? |
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| Jan-05-07 | | boz: <Domdaniel> I don't know about cut-ups but Juvenal could pass as a Roman Burroughs. |
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Jan-05-07
| | jessicafischerqueen: Yes, gentlemen, and <William Rice Burroughs> certainly deserves to be lionized. Did any of us invent <Tarzan>? Huh?
Heh. |
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Jan-05-07
| | jessicafischerqueen: <Edgar> we used to know thee well... |
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| Jan-05-07 | | boz: <jessicafischerqueen> Cut-up? |
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| Jan-05-07 | | Eyal: <jess> I fear that both Edgar Seward and William Rice are spinning in their graves at the moment... |
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| Jan-05-07 | | Eyal: <Borges and the essay form> What I find especially fascinating in this context is Borges' unique hold on the "fictional essay (or review)" form - that is, the discussion of a non-existent text. All in the spirit of what he wrote in the foreword to his first major story collection, "The Garden of Forking Paths" in 1941: <It is a laborious madness and an improverishing one, the madness of composing vast books - setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.> Borges can structure a complete text like that (like "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" about an imaginary book, or "A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain" about a whole imaginary corpus), or use it within the frame of a larger story - like Ts'ui Pen's novel in "The Garden of Forking Paths", or Jaromir Hladik's play in "The Secret Miracle". <aleatory writing> I suppose you mention that as a way for the author to "disappear" - or at least to problematize his presence. I would add that aleatory procedures lay bare the way in which EVERY text really is, as Umberto Eco once put it, "a machine for producing possible worlds". I actually had a fascination period with aleatory writing myself, though more from the theoretical than the historical angle. Btw, do you include in this category texts such as Raymond Roussel's "Impressions d'Afrique"? |
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Jan-05-07
| | Domdaniel: <jess> Who could forget the lion of Tarzana, author of the immortal <The Chessmen of Mars>? I used to have an old copy of New Worlds magazine - it seems to have dematerialized - with a pastiche combination of both Burroughses. The writer, possibly Philip Jose Farmer, asked 'what if William S Burroughs had invented Tarzan, not Edgar R...?' and then produced the result: a hilarious story called 'The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod'. I must try to find it sometime. Or write my own, I suppose. <So Buddha got tired of sitting around waiting for the man and said "I'll by god metabolize my own junk..."> |
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