JUDY KRAVIS

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Wednesday 29 December 2021

Olga Tokarczuk, Flights,

Halfway through Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk, in the middle of the night, I read about Filip Verheyen, seventeenth century anatomist, ancestor of Oliver Sacks, and Borges, and me, who writes letters to his amputated leg, preserved in formaldehyde.

Why am I in pain? Is it because ....  in essence body and soul are part of something larger and something shared, states of the same substance, like water that can be both liquid and solid?  How can what does not exist cause me pain? Why do I feel this lack, sense this absence? Are we perhaps condemned to wholeness, and every fragmentation, every quartering, will only be a pretence, will happen on the surface, underneath which, however, the plan remains intact, unalterable? Does even the smallest fragment still belong to the whole? If the world, like a great glass orb, falls and shatters into a million pieces — doesn't something great, powerful and infinite remain a whole in this?

I read this over and over.   

Am I doing the right thing by telling stories? Wouldn't it be better to fasten my mind with a clip, tighten the reins and express myself not by means of stories and histories, but with the simplicity of a lecture, where in sentence after sentence a single thought gets clarified, and then others are tacked onto it in the succeeding paragraphs? I could use quotes and footnotes. I could in the order of points or chapters reap the  consequences of demonstrating step by step what I mean; I would verify an aforementioned hypothesis and ultimately be able to carry off my arguments like sheets after a wedding night, in view of the public. I would be mistress of my own text, I could take an honest per-word payment for it.

His leg does not write back. 

Wednesday 22 December 2021

Tango, Lynne Tillman, Raymond Radiguet,

This is the season for Janet Baker singing Mahler songs at the hour of the wolf, around five o'clock, when darkness is falling rapidly and you've just started reading Le Diable au Corps by Raymond Radiguet, following on directly from Lynne Tillman Men and Apparitions. We are in a tango season. 

Reading Lynne Tillman made me think of Raymond Radiguet, his steamy old-fashioned schoolboy precision-tooled roman passionel, interspersed with pronouncements beyond his emotional age, as we might say now. Scandalous in 1923, the tale of of a sixteen-year-old boy and an eighteen-year-old girl recently married to a soldier who's away fighting in WW1, which was off, stage left, if you were sixteen and living in a strange kind of holiday, in a town beside the river Marne, where usual rules did not apply. Perfect for a poète maudit, a phenomenon of french literature, as Cocteau said, and he would know.

There is a hundred year gap between Tillman and Radiguet. Radiguet, who loved at sixteen, published at twenty and then died of TB, had a cultural vocabulary and some extraordinary grammar — what twenty-year-old now would know the past subjunctive in any verb at all, let alone scatter them throughout in full knowledge of how far away, how processed. His love runs along lines that reading has taught him. He is inclined, as Lynne Tillman is, towards the general statement, the tidy analysis, as well as an observational manner born out of reading Proust, Laclos and Baudelaire.

Mon esprit s'engourdissait peu à peu auprès d'elle, je la trouvai différente. C'est que, maintenant que j'étais sûr de ne plus l'aimer, je commençais à l'aimer.

Zeke Stark, ethnographer, Lynne Tillman's narrator, favours acronyms and abbreviations, as if he is writing notes for a thesis, and addressing readers who are used to reading notes. He makes clear his sources, books, films, tv series, snapshots, pix that r us, many of which are included in the book, he wields his culture, happy to be clunky, ready to be done over once again.  

In the beginning there is nothing, and nothing becomes something, and something becomes everything, and you're fucked.

The other night I watched Scent of a Woman, in which Al Pacino, embittered, angry, blind, dances as a blind man must dance, in the dark, in a New York hotel, with a doe-like girl whose uncertainty turns rapidly to enchantment. 

In my reading tango of Tillman and Radiguet, Tillman leads, with her overload of 21st century awareness, and Radiguet, fervent with new/old youthful passion, is the boy/girl, learning the dance as he glides and swoops and twirls.

The tango is a fault line between two dancers. Passion a fire that divides as much as it unites. 

Friday 17 December 2021

Isaac Babel, Irving Howe, New York Review of Books,

I read the essay on Isaac Babel by Irving Howe, published this week in the New York Review of Books, written in the late 1980s and left in a drawer. All the contextuals rumble under the page as I read. I have tried Isaac Babel a few times, but can't quite get there. Irving Howe, writing in the 1980s, can get there, I can sieve out my own reading from his. Affectionate irony and embarrassed nostalgia. Half-rhythms of Yiddish. Rueful inversion, like, 'Resting I did at school.' 

I recognise the narrator with his spectacles on his nose and autumn in his soul, watching the Cossack's grace, in fear and reverence. Like Pierre in War and Peace, out at the Battle of Borodino, I think, watching the battle from a nearby hillock and taking notes. Someone needs to take notes.

Isaac Babel wrote about Odessa in 1920s. Someone I met in Paris recognised me as 'one of the Odessa crowd', and I was happy to go along with that. The pit of northeastern europe, the ferment of old-style crossroads and staging-posts, a mess of language, many futile journeys in one direction or another. All this I respond to as to the manner born, which I was, we all are. In a manner, born.

After that we went to bed in the hay-loft. There were six of us sleeping there, keeping each other warm, with our legs entangled, under a roof full of holes that let in the starlight. I dreamt, and there were women in my dreams, but my heart, my scarlet murderer's heart, creaked and bled.

I have a childhood book called The Twenty-Four Ivans in which twenty-four ivans make their way to St Petersburg to buy a new bell for their village church. They try to make porridge in a river, and they sleep, as chez Babel, with their legs entangled so that in the morning they do not know who they are, Ivan, Ivan, Ivan, Ivan or Ivan. 

Tuesday 7 December 2021

Fleur Jaeggy, Hortus,

The Paris Review described reading Fleur Jaeggy as not unlike diving headlong, naked, into a bramble of black rose bushes. 

I would say, medicinal. Leaves you slightly numb. In need of antidote. 

She is the kind of writer who gets under your skin so you can't help imitating. 

If she gets under your skin it's because she was already there.

Fleur Jaeggy is a sharpener. At no point does she reassure. Au contraire. The ground is likely to vanish under you. Yes, the depths of your bramble roots. Vanished also.

I read a piece in the New Yorker about the value of pain in prompting our endogenous morphine to kick in. As if our chief activity as humans were to produce pain and then to produce painkillers. 

Reading Fleur Jaeggy is a bit like that. She produces, describes, pain, and the bluntness and swiftness of her style is the painkiller. 

Actually, as I began the title story of I am the brother of XX, I was relieved rather than pained that without ceremony we were plunged into the crosscurrents of family, that we took on the remoteness, the unwillingness, yet compulsion, the little you can say about it, the sense of release in saying even this much.

Most of Fleur Jaeggy's creatures are close to untimely death. Her sentences are short. You're left at the end of each one, abandoned, as she, the writer, we must suppose, was abandoned, obscurely and politely, in her upper middle class Swiss early life, without pathos or explanation.

Need to read a piece or two in Hortus to right the balance. 'I never tasted anything as good as an Ashmead's Kernel on a biodynamic farm near Stroud a few years ago.' We have an Ashmead's Kernel tree and the soft russety taste at this time of year is redemptive. 

Chez Fleur Jaeggy a lakeside calm in one story is the most redemption you find. There is very little eating. No apples at all that I can remember.