TRANSIT

Anna Seghers' Transit has been in transit on the floor for several months, beside my chair. When I bought it I read a paragraph and sensed a depth I wasn't in the mood for. Then the other day, now that it's Spring, I picked it up, read the first few pages and found that, despite the moment in history — Europe evacuating ahead of Hitler's armies— there was a lightness of touch, almost a casualness. The narrator, who's young, German, but not Jewish, makes his way to Marseille, the only open port in France, seething with refugees looking for exit visas, transit visas, boat tickets, friendly folk in consulates, lost husbands and wives, manuscripts in suitcases, trying to get to Colombia, Mexico, Martinique, America, via Spain or Casablanca or Lisbon, anywhere out of this world. Transit is a seething surface; depth is optional or a distraction in late 1940 in Europe. People meet in cafés, eat pizza, marvel at pizza, pluck coffee beans out of barley to have one real cup a week, drink rosé on the nights they serve alcohol, talk through where they are and where they might go, under which name, hide behind newspapers when they don't want to talk, change their mind and their name, if it suits. Every ship might be the last ship, and if you do get on, to Brazil or Mexico, it might sink, and then all there'd be, if you're fortunate, is this permeable story, persistently in flux, which you have told. As the narrator says to the American consul, 'all those writers who were in the concentration camp with me, who escaped with me, it seems to me that we lived through these most terrible stretches in our lives just so we could write about them: the camps, the war, escape and flight.'

There's a strange levity about this. Anna Seghers herself left Germany in 1933, then was interned in France because she was a communist and a jew; she escaped from the camp and left Europe with her husband and two children, from Marseille, in 1940. She went to Mexico where she wrote this book, framing it as a kind of thriller with a young male narrator who uses, by accident really, the identity of a writer who has committed suicide.

The narrative thread is what you need to wend your way through the bureaucratic flux of transit. Any story will do, there are as many stories as there are refugees, stories of escape and documentation, boats that sink and boats that don't leave. Less dark than Kafka, less esoteric than Borges, and far less dated than we would like, now, in 2024, when travel is closer to travail than ever, and the world is filled with displaced people, 110 million at the last count.

WENDELL BERRY

I heard Pete's account of reading Wendell Berry's Stand by Me, a collection of his stories, while we were in Portugal. It was hard to get into, he said, old-fashioned, so many people you don't know if you should remember them all. It gets better, he said, as he went on, and eventually he was engrossed. 

Feeling ill and staying in bed for a day is a bit like being on holiday. The view is down to one window, it's quiet, there's nothing else you're capable of doing. Stand by Me is a substantial book, capable of seeing even a rapid reader like me through a day or two. I have liked Wendell Berry's essays, up to a point. He can be too earnest. But the stories in Stand by Me gather momentum. Perhaps there is no other way to persuade of the value of land, of community, than by weaving tales of the same group of people, involved in the same activities, interconnected, part of a membership, as one character, Burley Coulter, likes to say. The penultimate story, 'Fidelity', is about the death of Burley Coulter, and, debilitated as I was on Easter Monday, disinclined for much more than the smudge of a purple honesty flower outside the window, I was racing toward the end of the story. I had joined this small community of people gathered in the lawyer's office to bring about the defeat of a young detective who's trying to figure out how Burley Coulter was kidnapped from the hospital and taken to a reassuring death on land that he knew.

I read about this membership and their landedness and their mutual affection and support with awe. I have no experience of this. I never will. You can't buy this as real estate or gather it up in pots at a garden centre and plant it. Yet I know the attention to land. Mat Feltner in 'The Boundary', an old man going to check a fence down a stream he has known all his life, clambers in the company of the dead and, on the way back up, tired at the end of the day, all but joins them. I think I have practised this kind of attention since I was very young, claiming woods, fields and streams wherever I found them, adjacent to where I lived and even passingly, from a paused bus or train. I have that need to occupy land. Wendell Berry is the doyen of this kind of occupation. 

REREADING UTOPIA

Last year we invited people to write a few lines about utopia, their idea of a society in which they'd like to live. We talked to people in Cobh, County Cork, and emailed friends. We thanked everyone who gave it thought and wrote it down, as well as those whose silence made us wonder why it is so hard to think beyond the confines of the society we are in. 

Utopia? That isn't real 

Utopia? Cobh is a very historical place

Utopia? It never works out, I hear

Utopia is a cas limite. Hard to imagine beyond the reality that surrounds you and you imagine an ideal, though you may not like the word. Take a leap. You have the time, the freedom. 

You have a neck, use it, Tony O'H used to say. 

Tread softly for you tread on my dreams. Mr Yeats.

It's a privilege to bear witness to your ideals. Bernard Laughlin.

A plague mentality has overtaken us. A  state of ranting and whingeing. We only have time for opposition. Utopia isn't opposition, it's dreaming radically and convincingly beyond your current state. 

HOLIDAY READING

Read the first chapter of Lynne Tillman on the plane, Haunted Houses. Too speedy at thirty-seven thousand feet. A quick whizz through the early lives of three girls,  Short sentences. All emotion kept to the full stops. I already had enough haunting of my own. I was impatient with Jane, Grace and Emily. I wanted to sleep. The cloud cover over southern Portugal was frayed underneath, shreds of it dangling in yellowish light as we approached the airport. 

On the communal bookshelf in the guest house in Tavira, on the main square, by the Ponta Romana, I found Graham Norton. 'Like sucking on sweets', said one of the puffs. I knew Graham Norton when he was twenty or so. He was defensive/derisive then. So I expected him to be wielding his material with some mix of his former self. But no. He was right in his small town mystery and the concoction of his plot. As advised I read  Forever Home at a gallop. It's a deepening puzzle, a domestic mystery plot, with wit, description, decisions and solutions in West Cork, a little emotion, not enough to be frightening, enough to affirm, in view of a positive outcome. Well, Graham, I would hardly have recognized you if you weren't so famous.

The next day we took a long walk along the beach, into the rising mist and the sun. Thinking about footprints and sand, how far we've come, how far to go, to the anchor cemetery where we learn the history of tuna fishing, its energy and then its demise. There's yellow broomrape in the marshes. Broomrape grows on the energy of other plants. Resplendent yellow flowers on a fat stem coming out of nowhere. The tuna do not run any more, straight in April into the Mediterranean from the Atlantic, athwart in September, the other way around. Seventy men, fourteen boats that formed a circle in which the massive tuna were trapped. A whole summer of work back then.

On the beach by the tuna cemetery I read the first paragraph of 'The Umbrella' by Tove Ditlevsen, and stopped, so pleased by this quietude, this unpromise. Every usual situation undermined, under threat. The stories in The Trouble with Happiness are very short, no one comes out of them well. Something that was already underway has come to a head and the future will scarcely be different. Writing is more than redemptive. It is a lone signal of being alive. My nephew Tom was in a band called Redemption but did not know what the word meant.

Hallélujah, says the accordion on the Ponta Romana, Tavira, that evening.

There's a wooden hut with a rusty padlock we occupy most of the day on the beach. We have a table for lunch, an old plank. Bread, cheese, tomatoes, olive oil. I read a Tove Ditlevsen story and then lie back. 

On the plane home I am still not ready for Lynne Tillman. My neighbour is a large woman in red who is doing Tesco Sudoku puzzles and eating crackers and chocolate biscuits alternately..  

Greetings from the Countryside (Strong Emotions)

An exchange between Judy Kravis and Laura Fitzgerald 

Hi Laura,

I've been reading your Greetings from the Countryside (Strong Emotions).

Good to see it on the page, with time to mull over your version of land etc.

You are so much of the place, by birth and more, whereas we have come in and made a place our own.

Strong emotions in either case. You by birthright and we by no right, as some would say.

Our immediate neighbours, and we only have one lot, have told us that everyone around here hates us.

Which isn't true, but they'd just like company for their own hatred.

I asked another neighbour a mile or two away, from a small farm in west cork herself, why they hate us.

She said it's because we're english by birth and they think we're better than them.

Becoming irish is no answer. You have to have a couple of people in the ground to be irish, someone told us.

And if you do, it's just another set of problems isn't it ....

Hope the exhibition went well. Do come visit if you're coming this way,

all the best,

Judy xx

Hello Judy,

I think the above email is very much a thing in itself, a container story. It's complex isn't it ... we all do and don't belong. Sure I think I'm probably Norman given the Fitzgerald, who knows who plundered what if you go back far enough ...

Thanks so much for buying a copy of the publication. I'm very glad I was able to make the printed version, the gallery were very good to me.

I hope we can manage to meet up over the summer, yourself and Peter are very welcome to call to us in Inch also. I'm sure Dad would enjoy showing you around.

Thanks for the great email/short story!

Best wishes,

Laura

LEAP DAY

Yesterday afternoon I nearly dozed reading Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq, by the stove, entranced by these literate non-sleepers, Kafka, Proust, Duras and many fellows who wrote out of and into their sleeplessness. Nothing like other people's failure to sleep for making you sleepy. This a leap year so we should leap. With friends, if possible. 

the oligarch's son, a harsh male predicament

A few pages into The Man from the Sea by Michael Innes, last of the old green penguin mysteries I've been reading at night, I found this:

Even as he stared at the other naked man he recognised within his own physical response a thrill of pleasure. What had risen from the sea was some harsh male predicament to which he responded as a release.

The one on the beach is naked because he is on, in, an assignation — the dark word still excited him — with the wife of local nouveau laird and scientist, Alex Blair. The man from the sea is a fugitive, a belt about his middle and a wisp of fabric round his loins, his secrets everywhere.

I read The Man from the Sea over a week or so, at night, without interest in the plot or its outcome, pausing where I paused, absorbing the costume and circumstance of new characters, then forgetting them. On the last page the man from the sea, a nuclear scientist with not long to live, walks back into sea in the clothes of the local nouveau laird and scientist, his daughter, not his wife, now the focus, as well as an Australian girl cousin called Georgiana, like someone out of Jane Austen gone walkabout. 

Dovetailed into this in my reading life, an article in the New Yorker called 'The Oligarch's Son', about a boy called Zac Brettler aged nineteen in London, who jumped off a posh balcony near Vauxhall Bridge, in order to live or in order to die, is unclear.  Another harsh male predicament. He changed his name, he was a not-quite from Maida Vale, he thought, a fabulist in a maelstrom of russian and arab rich kids.  He would rather be an oligarch's son, his mother in Dubai, everyone at a distance, various businesses on course. His actual parents in Maida Vale utterly perplexed and sad. 

At the end of The Man from the Sea I'd learned more about the author and his times than about the plot. A nineteen fifties fable. At the end of 'The Oligarch's Son' I've learned the fragility of whoever jumped off the posh balcony, to live or to die, the fabulist teenager in oligarchs' London laundry, in deeper than he could manage. Whether or not he was on heroin is immaterial, who he called and what he googled before jumping off the balcony towards the Thames. To live or to die. All part of the harsh male predicament.

INCURABLE

This afternoon I listened to Daniel Michael Kaiser's translation of incurable into music, a music of disappearing, almost a non-music, DK says. All rhythms were suddenly strange, every pause uncertain. The singing voice dancing over what I wrote and how I have read it out loud, to say nothing of how it took form in the first place. A manifestation of how DK made his way through it, what resonances he found and how the singer sings them.

The best part of listening is I have no words for it. I barely have words for what I write. I listened with bated breath on a broad plain. A thin fabric, translucent, seemingly improvised (although it is not). I wanted to focus on the resonance, he says. The reverb was recorded in an abandoned sugar factory tower.

Hard to listen on the computer, such thin sound. Brings you up short. I wanted to hear this sung version in all its literal resonance, this light incantation, translucent, yes. And all the time I was pulling on what I wrote seven years ago. incurable 'A tense and gnomic journey into the past as it resonates during a difficult long moment in the present, with personal photographs and influential images from the dangerous years of growing up', I said.

BLOG MYSTERIES

At night I have been reading mid-twentieth century mystery novels, the penguins with the green covers, by Margery Allingham, Josephine Bell, Carter Dickson. There was a moment in the 1970s when people I knew were reading mysteries, as well as a brief moment when a well-digger asked me what I wrote— mysteries? No, I said, I write about here, and waved an arm around.

Margery Allingham wrote in Tolleshunt D'Arcy, a few miles from where I grew up. Josephine Bell took medical tripos at Cambridge and poverty in Shadwell Basin. Carter Dickson, one of his names, writes a faux breezy pulp style.

Dream fodder. Expurgation. People running through. He Wouldn't Have Killed Patience? The Port of London Murders. Who wants to know? I, said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow. 

The solution is there. Any problem will do.

In a mystery there are so many people with attributes —looks, job, circumstance — in truth I have little patience, but to be led along the mystery of death or deaths is to ignore nearly everything else, which is the whole idea, and only incidentally or par hasard, find what you are looking for. 

Last night I dreamed I looked around at this line of people, that crowd, these few, who would all soon be dead, all of us, I knew — look again, dead again.

SELF-PORTRAITS, AGED THIRTY-ONE

When I was thirty-one I wrote a self-portrait every day for a year. I typed it out, a folder per month, a page or so a day. For example:

I like valleys, not wind, and sea and mountains only on royal days when I'm ready.

What I like best of all is a hand upon my forehead or the world somehow exactly equal to that as I watch from beside a tree.

I'm honestly selfish, and in lucid, plain moments think that others are mostly dishonestly unselfish.

I've always thought I'd never really been hurt. But sometimes I believe I've been hurt on a grand scale.

For a week in March I drew a self-portrait instead. Mostly patterns, one or two words. In July I went to visit my parents. Hand-written and noticeably blunt. I have been clearing out a filing cabinet and found these, among other files, manuscripts, clippings, photographs, envelopes—many envelopes. Hard to know what speed to take a dismantling of this kind. How much to read and how fast. Lecture notes on Pinget, Cocteau, Baudelaire. A story collection called Cacti and Succulents, three copies. Music notes for Monday Night At Home, a radio piece. An early artist book called Suckling Herd, hand-written on a blotting paper book, with tipped-in extracts from the Farmers' Journal.  

Dizzying.

NOT READING BUT FLYING

I knew as I neared the end of Inland by Gerald Murnane, that I would immediately start reading it again now I was attune to the shifting forms and spaces, multiple identities and unfulfilled histories, now I was a fully-fledged reader, I wouldn't need to keep re-reading the beginning, as I did the first time, to settle, as I thought, questions of who was where and in what language, between which rivers, with a view of what kinds of grasslands, inner and outer. This time I would not need to settle anything. As I began, I found I was turning the pages with the joy of dream-flying, Look! no hands, on a bicycle, the glorious understatement of the moment when horses no longer gallop but are said to break into a run.

The boy-man between two streams, on the grasslands, the same and different grasslands, same and different girl-woman, many names, many plants, a science everywhere if you're looking, the more you look the more enraptured and uneasy you become. Gerald Murnane, like Proust, like Virginia Woolf, makes you inhabit your own thoughts in the guise of his. The hungarian puszta, the faux american prairie, the grasslands of Melbourne County, the grasslands beyond where you live, between two creeks that flow down the map but never join up. People live between them and are fashioned by them, they have been ousted and must resettle between another pair of creeks, the same and different. As every person is many people, every name many names, every word many words, every grassland multiple within and without. There is another world but it is inside this one. Gerald Murnane kneads this Eluard line across several pages, stays with it, plays with it in the middle of the book, and we, his readers, often invoked, stay and play too. The room in which we read splits slightly for a moment to show what's inside.

When we were driving around Australia I wrote down the name of every creek we crossed. When I drove round North America in 1980-1, south from New York, west from New Orleans, north from L.A,  east from northern California, I noted all those You Are Now Entering boards at the edge of towns with name, elevation and population. Entering Ideal, South Dakota, elevation 12, Population 57. 

LITTLE WOMEN KNOW THEIR FABRICS

On foot of seeing the last half hour of a film adaptation of Little Women the other day, I started reading the book for the first time since I was maybe ten or twelve. On page 37, a word leapt off the page: spandy. Not sure I've ever had the experience of a word coming to greet me in quite that way, sharp and clear after many many years. I must have liked it when I was twelve or so. I may not have seen it since. According to the OED it is American English and first appeared in 1830. Frequency: 0.01 in a million. Louisa May Alcott comes up as one of the prime users.

The two older girls are getting ready to go to a party. They'll have to wear their poplins, and be presentable.

"Girls, girls! have you both got nice pocket-handkerchiefs? "Yes, yes, spandy nice, and Meg has cologne on hers", cried Jo. "I do believe Marmee would ask that if were all running away from an earthquake."

The March family are poor (somewhat fallen, one gathers). There is much discussion of clothes, especially Meg, the oldest, and Amy, the youngest. Dresses are referred to by the fabric they're made of. The word tarlatan caught my eye later in the book, and my ear. Their poplins, or pops, are the older girls' best  dresses (they yearned after silk, Meg did anyway), there was tarlatan in summer and gingham with sashes. Always gloves. Jo is impatient with all this. As Louisa May was too. But you have to know your fabrics whether you're a little woman or an incipient boy, awkward and antic, always losing hairpins. Dresses were made by a dressmaker then, and mended by the owner. The fabric was the thing, not, as now, the label. There were no labels. If there was a burn or a tear at the back of your dress, you spent as much time as possible against the wall. If one glove was less than perfect, you wore one and carried the other.

By page 239, Meg has her first silk dress. The impossibly sweet Beth has recovered from scarlet fever, the absent father, who has also been ill, has returned from the war. It's a cloying tale. Too much principled goodness, too much Marmee in her corner, faithful servant Hannah, wonderful neighbours, Mr Laurence and grandson Laurie, many references to The Pilgrim's Progress. Goodness winning through, whatever you were wearing.

Louisa May Alcott, like many of her readers, took refuge in Jo, up in her attic, reading and eating apples, playing with the rats — yes. Whenever I have thought of Little Women since I first read it, I have thought of Jo reading and eating apples in the attic — I forgot the rats.

FOU T'SONG PLAYS SCARLATTI

Fou T'Song was the first Chinese pianist to become well known in Europe. In the eighties I saw him on tv playing Scarlatti with such gentleness, his face seraphic. I was new to tv and this was one of its early moments, along with the bbc adaptation of Henry James' The Golden Bowl and The Old Grey Whistle Test.  Later I bought the Scarlatti CD and listen to it when I need to bring the days to size in the early evening. Fou  T'Song is good for managing your reading in deepest January, snowdrops nearly out, frog spawn beginning, lots of indoor time with upstairs reading, nighttime reading, reading in the bath. A great deal of my being is spread out over these books and New Yorkers, Hortus, the newspaper before you light the fire with it, to say nothing of the label on the organic milk, etc. Fou T'Song brings it all together, Eileen Myles' Working Life, mine, Elizabeth Strout's, Elizabeth Taylor's. Elizabeth Strout has said that when she meets people she absorbs their molecules and that is how she is able to write her characters. Elizabeth Taylor, half a century earlier, english rural middle class, does not have the concept of molecules. Eileen Myles does  not have the concept of character. She is on her own planet. I absorb their molecules, all of them. Often on the same day. That's where Fou T'Song and his seraphic smile come in.

NEW DOWN PILLOWS

We bought new down pillows about a month ago, after years in a pillow desert, and since then, uniquely I think, I have read all the novels of Elizabeth Strout that I have, which is all she has written bar about two, with my head resting on these soft, minimal yet full, pillows, either before I go to sleep or by way of interlude during the night. She has inhabited her people and I inhabit them in turn, buoyed by the new pillow and the sleep it will surely bring. It is only now I am on the most recent novel Lucy by the Sea, which is very much about the pandemic time, that I'm getting impatient, as I think I did when I first read it: this is too close to what I know, it doesn't matter that it's Maine or New York. In fact, knowing the characters from earlier books adds to the sense of familiarity: these are people I know, neighbours almost, and their story has become too familiar. Yes we were all united by the pandemic but I didn't want to be. I dislike the feeling of being united by anything. I prefer the condition of detachment. This is what I am saying, as Elizabeth Strout would say — she likes these little emphases, this disarming writerly presence which is both insistent and apologetic. Detachment is easier if the stories are of the past, like LP Hartley, whom I also re-read often in large doses, or Elizabeth Taylor, a more recent minor addiction, both of them early to mid-twentieth century. If I want to feel united, it is not with a society, it is with those strange and already themselves detached creatures like Virginia Woolf or Clarice Lispector. With them, not with the society they might depict along the way, I feel at one.

Aghia Galini, 1966

Lynne Tillman's Motion Sickness by page nine pauses at a hotel in Aghia Gallini in Crete. I stayed in a hotel in Aghia Gallini in 1966, it was two and six for a room with a bed, one and six for a mattress on the terrace, one shilling for a space on the terrace. Thin old women in black came down from the hills with sticks and cheese. I thought I'd rent a tiny cottage and look over the sea for a winter, write in a rocky landscape. There was a lot to absorb that year and far away by a sea the place for that, in a language I didn't understand. Sea urchins among the rocks. 

Lynne Tillman, thirty or so years later, stays on her shady balcony in Aghia Gallini, for fear of the Cretan sun. She is aware of her neighbours, Australians, and a New Zealander.

The New Zealander yells down that we should have a drink. He has a bottle, he says. Of what, I wonder, but don't ask. I say, I'm reading but all right. I don't know why I put it that way— 'reading but all right'. Perhaps I meant to suggest that his visit ought to be short.

Online now Aghia Gallini  looks like average tourists in shorts viewing the merchandise as they go down to the harbour. 

Lynne Tillman is in Bologna Paris Venice London Amsterdam and Agia Gallini. I am there too, passingly, by proxy and in my own right. We share the same motion sickness, or at least some of the same comforts.

I feel out of place and know that I'm right to feel out of place. Travel unsettles the appropriate. You're bound to be inappropriate. Which is probably why I don't feel the intense embarrassment some do at not being able to speak foreign languages correctly. It seems to me that one of the privileges of travel is never to fit in. And not to fit in, not to be able to, is a kind of freedom.

MYLES AND STROUT

I've read, for now, I've read chelsea girls and "working life", I've read the life of Eileen Myles these past weeks, a saturation that sounds like her truth and therefore nearly mine, while I'm reading her, or just after. 

In the middle of the night I read Eliz. Strout. I'm on Anything is Possible which is what you need to hear in the middle of the night.

STROUT AND MYLES

Strout at night and Myles by day, Elizabeth and Eileen, my two companions as we trumpet into winter in a strong northerly wind, sun barely up, ever, neighbours on the rampage, other airborne infections breeding fast.

Elizabeth Strout probably too young for Woodstock. Eileen was there, witnessing the end of America. 

But Jimi Hendrix was the best. It spelled destruction. it was so sour and noble. His Star Spangled Banner was the end of America for me. We were through with it. It was the most ironic end of an empire song any culture ever played for itself. I was so glad to be there to hear it. To know it was over.

It's important to feel when you're young that something is over. If something, everything, is over then you can do anything. Elizabeth aka Olive Kitteridge aka Lucy Barton has less an end-sense than a slow, not-even-rueful backwards look and coming to terms. Eileen is always in an endgame. A drinker and a brinkster.

I always heard a little voice yell my name just before I lost consciousness. I thought my death would be this way.  I loved it.

Elizabeth constructs herself among the stories of others' woes. Whether or not you can say you're trash. Why your brother paraded in women's underwear over his clothes. Now and then you — I — feel you've touched base. With Eileen you touch base every ten lines. With Elizabeth it's deferred, deflected into the lives of others. Eileen is onto it.

You can't force a story that doesn't want to be told. It was that kind of year .... I couldn't have handled anything less. I was going down to get some coffee and the Boston Globe to make me be something. Everything I did was something to fix me. With all my heart I was trying to be dead.

Lucy Barton is in hospital. Her mother has come to stay. There are startling revelations and long pauses in their conversation. Subtle, careful sentences. Where Eileen barks, bites into epiphany, Elizabeth moves quietly, and the devastation, for being hidden, is acute.

This is the rhythm that suits as we head into the winter solstice. I would like to be out more but it's freezing. 

WINTER

I've read Olive Kitteridge and Olive Again by Elizabeth Strout before going to sleep for a couple of weeks now. Olive taking residence at the back of my brain through new pillows, inside and out. I might ask, why is it comforting to give residence to Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout's creature of contrasts. Her confrontational empathy and plainness of thought. After Olive there is Lucy Barton, and Lucy Barton's Mom. 

This is my nighttime occupation.  I need to replace the current contents of my head with someone else's dramatic personae, their doppelgänger, my repository. 

Last night, after a sweet/sour night away in Kerry, I read a chapter of My Name is Lucy Barton and next morning read it again. Elizabeth Strout's narrator cannot bear the sound of a child crying in desperation. She can read the levels of children crying: tiredness, crabbiness, and desperation. 

It helps me to sleep, knowing that someone else can distinguish between the levels of crying in children, and will change carriages in the subway to get away from desperation. 

TANGO - FLEUR JAEGGY AND EILEEN MYLES

Fleur Jaeggy, swiss smooth and chilled, now partner on my private dance floor to Eileen Myles, open american and rough, both writers of hyper-aware short books. I bought The Water Statues and For Now in London, two short neat books, almost the same size. My favourite kind of reading. You read them once you read them twice, you look over them again for sentences that correspond to you in your inner receptive spaces.

I hadn't read Eileen Myles before. For Now is a talk she gave at Yale in 2019, who bought her archive. She is conversationally endearingly blunt. 'I have a very definite feeling that I am simply living ...' Living, thinking, copying is what she does. She is blunter than Fleur Jaeggy and blunter than me by a poet's mile. She talks and she talks and meanders with intent.

If you ask me to tell you why I write it probably has to do with this deep comfort/discomfort of being in the world and this option of devotion. If I want to sit here and copy all day that might be the best option available to me, it's not an anti-depressant and it's not exhilarating and it's not aerobic but it is a form of chanting and I do do it for religious reasons. I mean it's my default position.

Fleur Jaeggy's comfort/discomfort is far more processed. The eponymous water statues, collected in a flooded basement, are the carriers of her history. This is an intense, prickly, non-linear book of terse little chapters, often only a page, unheaded, beheaded. If a tale is told it's told in ice and avoidance, as in certain families, where the only alternative to ice is the slush or marshiness after a slight thaw. 

Beeklam, her main character, as a child wished to live as though he'd drowned. 

He was once again persuaded that his life was passing, had passed, and this made him rejoice while admiring the efforts of his fellow creatures, of the Dutch population with their firmness regarding the radiant pinnacles of domestic comfort —such home-sweet-home settings made his heart sink, so much happiness he was happier living without.

How writers try to characterise their own strangeness. This is the tango's turn and poise. These are defiantly singular writers, with what Fleur Jaeggy calls a theological ability to live alone. 

Eileen Myles would say it differently. She returns often to the question of 'my writing', 'that fuzzy category', what it is and when she is doing it, like now, writing a talk to be given at Yale, and if not how to say what it is. About thirty pages into the book, the talk, in a long sentence of a page and a half, she does what sometimes a writer of our ilk has to do, she says what writing feels like, how it is never ease, how it is perched in relation to this other thing called living.

I was ready to write a tango of Fleur Jaeggy and Eileen Myles, a splendid non-pair, I thought, to share a dance floor, when a chance re-reading of an unfinished piece about a radio programme called 'Monday Night at Home' from 2008 made me think how I might finish it, and, into my mind fresh from a long sleep on the bookshelves outside the bedroom, came a book I bought in Paris called Sur Un Air de Scarlatti. I may not have read it for decades but I often think of the title and occasionally notice the book on which I put an orange cover since its own was decrepit, using paper with which I made chinese lantern lampshades for my otherwise charmless flat in Paris. 

Sur Un Air de Scarlatti by Edmond Jaloux is from 1928, printed on soft watermarked paper with uneven edges, dark woodcuts settled into the page and dropped capitals in orangey red at the start of each section. I have always known, without looking inside the book to remind myself, that it was a tale that had slipped effortlessly into my state of mind after I found it in a box outside a secondhand bookshop further along the rue Durantin where I lived. Yes, I thought the other day, the radio programme in my story could somehow end with that. The narrator, who already shares a number of my tastes, could have this one too, whatever it was.

Something to do with the french language, with being a young and dream-filled passionate reader looking for as many truths as possible on the page rather than on the street — though this being Paris the street had truths of its own — I was in a nearly constant state of heightened receptivity, devoured by my own emotions, like the narrator of this tale who goes to Venice in search of more indifference, greater calm, less involvement, and feels he's succeeding until, on one of his nocturnal walks he finds a garden where a a violinist is playing the Scarlatti sonata, a mysterious young woman accompanied by visions that he too can see, visions of a century before, 'cette nostalgie d'un Paradis de verre filé dispersé depuis le Déluge', and finds himself ensnared as never before.

So, shall I leave my radio announcer, Thom Katch, happily stranded in Edmond Jaloux's Venice, chasing visions and the light dream of a happiness without intoxication and without tomorrow?

Junk Percussion, Roger Turner

1966 or 7, in the vast social space Sussex University had in its early days, Ginger Baker was doing a drum solo and I was right in front of him with Roger Turner who was right in with Ginger Baker's long frame, swift arms and hollow cheeks, the shifts and witching of the drum kit registering in his head with a precision and a passion he has spent the last half century refining and expanding. He was reading Ginger Baker and I was reading him.

And now I've read his book, Junk Percussion, an illustrated inventory of some of his instruments, and a reflection on the musical possibilities of junk, as well as, in the epilogue, a brief history of how sound exploration entered his bloodstream, via the Goon Show, via a mother who'd grown up in Palestine and sang Arab songs, and a wide array of jazz records brought home by an older brother. The first concert he went to was the Coltrane Quartet with Eric Dolphy, and Elvin Jones' drumming 'started to occupy my senses like rays from the planets'.

I remember going to a car salvage yard with Roger in the eighties. I was focused on whatever part my car needed, while Roger was darting about looking and tapping things lightly with his long reach, within and without, his eyes lighting up at the myriad prospects of half-dismantled cars and their viscera spread about on the ground, getting the antennae focused and spotting the future territory. 

His assemblage of instruments is a delight. The reader slips into the pleasure of using what others have discarded, finding the multiple musics of rubbish, chains, forks, bicycle bells, saucepan lids etc, slipping the unpitched into the pitch of manufactured instruments, 'playing inside the detail of the music'. I like that phrase for its sudden insight into the way percussion works with voice, other instruments, or melody, as if an inner voice were coming through, one that could bring flurries of electricity, send a light shock through what's there, or give an interlude of nearly pure interiority.

There's an episode late in the book, the last piece in the inventory, on the subject of the charms of paper and the like, one of the most ubiquitous forms of rubbish we create. Roger and a saxophonist were on their way by ferry and car to a concert in Brussels, when they were stopped by border police and Roger was asked, on a bright windy day, to empty his drum case, which contained 

...  masses of different kinds of paper of different lengths, colours and qualities. There were crumpled foils in silver and gold, and rectangles of silver paper, mirror-like, a dozen or more different kinds of poly-bags, with supermarket and specialist shop labels in various languages, winking at us all, some filled with polystyrene packing-beans blowing around, escaping into the air, gift-wrappers scrunched or rolled ... The paper was performing, blowing up in festoons of waves and the poly-bags filling with air, swirling and trying to get airborne ... The two policemen stood staring at the action. What was going on? ... We are musicians playing a concert tomorrow at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels,' we declared, 'This is all percussion, I added, waving my arm around generously to include the fields and trees. 'Just listen...'

The right moment to read Adalbert Stifter

Back from London, ill in bed, of all the books I bought I chose Adalbert Stifter, Motley Stones, in order to occupy on the page what I could not occupy outside. I read it in two or three days and then read it again, the fixity of the view outside my window expanded into Stifter's scrupulously described landscapes in 19th century Austria, one pulsing after another, along with snowstorms, hailstorms, fires and floods. 

The stories are embedded in the landscape, people are participants in their landscape, their work is elemental, they are shoemakers, dyers, tanners, fullers, they grow food and keep bees, they walk everywhere, know their rocks and their mountains, which streams overflow in a storm. Principal characters often show halfway through the story, or later, as dark interruptions to the Biedermeier charms of the narrators and their families, hairline cracks that turn into full-blown disaster.

Stifter doesn't like commas, nouns run along the rill of the line as if their togetherness matters more than their particularity. He repeats himself often, as if addressing children. Maybe this is comforting to the reduced reader. And peaceful. All is as it should be in the burgeoning bourgeois world, in the manor house, the castle and the trades folk's comfortable houses. At the same time all is not all right. In almost every story there are stranded, shy, reclusive stray folk who cross these lives and send shivers through them. In Stifter's life too, there are dark corners, we assume, a large unhappy man who lived too well after early writing success, who did not achieve anything like the gemütlich family life he often described, and cut his own throat with a razor. 

Clarice Again

Last week I made for Clarice Lispector like a homing pigeon. Hour of the Star has fed my inner writerliness for many years. I read it every year or two, when I want to situate myself between the beginnings of a story, with its thin, rachitic main character, and the eager, awkward writer, not entirely sure what she's doing but doing it anyway.   

It's peaceful to read stories like those of Rachel Ingalls or Elizabeth Taylor, and sometimes sleep inducing, which is a boon, but the possibility of sharing pages with a writer who writes from way back inside the fount of things may calm me even more by making me feel less alone.

A book is not just its pages, it's also the writer and her presence, even her face. Clarice Lispector, with her wonderful name, has for me an aura as powerful as Beckett or Kafka.

Mrs Caliban

In the context of Rachel Ingall's Mrs Caliban, very few mention Shakespeare's Caliban in The Tempest, scion of the witch Sycorax, a sad monster endowed with some of Shakespeare's best moments:

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises. Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not. Ready to drop upon me; that, when I waked, I cried to dream again.

Mrs Caliban is Dorothy's married name. Or is it? Her husband is hardly Fred Caliban, no monster he, only ever referred to as Fred either going out the door or, briefly, coming back in. Their marriage is shaky en permanence. 'I think we're too unhappy to get a divorce', says Dorothy to her friend Estelle, divorced herself.   

This is not Beauty and the Beast. It's the unhappy wife, grieving lost children and much else, who finds an equal soul in Larry, a 6' 7'' man like a frog escaped from a brutal institute where scientists  purported to study him. Dorothy and Larry come together very soon after they have met, in the way of dreams. He comes in through the back door, 'a gigantic six-foot-seven-inch frog-like creature shouldered its way into the house, crouching slightly, and staring straight at her face'.

Larry and Dorothy adapt rapidly to their secret life, as we adapt to dreams, sounds and sweet airs. Whether it is or we want it and so it is, or it is only as long as we want it and then the frog-like creature goes back to the Gulf of Mexico, or it never was, except —

I started the book again after I had finished it, to see where, how, in the housewifely life, you cross from unhappiness to dream.

Narratives, stories, tales

The word narrative has something controlling about it; story is cosy; a tale is recessive, mossy. 

We live in an era of narrative. Narrative sells. We all have one, whether or not we know it. These are the structures that shape our ends. Though actually, reading Elizabeth Taylor in the middle of the night, shaping sleep is what I'm trying for. The fascination of the weave should put me out, I hope.

In town today I sought out Elizabeth Taylor and Rachel Ingalls, both writers who have been resting for many decades, as actors used to say, 

I choose old narratives and their trappings because it's more peaceful. I do not want to read narratives of now, of Ireland. Why? To read its current fiction is to take on its history, the assumptions that underly it. 

The assumptions that lie beneath Elizabeth Taylor or Rachel Ingalls I grew up with. I didn't' know them, they were absorbed through the young soles of my shoes up and down Maldon High Street. I have no desire to write the fabric of Maldon High Street; or of Inniscarra, County Cork. I want to island myself on this island. 

READING IN THE BATH

I  read the New Yorker in the bath for the plaisir de luxe, today the story by Lore Segal, 'On the Agenda', a few women friends who meet, or not, and go some way towards structuring their encounters—shall we talk about forgetting? and then abandon, disperse. Lore Segal is ninety-five. Different rhythm and weave, but the same bumpy-jolty as other moments of life, different uncertainties, varieties of diffidence, deeper perhaps with age, and warmer.

It turned out to be easier to stay at home—not to have to leave the house. Then, one day, Ruth e-mailed everybody to ask if anyone would mind if they took a hiatus. Nobody minded, and it has become easier to not have Ladies Lunch. For now?

I have no idea, in truth, of this kind of late-stage camaraderie, the ability to condone, to commune and then withdraw. But I like reading about it. Grace Paley, she who occupies several of the steps up to my room, Clarice Lispector, Virginia Woolf, they all give me this feeling. The steps up to my room are well-occupied, slightly worn. 

Storm Agnes came through and had me running for shelter. 

 

A CHANGED SEASON

Junot Diaz wrote a chopped-about page about a chopped-about life, his Dominican-American languages knifing through the lines. Drown, his first book, is 160 chopped-about pages. At first you want to check his glossary for the words you don't know, then eventually you go along with these holes in the text. There's an honesty in a hole. We all have these penetrable/impenetrable words, rocker words, rocking chair words, cushions, pauses, old words so full of meaning they might just as well have none.

I have had his book for twenty-five years but not re-read it till now. Timeliness is all. The chance of a glance along the bookshelves in a changed season. 

THE READING DIET

When fully preoccupied with my own words, I seek out the words of others in strangely precise and precisely strange doses. More stories than usual. A plot is relaxing, after all, an end is an end. Rachel Ingalls does me well for that. She weaves tales, and the tired head is susceptible. One day, floored by a heavy head, I read all of Binstead's Safari and marvelled at her persistence with the lion theme, wondered if she'd been on safari herself or just read/seen Out of Africa.  

Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World —the title surely editorial, opportunistic— Barry Lopez' essays arrived and I scanned them for recognition moments. Did not quite find them. I was put off by the devoutness, the prayer—killer words. Flatteners, anyway. I haven't much liked travel writing unless very old, like Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey or Arabia Deserta, that glorious piece of desert English written and lived by Charles Montagu Doughty at the end of the nineteenth century.

Barry Lopez getting in wood for heating, choosing those he works with, growing old, pacing himself, writing himself into his life, and out of it, that I can read. Part of the reading diet is this flat speak, days of my life, very managed, convinced, less a confession than a table of contents.

In the bath I read an article in The New York Review of Books about Jean Eustache. More than Binstead's Safari or Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, I felt at home. By proxy. I have read more about Jean Eustache than seen his films. I cannot distinguish the two. 

Utopia, or Anything is Possible, Steven Millhauser, Richard Jefferies

The background of my reading for the last while is the sequence of eight wall panels we have been constructing on the subject of Utopia. People wrote, or didn't write, their idea of an ideal society, and I edited, jiggled and conjured a series of texts out of their imaginings. 

At the same time, mostly before or during sleep interludes, I was reading Steven Millhauser and Richard Jefferies, nearly a century apart. Steven Millhauser's story 'The Dream of the Consortium', the department store story, has an ending that pleased me. When you have exited the nearly infinite store, you are still not out of it.

Overhead, the avenue-wide strip of sky is brilliant blue. As we hurry along the sidewalk, we have the absurd sensation that we have entered still another department, composed of ingeniously lifelike streets with artful shadows and reflections—that our destinations lie in a far corner of the same department—that we are condemned to hurry forever through these artificial halls, bright with late afternoon light, in search of a way out.

Richard Jefferies, nearly a century earlier, I came to via the Faber Book of Utopias. The editor took Utopia at face value: no place, including good and bad. Richard Jefferies battled with good and bad. Just as William Morris did. 

Amaryllis at the Fair, the second piece in my Everyman Library edition, stems from a desire to set down his early life, good and bad, without regard for narrative. Every chapter is static. And on the last page he leaves his creatures as he made them, idle in their rural circumstances, with all their charms and yearning on display. 'I'll leave them there', he says.

Cathay, Steven Millhauser, Borges, Summer

Borges, Steven Millhauser, Utopia. Recent reading at the end of a summer that was so little summer so long ago. I read a review of a new collection of Steven Millhauser and went back to the ones I already have, In the penny arcade, 1999. The first story, 'August Eschenberg', and the last 'Cathay', both had me. Especially the last. August Eschenberg, a builder of mechanical universes so finely differentiated from the real that you would be dead to think of it, like Flann O'Brien's Third Policeman, Borges' dreamers. These perfectly calibrated tiny worlds. 

The twelve singing birds in the throne room of the Imperial Palace are made of beaten gold, except for the throats, which are of silver, and the eyes, which are of transparent emerald-green jade.

And The Knife Thrower, 1998. Which I'll read next.  

Borges

I first read Borges' stories fifty years ago, slowly, one at a time, stopping so as to have more to read. Another one tomorrow. Savouring your goodies, your fictions, tales he has made, fashioned, fabricated, woven, in the manner of life, history and matters of fact, affairs of the mind and the book. Borges was a portal. I have lived there ever since.

No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe sink into the sacred mud, but in a few days there was no one who did not know that the taciturn man came from the South and that his home had been one of those numberless villages upstream in the deeply cleft side of the mountain, where the Zend language has not been contaminated by Greek, and where leprosy is infrequent.

I read Borges in my early twenties. I was the grey man from the South, the bamboo canoe and the unanimous night. I wrote the Zend language, I lived in the circular ruins. I dreamed and was dreamed. 

At first his dreams were chaotic; then in a short while they became dialectic in nature. The stranger dreamed that he was in the centre of a circular amphitheatre .... clouds of taciturn students filled the tiers of the seats.  .... Asleep or awake, the man thought over the angers of this phantoms, ... He was seeking a soul worthy of participating in the universe.

Worthy of participating in the universe. If you value the universe. The grey man dreamed a man — I was not, am not, bothered it was a man, not a woman or any other combination—dreamed with misgivings—without birds, in sheets of flame—every dream ends abruptly. He dreamed a man limb by limb, a man capable of walking thought fire without being burned.

For a moment, he thought of taking refuge in the water, but then he understood that death coming to crown his old age and absolve him from his labours. .... With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone was dreaming him.

PONDWORKS 2023

I was up at the pond today as soon as I saw a sunny period unfold from the northwest. Two sunny periods, in fact, separated by slow-moving cloud, in which I wrote up two complex dreams in my diary, read the surface of the water, dragonfly reflections and water skaters, plus a story by Cynthia Ozick, The French Doll, in the New Yorker, a review of the film Oppenheimer and an article about Ultra Processed Food and how Nestlé sent a boat down the Amazon to bring junk food to indigenous children who then developed diet-related diabetes as well as more lethal covid; and closed my eyes, lay flat on my back. The sun was out again. The heating was on.  

POCKETBOOK SUMMER EDITORIAL, 2023

A July New Yorker piece called Tell No Tales offered the case for stories and the case for the dark matter that makes up so much of life, swarm not story, frantumaglia, a jumble of fragments Elena Ferrante called it. All the carrying that stories do, whether to satisfy the sense of belonging to a culture, staving off death, like Scheherazade, or simply putting a shape on the magma for a while, if not a a piece of laughable metaphysical colonialism perpetrated upon the wild country of time, as Lorrie Moore said.

August is a good month for reading, and slipping off into thinking about it, thinking out from it, engrossed for a short time, numbed, and then, back to the place in which you read, the pillow as it often is, or staring into the view out of the window, the shaping to be done out there, the sycamore basal growth trimmed, the euphorbia dead bits cut off, the state of compost heaps, frantumaglia of the garden.

I have been reading William Morris again, and his ancient forebears, Plutarch etc, browsing the Faber Book of Utopias from the front and from the back.  

Then he sat down beside me and said he'd been spending the morning wrestling with the problem of speaking the truth in books; so I said, haven't you always spoken it? because that seemed to me the chief point of M's books. But he said, not much, because most of it was quite unspeakable in our world, as we found it too shocking and humiliating.

Aldous Huxley in 1930, a long short story called 'After the Fireworks'. 

Clarice Lispector, in Agua Viva, 1973, does not need the word for truth.

This is not a story because I don't know any stories like this but all I know how to do is go along saying and doing: it is the story of instants that flee like fugitive tracks seen from the window of a train. 

Clarice Lispector is a continuum under my reading. Like Virginia Woolf. Like thinning out young turnips, leaving the spare seedlings beside the row. As all our fellow-travellers go too far sometimes, it is by this excess we find ourselves.

I read Aldous Huxley because I saw a lad called Florian in Sneem with a copy of Island in his hand, which he'd got from the village book box, read, then  gave to a young Portuguese woman working in the hotel for the summer. We talked for a while about utopia and dystopia. I have never been tempted to reread Aldous Huxley: something pinched and fussy, his language reflecting the machines he feared. Always harping on humiliation. Some other story there. 

Circus Train by Joan Selby-Lowndes

Gertie gave me Circus Train by Joan Selby-Lowndes for Christmas, 1958. I wrote my name on the flyleaf. I was impressed someone had thought about me enough to choose this, and read with respect and eagerness the story of running away to sea and then travelling with the circus, being chinese and having acrobatics bred into you, the fluidity and the stillness. From very young they can all hold and then flip their bodies with grace, it's natural, it's a way of dealing with world wars and starvation. Balance and interdependence. Onwardness and otherness. Encountering that at age eleven was electric.

Joan Selby-Lowndes has little online life except for several portraits in the National Portrait Gallery. Her writing too, is pre-motor car. She could have trusted more the tale recounted live to her. Kai Yong from China, who went to sea, then learned how to spin plates, entered the circus life, married Joanna from Germany, and had children who later formed a troupe of artistes, the Yong Sisters and Brothers, spanning China, Germany, France, England, America. There were long separations, deep privations. Joan Selby-Lowndes filled in the history around the tale of Kai Yong and his family like blue poster paint for the sky and black for world wars. 

 

The Greek Sources

My friend Noreen back in the day liked to get up at six, have a glass of grape juice and check the Greek sources. She said it with intensity and conviction. I felt excluded but pleased. That anyone should do this, say this.

Reading bits of Plutarch in the early evening recalls Noreen. I start to know what a source might be. The speech of a society two thousand years ago. In the infancy of looking at yourself. Plutarch's Lives are Parallel Lives. Greece and Rome. The glory that was Greece, the splendour that was Rome. I read all of the life of Lycurgus and the beginning of Demetrius. Simple moral certitudes which don't follow through any more. 

I read the beginning of the life of Demetrius, only because my boyfriend was Demetrius in the school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream (I was Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, my brother was Puck). The art of medicine, the art of music, must consider disease and noise. 

These arts below no praise on that innocence which boasts an entire ignorance of vice. In their reckoning, it is rather an absurd simplicity to be ignorant of these things, which every man that is disposed to live virtuously should make it his particular care to know.

I get up at eight, after mint tea, and check the Inniscarra sources. 

One of the big aspens fell up at the pond though there was little wind, knocking into a myrtle and a smaller aspen, happily missing the eucryphia and the snowdrop tree. The builders, Finbarr, Mick, Will and Nathan from Normandy, plus Ambrose, heritage joiner, occasionally, are renewing the new room twenty-seven years on. And the greenhouse. Talk runs around lead troughs and glazing bars. I spray the dust off the tomatoes after they've gone. 

Plutarch's Lives — Lycurgus

'Of Lycurgus, the lawgiver, we have nothing to relate that is certain and uncontroverted', wrote Plutarch two thousand years ago. My edition of Plutarch, marbled and leather-bound, translated by the Langhorne brothers in England in the eighteenth century, has a simplicity, a clarity born, perhaps of something similar to a novelist's wishful thinking. Lycurgus was a designer of ancient Sparta. The education of youth was the greatest and most glorious work of a lawgiver, he said. He went to strenuous lengths.

A second and bolder political enterprise of Lycurgus was a new division of the lands. For he found a prodigious inequality, the city overcharged with many indigent persons who had no land, and the wealth centred in the hands of the few. Determined, therefore, to root out the evils of insolence, envy, avarice, and luxury, and those distempers of a state still more inveterate and fatal—I mean poverty and riches—he persuaded them to cancel all former divisions of land and to make new ones, in such manner that they might be perfectly equal in their possessions and way of living. 

In the late nineteenth century, William Morris read Plutarch. News From Nowhere is saturated with  ancient greece. In the early twenty-first century, where News From Nowhere was set, where we now are, stressing and steaming in late capitalism when William Morris had us bucolic along the river by now, gathering for haymaking with comely folk in well-wrought clothes, having done away with money and politics.

Lycurgus minted iron money and luxury died away of itself, replaced by simple food and lots of exercise. No unnecessary production. Joy in workmanship. Les arts décoratifs. Healthy activity in leisure time. Reading and conversation. Common sense in 1930s Europe. Lycurgus as written by Plutarch, translated in the late eighteenth century, read by William Morris in the late nineteenth century, feeds into my history. As well as a child of Hitler I am a child of common sense. 

It was not, however, the principal design of Lycurgus that this city should govern others, but he considered its happiness, like that of a private man, as flowing from virtue and self-consistency; he therefore so ordered and disposed it, that by the freedom and sobriety of its inhabitants, and their having a sufficiency within themselves, its continuance might be the more secure.

Agua Viva: Taylor Swift, Natalia Ginzburg, Clarice Lispector

This week I read a piece in the New Yorker about a Taylor Swift concert in a football stadium and how each of the audience felt she was personally in touch with their lives, each with her twinkling bracelet, her individual sparkle that came with the entrance ticket. 

I started Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector. The Brazilian singer Cazuza read Agua Viva as Bob Dylan read Rimbaud's Illuminations. One hundred and eleven times. Though Bob Dylan probably wasn't counting.

Agua Viva sounds like lively water, living water, water of life. In Brazil agua viva first of all means jellyfish. Jelly is the living agua in the water, less a fish than a shape to catch the light. And this is what Clarice Lispector wanted to capture. Her word, I think. To capture the present. She worked on Agua Viva for several years, under different titles (Beyond Thought: Monologue with Life and Loud Object) trying to get her writing in step with her life. Proceeding by accretion, boredom, urgency. breathing. 

Jellyfish are one of the fastest-growing species left to us, multiplied by our pillage and pollution of the waters around us, from which we once crawled. Jellyfish have few predators left. We have eaten them all.

Inside Outside

On Sunday morning, at the little church in Sneem, the day after the launch of our video, five people came into the church, a husband and wife, her brother and a small woman. The funeral of a son had been held there some years before. He was twenty-nine. One or two of them were bikers. There was conversation around Royal Enfield Bullets and Interceptors. We encouraged them to sit down and watch Inside  Outside, with music from La Traviata. They sat quiet, absorbing the filling and pausing of the purple net curtain, the doom and despair of Alfredo and Violetta. It's peaceful, said the small woman. Purple is a good colour for communication. Soul to soul, she meant. All of them.

A pile of books

I dreamed someone gave me a pile of books I would want to read but would not find so easily, he said, he knew how to choose for me because he had read my books, this forceful spectral reader I know so well. I looked at the pile of books and they were so right. He was right, I would not find these books otherwise. The books were right. How did I know, looking up and down the spines? Like going to a discerning bookshop every five years, lustral, you read the bookshop as you go, pausing with certitude on some half-familiar writer, moving on, kneeling down, climbing the bookshop ladder, leaving your bag on the armchair. 

All this was at my elbow without leaving my room. Suddenly the other night.

Valentino, 62 pages by Natalia Ginzburg

Up at the pond I read the whole of Valentino, by Natalia Ginzburg, 62 pages of bare story on the edge of an Italian city in the middle of the twentieth century. The story feels bare, in the sense of relentless yet gentle. People are evenly presented, in a narrative without judgement but not without feeling. At the end you feel as much for all of them, even the feckless eponymous Valentino, who was meant, his parents thought, to become a man of consequence, a doctor who would discover things and be remembered. As it was, after a flurry of schoolgirls, he marries a rich unattractive woman and has three children with her. 

His sister Caterina, our narrator, goes to live in this ménage. Her room has a pale blue carpet. She is even-handed, a schoolteacher, modest, going along with love and death enacted by others, liking the idea of sharing in the lives of others, patient as regards her own, accepting of what happens. She might marry her sister-in-law's cousin, they have an agreeable day out in the country, he drove, he wore Valentino's gloves, a woman threw a shoe at them, they ate tiny pears. A few weeks later he says he can't marry her after all, and within the year he has killed himself. His room is filled with pictures of Valentino.

Like the films of same era, it only takes a pair of gloves and a few small pears. Drawers full of letters. Walls full of pictures.      

Henry James, The Europeans

Eugenia and Felix are the eponymous europeans in Henry James' novel, siblings born in France and Vienna, but Americans, nonetheless. Europe is a dangerous spice. Eugenia and Felix stir things up when they go to visit their American cousins, Charlotte, Gertrude and Clifford in New England at the beginning of the twentieth century..

Henry James liked to deal with the crème de la leisurely crème, in New England, whence he came, or Old England, which he occupied for many years in his comfortable observer role. 

Comfortable observer is no longer comfortable.  I read Henry James when I want to be in observer mode. With pleasure and unease. As if I'm being judged by a clamorous generation in its thereness, nowness, and grievance.

Plot

I read L P. Hartley's A Perfect Woman, without any notion, or concern, along the way, about which of his female characters was building most towards perfection. As well as a certain impatience with all this plotting, this godlike holding in reserve. Resolution is a decoy. My students sometimes thought that the kind of strange literature I wanted them to read had an answer that I was withholding. It must have seemed like obstinacy on my part. But actually it was desire for them to participate.

The veg plot will tell you that. A veg plot is a patch of land you have to dig and tend in order to know. Not a complot, nor a narrative, not a story but the ground of all stories. Mythic if you like. Aristotle thought that plot was myth, and he was half-right. Aristotle needed to do more gardening.

In The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley was passionate as a shy man is; he knew it from inside. You can be passionate about uncertainty when you are twelve. It doesn't read so well in A Perfect Woman.  Uncertainty is now plot. Earning laurels as a novelist. Keeping yourself and others in suspense.

L.P. Hartley should have done more gardening too. In Losey/Pinter's film of The Go-Between, Michael Redgrave as Leo aged sixty, revisits the scene of his adolescence at Brandham Hall. He is dry, detached and sad in a gentlemanly way. This is far more garden patch, veg plot than complot, plan or conspiracy. This is the old terroir, and terror, of his very being. 

When I read about Alexander Goodrich the novelist in A Perfect Woman, I see an upbeat version of Michael Redgrave in his latter years, as novelist, detached, spinning plots that represent him more or less. I find novels uncomfortable. I don't want to have done with a book. I want to want to start reading it again. 

The Go-Between, LP Hartley

This time reading The Go-Between it was the knowledge of the 12 year-old narrator that struck me: he knew french, he knew the zodiac, he had some spells up his sleeve, he had absorbed the Rather Wrong and the Very Wrong, from his mother and his school. He was, by today's lights, a learned child. Sensitive to what was correct. Fatherless. Nothing so fearful as a fatherless child. 

Leo's passage to knowledge left him scarred. He witnessed Very Wrong in the outhouse. The landed beauty, Marian Maudsley, and the tenant farmer, Ted Burgess. Two bodies moving like one. He was dragged to the scene by Marian's mother, intent as she was on a match between Marian and Lord Trimingham.

I think I was more mystified than horrified; it was Mrs Maudsley's repeated screams that frightened me, and a shadow on the wall that opened and closed like an umbrella

L.P. Hartley wrote The Go-Between out of his own needs and memories, a painful crooked truth he could only tell this way. Leo's breakdown happened on his 13th birthday.

During my breakdown I was like a train going through a series of tunnels, sometimes in the daylight, sometimes in the dark, sometimes knowing who and where I was, sometimes not knowing. Little by little the periods of daylight grew more continuous and at last I was running in the open; by the middle of September I was considered fit to go back to school.

After The Go-Between I started A Perfect Woman, also by L.P. Hartley, something to read at night or up at the pond. A lesser book, a pot-boiler perhaps. But I enjoy this grown-up Leo, L.P. Hartley, taking on suburban England: an accountant and his wife and their two tidy children, Jeremy and Janice, who play at farmer and trespasser in the back garden. Trespass: Rather Wrong. The accountant's wife, Isabel, is up against Irma, the Austrian barmaid. 1950s repression its painful. 

Here on the hill in Inniscarra, the weather is as hot as it was in Norfolk where Leo was checking the temperature daily. He sometimes met Mr Maudsley there. They would converse about expected temperatures. If you wanted to know about things like spooning, you asked Ted Burgess That was not what Ted and Marian were doing. It couldn't be. Spooning was not intrinsically Very Wrong. And yet it was.

.... the tidings of Ted's suicide came to me voicelessly, like a communication in a dream.

His fate I did know, and it was for him I grieved. He haunted me. Not only in the most dreadful way, by his blood and brains stuck to the kitchen walls, but by a persistent picture of him cleaning his gun. The idea that he had cleaned it to shoot himself with was a special torment to me; of all the thoughts he might have had while cleaning it, the thought that he was going to use it against himself must have been the one furthest from his mind. The irony of this was like an arrow to my spirit.

Unfair reading

I went up to the pond on yet another clear sunny day with a book that P bought recently, a writer on writing, and one of Maurice Scully's vols of poetry. The writer on writing I'd never heard of, Amina Memory Cain. Maurice Scully I knew for maybe twenty-five years. He died earlier this year, so I have been reading him again to find him on the page. Amina Cain has read a number of writers I have read and liked, but I could not find any echoes of their power or indeed any echoes of anything much. My reading started picking up the kind of speed that bespeaks giving up. 

I turned to Maurice Scully's Tig, which means house in irish. And in that house, the pages of that house, I splashed about. The less there is on the page the more gymnastic the reader. Making shapes out of what isn't there. Making games of what is there. Household games. Games of where you are right now.

it's a game in hide & seek/or dip & pursuit/quite formal/ too /  see/saw

The best I could find in Amina Cain is that she had a cat called Trout, as we did also. 

We have complex patterns of affiliation. This much I understand.

Etel Adnan (1925 - 2021} ( Lebanon, Paris, California) explored the same zone. She sat in Paris cafés and kept reflecting, pushing here and there. She wrote and painted and corresponded. 'Her childhood in Lebanon had been so fractured that there was no single audience, no way of communicating fluently, freely.' (NYRB, 'A Life of Sheer Will', Yasmine El Rashidi), and when she went back there in later life she felt exiled from her exile.

I am always away from something and somewhere. My senses left me one by one to have a life of their own. If you meet me in the street, don't be sure it is me.

I'm sure it's her on the page. As Maurice Scully is there on his pages, wanting to exchange his days for ours, and ours for his.

There are prodigious absences on his pages, on hers. These are the places that the reader resides. In the white around the black of the letters. 

The morning after/my death / we will sit in cafés/  but I will not / be there / I will not be.

Reading the beach

The day I go to the beach without a book is the day I read the shallows. After all the dogs and most of the people have gone home for lunch, we move down from our grassy spot onto the beach. P goes off to look for a stick and I stare into the shallows, prop my feet up on the awkward yellow stones. There are spectral young shrimp or prawn amid new growth seaweed. It's a rough stone beach you have to clamber as much as walk. The best is propped up on a rock staring into shallow water.

Do I read a beach near Kilmacaloge as Fleur Jaeggy, as Ingeborg Bachmann? They are company, for sure. 

Ingeborg Bachmann, suite et fin + Fleur Jaeggy

Ingeborg Bachmann leaves a reader uneasy, unended, upended, suspended. I didn't want to get to the end and I did, early this morning. Almost immediately the question is what to read next. Fleur Jaeggy was Ingeborg's friend. They spent time together. I'll re-read Brother of XX. 

Fleur Jaeggy leaves you frozen. She is Swiss. But relieved. She writes these short, fleshless pieces and then she is relieved. For now. 

Once with Ingeborg we talked about old age, she smiled at that word, but that word was accompanied neither by the heart nor by a real smile. I imagined a longevity without death, a house in the country, a wall. I described to her the external architecture and I bound her with a rope. And a garden within the walls and again I said to her the two of us. I was terribly convinced. A headstrong conviction about what doesn't come true.

Up at the pond, Fleur Jaeggy reads as a substrate of pond life. Pond skaters on the surface tension, caddis fly larvae in their pine needle cigars, tadpoles with spectral legs, dust of millions. The dancing flies are dancing low over the water today. You can't follow any one of them for more than about five seconds. 

On the 31st July, we left Rome by car, an Alfa Romeo 2600, for Poveromo-Forte dei Marmi. Ingeborg Bachmann manned the road maps. It seemed like a great voyage, with Poveremo  further away than Vienna and Klagenfurt, where we had already been. But now we were to spend a month together. Already that could be a mental voyage: cohabitation, prefiguring. The house we had rented was vast, with a garden. But the water was salty. Our first pot of tea was disgusting. 

Ingeborg Bachmann, continued

I read Part Two of Malina with bated breath. This was the hinterland of a woman and her father, every page or two a new, sharper, worse image to absorb. I read a few pages at a time. Homeopathic treatment in the middle of the night. Treat like with like. Father with Mother. War with Peace. Everywhere with Nowhere. 

Ingeborg Bachmann asks a lot of her words, her sentences, her readers. We have to be ready for her dreams. For her father. 

Malina shall know everything. But I decide: they shall be the dreams of this night.

 Part Two of Malina reads like a long night of the soul, born in Carinthia, raised in Vienna, shifted to Italy, smouldered and expired there. 

Suddenly, atop a polar summit from which there's no return, I am able to shout: a book about Hell. A book about Hell!

Rachel Kushner in her introduction says:

Once you're in, you're in. You're not decoding. Towards the end you're racing along, deep in the rhythms of the narrator's thoughts, which are bone-true and demonically intelligent—and I mean it would be a real burden to be that mentally acute, it can't go well for a person to know that much  ...

When I was about thirteen or fourteen I had a system to induce sleep. When I shut my eyes there was an afterimage, often black and white, jagged in a fifties way, which was War. If I was to get to sleep I had to replace War with Cream, which was silky and slow.   

Part Three I read up at the pond on a sunny, unslept, afternoon. I paid great attention to the tadpoles, fishing out one or two in my palm to see the tiny legs emerging. Part Three, back in daily life with Malina, who is particular about how his egg is cooked for breakfast, concludes that she was murdered by her father, in a manner of speaking. Whether or not she told Malina is irrelevant.

I like books that I can inhabit, without judgement or comparison. This is my society, my hinterland.

Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina

I came to Ingeborg Bachmann through reading Fleur Jaeggy. 

On the 31st of July, 1971, we left Rome by car, an Alfa Romeo 2600, for Poveremo-Forte dei Marmi. Ingeborg Bachmann manned the road maps. It seemed like a great voyage, with Poveremo further away than Vienna and Klagenfurt, where we had already been. But now we were to spend a month together. Already that could be a mental voyage: cohabitation, prefiguring. The house we had rented was vast, with a garden. But the water was salty.

Though we cannot know what it is to be a bat, as Thomas Nagel said, we can imagine what it is to be part of a culture, the two of them meshed in the Italian afternoon, with the rest of Europe behind them. Ingeborg and Fleur in Liguria. But the water was salty. Tilda Swinton striding through as Virginia Woolf's Orlando. Jacob Taubes in Vienna, sucking on his pipe, his philosophies. Me in Paris, in 1968, learning how to yearn in french.

On page 40 of Malina, there is a piece of young writing ecstasy.

A storm of words starts in my head, then an incandescence, a few syllables begin to glow, and brightly coloured commas fly out of all the dependent clauses and the periods which were once black have swollen into balloons and float up to my cranium, for everything will be like EXULTATE JUBILATE in that glorious book

One night in Paris, May, 1968, I got up in the middle of the night, washed, dressed, put on earrings, got out my diary and wrote six or seven visionary pages.

That night I knew what it was to be Ingeborg Bachmann, though at the time I did not know of her existence. 

Literary Taste and how to form it, Arnold Bennett at Blarney Car Boot Sale

After walking up and down a few rows at the car boot sale at Blarney GAA grounds, this May Day morning, already in a stupor of looking, I decided on a plan. I would find a book and go home and read it, preferably up at the pond. 

I could have bought Beach Reading, Sport, True Crime or Sebastian Barry. A Farmers Journal from 1965.  Literary Taste And How To Form It, With Detailed Instructions For Collecting A Complete Library Of English Literature, by Arnold Bennett. This was the only real possibility by halftime.

It's exhausting isn't it, I said to our neighbour in the clubhouse, tea and a fairy cake, a ham sandwich, strip lighting, photos of the teams. You'd need it, we agreed. There's more than buying and selling going on here. There's wholesale extrusion of lives, coins, ashtrays, 40-pack toilet paper, set of ware two euros, a lawnmower to try out, record player to play. A rusty saw, Pointless. Must be art. A boy with a blue trumpet blasting his way down the rows. Plates of chips slathered in ketchup and mayonnaise, A plastic dog rotating, a joyless buzz of pink on damp grass. Oil painting with a hole in it, of two apples. Now at our kitchen table.

Dandelions Kawabata

 I'd forgotten April could run as deep as this, in an easterly that picks up in the afternoon, so the first attempt at reading up at the pond — Kawabata's Dandelions — was an uncertain affair. I saw two whirligig beetles. Pete is cutting paths in the woodland. The meadow hardly needs a path. Yellow rattle is established more and more.

We're struggling with our stewardship in the season of dandelions. Trying to fix roofs and making mistakes. Living with them. The roofs and the mistakes. Rough and Roof are kissing cousins. 

Kawabata's dandelions grow around the Ikuta Institute where Ineko has been committed. As her mother and her fiancé leave the Institute, they are told that when they hear the 3 o'clock bell Ineko will be ringing it and that they'll hear her through the bell.

Her fiancé and her mother discuss her case. They are staying nearby in an old inn, in the season of dandelions. They have heard that dandelions open in the sunlight and close at night, but they aren't sure that's the case. 

It is. 

Ineko's illness, somagnosia, is the centre of Dandelions, plays out off-stage, acknowledged by a temple bell. The novel wasn't finished, or has no finish. Two people are talking about the condition of a third, Ineko, who plays ping pong and sometimes loses sight of the ball, makes love with her fiancé and sometimes loses sight of his body. 

This is a time to read books that have no centre of gravity.

The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles

A hundred and forty pages into Paul Bowles'  The Sheltering Sky, Port Moresby — his name takes a long time to say — is taken to the best place in Aïn Krorfa, a village — wrong word — in southern Algeria, where he and his wife Kit would stay a few days. 

If in doubt go south. There's always doubt.

There's a blind dancer at the café that night, a woman of perfect proportions, supremely impersonal. 

A dance is being done. I do not dance because I am not here. But it is my dance.

Port Moresby is an American going south in the Sahara after the war, with Kit and their many valises, her lizard-skin shoes, evening gowns, her Helena Rubinstein. Their relationship with luggage under the sheltering sky is the basso continuo of this tale. Under the sheltering sky there are patches of fur in the rabbit stew and other nightmares. Mosquitoes and flayed babies. 

I know, said Port absently, 'I hate it as much as you.'

'No, you don't. But I think you would if you didn't have me along to do your suffering for you.

They went to North Africa after World War Two, from New York. This is what restless existentials were doing around the time I was born. I liked deserts as soon as I was in one. The emptiness, the expanse, the sky, the music, languages I didn't understand, the silence, real and imagined. 

For many years I confused The Sheltering Sky with Reach For the Sky by Paul Brickhill, he of the great escape and the dam busters. Port Moresby is named for the capital of Papua, New Guinea, a creature of the existential era, fellow of Camus and Sartre, sentient in a pool of inertia and restlessness after the Second World War, an American in Africa, horrified by cockroaches and filth, pressing on into the desert. 

'You know, said Port, and his voice sounded unreal, as voices are likely to do after a long pause in an utterly silent spot, 'the sky here's very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it's a solid thing up there, protecting us from what's behind.'

Kit shuddered slightly as she said: 'From what's behind?'

'Yes.'

'But what is behind?' Her voice was very small.

'Nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night.'

 In absolute night, eventually everything would happen. Port would die of typhoid fever, slowly, on the floor of a room in a fort. Kit would lock him in, to die his own death, and she'd go south into the desert she feared, with all kinds of adventures with natives, as she and Port called them, as if she were appeasing his death, or her own.

Weights and Measures, Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth's novels happen on the fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where people live by accident, almost; they hadn't meant to come here, or were on their way somewhere else. In Weights and Measures, Anselm Eibenschütz, formerly of the eleventh artillery regiment, is sent to a small municipality next to the Russian border as Inspector of Weights and Measures. He wanted to stay in the army but his wife, also accidental, wouldn't hear of it. 

The Inspector spends much of his time in a border tavern frequented by vagrants, thieves and Russian deserters who drink mead and 99% schnapps, which is illegal, and eat sausage, horseradish and plates of salted peas, occasionally bursting into songs that, far from celebrating their new freedom, bewail instead their lost country, as they drink themselves into a stupor. 'Ja lubyl tibia', is their favourite. 

I googled the song and found a rendition by Alexandra https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEZ3WCYCxCc. Here, suddenly, was the music, the hopelessness and diffuse yearning of my forbears, I recognised all the shifts in pace, the scoops of emotion; the border country of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was pulled back from its remoteness into my rarely revived sense of origin. 

I read most of the book in a single day, in refuge from bad weather and insomnia, sinking slowly with Anselm Eibenschütz into the decay of his marriage, the vanity of his job, his infatuation with Euphemia, the gypsy girl, his decline into drink and eventual death.

Joseph Roth died of drink, in Paris, in his forties. He writes with a warm cynicism. Of the origins of the wiliest character in the story, Leibusch Jadlowker, owner of the border tavern, he says:

Rumour had it that Jadlowker had fled from Odessa because he had slain a man with a sugar-loaf. As a matter of fact it was hardly a rumour, it was almost a truth.

This is where a life is lived, between rumour and truth, in countries whose borders are permanently in a state of deliquescence. Anselm Eibenschütz wishes he'd never left the cavalry. The order of the army is such that one doesn't have to face the central void. Whereas the Inspector of Weights and Measures constantly faces the fact that no one's weights and measures are correct. The central void is everywhere.

Affinities, Brian Dillon

If I had gone the way of writing thinking books instead of poetic/creative books, I'd write like Brian Dillon in Affinities — and most of his other books — informed by the same impulses, not critical but digressive, sympathetic, reaching for those images and words that have impinged on him and fed him, many of which, especially the words, have also fed me: William H. Gass, Maggie Nelson, Wayne Koestenbaum. 

I start to compile my own book of affinities. Jean-Pierre Richard on Baudelaire's taste, for example. Virginia Woolf. Certain humans, bereft somewhere, bring certain sensations, phenomena, to bear on their creative lives, and are at least momentarily replete. There would be more music, more landscape, in my list.

On holiday in Portugal, as I read Brian Dillon, on this or that bed or beach, P. read The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abrams, which I glanced at, read a sentence or two, and felt that people like him, like David Abrams, academics and professional intellectuals, create a professional distance.  

Brian Dillon inhabits what he is writing about. There is no problem. Images and words compose him: affinities are what he's made of, instances of himself-in-others that he can recognise.  

There are ten short essays on affinity, in among pieces on writers, photographers, and the more personal affinities, not all of them understood with gratitude. Eccentric aunts. Family in general. Wayne Koestenbaum's 'ruinous attachment to the opening theme of Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15.'

This affinity, says Koestenbaum, is a kind of crush, and like a crush it tends to mark one out for the moment as faintly mad. The one who feels an affinity embraces knowingly, eagerly, his or her own madness and stupidity, idiocy. Affinity exiles us from consensus, from community.

Like Brian Dillon, I write for as long as the mood is on me, stop when it shifts or vanishes. No sense of a structure or a goal, or even that I've said all there is to say. Impossible, she says. Like the streets of Olhão, wriggling behind the waterfront, now crumbling, now wedding-cake, there is only an end when you give up looking for one.

'I'll side with what I can't understand'

Natalia Ginzburg, All Our Yesterdays

 I finished Natalia Ginzburg, All Our Yesterdays, on the last day of our holiday in Portugal, and was left wondering how she gave us a sense of intimacy with these people, and the war, and the land, without ever seeming to dwell long enough for us to know them, the people, the war, and the land. Yet there is an insistence, as people appear and disappear, marry unsuitably or oddly or not at all, grow old or die or think about how dying would be all right if it happened. We don't need to be told what people's feelings are because the onwardness of events takes the place of individuals and the feelings they might have. Or feelings are not the point. Onwardness, history, the interleaving of people, not even families particularly, any mesh of friends, neighbours, acquaintances. There's a coolness, distance, a looking outward at the broad flow of events, marriage, a baby here or there. Writing is a way of keeping going, not involving, urged by detail, little teeth like a wolf, a mother who works in a cake shop, or arrives from foreign parts with chocolates, goes away to school.

The quietly main character, Anna, becomes pregnant at 16, and marries an older man, a friend of her father's, who tells her a number of times, as most descriptive things like the little teeth of a wolf or a crooked smile or hair like chicken feathers, are said a number of times, that she is an insect and he just a big leaf on which she rests. He hoped she would become a strong woman but she was still an insect who didn't know how to do anything except perch on a big leaf. He is killed at the end of the book, at the end of the war, by the Germans. So, her big leaf gone, with one of her brothers and one of the family from across the road, she considers the long war and the sorrow and noise and confusion, and the long difficult life which they saw in front of them now, full of all the things they did not know how to do.

The chapter when Anna is dealing with, or ignoring, the fact that she is pregnant, about halfway through the book, is one of the few internal moments.

She thought how she had neither father nor mother, and how she had found her brother dead on a seat and how she had a baby inside her. But she had not the courage to tell anybody about the baby, nor had she the courage to go and look for a midwife in the town. It seemed to her that she would have courage only for starting a revolution.

The internal shifts quickly to the external. From the baby inside her to the revolution she might start. This is how we determine what is important. Abruptly. At times you'd least expect.

Our holiday went into a third week because we missed the plane home. There was a strike at the airport. The next day I started reading Natalia Ginzburg again, at first just sentences or paragraphs here and there, then outright I was reading the whole of the second half again, unwilling to leave these people behind, finding the emphases with pleasure, the insect face, the crooked smile and the little wolf teeth, threading the book like pearls.

READING AS WAITING

Two books, by Natalia Ginzburg and Brian Dillon, sit untouched on the windowsill downstairs. I bought them for our trip to Portugal and have kept them unopened. Meanwhile, a Raymond Chandler story, Goldfish, a few (unsatisfying) stories by Graham Swift. Most compelling might be the Rough Guide to Portugal, well out of date by now, but full of the charms of the partially unknown: town squares we'll sit in and vistas we'll absorb from hilltops and balconies. 

Graham Swift's Learning to Swim & Other Stories must have been the follow-up to Waterland, which I liked back then for its wet fenland intrigue. These days, his language seems flat and over-expansive. The undertow is on view. There's a completion I don't want and often don't wait for.

'Goldfish' I read by the stove upstairs, published for the 60th anniversary of Penguin, 60p for 60 pages, written by Chandler whose work is so filmed that his words leap off the page and into the stance of Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum, words for actions, and then the laconic pause that marks the end of one story and the start of another.

Natalia Ginzburg, whom I have been reading on and off for the last number of years, has no completion. You get in, stay a while and get off at what might be the stop at which you began your trip, yet you have travelled a long way to get here.

Brian Dillon's new book Affinities I imagine reading in the Hotel de Moura, a blue and white convent at the foot of the Great Lake; then later in front of the Forte de Sao Joao da Barra in southeastern Portugal, lying on a sandbank, facing south.

TROPISMES

Tropismes by Nathalie Sarraute has been on the floor near the stove for some months. I read one or two, puzzled, my knowledge of the french language functional but unhelpful. I read in the passing way of the insomniac, uncomprehending and and sometimes content, sometimes irrritated. Then, one evening, I read one or two pieces and recognise something. Clic. Déclic. Myself, namely. The rage—or is it relief?—of Caliban seeing himself in the mirror. 

Nathalie Sarraute writes in a silence broken by the light scratching of her creatures, nameless and close by at all times. People on the side of themselves. To the side. Recounting the little they can say, she can say, as they grow. It only takes a couple of pages. 

Quand il était petit, la nuit il se dressait sur son lit, il appelait. Elles accouraient, allumaient la lumière, elles prenaient dans leurs mains les linges blancs, les serviettes de toilette, les vêtements, et elles les lui montraient. Il n'y avait rien. Les linges entre leurs mains devenaient figés et morts dans la lumière.

Maintenant qu'il était grand, il les faisait encore venir pour regarder partout, chercher en lui, bien voir et prendre entre leurs mains les peurs blotties en lui dans les recoins et les examiner à la lumière.

I AM WHERE I THINK

"I am where I think." Elif Batuman explains.

Literature, in short, looks different depending on where you read it: a subject I found myself discussing one afternoon over lunch, in a garden overlooking Tblisi ...

Elif Batuman is american of turkish origin. She is reading russian literature in 2022 in Ukraine and Georgia. 

Gogol's story 'The Nose', in which a nose detaches from its face and becomes an independent being, takes on a glaring meaning in the context of Putin's Russia. Gogol was from Ukraine but wrote in Russia, in russian. Ukraine is the nose on the face of Russia.

My grandparents came from Ukraine, Moldova and Latvia. I grew up in England. I identify with no country, only the patch that I tend and the books I read and write. I live in Ireland, an island at the western extremity of Europe, at the edge of the known world, which spills off the left-hand side of old maps and feeds my innate detachment. 

I read Elif Batuman's article in the bath. Descartes is upended. Afloat. I think therefore I am, becomes, I am where I think.

We need to find new, "contrapuntal ways of reading", she says, and I think of the many tangoes I have experienced reading a couple of books at a time. 

There is no better place than the bath for taking on new ideas.

You are so comfortable they are immediately ideas you've always known.

The Middle Voice by Han Kang

I read The Middle Voice, a story by Han Kang, mostly in the middle of the night, where the middle voice speaks.  The middle voice is a greek third voice, reflexive, as in the english 'he hanged himself'. 

Perhaps insomnia is a method. Learn and suffer are nearly the same in greek. What I read in the middle of the night I read exclusively. Nothing else is going on. The world is mute and you are humming peacefully.

The woman in Han Kang's story has long episodes of being unable to move her lips, speak, She writes. Or someone writes. Her son calls her Thickly Falling Snow's Sorrow. His name is Sparkling Forest. 

A korean woman learns classical greek in order to take refuge in another language. To learn its economies and poignancy. To test her own speech. 

No, she says, it isn't that simple.

VERTICAL READING

Not long after I started a diary, I changed my handwriting to something less schoolgirl, more monk. It made my life feel more vertical, more intense. The onward flow of days was matched by the downward pull of calligraphy. This was where I lived. For sure. 

Casey Cep in The New Yorker reviewed The Wandering Mind by Jamie Kreiner, a study of monkish attention in mediaeval times. Their efforts look both 'riotously strange, yet ....  annoyingly familiar'. How far do you have to go to concentrate properly? 

Thirty-five years on top of a pillar. Twenty days without sleeping. Sixty years living next to a river and never once looking at it. 

What does it take and what are we looking for? Something worthy of our attention, somewhere to rest.