Recently Read…February 12, 2012

Haruki Murakami – 1Q84.  Knopf, 2011. 1Q84 is a 925-page love story overlaid with Murakami’s patented version of Magic Realism and populated with Murakami’s quirky characters.  As each of the main characters slip out of the world of 1984 Tokyo and into the 1Q84 world of Murakami, they find their lives suddenly threatened by a mysterious religious cult, and they spend most of the novel trying to figure out what role they play in this new topsy-turvy world, where two moons brighten the night sky, where Little People emerge from the mouths of the dead, and where other, equally strange events occur.  1Q84 functions as a kind of group detective novel, with each character, acting in isolation or in pairs, trying to deduce or intuit the meaning of each new revelation.  As the book comes to a close, the pace picks up as the various missing pieces of the puzzle start to fall into place.

John Muckle, London Brakes.  Exeter: Shearsman, 2010.  (I’ve previously written about Muckle’s photo-embedded novel Cyclomotors.)  The aptly named Tony Guest is a motorcycle courier in Thatcherite 1980s London.  He knows his way through the city and its environs, but he can’t connect the dots within his own life.  He and an assorted group of mates work, hang out, drink, smoke a little dope, and have run-ins with the police, all the while buffeted by political winds they scarcely see or acknowledge.  They know they’re stuck where they are; nevertheless, they talk wistfully about change and make lateral moves to a new employer, a new flat, a new roommate.  But Tony is a bit different.  He has slightly larger dreams and a higher level of self-awareness.  He reads, he can talk philosophy and, unlike the other couriers, he rides a vintage bike.  But this only serves to shove him awkwardly to the edge of his own crowd, who sense his desire to move outward and upward as a slap in the face.  In the end, Tony’s ambitions aren’t strong enough to protect him, they only add to his sense of guilt.

“You’re some sort of super-intelligent dope smoker.  Educated, though you pretend not to be, and you’re from a working-class background, like us.”

“How do you know?”

“I can tell.  It’s obvious.  What I want to know is what’s the big mystery about everything, to you?  Because as far as I’m concerned there isn’t one.  I mean, life seems very mysterious when you’re young.  To some people, anyway.  But basically, it isn’t.  Anything that seems strange, or interesting, has a perfectly ordinary explanation.  A boring one.  That’s what I’ve found, mate.  And this is my point.  You’re intelligent.  You’re not stupid.  So why go skulking around acting as though everything’s some big mystery?”

Julio in Jaipur

- for Teju, who was just there (see for yourself)

In 1972, Julio Cortázar published a small book called Prosa del Observatorio (Barcelona: Lumen), about his visit to the 18th century observatory built by the Indian Maharaja Jai Singh  in Jaipur.  Last year, the non-profit publisher Archipelago Books unearthed this little time capsule and released it in English translation for the first time as From the Observatory.  Cortázar’s text is a strangely beautiful prose poem in the guise of an essay, using the fabulous architecture of the astronomical observatory as the launching point for a text that twists and flows through time and space.  Accompanying his text are nearly forty of his own photographs, disorienting images in which light and shadow sculpt the monumental astronomical structures into architectural and landscape fantasies that seem to emanate from the stories of Borges or the frames of Last Year at Marienbad.

To my eye, From the Observatory bears the unmistakeable birthmark of the year in which Cortázar visited Jaipur – 1968.  As student protest movements erupted in Paris and elsewhere, Cortázar wandered among the structures of an astronomical observatory built 250 years earlier, trying to imagine a new, pantheistically-infused philosophy that could derive its moral power from the same immeasurable forces that created and energize the universe.  And his Möbius-like text invokes a continuum between the micro and the macro, between mortality and the infinite, between the the night sky and its twin black galaxy beneath the surface of the oceans.

To Cortázar, Jai Singh was “a guerrilla of the absolute,” more explorer than scientist.  He was a small-time Maharaja who stood up to more powerful figures, a man who turned to astronomy in order to avoid the “astrological fatality that guided his lineage.”   But instead of “organizing the cold chaos,” as Cortázar put it, Jai Singh engaged “in a slow, interminable copulation with a sky.”

I know Jai Singh was with us, on the side of the eel tracing his planetary ideogram in the darkness that distresses the hair-pulling science…Jai Singh knows that a thirst quenched with water will return to torment him, Jai Singh knows that only by becoming water himself will he stop feeling thirsty.

Sebald Events February-March 2012

“Festival W.G. Sebald: Politique de la Mélancolie” will take place in Paris at Centre Pompidou from February 22 through MARCH 12.  Participants include: Muriel Pic, Martine Carré, Jean-Christophe Baill, Martin Rueff, Ulrich von Bülow, and Jürgen Ritt.  von Bülow will apparently speak about the Sebald archive at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach.  According to the website:

Valérie Mréjen launches an investigation into writer W.G. Sebald and his work. Following upon the “lecture-performance” and the “spoken painting” that previous editions of the Festival have introduced as new and viable genres of contemporary art, this forensic investigation calls upon the ghosts of the past to cast a glimmer of light on the unknown future. 

“The SIP Re/View # 2: W.G. Sebald” will take place in Tel Aviv on March 5, 2012.  According to their website:

The Shpilman Institute for Photography and Holon Mediateque (Israel) are proud to announce The SIP Re/View # 2: W.G. Sebald, an interdisciplinary event dedicated to the works of noted German writer and scholar, whose work continues to resonate in contemporary art and culture.  The evening will begin with a panel of local artists and writers: artist Zvi Goldstein, psychoanalyst, artist and art-critic Itamar Levi and The SIP’s research manager, Dr. Romi Mikulinsky will, present three perspectives about Sebald’s evocative use of images and photography as vehicle to convey and distort meaning.  The event will feature keynote speaker Grant Gee, acclaimed documentary film-maker and director of Patience (After Sebald). This multi-layered film is narrated through a walk through coastal East Anglia whilst tracking Sebald’s  The Rings of Saturn. Gee will host an open debate with the public, following a screening of the film.

The event will also present a temporary library, focusing not only on Sebald’s work, but also on contemporary reactions in art, culture and literature, featuring the works and writings of international creative forces. As well as history and architecture books, special photography books and art manuscripts will be presented at the mediatheque during the first weeks of March.

Robert Walser

“Festival Robert Walser” will take place March 19-24 in Newcastle Upon Tyne.  A number of familiar names – including Jo Catling – will appear.  From their website:

One of the most remarkable artists of the Twentieth Century, the Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) has had a huge influence on a long list of literary, artistic and philosophical figures from Franz Kafka to Walter Benjamin, W.G. Sebald to J.M. Coetzee, musicians such as Heinz Holliger, contemporary visual artists from Fischli & Weiss to Billy Childish, and filmmakers including João César Monteiro, Percy Adlon and the Brothers Quay.  In recent years, international interest in Walser’s work via a growing number of world class translations has generated a wealth of new writing, artwork and critical discussion which continues to explore Walser’s unusual legacy.  The Institute Robert Walser will use Walser’s multi-disciplinary appeal as the basis for a week long arts festival in Newcastle upon Tyne in arch 2012. The festival will bring together local and international writers, academics, performers, musicians and visual artists. Participants include: Billy Childish (artist/writer/musician), Roman Signer (artist), Daniele Pantano (writer) Luke Williams (writer) and Jo Catling (translator/academic). The festival will also serve to showcase the extraordinary cultural and artistic diversity in the city of Newcastle at this time; it will be launched on March 19th at Newcastle City Library and will take place across a range of venues.

Happy travels!

Memory’s Gravitational Force

There are images from Patricio Guzmán’s 1970s documentary trilogy The Battle of Chile that are still engraved within my brain after more than three decades.  And I suspect that three decades from now I will still be able to recall images from his latest film Nostalgia for the Light (2010).  In the intervening decades, Chile has entered a period of official forgetting, of “turning the page” on the massacres and disappearances of the Pinochet regime.  So instead of being a documentary of politics and violence like The Battle of Chile, Nostalgia for the Light is a more restrained, steadfastly philosophical film about remembering and the necessity of recovering and telling the painful truth about the past.

Guzmán interweaves three concurrent, but independent narratives occurring in Chile’s Atacama Desert: the search by astronomers for clues to the Big Bang and the origins of life, archaeological discoveries about the area’s pre-Columbian inhabitants, and the search for mass graves and human remains from the more recent past of the Pinochet era.  To the searchers on the desert floor, the research in both astronomy and archaeology seem to promise reassurance.  The archaeological storyline seems to suggest, among other things, that the search for truth will continue on long after the parents and wives and other relatives of the disappeared ones are gone, that one day in the future the desert will eventually reveal its secrets.

But it is in the world of astronomy, which takes place high in the mountains of the Atacama, where Guzmán really develops powerful and poetic parallels with the people who walk the desert floor down below, straining their eyes for bone fragments.  As astronomers have recently discovered by analyzing their spectra, certain supernovae are full of calcium, the very calcium that is found in bones.  Thus, the tiny pieces of bone scattered across the desert floor are directly linked to the explosive and every-changing universe, suggesting that we are part of an endless cycle of birth and death and rebirth.

Comparison between two calcium lines in the spectra of stars

Near the end of the film, Guzmán talks about the power of memory.

I am convinced that memory has a gravitational force.  It is constantly attracting us.  Those who have a memory are able to live in the fragile present moment.  Those who have none don’t live anywhere.

Nostalgia for the Light is a most Sebaldian film.

Tracking Patience

Grant Gee’s excellent documentary on W.G. Sebald Patience (After Sebald) is starting to appear in cinemas across England.  It will have a short run at the ICA in London from January 27 through February 2, with Gee appearing on the 27th.  Details here.

If you are near Manchester you have a chance to see Patience and meet Grant Gee on January 29 at Cornerhouse.  It’s just a single showing as part of a series put on by the New British Cinema Quarterly.   Here is the link for more details.  The website includes a very brief video clip that manages to give a bit of the flavor of the film.

The NBCQ series moves on to London where Patience will be shown at Curzon’s Renoir Cinema in Bloomsbury on January 30.  Once again, Grant Gee will make an appearance at the showing for Q&A.  Details here.

The BBC has also posted a five-minute audio piece about the film.  Grant Gee talks for a bit and Andrew Motion reads a poem about Sebald.  Listen here.

American audiences will apparently start seeing Patience in theaters starting in late April, distributed by Cinema Guild.

And the film’s soundtrack by The Caretaker has just been released as a vinyl album and a CD.  Buy here (and sample three of the tracks).

And eventually, I am told, there will be DVDs of the film for sale.