New Voice

“to weigh and consider”, Francis Bacon (the essayist, not the painter)
“the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface”, Roland Barthes 

I cannot aspire to becoming one on whom nothing is lost but, by way of this diary I do hope to cease being one on whom almost everything is lost.  I will follow my fellow blogger Eugene in declaring my intention to make this a regular, perhaps weekly post, in an effort to shame myself out of idleness, and to catch hold of some of those impressions that flit by as I read my evenings away.     (continue reading…)

Faithful  readers, I hope you can forgive the rather prolonged period since we’ve added new content to these pages. Our excuses, as usual, are many and varied. The absence of new material on the site, however, does not arise from indifference or complete laziness, though drunkenness may be a factor. We, at New Voice, do not believe in forcing out a weekly post, just for the sake of it. We are a considered, reflective bunch, and so, over the last few weeks we have been reading, reflecting, considering themes and developing a store of comment, impressions, argument and aside to which we will be subjecting the reader over the coming months.  (continue reading…)

 In a number of my posts over the last year or so I’ve mentioned the difficulties writers have combining ideas and narrative – uneasy bedfellows as Coetzee writes in Elizabeth Costello. Coetzee himself is one who combines both well, lately adopting a kind of Centre Pompidou method – exposing the ideas he is attempting to explore, rather than attempting to hide them inside fictional scenario.  J.G. Ballard is someone whose daring and vivid ideas and imagination tend to outstrip his often pedestrian, flat prose and awkward plotting. Martin Amis often talks about the need for a writer to get a character from A to B – the details of mundane logistics that a writer, carried away by staging the big set-pieces that will dramatise his ideas, often ignores or stumbles over.  (continue reading…)

Secular Sundays would like to apologise for the lengthy delay since the last posting. The usual excuses apply – laziness, drunkenness, parenthood, obsessive running, existential angst, and sport on TV. Reading, however, is the main reason, and a new DeLillo is always a valid excuse for doing nothing else. Some may claim the size of the great man’s slim new offering is not sufficient to offer up as an excuse for keeping one from anything else, but as explained in David O’Connor’s post, there is more contained in the 115 pages of Point Omega than in most 300 page novels. (continue reading…)

 ”Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson 

There is a great deal to go on in Don DeLillo’s taut, contemplative new novel (or novella) Point Omega, only some of which I will comment on here.  I have no wish to review the book, or summarise its contents.  In the opening pages the author, always an accommodating if often misjudged, guide, teaches us how the book should be read, and how much can be gleaned from its apparently slim leavings.  A lone figure in the cool darkness of a gallery space is focusing on the art installation 24-Hour-Psycho: “It was only the closest watching that yielded this perception.  He found himself undistracted for some minutes by the coming and going of others and he was able to look at the film with the degree of intensity that was required.  The nature of the film permitted total concentration and also depended on it.  The film’s merciless pacing had no meaning without a corresponding watchfulness, the individual whose absolute alertness did not betray what was demanded” (p5).  His stillness is contrasted with the other visitors “wandering … in a daze” (p3).  (continue reading…)

Towards the end of his follow-up to The Smoking Diaries, The Year of the Jouncer Simon Gray mentions going to see a film called  Look at Me, “the idiotic title of the French film Comme une image”.  He goes on to describe this “freak of a film, full of intelligent and civilized people behaving to each other as such people frequently behave to each other, egocentrically, thoughtlessly, narcissistically, with mainly accidental but sometimes deliberate cruelty, all of them perfectly observed in their smallest reactions…”.  I’ve seen the film in question, and he’s right, and justly celebrates the “everyday sort of treachery” that forms the basis for a “marvellously painful moment” in the film.  (continue reading…)

First of all, Secular Sundays would like to wish everyone a happy new year and all that. We dip a toe into 2010 with trepidation, here at New Voice. We can’t say we are all that optimistic, politically or economically speaking. Literature, however, is another matter, and we are prepapred to plunge into the literary waters of 2010 with the wild abandon of the Christmas Day lunatics at the forty foot, promised, as we are, new work from DeLillo and Amis. Following on from the glut of work by heavy hitters the like of Roth, Auster and Banville (though we didn’t like the Banville at all) and Carver and McGahern, released at the end of 2009, we can’t really complain, although we’d love something new from Cormac McCarthy – if anyone has heard anything on this front they might let us know. We had a moment of panic a few weeks ago when we noticed (I’m not sure why I’m sticking with the ‘we’ instead of ‘I’, the stout I’m consuming, perhaps) a headline announcing his auctioning of his typewriter for charity. Apparently somone bought him a new one, though, for a fiver or something, so hopefully we will get something before long. In the meantime, we must make do with the film version of The Road, which we await, again, with some trepidation.
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The team at New Voice would like to wish our readers all the best for the Christmas, and we hope that there was some decent literature under the tree, or at least a book voucher or two. I would also like to announce the arrival of the newest voice on the team – Ruadhán Tomás Farrelly – nearly two weeks old and already showing clear signs of being a literary genius.

I am too full of turkey, and there are too many unopened bottles of Tyskie in the fridge, (not to mention the fact of a new baby demanding attention) for me to spend too much time typing this week. In fact, I just want to alert readers to some Christmas TV – the excellent Orson Welles season on BBC 4 continues this evening and ‘The Dead’, John Huston’s fabulous rendering of, arguably, the complete (perfect?) short story is on RTÉ tomorrow evening. As Fintan O’Toole wrote last week in the Irish Times, it is impossible now to read ‘The Dead’ and imagine Gabriel as anyone other than the magnificent Donal McCann.

Finally, some words from James Joyce to end 2009 – chosen, from ‘The Dead’, for absolutely no reason other than their simplicity and beauty:

The patting at once grew louder in encouragement and then ceased altogether. Gabriel leaned his ten trembling fingers on the tablecloth and smiled nervously at the company. Meeting a row of upturned faces he raised his eyes to the chandelier. The piano was playing a waltz tune and he could hear the skirts sweeping against the drawing-room door. People, perhaps, were standing in the snow on the quay outside, gazing up at the lighted windows and listening to the waltz music. The air was pure there. In the distance lay the park where the trees were weighted with snow. The Wellington Monument wore a gleaming cap of snow that flashed westward over the white field of Fifteen Acres. (Dubliners, Triad/Grafton p230)

I wrote, in the first of these posts on Carver, that I would address the question that Eileen Battersby was moved to ask, upon her reading of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and Beginners, side by side – why Carver allowed Lish to cut the book in the way that he did, why he didn’t fight for the original version of the book. It is a somewhat naïve question, and there are a number of answers, or a number of aspects to the answer. One I have addressed – some of the cuts worked. There is, or should be, nothing unusual in this, it does not mean that the author is not as good as we thought he was, it just means that the editor is doing his job. (continue reading…)

Reading the Carver and Lish versions side by side proves an exercise as irritating as it is interesting: one wonders at how Lish could possibly justify what is best described, solely on the comparative textual evidence supplied here, as a slash and burn approach to editing. (Eileen Battersby, ‘Raymond Carver in his Own Words’ Irish Times, Sat Oct 31 2009) (continue reading…)