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.    
 Independence of mind and an insistence on pleasure are both at the heart of what reading can and should be.  No matter how firmly established or canonically secure an author may be (not excluding those I’ll be stealing from), we must approach them as Emerson advises: “He is to approve himself a master of delight to me.  If he cannot do that, all his fame shall avail him nothing.” 
This attitude prevents the occurrence of such absurd situations as the one so riotously sent-up in Witold Gombrowicz’s comic masterpiece Ferdydurke.  In the novel, the 30-year-old hero reverts psychologically and (it seems) bodily to his teenage years, appearing back in the classroom, where the master questions another pupil on the source of a poet’s greatness: “Oh, yes, explain and demonstrate why the great Slowacki awakens our love, admiration, and ecstasy.”   
The master proffers his own answer before allowing the boys to speak: “Hm!  Hm!  Hm!  Well, then, why does Slowacki arouse our love, admiration, and ecstasy?  Why do we weep with the poet when we read that angelic poem In Switzerland?  Why does exaltation swell our breasts when we listen to the superb and heroic stanzas of The Spirit King?  Why is there no escaping the magic and seduction of the Ballardina?  Why do the sorrows of Lila Weneda rend our hearts?  Hm!  Why?  Because, gentlemen, Slowacki was a great poet.”  End of explanation.  No more need be said so the master turns to one of the boys:  “Walkiewicz, tell me why!  Tell me, Walkiewicz.  Why the enchantment, the love, the tears, the exaltation, the magic?  Why are our hearts rent?  Tell me, Walkiewicz.”
Wily Walkiewicz, his keen survival skills well-adapted to their surroundings, is poised and ready with the response: “Because he was a great poet, sir.”  And yet, the teacher reckons they haven’t got the message, so persists: 
“He was a great poet, don’t forget that he was a great poet.  Why do we feel love, admiration, delight?  Because he was a great poet, a great poet.  You ignorant dunderheads, get this firmly fixed in your heads and repeat after me: Jonas Slowacki was a great poet, a great poet, we love Jonas Slowacki and his poems delight us because he was a great poet – and because his verses are of an immortal beauty which arouses our deepest admiration.”
Unfortunately, (but not for the reader) one of the students, Kotecki, is in possession of an independent mind and feels inclined to put it to use:  “Heaven help me, sir, but how am I to be sent into transports of delight if I am not sent into transports of delight?”  This does not go down well:  “For heaven’s sake hold your tongue, Kotecki,” says the master, “you’re trying to ruin me.  No marks for Kotecki.  He doesn’t realize what he is saying.”  Gombrowicz clearly sides with Kotecki, as the boy is a reader, whilst the master teaches by rote. 

 
Edmund White, in his memoir of life in 1960s and 1970s New York, City Boy, experiences the same pressure to admire those with established reputations, yet, in his case, the pressure was self-applied.  He remembers questioning his own “intelligence and dedication and sensitivity” every time a “great” work failed to move him, or rather, he failed to be moved by it: 

“Although in my own way I, too, was moving toward the personal through my writing, I was never entirely convinced it was the right way.  I still idolized difficult modernist poets such as Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, and I listened with solemn but uncomprehending seriousness to the music of Schoenberg.  Later I would learn to pick and choose my idiosyncratic way through the ranks of canonical writers, composers, artists, and fimmakers, but in my twenties I still had an unquestioning admiration for the Great – who were Great precisely because they were Great.”   
Whilst reading City Boy over the past few days I also reread Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text, in which the (dead) author encourages exactly the type of self-confident reading White lacked.  We should, he says, follow Nietzsche’s advice and ask the question: “What is it for me?”  I’ve found that most of my favourite writers would agree.  This makes sense, I think, as I’m sure few people write so as to hear the words of others echoed back unaltered or unchallenged.  They are, rather, enacting an advanced form of what Barthes called “applied reading”, or what Harold Bloom calls “misreading”. Even such a seemingly untheoretical novelist as John McGahern, in his book of essays, Love of the World, describes writing as an “extension of reading”.   
But how are we to know if it’s us or the work that’s deficient?  Who can tell whether a more sustained, concentrated or even guided application to a difficult work of art will be rewarded?  I can only answer by way of avoiding the question.  Just as Martin Amis has been saying in recent interviews that writing is freedom, so, to me, is reading.  And being free is, contrary to the cliché, not easy.  “How free we are”, Emerson remarked: “inside, – the terrible freedom”.  Unless we wish to content ourselves with what Barthes identified as the two moralities of modern life: “platitude” and “rigor”, we must be willing to risk wasting time, to be disappointed, to be attacked and scorned, to be inconsistent, to change our opinions, to be wrong. 
With that in mind I must take issue with some of Barthes’ suggestions.  He claims that a writer is “deprived of fixed meanings”, a victim of polysemy.  But what would Shakespeare be without polysemy.  Othello would be nothing if not for the multiple meanings of the word “honest”, its variations and inversions.  Without polysemy there is no metaphor, no figurative language.  Blindness and sight in King Lear would mean next to nothing; there would be no Lear, no Shakespeare.  He is, as George Steiner says, our greatest poet because his words bear more weight and more meaning(s) than any other writer’s. 
Also, as a (one-time/some time) structuralist Barthes is forced to assume that because a term exists, so too must its opposite.  He argues that the label “dominant” in “dominant ideology” is redundant, as all ideologies dominate.  There are, he insists, no “dominated ideologies”.  This type of thinking can, however, be dangerous.  Stephen Sedley, in a recent London Review of Books article entitled “Enemies of all Mankind”, demonstrates how such logic allowed the younger Bush’s administration to invent the term “unlawful combatant” to classify those prisoners who were interned without trial, and deny them the rights due to “lawful combatants” under the Hague and Geneva Conventions. 
At times Barthes, the translated Barthes, sounds like Wallace Stevens rendered in a kind of technical idiom:  “there is not, behind the text, someone active (the writer) and out front someone passive (the reader): there is not a subject and an object.  The text supersedes grammatical attitudes: it is the undifferentiated eye which an excessive author (Angelus Silesius) describes: ‘The eye by which I see God is the same eye by which he sees me.’”  To me this is not too far from Stevens’ lines: “The reader became the book; and summer night/ Was like the conscious being of the book.” 

 
Darkness Visible, William Styron’s account of his depression or, what he’d rather term ‘melancholia’, begins with an author’s note, and then on the title page, a quotation from Job: “For the thing which/ I greatly feared is come upon me,/ and that which I was afraid of/ Is come unto me./ I was not in safety, neither/ had I rest, neither was I quiet;/ yet trouble came.  He goes on to describe in convincing detail his experience of mental illness, striving to convey how it feels to “plunge” into a “despair beyond despair”.  This book should be read.  Like Barthes Styron attacks platitude and jargon, and is alert to what is lost when a politically correct vocabulary is allowed to obscure the truth of certain afflictions, going so far as to deny that they are indeed afflictions:  “Our perhaps understandable modern need to dull the sawtooth edges of so many of the afflictions we are heir to has led us to banish the harsh old words: madhouse, asylum, insanity, melancholia, lunatic, madness.  But never let it be doubted that depression in its extreme form, is madness.”  If meanings are as uncertain in life as in literature, then we must do all we can not to add to the confusion.  Styron manages to get across to the reader, without any hint of self-pity, some of what a sufferer goes through.  Having recovered from his illness, he ends with the line from Dante, in Italian, then English: 
E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.
And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.

Whole acres of searing months have dissolved since my last post. Well, ok, just under two months has past with a distinct lack of writing on my part. I would obfuscate and manoeuvre and say things like – I was so busy, don’t you know how it is; or, My God, but where did the time go. Unfortunately, the truth is more accurate, I was finishing out a series of books that I had been plodding through and with no firm conclusions made on the subject matter I did not have any posts wandering around my mind. But, of course, now I do. Well, Newsweek, in all its genius, has helped.

There is so much news that floods the airwaves it takes serious effort to maintain a link to the pulse; pages of paper news, volumes of television spiel. Within the crowds of information on show, I have once again been absorbed at the mess that is the North Korean despotic state. Literally, for no apparent reason, they blew up a South Korean submarine – something that could quite easily, and surely in almost any other place in the world, cause a war. Except, in the Korean peninsula the sphere of influence is carried by China – a nation at startling odds with the standard interpretation of foreign policy. Very little, if anything, China does on the Global stage – bar currency manipulation – makes any sense whatsoever. For example, they attended the Copenhagen climate change talks and turned up with powerless bureaucrats that did not even have a mandate to approve anything significant. Bizarrely, they appear to have done this deliberately, which is actually somewhat psychotic.

And so the mangled peninsula continues to exacerbate international tensions. Following the close of the Korean War, the US remained active in the south and the north grew closer ties to the international communist powers of China and the Soviet Union. As with most communists states the economy declined and the rulers continued to gain greater control over the people. All the while the southern half of the peninsula embraced republican democracy and free trade, to grow into the country of today. It is sad, but the paths taken by north and south seem to have begun with the commencement of the Korean War, and are directly attributable to the Chinese Communist Party’s decision to support the North’s attack on American installations in the South. China did not just complete the standard practice of issuing arms to an ally, but sent in their veteran soldiers to compliment and often lead the North Korean advance.  Where the Soviets played hands off and supplied arms, the Chinese won the first period of that war for the north, amidst awful general-ship from an aging MacArthur, and a wearied American army five years following the surrender of Japan.

China deeply influences the north still to this day. Not least by a profile of recognition for the state when they regularly meet with the country’s representatives and continues to form economic ties, ostensibly for the north’s benefit, but realistically China is a veritable machine for resources and wants and is taking up contracts on all of the peninsula’s major mineral stock piles. A common goal of Communist China, which has an insatiable demand for minerals, consuming more by a long distance than any other country in the world. And not just minerals; look at the extent of the Chinese stake oil in Iraq (more even than the US by next year) and across Africa, for instance Sudan – major investment and massive consumption. Slight aside on Chinese purchasing power, but this new economic weight is a central aspect of the Korea issue: with their international standing China may be infuriatingly quiet but they are consistent in their sphere of influence. They are taking over from Japan and the United States and whether it is morally correct or not, none of these countries can play politics in this part of the world any longer without Chinese involvement. A somewhat nervy prospect.

 
Being one of the masochistic types drawn to marathon running, much of my reading in the Spring, in the lead up to the Belfast marathon, was about running form, fartlek training, tempo runs and tribes of Mexican Indians (more of all this, perhaps, in later posts). A suggestion I came across somewhere,  is for the runner to state their ambitions in advance for the marathon they are about to undertake, the theory being that if you have told a lot of people that you plan to finish your marathon in a particular time, and on the day find yourself faltering and succumbing to the temptation of taking it a little easier, then the embarrassment of having to tell all these people that you didn’t make your stated time but instead ambled over the line 45 minutes later, will prove more urgent than the fatigue and stimulate you to renew or maintain your effort. And so, applying this to posting a Secular Sundays on a regular basis, I am planning to write a series of posts on the ordinary in literature. 

 
It is not unusual, in June, in Dublin, that one’s thoughts turn to the ordinary. Wednesday, Bloomsday, sees what is, essentially, the celebration of the ordinary – Ulysses being  the epic attempt to represent the modern consciousness immersed in and bombarded by the utterly ordinary. By doing this, and by doing this in the way he does it, Joyce of courses, creates something utterly extraordinary. This as I think I’ve probably conveyed in my previous posts, is something of a preoccupation of mine, it is what I am drawn to in literature – the creation of art from the ordinary stuff of the day.
In the posts to come, I will reflect on and quote from work that is concerned with Kavanagh’s now overly-familiar phrase, the habitual banal. Rereading permitting, I will show how the likes of Updike, Nicholson Baker and William Carlos Williams, among others, understand how the ordinary, ordinary things, interact constantly with ones consciousness, how the fact of being in the world is dependent upon and conditioned by our relationships to the things around us, not just the extraordinary things, or the beautiful things or the huge things, but the trivial things, the small things, the bloody, messy things. Things have a different impact upon us, depending on our humour, or moods, our circumstances at the instant we encounter them – our memory of events are often triggered, Proustian-like, by a thing: the taste of peanuts, a song, a car, a tree, an advertisement, a shoelace, and on, and on. 

 
Of course, the ordinary can be trivial and inconsequential and dull. I had the misfortune recently to read Richard Russo’s Empire Falls a book about ordinary small-town life (that somehow won the Pulitzer prize)but one so formulaic and predictable and flat that returning to it each day required an act of will and discipline far greater than that needed to get out the door for that hard tempo run on a rainy Tuesday, after a hard day’s work. The book is a good example of the negative implication of the word ordinary, ordinary as in mediocre, uninspired, cliché. What distinguishes the authors I have mentioned above, is how their depictions of the ordinary, astonish, educate, elucidate while also reflecting their own fascination with and wonder in the face of the ordinary. This is beautifully articulated by one of our greatest chroniclers of the ordinary, John McGahern, describing the origins of his short stories in the preface to Creatures of the Earth: 

 
These stories grew in the mind and in the many workings of the material, but often began from as little as the sound of a chainsaw working in the evening, an overheard conversation about the price of cattle, thistledown floating by the open doors of bars on Grafton Street on a warm Autumn day, an old gold watch spilling out of a sheet where it had been hidden and forgotten about for years. (vii, Faber & Faber) 

 
To use William Carlos William’s theory about the creation of a poem – McGahern’s stories come from a fusion of the poetic sensibility, with imagination, and, importantly the ‘thing’. 

 
Finally, two things, one: to proffer an excuse in advance of any delay between postings for the next month, or rather, three excuses, three excuses per day, in fact, coming as they do at about twelve, three and seven. Two: a quote to get the thing underway, from Nabokov: 
 His thoughts were characterized by the same monotony as his actions, and their order corresponded to the order of his day. Why has he stopped the coffee? Can’t flush if the chain comes off every time. Dull blade. Piffke shaves with his collar on in the public washroom. These white shorts are not practical. Today is the ninth – no, the tenth – no, the eleventh of June. She’s again on the balcony. Bare arms, parched geraniums. Train more crowded every morning. Clean your teeth with Dentophile, every minute you will smile. They are fools who offer their seats to big strong women. Clean your teeth with Dentophile, clean your minute with your smile. Out we file. (King, Queen, Knave, Penguin Classics, p.201)

So, I eventually go around sitting down and watching the first few episodes of The Pacific. The build up to this programme was nothing less than Hollywood in its execution. Thousands of mini advertisements whistling across television; epic statements of the programme’s scope, appeared on celluloid and digital screens in cinemas; its status as the sequel to Band of Brother’s was made evident. The Pacific is a veritable beast of the television medium. In the UK it was attached to Sky, for syndication on their movie network of channels. I don’t think any television series has previously garnered that level of anticipation. It says a lot about the power of television at present.

American television has been going through something of a golden age from, maybe, the start of the new century. Multiple candidates for the finest television programme ever made have appeared in those years, with some of the candidates significant assessments of society in general, the nature of life and death, history and politics. All themes frequently found in other artistic mediums. That reality seems to be at the centre of this revolution in television. Where productions houses previously focused their efforts on locating major genre staples like detective dramas and sitcoms etc, an element of the programming of the recent period contains higher aspirations. That is not to say that the vast majority of modern television is not exactly the same as before; with continued investment in many situational comedies and police procedure shows – not to mention the new fad of reality escapades. The thing is, today there seems to be an appetite for something more than the familiar genre entries. And, currently, this appetite is finding a home in quality production.

The US premium channel Home Box Office is, of course, the finest purveyor of this serious programming. Each television season they produce at least one addition to the quality cannon, be it their Original Series brand, their miniseries collection, or a new documentary or two. But other players have entered the market in recent years, challenging HBO’s runaway success at the Emmy awards (US TV’s Oscars), including Showtime and AMC. It is interesting to note that major film producers and directors have begun to view the medium as a significant rival to Hollywood. Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott and Michael Mann have recently begun development of shows; for many years top acting talent has entered the billing, winning various plaudits.  Top writers are understood to be aiming for the major TV production companies, to coincide with the standard endeavour to shop a movie script. Indeed, many of the well known Hollywood studies have television production departments: Universal, Paramount, etc.

Such is the climate in which The Pacific appears. Tom Hank’s production company Playtone (track record includes Band of Brother’s, of course, the outstanding John Adams and a number of films); teams up with HBO and DreamWorks, Steven Spielberg’s enormous Hollywood studio. Literally a meeting of the top studios in the business. I’m four episodes in and it is savage military theatre – sweeping, visceral, ferocious. Two scenes already rival the infamous opening salvo of Saving Private Ryan. Script is a bit stodgy, though, and the characters pale when compared to that band of brother’s who marched across Europe. Let’s see if it picks up.

As William Carlos Williams writes: “There is no end of detail that is without significance”. (‘Spring and All’, Imaginations, New Directions, p.139) Updike is a particular example of a writer who understands this, his follower Nicholson Baker indeed never gets to the set pieces, the logistics of getting from A to B are never overcome: 

 
I had my coat on when I remembered that I had forgotten to put on antiperspirant. This was a setback. I weighed undoing the belt, untucking the shirt, untucking the T-shirt from the underpants: was it worth it? I was running late. (The Mezzanine, Vintage  p 51) 

   
Getting from A to B is the substance of the work, the ideas are the details, the mundane details that lie between a to b are so varied, so multifarious and such a cause of awe and delight that, for Baker, they contain anything you could wish to write about. 
As the oft-quoted William Carlos Williams maxim goes – …no ideas but in things. (Paterson, New Directions,p.6) 
The thoughts or impressions then, born of the interaction of the poet and the poetic imagination with things, and the expression of this impression – that unique moment when the poet with all his ideas and his imagination, meet, say, a soda sign, or a fire engine, or in the case of Nicholson Baker, three generations of vending machines at the top of an escalator (the journey up which has taken up much of the novel), or a shoelace.  The ideas should inform the writer, but should not replace the ‘things’ in the foreground. 

 
Anyhow, these musings were prompted by an essay in a recent Guardian Review by pianist Susan Tomes, who discussed those troublesome ideas: 

 
Having ideas about the music was a process we had relished in our rehearsals. But gradually, through experience of performing, I had to learn how to let my ideas sink down into the music and disappear.
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/mar/20/susan-tomes-playing-piano-concerts) 

 
And all of this, in turn, brings me to Richard Powers, a writer who also has trouble with ideas, having too many, to the point that they, according to some critics, choke his prose. I enjoy Powers’s work but acknowledge the accuracy of this criticism. The mundane details, dialogue, human interaction, are often perfunctory, cliché-ridden and awkwardly rendered.  The ‘things’ are forgotten in the excitement caused by the ideas, and the desire to impart the ideas. I quote both here and below from pages 370 and 371 of Plowing in the Dark (certainly the worst of his books that I have read) but pick your page, really: 

 
Adie took charge of the mosaic saints. Spiegel delighted daily in watching her assemble the stones. As she turned high-resolution photographic reproductions back into low-res squares of coloured tile, the staircased edges of her own soul smeared and softened. (Picador, p.370) 

 
What?… I’ve no problem with the techie stuff but when he tries to apply it to the human, the incidental, we get the ‘staircased edges of her own soul smeared and softened’. Suggestions to what this actually means are welcome, and if anyone confesses to actually thinking like this please leave a comment, I am interested in knowing how one comes to realize the edges of their soul (leaving aside the whole ‘soul’ thing) is staircased etc, etc. 

   
To digress momentarily, I do not mean necessarily realism, I’m not arguing for realism over ideas, I am arguing for a convincing novelization of ideas. Thomas Bernhard, for example, does not, ostensibly anyhow, practice realism, nor, however, are his novels choked by ideas. Rather, the ideas constitute the impulse for his work, in his case, the impulse for every aspect of his work – the form, style, tone and subject matter – they are subsumed into the fabric of arresting, funny, vicious, ironic and compelling novels, novels that despite initial impressions are very much concerned with the getting from A to B, even if, like Baker, but in a very different way, the thoughts and details of getting from A to B can constitute the entire novel.   Once again to invoke Dr Williams, who articulates with greater efficiency and beauty indeed what I have been trying to say – they must be real, not “realism” but reality itself. (Imaginations p.117) 

 
So back to Powers, Powers chooses to write in the medium or genre of the contemporary American (realist-ish) novel.  So he puts people in situations whereby they engage in dialogue. This dialogue, however, is either stilted or ridiculous, or is essentially a series of lengthy theoretical digressions staged to deliver a message or idea, and are comprised of the kinds of things no one would ever say to each other (unless they do talk like that to each other In America, in which case this whole piece is invalid and I apologise): 

    
Destined to do? he asked. But the old irony hid itself under a bushel. She shrugged. Every person has something she’s supposed to do. I knew this when I was little, but I forgot. It comes back to you, though. That’s the beauty: you think you’re lost. You stumble around forever with-out knowing which way is forward. But you turn a corner one day and your work is right there, smack in front of you. Tracking you like the moon. (p.371) 

 
Seriously… 

 
This is the kind of thing that, in Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee draws attention to. Part of Powers’s problem is, I think, that he knows a lot about a lot of stuff – music, physics, technology and literature, and he tries to squeeze all of this theoretical knowledge into each novel, often at the expense of the novel . I am reminded of Hemingway’s comments on writing in Death in the Afternoon. He says that a writer should only write about what he knows, and that a good writer should know a little of everything. The little is important – Powers, I think, knows too much of everything.

I endeavoured to follow through my readings of the Vietnam conflict, from my last post, with a shopping excursion to right my centre of gravity and ensure that I tackle the history from every angle – well, more than one. Being a historian first and foremost this is part of the obligation that is owed to the seriousness of the subject, apparently. I, of course, am not a historian, but I can read and do and pretend at the writing part.  My esteemed colleague, of the Secular Sundays posts, lent me his encyclopaedic knowledge of sixties and seventies American writings with a collection of Michael Herr-equalling shots of literature to vacuum up my soul into the US Armed Forces. Two things happened to impel a slight discursion on my Nam – centric world view.

• Firstly, while perusing the four epic floors of Hodges Figges (certainly they must have every book in the world) I found (as is normal practice for me) I couldn’t find two of the books on my list. Being a total independent I refused to ask for help from the staff, so I started to flick through the recently published section. My United States historiafied mind saw David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter sitting in a paperback edition, then sitting on the shop counter and then travelling to my home in a paper bag. I forgot to continue looking for the books I came in for; I plowed through the sharp chapters of Halberstam and fell into the Korean War.

• Secondly, I discovered the flawless work of stunning breadth that is Generation Kill, David Simon and Ed Burn’s (The Wire in television, The Corner in non-fiction gold-medal genius) play-like adaptation, of the book of the same name, following a first recon division in the Second Iraq conflict; as they weave through the desert mess of former-Mesopotamia and founder in the incompetence of the United States strategic armed forces.

Halberstam, very sadly, passed away not long after he finished work on this tome. I had for a long time meant to pick up just one of his many searing topical books, which tackle US history. The Coldest Winter is a lengthy walk through the miserable counter-Soviet, counter-Communist mess that was the three year Korean conflict. A prelude to Vietnam and the half a dozen later skirmishes with Soviet imperialist agenda, the Korean War was as much an aberration of modern war as it was a dynamic statement of US hegemony in East Asia. Akin to Nam, where the terrain was as much hostile as the opposition, Korea was simply staggeringly poor conditions. One of the major themes of the book (and which I intend to pursue in a later post on Korea) was the ineptitude of Douglas MacArthur. True the man was very old at this stage, but to say he was mildly sluggish when the North invaded in the South, would be an understatement. I found myself once again agog that MacArthur was so immune to any negativity: having recently read Max Hastings authoritative work on the final stages of the US pacific campaign of WWII, Nemesis, were Hastings depicted MacArthur as, definitively, a loose cannon, and, likely, insane. It was interesting (read: horrifying) to see this consistent interpretation of the Pacific Supreme Commander, and American warhero, continue into the opening pages of The Coldest Winter.

I could not fail to draw comparisons to Michael Herr’s withering portrayal of MACV which spent its time effectively trying to make it appear as though the Americans were winning when they were clearly not. MacArthur, following absurd decisions carried over from the pacific campaign, deliberately refused to use any intelligence that did not specifically agree with his own strategic opinion. This fantasy existed until it was fatal, and then frequently was ignored – though MacArthur was eventually found out in Korea. Most of this madness was rolling around my mind when I sat down and watched the first three episodes of Generation Kill. Not surprisingly the themes reappeared with the narrative following the grunts on the ground in Iraq, as they encounter the Ba’athists in a sea of despairing locals. Once again the strategic objective is poorly actioned, or hopelessly ignored. This, of course, does not lessen the impact of this finely crafted story. I mentioned above that it has a play-like feel to it – and this is no joke. Absolute rivers of dialogue materialise and hang around the scenes. In a similar way to how, say, Tarantino pours forth the open conversations, walling in the tale; Generation Kill is hilarious and serious in equal measure. I shall wander through the rest of the episodes, as I sit and wait out The Pacific which lands next month. I wonder how they will deal with MacArthur in that programme.

It is another new release, however, that concerns me this Sunday – The Unnamed, by Joshua Ferris. Veteran readers of these virtual pages will recall that I talked about Ferris’s excellent debut, And Then We Came To The End, in my very first posts about work and literature. It is a book narrated in the first person plural, a device that initially seemed a little like a gimmick but proved to be essential to the fabric of the novel. The second novel, treacherous waters responsible for the sinking of many a literary career, also features what at first seems like a gimmick. The central character, a successful lawyer, is periodically wrenched away from his work and his family, from his carefully constructed life, by corporeal demands – he suffers from a mysterious condition that demands constant walking to exhaustion, followed by sleep. The man, Tim Farnsworth, will suddenly leave a room and walk, without stopping (even for a cold drink or some food), until, exhausted, his body stops and he sleeps where he falls. The first part of the novel describes the carefully constructed life and the gimmick seems designed to counterpoint this, to offer some trite message along the lines of taking things for granted and to offer up opportunities for comedy. As with the first novel, though, the gimmick becomes central, the gimmick is the novel – the condition gets progressively worse, the walks longer, until the walking dominates the man and he deconstructs his previous life, constructing a new one around the demands of his condition. Anyone who has experienced serious illness, either directly or indirectly, will recognize the ability of infirmity, the ability of the body, to upend a life and suddenly begin determining every aspect of one’s existence.
It should be clear, then, that we are into some interesting theoretical stuff, about body and mind, about the existence or otherwise of self and soul:

“He” or “It” or whatever you wanted to call it – but certainly not “I” he thought – still bellyached for food, needed water, complained of soreness in the joints and muscles. He tended to its needs while trying not to spoil it. He made every effort to remember a time when he was not just the sum of his urges. (The Unnamed, p252)

This, in a way, is frontier writing, internalized. The frontier is no longer a physical space, man has colonized more or less all of the physical space – the frontier has been pushed back from the physical and become internalized, the frontier is now between the known and unknown self, the space between mind and body, an individual self or mere highly evolved animal
In a review of this book in the New Statesman, the reviewer alluded to John Gray’s Straw Dogs and in particular the following passage:

In Benjamin Libet’s work on the ‘half-second delay’, it has been shown that the electrical impulse that initiates action occurs half a second before we take the conscious decision to act. (p.66)

I always understood this as meaning we were mere animals and the attempts to elevate the human beyond this, were deluded. The reviewer (I’ve forgotten the chap’s name and an admittedly brief search on the New Statesman’s website was unsuccessful) argues that the impulse governing our actions in this half-second is God and claims Ferris is arguing that God is making Tim’s body work. This while I suppose (grudgingly) is arguable it doesn’t cut it. It is our animal instinct – to presume a God would bother or have the time to move my hand from the keyboard here to the cold beer beside me is as arrogant as assuming we are somehow more than animal. Farnsworth, true does flirt with God (I believe in God now. Isn’t that something? P.228) but seems then to reject it. The ending though is ambiguous about the whole God question. On my reading, Ferris comes down on the side of the mind and body, the ‘self’ and our corporeal urges all being one and the same thing:

The soul is the mind is the brain is the body. I am you and you are it and it will always win. (p.233)

It is not just by following Farnsworth’s struggle with his body and the construction of a life determined by his corporeal needs that Ferris introduces and examines his theoretical stuff. The thing is that Farnsworth’s fate is ours, our daily fate, whether we work or walk or run marathons. The other characters in the novel, much as they think they have a controlled, constructed existence, are subject to urgent physical needs, needs which tend to exert a degree of control, almost surreptitiously, on a character’s so called real, or external life. His daughter’s overeating, his wife’s sudden and unexpected alcoholism, and a colleague’s overwhelming need to have a snake (the more deadly the snake the better, it seems) in the room when he has sex. Ignoring all the religious symbolism here, this urge goes on to have a profound effect on the course of his life. Man’s lot, it seems, is to be at the mercy of his animal urges, for all of his urges are animal. As John Gray says:

The I is a thing of the moment, and yet our lives are ruled by it. We cannot rid ourselves of this inexistent thing. In our normal awareness of the present moment, the sensation of selfhood is unshakeable. This is the primordial human error, in virtue of which we pass our lives as in a dream. (Straw Dogs, p.78)

A review in the Guardian likened the latter part of the novel to early Auster, and the name Farnsworth echoes, in its arrangement of vowels and consonants, Fanshawe, another who abruptly upped and left a life. The struggle with mind and body similarly, is a struggle that informs Auster’s work, from his early non-ficiton writing, notably ‘The Art of Hunger’ right through to Invisible. This novel is superior to Auster’s most recent offering, and though it is a flawed novel (as noted in both reviews I mention), Ferris manages to combine a substantial idea with a compelling narrative - rarely  a successful marriage(some of his critics -not including this writer- might offer Richard Powers here as an example). 

Speaking of resonances, there are also echoes of another writer’s work in this book, evoked by the title, a writer whose work depicts men, animals, entities, trapped between states of non-being walking relentlessly, compulsively, sometimes even in circles with no end, no goal, other than eventual expiration:

…I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (Samuel Beckett, ‘The Unnamable’ Trilogy, Calder p.418)

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). 

In other words, take it slow.  And if we fall in with the deliberate, halting rhythms of these finely tuned sentences, there is no other way to proceed.  Details may emerge that we would otherwise miss.  The world, with its “shower of innumerable atoms” (to use Virginia Woolf’s phrase) will no longer pass us by, at least in part, and for a while.  We, like Whitman’s poet, become passers-by, our eyeballs peeled in Emerson’s great image.  America’s striving for transcendence is all over this book.  Yet, now it is not the continuing birth of a nation that is under consideration, but its “dwindling” (p35). 

Although the object of contemplation is a visual artwork it takes a writer’s sensibility, and verbal dexterity, to extrapolate so stirringly.  When DeLillo’s figure, (and this is contrary to his own expressed mistrust or lack of faith in words), sees Anthony Perkins’ eyes “in slow transit across his bony sockets” (p7), his experience, and our own as readers, is so vividly acute because he has the words to describe what is before him.  In the final part of the book, Norman Bates is succinctly captured in two perfect words: “scary bland” (p101, and p115).  Exactly. 

The figure worries that he might be “seeing too much” but soon accepts that “it was impossible to see too much.  The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw” (p5).  It is not the artist’s intention that is vital to the artwork but the work itself and its reception.  As with the world, the work is made and remade anew by each individual.  And to extend what Maurice Blanchot said of the literary text, this gives rise to the “wonder of its constant genesis”.  

There is, however, a warning within these pages.  What happens when the petulant man of words sides with the petulant men of action?  He implicates himself in their misdeeds, excuses their abuses, and sanctions the violence perpetrated now in his name.  We all need to appropriate the world, to make it our own, but this need can, to employ the cliché, get out of hand, as it did for the Bush administration. They felt entitled, as Paul Wolfowitz said, to make their own reality.  

Elster’s (DeLillo’s neo-con “tribal elder” in this novel) reference to “the reality we were trying to create” (p28) clearly echoes that statement.  We can see this tendency in his refusal, or inability to listen to or take heed of others, except insofar as they are mirrors in which he can see himself affirmed.  His “teeming ego forgets to attend to such details” (p25).  Like a toddler, everything depends “on the play of his mood, in his good time” (p25).  He is delighted at the idea that his daughter would mouth his every word: “When she was a child, she used to move her lips slightly, repeating inwardly what I was saying or what her mother was saying.  She’d look very closely.  I’d speak and she’d look, trying to anticipate my remarks word for word, nearly syllable for syllable.  Her lips would move in nearest synchronization with mine.”  This showed that she was “[s}omeone who truly listens” (p48).  In fact, she served as a sort of Lacanian mirror-stage mother confirming his existence, just as Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates does for the figure in the gallery: “Did he imagine himself seeing with the actor’s eyes? Or did the actor’s eyes seem to be searching him out?” (p7). 
 
Elster admits they went too far, but insists on the propriety of the project: “But we were devising entities beyond the agreed-upon limits of recognition or interpretation.  Lying is necessary.  The state has to lie.  There is no lie in war that can’t be defended.  We went beyond this.  We tried to create new realities overnight, careful sets of words that resemble advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability.  These were words that would yield pictures eventually and then become three-dimensional” (p28). 

We tell ourselves the story of the world: “To Elster sunset was a human invention, our perceptual arrangement of light and space into elements of wonder” (p18).  Not content to create a workable reality for himself, he has sought to remake the world or part of it.  “We can’t let others shape our world, our minds”, (p30) Elster says.  But he wants to shape the minds of others, and their world.  DeLillo’s novel offers a counterpoint to this desire.  It does not seek to control our response; it has no designs on us, yet compels quiet, considered attention.  It is not trying to rule the world, or part of the world, or even the solitary reader.  DeLillo suggests “new ways of thinking and seeing” (p29) without the intention to coerce.  He allows room for the reader, guides and leads, but never over-explains.  He gives just enough for the imagination to go on. 

Those reviewers who claim that DeLillo has said the same things before and said them better neglect the concise recontextualisation of previously drawn upon elements.  Among many echoes of earlier work, Elster’s thoughts on war recall End Zone’s war game: “Except their war is acronyms, projections, contingencies, methodologies” (Point Omega p27).  “Their war is abstract.  They think they’re sending an army into a place on the map.”  Which is precisely what Gary Harkness and “the major” do in the 1972 comic masterpiece – send armies to places on a map, imagining a Cold War come to the boil.  

But the fear and paranoia has moved from inside the mind of a young football player, and is now being played out “on the ground”, as the saying goes, in Iraq and Afghanistan.  DeLillo’s work traces these movements, the evolutions or revolutions of contemporary America, what is lost and what remains, whilst hinting at how one may attempt to counteract the ensuing confusion.  By taking your time, by remaining open to language in all its nuanced subtleties, and by resisting the urge to impose the products of your solitary ruminations on all and sundry.

Vietnam. A word that still to this day means many things to many different people. Travellers etch across its landscape throughout the year wandering its myriad paths and villages, soaking up its cultured cities. Its people are famous for their relaxed personalities and interesting take on life. But for several thousand Vietnam War veterans, this beautiful country remains a nightmare of ferocious memories, strange drug-addled flashbacks, and the emotions of fear and loss. Recently, I was picking through a history of America in the Twentieth Century and spent some time looking at this infamous war. One of the recommended readings, I was informed, was Michael Herr’s Dispatches. Herr wrote for Esquire Magazine during the late sixties and spent two years embedded with the US forces in Vietnam. A number of years following his return Herr wrote this book as a memoir of his time in the country and a scathing overview of the human catastrophe of the conflict. I was surprised, and deeply enlivened to the book before I even began reading, to find that Herr had co-wrote Full Metal Jacket – and indeed the crisp dialogue of that film is referenced significantly in the reality of his account of the war. He went further by writing much of the voiceover in Apocalypse Now – thus acquiring a central role in the two greatest Vietnam War movies.

Having finished the memoir, it is almost impossible to convey the savage intensity of Herr’s writing. Carefully examining the warfare from the point of view of the average “grunt” the book is a masterclass in exposing the utter depravity of the war. But much more than this the book finds a voice in the American soldier, a lonely dispirited, often courageous figure – mired halfway around the world in a green and brown sludge – drowning in death. Herr draws the colour from the country leaving only the forest and hills, the blood and rounds – the bright of napalm. Almost every single page (and I am not exaggerating here) reads like an image from the previously mentioned films – except Herr’s critical voice hangs dissonant echoing through the story, suffusing the theme. He examines the madness (absolutely staggering proportions), the fear and resignation, the burly anger and, scarily, the men who enjoy the unfolding drama. The killers. He weaves a narrative through some of the main conflicts of the latter section of the war – the Tet Offensive, the intensity of the military base at Khe Sanh. To my mind his journalist feels like Private Joker. Brash yet innocent, intelligent and conflicted. Herr mentions, quite loosely, that at times he crossed the line, his correspondent shedding viewer status and sitting behind an M-16 – gathering fire, shouting down the world.

Honestly, I have read very few books that truly – comprehensively – capture the very essence of a subject. Certainly, more so when that subject is the murderous hell of warfare. You sit with the marines for a period, wallowing in the endless rain of artillery (boarding the DMZ the forces effectively resided within bombing distance all of the time) the harsh shock of rifles and the buzz of choppers. Death exists permanently within inches, millimetres. And all of the time the NVA continued to pummel endlessly – never letting up, only dying, only to be replaced – inhuman in their courage. They fought viciously at night, armed to the teeth, almost no tracer rounds; just the startle of their AK47’s their AKMs, their shouts. It is serious reading when you look at the figures: Herr discusses this only in the broad sweep – 20% survival rate in some platoons, marine night-rotations often never returning, US napalm drops kill everything, period. It is serious reading any way you want to read it – but it is also reflective; it follows men into a war and explores their reactions, their humanity. Whether that humanity disappears into malevolence, or is shattered by madness and leaves an empty vessel where a grunt can exist on instinct, natural to the world around him, a marine, a Cav, whatever.

A World of Computers

Networking is a significant impediment on my life. I have been offline for what seems an age, in reality a shocking three and half weeks. Often the issue, when I am down and out from the interweb, is the catastrophic nastiness that is wireless networking devices. LAN is just so much more logical. Anyway, Happy New Year to one and all: may they be technologically flawless.

Before Christmas I was nattering on about the German soldier, which was jumping up all over my radar due to their involvement in Afghanistan. Similarly, there is a deal of talk these days about the return of the Russian to the forefront of international relations. Given this, I thought I might look at an aspect of Russian history that has always stood out to my mind.

The Fallen Man

The Russian consistently has it difficult. History is enamoured by the imaginative character; the sweeping independent figure that explodes out of the text, whether they be morally staunch or fractured. Often the narrative is militaristic: civilisations story is epic, but always deeply antagonistic. Pick up any history of a nation and the fountain of war will be buried in layers, appearing at constant intervals, shaping the scene, ending cycles, moulding the next age. There is a tremendous consistency. So too with the protagonists. The brilliant generals rise above the fold and capture a distinct position in the text. Frequently they are significantly divisive persons, usually ruthless, amoral, troubled; but yet personable, loyal (when they see fit), and often entertaining – in the humorous, intelligent way. They are also all extremely quick to action. If you were to require one particular skill, based on historical reference, to succeed as a general (baring luck, which is not a skill but you know what I mean) it would likely be the ability to react with alacrity. They were all shockingly fast: Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, William of Normandy, Genghis Khan, Edward the Black Prince, Napoleon Bonaparte, Erwin Rommel, etc, etc.

You will note, having keen eyes, that no Russian is included in that list. I am probably being remiss avoiding the name of Georgy Zhukov who (to many historians) was the finest general of the Second World War. But so little is known of this individual that it is difficult to assess him in the same way as the aforementioned commanders. Indeed, my point is that Russian military figures throughout history are consistently shadowy and seem to conform to a different mould than their contemporaries. Peter the Great is romantic certainly but as a leader he was more brash and wilful than any of the above traits. He is remembered more for his westernising of Russian society and his landmark urbanisation. Militarily he was involved and had some successes in his Northern War – though not to any major degree. Across the history of Russia there are few figures that stand up as remarkable generals, with the Soviet Union an improvement but still weakly compared. It is interesting, this fact, given the military nature of the Soviets and size and capability of its former armed forces.

Though, however, Russia has lacked in dynamic generals they have displayed an extremely powerful common soldier. Unparalleled courage remains the essence of the Red soldier: very few combatants attacked as consistently as the Soviets during the war, though their lack of ingenuity damaged them frequently. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the armed forces fell into decline in Russia (as did much else) and it is – as mentioned – only lately that this decline has begun to halt. Russia was massively affected by the Global Financial Crisis of Sept. 2008; they have been significantly reliant on the sale of petroleum and gas for their GDP for a long and with the crisis came a massive decrease in the costs of energy. Coupled with the share loss every globalised country saw – bar China and India – Russia is in major difficulties. And yet, they have re-entered international relations with a jolt. It is not easy to see why they have done this, though most commentators with an understanding of the Russian mindset (with analysis I agree with) believe that it is because the average Russian citizen requires their nation to be sufficiently strong in the world, or deemed to be strong, and will accept nothing less. Regardless if that strength is fact or fiction. These same commentators believe that Putin and Medvedev are jostling for position to retain their mandates. Their may be the whiff of electoral fraud any time United Russia goes to the polls, but their will be no United Russia without a world-leading Russian nation.