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…)

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…)

Regular visitors to NewVoiceBlog (and our site stats tell us that there are at least some of you out there) will have noticed, I hope, the absence of Secular Sundays over the last few weeks. This was as a result of a very busy wife needing more-or-less constant access to the laptop. The time, though, was not spent idling, or at least not all of it, but was spent trying to keep up with the spate of new books released by some of the big guns – Auster, Roth and Banville being three and a fourth, for me the biggest, albeit dead, gun, Ray Carver. (continue reading…)

“Our arms are canes of flesh with which the soul reaches and touches.” 
Joseph Joubert (The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert  p 30) 

“As spiders make webs and beavers build dams, so we tell stories” 
David Lodge (Consciousness and the Novel p 15)   

Paul Auster considers himself first and foremost to be a storyteller.  He is concerned with stories: how they are made and what they are made of; the part they play in our lives; and the manner in which they inform, and even form, our sense of selves. 
 
There is in his work a complex interaction between memory and imagination, experience and desire.  Language is, of course the medium through which they come together. 

(continue reading…)

“But alas, the novel too is ravaged by the termites of reduction”
(Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, p17) 

“a period of repetition in which the novel keeps duplicating its form, emptied of its spirit”
(Milan Kundera, p15) 

In his essay “The Uses of Desire”, Adam Phillips has the following to say about what psychoanalysts term “the antonym of desire” or “perversion”, but which he chooses to call “an anxious narrowing of the mind when it comes to pleasure”: 
“An intent knowingness – a determined and determining knowing what one wants – characterises so-called sexual perversions.  The person in a perverse state of mind has no conscious doubt about what will excite and satisfy him.” (Side Effects, 167)  (continue reading…)