Fast food reading

How we, in the age of Twitter and a rampant internet, are losing the art of sustained reading and contemplation - lit blogger Mark Sarvas discusses this with the help of the erudite visitors to his blog who throw in a host of insightful comments at the foot of the post. Ironically enough, reading this [total time - 8 minutes?] gave me a lot to ... contemplate. But in fact it's not ironic at all. There is a lot to think about on the net, as Sarvas says, it's just that it's there in bite-sized portions that we grab at like fast food [I guess I could have eaten a Big Mac in those eight minutes]. Deep contemplation is harder to find time for, he maintains, and some, like Philip Roth, say novel readers will become as thin on the ground as readers of Latin poetry are now. In fact, I have Jude Morgan's The Taste of Sorrow beside me on the table as I write this. It was there as I read the Sarvas blog. If I'd opened it instead, I could have read a few pages of the book at least [it promises to be rather wonderful but I am not as yet fully engaged with it]. However, now I have to go out and invade the day [grocery shopping, dropping children off, walking the dog]. The Taste of Sorrow will have to wait ... maybe later when I get home... after I've sampled my emails.   

Where the cool kids hang out - Obama in Netherland

Reading Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, I googled the cover [to put up on the blog] and found myself on literaryobama.com which is 'a chronicle of creative works by and about our 44th President.' Above this fab pic of Obama promoting libraries, is a post - written in April - titled 'On Obama's Nightstand: Netherland.'

According to Qiana - the young-looking chap who writes the blog - knowing Obama's reading a book is enough to make him pick it up. He hasn't posted subsequently, so I wonder if he did. Meanwhile, Netherland is on my nightstand but oh how it asks to be brought downstairs and read and read and read until it's finished. There's something about the tone, the language, the voice of a book like this ...

Netherland is a post-9/11 novel set in New York. It feels as if the smoke and dust from that terrible day are still in the air and have been breathed in by the protagonist - a Dutch banker called Hans whose wife has left him for a safer life in England- making his life the kind of 'white on white' John Vanderslice sings about in his 9/11 album Emerald City. The novel is spare of language and the tone is a meditative one that is taut with the desperate stuff of longing and blame and alienation. But there is belonging too - in the game of cricket and the NY immigrants who play it on the margins of the recovering city. I am nowhere near the end, but this book is marvellous. One of the best I've read this year.

Lit blogger Mark Sarvas, like James Wood before him, gives it his highest recommendation [the review is in his 'recommended' column on the right]. He says of Netherland that it is 'a Gatsby-like meditation on exclusion and otherness,' and the conclusion is: 'a radiant beacon illuminating one of our essential questions, the question of belonging.'

Wonder what Obama thought of it.

How to get a Gatsby

The editing process of a novel is a shady area not usually opened up to the gaze of the publishing unwashed: the reader or aspiring writer. As a first-timer, I stumbled into it with hope, excitement and anxiety.

Luckily, I had Jane Parkin as my editor for The Blue. Highly respected in NZ publishing circles, editor of a range of marvellous award-winning fiction writers, her style can be characterised as insightful, inclusive, gentle and persistent. She also never made me feel she'd edited enough first novels to know without looking what to do with mine. In other words, Jane approached The Blue with respect, excitement and curiosity. Or that's how it felt to me. And when I received the marked-up drafts -all red dashes and post-it notes - it was like seeing finger marks in a clay sculpture, as if she'd gently pressed the novel's skin to find the pulse.

All the changes Jane suggested were good ones that I applied forthwith; many were essential to the flow of the story. Often, she would present me with a problem in the book - we would discuss it - then I would go away and think what to do. I liked that she didn't always know the answer and trusted me to find it. One structural problem we tossed around for a bit, tried one thing and then another, and then at the last minute I flicked the difficult chapter into a slightly different position and suddenly the novel relaxed into place. Jane agreed. It was the many hours of dicussion that got us there. Frankly, it was exciting to have one other person in the world as fascinated by my novel as Jane Parkin was, and as willing to obsess about its every detail.

The elegant writing partnership between The Great Gatsby's F. Scott Fitzgerald and his editor Max Perkins is explored in a new book on writing The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House. Uber UK blogger Mark Sarvas has serialised the essay and it makes fascinating reading. Here's Part 1 - scroll up through his blog for the other three parts.

Here's the link to The Writer's Notebook on the Tin House website.

Nobility of Spirit or Know-Nothingness

[Updated at the end of the post, Sunday] With the New Zealand election upon us and the US election still reverberating, I've been attracted to the idea of an - ironically enough - slim volume called Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal by Rob Reimen. Super book-blogger Mark Sarvas - 10,000 hits a day! - has recommended it highly (look in the right sidebar of his blog - or scroll down here where I quote it in full).

From my internet perch here at the ends of the earth, Barack Obama seems to be someone who remembers what 'Nobility of Spirit' is all about. Of course it's hard to tell, being a pane of bullet-proof glass and a satellite dish away from it all, but the United States seems to have lifted its head up higher and prouder now, seeing itself as - overnight - a nobler beast.

In the depths of a New Zealand election, on the other hand, our parties are still nosing around in the gutter. Labour's nasty little advertisements about John Key have lacked all nobility. As a steady Labour/Green voter, I have been disgusted by them, enough so I started to wonder if the Labour part of my vote (candidate) shouldn't go elsewhere. It won't. There are other things at stake.

But I will try and get hold of Rob Reimen's book. The author is the president and founder of the Nexus Institute, a European-based humanist think-tank and Mark Sarvas says:

'Nobility of Spirit ... stands as the most stirring redoubt against the ascendant forces of know-nothingness that we've come across in a long time.

A full-throated, unapologetic defense of the virtues of Western Civ – in which "elite" is not and never should be a dirty word – this inspiring exploration of high art and high ideals is divided into three sections: The first looks at the life of Riemen's great hero Thomas Mann as a model for the examined life. The second imagines a series of conversations from turning points in European intellectual history, populated with the likes of Socrates, Nietzsche and others. The final section, "Be Brave," is nothing less than an exhortation to dig deep, especially in times of risk.

The notion of nobility of the spirit might strike some modern ears as quaint but it seems more desperately necessary than ever before, and there are worse ways to read the accessible Nobility of Spirit than as a crash refresher in the Great Thinkers,
free of academic jargon and cant.

As a meditation on what is at stake when the pursuit of high ideals is elbowed aside by the pursuit of fleeting material gain, however, Nobility of Spirit might well be the most prescient book we've yet read on what's at stake in the current election cycle and in the developing global situation. Agree or disagree with Riemen's profound, ambitious and high-minded plea, you will be thinking about his words for a long time. It's been ages since a work of non-fiction moved us this way. Read it. Discuss it. Argue about it. '

Late Breaking News: I voted and have my sticker to prove it. So has my 20-year-old son - it was his first time. I was deeply moved to be in the booth next to him and to think of him looking down the names and the parties making his decision. His decision.

Lovely piece from one of my favourite bloggers Denis Welch about the transformation of the ordinary person into a citizen for a day.

Later Breaking News: Some Thoughts on the Election

A National Government. One of the least-experienced Prime Ministers this country has had replacing one of the most committed and able.

'The pursuit of high ideals is elbowed aside...'

We had a good election night at David and Pam's with a small but select range of voters hunched over the TV and a delicious vegetarian lasagne: National/National, Labour/Act, Labour/Labour, Labour/Green ... so I don't want to condemn the decision the country made.

It was made by my friends and family and other people I know.

I wish, though, there had been more Green voters, more Labour voters, fewer National voters...I wish people hadn't thought, like the Mad Hatter, it was 'time for a change'.

Of all times.

When it would surely have been better to keep the able at the helm. When we need 'Nobility of Spirit' to counter all that's yet to come.

What does John Key know about being a Minister let alone about being PM? Ah, remember them:

'...the ascendant forces of know-nothingness...'

Tangled up in

beautiful writing here and here. The first one, from Marilynne Robinson's award-winning Housekeeping, is awash with light and dark, windows and reflections and water, what is glimpsed but not known. The second one by NZ writer, Martin Edmond, is delicious, edible, sensual.

Both pieces haunt you in the way straight narratives don't because these words have a longer life than words that simply work to take a character from home to the dairy. They are like long hairs that fall on pillows and in food, thicken a brush, tangle in a wool blanket. You keep finding them, picking them out, untangling them. Not sure that metaphor works that well as there is an element of irritation - the 'yuck' factor - with discarded hairs! But the endless discovery and untangling is just right, I think, and the work required.

It's interesting, too, that both writers have long sentences with a number of sub-clauses (long, curly hairs?) that are both purposeful and open-ended with room left for the reader to wonder (wander?) long after s/he has finished reading. Have a look and see.

that old blog thing

The computer's been out of action this week getting more 'grunt' and a faster modem. Trouble is I'm having to do my emails at Techdomain (the ones fixing the computer) and haven't been able to post as well. It's been an odd week - the family has talked more, I've read more books and made a real dent in the uni marking, the middle son even baked an apple pie last night to give himself something to do. It was delicious, by the way.

So here I am, posting here (quickly) at Techdomain, and Becky who is putting the bits of my computer back together is giving me hard looks. I said I'd be quick and I think over an hour has passed since I started trudging through my emails.

Anyway, here's a quick tip: try Rachael King's blog on.... blogging. She's taking part in a panel on the topic at the Christchurch Writers' Festival which includes ace literary blogger Mark Sarvas. I'll be down there to read from The Blue at the New Writers' gig on Sunday morning (Sept 7) and to chair a session with Lloyd Jones at 4.15 that afternoon straight after Rachael's panel on blogs - in the same room too.

I'm looking forward to meeting some of my South Island readers while I'm down there, and it would be nice to catch up with Rachael, too, and South Island writers like audacious crime writer Vanda Symon (when she writes a post entitled 'Dying for a Salad' you know it's not about a hungry vegetarian..... )