Lars Iyer's Blog, page 53

TheEnglish have always prized the lovably idiosyncratic...

The
English have always prized the lovably idiosyncratic individual over those arid
entities known as ideas. If they aren’t able to extricate the man or woman
‘behind’ the work, they tend to feel a little cheated. Their fondness for
biography, a superior version of what the media know as ‘human interest’ goes
hand in hand with their philistinism.

Terry
Eagleton

[...] 'Probably this whole settlement is drunk around us ...

[...] 'Probably this whole settlement is drunk around us at this moment. Almost everyone'.

He dreaded the monthly arrival of pensions. 'Single parents get an allowance for each child, so a man with five children and no wife can feel a millionaire! He'll drink himself sick while the children starve. The women do it too. Everybody. And when the vodka gives out, they'll search for anything. There's an American machine oil which is bought galore here. Our machines are all broken, of course, but people drink this fluid by the bottle. Within two or three hours they're asphyxiated. If they get to the hospital I can save them, but they die in their homes in the street'.

Thubron, In Siberia

Among the native peoples a myth exists that in the extrem...

Among the native peoples a myth exists that in the extremest cold words themselves freeze and fall to earth. In spring they stir again and start to speak, and suddenly the air fills with out-of-date gossip, unheard jokes, cries of forgotten pain, words of long-disowned love.

Thubron, In Siberia

... I became mesmerised by the taiga. Its snow-glazed des...

... I became mesmerised by the taiga. Its snow-glazed desolation seemed only to deepen its vastness: one fifth of the forest of the entire earth. Often it runs over a thousand miles deep from north to south, and the suffocating closure of its trees, crowing out all distances, any perspectives, has driven people literally mad. Magnetic anomalies can doom even a sane traveller here, while his compass-point swings uselessly. Others start walking in a mania to escape - this is the 'taiga madness' - but return to their own tracks, until they drop exhausted or lose themselves in quicksand.

Colin Thubron, In Siberia

The richest people in Potalovo are the children. They dri...

The richest people in Potalovo are the children. They drive tractors and bulldozers, own houses, sail ships. The fact that all these possessions are wrecked makes no difference. They are a simulacrum of the adult world. So the children keep house in burnt-out cottages, or climb into the cabins of tractors and roam the tundra on vanished wheels. Sometimes they man the bridge of the beached and derelict cargo ship, and steer for the Arctic sea. Only when they stop being children do they realise that they are inhabiting a world in ruins.

At the age of twelve or thirteen, said Nikolai, they start to drink.

Colin Thubron, In Siberia

Exodus shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. Winner annou...

Exodus shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. Winner announced November 13th.

Gabriel Josipovici on Exodus:

Who would have thought that a book about two disillusioned teachers of philosophy travelling round the country, talking about, among other things, Kierkegaard and the death of philosophy could be so gripping? Lars Iyer, however, has made it so, partly because he is often so funny and partly because he and his protagonists really do believe, and persuade us to believe, in the values they see disappearing before their eyes, under the pressure of successive philistine governments. In the end this, like the work of Patrick Keiller, but much funnier, is a book both about Britain today and about what is precious and needs to be preserved.

Exodus shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize.Gabriel Jos...

Exodus shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize.

Gabriel Josipovici on Exodus:

Who would have thought that a book about two disillusioned teachers of philosophy travelling round the country, talking about, among other things, Kierkegaard and the death of philosophy could be so gripping? Lars Iyer, however, has made it so, partly because he is often so funny and partly because he and his protagonists really do believe, and persuade us to believe, in the values they see disappearing before their eyes, under the pressure of successive philistine governments. In the end this, like the work of Patrick Keiller, but much funnier, is a book both about Britain today and about what is precious and needs to be preserved.

There is something very strange about Boswell, something ...

There is something very strange about Boswell, something that has been interpreted in two different ways. I’m going to look at the two extreme views: the one of the English essayist and historian Macaulay, who wrote around the middle of the nineteenth century, and that of Bernard Shaw, written, I believe, around 1915, or something like that. Then there is a whole range of judgments between those two. Macaulay says that the preeminence of Homer as an epic poet, of Shakespeare as a dramatic poet, of Demosthenes as an orator, and of Cervantes as a novelist is no less indisputable than the preeminence of Boswell as a biographer. And then he says that all those eminent names owed their preeminence to their talent and brilliance, and that the odd thing about Boswell is that he owes hispreeminence as a biographer to his foolishness, his inconsistency, his vanity, and his imbecility.

He then recounts a series of instances in which Boswell appears as a ridiculous character. He says that if these things that happened to Boswell had happened to anybody else, that person would have wanted the earth to swallow him up. Boswell, however, dedicated himself to publicizing them. For example, there’s the scorn shown to him by an English duchess, and the fact that members of the club he managed to join thought there could not be a person less intelligent than Boswell. But Macaulay forgets that we owe the narration of almost all those facts to Boswell himself. Now… in the case of a short composition a fool can utter a brilliant sentence but it seems quite rare for a fool to be able to write an admirable biography of seven or eight hundred pages in spite of being a fool or, according to Macaulay, because he was a fool.

Now, let us take a look at the opposite opinion, that of Bernard Shaw. Bernard Shaw, in one of his long and incisive prologues, says that he is the heir to an apostolic succession of dramatists, that this succession comes from the Greek tragedians—from Aeschylus, Sophocles, through Euripides—and then passes through Shakespeare, through Marlowe. He says that he is not, in fact, better than Shakespeare, that if he had lived in Shakespeare’s century he would not have written works better than Hamlet or Macbeth; but now he can, for he cannot stand Shakespeare, because he has read authors who are better than him. Before, he mentioned other dramatists, names that are somewhat surprising for such a list. He says we have the four Evangelists, those four great dramatists who created the character Christ. Before, we had Plato, who created the character Socrates.

Then we have Boswell, who created the character Johnson. “And now, we have me, who has created so many characters it is not worth listing them, the list would be almost infinite as well as being well known.” “Finally,” he says, “I am heir to the apostolic succession that begins with Aeschylus and ends in me and that undoubtedly will continue.” So here we have these two extreme opinions: one, that Boswell was an idiot who had the good fortune to meet Johnson and write his biography—that’s Macaulay’s—and the other, the opposite, of Bernard Shaw, who says that Johnson was, among his other literary merits, a dramatic character created by Boswell.

... what Boswell planned, or in any case what he carried out, was completely different: to make Johnson’s biography a drama, with several characters. There is [Sir Joshua] Reynolds, there is [Oliver] Goldsmith, sometimes the members of the circle, or how would we call it, the salon, of which Johnson was the leader. And they appear and behave like the characters in a play. Indeed, each has his own personality—above all, Dr. Johnson, who is presented sometimes as ridiculous but always as lovable. This is what happens with Cervantes’s character, Don Quixote, especially in the second part, when the author has learned to know his character and has forgotten his initial goal of parodying novels of chivalry. This is true, because the more writers develop their characters, the better they get to know them. So, that’s how we have a character who is sometimes ridiculous, but who can be serious and have profound thoughts, and above all is one of the most beloved characters in all of history. And we can say “of history” because Don Quixote is more real to us than Cervantes himself, as Unamuno and others have maintained. …. And at the end, Don Quixote is a slightly ridiculous character, but he is also a gentleman worthy of our respect, and sometimes our pity, but he is always lovable. And this is the same sensation we get from the image of Dr. Johnson, given to us by Boswell, with his grotesque appearance, his long arms, his slovenly appearance. But he is lovable.

….Now, in the same way that we have seen how Johnson is similar to Don Quixote, we have to think that just as Sancho is the companion Quixote sometimes treats badly, we see Boswell in that same relation to Dr. Johnson: a sometimes stupid and loyal companion. There are characters whose role is to bring out the hero’s personality. In other words, often authors need a character who serves as a framework for and a contrast to the deeds of his hero. This is Sancho, and that character in Boswell’s work is Boswell himself. That is, Boswell appears as a despicable character. But it seems impossible to me that Boswell didn’t realize this. And this shows that Boswell positioned himself in contrast to Johnson. The fact that Boswell himself tells anecdotes in which he appears ridiculous makes him not seem ridiculous at all, for if he wrote them down, he did it because he saw that the purpose of the anecdote was to make Johnson stand out.

Perhaps Boswell simply felt it as an aesthetic necessity that to better showcase Johnson, there should be a very different character alongside him. Something like in the novels of Conan Doyle: the mediocre Dr. Watson makes the brilliant Sherlock Holmes stand out even more. And Boswell gives himself the role of the ridiculous one, and he maintains it throughout the entire book. Yet, we feel a sincere friendship between the two in the same way we feel it when we read Conan Doyle’s novels. It is natural, as I have said, that this would be so; for Johnson was a famous man and alone, and of course he liked to feel by his side the friendship of a much younger man, who so obviously admired him.

From Borges's lecture on Boswell and Johnson.

On Facebook and Twitter, you are performing to attract pe...

On Facebook and Twitter, you are performing to attract people – you are dancing emotionally, on a platform created by a large corporation. People’s feelings bounce back and forth – happy Stakhanovites, ignoring and denying the system of power. […] We look back on [Stalin’s] socialist realism not as innocent but as a dramatic expression of power; it expresses the superiority of the state, which was the guiding belief at the time. I think sometime in the future people will look back at the millions and millions of descriptions of personal feelings on the internet and see them in similar ways. This is the driving belief of our time: that ‘me’ and what I feel minute by minute is the natural centre of the world. Far from revealing that this is an ideology – and that there are other ways of looking at human society – what Twitter and Facebook do is reinforce the feeling that this is the natural way to be.

Katherine Viner interviews Adam Curtis (via)

A writer, particularly a young and inexperienced writer, ...

A writer, particularly a young and inexperienced writer, feels himself under an obligation to give his reader the fullest answers to all possible questions. Conscience will not let him shut his eyes to tormenting problems, and so he begins to speak of ‘first and ultimate things.’ As he cannot say anything profitable on such subjects—for it is not the business of the young to be profoundly philosophical—he grows excited, he shouts himself to hoarseness. In the end he is silent from exhaustion.

Leo Shestov (via)