In a few minutes, literati from all around the region, and I among them, will be homing in on the Aotea Centre for the opening event of the 2012 Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, the New Zealand Listener Gala Night, titled What the Dickens? And there's more! I am also one of the invitati to the party afterwards. I wrote "afterwords" and then corrected myself, but you know, it might have been a Freudian slip. In fact, Books in the City will be posting a slew of "afterwords" on Festival events, from a swarm of charged-up librarians.
In our absence, I like to imagine our books will be enjoying themselves too, like those in this wonderful video which an art director named Sean Ohlenkamp filmed in a Toronto bookstore. I enjoyed seeing The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook go by, a book I haven't thought about in years. Or at least I think I saw it -- it all happens pretty fast!
May 11, 2012
Auckland Writers & Readers Festival 2012: it's here!
March 01, 2012
Just my type
Two clever video clips for Simon Garfield's book on the allure of fonts
How do you feel about getting to the end of a book and finding a stagy sort of note on the last page about what font the book you just read was set in? Although the tempation is there to be snide about the "toff" aspects of these About the type notes -- for one, they only appear in certain books (besides two W.G. Sebald novels which upon finishing last year I was advised were set in Perpetua, a quick look through some of my shelves to find a few other examples provided only two: Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking and a new translation of The song of songs, both set in Bodoni), all in all, I find this presumption on the part of the publisher of the reader's total love affair with the book endearing. In the end, I am won over by the pure bookishness, in all its quirky and somewhat stodgy particularity, of the thing.
For anyone who hasn't come across one yet, the note from the W.G. Sebald books will give you a good idea what I'm talking about:
If, like me, you have a soft spot for fonts (and if you don't - who are you?), watch these two clever video clips from Penguin Books, inspired by Simon Garfield's book Just my type, "a hugely entertaining and revealing guide to the history of type that asks, What does your favorite font say about you?" according to Penguin. I've ordered the book in, not because I want to dig into this aspect (having been a bit put off by seeing one of my favourites, Garamond, described on typophile.com as a family of “usable typefaces with a slight air of conscious refinement”) (I wouldn't have minded a "conscious air of slight refinement"), but because I might just learn the answer to a question which has always bothered me, and which I gleefully see one of the people in the video asking as well:
What is the point of wingdings?
The fonts star in the first clip, in the second it's people unashamedly liking Garamond and even, gulp, Comic sans!
February 16, 2012
Word as image by Ji Lee
Challenge: Create an image out of a word, using only the letters in the word itself.
Rule: Use only the graphic elements of the letters without adding outside parts.
Watch: Ji Lee's "Word as image"
February 01, 2012
Remembering WG Sebald
On the back cover of my copy of W.G. Sebald's novel Austerlitz Susan Sontag muses “Is literary greatness still possible? What would a noble literary enterprise look like? One of the few answers still available to English-language readers is the work of W.G. Sebald.”
"Oh Susan!" I wanted to say. "Only a cultural grande dame like you could lay it out so beautifully". I felt bad, I confess, for how I laughed during the scene in that great modern-classic baseball flick Bull Durham where the scotch-drinking, hard-hitting, old-time baseball player Crash Davis recites his man credo to Susan Sarandon, sexy in décolleté and jangly bracelets and fresh from a listen of her Edith Piaf album (on vinyl). He believes AstroTurf should be outlawed and that Christmas presents should be opened on Christmas morning and not Christmas Eve, and "I believe the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent overrated crap!" I giggled. I was the owner of a copy of The Volcano Lover at the time.
But if Susan Sontag seemed incapable of casting a lucid eye on her own fiction (and not just her written fiction -- I think of how, dying, she created a universe in which anyone wishing to be close to her had to conform to the laws of the Sontagian system which did not admit talking or thinking about death, a harrowing experience her son David Rieff described with much thought and much pain in his memoir Swimming in a sea of death), the cultural criticism she performed throughout her life was impeccable. As with her thirty words on the Austerlitz cover, which for me capture the essence of what it means to read W.G. Sebald, the author who believed above all in "the carefully composed page", and who, sadly, died after writing four brilliant novels, at what might have been the top of his game, or maybe, probably, with the top still to come, in a car crash most likely caused by a heart attack (he swerved into the path of a truck, with his daughter in the car with him), ten years ago last month.
“I don’t know where it comes from but I like to listen to people who have been sidelined for one reason or another, because when they start to talk they tell you things you won’t hear from anyone else,” he says in a wonderful podcast on the “Bookworm” programme. In a rich, musical voice, rolling his r’s, Sebald talks about the literature which had been important for him, like “Virchinia Woolf” – he remembers a passage in a Woolf novel "Two pages only. A moth coming to its death on a windowpane in Sussex. No mention of the battlefields of the Somme.” Even if that was clearly what it was all about.
He talks about being inspired by 19th century German writers to whom the quality of their prose was more important than social commentary or plot, unlike, say, the 19th century French novel, and names two of them, both unknown to me, but not to the interviewer, who releases an ecstatic sigh at the sound of the names – it’s possibly worth listening to just for this moment out of "Saturday Night Live" -- who “like me are from the periphery of the German-speaking lands”. I love the way he says “the periphery”. Who talks like that anymore?
When I did finally start Austerlitz, I'd just been to Prague, where in a public garden we had come across a series of huge panels displaying photographs of the "Winton Train", a special train honouring Nicholas Winton, the organiser of the Kindertransport trains which had brought Jewish children out of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia to safety in England. On the 70th anniversary of the date the last Kindertransport was to have departed Prague, in September 1939 -- I guess the date will tell you why it didn't -- the Winton train, drawn by a 1930s locomotive, travelled along the same route it would have taken, with some of the original "Winton's children" aboard, now in their eighties. It was met at Liverpool Station by Nicholas Winton himself, aged 100.
And guess what, the protagonist of Austerlitz, it turns out, is Jacques Austerlitz, who as a child had been sent to Britain on the last Kindertransport and raised in a dour Calvinist family in Wales, all the while retaining flickering memories of his Czech childhood, and who is eventually compelled to travel to Prague looking for an answer to the enigma of who he had been, what had happened.
Of course, as Sebald never tired of pointing out, it is all of Europe which should be asking the question. In an unforgettable scene near the end of the book, Austerlitz is standing in one of the towers of the babylonian-modern Bibliothèque Nationale, the French national library, repository of all that is published in France, as a friend describes how the ground the tower is built on had once held the warehouses where the Nazis stored the loot stolen from the 40,000 homes of the deported Paris Jews, everything that civilisation had ever produced, he says, down to boxes of rosin taken from the cases of confiscated violins.
One of the other things Sebald dwells on in his writing is time. I tend to live very much in the present, but -- or maybe because of that -- I always get a delicious yearning feeling when I read what other people less firmly rooted in the present have to say on the subject of time past or passing. I loved the scene where Austerlitz visits The Royal Observatory at Greenwich, the temple of timekeeping, and says that he hopes “that time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back and go behind it, and there I shall find everything as it once was or more precisely I shall find that all moments of time have co-existed simultaneously, in which case none of what history tells us would be true…”
Here is the trailer for the film, just uploaded to youtube by Soda Pictures, according to whom it is "coming soon".
In the meantime, people say that The Rings of Saturn is one of the best books to start reading W.G. Sebald with.
The books:
The emigrants by WG Sebald (1992, translated 2003)
The rings of Saturn by WG Sebald (1998)
Vertigo by WG Sebald (2000)
Austerlitz by WG Sebald (2001)
and
Swimming in a sea of death by David Rieff
June 07, 2011
Elizabeth Taylor's favourite poem
I'm not sure why I missed reading about Elizabeth Taylor's funeral. I am sure I would have taken the opportunity had it presented itself. I enjoy stories about funerals, from the one about how at Chekhov's funeral some of the mourners joined the wrong procession by mistake, following, to the sounds of a marching band, the casket of a certain General Keller, to the descriptions of the hundreds of thousands of people lining the streets to farewell Edith Piaf on her way to the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
And I have always been an Elizabeth Taylor fan. I loved her little Donald Ducky voice and the way that she converted to Judaism for love and coincidentally ended up the ne plus ultra of Jewish-American style, or at least what you might call its "ostentation" subcategory -- the outré clothes, the jewels (did she and Richard used to talk about 'rocks' or is that just my imagination), the bouffant hair. Above all, I loved her for not caring more about her incredible beauty than she did about having a good time, a trait which was never so evident as during her tumultuous and famously boozy love affair with Richard Burton.
Which brings me to my story. The other day I was killing time trolling through poetry-read-aloud clips on youtube -- don't laugh if you haven't tried it, you would be amazed at what is there -- and I came across a recording of Richard Burton reciting a poem by the great Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, a very complex and beautiful poem about the fading of beauty called "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo", and there on the little side bar was a clip about Elizabeth Taylor's funeral! It turns out that Richard used to recite this poem to her and she had asked that Colin Farrell read it at her funeral.
I don't know how Colin Farrell read it, but Richard Burton's performance of it is incredible. He is so urgent, so alive in every pore -- he really gives back to Gerard Manley Hopkins all that flood of feeling, that romantic ecstasy which used to make him throw himself down on the ground to be closer to the beauties of the earth -- and which the contortions of his inner self made him decide he had to sublimate to the love of God, depriving himself of worldly pleasures, choosing a life of discipline and drudgery as a Jesuit priest, and dying young of typhoid caused by the leaky drains of the squalid dwelling he had been assigned.
I have a wonderful scene in my mind of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in bed, in their cups, she is wearing diamonds and he is wearing nothing, and he leaps out of bed and recites this to her. Listen:
Here is the text of the poem, if you'd like to try it yourself:
The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo
(Maidens’ song from St. Winefred’s Well)
THE LEADEN ECHO
How to kéep—is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, … from vanishing away?
Ó is there no frowning of these wrinkles, rankéd wrinkles deep,
Dówn? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?
No there ’s none, there ’s none, O no there ’s none,
Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,
Do what you may do, what, do what you may,
And wisdom is early to despair:
Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done
To keep at bay
Age and age’s evils, hoar hair,
Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
O there ’s none; no no no there ’s none:
Be beginning to despair, to despair,
Despair, despair, despair, despair.
THE GOLDEN ECHO
Spare!
There ís one, yes I have one (Hush there!);
Only not within seeing of the sun,
Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
Tall sun’s tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth’s air,
Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,
Oné. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
Where whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that ’s fresh and fast flying of us,
seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet
Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matchèd face,
The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
Never fleets móre, fastened with the tenderest truth
To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an everlastingness of, O it is an all youth!
Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace,
Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace—
Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,
And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver
Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty's self and beauty's giver.
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.
Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould
Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept,
This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold
What while we, while we slumbered.
O then, weary then why should we tread?
O why are we so haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged, so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered,
When the thing we freely forfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
A care kept. — Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where. —
Yonder. — What high as that! We follow, now we follow. — Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.
