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David Ulin - the LA Times book editor writes about information overload:

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Found this from GK Chesterton after searching for essays on Great Expectations (of which, more to follow).

Nothing is important except the fate of the soul; and literature is only
redeemed from an utter triviality, surpassing that of naughts and crosses,
by the fact that it describes not the world around us, or the things on the
retina of the eye, or the enormous irrelevancy of encyclopaedias, but some
condition to which the human spirit can come.

from Chesterton’s intrdoduction to The Old Curiousity Shop

This has some resonance with what Coetzee had to say about literature and its capacity to offer relief for the extreme soul. See earlier post.

Interesting paean to Amy Hempel and the minimalist approach to writing in The LA Times.

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From ESPN:

According to reports, he [Vernon Forrest] was robbed at a gas station, where he had stopped to put air in his tires and allow his 11-year-old godson to use the bathroom. A man approached Forrest and demanded his Rolex and championship ring, and after the man took the items Forrest pulled out his .45 and chased the man on foot.

That’s when another man, presumed to be with the robber, had a verbal confrontation with Forrest, and the two exchanged gunfire. Forrest was shot eight times. Thankfully, Forrest’s godson was in the store at the time of the shooting.

Stephen Mitchelmore writing about the impact of a serious head injury in his blog, This Space:

I submitted and looked at the witness statements. One saw the cyclist fly into the air still holding the handlebars, then land to lie stock-still across the tarmac. The other witness got out of his car and ran over. After a minute or so the cyclist opened his eyes, sat up straight but did not respond to questions. Blood ran out of his right ear. Then he insisted on moving to the side of the road.

That was it really. I read the words with a forensic attention, as if each was an unrequited love letter, yet what I really wanted wasn’t there. I wanted to see what was not seen. Why was the fracture below the overhang of the skull? If my head struck the tarmac (there is no curb), how was this part damaged rather than the crown? Perhaps it hit the frame of the car, but wouldn’t that have been more damaging at such speed? Reading the statements has not been enough; answers have become questions.

What remains? The legacy of traumatic brain injury for one. My inner ear was damaged so I have had to retrain my sense of balance (this also has a weird side effect that mimics chronic fatigue syndrome). I may be able to cycle again as a result and so regain the freedom I lost. My sense of smell has gone and may never return - this also diminishes the sense of taste - while concentration and short-term memory levels are lower. On the plus side, I think my writing has improved; that is, has become more closely attuned to what concerns me and renews the fascination with books with which I began twenty-four years ago. This beginning and the time in hospital tell me that, while reading and writing are not enough, life isn’t, either.

Simon Schama in surprisingly good form wriiting in The FT about Updike and more specifically his last collection of short stories, My Father’s Tears.

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Geoff Nicholson and Will Self discuss the art of walking

Not a spectacularly interesting exchange, but this from Will Self wasn’t bad:

I very like the ‘munching on mental nothingness’ line, and it does apply
to me perfectly well, too. I liken it - again - to meditation: I set off thinking programmatically - or perhaps only troubled by what they call, in German, ‘the ear worm’, perhaps some ghastly mid-seventies pop ditty the lyric of which I can’t chak, or maybe more rarefied composition of lines, tropes and imagery, drawn with great intent from what I see and hear and smell and feel. However, in the fullness of time the steady beat of the feet usually manages to subdue all this. I pursue very high mileages for this reason: twenty-five, thirty - even thirty-five miles in a day. Up at these high mileages (like, I would imagine, high altitudes, although such a notion is inimical to me: I adore mountaineering literature, but only read it when I’m lying in a hammock in the delta), I find that I become - like your Old Etonian - absorbed into the landmass, feeling its contours as you might those of a body one is seeking carnal - or at any rate, sensuous - knowledge of.

As to the gestural - yes, I am too old for walking lobsters on a leash through the Tuileries, or negotiating Florence by dice, or finding my way around Berlin using a map of Hartford, Connecticut. I distrust the idea that the society of the spectacle can be torn down in this fashion - although I do believe long distance walking can undermine it. I cleave to airport walks for this reason: walking to the airport, taking a flight, then walking at the other end. Not only does this negate the way prescribed folkways banalize the sublimity of international jet travel, but because the physical perception of distance is so much more vivid than the mental, it actually feels as if Manhattan has been rammed into the Thames Estuary: in place of the special relationship an hideous miscegenation of cities.

Prescribed folkways??

Andrew Gimson writing in The Telegraph yesterday:

One of the Prime Minister’s weaknesses as a debater is that he so seldom dares to think on his feet. Tony Blair liked to seize some novel thought or suggestion and send it winging back in modified form towards his interlocutor: Mr Brown just treats whatever anyone else says as an unwelcome distraction from the tedious Brownite orthodoxy, which then has to be repeated at inordinate length in an attempt to wear everyone else down.

GB’s weaknesses are endlessly anatomised at the moment. His reputation as the Iron Chancellor is long gone - Mandy has his work cut out.

Not a great deal of insight in this report from The Star Ledger - a local paper in Camden, NJ. Former world champion Super Featherweight, Rocky Lockridge tells his story.

Lockridge took a job working for William Jones & Son, Inc. in Camden, a drum and barrel company on Liberty Street, where he cleaned and painted barrels for $8 per hour starting in January 1994.

Shortly thereafter, he was arrested for burglary — the first time — but was sentenced to five years probation, according to court records. Three years later, he was arrested for burglary again, this time serving 27 months before being released in July of 1999.

He hasn’t worked since.

When he got out of jail, he found he had nowhere to go and ended up on the streets.

“I don’t know exactly what happened or how it happened or what happened at that particular time in my life,” he says.

One thing he does remember is going back to using drugs.

“I knew a lot of people who I partied with here in Camden after a victory,” he says.

Lockridge says that if you’re going to be homeless, Camden is the place to be. There are many different places that will give you a free meal, many shelters that will put you up for a night.

Lockridge lives on the $140 a month and food stamps he receives from the government — as well as pocket change he gets from panhandling. He says the stroke he suffered three years ago makes it difficult to walk, no less hold a job.
John O’Boyle/The Star-LedgerRocky Lockridge walks along a street in Camden.

He sleeps in shelters occasionally but admits he’s had issues committing to a shelter because the curfew is sometimes as early as 7 p.m. Lately, he has slept in a mosquito-infested abandoned row house around the block from his regular corner.

And he continues to have troubles with the law, though his last arrest — for criminal trespassing in May — resulted only in community service.

…
As he sits on his stoop, smoking a cigarette, he talks about why he is finally ready to turn his life around, find a place to live, give up drinking and drugs.

“I’m going to get it back together and say no to drugs,” he said. “I’ve got a family that I want to spend some time with ’til my time is up on Planet Earth. I’m on a mission now, perhaps even greater than my mission before. My kids need me in their lives, experience being the best teacher.”
John O’Boyle/The Star-LedgerRocky Lockridge (left) jokes with his friend Charles Braxton on a street corner in Camden.

Lockridge says he recently was tracked down by his son, Ricky, now 24, who lives in the Washington, D.C., area near Lamar. The twins were surprised to find out a few months ago that they have a half-brother, Ramond Dixon, 22, born in Camden but who now also lives in the D.C. area. The three have become close — but they remain distant from their father.

“I remember spending time with him when I was 3 or 4, but he was never there at a steady pace,” Ramond, known as “Ron-Ron,” says. “Even though my dad wasn’t there for me growing up, I never really had harsh feelings. I never was really upset. As a man now I can see that people make mistakes.”

Ricky Lockridge has mixed feelings.

“It’s sad. It hurts,” he says about his dad’s predicament. “But I never lost confidence in my dad, he’s a strong person.”

Lockridge says reuniting with his boys is his inspiration for cleaning up his life.

“Now I’m ready for this, mentally and physically, to get me back on track,” Lockridge says. “I am in dire need of that kind of support and I want it. I’ve been knocked down. Now I’m finally ready to get back up.”

…
“It hurts. It hurts. In more ways than one, it hurts. How can you be a great man, father and husband … how can you be a great champion and not be a great father, husband? Dad? It hurts. But I’m still alive. I can’t make up for the lost time, but I can just get there, be there, spend the rest of the time with my wife and children and give them the time that I have left.”

Too good to let this pass unremarked - Julian Barnes on the underrated Frank O’Connor in The Spectator. For readers unfamiliar with his work, a good place to start is the classic GUESTS OF THE NATION. Interestingly mangled by Neil Jordan in The Crying Game.

More background information on Frank O’Connor via Michael L Storey’s article published in Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1998.

Julian Barnes on Frank O’Connor

Frank O’Connor was once stopped on the road west of Kinsale by a man who said to him: ‘I hear you’re a famous writer. I’d like to be a famous writer too, but ’tis bloody hard. The comma and the apostrophe are easy enough, but the semicolon is the very divil.’ The man was wrong, of course: the ability to punctuate, and even to spell, correctly are often missing from some of the best writers. What counts is the ability to be on that road, allow yourself to be stopped, listen to what the man says, remember the voice, and know when and how best to use it. O’Connor’s art was that of a man who travels his native Ireland at the speed of a bicycle, happy to pause and listen, slow to come to a general conclusion, preferring the particular instance and the gradually revealed truth.

Mrs W. B. Yeats used to address him as ‘Michael-Frank’, an affectionate combining of his birth-name (Michael O’Donovan) and his pen-name. But that brief hyphen is also an indicator of the proximity between his personal and artistic selves. In some writers, the artistic self is separated off from the daily one: Jekyll closes the study door and turns into Hyde (or, sometimes, vice versa). O’Connor, while containing paradoxes and contradictions as any artist does, was much less of a bifurcated spirit than most. What he was lay very close to what he did; his fiction and non-fiction have similar contours and spirit. And to read the totality of his work is to discover multiple criss-crossings between books, with the same stories alluded to and retold.

But such repetitions, when they occur, don’t feel like a writer recycling his material. Instead, the reader is more likely to smile in affectionate recognition as the stories of the Tailor and Anstey, or Mrs Yeats and the next-door dog, or Lord Edward Fitzgerald and the Native American woman, come round again. This is not just because O’Connor is a seductive and trustable narrator to whom we willingly submit, whether he is writing a short story about childhood, describing Celtic architecture, explaining Irish poetry, or fulminating against the Famine or James Joyce. It is because voice is central to O’Connor’s art. He is that comparatively rare thing in modern times, an oral prose writer.

When he came to literary awareness, modernism was enjoying its fullest and most successful expression. In its general and necessary attack on a dying tradition of panoramic social realism, it also inflicted major — and to O’Connor’s belief, catastrophic — damage on the notion of the writer’s voice. Modernism fragmented and ironised it, made it unreliable and shifty, sometimes hidden away altogether. O’Connor wanted to keep alive in prose, and especially in the short story, what he believed to be at its heart: the sound of ‘an actual man, talking’.

Talking, but also listening. O’Connor once said that when he remembered people — even those he was very fond of — he sometimes couldn’t remember their faces, but could always take off their voices. So, in his art, how a character sounds is more important than where they live or what they are wearing, or even what they look like. William Maxwell, O’Connor’s editor for many years at the New Yorker, amicably complained that though he was capable of ‘marvellous descriptions’, he didn’t go in for them much because they didn’t interest him. They did when he was writing topographically or architecturally — then he looked as closely as anyone — but in the rendering of human beings into fictional form it all began with voice — their voice, his voice.

The writer Benedict Kiely once noted that ‘O’Connor can be as outrageously at ease with his own people as a country priest skelping the courting couples out of the ditches.’ His fellow New Yorker writer Maeve Brennan also teased him with the clerical comparison, imagining St Patrick’s Cathedral with O’Connor ‘where he usually is in the afternoons, sitting in a confession box pretending to be a priest and giving penance to some old woman’. But the real priest listens, judges, issues penances, and keeps the sinner’s secrets. O’Connor listened, took notes, did not judge, and turned the confession into a story. His masters were not the moralists or the modernists, but those like Turgenev (‘my hero among writers’) who went with seeming simplicity to the complexity at the heart of human matters. And the short-story writer he turned to most often was Chekhov. When Maxwell inherited O’Connor’s volumes of Chekhov, he described them as ‘so lived with — turned down corners, coffee stains, whiskey stains, and perhaps tears’.

In his essay on the Russian in ‘The Lonely Art’, O’Connor identifies one central, and to him profoundly sympathetic, belief in Chekhov’s work: the notion that

We are not damned for our mortal sins, which so often require courage and dignity, but by our venial sins, which we often commit a hundred times a day until we become as enslaved to them as we could be to alcohol and drugs. Because of them and our toleration of them, we create a false personality for ourselves.

(Again, O’Connor’s confessional was an unorthodox one.) In ‘Checkhov’s ‘The Bishop’, written the year before he died, a bishop, originally from a poor background, is dying a lonely death. He is visited by his old mother who, because of his eminence, at first cannot stop calling him ‘Your Grace’. Only towards the end does she break through the ‘false personality’ society has imposed on her, to the intimate contact mother and son once had: she starts calling him again by the private names she once used when he was a small boy unable to button his trousers. ‘It is a final affirmation,’ O’Connor writes, ‘of Chekhov’s faith in life — lonely and sad, immeasurably sad, but beautiful beyond the power of the greatest artist to tell.’

And yet not beyond the power of the artist to try. If Chekhov was O’Connor’s prose master, Mozart was his musical master, and there is a conscious iteration in O’Connor’s analysis, on the 200th anniversary of the composer’s death, of what it is that we have come to call ‘Mozartean’:

It is a way of seeing things which revokes the tragic attitude without turning into comedy, which says, not ‘Life is beautiful but so sad’ but ‘Life is so sad but beautiful’, and this way of seeing things, half way between tragedy and comedy, represents a human norm.

That human norm tells us where O’Connor’s art came from, and where it is heading.

(c) The Spectator 2009