Stuart Jeffries, “John Banville: A Life in Writing,” The Guardian (Guardian Review p. 12), 30 June 2012.
Banville once said of his books that “I hate them all”. Is that affectation? “They embarrass me because they’re all failures. We’re aiming for perfection and never attain it. It’s become a cliché but, as Beckett wrote, ‘Fail again. Fail better.’ What one does is so little compared to one’s ambitions for it.”
Stuart Jeffries, “John Banville: A Life in Writing,” The Guardian (Guardian Review p. 12), 30 June 2012.
I’d given up Catholicism in my teens but something of it stays with me. I try to create the perfect sentence — that’s as close to godliness as I can get.
Stuart Jeffries, “John Banville: A Life in Writing,” The Guardian (Guardian Review p. 12), 30 June 2012.
The problem with doing an interview is that the person who wrote the story ceased to exist every day I got up from the desk. When you’re writing there’s a deep deep level of concentration way below your normal self. This strange voice, these strange sentences come out of you. When I was young I thought I was in control of everything. Now I realise it’s much more a process of dreaming.
Oliver Burkeman, “Happiness is a Glass Half Empty,” The Guardian 16 June 2012
In an unremarkable business park outside the city of Ann Arbor, in Michigan, stands a poignant memorial to humanity’s shattered dreams. It doesn’t look like that from the outside, though. Even when you get inside – which members of the public rarely do – it takes a few moments for your eyes to adjust to what you’re seeing. It appears to be a vast and haphazardly organised supermarket; along every aisle, grey metal shelves are crammed with thousands of packages of food and household products. There is something unusually cacophonous about the displays, and soon enough you work out the reason: unlike in a real supermarket, there is only one of each item. And you won’t find many of them in a real supermarket anyway: they are failures, products withdrawn from sale after a few weeks or months, because almost nobody wanted to buy them. In the product-design business, the storehouse — operated by a company called GfK Custom Research North America — has acquired a nickname: the Museum of Failed Products.
This is consumer capitalism’s graveyard — the shadow side to the relentlessly upbeat, success-focused culture of modern marketing. […]
There is a Japanese term, mono no aware, that translates roughly as “the pathos of things”: it captures a kind of bittersweet melancholy at life’s impermanence — that additional beauty imparted to cherry blossoms, say, or human features, as a result of their inevitably fleeting time on Earth.
[…] Behind all of the most popular modern approaches to happiness and success is the simple philosophy of focusing on things going right. But ever since the first philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, a dissenting perspective has proposed the opposite: that it’s our relentless effort to feel happy, or to achieve certain goals, that is precisely what makes us miserable and sabotages our plans. And that it is our constant quest to eliminate or to ignore the negative — insecurity, uncertainty, failure, sadness — that causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain or unhappy in the first place.
Yet this conclusion does not have to be depressing. Instead, it points to an alternative approach: a “negative path” to happiness that entails taking a radically different stance towards those things most of us spend our lives trying hard to avoid. This involves learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity and becoming familiar with failure. In order to be truly happy, it turns out, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions — or, at the very least, to stop running quite so hard from them. […]
[Photograph: Kelly K Jones]
Richard Lea, “The Truth About Memory and the Novel,” The Guardian 14 June 2012
[…] The US novelist Francisco Goldman admitted he also called Say Her Name, his portrait of his late wife Aura, a “novel” as a way of avoiding the memoir police, but for him the moments he invented were more than just artistic licence. By making up something that Aura really would have done, or finding exactly the turn of phrase she would have used he was in some sense claiming her back.
[…] In Say Her Name, Goldman examines his late wife’s unpublished fiction, looking for clues to her life in her drafts, her notes. Barthesians may shake their heads at this all-too-human reaction to the death of the author, but perhaps the fact they were still unfinished holds out the hope that these stories contain traces of the author that can still be made out, that the memories which had in some way inspired them can be caught before they have made the transition into fiction.
Bernard Comment, “Bernard Comment: I Write Fiction, to Engrave Time,” The Guardian 14 June 2012
The practice of writing résumés, or the more recent example of Wikipedia, is as chilling as taking an X-ray, when all that remains is a skeleton. In these documents, the hazy tide of a life is reduced to a few dried-out drops — dates, diplomas, geographical locations, professional history – and you can’t find any of that complex, contradictory, muddled pulp that is memory, with its radiant points and its miserable moments, its pride and its shame, its desires and its remorse — not to mention what’s entailed by the Portuguese word “saudade,” that is, nostalgia for what was, but also for what wasn’t and could have been.
Jonathan Jones, “Lost Art Comes Back to Haunt Us,” The Guardian 6 June 2012
The art that exists is a tiny fraction of the art that is lost. Vanished works outnumber the surviving masterpieces in museums, just as the dead outnumber the living. Where are the paintings of Apelles, court artist to Alexander the Great, who was said to be the greatest artist of all time? Gone forever. Not a fragment of any of his paintings survives. Meanwhile, the reputation of Gustav Klimt is forever scarred by the destruction of some of his most serious works at the end of the second world war.
Lost art exerts a fascination all of its own. Like ghostly mutterings in galleries, the images of vanished works linger behind the surviving corpus of art. Ghosts of Leonardo da Vinci’s Battle of Anghiari haunt Salvador Dali’s painting Spain. Holbein’s destroyed Whitehall mural is commemorated by his eerie full-size drawing of Henry VIII.
In the 20th century, art’s relationship with disappearance got stranger than ever. Some artists made works that were designed to disappear — Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty sank into the landscape before re-emerging in recent years.
[…] It hurts to lose art. Lucian Freud never gave up looking for a portrait of Francis Bacon by him that was stolen in Berlin. He made a compelling Wanted poster appealing for its return — Freud’s only work of conceptual art. The loss was evidently painful: the painting was an intimate record of his friend and equal, and eerily vanished from Berlin, where Freud had spent his early years. Berlin was his lost city.
Lost art is fascinating because it epitomises everything else that is lost, as well. The miracle of its occasional recovery is an image of redemption.
Simon Reynolds, “Paperback Q&A: Simon Reynolds on Retromania,” The Guardian (website), 10 April 2012:
[A] book continues to write itself after you’ve finished and handed it in.
Brian Dillon, “Katie Paterson, the Cosmicomical Artist,” The Guardian (Guardian Review, p. 17), 7 April 2012:
Just how small an object, or intervention in the world, can an artist make before the idea of a “work” drifts away on the wind?
Iain Sinclair, Review of Night Thoughts: The Surreal Life of the Poet David Gascoyne, by Robert Fraser, The Guardian (Guardian Review, p. 7) 31 March 2012:
…Without labouring the thesis, he [Robert Fraser] manages to suggest that Gascoyne’s lifelong interest in conspiracy, covert sexuality, the occult, is an extension of the rituals and disguises of London suburbia. Poems, on the edge of self-erasure, fret over the impulse that pushes them towards publication and exposure. The visionary poet, a Christian existentialist, was prolific in his silences. He contrived enough white space for others to mythologise a consistently aborted career. He traded in the distance between his own reluctant muse and the conviction and swagger of the great ones he sought out, echoed and honoured.
…Gascoyne’s rescue, his return to life in the suburban house on the Isle of Wight, was brokered by two remarkable people. Judy Lewis, a vet’s estranged wife, who read his “September Sun: 1947” to a depressed group at Whitecroft Hospital, provoked the previously mute writer to speech. “I am the poet.” “Yes, dear. I’m sure you are.” But it was true. He was the poet and it was always 1947. He became a living quotation recovered from a midden of fragments: “All our trash to cinders bring.”
ANDREW GALLIX 