B writes a book in which he makes fun of certain writers, variously disguised, or, to be more precise, certain types of writers. In one of his stories there is a character not unlike A, a writer of about B’s age, but who, unlike B, is famous, well-off and has a large readership; in other words he has achieved the three highest goals (in that order) to which a man of letters can aspire. B is not famous, he has no money and his poems are published in little magazines. Yet A and B are not entirely dissimilar. They both come from lower-middle-class or upwardly mobile working-class families. Politically, both are left wing; they have in common a keen intellectual curiosity and a deficient formal education. With A’s meteoric rise, however, a sanctimonious tone has crept into his writing, and B, who is a slave to print, finds this particularly irritating. In his newspaper articles, and with increasing frequency in his books, A has taken to pontificating on all things great and small, human or divine, with a leaden pedantry, like a man who, having used literature as a ladder to social status and respectability, now safely ensconced in his nouveau-riche ivory tower, snipes at anything that might tarnish the mirror in which he contemplates himself and the world. For B, in short, A has become a prig.

Marilyn Munroe at the Actor's Studio - Picture by Ray Schatt

Marilyn Munroe was deeply concerned with her identity throughout her life. Babtised as Norma Jeane Baker and abandoned by her mother, she spent much of her childhood in foster homes. As a high profile actress people frequently confused her image with her true self. These factors combined with her quest for an inner peace hint at an answer to the attraction of Strasberg’s teachings.

Strasberg worked with all the heavies, James Dean, Paul Newman, Montgomery Clift, Robert De Niro, Steve McQueen, Jane Fonda, and Al Pacino. But he maintained that the two greatest were Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe.

At this time she also entered analysis but never fully managed to overcome her inner battle; she regarded “Marilyn Monroe” and her true self as two different entities.

On her death Marilyn Monroe willed the control of 75% of her estate to Lee Strasberg, including the licensing of her image, as gratitude for his mentorship and kindness.

Others who have been associated with the Actors Studio include Edward Albee, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, Dennis Hopper, Sidney Lumet, Norman Mailer, Steve McQueen, Sean Penn, Sidney Poitier, Tennessee Williams and Shelley Winters.

“The truth concerning the passions, verisimilitude in the feelings experienced in the given circumstances, that is what our intelligence demands of a dramatist.”
Pushkin’s aphorism

“Create your own method. Don’t depend slavishly on mine. Make up something that will work for you! But keep breaking traditions, I beg you.” Konstantin Stanislavsky

There is an interesting two-part documentary on the relationship between Munroe and Strasberg, which is well worth a few minutes of your time:

and

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.
Albert Camus

Thanks to English Pen, I gave a reading in the library at Everthorpe Prison last week.

English PEN is actively concerned for the well-being of writers who are imprisoned all over the world. The organization campaigns constantly for writers who suffer intimidation and violence and the loss of their liberty.

Everthorpe is a category C training prison which houses young convicted male prisoners. It includes a workshop complex and a gymnasium and currently holds something short of 700 offenders.

The guidelines I was given before my visit included the following:

Do not be worried about awkwardness of dealing with Offenders as it is exactly the same as visiting any group of people: a positive and direct manner and preparation.
Do not refer to the prisoner’s crime or length of sentence.
Do not bring any personal diaries or headed named paper or any sharp objects; your mobile phone will be kept at the Gate and you will be searched on way in.
Do bring a photo ID preferably a passport.
Do not give out any personal details to prisoners.
Do dress conservatively, flat shoes and loose clothes more practical for women.
Do not take anything in or out of prison without permission.
Do make every effort to be sensitive to the prison officers and their responsibilities.
Do be careful about physical contact. A warm handshake is usually acceptable and respectful.
Do listen; a listening ear is important in prison.
Do be yourself. You are dealing with people who can spot a fake in an instant.

On one level the experience was similar to a visit to a small university, my audience was comprised of men of differing ages and ethnicity and, although they were only present because they had expressed an interest, some were obviously keener than others and a minority were certainly more vocal than the rest. Most were there to listen, but others were potential writers’ and hoped to pick up something or other to aid their ambition.

I opened the session with a fairly long extract from my latest novel, Winged with Death. Although I’m a practiced and fairly good reader, I know from past experience that a long passage can put some people to sleep, or at least into near coma. But there was none of that at Everthorpe. The guys were quiet and attentive, and for the most part engaged with the content of the passage. There was no tell-tale shuffling or fidgeting, and when I came to the end of the reading there was an immediate flourish of questions.

Some of the questions were inane; there’s always someone who wants to know where you get your ideas from. But others were probing and intelligent. Someone wanted to discuss the problems associated with a first-person narrator. Another question, which elicited replies from around the room, was interested in what Scott-Fitzgerald meant by his depiction of Gatsby.

We spoke about the nature of criminality and its fascination for those on the outside, and the comments were mostly insightful and thought-through, often perceptive and original.

Although the library was like any other, and from almost any vantage point could have been in a small village or college, the building itself was dire. Stone corridors punctuated by metal double-doors every few yards, each of which had to be unlocked, opened, closed and relocked for each person passing through. A lack of windows, an overall feeling of claustrophobia and a sense of being caged. In every way, in fact, it felt like you would imagine a prison to feel.

I was told that there is a lot of talent in prison which is untapped on both sides of the cells. And I suppose that that was my over-riding experience. It was a privilege to be allowed to share in that for a short time.

“Every minor work has a secret author and every secret author is, by definition, a writer of masterpieces. Who writes the minor work? A minor writer, or so it appears. The poor man’s wife can testify to that, she’s seen him sitting at the table, bent over the blank pages, restless in his chair, his pen racing over the paper. The evidence would seem to be incontrovertible. But what she’s seen is only the outside. The shell of literature. A semblance,” said the old man to Archimboldi and Archimboldi thought of Ansky. “The person who really writes the minor work is a secret writer who accepts only the dictates of the masterpiece.

“Our good craftsman writes. He’s absorbed in what takes shape well or badly on the page. His wife, though she doesn’t know it, is watching him. It really is he who’s writing. But if his wife had X-ray vision she would see that instead of being present at an exercise of literary creation, she’s witnessing a session of hypnosis. There’s nothing inside the man who sits there writing. Nothing of himself, I mean. How much better off the poor man would be if he devoted himself to reading. Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it’s knowledge and questions. Writing, meanwhile, is almost always empty. There’s nothing in the guts of the man who sits there writing. Nothing, I mean to say, that his wife, at a given moment, might recognize. He writes like someone taking dictation. His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of concealment. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter!

“Excuse the metaphors. Sometimes, in my excitement, I wax romantic. But listen. Every work that isn’t a masterpiece is, in a sense, a part of a vast camouflage. You’ve been a soldier, I imagine, and you know what I mean. Every book that isn’t a masterpiece is cannon fodder, a slogging foot soldier, a piece to be sacrificed, since in multiple ways it mimics the design of the masterpiece. When I came to this realization, I gave up writing. Still, my mind didn’t stop working. In fact, it worked better when I wasn’t writing. I asked myself: why does a masterpiece need to be hidden? What strange forces wreath it in secrecy and mystery?

“By now I knew it was pointless to write. Or that it was worth it only if one was prepared to write a masterpiece. Most writers are deluded or playing. Perhaps delusion and play are the same thing, two sides of the same coin. The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life. One might also say: we’re theater, we’re music. By the same token, few are the writers who give up. We play at believing ourselves immortal. We delude ourselves in the appraisal of our own works and in our perpetual misappraisal of the works of others. See you at the Nobel, writers say, as one might say: see you in hell.”

The city center was old, with three- or four-story buildings and arcaded plazas in a state of neglect and young office workers in shirt-sleeves and Indian women with bundles on their backs hurrying down cobblestoned streets, and they saw streetwalkers and young thugs loitering on the corners. Mexican types straight out of a black-and-white movie. Toward the east were the middle- and upper-class neighbourhoods. There they saw streets with carefully pruned trees and public playgrounds and shopping centers. The university was there, too. To the north were abandoned factories and sheds and a street of bars and souvenir shops and small hotels, where it was said no one ever slept, and further out there were more poor neighbourhoods, though they were less crowded, and vacant lots out of which every so often there rose a school. To the south they discovered rail lines and slum soccer fields surrounded by shacks, and they even watched a match, without getting out of the car, between a team of the terminally ill and a team of starving to death, and there were two highways that led out of the city, and a gully that had become a garbage dump, and neighbourhoods that had grown up lame or mutilated or blind, and sometimes, in the distance, the sillhouettes of industrial warehouses, the horizon of the maquiladoras.

The city, like all cities, was endless. If you continued east, say, there came a moment when the middle-class neighbourhoods ended and the slums began, like a reflection of what happened in the west but jumbled up, with a rougher orography: hills, valleys, the remains of old ranches, dry riverbeds, all of which went some way toward preventing overcrowding. To the north they saw a fence that separated the United States from Mexico and they gazed past it at the Arizona desert, this time getting out of the car. In the west they circled a couple of industrial parks that were in their turn being surrounded by slums.

They were convinced the city was growing by the second. On the far edge of Santa Teresa, they saw flocks of black vultures, watchful, walking through barren fields, birds that here were called turkey vultures, and also turkey buzzards. Where there were vultures, they noted, there were no other birds. They drank tequila and beer and ate tacos at a motel on the Santa Teresa-Caborca highway, at outdoor tables with a view. The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.

This is a remarkable book by any standards, and I’m so glad I wasn’t put off by its 900 pages, and took the time to read it.

Bolaño actually presents us with five separate novels and, with the exception of the last one, they can all be read without reference to the others.

2666 opens with a novel about four European literary critics, academics, who specialize in the work of a fictional German novelist, Benno von Archimboldi. Archimboldi, rumoured to be a future recipient of the Nobel Prize, is an evasive and reclusive writer who stays well away from the public eye. In fact, none of the critics who pursue him in this novel manage to track him down in person, though they seek him in several different countries, even traveling to a boom town in Mexico in their quest.

Bolaño’s subjects are writers and violence, and staying in the border town of Santa Teresa, we are introduced to Amalfitano, a professor of philosophy and literature at the local university. This text is quite different to the opening novel of the quintet, with an overt feeling of magical realism about it; Amalfitano leaves a book of geometry hanging on a clothesline in his back yard, and we slowly become aware that he is slipping into insanity. We also learn something about Amalfitano’s first wife, who ran off after a mad Spanish poet.

The third part of 2666 is entitled, The Part About Fate, and follows an American reporter, Oscar Fate, who is sent to cover a boxing match in Santa Teresa. There have been clues in the two preceding books, but in this one we are very aware that there are lots of cases of sexually-violated and murdered young women, their bodies found regularly in deserted parking lots, isolated ravines, abandoned buildings and the surrounding desert. The narrative throughout is that of hardboiled noir.

The Part About the Crimes, the fourth part of 2666, is a tour-de-force, one inexhaustible list of the hundreds of women and girls who are butchered in and around Santa Teresa. One of the characters in this section introduces us to the concept of gynophobia, which is fear of women. Bolaño describes the discovery of each body in forensic, even clinical terms, in some cases drifting over to the more hard-edged tone of the crime-novelist. As the body-count builds, and with no solution or hint of closure in sight, we begin to glimpse the extent of the deep misogyny which pervades our society and culture. Though a handful of these horrific crimes are ‘solved’, most are shelved with little or no investigation taking place.

The final section, The Part About Archimboldi, ties everything together. We finally meet the German writer, follow him through his childhood and his time as a soldier in the second world war, witness the surrealistic horror of the twentieth century through his eyes as well as taking in his relationship to beauty and solitude. And we finally understand how all the other sections of 2666 relate to each other.

It is, of course, impossible to describe this novel; to understand it and what it is about there is no substitute for reading the book. So much of its greatness is in the language and in the bravado of the telling. Bolaño is a poet and his prose is always drifting, like the smoke from a cigarette; it weaves patterns in your mind and carries on working in the same way whether the book is in your hand or not. I believe it is going to stay with me for a long, long time.

Roberto Bolaño was born 28 April 1953 in Santiago, Chile and he died 15 July 2003 in Blanes, Spain. 2666 was his final statement.

The occasion was a luncheon given by Miss McCullers in honour of the Danish writer.

According to McCullers, after the luncheon, they all danced, Karen Blixen with Marilyn and McCullers with Arthur Miller.

Anyone with a casual knowledge of the lives and works of Andersen and Burroughs could compile a superficial list of surface similarities. Both men were misfits, eccentrics of a certain sort, who were fortunate enough to find acceptance in large or small circles that would tolerate (and even celebrate) certain sorts of eccentricity. Had they consulted a present-day psychotherapist, both might have left the practice with a daunting range of acronymic diagnoses, a list of syndromes and conditions. Both travelled widely, in part because they felt ever so slightly more comfortable or truer to their authentic selves in direct proportion to the exoticism (and even the discomfort) of their physical and geographical surroundings. Both wrote works set in theatres (surgical and dramaturgical): fictions in which it is nearly always possible to hear Death chortling away ominously in the wings or in the front row. Both were fascinated by the complex interrelationship between freedom and obligation, the rococo interweavings of autonomy, creativity, social pressure and control. Both were profoundly subversive in their nervy determination to mine the subconscious for its fascinating or appalling treasures. Both had a predilection for what is generally called dark humour, and they shared an odd interest in hanging – a theme that surfaces in Andersen’s paper-cuttings and, with increasingly upsetting intensity, in Burroughs’s later fiction. Both felt a compulsion to explore the scary, attractive borderland between beauty and terror. One wrote for children, but both of them knew, and knew well, exactly what frightens adults.

This quotation is extracted from Brick Magazine

With thanks to A Little Red Blog

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The Guardian has a piece from Richard Price on his old tutor, Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road:

We were in our early 20s, and most of us had neither read nor even heard of him. In class he called you by your last name, no title: a brusque, slightly boarding-schoolish and utterly seductive form of address. He regularly and passionately savaged those writers whom he perceived to be his more validated (“lucky”, he called them) peers, but he treated a student’s work, no matter how hapless, with shocking earnestness.

He was a nurturer of grudges; an incubator of slights.

His personal gods were Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

He was bitter.

He had every right to be bitter.

He was really bitter.

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Chris Bowers at Undernews doesn’t see much hope or change on the horizon:

Even after two landslide elections in a row, are our only governing options as a nation either all right-wing Republicans, or a centrist mixture of Democrats and Republicans? Isn’t there ever a point when we can get an actual Democratic administration? Also, why isn’t there a single member of Obama’s cabinet who will be advising him from the left? It seems to me as though there is a team of rivals, except for the left, which is left off the team entirely. Not a single, solitary, actual dyed-in-the-wool progressive has, as far as I can tell, even been mentioned for a position in the new administration.

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Jonathan Dozier-Ezell speculates on writing and publishing:

It’s now easier than ever to get your ideas and content out to readers with or without help from publishing channels. Now there are writers who only write to see their names on a pulpy spine (and they will be disappointed), but on the whole, writers, authors, poets, etc. simply want to be heard. Being paid is nice, but it really isn’t the priority.

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Robert Fisk in the UK’s Independent:

General Roberts of Kandahar (told) the British in 1880 that “we have nothing to fear from Afghanistan, and the best thing to do is to leave it as much as possible to itself. . . I feel sure I am right when I say that the less the Afghans see of us, the less they will dislike us”.

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Love Thy Belly:

The record label Roadrunner has been getting some serious online bellyache from fans of one of its artists, Amanda Palmer of The Dresden Dolls, after she reported on her blog that she had been asked to cut shots from the video for her solo song Leeds United because “they thought I looked fat”.