Monthly Archives: October 2006

Counter-Clock World (1967) – Philip K. Dick

Counter-Clock World (1967) – Philip K. Dick
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While the 1991 Time’s Arrow is very much the best-known example of reverse chronology literature, the idea had been explored previously by Philip K. Dick’s 1967 Counter-Clock World. [Oct 2006]

“Dick’s best books always describe a future that is both entirely recognizable and utterly unimaginable.” –The New York Times Book Review

Counter-Clock World is a 1967 science fiction novel by author Phillip K. Dick, in which time has started to move in reverse, resulting in the dead reviving in their own graves, living their lives in reverse, eventually ending in returning to the womb, and splitting into an egg and a sperm during copulation between the receiving woman and a man. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Clock_World [Oct 2006]

See also: reverse chronology in fiction – 1967 – sf-literature

The Man of the Crowd (1840) – E. A. Poe

Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul. —La Bruyère.

IT was well said of a certain German book that “er lasst sich nicht lesen” – it does not permit itself to be read. There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors and looking them piteously in the eyes — die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burthen so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave. And thus the essence of all crime is undivulged. —http://poe.thefreelibrary.com/Man-of-the-Crowd [Oct 2006]

The Man of the Crowd, telling of one who roams day and night to mingle with streams of people as if afraid to be alone, has quieter effects, but implies nothing less of cosmic fear. –H. P. Lovecraft in Supernatural Horror in Literature (1924-1927)

See also: 1840 – E. A. Poe – flâneur – crowd

Hopscotch (1963) – Julio Cortázar

Hopscotch (1963) – Julio Cortázar
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Rayuela (1963), translated into English as Hopscotch, is the most famous novel by the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar.

Hopscotch is a dazzling literary experiment that ranks among the most important novels written in Spanish in the 20th century. It has been highly praised by other Latin American writers including Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa or José Lezama Lima. The novel has an open-ended structure that invites the reader to choose between a linear reading or a non-linear one that interpolates additional chapters. Cortázar’s employment of interior monologue, punning, slang, and his use of different languages is reminiscent of Modernist writers like Joyce, although his main influences were Surrealism and the French New Novel, as well as the “riffing” aesthetic of jazz. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayuela [Oct 2006]

Biography —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julio Cortázar [Oct 2006]

List of superlatives:
“The most powerful encyclopedia of emotions and visions to emerge from the postwar generation of international writers.” — New Republic

“A work of the most exhilarating talent and interest.” — Elizabeth Hardwick

“Cortazar’s masterpiece…the first great novel of Spanish America.”– Times Literary Supplement

“The most powerful encyclopedia of emotions and visions to emerge from the postwar generation of international writers.” — New Republic

In the eighteen-thirties occurred a literary dawn

In the eighteen-thirties occurred a literary dawn directly affecting not only the history of the weird tale, but that of short fiction as a whole; and indirectly moulding the trends and fortunes of a great European æsthetic school. It is our good fortune as Americans to be able to claim that dawn as our own, for it came in the person of our most illustrious and unfortunate fellow-countryman Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s fame has been subject to curious undulations, and it is now a fashion amongst the “advanced intelligentsia” to minimize his importance both as an artist and as an influence; but it would be hard for any mature and reflective critic to deny the tremendous value of his work and the persuasive potency of his mind as an opener of artistic vistas. True, his type of outlook may have been anticipated; but it was he who first realized its possibilities and gave it supreme form and systematic expression. True also, that subsequent writers may have produced greater single tales than his; but again we must comprehend that it was only he who taught them by example and precept the art which they, having the way cleared for them and given an explicit guide, were perhaps able to carry to greater lengths. Whatever his limitations, Poe did that which no one else ever did or could have done; and to him we owe the modern horror-story in its final and perfected state. –H. P. Lovecraft in Supernatural Horror in Literature (1924-1927) via http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Supernatural_Horror_in_Literature/Edgar_Allan_Poe [Oct 2006]

Love needs closeness, desire needs distance

Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic (2006) – Esther Perel
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“Love,” says Perel, “needs closeness and intimacy and familiarity to flourish. Desire does not. Desire needs distance, insecurity, novelty and surprise. Desire needs tension, breaches and repairs.”

“Love is not comfortable with fights, but desire needs fights,” says Perel. “Fights generate energy, erotic energy – and this is not just desire for sex, but a general exuberance and vitality, an élan, an aliveness! We often judge couples on the amount they fight, like: “Oh, they have such a good relationship! They never fight!” And yes, I know of couples who never fight and do have a very good relationship – but they also have a sex life that is somewhat flat. Desire needs fights! Intimacy – that is, emotional intimacy – inhibits erotic expression. Desire needs edge!”

“Love needs absence of sexual threat, but desire? Desire needs to know there are other options out there for your partner, that your partner moves out there in a sexual world when they are not with you, a world of other people who look at them, sexually. Love needs talk. Desire needs not to talk. Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other. In order to maintain a sexual edge in our relationships, we must learn to tolerate this void, these uncertainties.”

“I wrote this book,” she says, “because, in 22 years of practice in six different languages, I’ve met couples over and over again who were having a good relationship, who love each other, but who have no sex, no tingle! I met couples who had a bad relationship, and who I helped to have a good relationship again, and the expectation was that the sex would just come back – but it didn’t. I began to think there’s something in this premise – that if sex is wrong, the relationship is wrong; and equally that more talk, intimacy and closeness will equal more sex, better sex – that just doesn’t work.”

“Fantasy… is never politically correct, it’s transgressive and about power, which is why it’s so hot. It’s about surrender, revenge, aggression, abandonment. You can transcend moral and social boundaries. But this idea that you should share your fantasy with your partner… I think that’s very risky.”

“Talking is overrated. Especially talking to just one person”.

“I cannot stand this tendency to identify a victim and a perpetrator in an affair.”

“This idea that tenderness and emotional intimacy leads to good sex – I’m afraid it became current when women came into my profession.” –via Click Opera [Oct 2006]

Dictionary of the Khazars (1984) – Milorad Pavic

Dictionary of the Khazars (1984) – Milorad Pavic
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Much of the novel’s alleged power is embedded in the line, that compulsory author-directed movement from the beginning of a sentence to its period, from the top of the page to the bottom, from the first page to the last. Of course, through print’s long history, there have been countless strategies to counter the line’s power, from marginalia and footnotes to the creative innovations of novelists like Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Raymond Queneau, Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino and Milorad Pavic, not to exclude the form’s father, Cervantes himself. But true freedom from the tyranny of the line is perceived as only really possible now at last with the advent of hypertext, written and read on the computer, where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text. –(Robert Coover, 1992) via New York Times [Sept 2005]

Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel is the first novel by Serbian writer Milorad Pavich (Milorad Pavi?), published in 1984.

There is no easily discerned plot in the conventional sense, but the book is based on an historical event generally dated to the last decades of the 8th century or the early 9th century.

Pavic often veers into his own style of playful, somewhat Borgesian fantasy. The novel might be a sort of metafictional false document, as the people and events in the novel are presented as factual.

The novel takes the form of three cross-referenced mini-encyclopedias. Due to its format as a dictionary, the novel may be read in any number of ways, rather than just front to back. This challenges readers to shun passive reading and become active participants in the novel, as they piece together the story from fragmented, and often conflicting, accounts.

The book comes in two different editions, one “Male” and one “Female”, which differ in only a critical paragraph. –Adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_the_Khazars [Oct 2006]

The greatest critics help us understand

The greatest critics help us understand the greatest of poets and novelists; but sometimes the opposite is also true. Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve in 19th-century France wrote marvelous essays on literature, which are perfectly readable today. Yet if you want to get at Sainte-Beuve’s deeper instincts, you should read him in the light cast by his brilliant friend Victor Hugo. Edmund Wilson was Sainte-Beuve’s intellectual heir in the United States — the man who figured out how to write Sainte-Beuve-like essays in American English. Yet Wilson, too, makes a little more sense if you read him in a light cast by Hemingway, Dos Passos and Fitzgerald — Wilson’s novel-writing friends and contemporaries. –Paul Berman, 2003, The New York Times

Orlando Furioso and the fantastique

Ruggiero Rescuing Angelica (1819) – Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Orlando Furioso (1877) – Gustave Doré

 

Orlando Furioso (“Mad Orlando” or “The Madness of Orlando” ) is an epic poem written by Ludovico Ariosto in 1516. It is a “gionta”, a sequel, to Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (Orlando in Love), but it is quite distant from the other work in that it does not preserve the humanistic concepts of knight errantry.

Related: Orlando Furioso