Category Archives: literature

Blanchot day at Dennis Cooper’s

If you put a gun to my head — not that you would — and asked me whom I’d consider the greatest writer of the 20th century — not that asking my opinion is worth risking a police encounter — I’d say, ‘That’s easy, put the gun down. Maurice Blanchot.’ He’s both my favorite fiction writer and my favorite writer of what’s alternately dubbed philosophy or language theory. His ‘Death Sentence’ is either my favorite novel of all time, or it’s tied for favorite with Sade’s ‘120 Days of Sodom.’ To me, Blanchot is to the written text as Bresson is to the captured image, which is to say not so much the greatest at his chosen medium — obviously a ridiculous proposition — as he is an artist as singular, ruthless, pure, and infested with belief in the abilities of language as anyone who has ever tried their hand at writing. —Dennis Cooper

Some details about Dennis Cooper’s weekend:

I went to that American Writers Festival I mentioned, intending to hit a lot of the events. But I went to see the Peter Sotos (interviewed by Bruce Benderson) event and wound up just hanging out with them and Laurence Viallet of Editions Desordres and crew, which was great. Bruce is an old friend, but I’d never spent time with Peter before, and he’s a really nice guy. I also got to meet and talk to Gaspar Noe, who knows Peter, which was a thrill because, as you know, I’m a huge admirer of his films. —Dennis Cooper

From all this it would appear that Dennis Cooper is a thorough francophile.

Some of the best works of fiction since 1990

Via The Reading Experience comes a list of some of the best works of fiction since 1990 hosted at Scott Esposito’s Conversational Reading.

Scott remarks:

this is not a response to The New York Times list. This idea has been circulating in my head since last November, and I first began collaborating with people on it back in March, long before I knew of the existence of the NYT list. I do, however, think that the two lists make for interesting juxtapositions and I encourage comparisons.

The list includes:

JM Coetzee, Arundhati Roy, David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, W.S. Sebald, Jose Saramago, Michael Ondaatje, Richard Power, Colson Whitehea, Norman Rus, Cynthia Ozic, William Gas, Kazuo Ishigur, Zadie Smith, Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter, Danzy Senna, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen, Michel Houellebecq, William Gaddis, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Cunningham, Banana Yoshimoto, Jeffrey Eugenides, Richard Russo, A.S.Byatt, David Markson, John Berger, Mary Gaitskill and Haruki Murakami.

Digression: 1000 movies by NYT, the same, at Amazon.

Everyone knows that a good canon debate doesn’t get interesting until you reach the realm of the top 100. But by listing the top 1,000 movies, as the editors of The New York Times have done with this fat, readable collection of reviews, you get to skip all that huffing and puffing about quality and head straight for the fun. –Lyall Bush for Amazon

See also: lists

The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe – (1974) – D.G. Compton

The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe – (1974) – D.G. Compton
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Image sourced here.

Bertrand Tavernier based his 1980 film Deathwatch on this 1974 novel. In the film Romy Schneider plays a dying woman whose last days are watched on national television via a camera implanted in the brain of a journalist Harvey Keitel.

David Guy Compton (1930 – ) is a British author. He often writes science fiction set in the near future. He published his first science fiction novel, The Quality of Mercy, in 1965. He has not become hugely popular, but did achieve some recognition after co-writing a SF novel, Ragnarok, with Dr. John Gribbin.

He has written murder mysteries as Guy Compton (the first in 1962) and even a few romance novels as Frances Lynch.

In Bertrand Tavernier’s Death Watch (1980), Romy Schneider plays the dying heroine with the doubly punning surname Catherine Mortenhoe, whose death is being recorded on national TV in an ongoing soap opera of morbid video verité. — Garrett Stewart via Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (2000)

A review:

I’ve read two novels by British writer D. G. Compton: Synthajoy (1968) and The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (1974; also published as The Unsleeping Eye). Both novels deal with ethical problems raised by the use of technology to eavesdrop on human emotions. Both emphasize the human rather than the scientific side of the story, and they experiment with the subjective viewpoint of the narrator in a way reminiscent of Philip K. Dick. However, Compton’s writing style is more refined than Dick’s, which also makes it harder to overlook the implausibility of the technical innovations posited in each novel. –Glenn Frantz via http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/roboman/www/sigma/review/conmort.html [Oct 2006]

See also: reality TV – Deathwatch – 1974 – television – voyeurism

English criticism of Michel Houellebecq

Stephen Mitchelmore in This Space:

I have yet to read Michel Houellebecq. This is because I asked a friend (with infallible judgement), who had, for an opinion. Shrugging his shoulders and turning his mouth down at the corners, he said: nothing special … and when you have Thomas Bernhard …

Ah yes, Thomas Bernhard: the funniest and, indeed, most readable literary iconoclast of European fiction. Odd, I’ve long thought, how the market for Houellebecq’s virulence and extremism doesn’t extend to Bernhard.

But maybe not so odd, I now think, having read John Banville’s Bookforum essay on the French writer, an essay that takes in Houellebecq’s long essay on HP Lovecraft. It seems Lovecraft is the clue to why Bernhard’s name is not read close to Houellebecq’s (except here of course). –Stephen Mitchelmore in This Space

Stephen Mitchelmore goes on to compare Lovecraft unfavourably to Borges.

A digression to Borges and Lovecraft by Bruce Lord:

I had read many of Jorge Luis Borges  short stories several years before discovering Lovecraft, let alone studying the latter seriously, and so the idea of Borges owing any debt to or admitting any influence from HPL was new and somewhat shocking to me when I first encountered it.  While reading “Dreams In The Witch House” for the first time, however, I found it to be quite Borgesian (I didn’t have any problem with taking such an anachronistic view of the relationship, as Borges has based entire stories around such errors).  The story of an increasingly alienated and detached academic who becomes lost in his field of study and ends up transcending the known laws of the universe reminded me of the hapless people caught in “The Library Of Babel.”  In a similar vein, both authors used the technique of referring to fictional literary and scientific sources as well as legitimate ones (often combining the two in lists of books or thinkers) in order to better facilitate their stories  fantastic elements.  –Bruce Lord via Contrasoma.

And here is more by Stephen Mitchelmore on Houellebecq.

Premature burial

Premature Burial (1854) – Antoine Wiertz

“Can you possibly conceive it. The unendurable oppression of the lungs, the stifling fumes of the earth, the rigid embrace of the coffin, the blackness of absolute night and the silence, like an overwhelming sea.” –Guy Carrell in The Premature Burial (1962)

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Premature_Burial

See also: grave – asphyxia – E. A. Poe – Antoine Wiertz

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 – 1975)

Today would have been Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s 100th birthday. Belgian classical radio station Klara is running a special on him and one of the most surprising elements in his biography is that he accompanied silent films during a substantial part of his life. If you listen closely, you can hear this aspect in some of his music. He also scored films. After his death, his music was used in several films including favourites Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and Patrice Chéreau’s Intimacy. He also set one of my favourite short stories to music: Nikolai Gogol’s The Nose.

Rapture (2002) – Susan Minot

Rapture (2002) – Susan Minot
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Excerpt

It was amazing how much things could change between two people. That you could feel a person was your eternal mate one day and three months later bump into him in the flower district and hardly know what to say. It was after she’d fallen in love with him after they’d not been able to see each other on a friendly basis, so it was disorienting to see his figure standing there on the sidewalk, purporting to be like anyone else’s.

Review:

The concept of the tale drawn out through reflection during an extremely contained frame story has been done before. Well before Nicholson Baker’s Mezzanine shoe-horned a novel into a character’s ascending an escalator on his way to buy shoe laces, Wright Morris’ Field of Vision thrust a novel’s worth of thoughts into the minds of a few spectators watching a bullfight. One might even blame Laurence Sterne, whose “autobiography” of Tristram Shandy is perpetually delayed through digression, for begetting this trend of seeking plotless prose through cutesy narrative frames. Eventually someone will manage to cast an entire picaresque into a stifled yawn. It’s all just a question of scale. —http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2004/12/which-just-happens-to-mimic-ms.html [Sept 2006]

Review:

Kay and Benjamin meet for lunch a year after their affair has ended. The relationship Benjamin was in at the time (with his fiancée, Vanessa) has also finished, but he still sees her from time to time. In fact, he is due to see Vanessa after lunch, though he doesn’t tell Kay that. Kay finds that, far from wearing off, her love for Benjamin is stronger than ever. She doesn’t tell him that. Both tell themselves they had no idea this was going to happen: they never for a moment thought they would end up in bed after a couple of innocent tomato sandwiches in her apartment. —http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,6121,780108,00.html [Sept 2006]

Interview:

Perhaps fellow Maine resident Stephen King imparted some dark psychic influence on Minot’s soul. “Yes, ‘Rapture’ is a horror story,” Minot says. “It definitely is. Many love affairs are.” She then gives a healthy horselaugh. “They can be as devastating as death and war.” —http://archive.salon.com/sex/feature/2002/02/25/minot/index1.html [Sept 2006]

Biography:

Susan Minot (b. December 7, 1956) is an American prize-winning novelist and short story author.

Born in Manchester, Massachusetts, Minot is the author of the novel, Monkeys (1986), which won the Prix Femina in 1988. She has also won the O. Henry Prize and the Pushcart Prize for her writing. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Minot [Sept 2006]

See also: American literature – fellatio in literature

Ralph Ginzburg (1929 – 2006)

Via rare erotica comes Ralph Ginzburg, an icon in the history of American erotica and American censorship:

Collection of Eros magazine
Image sourced here.

1972 mug shot of Ginzburg
Image sourced here.

It’s agreed by all observers that what really sealed Ginzburg’s fate was a photo-spread in the fourth, final issue of EROS: “Black & White in Color: A Photographic Tone Poem” by Ralph M. Hattersley, Jr., a respected photographer and professor who wrote over a dozen instructional photography books. (Hattersley passed away in 2000.) The photos are extraordinarily tame by today’s standards – there’s no sex, and the only “naughty bits” on display are the woman’s breasts and both booties in one sideview shot. But showing a black man and a white woman, in the nude, embracing, kissing, obviously getting ready to do the deed – well, it was just too shocking in the early 1960s. Ginzburg was made to pay. —rare erotica

Playboy’s ’25 sexiest novels ever written’ (2006)

1. Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, by John Cleland [Read the complete novel online]
2. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D.H. Lawrence [Read the complete novel online]
3. Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
4. The Story of O, by Pauline Reage
5. Crash, by J.G. Ballard
6. Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice
7. Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth
8. The Magus, by John Fowles
9. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami
10. Endless Love, by Scott Spencer
11. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
12. Carrie’s Story, by Molly Weatherfield aka Pam Rosenthal
13. Fear of Flying, by Erica Jong
14. Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious
15. Story of the Eye, by Georges Bataille
16. The End of Alice, by A.M. Homes
17. Vox, by Nicholson Baker
18. Rapture, by Susan Minot
19. Singular Pleaures, by Harry Mathews
20. In The Cut, By Susanna Moore
21. Brass, by Helen Walsh
22. Candy, by Terry Southern
23. Forever, by Judy Blume
24. An American Dream, by Norman Mailer
25. The Carpetbaggers, by Harold Robbins

Via http://www.playboy.com/sex/features/25novels The list is compiled by longtime Playboy contributor Jim Petersen. See Susie Bright’s post.

Closing the loop: PCL Linkdump have picked up rather nicely on this post here.

See also: erotic fiction

Nine and a Half Weeks (1978) – Elizabeth McNeill

Nine and a Half Weeks: A Memoir of a Love Affair (1978) – Elizabeth McNeill
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

First sentence:
“The first time we were in bed together he held my hands pinned down above my head. I liked it. I liked him. He was moody in a way that struck me as romantic; he was funny, bright, interesting to talk to; and he gave me pleasure.”

Last sentence:
“I slept with another man and discovered, my hands lying awkwardly on the sheet at either side of me, that I had forgotten what to do with them. I’m responsible and an adult again, full time. What remains is that my sensation thermostat has been thrown out of whack: it’s been years and sometimes I wonder whether my body will ever again register above lukewarm.”

Nine and a Half Weeks is a true story so unusual, so passionate, and so extreme in its psychology and sexuality that it will take your breath away.

Elizabeth McNeill was an executive for a large corporation when she began an affair with a man she met casually. Their sexual excitement depended on a pattern of domination and humiliation, and as their relationship progressed they played out ever more dangerous and elaborate variations on that pattern of sadomasochism. By the end, Elizabeth had relinquished all control over her body — and her mind.

With a cool detachment that makes the experiences and sensations she describes all the more frightening in their intensity, Elizabeth McNeill deftly unfolds her story and invites you into the mesmerizing and dangerous world of Nine and a Half Weeks — a world you won’t soon forget.

About the Author
Elizabeth McNeill is a pseudonym. At the time of the book’s writing and original publication, McNeill lived in New York, where she worked as an executive for a large corporation.

Blog entry by One Life, Take Two – Wikipedia entry for the film – Everything2 entry

See also: 1978 – s&m fiction – American literature