Limantour

Quote: Jean Genet

My heart's in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand's in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught.

Oyster shell dust, Point Reyes

Jonathon Coe 'Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of BS Johnson'

The atmosphere of reverence that has attached to this horribly unsatisfactory biography (the Boston Globe calls it one of the finest literary biographies ever written) is just incomprehensible to me. Have reviewers actually read the book cover to cover? It's as if they are more excited by the idea of one iconoclast (if that's what Coe is) taking on another than they are by the book itself.  Subtitled The Story Of BS Johnson (probably ironically, given Johnson's famous rejection of stories as 'lies') this is most categorically not a story; nor is it, incidentally, an analysis of Johnson's novels. Perhaps his failure to work the material into a narrative or even a cogent analysis is Coe's deft tribute to Johnson, a nod to his hero's (or antihero's - he can't decide) attitude of refusal and nonconformity, but the result is painfully glib. His exasperated authorial interjections varnish what is otherwise a rather dreary ledger of accounts, a catalogue of every business transaction and project Johnson ever undertook in film, TV, theatre, poetry, and the novel. It is mostly illustrated with letters, and of those a preponderance of business-oriented exchanges between Johnson and his hapless agents and publishers. We do encounter extracts of plays and TV dramas; there are a couple of poems, and some letters to friends, but most egregiously there is practically nothing from or about the novels, which works are the absolute bedrock of Johnson's achievement. Instead we get a slight, in every sense of that word, synopsis of each novel at the beginning of the book, 16 pages in total, before we move on to what is evidently for Coe the more pressing task of registering BSJ's every career transaction over a period of about 15 years or so until he died in 1973. What is clear is Coe's developing distaste for his subject, coyly evidenced by his repeated sampling of Johnson's absurdly inflated self-appraisals, and of his sometimes hysterically defensive posturing vis-a-vis the English literary establishment and its obtuse intellectual positions. Judging from this sour, malnourished and poorly imagined effort, things have not improved much since Johnson's day.  The organization alone is horrible, more like a school project than a book, with ruled-off cubbyholes for excerpts, and isolated sections which briefly 'contain' different approaches to the material; one for novels as mentioned, one at the end for an attempt at analysis (again, just 33 pages), and a lone chapter of quotations from Johnson's friends and colleagues, which might have gone some way towards humanizing the man had Coe taken the trouble to assimilate them. The whole thing is a nightmare, a catalogue of meaningless facts, absolutely lacking in creativity or even a willingness to organize the evidence into something resembling a true biography. So many questions go unanswered, unasked, questions about the work as well as the life. Why was he so tortured? How successful was his method? Did he sacrifice content to form and if so, why? How did his interrogation of form relate to his experience? How did his art reveal (or conceal) his personal preoccupations? How successfully did he continue the tradition of Joyce and Beckett, his avowed literary idols? What were his relationships like, his childhood, his marriage? Unbelievably, the most important of his early love affairs, a relationship Johnson himself considered as devastating as anything that had ever happened to him, is flatly dismissed by Coe as a piece of immature grandstanding unworthy of his consideration.

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I can only conclude that the curious work and the complex, baffling personality of this writer are simply beyond Coe's powers of comprehension, as they might be to many of us, but we are not burying him all over again in a mountain of meaningless, lifeless, superficial, unexamined and disconnected facts masquerading as an honest work of biography. The revelation at the end, which resembles nothing so much as a cheap mystery novel gimmick, does not redeem it either. Will Self, a more dazzling and innovative writer by far, has remarked of Coe that he takes an artist's pleasure in the cultivation of a certain kind of tedium vitae. I couldn't have put it better myself. Let's hope Johnson's case will not rest here.

Quote: Milan Kundera

" ... the novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novel."

'Exposed' at the MoMA

The SF MoMA will continue Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera since 1870 through April 17, so there's still plenty of time to see it, but be prepared - it is shocking and perverse, though not unbeautiful. I didn't make a note of photographers' names, but there were many images I'll never forget. This iconic image of Thich Quang Duc protesting treatment of buddhist priests by South Vietnamese authorities in 1963 functioned as a kind of fulcrum, positioned as it was in a glass case in the center of the room, but the images fanned out around it were just as extreme. A spinal column sticking out of a truncated torso in a pair of shorts. A would-be suicide on high scaffolds. The blackened but otherwise perfect face of a man burned by Nazis before he could squeeze out from under floorboards into open air. A police dog lunging like a bullet at a black man in the South. A lynching. An armored British Army hut like some space pod bristling with black spears on a little street in County Armagh. Surveillance shots of British suffragettes. Disintegrated remains in Rwanda. Burning oil fields in Iraq - 'the mother of all battles'. The whole thing was stunning, awful. I thought somebody should be filming us. The voyeur motif so clearly implied us, the consumers of art and images flocking like bats to open wounds. We pooled up around particularly shocking images in corners, we bumped into one another, looked at one another uneasily, tried to communicate our dismay and hide our fascination. Not so surprising, I suppose. But there was awe and reverence in the room as well.

Quote: Sharon Doubiago

'Grammar makes you lie, I've always known that. That's partly why I'm a poet ...'

from My Father's Love, Vol. 2, 2011

Yemen - by Gwen

'Bag of Mice' - a poem by Nick Flynn

I dreamt your suicide note
was scrawled in pencil on a brown paperbag
& in the bag were six baby mice. The bag
opened into darkness,
smoldering
from the top down. The mice,
huddled at the bottom, scurried the bag
across a shorn field. I stood over it
and as the burning reached each carbon letter
of what you'd written
your voice released into the night
like a song, & the mice
grew wilder.

from 'Some Ether: Poems'

Excerpt from a novel by William Golding

' ... perhaps the truth of life and living lies in the strange things women do and say when they are hysterical.'

from 'The Double Tongue', 1995