Small / champions

Les maîtres

Who established the Truths governing Art? Who?
The Masters. They had no right to do so and it is dishonest to concede this power to them.

— Erik Satie, from a text written on the cover of the manuscript notebook for Mort de Socrate.

Tomorrow and the world

Some further thoughts on reading Martin Carter and watching recent events in Egypt, published this week in the CRB.

Notes on Egypt

I switched off Al Jazeera and ignored Twitter for fifteen minutes, trying to get something written, and I missed it. By the time I plugged back in, people were already celebrating in the streets of Cairo.

•

As I type this, it’s more than three hours since Hosni Mubarak’s resignation-by-proxy. Right now I’m watching and hearing hundreds of thousands of people — millions, for all I know — singing and dancing, waving flags, setting off fireworks and aerosol torches. I am six thousand miles away, and finding it hard to get back to work.

•

The Wall Street Journal reporter Tamer El-Ghobashy, via Twitter:

soldier, away from crowds, on cell phone, crying: "mom, i want to celebrate with the people"

•

Martin Carter: “Mankind is breeding heroes every day.”

•

The Jamaican writer Marlon James, via Facebook:

“I never thought in my lifetime that these words would mean anything to me, but goddamn it, Power To The People.”

•

Al Jazeera reporter Jamal Elshayyal, on the celebrations in Alexandria:

“... every meaning of the word hope.”

•

I find myself thinking that the nearest equivalent to this mass euphoria that I’ve ever seen in my own country was when Trinidad and Tobago qualified for the 2006 FIFA World Cup. I ponder this. I think about all the ways that my country is nothing like Egypt. I think about why I’ve been so anxiously, obsessively following events six thousand miles away over the past eighteen days. I think about my own jadedness and alienation from the political realities of my here and now.

•

I think about Martin Carter’s phrase, “a free community of valid persons,” and its four difficult words. Free. Community. Valid. Persons.

•

Freedom, community, validity, and personhood are all hard work.

•

Six thousand miles away, it is hard to get back to work.

The right to the unknown

don't know what will happen. pre #Jan25 I could predict tomorrow will be like today and yesterday, we revolt to gain the right to unkown

— Alaa Abd El Fattah, @alaa

Da, chital

There’s a way in Russian of saying that you’ve read something without specifying that you've completed it. Think about how nice a distinction that would be to have at one’s fingertips! Did you read that book? Yes, I did. (Da, chital, which, I suppose, if you want to get technical, would mean something like, “Yes, I engaged in the activity of reading,” without particular reference to one stage of it or another, especially its completion.)

— Russell Scott Valentino, at the Iowa Review blog.

Domesticate the demon

Virginia Woolf has that great line in The Common Reader, that try as we might to read impartially, “there is always a demon in us who whispers, ‘I hate, I love.’” I’ve always hoped that it might be possible to domesticate the demon, and that if we can understand what in us quickens or recoils and why, some larger truth can be extracted — even if it’s just about our own tastes. How do I know if I have accomplished this? I don‘t.

— Parul Sehgal, interviewed by Scott McLemee.

Why

Only because I am a bad swimmer.

Only because I cannot draw.

Only because I cannot walk a tightrope.

A brief definition of the novel

Some things can be helped, other things can’t be helped.

In other words

All my best lines are mistakes.

At the turn of the year

To: communications@foreign.gov.tt

Re: trinidad and tobago abstention in UN human rights vote

Sent: Wednesday 22 December, 2010, 1.08 pm


Hon. Minister of Foreign Affairs
Dr. Surujrattan Rambachan

Dear Minister Rambachan,

I am writing to register my profound disappointment and indeed anger at Trinidad and Tobago's abstention in an important human rights vote in the United Nations General Assembly yesterday.

As you must be aware, on 21 December, 2010, the UN General Assembly voted on an important amendment to a resolution condemning extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions. This amendment, as described in UN document A/65/L.53, restores a reference to sexual orientation in the list of groups of people particularly targeted in extrajudicial killings. It recognises that in many parts of the world people are under extraordinary threat of violence because of their sexual orientation, and urges UN members to take necessary legal and judicial measures to protect all citizens.

The amendment was passed by the General Assembly by a vote of 93 to 55, with 27 abstentions. Trinidad and Tobago was one of the abstaining nations.

As a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago, I am deeply disturbed that my country failed in its responsibility to take a stand on this very basic question of human rights.

I would like to believe that the government of Trinidad and Tobago is committed to creating a safer and more just and tolerant society for all citizens. Yesterday's abstention forces me to question that commitment. I hope you will take the time to respond to this email and explain this very disappointing decision.

Yours faithfully,

Nicholas Laughlin
Diego Martin

The perils of foreign travel

He goes to a Russian tragedy in five acts by mistake....

— Lydia Davis, “Lord Royston’s Tour”.

It took me so long to realise

There are too many poems in the world, and not enough poetry.

“It was going to be extraordinary”

Shouldn’t we struggle against Facebook? Everything in it is reduced to the size of its founder. Blue, because it turns out Zuckerberg is red-green colour-blind. “Blue is the richest colour for me — I can see all of blue.” Poking, because that’s what shy boys do to girls they are scared to talk to. Preoccupied with personal trivia, because Mark Zuckerberg thinks the exchange of personal trivia is what “friendship” is. A Mark Zuckerberg Production indeed! We were going to live online. It was going to be extraordinary. Yet what kind of living is this? Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn’t it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?

— Zadie Smith, reviewing The Social Network, dir. David Fincher, and You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by Jaron Lanier, in the New York Review of Books.

Plot and character

CABRERA INFANTE

There is an important parodic strain that runs through most of my favorite English writers: Swift, Sterne, even Lewis Carroll. In fact, the three could be said to have written a single book, with chapters called A Tale of a Tub, Sentimental Journey, and Sylvie and Bruno. Their remote ancestor is the Satyricon, with which they share a will to fragmentation and black humour.

INTERVIEWER

None seems terribly concerned with plot, or, for that matter, character.

CABRERA INFANTE

I don’t know what plot and character are. Dickens created all possible (and impossible) characters, so that takes care of character. And plot, for me, belongs in mystery stories and movies. I am concerned with literary space, which is language, and not literary time. When we talk about character, we inevitably drift toward psychology: Choderlos Laclos was the first and the last to use it properly.

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante, interviewed by Alfred MacAdam in Paris Review, Spring 1983.

Repent it, acrobat.

I do not know why yet I live to say, “This thing’s to do”

Next best thing

“The next best thing to having your stuff burned, if you’re ambivalent, is giving it to some guy who gives it to some lady who gives it to her daughters who keep it in an apartment full of cats, right?”

— From Elif Batuman’s article “Kafka’s Last Trial”, in the New York Times Magazine.

Meaning yes, message no

INTERVIEWER

When you say that sometimes you think your poetry is weird, what do you mean exactly?

ASHBERY

Every once in a while I will pick up a page and it has something, but what is it? It seems so unlike what poetry “as we know it” is. But at other moments I feel very much at home with it. It’s a question of a sudden feeling of unsureness at what I am doing, wondering why I am writing the way I am, and also not feeling the urge to write in another way.

INTERVIEWER

Is the issue of meaning or message something that is uppermost in your mind when you write?

ASHBERY

Meaning yes, but message no. I think my poems mean what they say, and whatever might be implicit within a particular passage, but there is no message, nothing I want to tell the world particularly except what I am thinking when I am writing.

— John Ashbery, interviewed by Peter A. Stitt in Paris Review, Winter 1983.