The Proper Binge

A GOOD talk on Goedel’s incompleteness theorem with two mathematicians (one a logician) and a theoretical physicist.

And oh, watched Volver today, such a lovely movie! And a gorgeous song.

“That looked like Comme des Garcons goes to the Amish country.”
- Michael Kors, Project Runway, S3-8.

WATCHING the markets compulsively — I’d not thought this kind of implosion possible. The fear indexes are dramatically high, and there’s the incredible scale of it, with markets have falling so much that governments have had to halt trading every day. And currencies in free fall too. The credit markets, the heart of the financial system, remain in near paralysis.

I LOVE it when the Nobel Prize for Literature goes, as this year, to a writer whose name is unfamiliar to me. I’m woefully ignorant of French literature in general, and contemporary French literature in particular, and so Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio is not a byline I’d noticed before. Given how few of his books are currently available in English translation, though, I expect I’m not alone in my ignorance.

In its citation, the prize committee in Stockholm called him an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization”…“As a young writer in the aftermath of existentialism and the nouveau roman, he was a conjurer who tried to lift words above the degenerate state of everyday speech and to restore to them the power to invoke an essential reality.”

Picture source: S.

MEMORY is not quite the same thing as consciousness, but they are intricately and delicately intertwined. Someone once said that we consist of the pure, theoretical instant of awareness, and everything else is already memory. When we think of our selves we immediately begin to sort and arrange memories, which we then rearrange. We are fascinated by those who have — through wounds or brain damage — lost all or part of their memories. A terror of our times is living with dementia — either in ourselves, or in those we share our lives with. Memories can be polished, like objects taken out, burnished, and contemplated, or they can flitter just out of reach, like lost threads of broken webs. To remember is to have two selves, one in the memory, one thinking about the memory, but the two are not precisely distinct, and separating them can be dizzying.

Craig Raine has written that “Memory is like metaphor in its operations”. Memory is like metaphor, and humans have always needed metaphors to think about memory. There is a long tradition, starting with Plato, which uses the metaphor of the mind as a soft wax surface, on which an image can be impressed, or as a gemstone, in which it can be engraved or scratched. St Augustine thought of his memory as palaces full of spaces in which he encountered thoughts and people. Memory can be a pit or well from which things rise to the surface. Memory, or Mnemosyne, was, the Greeks believed, the mother of the Muses. Art is all, at some level, both a mnemonic and a form of memory. Malcolm Bowie is interested in what he calls remembering forwards — the way in which a composer, or a painter, can envisage and then make something new, by remembering and reshaping something earlier — Beethoven remembering Bach’s variations, Titian remembering Ovid’s Marsyas. Bowie is extremely subtle about the way the mind moves forward and back, elaborating and discarding. His essay reminded me of what a painter once said to me when he was halfway through reading Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. You can feel the form of what is to come, he said, weighing on you. Or in you. I think the felt form of the part of an unfinished work — a novel half written, say, that has found its shape — is not unlike the search in the memory for something you know you know. And culturally, of course, the same mixture of remembering and reinventing is always going on.

Memory, language and the body are intertwined in a very complex way. Consider the case for learning by heart — a phrase that recalls Wordsworth, remembering sensations “felt in the blood and felt along the heart” and reminds us of the fact that the basic unit of English verse, the iambic pentameter, contains as many heart beats as we make during one breath. Committing poetry to memory is a kind of bodily memory that becomes a human resource.

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James Wood, How Fiction Works:

In Antonioni’s film L’eclisse, the luminous Monica Vitti visits the Rome stock exchange, where her fiance, played by Alain Delon, works. Delon points out a fat man who has just lost 50 million lire. Intrigued, she follows the man. He orders a drink at a bar, barely touches it, then goes to a cafe, whree he orders an acqua minerale, which he again barely touches. He is writing something on a piece of paper, and leaves it on the table. We imagine that it must be a set of furious, melancholy figures. Vitti approaches the table, and sees that it is a drawing of a flower…

Who would not love this little scene? It is so delicate, so tender, so sidelong and lightly humorous, and the joke is so nicely on us. We had a stock idea of how the financial victim responds to catastrophe — collapse, despair, self-defenestration — and Antonioni confounded our expectations. The character slips through our changing perceptions, like a boat moving through canal locks. We begin in misplaced certainty and end in placeless mystery.

The scene raises the question of what really constitutes a character. We know nothing more about this investor than this scene tells us; he has no continuing role in the film. Is he really a “character” at all? Yet no one would dispute that Antonioni has revealed something sharp and deep about this man’s temperament, and by extension about a certain human insouciance under pressure — or possibly, about a certain defensive will to insouciance under pressure. Something alive, human has been disclosed. So this scene demonstrates that narrative can and often does give us a vivid sense of a character without giving us a vivid sense of an individual. We don’t know this particular man; but we know his particular behaviour at this moment.

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On plots:

A: “So what is the worst tribulation you can think of? Botched plastic surgery? An IRS audit? The hero running off to join the Hare Krishnas? Bring in an invading army!”

I LOVE this song, which I heard at a friend’s place tonight. And isn’t this Fugees’ version of No Woman No Cry lovely as well?

Today I resolve to take writing seriously, to keep going and never stop. To learn everything I can and make it as a writer.

Picture source: Vogue

A: “Physicists do it with beautiful models.”
B: “Only on paper, darling.”

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A good interview that explains the financial crisis well. And an article on income inequality. Also, an interview with Buffett that I like.

Albeniz Iberia Suite
Bach Goldberg Variations
Barber Violin Concerto
Bartok Piano Concerto No. 3
Bartok Violin Concerto No. 2
Berg Violin Concerto
Brahms Cello Sonatas
Brahms Clarinet Quintet
Brahms Concertos
Brahms Haydn Variations
Brahms Late Piano Music, Op. 116-119
Debussy Piano Music
Debussy Piano Trio
Debussy String Quartet
Dutilleux Piano Sonata
Dvorak Cello Concerto
Elgar Cello Concerto
Finzi Cello Concerto
Francaix Concertino for Piano and Orchestra
Franck Violin Sonata
Franck Prelude Chorale and Fugue
Korngold Violin Concerto
Messaien Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jesus
Mozart Piano Concertos K466, 467, 488, 491, 503, 595
Mompou Cancions y Danzas
Poulenc Piano Concerto
Prokofiev Piano Concertos
Prokofiev Piano Sonatas
Rachmaninov Cello Sonata
Rachmaninov Piano Concertos
Rachmaninov Piano Sonata No. 2
Rachmaninov Symphony No. 2
Ravel Introduction and Allegro
Ravel Piano Concertos
Ravel Piano Music
Ravel Piano Trio
Ravel String Quartet
Schumann Davidsbundlertanze
Schumann Fantasie Op. 17
Schumann Fantasiestucke Op. 12
Schumann Humoreske
Shostakovich String Quartet No. 8
Strauss Metamorphosen
Szymanowski Symphony No. 3
Volodos Transcriptions

Picture source: ???

“The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think of, say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company…a church…a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past…we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude…I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you…we are in charge of our Attitudes.”

- Charles Swindoll (I know, I like the self-help stuff, so sue me.)

Was talking to someone about how the humanities need to strip away a lot of the dead, cheerless weight that is the consequence of overspecialised scholarly writing, that we need to work back towards a more common-sense engagement with literature, art, cultural expression of all kinds. We need to speak to and inform a wider public while also persuading them that there is unguessed-at beauty, possibility, meaning in human culture and practice that they can and should learn to see and appreciate. In this sense, being “old-fashioned” about the humanities is very appealing to me.

Won’t be applying to grad school next year: I’m taking some time off to travel and write.