Insta Readings
An Archive, 2019-2024
(thumbnail sketches of books being read, composed on the fly as Instagram captions
Sur le style de Flaubert, Marcel Proust. Editions Sillage, Paris 2014
To talk about style, Proust focuses closely on the use of the past perfect tense, and on the way Flaubert uses prepositions and little words— and, and it. This was his last essay, written in 1919 in response to mainstream literary criticism which was emphatically claiming that Flaubert had poor style, was a bad writer, that he had no ear for grammar, etc. At the end of the essay he talks about the structure of memory in his own novel in reaction to Chateaubrind and Nerval. Referring to La Recherche he describes “the narrator who says I, who is not always me.”
Lecture pour tous, Dominique Aury. Gallimard, 1958
Of course Dominique Aury, pseudonymous author of The Story of O, wrote on Chateaubriand’s last book, as Roland Barthes did too, shortly after, introducing the 1965 edition of La vie de Rancé. Chateaubriand, the romantic memoirist, played the life of the reclusive baroque abbot, she said, as if it were a grand lyre with which he shared certain strings. She too nurtured the baroque taste for passionate retreat.
Still Life With a Bridle, Zbigniew Herbert
I bought this book in Krakow, based on its beauty (it’s cloth bound, embossed, and the endpapers are matte persimmon like the cover) and also based on a Herbert essay on troubadour culture that Ben Friedlander sent me several years ago, which I ended up citing in Anemones, my book of Simone Weil and the troubadours. Still life with a Bridle is Wonderful— it’s a travel narrative and essay book that becomes a work of 17th Century art history and landscape/material history, beginning with the utterly engaging first sentence “Just after crossing the Dutch-Belgian border, suddenly and without reason or reflection I decided to change my original plan.” Herbert claimed to be an ancestor of the poet George Herbert, who coincidentally was responsible for Weil’s conversion to Christianity.
Sor Juana, Octavio Paz
“Black teardrops from my melancholy pen”. Paz is not enthusiastic about such Baroque rhetorical tropes. His romantic judgements oddly remind me of late 2oth century avant gardist positions against metaphor as such, among some language poets for example. But there are diverse circumstances— political, social, spiritual, economic—in which one is not free to sauy the direct thing, or there is no direct form of representation possible or available for transparent expression. I think much of the work of language is indirect, including in its critical dimensions.
The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell
In a peculiar surge of nostalgia I’m rereading the The Alexandria Quartet, which I first encountered and read in the early 80s, on various trains during my first trip in Europe. I loved to cry on trains. The current one is Balthazar; last summer I read Clea. Everything embarrassing and shabby about my own mental habits and totally uncritical embrace of cliché is captured and augmented by this book, making it feel familial. Then I thought his prose was the ultimate romantic sophistication.
Roland Barthes’ little 1969 book Michelet par lui-meme, is delicious and full of transcriptions and photographs of primary documents. It’s part of a series by Editions du Seuil. The Baudelaire is a gem also. First paragraph in the Michelet— mud, elements, migraines, aging. My core obsessions.
Ages back I wrote a blurb for Bob Gluck’s I Boombox (Roof Books) (a life-long poem of recomposed misreadings) and now I have a copy for real. It has wonderful drawings by the Bay area artist Colter Jacobsen all through it, and it makes me miss Bob and Colter and San Francisco. Here’s my blurb: Rimbaud infamously claimed that I is an other, but for Bob I is a flicker of error, or a wandering ear that invents. He has made a home for several decades of errant listening in this sinuous long poem, which light heartedly teases the modernist tradition it also subverts. In true mock-heroic manner, Bob reveals from his gay marble desk how God’s laughter glides in and out of garden festival, action film and sublet alike. I have been waiting for this book for years and it sweetly exceeds all of my hopes.
Dans l’arène enemie, Monique Wittig (textes et entretiens 1966-1999)
Overjoyed to encounter Emile Benveniste in the new Wittig. Of course her j/e is Benvenistian! And in a very early conversation of Woolf she refers to his Vocabulary of Indo-European Institutions to explain the relationship of patriarchy to language.
Sleep, Amelia Rosselli. NYRB
Rosselli wrote these poems in English, one of her several languages, from the years 1953 to 1956. I’ve certainly not read a better book of poems than this one. It makes me wish I could read backwards and forwards simultaneously. Here is a single page verse:
hell, loomed out
with perfect hands.
Lament for Julia, Susan Taubes NYRB
Imagine a petty jealous supercilious god who lives by turns in a girl’s tummy, her attic, her gestures, her appetite, and who considers killing her because she is not a tree, not her little friend cruel Caroline who swings her tawny thin legs from tree branches and plunges into icy ponds on a dare… This god is not Simone Weil’s god et tant mieux. Or I am quite mistaken. In fact, Taube’s wrote her doctoral dissertation on Weil.
An Angel at My Table, Janet Frame
“Time, now a sticky mess, now a jewel bigger than the planets and the stars.” I’m finally reading this after picking up a second hand copy in small town Ontario, and what a joy. Class and female shame swag the passionate metaphysics of the sheltered yet wildly ambitious girl-poet with badly decaying teeth as she first sets foot in city, Coleridge, Freud, psychiatry.
Un Captif amoureux, Jean Genet
My feeling reading Genet—I’m with a person. He’s not a nice person but he is somebody who has succeeded in expanding his inner life against all odds, in part by deepening his observation of the micro-currents circulating among people around him. It’s very awkward and uncomfortable to be near him, so I read only 6 or so pages at a time. He works with moral precision and morals are his material. But they’re nobody else’s. Having an inner life is most likely offensive. His movements are surgical. He is in full possession of himself.
A Breath of Life, Clarice Lispector. Penguin
The strange exhilaration of reading Clarice Lispector is that something so scattered, so fractured, in such total refusal of narrative unity, could continue for so long—over 160 pages—and still recognizably resemble itself. There is a radical refusal of identity which ambivalently and erotically produced identity. The justifying hunger, as she calls it, is for glamorously and mysteriously not being. It doesn’t stop.
Collected Poems, Lynette Roberts. Carcanet
Denise Riley told me years ago to read Lynette Roberts so I ordered the book (there are certain people one only ever obeys, and Denise had already guided me to Merleau Ponty, to Delueze’s The Logic of Sense) and then there was a very long pause. I wonder about her influence on Plath—and in Canada, maybe the early Phyllis Webb? Also, the poems she was writing in the 1930s are like brilliant versions of what I wished to be writing in the late 70s and early 80s—a sort of dramatic lyric, intricately sounded, rooted in the observed mythos of landscape and domestic dailiness. My poems then were full of parsnips, loam, sea lions, soup pots, kelp ribbons, bucket and spades. Roberts was still alive then— she died in 1985.
The Passionate Exiles, Maurice Levaillant.
I’m deeply absorbed in this book, a biography of the friendship between two great women intellectuals—Mme Recamier (she of the chaise longue, in David’s iconic painting) and Mme. de Stael— written in 1956, and found in the village phone booth last summer I think. Reading about these early 19th C friends, I see the sentiments of friendship shift over time. I mean not so much the relation between specific friends as true as that could be, but that the feelings and forms of friendship possible in certain eras also disappear or alter. Their passionate fidelity was Romantic in nature, but also kept part of 18th C formal codes alive, and even in a way some of the emotional awe of medieval courtly love. To think of friendship as a living weave of centuries-long relational currents and customs which nevertheless do find their ends as conditions and habits shift and perhaps new barely perceived patterns of attachment fuse is so moving to me. What is a friend now, and what has a friend been historically? It is a more mysterious question than love I think.
The Pickwick Papers, Dickens.
I love Dicken’s eye for threads. “Round his neck he wore a green shawl, with the large ends straggling over his chest, and making their appearance occasionally beneath the worn button holes of his old waistcoat. His upper garment was a long black surtout; and below it he wore wide drab trousers, and large boots, running rapidly to seed.” I’d wear this getup gladly.
Manette Salomon, The Goncourt Brothers
An 1867 novel about bohemian painters in Paris. It functions as a brilliant anthropological document. During the revolution of 1848 in Paris there was no remaining market for artists. So this painter, at the end of his means, realized he could unpick the fabric cover of his mattress, sleep on the bare wadded wool lumps, and sell the ticking, in this way acquiring enough money to eat rye bread twice daily for eight days.
Fragments sur Aby Warburg, Gertrude Bing
Such an important book, this is part of a silent intellectual history of women. Bing devised the uniquely supple cataloguing and shelving system still used at the Warburg library, which permits Warburg’s idea of the good neighbour effect in research to remain startlingly alive. The book you need, he thought, was next to the one you think you want. Bing was Warburg’s assistant starting in the 1920s, and with Fritz Saxl liberated the library from the Nazis and its certain destruction, and put it on a barge to cross to London, without yet having a fixed destination or institutional home for the collection. They reestablished the library under the protection of the University of London, and she was its director from 1954-60. She also assisted Warburg’s composition of the Mnemosyne Atlas in Italy before his death. Warburg called her Bingiothek. The work of transmission, an essential art of peace, has a subterranean material history.
Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, Liz Howard. McLelland and Stewart, 2022.
Liz Howard’s poery is the elegant fuck-you to all resource based extractionism and related colonisations of river spirits, night skies and bodily cogitos. Geometry Sings.
Torrid Auspicious Quartz, J. H. Prynne Face Press, 2020
You might want to know that this book exists. How to get it: Go to the LRB bookshop in Soho, tell the person at the desk thst you’re a poet, then ask them to please unlock the secret closet where every existing chapbook and pamphlet by Mr. Prynne is stacked in crisp multiples. Then they leave you alone in the closet. In this text, the word “the” occurs just one time.
The Coleridge Notebooks, (complete) ed Kathleen Coburn
Each next page better than any other page I’ve ever read. Inside the notebooks of STC, Sara Hutchinson exists. Read Coburn’s indexes for the volumes for pure pleasure and inuendo.
The Obituary, Gail Scott. Coach House Books
Duras said “there are often narratives and seldom writing.” Gail Scott’s novel The Obituary is the latter—read it to feel deeply how we are spoken through by buried secrets, histories of suppression, violence and shame. First published in 2010, and newly essential today. Read it as a way to enter a thinking that can approach the foul fact of the recovery of 215 nameless indigenous children’s corpses from the grounds of a residential school in Kamloops where they had been incarcerated and tortured. We need writing to think this. Narrative is not enough.
Astragal, Albertine Sarrazin
A wild plant of little use, a torture implement, a part of a canon, a decorative motif, a bone in the human ankle, a story of a girl’s prison escape from 1965 in the tradition of Jean Genet and Violette Leduc.