“According to Fielding the whole world of letters was becoming a ‘democracy, or rather a downright anarchy’; and there was no one to enforce the old laws, since, as he wrote in the Covent Garden Journal (1752, no. 23,1), even the ‘offices of criticism’ had been taken over by ‘a large body of irregulars’ who had been admitted ‘into the realm of criticism without knowing one word of the ancient laws’.”

Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, The Hogarth Press, London, 1987 (1957) p. 58.

“…this unsettled way of reading … which naturally seduces us into as undetermined a manner of thinking. … That assemblage of words which is called a style becomes utterly annihilated. … the common defence of these people is , that they have no design in reading but for pleasure, which I think should rather arise from reflection and remembrance of what one had read, than from the transient satisfaction of what one does, and we should be pleased proportionately as we are profited.”

Richard Steele, in the Guardian, 1713, quoted in Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, The Hogarth Press, London, 1987 (1957). p. 48.

“‘The present age may be styled with great propriety, the Age of Authors; for perhaps the never was a time in which men of all degrees of ability, of every kind of education, of every profession and employment were posting with ardour so general to the press.’

‘The province of writing was formerly left to those who, by study or appearance of study, were supposed to have gained knowledge unattainable by the busy part of mankind.’

Dr. Johnson in the Adventurer, 1753, quoted in Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, The Hogarth Press, London, 1987 (1957), p. 58

And, well, what do you do with dome time on your hands in a city like Leeuwarden, your students apparently not needing your help right now and the weather not so nice to sit in a park and read? You walk into this so-so-second hand bookstore. And there it is, as if it’s waiting for you, as if its specially put here for you: Merci Freddy, Merci Lucien, by the Flemish journaliste Jan Cornand and Andre Blancke, an account of the cycling season 1976. This is the first book I read about cycling and I partly ‘blame’ this book for my love of cycling. It has certainly played a role in my ongoing interest in the cycling of the seventies. They had it in the public library of Almelo and I must’ve read it three times from cover to cover. I’ve never seen it in any second hand bookstore. I buy it (5 euro’s). And while eating my dinner in the Irish pub, I read the account of the Giro of 1976, the one Johan De Muynck should’ve won, the one that the Brooklyn-squad dominated, and I enjoy every single word of it.

Interestingly: I find out that in 1976 the Giro-director had tried to come up with some ‘inventions’ to make the race more interesting, namely: putting two new cols (well, a col and a climb) on the programme that both were not paved yet. There’s nothing new under the sun. The Valjolet ( a climb somewhere around the Sella) and the Manghen. (The Manghen comes easily in the top 10 of my favorite cols: when I ‘did it’ a narrow paved road of very black asphalt and no soul to see.)

And into Schmidt again as well, as I received a little booklet as a present: Arno Schmidt in Bargfeld, from the series “Menschen und Orte” (“People and Places): http://www.atelierfischer-berlin.de/menschenorte/menschenorte_re.html. A nice little book, that brings the Schmidt-fan nothing new, nothing but an opportunity to read again an account of his life, and his work (“Arbeit, Arbeit, Arbeit”). The photographs also are well-known, but because I do not own any books on Schmidt except for the Rowolth-biography, they are very welcome. I’m always fascinated by photographs of writers desks…. I enjoyed it so much (the nearness of Schmidt’s world) that this morning I quickly picked a Schmidt-book from my shelves to read on the train to work. I re-read the ‘short story’ Schwanze and am beginning to also see the humour of the later work of ‘der Arno’ leading up to Zettel’s Traum. I left the newspapers unread today.

Page 120 already! Two days of reading, well, just a few hours, and I’m on page 120 of the Maximus Poems! Of course the whole thing is more than 600 pages long, but still… This is possible thanks to the style of these poems. This is not poetry to re-read. This is not poetry of precise, quotable lines, there are hardly stanzas that one would like to go over again and again, to savour all the music and meaning. (Those that stand up to this test are those one will find in the anthologies). Approach it with an expectation of finding ‘finished poems’, and one will find Olson a rather messy and careless word-smith. Olson lets the sound determine the syntax and the flow of words; this is poetry to read, line after line, ‘listening’: imagine a big man speaking aloud to you (Olson was a big man). He (Maximus, not Olson) talks on and on, makes little mistakes, comes back to the same points, repeats. Speaks sometimes in prose and at other times in verse. And slowly, while reading, the image of Gloucester takes shape, the early history and economy of it, the ‘locality’, the muthos – Olson trying to be a Herodotos to Gloucester, not a Thucydides.

Read the Maximus Poems that way, and you’ll find it fascinating. (Well, I do). And the image of Gloucester becomes becomes more and more clearer and multifaceted the further the poem progresses, the more Maximus ‘talks’.

(Of course, I write this after having read ‘only’ 120 pages…)

(Now that I finally upload this account of my reading experience – written down on a train, travelling to Groningen – I’ve progressed unto page 180).

Finished reading Falling Man on sunday. As I am a bit of a DeLillo-specialist (having read all of his prose and most of his plays) I guess I have to give my opinion here… Falling Man is a novel about the effects of 9/11 on the lives of a group of Americans – DeLillo-characters, all with something to hide, a secret maybe, though this ‘something to hide, this secret, might be just nothingness, a big hole. It’s a novel on the scale of Endzone or Players. It doesn’t compare badly to his earlier prose at all. I say this because his novels after Underworld seemed to be the work of a free-wheeling writer returning to his subject matter, without any urgent reason. Whereas in the earlier prose DeLillo seemed to struggle – sign of urgency. Underworld was a sort of summary of all of DeLillo’s earlier concerns and themes, which resolved most of the loose ends and problems of the earlier novels – (a reason why I never feel compelled to pick up that book a second time, yet continue to read the others. like Americana). Though sometimes praised by reviewers who discovered DeLillo through Underworld, The Body Artist, Valparaiso and Cosmopolis are simply the least interesting works from his oeuvre. The lack edge, and even seem false/fake sometimes.

Falling Man, I think, is simply the book DeLillo had to write, although he might not have longed to write it. It has to exist. Without it, there’s a lack in his oeuvre. Libra is the novel which defines the ‘postmodern age’; all of his other novels project a world that is running toward 9/11. One could even say that DeLillo’s prose pointed towards 9/11 in an eerie way.

And to be silent then, afterwards, after what for the New Yorkers signifies catastrophe, would be too much. I can imagine, that being DeLillo one feels compelled to take the impact of the catastrophe as subject matter.

Falling Man then, might not be Delillo’s best novel, but it’s all there. The characters, the short sentences, the distanced, ‘objective’ observations, the scenes that seem to be overexposed (a metaphor I’ve used for years trying to describe DeLillo’s style, and never have been able to explain in detail). Maybe a critique could be that DeLillo doesn’t delve deep enough into the post-9/11-American-soul, nor deep enough into the soul of the terrorist. (The theory was already there in Mao II, the soul I guess in Libra). Maybe a critique could be that most of what DeLillo tells, reminds one of the journalistic accounts of 9/11. But even if that is the case, it is there: descriptions of the impact of the planes, of people going down the stairs of the WTC, of the moment just before the impact. And these descriptions are precise. DeLillo-esque (which is scary enough I guess, for a writer, to describe historical scenes and then someone saying that such scenes are DeLillo-esque…)

But that said, this book is not about terrorist or terrorism, not at all about victims, not about ‘our age’ It is a novel about the soul of white, well-to-do Americans and their secrets (see above). It is also an attempt to look into the soul of an Arab terrorist, but this fails just as it fails in Mao II: it makes sense, theoretically. It shows how ‘we’ (Westerners) think terrorists think, and bringing European terrorism in, does not alter that. It shows the surface. But it might also be that there is no more. That said, not many writers go where DeLillo goes, and the prose in Falling Man doesn’t sound false or weak for one sentence. It’s ‘Delillo’ – and in the world of his characters, 9-11 was always already there.

Well, I could’ve also pointed you to Omar’s review at: http://www.cut-up.com/reviews/detail.php?id=561.

I am working on an article about epic poetry – well, epic poetry now, in the light of internet, new media. Hmm. Those kind of assignments (“those kind” – what does that mean?) for me are a reason to order books that I’ve been wanting to read for a long time. The occasion presents itself.

So today the postman brought Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems and Albert B. Lord’s the Singer of Tales.

I’ve read quite a bit of the shorter poetry of Olson (from the Selected Poems, edited by Robert Creeley) and I like his prose-essay Call Me Ishmael. Olson is a bit of a strange type, and he could be a total nuthead it seems. (Is it HC ten Berge who calls him a ‘warhoofd’ in a fairly recent piece? I don’t remember). His poetry is straight out of Pound’s Cantos in many senses, and well, I’m simply drawn toward these really long poems (that one hardly ever finishes reading completely, from first till last page).

The ideas of Lord are well-known to me, as they form the fundaments of much contemporary knowledge of oral poetry and performance – but I’ve never read the actual book. So now’s the time.

I did however recently reread Bauman’s 1970’s essay Verbal Art as Performance – it was requiered reading for Literary Theory back in 1988. Rediscovering in a sense where I’ve picked up ideas on literature…

“We were yesterday three kiple chined, by the grease of God, in the holy bands of mattermoney.”

“As for madam Lashmiheygo, you nose her picklearities.”

No, this is not from FW, this is Smollett The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, Penguin Classics, p. 394-5.

… the Arno Schmidt-reference library (see http://www.gasl.org) is an online collection of pdf’s of books that Arno Schmidt owned and to which he often referred in his novels. Shakespeare, Jules Verne, Tobias Smollett, Herodotos. Nice for the fans of Schmidt and the literature-professors.

But in the 3 years of its existence it has already send 400.000 texts into the world. Interestingly, from december 2006 on the downloads increased dramatically because China allowed province after province access to the reference library.

Says Günter Jürgensmeier of GASL, in an e-mail to the Schmidt-discussion list:

“Die Referenzbibliothek hat damit im zurückliegenden Jahr vermutlich erheblich mehr für die Bildung getan als die Bayrische Staatsregierung. “Jaja”, rufen da die Herren Goppel/Schneider unisono, “für die Bildung der Chinesen!” Naja, immerhin!)”