‘In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. If one begins with generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it.’

So Vladimir Nabokov in ‘Good Readers and Good Writers’ which introduces his Lectures on Literature (ed. Fredson Browers, Harvest Book, San Diego, 1980).

As I’ve probably remarked here before, I’m not a big fan of Nabokov. Actually I’ve never finished one of his novels, not even Pale Fire. 40, 50, 60 pages long I think, ‘wow, this is great’, and then I lose interest and see no reason whatsoever to continue. But I thought his lectures might be enjoyable, and I was curious what he’s made of Ulysses.

But I found myself reading diagonally after a few pages. Nabokov’s strategy seemed to’ve be trying to make one love a book by retelling the story, reading out passages and making you image what the fictional world of the novel looks like. His insists on this visualization as being the key to reading novels. That’s why for him it’s so important that “(w) have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and can enjoy its details.” Apart from the fact that it’s unsure that we can do this with a picture, I doubt whether this is always so important. (If it is, the novel would surely have been superseded by the movie). In any case, it explains, for me, why Nabokov is so low on my list. I enjoy the language of language, and then the sound of language, and the thought of language, much more.

This doesn’t mean there’s nothing to enjoy or to be learned in Nabokov’s Lectures. Like, when, at the end of the lecture on Jane Austen, he states that for young author learning to write means ‘free his language from cliches, to eliminate clumsiness, to form a habit of searching with unflinching patience for the right word, the only right word which will convey with the utmost precision the exact shade and intensity of thought.’ (p. 60) That sure is something to think about when you’re spitting out a few hundred of words, rewriting without having the time to rewrite, another text. Pff.

http://decodeunicode.org/; a wiki with about all the unicode-characters! So, thousands and thousands an thousands of characters from all written languages.

The first really tidied-up and edited version of my text on Poetry for the Screen amounts to 1600 words, where 1000 is the limit. That’s pretty normal for me. I can bring that back to 1400 by rewriting without losing too much info. Still means I have to get rid of some, well, paragraphs. Mostly that means cutting the first paragraph on which I have spent a lot of time, introducing the subject nicely. That’s down to 1200. So then I still have to thrown out some…

Paul Bogaert (another one of my favorite poets) is the victim. I cut this:

“Fascinerend vind ik echter Interne keuken, een powerpointpresentatie van alle versies van een gedicht, van eerste regel tot en met laatste versie. 700 schermen. Bogaert introduceert het als een verhandeling over een van zijn gedichten, maar het kan evengoed een zelfstandig poëzieproject zijn. Ik stel me een programma voor dat alle toetsaanslagen voor een file (een gedicht in wording) vastlegt, zodat deze kunnen worden gereproduceerd. Dat kun je presenteren als (conceptuele?) poëzie. Ook in Later zal het opzien baren, 21 versies van het einde van Liefdadigheid nu, ligt een kiem van zo’n geprogrammeerde, veranderende poëzie.”

See http://www.paulbogaert.be.

“Sorrentino never got the big ticket acknowledgement for his accomplishments that he deserved. His fiction has too many layers for an age that thinks Philip Roth is serious writing.”

As scribbled by Ron Silliman: http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2006/05/when-i-began-project-of-this-weblog.html.

I’ve hardly read any Sorrentino, and even less Philip Roth, but I’d say I agree for the full 100%. Roth’ The Plot Against America I found okay — the novel does the job it wants to do — but I think it’s also flawed. Sorrentino’s Splendide-Hotel is pure perfection in words.

(Of course, without argumentation, these opinions don’t amount to much…)

Today:

Samuel Vriezen on curiosity, ‘Ernstige Muziek’, ‘Muziek van verpozingsaard’ and the BUMA/STEMRA: http://blogger.xs4all.nl/sqv/.

Jeroen Mettes has some good thoughts on electronic poetry: http://n30.nl/2006/05/vertraagde-speculaties-over-zgn.html.

And the newest issue of Parmentier (http://www.literairtijdschriftparmentier.nl/) deals with electronic literature and comes just too late for me. (De Tribune didn’t have it yesterday, and my text is due friday).

simply ‘the actuality of the words’.

So went out and bought Van Bastelaere’s ‘De voorbode van iets groots’ at De Tribune, Maastrichts nicest bookstore. Read through it once now. I do not read poetry slowly, at least not when reading through it the first time. And wrt Van Bastelaere I have the impression that some poems work best when read rather quickly. Especially the poems in which he uses a lot of ‘fragments’ — just bits of language, quotations, cliche’s — will not work when read slowly. (I think now).

Marjorie Perloff wrote in the preface to Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media, “There is today no landscape uncontaminated by sound bytes or computer blips, no mountain peak or lonely valley beyond the reach of the cellular phone and the microcassette player. Increasingly, then, the poet’s arena is the electronic world.” She wrote that in 1991.

The world of Van Bastelaere is made just as much of the mythology of action movies (a very one dimensional mythology, that he sort of deconstructs to show what desires are at play there — but because the mythology is one-dimensional, the deconstruction also comes out one-dimensional) and the postmodern desire and fear of catastrophe (the theme that keeps this book together). And there’s a messianic bit as well (in Whoooosssssh). The references are all well-known. And actually he often plays, I think, with quoting in very beautiful Dutch, sentences which one knows from for instance Burroughs (‘who scared you into this flesh?’), Gibson, Delillo or Ballard. At least, so is my impression. Or, for that matter, from action movies, or Blanchot.

Which make these poems a bit 1990’s as well. (They might be from the ’90s, partly, at least Zapruder Stress was already published (in a different form) years and years ago).

Van Bastelaere has a particular good ear for language, and plays often with making you expect one thing, then turning the sentence into another direction. Easy example: “Dit is waar / Het verhaal eindigt”; which makes you read: “This is true / The story ends”, immediately correcting yourself into reading “This is where / The story ends”). Van Bastelaere uses such poetic ‘tricks’ a lot, to good effect. Another is the use of loose bits of spoken language, just utterances, sometimes he just strings them together. They form a sort of language canvas… . It’s as with the ‘almost quotations’, that you think you remember recognize, but not quite, and before you can wonder about it, the poem is elsewhere already. This is the language of which our world is made (if you listen closely… a girl walks by the window and I hear her say ‘Ooh, dat is zo….’ )

It reminds me of Creeley’s use of rhythm. But a radicalized version of it.

I like those effects. I do not find them disturbing, I do not get the feeling that Van Bastelaere is playing a game against me, or tries to undermine my preconceptions of what poetry is or should be.

But then, I am a reader who is not bothered by not getting to the core of a ‘meaning’. I read poetry for rhythm and sound as much as for meaning. Or for the voyage through language.

My 2 cents. (For now).

Have to start writing down the actual sentences for my text about the electronic/multimedia/internet/new media-poetry shown at De Waag last week. But I click’n read from poetry-blog to poetry-blog. Making the rounds: the weekly ones (a.o. Mettes: http://n30.nl/poezienotities.html, Contrabas: http://www.decontrabas.com/, Silliman), the monthly ones (Inwijkeling: http://reugebrink.skynetblogs.be/), and checking out what has happened in the e-poetry scene in the past months.

I read the discussions about Dirk van Bastelaere’s new book. Van Bastelaere was (is?) definitely one of my favorite poets. There are not many poems that I have read as often as those in Pornschlegel and Diep in Amerika. Yet I was disappointed by Hartswedervaren and Van Bastelaere’s current theoretical interests (Lacan…) are certainly not mine. And yet, even the poems in Hartswedervaren, I think, are stronger than those of Stefan Hertmans (who’s much milder, & whom I also continue to follow), or the much-praised Peter Verhelst, whose work to me always has seemed to be artificial and ‘unreal’ (‘gewild’ — tho that’s a very problematic criticism… I know). Hmm. anyway, I have to get a copy of Van Bastelaere’s de voorbode van iets groots today — so I can give my 2 cents…

I read Silliman on the poetics of Charles Olson — a very nice piece: http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2006/05/breathe-say-all-manner-of-meditators.html. Olson’s ideas about breath and projective verse are another ‘topic’ that I keep going back to (or ending up with?)

But what is this… research? Or am I postponing the moment to ‘jot down’ the first real draft of my text.

I should’ve known. Of course Raymond Federman blogs: http://raymondfederman.blogspot.com/. Federman is another PM-AmLit-writer, but he’s bilingual (French – American). His work is wildly innovative, full of life and funny, and very moving.

Years ago I translated his most dense work The Voice in the Closet / La voix dans le cabinet de debarras; my translation was published by Perdu (http://www.perdu.nl) and is since long sold out. The text is available online at different locations (probably even at my own site… one forgets what one has put online…. ah yes, there it is: http://www.xs4all.nl/~ariealt/stem.html and http://www.xs4all.nl/~ariealt/voice.html, and also here: http://www.federman.com/voice.htm).

It was in fact one of the first things I did, after finishing my studies (with a thesis on Federman and theories of postmodern fiction) — without any real experience in translating. (Well, one has to start somewhere).

‘[…]
As far as I know, there is still not a Decent Writing System anywhere in the world, although several things now come close. It seems a shame that grown men and women have to rustle around in piles of paper, like squirrels looking for acorns, in search of the phrases and ideas they themselves have generated. The decent writing system, as I see it, will actually be much more: it will help us to create better things in a fraction of a time, but also keep track of everything in better and more subtle ways than we ever could before. […]’

Quote from Nelson’s Dream Machines, 1974, as found on http://www.mprove.de/diplom/ht/tndm.html.