1) The extended first section of the review, which deals with the play of truth and fiction in Goethe’s novel, seems like it might be relevant to – that is, it might be an oblique commentary on – Coetzee’s own recent (and incessant, from Lives of the Animals forward) entangling of the truth and fiction. For instance:

The image of Werther as a twin or brother who has died or been killed and returns to haunt him recurs in a poem entitled “To Werther,” written when Goethe was near the end of his life. Between Goethe and his Werther self there was a complex, lifelong relationship that swung back and forth. In some accounts, Werther is the self he had to split off and abandon in order to live (Goethe spoke of the “pathological state” out of which the book emerged); in others, Werther is the passionate side of himself that he sacrificed, to his own cost. He was haunted not only by Werther but by the story of Werther he had put out into the world, which called out to be rewritten or more fully told. He spoke at various times of writing another Werther and of writing a prequel to Werther; but it would seem he could not find his way back into Werther’s world. Even the revisions he did to the book in 1787, masterly though they are, were done from the outside, and are not at one with the original inspiration.

Difficult not to read this in relation to Coetzee’s ostensibly late-life depictions of “himself” – or depictions of fictional depictions of himself – in Summertime and elsewhere. Yet another reframing – is his portrayal of himself (or, again, portrayal of portrayals of himself) as emotionally desiccated a kind of yin to Goethe’s yang, something he had to “split off in order to live,” or do something else than live. Anyway, bears some thinking through, this.

2) Corngold and his translation are mentioned only twice in the course of this long essay. The first time is to criticise the fact that the translator does not retranslate a long excerpt that Werther recites from The Works of Ossian but rather inserts Macpherson’s original. The second mention is simply to introduce some consideration of another broad question:

Corngold’s scholarly concern about anachronism raises a wider issue: With works from the past, how should the language of the translation relate to the language of the original? Should a twenty-first-century translation into English of a novel from the 1770s read like a twenty-first-century English novel or like an English novel from the era of the original?

A great question, but one that leads off from rather than back into Corngold’s own translation. So, after these two slight incursions into the edition at hand – incursions that mostly offer Coetzee to offer brilliant riffs of his own on the topics which and implicitly leave Corngold looking a bit under-rigorous in these spots – Coetzee makes a jarringly abrupt turn into the final paragraph of the review:

The Sorrows/Suffering of Young Werther has not lacked for translators. Among first-rate modern versions are those by Burton Pike, Michael Hulse, and Victor Lange. Corngold’s new translation is of the very highest quality, punctiliously faithful to Goethe’s German and sensitive to gradations of style in this extraordinary, trail-blazing first novel.

Wait, what? Sounds like the first paragraph of a more conventional review, the 800 word pieces you see in other magazines and newspapers. After all this, just “very highest quality, punctiliously faithful… sensitive to gradations of style”? After all of these complex and provocative analyses that Coetzee has offered – only some of them provoked by anything specific to the translation ostensibly under consideration?

In other words, it seems as though Coetzee here has written something like a pastiche of the style of the “long-form” reviews that we’re accustomed to find in the LRB and NYRB, where the expectation is that the reviewer does her or his own routine about the topic and then, only late, turns back to the book at hand. Which is what he does here too, but comically starkly, as if to make yet another point – this one performative – about the issue of writerly personality and its vicissitudes.

From the NYT today: 

The agreement came despite a series of setbacks in Afghan-American relations, including the burning of Korans, the massacre of 16 civilians attributed to a lone Army sergeant, and the appearance of grisly photos of American soldiers posing with the body parts of Afghan insurgents.

“In the midst of all these meteor strikes, we were able to still sit down across the table and get these documents agreed to,” one NATO official noted. Many Afghans, including some who are ambivalent about the American presence, believe that the country’s survival is tied to having such an agreement with Washington.

More meteor strikes, slightly older ones, from the Guardian this weekend. One example, if you don’t feel like clicking through, although you really should:

I saw Patrick Keiller’s exhibition at the Tate yesterday. It features, among so many other things, a few meteorites that had fallen in Britain. The most interesting one of all – at least to me – is the Wold Cottage meteorite, the one in the middle in the picture above. It fell in Yorkshire in 1795.

What is important about it, as Wikipedia summarizes, is this: “The Wold Cottage meteorite was the first meteorite observed to fall in Britain and is the second largest ever recorded to land in the United Kingdom. It was used by scientists as proof that extraterrestrial matter existed, and was made of the same materials as terrestrial matter.” In other words, it wasn’t until they found this one in a field that they believed that meteorites were in fact real rather than superstitious fictions.

What’s fascinating about that, of course, is that while we’re accustomed to thinking of the progress of human thought (or Enlightenment, if you will) as a process that involves the dispelling of myths (things that weren’t true that were thought to be) in some cases, as with this one, it works in reverse: things that were thought to be untrue, to be a matter of myth, were proven to in fact be true.

The usage of the phrase “meteor strikes” by the NATO official in Afghanistan, which have threatened to undo the persistence-despite-withdrawal of American power there, seems to me to partake of the pre-Wold Cottage meaning of the phrase. Events like these are taken as random and immaterial, lacking a physical foundation or cause, meta-effects like fireworks projected onto a screen rather than, as the photos in the Guardian begin to illustrate, part of the predictable weather patterns of our world as it is currently arranged.

Out the window, then, two women seated on the stairs leading into the building across. They are squabbling, it seems, but then the squabble turns into a sort of sexual rubbing, the one frantically rubbing the crotch of the other.

Are they both women or not?

One jumps from the stairs and darts between two parked cars. She drops her trousers and squats and a circular puddle forms on the street.

Passers-by do not look, do not stop to look, even though assuredly they can hear what she is doing even though they do not stop to see it.

She moves back to the steps, to her companion.

On these steps, each a week just before the weekend, a couple – posh and white, tenants of the building – sit and await the arrival of a delivery. He repeatedly checks his phone until two others roll up on bicycles – a man and a boy. There is some small talk, some awkward attempts at customer-service and good-customership in the form of feigned racial cross-toleration, and then an exchange of goods for a wad of cash.

But today, the woman in the flat across the street and one story down leans out of her window to look. She is blonde, in her late thirties, and a window peeper without the excuse of smoking. Normally when she sees that she is seen in her peeping she pulls back and yanks the curtain across. As she does now.

More playground noise. They are in the course of a transaction of some sort. Then one of them – not the one who peed on the street – pulls tight to the area railing and from her hands comes a massive flame. Though she is smoking crack, she sits back to chat as she tugs on the pipe. Casually, like an office-worker on her break, chatting with a colleague.

Another arrives. This one, unlike the others, is white. And apparently elderly, or at least looks that way. She is wearing enormous fluffy slippers on her feet and she walks with an injured shuffle. She shuffles down the middle of the street toward the pair on the stoop and stops to complain or cajole and then begins to weep. The tears of a little girl.

The curtain across the street is drawn again and the blonde woman reappears, extends her head out the window, as well as an arm whose hand grips a mobile phone tightly.

The tears of the old-looking woman continue as the pipe runs out and is returned to the smoker’s backpack. There are more faces visible at more windows. A man – overweight and of a certain age, but still in his way dashing in his way – exits the door behind them. With arthritic difficulty, he negotiates the steps and then heads south on Great Titchfield Street.

Now the two black women are taunting the white woman. Laughing at her and then laughing harder when she extends an open hand toward them, palm up, imploring them to share with her. The tears continue; the black women embrace wildly, again as if to show the other her place in this association. A man passes, and then a well-dressed woman. Someone is setting up tables outside the pub at the corner.

The woman at the window across draws the curtains again and disappears. She will not reappear during the course of this vignette.

The women on the stairs stand and begin to walk down the sidewalk, past the puddle and below the window of the woman who just now was watching. More tinkling taunt talk, more weaving and some rail-grabbing for steadiness’s sake – and more tears from the white woman who shuffles slowly in her slippers, too slow to keep up.

Only when the two in front turn to taunt does she make up ground on them. If they were to walk normally and ignore her they would quickly leave her behind.

From Baudelaire’s essay “The Painter of Modern Life”:

In this way a struggle is launched between the will to see all and forget nothing and the faculty of memory, which has formed the habit of a lively absorption of general colour and silhouette, the arabesque of contour. An artist with a perfect sense of form but one accustomed to relying above all on his memory and his imagination will find himself at the mercy of a riot of details all clamouring for justice with the fury of a mob in love with absolute equality. All justice is trampled underfoot; all harmony sacrificed and destroyed; many a trifle assumes vast proportions; many a triviality usurps the attention. The more our artist turns an impartial eye on detail, the greater is the state of anarchy. Whether he be long-sighted or short-sighted, all hierarchy and all subordination vanishes.

I wonder what Walter Benjamin made of this passage. Hard not to think of his description of a “perception whose ‘sense of the universal equality of things’ has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction,” although, of course CB is warning against the arrival of such a mode of perception while WB is (with due ambivalence) welcoming its arrival.

Obviously the relationship between literary form and political form is complex – incredibly complex. But it’s nonetheless there, and there more than simply as metaphorical. I’m going to leave this as I’m busy with nothing more than a potential suggestive stub which I’ll hopefully return to soon: linguistic / discursive / narrative forms come and go, and with them ways of seeing or thinking. Avant garde literature at times tries to bring new forms into existence or even into currency.

(One other stub: I might be wrong, but it strikes me that we have only paintings of crowd scenes from Paris 1848-1851 not photographs. We only get unmanned barricades in the latter, as the photographic process at the time demanded long exposures. This to me seems interesting, and almost undoubtedly relative – if tacitly – to what I’m trying to suggest about the quotation above from Baudelaire… See here… And correct me if I’m wrong…)

Haven’t seen the film yet, but strange, this from the New York Times review of Tiny Furniture:

One of the knots that Ms. Dunham requires you to untie while you’re watching “Tiny Furniture” is the extent to which she is playing with ideas about fiction and the real, originals and copies. Is the character Aura actually Ms. Dunham (the unique woman who lived in that loft) or is the director playing a copy of herself? Ms. Dunham doesn’t overtly say. One hint, though, might be the character’s unusual first name, which suggests that Ms. Dunham, at the age of 24 and herself a recent graduate, has read the social theorist Walter Benjamin’s 1930s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” one of the most influential (and commonly classroom-assigned) inquiries into aesthetic production and the mass reproduction of art.

Benjamin argued that an original work of art (say, a Rodin sculpture), has an aura, which creates a distance between it and the beholder. But aura decays as art is mechanically reproduced (say, for postcards). This decay is evident in cinema, where instead of individuals contemplating authentic works of art, as in a museum, a collective consumes images in a state of distraction. While there were dangers inherent in this shift, and while cinema could uphold what he called “the phony spell of a commodity,” its shocks might also lead to a “heightened presence of mind.” (“The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, while the truly new is criticized with aversion.”) Cinema, in other words, might spark critical thinking.

Strange move, if that’s what’s going on. Seems perfectly evocative of the way that certain “canonical” theoretical texts turn, via the way they are presented in undergraduate classrooms at liberal arts colleges and the like, into a generalized soup of “life philosophy” and gnomic multi-use utterances. Someone texts their girlfriend / or boyfriend: Please stop texting me to check what I’m doing when I’m drinking with my friends – it’s like I’m living in the panopticon! Or, on a bros night out, Dude, she’s like your pharmakon – the medicine that you need but also the poison that’ll kill you.

Loss of the aura indeed. Suppose it’s bound to happen. “Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction…” and so forth.

But….

Not feeling so great tonight at the thought that a) on the one hand someone told me I could potentially get paid £900 for this piece that I am supposed to be writing, a piece that I’ve basically (it seems incredibly clear) I’ve been angling basically my adult life to get, and I got excited, as believe you me the £900 would come in some serious handy…

But….

b) The girl from downstairs, a first-year undergraduate at the university at which I teach, came up last night whilst I was out to ask my girlfriend if she could use out washing machine. Thing is, she had a job interview today and needed to wash some clothes for it. Out of politeness, said girlfriend said yes and then asked her what the interview was for. “Oh, Goldman Sachs. An internship!” Right. “It pays £10,000 a month – it’s a month’s work. I really need this! Thank so you much etc etc etc.”

Look. I’m fine. I live beyond my means and seriously shouldn’t complain and  etc. But still… Jesus fucking christ does that stick in the craw amidst bank machine balance checking and aggressive notes from landlords and all the rest. Hard to imagine, in the end, that the value added that she adds to the world is etc.

Wonder if she got the job.

Strong sense tonight that it’s time to FSU. And  etc.

As with most blogs, I imagine, these are largely searches after pornography.

I’m not going to write pornography.

But still, even those searches / titles could work. So… how about for tomorrow (if there’s time):”the thing girls find pleasurable but shameful.”

Feels right to me….

Not that one should really go in for such things, but I just saw a Gawker post that makes a point pertinent to other things that I’ve been thinking about lately. Only going to name one name here, as it’s a name attached to a current piece, but I’m starting to notice a bit of a trend or a trope that is persistently appearing in a certain, well, caste of writing:

1) one writes an article / piece / novel that is a bit or a lot tone deaf when it comes to the social positionality of the dramas, humorousness, or both invoked

2) perhaps one thus delights / edifies / entertains those readers / viewers how happen to share the social position involved but then

3) one is criticised for the naive / un-reflexive / bizarre / grating (attempts at) drama or humor, perhaps by those who don’t share the same social position, and so

4) one explains / argues that said piece was meant in jest / as satire.

For instance, see this piece by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian in The New Inquiry, this response to the piece, and the original writer’s response to the response.

The trick  - and this runs parallel to what the Harvard kids in the video on Gawker don’t get either – is that the ultimate purpose of one’s piece, the final message, may well undercut any semi-satiric posturing that comes in the middle. That is to say, if in the New Inquiry piece, in the words of the author,

the ‘woe is columbia’ attitude was intended to be self-mocking (um, i guess i failed?) and the main point i was trying to make is that going to fancy liberal arts college actually makes you less competent for the kinds of jobs you get right after college…

it’d probably be better for the penultimate (or is it ultimate?) point not to be that the problem with humanities degrees is that just about anyone – not just the tenderly cultivated products of international schools who end up at Columbia – can get one. As she says in the initial essay linked above:

The reason for the bachelor’s degree’s impending obsolescence has a lot to do with the high costs, and now publicly-recognized flaws of American four-year colleges. It is also an inevitable consequence of just how available higher education has become. With limitless student loans and free-for-all admissions to for-profit colleges, education is no longer a surefire indicator of class or race—a valuable function for the reproduction of both hierarchies—or even intelligence or ability—the supposed backbone of the information economy.

Anyway, it is one example of many, this… But you see how it works, right? Someone calls you on your snobbery or silliness, and you in turn call them, implicitly or explicitly, on their stupidity for not getting the in-joke, the ironic jargon of the quad, the argot of the ivied.

From Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, which I’m rereading to teach this week. The protagonist is sitting at a coffee place in Soho and is watching people on Old Compton Street outside:

They reminded me of an ad – not a particular one, but just some ad with beautiful young people in it having fun. The people in the street now had the same ad in mind as me. I could tell. In their gestures and their movements they acted out the roles of the ad’s characters: the way they turned around and walked in one direction while still talking in another, how they threw their heads back when they laughed, the way they let their mobiles casually slip into their low-slung trouser pockets. Their bodies and faces buzzed with glee, exhilaration – a jubilant awareness that for once, just now, at this particular right-angled intersection, they didn’t have to sit in the cinema or living room in front of a TV and watch other beautiful people laughing and hanging out: they could be beautiful young people themselves. See? Just like me: completely second hand.

From Andrew Delbanco’s discussion of The Encantadas in his Melville: His World and Work:

In the eighth of the ten Encantadas sketches… This time the fated woman is not a Nantucket bride but an Indian woman, Hunilla, dropped off by a whaleship with her husband and brother on an expedition to gather Galapagos tortoises, prized for the sweetness of their meant. While awaiting the ship’s return, the two men are caught in a squall that capsizes their catamaran:

Before Hunilla’s eyes they sank. The real woe of this event passed before her sight as some sham tragedy on the stage. She was seated on a rude bower among the withered thickets crowning a lofty cliff, a little back from the beach. The thickets were so disposed that in looking upon the sea at large she peered out from among the branches as from the lattice of a high balcony. But upon the day we speak of here, the better to watch the adventure of those two hearts she loved, Hunilla had withdrawn the branches to one side, and held them so. They formed an oval frame, through which the bluely boundless sea rolled like a painted one. And there the invisible painter painted to her view the wave-tossed and disjointed raft, its once level logs slantingly upheaved, as raking masts, and the four struggling arms undistinguishable among them, and then all subsided into smooth-flowing creamy waters, slowly drifting the splintered wreck, while, first and last, no sound of any sort was heard. Death in a silent picture, a dream of the eye, such vanishing shapes as the mirage shows.

 With this harrowing passage, Melville joined a number of ninteenth-century writers who were drawn to the theme of what Shakespeare had called, in The Rape of Lucrece, “double death” (“‘Tis double death to drown in ken of shore”). In David Copperfield, which [Melville] and Lizzie had read aloud in the winter of 1850-51, Dickens describes a schooner foundering just off shore while helpless spectators watch until the last man clinging to the mast goes down in a shower of splinters and spray. Melville now followed his own version of “double death” with a protrait of the surviving witness eviscerated by what she has seen: year after year, Hunilla “trod the cinder beach” with “her spell-bound eye bent upon the incessant waves,” hoping without hope for the sight of a sail.