Zadie Smith: NW

Posted: September 2, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: books, features | 1 Comment »

 

zadie-smith-portra_2319021i

Written for Exeunt

In elegantly precise, shorthand stage-directions, Smith pulls her world up to the curb alongside us and says Get in. She doesn’t stop; you have to run a little, then throw yourself in a way that is neither comfortable nor expected. There is a barely cursory You in? before she accelerates off. There just isn’t time for the nonsense language usually associates itself with because by the end of the one and a half page first chapter, she has got you to a place most books don’t even attempt to take you in their entirety. She is saying, let’s cut the bullshit. Let’s admit that we see things and we know what they means. Let’s not pretend our outsides are our insides; we all know the truth here.

Set around the trajectories of four people – Leah, Natalie (nee Keisha), Nathan and Felix – who grew up the Cadwell housing estate in Wilsden, we spend time some time inside each characters mind. Life has been kinder to some than to others, but it is not always easy to tell which. This is a book about the price of escape, the price of idealism and the price of turning away from it. The very first page offers us this: “Here’s what Michel likes to say: not everyone can be invited to the party.” Leah doesn’t agree with this statement- or doesn’t want to agree. It is in this gap between what she wants to think and what she can no longer deny, that the book takes place.

Smith says that one of the reasons for the fragmentary, stop-start nature of the narrative is that she now has a young daughter and can only write in short bursts. Whatever the reason, it works: we live in bursts; what is life if not a strange combination of absolutely unrelenting continuity and absolutely nothing of the sort. In an interview earlier this month she also said that she wanted to write something like a “problem play…one of those little machines in which you come out the other end and feel odd.” Something akin to Clydeborne Park perhaps; plot, merely an excuse for a gentle yet brutally final stripping away of our excuses. In this elegant yet ruthless dissection, NW is similar to Richard Yate’s Revolutionary Road (a book that could also, in many ways, be seen as the very necessary novelisation of a play.) Richard Ford’s famous comment about Revolutionary Road also sums up NW : “Handing it over cold feels clumsy. We almost would rather not, for all the crucial things that cannot be thought and said again.”

We are often given no depth of field. Sometimes this seems unnecessarily confusing, as when in an early chapter, song lyrics from The Kinks blend, undifferentiated into Woolfesque stream of consciousness and dialogue. Yet it soon becomes clear that it is far more than self-conscious quirkiness or posturing: Smith’s technique of non-differentiation is crucial; we are given this ongoing stream of advertisements, sights, sounds, speech, interior monologue and memory unfiltered so that we can witness the characters filtering; we get to know them by watching how they make the objective subjective; what they focus on, what they prioritize and what they ignore.

This is a book that begs to be re-read. You find yourself reading, looking forward to re-reading. On the first go, you don’t have time to suck out the meaning that is packed into every offhand observation because you want to find out what’s going to happen next. And what’s-going-to-happen-next doesn’t mean action or plot: In the hands of an author with this much fierce insight, a character simply walking down the street, thinking, is an epic battlefield.

The middle section follows Felix, and allows Smith to display her talent for dialogue. She can have a man breathing in front of you with one line and have you caring about what happens to him in two. Smith’s people do not speak to illuminate their character, describe their predicament or voice their authors opinions. They speak because it is what people do. They speak because they are trying to live their lives.

The final section is almost an essay. Like her non-fiction (Changing my mind: Occasional essays (2009)) it takes on complex issues with wit and fights hard to address them with the rigour they deserve.  It is in this section where Smith drops any of the ‘rules’ and goes into freeform; her voice mingles with Natalie’s and the concept of character itself becomes an idea to be interrogated. Numbered paragraphs lay out random episodes in Natalie’s life like riddles and the reader must do what they will with them. Critics have found this section cold or unnecessarily stylized, but surely this is a more realistic shape for  back-story than a  string of cause and effect? This said, the section has its flaws: ‘The listings’ Natalie keeps checking are left unexplained for too long- it is one of the few visible plot devices in a book reassuringly free of such annoyances- and her related actions also seem slightly forced.

We live in a society built entirely on contradictions and it is this very real reality that Smith is pinning to the page. This tension is coiled into every half lie, every laugh at an unfunny joke, every alteration in an anecdote that used to contain meaning. As we read, we wait for something, anything, to dramatise it away, but we are given nothing to release the pressure. It continues, exhaustingly real; people burst out with truths, they say exactly what they are thinking- but it makes no difference. Moments are forced to carry unbearable weight and then two pages later dismissed as completely substanceless. It turns out that this dramatic event we await, is also what the characters are waiting for; they too are searching for something to give the relief of a conclusion.

Like pate on toast, NW is a spread of digested, distilled, regurgitated insides. You are what you eat and the liver cannot lie. What is happening is clear for the reader to see from page one; this story is about whether the characters can admit it to themselves or each other. The tragic denouement happens on the final page. Dry as bone, it offers not release, but the evaporation of everything that preceded it. The cost of being able to see, and of being able to admit you are able to see, is suddenly far too high and can simply no longer be afforded. Self -preservation arrives like the reaper, swinging his scythe at the level of thought. Being alive will kill you; then you will have to live on.

 

Ross Sutherland: Emergency Window

Posted: September 2, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: books | Leave a comment »

Written for Exeunt

We feel safe enough, to begin with, as we read Sutherland’s new book of poems. A stalling relationship is explained with “Shrek watches from the electrical shop across the street/ seven Shreks running in parallel across a burning rope bridge/ It’s impossible to root for any of them.” Last summers London riots quietly evoked by “Birds above a fancy dress shop on fire/ aspire to an earlier historical period.”

The images cohere and expand, making gloriously relevant new ones; the crows rising up in omen as ornate costumes burn is undercut by the pile of singed polyester flares and pink Mia Wallace wigs. Neither image can flatten the other, both floundering in the disconnect between feeling and circumstance.

Sutherland’s work is built not from the things he says, but from the ones he arranges to appear in response. There is sometimes a glibness to his lines- “the sunrise always looks worse than it is”- but this only lowers our guard; the wit elicits a nod, then you are floored by the weight: what has happened here for such reassurance to be needed, for dawn to have become something requiring stoic mitigation?

The texture of the poetry is life-like; from blurs of unrelated, half formed shapes emerge moments of perfect clarity – yet they cannot quite be decoded. They cannot be translated into anything other than exactly what they are: “Like a dick  drawn on his cheek in his sleep.” Imperceptibly, as we move through this slim volume, the references grow more obscure; the words and corresponding images don’t quite make sense. Descriptions are reminiscent of the almost figurative marks in an abstract painting; pulling you in only to leave you re-stranded among the brush strokes. “The sky turned the colour of a dead man’s helmet.” An image forms and then dissolves: What possible colour is a dead man’s helmet? In this deliberate ambiguity, Sutherland is making the reader supply their own imagery (A biker’s? A soldier’s?). He is insisting on our collusion.

We read on and meaning slips further. We are now in the realm of poetry about poetry. In X– “Word came that someone had sold the TV rights to our fear of wasps” – other people’s words are “descending like Tetris onto our beds, finishing our sentences.” The Prison Librariantries to regain some solid ground: “Regardless of poetry/ it remains a definitive interpretation of a prison” yet this too seems to dissolve “Like an asprin, for example. Or like a prison.” In OX, a poem about “a bastard barn-door of a boy,” Sutherland takes on certainty itself; “You need a thug in your opening line up… like a lightening rod.” He reversing the co-ordinates of our consoling comparisons and leaves us lost.

His references are more often than not those of suburban childhood and early adolescence. Trips to Dixons in the back seat of the car, afternoons of Nintendo and Easter eggs. Computer games are his developmental fairy tales; the building blocks of his psyche. Poems on Street Fighter characters have the horror and honor of Greek myth- heroism, gravitas and gore; war poetry from a non existent war. As we move from computer games to Google Earth, in A poem looked up on Google street view, there are scenes but no characters or emotion; every inch of earth is here, yet no meaning can be wrung from it. Metaphor is losing any thing to compare itself with. There is no blood, only “the colour of a grateful dead album/ the colour of the inside of a lawyers suit jacket.”

In Poet in Residence at a Toy Shop at Midnight, he takes us behind the scenes and into the basement, where we are surrounded by over-turned bins of reject toys and “racks and racks of leprechauns.” Pulsating between the lines is the realisation of the terrifying force of will children must have to make this junk come alive.

The final section - The National Language - is a formally and conceptually brilliant punchline. A set of famous poems (Plath, Pound, T. S. Eliot) have been passed back and forth through online translation programmes, the output re-ordered, edited and published. There is, due to this process, nothing you could call intention behind these poems – yet,  you can feel your mind creating it. You can feel your own brain seek out and find what you know isn’t there.

Through this arrangement of form, content and context, the lie of language itself is laid bare; the whispers in the darkened toy shop made proof: Our words are spells that make meaning out of nothing. This is poet as betrayer; we trusted him and now he is plunging us, viscerally, into the void.

Like the dutiful wife of Darwin you read on to the end, then try very hard to forget what you’ve learned.

For more information on Ross Sutherland’s work go to Penned in the Margins or visit hiswebsite.

London Literature Festival: Other People’s Stories

Posted: September 2, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: books, features, Festivals | Leave a comment »
teacup2Written for Exeunt

Where the contemporary novelist can be crippled and silenced by the ethical dilemma of trying to ‘write the Other,’ many politicians have no such qualms. Deemed as chosen by the people and with a job description that entitles them to speak for us, lack of first hand experience rarely hinders. This telling of other peoples stories is the subject for two events at this yearsLondon Literature Festival-  London: One year on and Granta: Britain in the world .

On the Anniversary of last summer’s London riots, Gillian Slovo- writer of The Tricycle’s verbatim tribunal-play The Riots- and Harriet Sergeant, author of Among the Hoods: My years with a teenage gang, were joined by Tottenham MP David Larry and writer/ campaigner Melissa Benn. At Granta Magazine’s discussion a few days later, eschewing the maxim ‘write what you know,’ contributors to the latest anthology- Ross Raisin, Rachel Seiffert and Andrea Stuart- delved bravely into worlds completely alien to them. Raisin’s looked at the closed world of football clubs and their supporters, Seiffert transported us into the world of protestant Orangemen in Northern Ireland and Scotland and Stuart investigated seventeenth century sugar plantations and slavery.

One of the rules of verbatim theatre is that that only the actual words of those interviewed can be used, but as Slovo admits, this doesn’t necessary mean the whole story gets told. When researching her play in the aftermath of the riots, it was very difficult to speak to people actually involved in the rioting- most were in prison or in hiding. Also turning 55 hours of tape into 2 hours of performance requires editing and the inevitable loss and bias that accompanies this. Sergeant’s My years with a teenage gang could have been a memoir of a gang member- if it wasn’t for the fact that the majority of boys featured and interviewed within the book are almost illiterate. Using verbatim techniques and interviews Sergeant charts the time she spent with the group of South London boys, but it is only when framed and interpreted by an outsider- a middle class, Daily Mail columnist- that their story can be told.

In telling these stories the writers and commentators are representing groups and people who have little visibility and voice. Seiffert is aware of this and insists that using an outsiders viewpoint to allow the rituals and customs of a group to be explained is “taking an easy way out”. Getting inside another person is hard, but for her “writing from the inside out” is what a novelist does. Ross, similarly writes to understand; he wants to know what it is like to grow up somewhere where things condemned by the rest of society make up the unquestionable category of ‘all you know.’

This idea of trying to represent and understand a society within society- a group perceived to have different values and rules- takes us back to the riots. What is clear is that the kind of research these novelists do in order to feel  able to voice their characters with any authenticity- delving deep into the psychological motivations and varied influences- has in no way been attempted in the response to last summers unrest. Perhaps a reason for this is what all fourOne Year On panellists refer to as a homogenisation of political voices; the convergence of the right and left has left us in a situation where the only voice heard in parliament is that of the privately educated, Oxford PPE alumni. A lack of representation from the less privileged areas of British life that means, as David Larry puts “there are no journalists or policy makers who grew up on a council estates. None of them have any understanding of that.”

While we do not hear the voices of the rioters themselves, at the Royal Festival Hall where the festival takes place, the audience is full of teachers and community workers who work with young people in deprived areas. They describe cramped housing, hopeless boredom and the effect of a violent, rampantly consumerist culture in places where there is neither the time nor resources to provide an antidote. In the passionate and informed Q and A, what is striking is that the issues raised and the voices that raise them are so rarely heard in our political discussions or media.

Also, it is telling that these important stories and questions are being aired not in parliament but at a literary festival. Many present said that Slovo’s play (shown at Bernie Grants Arts Centre in Tottenham as well as in Kilburn) gave them more insight into the riots that the official reports. Yet, while the sustained and deep research undertaken in creative work is clearly very important, the opportunity to undertake such projects also re-emphasises unequal divisions of time and education.

“A woven finger cannot undo its thread.” Seiffert quotes a Louis MacNeice poem that encapsulates the issue at the heart of her book. The line began as a statement, but as she redrafted and researched, it turned into a question. These ideas of whether a self is chosen or imposed, decided upon or inherited are crucial in her writing and are, of course, political as well as narrative. If it is now left to our storytellers to broach such issues, we must find a way to ensure that British literature becomes more than a series of well-intentioned acts of ventriloquism.

Occupying Images

Posted: March 28, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: books, exhibitions, features | Leave a comment »

To coincide with Dissonance and Disturbance, a retrospective of Lis Rhodes’ films, the ICA held a short talk entitled The Trouble With Image Politics. Speakers were Iain Boal, a social historian of what he refers to as ‘The Technics and the Commons’ and Astra Taylor, co-editor of an anthology about the Occupy Movement- Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America- and director of the films Zizek! And Examined Life.

Lis Rhodes, Light Reading 20 min. black & white 16mm film, 1978

The talk opens with a quote from Jorge Borges: ‘Control over the image is now the key to social power’ and social historian Iain Boal, speaks of the changing status of truth in a world saturated with visual and information data. He claims we can no longer believe in the ‘old enlightenment idea’ that the ‘unmasking of power’ is all that is needed to bring about change. He asks us to consider whether building slaughter houses with glass walls would still be enough to make vegetarians of us all today or whether the image has lost the power it may once have had to reveal truths and alter behavior.

This is part of the dilemma facing Astra Taylor and the other documenters in the Occupy! anthology and a problematic issue for the Occuy movement itself. The book is in part a collection of writing from the OWS gazette and the diary style of many entries both questions and assumes that truth can be found in personal, subjective accounts. Occupy is a theatrical movement: it is a dramatisation that makes a narrative by putting private lives in a public space. At its General Assemblies it makes participants thoughts audible through the A Capella of the Human Mic- comments, questions and ideas are repeated by a chorus and performed for an audience. Costumes – the zombie, Guy Fawkes via Alan Moore, or the evil banker being the most common- feature heavily. It is also a televised movement; Zuccotti Park in New York had a constant You Tube live-stream for 24 hours a day.

Like Borges’ story of the cartographers who “struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it” – does this 24 hour real-time image stream also create a distorting 1:1 to cover and replace the uncapturable real of unfolding events?

Guy Debord claimed that any radical action must create what he called a ‘disruption of the realm of images…a break in the seamless fabric of spectacle.’ But does this footage, documenting the attempt to disrupt the capitalist spectacle, disrupt the spectacle- or become a spectacle in itself?

Taylor speaks of what it might be to create an Ethical Spectacle:  in her documentary about the philosopher Slavoj Zizek, she says she felt the truth of the man would not be found in following his every move so that an off-guard – and so possibly more authentic – moment might be caught, but in creating an encounter where a ‘privileged moment’ could be glimpsed. A ‘privileged moment’ is what Proust was describing when the eating of a particular cake invoked an ‘involuntary memory,’ creating an intense feeling in the present that belonged to his past. It has also been described as a ‘moment of enigmatic ecstasy resulting from direct contact by means of one or more of the senses’ or ‘felt knowledge’. Is it possible for such a moment be captured or documented in any faithful way?

Earlier this month at LSE’s annual literary festival Dr Alex Gillespie spoke on Traveling the known and unknown: How literature and photography change the world we see.Part of his research involved questioning tourists traveling in India and asking them how they chose where they wanted to go and how they felt when they got there. Many spoke of the pictures they had seen in guide books or National Geographic and Gillespie suggests that a big part of going to these unknown places was to find this image. On encountering, say, the Taj Mahal, they were prone to gasp and exclaim- “it’s just like in the National Geographic.” It was at this moment, standing in front of the image’s reality, that they felt they had arrived. As Gillespie puts it ‘They see the fiction and feel it as the truth.”

This idea that entering an image of a place or a way of life can be the key to feeling something is real or meaningful is interesting when thinking about Occupy. The history of protest is a nostalgic and romanticized one; in ideas of what authentic and meaningful, the fictions of the sixties lie heavily. Is the invigorating feeling of being part of something ‘real’ and ‘actually happening,’ described by almost all the writers inScenes from…. in part also a recognising of a story or image from the past and feeling this recognition as a sign of truth? Has a ‘privileged moment’ now become a bit like that feeling that feels somehow more authentic when you recognise it as something you’ve seen people experience in a film?

Rhodes’ later montages are filmed and projected on DV, yet their colouring is reminiscent of Super 8 film and they look like the mixing monitor of an old analogue editing suite. This grading creates a nostalgic mood despite the contemporary content and the old-style double exposures lend it the weight and drama of the historical. A Cold Draft (1988) is looped on one screen while In the Kettle (2010) followed by Whitehall(2012) loop on a screen beside, showing footage of protesters, police brutality and kettling at recent London protests and in Gaza. All three films share the same soundtrack of Rhodes’ reading her tangential and poetic essay- “Fragments of eye sight bought and sold… can warning warn when there is no place to go…”

The whirring of the projector in use for the eighties film adds to the uncertainty of what we are watching and how it was created, as does the digital re-creation of an end-of-reel spin and of the bulbs piercing light just before the film strip bursts into flame. The tools effect the meaning; the medium has become part of the message.

This constant questioning of how meaning is formed and the idea of the process being part of the message is of enormous concern to the Occupy movement. In its every interaction, it is attempting to express its bigger intentions and live out what it wants to see and be. It is in no way always successful but, like Rhodes’ work, it is through this reflexivity- the continual awareness of how and the desire to make it transparent- that it finds its power.

The choice of which tools to use at Occupy’s nightly General Assembly was a very important one. Because of their adoption of consensus, democracy as their decision making process- a slow and complicated process that allows an active rejection of hierarchical power- the meetings often became more about working through this methodology than anything else. A major issue with the movement, as highlighted by various Scenes from… writers, was that it found itself focusing more on how to be, rather than what to do; the process was becoming the purpose.

Rhodes calls her films ‘The geography of disturbance’ but her map, far from becoming a hyperreal spectacle, draws attention to how this kind of reductive mapping occurs. Her images are not attempts to represent or explain, but layers of movement and repetition- the moment fragments begin to coalesce into an understandable picture (a protesters head on the concrete beside a policeman’s boot) they blur and re-frame. She re-creates the flaws that were visible in older media- the traces left by replication, manipulation and time- and shows their Chinese whisper-like distorting effect. In clearly displaying the potential for manipulation in both the poetic and observed attempts at documentation or representation she dispels a spell at the same time as creating one. Is it in this constant return to and awareness of form and method that both the Occupy-er’s and Rhodes can avoid becoming just another reel of the spectacle?

In the introduction to a new addition of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle- re- published in response to 2008 economic crisis- Mark Jenkins writes that “contesting the Spectacular society in quotidian matters is essential in fighting the false separation of society into what is properly ‘political’ and what is not.”

Debord’s spectacle is created and enforced by removing ‘the reality of (class) struggle in the arena of everyday life,’ but perhaps by being so resolutely involved in the everyday- in issues of sanitation, eating and sleeping; of who gets to speak first and for how long- the protesters are finding a way of resisting it.

Rhodes cuts her footage into parts to reveal how they form the whole and Occupy’s breaks its political action down into step by step moments of process and participation. In doing this, something is held still or disturbed for long enough for a kind of meaning to begin to grow. In its repetitive and constant oscillation, it’s re-framing and re-describing, Occupy is finding a way to put Rhodes’ aesthetic into action.

Penned in the margins: Austerities

Posted: February 27, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: books, performance | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

POETRY AT ARTSADMIN

Sam Riviere: Austerities.

Poetry, is often seen as an art form set apart, protected from the cruder world of advertising and self promotion. Publishing on his blog austerities.tumblr.com, incorporating viewer stats into his stanza’s and posting re-tweets as poetry, Sam Riviere is trying to find a way of being authentic about this inauthenticity.

Performing at Toynebee Studios, he recites a poem that reads like a shipping forecast of literary criticism. Comprised of a tutor’s one line comment on each poem- good, okay, we’ve heard this idea before, nice rhythm- it reveals the work lurking behind the myth of inspiration. Poetry is shown as calculated word-smithery; like everything else, poems are made because they want a certain response from us.

Austerities 81 refers to the eighty-one daily poems Riviere posted on his blog, looking at the politics and aesthetics of selection, communication and paring down. In keeping his work short and digestible for the screen, he applies notions of austerity directly to language. Throughout his work and its presentation, there is a theoretically rigorous play between form, method, content and delivery. He insists that the confessional nature of poetry, perhaps like social media itself, comes not from the content but from the very act of noticing, recording and sharing. It is a confessional form irrespective of content; what you see and don’t see, what you see as important enough to comment on is inherently revealing. Echoing the information overload of the web, decisions about what to cut and which words will achieve which effect are often discussed as a stream of consciousness within the poems. Yet these notions of value and visibility are not only revealing, they are political and by disclosing his methodology, Riviere alerts us to the absence of any such transparency within policy making.

Despite the political engagement, his subjects are deeply personal; microscopic, observational and neurotic, we have his musings on pornography- all day I have been watching women/ crush ripe tomatoes on their cleavage- past girlfriends- we will appear at the wedding/ of people we don’t care about/ our faces radiant from fucking-and funding opportunities- in three years I have been awarded/ £48,000 by various funding bodies. As he samples, borrows and nods to the world his poetry inhabits, new references take the place of familiar allusions to myth and the classics. Self referential and knowing, these poems operate in a niche, building a new language of exclusion; forget your knowledge of the Greeks, if you haven’t been watching the right crap TV or surfing the right pornography you’re not going to get this.

Joined by Steve Fowler from 3am magazine- slogan: whatever it is, we’re against it- they speak about the necessity for friction. Now on a funded PHD at East Anglia, Riviere can no longer see himself as a struggling poet, writing against the odds. He speaks of the paralysis this has caused and how the daily blogging of poems about this very problem was how the project began. He used this contradiction and the backlash of guilt caused by his collusion with the establishment, to generate more writing. All is sucked back in, re-described and re-incorporated. Like the internet or capitalism itself, everything becomes grist for the mill of his poetry.

Very aware of his cult appeal, he has created video adverts for himself on You Tube, asking what is satire worth now if it can also function as a successful marketing tool? The more derisive his poems are about publishing, the media or poetry itself, the more successful they seem to be. His poems about poems appear in papers, ‘gated off’ in their boxes, the newspaper and the poem both equally uncomfortable by the coupling.

Poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes that “doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism… attentive and persistent…it will become one of your best workers.” and Riviere’s piercing and fierce desire for honesty is like a re-working of this idea for the internet age; in searching out the contradictions and deceptions of his medium, form and feelings his poems attempt to distill the noise and clamor of social media into something more reflective. Each line is interrogated by the next until there is a moment of something like peace. In a testament to his talent for rhythm and structure, each poem feels resolved, even when its subject is the impossibility of resolution. After showing us the lie held in sentiment; how it can convince us and how it can trick us, he then returns to his starkly observed specifics, tearing each thought into beautiful html shreds.

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