Friday, 16 December, 2011
[Christopher Hitchens] became a staff writer and editor for The New Statesman in the late 1970s and fell in with a literary clique that included Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, James Fenton, Clive James and Ian McEwan. The group liked to play a game in which members came up with the sentence least likely to be uttered by one of their number. Mr. Hitchens’s was “I don’t care how rich you are, I’m not coming to your party.
— From the New York Times obituary for writer Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011).
Wednesday, 26 October, 2011
There was an exact moment when I decided to quit. I was sitting on a man’s lap and we had just determined that I was “his girl.” As we kissed, I thought, Well, I guess I have to stop stealing now. As if the idea of having a boyfriend, of being straight, required straightening out in other ways. I may have been looking for an excuse; I may have realized that I didn’t need to be a criminal to be an artist. Art itself could be the crime—could be scary and dangerous enough to shoulder my rebellion. After a while, I also stopped getting into physical fights, working in peepshows, bleaching my hair white, and wearing my tights over my shoes. Still, for a long time I thought my biggest heist was fooling everyone into believing that I was an upstanding citizen, a sweet girl. Then, just a few years ago, I realized that everyone feels secretly fraudulent. It’s the feeling of being an adult.
— Miranda July, on shoplifting, in the New Yorker.
Friday, 1 October, 2010
Love, Lust and Lies (2009) is the fifth (and last) installment of Gillian Armstrong’s 7-Up style longitudinal documentary series following the lives of three Adelaide women. Armstrong was commissioned to make the first film in 1976, when she herself was only 26, eventually selecting her three teenage subjects at a South Australian youth group.
(Australians can watch the documentary for free on iView for the next twelve days…)
Thursday, 29 July, 2010
Family history is one of those things you should never inflict upon people you like or respect, but this little story I learned last week is too good to let pass. It concerns my Great-Grandmother, Adelaide Bradley, who was run over by a tram on Jetty Road in Glenelg in 1942. Sad, obviously, but it’s difficult not to wonder what the family (who were Church of Christ in those days) were thinking when they drafted her death notice, which read, in one of those delightful collisions of religion and modernity, that she’d “been called to glory after contact with a moving vehicle.
— Writer James Bradley, from his blog, city of tongues.
Friday, 25 June, 2010
To think through the intensity of memory-work in the contemporary moment, it is important to see it as inextricably intertwined with an anxiety concerning systems that induce structural forgetting. But memory and forgetting are not opposing things; rather, they are an interplay of the same process. It was the peculiarities of what an individual forgets and the invention of a new pathology of amnesia, after all, that led Victorian psychologists to privilege memory as the locus of identity. Then again, for memory to work at all, forgetting is intrinsic to its function, for to remember everything would be to overwhelm the present with the past. Perhaps most importantly, though, for contemporary criticism that sees technology as accelerating forgetfulness, it must not be assumed that memory is automatically redemptive and forgetting a terror to be warded off. Memory can tyrannically bind you and impose a determining identity you might wish to resist; active forgetting can be a liberation from the dead weight of memorial history. Equally, memory can be incited, a compulsory injunction given to remember, and this is what Pierre Nora has in mind when he suggests we are being constructed as ‘memory-individuals’ in the service of memorial narratives we do not always control. To recover memory, then, is not always an act of resistance against a culture of forgetting. To track the vicissitudes of contemporary memory it is vital to sustain the ambivalence of working between hypermnesia (too much memory) and amnesia (too little).
— Roger Luckhurst, “Memory Recovered/Recovered Memory,” in Literature and the Contemporary
Wednesday, 2 June, 2010
Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world. The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house … and triumphantly bearing his loot away. The voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity. The biographer is portrayed almost as a kind of benefactor.
[…] The reader’s amazing tolerance (which he would extend to no novel written half as badly as most biographies) makes sense only when seen as a kind of collusion between him and the biographer in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole.
— Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
Wednesday, 20 January, 2010
Unseemly self-exposures, unpalatable betrayals, unavoidable mendacity, a soupçon of meretriciousness: memoir, for much of its modern history, has been the black sheep of the literary family. Like a drunken guest at a wedding, it is constantly mortifying its soberer relatives (philosophy, history, literary fiction)—spilling family secrets, embarrassing old friends—motivated, it would seem, by an overpowering need to be the center of attention.
— The New Yorker’s Daniel Mendelsohn on the memoir genre.
He continues: “Even when the most distinguished writers and thinkers have turned to autobiography, they have found themselves accused of literary exhibitionism—when they can bring themselves to put on a show at all. When Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Confessions” appeared, shocking the salons of eighteenth-century Paris with matter-of-fact descriptions of the author’s masturbation and masochism, Edmund Burke lamented the “new sort of glory” the eminent philosophe was getting “from bringing hardily to light the obscure and vulgar vices, which we know may sometimes be blended with eminent talents.” (The complaint sounds eerily familiar today.) When, at the suggestion of her sister, Virginia Woolf started, somewhat reluctantly, to compose an autobiographical “sketch,” she found herself, inexplicably at first, thinking of a certain hallway mirror—the scene, as further probing of her memory revealed, of an incestuous assault by her half-brother Gerald, an event that her memory had repressed, and about which, in the end, she was unable to write for publication.”
And later:
“Once the memoir stopped being about God and started being about Man, once “confession” came to mean nothing more than getting a shameful secret off your chest—and, maybe worse, once “redemption” came to mean nothing more than the cozy acceptance offered by other people, many of whom might well share the same secret—it was but a short step to what the Times book critic Michiko Kakutani recently characterized as the motivating force behind certain other products of the recent “memoir craze”: “the belief that confession is therapeutic and therapy is redemptive and redemption somehow equals art.””
Monday, 7 September, 2009
Without betrayal, memoirs would not exist.
— Nancy K. Miller, Bequest & Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s Death.
