Have been reading a lot recently, notably best selling 'award-winning' books alongside more obscure and gritty things. Really liked Andrew Miller's Pure (more of which later some time) and Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles which was a highly readable guilty pleasure, plain and simple.
Am very much addicted to Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy, great for an ex-Renaissance student and general history fanatic. I really like Mantel's quote that Cromwell... 'is a modern man, he was a great reformer, he was a revolutionary who had no recourse to a corpus of revolutionary doctrine, which is what makes him so extraordinary'... her point seems to imply that Thomas Cromwell's general adherance to the standards of the time is pertinent too, presenting an interesting and essentially humanised way of looking at an iconic historical figure.
Maybe I'm reading between the lines, but she seems to imply that these people do not set out to change the world, it's not an overblown Hollywood-style blast of ideology that does it, but rather a slow burning, self-motivated, self-interested, adaptability to the world, survival of the fittest kind of attitude. This is very interesting, and something I aim to convey in my own work, which like Mantel's, is pretty obsessed with exploring the humanised, personal stories of historical figures. Hopefully one day, I will like Mantel, be able to take sources contemporary to the time, write with a rigourous and absolute historical accuracy, yet also be able to creatively investigate the stories behind them.
Although for those who like to read too much into these things, it must be noted that Mantel likes to 'insist that the past be valued for its own, not as a rehearsal for the present. So when I'm writing about the economics of the 1530s and the glint in Cromwell's eye that is a welfare state, I am actually writing about the 1530s, I'm not just making a giant parable about events today. I think you see, that we have to honour and respect those people, they walked and talked just as we did. They're no less people because they happen to be dead. They were not a rehearsal for us, so we have to respect their stories in their own right.'
This is fascinating, and really relates to the discussions about historical interpretation, the reinterpretation of the past and its people, in Hollinghurt's The Strangers Child. I really hope that when I write about historical subjects, whether it might be Elizabeth Simcoe or the Glasgow Mill workers, I can like Mantel, avoid Brechtian placards saying what will happen next, and rather use the 'classic novelist's technique' and 'really go inside the consciousness of one person, seeing the world through one person's eyes'.
To put it simply, writing about history is to move past the knowledge that ultimately, the truth of the matter will never really be available to us. It is, as Mantel says, above all to be 'content with making a story that will stick...with putting pictures in your head, which cannot easily be got out again'. What a great thing to aim for.
Friday 6 July 2012
Saturday 24 March 2012
To see a world in a grain of sand
Bright Star was on TV tonight, a beautiful Jane Campion film about John Keats and Fanny Brawne. It makes you swoon at the tortuous romance of it all, the beautiful poems and odes their love gave rise to. One of the loveliest examples is Last Sonnet...
Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.
But actually, what I love more about Keats than the romance and torture of his love poetry, is observational work, in which inspiration is taken from little objects and innocuous trinkets. Poems such as On Receiving A Laurel Crown From Leigh Hunt or On Receiving A Curious Shell, which use observation and daily activity to explore their themes. They find stupendous magic and elaborate tales in the everyday.
That is far more inspiring; the ability to articulate and explore huge themes such as life and death in an immediate way, just from your experience of the things around you. Poems such as On Seeing the Elgin Marbles for the First Time:
My spirit is too weak; mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep,
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep
Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an indescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old Time -with a billowy main,
A sun, a shadow of a magnitude.
Good old Keats. Sentimental maybe. Important definitely.
Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.
But actually, what I love more about Keats than the romance and torture of his love poetry, is observational work, in which inspiration is taken from little objects and innocuous trinkets. Poems such as On Receiving A Laurel Crown From Leigh Hunt or On Receiving A Curious Shell, which use observation and daily activity to explore their themes. They find stupendous magic and elaborate tales in the everyday.
That is far more inspiring; the ability to articulate and explore huge themes such as life and death in an immediate way, just from your experience of the things around you. Poems such as On Seeing the Elgin Marbles for the First Time:
My spirit is too weak; mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep,
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep
Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an indescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old Time -with a billowy main,
A sun, a shadow of a magnitude.
Good old Keats. Sentimental maybe. Important definitely.
Wednesday 21 March 2012
The Stranger's Child
Plenty more course-related reading and writing awaits. But for now, the most recent book that has inspired the way I think about writing and literature is Alan Hollinghurst's 'The Stranger's Child'...
I'm not sure I agree with The Guardian's view that Hollinghurst has a 'strong, perhaps unassailable claim to be the best English novelist working today'. For me, that title is usually accompanied by a tingle of excitement, a gasp of delicious enjoyment at a phrase or sentence when reading. Hollinghurst certainly has some nice turns of phrases and poignant truths inherent in his words, but does not make me gasp with delight.
However what the novel does provide, is a fascinating ponderance on how literature reflects the society we live in, on how far we can ever trust narrators or narratives, on the ways in which the written word can become twisted and reinterpreted according to the age it lives in.
For me, art is escapism, fantasy. Gritty social realism was never my forte. But Hollinghurst has produced a book that manages to be fantastical, romantic and historical, yet reinforces the fact that there are necessary social projections inherent within all artistic works. Very clever.
Art is not to be trusted, Hollinghurst says. Yet art somehow, like 'The Stranger's Child' itself, still manages to tell us something truthful about the world we live in.
This is ultimately what, even in my most sentimental, fantasist and escapist work, I shall aim to achieve.
I'm not sure I agree with The Guardian's view that Hollinghurst has a 'strong, perhaps unassailable claim to be the best English novelist working today'. For me, that title is usually accompanied by a tingle of excitement, a gasp of delicious enjoyment at a phrase or sentence when reading. Hollinghurst certainly has some nice turns of phrases and poignant truths inherent in his words, but does not make me gasp with delight.
However what the novel does provide, is a fascinating ponderance on how literature reflects the society we live in, on how far we can ever trust narrators or narratives, on the ways in which the written word can become twisted and reinterpreted according to the age it lives in.
For me, art is escapism, fantasy. Gritty social realism was never my forte. But Hollinghurst has produced a book that manages to be fantastical, romantic and historical, yet reinforces the fact that there are necessary social projections inherent within all artistic works. Very clever.
Art is not to be trusted, Hollinghurst says. Yet art somehow, like 'The Stranger's Child' itself, still manages to tell us something truthful about the world we live in.
This is ultimately what, even in my most sentimental, fantasist and escapist work, I shall aim to achieve.
To begin...
I've wanted to start a blog for a long time.. it seems to be a good way of collecting together the thoughts, sources and ramblings associated with my passion for art, history and literature.
Starting a creative writing course at the Open College of the Arts has finally put words into action, and already I'm finding myself inspired by taking part in practical creative work.
Art can seem all too often like an epic and mystical undertaking, whether it be painting or writing poetry. The OCA course has already helped me view artistic endeavour as more of.. a craft.. a vocation.. in which a vast toolbox of tricks and lessons can be utilised. It is certainly an easier way to break down and approach the creative process, rather than sitting around waiting for bolts of stupendous inspiration. AHA! Art is a skill, a job, not a mystical calling!
The great Werner Herzog has articulated this better than me... here he is, speaking during the making of Fitzcarraldo, in the documentary film Burden of Dreams (1982)...
It is not only MY dreams, my belief is that all these dreams are yours as well and the only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them.
And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about. It’s as simple as that.
I make films because I have not learnt anything else, and I know I can do it to a certain degree. And it is my duty, because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.
- Werner Herzog, 'Burden of Dreams', 1982
Starting a creative writing course at the Open College of the Arts has finally put words into action, and already I'm finding myself inspired by taking part in practical creative work.
Art can seem all too often like an epic and mystical undertaking, whether it be painting or writing poetry. The OCA course has already helped me view artistic endeavour as more of.. a craft.. a vocation.. in which a vast toolbox of tricks and lessons can be utilised. It is certainly an easier way to break down and approach the creative process, rather than sitting around waiting for bolts of stupendous inspiration. AHA! Art is a skill, a job, not a mystical calling!
The great Werner Herzog has articulated this better than me... here he is, speaking during the making of Fitzcarraldo, in the documentary film Burden of Dreams (1982)...
It is not only MY dreams, my belief is that all these dreams are yours as well and the only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them.
And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about. It’s as simple as that.
I make films because I have not learnt anything else, and I know I can do it to a certain degree. And it is my duty, because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.
- Werner Herzog, 'Burden of Dreams', 1982
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