"An extension of my work as a novelist" (Paul Auster)

This is an excerpt from a 2006 interview, re. Auster's new film The Inner Life of Martin Frost:

Céline Curiol: You wore two hats on this movie: writer and director. What are the advantages of doing both? What are the disadvantages?

Paul Auster: To tell the truth, I can't think of a single disadvantage. I'm not a full-time filmmaker, after all, and I tend to to think of my occasional forays into the world of movies as an extension of my work as a novelist, as a storyteller. Not all stories should be novels. Some should be plays. Some should be films. Some should be narrative poems. In the case of Martin Frost, it was conceived as a film from the start – just as Smoke and Lulu on the Bridge were. By directing my own screenplay, I profit from the fact that I know the text better than anyone else. I know the rhythm of the words, the rhythm of the images, and I can communicate these things directly to the actors and the crew.

– Taken from The Inner Life of Martin Frost by Paul Auster, published by Picador/Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2007, page 10. The excerpt is from an interview conducted on August 22, 2006, which precedes the screenplay in this edition.

LINK
Paul Auster Bio & Bibliography - Wikipedia

The oscillation between humour and drama (Paul Auster)

"Life is both tragic and funny, both absurd and profoundly meaningful. More or less unconsciously, I've tried to embrace this double aspect of experience in the stories I've written – both novels and screenplays. I feel it's the most honest, most truthful way of looking at the world, and when I think of some of the writers I like best – Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dickens, Kafka, Beckett – they all turn out to be masters of combining the light with the dark, the strange with the familiar. The Inner Life of Martin Frost is a very curious story. A story about a man who writes a story about a man who writes a story – and the story inside the story, the film we watch from the moment Martin wakes up to find Claire sleeping beside him to the moment Martin stops typing and looks out the window, is so wild and implausible, so crazy and unpredictable, that without some doses of humour, it would have been unbearably heavy. At the same time, I think the funny bits underscore the pathos of Martin's situation. The tire scene, for example. The viewer knows that Claire has just left the car and run off into the woods, and here comes Martin pushing a tire down the road, unaware that the woman he loves has just disappeared – and suddenly the tire gets away from him. It's classic silent comedy: man versus object. He runs after the tire – only to have it bounce off a stone and knock him to the ground. Funny, but also pathetic. The same goes for Fortunato, with all his weird comments, bad jokes, and ridiculous short stories. He shows up when Martin is at his most abject, suffering over the loss of Claire, and amusing as I find this character to be, his presence underscores the powerful loneliness that has enveloped Martin."

– Paul Auster, in an interview which Céline Curiol conducted with him on August 22, 2006, to be found in The Inner Life of Martin Frost by Paul Auster (Picador/Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2007, page 16).

LINKS:
Paul Auster Bio & Bibliography - Wikipedia

Writing can certainly be dangerous (Paul Auster)

Céline Curiol: (...) Do you think writing is a dangerous weapon. Can it kill?

Paul Auster: Writing can certainly be dangerous. Dangerous for the reader – if something is powerful enough to change his view of the world – and dangerous for the writer. Think of how many writers were murdered by Stalin: Osip Mandelstam, Isac Babel, untold others. Think of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Think of all the imprisoned writers in the world today. But can writing kill? No, not literally. A book isn't a machine gun or an electric chair. And yet, strange things sometimes happen that make you stop and wonder. The case of the French writer Louis-René des Fôrets, for instance. I first heard about it when I was living in Paris in the early seventies, and it haunted me so much that I wound up incorporating it into one of my novels years later, Oracle Night. Des Fôrets was a promising young writer in the fifties who had published one novel and one collection of stories. Then he wrote a narrative poem in which a child drowns in the sea. Not long after the book was published, his own child drowned. There might not have been any rational link between the imaginary death and the real death, but des Fôrets was so shattered by the experience that he stopped writing for decades. A terrible story. It's not hard to understand how he felt.

– Paul Auster, interviewed by Céline Curiol in 2006, excerpt taken from the interview that precedes the screenplay in The Inner Life of Martin Frost by Paul Auster (Picador/Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2007, page 18).

LINKS:
Paul Auster Bio & Bibliography - Wikipedia

Solitude (Bukowski)

"I was a man who thrived on solitude: Without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude: but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me."

- Charles Bukowski (Factotum, 1975)

I write poetry, because... (Allen Ginsberg)

Well, the following really puts it into a nutshell.
I guess I can underwrite this:

"I write poetry because I want to be alone and want to talk to people."
- Allen Ginsberg (from "Improvisation in Beijing", the preface to Cosmopolitan Greetings. Poems 1986-1992, Penguin, 1994, page xiv)

On Writing (Kerouac)

"Always considered writing my duty on earth."
- Jack Kerouac (1922 - 1969)

(from: Atop an Underwood. Early Stories and Other Writings (1936-1943), page vii, Viking, 1999, edited by Paul Marion)


"You, man must write exactly as everything rushes into your head and AT ONCE. The pain of writing is just that..."
- Jack Kerouac, letter to Neal Cassidy, 6 October, 1950

Quotationspage - Jack Kerouac

Der größte Feind der wahren Kunst (Grillparzer)

„Die sogenannte moralische Ansicht ist der größte Feind der wahren Kunst, da einer der Hauptvorzüge dieser letztern gerade darin besteht, daß man durch ihr Medium auch jene Seiten der menschlichen Natur genießen kann, welche das Moralgesetz mit Recht aus dem wirklichen Leben entfernt hält."
- Franz Seraphicus Grillparzer (1791-1872)

Link zur Auswahl seiner Texte: Gutenberg Archiv (Dt) - Franz Grillparzer

Some Ideas On How To Overcome Writer's Block

What do you do when you're stuck in a rut? Here's how some working writers responded upon being asked how they cope with writer's block. Their tips can be found in Terry Bisson's May 13th, 2008 article "Writer's Block Moves" under www.writersdigest.com, as well as a wealth of other information and recommendations.

Here's the link: Writers's Digest - Getting Past Writer's Block

Check it out!

Adorno re. Dictating as Provisional Step in the Writing Process, Termed "Sacrificial Lamb" ...

Aphorism No. 135 – Lämmergeier.
[Sacrificial lamb., bearded vulture 'Gypaetus barbatus']

Dictating is not merely more comfortable, and is not merely a spur to the concentration, but has in addition an objective advantage. Dictation makes it possible for the author to slide into the position of the critic during the earliest phases of the production process. What one puts down is non-binding, provisional, mere material for reworking; once transcribed, however, it appears as something alienated and to a certain extent objective. One need not fear establishing anything, which ought not to remain, for one does not have to write: one takes responsibility by playing a practical joke on responsibility. The risk of formulation takes the harmless initial form of effortlessly presented memos, then work on something which already exists, so that one can no longer even perceive one’s own temerity. In view of the difficulty, which has increased to desperate levels, of any theoretical expression, such tricks are a blessing. They are a technical means of assistance of dialectical procedure, which makes statements, in order to take them back and nevertheless hold them fast. Thanks however are due to those who take dictation, when they flush out the author at the right moment through contradiction, irony, nervousness, impatience and lack of respect. They draw rage to themselves. This rage is channeled from the storehouse of the bad conscience, with which authors otherwise mistrust their own texts and which the author would be that much more stubborn about leaving in the presumably holy text. The emotional affect, which ungratefully turns against the burdensome helper, benevolently purifies the relation to the matter [Sache]. — Theodor W. Adorno

(Aphorism No. 135, taken from: "Minima Moralia. Reflections on a Damaged Life", 1951 by Theodor W. Adorno. Translation by Dennis Redmond.)

Link to English translation: Adorno Achives - Minima Moralia (Engl)

Adorno über Diktieren als unverbindliche Vorstufe des Schreibens, genannt "Lämmergeiern" ...

Lämmergeiern [135]

"Zu diktieren ist nicht bloß bequemer, spornt nicht bloß zur Konzentration an, sondern hat überdies einen sachlichen Vorzug. Das Diktat ermöglicht es dem Schriftsteller, sich in den frühesten Phasen des Produktionsprozesses in die Position des Kritikers hineinzumanövrieren. Was er da hinstellt, ist unverbindlich, vorläufig, bloßer Stoff zur Bearbeitung, tritt ihm jedoch zugleich, einmal transkribiert, als Entfremdetes und in gewissem Maße Objektives gegenüber. Er braucht sich gar nicht erst zu fürchten etwas festzulegen, was doch nicht stehenbliebe, denn er muß es ja nicht schreiben: aus Verantwortung spielt er dieser einen Schabernack. Das Risiko der Formulierung nimmt die harmlose Gestalt erst des ihm leichthin präsentierten Memorials, dann der Arbeit an einem schon Daseienden an, so daß er die eigene Verwegenheit gar nicht recht mehr wahrnimmt. Angesichts der ins Desperate angewachsenen Schwierigkeit einer jeglichen theoretischen Äußerung werden solche Tricks segensreich. Sie sind technische Hilfsmittel des dialektischen Verfahrens, das Aussagen macht, um sie zurückzunehmen und dennoch festzuhalten. Dank aber gebührt dem, der das Diktat aufnimmt, wenn er den Schriftsteller durch Widerspruch, Ironie, Nervosität, Ungeduld und Respektlosigkeit im rechten Augenblick aufscheucht. Er zieht Wut auf sich. Sie wird vom Vorrat des schlechten Gewissens abgezweigt, mit dem der Autor sonst dem eigenen Gebilde mißtraut und das ihn um so sturer in den vermeintlich heiligen Text sich verbeißen läßt. Der Affekt, der gegen den lästigen Helfer undankbar sich kehrt, reinigt wohltätig die Beziehung zur Sache." — Theodor W. Adorno

(Lämmergeiern - Eintrag, bzw. Aphorismus, Nr. 135, aus: "Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben" (1951) von Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno.

Link:
T. W. Adorno - Minima Moralia (Dt)

Gary Indiana on Going Out of Print, Kinski and Out-of-Control Memoirs

Here's a review of Klaus Kinski's "ALL I NEED IS LOVE", that Gary Indiana (real name, Gary Hoisington) wrote in 1990. It's taken from his highly readable collection of essays and reviews "LET IT BLEED. ESSAYS 1985-1995), published by Serpent's Tail/High Risk Books, London and New York, in 1996. This anthology collects samples of his work for "Art in America", the "Village Voice" and "Artforum". Great stuff. Check it out!

"Going out of print is only the last in a long series of humiliations inflicted on most writers by most publisheing houses. Unless you are the most wildly popular public strumpet, or have written some vapid book about one, chances are your publisher - who, after all, is running a whorehouse, not a publich charity - believes he is doing you a huge favor to begin with. Of the thousands of writers he could pluck from obscurity, it's you whom he's decided to favor.

Naturally, it would be base ingratitude for you to expect anything more than chump change in return for one, two, three, sometimes four or five years of work. You think your publisher doesn't have an overhead? Who do you think you are, Belva Plain? Ads? Are crazy, ads? Why should he do anything for you? It's no surprise that dozens of good books go out of print every year, when their publishers manifest no real support for them in the first place. I know one writer whose five novels are widely regarded as ground-breaking, fascinating works; they're all out print. I know another whose two novels are universally considered plodding, mechanical, unreadable exercises in intellectual vanity; because of her enduring fame as a writer of jacket quotes and slender, precious meditations on contemporary aesthetics, her publisher has dutifully reissued the novels every few years for the past 20.

Arbitrary as it really is, authors naturally experience going out of print as a horrific form of judgement. Klaus Kinski, however, need feel no such qualm. All I need is love would certainlyhave given Belva Plain a run for her money, but Random House stopped shipping after 10 thousand copies, reportedly out of fear of libel suits. Kinski collected a hefty advance and, if his book's self-portrait is anything to go by, couldn't care less whether anybody gets to read it. It is an astonishing document that makes Errol Flynn's My Wicked, Wicked Ways and Hedy Lamarr's Ecstasy and Me look exceedingly like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

Kinski grew up in hideous poverty. At age 16, at the desperate end of World War II, he was forced into army service and then became a prisoner of war. His account of childhood has a blunt descriptive brilliance. After a meal in achildren's welfare home:

"I barf right into my torturer's mug. Ithrow up everything in my stomach. Filthy shit comes shooting out of my wide-open throat in spurts like a sewage pump until I'm emptied to my very bowels and can't pump anything more. Doubled over by cramps, I rush from the table, as the jail-warden slut nearly chokes to death on my barf and bawls me out at the top of her lungs."

His adventures in the army are equally salient. Right after the war, Kinski starts his career as a stage actor. Everyone, including Bertolt Brecht, senses his genius. But that's not important to him. What he cares about, what consumes him, is getting laid. Starting at age 14, Kinski fucks virtually every female who crosses his path, in doorways, dressing rooms, public parks and toilets. His triumphs on the stages of Germany and Austria are mere background noise in the din of grunting, snuffling sex.

"I haven't called Biggi even once from Prague. When she calls me, I lie and say that I'm shooting day and night. I am a pig. But I am rendered powerless by Dominique who has enslaved me with her cunt. Dominique is obsessed with me, too; she asks me to stay with her, live with her. I promise I will."

Like Henry Miller, Kinski is irresistably attractive to everyone around him. Men and women both go crazy for his cock, though he has evidently avoided homosexual penetration. And while he's surrounded, like Miller, by a chorus of arty gargoyles proclaiming his genius, Kinski himself has nothing but loathing for his career. The money passage of this bookdescribes the director whose films made Kinski an international star:

"It's perfectly clear to me that never in my entire life have I encountered such a humorless, mendacious, stubborn, narrow-minded, pretentious, unscrupulous, bumptious, spiritless, depressing, boring, and sickening person - entirely unconcerned, he drives home the most uninteresting high points, finally falling to his knees like a sectarian, holding forth fanatically, waiting for someone to pull him up. Having unburdened himself of his garbage stinking all over the place and making me want to vomit, he pretends to be a naive child of innocence, talking about his dreamy poetic existence, as if he weren't living in reality at all and doesn't have the vaguest idea of the brutal material side of the world."

All Kinski needs is love, but the love he needs can only be had with a great deal of money. Offered a choice between "quality" films and high-paying trash, Kinski opts for trash almost every time. This buys him villas and Rolls-Royces and epic weekend flights from cooze to cooze. His mania is aggravated by marriages, the birth of children, and ever-burgeoning fame.

It isn't so much the belated Beat Era anarchy, or Kinski's quirky compassion for animals and children, or the scads of amusing pornography that give this book its great charm. What distiguishes All I Need Is Love from other out-of-control, cunt-crazy, tell-all memoirs (cf. Miller, Bukowski, I Jan Cremer) is its operatic self-contempt, so blaringly sustained that it aquires a sacramental aura. Unlike the wild and crazy guys who pioneered this genre, Kinski knows that his "genius" doesn't redeem a single moment of his piggishness, and beause he wallows in it on its own terms Kinski invests it with quixotic integrity."

(from: "Let It Bleed, Essays 1985-1995", by Gary Indiana, 1996, pp. 219-221.)

Gary Indiana is a US playwright, novelist and journalist. A biography with bibliography is available under following link: Gary_Indiana - Wikipedia Bio

Ray Bradbury im Gespräch

Ray Bradbury, 88-jährig, poetischer Geschichtenerzähler und Science-Fiction Autor, im Gespräch mit Denis Scheck (Druckfrisch-Sendung vom 06.04.2008, ARD)

Mit "Fahrenheit 451", seinem ersten Roman, wurde Ray Bradbury 1953 auf einen Schlag als Meister der Sciencefiction weltberühmt. Den Roman verfilmte Francois Truffaut in 1966.

Link:
Ray Bradbury im Gespräch

The Decline of the Reading Public

Here's another helping from Gore Vidal's highly readable memoir "Point to Point Navigation" (Abacus, 2007, previously published 2006 in USA by Doubleday, and 2006 in Great Britain by Little, Brown).

"The best of our literary critics was V.S. Pritchett. I find fascinating his descriptions of what the world was like in his proletarian youth. Books were central to the Agora of 1914. Ordinary Londoners were steeped in literature, particularly Dickens. People saw themselves in literary terms, saw themselves as Dickensian types while Dickens himself, earlier, had mirrored the people in such a way that writer and Agora were, famously, joined; and each defined the other.

In London, Pritchett and I belonged to the same club. One afternoon we were sitting in the bar when a green-faced bishop stretched out his gaitered leg and tripped up a rosy-faced mandarin from Whitehall. As the knight fell against the wall, the bishop roared, "Pelagian heretic!" I stared with wonder. Pritchett looked very pleased. "Never forget," he said, "Dickens was a highly realistic novelist."

Today, where literature was movies are. Whether of not the Tenth muse does her act on a theater screen or within the cathode tube, there can be no other reality for us since reality does not begin to mean until it has been made art of. For the Agora, Art is now sight and sound; and the books are shut. In fact, reading of any kind is on the decline. Half the American people never read a newspaper. Half never vote for president - the same half?"

(From "Point to Point Navigation. A Memoir 1964 - 2006", page 4.)

Der beste Autor

Der beste Autor wird der sein, welcher sich schämt, Schriftsteller zu werden.

- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (Eintrag Nr. 192, aus: Menschliches, Allzumenschliches - Ein Buch für freie Geister, 1878.)

Link:
Projekt Gutenberg (Dt) - Nietzsche, Aus der Seele der Künstler und Schriftsteller

BROCKEN Ein Buch in der Entstehung

Die Entstehung eines neuen kollaborativen Buch-Projektes von Ralph D. Lichtensteiger und George H. E. Koehler kann auf der Webseite Brocken Dossiers verfolgt werden.

"Brocken" stellt diverse noch in der Entstehung sich befindende sowie bereits verfasste Einträge eines sich hinstreckendes "Work in progress" in einer Blog-Version vor.

Aus der Projektbeschreibung:
"Ausgehend von einer zentralen Annahme Sören Kierkegaards, die Wahrheit sei subjektiv und die Subjektivität sei die Wahrheit, fühlen wir uns berufen unsere Anmerkungen zu einer subjektiven Kultur- und Philosophiegeschichte zu leisten.

In unserem Zeitalter der technischen Reproduzierbarkeit bleibt das Individuum und die individuelle Perspektive dennoch das kostbarste Gut der Kultur, und wird zukünftig, in Opposition zur virulent orthodoxen Verabsolutierung im Prozess der Geschichtsschreibung, DAS KOSTBARE der Kulturgeschichte werden.

Als Gegenentwurf zur Erfindung der traditionellen Objektivität, wie sie uns von den Archiven der Herrschenden vorgegaukelt wird, und als Angriff auf die korrumpierende Subjektivität der Orhodoxie, erkämpfen und erschliessen wir mit dem Projekt "Brocken Dossiers" ein neues aphoristisches Terrain der Kulturbetrachtung."

Invention or Description

Gore Vidal's lucid analyses are unsurpassed for succinctness.

His clarity of prose and the casual apercus in his latest memoir, tossed off along the way, are as irresistable as ever. "Point to Point Navigation" (published 2006), is a highly recommended augmentation to his "Palimpsest" and "United States. Essays 1952-92".

Here's an excerpt:

"Paul [Bowles] had a difficult time with his memoir because he tended to remember places more than people. He had given his agent a list of famous people he had known and then discovered, a bit late, that he had little or nothing to say about them. (...) I now recall that at one point Paul asked me jokingly, I thought, if I could think of anything interesting or memorable that I had said or done when he was around. I replied, accurately, that I had forgotten me, too. Fiction writers with a gift for inventing other universes cannot be held to the journalist role of describing someone actually observed at large in quotidian reality."

(From "Point to Point Navigation. A Memoir 1964 - 2006", pages 110-111.)

A Writer's Journal (10)

„Novels, then, with their complexity, their scope, their built-in engagement with our common humanity, may be an ideal way of getting under a nation's skin.“
- from: „Three French Novels“, William Boyd's review from 2003 of Alain Fournier's „Le Grand Meulnes“ (1913), Albert Camus' „L'Etranger“ [The Outsider] (1942) and Michel Tournier's „Le Roi des Aulnes“ [The Erl King] (1970).

This review can be found in William Boyd's fascinating anthology „Bamboo. Non-Fiction 1978-2004“ (published by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books, London, 2005). Highly recommended.

William Boyd is also the editor of the centenary edition of the British literary review Granta, Issue no. 100, Winter 2007 (see also my post dated 7th Feb. 2008).

A Writer's Journal (9)

Zum Detektivroman

„Totus mundus agit historionem – Die ganze Welt agiert als Schauspieler, stand einst in Shakespeares Globe-Theater. Dies gilt im besonderen Maße für den Detektivroman, den Gilbert Keith Chesterton, der frühe Meister und kenntnisreiche Kritiker des Genres, einmal eine „Komödie der Masken, nicht der Gesichter genannt hat.“
- aus dem Nachwort von Volker Neuhaus in „Madam Wilkins’ Palazzo“ von Charlotte MacLeod, dt. Ausgabe 1992 (Die englische Originalausgabe erschien 1982.)

A Writer's Journal (8)

On Creating Characters

„We’re all works in progress on planet Earth, and no one of us possesses physical, emotional, spiritual, and psychological perfection. This should be true of our characters as well. No one wants to read about flawless characters. Since no reader is perfect, there is nothing more disagreeable than spending free time immersed in a story about an individual who leaps the tall buildings of emotion, psyche, body, and spirit in a single bound. Would anyone want a person like that as a friend, tediously wonderful in every way? Probably not. Thus, a character possessing perfection in one area should possess imperfection in another.”
- from: Elizabeth George, Write Away - One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and The Writing Life, 2004, page 9.

A Writer's Journal (7)

"I remember being shocked when I discovered some of my school pals didn't have books in their homes. I thought it was like not having oxygen, or hot water. If I could have lived in the library at that time, I would have."
- Iain Banks (who also publishes as Iain M. Banks), interviewed by Sarah Kinson. There's more from this interview under the following link:
Why I write · Iain Banks · 7th Feb 2008

Was there someone who got you interested in writing?
"We did a lot creative writing at school. We were sat down to write a story, in quiet, at least twice a week. They don't do creative writing in school now. It is an absolute tragedy." - Anne Fine, interviewed by Sarah Kinson. More under:
Why I write · Anne Fine · 5th Dec 2007

The Guardian publishes interviews regularly in their "Why I Write" series. Recent interviewees have also included David Mitchell (19th Nov. 2007) and Maggie O'Farrell (19th Dec. 2007).