one of the strands i look for in visual art these days is something that captures a sense of what it is i see and do at work. so i was browsing an old copy of granta this morning and came across kanitta meechubot. you can see more in this series here, catch up on her blog here and if you're in that london you can see her exhibition at the book club until january (should you want to send me the accompanying catalogue i would accept it with some gratitude!)
in contrast, and seeing as how i'm never going to get round to it, i've had a blog post kicking about in my head that's kind of jeanette winterson, kind of virginia woolf and a bit of a lament about the state of writing at the moment. maybe this is because i'm just after reading woolf's the waves, which if it was written today i'd hazard wouldn't have chance one of getting published, and a fair bit of la winterson, who i'm always surprised gets published at all.
there seems, to me (!), to be so much really excellent, thought provoking and generally wow-ish visual art knocking about these days (all hail the internet) in contrast to the written word. is it just because reading takes longer? are there repositories of genuinely dazzling writing that it just takes too long to get to? who knows? me, rather than reading i'm going off out on my bike with a head full of kanitta meechubot. that'll do me!
7 comments:
Maybe I'm just getting old but sometimes, with writing and reading, I think it does feel that all the new (because you wrote about "the state of writing at the moment") has already been done and that it's all just circling round and around (whilst feeling new, whilst thinking it's new...). How long it's been like that... who can say? I suppose it doesn't really matter... and younger folk won't notice anyway. Or maybe I'm completely wrong/am looking in the wrong places. Maybe even looking is wrong... maybe old is right!
x
i'm not long after reading woolf's the waves. now it may not be to everyone's taste but there's writing in there that's just sublime, plus a singularity of vision that's wholly absent in just about everything i've read in british fiction in the last ten or so years. more to the point reading it now i was thinking to myself there wouldn't be chance one it'd be published today.
similarly i was working on a thing not so long ago when i made the (in retropect foolish) decision to go and have a delver thru the poetry magazines to get a feel for somne inspiration. i gave up and came away feeling proper depressed. all of it felt so samey, the same perspectives, the same observations, the same conclusions, as if the poetry world is entirely populayed by guardian readers who either have, or want to do, a creative writing ma.
which is why i was so taken with meechubot. i like the anatomical/botanical character of what she's doing. i like the craft of it. looking at that i think differently about my own work, i want to go and make some more of my own. maybe it's the winter but i look at quite a lot of uk poetry and (whisper it)i want to give up writing altogether
maybe we just go thru phases but i'm finding with my arty practice these days it's all just more exciting, more satisfying and i get to push what i'm doing, the techniques i'm using much more than when i'm writing. not only that i've yet to find some cheeky so called editor type coming up to me and saying i should maybe use a different colour, or do it a different size etc!
it can soooo feel like that. and then other times not. best to keep away when it feels that way really... let everyone else get on with it... they all seem happy enough.
x
are they? you are kinder than me! lol
sometimes i am... plus i just don't hang out with them much! absence makes... the heart grow less impatient...
x
maybe i'm just entering my grumpy phase!
"I have a feeling that there is a dying, if not a death, of great literature. Some blame the television for it. Perhaps. There is hardly any distinction between a writer and a journalist—indeed, most writers are journalists. Nothing wrong with journalism any more than with dentistry, but they are worlds apart! Whenever I read the English Sunday papers I notice that the standard of literacy is high—all very clever and hollow—but no dues to literature. They care about their own egos. They synopsize the book, tell the plot. Well, fuck the plot! That is for precocious schoolboys. What matters is the imaginative truth, and the perfection and care with which it has been rendered. After all, you don’t say of a ballet dancer, “He jumped in the air, then he twirled around, et cetera . . .” You are just carried away by his dancing. The nicest readers are—and I know by the letters I receive—youngish people who are still eager and uncontaminated, who approach a book without hostility...Also, great literature is dying because young people, although they don’t talk about it much, feel and fear a holocaust.
---Edna O'Brien.
ps. thank you for kanitta!!!
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