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Veckans bokstav hos Lyran är D. Som vanligt handlar det om att presentera en författare som fått Nobelpriset, samt en som är väl värd det.

Doris Lessing fick priset 2007 med motiveringen “den kvinnliga erfarenhetens epiker, som med skepsis, hetta och visionär kraft har tagit en splittrad civilisation till granskning”. Hon verkar vara en riktig kruttant som inte skräder sina ord. Att hon kallades ”den kvinnliga erfarenhetens epiker” tog hon knappast som en komplimang. Inte heller verkade hon speciellt överraskad över priset utan tyckte snarare att det var på tiden så hon blev den äldste litteraturpristagaren, “Jag har vunnit alla europeiska priser, varenda jäkla ett!” kommenterade hon i DN. Hon kallade också priset “en jävla katastrof”.

Doris Lessing  föddes i Iran 1919 och växte upp i dåvarande Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Den bok jag läst av henne Ljuvaste dröm, handlar om ett fiktivt afrikanskt land med en ledare som fått “stora mannen syndromet” och ivrigt påhejas av vänsterradikala engelsmän. Boken är delvis självbiografisk, men utan att lämna ut personers verkliga namn. Sannolik, men inte sann skulle man kunna säga. Så här skriver Bokus:  

“Ljuvaste dröm är en sällsynt rik roman om en familj, som i sig speglar samhällsutvecklingen under tre decennier i England och Afrika och med den också människornas förändring. Doris Lessing skildrar allt detta med brinnande engagemang och stor psykologisk och politisk insikt.”

Bei Dao, kinesisk poet blir den jag nominerar till framtida Nobelpris. Nu är det ett tag sedan jag bläddrade i den bok av honom jag har Samlade dikter i tolkning av Göran Malmqvist (Norstedts förlag 1995), men jag minns att jag tyckte väldigt mycket om hans dikter när jag läste dem. Bei Dao är en pseudonym för Zhao Zhenkai, så risken att jag återanvänder honom på Z är överhängande. 1989 tvingades han i exil efter att han anklagats för att  anstifta studentrevolten. Han bor numera i USA och har nekats inträde i Kina. Att ge honom priset hade varit en sund protest även om jag egentligen inte tycker att Nobelpriset ska vara för politiskt.

ur Manifest

Kanske är den sista stunden inne

jag efterlämnar inget testamente

endast en penna, åt min mor

jag är alls ingen hjälte

i en tid utan hjältar

vill jag endast vara en människa

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in a far, far away country, for the very same offence.

Ditch that fairytale noise.

Sometimes, even the ending of the darkest novel brings more relief than reality. A routine browse at the Guardian website after lunch brought to me a story of Ben, in the World in proper reality, only the hero (please don’t mind the pun) is in a more dire plight than Ben. A British man with serious mental illness was convicted of drug trafficking on the Mainland. He appealed, was dismissed and awaits execution by the gun as the offence is punishable by death in China:

Mentally ill Briton faces execution for smuggling heroin to China

The plot is horribly similar to Ben. In Lessing’s novella, the hero is half-coaxed, half-threatened into trafficking by the pimp-boyfriend of his prostitute friend. The deal is a smashing success. Ben is not suspected at all, not at the customs, nor the plane, let alone in front of the sun-flooded cafe in Marseilles despite the fact that he has bags of heroin strapped all over his body and is pulling along a full suitcase of drugs. I think the boyfriend at one point even hails himself as a criminal genius. The plot, unraveled as it did had me sat there, feeling the gentle tug of a furrow. It is a wicked scam, particularly so as a mildly intelligent person is used, used and conveniently crumpled up and disposed of like a piece of toilet paper afterwards. But you have to admit it’s as close to flawless as it can get, and it’s plausible. I wondered at that time if some swines had tried that before.

Why it works: Ben is not a fool, but he is slow. Even if he panics under interrogation, he doesn’t have the wit to give a full and convincing account of the slimy mire behind and who is pulling the strings. That’s an advantage the traffickers play to the full. The dealers are then shielded. The police and prosecution now rely on Ben. They have to establish that Ben was in possession of the drugs and has knowledge of the nature to secure a conviction. No experienced trafficker will and can deny that under such circumstances, with his entire torso cushioned by heroin bricks, he was not in possession of the drugs at the material time. But the prove of knowledge: that hurdle is prosecution’s Mount Everest. Drug is alien to Ben. The dealers pass Ben off as their scapegoat, but if the reader finds this too disturbing, one can always council oneself that under a properly guided legal system, Ben might turn out fine – deported. Lessing’s urban tale sees Ben drift to South America and commits suicide out of utter loneliness, and repeated disillusions with humanity. That might be more comforting than the present case. At least he seizes back his life at the last minute and takes control. His last decision is a free choice.

The British man in the news suffers a different sort of illness than Ben. He is not half as ‘lucky’. Mr Shaikh is reported to have delusional psychosis. A businessman, he displayed signs of mental instability as early as 2003, but his condition took a serious downturn in 2007 in Warsaw when he conducted huge business deals clearly not substantiated by his then financial status, and sent numerous e-mails to the British embassy there, claiming he had spoken to an Archangel and could have stopped the 7 July bombings. It was also at that time that he befriended gangs in Poland, and it is believed as is his defence that the gangsters exploited his illness in smuggling drugs to China. All this was put before the Chinese court, as suggested in the news, but none was considered, not even when the evidence was compounded with Shaikh’s incoherent 50-minute speech which sparked off laughter in court.

What exactly is on trial? A man? Wrong. A man and the unspeakable conditions and my patience. I do hope Mr Shaikh comes off with a better ending – not Ben’s, but one better than that and his present prospect. I still hope against all odds that people have the heart to feel ashamed for their ignorance and apathy. No, not just in this case (see, that’s why I say against all odds).  Some trauma bears no scar; grows no scab, and is either brushed aside like dust or exploited to the full once spotted. Vulnerable does not fit it. It’s the loneliest status.

I found some strange stories about Nobel laureates.

1. Robert Lucas is winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in economics for his work on the theory of “rational expectations,” split his $1 million prize with his ex-wife.

Robert Lucas

If there were a Nobel Prize for Foresight or Timing, she should be nominated, based on a clause in their divorce settlement from seven years earlier: “Wife shall receive 50 per cent of any Nobel Prize.” The clause expired on October 31, 1995. Had Lucas won any year after, he would have kept the whole million.

2. Physicist Lise Meitner, whose work helped lead to the discovery of nuclear fission, was reportedly nominated for the Nobel Prize 13 times without ever winning (though nominations are kept secret, so we don’t know for sure).

Lise Meitner

This makes her the Dynasty of the Nobel Prize scene — that show was nominated for 24 Emmy Awards but never won. Other analogies we’d accept: The Color Purple (11 Oscar nominations in 1985, no wins), the Buffalo Bills or Minnesota Vikings (4 Super Bowl losses each without a victory) and William Jennings Bryan (three-time Democratic nominee for President, losing twice to McKinley and once to Taft.)

3. People who refused the Nobel Prize:

(i) Le Duc Tho was awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize with Henry Kissinger for their roles in brokering a Vietnam cease fire at the Paris Peace Accords.

Le Duc Tho

Le Duc Tho with Henry Kissinger

Citing the absence of actual peace in Vietnam, Tho declined to accept.

(ii) Jean Paul Sartre waved off the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Jean Paul Sartre

His explanation: “It is not the same thing if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre or if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner. A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honorable form.”

(iii) Afraid of Soviet retribution if he travelled to Stockholm to claim his prize, Boris Pasternak declined to accept the 1958 Prize in Literature, which he’d earned for Doctor Zhivago.

Boris Pasternak

The Academy refused his refusal. “This refusal, of course, in no way alters the validity of the award. There remains only for the Academy, however, to announce with regret that the presentation of the Prize cannot take place.” Yevgeny Pasternak accepted the prize on behalf of his deceased father in 1989.

(iv) Swedish poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt won Nobel for Literature in 1918.

Erik Axel Karlfeldt

He did not accept because he was secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize. He was given the award posthumously in 1931. This was allowed because the nomination was made before Karlfeldt died — no candidate may be proposed after death.

4. In 2007, 90-year-old professor Leonid Hurwicz became the oldest person to ever win (one-third of the Prize in Economics); at 87,

writer Doris Lessing became the oldest woman (Literature).

Doris Lessing

5. DNA expert Kary Mullis — 1993 winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry — was scheduled to be a defense witness in O.J. Simpson’s murder trial.

Kary Mullis

However, Simpson’s lawyer Barry Scheck felt the prosecution’s DNA case was already essentially destroyed, and he didn’t want Mullis’ personal life to distract jurors (he’d expressed an affinity for LSD.)

6. Big names who never won:

Dmitri Mendeleev, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, Henrik Ibsen, Joan Robinson, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Jules-Henri Poincaré, Raymond Damadian and Mahatma Gandhi.

Dmitri Mendeleev

Gertrude Stein

Henrik Ibsen

James Joyce

Joan Robinson

Jules-Henri Poincaré

Leo Tolstoy

Mahatma Gandhi

Marcel Proust

Mark Twain

Nikola Tesla

Raymond Damadian

Thomas Edison

Virginia Woolf

7. Winners without the greatest reputations:

(i) Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, who won in 1976 for his research in human slow-virus infections, spent 19 months in jail after pleading guilty in 1997 to charges of child molestation.

Daniel Carleton Gajdusek

(ii) Johannes Fibiger won in 1926 after discovering parasitic worms cause cancer — a breakthrough that turned out to not be true.

Johannes Fibiger

(iii) Yasser Arafat shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin.

Yasser Arafat

Shimon Peres

This decision caused Nobel Committee member Kare Kristiansen to resign.

Yitzhak Rabin

“What consequences will result,” he asked at the time, “when a terrorist with such a background is awarded the world’s most prestigious prize?”

(iv) William Shockley won for Physics in 1956 for his role in the invention of the semiconductor, but his support of the eugenics movement alienated the scientific community.

William Shockley

Shockley also donated sperm to the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank developed to spread humanity’s best genes.

8. As part of his divorce settlement, Einstein’s Nobel Prize money went to his ex-wife, Mileva Maric.

Mileva Maric with einstein

9. The Curie family is a Nobel Prize machine, winning five: Pierre and Marie for Physics in 1901;

Pierre Curie with Marie

Marie solo for Chemistry in 1911; daughter Irene and her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie for Chemistry in 1935;

Frédéric Joliot with Irene Curie

and Henry Labouisse — Irene’s daughter Eve’s second husband — accepted on behalf of UNICEF in 1965. No family has won more.

Henry Labouisse (left)

10. Marie Curie’s second prize was marred by a scandal. Then a widow, Curie had an affair with a married scientist, Paul Langevin — a former pupil of Pierre Curie.

Paul Langevin

Love letters were involved, eventually leading to a duel between Langevin and the editor of the newspaper that had printed them (no shots were actually fired.) According to NobelPrize.org, when it was suggested that Curie not accept the prize, she wrote a shrewd letter, “which pointed out that she had been awarded the Prize for her discovery of radium and polonium, and that she could not accept the principle that appreciation of the value of scientific work should be influenced by slander concerning a researcher’s private life.”

11. Singing support — While there’s no evidence the Nobel judges can be swayed by theme songs, that hasn’t stopped Loriana Lana from composing one for Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Loriana Lana

“Peace Can” includes the lyrics, “Silvio forever will be / Silvio is reality / Silvio forever! /Silvio gives us trust.”

12. Alfred Nobel — inventor of dynamite — may have been inspired to create the Nobel Prize after a premature obituary in a French newspaper called him a “merchant of death.”

Alfred Nobel

13. Nobel died on December 10, 1896. The formal awards ceremony is held in Stockholm each year on the anniversary of his death. The first awards show took place on December 10, 1901.

Pics courtesy: Google

Tout le monde connaît Doris Lessing, prix nobel de littérature 2007, auteur engagée, féministe, essentiellement connue pour son fameux roman Le Carnet d’Or. Cela faisait longtemps que je voulais lire une oeuvre de Lessing, quand je suis tombée par hasard sur ce roman-journal intime, je me suis dit que c’était l’occasion!

Ce roman et sa suite (Si vieillesse pouvait) paraissent en France en 1986… Une femme d’une cinquantaine d’années, rédactrice en chef d’un magazine de mode londonien, vient à s’occuper d’une vieille femme, Maudie Flower, incarnant toute l’horreur de la vieillesse : solitude, pauvreté, crasse, douleur et maux de la vieillesse … Jane, comme malgré elle, se met à lui rendre visite, à lui faire ses courses, passe la voir après son travail… Durant tout le roman, écrit sous la forme d’un journal intime, Jane semble lutter entre le besoin d’aider cette femme guère sympathique, et sa répulsion. Ayant nié la maladie et la mort de son mari, celles de sa mère, en venant en aide à Maudie, Jane tente de comprendre, de se faire pardonner, et la difficulté de la tâche est comme une punition qu’elle doit assumer… Entre les deux femmes, se nouent cependant un lien amical, Maudie raconte sa vie passée, et ces anecdotes viennent rompre l’horreur du présent.

C’est un roman dérangeant sur la vieillesse, un roman qui ne mâche pas ses mots, qui décrit les maux de la vieillesse avec réalisme : l’incontinence rectale, la saleté, le quotidien douloureux… Les sentiments de Jane sont légitimes, humains, oscillant entre l’humanité et l’envie de ne pas voir… L’intérêt est aussi dans les transformations du caractère de Jane. D’abord totalement absorbée par son travail à la rédaction, son lien avec Maudie va lui permettre de lâcher prise, et de se lancer dans l’écriture. Petit à petit, elle devient plus humaine, moins centrée sur elle-même (le temps passé dans son bain du soir diminue).

Je ressors de cette lecture sans doute changée moi-même, avec un regard différent sur la vieillesse, avec une plus grande angoisse aussi, parce que le portrait que Doris Lessing fait de la grande vieillesse est malheureusement très réaliste ! Je lirai sans doute la suite… un peu plus tard !

NOTE :  chut !                          7 / 144                   Lu dans le contexte du Prix Littéraire des Blogueurs

En ljushårig kvinna i en solstol läser en grön bok som är väldigt lik den senaste svenska pocketupplagan av Doris Lessings Gräset sjunger. Är det den?
(Sen kommer familjen förbi och har trasiga byxor för att de åkt rutschkana. Det är Vingresor eller Fritidsresor eller nåt sånt.)

Est-ce à dire qu’avoir entrepris de changer un deuxième défaut majeur de ma personnalité ne rime à rien ?

L’appréhension d’une phase nouvelle et inconnue de relatif bonheur est-elle un leurre ? « That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way. » . Ai-je appris, sans avoir appris auparavant ? J’ai presque toujours su que “l‘amour fait toujours croire ce dont on devrait douter le plus“. Peut-être est-ce là que réside mon apprentissage. J’ai l’impression de le savoir, différemment, maintenant. Je ne me sens plus simplement mélancolique, pas plus pessimiste, ni même optimiste et mal informé. Corriger son défaut en se rappelant que “quand on aime quelqu’un, on a toujours quelque chose à lui dire ou à lui écrire, jusqu’à la fin des temps“.

Ces soirs ont un drôle de goût. Rendent le futur avec une troublante certitude, globalement embrumée mais présente. Considèrent le passé dans une distanciation assagie mais pas dépourvue d’amour.

N’a-t-il pas toujours su

qu’un “bon maître a ce soucis constant d’enseigner à se passer de lui” ?

Nobel Winners in Literature

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091007/ap_en_ot/eu_nobel_literature_list

© The Nobel Foundation

The Swedish Academy for the Nobel Prize in Literature has awarded the honor of 2009 Nobel Laureate to German author Herta Mueller. Mueller was born in Romania, Nitzkydorf and is known for writing about life under the Communist Romanian regime of Nicolae Ceausesc.

“I am very surprised and still cannot believe it,” Mueller said in a statement released by her publisher in Germany. “I can’t say anything more at the moment.“

According to Nobelprize.org, laureates are awarded ”a  Nobel Prize Medal, Nobel Prize Diploma and a confirmation document confirming the Nobel Prize amount from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. Ceremonies will be held on the 10th of December.” Since 2001, the monetary prize has remained 10,000,000 Swedish Krona, which amounts to $1,419,445.63 USD.

French author and professor Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio won the 2008 Nobel for Literature. The Academy named Le Clézio the “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization”. British author Doris Lessing took the prize in 2007, and Turkish author Orhan Pamuk was the 2006 winner. The first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to poet and philosopher Sully Prudhomme in 1901. See Nobelprize.org for a list of all Nobel Laureates in Literature.

Read more about Herta Mueller at The Washington Post and Nobelprize.org.

Die New York Times veröffentlicht einen AP-Artikel, der so beginnt:

Herta Müller, eine wenig bekannte, in Rumänien geborene Autorin, die wegen der kritischen Darstellung des Lebens hinter dem Eisernen Vorhang verfolgt wurde, gewinnt den Literaturnobelpreis 2009 – eine Auszeichnung, die auf den 20. Jahrestag des Zusammenbruchs des Kommunismus verweisen soll.

Die Entscheidung wird die Kontroverse um die Tendenz der Akademie beleben, den Preis an europäische Autoren zu vergeben.*

Nunja – wer etwas “wenig bekannt” nennt, verortet sich selbst. Ich will mich ja nicht mit Amerika vergleichen: mir ist der Name ein Begriff, seit ich in den 70er Jahren zum erstenmal einen Satz von ihr in einer rumäniendeutschen Zeitschrift las. Eine irre, elektrisierende Prosa! Von deutschen Zeitungen jedenfalls erwarte ich zuversichtlich, wenn ein in Deutschland wenig gedruckter Autor ausgezeichnet wird, was schon vorgekommen ist, daß sie nicht nörgeln, sondern erschrocken sagen: O, das müssen wir schnell nachholen! In den Staaten ist man nicht so zimperlich:

Der allgemeine Konsens in den letzten Jahren [allgemein-amerikanisch, soll das heißen!] sei, daß der Nobelpreis ein “Witz” sei, wie Roger Straus, Ko-Gründer von Farrar, Straus and Giroux einmal sagte, oder, wie es Charles McGrath, früherer Herausgeber der New York Times Book Review, diplomatischer ausdrückte, ein “großes Mysterium”. / L&Poe 2006    Okt #37.    Nobelwetten und Damenfußball

Weiter hieß es in dem damaligen Bericht über amerikanische Reaktionen:

Der ideale Kandidat für den Nobelpreis wäre eine Lesbe aus Asien, so zitiert der Meinungs-Leader (bzw. seine Autorin),  und deutet gar an, Czeslaw Milosz 1980 und William Butler Yeats 1923 hätten den Preis primär aus politischen Gründen bekommen.

* Also Europäer wie Nagib Mahfus, 1988 (Ägypten), Octavio Paz, 1990 (Mexiko), Nadine Gordimer, 1991 (Südafrika), Derek Walcott, 1992 (Karibik), Toni Morrison, 1993 (Afro-USA), Kenzaburo Oe, 1994 (Japan), Gao Xingjian, 2000 (China – nach offiziell chinesischer Ansicht aber Franzose), V. S. Naipaul, 2001 (Karibik), J. M. Coetzee, 2003 (Südafrika),  Orhan Pamuk, 2006 (Türkei), Doris Lessing, 2007 (Britin, geboren in Iran). Irgendwie stimmts schon – nicht nur bei Pamuk.

Clarity is a high virtue, but so is beauty; and increasingly I see that it is from varying length and sentence structure that writers achieve voice, rhythm, emphasis, and musicality. Variation works because we naturally vary our speaking rhythm when we’re emotionally connected to what we’re saying:

“He fouled me! That jerk! Coach! You’re always telling us This is just a scrimmage—we’re still on the same team—don’t get carried away. Didn’t  you see him hit me after the whistle? I don’t care if he’s first string. It isn’t right.”

This point is obvious when someone’s upset and emphatic, but syntactical variation works as well to convey any strong feeling in the subtext. And rhythmic sentences can sing to us, perhaps moving our emotions by bending our ears toward the ancient roots of language in music and epic. Consider the opening of Leslie Rubinkowski’s essay “The Funeral”:

Gertie is my favorite aunt, her apartment is four miles from my house, and I haven’t seen her in twelve years. I got lost trying to find her, so lost that the fifteen-minute drive stretched to an hour, so lost that I navigated one-way tubercular streets with a map across my knees before I found the Doughboy guarding Lawrenceville—Penn bends into Butler, I knew that, I didn’t really forget—and I have to force myself not to run to her when I see her across the room: my sweet Aunt Gert in her fawn-colored suit with satin lapels and rhinestone angel pin, her hair, as ever, upswept and immaculate; and I lean in to touch her arm and study the fine familiar fuzz on her cheeks, the broader, softer version of my own jaw line, and the rafts of pink roses that cover her coffin and climb the walls.

The complex structure of the second sentence—with dashes, beaucoup commas, a colon, and a semi-colon—is compelling in its movement and in its tumbling cascade of detail and memory toward the surprise for the reader at the end, a surprise that mirrors the writer’s shock at her loss. Yes, it’s a long sentence. Don’t try this at home, kids! Actually, do. Most of us are stuck at the middling length, when we need short, medium, and long sentences.

As Roy Peter Clark says in his pithy book Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, “Until the writer tries to master the long sentence, she is no writer at all, for while length makes a bad sentence worse, it can make a good sentence better.” And a well-made long sentence carries the proof of its achievement in our delight. (I once counted 199 words in a jaw-dropper by Virginia Woolf in To the Lighthouse. Of course, there are longer sentences, but the longest ones seem famous just for being long.)

Ernest Hemingway is famous for his simple declarative sentences. Actually his diction is simple, his words as common as dirt, but strong in their plainness. Ford Maddox Ford: “Hemingway’s words strike you, each one, as if they were pebbles fetched fresh from a brook. They live and shine, each in its place. So one of his pages has the effect of a brook-bottom into which you look down through the flowing water. The words form a tesellation, each in order beside the other.” And his sentences are varied and often complex even though they’re clear. Some are quite long. They also employ repetition artfully to help them flow with emotion. For sharpening his rhythm, Heminway liked listening to Bach and reading Huckleberry Finn and the King James Bible.

Consider this passage from his story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”:

It was late and every one had left the café except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. In the daytime the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference. The two waiters inside the café knew that the old man was a little drunk, and while he was a good client they knew that if he became too drunk he would leave without paying, so they kept watch on him.

(I’m grateful for this example to David Jauss’s Alone With All That Could Happen: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom About the Craft of Fiction.)

Here’s a passage from my story “Killing Dogs” in which I tried Hemingwayesque rhythm to show unfolding action and emotion through sentence structure as well as what its words say—the long first sentence dies on the word “dying”:

The black dog was trotting toward the barn and he aimed carefully and shot again and it yipped and staggered sideways and dived under his truck, where it thrashed on the gravel, dying. He walked over and squatted, and it looked at him. A mortally gunshot dog has watchful, expectant eyes; and this one regarded him reproachfully, too, with an almost human look of disappointment, its sad expression aided by a vaguely human domed skull and blunt snout. This dog had known only kindness. A film puckered across one dark pupil as the life left its eyes.

Here’s part of a passage, also cited by Jauss, from D.H. Lawrence’s story “Odour of Chrysanthemums”:

The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly trapped between the jolting black wagons and the hedge; then they curved away towards the coppice where the withered oak leaves dropped noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips beside the track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into the spinney. In the open, the smoke from the engine sank and cleaved to the rough grass.

Notice how in the long opening sentence the first clause’s words mimic the clanking train and how, after the semicolon, the sentence becomes more flowing as the train recedes. I tell my students to try to infuse their writing, through word choice and sentence structure, with the emotion (joy, love, delight, anger, inexorable movement) they’re trying to convey.

Here’s a bit of “Kathy,” an essay in which I tried to show my love for her and my awe for her questing nature (which, this indicates, she came by honestly). The passage ends with a pungent colloquial farming word:

To appearances another tanned Ohio farm girl who played in the mud, she was eccentric, a birthright that ascended. When she was ten her mother cut her hair short, and Kathy clamped a sailor’s cap atop her head. That summer, a pet duck loved her; Huey’s trust shined from his leaden blue eyes. She carried the white drake around, which he tolerated, and dropped him in a wading pool, which he polluted. Although the family was busy farming, the duck and that useless circular hat got noticed—something about the combination unsettled her parents. Kathy was the only one of his five daughters Karl routinely punished physically, the only child who defied him. Secure in his love, she tolerated his tantrums but drew the line at tyranny. He dangled her by one ankle to spank, his hand hard on her bottom. She kept cussing. Like him, bullheaded.

Consider the variety of rhythms in the opening of Truman Capote’s essay “Hand-carved Coffins: A Nonfiction Account of an American Crime” in his collection Music for Chameleons:

March, 1975

A town in a small Western state. A focus for the many large farms and cattle-raising ranches surrounding it, the town, with a population of less than ten thousand, supports twelve churches and two restaurants. A movie house, though it has not shown a movie in ten years, still stands stark and cheerless on Main Street. There was once a hotel, too; but that has also been closed, and nowadays the only place a traveler can find shelter is the Prairie Motel.

Bill Roorbach’s Writing Life Stories says of this:

“The opening phrases are blunt. The sentence fragments cut the rhythm short—shorter, that is, than our ears expect. This chopping isolates the fragments’ beat from the beats of the full sentences that follow. But Capote doesn’t allow those longer sentences to flow, either. He breaks them with commas, a semicolon, with subordination, interruption, and apposition. This is the vocal rhythm of someone with bad news to tell: hesitant, throat-clearing, yet resolute. And note that each of the last words in these sentences ends with a tongue-stopping (and beat-stopping) T, except the last sentence, with its motel, whose T echoes the earlier stops, but trails into the “el” sound, enough to carry the music forward into a new paragraph. Capote wants the delivery halting, but not so halting that the reader stops and turns elsewhere. Note that you can’t read this paragraph in a joyful rush.”

Roorbach contrasts this with “one you could sing,” a passage trilling with alliteration, bouncy with humor and singsong rhythm, in Doris Lessing’s memoir Impertinent Daughters:

Modern-minded John William McVeigh, proud of his clever daughter, was thinking of university for her, but was confronted with a rebellious girl who said she wanted to be a nurse. He was horrified, utterly overthrown. Middle-class girls did not become nurses, and he didn’t want to hear anything about Florence Nightingale. Any Skivvy could be a nurse, and if you become one, do not darken my door! Very well, said Emily Maude, and went off to the old Royal Free Hospital to begin her training. It was hard: conditions were bad, the pay was low, but she did well, and when she brilliantly passed her finals, her father was prepared to forgive her. She had done it all on her own, without him.

“Note . . . how hard the [opening] sentence lands on the word nurse, which turns out to be the critical word of the passage (an instance of rhythm providing meaning),” Roorbach writes. “Note the tongue pleasure of the phrase ‘utterly overthrown.’ I want to say it again and again. . . . The repetitions in structure here . . . give the sound of a folk tale, very nearly a folk song. . . .

“Rhythm should be attended to in each sentence we write, in each paragraph, but there is a rhythm of paragraphs, as well, a rhythm of sections in an essay, a rhythm of chapters in a book, and all of it ought to be in your control as you write.”

In my own writing, I’ve noticed that passages that flow during composition do so because of my strong emotional connection to the material. But they take a lot of work, anyway, to get right. The writing that doesn’t flow—the bulk of it—can be helped to move by consciously varying the structure of sentences and paragraphs and passages. This isn’t mere whitewash or a trick: varying structure seems to connect me emotionally with the content and its subtext.

    Na semana passada, num artigo em que fazia “apostas” para o Nobel (ver abaixo), declarei que o primeiro nome a vir à minha mente era o de Doris Lessing. Era, na verdade mais uma indicação do gosto pessoal persistente, revelando uma paixão que dura há um quarto de século (a primeira vez que a li foi em 82, e comecei já com um dos melhores, Roteiro para um passeio ao inferno) do que uma aposta: aquela que é o maior nome vivo da ficção (agora com 87 anos) fora preterida nas duas oportunidades em que deram o prêmio a escritoras de língua inglesa: em 91, para Nadine Gordimer (fina estilista, autora de romances excelentes, e por quem eu tenho o maior respeito, só que seria o mesmo que premiar Lygia Fagundes Telles no lugar de Clarice Lispector); e em 93, para Toni Morrison, em minha opinião uma escritora decepcionante e menor, embora a unanimidade da crítica em torno de obras (Amada, A canção de Solomon, Jazz, Paraíso) que eu considero recheada de partes ridículas e constrangedoras, me leve a crer que o erro de percepção é meu, e se trata de uma incompatibilidade fundamental mais do que um juízo crítico.

    Parecia pouco provável que a essa altura do campeonato lhe atribuíssem o prêmio. E que surpresa: 50 anos após o anúncio de Albert Camus como ganhador, sai da caixinha o nome de um autor que me influenciou tanto quanto ele. Considero a premiação mais relevante desde 1969 (o ano de Samuel Beckett). Não que, de lá para cá, não fossem anunciados grandes nomes (Neruda, Soljenítisin, Bellow, Singer, Montale, Canetti, William Golding, Claude Simon, Pinter, Saramago, Naguib Mafhouz, Octavio Paz, Coetzee, Günter Grass), porém nenhum deles foi, é ou será o que Doris Lessing representa: um mundo, a recuperação épica de toda as fraturas individuais e desmoronamentos coletivos das últimas décadas, uma romancista de quem vários títulos parecem conter toda a vida, e que ainda por cima, numa chave mais miniaturista, a do conto, consegue igual maestria.

    Quando ela estreou na literatura, em 1950, chegando a Londres, aos 30 anos, vinda da África (nasceu no Irã, em 1919, que então era a romanesca Pérsia), com The Grass is singing-A canção da relva, no qual conta a história de uma fazendeira branca assassinada por um criado negro, com quem tivera relações, parecia uma estilista tão fina quanto sua colega Nadine Gordimer, na tradição flaubertiana, capaz de tratar um tema explosivo com grande elegância. Volta e meia, aliás, ela publica um livro “perfeito” e bem acabado, talvez para nos mostrar: olha o que eu poderia ter sido, como eu faria bem isso…

    Mas assim com a parede do apartamento da narradora do extraordinário Memórias de um sobrevivente insiste em se abrir para outros tempos e outras possibilidades da realidade, os romances de Doris Lessing começaram a romper os diques da mera ficção (enquanto isso ela estabelecia um sólido nome como contista, com suas histórias africanas, reunidas em dois volumes obrigatórios a qualquer um que ame a arte da narrativa, no Brasil intitulados A terra do velho chefe e Sabores do exílio).

    Isso aconteceu com duas obras-primas: 1º.) o ciclo de cinco romances que acompanha a protagonista Martha Quest da infância na África até a Terceira Guerra Mundial, Os filhos da violência, iniciado em 1952 e só concluído em 1969, com A cidade de quatro portas. Para mim, é a única realização romanesca do século XX a rivalizar com Guerra e Paz, em abrangência e ímpeto épico, e que lhe valeu o epíteto (dado por Irving Howe) de “arqueóloga das relações humanas”. Não é que a ficção lessinguiana seja epigonal ao realismo do século XIX, não, ela é tomada pelo mesmo furor arcaico e homérico do velho Tolstoi, um talento que parece natural, nem parece “literatura”. É claro que isso é mentira, sua fabulação é tão construída como a de qualquer outro, mas o efeito é poderoso e único; 2º.) o seu romance mais famoso, The golden notebook- O carnê dourado, onde a heroína, Anna Wulf, enfrenta a loucura e a fragmentação, o caos do mundo à sua volta, subdividindo-os em diferentes cadernos que procuram conter a realidade, até que essas frágeis molduras também explodem. Embora O carnê dourado tenha sido encampado como bíblia do feminismo, a sua incomparável arquitetura narrativa e seu visionarismo sempre o resgatarão de ficar datado e reduzido a um manifesto.

    Se Doris Lessing tivesse ficado por aí, já seria um dos maiores nomes da literatura. A partir da sua adesão ao sufismo, ela parece ter ficado cada vez mais ousada literariamente. Além de dois contos longos antológicos, O quarto 19 (homenageado em As horas) e A tentação de Jack Orkney (onde o protagonista, comunista, é contagiado pela idéia da existência de Deus), em 1971 aparecia Roteiro para um passeio ao inferno, que começa em pleno delírio do protagonista, um professor de literatura que “pira” e mistura medos pessoais, arquétipos e mitos civilizatórios. Aos poucos, ficamos sabendo que ele foi enviando por instâncias intergalácticas (ou deuses) para cumprir uma missão, mas a esqueceu e se perdeu na condição humana (daí, o sentido literal do título, “instruções para uma descida aos infernos”); em 1973, apareceu o livro que a tornou famosa no Brasil, O verão antes da queda (que está na linha daqueles livros que citei mais atrás, no comentário a The Grass is singing); em 1974, um ponto alto da sua produção, Memórias de um sobrevivente, que prenunciava um pouco o que estava para vir: no final da década de 70, Lessing se lançou na criação de uma série cosmológica, que contava os embates entre dois impérios, o de Canopus, e o de Sirius (um contra-império maléfico, Shammat, representava o desequilíbrio entre ambos). Os agentes de Sirius não conseguiam compreender os métodos e intenções dos agentes de Canopus porque acreditavam na tecnologia, no progresso material, na racionalização do mundo.

    O primeiro resultado dessa confrontação (resumida aqui de forma tão simplória) foi Shikasta, o meu favorito pessoal entre todos os livros de Doris Lessing, numa preferência absolutamente aliterária. É uma lindíssima reescritura da história da Terra, e ainda que esnobado por críticos do naipe de George Steiner e Harold Bloom, acho que é um dos livros necessários na bagagem de qualquer existência. Por isso, considero-o além do literário.

    O outro grande livro da saga, e complementar, é As experiências de Sirius, que tem algumas das cenas mais lindas já escritas pela grande escritora britânica.  Mas há dois outros volumes onde se pode dizer que ela atingiu a perfeição absoluta do relato literário, duas jóias de ourivesaria narrativa: Os casamentos entre as zonas 3,4 e 5 e Planeta 8-Operação Salvamento.

    Quando a série termina, com Os agentes sentimentais, parece que é mais por desinteresse do que por outra coisa. O livro não é ruim, mas parece uma dramatização literária das suas idéias sintetizadas num livro emblemático: Prisão que escolhemos para viver:

Parece-me, cada vez mais, que estamos sendo governados por ondas de emoções de massa e que, enquanto o fenômeno durar, não será possível avaliar respostas sérias, ponderadas e desapaixonadas que poderiam nos salvar. Olhando para minha vida, que agora conta 60 anos, o que vejo é uma sucessão de grandes eventos de massa, de emoções inflamadas, de paixões selvagens e sectárias (…) Um movimento de massa sucede a outro; pela guerra e contra ela; pela tecnologia e contra ela. E cada um cria nas pessoas um determinado ânimo, violento, emocional, sectário, suprimindo os fatos que não convém, mentindo e abandonando a sensatez da fala ponderada que, para mim, é a única maneira de chegarmos à verdade (…) Todo avanço do mundo, todo o seu desenvolvimento, estão ligados à complexa capacidade de nutrir várias idéias, muitas vezes contraditórias, ao mesmo tempo.”

    Por essa época, ela criou um alter ego e enganou as editoras e meios de comunicação na Inglaterra, com Jane Somers, uma escritora “menor” e bem acomodada à tradição da narrativa britânica. Da brincadeira resultaram Diário de uma boa vizinha e Se os velhos pudessem. A “verdadeira” Doris Lessing produzia, por sua vez, mais um grande e provocativo livro (que veio divulgar no Brasil), The good Terrorist- A terrorista. Já parecia, contudo, estar perdendo o fôlego.

      Alguns anos depois, porém, reaparecia em plenos anos 90, com um romance maravilhoso e inusitado: Amor, de novo. E lançava pouco depois dois volumes autobiográficos: o primeiro, Debaixo da minha pele, é excepcional; já o segundo, Andando na sombra, deixou um pouco a desejar no seu acerto de contas com o comunismo, talvez porque ela já o tivesse feito em várias ocasiões, na sua ficção, e porque ela minimiza muito sua carreira literária, cujo desabrochar deveria ser o contraponto do livro.

   E agora, na década que estamos vivendo, mais um romance ciclópico, O sonho mais doce (2001), sua chegada ao século XXI. E se alguém acha que ela virou uma doce e boa velhinha, basta ler o malicioso, incisivo e lapidar prefácio que escreveu (em 2003) para textos recuperados de Virginia Woolf (homenageando o único outro nome comparável a ela na literatura inglesa), A casa de Carlyle e outros contos. O prefácio é tão ela, e isso representa uma força tão grande, que até deixa a autora prefaciada em segundo plano.

 (texto publicado em duas partes, em 13 de outubro e 20 de outubro de 2007)

APOSTAS PARA O NOBEL

    Chega outubro e as pessoas começam a perguntar: quem você acha que merece ganhar o Nobel? Quais as suas apostas?

    Há 50 anos Albert Camus foi anunciado como o vencedor. Quem sabe em 2007 o nome escolhido seja tão fundamental para a literatura…

    Se Doris Lessing  é o primeiro nome a vir à mente do responsável por esta coluna, dos grandes escritores ativos da atualidade o que produziu as obras mais impressionantes em anos recentíssimos (caso de Submundo e Cosmópolis) foi Don DeLillo. Nos EUA, além dele, seriam escolhas mais que justas Philip Roth, John Updike, Thomas Pynchon,Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion, John Irving, sem falar no lendário Norman Mailer, cuja obra-prima Um sonho americano acaba de ser reeditada no Brasil.

    Na América Latina, o peruano Mario Vargas Llosa é imbatível, embora o mais venerável (ainda que inativo) seja o argentino Ernesto Sábato (e não possamos esquecer o uruguaio Mario Benedetti). O Brasil também poderia passar a existir no mapa Nobel com o genial Dalton Trevisan, nosso maior escritor vivo, ou com Autran Dourado. Na nossa ex-metrópole, o nome mais cotado é mesmo o de Antônio Lobo Antunes.

    A literatura da França anda muito fraca, mas seria justo lembrar o espanhol que criou obras-primas em francês, Jorge Semprún (A grande viagem, A segunda morte de Ramón Mercader, Um belo domingo); ou do tcheco Milan Kundera, que após ter escrito alguns dos melhores livros do século XX (A brincadeira, A valsa dos adeuses) na sua língua natal, adotou a língua do seu país de exílio nos seus últimos textos.

    É, aliás, a síndrome Camus (escritor que veio da Argélia para o coração da literatura de língua francesa). Os “que vêm de fora” lentamente dominam a cena. Ninguém exemplifica melhor isso do que o extraordinário anglo-indiano que escreveu Os filhos da meia-noite, Os versos satânicos, O último suspiro do mouro e Fúria:  Salman Rushdie.

    Mas se o império britânico agoniza e os imigrantes é que lhe trazem seiva nova, um escritor como Ian McEwan, com livros da categoria de Amsterdam, ainda representa seu último alento.

    Aqui também não poderia faltar a canadense Margaret Atwood, de Madame Oráculo e Olho de gato. E um autor insólito e inventivo de um país que foi destruído e pulverizado, a Iugoslávia: Milorad Pavitch, de Dicionário Kazar e Paisagem pintada com chá. E por falar em paisagens na neblina temos ainda o albanês Ismail Kadaré, de Abril despedaçado e Dossiê H.

     E se o mundo islâmico é a maior inquietação do Ocidente de Bush, um escritor lúcido e poderoso não pode faltar nesta lista: Táriq Ali, de Sombras da Romãzeira e Medo de espelhos.

    Apostas feitas.

(resenha publicada em 6 de outubro de 2007)

“There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.”

– Doris Lessing

Lily Pads

2.5″ x 3.5″ Watercolor & Gouache

I had the best time this morning! Vikie Lea emailed me about this wonderful artist, so I just had to go see. Karrie Evenson is another artist who loves color and has a wonderful style, like Lindy Gruger Hanson, who I have been following for a while. When I spend time looking at art like theirs, I am always inspired to take a few more chances and get a little more bold with my art. They just seem to be having so much fun! Thanks, Vickie!

About Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing, the iconoclastic British author who writes both realistic literary novels and humanist science fiction, is best known for her book The Golden Notebook, an experimental novel about a blocked writer who jots down her thoughts in a set of notebooks. She was born in Iran in 1919 to British parents and grew up in Rhodesia. She went through a communist phase but became disenchanted after witnessing the reality in the Soviet Union. She was awarded a Noble Prize in Literature in 2007. She has been married twice and has three children.

Ben, in the World.

by Doris Lessing.

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, a   dull, heavy frock is draped over the word ‘intellectual’ in Communist Czechoslovakia; the irony is especially starling since this twisted and warped meaning of the word, already adopted in daily life and superseded the original one there, should be spread over the page of a novel, a work of fiction. Newspeak is a prophecy, after all. Yet, however unjust and abominable I might find this condemnation, I’m going to stamp it on the cover of Ben, in the World. It’s not a thumb-down verdict. I wish it were that simple but good novels never are.

In and with all respect, the novella is very much about modern life. Doris Lessing offered a chilling but perceptive version of its many vices, and how humanity, its tenderness as well as weaknesses. Lessing’s sentences throughout were uncomplicated, sometimes broken which, I find, effectively mimics the fuss-not, tact-free, fast-and-easy style that characterizes modern life, and the simple-minded Ben. Take the following excerpt:

“So he took the old, old road to London, rich London, where surely there must be a little something for him too. There he did find work, was cheated again, lost heart, and Ellen Briggs found him starving in a supermarket.” (20)

The structure of the first sentence, simple with repetition, is almost one lifted from a bedside fairytales collection. Likewise, you can say it’s from the mouth of a child. The end bit carries the wistful tone of an uncertain young man. What follows is a loose pattern, essentially draws a picture of the haphazard life Ben leads in busy, busily indifferent London. For me, these are painful delights you pick up page after page. While Lessing’s narrative prowess marvels you, the world constructed with the very same strength leaves you cold and disappointed – it’s all too oddly familiar.

But now, let’s go back to the equally odd meaning of ‘intellectual’. It’s obvious in Kundera’s work, that there’s an implication of detachment and lack of passion to it. Intelligentsia are often – be it under Communist or democratic governments – are often disregarded or dismissed for being a habitant of the ivory tower, people who have immense knack with theories and hypotheses, but show no sense at all with the widespread depravation beyond their white, blank walls. I’m not saying Lessing is ‘intellectual’ theme-wise. Now, perhaps it’s time, before this piece gets any deeper, and in case there’s anyone reading (this jumble of English words on the internet, I mean), I’d better give a sketch of the story now. It’s a tale of serial rejections and betrayals. Ben Lovatt is a huge and hideous eighteen-year-old boy, with a hyper-nervous, occasionally violent temperament. His appearance is deceptive though for Ben has a simple mind, something that makes cheating him extremely easy and very often, irresistible to people around him. After being abandoned by his family, Ben begins his reluctant adventures in London, Marseilles and Rio.

The only fine flaw with Ben, for me anyway, is the characterization – the reader is given a distant and minimum knowledge about the characters’ background and their thoughts, take the main female casts in Ben’s life as examples. We know the basic about Rita and Teresa, prostitutes in London and Rio, both had a difficult time with their less than caring parents, and are fond of Ben, wants to help him but is either hand or courage-tied. At times, even the driest journalist beats Lessing in tone and dramatization as in this scene where Teresa, the simple girl taking care of Ben in Brazil is cornered by a female scientist to hand the boy over for ‘some tests’:

‘She [Teresa] was afraid. This immediate, honest and true reaction was swept away because of her awe at words like scientist, science: she knew nothing about all that, her education had not been much more than reading, writing and arithmetic, and a lot of religion. She knew she was ignorant, but not how ignorant: Inez’s education was to her a wonder, something distant and unreachable […] Inez knew she was being deceitful, but her education had taught her that truth, scientific truth, was more important than anything else: you could say that her education had as much religion in it as Teresa’s.’ (121)

Lessing is like phantom, hovering above and around the confronting women, her gaze piercing, unsympathetic. This critical approach to one’s own creations almost to the point of lack of emotional involvement in turn bars the reader from these fictive people. I didn’t cringe when Teresa foolishly gives Ben away nor when it was revealed, as any reader expects, that Inez betrays her friend’s trust. I was left unruffled. The story – style and plot – so carefully planned and conscious of its themes reads like a research paper. Lessing played the role of public intellectual with dexterity, but not a novelist. This perhaps is the best I can come up with in expressing my slight disappointment.

Theme-wise, the three cities, different in culture and degree of modernization, are bounded by a common, unshakable faith in development. Development, the word that steals into café chit-chat, pops up its cheeky face whenever possible at international submits, have you ever asked yourself what exactly do you mean when it creeps up (or out between) your lips in conversation? How do you measure development? Is there an end to it? What Lessing put to the reader in Ben are the flickering ashes in the all-engulfing fire of development, people who just didn’t make it and eventually end up in the drain for one reason or another – boys and girls neglected or abused by parents end up in the streets, living on the edge as traffickers and prostitutes; elderly people forgotten by the state to which they’ve worked all their lives to help build. Among these less fortunate lots is Ben, the most misfortunate of all. He doesn’t even have a tinge of the looks and wit to make it on his own. Ben’s vulnerability is painfully obvious and it’s precisely this that makes him the perfect target of drug dealers, and desperate twats short of cash. Johnston and Rita in London pack him on a plane with drugs to traffic for them; a numbskull director in Rio sniffs Ben’s capital and treats him as his patron, all willfully turn a blind eye to Ben’s needs.

As said, the story is set in our time, our world, one that’s obsessed with the idea of development and capitalism. This vulnerable, socially rejected anti-hero represents all those left behind, and how they’re conveniently forgotten or even curtly swept aside. Teresa’s words at the end poise a cold mirror to the readers, and ask us to take a good steady look at our true, ugly selves. ‘I know we are pleased that he is dead and we don’t have to think about him,’ she says after Ben has jumped to his death in the mountains. Too true. Whenever problems crop up, we immediately shoot at other people – governments, schools, anyone at hand, occupy ourselves with culprits-hunting, not problem solving. A BBC program brought home one issue which easily escaped any modern man – that social inequality is generally accepted though we’re not happy with it. We moan and growl sometimes, about the widening income gap but accepted it comes with the package of capitalism and development, and so as long as at the end of the day, we have a roof over ourselves, food to fill our stomachs, it’s normal to have beggars prowling down the streets, old men and women rummaging through dustbins for a bit of scrape paper and cans. The indifference that’s part of us, part of modern life is dragged to glaring light by Teresa’s line, it’s better not to think about the ‘problems’, not to even look at the eyesores.

Lessing created a hero whose starting point in life is down in the abyss, compared to the majority. Ben is a child trapped in an all-powerful adult body. He is a stigma to his wealthy family and proper London. Instead of welcoming him and giving him a helping hand, we’re more comfortable, as all city people, artists, professionals and workers, trampling all over him in our frenzy climb up the social and income ladders. We are all ready to do just that – Ben is an innocent accomplice to traffickers, sex toy to a prostitute, easy pawn for scientists – a faithful portrait of modern life, one that we cease to see anything unusual or even wrong. But in fact, standing aside, arms crossed, we’re allowing what happens to Ben to continue, we are in fact passively perpetuating social inequalities and vices.

The Summer holidays are drawing to an end, but the battle against teenage drugs abuse is an endless one. As is obvious, the issue draws wide and increasing concern over the territory, and there is no shortage of finger-pointing – teachers, social workers, parents, the law enforcement, and of course young people are all the common and preferred targets. They don’t do their job, and that’s why drugs problems are getting out of hand, and that’s why we’re told, the government is stepping in to curb this vice. But think deeper. Is compulsory drug test the answer? Imagine a park with weeds and a few bugs. How did it get to this state? Through negligence. What will you propose to turn it lush and green again? Ruthless weeding? Sounds more like an idea from an unsound mind. No, you wouldn’t dream of doing that cos that will ruin the soil, uproot clear every bud. Still, you won’t get what you set out for. That’s exactly what it seems the government is doing – blind, mindless eradication – but what will it get rid of in the end? Trust between teachers and students; and a clearly defined legal boundary we’ve enjoyed so far. Definitely not the vice. The bottom of the issue, as in Ben’s case, are the needs and addressing the needs of those slagging behind. Why do young people throw their lives away, why do they find life as itself so unbearable? Perhaps we should answer these questions before speeding down a cliff.

A quick search on the internet shows that the novella is not well-received, a pygmy among Lessing’s other giants. Readers invariably found the ending abrupt and inconclusive, the seemingly pointlessness of the plot that is not really going anywhere. But far from being awkward, I found the ending sad and powerful, a brazen reflection of our world and our cowardice.

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Literatur-Nobelpreis für Bob Dylan?

Bob Dylan (*1941)

Die Berliner Zeitschrift «Literaturen» meint in ihrem jüngsten Heft, der US-Pop-, Folk- und Rocksänger Bob Dylan sollte den nächsten Nobelpreis für Literatur erhalten. Denn immerhin sei er «der einflussreichste und wirkungsmächtigste Lyriker der Moderne». Das Werk des inzwischen 68-jährigen sei «lebendig und bleibt in Bewegung, nicht zuletzt durch ihn selbst und die fortgesetzte Neuinterpretation seiner alten Songs», heißt es in der aktuellen Ausgabe der Zeitschrift. «Bei ihm wird aus Dichtung Musik und aus Musik Poesie», schreibt das Heft weiter; «Einer wie er sollte endlich den Literaturnobelpreis bekommen.»
Alljährlich im Oktober vergibt in Stockholm das Nobelpreis-Komitee diese in verschiedenen natur- und geisteswissenschaftlichen Disziplinen dotierte, hoch angesehene Auszeichnung. Die Literatur-Preisträger der letzten fünf Jahre waren Elfriede Jelinek, Harold Pinter, Orhan Pamuk, Doris Lessing und Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. Pro Jahr gehen nach inoffiziellen Angaben bis zu 300 Nominierungen in Stockholm ein. Vorschläge einreichen können neben Literatur- und Linguistikprofessoren auch frühere Preisträger, Mitglieder der Schwedischen Akademie und Vertreter von Schriftstellerverbänden.

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“…Janet se está despertando.  Simultáneamente, Michael se remueve y siento su erección contra mis nalgas.  El rencor adopta la forma siguiente:  “Claro, escoge este momento en que yo estoy tensa oyendo despertarse a Janet” (…)   Es una lucha agotadora.  Michael me penetra por detrás, medio dormido, con fuerza y apretándome.  Me posee de un modo impersonal,  y por eso yo  no reacciono como cuando le hace el amor a Anna (…)  Mientras Michael se agarra a mí y me llena, en el cuarto vecino continúan los ruidos, y yo sé que él también los oye, y que parte de su excitación proviene de tomarme en momentos arriesgados, y que para él Janet, la niña de ocho años, representa en cierto modo a las mujeres, a las otras mujeres a quienes traiciona durmiendo conmigo…

…Durante los breves segundos que tardo en ponerme la bata para ir a ver a Janet, mi rencor se vuelve furibundo.  Antes de reunirme con Janet, me lavo a toda prisa la entrepierna para que no la turbe el olor a sexo, a pesar de que todavía no sabe qué es.  El olor me gusta y detesto lavarme con prisas; por eso me pongo de mal humor (…)  Pero cuando cierro tras de mi la puerta del cuarto de Janet y la veo sacando la cabeza de la cama, con el pelo negro en desorden y la carita pálida (la mía) sonriente, mi rencor se desvanece tras la costumbre de la disciplina:  casi enseguida se transforma en afecto (…)  Me reduzco de tamaño por el cariño hasta ser como Janet, y me convierto en Janet.”

(1962 – del cuaderno azul)

“…Hay cierto tipo de proceso social que vuelve estúpidos términos como “crimen”.  Y al pensar en esto siento que me nace otra idea.  Y sigo pensando, confusamente:  “El Partido Comunista, como cualquier otra institución, sigue existiendo gracias al proceso de absorber en su seno a quienes le critican.  Les absorbe o les destruye.  Siempre he visto la sociedad, las sociedades, organizadas de la siguiente manera:  una sección dirigente o gobierno, y otras secciones que se le oponen y que acaban transformando aquella o suplantándola”.  Pero la realidad no es en absoluto así.  De pronto, lo veo todo de un modo diferente.  Hay un grupo de hombres endurecidos y fosilizados a quienes se oponen nuevos jóvenes revolucionarios como lo fue John Butte en su tiempo.  Se crea así entre los dos grupos un conjunto, un equilibrio.  Y luego, al grupo de hombres fosilizados y endurecidos como John Butte se opone un grupo nuevo de gente viva y crítica.  Pero el centro de ideas muertas y secas no existiría sin los brotes de nueva vida que, a su vez, se transforman rápidamente en madera muerta y sin savia.  En otras palabras:  yo, la camarada Anna -y ahora, al recordarlo, el tono irónico con que me llama el camarada Butte me atemoriza-, conservo vivo al camarada Butte, le alimento y, a su debido tiempo, me convertiré en él.  Y en esto no hay bien ni mal, sino simplemente un proceso, una rueda que gira”.

(1962 – del cuaderno rojo)

“…soy incapaz de escribir la única clase de novela que me interesa:  un libro dorado de una pasión intelectual o moral tan fuerte que pueda crear un orden, una nueva manera de ver la vida.  Ello se debe, sin duda alguna, a que me he desparramado en exceso.  He decidido no volver a escribir una novela.  Tengo cincuenta “temas” sobre los que podría escribir, y todos serían suficientemente aptos.  Si hay algo de lo que podamos estar seguros, es de que seguirán fluyendo de las editoriales novelas aptas e informativas.  Yo sólo poseo una de las menos importantes cualidades necesarias para escribir:  la curiosidad.  Es la curiosidad del periodista.  Sufro tormentos de frustración y de deficiencia en razón de la imposibilidad de introducirme en las áreas de la vida que mi modo de vivir, mi educación, sexo, ideas políticas y diferencias de clase me prohíben.  Es la enfermedad de alguna de la mejor gente de la época actual:  los unos soportan bien sus efectos, mientras que los otros acaban cascados a causa de ello; es una nueva sensibilidad, un intento semiconsciente de alcanzar una nueva comprensión imaginativa.  Pero eso, para el arte, resulta fatal.  A mí sólo me interesa extenderme hasta el límite, vivir lo más plenamente posible.”

(1962 – del cuaderno negro)

On October 22:

1734 Daniel Boone, American pioneer and hunter, was born.

1797 André-Jacques Garnerin made the first recorded parachute jump 1,000 meters (3,200 feet) above Paris.

1811 – Franz Liszt, Hungarian pianist and composer was born.

1836 Sam Houston wss inaugurated as the first President of the Republic of Texas.

1877 The Blantyre mining disaster in Scotland killed 207 miners.

1883 The Metropolitan Opera House in New York City opened with a performance of Gounod’s Faust.

1919 – Doris Lessing, British writer, Nobel Prize laureate, was born.

Doris Lessing at lit.cologne 2006

1924 Toastmasters International was founded.

1946 Deepak Chopra, Indian-American physician and writer was born.

1953 Laos gained its independence from France.

1960 Mali  gained its indepndence from France.

1964 Jean-Paul Sartre  was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but turned down the honor.

1966 The Supremes became the first all-female music group to have a No. 1 selling album (The Supremes A’ Go-Go).

The Supremes: Diana Ross (left), Mary Wilson (center), Florence Ballard (right) circa 1965

1972 James K. Baxter died.

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia.