All posts in category writing
‘what kind of writer am i…’
Posted by sean on August 3, 2018
https://sd-stewart.com/2018/08/03/what-kind-of-writer-am-i/
2017 in books and music
Snow Bunting at North Point State Park, Maryland, USA. © 2016 S. D. Stewart
Following surgery to repair a pelvic fracture in January I was unable to put weight on my left leg for three months. One might think this would have resulted in a higher read count than usual for the year, but in fact my total fell short of my average over the past few years. Part of this was actually due to a concerted effort to slow down and read more leisurely. However, another reason was that once I was fully mobile I simply did not want to sit around reading, so I ended up reading much less in the second half of the year, though toward the end as bird migration tapered off and the weather grew colder my pace did pick up again.
Below is the list of books I assigned 5-star ratings on Goodreads in 2017. A number of books I rated 4 stars probably deserve a place here, too, but I had to draw the line somewhere. In the 4-star category I will mention the two Julien Gracq novels I read as being particularly noteworthy (The Castle of Argol and The Opposing Shore). Regrettably I believe both of these are out of print in English translation. However, I’m happy to report that NYRB has just reissued Gracq’s moodily atmospheric novel A Balcony in the Forest, so there’s hope now for future republication of his singular work in English.
In general this year was a good one for reissues of some of my favorite buried writers. Mid-20th century British avant-garde women writers fared especially well in 2017. Much of Leonora Carrington’s writing finally came back into print as part of the centennial celebration of her birth year, including short fiction collections in both U.S. and British editions, as well as her harrowing memoir Down Below and her children’s book The Milk of Dreams. A biography by Joanna Moorhead also appeared in the spring.
A 50th anniversary edition of Anna Kavan’s novel Ice came out from Penguin in the U.S. this fall. As the 50th anniverary of Kavan’s death approaches there has been a small surge of interest around her work. For example, the journal Women: A Cultural Review devotes its entire current issue to exploring various themes in Kavan’s work. Hopefully this new scholarship will help prompt Peter Owen to finally reprint Kavan’s mysterious novel Eagles’ Nest and the kaleidoscopic short fiction collection A Bright Green Field, both of which have inexplicably been languishing out of print for years. (For more on Anna Kavan visit the House of Sleep).
Finally, the brief but bright shooting star of Ann Quin’s literary career received a much-deserved coda when the subscription-based UK publisher And Other Stories released a collection of her unpublished stories and fragments, which includes the powerful (though incomplete) manuscript The Unmapped Country. This fragment had previously appeared in shorter form in the long out-of-print Beyond the Words anthology. (Note that non-subscribers will need to wait until mid-January 2018 for the official publication of this volume). While the publication of this book is a boon for Quin fans, it’s probably not the best place to start with her writing. In fact, her four published novels are all quite different, so it’s tough to suggest a starting point with Quin. On an initial recommendation, I began with Tripticks and actually did not care for it but still sensed there was something drawing me to Quin. I found that in Passages, which I consider to be her masterwork. Three comes in second place, followed by her debut, Berg. Thankfully, all of Quin’s novels remain in print courtesy of Dalkey Archive Press, bless their dedicated hearts.
I will just mention one other reissue of note, tangential to Ann Quin. In April, the micro press Verbivoracious Press (VP)* published the first volume of an omnibus edition of Alan Burns’ novels. Burns was part of a loosely connected band of British avant-garde writers in the 1960s that included Ann Quin, as well as B.S. Johnson, Eva Figes, Rayner Heppenstall, and others. His novel Europe After the Rain† draws interesting parallels to Kavan’s Ice and the relationship between the two novels is investigated in an article by Leigh Wilson in the previously mentioned issue of Women: A Cultural Review. In the past, VP, which specializes in reprinting ‘exploratory literature from Europe and beyond,’ also reissued a volume collecting two of Heppenstall’s novels (review), and many other experimental gems, including much of Christine Brooke-Rose‘s output.
*Unfortunately VP has closed its doors since this post appeared, so I have removed any relevant links.
†This novel was reprinted in 2019 by Calder.
2017 5-star books (in order read):
Being Upright: Zen Meditation and the Bodhisattva Precepts / Reb Anderson
The Passion of New Eve / Angela Carter (Review)
The Poor Mouth / Flann O’Brien (Review)
The Plains / Gerald Murnane (Review)
The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington (Review)
When the Time Comes / Maurice Blanchot (Review)
Snow Part / Paul Celan (Review)
S.S. Proleterka / Fleur Jaeggy (Review)
The Way of Chuang Tzu / Thomas Merton (Review)
The Rings of Saturn / W. G. Sebald (Review)
Alejandra Pizarnik: A Profile / Alejandra Pizarnik (Review)
Old Rendering Plant / Wolfgang Hilbig (Review)
If you’re a Goodreads user, my full list of books read in 2017 can be found here.
2017 soundtrack:
Barn Owl (and solo work by Jon Porras and Evan Caminiti)
Belgrado
Drab Majesty
Emma Ruth Rundle
Gate
Goat
Grails
Grouper
ISIS
Keluar
Kodiak
Marriages
Nadja
Neurosis
Portion Control
Scorn
Tim Hecker
Yellow Swans
…and too much post-punk to list (mostly by way of this finding aid)
Posted by sean on December 28, 2017
https://sd-stewart.com/2017/12/28/2017-in-books-and-music/
fiat lux
I remember. They said I wouldn’t but I do. I don’t remember everything, but enough.
Dawn is now breaking—through the window pink sky appears, followed by a spray of golden light. From close overhead a lone crow utters a single drawn-out caw. Silence follows.
The silence only spreads itself so far. I stretch out its thin covering and fold myself inside it.
This is neither a beginning nor an end. I know how I arrived. I can turn and see a faint trail threading back to the fields of my youth. There are burn marks where attempts at erasure have been made.
I wanted to help, in this one way, this very simple way. They said my ‘self-limiting naiveté’ would destroy me. They were wrong. Instead their rigid framework destroyed me.
The air was cold, like it is today. And these stretched and endless limbs were no more suited to it then than now.
What strange form of life it was. How grew the light late in winter days—spreading across fields, streaming out over the river. How the darkness hid our fears.
Holy songs and rituals haloed material desires. Now far off—now beyond—now tinny at the end of this dying line.
Sudden harmonics ring out like hinges from one wall of noise to the next. Awash in reverb, notes soar to the forbidding sky.
I am underneath them. They enter my bones. The fullness of sound enters me, expanding at speed to the point of fracture.
The rending leaves two tottering halves, headless and forlorn. Push one down the hill while the other spins and spins. Rotate or roll away, makes no difference.
Yet still the light remains, ever-present, flashing in our eyes. It illuminates the new but it is the same light, and from the same sources. Even with our backs turned it warms us.
As we return to plaster together the beginning of another day.
[Text extracted from several years’ worth of abandoned drafts and reassembled, with minimal edits, to form a new whole]
Posted by sean on December 13, 2017
https://sd-stewart.com/2017/12/13/prelude-to-nothing-let-there-be-light/
old rendering plant by wolfgang hilbig
New review of this brilliant, tangled web of words posted on the Book Reviews tab. For more information on the book, visit Two Lines Press.
Posted by sean on November 27, 2017
https://sd-stewart.com/2017/11/27/old-rendering-plant-by-wolfgang-hilbig/
small poems in prose [alejandra pizarnik]
The sun closed, the sense of the sun closed, the sense of the closing was illuminated.
*
A day arrives in which poetry is made without language, day in which the great and small desires scattered in the verses are called together, suddenly gathered in two eyes, the same ones I praised so much in the frantic absence of the blank page.
*
In love with the words that create small nights in the uncreated part of day and its fierce emptiness.
[Alejandra Pizarnik, Texts of Shadow and Last Poems (1982)]
(The Unstoppable Myth of Alejandra Pizarnik by Enrique Vila-Matas)
Posted by sean on November 7, 2017
https://sd-stewart.com/2017/11/07/small-poems-in-prose-alejandra-pizarnik/
at the border of writing
It was almost easy for him, there where he lived, to live almost without a sign, almost without a self, as if at the border of writing; close to this word, barely a word, rather a word too many, and in that nothing but a word from which, one day in the past, gently welcomed, he had received the salute that did not save, the summons that had awakened him. That could be told, even if, and especially if, nobody were there to hear it.
—Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond [translated by Lycette Nelson]
Posted by sean on August 29, 2017
https://sd-stewart.com/2017/08/29/at-the-border-of-writing/
when spirits decide
the planchette inscribed
ovals on the board
stay or go
we had asked
a reply of stay
led to a why
ovals came back
first spelled out
then drawn
over and over and over.
Posted by sean on July 25, 2017
https://sd-stewart.com/2017/07/25/when-spirits-decide/
spatial divide
Black sky of crows crowns mornings, bookends to nights of ferocious dream violence
[can an empty space feel occupied—be occupied—with no bodies present]
Jackal fear circles, breathing hidden threat-breath, by unknown summons
[can shadows of bodies, once (they have) / left, still linger, filling space once occupied]
Inside, a wavy line descends, evens out, climbs a steep peak—teeters—declines again
[two containers—one infinite, one finite—hold space—connecting valves open and shut to control in/voluntary flow—allowance for expansion / contraction]
Outside, surrounding space—unbroken—limbs recede at the height of uncertainty
(11-12.14 / 7.17)
Posted by sean on July 23, 2017
https://sd-stewart.com/2017/07/23/spatial-divide/
[revised] guidance [from two years ago]
There is nothing where you are going.
What do you mean…nothing.
I mean what I say.
That means nothing.
I understand it to mean something.
I think it’s just something to say…
[shrugs]
But there are things here…around me.
Are you certain.
Yes.
Describe them.
Leaves scattered on the sidewalk. A car’s headlights flicking on in the predawn gloom. The distant whistle of a train.
And do these things have meaning to you.
I-I’m not sure.
Take a closer look.
Well, I notice them.
And what about faces—do you see faces.
They are obscured.
Do you wish to see them with more clarity—to distinguish one from another.
Perhaps.
Now it is you who are evasive.
It is in my nature.
And everything that came before—what happened between when you left and when you returned—is it now gone.
Yes, for the most part. I see only glimpses but I cannot bring it all into focus.
In those glimpses you see more than in what surrounds you now. The latter is of little consequence.
How do you know.
It does not matter. What matters is in between.
In between what.
The words.
Posted by sean on July 20, 2017
https://sd-stewart.com/2017/07/20/revised-guidance-from-two-years-ago/
Moment death–
each day a thousandfold.
From atop the promontory:
Ahoy! The headwind wakes.
Connections cleave–
backwind pushes us.
I cannot stop it.
I cannot step into it.
Clinging tendrils,
even unthought-of,
gulliver us
to the not-now.
Tripartite refuge limps
on weakened limbs.
Ever-widening eyes
Astigmatized.
Posted by sean on July 12, 2017
https://sd-stewart.com/2017/07/12/7845/
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