Out, damned damp!

Despite reasonably good intentions, I find myself once again up against it tonight, without the time I'd hoped to set aside to blog. Fortunately, however, I have in hand more good bits from Exodus, the newest novel in Lars Iyer's Spurious trilogy. Herewith, in hopes of convincing anyone who's ever worked in even the fringes of academia (or even, say, culture in general) that they should buy these books, one of my favorite bits thus far:

Spital Tongues, Newcastle. There it is, W. says, as we walk past the allotments. There it is, the terrace where my flat is buried. The dampest row of flats there ever was, W. says. The dampest Tyneside flats, built atop a culvetted river, atop a coal tunnel now used for sewage, atop old mine workings, now full of water. The dampest, most rat-infested flats, which should have been demolished a hundred years ago, but have been allowed to survive in their degradation. The last of the slums after all the slums have been cleared . . .

And then there’s my flat, the centre of the catastrophe, W. says. My flat, a swamp in the shape of a flat, a flat-plague, interred in its pit. My flat that the sun doesn’t reach, deep underground like a mausoleum to the world’s greatest idiot. My flat, like a barrow for the greatest of imbeciles. . .

‘What possessed you to buy an underground flat?’ W. says. To be close to the earth, he says, was that it? To be close to the toads and the worms, to the creatures of the earth?

Slug trails along the floorboards. . . Curled up woodlice in room corners. . . — ‘The flat’s being taken back by nature,’ W. says. He’s right. The walls are green. Mushrooms grow from the ceiling. And then there’s the damp, of course. The ever-present damp. Is it alive? Is it dead? It’s beyond life, and beyond death, W. says. They should send scientists out to study it, my damp, W. says. They should try to communicate with it, like the scientists in Solaris. It’s more intelligent than us, W. says, he’s sure of it. My damp has something momentous to say, something profound. In fact, isn’t it speaking now, to those who have ears to hear? Isn’t it rumbling in the darkness? I should know, W. says. I live with it.—You understand the damp,’ W. says. Or rather, the damp understands itself in me.

. . .

What next?, W. wonders. What will be the next plague? There are the slugs, of course, but they’re scarcely a plague. There are the ants — and the mushrooms. But he believes something more dreadful is gathering itself in my flat, W. says. Something Lovecraftian. Something cosmic.

It's barely even February, but I suspect I can already mark this one down as the funniest novel I'l read this year. And the most entertainingly biting.

Lars Iyer is not getting any more hopeful.

The gray and drippy depths of winter are the perfect time to read Lars Iyer. His new book, Exodus, the third volume in his Spurious trilogy, was just published, and in honor of that I'll share a brief piece about the middle book, Dogma, that I wrote a while back for a year-end-favorites wrap-up at my office that we didn't end up needing.

---

"You should never learn from your mistakes, W. says. He never has, which is why he associates with me."

That's how Lars Iyer opens his novel Dogma, and that's the tone—lacerating, ironic, dismissive, fatalistic—that runs through the whole book. An account by a low-rung British academic (named Lars) of his friendship and intellectual collaboration with W., a professor of philosophy, the book largely consists of W.'s caustic enumeration of Lars's many failings as a thinker, friend, and human being. But what other than failure, W. suggests, can we expect other in this decrepit world of hollowed-out universities ("The rumour is they're going to close down all the humanities, every course. . . . They'll probably make me professor of badminton ethics."), sham intellectualism ("All our books, all our philosophies, are only articles in some gossip magazine"), and commercial pseudoreality ("Pigeon Forge. The end is nigh.")? Like a demented, brainy cousin of Withnail and I crossed with the early, blithe and vicious Waugh, the book is hilarious, rude, and deeply pessimistic, yet at times moving and even profound, the kind of satire that razes our sordid reality and then takes the extra step of salting the earth, lest we take it in our heads to let any of that nonsense grow up again.

---

Spurious was one of my favorite books of 2011, Dogma of 2012, and I fully expect Exodus to hold a similar position for 2013. Hell, I'm only about twenty-five pages in and I'm already quoting it in e-mails. The following went out to a friend this morning:

My living room. W. takes his place on the Chair of Judgement: "Bring me gin!" It's going to be a long night. He has a lot to get through, W. says, leaning his chair back against the wall.

My failings, my failures: the usual topic. The failure of my life, of my thought. The failure of my books. Familiar topics. My past failures, my present one: yes we know about those, W. says. but my future failings . . . that's what W. wants to talk about tonight.

"Where will you have gone wrong?", he says. "What will you have done? What crimes have you yet to commit? How will you have managed to have failed anew?"

It's quite a tense, isn't it, the future perfect?, W. says. Who will I have disappointed? Him, of course, W. says. Whose hopes will I have defiled? His, of course, W. says. His hopes.

Ah, what will I have done to him, W., in the future? What terrors await him? -- "Will you have written another book? Will you have come up with another escape plan? Ah, but he know what will have happened. I know. We'll have been sacked, and living on the dole.

If that's whetted your appetite, you can get more of Iyer's inimitable writing at his blog--and after a bit of wandering there, I expect you'll want to make unseemly haste to your nearest bookstore and buy up the trilogy.

The sacred and profaned library

On Wednesday, I quoted a letter from Machiavelli about how he dressed up before entering his library, as an act of appreciation for the thought and learning it provided him. Today, a counterpoint, from the ever-caustic Lars Iyer, creator of the blog Spurious, which became the book Spurious and, now, a second volume, Dogma. I'll have more to say about the many pleasures of Dogma soon, but for today I'll just share a passage about a personal library, appropriate dress, and respect.

The library belongs to Lars's friend, interlocutor, and abusive rotten conscience, W., whom Lars is visiting.

Up another flight to the top floor, and the holy of holies: W.'s study. His bookshelves--not too many, since W. gives away most of his books ("I don't hoard them, like you," he says), but enough for all the essentials. His Hebrew/English dictionary. His volumes of Cohen. His collected Rosenzweigs.

W. is terrified that he will soon have to leave his house--that the humanities at his university are on the brink of being crushed by the overwhelming need to demonstrate value, that they'll soon be replaced by yet another Department of Sport. So he is attentive to his house now, savoring his moments there.

Nonetheless, he doesn't feel the same duty that Machiavelli does to wear his finest robes:

How does he dress himself for scholarship?, I ask him. He wears his dressing gown, W. says. He sits in his dressing gown and reads, looking up difficult German words (which is to say, most of them), in the dictionary.

But such a space can still be profaned:

This is the room where I sleep when I stay. W. pulls out a camp bed and makes it up. He has to fumigate his study after I've slept in it, he says. It has to be re-consecrated, his temple of scholarship.

This, this must be what the ancients meant when they wrote paeans to friendship!

Kafka remains the rage, or, Siding with Spurious

{Photo by rocketlass.}

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about my love of Kafka, and of my preference for reading his works as essentially self-contained little worlds, strange and ultimately uninterpretable. To attempt to extract meaning from his fragmentary parables and inwardly spiraling novels, I argued, was in some sense to fail them utterly: they are to be taken whole, swallowed like a pill that, once inside you, spreads out to do its magic in ways you can't quite understand, let alone articulate. To extract their meaning is to extract their life; the carcass that remains is of no interest, and their essential organs can't be transplanted into any other context

Had I been thinking, I would have enlisted Spurious to my cause. I've praised Spurious in these pages before: the crabbed discussions on the exact nature and ramifications of failure, loss of ambition, lassitude, and general impotence in which he's engaged for the past several years with his interlocutor, W., on his blog are one of the true idiosyncratic pleasures of the Internet.

And now they're a book! A novel, perhaps?--it gets filed under fiction if only because no bookstore has a section devoted to Meditations or Grumbles. (Every bookstore should have a section for Rants, however, though Spurious wouldn't really belong there, either: a rant requires energy and the confidence of your convictions, neither of which Spurious would claim.)

Anyway, Spurious is sound, very sound, on Kafka. "Kafka was always our model, we agree. How is it possible that a human being could write like that?" he writes. W. takes it even farther:

For a long time, W. thought he might become Kafka. He was all W. read. Constantly, again and again, everything by him and everything about him, and he speaks lovingly of discovering the brightly coloured Schocken editions of Kafka.

But literary obsession is, like all obsessive loves, ultimately unhealthy:

At the same time, we have Kafka to blame for everything. Our lives each took a wrong turn when we opened The Castle. It was quite fatal: there was literature itself! We were finished. What could we do, simple apes, but exhaust ourselves in imitation? We had been struck by something we could not understand. It was above us, beyond us, and we were not of its order.

Literature softened our brains, says W. --"We should have been doing maths. If we knew maths, we might amount to something. As it is, we'll amount to nothing."

As for the question of interpretation, well, we'll let Spurious and W. opine on Max Brod, blessed (for all his failings) be his name:

Max Brod, so unselfish in his promotion of Kafka, yet so given to a vague and general pathos--to amorphous stirrings wholly alien to the precision of the writing of his friend--has always served as both our warning and our example.

What could he understand of Kafka? Weren't his interpretive books--which did so much to popularise the work of his friend--at every turn, a betrayal of Kafka?

So instead we imbibe, and we try not to overdo it, and to never lose sight of (or be inordinately borne down by) the fact that, as Spurious writes,

We know what genius is, says W. aphoristically, but we know we're not geniuses. It's a gift, he says, but it's also a curse. We can recognise genius in others, but we don't have it ourselves.

Which, obliquely, brings to mind a passage from one of Kafka's letters, sent to Minze Eisner in late 1921:

Are you a little more cheerful than the last time you wrote me and I was truly at a loss how to answer? I often am apt to beat my forehead against such a barrier.

And thus back to Spurious (and Spurious):

The last days! What are we going to do?--"We'll be the first to go under," says W., "we're weak. Gin?" Yes to gin, no to the apocalypse. What time is it? Already late, though you can never be sure in the shuttered living room.

Yes to gin. Open the shutters; enjoy your weekend.

"no one's going to love you, don't be alarmed"

{Photo by rocketlass.}

It seems fitting that this day of fireworks and celebrations opened, for me, with a post from the mysterious and self-lacerating Spurious, who earlier this week alerted us to the existence of a museum in Lisbon devoted to Fernando Pessoa--and off-handedly noted that the museum was a tremendous disappointment. {Let's be honest, though: doesn't that seem right? Would you want to come out of a Pessoa museum invigorated, transformed, calling your friends to tell them of your love? No, no, instead you want to leave by an unmarked door, pull your hat lower, hunch your shoulders into your coat, and wander off, barely looking at the street signs; your silent room will find you.}

Today Spurious is gnawing at some overwrought, yet admirable, lines from Alberto Giacometti in which the sculptor finds himself "sobb[ing] with rage" at his inability to express himself in words. Why, wonders Spurious, is the very thought of sobbing over recalcitrant prose these days more likely to make us smile with amusement than shake with sympathetic frustration? The investigation leads Spurious {him? her? I don't know that anyone knows, aside from Spurious's occasional interlocutor, W.} right back to Pessoa, then through Beckett and Blanchot, until finally Spurious surrenders, offering a closing paragraph that opens with a ring of rapturous abandon--

Stab yourself in the neck, drink until you fall over. Copy out Giacometti's lines on the walls of your padded cell. Laughter, endless laughter: literature has a fever and is burning up.

--and gets better from there.

All of which led me, too, to Pessoa, in the moments just after dawn, when, having woken with the birds, I was alone in the quiet house; as always, a few minutes spent paging through The Book of Disquiet were rewarded. Here, from "A Factless Autobiography," Pessoa {or his heteronym Bernardo Soares} quietly urges us to rapture by laying out its opposite:

The world belongs to those who don't feel. The essential condition for being a practical man is the absence of sensibility. The chief requisite for the practical expression of life is will, since this leads to action. Two things can thwart action--sensibility and analytic thought, the latter of which is just thought with sensibility. . . . Every man of action is basically cheerful and optimistic, because those who don't feel are happy. You can spot a man of action by the fact he's never out of sorts.

Can those who are never out of sorts really ever be in sorts, though? Can a state exist without its opposite? Or do they simply exist, unchanging and unchanged, neither gaining nor losing--simply, uncomplicatedly, unreflectively being? Is it better to rage like Giacometti?

In principle, yes, for we all can see what Giacometti made of his rage. But I will admit that I tend to keep an even keel, that right now I am unequivocally enjoying sitting on the back stairs in the summer breeze with my laptop, coffee, and ziggurat of books. Uncomplicatedly.

As Beckett had the first word of this post, in the headline, it seems right to let him also have the last one, stepping forward, stepping back, stepping forward. If he can't convince us, no one can.

From "Texts for Nothing" (1950-52)

Leave, I was going to say leave all that. What matter who's speaking, someone said what matter who's speaking. There's going to be a departure, I'll be there, I won't miss it, it won't be me, I'll be here, I'll say I'm far from here, it won't be me, I won't say anything, there's going to be a story, someone's going to try and tell a story. Yes, no more denials, all is false, there is no one, it's understood, there is nothing, no more phrases, let us be dupes, dupes of every time and tense, until it's done, all past and done, and the voices cease, it's only voices, only lies.

Now hie thee out into the holiday and rapturously set some things on fire.