To the limit of glancing?

In his fiction, to my knowledge, Nabokov wrote about the Holocaust at paragraph length only once – in the incomparable Pnin (1957). Other references, as in Lolita, are glancing.

-Martin Amis on Nabokov’s decline in The Guardian

What about…?

“How well I would write,” wrote Calvino, “were I not here.”

The previous post originally had “But there are of course other KINDS OF SPEECH in which the speaker is reluctant to be present.” What followed, however, did not name kinds of speech, it named kinds of reluctance–that is, speakers’ motives. An unanticipated shift was made from impersonal forms to personal ones.

The previous post addresses a sort of abdication. A backing out of, or dispossesion. The verbal opposite of what one might call ownership. An attempt to abstract beyond oneself, an attempt to take an impersonal position. Not just an abdication then, also a sort of presumption. The concomitant so-called objective tone brings to mind so-called scientific writing. But there are of course other cases in which the speaker is reluctant to be present. Speakers who are at odds with their own objectification, for instance. The especially self-conscious. Speakers reluctant to assume a certain kind of authority–that is, the authorial kind.

An effect of avoiding the first person in these posts is a curiously detached tone. Neither A Man Named Me nor Jawbone, in the third person, has been sufficiently flexible. (Shrug.)

Links sometimes die. Like, to images. The expectation, or hope, is that when this happens, if it is left that way, it will make this blog look weathered, or organic–as in, given to decay. The visible appearance of a natural death. But something else often seems to be the case, and it is hard to resist making an obvious, and one suspects quick, fix.

Art

Art

Francesca: Have you ever tried blogging?

Wells: No… the idea of blogging seems really weird. I don’t know why writers do it. The idea of writing in a way that’s not careful seems kind of insane if you’re a fiction writer, or a long-form nonfiction writer. Maybe there’s something invigorating about it, but for me so much of the process is worrying about every word — just belching a bunch of stuff out there seems strange. Also the web is really weird. I don’t like the idea that stuff you write is just going to be on there, and people will be able to access it whenever, forever. A piece of writing should have its own little half-life and when people are no longer interested in reading or anthologizing, it should be forgotten.

–Wells Tower in Index Magazine

“the particular vanity of perceiving social life as a problem to be solved by the good will of individuals”

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