On that day and in the days to come, when a boy was going to die, he
would first stop talking. His throat would be too dry and to speak
required too much energy. Then his eyes would sink deeper, circled in
ever darker shadows. He would no longer answer to his own name. His
walk would slow, his feet shuffling, and he would be among the boys who
would rest longer. Eventually a dying boy would find a tree, and he
would sit against the tree and fall asleep. When his head touched the
tree, the life in him would fall away and his flesh would return to the
earth.
The narrator of Dave Eggers' What Is the What circles
the subject of death concentrically - recounting terror, outrage and
anger by turns, as he both fears for his own life and watches his
Sudanese Lost Boy compatriots die in an endless variety of awful,
sudden or slow, often shocking ways; by slaughter at the hands of Arab
horsemen, attack by predators, aeroplanes, disease, infection and
starvation. Mainly though he's resigned to the fact that he can't
predict which of his companions will survive the terrible journey,
cannot know for sure if he himself will make it through. Obsessed with
this question Achak tries for while to use a friend, another lost boy
walking beside him, as a kind of index of his own health.
In the mirror of William K, I did not look well that day. My cheeks
were sunken, my eyes ringed in blue. My tongue was white, my hipbones
were visible through my shorts...
Very often through the book (which I wrote about already here)
Eggers returns to the topic of the flimsy separation between life and
death, puzzling at the all-too-easily passed border between survival
and extinction, existence and disappearance. Its a distinction that he
sees can exist even in life itself, when at another comical and
chilling point in the book he meets a solitary adult living alone in
the jungle, hiding from everyone. The un-named adult gives him food,
and jabbers continuously as he eats, lecturing Achak:
I don't live anywhere, and you should learn from this. Why do you
think I am alive, boy? I'm alive because no one knows I'm here. I live
because no one knows I'm here. I live because I do not exist.
Hugo Glendinning has a re-vamped website here
with images and texts about his work including collaborations with
Martin Creed, Adrian Heathfield, Franko B, Yinka Shonibare, Paola Pivi
(and me!). Arriving at Hugo's place to visit (in the real world)
there's often a moment where we'll end up at the computer, with Hugo
randomly opening folders to show me things that he's been working on
for himself, or with or for different people. From what's there on his
site I'm guessing that the notebook there will be a virtual version of
this 'what's new', which is great because he's always got pretty
fascinating projects on the go. Check out the images (as above) from Forced Entertainment's durational performance And On The Thousandth Night, the text and series of images of his son Louis sleeping and finally this one
of many images that he's been shooting for some Olympics related
project, in which kids create dance in East London locations. I'm sure
I'll be linking back and forth to Hugo's site a lot.
*
Another new blog/site I've been checking out is this one
from theatre director and writer David Gale, well known for his work
way back leading Lumiere & Son with Hillary Westlake. I really
liked this line from David's recent entry on American identity/Paris Hilton:
"Mythical figures are not people, they generally represent single
human characteristics rather than the complex of qualities that
comprise flesh and blood persons. We devise mythical figures for the
purposes of instruction - they’re not supposed to be something you
become".
"Bachelard says that our childhood homes physically form our
imaginations. So in a way we're always there, ripping up carpets
or digging into corners, or building whole new extensions I
guess. For me there's something very physical about [this
relationship to space] too - related to our understanding of our
bodies..."
*
M. mailed me a link to a 1995 sound installation piece by Janek Schaefer, titled Recorded Delivery.
Made by sending a voice/sound activated tape-recorder in a package on a
journey through the postal system from studio to gallery it looks like
a conceptual precursor for the great Tim Knowles Spy Box
piece I wrote about briefly a while ago and which involved a
boxed/rigged camera sent by post to record the sights of it's journey.
Audio samples, and details of a vinyl edition recording of the Janek
Schaefer Recorded Delivery are here.
Second place goes to this one:
Subject: On the site of each disintegration explosion, a fireball rose up first, immeasurably brighter than Sol itself.
First place goes to this one which came from my friend G. who just got
married. He was at the airport heading to honeymoon, sending and
checking last mail on wifi when it arrived.
Subject: In a lively row walking, drinking Sunset, voices, lights,
- all that's there, And at times lowering our eyelids Under someone's
assiduous stare.
The devil got all the best tunes but those spammers got all the best lines.
Really loving Dave Eggers' What is the What after strong recommendations from M John Harrison and from Hugo. I've always really liked Eggers as a writer of sentences. There's stuff in Heartbreaking Work and in You Shall Know Our Velocity
that has all the energy and verve of Kerouac at his best. I read
Kerouac at 17/18 I think, along with Burroughs whose hardcore cut-up Nova Express I accidentally picked up on Derby Market, having mistaken it for something by Edgar (Tarzan)
Rice Burroughs, whose probably stupid books about some bloke marooned
on Mars I liked. Oh well - I'm glad of these accidents of naming and
the alphabet. Some of Kerouac and Burroughs are really embedded in me
(though I think thankfully the Rice Burroughs is pretty well all washed
away). In Kerouac and Burroughs I found sentences, runs of words, but
more than that energies, approaches to language that I still draw on
from time to time, in that strange way that we do incorporate language
from other people, sample it, replay it, echo it, often unknowing and
unwittingly.
Despite the stylistic connection to Kerouac I've sometimes been
pushed back by the content in Eggers - the whole Real World/MTV thing
in the back end of Heartbreaking Work
I found too painful, or too thin, I was never sure which. In What is
the What though he's given up on the flowing, stream-of-consciousness,
post-Kerouac sentences and on the eternal teenager routine anyway and
replaced them with a very tight narrative structure and with what Mike
describes in his TLS review
as a kind of ventriloquism job; a manoeuvre that has Eggers inhabiting
someone else's life story entirely (that of Sudanese 'Lost Boy'
Valentino Achak Deng), whilst (at the same time) standing far back from
it (writing-wise) in order to let it breathe. No showing off, except
the kind of showing off that's all about not-seeming-to. Really great,
awful, disquieting, elegant. Funny too.
Before that I got about one third into We Have to Talk About Kevin.
I wasn't buying really. Didn't like the narrator, didn't believe in
'her/it' either and I really seemed to be being asked to believe. Had
that feeling I get sometimes with overbearing narrators that if I was
sat next to this person at a party or on a bus or whatever I would make
my excuses and leave. I guess the extended conceit (letters to the
ex-partner) started to drive me nuts too.
Listening (meanwhile) to No Age. Can't remember why a kind of lo-fi Los Angeles punk-duo crossed my radar at this point. Maybe via Other Music. The No Age CD Weirdo Rippers seems very cool I think, just playing some tracks from it here and there at the moment. In fact I am playing the track Everybody's Down many times over and over and the neighbours are fucking loving it. Ha ha.
Last weeks image residue: canisters of something called patio gas,
grinning burning men wrestled to the ground out of flaming Cherokee
jeeps by random have-a-go holiday-makers, cops in those white boiler
suits again, a forensic facility in Kent called The Igloo, flooded
streets, sunken cars and floating skips. Must be Summer.
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Hugo Glendinning has a re-vamped website