Riddley Walker again

Patrick Jehle has a post on Riddley Walker on Night Hauling. Of the 25 voters in the Paperpools Riddley Walker poll, 13 think it's a masterpiece of 20th century fiction, 3 have heard of it but never read it and 9 have never heard of it.

This is, of course, a ludicrously small sample, but the pattern is what I would expect to find for an unjustly neglected work of genius (if a similar poll were run for Ulysses, even one vote in 'never heard of it' would be astounding, though it would not be surprising to get many votes in 'heard of but not read' ). More Riddley:

Befor I write down that 1st connexion I bes say a word or 2 about connexions and I myt as wel tel Truth. When my dad ben a live I all ways thot I cud do better connexions nor him when my chance come. How he don it he wud mummel slow and quyet and start and stop with long sylents be twean and mosly his connexions wernt nothing as citing. Every body liket them tho. They all ways went strait to the hart of the matter plus they wer jus that littl bit else nor mos peopl wuntve thot of it qwite the same way.

Like the time wen I ben 7 or 8 when Littl Salting Fents got largent in by Dog Et Form. That ben up on Top Shoar and we ben down by Fork Stoan then in Crippel the Farn Fents. Every body heard of it tho and talking on it. Dog Et tol some cow shit story of a Outland raid from over water they said thats how Littl Salting got ther Big Man kilt plus 8 mor dead and the res of the crowd sparsit out to who ever wud take them in...in that woal story Dog Et tol ther bint a word of Truth only how many dead. Every body knowit Dog Et said, 'Les largen in to gether' and Littl Salting said 'No' which then it wer arga warga for them.

Wel the Pry Mincer and the Wes Mincer don 1 of ther specials dint they. Coarse they don. My dad tol me that show over when he ben learning me. I myt as wel tel it here then when I write down the connexion for it thatwl show his styl.

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Yvain Dewaele on French and English books

I got an e-mail from YD, a reader in Rouen, and wrote back saying how much I liked the savage austerity of formal French prose, which has no equivalent in English — English texts show such a terrible anxiety to please. This, I thought, was why Beckett was drawn to writing in French. YD's English is very good, but I urged him to write in French if he preferred. He sent back a reply which I thought everyone would want to see -- except that, of course, all readers of the blog do not know French, and I am a very bad translator.

One thing this shows, of course, is why we do need e-books if fiction is to be everything it is capable of being. I have texts I have never bothered to try to publish, because they include a quotation from Vasari in Italian, from Spinoza in Latin, from Adorno in German -- and the texture of the piece depends on moving from one language to another. In an electronic medium it would be easy to let the reader either click on passages s/he did not understand to bring up a translation, or even to set the text from the start for English -- this is no different from what we do all the time with DVDs. That is quite different from having wall-to-wall English published as the official version. It's also quite different from cluttering up the text with translations every time another language is brought on the page -- if you do that you spoil the thing that made the text interesting in the first place.

One way to publish such a text, of course, would be in a blog like Wordpress, where translations could be included under the fold. It's a clunky workaround, but it does also mean images can be included. The good thing about these blogs with their prefab templates and features is that they bring out into the open constraints that operate on books without being visible: one can see the extent to which formal possibilities are opened up or closed off by technical decisions made off-stage. Books don't lay bare the things they make it impossible for us to do.

After YD wrote back about French and English books he then wrote another e-mail about Serbian writers. I don't know Serbian writers at all, and I felt even more that readers of the blog should see this, while being even more conscious that non-francophone readers of the blog would be even more at sea.

Several readers have proposed ways of introducing code to Blogger so that posts can be continued on a separate page, and I have done nothing whatseover about it. So I am going for the clunky workaround: the first paragraph of each of these wonderful e-mails is posted here, and the whole text posted on the sister blog, paperpools.wordpress.com.

YD writes:

Oui, la France a ses bons cotés, particulièrement en ce qui concerne les librairies (même si, depuis que je me suis installé à Rouen avec mon ami, je n’arrive pas à trouver de travail dans ce secteur, ce qui me déprime grandement et me force à me reconvertir temporairement en vendeur de popcorn dans un cinéma…). Je suis d’accord avec vous sur l’austérité de la prose française classique, d’autant plus étonnante qu’elle se conjuguait bien souvent avec un sens de la description interminable. Je me rappele avoir lu “La peau de chagrin” de Balzac alors que je n’avais que onze ans et avoir été très impressioné par le fait que la plupart des phrases faisaient une vingtaine de lignes en moyenne, une ou deux pages pour certaines… Je ne savais pas à l’époque que la plupart des grands auteurs dit classiques écrivaient par épisodes pour les journeaux, et étaient donc payés à la ligne… Qu’auraient donné les flamboyantes descriptions de 50 pages des égouts de Paris par Victor Hugo dans les Misérables si les salaires d’écrivains de l’époque avaient été calculé autrement? C’est un mystère insondable, mais assez plaisant.

(the rest here)

Yvain Dewaele on Serbian writers

En ce qui concerne les auteurs serbes. J’ai découvert Branimir Scepanovic avec son recueil de nouvelles “La mort de Monsieur Golouja”. Ce sont des nouvelles assez noires, écrit dans un style vif et le plus souvent sans fioritures. Son chef d’oeuvre est “La bouche pleine de terre”, qui en moins d’une centaine de pages en dit plus sur l’humain que des bibliothèques entières…

(the rest here)

Guinea Pigs

There has been a lot of talk in the blogosphere about underrated books, but no one is talking about Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker. How it works: A puts up a post. Readers send comments. If one mentions a book it has had its 2 seconds of fame: other readers think they must come up with a different book.

Meanwhile Blogger has introduced a poll widget. When I mention Riddley Walker in conversation people who've read it say YES, it's a work of GENIUS -- but most people haven't heard of it. That said, I don't tend to go about dragging Riddley Walker into the conversaton. This is what polls are for. So I have put one in the sidebar.

Riddley Walker takes place in a landmass that had been Britain before a nuclear holocaust. Scientific knowledge has been lost, but traces of it survive in the language as mythological explanations for what now makes no sense ('the party cools of Addom and the many cools of stoan'). It begins like this:

On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he wernt all that big plus he lookit poorly. He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and made his rush and there we wer then. Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, 'Your tern now my tern later.' The other spears gone in then and he wer dead and the steam coming up off him in the rain and we all yelt, 'Offert!'

Unenumerated

Have just discovered Unenumerated, on law, technology, economics and history; the opening paragraph of a scathing early post on Rawls (Rawlsian maximin: preposterous risk aversion) give the flavour:

To get from John Rawls' "veil of ignorance" argument to his (and worse, most of his followers') favored wealth redistribution schemes requires (besides the ultimate fatal conceit that ignorant people can make rational contracts, as well as the dubious idea that we can pretend that we are ignorant of our own actual preferences) the rather extreme degree of risk aversion embodied in the "maximin" principle. As wikipedia summarizes maximin, "economic inequalities are only permitted insofar as they benefit the least well off members of society." How extreme the risk aversion this principle gives us depends on how small the group constituting the "least well of members" are...you get into strange and intractable triage hypotheticals about saving the life of one person up to the point where you'd cause the starvation of another...define your "least well off" group small enough and North Korea ends up looking like Beverly Hills in comparison to the maximin society.

The rest here.

Rule, Britannia

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