With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves

If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.

— Shelby Foote, born on this date in 1916


Australia For Me, Is A Land Rich Not Only In Literal Soil, But Personalities

  via Lisa of Botany fame: "If You Can't Dazzle Them With Brilliance, Baffle Them With Bullsh*t"

Of Art And Fallen Artists (Do We Reject The Art Now?)

"Wrestling with what to do with the product of tainted executives, artists or news figures is not that far from the eternal issue of how (or even whether) to separate our views of art from our views of the artists. Wagner was blatantly anti-Semitic. Alfred Hitchcock abused actresses who worked for him, so openly that you can see his dysfunctional psychosexual power dynamics right onscreen. Roman Polanski was convicted of having sex with a 13-year-old, but does that mean “Rosemary’s Baby” should have been pulled from circulation?" … [Read More]

The Harvard professor of Bob Dylan studies: 'My thesis is that he has become Odysseus' | Books | The Guardian

… Thomas is engaged in a decoding of his own, looking for imagery, biblical allusions in the early days, classical references in his later years, Woody Guthrie breaking into a song like a phantom, Ovid blasting into a love stanza. Other times, unable to fathom a source, Thomas gazes in admiration at the poetry. “Where did the music come from? In the 60s, these incredible lyrics, ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’. The poetry of them, these lyrics, ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ – ‘dance beneath the diamond sky, with one hand waving free./ Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands./ With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves’. Where does that come from?”

Where all art does...

The more the poet grows, the deeper the level of creative intuition descends into the density of his soul. Where formerly he could be moved to song, he can do nothing now, he must dig deeper.— Jacques Maritain, born on this date in 1882

On July 26, the House of Illustration on Granary Square hosted an hour-long talk, From Leningrad to London, to accompany their exhibition of Soviet picture books from the 1920s and 30s, several of which are on display in the UK for the first time. The evening’s speakers – the collector and publisher Joe Pearson and the artistOtto Graphic – were charged with the task of tracing the lines of influence left by these revolutionary children’s books.

The exhibition itself, curated by Olivia Ahmad, is impressive if compact. A visual treat for readers young and old, it comprises four rooms of eye-catching illustrated works drawn from Sasha Lurye’s enviable collection (which also formed the core of Julian Rothenstein and Olga Budashevskaya’s recent book Inside the Rainbow). The books are displayed alongside original sketches and paintings, with artwork by giants of Soviet illustration including Vladimir Lebedev, Vladimir Tambi and the Chichagova sisters, as well as such luminaries as El Lissitzky and Marc Chagall, who had taken up the revolutionary call to ply their trade in more "practical" endeavours. Entreated to rid Soviet youth of "the mysticism and fantasy" of the old order, artists and designers worked hand-in-hand with authors to supplant Baba Yaga and Koshchei the Immortal with the new heroes of Soviet life: construction, agriculture, transport and heavy industry. Visitors to the exhibition will even see Alexei Laptev’s beautifully illustrated fold-out Five Year Plan (1930) for children. But, as the exhibition demonstrates, there was much more to this golden age of Soviet children’s books than the strictly utilitarian: among the collection’s more striking examples are Lissitzky’s Suprematist-inspired About Two Squares (1922), an avant-garde allegory of the revolution itself, and Tambi’s haunting illustrations for The Book of Wrecks (1932), a macabre compendium of naval and shipping disasters. Books in other languages and in translation feature too, with Yiddish works by Leib Kvitko and Der Nister on display, as well as colourful Soviet editions of Walt Whitman’s "Pioneers! O Pioneers!" and Rudyard Kipling’s "The Elephant’s Child" (again, illustrated by Lissitzky).

Vladimir Tambi, cover art for Book of Wrecks [Kniga Avarii], Moscow: OGIZ, Molodaia gvardiia, 1932.]

Michael Czerwinski, head of public projects at the House of Illustration, introduced the evening’s speakers. Joe Pearson was first up. With infectious enthusiasm he described the revolutionary effect of Soviet children’s publishing on the British book market, which transformed the dowdy black-and-white print of contemporary children’s books by injecting them with colour and innovative design. The Soviet editions, he explained, were the result of a discerning publication process: expert commissioning committees, close collaboration of artists, writers and publishers, "focus groups" of young readers, and the latest in printing technology to ensure that the books could be produced to a high quality, in phenomenal print runs (often in the hundreds of thousands), and sold cheaply. The end result was a slick mass-production operation, intentionally designed to quicken the creation of new Soviet man. What could be farther removed from the stagnation of children’s books in Britain at that time, languishing in small print runs and keeping children in their protective bubble of fairy tales and neverlands?

All this began to change for Britain in the 1930s, Pearson said, when colour-illustrated books such as J. M. Richards’s High Street (1936) appeared for the first time. The signal moment, however, was the publication of the first Puffin Picture Book in 1940: the initial print run of 40,000 copies sold out in less than a month, giving publishers to understand that the picture-book business was a lucrative one. Puffin went on to commission a vast list, built largely around the same models as the Soviet series. Indeed, the changing social structures and much-needed orientation towards reconstruction in post-war Britain would chime conveniently with the books’ Soviet forerunners. Women-at-work books, for instance, which had been a staple of Soviet children’s books since the 1920s, now appeared in the UK, subtly reflecting changes in gender roles. At this point Pearson presented, to the audience’s delight, one example of a book on car mechanics – showing not a boy, but a girl with pigtails examining the pedals and gear stick (her knitting stowed safely in the glove compartment).

A. Gromov, a spread from Stencils [Trafarety], Moscow: OGIZ, Molodaia gvardiia, 1931

The artist Otto Graphic spoke engagingly of his admiration for the integrated design solutions found by the early Soviet illustrators. He also spoke with charming self-effacement and humour of his own trials and tribulations in attempting to reproduce their tricky stencil and autolithographic techniques, divulging to the audience several behind-the-scenes slides with examples of his efforts leading up to the completed works. The stencilling techniques had apparently given him particular trouble, so it was not without irony that he mentioned having spotted in the exhibition Alexander Gromov’sStencils (1931), which teaches children how to make their own. "It’s in Russian," he lamented, "so unfortunately I can’t read it."

The talk closed with a discussion of the recent reaction against digital modes of design and production, and the resurgence of analogue photography, vinyl and niche printing. However, as one audience member astutely commented, this exhibition also sounds a cautionary note: Given these books’ raison d’être – to depict the future through the latest in technological innovation and mass communication – is there not perhaps something elegiac in today’s vogue for nostalgia?

A word about literary magazines on this blog is overdue – sorry, we've been busy thinking about Sarah Moss, Soviet picture booksand Chet Baker. What fine distractions are to be found in the summer crop of journals new and old, famous and fresh?

The freshest first, and a full disclosure: Hotel is a "magazine for new approaches to fiction, non-fiction and poetry" that is one issue old; and I had the pleasure of attending the launch for that issue, on the night after the EU referendum, because a former TLS editor contributed to it. Let us not dwell on Will Eaves unnecessarily. Instead, I can only say that Hotel's debut offers some "Notes on the Pink Hotel", by Jess Cotton, on pink paper ("I think of Rimbaud, far from his soft city rain . . ."), a couple of poems by Jane Yeh ("The maid thinks of cream cakes and breaking rules") and an excellent essay by Tyler Malone, "Sometimes He Left Messages in the Books", about the fate of David Markson's extensively marked-up library.

Markson's reputation stood sufficiently low at the time of his death in 2010 for the Strand Bookstore in New York to scatter his books along their 18 miles of shelves in the ordinary way, rather than keep them together. Every day for six months, Malone spent a few hours hunting around for them, and helping other enthusiasts find them, too – not an absolutely straightforward matter when The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is "filed under T for Toklas instead of S for Stein", and books are (understandably) taking months to emerge from storeroom to open shelf. Yet "it is not just a delight to read Markson reading", Malone argues, referring to the marginal comments Markson made, the underlinings that led directly to passages in his books, "but it is truly indispensable to any study of the man and his work".

Online, meanwhile, the seventh edition of Prac Crit has appeared. This is a triannual "journal of poetry and criticism" that specializes in looking at contemporary poetry "up close" – it's an invaluable approach, I think, not least for anybody for whom the words "contemporary poetry" brim with menace.

Here are, for example, poems by Matthew Welton ("Think of it as the rubber ball we've hidden / in the fruit bowl . . .") and Katrina Porteous("Imagine it a ruin . . .") that come with parallel critical responses (in these respective cases, an interview by Alex MacDonald and an essay by Jenny Holden). You keep the poem in sight in the left-hand half of the screen while scrolling through the prose on the right ("When we met by the stone lions in Market Square, Matthew was concerned with finding us a pub to talk in"). Kiki Petrosino, meanwhile, walks you through one of her own poems, "Scarlet", via thirteen footnoted stepping stones. Although maybe my metaphor's wrong here: it's more a case of taking a tour around the roots of a tree, discovering that one lies in childhood illness, another in the Super Mario Brothers video game, a third in a preference for the ampersand. "I prefer it for its visual dynamism; an ampersand looks both energetic & ornamental to me, like jewelry made from typewriter keys, spoons, or the innards of watches."

These are but striplings, though. Congratulations are due to Slightly Foxed: The real reader's quarterly – who is this real reader, I wonder, and what has she done with all the others? – for publishing its fiftieth issue this summer. Pleasures here include Laura Freeman's piece on Elizabeth David's elopement, which unexpectedly turned her from an actress into a cookery writer, and Richard Mabey's homage to the "swashbuckling" Round the World in Eighty Dishes by Lesley Blanch. There is also Michael Holroyd's warm appraisal of Dan Rhodes, which is surely destined to be excerpted for publication on the back of a paperback some time soon:

". . . his books would appeal, I believe, to many readers. But he avoids journalism, does not belong to any literary groups or contemporary school of writing and is very much an individual novelist. He neither pursues fame nor patronizes his readers. What he believes is what you get: sensitivity, humour, sadness and devastating shock. Sometimes I have been so saddened, so shocked, that I have stopped reading and put the book aside. But before long I am compelled to pick it up again and read on. And what I have read has found a place in my imagination."

What lies beyond fifty issues? Well, Granta recently reached no. 136 (with the theme "Legacies of Love") and Ambit hit no. 224. Not to get carried away, however, I'll close with a solemn nod to the Dublin Review (63 not out). Here, amid the contributions with eye-catching titles such as "The transhumance" and "Uncle uncle uncle uncle uncle", is Rob Doyle's "To the Point of Death", the record of an intellectual relationship. That's the dry way of putting it. Doyle writes about losing himself in "the overpowering, life-justifying rapture" of clubs and drugs, while taking philosophical succour from the works of Georges Bataille. In Paris (not the City of Lights but the "City of Condoms") Doyle makes a Bataille pilgrimage, heading for the Rue de Rennes, near Montparnasse, where the great man lived for a formative period of his life. Only later, as Doyle turns thirty-three, he realizes that he had felt older when he was younger, and Bataille had been the guide to see him through that gloomy period of his life. "If philosophers were musical sub-genres, then Bataille was death metal – and death metal was insufferable, its devotees a gang of dreary bastards." What fun it is, being in on this gradual process, without having to go through it yourself.

Perth's five-star hotels offer big discounts as Airbnb, new projects lure guests
abc.net.au, 31/10/17. Heavy discounting by Perth's top hotels in the wake of a glut of new accommodation and competition from Airbnb has seen room rates at five-star establishments nosedive to as little as $127 a night.