Bookmash: The Holy Door

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[click to enlarge]

Black hole, the long falling
Darkness peering, portable darkness –
Tidal dreams, grotesque dreams,
The holy door on Green Dolphin street.

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Featured authors and editors: Charles Burns, Keith Ridgway, Alice Blanchard, Aleister Crowley and Scott Michaelsen, Eugene Percival and Wayne Harlow, Natsuo Kirino, Carl Jung, Frank O’Connor, and Sebastian Faulks. With thanks to Nina Katchadourian for the idea.

[bookmash archive]

It is Cork

Frank O’Connor once visited James Joyce in Paris and asked him about a picture that was hanging in the hallway.

Joyce said it was Cork.

O’Connor replied that he recognised his home city, and that it was the frame he was wondering about.

Joyce said it was cork.

Stories set in sand

Asked by the Paris Review whether he rewrote his stories, the Irish writer Frank O’Connor replied, “Endlessly, endlessly, endlessly.” He elaborated on this in his introduction to Fish For Friday, a short story collection published in 1964:*

It is true that a number of my stories have been re-written a score of times — some as many as fifty times — and re-written again and again after publication. . . . This is a great annoyance to some of my friends, particularly my publishers and editors who would prefer me to write new stories instead; I am afraid it shows a certain lack of respect for one’s own public image . . . .

The only criticism of this eccentricity, if I may so call it, that ever shook me was that of the editor of The New Yorker in which so many of these stories have appeared. He asked, ‘But can you remember the story you set out to write?’ and it is a question I still cannot answer. I believe I can remember. I believe the essence of any story can be expressed in four or five lines, but I cannot prove it.

This lack of resolution rings true for me with most kinds of writing: there is no definitive version, nor can there be. It’s not in the nature of ideas, events and our interpretations of them to settle down into final and absolute coherence. We select a representative text, a best fit from many possible forms, as carefully as insight and circumstances allow.

Even this is subject to further variation — through the reader. That the same reader might read a set text more than once is misleading, because it’s never quite the same reader reading in the same way. As Borges put it in A Note on (towards) Bernard Shaw, “A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.” Or, to adapt the old saying, you can’t step into the same book twice (hence part of the appeal of re-reading).

O’Connor (born Michael O’Donovan in 1903) was a master of the short story form. He felt that a novel was built around “the character of time, the nature of time, and the effects that time has on events and characters”; that it should create a sense of continuing life, whereas a short story need only suggest it. On confining himself to a four-line summary of his stories, he said: “If it won’t go into four, that means you haven’t reduced it to its ultimate simplicity, reduced it to the fable.”

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* Regular readers might remember this title from a bookmash several weeks ago.

Book spine mashups

There was a minor book avalanche here last weekend. I removed one from its tower, which toppled unstoppably against its neighbour, and so on, with results that need hardly be described at length. Luckily there were no casualties: no toes crushed or book spines broken, just a torn cover getting torn some more. I took the hint and arranged them more stably. (And yes, I need a new bookshelf, or a dozen.)

It prompted me to carry out a plan that had just taken seed. A little earlier I had come across Nina Katchadourian’s Sorted Books project and immediately wanted to try it. The tangling of titles, the possibilities of ‘found form’ and cut-up wordplay — as a game it was irresistible. I took photos of a few, and have written them as mini-poems for ease of reading and to see how they appear in verse:

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How it is

How it is, the way that I went
Into the wild ancient world
Where the wasteland ends.

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Moondust

Chew on this moondust –
Good enough to eat.

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