The internship is over.....sort of. I have to go back into the library some time this week to finish cataloguing the last box I was working on. Then I will have done all the letters and magazines from the 50s to the 70s. And there is it, this complete phase of life that can only be glimpsed on the page. The letters are like butterflies pinned in a display case - merely specimens, only those few fragile samples that have been caught and kept.
Soon, the whole thing will go full circle and I will be inside the story. I'm going to Elaine's book launch, and the invitation will go into the special bottom drawer that forms my archive of sorts.
And I'm writing a piece, or maybe a couple of small pieces, inspired by the archiving to go into my magazine, Bewilderbliss.
This post is all very disconnected. I've spent the last few days catching up on things I'd let slide while I was finishing my masters essay and doing the internship. I've even squeezed in a bit of felting to make a commissioned piece for somebody and a scarf for a friend. Now I feel like I just want to sleep for a few days.
But I can't. I feel like I'm making progress with the novel after it had been lost for a while. I've got out several hefty books on Madagascar from the library so I can get totally immersed back into the subject.
The only problem as far as that goes is that the books I ordered last week have arrived (the Bananas anthology and the Tsvetayeva-Pasternak-Rilke letters that I mentioned here). They're very distracting and the summer sun is calling for me to sit in it and read by its warm light.
Finally, I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but I have to point to Max Dunbar's blog. It is always interesting and hugely varied and even when I've got no time at all it somehow manages to suck me in.
Showing posts with label bananas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bananas. Show all posts
Wednesday, 17 June 2009
Friday, 12 June 2009
Almost Over
So my internship ends tomorrow. I can't really bring myself to believe it. I've become so comfortable in the little closed and completed world that I've been reading about. Everything in there is knowable and interesting. Everything has already happened and waiting to be discovered.
For that reason I prefer to read about all the ups and downs of the lit mags from the 60s and 70s than deal with my own. I really should be sorting out the selling of ad-space in Bewilderbliss issue #2, but instead I've spent the day with my head stuck in the very curious English Intelligencer and the absolutely wonderful Cambridge Opinion.
I'm even interested in the adverts in these other magazines. Especially those in Prospect! It's 50 years since it was set up and I love to flick through the adverts for things in a version of Cambridge that's so different to the one I know. There was one (in Cambridge Opinion as far as I recall) for Gardenias guesthouse, which I'm guessing was the forerunner of the wonderful Gardies, source of so many late night kebabs. Another advert was for an indigestion remedy, the copy was so dated, it was something like 'It may seem like a good idea to hurry your meals inbetween lectures or over you essays. But it's not good for your digestion!' Below that was a picture of a neat-looking young man with a nice suit on and a perfect parting. I love that world. No, actually I love to feel nostalgic for a world that in reality never existed, but in my head is so delightful and proper. In that world, gentlemen wear buttonholes every day and they ask ladies to dance or escort them home.
The Cambridge Opinion I was reading today was Issue 14, the one that Elaine Feinstein edited. In it I've finally found where all her correspondence with the beat poets came out. There's a really wonderful piece she's written on all of them, and she quotes a bit of Ginsberg that really seemed to express its ideas so perfectly. It's about people:
'who cut their wrists three times successively
unsuccessfully gave up and were forced to open
antique stores where they thought they were
growing old and cried'
Another exciting thing I've discovered in my archiving is that the dozens of letters from some bloke who signs his name as Alan are actually from Alan Sillitoe. He has some really beautiful things to say about writing. One that I've made a note of because it seems significant to me and my problems with writing is:
'It takes real imagination to show reality and truth. You have to be capable of eating your own heart.'
I feel entirely inspired by my work with the archive. Now I just need time to get away and really intensify it all. I need to get away from worries about ad-space and uni work and anything that keeping me from being honest and real. I really don't know how Elaine has managed to be a writer on top of all her work on magazines and her huge amount of correspondence and raising three boys. I feel exhausted and spread too thin just trying to keep up a fraction of that. Well, I am going to the launch of her new book with Carcanet soon, so I shall have to ask her.
Finally, as a result of working with the archives I've had to expand my library. I've just purchased the Bananas anthology and a book of the Tsvetaeva-Pasternak letters that I mentioned in a previous post. It's probably a good job I'm finishing work there tomorrow or I'd bankrupt myself with new books....I say that as though that isn't the normal situation, as though I've never spent my last £3 on a book rather than food.
For that reason I prefer to read about all the ups and downs of the lit mags from the 60s and 70s than deal with my own. I really should be sorting out the selling of ad-space in Bewilderbliss issue #2, but instead I've spent the day with my head stuck in the very curious English Intelligencer and the absolutely wonderful Cambridge Opinion.
I'm even interested in the adverts in these other magazines. Especially those in Prospect! It's 50 years since it was set up and I love to flick through the adverts for things in a version of Cambridge that's so different to the one I know. There was one (in Cambridge Opinion as far as I recall) for Gardenias guesthouse, which I'm guessing was the forerunner of the wonderful Gardies, source of so many late night kebabs. Another advert was for an indigestion remedy, the copy was so dated, it was something like 'It may seem like a good idea to hurry your meals inbetween lectures or over you essays. But it's not good for your digestion!' Below that was a picture of a neat-looking young man with a nice suit on and a perfect parting. I love that world. No, actually I love to feel nostalgic for a world that in reality never existed, but in my head is so delightful and proper. In that world, gentlemen wear buttonholes every day and they ask ladies to dance or escort them home.
The Cambridge Opinion I was reading today was Issue 14, the one that Elaine Feinstein edited. In it I've finally found where all her correspondence with the beat poets came out. There's a really wonderful piece she's written on all of them, and she quotes a bit of Ginsberg that really seemed to express its ideas so perfectly. It's about people:
'who cut their wrists three times successively
unsuccessfully gave up and were forced to open
antique stores where they thought they were
growing old and cried'
Another exciting thing I've discovered in my archiving is that the dozens of letters from some bloke who signs his name as Alan are actually from Alan Sillitoe. He has some really beautiful things to say about writing. One that I've made a note of because it seems significant to me and my problems with writing is:
'It takes real imagination to show reality and truth. You have to be capable of eating your own heart.'
I feel entirely inspired by my work with the archive. Now I just need time to get away and really intensify it all. I need to get away from worries about ad-space and uni work and anything that keeping me from being honest and real. I really don't know how Elaine has managed to be a writer on top of all her work on magazines and her huge amount of correspondence and raising three boys. I feel exhausted and spread too thin just trying to keep up a fraction of that. Well, I am going to the launch of her new book with Carcanet soon, so I shall have to ask her.
Finally, as a result of working with the archives I've had to expand my library. I've just purchased the Bananas anthology and a book of the Tsvetaeva-Pasternak letters that I mentioned in a previous post. It's probably a good job I'm finishing work there tomorrow or I'd bankrupt myself with new books....I say that as though that isn't the normal situation, as though I've never spent my last £3 on a book rather than food.
Tuesday, 9 June 2009
Penelope Shuttle
I'm still working away in the archives. I'm really loving it, especially today when I was cataloguing lots of issues of Elaine Feinstein's magazine from the 50s/60s: Prospect. It is my new favourite magazine, it had such great stuff in it, I wish I lived in a time full of that sort of stuff.
In the same box as the copies of Prospect was an issue of another magazine of the same era called Bananas. It's quite a rubbish name I think, and very misleading in that way because the work it contains is powerful and incredible. Bananas is one of those things that makes me entirely rethink the way I connect people in my head - associate editors include Elaine Feinstein, JG Ballard and Angela Carter. I can't quite imagine how they came to work on the same magazine.
The issue of Bananas I was reading was 'The Russian Issue', which contained too much good stuff to mention. I will just describe two absolutely great things I found in it:
- Marina Tsvetaeva's letters to Pasternak. He famously lost her letters (which were part of a rather unusual correspondence between those two and Rilke, none of whom really knew each other in real life, but they were very intimate in their letters), but thankfully she had drafts of them. The few letters that were in Bananas were beautiful and have made me desperate to get the full book of their correspondence. One part was just so wonderful I had to write it down:
'My dear Pasternak,
My favourite mode of communication is in the world beyond: a dream, to see somebody in a dream.
My second favourite is correspondence. A letter is, as a form of other-worldly communication, less perfect than a dream, but the rules are the same.
Neither can be ordered. We dream and write not as we want, but as they want. A letter has to be written; a dream has to be seen.'
She goes on to say that for this reason he should never feel guilty if he's slow in his response.
- A story by Ted Hughes (which seemed to have nothing to do with the Russian theme of the issue) called 'The Head'. It starts out with a line about his mad wife and I thought it was autobiographical, but then it went on to describe a trip to the woods with very scary results that are definitely fictional. It's not the sort of story I'd go looking for, but I loved it, perhaps even more because it surprised me and sucked me in despite me not really looking for it.
The other wonderful thing that happened today was that Penelope Shuttle came to visit the library. Strangely enough, I had just been reading an advert for a novel of hers in the issue of Bananas that dated all the way back to 1978. She had heard about the sonnet exhibition and wanted to visit it. And since she is a friend of Elaine Feinstein's, Stella thought that she might be interested in seeing the archive I'm working on and talking to me about it. Penelope Shuttle has the most wonderful presence, and it was almost like a part of the archive had gathered up its strength and appeared in corporeal form. It wasn't just that which was pleasing though, meeting Penelope Shuttle was wonderful in itself. She was so genuinely interested in everything I was doing and she asked just the right questions to make me feel comfortable and knowledgeable.
I can't believe that my work with the archive finishes on Friday. I really don't want to leave. Though now I'm a reader at the John Rylands I don't really have to leave, I can come and go as I please and read all the lovely archives every single day.
Oh, also, in my researchy travels I found this interesting interview with Elaine Feinstein conducted by Michael Schmidt, if you want to know more about Elaine. If you want to know more about Michael then you'll have to google him because he has just done too much interesting stuff to mention.
In the same box as the copies of Prospect was an issue of another magazine of the same era called Bananas. It's quite a rubbish name I think, and very misleading in that way because the work it contains is powerful and incredible. Bananas is one of those things that makes me entirely rethink the way I connect people in my head - associate editors include Elaine Feinstein, JG Ballard and Angela Carter. I can't quite imagine how they came to work on the same magazine.
The issue of Bananas I was reading was 'The Russian Issue', which contained too much good stuff to mention. I will just describe two absolutely great things I found in it:
- Marina Tsvetaeva's letters to Pasternak. He famously lost her letters (which were part of a rather unusual correspondence between those two and Rilke, none of whom really knew each other in real life, but they were very intimate in their letters), but thankfully she had drafts of them. The few letters that were in Bananas were beautiful and have made me desperate to get the full book of their correspondence. One part was just so wonderful I had to write it down:
'My dear Pasternak,
My favourite mode of communication is in the world beyond: a dream, to see somebody in a dream.
My second favourite is correspondence. A letter is, as a form of other-worldly communication, less perfect than a dream, but the rules are the same.
Neither can be ordered. We dream and write not as we want, but as they want. A letter has to be written; a dream has to be seen.'
She goes on to say that for this reason he should never feel guilty if he's slow in his response.
- A story by Ted Hughes (which seemed to have nothing to do with the Russian theme of the issue) called 'The Head'. It starts out with a line about his mad wife and I thought it was autobiographical, but then it went on to describe a trip to the woods with very scary results that are definitely fictional. It's not the sort of story I'd go looking for, but I loved it, perhaps even more because it surprised me and sucked me in despite me not really looking for it.
The other wonderful thing that happened today was that Penelope Shuttle came to visit the library. Strangely enough, I had just been reading an advert for a novel of hers in the issue of Bananas that dated all the way back to 1978. She had heard about the sonnet exhibition and wanted to visit it. And since she is a friend of Elaine Feinstein's, Stella thought that she might be interested in seeing the archive I'm working on and talking to me about it. Penelope Shuttle has the most wonderful presence, and it was almost like a part of the archive had gathered up its strength and appeared in corporeal form. It wasn't just that which was pleasing though, meeting Penelope Shuttle was wonderful in itself. She was so genuinely interested in everything I was doing and she asked just the right questions to make me feel comfortable and knowledgeable.
I can't believe that my work with the archive finishes on Friday. I really don't want to leave. Though now I'm a reader at the John Rylands I don't really have to leave, I can come and go as I please and read all the lovely archives every single day.
Oh, also, in my researchy travels I found this interesting interview with Elaine Feinstein conducted by Michael Schmidt, if you want to know more about Elaine. If you want to know more about Michael then you'll have to google him because he has just done too much interesting stuff to mention.
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