Moving toward late fall here in Chicago, and while the leaf colors are past peak, the amount of leaves on the ground has reached a high point. I notice them everywhere, on top of cars and under the wheels, covering sidewalks, and of course blanketing the ground. From what I see in the neighborhood here on the South Side, among the greatest generators of leaf detritus by volume are the maples (Acer), particularly the silver maple (Acer saccharinum) which I have seen planted both by the city in streets and parks and in private backyards. W.J. Bean writes in his Trees and Shrubs Hardy to the British Isles, that “owing to the rather brittle nature of the wood, it is not suitable for use as a street tree,” but current usage around here disproves that. Its leaves are almost always yellow, which is also, to my eye, the predominant color of fall in Chicago.
Joan Acocella’s reassessment of Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (I Promessi Sposi, 1827), in The New Yorker, is worth a read.
I went through large sections of the book near the beginning of the pandemic, and was delighted to see that Modern Library has published a new edition.
The Paris Review had good timing when it devoted space this past spring to 2022 Literature Nobel Winner Annie Ernaux, several months before she won the prize.
According to a blog post about the material published in May, the real diaries are the source material for her book Simple Passion (1991).
From the blog:
While reading an old diary, and letters she sent to a classmate, she recognizes certain falsenesses in them—pretensions, lies, self-deceptions. The quotations from books she copied down in 1958 now strike her as a more direct means of access to her state of mind then. All memoir involves time travel, and yet Ernaux, as she twists and turns, trying to cross the schisms between her various selves, manages to create what feels like a new tense—a literary time zone that can hold it all at once.
And
These diaries feel like gifts, or offerings, that are unlike any other kind of writing. There is, as Ernaux herself writes in a brief introduction, “a truth in those pages that differed from the one to be found in Simple Passion—something raw and dark, without salvation, a kind of oblation.”
Coon Valley, Wisconsin
Seen over the weekend: a microwave tower that was part of the now-abandoned “long line” telecommunications network.
This one is in good shape. It has an AT&T sign on the front, and it appears to be still maintained. One source says this could be for other radio broadcasts, or for cellular tower signals.
Sources longlines.com
I’ve often thought that the so-called “Lasalle Canyon,”–which descibes a visual effect in Chicago, created by tall buildings between approximately Randolph and Jackson, looking south–actually had less to do with the height of the buildings on either side of the “canyon,” which was nothing unusual by city standards, and more to the with the dead-end appearance of the Chicago Board of Trade Building at the canyon’s end. That building, which abruptly blocks the street at Jackson, is what creates the claustrophic effect for me.
And its imposing–I want to say ominous–appearance is like a fortress with its personification at the top: a statue of Ceres, Greek goddess of the harvest. That, to my mind, is one of the most unfriendly, menacing public statues anywhere. But it is hard for me to walk past LaSalle Street without turning to look.
A trend that seems to be accelerating in the last few years is the disappearance of dates from the internet. So far I haven’t seen it on news sites, but I see it more often on private corporate communication, blogs, and other lightly trafficked publications. I’ve heard rumors of some corporate sites removing the date after a set period of time, or even running periodic scripts to change the date to the present.
Some news websites, like The Guardian, display the date in a surprisingly inconspicuous position: on a sidebar, in small grey text, beneath the journalist byline. The newest variants of social media, like TikTok, remove the the date entirely from main screens. Older apps like Facebook may not go that far, but they do prefer to count time in terms of distance from the present (“9 seconds ago”).
The internet was never really designed to be an archive. Even more, I doubt its designers could have conceived that the modern web, in all its various media streams, would become the place where large numbers of people “spend” the waking day, and that what people paid the most attention to online would effectively be live action.
If the date continues to disappear from the most populous places on the web, maybe it will be because the only date that matters on the internet is now. There is so much written online about the news today today, not because there is so much happening, but because when the standard is “right now,” it is never too soon to start catching up.
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In American media, a lot has been written in the last year about the Australian novelist Gerald Murnane. He just published what he claims is his final book, Last Letter to a Reader, which has set off many new attempts to introduce and assess his work.
I wanted to see what he was about, so I found a copy of his A Million Windows (2014).
Some underrecognized writers attract the interest of writers, and others the critics. I haven’t seen as much about what, say, novelists think about Murnane, but he has definitely attracted the interest of critics. Here is Merve Emre’s description of him in The New Yorker:
The act of contemplation is rendered in a compact and highly finished style that distinguishes Murnane both from his predecessor Proust and from his contemporaries W. G. Sebald, J. M. Coetzee, Jon Fosse, and Rachel Cusk. Murnane has described himself as a technical writer, and his outspoken and fastidious devotion to grammar steers a great deal of the thinking his narrators perform. This thinking is usually about the nature or the essence of fiction’s relation to life, and it often begins with verbs of supposition. “I, who dislike the word imagine, would prefer to use such an expression as speculate about,” reports the narrator of “A Million Windows.” “Speculate,” “suppose,” “presume,” and “seem”—as in “I seem to recall”—all shift narrative into the subjunctive mood, in which ambitions, conjectures, and longings reign.
The mood is enhanced by the sudden appearance of the perfect continuous conditional tense, which considers not what was, or what had been, but what would have been, or might have been, in certain secluded corners of the narrator’s mind.
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Continuing from “The condition of being blocked”
A creative block does not have to end a work before it begins, but it can mean that something is wrong. The most disappointing response to a block is to take it literally, to believe that there is really nothing there worth pursuing. Where would this “there” be? The more reasonable response is to understand the block as a signal, a pause imposed from elsewhere for undetermined reasons–a signal which has to be taken seriously, but interpreted. Something about the specific makeup of this work, at this time, under these conditions–something about it is not right, and so it can’t continue.
If one interprets the block provisionally, as a sign to reassess and work in a new way, then it is possible to work while blocked. The decision to change one’s working pattern, however slight, is already a temporary release from the block. The act of assessing the new situation is itself a novel, creative act.
One of the most extraordinary recent examples I have seen of what can come from working while blocked, to working with a block rather than against it, is Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle series. An article in the New Republic describes the origin of the six-part, 3,600-page autobiographical books. It began with a writer’s block that intensified when he became a parent:
Between child-rearing duties, Knausgård was trying to reckon with his relationship with his father in a new novel, but it was falling flat on the page.
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