This is not a blog
Via wood s lot, a great article on the US writer David Markson by Keith Gessen. I love the brief aside in the brackets about the consecutive novels Reader’s Block and This is Not a Novel (the latter link is to my review):
“Each consists almost exclusively of one-sentence anecdotes about the lives of artists; each (though not both) makes for excellent reading; each establishes beyond doubt that writing is a senseless act, a throwing of words into a void, an activity in which honest men can no longer participate.”
It disrupts, amuses and instructs all at once. Gessen goes on to say that “[Markson's] last three books had in their way dramatized the problem that’s bedeviled all writers since approximately Flaubert: How can someone who spends all his time writing and reading write about anything else? They dramatized the problem in the sense that they so obviously lacked any solution for it. And if the truth is that all writers, in fact, want to write about writing but work to sublimate this desire into novels about bullfighting or atom bombs, then Markson can be considered an exemplary capitulant.”
Ah, bullfighting and atom bombs, yes! Now, as I was saying�
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Untitled
- Relevance, continued
- Reading Borges Another one of those soon-to-be…
- Nothing is illuminated
- Vanishing Penguin
