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landingtreeSick with a cold, I am editing my reading diary to be handed in. Gosh, I was energetic two months ago! How quickly this course has come to seem normal, it's good to have the process recorded.
I never posted this entry, on Sonya Taaffe's collection Forget The Sleepless Shores, partly because I was waiting to finish the collection, but mainly because I'm always more anxious posting about Dreamwidth people's books on Dreamwidth, and Sonya Taaffe is alsosovay.
4/04/2023
I was going to take M. John Harrison with me on the bus today, since I felt like that prose density, but I thought 'Too many men!' (I was editing my hui response today, which brings this front of mind) and so I took Sonya Taaffe instead. Forget The Sleepless Shores, like You Should Come With Me Now, is a book full of ghost stories, but where Harrison is deceptively plain, Taaffe is lush with images. This from 'Chez Vous Soon':
“The rain was full of leaves, like hands on her hair as she hurried home. Grey as a whale's back, the last cold light before evening: the clouds as heavy as handfuls of slate, pebble-dash and mortar; the pavement under Vetiver's feet where blown leaves stuck in scraps to her sneakers, brown as old paper, tissue-torn. There were few trees on her street, but the wind hurled through them as hungrily as for a forest.”
That very first image, of being touched by the fallen leaves, by Autumn and by death, is central.
When I deflect from Forget The Sleepless Shores – which I've owned for many years and read only half of – it's because this poet's-prose is too much for me. I'd feel I was misrepresenting it if I didn't quote what comes next:
“The chill made her breath shudder, and her hands might have been coated in stone for all their dexterity as they sorted through keys on the cracked concrete steps, fingers numbed and shining, her shoulders hunched under rain-blackened leather.”
Some writers use smell, reminding me that it's often forgotten; Taaffe I notice as using textures, materials, all figures grounded.
The stories in this book know themselves to be in conversation. We soon meet a consumed artist who ignores Vetiver in favor of his art, yet he hesitates ruefully in the middle of it all, seeing himself on the verge of acting like a cliché. He does the cliché thing anyway, in the end, but this moment is an indication both that these people are real enough to know what world they're in, and that the story is talking with the version of itself we've read before, in which the artist understands a little more, and is a little more romanticized.
This book repeatedly surprises me in new ways. I shall spoil a thing this story does, to show what I mean: 'Chez Vous Soon' quotes the music of the band Nobody's Home, and describes the voices of the band's singers with as much detail as it describes hands and roads. Knowing only a little music, I assumed the band existed, and expected to like them: I was looking forward to listening to those songs after the story was finished. But they don't exist, and never have. Discovering that opened a little emotional void, a moment of grieving for an artistic vision – which is also what the story's about.
Edited later in the day to add this second more rambling diary entry from later in the year:
18/04/2023
More Forget The Sleepless Shores today. When I try to write a sentence like the ones in this book I write 'the basalt glitter of an eye', because it sounds good, but then I have to google basalt, and no, nope, pretty matte as far as rocks go. Impoverished dictionary of the material world, I've often thought this, and even taken some steps to remedy it, but just as I have bought knot-books and checked knot-tying websites and forgotten the bowline as many times as I've learned it, to my nautical stepfather's hair-tearing, so too I have studied geology and bought a book called 'Old New Zealand Houses' for its glossary (and I have got the hang of gables now), and thanks to M. John Harrison I have the obtrusive 'chamfered' available, but so much doesn't go in. I've been weeding around walnut trees for years and I still don't know what a walnut tree looks like. I go for walks on which I'm alive to the world in a writerly way and take note of ten useable comparisons or descriptions before I get home, and I notice them because they're rare, though I walk for an hour or two most days. Perhaps I should make a new practice of this. It'd be the year for it.
Main thought: the stories in this book put responsibility. Desire does not escape the desirer, and 'having a muse' is something being done by the artist, not by whoever he thinks his muse is – and it was not Janet's fault that she could not hold onto a man who was a tiger and a wolf and a burning fire.
I never posted this entry, on Sonya Taaffe's collection Forget The Sleepless Shores, partly because I was waiting to finish the collection, but mainly because I'm always more anxious posting about Dreamwidth people's books on Dreamwidth, and Sonya Taaffe is also
sovay.4/04/2023
I was going to take M. John Harrison with me on the bus today, since I felt like that prose density, but I thought 'Too many men!' (I was editing my hui response today, which brings this front of mind) and so I took Sonya Taaffe instead. Forget The Sleepless Shores, like You Should Come With Me Now, is a book full of ghost stories, but where Harrison is deceptively plain, Taaffe is lush with images. This from 'Chez Vous Soon':
“The rain was full of leaves, like hands on her hair as she hurried home. Grey as a whale's back, the last cold light before evening: the clouds as heavy as handfuls of slate, pebble-dash and mortar; the pavement under Vetiver's feet where blown leaves stuck in scraps to her sneakers, brown as old paper, tissue-torn. There were few trees on her street, but the wind hurled through them as hungrily as for a forest.”
That very first image, of being touched by the fallen leaves, by Autumn and by death, is central.
When I deflect from Forget The Sleepless Shores – which I've owned for many years and read only half of – it's because this poet's-prose is too much for me. I'd feel I was misrepresenting it if I didn't quote what comes next:
“The chill made her breath shudder, and her hands might have been coated in stone for all their dexterity as they sorted through keys on the cracked concrete steps, fingers numbed and shining, her shoulders hunched under rain-blackened leather.”
Some writers use smell, reminding me that it's often forgotten; Taaffe I notice as using textures, materials, all figures grounded.
The stories in this book know themselves to be in conversation. We soon meet a consumed artist who ignores Vetiver in favor of his art, yet he hesitates ruefully in the middle of it all, seeing himself on the verge of acting like a cliché. He does the cliché thing anyway, in the end, but this moment is an indication both that these people are real enough to know what world they're in, and that the story is talking with the version of itself we've read before, in which the artist understands a little more, and is a little more romanticized.
This book repeatedly surprises me in new ways. I shall spoil a thing this story does, to show what I mean: 'Chez Vous Soon' quotes the music of the band Nobody's Home, and describes the voices of the band's singers with as much detail as it describes hands and roads. Knowing only a little music, I assumed the band existed, and expected to like them: I was looking forward to listening to those songs after the story was finished. But they don't exist, and never have. Discovering that opened a little emotional void, a moment of grieving for an artistic vision – which is also what the story's about.
Edited later in the day to add this second more rambling diary entry from later in the year:
18/04/2023
More Forget The Sleepless Shores today. When I try to write a sentence like the ones in this book I write 'the basalt glitter of an eye', because it sounds good, but then I have to google basalt, and no, nope, pretty matte as far as rocks go. Impoverished dictionary of the material world, I've often thought this, and even taken some steps to remedy it, but just as I have bought knot-books and checked knot-tying websites and forgotten the bowline as many times as I've learned it, to my nautical stepfather's hair-tearing, so too I have studied geology and bought a book called 'Old New Zealand Houses' for its glossary (and I have got the hang of gables now), and thanks to M. John Harrison I have the obtrusive 'chamfered' available, but so much doesn't go in. I've been weeding around walnut trees for years and I still don't know what a walnut tree looks like. I go for walks on which I'm alive to the world in a writerly way and take note of ten useable comparisons or descriptions before I get home, and I notice them because they're rare, though I walk for an hour or two most days. Perhaps I should make a new practice of this. It'd be the year for it.
Main thought: the stories in this book put responsibility. Desire does not escape the desirer, and 'having a muse' is something being done by the artist, not by whoever he thinks his muse is – and it was not Janet's fault that she could not hold onto a man who was a tiger and a wolf and a burning fire.
