9.3.2002


This episode brought to you by the letter moribund*

So, you might have noticed that I haven't updated this site in a month. I've been busy and away from the computer and blah blah blah.

I've been reading this interview with Nicholas Mosley on and off for most of that time (it's really long) after finishing Impossible Object, a great collection of stories. He describes the idea behind the book:

Well, there were two or three strands I think that came together to give the book its form.

1) My coming across, quite by accident, the symbol of an Impossible Object--the triangle that can exist in two dimensions but not in three; this was in a short newspaper feature in the "Observer" (London Sunday)--the feature was describing some work that had been done by two psychologists (one of whom was called Penrose I think) who had published a short paper in a learned journal. The image of the triangle excited me greatly and I went off to the library to look up the original learned article, which didn't seem to be saying much except that these images could be created. The psychologists didn't seem to be making any suggestions beyond this. Anyway--what had excited me was the idea that this visual image was a symbol of the other two strands that were moving around in my mind at that time.

2) For a long while I had been obsessed with the idea (or the way of putting the idea) that to have a good life was "impossible" and it was only when one recognized the "impossibility" that it became possible. I think this sort of idea had been with me from the very beginning of my writing novels: my first three novels had fairly conventional tragic/romantic stories: the first about the impossibilities attendant on war, the second about those attendant on romantic love; in both the protagonists were doomed to tragedy, whatever their good intentions. In the third novel, "Corruption," there was an effort to break out of this conventional pattern: but still, life could only "work" through renunciation. After these three novels I gave up writing novels for a time; I was dissatisfied with romantic doom, yet didn't see much way around it. I became something of a Christian, specifically in an effort to find out something of all this. But it was in my process of getting out of conventional Christianity, rather than getting in, that I got hold of the idea that, all right, life is impossible, but once you know it's impossible, all right, it mysteriously isn't.

I'm not making any kind of larger point by linking to that. I just thought it was interesting. I also like this:

The problem of how to write about boredom, or boring people, without being boring. I think some writers do this skillfully. But I don't think it's ever been a point I've been trying to make. I've quite often been accused of only writing about "glamorous" people: and I've never quite know what to reply to this. I think I feel that if a writer is obsessed with cliche-ridden people than he's using his contempt of them in a suspect way--like a mother who keeps her children awful so that she can have power over them. I think I'd like to reply to the "glamorous" charge that I think almost everyone could be "glamorous" in this sense (not cliche-ridden) if they liked, but a lot of people don't like, but couldn't one encourage them to by not condescending to them?

OK, I'm through with the Nicholas Mosley interview now.
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*When I was using dictionary.com at some point today, I saw (saved by my browser) the links for the last bunch of words I'd looked up. I don't know what this says, but here they are:

http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=aphasia
http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=fugue
http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=moribund
http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=solipsistic
http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=twee
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