A is for Artful

Well, I did find a one word book to start my 2013 quest, Artful by Ali Smith.  A book that began as a collection of four lectures give at Oxford on literature:  On Time, Form, Edge and Offer and Reflection.  This was my impetus for picking the book up; over the past couple of years, I have blogged on other authors whose lectures were meaty and thought-provoking and helped me understand why I liked certain genres and styles better than others.  But Smith's book is something else again, a memoir more like Didion's Year of Magical Thinking.  In fact, Smith begins her story a year and a day after her lover of thirty years has died and writes about how haunted she is.  Mourning becomes dementia.

The sudden death has not been covered up:  her desk still evidences a critique that stopped mid-sentence; Ali cannot bear to even move a chair to where the light would be better; she hopes to enliven her loss by reading old books.  At first, I found her reminiscing distracting; I wanted her to get to the literary analysis.But then I came to realize that Smith has several of my writing quirks and traits:  she goes off on tangents about her life and how she interprets it through books and authors.  Duh, my blog.

Her memorable insights:

On the difference between short stories and novels -- "... not to do with length, but with time.  The short story will always be about brevity ... Because of this, the short story can do anything it likes with notions of time; it moves and works spatially regardless of whether it adheres to chronology or conventional plot.  It is an elastic form .. In this it emphasizes the momentousness of the moment."

On the impact of art (and this quote is included for book clubber PD since it reminds me of her becoming enraptured of TS Eliot) -- "a magical shifting of the position of observer and observed, it means that the "you"of the poem becomes not just the thing seen instead of the art, but something so utterly, so wholly, that there is no place that does not see you.  It's this being seen (met in the act of looking) - the exchange that happens when art and human meet - that results in the pure urgency for transformation: 'you must change your life.'

On re-reading -- "We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture.  We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once ... Books tend to draw us in, it takes time to understand what makes them, structurally, in thematic resonance, in afterthought, and always in correspondence with the books which came before them ... Great books are adaptable; they alter with us as we alter in life ... You can't step into the same story twice - or maybe it's that stories, books, art can't step into the same person twice ... and maybe it's this adaptability ... that makes them art ... in an elasticity and with a generosity that allows for all our comings and goings."  WOW

On the poetry from her On Form lecture (and this is quoted at length as the inspiration for my reading of Shakespearean Sonnet 155 which I read at the January book club) 
"Not marble nor the gilded monuments
of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmearched with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword, nor war's quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
Gainst death and all oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth, your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgement that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.
Aah, Essex loved Elizabeth.

But this tracks to me reading of The Frenzy of Fame, and the evolution of the author, not the "hero" as being the determinant of worthiness to be remembered.  Smith goes on -- "... The power of artform is stronger than stone, the poet says, and chooses the sonnet, the form concerned with arguing and persuasion, to say so.  This sonnet, he says, will last longer than any gravestone - and you'll be made shinier, brighter by it."

On how literature remains with us -- "... this truth about the place where aesthetic form meets the human mind.  For even if we were to find ourselves homeless, in a strange land, with nothing of ourselves left ... we'd still have another kind of home ... in the familiarity, the unchanging assurance that a known rhythm, a recognized line, the familiar shape of a story, a tune, a line of phrase or sentence gives us every time, even long after we've forgotten we even know it."

The last quote came from page 76 in a volume of 204 pages.  What happened to me?  What failed to resonant in the remainder of the book?  Smith goes on to heal, after bouts of kleptomania, seeing a shrink, finishing Oliver Twist, emptying the house of her lovers' clothes.  I think I missed the despair.  She seems to lose her hypersensitivity.  All the observations and anecdotes skillfully merge and re-echo but the pyre has burned out.