Had never thought of them that way, as tears, those power droplets puts a whole new attitude on them toward them another relief after so many years from another perspective by incongruity although these tears not so incongruous body based body release wet out water fluid burst forth from flesh flesh that book might have marked before I knew it the end of that flesh chapter could see it as so hindsight now this morning via apple news an item in gq Britain giving us permission to readmit Fosse even though he converted to rome conversion being the key and tag for remembering how all mystics need the floor or dome or both of cave, mountain, island, boat, garden, farm in which to settle center rest sink burke in western nj farm merton in church for beckett living on rue vaugirard writing in French gave him a variant of conversion to rome that worked Josiah Gogarty has been a regular GQ writer since 2024, and covers a mix of music, books and lifestyle. He has an MA in magazine journalism from City, University of London, and previously worked at The Knowledge, an email news digest. Away from GQ, he's written for the likes of The New Statesman, UnHerd, Prospect, Monocle and The Londoner. Away from journalism, he can often be found running, reading weird European novels, and procrastinating over finally moving out of his parents' house in west London T his might sound exhausting, but Fosse’s style is actually one of the most accessible and powerful reading experiences contemporary literature can give you. The lack of sentences, the rolling commas, the filler words and phrases like “yes”, “no”, “I think” and “that’s just how it is” – it hypnotises you. It’s like gazing into a dancing fire or being towed along by an Atlantic Ocean current. It’s so engrossing, in fact, that I reckon it can compete with the main hypnotising force in our lives: our smartphones. Modern discourse How can you get through a doorstopper Victorian novel if you’re checking TikTok every six pages? Fosse’s writing helps with this because, in a funny way, it’s a bit like TikTok. Social media today is an infinite scroll of content with neither beginning nor end; you just submerge, and time melts away. There is no equivalent of a full stop. Fosse, of course, doesn’t use full stops either. His writing is the literary equivalent of an endless online feed – but after reading it you feel vaguely at peace, rather than feeling the exhausted anxiety that comes from a fit of doomscrolling. My attention span isn’t terrible, but I still tend to check my phone between a regular novel’s chapters. Fosse absorbs me in that all-consuming way I used to gorge on fantasy novels as a kid. A recent piece in The New Statesman suggests that Fosse is interesting because he is “deliberately indifferent to the thematic” in a literary world obsessed with a book’s subject matter being “timely” and “relevant”. It’s true: Fosse’s subject matter isn’t timely or relevant. His characters tend to be thinking about the most mundane things or the biggest things, like God and death. But his style is timely and relevant. Fosse’s endless flow is an unlikely but compelling companion to the scrolling era. The writer of our age might not be a trendy Zoomer living in London or New York after all, but a boomer Norwegian, shut away in a little house in Oslo. so indeed here is our quietist par excellence this from the new statesman piece by Amit Chauduri Jon Fosse, a novelist and a playwright and one of Norway’s best-known living writers, was born into a family of Quakers and Pietists in 1959. This religious formation is important for Fosse. At the age of seven, he had an accident that resulted in a near-death experience whose qualities – luminosity and a sense of peace – are in part responsible, Fosse has said, for his being a writer. But surely his sense of what those qualities were arises, retrospectively, from the kind of writer he is. His 2023 Nobel Prize citation borrowed from this vocabulary – to do with what hovers on the edge of life – and called him a writer of the “unsayable”. His new novel, Vaim, is about absurd, life-changing volte-faces as well as life’s calm sameness. In it, one of the characters, Frank, after having been drawn casually into a complete realignment of his existence, feels as his boat moves forward that “a kind of peace comes over everything”. The phrase again raises the question: what kind of writer is Fosse? now here Chauduri really gets to the inner fire the quiet stream of tranquillity Tranquillity Acres was a house we could have rented when we first moved here to NH It’s not the Nobel that’s of interest here, but a kind of writing that, from the romanticism of the 19th century onwards, constituted a subterranean stream in cultures dominated by the Enlightenment, and which made the literary such an inexplicable but powerful category in the modern world. One characteristic of this stream is an obsession with what another Nobel laureate, the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, called the anavashyak, or the “unnecessary” or “superfluous”. It’s a way of thinking that is deliberately indifferent to the thematic. When the filmmaker Satyajit Ray said that some of the worst films have been made on the noblest of themes, he was speaking from the heart of this tradition. The stream seems to have dried up in the time of globalisation, not least because of the monetisation of the thematic, the “relevant” and the representational by publishing houses and the role these categories have played in the new morality of today’s sociologically driven humanities. But a counter-movement has been at work, in which Fitzcarraldo has played a significant role, restating literature’s oddity while downplaying what’s so important about it to the mainstream – its moral temper and cheerleading capacities. Chauduri is right on it osse, in his various observations about writing, is keen not so much to escape the label of autofiction as the way the word privileges confession. He seems to see Ernaux in these terms. His caveat against subjectivity, in his Nobel lecture – “In any case, I have certainly never written to express myself, as they say. Rather it was to get away from myself” – is not that far away from Ernaux’s ambivalence about the self’s authority. Fosse’s words are almost a contemporary version of TS Eliot’s reminder to his readers: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” Eliot is arguing for what he calls “significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet”. This genealogy is where autofiction, the personal essay and the misfit writing of the last two decades should be placed. The practice of impersonality, which Eliot theorised in 1919, was perhaps dependent on Europe’s encounter, from the 18th century onwards, with non-representational traditions from Asia and Africa: it’s from here that, to a great extent, what’s strange and compelling about modernism gets its resources. Eliot’s understanding of the self was deeply formed by his readings of Buddhist and Upanishadic texts. Fosse mentions Beckett, Kafka, Woolf and the Bible among the works and authors that were formative for him. But the writers he cites all emerged in the aftermath of, and were the progeny of, this non-representational turn. The Bible by itself could never have caused the turn to occur. The “unsayable” in Fosse’s work, his novels’ abandoning of “message” (his word), is part of a longer subterranean intercultural itinerary than any idea of “Europe” can contain. To see autofiction or the contemporary essay as a purely European efflorescence misses its genealogy. To the Man Booker International Prize we owe, through its recognition of the likes of Ernaux and Fosse, our awareness of the emergence of a counter-tradition. But it’s an emergence that, for us, is inadvertently European. The new European novel comes to stand for the “genre-defying”; the Indian winners of the Man Booker International Prize, say, continue to stand for India.Vaim is a 116-page novel in three sections. Brevity is one measure any counter-tradition might adopt to resist the realist or global novel’s large representational claims. Some of Ernaux’s books, for instance, seem to be between 5,000 and 30,000 words. This, too, has a genealogy in both publishing and fiction-writing. It’s only in the Anglophone world that the novel needs to exemplify the “fully formed”. For more than 100 years now, relatively tiny works have been published in Bengali, Japanese, French, Spanish, German and more as full-length books. It’s always a delight to hold such a seemingly slight volume in one’s hands, and you have to be grateful that Fitzcarraldo gives us the opportunity to experience this deceptive slightness. There is Woolf once more I supposed in duty bound I should finish Orlando just to honor all of these who bow to her and indeed note how much more influence she is having versus joyce even perhaps in Beckett because he most of all had to find a way out from under joyce professor chauduri at least a generation older than gogarty with this literary activism web site and conference in India The fifth symposium in the UEA ‘literary activism’ series took place on 14–15 February 2020 in partnership with Ashoka University at the India International Centre, New Delhi. What is it that draws us to failing? We might not consciously want to fail, but, if we’re engaged in creative practice, might unconsciously develop, over time, measures to protect ourselves from what Pound called ‘SINGLE AND UNIQUE SUCCESS’. The free market, in the last twenty-five years, might have exhibited to us the importance of success—that success is not good fortune or a reward for accomplishment, but basic survival—and we might conspire to succeed only to a degree that’s necessary for us to fail: because we know that it’s only by failing that we can produce viable work, and only by succeeding to some extent that we can have the freedom to be non-viable. Failure has not only no dignity in the post-free market world we inhabit; it has no legitimacy, no vocabulary for selfappraisal. There are no actual ‘alternative spaces’ in the free market. Where do we locate ourselves, then, if we’re to speak about ‘failing’? For millennia we learnt from failure, and from failures: what do we make of that antithetical way of estimating significance? Various conceptions of form have, across cultures, embodied the liberations of failing: synecdoche; the image; metaphor—all these arise from a preferred inability to represent fully. Failure creates immediacy. This symposium asks participants to account for the attractions specific to failing; for why, and how, it awakens our desire; why it is taboo today in a way quite different from the by-no-means unbroken era before the market; and to reassess this history. Monday and it feels at once like thanksgiving, the week of, the quiet before anticipation of save the date message for celebration for Nancy jan 25 details later George sent his AI dialogue about their turkey roasting gathering yesterday we were dropped out of the thanksgiving get together so many years ago 55th says George maybe we went one or two or three times when they lived in the gray sears roebuck house but when they moved up to the pasture might be when they stopped asking us for the turkey day gathering could be the table was too small or they wanted to have only two or four guests instead of six plus them anyway another quiet mystery by the board no tears shed any longer for such slights and yet they remember themselves in spite of years put my finger on a key experience during the middle of the night st michaels camp when I was 10-12? the man who instructed us in swimming points we got into the cold deep creek lake water he stood on the dock was he in his forties or fifties a veteran perhaps tough soft in that post-war way muscular he swam lots hairy kinda ugly but not too much balding or buzzed cut worried we would keep our bathing suits on too long after our swim and catch a cold especially a cold in the groin something I'd never known about or considered he did not wear boxer bathing suit but a black was it knit with shorter legs like a heavy underwear not trunks watched him when he gave us the breathing and kicking and swimming tips american chopped suey on the stove defrosting from the fans store misnomer or old army? joke comer even racist sorta? looks like chile with Mac rather than beans put two veggie burgers into it to add beans corn and rice in small quantity does Antunes belong to the stream literary that chauduri describes surely so The breakthroughs of misfit writing arise not from a restatement of subjectivity, but the opposite: a questioning of the authority of the subjective voice, and a consequent freeing up of language, form and worldly objects. Rabindranath Tagore, called the anavashyak, or the “unnecessary” or “superfluous”. It’s a way of thinking that is deliberately indifferent to the thematic. When the filmmaker Satyajit Ray said that some of the worst films have been made on the noblest of themes, he was speaking from the heart of this tradition. The stream seems to have dried up in the time of globalisation, not least because of the monetisation of the thematic, the “relevant” and the representational by publishing houses and the role these categories have played in the new morality of today’s sociologically driven humanities. But a counter-movement has been at work, in which Fitzcarraldo has played a significant role, restating literature’s oddity while downplaying what’s so important about it to the mainstream – its moral temper and cheerleading capacities. have tried harder to drink more water to head off the morning headache but it is still here even more water and perhaps some movement around the house Bela wants me to switch the front door wreaths from harvest to holiday That army swimmer man may have been named Mike. Went outside yesterday to take a photo some photos of the huge bare oak tree must be 70+ years old yard covered with thousands of acorns later saw a tick on the kitchen floor must have dropped off my pant leg glad that was all Bela sleeping most of the morning in her chair took zyrtec last night always konks her out Wimbush conclusion Orwell on miller's cancer belly of the whale womb tomb Gide's integrity. of incoherence oh god hope Bannon didn't throw such around our clown still wimbushs title term term is the thesis still going on surprise exasperation dennis's dad wanting to die he that can suffer well shall find the most peace from Imitatio of Kempis last line wimpish gives his book thus we conclude our autumnal research conference settling Beckett's hash once more now handke and fosse forward bye bye to orlando alas perhaps today Hans gude will look at my painting lars hertervig dennis sent more of his text but will I read it? I like the character being a painter I did some painting so in my egotism I can imagine being that painter with his beloved helene and the teacher named kressy or no it is gude thank goodness I turned off auto correct he's now 66 literary movement minimalist younger sister His conversion to Catholicism helped Fosse in his effort to stop drinking. Fosse practices solitude by keeping away from noises, never watching television or listening to radio, and rarely listening to music. In his pursuit of solitude, Fosse sees writing as a confession and a prayer married three times compare contrast with murnane obvious partners in the zeitgeist murnane might be better or more extreme crazier or less drunken but that is not fair and what of antunes too much war there in the background we no longer want background doom scrolling makes us crave endless something else nonstop alter consciousness should I worry about bela she is sleeping the day away did she not sleep last night silver soft gray day gray sky outside not cold but gray chill gray light no fog or mist but there might as well be it feels so gray and hyper quiet my purple velvet suit I am calm calm like I've never been before
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