Busy Making Plans

Now busy planning for a short trip to New Zealand coming this Wednesday for some IB training. I'll be back on the following Monday. The missus is thinking of what I'm going to wear, the money I'll need and all the practical stuff. I'm thinking of what to take to read. This is why we make a good team.

I've just started on a collection of Conrad's shorter stories, well, novellas really, including the unfortunately titled The Nigger of the Narcissus and Typhoon. This is in tandem with Mailer's Advertisements for Myself, both being old paperbacks I brought back from the shelves of Maison KL. Actually today I've been reading largely from Ackroyd's London: The Biography which I'm not taking with me as it's too heavy. I've not picked it up for the best part of a week and I felt it important to maintain some sort of continuity. Having said that, the chapters have a distinctly self-contained quality, reading at times like separate essays, that makes it easy to pick up and start again, and put down. For example, Chapter 9, Packed to Blackness, which I've just finished, is a lovely short essay on just how dark the city, or certain parts of it, have been perceived as being over the centuries.

Conrad and Mailer were key writers for me in my university days. I've kept reading them over the years, last reading Nostromo around three years ago (a brilliant novel, surely one of the greatest of the twentieth century) and Oswald's Tale around four years back. Conrad's sense of the need to do one's duty in an absurd world as there's simply nothing else to hold back the chaos had a powerful, and lasting impact upon me. Anyone who can start a preface: A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line, and really mean it, gets my vote. What's so appealing about Conrad is that he churned out a fair amount of second rate stuff also even when genuinely aspiring to the condition of art. The early and late novels don't always cut it, but the great stuff from the middle period is just, well, great: Under Western Eyes, The Secret Agent, Nostromo, Heart of Darkness to name but four. And such variety! Another endearing thing about Conrad is how he reflects the limitations of his time especially when it comes to views of race (Achebe gets it right) but his attempt to transcend those limitations is wholly admirable, it seems to me.

I must say though, I've long cultivated a hankering to rewrite the action of Lord Jim from the perspective of one of the pilgrims aboard the Patna - the unconscious pilgrims of an exacting belief indeed. It would be nice to make at least one of these folk a bit more conscious.

I fell under the spell of Mailer and his daft ideas for a good six months or so at the tender age of twenty. Now I'm distanced from that spell it's good to be aware of the mechanics of it. Whatever his shortcomings were, the guy could write and he's rarely dull, except when he's caught up in an idea that won't let him go. But then, there's something endearing about that also.

I just hope I actually get the chance to settle to some reading when I'm over in New Zealand. It won't be from any lack of enthusiasm if I don't.