Now, again

Originally published in German as Nachscrift by Edition Neue Texte, 1986. This edition, Dalkey Archive Press, 2010. Edited and with an afterword by Friedrich Achleitner, Translation by Patrick Greaney and Vincent Kling,Afterword to the English Edition by Patrick Greaney.

This book is a collection of quotations which come from documents of the bueaucratic world of the Nazis and also from trials and from victims of the Shoah.According to Patrick Greaney in a journal article, Baeckers method is ‘quotation, documentation,isolation, abbreviation,and in some cases, modification’.

Article: Duke University Press,New German Critique 109, Vol 37 Number One, Winter 2010

All the source documents are identified. In 43 cases he makes modifications to the excerpt. These are ‘mostly’ ( Greaney) noted in the index. Baecker decribes what he does to the excerpt from mein kampf as ‘methodical gibberish which reproduces a deadly gibberish’

Nachschrift aims not to create a new language but to enable readers to gain some kind of knowledge about the language of the Third Reich.

This language was, for a time, also Baeker’s language ( as a 17 year old he wrote a review of a book about Hitler), so in a sense the book Nachscrift is also an autobiographical text. Apparently Baecker referred to the work as being ‘sublation’ rather than anything like working through, which contains the idea of something going away. Sublation is a term which literally means something accumulating on the surface in an imiscible  liquid -hence the movement to the surface of something.

Greaney calls the work ‘montage’ and considers a debate about whether it has unity or remains fragmented.

There are 3 levels of mediation in this work; text, notes and bibliography. The notes complement the text but often do not fully explain it. The whole process of reading this opposes the idea that the event s were unspeakable.

His focus, says Greaney is not The Shoah, but the language of the its planning. 

Nachschrift also contains some pages in handwriting. These are not referred to in the notes, and should be thought of, according to Greaney, as authorial instrusions.

For me, perhaps the most interesting fact about Baecker is that he had expanded this work into a whole lot of different forms. There was also nachschrift 2 which is all quotations, epitaph, a book of quoataions and photographs, photography and a radio play gehen wir wirklich in den tod?, a stage version of nachscrift, also called epitaph. At the time of his death he was working on nachschrift 3, a collection of materials about his nachschrift project and its method, and landschaft m, a book of photographs of Mauthausen.

Greaney’s section headings make a nice way of thinking about this work. The headings are; Gibberish, Autobiography,Typewriting, Handwriting, Elegance,White Space

‘When you have changed every word in a sentence from Russian to English, have thereby altered the sense a little,the sound, weight,and accent of the words in relation to each other completely, nothing remains except a crude and coarsened version of the sense.Thus treated, the great Russian writers are like men deprived by an earthquake or a railway accident not only of all their clothes, but also of something subtler and more important- their manners,the idiosyncrasies of their characters. What remains is, as the English have proved by the fanaticism of their admiration,something very powerful and impressive, but it is difficult to feel sure, in view of these mutilations,how far we can trust ourselves not to impute, to distort,to read into them an emphasis which is false.

They have lost their clothes, we say, in some terrible catastrophe, for some such figure as that describes the simplicity, the humanity, startled out of all effort to hide and disguise its instincts, which russian literature, whether it is due to translation or to some more profound cause, makes upon us. ‘(The Common Reader, page 220)

Woolf goes on to say that ‘the assumption that in a world bursting with misery the chief call upon us is to understand our fellow sufferers,”and not with the mind- for it is easy with the mind- but with the heart”- this is the cloud which broods above the whole of Russian literature, which lures us from our own parched brilliancy and scorched thoroughfares to expand in its shade- and of course with disastrous results.’ (page 221)

‘We become awkward and self conscious;denying our own qualities, we write with an affectation of goodness and simplicity which is nauseating in the extreme.’

If I think about Woolf’s image, there is a man who has survived something which has caused the death of many others. This man is alive but naked. He has nothing left to protect him from any of the world’s harshness. He is completely vulnerable. And he is there, before our eyes. There is no reason to think that he is any particular sort of man, not cunning or kind, or containing evil intent. He is in some ways the same man he was before the catastrophe- perhaps he has habits of keeping his thoughts to himself, or of helping the weak.  Perhaps he is in the habit of being dishonest with himself about his motives, or of following every path that leads to pleasure. Perhaps he has a sweet singing voice?

All of these possibilities matter and at the same time they dont. They matter because he will keep being himself, turning every meeting he has with the world in the direction of his best and worst qualities.But they also dont matter. He just is whoever he is, and according to Woolf’s metaphor, it is our job to let our hearts feel sympathy for him.

Tolstoy she says notices everything.

‘One shuts ones eyes to escape the feeling of pleasure and fear’ she says ( page 230)

‘Life dominates Tolstoi as the soul dominates Dostoyevsky.There is always at the ecntre of all the brilliant and flashing petals of the flower this scorpion,”Why live?”‘ (page 231)

From The Common Reader, First series, by Virginia Woolf,The Hogarth Press,London, 1968, eleventh impression. First published 1928.

I bought this book yesterday from Quilters Bookshop. It has been in the window for a few weeks, and it attracted my attention with its beautiful cover design by Vanessa Bell. The book cost me $20.00. It is hardcovered, in perfect condition- you would think no-one had ever opened it- and it brings with it something which has no particular value except to a reader like me, and that is a smell.

Smells can be described. I know this from the study of wine and perfume and coffee. So I will set myself the job of describing this smell. The bass note is somewhat sweet, and somewhat of decay. It has as they would say of wine, high notes. The smell is strongest at the inside edge of the pages, the edge nearest to the binding, so perhaps the smell has something to do with binding materials. It is the smell of age. One of the smells in second hand shops. But this smell has nothing to do with the smell of people- nothing of sweat or grease- it has something to do with being closed, enclosed, and something to do with water. It is a smell you recognise from summer houses, with their shelves of books that no-one opens for years at a time. I notice that the longer the book is open, the less strong the smell is, and if I want to smell it strongly again, which I do, I have to open the book at a new place.

It is a smell which I love.

An ebook does not have a smell.

Perhaps it is no longer reasonable to expect people to read 400 pages of anything? Perhaps richness can be added to a topic by being able to see a trail from the present comment, backwards, including all the things people have said which leads up to, or preceeds the present comment. There may or may not be any apparent connection. As with email, or with Facebook.

Perhaps my PhD writing could represent social networking structure in some way? It already does by being a whole lot of brief chunks of text.Perhaps it could contain links? Or photos, or things in some other medium than words.

Chatting with Julie Bytheway today- she mentioned a bok made to loook like Penguin Classics, called Twitterture. In this book there are backward trails. She also mentioned a stream of interesting ideas called Tedtalks, which are on Utube. Apparently he talks about whether Social networking has made people more honest because eerything is in public.

Penguin has issued the following statement for its authors regarding copyright:

As you know, the question of plagiarism and unfair use of other people’s copyrighted material has become a controversial issue in New Zealand publishing in recent years. There’ve been controversies in the media, and books have been withdrawn from sale. As your publisher, we ask you to take special care in this area.

The development of content in digital form over the years has made it very much easier to copy other people’s work and pass it off as your own. Google, for example, enables you to cut and paste from the world’s vast literary resources straight into your own work. If you do this in a sloppy way without following correct practice you might end up with pieces of other people’s copyrighted material sitting in your own book unacknowledged.

At the same time, of course, it is very much easier to detect the use of such plagiarised material by the use of that very same Google that may have caused the problem in the first place.

You should be very clear that it is your responsibility as the author of your work not to transgress other people’s copyright in any way and to deliver to your publisher a manuscript which is entirely your own work. If you do use other people’s material you must formally acknowledge it and seek permission for its use if necessary.

To read the full statement visit<http://authors.org.nz/ra.asp?m=13&p=8043&url=http://www.penguin.co.nz/webfiles/PenguinGroupNZ/files/Copyright_for_authors.pdf>

Today is the first day of my PhD blog. The rationale for blogging is as follows

1. the internet must be the best back-up system in the known world.

2. blogs are searchable.

That’s it. That’s the rationale. All about me. I am grateful to Pip Adam from my PhD class for taking the time to explain these aspects to me. There may turn out to be unforseen benefits along the way, such as outbreaks of fun, but from the beginning it is a PhD student’s tool.

Welcome to Blogtown NZ. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!