Dubyedee

@wdclarke

Writer. PhD English UWarwick 2009, pubbed on Thomas Pynchon Two novels with @coronasamizdat.bsky.social For now, not here much...active at (reviews, crit, pol economy) Ontario, Canada

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Dubyedee@wdclarke· 1d

The Lamentation of Natasha Stagg volume0.substack.com/p/the-lament...

"The book could have been more purposeful,
structured, dissectable. I hear disruptive, sticky,
urgent. I remember, in my creative writing MFA
workshops, the words people most often used to
discredit someone's story draft: pat, heavy-
handed, earnest. None of us wanted, then, for
our manuscripts to end up in airports or adapted
into miniseries."
VOLUME O and Natasha Stagg
The Lamentation of Natasha Stagg
VOLUMEO.SUBSTACK.COM

Dubyedee@wdclarke· 7d

Some of his others

Dubyedee@wdclarke· 7d

Just one of Rick Harsch's many great gifts

$Dubyedee \ wdclarke.bsky.social If you are at all familiar with the #rickbrick from @CoronaSamizdat you'll understand why I'm not attempting to wield the knife required to open one until I've had at least a second coffee„.$

Dubyedee@wdclarke· 7d

RIP, my mischievously sweet and generous brother

$Press D @EquusPress I.M. RICK HARSCH We are heartbroken to learn of the death of Rick Harsch, & bid farewell to a magnificent writer, a fearless publisher, & one of the warmest, brightest, most generous people we have had the privilege to know. Through Corona\Samizdat, Rick conducted his tireless literary operations from Izola, Slovenia. From that unlikely hub he unleashed on the unsuspecting world some unruly, uncompromising, & criminally overlooked writing with an enthusiasm entirely his own. His solidarity with fellow independent presses was equally uncompromising. In his wonderfully digressive YouTube videos, he devoted time & attention to several Equus books, discussing them with the wit & infectious passion that made him such a rare reader & advocate for a common cause. In October 2024, he joined us in Prague for the Prague Microfestival, bringing with him that unmistakable mixture of erudition, mischief, outrage & immense human warmth. We were enormously fortunate to visit Rick in Izola last February, to see the place from which Corona\Samizdat carried out its improbable & essential work, & to enjoy his company, conversation, & boundless hospitality. Rick was one of the great independents: a writer and publisher who understood literature not as a career structure or marketplace, but as a form of selfless friendship & stubborn collective life. His loss leaves the small-press community immeasurably poorer, and all of us who knew him bereft. Our love and deepest condolences go out to his family, friends, writers, readers, & the entire Corona\Samizdat community. The mission continues, as it must. But without Rick, it will be a lonelier one. Ave atque vale.$

Dubyedee@wdclarke· 11d

Two fledglings on flight training, momma scolding them/me from the tree above

Dubyedee@wdclarke· Jul 14

Q: Truth is stranger than fiction? A: Nothing is stranger than fiction (but…) —Martin Amis's 2020 novel, Inside Story

are almost touchingly naive. One thing literature
can do, and has always done and will always go on
doing (with no particular exertion), is conjure up
characters stranger than Trump. As for satire: while
turning him into art, would Swift, Pope, Dickens,
Evelyn Waugh, or Don DeLillo, say, feel that there
was nothing to add?
...In real life — in society, in civilisation — we bow to
the old rule, No freedom without laws. Novels and
stories aren't like that: in fiction there are no laws
and at the same time freedom is limitless. Fiction is
freedom. Mm, I suppose that's what some people
find so terrifring, early on, about the blank sheet of
white paper: write anything you want; no one's
stopping you.
Still, I've come to an awkward conclusion: there
are certain things that fiction must broach with
extreme caution, if at all, certain sizable and
familiar zones of human existence that seem
naturally immune to the novelist's art. At the least,
fictional successes, in these areas, are dismally rare.
Just the three things, by my count (though there
may be more) — and that's not many things.
One. Dreams. This would be the least

Dubyedee@wdclarke· Jul 9

The Atlantic (“Clickbait, yes, but in such large portions”): single-handedly saving Reading Culture, one interminable hate-read at a time...

Dubyedee@wdclarke· Jul 3

[2/2]

TESTAMENTS BETRAYED
when it comes to music and the novel, we are all of us
raised in the aesthetic of the second half. A mass by
Ockeghem or Bach's The Art of Fugue are for the aver-
age music lover as difficult to comprehend as Webern's
music. However enchanting their stories, the novels of
the eighteenth century intimidate the reader by their
form, to the point where they are much better known
in movie adaptations (which necessarily denature both
their spirit and their form) than through their written
texts. The works of the eighteenth century's most
famous novelist, Samuel Richardson, cannot be found
in bookstores and are practically forgotten. Balzac, on
the contrary, even though he may seem old-fashioned,
is still easy to read; his form is comprehensible, famil-
iar to the reader, and even more important, it is for
that reader the very model of the novel form.
The chasm between the aesthetics of these two
halves makes for a multitude of misunderstandings.
Vladimir Nabokov, in his book on Cervantes, gives a
provocatively negative opinion of Don Quixote: over-
valued, naive, repetitive, and full of unbearable and
implausible cruelty; that "hideous cruelty" makes this
book "one of the most bitter and barbarous ever
penned"; poor Sancho, moving along from one drub-
bing to another, loses all his teeth at least five times.

Dubyedee@wdclarke· Jul 3

The history of the novel, the history of music as (World Cup?!) football match (in Milan Kundera’s Testaments Betrayed (1993)) [1/2]

The Two Halves
The history of European music covers about a thou-
sand years (if I take as its beginnings the first experi-
ments in primitive polyphony). The history of the
European novel (if I take as its start the works of
Rabelais and Cervantes) covers about four centuries.
When I consider these two histories, I cannot shake the
sense that they developed in rhythms resembling, so to
speak, the two halves of a soccer game. The caesuras,
or halftime breaks, in the history Of music and in that
of the novel do not coincide. In the history of music,
the break stretches over a big part of the eighteenth
century (the symbolic apogee of the first half occurring
in Bach's The Art of Fugue, and the start of the second
half in the works of the earliest Classical composers)
the break in the history of the novel comes a little
later: between the eighteenth and the nineteenth cen-
turies—that is, between Laclos and Sterne on the one
side and, on the other, Scott and Balzac. This asyn-
chronism shows that the deepest causes governing the
rhythm of the history of the arts are not sociological or
political but aesthetic: bound up with the intrinsic
nature of one art or another; as if the art of the novel,
for instance, contained two different potentialities (two
different ways of being a novel) that could not be
worked out at the same time, in parallel, but could be
worked out only successively, one after the other.
The metaphor of the two halves of a game came to
me some time ago in the course of a conversation with
a friend and does not claim to be at all scholarly; it is
an ordinary, elementary observation, naively obvious:

Dubyedee@wdclarke· Jul 1

Most novels... (Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed)

Dubyedee@wdclarke· Jun 30

Also, this passage about our non-identity with those wishes/desires tutelary angels might have for us, instantly brought mind Todd Friendly’s backward-facing and - living Soul in Martin Amis' novel Time’s Arrow

According to Scholem there is a Talmudic tradition in which "the
personal angel of each human being represents the latter's secret self
and whose name nevertheless remains hidden from him This angel,
to be sure, can also enter into opposition to the earthly creature to
whom he is attached." So, whoever we are—and we are someone! We
have a secret self! We have a way we should be living!—we Will remain
mysterious to ourselves. Bleak, but no surprise: who among us has lived
as we wished? That is, we can't take our unfolding, which occurs
almost exclusively in the future, for granted, and to encounter our
angel, our secret self, is never easy: it shimmers with accusation,
protest, catastrophe.

Dubyedee@wdclarke· May 26

The Novelist (89 Words, Milan Kundera, 2025) ((A earlier draft of/supplement to a keywords list found in his The Art of the Novel, link to my midrash of which in reply))

NOVELIST (and the novelist's life). ' 'The artist must
make posterity think that he never existed, " Flaubert
said. Maupassant prevented his portrait from appearing
m a series of famous writers. 'The private life of a man
and his face don't belong to the public," he sald_
Hermann Broch said the following about himself, Musil,
and "Not one of us has a real biography. : : This
doesn't mean that their lives lacked interestmg events,
but that their lives weren't destined to be distinguished,
to be public, to become life-writing. When Karel Capek
is asked why he doesn't write poetry, he says: "Because 1
hate talking about myself The distinctive characteristic
of a ncnellst is they don't want to talk about themselves.
"l hate sticking my nose into the Intimate details of the
lives of great writers: and no biography can ever remove
the from my life," Nabokov said. Italo Calvino
warned others: he 'vas resolved to never say a single true
word to others about his life. And Faulkner wanted "to
be a nobody, kept out of history: leaving no trace at all,
other than what is in my books. (Let's emphasize
'books" and ' 'publlshed,:: and not manuscripts, letters:
and journals.) According to a famous metaphor: the
novelist destroys the house of his life in order to build
another with its bricks: die house of novels. With this in
mind: the biographies of a undo what the
novelist did: and redo "hat he had undone. Biographies,
which add nothing to art, cannot bring light, value, or
meaning to a novel. When Kafka attracts more attention
than Joseph K _ , then his posdlumous death IS undenvay_

Dubyedee@wdclarke· May 24

As I say in my book

Dubyedee@wdclarke· May 24

The Novel's Beauty (Milan Kundera, 89 Words, 2025)

* BEAUTY (and KNOWLEDGE). Those who say, along with Broch,
that knowledge is the novel's only moral end are betrayed by the metallic
aura of the word "knowledge," which is compromised by its connections
to science. More is needed: the novel discovers every aspect of existence,
including beauty. The first novelists discovered adventure. It's thanks to
them that adventure seems beautiful and something we want. Kafka
described the situation of a person who is tragically trapped. Those who
study Kafka used to argue a lot about whether the author was giving us
any hope or not. No, no hope. Something else. But Kafka discovers how
the unlivable situation is both strange and full of black beauty. Beauty:
the last possible victory of a person who has lost hope. Beauty in art: the
light subtly emanating from the never-said. This light suffuses great
novels; there will never be a time when it fades because, human
existence being perpetually forgotten by people, the discoveries of
novelists, even when they become dated, will never cease to amaze us.

Dubyedee@wdclarke· May 22

Someone deleted their reply, but they are right: Bennett is indeed a bit of an oddball...I used to teach his "Translating Literature into Life" just to stimulate discussion, but he does have a point about a need to 1st empathise in order to (mix his metaphors) "wrestle" "using all 1's engine power"

You say : I know all that. But it is not so
easy to translate literature into life." And I
admit freely that when I think Of the time I have
wasted in reading masterpieces, I stand aghast.
The explanation IS simple. Idleness , intellect
sloth, LS the explanation. If you were invited
to meet a great writer, you would brace yourself
to the cxcasion. You would say to yourself :
I must keep my ears open, and my brain wide-
awake, So as to miss nothing. You would tingle
With your own bracing Of yourself. But you—
I mean we—will sit down to a great book as
though we were sitting down to a ham sandwich.
NO sense Of personal inferiority in us! NO
mood of resolve! No tuning up of the in-
tellectual apparatus ! But just a casual, easy
air, as if saymg to the book : Well, come along,
let's have a 100k at ! What is the matter
with our reading IS casualness, languor, pre-
occupation. We don't give the book a chance.
We don't put ourselves at the disposal Of the
It is to read properly Without ["using all one's engine power"]
44

Dubyedee@wdclarke· May 22

There is a gulf (Arnold Bennett, Literary taste How to Form It, 1909)

60
LITERARY TASTE
find them—I may as well out with the word—
dull. You may have found Lamb less diverting,
less interesting, than you hoped. You may have
had to whip yourself up again and again to the
effort Of reading him. In brief, Lamb has not,
for you, justified his terrific reputation. If a
classic is n classic because it gives pleasure to suc-
cecding generations of the people who are most
keenly interested in literature, and if Lamb fre-
quently strikes you as dull, then evidently there
is something wrong. The difficulty must be
fairly fronted, and the fronting of it brings us to
the very core of thc business of actually forming
the taste. If your taste were classical you would
discover in Lamb a continual fascination; where—
as what you in fact do discover in Lamb is a not
unpleasant flatness, enlivened by a vague humour
and an occasional pathos. You ought, according
to theory, to be enthusiastic; but you are apa-
thetic, or, at best, half-hearted. There is a gulf.
How to cross it?

Dubyedee@wdclarke· May 20

Virginia Woolf: James Joyce FTW ("Modern Fiction," The Common Reader I, underlinings not my own)

90
MODERN FICTION
work of several young writers, among whom Mr.
James Joyce is the most notable, from that of their
predecessors. Thy attempt to come closer& life,
and to preserve more sincerely and exactly what
interests and moves them, even if to do so they must
discard most of the conventions which are commonly
observed by the novelist. Egt us record-theatoms-as_
they fall upon_thevmindin the they fall,
let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and
incoherent in appearance, which each sight incident
scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take_it
for granted that life exists more fully in what is
commonly thought big than in what is commonly
thought small. Any one who has read The Por-
trait of the Artist as a roung Man or, what promises
to be a far more interesting work, Ulysses,U now
appearing in the Little Review, will have hazarded
some theory of this nature as to Mr. Joyce's intention.

Dubyedee@wdclarke· May 20

[If]

a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he
could write what he chose, not what he must, if
he could base his work upon his own feeling and
not upon convention, there would be no plot, no
comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe
in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button
sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it.
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged ;
life is a Luminous halo, a.emi-transparent•- envelope
surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to
the end. Is it not the task of thc novclist to convcy this
varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit,
whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with
as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?
We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity;
we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is
a little other than custom would have us believe it.

Dubyedee@wdclarke· Apr 17

NDG, Montreal

Dubyedee@wdclarke· Apr 17

Today is the day! (From Leonard Cohen'snovel, Beautiful Losers)

Dubyedee@wdclarke· Mar 24

I'll imagine this flock of wild turkeys as domestic so I can legit refer to them by the clearly superior "Rafter of Turkeys"

Dubyedee@wdclarke· Mar 22

(fr. ca. 1685, also, sans hyphenss fr 1708)

OED36829
come-at-able, adj.
OED.2022.V4
Pronunciation: Brit. O/
l, U.S.O/
kmnlatabl
Ikam
Iædabal/'
Frequency (in current use): frequency band
(_sh_Qy_ pr)_
information
Now rare.
Able to be come at or reached; accessible,
attainable, obtainable.
Derivatives
come- at-a bility n. the state or quality of being
come-at-able.
1909
come- at-ableness n.
1837_1898
come-at-ability n.

Dubyedee@wdclarke· Mar 22

"come-at-able" [Emma, Jane Austen (1816)] #c18th #18thc

After these came a second set; among the
most come-at-able of whom were Mrs. and
Miss Bates and Mrs. Goddard, three ladies
almost always at the service of an invitation
from Hartfield, and who were fetched and
carried home so often that Mr. Woodhouse
thought it no hardship for either James or the
horses. Had it taken place only once a year, it
would have been a grievance.

Dubyedee@wdclarke· Mar 12

Feels apropos somehow

The Parthian Dart:
Endings and Epilogues in Fiction
PA T ROGERS
MY TITLE refers to the sense one gets at the end of many
traditional novels that the author is walking backwards
out of the narrative, vacating textual space at his or her
conclusion by reversing the perspective or redirecting the
angle of one vision on events. The technique may loosely be
called Parthian in that the author has saved up some of
his or her best shots until the moment of departure (there
is commonly a ceremony of leave-taking). Moreover, the
reader is Often on the retreat as well: as soon as the credits
come up, we head for the exit, craning over our shoulders to
catch the final words. But the emphasis here will be on the
writer's end of things.

Dubyedee@wdclarke· Mar 12

A poet cannot read another poet, nor a novelist another
novelist, without comparing their work to his own. His
judgments as he reads are of this kind: God! My
GreatGrandfather! My Uncle! My Enemy! My Brother! My
imbecile Brother!

Dubyedee@wdclarke· Mar 9

Authors, Critics (fr W.H. Auden, The Dyer's hand)

If good literaly critics are rarer than good poets or novelists, one reason
is the nature of human egoism. A poet or a novelist has to leam to be humble
in the face of his subject matter which is life in general. But the subject
matter of a critic, before which he has to leam to be humble, is made up of
authors, that is to say, of human individuals, and this kind of humility is
much more difficult to acquire. It is far easier to say—"Life is more
impoltant than anything I can say about it"—than to say—"Mr. A' s work is
more important than anything I can say about it. "
There are people who are too intelligent to become authors, but they do
not become critics.
Authors can be stupid enough, God knows, but they are not always quite
so stupid as a certain kind of critic seems to think. The kind of critic, I mean,
to whom, when he condemns a work or a passage, the possibility never
occurs that its author may have foreseen exactly what he is going to say.

Dubyedee@wdclarke· Mar 6

Last day on the river this year... 14C and perhaps 40mm of rain tomorrow :(

Dubyedee@wdclarke· Feb 26

Standoff

Dubyedee@wdclarke· Feb 3

X deleted this reply I made over there: a character in my first novel, a psychiatrist & lead researcher for a new antidepressant, was wont to speak ill of Freud, though he had never read him—as with most Marx-detractors, ofc!

Indeed, It was something ofa personal joke of Dr. Ed's that
Frud, that 'grat' dream-reader (Traumdeuter), that puffed-up old
spinner of yarns, had 'discovered' or rather imagined there was
a connection between an adult individual 's dream-states and the
'rpressed ' but psychically active traumas of childhood, and that
the patient's dream was therefore the 'myal road to the uncon-
scious'. And this imagmed connection, as Dr. Ed saw it, was based
upon some rather spurious etymologizing on Freud 's part, or to
use Freud's own terminology against him, upon some uncon-
scious 'wish-fulfilment' of the late, grat Viennese witch-doctor's.
Freud may have considered himself a scientist, but Dr. Ed's pin
had him wriggling in an entirely different collection of exotic
specimens: amongst the family of august, Germanic theoreti-
cians, the species of the 'professional' philologist. Like his fore-
runners Hegel and Nietzsche, Freud's reputation rested not so

Dubyedee@wdclarke· Jan 28

3) Give up reading newly-published books & Commence Endgame/literary Hail Mary Moonshot Dice-roll: —Withdraw still further into Self —Craft sentences exponentially harder to follow in a private language & an ever more personal style ➡️Enter the Vivid, Concrete, Poetic Sublime