There is much talk of ‘mashing’ these days. Monster-mashing, for instance. I discussed it briefly here, in reference to Fjona Uu’s recent novel The Brontesaurus Sisters. Today, however, I’m pondering on a rather more general scale. Mash-ups are, after all, but another form of parody. That’s right: parody. That beautifully disgusting genre. The highest of the low arts. No one can sneer at a perfect parody, but experience tells us that these are few and far between. So why do we all think we can do it?

I speak not for myself, per se, but for my friends, the majority of whom spend a large portion of their evenings at The Crippled Bee musing over parodies they are thinking of/are definitely going to/have just started writing. There’s Mr X, waxing lyrical over his proposed Portrait of a Ladyman, Miss Y dreaming of making a mint with her Search for Lost Thyme and Mr Z all at sea over his Robinson Crusoe, Space Adventurer. All very much beneath me, of course, yet it seems to delight them so. And they remain convinced that this is what readers want; the same stories repeated over and over, albeit embellished with ludicrous subplots. Could they be right?

My wife, meanwhile, continues to write her Hieronymous Bosch-based thriller. I say write, but I think she’s still in the planning stage. In fact, I fear she’s overestimating the amount of work that ought to go into a sensational novel. Those sort of things need to be vomited onto the page, or left well alone.

I don’t think my wife reads this blog. Or if she does, not very often. Last week, however, she clearly took a peek, for on Saturday morning, at breakfast, she came forth with the following question:
‘Were you ever invited to Maria von Küppelberg’s?’
My answer was succinct. ‘Yes,’ I said: ‘Once’.
‘Can you elaborate?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, scooping a spoonful of scrambled egg into my mouth. ‘I don’t know’.

Can I elaborate? The truth is, Maria von Küppelberg was past her prime by the time I met her. In the seventies young literary sorts would do anything to bag an invite to one of her ‘evenings’. By the mid-eighties, however, she was considered – how can I say it? – a little ’stuffy’. It was in 1981, I think, that a certain Hungarian poet described her as ‘that grizzled fig’. So far as her physical attributes went, this was on the mark. As for her mind: I confess, that too was fading. By her death, in 1989, she was (according to the same poet) ‘as sharp as a squirrel’s tail’.

As far as our meeting went, there is very little to report. I neither impressed nor insulted the famous hostess. I was never invited back, granted, but then I did leave the city soon after. In any case, I’m pretty certain I did not embarrass myself.

I do regret, of course, that I never visited the woman in her prime. Or, to be exact, that I never visited her house at its prime. For one went to the von Küppelberg’s as much for other people as for Maria herself – much as one goes to The Crippled Bee for the excellent company – and not for that strange potion they serve at this time of the year (I don’t know what it is, but it certainly isn’t mulled wine).

‘Many people imagine being a short story writer is necessarily contingent upon the quality of having lived’ (Andrew K)

Johannes Speyer was not what you’d call a violent man. Violent language – possibly even violent ideas – were very much a part of his criticism, especially in later life, but beyond the page, well, I have met soft toys with a meaner streak. For all his call to action; his appeal to readers across the world to get up off their backsides and fight the good fight, Speyer himself led a quiet life. Which is not to say that he was a hypocrite; he was simply slow-off-his-feet and hampered, throughout life, by a series of crippling injuries. Had he not had chronically flat feet and a back that would make loners on the roof of Notre Dame chuckle carelessly, who knows – he might have read a few more novels on mountain tops.

Of course, even the calmest souls bubble over into casual violence occasionally. Remember the contretemps with the vociferous magpie? Who could forget it? Speyer in a temper was a dangerous beast. It was lucky that it happened so rarely – and that when it happened, the circumstances were usually so bizarre that the whole thing could be covered by laughs.

Throwing milk in the face of a ten year old isn’t, on reflection, all that funny. But one must appreciate the fact that this was, all things considered, a somewhat ‘difficult’ child – and that the best of us, put in the same situation, might have thought a glass of milk the safe option. Indeed, I’ve heard it said that the same child, on different occasions (and by different people) had the following things chucked in her general direction: a fire extinguisher, a shoe, a large cactus, a hot apple pie and a small-scale model of a cathedral in southern France. So a glass of milk represents restraint: real restraint.

But what was Speyer doing with this child in the first place? That will all become clear when I explain that she was the daughter of Maria von Küppelberg, the infamous German hostess, whose Thursday ‘at homes’ were the heart of the Viennese literary scene in the early 1970s. You’d be hard pressed to find an Austrian writer who wouldn’t have chopped off a limb or two in order to get through von Küppelberg’s front door. Even Speyer, it seems – not usually a social butterfly – was drawn in by her mysterious powers.

Her daughter, however, he was less impressed with – for the very good reason that he had high expectations of her. Too high, one might say – but then Speyer had ridiculously high expectations of all children. As you will no doubt know, his texts are liberally sprinkled with phrases such as ’seeing with a child’s eye’ or ‘this supreme child-like vision’. The idea of the child-like eye was one with which he was obsessed. Too bad he never met a child who had such an eye. All the children he ever came across saw with somewhat cynical eyes, sorely lacking the profound naivety he praised them for.

Matilda von Küppelberg was one such child. He thought, poor chap, that she of all people would appreciate his forward-thinking theories. Her pure child’s mind would see to the heart of his vision and understand its eternal truths. Her young imagination would be fired up by his thoughts. She would understand, oh yes: she would understand.

Unfortunately not. ‘You are a silly man,’ was all the young girl had to say on the matter. Active Reading was not for her. A glass of vanilla milk in the face, consequently, was.

‘So,’ he said, ‘You think yourself unlucky?’
He let out a chuckle, as a chimney lets out smoke; a quiet puff of malevolence put forth.
‘I knew a man,’ he continued, ‘who had what you might call a difficult week. On Monday he was, believe it or not, head-butted by a llama. On Tuesday he accidentally swallowed his boss’s car-key. On Wednesday, no less, his house was broken into and all his books stolen. On Thursday his girlfriend’s arm was broken by an angry swan. On Friday, for Friday it was, he was hypnotized by a professional magacian and broke the law eighteen times within an hour. On Saturday his brother died. On Monday, the following one, I met this man and asked him whether he thought himself unlucky. Do you know what he said?’
I shoke my head wearily.
‘He said “not at all. Not in the slightest. For guess what? Sunday passed quite without incident“‘

(Pyetr Turgidovsky, A Sea of Blood is Not Enough)

I have to strain my imagination to picture the sort of person who might not have been thrilled by every last line of my article The Doors of Pineappleception. However, after careful thought, I appreciate the fact that such a person could actually exist. Yes, I confess it: it’s isn’t beyond the realms of possibility that I, Georgy Riecke, might have wondered into the murky woods of literary tediousness. Still, it does seem a little unlikely, does it not?

In any case, for those who still care, allow me to remind you of the fact that said article has, at last, been delivered in its entirety. Which is to say: I am finished with it. No more talk of pineapples for now. It is high time I let the cow of contemporary thought out to graze on the pasture of fresh ideas. High time indeed.

I should just add, however, that, as well as featuring on this blog (in nine bite-size parts), the article has also been published, in full, over at Underneath the Bunker. Read the whole thing here.

Meanwhile….

[Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven and Eight]

I don’t doubt that more can be said on the effects of drinking fourteen pints of pineapple juice. That I am the man to say these things must, however, be questioned. Pioneering volunteer I may have been – pioneering scientist I am not. What goes on in one’s mind during such an experience can be explained, to some extent, in layman’s terms. This I have attempted to do. But the whole thing goes deeper than this. A mind is a complex thing, as well you know – and knowledge of its inner workings are, I fear, far beyond the knowledge of a literary critic (or this one, at least). I was the guinea pig, granted, but this was Emmanuel Yile’s experiment. I left it to him to put my pineapple-induced adventuring into some sort of scientific perspective.

That he didn’t do this wasn’t exactly his fault. He intended, no doubt, to expand upon his pineapple theories. I say this with some misgivings – in truth, I’m not sure the experiment went quite as well as he expected. How so I cannot say; it’s just that he didn’t seem, to my mind, entirely pleased with the results. The effects took a while to wear off, so I can’t say for sure, but if my wife is anything to go by (and she usually is), Yile was far from excited by all that had occurred. He wasn’t downcast, exactly – but then neither was he elated. And Yile was, as previously noted, a naturally enthusiastic man. One expected it of him. Anything else and you’d be concerned.

Why wasn’t he happy? I’m not sure. I don’t know what his expectations were. He had always said that he thought the pineapple-fuelled participant would experience a ‘different state of mind’. This I did. But was it different enough? Yile didn’t appear to think so – but then what did he know? He was taking my word, and my actions, for it. And I was, in my way, perfectly enthusiastic – so why wasn’t he? Had he expected me to shoot off like a rocket; to cavort around the Scottish streets like some lunatic, stripping off my clothes and squealing like a frightened piglet on speed?

I don’t know. I don’t quite know what he expected – nor do I know, for sure, what he made of it. In short, I know very little. And I cannot say whether this is because there was very little to know, or because there was a lot which was not said. In either case, very little is all I ever shall know, for now I know that Yile will never say all that he might, or might not, have said. And this is because Yile, Emmanuel Yile, he of the sturdy and sumptuous shoulders, is dead.

You could say that, were Yile alive, the mysterious properties of the pineapple would have been revealed to all, once and for all. You could also say that, were Yile alive, we’d be just as ignorant as we always were – and happily so. Yile’s genius was, I confess, of the uncertain sort. He seemed as though he possessed a wonderful mind – but did he?

His death doesn’t really answer the question. He killed himself, of course. I say ‘of course’ – not because it was inevitable, but because it wasn’t exactly surprising either. Had it been obvious, I would have done something to stop it. I might have answered that phone call in the middle in the night. I might have replied to that e-mail a little sooner. As it was, I didn’t, because I didn’t know that the man’s life was hanging on the line – though, in retrospect, it doesn’t shock me to know that it was. Emmanuel Yile was never quite of this world, and it doesn’t feel strange to think that he isn’t still in it.

The sordid facts are as follows. About two months after the great pineapple experiment, Yile was found dead in a bath of pink water. He’d slit his wrists, they thought at first, though it soon transpired that he had, in fact, drowned – in cranberry juice. You might argue that he was experimenting until the end. Or you might just say that he was deliberately killing himself in a suitably peculiar way. Read it as you will. I shall say no more on this.

As for the pineapples, however, a few closing words – for this was not an episode I should wish, for whatever reason, to pass over without due comment. The fact is, I experienced something very interesting that day. I delved beneath the veneer of ordinary existence and left my dirty fingerprints on the doorknob of deeper understanding. Can one keep quiet about such a thing? One cannot. Anything that teaches one to read in another way; that gives one a different perspective on Art, oh so precious Art, should never be sneered at.

On the other hand, what to do with it? Is there any sense in recommending that other readers should follow me down the road of copious pineapple-juice consumption? Was it really worth it?

To put it simply; in the right spirit, and under proper conditions, I should not dare to turn my nose up at anything which leads one to a new perspective; to a fresh way of looking, not just at the world, but – more importantly – at text: at the book, that holiest of objects, that most beautiful of earthly things: our saviour. It isn’t for everyone, perhaps, but I speak as a critic – and we, of all people, should take every care never to rest on our laurels. There is never one way to experience something: there are a myriad ways of viewing this world of ours – and we’d be fools to overlook any way of thinking, however strange it seems, and however unhealthy it may turn out to be. In short: drink away (but I wouldn’t go so far as fourteen pints, unless you want to embarrass yourself in a public park).

[finis]

An interesting fact: Koira Jupczek’s novel Death Charts (reviewed here) has been translated into French. It is called La Mort mode d’emploi  and the cover features a skull encrusted with pumpkin seeds lying on a well-mown lawn.

[Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six and Seven]

There were several texts, but we started with Koira Jupczek’s Death Charts – one of my favourite contemporary European novels. We sat down in a café and Yile passed the book over to me. I opened it eagerly, like a hungry child unwrapping a chocolate bar. This was a good sign: oh that all literature might be approached like this – as if it were the most precious, delicious object in the world! Words are not turgid: they are not dusty, nor dull, staid nor sullen. So why do so many people open books whilst wearing such sad faces? One should open a book with the expectation of being thrilled to within an inch of your life; in the knowledge that what you hold in your hands is a whole new country of words: virgin soil awaiting an eager conqueror. Go forth into novels like a soldier rushes into battle, like a turtle scoops into the ocean, like a bat flies into the night. Don’t let the words come to you: you go to them.

At first, of course, I found it hard to concentrate on any one word, on any one sentence – on any one page. The pineapple juice had driven me into a state of sensual over-excitement. I wanted to read every word at once: to consume the novel in one big bite, as if it were a doughnut. I learned, at length, to control this appetite – the skill that every juice-drinker must master, as soon as possible. For great as it is to want to throw oneself into a book right off, one has to accept that some things are beyond the powers of the reader. Excited states of mind, in this sense, represent somewhat of a tease. They promise great things, giving the host the feeling that anything can be achieved, at any point in time, by anyone. At the same time they make it hard for this host to do anything: he/she ends up crippled by freedom: shaken to a blurry statue.

Tame the beast, however, and you will reap the rewards. When I did at last get around to devoting my overactive attention to a whole page of the book, I must confess that it was, all in all, a most enlightening experience. It is, again, most difficult to put into words, but I felt almost as if the story was lifting itself off the pages as I read. My eyes moved along the formal black and white print, marching across the usual lines; but what I felt was something far beyond this. Each word was like a blast of colour, or a small explosion of sound. The text was not text. It surrounded me. I was at the centre of a noisy rainbow of words; a sweet tornado of literary ideas and images. Jupczek’s prose came to glorious, multi-coloured, multi-dimensional life. I was engulfed. I was absorbed into the book – and the book into me. I was lost, so very beautifully lost.

How long did it last? Not long enough – and yet too long. Such things cannot go on forever. There is far too much to take in. The experience is, for all its advantages, an overwhelming one. More is crammed in a minute than normal existence can cram into an hour. This is both a good and a bad thing. It takes up less time, in itself, but it requires just as much time, if not more, for recovery and reflection. And these things, especially the latter, it most certainly needs. The moment is not enough on its own. The moment must be able to teach us something; it must allow us to take something back with us when we return to reality; to the world of ordinary perception.

[Part Nine]

‘Please don’t write anything further about pineapples,’ writes a reader at the end of the most recent instalment of my article, The Doors of Pineappleception. ‘All this has gone too far,’ he adds, with the peculiar confidence of someone who thinks they have the monopoly on common sense.

Of course, the very idea of ‘going too far’ is intimately bound up with questions lying at the heart of that very article. Emmanuel Yile, the anti-hero of my narrative (if you please) is a man who frequently ‘goes too far’. By volunteering to be his human guinea pig I also step beyond a boundary; I too delve into the mysterious lands that lie behind the line of ’sense’.

Yile does this because he is, in all fairness, a lunatic. I do this, however, in order to raise what are, I believe, quite valid points – one of which is, inevitably, that ‘going too far’ is not, all things considered, always such a bad thing.

In truth, I have made quite a habit of ‘going too far’. People thought that setting up a publishing house dedicated to writers like Jean-Pierre Sertin, Yevgeny Nonik and Eva Holubk was ‘going too far’. I did it anyway. People thought that creating a blog to supplement my already unpopular website Underneath the Bunker was ‘going too far’. I did it anyway. The only regrets I have in life concern periods during which I didn’t go far enough.

There is another side to this, of course there is. Whilst reluctant to admit that that any place can be, in fact, ‘too’ far, I will confess that there are drawbacks. There is a point in which one’s work becomes self-indulgent and pointless. To put it another way – as I go to explore at the end of my article – one can drink too much pineapple juice. These things, however, these ‘boundary-crossing-acts’, teach us to look at the world in a different way; they tease the creases of life’s fabric, not because they wish to tear a hole, as such, but because they sense the need to keep things moving: to keep us thinking.

Much of this will, I hope, become clear in the last few episodes of my article. Should the reader decide that he/she isn’t keen to follow me down that particular path, I am more than happy to let them stay by the wayside. But I wonder whether they may one day regret, as they squander there, that they never went far enough.