I have now relocated the Nehemiah Blake blog to it’s own domain: www.nehemiahblake.co.uk. For the time being, this blog will remain online as an archive. I look forward to having you join me at the new site.
July 8, 2011
What is it to be prophetic in England today? It is to the ability to imagine a future that is radically better than the present. The radio journalist said, “This is the UK’s third great crisis of trust.” First it was the banks. Then it was the politicians. Now it is the media. But the… [Read more…]
July 1, 2011
The quote below is taken from the chapter “Culture and Capital” in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. I find it worth quoting because it contains within it the critical part of the prophetic imagination that establishes the paradigm in which the consciousness of power works. Musil may be writing about an imperial Austria on… [Read more…]
June 28, 2011
I recently changed the tagline of this blog from “Pursuing a theology of the novel” to “Bringing prophetic imagination to the novel”. This is in part because I’ve discovered what I was pursuing. The theology I was looking for in the novel was a theology of prophetic utterance. Having found that this is what I… [Read more…]
June 22, 2011
David Foster Wallace spoke in an interview with Ostap Karmodi (recently translated from the Russian) of the “moral obligation … to develop compassion and mercy and empathy” through writing that would counter “a very aggressive capitalism and consumerism” that is swamping the moral attitude of America. He also noted that writers in America “are much… [Read more…]
June 17, 2011
The quote below comes from Gabriel Josipovici’s The Book of God. I quote it because it confirms to me an idea that has been growing in my head of late: that the work of Beckett and the like, in which there is expressed that there is nothing to be said, has the same ground of… [Read more…]
May 27, 2011
From Time Magazine, 22 Dec 1967: “Is William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury a religious novel? Faulkner himself was a somewhat cynical agnostic, and few readers would find much spiritual comfort in his dour chronicle of the Compson family. But to Professor Nathan Scott of the University of Chicago Divinity School, the answer is… [Read more…]
May 26, 2011
The four books below were my first quarter’s reading (though I only finished them in April). What’s below are less reviews and more riff responses to them. Farenheit 451, Ray Bradbury I found it quite interesting, given my own pursuit of the theology of the novel that Bradbury should have rise up in Guy Montag… [Read more…]
May 9, 2011
C.S. Lewis at his desk; image from kenwytsma.com Dear Lector, It has been a long time since I wrote, but that does not mean I have not been giving much thought about what it is I want to say to you. During a recent holiday, I picked up a copy of A.N. Wilson’s biography of… [Read more…]
May 9, 2011
This passage from Kafka’ The Trial where the priest discusses this particular interpretation of the gatekeeper with K. reflects quite a bit of what is going on between Nehemiah Blake and his angel guide in The Dream Vision of Nehemiah Blake. My point of comparison is this verse from 1 Peter 1:12: “It was revealed… [Read more…]
May 4, 2011
A few of quotes taken from Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel (Faber & Faber, 1988) that bear on my own pursuit of the theology of the novel. “As God slowly departed from the seat whence he had directed the universe and its order of values, distinguished good from evil, and endowed each thing… [Read more…]
April 28, 2011
I have been thinking over Lent about the theology of the novel. If the novel begins to appear at the point at which God begins to depart from the seat in which he presided over the Middle Ages, then the theology of the novel is concerned with the absence of God from its pages. But… [Read more…]
March 2, 2011
“Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending. …Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last… [Read more…]
February 27, 2011
The first of hopefully a weekly series of links encountered on the Interweb during the preceding week and to be posted on Sundays, if I can manage it. In this week’s links: A new work on Postcolonial Asylum, Tom McCarthy interviewed in the White Review, Terry Eagleton reviewing Eric Hobsbawn and recent BBC doc on… [Read more…]
February 25, 2011
Dear Lector, It seems a fortnight since I last wrote to you, would that be about right? I wonder if this is a more sustainable pattern for our conversing hence forth? I want to thank you for saying how much you enjoyed reading my last missive. And it’s good to hear your own story is… [Read more…]
February 23, 2011
I have long been a fan of Terry Eagleton and derive great enjoyment from reading what he has to say as well as how he says it. His review of Eric Hobsbawn’s How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011 (Little, Brown, 2011) in the London Review of Books is no different. I’ve pulled… [Read more…]
February 23, 2011
The long quote below is (hopefully) a complementary response to Daniel Hartley’s (Thinking Blue Guitars) post ‘O Happy Fall’. It comes from an essay I wrote on Derrida for a post-grad course a few years back, but on reading Daniel’s post, I was reminded of it: Derrida notices that if you write down a spoken… [Read more…]
February 22, 2011
A quote from the closing pages of Rob Young’s excellent Electric Eden (Faber, 2010) “Ever since the Enlightenment, and even to an extent prior to thatm, this superimpositionof the biblical/Miltonic Paradise onto the golden age of the ancient Greeks has been a necessary survival mechanism for British culture–mental insulation against the changes wrought by industrial… [Read more…]
February 21, 2011
A quote from Molloy by Samuel Beckett. It’s the humour over Molloy’s confusion about whether he’s Belacqua or Sordello that caught my eye. Both are figures from Dante’s ante-purgatory, the former lazy and indolent: “Lazier he could not look, not even if ‘Lazy’ were his middle name (IV, 110-1); the latter “watching like a couchant… [Read more…]
February 19, 2011
A short essay on the Bible in quotes taken from Gabriel Josipovici’s The Book of God (Yale University Press, 1988) “…it is not surprising that Kafka and Proust and Beckett all deny that they are artists. Neither purveyors of entertainment nor priests of any sacred cult, they see their writing as the only way to… [Read more…]
February 11, 2011
Dear Lector I haven’t written to you now in a few weeks. My fault really for not taking the time to do so. I’ve now reconfigured my afternoons so that I have an hour to write while my daughter naps (this in addition to the hour or so I do in the morning. Did I… [Read more…]
January 21, 2011
I have been re-converted to the practice of writing long hand. On the face of it, not a very efficient (read maximum amount of information recorded in the shortest amount of time) way of going about things, but for writing a novel, I am amazed that I have discarded this method for so long. I… [Read more…]
January 16, 2011
So, I finished rewriting the first 50-odd pages of The Dream Vision this week, to be left with just 40. That’s some 2,000 words left on the cutting room floor. The process has been a bit like a film director reshaping the narrative by bringing scenes together that have hitherto been in entirely different parts… [Read more…]
January 10, 2011
There are some days when you read over what you have written the previous day and you simply think uggghhh. Had one of those early last week. Encouragement is usually what’s needed, and it generally comes from the large, invisible community of writers, both living and dead. The following day, I caught this week’s edition… [Read more…]
January 4, 2011
As you plan your reading year for 2011, let Borges’ wisdom help guide your choice.
December 28, 2010
At the beginning of the year I noted to myself that one of my goals for 2010 would be “to focus on writing career and produce material for publication.” By March my notebooks record my commitment to the Nehemiah Blake project, a desire to produce a pamphlet and do a public reading. At my mid-year… [Read more…]
December 3, 2010
What with all the snow this week, it’s been a hibenatory week. Particularly today. Forget to set the alarm last night and woke up at 7am. So no writing today. I’ve begun rewriting the first fifty pages of Dream Vision this week in preparation for a submission come the new year. When I say rewrite,… [Read more…]
November 26, 2010
It’s getting to that time of year when the goals I set fly at the beginning of the year are coming home to roost. Across the board I’m not doing too well. In most cases it’s one step forward, two steps back. One of my goals in setting this year aside to focus on my… [Read more…]
November 16, 2010
Thinking back on it, the past writing week doesn’t conjure up much emotion, which is good in a way because it means the habit has taken hold, and I’m just getting on with it. There was a spat between the tenses though this week, where a couple of the visions lurched from the simple past… [Read more…]
November 8, 2010
In a recent interview with 3:AM, Italian “novelist collective” Wu Ming (formerly of Luther Blissett) said the following: “We’ve never been dismissive of the religious issue even though we are atheists and anti-clerical and against the pope and church et cetera. But we’re never dismissive of faith and religion. You have to understand what happens… [Read more…]
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September 14, 2011
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