Erica Wagner » Notebook

Existential football

ericawagner — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 13:28:39 +0000

Owen Slot in The Times, on France’s defeat by South Africa, and the troubles of the French team: “The atmosphere in the French team, mutinous on Sunday, had been replaced by regret and emptiness.”

On writing and memory

ericawagner — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 07:14:28 +0000

“The intrinsic dishonesty of writing corrupts memory too. Susan writes her memories into narrative. But narrative does not flash like memory, it’s built across time with cells for storing the flashes that come. It transforms memory into a text, relieving the mind of the need to dig and hunt. Remembered Edward is such a text, and early Arnold and her marriage, established through many writings long ago. Obliged now to reread these old texts, she can’t help rewriting. She’s rewriting now, as hard as she can, trying her best to bring back an illusion of memory alive, because the orthodox narrative is totally dead.”

From Austin Wright’s Tony & Susan; first published in 1993, republished in 2010

Erica Wagner — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 13:53:00 +0000

“As we counted down to S-IVB ignition for TLI [translunar injection], a hush fell over Mission Control. TLI was what made this flight [Apollo 8] different from the six Mercury, ten Gemini, and one Apollo flights that had preceded it, different from any trip man had ever made in any vehicle. For the first time in history, man was going to propel himself past escape velocity, breaking the clutch of earth’s gravitational field and coast into outer space as he had never done before. After TLI there would be three men in the solar system who would have to be counted apart from all the other billions, three who were in a different place, whose motion obeyed different rules, and whose habitat had to be considered a separate planet. The three could examine the earth and the earth could examine them, and each would see the other for the first time. This the people in Mission Control knew; yet there were no immortal words on the wall proclaiming the fact, only a thin green line, representing Apollo 8 climbing, speeding, vanishing — leaving us stranded behind on this planet, awed by the fact that we humans had finally had an option to stay or to leave — and had chosen to leave.”

from Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut

Erica Wagner — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 06:26:00 +0000

Spent the weekend at the wonderful Shakespeare and Company in Paris — teaching a writing course for the Faber Academy. So here I am signing books outside on a sunny Sunday evening — for any writer or reader, what better place to be?

Erica Wagner — Sat, 02 May 2009 10:59:00 +0000

A few days ago I had the privilege of interviewing Benjamin Zephaniah. What’s not in the interview is the conversation I had with him about his version of Tam Lin, Tam Lyn Retold, recorded with The Imagined Village. I told him how much Tam Lin meant to me — that my novel Seizure was partly based on the story — and he laughed, I like to think with delight. “I’m not just saying this,” he said to me, “but I get this almost every day. One thing I find about people who are into Tam Lin, is that they’re really into it. And maybe I shouldn’t admit this, but I didn’t know it at all. Maybe that helped me, because I could just look at it and think, how would I tell this in a modern setting? What wld be the modern day version of this? it’s interesting reading what people said about it – I dunno, it’s diff icult to say, you can’t go back to the past, you can’t imagine knowing something you didn’t know, but I think it would have been harder if I’d known it. I would have been asking myself, like, what would Erica think? And from all over the world I get people writing to me about it – some one just the other day from central Africa, from Malawi, wrote to me, saying something like, you’ve done us good.”

Erica Wagner — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:21:00 +0000

Walt Whitman said that the Brooklyn Bridge was “the best, most effective medicine my soul has yet partaken”. This remarkable photograph is by New York photographer Barbara Mensch. Find her work here.

Erica Wagner — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 14:37:00 +0000

The other night I went to hear Simon Callow give a talk at the wonderful London Library. When asked by a member of the audience what his favourite book of all time was he replied that he would have to choose Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers for its quality of beneficence — a quality he said, rightly, was thin on the ground these days. He reminded me of the closing paragraph of the book, an exemplar of what he means:

“And there in the midst of all this, stood Mr. Pickwick. Let us leave our old friend in one of those moments of unmixed happiness, of which, if we seek them, there are ever some, to cheer our transitory existence here. There are dark shadows on the earth but its lights are stronger in the contrast. Some men, like bats or owls, have better eyes for the darkness than for the light; we, who have no such optical powers, are better pleased to take our last parting look at our imaginary companions, when the brief sunshine of the world is blazing full upon them.”

Three cheers for Mr. Pickwick and his friends. That’s us, too.

Erica Wagner — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:06:00 +0000

Eunoia is the shortest word in the English language that uses every vowel. Eunoia is a book by the shockingly clever Christian Bök. It’s published by those equally clever people at Canongate.

Whenever Helen enters Hell’s deepest recesses, she sees
Hell’s meekest dwellers. She meets the repenters, never
redeemed. She greets her decedent elders. The elder
seers, when greeted, tell her: ‘repent, repent – never let
the tempters here tempteth thee’ – then these helpless
wretches tell her three spells best kept secret, lest the
tempted empress reverse these hexes, then set free demented
spectres, held here, bespelled. The three spells,
when reversed, sever these hexed fetters; hence, the
berserk efreets, when freed, screech ‘hell’s bells’, then
flee these endless deserts, where the embers swelter.

Hear Christian Bök read from Eunoia on YouTube

Erica Wagner — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:01:00 +0000

Seal, Killiniq Island –

Erica Wagner — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 10:27:00 +0000

Killiniq Island, at the northern tip of Ungava Bay, September 3rd. I travelled there with Adventure Canada.