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arirang's review
4.0
A blush is a quick-motion bruise.
Jack Robinson is one of a number of pen names of Charles Boyle, who runs the wonderful small independent publisher CB Editions (publisher e.g. of Murmur, which should have won this year's Goldsmiths Prize).
For Jack Robinson's Overcoat, and his contribution to literature generally, our 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize jury gave Charles Boyle a special ‘The William Gass award for metafiction and for being the best person in publishing, like ever’ - Charles' one, rather bemused, take here (http://sonofabook.blogspot.com/2018/03/surprise-prize-murmur-it.html).
In Boyle's rather self-depreciating words on his authorial alter ego:
[b:by the same author|35400517|by the same author|Jack Robinson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1497111387s/35400517.jpg|56769876] - my review:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2181414703
[b:An Overcoat: Scenes from the Afterlife of H.B.|35111445|An Overcoat Scenes from the Afterlife of H.B.|Jack Robinson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1497110718s/35111445.jpg|56424633]- my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2164055567
[b:Robinson|35400500|Robinson|Jack Robinson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1497111130s/35400500.jpg|56769853] - my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2025434003
[b:Recessional|12504416|Recessional|Jack Robinson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1497110624s/12504416.jpg|17489909] - my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2029101003
and
[b:Days and Nights In W12|11481360|Days and Nights In W12|Jack Robinson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1497110823s/11481360.jpg|6671865] - my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2182001538
Blush is however a new departure in that it is a collaborative effort with visual artist, art conservator and curator Natalia Zagórska-Thomas and published in association with Studio Expurgamento. Zagórska-Thomas provides the visuals via beautiful and colourful photographs (with pink one common feature) - some of her own artwork, others street scenes - interspersed with texts from the erudite pen of Robinson/Boyle, but with the two artforms given equal prominence:
Images here are not illustrations, nor are text captions: they arrived here together through talk, which is sallies and parties and all measure of misunderstanding.
Examples of Zagórska-Thomas's artwork - some featured in the novel - can be found here: http://www.studioexpurgamento.com/index.php/10-galleries/1-natalia-zagorska-thomas
e.g. Insomnia: http://www.studioexpurgamento.com/images/current_gallery/pillow3.jpg
I was reminded of the dialogue between the pictures of Max Neumann and the text of László Krasznahorkai in their collaboration Animalinside.
The theme of this brief but stunning book is the social, and literary, history of the blush from the late 18th Century
As one expects from Jack Robinson, there are copious references to literature - his beloved Stendhal among them, but also Darwin, Isak Dinesen, Maupassant, Thackeray and more. For example:
The Golden Age of blushing may be said to have ended in 1894, the date of first publication (in The Yellow Book) of Max Beerbohm’s essay ‘The Pervasion of Rouge’: ‘The era of rouge is upon us, and as only in an elaborate era can man, by the tangled accrescency of his own pleasures and emotions, reach that refinement which is his highest excellence, and by making himself, so to say, independent of Nature, come nearest to God, so only in an elaborate era is woman perfect. Artifice is the strength of the world, and in that same mask of paint and powder, shadowed with vermeil tinct and most trimly pencilled, is woman’s strength.’
Saturated with irony and making parodic use of traditional rhetorical strategies, Beerbohm’s essay parades its own artifice.
But also lowbrow fiction:
Since the late 19th century the blush has been coarsened: marginalised, cosmeticised, monetised, medicalised . . . While many novelists have employed the blush as a device to explore ambiguous psychological states, the currency has more usually been debased. Pasted like emojis into the plots of traditional romance fiction, blushes add a light sexual frisson. Blushes are Mills & Boon and Barbara Cartland (whose heroines were described by a Times reviewer as ‘helpless, coy, game-playing blushing violets who say no and run away, no matter what they feel’). Blushes are ‘bashful’, ‘virginal’, ‘maidenly’; they have been co-opted into a reactionary system of binary gender stereotypes: pink for girls, blue for boys.
Blushing is not cool. It is associated with social anxiety, which undermines self-esteem, and the consequent feelings of inadequacy can be horrible, but the implication in the titles of self-help books that social anxiety is somehow abnormal and needs to be corrected is stupid. Social anxiety is as normal as it gets.
And perhaps the most striking example of the dialogue between text and image comes with a photo of the artwork The World, a map of the world with the British empire roughly marked in smudged pink gouache, accompanied by a quotation from Tennyson's Maud where, Robinson observes, male sexual conquest is celebrated as an ever-expanding imperial blush:
Pass the happy news,
Blush it thro’ the West;
Till the red man dance
By his red cedar tree,
And the red man’s babe
Leap, beyond the sea.
Blush from West to East,
Blush from East to West,
Tennyson, Maud
Highly recommended - as is everything written by Jack Robinson and indeed everything published by Charles Boyle and CB Editions. 4.5 stars
Jack Robinson is one of a number of pen names of Charles Boyle, who runs the wonderful small independent publisher CB Editions (publisher e.g. of Murmur, which should have won this year's Goldsmiths Prize).
For Jack Robinson's Overcoat, and his contribution to literature generally, our 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize jury gave Charles Boyle a special ‘The William Gass award for metafiction and for being the best person in publishing, like ever’ - Charles' one, rather bemused, take here (http://sonofabook.blogspot.com/2018/03/surprise-prize-murmur-it.html).
In Boyle's rather self-depreciating words on his authorial alter ego:
Jack-of-all-trades? Hardly. He’s no poet. He’s not a non-fiction writer because he likes making things up, but nor is he a novelist: he has a short attention span, he lacks stamina, he can’t sustain a plot and he’s not that interested in how characters develop. He writes short books, generally made up of fragments, in which fiction and fact bounce off each other. He likes table tennis, without being much good at it. He’s a bit frivolous, frankly. I don’t think he’s married. He can be forgetful (as I can: I’d forgotten, until the review of by the same author reminded me, that I once described CBe as ‘a small machine for reading aloud to strangers’). He’s not good at joining things up (he can just about do joined-up handwriting). He has a problem with endings. (A review remarks on how many of the paragraphs – ‘It’s hard to describe these sequent pages as “episodes”’ – don’t so much end as simply stop: ‘Robinson’s paragraphs run for as long as their thoughts do, and then stop running’.) He’s stubborn: knowing that he’s not a ‘natural’ novelist/poet/journalist, he still insists on writingAnd we should all be very thankful he does insist. This is his 6th book, the previous 5 - all highly recommended - being:
http://sonofabook.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/on-jack-robinson.html
[b:by the same author|35400517|by the same author|Jack Robinson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1497111387s/35400517.jpg|56769876] - my review:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2181414703
[b:An Overcoat: Scenes from the Afterlife of H.B.|35111445|An Overcoat Scenes from the Afterlife of H.B.|Jack Robinson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1497110718s/35111445.jpg|56424633]- my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2164055567
[b:Robinson|35400500|Robinson|Jack Robinson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1497111130s/35400500.jpg|56769853] - my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2025434003
[b:Recessional|12504416|Recessional|Jack Robinson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1497110624s/12504416.jpg|17489909] - my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2029101003
and
[b:Days and Nights In W12|11481360|Days and Nights In W12|Jack Robinson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1497110823s/11481360.jpg|6671865] - my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2182001538
Blush is however a new departure in that it is a collaborative effort with visual artist, art conservator and curator Natalia Zagórska-Thomas and published in association with Studio Expurgamento. Zagórska-Thomas provides the visuals via beautiful and colourful photographs (with pink one common feature) - some of her own artwork, others street scenes - interspersed with texts from the erudite pen of Robinson/Boyle, but with the two artforms given equal prominence:
Images here are not illustrations, nor are text captions: they arrived here together through talk, which is sallies and parties and all measure of misunderstanding.
Examples of Zagórska-Thomas's artwork - some featured in the novel - can be found here: http://www.studioexpurgamento.com/index.php/10-galleries/1-natalia-zagorska-thomas
e.g. Insomnia: http://www.studioexpurgamento.com/images/current_gallery/pillow3.jpg
I was reminded of the dialogue between the pictures of Max Neumann and the text of László Krasznahorkai in their collaboration Animalinside.
The theme of this brief but stunning book is the social, and literary, history of the blush from the late 18th Century
As one expects from Jack Robinson, there are copious references to literature - his beloved Stendhal among them, but also Darwin, Isak Dinesen, Maupassant, Thackeray and more. For example:
The Golden Age of blushing may be said to have ended in 1894, the date of first publication (in The Yellow Book) of Max Beerbohm’s essay ‘The Pervasion of Rouge’: ‘The era of rouge is upon us, and as only in an elaborate era can man, by the tangled accrescency of his own pleasures and emotions, reach that refinement which is his highest excellence, and by making himself, so to say, independent of Nature, come nearest to God, so only in an elaborate era is woman perfect. Artifice is the strength of the world, and in that same mask of paint and powder, shadowed with vermeil tinct and most trimly pencilled, is woman’s strength.’
Saturated with irony and making parodic use of traditional rhetorical strategies, Beerbohm’s essay parades its own artifice.
But also lowbrow fiction:
Since the late 19th century the blush has been coarsened: marginalised, cosmeticised, monetised, medicalised . . . While many novelists have employed the blush as a device to explore ambiguous psychological states, the currency has more usually been debased. Pasted like emojis into the plots of traditional romance fiction, blushes add a light sexual frisson. Blushes are Mills & Boon and Barbara Cartland (whose heroines were described by a Times reviewer as ‘helpless, coy, game-playing blushing violets who say no and run away, no matter what they feel’). Blushes are ‘bashful’, ‘virginal’, ‘maidenly’; they have been co-opted into a reactionary system of binary gender stereotypes: pink for girls, blue for boys.
Blushing is not cool. It is associated with social anxiety, which undermines self-esteem, and the consequent feelings of inadequacy can be horrible, but the implication in the titles of self-help books that social anxiety is somehow abnormal and needs to be corrected is stupid. Social anxiety is as normal as it gets.
And perhaps the most striking example of the dialogue between text and image comes with a photo of the artwork The World, a map of the world with the British empire roughly marked in smudged pink gouache, accompanied by a quotation from Tennyson's Maud where, Robinson observes, male sexual conquest is celebrated as an ever-expanding imperial blush:
Pass the happy news,
Blush it thro’ the West;
Till the red man dance
By his red cedar tree,
And the red man’s babe
Leap, beyond the sea.
Blush from West to East,
Blush from East to West,
Tennyson, Maud
Highly recommended - as is everything written by Jack Robinson and indeed everything published by Charles Boyle and CB Editions. 4.5 stars
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