Suing bloggers and actors unravelled (Books - Eclipse by John Banville)

The litigiousness of our greater society has, it seemed, reached the blogosphere, according to a segment on On The Media, a weekly National Public Radio show that does an excellent job reporting on the media. Now, if you don't pay attention to the law when it comes to copyright infringement or defamation, you could find yourself in court. Blogger membership organizations now exist to educate bloggers about media law and to insure them against the costs of litigation. They express concern that law suits will curtail freedom of speech. It sounds to me like an opportunity to make money off insurance premiums, but I suppose I should watch what I say. The link above provides an MP3 of the complete report as well as links to the organizations so that you can check them out.

In John Banville's Eclipse a fiftyish actor dries up on stage and leaves the theater, and subsequently his wife. He moves into his childhood home, dilapidated and inhabited by squatters.

I loved to prowl the house like this when I was young. Afternoons were my favourite time, there was a special quality to afternoons indoors, a wiestfulness, a sense of dreamy distance, of boundless air all around, that was at once tranquil and unsettling. There were hidden portents everywhere. Something would catch my attention, anything, a cobweb, a damp patch on a wall, a scrap of old newspaper lining a drawer, a discarded paperback, and I would stop and stand gazing at it for a long time, motionless, lost unthinking. My mother kept lodgers, clerks and secretareis, schoolteachers, travelling salesmen. They fascinated me, their furtive and somehow anguished, rented lives. In habiting a place that could not be home, they were like actors compelled to play themselves. When one of them moved out I would slip into the vacated room and breathe its hushed, attentive air, turning things over, poking into corners, searching through drawers and mysteriously airless cupboards, diligent as a sleuth hunting for clues.

That is an actor all over. Life is a series of opportunities to imagine oneself inside the lives of others. It becomes a habit, you do it everywhere - on line at the supermarket, waiting for a subway. You collect other people's biographical or behavioral detritus - how they use their hands, what they read. You stand as they stand, feeling the shift of weight, if they shake the hair out of their eyes a certain way you find yourself unconsciously copying them just a few minutes later. You try to remember not to stare. I used to read biographies when I acted and find myself unconsciously slipping inside the lives of the subjects. Lives, behaviors are the medium of the actor and as the painter sketches and the writer scribbles in a pocket notebook so too the actor is compelled to practise.

Banville's Alex Cleave seems to have lost his grip.

"So what are you up to? Quirke said. "Down here, I mean."

Last of evening in the window, dishwater light and the overgrown grass in the garden all grey. I wanted to say, I have lived amid surfaces too long, skated too well upon them; I require the shock of the icy water now, the icy deeps. Yet wasn't ice my trouble, that it had penetrated me, to the very marrow? A man thronged up with cold... Fire, rather; fire was what was needed... With a start I came back to myself, from myself. Quirke was nodding: someone must have said something of moment - Lord, I wondered, was it me? Often lately I would be startled to hear people replying to things I had thought I had only spoken in my head...

Banville captures that coming unravlled distractedness perfectly, and more than accurately, he finds a sad beauty in it. I am loving this book.