Absinthe Minded

From a Conversation about Anthologies

2008-05-12T01:56:00.002-04:00

An expert from a conversation about the new Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Press):

The difference between the blandness of the Dalkey anthology in English and its analogue in Russian is that many more Russians (especially poets) speak English than English speakers speak Russian. Therefore, the blandness of the English anthology in Russia is counteracted by the fact that many Russians have read the books of many American poets, and have also read English anthologies that don’t attempt a general overview of American poetry as a whole. So, the Russian reader (poet) for the most part is fine, but the English reader may actually think that this is all there is to contemporary Russian poetry. As if the work of say Viktor Ivaniv, Andrei Sen-Senkov, and Alexander Skidan didn’t exist, or that the brilliant lyric of Kolya Baytov wasn’t one of the finest in Russia today. The Dalkey anthology, as all anthologies trying to present a general overview, aims too high and falls too short. The English reader has been presented with another “contemporary Russian poetry” anthology, but the operating principle behind this collection has once again rendered such a project rather wanting. The only way to correct such a problem in the future is to do away with the illusion of a “general overview” and put out several anthologies, which will have a modest, but clear principle of operation: to show the best work of a particular camp. For instance, we could easily imagine contemporary poetry anthologies for: 1) postacmeist poetry; 2) postmodern Russian poetry; 3) the young generation: Vavilon and Debut; 4) the St. Petersburg poets; 5) the Moscow poets, etc. All of these anthologies would be lacking something important, but they would not be giving the false impression of representing the whole of Russian poetry. The aim would be not to once again cart out a large volume that is both too big to read and too broad to be interesting, but to give a distinct sharp taste of one specific branch. In a good restaurant you do not order everything at once –you enjoy the various courses one at a time. The same should be true of Russian poetry anthologies, which as of now resemble more a drive thru meal, than anything truly tasty.

German film "Yella" at OU/Absinthe Festival

2008-05-05T21:05:00.003-04:00

On Saturday morning, May 10th, we'll be screening German director Christian Petzold's latest film "Yella" as part of the Oakland University/Absinthe Festival of New European Film and Writing. In Variety, reviewer Derek Elley states that this "metaphysical thriller" ... "confirms him as one of Germany's finest middle-generation directors." You can read the entire review here.

Belarusian Poet Valzhyna Mort in Poets & Writers Magazine

2008-04-25T21:23:00.002-04:00

The Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort is featured in the cover story of the May/June issue of Poets & Writers magazine. After reading the article you'll want to pick up her book Factory of Tears and if you're in the Detroit-area on May 9th you have an opportunity to hear her read at the Oakland University/Absinthe Festival of New European Film and Writing.

A SHOUT FROM COPENHAGEN: That Big Yellow 'M' -- I'm Hatin' It!

2008-04-24T04:06:00.001-04:00

That big yellow ‘M’ with its loopy humps – like breasts really. How diabolically ingenious. The word for mother in practically every language – Mom, Mommy, mere, mor, moder, mama, mutter, mamasita, even in Korean! – begins with an ‘m’ sound – the sound an infant makes when hungrily moving its lips toward the nipple, the sound we make when something is delicious: Mmmmmm….

And those mother-jumpers have commandered it – just as the jingoists would commandeer our flag.

It is a cancer on the earth, franchises everywhere, in every capital city of the world and in the smaller and medium-sized towns, too. Not just in the U.S. but everywhere, Paris, London, Rome, Moscow, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Beijing… Destroying the health of the poor, of kids, ruining the architectural symmetry of ancient cities, adding their ugly emporia to the urban sprawl along with all the other franchise burger, chicken, taco and coffee joints.

Where are the great old American diners, the one-of-a-kind places owned by one man or woman or couple? Where have they gone? Starved out, that’s where!

Okay, maybe twice a year – because I’ve got a bodacious hang-over which craves grease and fat – I skulk into the gaudy red and yellow joint behind its gaudy ‘M’, cap pulled low, and order one, even two cheeseburgers and wolf them down, get a belly ache on top of my headache and go home to crawl into bed.

Why do I do it? Why do I support this junk food factory which plants its fat ugly butt and shows its ludicrous Ronald clown-face on the best, most historic corners of my beloved ancient capital?

I mean it would be okay if there were one or two of them around and if they would low-profile their gaudy facades, but no. They want to be everywhere, to be seen, they want to fatten themselves with big bucks behind their ugly signs that say, I’m lovin’ it – 200 meters.

Well I’m hatin’ it! And I’m hatin’ what they and their kind do to our world. And I hate the fact that this has become the face of American culture throughout the world. What we are most famous for “culturally.”

Why don’t we boycott those fuggers? All of them. Starve them out. Or at least pinch them hard as we can. We Americans can do a hell of a lot better than that!

Let’s put a big black X through that ugly yellow M!

Greetings from this ancient capital!
Thomas E. Kennedy
(www.thomasekennedy.com)

A SHOUT FROM COPENHAGEN: Farewell, Varvara; Farwell, Sweet Baroness

2008-04-17T01:39:00.004-04:00

Today I escort Lady Alice along the sunny cobblestoned courtyard of Kastels Church in eastern Copenhagen for the funeral of our friend, the Baroness SoniaVarvara Hasselbalch Heyd – just four days before she would have been 88 years old.

Varvara was one of the last of the Danish nobles, a direct descendant of the Russian Princess Varvara Gagarin. Varvara’s life was long and rich in experience – ambulance and truck driver and spy for the allies in World War II, portrait photographer of royalty and of African tribes, award-winning equestrian, author of several books. Death, at her age, is a natural event. Still, it is sorrowful to say farewell to an admired friend, to know that we will never again hear the chuckling music of her laughter or see it twinkle in her brown eyes.

Her only son, Eggy, and his wife Olivia and son Nicholas, stand at the church doors, greeting the mourners of this great woman. Eggy is tall as his mother was, and you can see her in his face, his strong jaw, his smile; Nicholas is even taller, also smiling gently, in his mid-twenties. Eggy thanks Alice for the obituary she wrote for Varvara in the local newspaper.

Unlike the dark and gloomy churches of my youth, this one – built in 1704 – is light and bright, walls and ceilings and pews and pulpit painted white with gold trim. From the ceiling hangs the large model ship one finds in all Danish Lutheran churches, giving a sense of wordliness, a worldly journey, to the surroundings, and the windows are tall and clear – no gloam of stained glass; bright sunlight slants in through them behind the altar which is decorated with three colorful religious paintings, one above the other, within a massive, delicately carved and gleamingly gilded wood frame. Through the windows behind and to either side of the altar can be seen strollers, joggers bouncing past on the high green path. Lady Alice touches my arm to be sure I’ve seen them and I know we are thinking the same, that this suits Varvara’s spirit and love of life.

The central aisle is strewn with a variety of flowers in many colors. Varvara didn’t like cut flowers, felt it a shame to kill them slowly that way. But what is a funeral without flowers? Alice has chosen to honor Varvara with a bouquet of peacock feathers which we give to the church attendant to add to the display.

I remove my Borselino as we walk down the aisle, and it occurs to me that the hat – and my shoes, too – belonged to another friend, Ole; he purchased them shortly before his death at 75 and were given to me by his widow, Bente. His funeral was also from this church, just a year ago, and it feels a bit as though Ole and Bente are with us for this funeral. I’ve never owned a Borselino before. I hold it to my heart as we gaze at the casket which contains Varvara’s body.

The casket, too, is white, heaped with white flowers and adorned at its foot with three of the medals Varvara was awarded in her lifetime – the Crois de Guerre with two bronze stars and Légion d’Honneur for her valorous service to the wounded under fire as an ambulance driver during the Second World War and an Italian decoration for diplomatic service to Sweden. Varvara was a truly international woman, with Danish, Swedish, Russian, and German blood in her veins, the master of half a dozen languages.

We find a seat in a pew not too far back amidst the 150 or so mourners. Varvara had many friends from many places in society. I remember her replying once, when interviewed by a journalist who asked what it was like to have been in company with monarchs and nobles. “What were they like?” he asked, and she said, “Oh pretty much like you and me – but not quite as snobby.”

The organ begins with Schubert’s Opus 100 then mingles with some other theme. The music seems to embody in a remarkable manner a combination of a purposeful procession with a melody at once uplifting and deeply and sorrowfully moving.

Then the congregation rises and sings with the choir the three psalms which Varvara had stipulated – 19th century psalms by Grundtvig, Ingemann and Christian Richardt:

We vision a mansion, fair and good
Where joyously friends are waiting…
and
Lovely the earth it is!
Splendor in God’s heavens!
and
Never fear the power of dark.
The stars will give us light.

We sit and the priest steps up with his back to the altar and speaks about Varvara’s life, why it is so fitting that her last service be held here, just a walk from the great mansion in which she was born, the opulent apartment to which she moved after the war, and the peaceful cemetery in which she will be buried. He talks about the things she did with her life, her courage and her pain, her three husbands, the child she lost, the one who survived and how she loved him and his son. He talks about how fully Varvara lived, how she tried everything, how in her childhood she had lost her father very young and had been called upon to make her inner feelings give way to expectations from her mother…

Then son and grandson and four other men hoist up the coffin and carry it in slow procession down the aisle as the mourners file out behind them and the organ plays something which does not sound quite religious. Alice whispers to me what it is – a popular song from the 1940s, from a Danish musical comedy staged during the German occupation of Denmark – “Close Your Sweet Innocent Eyes.” It was written by Aage Stentoft (1914-70) expressly for Varvara when she was 22-years-old. The six-year older song-writer had a crush on her.

We proceed to Garnison’s cemetery, a lovely green place where Alice and I plan to be (http://webdelsol.com/LITARTS/Literary_Explorer/garnison/garnison.html),
buried together when that time comes. The six pallbearers lower the casket into the grave, and the priest steps up with a small shovel and throws earth in upon the casket three times, speaking with each shovelful: “From earth you have come. To earth you shall return. From earth you shall rise again.”

The priest leads us in the Our Father, and then the mourners one by one step up to cast a single red rose in on top of the coffin. My thoughts turn, I feel certain, in a similar direction as Alice’s, remembering times we spent with Varvara, sharing champagne and oysters, snaps and chocolates, cigars, how Alice researched and wrote and published a book about the mansion in which Varvara grew up (A Noble House for Doctors, 1995) and in which Alice and I worked for 30 years, how Varvara insisted on doing portraits of Alice, how she would come to my readings and read my books and count the number of times the word ‘fuck’ appears – “Thirty-seven times in that book. Time to find a synonym perhaps?” Once she sent me a copy of Tom Wolfe’s new novel with a note, “You’re falling behind. This Tom uses the word ‘fuck’ three times as often as you do!”

I am remembering what Alice wrote in her obituary of Varvara – that strong and impressive as she was there was a tiny plea in her eyes that said, Please love me. I put my arm around Alice’s shoulder and give a squeeze – in thanks that she introduced me to Varvara who had been her friend for many years before I ever met her.

The burial beer is on the indoor balcony of the elegant La Boheme on Esplanaden – a short way from Varvara’s apartment. The food and drink are elegant, too, fully in the spirit of this elegant woman. Among those attending we see many whom Varvara helped forward in the world with, as Alice noted, her diplomatic powers of bringing people together for their mutual good – a young goldsmith, a journalist, a hospital aide, a film-maker…

We chat with Varvara’s grandson, Nicholas, and his beautiful fiancé, Kristina, a Danish-Canadian who is an art dealer in London. We ask Nicholas what he is doing, and he tells us that he has now completed his degree in French literature and entered upon a career as a film-maker. He is on his way to Brazil for a new project. Alice tells him how Varvara once said about him, “Oh please don’t make him be a banker!”) Nicholas laughs.

He and I have met a few times but I am not certain he remembers me. Still there is some spark of recognition and he seems to make a connection. With a curious smile he asks, “Have you seen this…this blog that has a picture of my grandmother holding a…a petrified whale penis?”

My own smile is sheepish. “I wrote it,” I say. “With her blessing and permission.”
(http://webdelsol.com/LITARTS/Literary_Explorer/varvara/varvara.html) But that blog has many other pictures as well and many amusing stories that Varvara shared with us about her life and times.

The get-together is just under two hours. At one point as Alice enjoys a cigarette in a chair on the sidewalk outside La Boheme, I keep her company, and one of the other guests comes bustling out, fumbling into a pack of fags – the 77-year-old Ingeborg, slender and sprightly. “What a horror it is,” she says, lighting up,.“that a Dane can no longer even smoke a damn cigarette at a reception anymore!”

Alice and I laugh, and I am sure our thoughts are identical – remembering the sign that Varvara had in the entry to her huge apartment: Thank you for smoking. And the first time I visited her, when I asked if she minded if I smoked a cigar, she lifted a leopard-skin trimmed cannister from a side table and removed a cigar of her own, “Only if you don’t mind if I do!”

At that moment I can see her twinkling eyes, hear the chuckle of her laughter. Goodbye, dear Varvara. There will never be another like you.

Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy
(http://www.thomasekennedy.com/)

Six-word Short Stories

2008-04-16T12:48:00.003-04:00

Hemingway is credited with creating the six-word short story "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" to win a bet. There's something seductive about the idea of creating a story in a mere six words. In fact, Wired recently solicited a variety of writers (mostly sf and horror) for what they could come up with (click here to see their results).

As an exercise, I recently had a couple of my creative writing classes come with their own six-word short stories. I was impressed with their stories, the best of which I've posted below:

A Shout from Copenhagen: The Envelope, Please? National Magazine Awards 2008.

2008-04-11T07:17:00.002-04:00

One of my old professors was fond of saying that when the gods elevate you it is just to get better leverage to kick you in the gonads.

Not quite three years ago, my GP sounded the alarm because a blood test indicated I might have prostate cancer, even though I had no symptoms and no pain. Consequently, I spent two years undergoing about 20 blood tests and 34 biopsies, the last three of which were surgical. And I learned the ugly word “catheter.” The doctors were convinced I had cancer because the indicative number in my blood (PSA) kept rising. But finally they decided that in my case the indication was wrong. I just had a high PSA, that’s all. It shouldn’t be higher than 4 but mine was up to 20. They let me go, pronounced my prostate healthy in January 2007.

I had kept a journal of all this and wrote an essay about it which New Letters magazine published last summer. Apparently I had succeeded in striking a humorous note in the essay because despite the gory details, a number of people wrote to say how funny it was. It even won a prize and was nominated for another, and a couple of weeks ago, I was startled to learn that it was also a finalist for a National Magazine Award.

Ignorant as I am, living in this distant kingdom, I didn’t even know what a National Magazine Award was until I started receiving emails congratulating me. Apparently the National Magazine Awards are the Oscars of the magazine world in the U.S., the highest honor in the field. You even get a statuette if you win, an “Ellie.” Along with five other writers I was a finalist in the essay genre, up against writers who had published in the New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper’s, Entertainment Weekly, and Elle. I was, I learned, up against Stephen King’s essay about Harry Potter. There would be a black tie award ceremony at Lincoln Center in New York City on May 1st.

Nervously, I got my tuxedo out of mothballs (unnecessary – it is a semi-synthetic fabric, of no interest to moths -- I bought it for like 95 bucks about 20 years ago). Thank god it still fit! I must have been fat back then, too. Lady Alice suggested that I wear it with my white suspenders over a high-quality black T-shirt, that I don my Sheela na Gig pendant and leopard-skin pillbox hat for the ceremony. And that I polish and wear my Giglio running shoes. Lady Alice always knows the right thing to do.

I bought a plane ticket, reserved a room in a 1½-star hotel on West 43rd Street ($116 a night including tax – the very same hotel where Joe Buck stayed in Midnight Cowboy), began fantasizing headlines: Kennedy Dethrones King! even as the butterflies in my stomach whispered, Don’t worry, asshole – you ain’t gonna win!

Meanwhile (and here’s where the gonad kick of the gods comes in), I had been invited to take a routine follow-up blood test which showed my PSA had shot up even higher, to 25, so high that the cancer which had proven not to be there would now have begun to spread to my bones. So I was called in to the hospital for more tests.

Up the arse with the ultrasound wand again for 11 zaps with the needle, fiery micturitions and bloody gism. There is no polite way to describe these things. Into the bone scanner (scintograph, if we want to be Latinate about it) where you lie on a narrow table and the nutsy nurse tries to be cute by hovering over me like a vampire and saying, “Now I am going to tie you up!” as she binds my arms in Velcro bondage.

I consider chortling and flirting back, but I really don’t feel like doing that. So I lie there and contemplate my itchy nose, making anagrams out of the name of the company that manufactured the machine, printed in block letters on its side – PHILLIPS. HILL LIPS ILL LIPS PILLS HI LILI PLIP SHILL SIP SILL SHIP SLIP for half an hour, with radioactive serum running through my veins – drink plenty of water, please! – while the narrow table to which I am strapped moves infinitesimally slowly through a big metal doughnut.

When I am out the other side, the nurse returns to tell me I will have to change my underpants. “There is a spot we don’t like on the picture. It might only be a spot of urine. The machine is so sensitive. We put a pair of hospital panties over there for you to change into.”

That’s what she said. “Panties.” I consider saying, “You just want to see me naked, admit it.” But I really don’t feel like saying that so I just go and change from my black Calvin Klein’s into a pair of sexy white hospital drawers. I wonder how they knew my size. The nurse must have checked out my butt, I think to amuse myself, but I am not actually amused. In fact, I am thinking about that spot they didn’t like on the picture and wondering how a freaking radar machine or whatever it is can see through my jeans, zipper, and Calvin Klein’s but not through a spot of urine? Whatever.

To my relief, I learned today, the bone scans proved normal as did every one of the 11 new biopsies as well. (I am now a fully biopsied man, with 45 of the buggers – not to put too fine a point on it – to my credit!) So the gods didn’t want to position me for a kick in the gonads after all. Sometimes they only kid around with you, and they have a creepy sense of humor. But one of these times – comes to all of us! – they will come for real and cut me down. This time they let me off with a warning and a wink.

Oh I forgot! There’s also the bladder probe – don’t forget the bladder probe, another coming attraction in two weeks time. The picture showed something they didn’t like there in the bladder, too, so they want to do a probe. That’s real fun.

I began to think, Damn, couldn’t it be a different organ this time? I already wrote an essay about my prostate gland. Pick another, non-urological one – but not the heart, please. And not another kidney stone. Not even the hope of an Ellie would make me want to endure another kidney stone.

A friend enquired whether I have some Faustian pact with the devil in which one by one I sacrifice my organs for essays that might win prizes.

Hhhmmm….Before I answer that : May I have the envelope, please?

(Tune in after May 1st for the final installment of this cliff-hanging serial! Orchestra: Accelerando con moto! Organ sound-track, please… Penguins in a line now!)

Greetings from this ancient capital!
Thomas E. Kennedy
www.thomasekennedy.com

A Shout from Copenhagen: Hillary vs. Obama. Why do we forget?

2008-04-03T15:17:00.001-04:00

Listen: this is what I remember, the best of my recollection. My country, the United States of America, which I love, invaded Iraq in March 2003 on the basis of a congressional vote that took place in October 2002. We did so because we were hurt and angry. Our hurt and anger were understandable – a bunch of ugly-minded, twisted fanatics attacked the United States, using civilian human beings as weapons against other civilian human beings and succeeded, inter alia, in destroying the twin towers in Manhattan, killing some 3,000 Americans.

Consequently, in October 2001, we invaded Afghanistan to take out Bin Laden and smash his organization; we have now been there for 6½ years, trying to do that. Then, one year later, in October 2002, we turned our eyes on Iraq – and not long ago began muttering about Iran, too.

But in October 2002, the leaders of the United States decided that Iraq was also a threat, secretly manufacturing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). The United Nations, about which there are understandably mixed feelings but which I believe is an essential organization, favored diplomatic measures and economic pressure to deal with this, but the US leadership, on whatever grounds and for whatever reasons, decided that this was not enough. One of our potentially great men, General Colin Powell, was sent to the UN to assure the assembly of the truth of what many many people around the world, myself included, strongly suspected to be untrue and perhaps a willful lie: that Saddam Hussein was manufacturing WMDs. Everyone agreed that Saddam Hussein was an evil despot, but there are many evil despots in this world, and being an evil despot is not synonymous with manufacturing WMDs. Furthermore, at various times, we befriend and support evil despots when it suits our purposes.

It was my distinct impression that Colin Powell was one of the few at least partially honorable persons in the US administration at that time – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and a few others seemed to me to be cynical, rich, opportunistic, hypocritical people who had control of the most powerful country in the world, though they had achieved that control by the narrowest of electoral margins (and even that might be a hyperbole). It is my distinct impression that these three leaders either intentionally fostered an untruth about the Iraqi WMDs or were deceived themselves about this alleged weapon manufactory. What this seems to indicate to me is that either they are dupes or they are liars; whichever it is, they are not fit to govern. (Thank god, Rumsfeld no longer is governing. He is gone. But torture is still with us as is the other damage he assisted in causing.)

On behalf of these leaders, Colin Powell was sent to the UN to tell them that the Iraqi WMDs did exist and that the world was in danger. Either he was duped or pressured into doing so or he was consciously lying. Again, either way he proved himself unfit to carry what seemed to be his considerable potential as a statesman (and I say this as a Democrat about a Republican) forward on behalf of our country.

Most of the UN did not buy General Powell’s story (most notably France, against whose disagreement we expressed our rath by renaming French fries as Freedom Fries and French toast as Freedom Toast in the US congressional dining rooms) but a few did. Tony Blair (a labor PM whose election I myself had cheered not so long before) placed the UK in the coalition of nations that attacked Iraq. A few other great though small European nations joined that coalition, too – including, it breaks my heart to say, my adopted nation of Denmark. So both my home country and my adopted one (I am a citizen of the US and a resident of Denmark) attacked Iraq along with the UK and a small following of other countries to stop Iraq from producing WMDs, the existence of which many people seriously doubted and which, indeed, today, five years later, still have not been found. Safe to say they do not and never did exist? But of course we quickly forgot that we had gone into Iraq to stop the manufacture of WMDs; when we didn’t find those weapons, the focus began subtly to shift – we had ousted an evil despot. What could be wrong with that? Mission accomplished!

The attack on Iraq began in March 2003. The congressional vote that made possible that attack took place in October 2002. In the US about 77% of the Senate voted to allow the invasion (and in the House the relevant resolution, Joint Resolution 114, passed by 296 to 133). Among that 77% of Senators was Hillary Clinton; among the 23% opposed was Senator Ted Kennedy. Ted Kennedy has endorsed Obama as our next president. Though only a candidate for the US Senate at the time of the vote on Joint Resolution 114, Obama spoke out firmly against the Iraq invasion, predicting that it would result in the terrible situation in which we currently find ourselves, five years after the invasion and four years after George Bush pronounced it, “Mission accomplished!” parading as a victorious warrior in a phony flak suit on the deck of a ship in the San Diego harbor, many thousands of miles away from the action.

Numerous people at the time of the 2002 debates and since then proclaimed, in contradiction of those who warned that we were getting ourselves into another Vietnam, “This is not Vietnam!” Many who came of age in the 1960s, including myself, said, “This is exactly Vietnam. And we will get stuck right in the middle of the Big Muddy again with the damn fool saying go on!”

But the people who “understand these things” and had the power to decide emphasized that this was not Vietnam, and they prevailed.

But of course it was. We are still there and it gets worse and worse and people are still dying. And finally George Bush decided to pronounce that this was indeed Vietnam. But weirdly, he said that that was why we should not pull out and why we should send in more troops and spend more money on killing and getting killed. Which to my mind is either mad logic or overwhelming arrogance, perhaps both.

Let’s go to the economic questions, the big and the broad ones. Not long before the vote to attack Iraq, there were also murmurs that it would be good for the economy – which at that time had been left in an extremely healthy state by the previous president, Bill Clinton. We had billions of dollars in surplus – dollars which could have been used to build up the American health care system, the educational system, the welfare systems... Now, a few years later, we are billions of dollars in deficit – billions that were spent on war and destruction and on fattening the pockets of the elite rich.

Let’s go back to the vote in October 2002. Hillary – a woman for whom I previously had tremendous admiration and respect – voted yes. Maybe she wanted to prove she had the balls to do so. And she stuck to that decision, for a long time, playing tough girl. I seem to remember a journalist asking her, What if we wind up getting mired in a war in Iraq that we lose like we lost in Vietnam. She smiled condescendingly and said, “Not gonna happen.”

Obama at that time said no. And he predicted that what would happen is in fact that which did happen. Death, destruction, waste, and international shame. He saw it coming. At the time of George W’s daddy’s Gulf War, even Republicans like Cheney were predicting it would be a very bad idea to take the war further into Iraq. That first Gulf War, too, to the best of my recollection, resulted largely from American diplomatic fumbling that no one talks about anymore. A deputy ambassador indicated to the Iraqi foreign minister that the US would do nothing if Iraq invaded Kuwait. So Iraq invaded Kuwait, and George Bush’s daddy got a chance to prove he was not a wimp by kicking ass. That, too, seems to have been forgotten.

Because Obama spoke out against Iraq at a time when it was not popular to do so seems to me to indicate that he had not forgotten. And quite simply that is why I voted for him in the primary and why I am going to vote for him in the election.

We need someone who had the guts to say no at a time when people were afraid not to say yes – and who did it on the basis of a clear vision which has proven itself to have been accurate.

It has often been said that those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it –and that even those who do remember history might be doomed to repeat it, too. Let’s hold tight to our memories of what has happened over the past few years and do what we can to reverse this terrible situation we are in now.

Let’s give Obama a chance to find a new path for us out of this mess.

Greetings from this ancient capital!
Thomas E. Kennedy
www.thomasekennedy.com

Oakland University/Absinthe Festival of New European Film and Writing

2008-03-30T20:29:00.003-04:00

After a few delays Absinthe 9 is off to the printer tomorrow. I'll have more information about the issue later.

For now I want to mention the festival we're co-hosting with Oakland University in Rochester, MI, on May 9-10th. The festival features the poets Eamonn Wall, Valzyhna Mort, and Piotr Sommers, along with three award-winning films from Europe. All events are free and open to the public and you can find the full festival schedule here.

Hope you can join us.

A Shout from Copenhagen: The Other Chekhov. Check it out!

2008-03-28T10:40:00.002-04:00

The Other Chekhov: Check it out!

At least half a dozen people I know are reading a new, annotated collection of Anton Chekhov’s stories, edited by Okla Elliott and Kyle Minor – two awesome young literati – published in 2008 by an awesome young house known as New American Press (www.newamericanpress.com). The collection is entitled The Other Chekhov and consists of ten stories by Chekhov, all but three or four of which I have not read before.

Many of the stories are by the young Chekhov, whose pseudonym was Antosha Chekhonte, from the period prior to 1888, but there are also three from the 1890s. For those who may not know, Chekhov’s life was short – born in 1960, dead in 1904 – but his production long, hundreds of stories, plays, and other writings. And he is one of the masters, perhaps the father of the modern short story.

The ten stories in this collection are varied examples of the richness of Chekhov’s craft and his genius, which are by turns subversive, humanistic, sociological, terrifying, and scathingly humorous. I was pleased to see that none of the very early “twist” stories were included which, although Chekhov always amazes with his prose, conclude with a gimmick. (And why not? He was just earning a few extra roubles as a young medical student, by publishing his first pieces at the age of twenty.)

One of the two earliest pieces here, “In a Strange Land” (1882-5), in fact, could be used as a caricature of the contemporary western racist opening a door to foreigners and feeding them well while insulting them at the table – a little portrait of hell. Some of the shortest pieces – e.g., “The Huntsman” – remind one of Chekhov’s wonderful definition of very short fiction as reading which “feels rather like swallowing a glass of vodka.”

Others of the stories haunt by virtue of their unsentimental depiction of human suffering (“Misery,” 1886), the portrayal of the power of human passion suppressed (“The Witch,” 1886), dramatizations of solipsistic foolishness (“From the Diary of a Violent-Tempered Man” and “The Kiss,” both 1887).

While each story in this assembly is powerful and memorable, the two I found most haunting Dr Chekhov wrote later in his too short life – “Gusev” (1890) and “The Murder” (1895). “The Murder,” in a mere 40 pages (of large, eye-friendly type) achieves what most novelists would require two or three hundred pages even to begin to approach, the creation of a world both strange and familiar, at once real and surreal, and cause of great wonder. “Gusev,” for its part, does something I don’t believe I have ever seen done in language, at least not like that – a haunting, hallucinatory piece which portrays the grittiest of realism, but then...

Another distinguished feature of this collection is that each of its ten stories is introduced by a distinguished practitioner of the art of fiction and/or translation: Pinckney Benedict, Fred Chappell, Christopher Coake, Paul Crenshaw, Dorothy Gambrell, Steve Gillis, Michelle Herman, Jeff Parker, Benjamin Percy and David R. Slavitt. These introductions are by turns playful, esoteric, suggestive, illuminating – one even takes the form of a cartoon complement to the story it introduces. And they can be read before or after the story, as the reader wishes – a couple of the introducers request the readers to come back to the introduction after they have read the stories. Add to these ten introductory pleasures, the excellent, brief, knowledgeable introduction to the book itself by its two editors – Okla Elliott and Kyle Minor – and you have the makings of a literary feast.

A word about the translations: they are by Constance Garnett. Garnett-bashing seems to have become an international sport in recent years. But Constance Garnett was like a mighty human bridge, facilitating the passage of millions upon millions of readers into a world containing some of the greatest wonders of literary achievement – Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov… She was good enough for D. H. Lawrence, for James Joyce, for Katherine Mansfield, and she is certainly good enough for me.

Is there anything at all that I missed in this book? No – however, I would have loved it if Messrs. Elliott and Minor had included Dr Chekhov’s “The Black Monk.” But that’s a quibble. This book is a literary treasure. And for a real, literary review of it, read Walter Cummin’s piece which will appear in the Summer 2008 edition of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s international journal, The Literary Review.

Let me conclude by proclaiming that New American Press is a class act – this book has a beautifully designed cover, high quality paper well bound, reader-friendly typeface, no typos that I caught and, of course, the incomparable content – for the modest price of not quite sixteen bucks. You can’t hardly buy a bottle of decent vodka for that. Each of these stories is a generous dram of the real stuff, triple distilled, ten generous glasses of it. Messieurs et madames: Enivrez-vous! Inebriate yourselves on the words of the master!

Greetings from this ancient capital!
Thomas E. Kennedy
(www.thomasekennedy.com)

Michael Haneke's Funny Games

2008-03-19T20:29:00.002-04:00

At The New Republic Jacob Rubin and Christopher Orr debate the merits of Funny Games, the new film--actually a remake of his own 1997 film--by Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke (director of The Piano Teacher and Cache).

Rubin calls it "a brutal, manipulative film" but suggests "there is much value in Funny Games," while Orr states that it "is hardly the first violent, sadistic film to present itself as a critique of violence and sadism in film ... yet Haneke's film is ... perhaps the most repellent."

Having seen most of Haneke's recent films I'm interested in seeing this but I generally avoid violent films. Perhaps I'll borrow the original from my library first.

Fiction and Poetry in Translation in 2008

2008-03-17T20:12:00.002-04:00

Chad Post at Open Letter is compiling a very helpful list of books published (and to be published) in English translation in 2008. The list is available as an Excel spreadsheet and there are also reviews of a number of the titles at the Open Letter site.

A SHOUT FROM COPENHAGEN: PAIN.

2008-03-11T05:46:00.001-04:00

This starts with me, but it is not about me. It is about pain. The pain of hurting and the not knowing why you hurt. Or knowing why and the reason making it worse.

I have lived a life in which I never thought much about my health. I eat and drink as I please, exercise a bit, mostly don’t smoke anymore but for an occasional cigar, have had no real health problems and, aside from the occasional tooth ache and a bout of indignity with a urologist a while back, very little pain.

This past Sunday I woke at 5:28 a.m. It was my 64th birthday, and I’d invited Lady Alice and my kids and son-in-law out for a birthday lunch. But the clock was set for 6:30 and it was only 5:28. Something else had awakened me.

Pain. In my side. Bad pain. Very bad. Appendicitis? I limped out to my computer, googled “appendicitis.” Right side. This was the left. And escalating. I limped around the apartment, groaning like an old man, instructing myself not to act like a baby, thinking, God has decided to cut me down on my 64th birthday! Which somehow seemed ironic and vaguely funny, though the pain would not allow me to laugh. There was a basic background of excruciating pain which every so often would notch up and remain at the new level.

Pain this great, I thought, cannot continue for long. It continued. Half an hour. Forty-five minutes. An hour. I leaned on a chair back, bowed forward across the surface of the dining table, knelt on the floor with my butt in the air and my chest on a cushion, lay on my right side, left side. Nothing helped.

I tried to think. What to do? Emergency room? Call the emergency doctor? What’s the number? But my brain was taken up by the pain, no room for thought, trying to fathom it. Without success. Abstract from it. Can’t. Now it was an hour and fifteen minutes, and the pain still constant and very bad. On a scale of 1 to 10? This has its own scale which outweighs all normal measures. Here there’s only max.

You baby! Pull yourself together! Can’t. Why do I hurt so bad?

As the pain moved toward an hour and a half’s duration, I went back in to the bedroom and woke Alice. I said, “Honey, I need your help.”

Within a minute, she was on the phone calling the emergency doctor. There was a queue on the line, and we were told by a recorded voice that we were number fourteen. Which meant a good hour before we got through and then no doubt three or four or five hours before the doctor came. Alice called the hospital emergency room to ask for an ambulance, was told we should take a taxi out, so she called for a cab and was promised one in ten minutes.

At which point I ran for the bathroom and heaved. Twice. Red. Blood? I thought of my father who at 58 one day threw up blood, lived on in terrible pain for three days, then died. My heart went out to him for those three days of pain. Here I was not quite at two hours and almost willing to die to be free of it.

Meanwhile Alice cancelled the taxi and called back to demand an ambulance. They were there in less than ten minutes. Two young men. The one said to me, “Boy, some birthday present, huh?”

They drove me to the trauma center at Rigshospitalet – the hospital made famous by Lars Van Trier in his TV series Riget, later optioned by Stephen King as The Kingdom, although King could never touch Van Trier in terms of intelligent eerie dark humor.

The details of what happened at the trauma center are not interesting – other than to say that everyone was enormously kind and that finally, to put an anticlimax on it, I learned that the pain was probably due to the passing of a kidney stone. So, nothing fatal. Curfew would not ring for me that day. But what did interest me about the whole experience – aside from the confirmation that, despite complaints to the contrary, the Danish health care system seems to me to function extremely well and the confirmation of the great good fortune of modern medicine as well as of having someone who loves you and will stand by you in need (to be more specific my great fortune at having Lady Alice by my side!) – was what it taught me about pain.

I had never known pain like that before and for the four unbroken hours (four hours and 20 minutes to be exact) that it continued, it occupied me constantly. The only relief I found came via my mind and my emotions – the relief of thinking about and empathizing with everyone I know who had experienced pain – my father in his three days of dying, my friend Susan and my former student Cindy who had battled cancer for their lives and won, my oldest brother who’d endured holes being drilled into his skull, my son who was in pain after an operation and denied the additional morphine he requested, my friend David who’d had his breast bone sawed and pried open to have a new valve installed in his heart, my mother who just before she went into her final paroxysm said, “I’ve never had such a headache before,” which I suddenly understood to have been pain of extremely great magnitude.

And I thought of the torture victims whose stories I know via Inge Genefke and the torture rehabilitation center organizations here and whose pain was not only as bad as what I was experiencing but far far worse and further amplified and complicated by the fact that it was being caused intentionally by other human beings in order to promote their suffering and to try to eradicate their personalities with pain. With my intellect I could see how much worse that was, and although it did not alleviate my own pain, it gave some degree of comfort for me to be able to feel a rending compassion for those suffering souls in their lonely torment.

When one of the hospital orderlies told me that the pain I was experiencing was said to be similar to the pain of a woman in childbirth, this did not have the same effect on me. Because, although I have respect and compassion for women in the pain of childbirth – indeed am awed by their ordeal, I can not help but feel that it must alleviate the pain to know that it is leading to the delivery of a new life into the world. Torture victims must have an almost exactly opposite impression of their pain, their degradation; that it serves no good, on the contrary. I think about the fact that today, the day after, I ache in all the muscles of my chest, in my pleura, the muscles of my back – because I was literally writhing with pain for four hours. What after-affects – sequelae – do torture victims experience, both physical and psychological? It does not bear contemplating. The vast majority of us will never know anything of that kind of hell of pain.

And my own pain yesterday was in a sense, in the words of the ambulance attendant, a birthday gift of sorts. Because it opened a part of my mind and taught me something.

It taught me that pain is another dimension. It gave me a glimpse of what it is like for anyone stuck in that dimension and made me understand, graphically, the need for empathy. And it made something else quite clear to me: I do not wish to visit that dimension again anytime soon.

Still, the end awaits us, and we do not know what path will take us to it. And as Sophocles put it, in one of the greatest scraps of dark humor of all time, “Count no man happy until he is laid in his grave.”

But something else, too: We are all in this together.

Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy
www.thomasekennedy.com

Like a Child

2008-03-07T14:45:00.003-05:00

Picasso is quoted as saying, "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child." The return to a child's way of viewing the world (one that is childlike as opposed to childish) is a theme that other artists and theorists have explored as well. Viktor Shklovsky's notion of defamiliarization has to do with the way art can refresh our automatized ways of perceiving language and the world, something that's necessary when we stop being children and fall into routines. There's nothing sentimental about it: children apprehend the world in unfamiliar and interesting ways, and their observations and ways of thinking can be fascinating.

My five- and six-year-old children were recently asked to come up with a list of questions they were interested in trying to answer for our school district's science fair. Below are some of their responses:

A SHOUT FROM COPENHAGEN: THE FIVER, SOMETHIN' ELSE!

2008-03-04T07:59:00.002-05:00

We learned last week that Ruth, who owned the Fiver (Femmeren) here in Copenhagen, had gone on to her reward and that the Fiver had locked its doors, unlikely to open them again.

This is a great loss – even in this ancient city of 1,525 pubs. Serving houses they call them – værtshuse – which sounds a bit more elegant. Small humble establishments. The Fiver was among the very best of them, a small brown place located at Classensgade 5 on Copenhagen's east side. It had a fabulous collection of jazz CDs and the atmosphere of a clubhouse – a noir club for men and women, with jazz and cigarette smoke, beer and whisky and vodka, and always somebody to talk to if you wanted that or a quiet corner to sit and read or brood in if that's what you were after.

It was at The Fiver that I first heard the wonderful CD Somethin' Else. It was Lady Alice who brought me in to hear it there in 1999 when I was 55 years old. Ironic because the record was cut on my 14th birthday in Hackensack, New Jersey, a stone's throw from my Queens home across two rivers. But I had to fly over the whole wide ocean to the east, thousands of miles and wait forty-one years to hear that album in that wonderful dark little place in Copenhagen.

Anyone who has never heard that record need only hear the list of its personnel and, if you love jazz, you will hurry out to find it: Juli9an "Cannonball" Adderley on alto sax, Miles Davis on trumpet, Hank Jones on piano, Sam Jones on bass, and Art Blakey on drums. On this album you will hear arguably the very best version of "Autumn Leaves" ever recorded – with Miles on trumpet those leaves will break your heart and patch it up again with the wisdom of pain.

At any time if you wanted to hear Somethin' Else in the Fiver, you needed only to ask who was on duty at the bar – Morten, perhaps – to put on "Elsa," which is how they pronounced it in there, giving the record a woman's name, a woman who was really somethin'!
So taken was I by The Fiver that it became chapter 25 in my book Kerrigan's Copenhagen, A Love Story – a novel disguised as a guide to the serving houses of Copenhagen. But more important than that, it became the place that Lady Alice and I would invite our most cherished of guests visiting from abroad – Walt and Alison Cummins, Bob and Lisa Stewart, Dave Poe and Candy Stevens, Thomas and Lisa McCarthy, David Applefield, and my wonderful publisher, Roger Derham, who was the man who put Kerrigan's Copenhagen and the following three books of my Copenhagen Quartet in print (http://www.copenhagenquartet.com/). If I have forgotten to mention others who joined them there it is no doubt because I'd swallowed too many Stolis that night!

The regulars of The Fiver always made my guests feel right to home. One of my favorite evenings was one that went on to the wee hours with Bob Stewart and Lisa. It was Bob's 60th birthday. That was the night, if I remember correctly, that Bob told the story of his fist-fight, at the age of eighteen, with Chuck Berry – a great story which ultimately became a fine poem, scheduled to see print in The Literary Review.

As we sat there, a prominent musician who will here remain nameless came in – let's call him Niels – and I said, "Niels, I'd like you to meet Bob and Lisa. They're from Kansas City." Niels was delighted because Kansas City was the birthplace of so much great jazz. He sat down and started slinging names of great Kansas City jazz musicians at Bob, but Bob, who knows a lot of jazz musicians, didn't know any of those Niels mentioned.

After a while, Niels stopped slinging names, ordered another double Jack, whipped out some hash and a chillum and lit up. After a few moments of meditative puffing, he looked at Bob and said, "You don't know shit, do you?" A moment Bob and I always recall with relish.

I am pleased to recall that before the great Fiver closed its doors, Lady Alice and I managed to invite our good Copenhagen American friend Dave to join us there one evening. Dave had the foresight to take some pictures, and if I knew how to upload them onto this blog, I would do so.

As mentioned there are 1,525 serving houses in Copenhagen. And I will tell about some of them in future blogs. But now there are only 1,524, and the one that is missing is one that was really somethin' else.

Five seconds of silence, please, and five fingers of Stoli, for the late, great Fiver.

Greetings from this ancient capital!
Thomas E. Kennedy
www.thomasekennedy.com

A SHOUT FROM COPENHAGEN: PUTTING YOURSELF SECOND

2008-02-27T06:12:00.003-05:00

In communication with a translator friend, Okla Elliot, recently, he expressed uncertainty whether he wished to be a writer first and translator second or vice versa.

This reminded me of a conversation I once had with the excellent translator of the fine Dutch novelist, Marcel Möring. Her name is Stacey Knecht, and she comes from Brooklyn but had moved to the Netherlands and was now translating Dutch literature into English.

I, too, had done some translation of Danish literature, and my conversation with Stacey clarified something for me. At that time – late ‘80s/ early ‘90s – I was a kind of half-hearted translator- rendering stuff from Danish into English for no reason other than that I could not really fathom the impact of Danish poetry or fiction unless I got it over into my own native English. But I tended to be an impatient translator back then. I wanted the pay-off fast and if something didn't seem right, I would consider taking liberties to make it what I saw as right. A translation that I did of a Klaus Rifbjerg poem for the magazine Frank, Rifbjerg referred good-naturedly to as “enthusiastic.”

And occasionally I have made the kind of mistakes that are called howlers. Obvious, glaring errors that evoke a howl in the knowing reader. I did this with a couple of poems by Thorkild Bjørnvig once – translations that were destined to appear in Tel Aviv Review. Thorkild was not only a wonderful poet who had an amazing life (for more information read his book The Pact – about his friendship with Karen Blixen – a.k.a. Isak Dinesen, known no doubt to some as Meryl Streep), but he was also, in my experience, an incredibly kind man who wore his very large reputation lightly. When I sent him my translations, he wrote back saying that they were excellent and he was very happy with them; however, he added, they are not about foxes but about ravens. (The word for fox in Danish has a resemblance to the word for raven, and I blundered right into that mistake because I had not carefully taken the time, eyes and mind wide open, to check and check again my translation.)

Stacey was clearly a more dedicated translator than I. We met at an international conference at Kasteel Well in the Netherlands, where I used to teach, and she was attending my fiction workshop because she wanted to focus more on her own writing for a while. Ironically, Marcel visited our workshop and gave a reading from one of his books – The Great Longing – in English, Stacey's translation. It was wonderful –students and faculty alike were enthralled. Afterwards we sat in the salon of the castle – named for the fifteen-year-old daughter of the house, Sophie, who had died nearly 500 years before – sipping cognac from snifters and talking, and Marcel was encouraging Stacey to go on translating his fiction. For an author to lose an outstanding translator is a great loss.

I said to Marcel, “She’s good, huh?” and he said, “The best.” So I asked Stacey, "What does it take to be as good a translator as you clearly are?" and she answered, "You have to put yourself second."

I've never forgotten that. Now when I put on my translation cap, I remind myself that it must be a humble one, that while I'm translating, I am less important than the person I'm translating, that I come second. Of course I have to let my instinct and my intuition into the process as well – otherwise, the translation will be slavish and uninspired. But I must maintain that humility which will have me read and reread and reread and keep looking at words, hunting for the words that I translated quickly and facilely so that my eye might see them fresh, might see through the easy mistakes one makes, the false linguistic friends, or the easy mistaking of a present tense for a past, of a present tense used to indicate future. Actually, this process has also helped me in editing my own fiction – because it has made me more patient at revising my own stuff now, too, and even at proofing it.

Since most of the people I translate are still alive, if there is something I don't understand, I will contact them and question them about it to try to get it right, as close as I can to the original. And I always submit the translation to the author for final approval. Not all translators do -- some even have it in their contracts that they have the final say, and this can result in bad feelings.

Most Danes are good at English and can get a sense of it if you didn't quite catch something in the poem or fiction, and most are willing to work with you in the interests of getting it right, but without trying to usurp your "sovereignty" as the English-speaker in the relationship. Some will call in third parties to review the translation, and that can rankle, particularly if it is, for example, somebody’s cousin who happens to be good at English or born in Bath or somewhere – and Americans, as some find it amusing to remind us yanks, do not speak English. Sometimes the consultant called in is an academic with a lot of knowledge of English but little imaginative facility in deploying that knowledge.

Nonetheless, even in these cases, it behooves the translator (behooves me I should say) to resist the urge to fly into a Donald Duck like rage and simply dismiss all the “suggestions” out of hand. Because sometimes something valuable is brought into the process, sometimes something that you did passably is made better. And those moments call for a repositioning of the humble cap on the skull and, again, putting oneself second.I think for most people who aspire to be artists, their own vision is hard-pressed to put itself second to the vision of someone else. For this reason, I satisfy my wish to translate mostly with short works -- individual poems and stories, only occasionally a book. I have translated scores of poems and many stories, but of my approximately 28 books, only three are translations, and two of them are not quite completed yet. While I work on them, they come before my own writing. But those are short stints.It is indeed an honor and honorable work to render a piece of good writing, of art even, from another language into our own. It makes us a kind of messenger of the gods, a semi-divine go-between.

But although it is a pleasure for me to be able to do that, I have no doubt about it: I am a writer first.As a writer, sometimes you get a taste of being translated. Sometimes it is into a language that you have not a jot of understanding of, so you can only trust. I've had a few stories in the former Yugoslavian magazine SVESKA (which funnily enough means, very nearly, ‘prune’ in Danish, but ‘notebook’ in Serbian) and could only trust the translator because I could not even read my name in the Cyrillic lettering.

With Danish it is another matter. I do have a fair mastery of it and cannot resist involving myself if someone is translating something of mine from English. Once someone was rendering one of my stories into Danish and sent it to me for review. There was a sentence where I had incorporated a phrase from Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" -- "the melancholy, long withdrawing roar" -- by which of course I meant the sentence to have an echo of the loss of faith as reflected from Arnold's magnificent poem. That sentence in my story had not been translated in any way resembling those words, and I suggested that she find the standard Danish translation of Arnold's poem so that the sound and sentiment of that line could be retained. She thought I was being fussy. "No one is going to notice this anyway," she said.

My current translator, Birgit Fuglsang, however, is a dream, and she makes me understand how much hard work it is to BE translated when you have a good translator who wants you to be fully satisfied with the result. Which keeps me honest when I am translating, too -- wearing the humble cap, keeping myself second.

Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy
www.thomasekennedy.com

A SHOUT FROM COPENHAGEN: The Bookshops of Copenhagen Minus One -- Chester's turns the key.

2008-02-19T14:22:00.003-05:00

A couple of months back, I had the pleasure of sharing the joy that the city I chose as my home has, amongst its many delights (which include 1,525 serving houses), at least eight outstanding independent bookstores: Arnold Busck, Politiken’s Boghal, Atheneum, Chester’s Book Café, Paludan’s Book Café, Tranquebar, the Jazz Cellar (mostly records but also books), and the absolutely unique, Booktrader.

Well as of this evening – Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 – their number has decreased by one when Chester’s Book Café turned the key on its Christianshavn Shop for good. For bad, rather. It is always sorrowful to say goodbye to a great place, an inspired space.

Chester’s – with its leaders Anders and Lars – has been a wonderfully supportive place, not only for readers, but also for writers. The café had a variety of excellent coffee and cakes, beers and wine, and hosted regular public readings. I personally launched each of the four novels of my Copenhagen Quartet there. Walter Cummins and I launched our co-edited book, The Literary Traveler, there three years ago and were joined at the reading by the wonderful Baronness Varvara, whom the essay I read was about. Chester’s also hosted the launch of an issue of The Literary Review in which I had included a feature focusing on the Danish Writers School and including samples of work from several of the students who had recently completed their education there. A couple of years back, I assisted in the launch of a book by the 93-year-old (alas now deceased) Bob Deane, who had written about his late wife, Ebba Lund – the girl with the red beret who had helped ferry many many Jews to safety in Sweden when the Germans occupied Denmark during World War II. And my partner, Alice Maud Guldbrandsen, launched her book there in 2005, Silence Was My Song: The Bombing of the French School – an emotional evening of remembering not only the dead, but also the survivors of that tragic catastrophe. And last year, Chester’s generously hosted the launches of both my new books – a novel and a story collection.

That’s at least ten readings that I myself and Alice had the privilege of holding there – but there were scores and scores more, by outstanding Danish and international writers.

Chester’s was a place that cared about writers and made us feel at home. The shop stocked our books and made them visible and available to the many readers who came in to enjoy a coffee while browsing and listening to the jazz playing from Chester’s outstanding collection of CDs. It was a place where we spent many pleasant afternoons and evenings –even on past closing time until we finally moved the company around the corner to the Eiffel Bar to continue into the wee hours.

About three weeks ago, Alice and I went in and heard the sad news from Anders. Alice was in again a couple of days ago to say goodbye – I couldn’t make it then or for the closing reception today, so I have to choose this method of saying goodbye and paying tribute to a great place for books that ended much too soon.

Chester’s will continue to exist as an on-line bookshop, and that is good. They will even continue to sell their excellent blends of coffee on-line, and that is good, too.

Still, I have reached the age where I don’t like changes – especially changes of this sort. Chester’s was there for not quite five years. All of us who had the good fortune to be frequent visitors there can count ourselves among the lucky ones.

We’ll remember Chester’s. Thank you, Anders. Thank you, Lars. Thanks to all of those who made it run.

Don’t forget to google Chester’s Bogcafé or contact chester@chester.dk for future book orders.

And don’t forget to support your local independent bookstores. Because if you don’t, they will disappear. And we need them.

Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy
(www.thomasekennedy.com)

Estanislao Zuleta

2008-02-13T11:14:00.005-05:00

I've recently been part of a project to translate some of the writings of Colombian philosopher Estanislao Zuleta (1935-1990) into English. Zuleta is one of Colombia's greatest thinkers, and translation of his writing into English is certainly due.

Many of Zuleta's writings result from close readings he has done of European thinkers and writers including Nietzsche, Freud, and Thomas Mann. His thoughts on a variety of subjects including war and the dynamics of social groups confronting adversity are especially timely in the U.S. at this time.

There will be a symposium on him at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY; 445 West 59 St., Room 1551-N, New York, NY 10019) on Feb. 16, 2008 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The symposium is sponsored by Momentos de . . ., a cultural organization.

Below are some selected lines from his writing (translated by Rosene Zaros and myself):

"The terrible attraction of collective entities, which become intoxicated with the promise of an unproblematic human community, based on an infallible word, is that they suppress indecision, doubt, and the need to think for oneself; they grant their members an identity exalted by participation; they distinguish a good inner entity—the group—from a threatening exterior."

"A great question mark must be placed over the value of what is easy; not only over its consequences, but over the thing itself, over the predilection for everything that doesn’t demand some sort of overcoming from us, that neither puts us in question nor forces us to rise to our potential."

"Just as, whether your eyesight is good or bad, you have to look from some standpoint, in the same way, you have to read from a certain standpoint, from some perspective, which is nothing other than an open question, an unanswered question, which works within us and on which we work with our reading. An open question is an ongoing search that has a specific effect on reading."

"The eradication of conflict and its dissolution among people living together is neither attainable nor desirable, not in one’s personal life—love and friendship—nor in the community. On the contrary, it is necessary to construct a social and legal space in which conflicts can manifest themselves and develop, without the opposition to the other leading to the suppression of the other, destroying it, reducing it to impotence or silencing it."

A SHOUT FROM COPENHAGEN: SEX WORKERS OF THE WORLD REJOICE!

2008-02-11T17:12:00.000-05:00

As readers of these periodic Shouts will know, prostitution has been legal in Denmark since the end of the last millennium. In a society where it is viewed as a violation of human rights to force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term – because it is, after all, that woman's body over which to decide, it seems quite logical to decline to criminalize the sale of sexual services by an adult woman – or man, for that matter. Thus, prostitution has been legal here since 1999.

What is not legal, however and fortunately, is for third parties to profit from the sale of sexual services. This would seem to have solved – at least in principle – the old problem of trying to suppress the oldest profession. (That unscrupulous persons do exist who find ways to exploit women and children and force them into sexual slavery is also an unfortunate, nay, despicable fact; but this Shout is not about that – this Shout is about another, to my mind, brighter aspect of this issue.)

As my criminologist friend here, Professor Dave Sorensen, has pointed out to me, this also led to the solution of a long-standing problem about the right of the physically and mentally handicapped in this advanced social democracy to have their sexual urges satisfied on a regular basis – with public funding. At present, a monthly government allotment is available for visits to prostitutes by disabled persons in recognition of the inevitability of sexual desire and of the rights of all adults to seek satisfaction for their sexual needs with consenting adult partners. (How can you fail to love a country that recognizes the inalienable right of men and women to get laid?! And provides funds to secure the fulfillment of that right?)

This allotment has been in focus in the media recently because a fellow named Torben Hansen, who suffers from cerebral palsy, has sued the government for declining to cover the additional costs of having a prostitute visit him in his home because "access barriers" prevent him from visiting a prostitute himself – which, he charges, constitutes disability discrimination. (If Torben can't come to the prostitute, let the prostitute come to Torben.)

At a time when doctors no longer routinely make house calls, it would hardly seem fair to expect a prostitute to do so without extra compensation. (This might be said to constitute professional discrimination.) The question here is whether the state is willing, or required, to pay that extra fee. In the case of medical visits, it is a matter of how sick the patient is – if you are very sick, an emergency doctor can be dispatched; so perhaps in the case of the prostitution service it should be a matter of how horny you are – whether you are, so to speak, dying for it. As Molly Bloom said to Leopold, "Give us a touch, Poldy. I'm dying for it!"

And as my friend, Professor Sorensen points out with a bemused smile, there is also a movement afoot to secure the right to government-funded prostitution for the unattractive, the awkward, the bashful, those with halitosis…

I say that if you fund it, they will come.

Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy
(www.thomasekennedy.com and www.copnhagenquartet.com)

Absinthe Recommends

2008-02-10T18:13:00.000-05:00

Absinthe recommends the Arts and Ideas podcast from the BBC. Recently the German filmmaker Wim Wenders was interviewed and spoke about his return to Europe after living in the U.S. for many years. The novels Day In Day Out by Terezia Mora (translated by Michael Henry Heim) and The Book of Words by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Susan Bernofsky). Irving Singer writes about Ingmar Bergman in Ingmar Bergman, Cinematic Philosopher. Check out the winner of the Foreign-language Academy Award The Lives of Others, directed by Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck and the Danish film After the Wedding, directed by Susanne Bier.

A SHOUT FROM COPENHAGEN; LIFE, DEATH & GRACE PALEY

2008-02-04T10:18:00.000-05:00

A few months ago Grace Paley died. I met her only once and had always hoped I might have the good fortune to meet her again. That one time was in 1986 at a barbeque in Vermont one summer evening, and to the annoyance of the hosts and other guests, I hogged her company far longer than was polite. Why she allowed me to do so I do not know, for I can only imagine it was uncomfortable to hear me lengthily gushing at her ear trying to articulate the pleasure her stories had given me, how particularly her story “Faith in a Tree” had encouraged me. She would have been 64 years old that evening, my age now; at 42, I perceived her as elderly. But wise. And she radiated something warm and kind and smiling. In any event, she was kind enough not to turn her back and flee, to allow me my one opportunity to celebrate her.

She was not quite 85 when she died, and The New Yorker in December of 2007 published a poem of hers about death which takes my breath away each time I read it. Until reading that poem, the statements about death which have most satisfied my own perception of the inevitable end we cannot quite conceive have been ancient ones – from Chaucer and Gilgamesh:

There is the house where people sit in darkness;
dust is their food and clay their meat.
they are clothed like birds with wings for covering,
they see no light, they sit in darkness…the house of dust.”
-The Epic of Gilgamesh (tr N. K. Sandars)

and

What is this world? What asketh man to have?
Now with his love, now in his colde grave,
Allone, withouten any compaignye.
Fare wel, my swete…
-Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Knight’s Tale,” lines 2776-80

Now, however, I add Grace Paley’s breath-taking expression of the end awaiting us all – because somehow it takes the cold loneliness of that end and makes it an embrace of another, of the one you most love, a last embrace in words:

One Day
One day
one of us
will be lost
to the other

this has been
talked about but
lightly turning
away shyness this
business of con-
fronting the
preference for
survival

my mother said the
children are grown we
are both so sick let us
die together my father
replied no no you
will be well he lied

of course I
want you in the world
whether I’m in it or
not your spirit
I probably mean

there is always
something to say in
the end speaking
without breath one
of us will be lost
to the other

-Grace Paley

Against the poems of death, of course, there are the ones of life. Grace Paley’s marvelous story “Faith in a Tree” has always – since I first read it in New American Review number one from 1967 – been such a confirmation of the determination to live and be happy, and I keep it in my heart alongside two others – one from antiquity, one from the mid-20th century.

The former is, again, from Gilgamesh, the words of the divine ale-wife challenging the hero’s ambition to find eternity:

Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh, where do you roam?
Why do you come here, wandering these pastures
In search of the wind?
The life you seek you shall not find,
When the gods created mankind,
Death for mankind they held in mind,
Life they kept inside their hands.
You, Gilgamesh, fill your belly,
Make merry by day and by night.
Of each day make a feast of rejoicing,
Day and night dance and play!
Let your garments be sparkling fresh,
Thy head be washed; bathe thou in water,
Pay heed to the little one that reaches for your hand,
Delight your spouse with your embrace
And rejoice in hers.
For this, too, is the lot of mankind!

And finally there is this exchange between Caligula and his advisor Cherea in Albert Camus’s play, Caligula, which sums up most simply and profoundly, to my mind, the choice that lies before us:

Caligula: Men die, and they are not happy.
Cherea : Yes, but I choose to live and to be happy.

Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy

See also www.copenhagenquartet.com for information on four independent novels about the souls and seasons of Copenhagen, each written in a different style and set in a different season and which can be read independently of one another or together in any order desired: Kerrigan's Copenhagen, A Love Story, which is a novel disguised as a guide to the bars of Copenhagen, each chapter unfolding in a different serving house; Bluett's Blue Hours, a noir tale about the deep dark of Copenhagen winter and the seamier sides of life in this beautiful capital; Greene's Summer, about a Chilean torture survivor who comes to Copenhagen to be treated in a torture rehabilitation center and meets a Danish woman who has herself survived a violent marriage; and Danish Fall, a satire about 12 people connected to a Danish firm which is being downsized. And on the website www.thomasekennedy.com you are invited to see film clips from a documentary video of the Copenhagen novels and find information about Kennedy’s 2007 books of fiction, A Passion in the Desert and Cast Upon the Day, as well as the forthcoming essay 2008 essay collections: Riding the Dog: A Look back at America and Writers on the Job: 20 Tales of the Nonwriting Life (co-edited with Walter Cummins)

Edith Grossman

2008-01-30T08:15:00.000-05:00

Check out the recent article on Spanish-language translator Edith Grossman in Bookforum here.

I have a small but interesting connection to Grossman: She co-translated, along with Allen Ginsburg, a chapbook of the work of Carlos Edmundo de Ory, a Spanish poet whose work I've been translating. Though the chapbook was printed, it was never distributed; it was deemed to have too many problems by the publisher and most of the copies were destroyed. Only a handful of copies still exist (I was fortunate to obtain one a couple of years ago in Spain from Jaume Pont, an Ory scholar). Grossman herself has never seen the edition (I need to at least send her a photocopied version), and no one I've spoken to at the Allen Ginsburg trust had any notion of its existence.

Absinthe at AWP

2008-01-28T21:15:00.000-05:00

Absinthe: New European Writing will be at AWP in New York this week and we look forward to seeing many of you. We're sharing table 447 at the Bookfair with our good friends from Dzanc Books.

If you're not registered for AWP you can still stop by the Bookfair on Saturday, February 2nd as it will be open to the general public on that day.

Subscribe and Receive Three Years for the Price of Two

2008-01-22T22:35:00.000-05:00

Until February 29th, 2008 you can subscribe to Absinthe: New European Writing for two years (or extend your subscription) for only $20* and receive an additional year (two issues) FREE! That’s three years (six issues) for only $20.*

You can subscribe using Paypal here or send a check for $20 to:

Absinthe
P.O. Box 2297
Farmington Hills, MI 48333-2297

*$50 for non-US subscribers

Absinthe/Oakland University Festival of European Film and Writing

2008-01-15T20:43:00.000-05:00

The first Absinthe/Oakland University Festival of European Film and Writing will be held on May 9-10, 2008 in Rochester, MI. More details will follow very soon.