ABC OF READING

A NOTE FROM ESTONIA

2009-07-02T15:31:00.003-04:00

No longer that possibility to write as I do not have the connection.

What do I mean?

In every country of the former Soviet Empire from Bulgaria to Estonia there is a word for connection, for that person who will help you in whatever matter is at hand

If a person does not have a connection there is the shaking of the head and the lowering of the voice: it is or was very sad, he or she did not have a connection so it was not possible.

I have come to that moment in writing.

While in memory the pleasure of writing remains… the reality is that I do not have a connection that would allow my words to be read.

Dalkey Archive, Turtle Point, Harper Collins, Arcade, Melville, FSG have found even JUST LIKE THAT my most accessible novel and the one with the easy hook of being a book from the so-called Sixties to be too something or other…

I could delineate the reasons these publishers found for… but what is the point.. I could show the whim that lead them to whatever it was that they actually did publish…

I have no connection… and everyone should understand that publishing is a simple a matter if whim.. just as in the life in Estonia under communism: whim masqueraded as political reasoning…

So…

Even reading becomes difficult.

For two weeks I have been reading the new translation of PORNOGRAFIA by Witold Gombrowicz that Grove will publish in the fall, published only to maintain some connection to the reputation that made that publisher.. but when our hostess in Helsinki falls asleep looking into the poster of a pensive PAUL AUSTER… what hope is there for reading?

Anyone who might think that Paul Auster is a writer is beyond help… even my reading of PORNOGRAFIA is shadowed by the fact that Grove feels it must foreword the book by a popular writer like Sam Lipsyte--- who is supposed to write funny stuff about “losers” though his press agent seems to get him space in popular magazines to look down upon… but the bound galleys are not burdened by his words except for the blank soace where the Foreword is supposed to be…

Even mentioning Auster’s name is a victory for Auster…

I wrote a review of NORMANCE by Celine for the Los Angeles Times... it might appear on 12 July... of course I remember and Celine’s words shadow these: you have to be a little bit dead to be really funny…

GOING EAST or NORTH (2)

2009-06-18T16:47:00.003-04:00

54

Leaving one’s room to go travelling is probably always a mistake and to go to Europe, to go to the East one cannot avoid committing an injustice, to be not aware enough, to know that one does not know enough…

In FADO, a forthcoming book of travel essays, the Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk writes. “To travel is to live. Or in any case to live doubly, triply, multiple times.

I am surprised by Stasiuk’s lack of hesitation in his assertion. Surely memory would assert itself… for to travel is to be killed, to die enroute… surely he must be aware of those tiny towns that were set in motion and I am not just thinking of the recent century… but to leave those villages for the new world. It was not an accident of hyperbole that the Irish talked of coffin ships sailing from Europe… did not those from Poland, from Germany… of course many did not die crossing over and I live here on East First Street in Manhattan midst the remains, still of their arrival…

55

This morning, Anna says she had an email: her grandfather was killed on 2 October, 1941 in Kirov. He had been set in motion on 25 June 1941, from Tartu in Estonia. His bag had been packed for weeks… our bags have been packed for three days… Anna did not know her grandfather, Richard Raago’s death day. My mother heard many stories… I think we will learn many things in Estonia… they had come to get him… no one knew where he was taken, there was no one to ask…

32

I would say Eastern Europe began for me in 1960. Bear with me. The year is arbitrary but on Sunday in the Cranbury book store for fifty cents an Avon Original paperback EICHMANN MAN OF SLAUGHTER by John Donovan with the blurb: The murder of 6,000,000 Jews: Hitler demanded it, Himmler ordered it--- ADOLF EICHMANN DID IT!

I am sure bought this book in 1960 or in 1961. I remembered the photos on the inside of the cover a large hole filled with dead bodies, one body in convict clothes pulled out and lying on the incline leading into the hole filed with dead bodies. Another picture of people getting into a freight car… On the inside of the back cover: a box of wedding rings; the three ovens in a crematoria with human remain; a prisoner pointing his finger at a German soldier wearing a cloth cap while another German soldier wearing a more formal hat looks on…

In those years I had other books: THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF HELL, THE SCOURGE OF THE SWASTIKA… I had sometime later …. THE KNIGHTS OF BOSHIDO but that didn’t have the same impact.

Those years I followed the trial and then the execution of Eichmann… the holocaust had arrived in the Unites States.

89

Until the early 60s World War Two had been in the Pacific for most Americans, I dare say. My grandfather had build airfields in Burma I was told. Other uncles had been in the Marines in the Pacific. In their houses they had picture histories of those island campaigns but did not talk about… one of them had a tattoo on his arm and smoked Camels…

Pearl Harbor and Tokyo Harbor and Douglas MacArthur summed up WW2…

In Europe--- if we thought about it: Hitler and Rommel and little later reading the books of Willi Heinrich: CROSS OF IRON, CRACK OF DOOM and MARK OF SHAME and another because it was about young boys my own age I read many times: THE BRIDGE by Manfred Gregor… I do not think I was atypical…

Why I didn’t I read THE NAKED AND THE DEAD or FROM HERE TO ETERNITY? Maybe they were too long or… and in the case of Heinrich and the Gregor? They were about the other as I would probably be forced to describe them later on.

Because of the Eichmann’s capture I bought my first hardcover: Hitler a Study I Tyranny by Allan Bullock and then a copy of Mein Kampf from Ben who ran The Patchogue Book Store, a a secondhand book store on Main Street that was owned by Ben a guy who worked on a town sanitation truck and the opened the shop after work. He had thick glasses and sat in his shop in his green sanitation department uniform. John tells me Ben sold everything. It is where people went to get titty magazines… my copy of KAPUTT was bought there. Ben islong dead and the store torn down to be replaced by a court building.

Literature had no appeal for me. How could it? In high school they wanted us to read the novels of Thomas Hardy and SILAS MARNER and plays of Shakespeare: Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Julius Caesar and Macbeth… that was literature. The Shakespeare was explained via film clips… now kids are drowned in ethnic literature and surely never read that sort of junk ever again… who wants to learn life lessons from Korean prostitutes as they interact with Hispanic reformed drug dealers who ive to support their sisters created by Toni Morrison

48

These paperbacks about Jew killing… that is what one now thought World War Two was all about… what was going on over there in Eastern Europe and would still be going on if there were Jews left to kill.

44

The Hungarian Uprising in 1956 had confused me.… the pictures in LIFE Magazine and I guess at 12 I didn’t understand why the US didn’t help the Hungarians… THE BRIDGE AT ANDAU by James Michener… describe the new travelers who were fleeing the failed uprising… we read of Pal Maleter and Cardinal Mindszenty living on in the American Embassy

23

Do I know anything more about Eastern Europe now?

I have read Tadeusz Borowski: THIS WAY FOR THE GAS LADIES AND GENTLEMEN.. about the famous soccer match and Borowski’s suicide by gas after the war, after a friend had been imprisoned and tortured by the communist regime that now used Auschwitz for its own prisoners much as the Communists re-opened Buchenwald for its own prisoners of the German Democratic Republic…

And I have read KAPUTT of course…

I have read The Gulag Archipelago…

I have read THE FINAL STATION: UMSCHLAGPLATZ by Jaroslav M. Rymkiewicz which describes the limits of being able or not being able to describe the Warsaw ghetto…

No, I will not go on and make a list of books…

I know nothing about life in Eastern Europe.

GOING EAST or NORTH

2009-06-16T08:50:00.002-04:00

Is it then that you have reached such a degree of lethargy that you acquiesce in your sickness? If so, let us flee to lands that are analogues of death. I see how it is, poor soul! We shall pack out trunks for Tornio. Let us go farther still to the extreme end of the Baltic; or further still from life, if that is possible…
---Charles Baudelaire

5

At the end of the week I am going East: to Poland and Estonia. There was a time when Cracow was not in the East but that is possibly true only if one reads history though today fewer and fewer read history and then only a history which compliments whichever prejudice is the ruling theme of the contemporary moment.

In Estonia I am going to Tartu which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes as a charming town with numerous Latin inscriptions, a hillside park in the town city and seemed to him to be part of Europe.

A.S. had come to Estonia to escape the constant eye of the KGB in order to work on The Gulag Archipelago and mentions that in the camps of the Gulag he never met a bad Estonian but he knew, “there were some Estonians who helped drive their country into Communism, others had helped keep it there; still others had worked in the early Cheka and some had contributed to the defeat of the Whites at Livny in 1919.”

The detail: numerous Latin inscriptions…

7

To go Cracow is to visit the Cracow castle and see the scene of Curzio Malaparte’s visit in KAPUTT to “I am the King, der Konig,” said Reichsminister Frank, Governor-General of Poland, spreading his arms and gazing upon his guests with proud complacency… I should be the happiest man alive, I should truly be like Gott in Frankreich, if the Poles were grateful to me for all that I am doing for them. But the more I strive to allay their misfortunes and to deal justly with them, the more they despise all I am doing for their country. They are an ungrateful people…”

As they walk about the castle Frank’s wife points out a, “small room with walls that were totally bare and whitewashed. There was not a single piece of furniture, no carpets, no pictures, no books, no flowers--- nothing except a magnificent Pleyal piano and a wooden music stool. Frau Brigitte Frank opened the piano, and leaning her knee on the stool stroked the keyboard with her fat fingers. “Before taking a crucial decision or when he is very weary or depressed, sometimes in the midst of an important meeting, “ said Frau Brigitte Frank, “he(Frank) shuts himself up in this cell and sits before the piano and seeks rest or inspiration from Schumann, Brahms, Chopin or Beethoven. Do you know what I call this cell? I call it is his eagle’s nest.” “He is an extraordinary man, isn’t he? she added gazing at me with a look of proud affection. “He is an artist a great artist with a pure and delicate soul. Only such an artist as he can rule over Poland.”

“Yes,” I said a great artist and it is with this piano that he rules the Polish people.

9

Later in KAPUTT, Malaparte will visit Fischer, the Nazi Governor of Warsaw, and the condition of the children in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, will be discussed, “It’s the children who worry me. (Fischer says) ‘Unfortunately there is little that can be done to reduce the children’s death rate in the ghettos. I should like however to so something to relieve the suffering of those unfortunate children. I should like to train them to love life, I would like to teach them to walk smiling through the ghetto streets.”

“Smiling?” I asked. “Do you wish to teach them to smile? To walk smiling? The Jewish children will never learn to smile, not if you teach then with the whip. Neither will they ever learn to walk. Don’t you know that the Jewish children do not walk. Jewish children have wings.”

REPETITION or insistance

2009-06-05T17:01:00.002-04:00

Book Expo the annual publishers show settled down in New York City. In the few weeks before it I had been invited to meet some distinguished authors who would reveal to me what goes on in the mind of an automobile dealer, how a former powerful executive deals with bone cancer, the art and practice of dog fighting and how stones and gardens can heal my mind. There would also be famous “literary” writers and politicians on display: Sherman Alexie would be there.

In 1929 Margaret Anderson decided to close THE LITTLE REVIEW, the magazine she and Jean Heap edited with the sometimes help of Ezra Pound. In the course of 15 years it published the early work of among others: T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Evelyn Scott and Djuana Barnes.

James Joyce serialized “Ulysses” in the magazine.

Anderson wrote in afterword for an anthology of some of the writings that had appeared in the magazine, “In 1929, in Paris, I decided that the time had come to end the Little Review. Our mission was accomplished; contemporary art had “arrived”; and for a hundred years, perhaps, the literary world would produce only: repetition.”

80 years on from the closing of the Little Review can anyone argue with Anderson?

Yes, she missed publishing Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and that is about it, really.

It is known that both Beckett and Faulkner read the Little Review so as to make sure they would not be repeating too much…

20 years from today will there even be books? Will the repetition have come to an end?

Any evidence for that hope is pretty thin, at the moment.

If you doubt the end of the book as we know it today ask yourself the question: when was the last time you used a typewriter?

(homage to G. Stein for those who know the reason)

MEMORIAL DAY READINGS

2009-05-26T22:33:00.003-04:00

Remembering on Memorial Day

Published in the Los Angeles Times. 25 May 2009

As recently as the late 1950s, in a small town on Long lsland near New York City, young people in school learned certain poems: Joyce Kilmer’s “Prayer of a Soldier in France,” Alan Seeger’s “ I Have a Rendezvous With Death” and John MacRae’s “In Flanders Field.” Does anyone still remember the fallen this way in classrooms?

This spring, “Dispatches” by Michael Herr appeared in the Everyman Series from Alfred A. Knopf, 40 years after the publication of Herr’s memorable article on Khe Sanh in Esquire (it is also one of the most memorable parts of “Dispatches”). How many literary books are there about the Vietnam War? Some would say Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” is at the top of that list, though for many people the experience of Vietnam probably derives mostly from movies, not books — “Apocalypse Now,” of course, or “Platoon,” or “Go Tell the Spartans.”

As the poems above may suggest, World War I seems to have left a deep impression, not to mention some powerful books about that conflict: “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque (still read in many middle schools across the country) and, now and again, Ernst Junger’s “Storm of Steel” (now in a very good translation by Michael Hoffman). “Storm” is probably the single best book ever written about the actual experience of an individual soldier in modern combat.

But for many around the world, is it Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” — with its description of a young man’s experiences of combat on the Italian front in World War I — that has had the most lasting literary impact?

One can’t help but think so, especially in light of Mark Thompson’s new book, "The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919" (Basic Books), which throws light on the true horror and sheer futility of that arena of the war. Thompson also points out that two other major world writers, besides Hemingway, were on that front: Robert Musil (“The Man Without Qualities”) in the Austrian army and, in the Italian army, Carlo Emilio Gadda, whose “That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana” is the only Italian novel of the 20th century that is reasonably compared in power and scope to James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

But it seems that “A Farewell to Arms” is the book that has given shape and spirit to the way we think about war, how we read Herr’s book and, maybe, even how our view of 19 year so far involvemen or warin Iraq and it will be reflected in books to come. As Hemingway wrote:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. ... I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory... . There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. ... Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

The quotation from Hemingway of course is finally echoed in the realty of the Vietnam War monument in Washington.

REPETITION

2009-05-25T13:30:00.004-04:00

In the 15 years of its existence THE LITTLE REVIEW edited by Margaret Anderson and Jean Heap with the help of Ezra Pound published among many others: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Djuna Barnes, Evelyn Scott...
It serialized ULYSSES.

Of course the english departments, those depositories of stupidity, ignore this sort of achievement in their adamant hatred of literature as does the vast publishing industry, thankfully shrinking day by day as I am typing this.

In an anthology published many years after of the closing of THE LITTLE REVIEW Margaret Anderson wrote: In 1929, in Paris, I decided that the time had come to end the Little Review. Our mission was accomplished; contemporary art had "arrived"; and for a hundred years, perhaps, the literary world would produce only: repetition.

With 20 years to go it is probably possible to say that Anderson is absolutely correct. She missed out on publishing Finnegans Wake but it is known that Faulkner was reading The Little Review. She missed out on publishing Ernst Junger and E. M. Cioran

95 percent of writers write today as if the last hundred years did not happen.

BOOKS TO READ THIS SUMMER, FALL,WINTER, SPRING

2009-05-19T18:45:00.005-04:00

BOOKS I WILL TRY TO READ AS IF REALLY IS THERE ANY DIFFERENCE: SUMMER FALL WINTER SPRING

One

Summer seems to be a time when people PLAN to read. The lists are made. The intention is made but then of course…

Two

What I will be reading subject to boredom, distraction and who knows what will show up and even after I made this list I forgotten to include so I stick it in right now THE SIXTH SENSE by Konrad Bayer with the mysterious line: “she wanted my body from me”

--OP OLOOP by Juan Filloy. Argentinian: “Alas, idiotically, I chose to enroll myself in the bitter school of constraint. I’ve turned my psyche into a stop watch of perfect and ineluctable exactitude…”

--THE COLLECTOR OF WORLDS by Iliya Troyanov : a recreation or a creation or an alternative yet a life of Sir Richard Burton, the 19th century traveler and translator: from the German of a Bulgarian: “She left behind a smile as small as the folded-down corner of a page in a book.”

--GEORGE LETHAM Physician and Murderer by Ernst Weiss… Weiss killed himself in Paris as the Germans marched in… had known Hitler in the early 20th century… “How could I, Georg Letham, a physician, a man of scientific training of a certain philosophical aspirations let myself be so far carried away as to commit an offense of the gravest sort, the murder of my wife?”

--THE NECESSARY MARRIAGE by Dumitru Tsepeneag… the third of this Rumanian’s novels to appear in English: “everywhere the smell of damp and mice and”

--MIRACLES OF LIFE by J.G. Ballard… “the prosperous Chinese businessmen pausing in the Bubbling Well Road to savour a thimble of blood tapped from the neck of a vicious goose tethered to a telephone pole”

--BRECHT AT NIGHT by Mati Unt… Brecht is in Helsinki in 1941 luxuriating while waiting to move to Hollywood while in Estonia the Russian communists and their Estonian fellow travelers are rounding up thousands of Estonians to be murdered including my wife’s grandfather…

--REX by Jose Manuel Prieto… whose NOCTURNAL BUTTERFLIES OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE is one of the greatest titles in all of literature… the final volume of a trilogy of which NOCTURNAL is the first…

--THREE DROPS OF BLOOD by Sadeq Hedayat by the author of THE BLIND OWL… the only world author from what is now IRAQ… THE BLIND OWL is much like STORY OF THE EYE… a singular book on a tiny shelf of such books

--ANONYMOUS CELEBRITY by Ignacio de Loyola Brandao I had read his ZERO a long time ago in an Avon paperback when such books were published as massmarket paperbacks … I love the many typefaces, the fragmented story,: read it in spite of the blurb from a hack and fellow traveller like E.L. Doctorow

--THE TANNERS by Robert Walser… I am not smart enough to understand the complexity of this novel…

--TREADING AIR by Jaan Kross and THE CONSPIRACY AND OTHER STORIES by Jaan Kross Since I am to be in Estonia one can only trust novels when deciding where to go

--NEWS FROM THE EMPIRE by Fernando del Paso.. I am still reading this book, paragraph, sentence by sentence… some books should never be read all the way through… one puts it aside and picks it up… knowing it might out live me…

--THE HALFWAY HOUSE by Guillermo Rosales I will find 300 words… another novel about the consequences of the criminal rule by communist gangsters in Cuba

--LOVE IS LIKE PARK AVENUE by Alvin Levin… the translator of Thomas Bernhard’s poetry recently published by Princeton was respomsible for getting New Directions to bring Levin back to life…

--THE ALLURE OF CHANEL by Paul Morand. Just that. And again: VENICES by Paul Morand… to read them together is to realize once again that all the really interesting writers in Twentieth Century France were on the right: the left produced for the most part apologists for mass murder who never scorned a thug if they could quote Karl Marx

Three

And again THE DEATH OF VIRGIL by Hermann Broch…
and it is time again to be reading Plutrach in preparation for the great novel of Peter Nadas…

four

I will re-read my unpublished books:
ST. PATRICK’S DAY
FORGET THE FUTURE
JUST LIKE THAT
LOSS OF DIGNITY
EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS
TRAVELING WITH THE DAUGHTER TO EUROPE
FRIDAY SATURDAY SUNDAY

All of it a homage to futility though containing a desire to…

The sad consolation of the two published books with the much copied reviews and articles that they provoked will accuse me or be accused by me: THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV, GOING TO PATCHOGUE.

five

Of course I will hear about how times are hard in publishing, for books, for authors and all the rest of it and the amnesia is so apparent: it has always been a hard time…

SOME GOOD BOOKS and then a sad story

2009-05-06T16:56:00.003-04:00

48

Vladimir Nabokov once said that when he was sent a new novel he would open it, scan the pages and if it contained mostly dialogue he would quietly close the book unread. The point being obvious, I assume…

I did not close Jeremy M. Davies’s ROSE ALLEY (Counterpath Press, Denver) as I am pretty sure Nabokov would also not have closed the novel. The making of a movie in Paris in 1968 told from the various viewpoints of some of the people involved in the making of the movie. Of course I thought of Fassbinder’s BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE--- Fassbinder directed a film form VN’s DESPAIR--- and I was also thinking of Godard’s CONTEMPT…

I loved the genuine nastiness of everyone involved in the making of the movie and the various tones , “ Selwyn Wexler in his hotel room gets a hard-on thinking about me and the blood that goes into his cock could probably be put to better use.” Or. “…Wexler had put Myrna’s jeans in the glove box and gone down on her, complaining obscurely as she licked his neck some time later that he felt like this massive crustacean.” Or. “He settled in a township in Estonia tiny enough to escape the notice of any cartographer born west of the Danube. Content with a life of dirt and blood, gossip, manure and provincial pussy, he read Longfellow and broke up marriages.”

The novel comes with a helpful index. There is none of that cloying insinuating hooking of the reader into the thinking that this I a transcription of the reality of some group of young people thought to be of interest to the fleeting tastes of those who read with ears being penetrated by IPODS.

Counterpath also published sometime ago DIVERTIMENTI AND VARIATION by Heimito von Doderer who some know for his essential novels THE DEMONS, EVERY MAN A MURDERED and THE WATERFALL OF SLUNJ… sadly not as well known at Robert Musil but probably in the long run more significant he is the key for eventually understanding Thomas Bernhard… one can only hope that Counterpath will do THE STRUDLEHOF STEPS… then that link will become clear.

Again, von Doderer appears to be a realist in the dreariest sense of that word but gradually, ever so slowly we are inducted into vision…

53

Turtle Point Press has published:

THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE by Hannah Green--- a novel that sits in the sure company of THE GRET GATSBY, ABSALOM ABSALOM, ON THE ROAD--- a novel of vision and there is again no way to avoid that word--- a whole family history in less than 200 pages, all of American history, written in a language that resonates with the American experience but In such a way that it becomes the common human experience

LORD OF DARK PLACES by Hal Bennett is a far more brutal book than Hannah Green’s novel but --- if you have always suspected that Toni Morrison and all the other hustler of their dark skins were just that little bit of a fraud--- Bennett is the genuine corrective and probably one of the few writers of today who would have found himself walking along with Chaucer to Canterbury with a damn good tale to tell

And four books by Julien Gracq: KING COPHETUA, THE NARROW WATERS, THE SHAPE OF A CITY and READING WRITING.

THE SHAPE OF A CITY describes Nantes in such a way you will be forever using it as a model for when you read anyone else who describes any city ever again…

THE NARROW WATERS, a short boat ride that in 50 pages becomes a whole life’s story…

KING COPHETUA one of a the few novels that I know of that can sit next to Ernst Junger’s ON THE MARBLE CLIFFS with its precise message of BEWARE

READING WRITING if read along with Ezra Pound’s ABC OF READING: all anyone needs to know how to read, how to write and…

In the coming months Jon Rabinowitz who owns Turtle Point will also be publishing:

BY MYSELF by D.A. Powell and David Trinidad the autobiography of a star written in three hundred lines appropriate from three hundred autobiographies of show business people… one has always suspected that everyone in show business is actually the same person.

MARBLES by James Guida, a book of aphorisms… and if Guida can refrain from publishing in the future anything but more aphorisms he will become very very interesting. I will not quote from him as we have to see if he has the =genuine courage of this book or is it just a gimmick

CREATURELY AND OTHER ESSAYS by Devin Johnson is a book of little essays about nature by a man who mostly stays in doors…

Jon Rabinowitz the owner and publisher of Turtle Point Press is the rarest of the smaller publishers: he spends his own money--- taking no money from the taxpayers or foundations--- and publishes what he likes. It eats at me, it is true, that he has never wanted to publish my little books but one lives with such accidents of taste, badly, I fear.

77

A SADNESS falls on me with a phone call from Elliott Anderson’s daughter. He died on May 2nd. I had last seen him in January just after the doctor had taken out his cancerous stomach. He hoped that the intestines would take over. They did not and the cancer killed him. The last picture of him in my head : of his sitting on his balcony taking the sun then going down into the Pacific--- how to find your place?... Take Wilshire to the ocean, turn left and stop.

I first met Elliott really in 1965 at Beloit… before that we had been classmates but he lived in a fraternity but a year in France for him and a year in Dublin for me… he was wanting to write and actually gave the class essay at graduation, then the Peace Corps in Kenya, then Iowa—a visit to him there had Elliott talking about JMG LeClezio, then he was at Northwestern first as assistant to Charles Newman at Triquarterly then editor and famous for many issues devoted to American fiction and for a fat near 800 page issue devoted to the history of the little magazine… eventually forced out of the editorship by a creep by the name of Joseph Epstein who wanted the journal to have more essays since it was a journal published by a university--- since then no one reads Triquarterly (to be sure of this I looked in the NYU library yesterday and the pile of the last two years sits there never having been opened)… then Hollywood took to Elliott and he made money with a production company and wrote a few episodes for TV:

• "Silk Stalkings" (1 episode, 1992)
- The Brotherhood (1992) TV episode (writer)
• "Dragnet" (2 episodes, 1989-1991)
... aka "Dragnet: The Nineties"
... aka "The New Dragnet" (USA)
- Weekend Warrior (1991) TV episode (writer)
- The Payback (1989) TV episode (writer)
• "Adam 12" (2 episodes, 1990-1991)
- D.A.R.E. (1991) TV episode (writer)
- Witchcraft (1990) TV episode (writer)

Elliott told me the producers said they now needed someone younger... so he went into real estate and read mass market thrillers and watched sports. He had tried to write a novel but then couldn’t read or make sense of his own work and he for sure wouldn’t buy a novel like that. He had not published me in Triquarterly for whatever reason--- probably just forgetfulness but I came to forgive him by when I published for three issues ADRIFT, I made a point of publishing friends and people I knew form the group that was putting up the money, because all journals exist for that purpose IN PART if they are edited by human beings and not business machines--- just look at any of the journals edited by Ezra Pound or T.S. Eliot for confirmation of that…and that is why magazines like Vanity Fair and The New Yorker are finally only machines that are published to amuse Sy Newhouse much like an erector set used to fascinate clever adolescents…

Elliott was very tall and a man of the west. Anna when she saw us walking down the street said, the tall and the short of it. When I saw him on his porch in January with a tube coming out of his stomach he simply said, what will be… I missed going horseback riding with him in Malibu but I did have a nice lunch with him at the Getty Villa in July--- he insisted on paying---… he admitted to liking Cormac McCarthy and it is due to Elliott that I had discovered Le Clezio when that guy was actually a good writer…

I wonder if Elliott did actually have any manuscripts in that apartment? I do have a magic script Elliott write, western based on Hamlet… I once jokingly suggested that I would like to be a script doctor and make a couple thousand a week. He replied, NO WAY you just reveal yourself as a rank amateur if you had said 200,000 then the guys in Hollywood would have lapped you up. He said that in a nice restaurant in that Santa Monica. We were eating and he was drinking the money from the Hamlet western… people paid him money for many reasons other than to actually see a film made, a person had to understand that about living out here.

ANOTHER ASPECT OF DUMBNESS in the work of Elaine Showalter

2009-04-28T11:42:00.003-04:00

Another aspect of the dumbness of Elaine Showalter became apparent when a friend, TW sent me a list of his favorite novels written by women--- his list by gender which he did with the provocation that ES probably did not include them in her book--- but the listing was something he would not normally do as he like myself is uninterested in the sexual equipment of a writer:

Barbara Pym - Quartet in Autumn
Barbara Comyns - Who Was Changed and Who Who Was Dead
Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Anna Kavan - Ice
Penelope Mortimer - The Handyman
Penelope Fitzgerald - Gate of Angels
Anita Brookner - Incident in the Rue Langier
Hannah Green - The Dead of the House
Shirley Jackson - We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Tremor of Forgery - Patricia Highsmith
Ilse Aichinger - The Greater Hope
Margarita Karapanou - Kassandra and the Wolf
Espido Freire – Irlanda

TW added for completeness in a subsequent email, THE GATE OF ANGELS by Penelope Fitzgerald.

The Aichinger novel in particular reminded me of another further dumbness of books like ES’s.

It is bad enough that she has chosen to write only about writers who possess a vagina but she was also requiring them to have American passports… so of course she is limited to writing for example about a pathetic and minor writer like Sylvia Plath when she could have been able to write a far more interesting book if she had gone beyond the narrow focus based upon the passports or self-declared ethnicity of her writers.

I was thinking of novels, stories and poems by writers like Ingeborg Bachmann, Marina Tsvetaeva, Clarice Lispector, Nelida Pinon, Jean Rhys, Violette Leduc …

A GREAT MODEL OF ACADEMIC STUPIDITY: Elaine Showalter

2009-04-22T15:53:00.004-04:00

An underlining idea of what I have been trying to do is that one should never really trust academics when it comes to literary matters. They mostly get everything wrong and this has always been so in the modern age. Today,no sane person would ever seriously expect to study literature at an American university as that is the one thing that is not studied in English and foreign language departments at 99% of American universities.

A very good example of your typical tenured, honoured, respected academic is Elaine Showalter. She has chosen to publish A JURY IF HER PEERS, a 608 page study of American women writers. Of course the absurdity of such a book is self-evident as if it was really of interest to study writers on the basis of whether or not they have a vagina or a penis... but even allowing for this sort of trivializing ghettoization is the simple fact that she overlooks Evelyn Scott whose body of work from the 1920's 30s, 40s is far superior to any of the writers she does actually pretend to discuss: most of them are minor to say the least and deserving of their obscurity when compared to so many other writers who happen to have other physical attributes... but it is in wondering how she could overlook Evelyn Scott.. who introduced Faulkner's THE SOUND AND THE FURY and received for her troubles his back-handed compliment, as being pretty good for a woman.. though Faulkner well knew Scott was in so many ways his equal through her actual books: THE WAVE, A CALENDAR OF SIN, BREAD AND A SWORD, THE NARROW HOUSE, BACKGROUND IN TENNESSEE, ESCAPADE...
Of course the real reason Showalter is afraid of such a writer as Scott is simple laziness and tenured academics always avoid the difficult as that is never a good career move. Showalter will drivel on and on about Sylvia Plath, Sara Teasdale and Adrienne Rich...

If a young person wants to actually study literature at a college or university they should probably study geology or botany or chemistry or mathematics... in the former Soviet Union where literature departments were as awful and as stupid as your typical American literature departments the real readers were in the sciences and it was these people who kept alive for instance the work of Mandelstam and many others...

THE SADDEST NEWS: The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

2009-04-03T14:39:00.004-04:00

Sadder even than the famous three saddest words in the English language according to Gore Vidal--- Joyce Carol Oates--- I see that Farrar, Straus & Giroux is about to unleash the collected stories of Lydia Davis in the Fall.

Sad, so sad that Lydia Davis was caught by the virus of wanting to be a so-called creative writer and this virus has for the most part stopped her from being truly socially useful as a translator, a vocation that she was so good in and if she had persisted she could easily be ranked with those other two great translators Helen Lane and Barbara Wright to whom all English speakers are indebted to for having providing some of the most important translations in modern times.

This all too common virus has stopped Davis from finishing her translation of Michel Leiris’s great autobiography RULES OF THE GAME of which she masterfully translated two of the four volumes. RULES OF THE GAME is the most important autobiography in modern literature.

And one can only deeply and profoundly regret the writing of these pathetic pale exhibitions of experimental prose has taken the place of Davis possibly translating Leiris’s PHANTOM AFRICA or some of the many books by Marcel Jouhandeau whose life and work embodied all the terrible modern dilemmas of trust, sexuality, religion and the temptations of extremist politics.

And I am sure I have only scratched the surface of what should be made available in English and sadly it seems that Davis will not have a leading role in that but instead: almost 700 pages of creative writing… Maybe the publishers should have held out for another two hundred pages and Davis could challenge James Joyce’s Ulysses at least in the matter of length.

Interestingly,the publishers have also decided that Davis's work should be compared to the Velvet Underground and helpfully note that the Velvet Underground is a rock band. Nico the most important member of that band is rolling in derisions of laughter in her Berlin grave at the impertinence of this comparison.

NEW and OLD: Lim, Marten and Fine

2009-03-17T13:20:00.003-04:00

In the background Joy Division as I type.

SECTION ONE

In the mail:
WASTE by EUGENE MARTEN
and
FOG & CAR by EUGENE LIM.
They came to me with compliments about this blog.

I have tried to read each of the books.
I know that Marten has published an earlier book with Turtle Point Press.
I am interested in why I have not read more.
The Marten book is in the tradition of Bataille’s The Story of the Eye.
I am probably not strong enough to read about a janitor and what he collects.
FOG & CAR by LIM is more appealing but I can’t get beyond the names: MR FOG and SARAH CAR.

Names.
Publishers objected to MURPHY and SB was willing to change it to any name they wanted.

I liked the short paragraphs, the short chapters. And I liked the reported reading within the book.

No blurb from Gordon Lish who I had thought dead but whose ghost must have blurbed Marten’s book and I guess it would be inevitable that such a person is one of the undead.

Steve Katz blurbed the Lim book.
Boy, he’s been around a long time. In 1968 I had liked his EXAGGERATIONS OF PETER PRINCE. But then he went on and on writing and even becoming a tenured professor and director of creative writing didn’t stop him and was published in all those places that specialize in log-rolling--- you publish my book and I’ll publish your book…

BUT: FOG & CAR seems to be a book that has to be gotten out of the way. It is too long and not for a moment do I like the division into a sort of his and her version. At least many pages have a lot of which space but that forces the reader to look at each and every word, and probably with the eraser part of the pencil…
BUT now that the book is done with and one is heartened to see that Mr. Lim is a high school librarian, a socially useful profession.

SECTION TWO

In the early 1970s Alfred Knopf published four novels in illustrated laminated hard covers without dust jackets. They charged $3.50 each. It was an attempt to bridge the gap between hard covers and paperbacks. There was a book each from David Ohle and Kathy Black and two novels by Warren Fine. Fine had previous published THE ARTIFICIAL TRAVELER and a tale in the New American Review, The Mousechildren and The Famous Collector. The two Knopf novels are: IN THE ANIMAL KINGDOM and THEIR FAMILY. Both novels are in the imagined voices of settlers on the early American frontier in 1779 and 1800… The books gathered tiny reviews… they did not seem relevant in that time in which Ellen Willis, a then prominent Village Voice writer, could seriously write that good writing is counter-revolutionary.

IN THE ANIMAL KINGDOM and THEIR FAMILY sit on my shelf next to IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN.

How to persuade people to read them, find them…

Greg Kuzma, a poet who once knew Fine, wrote me of Fine’s drinking himself to death in the 1980s having finished one more still unpublished novel, THIRST, though Kuzma couldn’t find it when he went to look for the manuscript.

Kuzma send me a poem he had written about Fine which contains these lines that can serve both as a commentary on SECTION ONE OF THIS POST and on…

I read/ another book of his (Fine’s) after his death/ forty pages of In The Animal Kingdom./ There were no two sentences alike,/ and not a single one I’d ever seen/ That’s the sort of writer he was./ Daring and original and strange./ I stopped reading the book. It was/ too much work. Besides, I said/ Warren’s dead. What does it matter?

GHOSTS by CESAR AIRA with an afterword about teaching

2009-03-16T17:35:00.003-04:00

(a version of this review was published in the Los Angeles Times

GHOSTS
By Cesar Aira
Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews
New Directions: 139pps, $12.95.

Are there ghosts in “Ghosts?” Short answer: you betcha. Long answer: well that is what reading this wonderful novel is finally all about: what is a ghost?

Or maybe not. The fourth of the Argentinean Cesar Aira’s more than seventy books to be translated into English (the third to be available in the United States) is an incitement to the sensuality of thought, of wonder, of questioning, of anticipation.

Beware: some novels are quite shy about announcing their intentions, the greatness that lies within. “Ghosts” is a model of such reticence , “ On the morning of the 31st of December, the Pagaldays visited the apartment they already owned in the building under construction at 2161 Callle Jose Bonifacio, along with Bartolo Sacristan Olmedo, the landscape gardener they had hired to arrange plants on the two broad balconies, front and rear.”

Admittedly not the most gripping of opening sentences but readers who have had the good fortune of reading the two recently published Aira novels and their opening lines, “Western art can boast few documentary painters of true distinction.” (“An Incident in the Life of a Landscape Painter.”) or “My story, the story of “how I became a nun,” began very early in my life; I had just turned six.” (“How I Became a Nun”) will remember their own startling realization, as they began to read on, that the brevity of these novels and the inauspicious opening were all aspects of the ingenuity of the author who has established himself as one of the greatest writers and it is not ludicrous to place him in the same garden with Nabokov and Borges--- both masterful insinuating charmers.

“Ghosts” takes place in the construction site for a luxury apartment building in Buena Aires on New Year’s Eve. And the first deception is that it does not concern itself with the owners of the apartment building but with the men who are building it and in particular the large family of one of the workers who is living in one of the half finished apartments and acting as watchmen. Much of the novel is taken up with the comings and goings of the preparations for and the actual party welcoming in the new year. This being in the southern hemisphere there is an oppressive heat wave on and there are many mischievous children and assorted relatives, lovers and hangers on milling about. While always interesting, the conversations ,the careful detailing of the uneventful activities complete with the letting go of fireworks seems random yet there is a great delight in the ordinariness of life complete with the gentle though pointed rivalry between the Chilean workers and their Argentinean surroundings. Of course one is reminded of early novels of Manuel Puig such as Betrayed by Rita Hayworth which saturated itself in the rhythms of ordinary speech and left the meaning to the reader…

However the distractions, the ruminations hold the reader and one which begins with trying to to tease out the difference between the built and the unbuilt continues, “The unbuilt is characteristic of those arts whose realization requires the remunerated work of many people, the purchase of materials, the use of expensive equipment, etc. Cinema is the paradigmatic case: anyone can have an idea for a film but then you need expertise finance, personnel, and these obstacles mean that ninety-nine times out of a hundred the film doesn’t get made. Which might make you wonder if the prodigious bother of it all--- which technological advances have exacerbated if anything--- isn’t actually an essential part of cinema’s charm, since, paradoxically, it gives everyone access to movie- making in the form of pure daydreaming. It’s the same in the other arts, to a greater or lesser extent. And yet it is possible to imagine an art in which the limitations of reality would be minimized, in which the made and unmade would be indistinct, an art that would be instantaneously real without ghosts. And perhaps that art exists under the name of literature. “

My reason for this long excerpt is to both hint at the genius of Aira and to preserve the plot of the novel which concerns itself with Patri--- the increasingly obvious center of the novel--- the eldest daughter, but not that old, though burdened with looking after those mischievous children, shopping, chores but who has seen the ghosts, “they (the ghosts)seemed to be making an exception for her, as if she were the object of their ostentatious senseless amusements. She didn’t take offense, because it wasn’t serious. It was more like a flying puppet show, a out-of-place, unseemly kind of theater. She had seen naked men before of course (although not many); she didn’t find that especially frightening. But there was something implausible about it since you wouldn’t normally see men without clothes except in particular situations. The way they were floating in the air accentuated the ambivalent impression…”

A final reviewer's sigh: the charm--- if that is still meaningful--- so refreshing and what a gift in such trying times, looking forward to reading a new Aira novel every year for the rest of our lives!

An afterword ON TEACHING.

( By Auberon Waugh quoted by his son Alexander in the book FATHERS AND SONS The Autobiography of a Family)

Teachers live in a small world and their job is an unpleasant one. Among the few consolations it offers is an aura of semi-divine omniscience which enables them to patronize and feel important. This is what is threatened every time a pupil raises his hand with the correct answer. How pleasant it must be for a teacher, as he ignores the raised hands in front and approaches some bemused oaf in the back who hasn't the faintest idea what he's talking about, to imagine he is making his contribution towards a fairer, more equal, society in the future.

THE TWO GREATEST WRITERS and THE UTTERLY FORGOTTEN

2009-02-26T10:22:00.004-05:00

All of this is a gesture

1.

The two greatest living writers who happen to be American are William T. Vollmann and James McCourt. I should really have included myself in that by saying the three greatest writers… because if you are not prepared to assert this self-evaluation you might as well stop right now. I also do not like giving into mentioning that McCourt and Vollmann are American. Writing is only writing and once a writer is provided with a nationality he ceases to matter in some essential way.

But I have given in and the occasion is the forthcoming publication of Vollmann’s IMPERIAL and within the year the second volume of McCourt’s great novel , NOW VOYAGERS which joins TIME REMAINING as being his claims upon the world’s attention

Vollmann of course has been far more prolific and I won’t bother to list all his books citing only : his three thousand page seven volume RISING UP AND RISING DOWN meditation on violent death and THE ROYAL FAMILY a novel loosely centered upon northern California now joined by IMPERIAL which creates the far south of California, which will appear in the summer.

Vollmann is our Balzac, our Tolstoy--- since people like such comparisons--- though I should avoid the our since Vollmann belongs to the world as surely as does Faulkner and Beckett. Soon enough his worlds will seem a permanent part of the world’s imagination.

James McCourt creates in TIME REMAINING the existence, the fate of what it means to be homosexual in the modern world… as it journeys forth on a train from New York to the Hamptons… in NOW VOYAGERS the journey is through both time and space and imagines a world that will never pass away even as it is so obviously dead, remembering as Celine has remarked, you have to be a little bit dead to be really funny.

Happily neither Vollmann nor McCourt's work can be enlisted in any cause outside of literature.

One can well imagine Vladimir Nabokov on a rainy day in Portal, Arizona housebound and turning away from the note cards for LOLITA picking up the latest from Vollmann, remarking how heavy the bound galleys are of IMPERIAL and saying to Vera that Georgi Ivanov would have liked this book, this sordid march, this squishing of language and how anyone who reads surely remembers Nina Berberova's portrait of the Ivanov's existence in Paris that she re-counted in THE ITALICS ARE MINE

One can well imagine Nabokov as he journeyed away from Portal and stopping say in Douglas for a night at the Gadsden Hotel, squeezing it into their budget as the hotel seemed so right after that version of the Alps that they had passed through circuitously leaving Portal and finding the first volume of McCourt's NOW VOYAGERS left there by Thornton Wilder in the dream that is time, and remarking again to Vera here like that McGonigle is another writer who has learned from Andrei Bely how to be truly in a city as was Bely in PETERSBURG.

UTTERLY FORGOTTEN.

While praising these writers I was thinking of writers who I knew who seemed to be well published, even known but now… utterly forgotten…

Chad Walsh and Bink Noll were poets both nationally published, reviewed and now gone… they had stocked my life at Beloit College 1962-

I used to tell a Bink Noll story and I went to Marion, Virginia where Walsh had been a boy and a proof reader for Sherwood Anderson’s last newspaper. Another gone writer. In the public library was a folder for Chad Walsh but nothing of course recently in it.

Richard M. Elman had been a professor at Columbia. He had my fellow students write my obituary. He had been a teacher to Richard Price but then had a falling out… he published more than 20 books and all of them are gone… a book of memoir/criticism was published and is vaguely in print Sun and Moon Press has two unpublished books in its file cabinets. No one has been knocking on their door demanding they appear…

George Garrett will shortly be a year dead and he seems on the way to being forgotten… his editors are all dead, his students remember him but none of them are powerful publishers… by the of his life he had been honored, feted and now… gone. he is mostly an anecdote instead of a read writer.

Chandler Brossard: in spite of Dalkey Archive, Steve Moore and others this man who invented the beat world and who was victim of the worst instance of the malicious power of a vengeful stupid reviewer, Anatole Broyard...

BS Johnson… is nearly gone away…

James Liddy will be remembered for maybe another year.. there might be a posthumous collected poems but then… can a hole be made for him in the history of Irish poets.. is there a need for another Irish poet?

UWE Johnson will never be republished in the US… the dreariest Palestinian propagandist will be published by the new publishers of translations before they get around to this writer who found a form for precisely describing the consequences of the divison of Germany and the how of history working on a person’s mind…

Glenway Wescott will never get pushed into world literature.. he has become a regionalist writer, something he despised

John Hawkes once a required writer in nearly every introduction to literature course in American universities in the 1960s... being forced to read him destroyed many a person's interest in modern writing

Louis Bromfield...

Ellen Glasgow...

Paul Metcalf...

Francis Stuart...

Wright Morris...

WHAT YOU DON'T HAVE TO READ and a few suggestions of what to read

2009-01-31T17:48:00.006-05:00

THE FIRST

An Avalanche of shit is about the only way to think of the new books that are scheduled to come out in the near future even as publishers see themselves going out of business, cutting back and moaning that this is the most difficult time they have ever faced.

Of course people are not reading. That is nothing new. In the 1920s a literary book was lucky to sell and I mean really lucky two thousand copies… today with the population almost tripled things have not changed: a literary book still sells two thousand copies over a certain number of years.

What has changed is the sheer amount of crap that the publishers keep shoveling out. The big publishers have a large core of six figure salaried pencil pushers who have to be wined and dined to suit their personae as wise leaders who know what is good for the reading public.

As a guide to how to sift through the crap that is on offer and in the bookstores just beyond where they keep all the non-book stuff which of course is usually of more interest to the people who wander into a Borders or Barnes and Nobel I offer these tips:

You don’t have to read any novel or memoir by a person who claims to be a script writer.

You don’t have to read anything at all by anyone who appears with some regularity on television…

You don’t have to read anything that purports to tell you the real story behind whatever it is…

You don’t have to read anything by a person who has the indecency to admit that they are recent graduates of an Ivy League college or university…

You don’t have to read anything by a person who claims to be a journalist working for some major newspaper or of course television. By writing a book they are shortchanging their employers and anything that they really know is in the newspapers or at least should be…

You don’t have to read any novel or book of poetry in which the race or ethnicity of the author or of his or her characters is mentioned on the dust jacket. The book will be inevitably be second rate and compromised by this limitation

THE SECOND

HOWEVER there are a few tiny glimmers of literature that will be shyly taking themselves into the world:

From the Library of America : The American Writings of Lafcadio Hearn who was well known once upon a time for his writings about New Orleans and Japan… but in this volume of his writing about New Orleans, his travels in the West Indies and his miscellaneous journalism there is a story that is so startling and moving that once read you will have hard time going to bed for their you know you will be finding yourself either as a witness or as the center of the story:

Gibbeted Execution of a Youthful Murderer

“The execution of James Murphy yesterday at Dayton for the murder of Colonel William Dawson in that city on the night of August 31, 1875 was an event it must be said which the people of Montgomery County had long looked forward to with no small degree of satisfaction…”

The subtitle of the story gives a hint: A Broken Rope and a Double Hanging…

The story concludes: “The rope has cut deeply into the flesh of the neck, and the very texture of the hemp was redly imprinted on the the skin. A medical examination showed that the neck to have been broken.”

AND from Dalkey Archive: NOTES FROM THE EMPIRE by Fernando Del Paso… a meditation at 716 pages of the fates of Maximilian and his eventual widow… that French emperor of Mexico… You will remember the painting by Manet… a model of what an historical writing can and should be

AND also from Dalkey the last of Louis Ferdinand Celine’s great novels to be translated NORMANCE

AND AGAIN from Dalkey: THE LOOP by Jacques Roubaud , a companion to his THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON.

AN ASIDE: There is not a publisher in the English speaking world with such a selection of books to be published in this season and that is just a few of them…

NOT TO forget GHOSTS by Cesar Aira which I am reviewing for the Los Angeles Times… from New Directions, one of the few publishers that has never forgotten what their job really is…

Unlike 95 percent--- maybe I could push that to 98 percent--- of what will be published in the coming months will not be remembered a year from publication… I can guarantee that these five books will be still be read as long as books are being read and you will be able to re-read them with increased enjoyment...

THE THIRD

Contrary to the delirium of delusion that seems to have gripped the hacks who write for the newspapers, that teach in our universities and inhabit the television networks, I do think we are about to enter a truly dark period of history with only an increasing tide of terrible news.

I have begun to read again Ernst Robert Curtius’s EUROPEAN LITERATURE AND THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES which he began to write as Adolf Hitler took control ---in the midst of scenes of delirious hope for change--- of Germany.

I do so as a personal answer to this moment and as a way to remain sane midst the increasing barbarism which is our sure fate as things will get inevitably worse and worse.

What Curtius was trying to remind his readers is that while the Twentieth Century saw its progressive fruition in Auschwitz, in The Gulag, and at Hiroshima, there was still some tiny possibility that this might eventually be a continuing otherwise.

As someone living in New York City who lived through 9/11 and now in February 2009, as we are in the midst of the 19th year of the Iraqi War, I will refuse the easy temptation to despair and at the same time forsake the consolation of optimism.

THE FOURTH

I did take a little pleasure in seeing that the Book World of the Washington Post is about to cease publication. The last book I reviewed for them in 2002, commissioned by Michael Dirda, was Maurice Blanchot’s AMINDAB.

I never reviewed for them again and when I asked I was told that Marie Arana and the younger editors at the paper decided that my review of this novel by the most influential French critic of the 20th century was exactly the sort of book they never wanted reviewed in the paper. It was too intellectual, too obscure, too foreign. It sent the wrong message as to what they were really interested in.

Of course Blanchot is represented by 15 titles in St Marks Book Store and is even well stocked by Politics and Prose in Washington… but what the geniuses at the Washington Post decided was: they wanted to truly embrace their public of semi-literate political junkies whose only interest is in the aggregation of personal political power, forgetting that when you suck up to the public that public has to evacauate its bowels once a day, and the tongue attempting to block that path is no match for the…

VARIETIES OF FAILURE: Cheever. Messerli, Spicer, Littell and Cela

2008-12-25T17:24:00.008-05:00

y

In the new year there will be much talk of John Cheever: two books from the Library of America will collect his stories and novels while there will be a tell-all biography detailing the failure of his life along with the lives of his wife and children. The biography will sell some copies and provide an unintentional, I hope not, distraction from the actual books that Cheever wrote.

The Library of America fell into a sad trap by not publishing the Journals of John Cheever which detail his life that in its failure was more interesting than any of the actual stories or novels--- though some of them are quite readable to be sure. The Journal and the reading of it reminds one of course of E. M. Cioran's great essay on the Crack Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald... and in this moment when two movies are devoted to stories by Fitzgerald it is probably of value to remember the last lines of Cioran's great essay, "Fitzgerald The Pascalian Experience of an American Novelist" from ANATHEMAS AND ADMIRATIONS:

A novelist who wants to be nothing but a novelist undergoes a crisis that for a certain time projects him outside the lies of literature. He wakens to certain truths that devastate his awareness, the repose of his spirit--- a rare event in the world of letters where sleep is de rigueur, an event that in the case that concerns us hast not always been grasped in its true significance. Thus Fitzgerald's admirers deplore the fact that he brooded over his failure and, by dint of ruminating so deeply upon it, spoiled his literary career. We on the contrary deplore that he did not remain sufficiently loyal to that failure, that he did not sufficiently explore or exploit it. It is a second-order mind that can not chose between literature and the "real dark night of the soul."

x

Douglas Messerli is the publisher of Green Integer Books and what had come before, Sun and Moon Press. With hundreds of books in print Green Integer is one of the most important literary presses in the US.

Messerli is a poet, novelist, critic and teacher. Of late he has been publishing his collected essays on all things cultural in the form of yearly gatherings under the title MY YEAR___. Two have been published so far: MY YEAR 2004 Under our Skin and MY YEAR 2005 Terrifying Times. He has said that friends have asked him to write a memoir of his life and times but he claims he has not an interest in that so these books of collected writings on literature, film, art and both directly and indirectly public affairs can serve as a record of his times and of his participation in the current moment. He eventually will publish both bacwards to 2000 and forward to "the end of his life."

For the most part the essays are reprinted as they were written and of course they serve as a record of his reactions to what he has read, heard, seen...but by refusing to explicate, by refusing to comment beyond a brief introduction Messerli wants the reader to pretend that time has not gone on, and while I know he must still be interested in these essays I want to know why and how we are supposed to read them... of course I think I would rather read Messerli's essays from a far distant moment in time... but he can not live himself into so thirty years from 2004 or 2005... and so again one has to admit that the French have done these things better with the published journals of Andre Gide and Julien Green (remember of course Green is American) Michel Leiris... I miss the dailyness of Messerli's life, his avoidance of the ordinary in which what he read, saw and heard was surely embedded.

Will I read My Year 2006, My Year 2003? Of course.

At the time when I was given the two books of Messerli's I was also given a curious book by Joshua Haigh Letters from Hanusse (The Structure of Destruction: 3) Not having books 1 and 2... I am waiting to see those other books by Messerli in which he seems to be trying to efface himself on the evidence of Letters from Hanusse.

w

Jack Spicer was a name passed about as being the one real poet whose life and work was the absolute necessary critique of every single poet in the United States. Sadly he seems to have been taken up by a nearly unreadable but fully tenured bunch of so-called poets though there is nothing new in that. He self-published many little books or had them published. He drank himself to death.

In an ideal world you would need only read the Collected Poetry of T. S. Eliot and The COLLECTED POETRY OF JACK SPICER (my vocabulary did this to me) if you wanted to read the very best poetry published in the English language in the 20th Century...

Here is a nice example from 1956:

A POEM WITHOUT A SINGLE BIRD IN IT

What can I say to you, darling,
When you ask me for help?
I do not even know the future
Or even what poetry
We are going to write.
Commit suicide. Go mad. Better people
Than either of us have tried it
I loved you once but
I do not know the future.
I only know that I love strength in my friends.
And greatness
And hate the way their bodies crack when they die
And are eaten by images
The fun's over. The picnic's over.
Go mad. Commit suicide. There will be nothing left
After you die or go mad.
But the calmness of poetry.

v

In March, Harper Collins will publish THE KINDLY ONES written originally in French by Jonathan Littell and now translated. Winner of the Prix Goncourt, among other awards, purports to be the memoir of a high SD officer in Nazi Germany during World War Two. The "novel" is much concerned with the mechanic of murder on a mass scale and how Max Aue participated in the mass killings all the while maintaining a delicious distance from the events. My favorite line is, "And that is how, my ass still full of sperm, that I resolved to enter the Sicherheitdienst."

The reader of THE KINDLY ONES is unsure how to read such a novel. Are we supposed to identify with just how difficult it is to kill women and children, the strain it puts upon the nerves and stomach of the man or woman who has to do the killing: damn it there are just so many of them to kill and the terrible smells and sounds they make... of course we know that Littell is Jewish and that adds an additional level of complexity to one's reading...

u

AN END NOTE AS COMMENTARY: from Christ Versus Arizona by Camilo Jose Cela:

...each of us has desires nit also loathing and prejudices, we all have our own or received ideas, some are true and others not, prayers are word games, God doesn't listen to them because he doesn't care for wit, and he laughs at the meaning of our little words, too, he laughs at the value of our parables with their timid, meaningless morals, with purposes, sure, but without meanings, God, has a another, harder, truer voice and won't allow himself to be confused by our nattering despite the fact that he keeps hearing about our countless misfortunes, our spectacular and significant misfortunes...

ON BORROWED TIME: HARALD WEINRICH

2008-12-23T17:10:00.003-05:00

The following appeared today (23 December 2008) in the Los Angeles Times book blog JACKET COPY

On Borrowed Time" at year's end

The end of the year is a celebration of simplification and cliché -- everywhere you find "best of" lists, and, as Jan. 1 approaches, resolutions get made for the new year. Behind those resolutions is the idea that life is short, so you better make some changes right now. (And behind that, of course, is the familiar Latin “vita brevis, ars longa,” usually translated as “Life is short and Art is long.”)

According to "On Borrowed Time" (University of Chicago Press), an endlessly intriguing, illuminating and smart new book by Harald Weinrich, the phrase about life and art had been originally written in Greek in 400 BC by Hippocrates in a little book of “Aphorisms”: It was the very first sentence of the first aphorism (in fact, it was the first four words).

Weinrich, holder of the chair in Romance literature at the College de France, is the author of many books of which two are available in English, "Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting" and "The Linguistics of Lying," the very titles of which suggest their usefulness in our current situation in the United States regarding public and private morality. Weinrich is one of a dying breed of intellectuals (George Steiner and Roberto Calasso among them) and those already dead (Erich Auerbach, Ernst Robert Curtius and Hannah Arendt) who stock the well-read, thoughtful imaginations of readers and move with practiced skill through classical literatures and the major literatures of the world.

Weinrich's book, as it traces the complex meaning of the sentence "Life is short and art is long," offers startling juxapositions of writers such as Emily Dickinson and Pascal, John Keats and Gottfried Benn, Dante and Ben Franklin -- along with Seneca, Gide, Shakespeare and many others. He sends readers back to these writers, and even urges us to see again (if we haven't already) the film "Run Lola Run" or a popular entertainment like "Boeing Boeing" so that we will rethink such simple words as time, art and life.

Here is what he says, for instance, about art: "We must not think of the modern concept of art as it was developed in the cult of genius in the late Enlightenment and in early Romanticism. We must avoid all the ideas of inspiration, spontaneity, and creativity that are associated with this concept. Art...[is]...a complex object of knowledge formulated in rules that can be taught and learned.”

And that idea has been around a lot longer than the course "Introduction to Creative Writing" at your local community college.

The final words of Weinrich's book? “Time in short supply.” Those four words perfectly articulate the inarticulate feeling gripping some of us as we wake on Dec. 26 or Jan. 2. Weinrich will do for the brain what Alka Seltzer does for the stomach.

-- Thomas McGonigle

JAMES LIDDY, ERNST JUNGER, PIONEER CEMETERIES and KATHRIN STENGEL

2008-12-09T13:20:00.009-05:00

preface

"Culture is based on the treatment of the dead; culture vanishes with the decay of graves--- or rather: this decay announces that the end is nigh." (from Ernst Junger's Aladdin's Problem, a meditation in the form of a novel on end matters but as in all of Junger's work there are other suggestive asides, "The state has become a multi-armed octopus, drawing blood in thousands of ways," and "Business is, after all, other people's money and that is what bankers live on."

Of course Junger is the author of STORM OF STEEL the single best book ever written about the experience of combat.

preface

From one of my favorite books of 2008--- since this is the season for such phrases, though this book is better than that---: PIONEER CEMETERIES Sculpture Gardens of the Old West by Annette Stott, University of Nebraska Press:::

Many cemeteries have been abandoned or gone through periods of total neglect. An article in the Denver Post in April 1967 noted that with its weeds huge ant hills and broken headstones a local nineteenth-century cemetery "actually more closely resembles a dump than a cemetery in this sector. The Helena, Montana, Independent Record ran photographs in May 1980 of hundreds of tombstones and bases "lying hither and thither" in the county gravel pit. The inscriptions dated from 1880 to 1905, and concerned citizens had been asking if road crews, were desecrating an old rural cemetery. Research by the sheriff's department and the Montana State Historical Society as well as letters to the editor gradually revealed the truth. The old Catholic Cemetery near St. Mary's Church in Helena had been turned into a park in the late 1960s or early 1970s. The Booster Club of the Catholic high school had volunteered to help clear the ground, and after obtaining releases from as many descendants as could be located, the tombstones and monuments had been hauled out to the pit, where they were expected to be used as landfill. Many of the oldest cemeteries in Rocky Mountain cities met a similar fate as cities expanded, but more often the monuments were transferred to newer cemeteries. Whether monuments were moved or discarded, all trace of the original cemetery was lost in the process of transforming it into a city park and the recipient cemeteries were also altered.

I trust the point is taken. RURAL CEMETERIES is a moving reminder of the sheer transitory nature of American life. We live in the eternal present and are permanent victims, always surprised, always astonished and if we have a linger memory it is taken as a sign of weakness unless it has been packaged up into expressing the self

preface

I had written of James Liddy in the present tense in a recent post and I received a note questioning my use of the present tense has he was now in the past tense according to google having died in early November.

I have known or rather I first met James Liddy in 1964in Dublin in O'Dwyer's pub at the corner of Lesson Street... and I would have gone on about--- but he did pay me four guineas for the following poem which appeared in the last issue of ARENA, (1965) the most important magazine published in Ireland in the 1960s.

SHORT THOUGHT ON DEATH

Bright white bird
COME
claim me
for black paradise.

I had to buy a round of drink for among others, James Liddy, Brian Higgins, Anthony Cronin and I think Pearse Hutchinson and Leland Bardwell...

James Liddy's best book is BAUDELAIRE'S BAR FLOWERS and the best poems were published in the three issues of ADRIFT that I published: "Glass of Oblivion, "Ossie Esmonde: The Blueshirt Goes to Heaven"

preface

I was going to go on about James Liddy and the what he had or had not done but on Saturday (Dec 6, 2008) at the Small Press Fair midst much rubbish I discovered NOVEMBER ROSE A Speech on Death by Kathrin Stengel... published by Upper West Side Philosophers (NY, 2007). Stengel has written on the death of the other and how to understand the fact of that death without resorting to feel good pyscho-babble or self-improvement moralizing...(though tinged with one little marring section on a need to explain the occasion for the book; this can easily be ignored) in a language as clear as reading Cioran or Unamuno...:

"Death turns the survivor's life into public property by virtue of the stigma that it bestows upon him, thereby subjecting his every move to particular scrutiny, and by virtue of the deceased's sudden, unrestrained availability.
As the deceased can no longer stand up for himself or protect his privacy, he enables the arrogation of his life. Everything can be said about him, everything can he ascribed to him, everybody's perspective on him is the only valid perspective." (p 65-66)

CARRIE KANIA PROVOKES ME TO WRITE

2008-11-27T21:05:00.005-05:00

five

With a certain amount of moaning about thinking there was no one who could read my new writing with an eye to publishing it but always remembering Richard M. Elman in 1971 pronouncing: there are no undiscovered geniuses in New York and remembering even then thinking how wrong he was and surely he was saying this to be provocative though as the years went on I was of course really aware of many undiscovered great writers and the accidents of their obscurity...

six

Not totally closed down, but pretty close to it, I still read the newspapers--- kept up as they say--- but dreading discovering a name with whom I might have something in common and dis-regarding the memory of the agent who said: I can't eat lunch off of you and the probable futility of approaching... the initial establishing of credentials, the asking to be read, the sending of the manuscript and then the waiting with the sure knowledge, though drawn from the actual experience of publishing my two books, THE CORPSE DREAM OF. N. PETKOV and GOING TO PATCHOGUE (Dalkey Archive), that if an editor does not get back to you within a week there is really very very little chance they will be interested because by then they will have forgotten why they asked to see the manuscript and it will just be another thing on a pile that has to be gotten through in some fashion

eight

Could be the season but I was taken by a profile of Carrie Kania in the New York Observer and how she had re-vitalized Harper Collins' paper line and in the profile it had talked about her growing up in Wisconsin, of having been on the outside in Milwaukee during the 80s and her coming to New York to be in publishing and how she had learned of the power of books published by a certain imprint. She mentioned Grove's Black Cat and IT IS right there I probably said to myself, well she is young and yet that was how I had learned to read by trusting the New Direction imprint and the Grove Press imprint and had been published by Dalkey Archive which was inspired by those presses.

nine

I liked her emphasis in the profile on paperback originals and the possibility that they represented in terms of not a lot of money invested and their availability because most people no longer bought hardcover books...

ten

So I was composing a letter in my head to Carrie Kania and it would have begun by saying I used to visit Milwaukee in the early 80s and into the 90s to visit with James Liddy who I had first met in Dublin in 1964 and who now presided at Axel's Tavern, taught a very popular course at UWM on the Beats and who was spooked by the reality of Jeff Dahmer, the cannibal, and knowing one or two young men who had been killed by that guy... and I would have said my parents had died in exile in Menasha, Wisconsin,far from Patchogue

eleven

And while all the writers she was publishing as originals were far younger than me I did have a very good book on the so-called 60s A BEGINNING OF THE BEGINNING and AN END OF THE END...

twelve

Right here I was thinking why would someone who was really plugged into the present moment be interested in such a book?

Well, just in the talking about her own past Kania was not a total creature of the present moment and surely realized that without some knowing of what had happened...

But how was I to describe my own book that neatly contained that over-talked about moment but this time from a young man going off to East Germany from Ireland in 1965 discovering the Vietnam war, the bed of a young man.. the echoes of all that was surely coming even then and how brief it would all be... the coming back and so the necessary end of that time now on the Upper West Side in 1971-72 when people were re-enacting as theatre that iconic figure Charles Manson as they were being sneered at by Anthony Burgess who had seen it all so well... even as the weird sex lives of the Sullivanians and the...

and while the opening and last chapters of the first part of this book had been published by Barbara Probst Solomon in The Reading room I could not expect Carrie Kania to know who Solomon was or to remember that I had read at the KGB bar and I was going to say of course I had read there...

thirteen

And to try Carrie Kania's patience I would ask if she had has been reading about the recent gang killing in Patchogue when a gang of white and black kids went out looking to kill a Mexican and ended up killing an Ecuadorian as I had published only in hardcover with Dalkey Archive GOING TO PATCHOGUE which if anyone cared is the only book to explain why such things happen... and while reviewed across the country NYTIMES, CHICAGO TRIBUNE, LATIMES, full pages in The VILLAGE VOICE and NEWSDAY... now it still languished only in hardcover

fourteen

But I knew I was then venturing to the edge of looniness as no editor really wants to know all this, but I guess though one never knows...

Fifteen

SO I thought to write this as an example of how writers stew stew and toll beads of futility though in my case by reviewing with some frequency for the LA Times and in years gone by for the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and doing interviews for Newsday and The Guardian in London I would not be talking about A BEGINNING OF THE BEGINNING and AN END OF THE END if I did not believe it was literature and deserved to be read, could hold its own against those writers I had reviewed, Bernhard, Bolano, Cela, Celine, Kerouac, Cioran, Green... since it did not just re-package the so-called 60s but tried to find a form that... and I knew one of the reasons those kids went looking to kill in Patchogue is that no one had ever taken the time to write of those lives without the dreary condescending tone of outraged journalists and that Ecuadorian man would be buried as just a victim as surely as the 60s were buried in the tawdry familiarity of "what everyone knows." and while I had not much faith in my own self I did know that A BEGINNING OF THE BEGINNING and AN END OF THE END was now distant enough from myself to be the final real word on the so-called 60s and GOING TO PATCHOGUE told a story and might just force a little a moment of hesitation as people rushed passed Patchogue on the way to the Hamptons or Fire Island...

fifteen

The picture of Carrie Kania illustrating the profile shows her reading a book DIRTY, NASTY BAD, BAD THINGS. I don't have a clue what that book might be. I guess I should have gone to Amazon but I just have to walk out of the door down here on East First Street... walk by the Catholic Worker as the guys line up in the morning...

sixteen

I am really here. I wonder if Carrie Kania...

TONI MORRISON GETS A BLACK KISS

2008-11-26T13:22:00.003-05:00

In this coming Sunday's New York Times Book Review (November 30) Newsweek hack David Gates gives Toni Morrison's new novel A MERCY a black kiss.

The photograph of Morrison with bright light shining upon her face reminds one that surely BO will be inviting her to his inauguration to read as JFK invited a dottering Robert Frost.

Of course informed observers have reported that Morrison will receive her second Nobel Prize for literature next year since the Swedish Academy wishes to overcome its inherent racist attitudes as expressed in having only given her one Nobel Prize thus allowing people to compare her to Pearl Buck, the writer most people associate her name with when commenting on Morrison's first Nobel Prize.

COLLAGE AGAINST FUTILITY: thinking of SHALAMOV, PINON, DONOGHUE, JUNGER

2008-11-21T11:33:00.008-05:00

A collage to help me forget the futility of writing since each day is spent, hour by hour, consciously trying to forget that writing is futile and in my ignorance of not knowing a single publisher who might be capable of publishing my new books, sadly, and since Heidegger mentions that one of the aspects of the activity called writing is based upon "conversation"...no act of writing is complete until it has been read by someone other than the writer...

seven

A quote from what is probably the best literature site in the world: www.signandsight.com::::

Frankfurter Rundschau 18.11.2008

The poet Olga Martynova writes about Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov and recounts a memorable decision that Georgi Vladimov had to make as editor of the periodical Novyi Mir. He could only publish one text about the Gulag, and had to decide between Solzhenitsyn's "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" or Shalamov's "Tales from Kolyma": "'You see' Tvardovski admitted, 'Shalamov might be the better writer. But' – and here the hidden mechanisms started to kick in - 'Solzhenitsyn's novel can be published in one go. Even if the censors tear it to bits, it will at least remain whole as a work. But with Shalamov's short stories, the censors would simply remove the best ones and the rest would perish.' And so it was ultimately down to censorship that Alexander Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel prize, went into exile, and taught mankind, and the Russian people in particular, 'not to live a lie'. While Shalamov, who was not allowed to publish a single paragraph in Russia during his lifetime, died bitter, sick and lonely in 1982."

One hopes that everyone would have read the KOLYMA TALES by Varlam Shalamov but I well understand this is probably not possible as it is the grimmest book ever written and its obscurity is testament to its power. Only A TESTIMONY by Alatoly Marachenko comes close. People have been stuffed with horror by the current and recent focus upon the Nazi killing machine, so stuffed is the public that there is little room for any other victims...

eight

To try to outlive the awfulness one can end up reading collections of letters in which one discovers comments about people one has known and well liked:

WORDS IN AIR The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell sent me to the index and NELIDA PINON but before I quote I opened again THE TRIQUARTERLY ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE, published by E.P. Dutton-- does anyone remember when that was a real and important publisher?--- and there is an inscription to me from Nelia prefacing her story "Brief Flower": TO DEAR THOMAS NOT A BRIEF AFFECTION BUT A LONG ONE I HOPE. Nelida Pinon New York 1971. I had met Nelida through Hannah Green and that year Nelida was living in a bare apartment in Brooklyn with a young elegant protege...this time in America, Nelida told me, she was not meeting famous people. In a previous visit he had met famous people. Updike had been warm and hospitable and a meeting with Philip Roth in a low bar on Eighth Street in Manhattan had been very disturbing as he felt called upon to make an advance on her and at the same time telling her, bragging almost, that this was his year to make a million dollars as had Bellow and Styron in previous years... and it is what he thought he deserved, she said.

Nelida Pinon no longer much travels to the Unites States. She reported on a later visit when she discovered universities in America are of no real importance and what happens in them seems to have very little impact on the country as a whole in spite of most academics' inflated sense of self importance. She learned this when she was invited to a big conference at Duke University and during that time she had the occasion to watch the local news reports and never once did any of them ever report on the conference which had brought writers and intellectuals from all over the world to discuss...

I do remember her talking about Lowell and his mental breakdown... but in the letters Nelida's affection for both Lowell and Bishop seems...

Bishop writes on September 21 1962, "Nelida has been here once to talk the higher Portugese with me and I think she will come now twice a week."

And then on November 7, 1962, "That girl Nelida came to call--- with a poet friend---pretty awful--- the Teasdale school, I think. They treat me as if I were 100--- help me up steps,etc! I hate lack of respect--- hate respect--- never pleased, I guess."

On December 24 from Lowell, "They (the Fairfield Foundation) also might be able to finance a trip by Nelida to New York. She might get a Ford if you and I and Keith sponsored her. I think she would have to apply first."

On January 8, 1963 from Bishop, "I don't want to mean-- but I don't think Nelida would be a good person unless there are fellowships to spare. Her novel is so bad, really. She is nice, personally, but arty and pretentious. I could have told you this that first time I met her, out of my superior knowledge of the language and the customs, but for some reason I was being discreet... maybe Nelida will learn. Clarice suffers the same kind of datedness provincialism, etc-- but she really has talent..."

nine

Edward M. Burns has just published with UCD Press in Dublin: A PASSION FOR JOYCE. The Letters of Hugh Kenner and Adalyne Glasheen. Kenner writes to Glasheen that, "DENIS DONOGHUE is not one to bury himself in a magnum opus, spending years away from the gratifications of celebrity continually conferred and renewed... Donoghue is an articulate ass."

The magnum opus was a biography of W.B. Yeats. Over the years Kenner and Donoghue had run into each other in reviews of each other's work. And I remember Donoghue in 1966 in the UCD Kevin Barry Room I think it was--- I might have the wrong room--- mentioning that the problem with Kenner was that he had no voice of his own. When he writes of Joyce he sounds like Joyce, like Beckett when writing about Beckett, when writing about Wyndham Lewis, Lewis...

As we all know, Kenner left really only one solid important book THE POUND AGE and it is a model of critical writing. DENIS DONOGHUE has written one of the greatest memoirs in WARRENPOINT and it easily holds its own in the company of such books as MANHOOD by Michel Leiris, BLACKLIST SECTION H by Francis Stuart, LITTLE SAINT by Hannah Green and A TRIP TO KLAGENFURT In the Footsteps of Ingeborg Bachmann by Uwe Johnson.

ten

And why not: the best book of 2008. ON PAIN by ERNST JUNGER just published by TELOS PRESS:

There are several great and unalterable dimensions that show a man's stature. Pain is one of them. It is the most difficult in a series of trials one is accustomed to call life... Tell me your relation to pain, and I will tell you who you are!

CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA by CAMILO JOSE CELA: the perfect book for this moment or any moment

2008-11-05T13:17:00.006-05:00

For the last year or so, midst other readings and writings, I have been reading CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA by Camilo Jose Cela (Dalkey Archive). It is the perfect book for this exhilarating or gloomy moment, as the case might be. Or it is for any other time.

In my mind it shoves over a little Celine's JOURNEY TO THE END OF NIGHT.

CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA is both very hard and incredibly easy to describe. On one level it is 261 pages being told by, "My name is Wendell Espana, Wendell Liverpool Espana, or maybe it isn't Espana but Span or Aspen, I've never found out for sure, I've never seen it written down..."

The book goes on for those 261 pages without a period. It is vaguely centered on Tombstone or Tomiston the most notorious town in Arizona and upon the famous gunfight at the OK Corral. But as there are at least a hundred different versions of that gunfight in reality--- I might be under counting--- these are just two of hundreds of places and events mentioned in the book...

Cela through Wendell Liverpool Espana has created the great necessary epic of Arizona and by implication the West. He never falls into a dreary realism which attempts to describe the psychologies of any of the people he mentions or takes the time to tease out a dreary plot of conflict and either resolved or un-resolved resolution... he counter-points a vast array of "characters" with the constant refrain from the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary... and while it is easy to lose track of these characters they gradually inhabit your imagination and while some appear and re-appear you are gradually brought into this familiar yet mysterious world that seems as timeless as that created by Rabelais or Dante, forsaking always the temptation to fantasy or invention. My own GOING TO PATCHOGUE is a genuine companion to CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA

In homage to the last few days (early November 2008) I thought to share some selected lines from Cela's book and telling you these should give you a very good idea as to why I put this book on the top of what everyone should be reading. I have not cited any of the famous Earps who are mentioned of course in passing ...

It is all an eerie counterpoint to the shrieking political celebrations going on beyond my windows here on East First Street in Manhattan still at 2PM on the day after...

1.

...there's a lot of loneliness around here, and rosemary grass is used to fix up vaginas, to fake virginities, and my friend and I still have two steps to go, drinking beer and pissing on the Chinaman's door...

2.

...she gets her mouth of your asshole puts in her tongue a little and sucks hard, like a vacuum, it's called the "black kiss" and it was invented by Bonne Mere Mauricette, a madam from Napoleonville, near New Orleans, my mother does it to anyone who pays for it, I'm exempt, she doesn't charge me for it...

3

...do you know if it's true that they instituted proceedings against Christ in Arizona?, no, no I don't know, nobody can take Christ to court because he's God and God always wins, God can work miracles and change a woman into a lizard with three eyes and horns, it depends what he wants, Christ-- rather, God--- is tougher than Arizona...

4.

..where the Papago Indians stand and brood about poverty, loneliness and the wind, and the Papago Indians don't like that name, they are the Tohono-O'Odham, the cactuses resemble bell-towers, surrounded by disaster...

5.

...what's bad is when a man wants to put his thoughts into another person's head, that's a sign that death is lurking nearby and feeling brave...

6.

a man has to come from somewhere. what's bad is being a stranger, all strangers go around dragging a dirty bloody history that they don't want to tell anyone, silence ends up making the bones ache, but anything is better than the gallows, strangers don't have any traditions and that's why they rob banks and trains, they cheat at cards, they steal cows and horses and they shoot you in the back, tradition doesn't forbid robbing banks and trains or cheating at cards or stealing horses but it does forbid killing a man from behind

7.

Negroes want to turn their children white and the only thing that matters for whites is making money, if this isn't the end of the earth it's something very close to it...

8.

...when halfwits finish coming they also fall asleep if the woman sucks their cock very carefully, first their thoughts fade away and then they doze off,

9.

Ronnie killed him with a bullet between the eyes, the price of life is life and no one escapes this law, nobody can know what will happen after they go

10.

nobody knows it God is male or female but if she is female instead of male the Grand Canyon would be the cunt of God, the horrendous Grand Cunt of God

11.

...you have to organize what you're saying so people don't get confused, the best way is to keep telling the story in terms of the dead, I said to him, it's very easy to talk but bringing order to what you're saying isn't so easy...

12.

...reason is worthless if a man can't get a hard-on, words are always traitorous and end up betraying whoever speaks them, if a men were mute the jails would be empty and the gallows wouldn't have been invented, man is an animal that doesn't know enough to die on time and keeps praying to go on living...

13.

the opposite of mercy is indifference--- people think it's cruelty--- but what's really bad about cutting off a dead man's privates is doing it without even looking, when giving someone food or drink you must look into his eyes, the same applies to forgiving insults or cheering up sad people...

14.

the Chinaman Wong wasn't a murderer because he didn't kill living men but instead disinterred dead children, afterwards he would slice them up or shred them, all very carefully, the soybean shoots with minced pork were also delicious...

15.

there's always one woman that would like to blow the hanged man, custom doesn't allow it and the law even less, it's a pleasure that hardly any woman gets to enjoy...

16.

my little brother Pato Macario's flatulence doesn't make any noise because by now all his farting has smoothed out the wrinkles in his asshole, we usually say "ripe avocado, fart for sure," real men's farts sound like whiplashes, they crack the wind

17.

...dogs don't piss on the houses of the dying, they are very respecful and go straight past, this detail doesn't belong here but I wanted to note it down before I forgot

18.

it's the custom to smile at the hangman and spit in the face of the man sentenced to death, men are born wearing their masks and every line already carved in its place, on the forehead, the corners of the eyes, at the corners of the mouth, in the cheeks the same things have always been done, spitting on the one who loses and smiling at the one who wins

19.

the women wait at the Nabor Guevara tavern, groping and feeling each other up, their hearts pounding they while away the time telling each other dirty stories and killing doves by squashing their heads, they also strangle roosters by pinning them their between their thighs, there's plenty of pleasure in it

20

...nearly every day remembers Maggie Cedarvael the little neighbor girl who as a child used to play with his little cock, she would fondle it delicately and also suck it, later she died of tuberculous, this game of life and death is upsetting

TRANQUILITY or a book to buy right now

2008-10-27T16:11:00.002-04:00

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-ca-attila-bartis26-2008oct26,0,1679894.story
From the Los Angeles Times
BOOK REVIEW
'Tranquility' by Attila Bartis
By Tom McGonigle

October 26, 2008

Tranquility

Attila Bartis

Translated from the Hungarian

by Imre Goldstein

Archipelago Books: 292 pp., $15

"Tranquility" is a moving, emotionally complex, subtle, shocking novel -- and the inadequacy of these words of praise might be overcome by considering imagery, such as the narrator's "remembering how I crawled, like a creeper, upon the back of that woman. Like a slug on the wound of a decaying fruit tree." Or this: "You live only as long as you can lie into the mug of anybody, and without batting an eye. And when you can't anymore, well, it's time to get hold of that razor blade." Or this: "[The narrator's mother's] nakedness was like that of the dead, in whom only the corpse washer and God take any delight."

The first of Attila Bartis' books to be made available in English, "Tranquility" may come as no revelation to those who have followed the incredible explosion of literary greatness coming out of modern Hungary: Péter Esterházy, Peter Nadas, Imre Kertész, Zsuzsa Bank. Each of these writers may seem like an individual voice speaking into a solitary silence, but the effect is of a startling chorus and of a sustaining vision of how to survive in a world that is increasingly hostile to the individual imagination.

Andor Weer, the narrator of "Tranquility," is a writer of short stories entangled with his aging, controlling mother who is terrified by the thought of being cremated (she has been told that her corpse will sit up in the oven). Once a leading actress on the Budapest stage, she has been reduced to playing bit parts as a punishment for being unable to lure her violinist daughter back to Hungary from the West.

Spanning the declining years of the Communist regime, Bartis' novel presents a form of narration that twines a record of Andor's day-to-day life as a writer with what are surely snippets, both long and short, of stories echoing his own mastery of the short story (by which Bartis first rose to prominence in Hungary) in a novel that moves effortlessly through all levels of a truly damaged society attempting to recover from communist devastation.

Bartis comes close to exemplifying Louis-Ferdinand Céline's wonderfully provocative comment that one has to be a little bit dead to be really funny. Bartis fractures any sense we have as to whether the characters -- the narrator, his sister Judit, his girlfriends, his mother and father -- are actually alive or dead. And it doesn't matter, for even the minor characters imprint themselves thoroughly upon one's memory.

Bartis creates an atmosphere of believability in this novel without forsaking the use of irony. Early in the story, for instance, Andor reads a short story to a provincial audience about a homicidal priest who kills off his congregation with poisoned communion wafers. After the reading, the priest in the village invites Andor to supper. "I've got a pretty good ceremonial wine, if you've got the courage," he tells him. During the course of the evening, the priest reveals himself to be one of those rare members of the clergy -- a priest who actually does believe in God -- and, next morning, as Andor leaves on a train, the priest gives him a book as a gift.

It isn't a copy of Augustine's "Confessions" or some such but is something else entirely, which isn't revealed for another 30 pages. What that book is won't be identified here -- no plot spoiler for readers -- so get the book as soon as you can.

McGonigle is the author of "Going to Patchogue" and "The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov."

2666 BY ROBERTO BOLANO, TRUE CRIME and TRANQUILITY: some hints for reading now

2008-10-16T16:24:00.003-04:00

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2666 By Roberto Bolano has landed and will be making its way into bookstores. It probably should have come with stickers: ONLY TO BE READ AFTER READING THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES. As 2666 is likely to be the only big literary book of this season--- and it is a genuine literary book, the real thing--- most readers will have read THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES in great expectation of 2666 but new readers will find the first long section of 2666 tough going though for readers of THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES we well know there is a reason, a purpose behind what could be very off-putting: the entanglements of four academic critics with a reclusive German author's life and novels.

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To date no one has mentioned the name B. Traven but since Bolano is soaked in literature and surely he is aware that B. Traven is the only German author who is in anyway mysterious and surely Bolano is depending on our faint memories of Traven...

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2666 is a baroque balloon capping Bolano's career. It is not a Finnegans Wake to his Ulysses. It is of a piece with all his work.

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If Bolano was alive I think that he would be reading two other books published this season in New York. As 2666 is filled with violent crime he would be reading the Library of America's TRUE CRIME, edited by Harold Schechter. He would have remembered Williams Burroughs talking about how essential crime was to American life: it was there before the Indians… as you well remember.

TRUE CRIME: from the first murder and the first hanging in Boston mentioned by William Bradford to Dominick Dunne, by way of Jack Webb (Dragnet) and a wonderfully rescued piece by Dorothy Kilgallen who I remember reading in the old Journal American which my father brought home at night turned to the comics page though mother was listening to her on the radio having lunch at Sardi's talking of the celebrities lunching around her and her husband Dick..

Much as the characters in Robert Musil's great novel THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES were fascinated by a brutal psychopath, TRUE CRIME has stories about the two disturbing and ever fascinating contemporary killers, Charles Manson and Ed Gein who together occupy much of the popular imagination with either their deeds or their influence on an endless series of trashy violent movies

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As I was reading Robert Bloch's piece on Ed Gein (the inspiration for PSYCHO) I was remembering Duane, the boyfriend of Bink Noll in Beloit, talking about growing up in the same town as Ed Gein. Duane was a little odd being a male nipple fetishist who published a newsletter for those so inclined from Noll's basement via a post office box in South Beloit. Duane said that was the most disturbing aspect of Gein's career was that he had supplied meat for sausages to the local butcher shop and when he was found out people realized they had been eating their relatives for quite some time…

Another friend who had become a cop in Wisconsin after college told me that he had been up the state lunatic asylum to look at Ed Gein who was their prized exhibit and was a reminder that criminals are very very ordinary looking.

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TRUE CRIME is the best anthology that the Library of America has published… well to be really scrupulous it is the best if you also say that their anthology on Los Angeles and about American in Paris are also included in that bite of praise…

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AND TRANQUILITY (Arhipelago Books)the first novel of Attila Bartis to be published in the United States would attract Bolano. I have written a review of it which will appear shortly in the LA Times… SO not to chew the cabbage twice. Bolano would have liked the particularity of detail in TRANQUILITY: the acceptance of the appearance of convention and then the trusting to a fearless honesty and the necessity of destroying chronological time in the telling of his narrator's entanglement with his mother, his father, his father's whore and the sister in exile… Bartos with this novel joins that little essential pantheon made in Hungary composed of Peter Nadas, Peter Ezsterhazy, Imre Kertesz and Zsuzsa Bank

J.M.G. LECLEZIO: Getting older sometimes just means getting older

2008-10-14T13:14:00.003-04:00

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Let's not kid ourselves into thinking literary prizes are meaningful. They are a real pain in the ass. You will have seen the film The SWIMMING POOL and remember when the Charlotte Rampling character complains about not getting any literary prizes her editor consoles her with the sentence, Literary prizes are like hemorrhoids, eventually ever asshole gets one.

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SO, the Nobel and J.M.G. LeClezio. A Canadian correspondent wrote complaining of Swedish racism in that they failed to give the Nobel Prize a second time to Toni Morrison for her having to live in such a hostile environment as the United States…

Of course we all know that the three saddest words in the English language (according to Gore Vidal) Joyce Carol Oates grew a little sadder and more Chinese food was consumed as Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill once told me that when she was invited to Princeton she was surprised that the chief subject of conversation there was about Chinese versus Indian take out…

Of course we all know that Princeton is a dumping ground for second rate Black intellectuals that even Harvard could no longer stomach…

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One should be happy he got the prize if only in the hope his earlier books will be re-printed in the US.

Let us remind ourselves that the Nobel did get it right when it gave the prize, to Claude Simon and Camilo Jose Cela and again they didn’t give it to that hick P. Roth.

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I took down from my shelves that pile of LeClezio books. He has been well published in the United States.

In 1970 I must have written to LeClezio as I have a little note from him in which he carefully mimics the typewriter in his block lettering: The mind is not too well but the hand continues to write.

I had written to him after reading TERRA AMATA which was the fourth of his books to be published in the US by the long gone Atheneum…

I had heard of him on a pig farm in West Branch Iowa from Elliott Anderson who had been reading FEVER, a collection of Le Clezio's short stories.

Those early seven books: FEVER, THE INTEROGATION, THE FLOOD, TERRA AMATA, BOOK OF FLIGHTS, WAR, THE GIANTS… catalogue a vision of disintegration of the known world… the desperate isolation of the individual and I probably had written to LeClezio suggesting that Max Stirner so long ago had talked about the creative nothingness out of which everything is possible…

Again when I go to TERRA AMATA, THE FLOOD… I am midst that collapse and LeClezio's ability to find a language and form for it: "He turned into writing; it turned into crossing-out." (TERRA AMATA) or "All that remains now is writing, writing by itself, groping its way with words, searching and describing, meticulously in depth, hanging on hammering out reality, rejecting compromise." FEVER (1965)

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Of course all young people should be so imbued… and not seek out as today the tired best sellers and mimicking them as seems the case for 99% of what is published in the US today.

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And the great ambition: "You must abandon the field of solitary contemplation, the false protection of forgetfulness; you have to sally forth recklessly into the open, determined to explore the outside world in all its aspects, driven on by a mad desire to invade every space and drain every attraction to the dregs. No longer, either, by analytical reason, but by a willing acceptance of the illogical in your reactions to every room and person, each tree, each speck of dust… (THE FLOOD).

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I have mis-placed THE BOOK OF FLIGHTS but with WAR and THE GIANTS LeClezio gives himself over totally to the visionary in the hope of staying alive: "One day, round noon, he looks round him, in the big city where he lives; he stops moving, and looks round him. He stops flapping the twin cushions of his speaking lips, he stops blinking his eyes at the sight of set pieces, women, cars, trains, films, pages of essay-poem-novels and looks round him. In a single stroke the world stops moving. (THE GIANTS)

THE GIANTS appeared in 1975 and for almost twenty years LeClezio did not exist in the US. I tried and failed to get Dalkey Archive to reprint the early books.

In France, of course LeClezio continued to publish and I picked up VERS LES ICEBERGS in the hope of seeing that one day into English or… and I waited.

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In 1993, finally THE PROSPECTOR and THE MEXICAN DREAM appeared. Larry Kart (some day I will write about him--- one of the great editors of our time) then editor of the book section of the Chicago Tribune allowed me to review them… by then LeClezio was part of the usual forgetfulness.

In my review I wrote that THE PROSPECTOR was a romance… and while it did not continue in the vein that I had treasured in those earlier novels… of course in 20 years a writer… I disguised my disappointment and allowed that he had written a very good novel, one that as they say, kept me reading… I imagine nothing much happened for Godine, the publisher of this novel… I had found some words they could use as a blurb but there would be no paper version, I was sure of that. The book of essays THE MEXICAN DREAM was a hodgepodge and sadly LeClezio had given himself over to a too easy self-hatred of being a white European writer.

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When I read again today in THE MEXICAN DREAM… I see something I had missed before… and which I have only recently become aware in regard in my case the state of Arizona and the native peoples living there: I know nothing. I know nothing.

LeClezio was trying to share that idea with his readers and only if he had been able to free himself from his ordinary European self-hatred so as to truly give words to what he mentions was, the greatest disaster in human history: the destruction of the various Indian civilizations in the Americas… if only it was possible to do this but not from now comfortable and well rewarded self-hatred…

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Since then the novel ONITSHA, and a book of stories THE ROUND AND OTHER COLD HARD FACTS have appeared from Nebraska…and seemed too conventional for me… in 2004 Curbstone published WANDERING STAR and not for a moment was I interested in LeClezio's take on the Palestinian/Israeli situation…the novel might have been a parody for all I know and LeClezio was creating a mock entertainment.. Not for a moment did I believe that he could inhabit the experience of an Israeli or Palestinian woman… not for a moment was I unaware of the dreadful fall into the imperialism of LeClezio's imagination and a politically correct and calculated arrogance that had displaced his heroic stuttering yet articulate hesitation that had shaped those early book…but it is for these later books that he was being honored so possibly the comment in THE SWIMMING POOL is not too far off…

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Maybe in real old age LeClezio will return to the consoling truth of the last lines of TERRA AMATA: How can one bear witness? I am only an actor who doesn’t know the play he's acting in. What I've done I've done by chance, like a gnat in a strong wind. I've said first one thing, then another. I've written pins, tobacco, passions, suffer, nylon, seed. You've read zip-fastener, top, beauty, woman, cigarette, cloud. And accurate chance is its own individual path. But I've said enough. Now it's your turn."

Sadly, I doubt it.

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Re-located material.

Of course Princeton is a wonderful place…according to the late George Garrett, Princeton used to recruit Black students and allow them to go through the first two years with no grades… just passed them along and then in the final two they began to be graded and flunked out. Princeton thus had to it both ways: good liberal admission policies and then ruthless preserving of the degree….now of course the more typical graduate of Princeton is Michelle Obama--- discovering the nasty secret racism of Princeton which allowed her to go there and being half way alert discovering she was probably just not as smart as the non-Black students she found herself among… and of course she was aware of how the good liberal professors treat the hired help. No wonder many Black people voted for George Wallace…