KAPUTT: bookstores, book reviews, writing, my own

KAPUTT (due homage to Malaparte): Bookstores  Book reviews,  writing , my own .

      

ONE                    “If I had planned it, I should not have made the sun at all.  See! How beautiful!  The sun is too bright and too hot… And if there were only the moon there would be no reading and writing,” Ludwig Wittgenstein quote in a biography by Edward Kanterian (Reaktion Books)

  

TWO            “ …and he saw himself nailed to the cross of his own cradle and coffin, painfully trying to tear his body away only, eventually, to deliver himself--- utterly naked, without identifying mark, stripped down to essentials--- into the care of the people whose duty it was to wash the corpses,  people obeying an order snapped out in the dry air against a background loud with torturers ad flayers of skin,” from SATANTANGO by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, to be published by New Directions in February, 2012 (these quoted words show why I can write that there is not a living American writer who comes anywhere close to Krasznahorkai in ability or in genius.

1-      DEATH is the most mind concentrating word in the English language… in all languages.  To even begin to write why is to attempt to dilute… but death is never diluted.

2-- The death of a bookstore has been on the mind here in Manhattan, NY, US.  Having lived through the death of New Morning Bookstore on Spring Street in SOHO--- given what SOHO has become--- it is a little hard to imagine at one time there were seven bookstores within that area and New Morning was the one where I worked.  The film director Nicholas Ray lived upstairs from it and was dying. 

3-- New Morning was owned by the guys who put out HIGH TIMES… it was both very literary and a destination store for what was new in every aspect of that word.  But it died.  The founder of HIGH TIMES blew his brains out… other people ran it… money problems… the stock begins to shrink… shelves disappear, individual books begin to be faced out…book stock has to be bought from wholesalers… magazines are no longer being delivered for sale… smaller presses start to see their books faced out—since they are really unaware of the lack of credit they advance books and so become the last in and the last screwed… and then eventually the marking down of books…

4-- I went through the agony down to collecting a few of the metal book ends made in the silhouettes of airplanes.. . hinting at the planes used to airlift essential supplies from South America or Mexico… the quick money fortunes that bought the first lofts in SOHO … 

5-- New Morning pioneered the idea of having low tables on which piles of new books would be displayed, mixing new with the old, fiction with nonfiction…  a demonstration of the eclectic taste of the managers…on Saturday nights the three Old Testament prophets as they were called would come in: Samuel Menashe, Tuli Kupferberg and Sidney Bernand… I hope everyone who might read this knows who they are… as they Irish would say, their like will not be seen again

6-- After New Morning closed,  I worked at the oldest bookshop in what became the East Village: East Side Bookstore… by the time I worked for them they were in a tiny shop on the north side of St Marks Place, next door to St Marks Bookshop.  The owner was a professor at Pace but was dying and after he died his widow kept it going for a time…  the same thing happened… the stock shrank etc…

7--St Mark’s Bookshop prospered and then moved across the street to larger quarters, had some problems and moved again to its current location on Third Avenue after receiving help from the founder of Rodale who was sadly killed in an auto accident in Moscow 

8-- Currently, the store’s stock is shrinking, shelves from sections have been removed, books get faced  out, smaller presses see their books being prominently displayed and one is aware that the shop does not have credit to order directly from the big publishers and they are having problems meeting the rent… and for a while that problem has been met with a temporary reduction but I would think by the time the lease comes for renewal in two years St. Marks will be but a memory unless they find a rich leftist--- and there are many many of them--- who is prepared to stake them to a chunk of cash… the latest estimate from an employee: six months more… I suspect  and hope I am wrong but March will see the end…   

9-- The best bookstore of recent memory was Books & Co. up on Madison Avenue but that was supported by the heir to IBM though  even she eventually got tired of putting  up buckets of cash…  of course landlords, gentrification, the economy are always dragged into play but the reality is that we are living through the waning time for the book and bookstores… even The Strand which according to tax returns still produces millions of dollars in profits for it owners is now a tourist destination that is thriving just on that… secondhand books are a shrinking part of its business and the selling of shoulder bags, candy, cooking gadgets and a myriad number of other spur of the moment purchases along with well discounted new books is what is keeping that show going, plus they own the building.

10- I treasure St. Mark’s but I see my own mortality in it.  The ageing owners who have heroically kept the store going—even stocking my own books from Dalkey Archive--- have a long and honorable life of selling books and making available books that would not normally be available… going as far back as when one of the owners then learning the trade by working at the East Side Bookshop was arrested for selling the infamous ZAP comic book that featured incest as a pleasurable activity and as a way to keep families together… and more recently they even sold THE TURNER DIARIES, a very controversial book that showed in glowing terms the triumph of a Nazi ruled US… written by a man who was not being ironic. 

11- The owners of St Mark’s deserve to have that one rich person help them… that is what they really need… but I have a feeling it is like hoping to find that last seat on a life raft after an iceberg as done its work and echoing William Burroughs  these guys are not going to put on dresses to save their skins---  for many years the best-selling novel at St Marks was William Burroughs’ NAKED LUNCH… but now you can see I have been writing about the past and a past fondly remembered as the semi-literate youth have  other things on their mind or minds…

12- Books have been shoved to the side and for a long time when the conversation turns to books they are quickly exhausted and replaced by the latest movie or movie available on DVD…

13 --The US has only newspaper book review section that deserves that title and it is the rather pathetic New York Times… but I have no real complaints, both of my books were well reviewed there but when the burden falls upon them as being the sole book section one is disheartened by the pages of the review given up to best seller lists and articles of a general interest… so in a sense even they are a little embarrassed by having to actually run reviews.

14--The Wall Street Journal on Saturdays now has a large book section but the editor obviously is interested in non-fiction which seems naturally to revolved around and around business, war… and eccentric lives… literature is treated in columns…

15—Newspapers still review books but most are like the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe… a couple of books reviewed usually by staff on the newspaper… there is no personality, no feel that there is much thinking going on… and while it is true that far more books are reviewed on the basis of whim than anyone realizes, now all to often it is a simple of matter of seeing if someone can be cajoled into saying something, anything really, just as long as it vaguely makes sense.

16—But is there a future ON LINE?  Isn’t that the desperate hope… blogs, online reviewing sites… I myself read some of these but I still want those words on actual paper though I will also admit that while I have a subscription from my sister for The New Yorker I download it and read it on my iPAd and then the actual print version arrives in the mailbox and is not usually opened…

17--  For a long time I have noticed the disappearance of news papers from the subway here in NYC and I have begun to notice people reading on handheld devises… and they seem to be reading what looks like novels. 

BUT I AM STILL ANNOYED BY THE CRAP THAT GETS PUBLISHED IN BOOK FORM… So I guess you can say I still have an interest in books

(I have privileged moments of criticality)(I especially regret the lack of women and minorities in this book)(To make matters worse mine is a small canon of only of white men) These words are from the Townsend Martin Class of 1917 Professor of Art and Archeology at Princeton University who has published a book THE FIRST POP AGE which is packed with full colour reproductions but no thinking… a book about Warhol, Lichtenstein, Hamilton, Richter and Ruscha… the selection of course is arbitrary but so ordinary… all the complaining or excusing, all so much throat clearing…  I guess if he had at least mentioned John Wesley, I would not have been so annoyed, but Princeton does that to its tenured professoriate who it seems spend too much time thinking and talking about their favorite Chinese and Indian restaurants in the Princeton area as reported by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill who had the well paid accident of spending some time among this human society, a place, as Anthony Burgess noted, even the bank tellers are rude…

18--  HOWEVER there are a few tiny scraps of interest available:  THE POETRY OF THOUGHT FROM HELLENISM TO CELAN by George Steiner which is published by New Directions…just mentioning the publisher is designed to show how that word has changed.  The so-called larger publishers cannot afford to publish a book like… Steiner well understands, “this little book, the interest and focus it hopes for from its readers--- statistically a tiny minority--- the vocabulary and grammar in which it is set out are already archaic.”

And the reason for that is quite simple:  the universities are controlled by those who write inside the thinking exemplified by the Townsend Martin Class of 1917 Professor of Art and Archeology at Princeton University  and we all live in a world where the young  (8-18) devote  eleven hours of their day to their engagement with electronic media of one sort or another and where they use a vocabulary of approximately 65 words…

There are these words by Steiner:  “… the “discovery” of metaphor ignited abstract disinterested thought.  Does any animal metaphorize?  It is not only language which is saturated by metaphor.  It is our compulsion, our capacity to devise and examine alternative worlds, to construe logical and narrative possibilities beyond any empirical constraints.  Metaphor defies, surmounts death—as in the tale of Orpheus out of Thrace…”

JOURNEY OF THE DEAD or the ALMOST DEAD

Q             The world is calling is a cliché of what the young experience.  As one gets older increasingly it is the world within calling and that is finally the only to explain how the books pile up about me since it gets a little more difficult to go out into the world…

Q             Last night Denis Donoghue was here for dinner and I showed him a line in a new book from George Steiner that is coming from New Directions: THE POETRY OF THOUGHT From Hellenism to Celan.  I also mentioned that Steiner was the only critic today who did what Denis does: close reading of texts and writing for the general educated population…  Denis did not dispute this but did mention that he thought Steiner far better  read and in fact much more erudite… and then Denis mentioned the loathing that people felt for Steiner when he was a professor at Cambridge and the ridicule he was exposed to  if not to his face than  firmly to his back.  And I was saying I thought it no accident that Steiner was now being published by New Directions since that publishing is one of the very few that is still engaged in publishing what is genuinely of interest in terms of literary originality.  Happily Denis Donoghue’s WARRENPOINT is being reprinted in the near future by Dalkey Archive, the only other American publisher what keep to the Poundian way of : MAKE IT NEW.

Q             But that line from Steiner:  WHERE EVER FEASIBLE ADORNO YIELDED TO THE CHARMS OF OBSCURITY.

Q             Of course Steiner’s touchstones are those epitomes of the obscure: Heidegger, Hegel, Celan,  Holderlin, Plato but he also fears not to venture into the works of Genet, Valery, Strindberg, Goebbels, Marx and the list goes on… I am willing to follow him as I am Pound… because the question is what to read next, or re-read next.

Q             Steiner also knows that things have changed:  “In the “free world” license has often been indifference.  What potentate in the White House would take note of, let alone dread a Mandelstam epigram?”  But is he saying that George W and BO are incarnations of Stalin… the comedy of it all…

Q             The sentence after the one just quoted:  “The image of Marx in the British Library rotunda is totem.  It is a celebration, now virtually erased, of the belief that “In the beginning was the Word.”

Q             An aside:  Heidegger is the great seducer of Jewish intellectuals, both mentally and physically, if I mention Steiner one has to also mention Levinas and of course Hannah Arendt  

Q             So Steiner has sent me back to the dialogues of Valery, he has returned me to Faulkner--- though never far from him to be sure and Poe as they are really the only American prose writers he is interested in while of the poets there are only Eliot and Pound…

Q             My only contact with Steiner was in a classroom--- too many years ago--- at Columbia and he was mentioning how fortunate I was to have been talking with Anthony Burgess who was the only English writer who was not an English writer, because to be an English writer was almost a term of abuse in Steiner’s vocabulary of criticism, Burgess if he wanted to, if he had not given into being an entertainer ,might have been a very great writer, he was the only one in Twentieth Century England who had this potential, all the rest of them were minor regional provincials…

R             I prefer Steiner’s pompous  attituding  (which is probably the worst that can be said.. but I still read carefully as he like Calasso are even at their most pompous are not devoid of interest) when compared to Geoff Dyer  whose bound galleys for ZONA a book he has written about STALKER  fell into my hands and  I tried to read  in it going to and from doctor...  I was going to write about it on this blog but I type so slowly....  i think that Geoff Dyer writes all the reviews in all the English newspapers and magazines... all the culture pages, all the commentary pages.

R             At one time I looked forward to London because of the number of national newspapers and their book pages… but that is no longer so and the reason is that Geoff Dyer is writing all those pages.  In the first few pages of ZONA  my eyes ran into or were run over by these phrases that I circled as evidence for my contention that he is solely responsible for all the book pages of the English newspapers:  1, the barman's jacket could do with a good clean   ,2, as anyone who has enjoyed a couple of bong hits already knows  ,3, Tarkovsky couldn't give a toss about the audience  ,4, the screen was no bigger than a big telly ,5, we were able to have a discreetly good gawp, 6,sitting near her at a lavish fund-raiser.
              It is the phrase, “no bigger than a big telly” that did it for me.  The instant response: Dyer writes all the English newspapers

S              I have been reading PARALLEL LIVES by Peter Nadas since the summer… and have made it to about page 200 with another 900 pages.  Some of that time was taken up with surgery and recovery but the actual reading of this novel by Peter Nadas is the most difficult, the most complicated, most demanding of my life.  And not being done inside a class, not being read against a deadline and not worried that I would have to fake the in depth review.. but already I know this is a terribly great novel, beyond probably my ability, but still demanding and I will not be able to show how he used Plutarch’s lives to structure his novel, I will not be able to talk about the use of time:  Is it taking place on 16 June as Peter Esterhazy suggested all novels now take place:  I spend three weeks reading the section:

Two women are in a cab on the way to the hospital where the older woman’s husband is dying, or about to die.. the younger woman is in love with this woman’s son… There is a terrible rain storm going on and the driver of the taxi has difficulty driving… it is possible the driver is an agent as this is still communist Hungary… the older woman loathes the younger woman, the younger woman is in awe of the older woman… the older woman and the younger woman eventually clutch each other and the older woman is remembering long ago another clutching as she was nursing a recently born child and the younger woman is described as having been used and abused since she could not get a residency permit to live in Budapest…  All of this is told with the objectivity and distance of Plutarch… almost as if we forget we are reading invented lives: while Plutarch was describing mostly historical figures, but which in some cases would not exist unless he had described them… Now what to made of PARALLEL LIVES… the discovery of a murdered man in a Berlin park and the insinuation that a young man did it… We creep on into the book ,900 pages to go and off to the side I am aware of a huge Murakami and even a Stephen King… but all three didn’t get the Nobel Prize and the mind drift as to which will be really talked about, reviewed, and most importantly like the movie box office results on Monday morning…

T              Francois Augieras is not a household name.  Probably and sadly for a good reason, but on the other hand I wish I could give his JOURNEY OF THE DEAD to every smart kid I know or will know and I wish some had given me this book many many years ago…  I had read his JOUNREY TO MOUNT ATHOS and  THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE which like JOUNREY TO THE DEAD were published by Pushkin Press in London, the only English publisher that can stand with Dalkey Archive and New Directions when it comes to being perfectly essential to anyone who might in any way describe themselves as interested in reading, in being well read or…

                JOURNEY OF THE DEAD is Augieras long life as wandering shepherd in Algeria in the early 1950s… he rivals Genet for the clarity of his writing, for the ordinariness of his understanding of human nature, for his acceptance and fearless  confidence…  as Genet mentioned when he was in Chicago for the Democratic Convention in 1968: the only sexy people were the leather clad police… all the mere political became uninteresting… Augieras writes, “Whenever the moonlight offered them up to my sense of purity and wonder, I loved these symbols of the twentieth century, the perfection of things that were easy to come by—guns, gramophone records.”  OR   “What makes Africa enchanting?  Is it the sound of dogs barking at night?”  OR three incidents:  “What whet my appetite was just being with women,; prostitution appealed to me, I didn’t find submissive young women so threatening.  Europeans didn’t interest me: they knew nothing of the steppe, the animals  I loved, they had no smell… How fine it was to be twenty and between a girl’s legs!   OR  I noticed a tall Arab boy of about eighteen with beautiful well rounded shoulders… I followed him into the darkness.  I kissed him in the lips but instead of kissing me in return he told me to meet him some distance away… He returned my kisses so passionately  that my eyes filled with tears… We stayed where we were, leaning  against a boulder .  At my waist the pistol gleamed  in the darkness  OR OR  I went into the sheepfold grabbed one of the lambs by its fleece.  I had my favorites and as the rest of the flock retreated to the far end of their prison with a great rumbling sound, kneeling on the urine soaked bedding and holding its head down , I imitated the rams and made violent love  to him.  The wool rubbed against my belly…”

U             Far gentler is another Pushkin title  HYMN TO OLD AGE  by Hermann Hesse… but that is for another time as is THE UNCANNILY STRANGE AND BRIEF LIFE OF AMEDEI MODIGLIANI by Velibor Colic.  Just by mentioning the Hesse and the book by a Bosnia writer living in France, one can see  the range of PUSHKIN PRESS

V             ISLE OF THE DEAD by GERHARD MEIER is a perfect Dalkey Archive book:  two old men walk around   a city in Switzerland, one of the guys talks a great part of the novel and the other guy listens and observes… 110 pages: “What has time, what has life done with these faces?”

                But more from ISLE OF THE DEAD on another day…  what an act of optimism…

W            Hard to believe but back in 1963 SIMON AND SCHUSTER  actually occasionally published real literature.  In addition to Michel Butor they published COMPOSITION NO.1 by Marc Saporta.  The book was unbound and came packaged in a bright orange, black white glossy box.  There was a sort of introduction on the inside front of the box telling readers what to do and reminding them that “a life is composed of many elements.  But the number of possible combinations is infinite.  He pages were wrapped in a narrow orange band with instructions:  The pages of this book may be read in any order.  The reader is requested to shuffle the like a deck of cards.

                VISUAL EDITIONS in London has reissued the book in a yellow box but does not mention on the title that it was translated by Richard Howard or the date of its original publication. Two introductions to the box are now included and a grey illustration is printed on the back of each page… the illustrations seem very intrusive and distract from the confrontation with words on a page and the shuffling of those pages as we are now also shuffling these illustrations. 

                Of course COMPOSITION No. 1 preceded THE UNFORTUNATES by B.S. Johnson but in one essential way these are quite different.  The Saporta is more radical in that individual pages are shuffled while with Johnson’s box it contained signatures of pages… and it seemed that he was shuffling events while Saporta was moving about elements… however in no way should one be discouraged from getting a copy or getting the box by Marc Saporta… this gauntlet remains ever new which cannot be said for ALL the books that Simon Schuster published in 1963, all of which are dead and gone.

HOW NOTHING CALLS

3---The world is calling is a cliché of what the young experience.  As one gets older increasingly it is the world within that calls and that is finally the only reason that explains how the books pile up about me and I thought this time out to explain how the NEW and the older books arrived here on East First Street at this moment or I might not as I begin to move through them as they are arrayed about me here.

((((music being played as this is being typed   THE COMPLETE WORKS FOR STRING QUARTET  by Ggorgy Kurtag  by the Athena Quartett , from NEOS)))

4--- I placed this comment after David Ulin’s forecasting article in next Sunday’s ( 18 IX 2011) LA TIMES: Thomas McGonigle at 6:31 PM September 15, 2011 

Glad to see that David Ulin mentioned Peter Nadas's PARALLEL STORIES... don't worry about the length and the glib commentary about the sudden coincidence of a few long novels:  PARALLEL STORIES is one of the greatest books that I have had the privilege to read:  it is the most demanding, emotionally, intellectually and dare I say spiritually... in a better world people would be lining up to buy it when it is published in November 2011...I thought Bolano's SAVAGE DETECTIVES was a great book and wrote so in this paper...Nadas is even better... right there with Musil's MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES and Joyce's ULYSSES... and Plutarch would not be insulted...

4--- Two sentences from PARALLEL STORIES are two among the most riveting and revelatory  sentences that both describe a woman in the novel and by implication or inference the reality of life in what used to be called Communist Hungary:  “She had lived in workers’ hostels, abandoned farms; for months she slept on a folding cot in the locker room of a gym, and sometimes, for a single night or a few weeks, she would find shelter in the beds of pitiful, questionable, or revolting characters, about whom no one would ever know.  In those places, her held high, she had to let her hosts ejaculate into her body.

5--- I have been reading--- very slowly--- now that I am old enough: THE INQUISITORY by Robert Pinget.  He had signed it for me back in 1988.  The nice Grove hardcover with the remainder pricing from Marlboro: 59cents//2/&1.00.  Cordialment…

As you know the novel is the questioning of one characters for  400 pages…  he is talking about the streets of a local town and the local newspaper:   the history of these streets and houses that’s so fascinating they’d do far better to run a regular column in the Echo on the Fantoniard instead of those articles by that Lorpailleur woman on the new novel as she calls it her theories dot interest anyone, yes the old streets.

Beckett, to name drop, was a great supporter of Pinget and he had probably the greatest translator from the French Barbara Wright, who translated him nearly without pay as there was no way that anyone could pay someone to translate a writer like Pinget… fortunately the dread Richard Howard only mangled one of Pinget’s books, unlike the savaging that he was allowed to administer to and nearly destroy with Claude Simon. 

I am partial to Pinget’s APOCRYPHA  and the various small books devoted to MONISEUR SONGE.  In 1988 was at a tiny, no longer here, bookshop in the East Village, there were four other people in the shop for the reading and signing.  He and Wright stayed at the Earle Hotel, now the Washington Square Hotel and if I could I would have a plaque on the wall of that establishment attesting to that fact.

6--- Barbara Wright translated a few of Michel Tournier’s books but not THE WIND SPIRIT which has the memorable meditation on a bloody removal of his tonsils:  I have never stopped ruminating on that bloody mishap that left my childhood splattered as thought it had bathed in a huge red sun…Childhood is given to us as confusion, and the rest of life is not time enough to make sense of it or explain to ourselves what happened. 

6--- Tournier also mentioned another mutilation that man is subjected to:  “an anti-erotic mutilation, a symbolic castration, which seriously and irremediably reduces genital sensitivity as a result of keratinization of the epidermis of the glans.  Fellatio becomes impossible or at least so laborious that it loses all its charm.  The prepuce is like the lid of an eye, and the glans of a circumcised male resembles an eye whose lid has been torn off.”

7--- SEAGULL BOOKS  joins DALKEY ARCHIVE and PUSHKIN PRESS to the old reliable NEW DIRECTIONS as the essential publishers of books companies like Knopf, Random House, Penguin, Harpers can no longer afford to do since these so called large publishers are now committed to keeping the shelves of Wal-Mart, Target, Big Lots stocked with books.  Literature is mostly done by accident at these so-called larger publishers. 

7--- Seagull is re-introducing PASCAL QUIGNARD to American and world English readers.  Some might have read his THE SALON IN WURTTENBERG (1991) but that does not prepare for the singular beauty, originality and consoling ability of THE ROVING SHADOWS.  I went down to J and R and purchased the short piano piece by Couperin…  with this book we are back in the familiar--- and to some, like myself--- comforting rooms of Jansenism being talked of…as did Calasso in THE RUINS OF KASCH… years before… the most modern, still, way of remaining within Catholicism, to remain within an orbit of thinking that has never lead to murder… but I probably do violence to THE ROVING SHADOWS:  it is a full orchestral parade of genuine learning, thought, reflection: a moment when the old books are still, really alive.. as indeed they are… when Gibbons is the only text you need to understand the contemporary moment.

7--- More about and by Quignard as the weeks go on…

8---Also, from Seagull two books by AnneMarie Schwaryzenbach:  ALL THE ROADS ARE OPEN An Afghan Journey in June 1939.  Published now for the first time in English a short novel LYRIC NOVELLA… again  I will write about these little books at another time…

9--- UPROOTED  How Breslau Became WROCLAW DURING THE CENTURY OF EXPULSIONS… by GREGOR THUM.  Princeton.  I am a close reader of publishers catalogues and this is the sort of treasure that one finds.

I have always been vaguely aware of these expulsions…  these shoving of one group people out and the putting in of another.  When I had part time library job at Beloit College I remember always checking in a journal published in West Germany about the culture of the Germans who had been expel from Bohemia in what is Czechoslovakia.  So one was ready in some way for complexity when it came to Kafka…a Czech writer who wrote in German or a Jewish writer who wrote in German… of course one sympathized with “poor Czechoslovakia” first victims of the Nazis and the  Communists… but what about those Germans who had once lived in Bohemia.. was the same as Sudetenland?... so now UPROOTED…why was Poland given a slice of Germany… but that brings up the uncomfortable fact of which other country invaded Poland in 1939?  And why did that country get a chunk of Poland after World War Two…

So, UPROOTED is the perfect European history book to be reading, right now, because everyone thinks that all the old questions in Europe were all settled not a long time ago and of course I am not suggesting that something awful is about to descend upon Europe… but the past as Quignard well shows…shadows…

10--- That explaining.  BY WORD OF MOUTH Poems from the Spanish by William Carlos Williams.  Long ago Julio Marzan pointed to that middle of name.  This was back in 1970 or 71 at Columbia when I knew Julio as we sat in classes in the School of the Arts  Columbia.  He like I enjoyed the accident created by Frank MacShane in those days when writers like Borges, Parra, even Neruda were not infrequent visitors to Columbia…  even then I loathed Neruda, that good Stalin Prize winner and sought out Parra who I remember telling me in THE ONLY CHILD on 79^th Street: that to write “I” is not to speak for Nicanor or Thomas as the case may be…so that is why BY WORD OF MOUTH….  I have always been astonished that PATERSON is not a required book for all residents of New Jersey…  in the back of my mind GOING TO PATCHOGUE tries to do what WCW did for Paterson… replaced the so-called real place with a book.

11--- CALLING MR. KING  by Ronald De Feo.  I first found his name in the REVIEW  the journal of Center of Inter-American Relations…  there was a real time when Americans cared about books from South America but that was replaced with rise of ethnic literature in the US  and publishers didn’t have to pay translators… that 99% or more of the Hispanic ethnic US writing was and is junk is not a problem as it serves a purpose--- to provide lousy role modes for  Hispanic surnamed students…  at the moment De Feo’s novel  seems more conventional than might have expected but it is from the Other Press , one of the most consistently disappointing publishers…their books seem interesting--- in particular the translations--- but inevitably the books are committed to a debilitating realism…

12---LUMINOUS AIRPLANES by Paul La Farge… who I sadly see is teaching at Bard College, never a good sign, has made the move to publish a novel that is then continued on-line.  This will be hailed as innovative though the Hungarian novelist Krasznahorkai had been there with his WAR & WAR back in 2006…I will be trying to read his novel… there seems a modesty to his ambition and at least he does not pretend to being socially useful as the dire Russell Banks would claim.

13---Today, as on other days, going to and from places of my employment I have been reading ISLE OF THE DEAD BY Gerhard Meier  that Dalkey Archive will publish in November.  114 pages long.  Two elderly men walk about a Swiss town on November 11, 1977.  Does a novel need more than that?  For instance, Baur is saying to his friend Bindschadler, “At that time the wind still blew through the two elms in the cemetery.  And here was where my father was moldering.  In the meantime he has been cleared off, that is, the gravestone had be leveled.  The grave of Lina, Philipp’s first wife, is also gone…

The epitaph for the book is from Flaubert, “What seems to me beautiful and what I would like to do is a book about nothing.”