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.”