BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS  

What else do I care about

          I saw Sun and Forest by Max Ernst at MOMA in a small show of his work and realized the pity of both time and war NOT doing their fine work in cutting down the number of works by so many of what one has to call modern artists... in particular in the 20th and 21st centuries the amount of art that has survived is unbearable to any thoughtful person.  

         In the world of books  the digital sledgehammer is ever at its destruction of the world of books so that now with books--- except for a few precious ones--- there is hardly any market for used books except through extremely large warehouses or the proliferation of individual sellers on Amazon and similar sites.

        In New York City. the Strand Bookstore  continues in a fashion but it survives by being a destination store for people wanting to buy souvenirs of their visit to New York City.  The second-hand book section is assiduously combed by clerks and books no longer sit on their shelves waiting.  

            Increasingly as I will be doing books are simply put out with the trash... it is not worth one's effort to take them to the shops to sell and the shops if they are possibly interested mostly will not send a truck to collect the books as those books then have to be sorted and most of them will end up on the one and two dollar shelves for a time...   

BUT for now books, books--- a few and I start with H.G. Adler's first book, THERESIENSTADT 1941-1945, The Face of a Coerced Community.

Adler began to save notes for this book when he with his family was sent to this "show-camp" by the Nazis.  Surviving unlike his famy the subsequent deportation to Auschwitz, Adler returned to Czechoslovakia and rescued his notes and after fleeing  that country for England began this massive and really first comprehensive description of A CAMP.  
857 pages.  A book that will endure but few will read as it is very expensive and printed in a small edition by Cambridge University Press.  A book destined for the library YET  the sort of book that should be on the bedside of every thinking person because it is both a reminder of the horror of this camp--- which I trust if you are reading this blog--- are well aware was established by the Germans as a show camp to show how well they were treating the Jews contrary to the common belief  and I will repeat that: a reminder of THIS camp.  Adler concentrates on the experience of being in a camp.  He refuses every opportunity to simplify the story he tells: showing the full range of individual human response to the situation people find themselves in.  Even to site in anyway the details of those described is to needlessly limit the experience...

People avoid and are proud of their avoidance of the great big long books and I always take that this avoidance---every excuse seems so tiny, so mean as not even worth repeating--- as a pathetic need to think of the world as a simple place...Ulysses, Remembrance of Things Past, War and Peace, The Man Without Qualities, Death of Virgil, Parallel Lives


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 THE BOOK OF DISQUIET by Fernando Pessoa (New Directions) Translated by Margaret Jill Costa.   Some, a few, well know Pessoa... the writer who in some way has come to be listed with Proust, Joyce, Musil... Celine when such lists are made---  of course the most obscure and for me to list him thus might seem more eccentric than called for...yet...  there have been many versions of this book done into English in the last 20 plus years...  and everyone knows the story of Pessoa who never wrote in his own name but always wrote in the voices of a myriad of the invented and then there is vast prose book discovered in a large trunk and assembled by a series of editors... each one with a different approach...I had held to Richard Zenith's version published by Penguin but Zenith has complimented Costa for the quality of her translation... and this is physically a beautiful book with no dust jacket and a starling cover...a book of moods, a book to comfort on the sure way to the grave: the consolation is bracing as the English would say:     
       ...to find people who are but a series of marginal notes in the book of life
       ...All pleasure is a vice because seeing pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the worst vice of all is to do what everyone else does
       ...every gesture is but a dead dream
       ...intelligence, a fiction composed solely of surface and error
       ...A Homer or Milton is not more than a comet colliding with the earth
       

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           The house of the title is the large apartment complex in Moscow where the bureaucrats who ran the Soviet regime lived with their families during Stalin's time and after. And while it is a little wrong to compare it to War and Peace and The Gulag Archipelago--- as the blurb writers do--- there is a grandeur to it in the great length and in the detailing of the fates of true believers in Soviet Communism who with few qualms of conscience killed anyone who go in the way of the building of the communism in the Soviet Union and now in their own turn they are to be murdered by the very machinery they had created.  The genius of Slezkine is to individualize the murderers and the murdered... one is taken up by their lives and their inevitable terrible ends even for the few survivors who are  all  contaminated.

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ErichMaria Remarque was the second writer I came to in Patchogue after Thomas Wolfe and over the years I read all of his books that were translated into English as a result of the great success of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN  FRONT.  ---  I am ssure there are others who  followed his career:  THE BLACK OBELISK, THE ROAD BACK, THREE COMRADES...  THE PROMISED LAND did not get published in the United States ...  

AND HERE I STOP FOR NOW AS THIS TYPING HAS AWAITED POSTING TOO LONG...

TO HAVE BEEN IN LISBON. PESSOA, ALAIN TANNER

----High Road---

1.

At the beginning of February a woman from Harper Collins asked me if I would like to join a group of writers in Lisbon, all expenses paid for a long weekend, to hear about a novel, meet the author and tour the sites associated with the book, Codex 632, which seeks to prove that as a result of a long and complicated conspiracy the fact that Columbus was a Portuguese Jew had been suppressed. The bound galleys were sent to me and I should have refused as the book is a clunky mechanical effort hoping to duplicate the success, if that book can be seen as a success, The DaVinci Code.


But I did accept and began to read again in Pessoa because I realized I could finally see the city of this most wonderful of writers.

I re-read but did not act on Pessoa's words:

Travel? One need only exist to travel. I go from day to day, as from station to station, in the train of my body or my destiny, leaning out over the streets and squares, over people's faces and gestures, always the same and always different, just like scenery.

If I imagine, I see. What more do I do when I travel? Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to travel to feel.

2

I watched IN THE WHITE CITY a film by Alain Tanner which walks Bruno Ganz about the hilly streets and by the shore front of Lisbon as he makes little movies showing what he sees and which he sends to a woman back home as a way to remind himself that he is away.

Because it is not on VHS or DVD I was not able to re-watch Tanner's RETOUR D'AFRIQUE... and the great lesson of that film that sometimes it is better to just think about going away and then not go away... though when I re-read a review by Vincent Canby which was not at all kind about a movie I remember liking very much because it reflected so well my own boredom and vicissitude in 1973..."It is never strong enough to prevent the boredom and futility experienced by Vincent and Francoise from seeping into the experience of watching the film."

Well, I had admired the film for so well depicting my desperate situation of living in the Earle Hotel in a room over-looking Washington Square--- the same room according to Richard M. Elman, that Lenny Bruce had lived in, behind aluminum foil covered windows... but that is all another story...

3

I had asked the guys at Dalkey Archive if they knew how to get in touch with Antonio Lobo Antunes whose new novel they were publishing, KNOWLEDGE OF HELL. I had written about two of his previous novels and he is the best living Portuguese writer. Dalkey Archive did not know how to get in touch with him. He didn't answer his mail.

So now I was confronted by the reason for why should I go to Lisbon?

To sit in the cafe Pessoa sat in?... to see some pretty buildings?... to note the downward spiral that was sure to be on display from the 1920s when Albert Jay Nock was in Lisbon and noted that they had the best bookshops in Europe because Portugal had the lowest rate of literacy in Europe and as a result the country was also free for the most part of billboards...

4.

I tried to watch another movie LISBON STORY by Wim Wenders but it was nearly unwatchable. Ugly people in ugly places celebrating EUROPE... would probably be an unfair summary of the film but it put me in a very dark mood to think again about having been in Lisbon.

---the low road---

1

The e-tickets were long in coming but the details of the first class hotel, the meals to be eaten, the places to be seen and the description of the fellow travelers--- free lancers: one wrote for the Boston Globe, a few wrote for Jewish newspapers and one did something for SHELF AWARENESS... and myself...

I had already gone to Lisbon... if there was a financial incentive I could describe the whole weekend...

5.

The e-ticket finally arrived and it was for tourist class courtesy of the Portuguese airlines and the land arrangements were from the Lisbon or Portuguese tourist office... so the journey was not sponsored by Harper Collins... and my excuse for not going finally was I could not see myself for 14 hours to and fro crammed into a tourist seat on a plane for three nights in Lisbon..

A low reason, I guess, and I did have second thoughts but still that crammed in sitting and the basic cheapness of the airline--- how was one to enjoy the sights, the meals after such a flight and then the coming back to a week of recovering...

6.

I could never figure out why me? though a friend said I guess they know you write about foreign books with a real appetite but I knew deep down it was my connection to the LA Times that really interested them... and that connection is real and so this was really business and so finally on that low road I was surprised that they had offered me a tourist class seat on the plane-- but to be fair the nice woman at Harper Collins did say there was the possibility of an up-grade but the dice had been rolled and that up-grade should have been from Business to First to have any real meaning.

7.

All through these last few weeks I was remembering Michael Oldfield, the former editor of Melody Maker, saying when I told him of this trip or junket as it might reasonably be described, "Everybody hates people who go on junkets."

I do not know if Oldfield is really correct though hearing of someone's good luck is never totally free of envy and begrudgery...

8.

Jewish people in New York to whom I mentioned this voyage told me that they had long heard that Columbus was a Jew. I looked at Morrison's great definitive biography of Columbus and he argued that there is no real solid evidence for this rumour which has been about for centuries. A friend of Anna's was here from Barcelona and she said everyone there knows that Columbus was Catalan. Elizabeth Frank suggested to me that of course Columbus has to be a Jew now that generally in liberal circles Columbus is seen as a greedy Indian killing monster.. and such a book I added, to Elizabeth's insight, by suggesting that it was another little scratch of the resurgent European antisemitism that is a very real characteristic of the European left...

and so, a little sad--- I didn't get to ask my question though I had anticipated a certain real pleasure in seeing what would have happened if I had asked that question...

9.

Did I learn anything?

MY FAUST by PAUL VALERY, HARALD WEINRICH, NICOLAS POUSSIN, FERNANDO PESSOA

another

"Whereas before Kant morality was still expressed in terms of virtues (and immorality in terms of vices), Giovanni Della Casa, the Italian author of a conduct manual titled Galateo (1558), translated into French under the title Galatee (1562), had already speculated about the moral status of politeness. Is it proper to count politeness among the classical (theological, cardinal) virtues, and can one brave the authority of Aristotle and Saint Thomas so as to open the canonical catalogue to a new category of virtues that we might today call sociable or even social?" This is the opening of an essay Politeness and Sincerity in a collection of essays by Harald Weinrich entitled THE LINGUISTICS OF LYING. I had come to this book of Weinrich's by way of his LETHE The Art and Critique of Forgetting.

And another

Being in bed after the minor surgery of a few days ago I was struck by how unprepared I am for such a sentence. Like all Americans I did not study philosophy in high school unlike French lycee students who are required to study philosophy through their entire secondary education. Of course in my primary school education at St Francis de Sales School in Patchogue I had religion classes and while they were not formally philosophical they could be seen as my introduction to the discipline of theology and as such can serve as an introduction to all that it is not immediately available. Such classes are looked down upon by many but now they seem to have been the most lasting as they were finally concerned with what philosophy has always been concerned with: what and why.

Weinrich's essay then went on to a discussion of MY FAUST by Paul Valery and that is what I have been reading. Written in 1940 midst the French collapse it is a humourous version of Faust and one in which both Faust and Mephisto are aware of all the previous versions of their appearances on the world's stage and one might suggest they are aware of the versions to come... in this version Faust wants to write a book to end all books: the book in the sense Mallarme used, in the only sense that really matters--- a book that has not been written before and which ends the need to write another book.

but another

If only writers would ask themselves: does anyone really need to read the book I am about to write, hasn't this book been written before, how many books will the book I am writing replace or shove to the side.

In the mail a summer catalogue: celebrity and journalistic efforts by Barbara Walters, Arianna Huffington, Martin Amis, Rick Bragg, David Price, Robert Kagan, David Gutterson, Bill Clinton and Linn Ullmann. And A NOVEL: already an enormous success, an astonishing invention of stunning economy in the most confounding precincts of the human heart returning to the fairways stunningly inventive debut from the slums of Columbia to the still mysterious 1988 plane crash back with a razor sharp novel opens eleven year old Isabelle hasn't spoken in eight months into the fragmented lives of two sisters a wannabe Texas princess, the fiercely intelligent ambitious MI5 officer in a crowded residential suburb that wreaks havoc widespread havoc of that awful summer and its ultimately unavoidable dangers

and another

I turned from the review in the NY SUN of the new Poussin show at the Met where Lance Esplund reports of a nymph, "In her orgasmic shudder, she rises off the ground to their gaze, as if she were a floating cloud. The satyre's nipple burns red hot..."

to the actual catalogue of the show published by Yale University Press and look again at my favorite Poussin, last seen in the National Gallery in London, LANDSCAPE WITH TRAVELERS RESTING--- those three men who I have been writing about while trying to imagine a further place for them in the world

while another

"I'm the character of an unwritten novel, wafting in the air, dispersed without ever having been, among the dreams of someone who didn't know how to complete me."
(262 The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa)

"Travel is the traveller. What we see isn't what we see but what we are."
(451 Pessoa)