WHAT OUGHT TO BE ON YOUR READING DESK

A list for the Spring and Summer  2012 or really any season for that matter

--From the Library of America:   

---THE CIVIL WAR The First Year

---THE CIVIL WAR The Second Year

---KURT VONNEGUT  Novels and Stories 1950-1962      

---KURT VONNEGUT  Novels and Stories 1963-1973

---DAVID GOODIS  Five Noir Novels of the 1940s &50s

And then...

-- STOLEN AIR Selected poems of Osip Mandelstam  translated by Christian Wiman. (Ecco Press)

 --A TIME FOR EVERYTHING by Karl O. Knausgaard.  Archipelago

 --MY STRUGGLE by Karl Ove Knausgaard.  Archipelago

 --SATANTANGO by Laszlo Krasznahorkai  New Directions

 --PARALLEL LIVES by Peter Nadas.  Farra Straus & Giroux

 --SEX AND TERROR by Pascal Quignard.   Seagull Press

 --THE ROVING SHADOWS by Pascal Quignard.  Seagull Press

 --AS CONSCIOUSESS IS HARNESSED TO FLESH  Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980

    by Susan Sontag.  Farrar Straus & Giroux

 --THE HUNGER ARTIST by Herta Muller.  Metropolitan Books

 --TRANSPARENCY by Marek Bienzyk.  Dalkey Archive

 --ON THE MARBLE CLIFFS  by Ernst Junger.  New Directions  (out of print)

 --SONG BOOK.  The Selected Poems of Umberto Saba.  Yale University Press

 --ON THE BORDER OF SNOW AND MELT.  Selected Poems of Georgy Ivanov. Perceval Press

 --JAMES JOYCE.  A New Biography by Gordon Bowker.  Farrar Straus & Giroux

                     NOTICE

The American writers on the this list are all dead.  

Is that saying something? 

More, maybe than I would like to say, really: but does anyone look forward to any American writer’s newest book with the eager anticipation that the announcement of a new translation of a book by THOMAS BERNHARD or ROBERT PINGET or ERNST JUNGER or MICHEL LEIRIS would create?

(there is William T. Vollmann and then...)

A PERFECT BOOK SECTION

If I was editing a book section right now these are the books I would have written about or have had written about.

9--In 1950 when my sister came down with polio a cloistered nun sent her a 1/4inch square of cloth attached to a card.  The fabric had come from the dressing gown worn at the moment of death by Pope Pius X--- who was known to take a great interest in children---

9--I also knew that in each altar of a Catholic church was embedded a relic of the saint to whom the church was dedicated.  I did wonder about churches named for the Sacred Heart or the various aspects of the Virgin Mary, but did not ask too closely.

9--When in European museums and in the Met in New York on display were beautiful containers for relics and always looked closely if it was possible to see exactly what human remain was encased usually in gold.  The fascination was always compromised by an understanding that when a religious object becomes a mere object of art some irreparable has been lost and I guess about the only person who knows what I am talking about would be Julian Green and he is now dead.

9--HOLY BONES,HOLY DUST How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe by Charles Freeman (Yale University Press) is exactly what it says it is.  Wonderfully written and inviting:  “The first downward slice of the sword glanced off the archbishop’s skull and cut through to the shoulder bone, almost severing the arm of one of his attendants as the weapon fell.”

 

9--The passage ends, “Two more slashing cuts on his head followed and the archbishop slumped dying to the ground.  The top of his head was sliced off and finally the exposed brains were scraped out of  the skull and scattered on the cathedral floor.”  Freeman than goes on to explain how this murdered archbishop became St Thomas Becket and his relics an object of pilgrimage as in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales…

9--How far most people have come from any interest in relics unless they are the possessions of a pop singer like Elvis Presley… But Freeman right down to the notes for his illustrations fascinates:  “These early saints’ tombs were given holes into the space under the body and often sacred dust was collected from below and mixed with water to drink.”

9--A model for how history is to be written and happily for those who know Hannah Green’s “Little Saint,” the town of Conques is described and the great reliquary of St. Foy is pictured.

 

9—Hannah Green wrote THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE.

10—This is the year Kurt Vonnegut gets the authorized biography.  Of course it will be widely reviewed as it is the easiest sort of books to review: a potted mini bio of the author and one or two little bits of info and the reviewer is done.  But remember literary biographies are always the first books that get tossed from personal libraries, followed by books of literary criticism.

10—the Library of America is publishing the first of a series of volumes devoted to  Kurt Vonnegut.  I wish they would tell us what the remaining volumes will contain.  This one has SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, GOD BLESS YOU, MR. ROSEWATER, CAT’S CRADLE and BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS.  These are the books that make his claim to be remembered.  I did not read them as they were being published.  I heard about them, as one could say.  But, now, finally, I realize:  SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE together with Joseph Heller’s CATCH 22  for the European theatre and  with two novels by James Jones, THE THIN RED LINE and FROM HERE TO ETERNITY covering the Pacific theatre that this is how an American imagines that thing called World War Two.  I would add only Curzio Malaparte’s KAPUTT and THE SKIN along with Celine’s CASTLE TO CASTLE  and RIGADOON to fill in a little shading.  RIGADOON comes with an introduction by Kurt Vonnegut.

10-- The Library of America volume devoted to Vonnegut is the best way to experience Vonnegut if like me you didn’t read him the first time around and even if you did, this is a way to over-come the prejudice that always surrounded his career: an entertaining ScFi scribbler.

11--The only competition for the Library of America is the EVERYMAN series of books from Knopf.  In the Strand I notice that EVERYMAN books do not linger on the shelves and they seem to be read when they do end up there, while the Library of America books tend to gather unread.  Both series are actually one of the few bright spots of publishing.

 

1--THE EVERYMAN CHESTERTON, George Orwell’s BURMESE DAYS, KEEP THE APIDISTRA FLYING, COMING UP FOR AIR in one volume and the COLLECTED SHORT FICTION by V.S. NAIPAUL are the three latest books in EVERYMAN.  I cannot pretend to have read all three but I can tell you that these books do invite reading.  The Chesterton does not have some of his classic short essays such as Writing on the Ceiling, What I Found in my Pocket or Advantages of One Leg but this made up by including his ever new ORTHODOXY, THE EVERLASTING MAN and a large collection of Father Brown Stories, which as everyone knows always delighted Jorge Luis Borges…  remember always it was Robert Louis Stevenson and Chesterton to which Borges always returned and provided the constant clarity to the typical Borgesian story.

11--When 1984 came and went as a year Orwell seemed to dim a bit and while ANIMAL FARM remains it is good to have the chance to read these three books again.  My own Penguin versions have become brittle and brown.  Burmese Days does little for me while the other two novels constantly remind of just how dreary life was and is for the most part in England, right down to the present moment which while slightly more glammed up remains at its core,  still a plate of over-cooked  take-away food washed down by watery beer, that is if you got back to the dingy over-priced hotel room without being set upon by drunken soccer thugs.

11—A few factual details to remember according to the Note on the Text.    BURMESE DAYS was published in England in an edition of 2500 copies with an additional 500 were called for. KEEP THE APIDISTRA FLYING  was published in an edition of 3000 copies of which 2194 were sold.  COMING UP FOR AIR was published in an edition of 2000 copies and an additional 1000 were called for.

11—These numbers for most books of fiction are still the reality even in the US where the population is now 300 million.  And in fact might be considered rather remarkable.

11—V.S. Naipaul has become a little eclipsed though given the reality in what used to be called the Third World he is as relevant, as understandable, as necessary.  Though things in that part of the world have become even worse… but these stories fill in his permanent place in the world imagination… but come to them after A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS.

12—No one would let me write about THE SLY COMPANY OF PEOPLE WHO CARE by Rahul Bhattacharya (Farrar Straus & Giroux).  How to say the guy’s last name was a starter and then if I mentioned it’s a novel set in Guyana… quickly the conversation would yo-yo between my talking about the Guyanese students at the various colleges in NYC and Reverend Jim Jones who as you remember put that country on the map with his Kool-Aid transportation into the next world.  An opening line, “Life, as we know, is a living, shrinking affair and somewhere down the line I became taken with the idea…”

                12—A closing few lines from SLY COMPANY OF PEOPLE WHO CARE: “Light crept like a thief out of the fragile wet houses.  Somewhere in the drip drop dark a maga dog whined.  And my tears, they kept returning at intervals, and I purse them to no avail.  Dayclean.  Gone.”

                12—I would go to Guyana in the morning if given the chance and while I would not use this book as a guide I would go because of this book.

                13—Reviewing Enrique Vila-Matas’s BARTLEBY & CO  for the Los Angeles Times (http://articles.latimes.com/2004/dec/19/books/bk-mcgonigle19) and declaring that it is: Perfect. Beautiful. ..what can I claim for his new book, NEVER ANY END TO PARIS? (New Directions)  Well, I am jealous of every single line of this book, of every gesture he makes.  In memory Vila Matas is back in the attic of Duras, back in his youth in Paris, back midst names of the famous…circling constantly about Hemingway who while it seems  at this moment as I am typing to have disappeared is still of course ever present--- I have thought to seek out the man who wrote BARTLEBY & CO and MONTANO’S MALADY and now NEVER ANY END TO PARIS but I have not.  How could I, since I have been in Nantes with my daughter as Vila Matas has also been there--- though did we pass in the street?---Vila-Matas gives one the illusion that anyone could write like he does  but like the lottery in New York State…the dollar, the dream… I am not sure you have to have gone to Paris to read NEVER ANY END TO PARIS but it is probably necessary but only if you do not speak French.  You must become the perfect French tourist in the Unites States: not speaking a single word of English but understanding everything because you have seen Vertigo, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, DOA…

                14—Nantes always calls up Julien Gracq and Green Integer has released a short novel of his THE PENINSULA.  Again I have reviewed and written about him. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2007/12/the-passing-of.html  Each of Gracq’s books is distinct and while I am not going to ever know French and live in constant poverty as a result and why I take pride in my daughter who is very fluent in French with a good accent but who is not living in France so can I ever look forward to listening to her reading Gracq to me in French and then translating his travel journal from his voyage through the American Midwest?

                14—In THE PENINSULA  a man is waiting for a woman to arrive at a train station.  She does not come on the morning train.  He sets out driving waiting to come back to see if she will be on the evening train.  “She had become simply the force that was hurling him towards their impending meeting, and what he felt was the passive well-being of a pebble skidding down a slope and whose onlt sensation of existence comes from the ever-increasing acceleration.”

                14— from THE PENINSULA, “He would let himself be swallowed up by the wide lazy yawn of the countryside.”

                14—from THE PENINSULA:  (The girl in memory)”What a prude!” delivered with a school girl sententiousness from behind thee tangled barrier of blonde hair through which only the end of her very small nose emerged and which always made him want to kiss her.

                15—if you want to have my literary references for writing these sentences you should know that GOING TO PATCHOGUE is again available and now in paper from Dalkey Archive and THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV is still available from Northwestern University Press.  My other books--- among others---   JUST LIKE THAT, NOTHING DOING, FORGET THE FUTURE have not found a courageous reader.

FROM THE WASTES OF TIME: THE CIVIL WAR The First Year Told By Those Who Lived It

7- Today, given that too many college students in the various colleges of the City University of New York have much difficulty figuring which came first, World War One or World War Two (and I am not putting you on) it is with some trepidation that I mention that in April begins the 150th anniversary of the Civil War with the remembering of the firing upon Fort Sumter.

2--I doubt many college students could make a list of three Civil War battles or even associate Lincoln in some way with the war. These students can go on at some length about the racist nature of American society since they will be reciting in a rather rote fashion the obsessions of their professors and like students in the former Soviet Empire they know what they have to do to get ahead: never argue, never question just repeat after me.

3--I am of an age that I do remember the 100th anniversary of the Civil War as I was working at Francis Bannerman Sons out in Blue Point and that company, you might know had long before bought up 90 % of the war surplus from the Spanish American War and still had in Blue Point and up in the castle on an island in the Hudson River a vast assortment of the necessary parts and other gear to outfit those who were now collecting the various weapons and accouterments. It was a great first job for a 16 year old. (for another day)

4—My own connection to the Civil War was via a picture on a great aunt’s wall in her apartment in Brooklyn where I was told of this man: a great-great uncle who had lost his army at Gettysburg fighting on the Union side. This aunt was from my mother’s side of the family and was a Whitney which lead to the family legend that Eli Whitney was a relative and as I learned incorporated the whole of the Civil War within his biography. Having invented the cotton gin he made cotton profitable and slavery necessary in the South but being cheated out of any profit from his invention went North where he perfected the process of interchangeable parts in the manufacturing of muskets thus giving the North the reason why they would win the Civil War: industrial might of an inexhaustible magnitude. Aunt Marie had met this man and remembered only the pinned-up empty sleeve of his suit jacket.

11--On my father’s side of the family, the Irish side--- was made complex because of the Draft Riots that occurred almost around the corner from where I am typing these lines: recent Irish immigrants unable to buy their way out of Mr. Lincoln’s draft rebelled against being forced to serve in an army that represented a country that saw them as agents of the Vatican. A country where there were plenty of places: dogs and Irish not allowed--- and why should they go off to die to free the coloured people? But the history knowing came only came later since my grandfather had been sent out of Ireland as a 12 year old boy to work as best he could and this was well after the Civil War. Ireland meant, really only a place you left. If you are 12 the history of a new place does not matter.

12--When I think back to reading the 100th anniversary celebration it seems that the war was described by Bruce Catton but which now when read is the sort of official version of Union triumphalism and was blessed by Life Magazine and who was to argue with that authority, then?

15--Times change. THE CIVIL WAR , A NARRATIVE by Shelby Foote was read. Twenty years of writing 3000 pages, one man---not an academic committee, not a gang of indentured student assistants--- the masterful opening as Foote delights in the genius of Lincoln’s calculating the necessity of getting the South to fire first…
Shelby Foote is America’s Edward Gibbon and he provides the grand narrative of the Civil War. There is no need for any other, probably.

15--AND there is great news RIGHT NOW from the Library of America: they have begun to publish a series of books made up of near contemporary writings based upon a chronological account of the war. With a great breadth of sources one hears the actual voices, remembering that this was the first war in which most of the soldiers on both sides were literate and many of them wrote letters home and these letters were preserved. The Library of America book: THE CIVIL WAR The First Year Told by Those Who Lived it. It is edited by three academics but excusing this I do wonder why one couldn’t have done the job but that would lead to the usual discussion of the decline of education…

34--Since I am writing this toward the end of February: one hundred and fifty years ago Jefferson Davis (February 18, 1861) is giving his Inaugural Address: We have entered upon the career of independence, and it must be inflexibly pursued…As a necessity, not a choice, we have resorted to the remedy of separation, and henceforth our energies …It is joyous in the midst of perilous times to look around upon a people united in heart…

16--Given my own predisposition I did skip ahead and read a letter from a surgeon ( Lunsford P. Yandell Jr) writing about what he saw at the Battle of Belmont in November of 1861: “The gun had exploded into a thousand atoms. One of the men had his right arm torn to pieces, and the ribs on that side pulpified, though the skin was not broken. He breathed half an hour. The other poor fellow received a piece of iron under the chin which passed up into the brain—the blood gushing from his nose and ears. He never breathed afterward…”

"As to the variety of expression depicted upon the faces of the corpses, of which I heard so much I saw nothing of it They all looked pretty much alike---as much alike as dead men from any other cause. Some had their eyes open, some closed, some had their mouths open, and others had them closed. There is a terrible sameness in the appearance of the dead men I have ever seen.

"My friend Captain Billy Jackson was shot in the hip while led a portion of the Russell’s brigade. I think he will recover. I am afraid Jimmy Walker (James’ son) will not recover. I think he is shot through the rectum.

19-- So to Shelby Foote where you can read his eloquent description of this minor battle of the Civil War, a battle that in no way changed the war, no way either shortened it lengthen it: just a brief moment of slaughter… but seen as one of the first steppings of Grant from the obscurity which had been his fate until…

17—The selections in THE CIVIL WAR THE FIRST YEAR TOLD BY THOSE WHO LIVED IT and only my poor typing skill prevents me from making a simple list of all the contributors to this wonderful book so you probably should go to the Library of American website and see for yourself. They do quote from a poem by Hermann Melville written after the Civil War as to his premonition of what as to be come. One line holds me:
The tempest bursting from the waste of Time.

18--Of course as I type I am nearly buried by the waste of time and in that waste I remember walking , six, seven years ago was it, with my wife and son and daughter across the field which Pickett send his men in 1863 at Gettysburg and here we were walking in the hot sun of a similar July and I was asking Lorcan could he imagine what it must have been like for young men not much older than his 12 years of age or his sisters 15 years… but he had not great defining sentence.. and the daughter and wife were there only because after you promised we were then going to the wholesale outlet mall built it seems on the side of a Confederate hospital but Lorcan did mention he would have taken shelter behind the one tree that we could see and I was asking but what about the other hundreds of men would they all lie up behind him, and his silence seems to have born some fruit as he has a remarkable narrative gift when writing on historical events but that is all off the subject which in some way is the problem of the Civil War: how to talk about it, about this something that happened and still resonates in our daily life even if unacknowledged, and that silence evident in all our modern major poets and save for Faulkner all out major prose writers…

20—THE CIVIL WAR THE FIRST YEAR TOLD BY THOSE WHO LIVED IT. What a wonderful title. Maybe someone will find a way to use it in imagination, but it has the practical value of putting the reader really there back then in the waste of time.

AFTER--And I should mention that Madison Smartt Bell has written a provocative novel based on the life of Nathan Bedford Forrest which Pantheon published two years ago, DEVIL’S DREAM. So it can be said that the Civil War still is news. The provocation comes from the fact that Forrest was an early supporter of the Ku Klux Klan but on the other hand Bell is probably the single most interesting writer at the moment in the US based on his more than 2000 page trilogy based on the life of Toussant L’Ouverture and other books now too many to mention… another day, then.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA: why it is the center of any real library

A.

The LIBRARY OF AMERICA is one of the brightest lights in the dimming world American publishing and I have followed it since its beginning. i have been both appalled and pleased with it all these years. At first I was almost prepared to define the Library of America as being the gold standard of publishing but in fact that must be the PLEIADE editions published by Gallimard in Paris.

B.

Not in my lifetime will there ever be an English language equivalent of the Pleiade whose books are models of publishing beauty and integrity. In Paris, when an author is selected for the Pleiade all of that author's works are published complete with well written notes. This is not the habit of the Library of America and it has resulted in two truly botched books which should be withdrawn. I am speaking of the Gertrude Stein and the Richard Wright volumes. They are embarrassment and do an active dis-service to the reputations of the authors.

C.

But over the years I have constantly read in the Library of America's Poe, Faulkner, Melville (though Melville's poetry is not included)Henry James, Henry Adams... OK the list can go but simply put my room would be bare indeed with the Library of America. It is a putting aside of those paperbacks and becoming an adult.

D.

I already know that in February/March there will be volumes devoted to John Cheever, Lafcadio Hearn and A. J. Liebling...

E.

But in the now I have been reading in the new volumes devoted to Katherine Ann Porter, William Maxwell, John Ashbery and Philip Roth. It must be understood that one usually does not sit down and read these sorts of books cover to cover no matter what reviewers pretend... one of the details that emerged from the discussion of the suicide of David Foster Wallace was that he was well aware that many of the reviewers of his big novel INFINITE JEST had not read the whole book... and all astute readers well understand the fakery in much of the writing about books in the United States. Readers should find Jack Green's great defining book FIRE THE BASTARDS (Dalkey Archive) on just how truly awful book reviewing in in the United States.

F.

How does one read the Library of America books?... I was reminded of Ed Burns talking about his summers with Michel Leiris in France. Before setting out for their summer holidays there would be the going to the bookstore to decide on what would be read that summer... inevitably a Pleiade edition would be selected both because of the ease of carrying those beautiful books and the authority of the editions... Ed was remembering the summer of Goncharov... unlike the Library of America the Pleiade thinks of itself as creating a library of world literature...

G.

I have been reading in the Ashbery...a poet that becomes readable with the distance of this edition. One has to carry a poet when one goes traveling and Ashbery helps with seeing what is OUT THERE.

Now should he be up there with Ezra Pound? or T.S. Eliot? or William Carlos Williams?

H.

The Katherine Ann Porter volume collects her stories and journalism... and while the stories are essential the missing SHIP OF FOOLS is a serious problem and something that would not have happened it this had been the Pleiade. I read the bound galleys of the Porter stories while in Arizona and in the California desert. By making them available again our literature seems a little more populated just as happened with the two volumes devoted to John Dos Passos...

I.

The second William Maxwell volume is more a homage to his role as an editor at The NEW YORKER and his still living presence in New York literary circles though I am pretty sure that the actual man, who I met at Glenway Wescott's memorial service, would be a little embarrassed by these volumes because with no volume devoted to Sherwood Anderson there is no context for his own work. Maxwell would probably also suggest that Glenway Wescott should also have appeared before his own books were published. Of course the Maxwell volumes are treasured for the quality of the writing, for their sheer readability but there is something a little wrong in how naked they sit in the Library of America and I can well imagine that Maxwell, if still alive would rather be talking about Anderson and Wescott's work than his own.

J.

At the moment I am in the midst of a discussion about education at John Jay College here in New York City. Of course the relevant document is in the volume devoted to Thomas Jefferson... about the power of the sweeping broom and the necessity of sweeping out the faded leaves... to allow what remains to flourish...

K.

The Cheever volumes at least seem to collect all his fiction though we will have to see when they appear...

L.

I am looking forward to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, more Kerouac, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, the poetry of Melville, the remaining Henry James, Howells...James Baldwin... Edward Dahlberg and of course as I mentioned above: Glenway Wescott and Sherwood Anderson...

M.

How many publishers invite expectation anymore in the United States?

LIBRARY OF AMERICA and LIEBLING and CELINE and DAHLBERG and a SAD LUNCH and a NOT SO SAD LUNCH

28---

The publicity people for the Library of America must have missed sending me a copy of A.J. Liebling that just came out. An editor at a newspaper sent me a copy as they were not going to review the book.

I always look forward to the Library of America books and in the Fall they have some interesting ones: the second William Maxwell, a Philip Roth and a book of poetry by Ashbery. I hope I will not be over-looked as the bound galleys should be coming shortly. In the summer they are doing a second book by Philip Dick which I will talk about one of these days.

But to the Liebling. If this editor had not sent the book to me I would not have discovered this meeting with Louis Ferdinand Celine:

For myself, I shall always remember him as a big-shouldered man, unexpectedly rugged and tweedy for a Frenchman, sitting in the dining room of the Vanderbilt Hotel in New York in 1934, eating strawberry ice cream after rare roast beef and at intervals pausing between enormous mouthfuls and great, grasping swallows to shout obscene regret for the Middle Ages, when the Church assured the common people that they would go to hell after death and be miserable in the meantime. "Then, at least, there were no false hopes," he said.

So, while I might have been skeptical of why the LOA was doing Liebling, I have been won over. The book is a compilation of all his writings during the Second World War and while it is a little marred with the fakery of having a celebrity editor whose name I will not mention it is a real book.

Many of us are waiting for the LOA to do the collected poetry of Melville, the books of Sherwood Anderson, the work of T.S. Eliot and of course: Where is Hemingway? Where is Glenway Wescott? Edward Dahlberg? William Carlos Williams?

29---

In THE WRITER'S CHRONICLE, the trade journal of the creative writing business there was an announcement of the PEN WORLD VOICES FESTIVAL. "Over 200 members of the publishing industry attended a reception for the festival in March, boarding the ocean liner Queen Mary 2 to celebrate the upcoming event"--- hours waiting in a vast storage facility to board, searched as if getting on a plane, a thousand waiting to sail... lines like entering a detention camp--- "the on-board luncheon featured readings"---before the food people were ordered into a stadium seating theater to hear speeches about how the Cunard lines (remember they gave us the Titanic: the ship that God couldn't sink, as they say but as Julian Green once told me, "As they were saying that the iceberg was making its way..." were in favor of crossings, communication... And then there was a pathetic rock band with dragooned "writers" singing anti-George W Bush lyrics; I kid you not, and then the President of PEN was going on about the impending dawn of fascism in the US as witnessed by the denial of entry to a convicted criminal writer at Newark airport. The decor of the boat is down-market Las Vegas. "was hosted by Salman Rushdie, the festival chair"--- no, he did not show up as he had more important things to do: he was in London shilling for another of his unreadable novels.

Two writers by chance this week asked me if I had received the brochure for the PEN conference. Did you do what we did: throw them out? I did not ask why they had thrown them out but can only guess---

If anyone remembers Georgi Markov, the exiled Bulgarian writer who was murdered in London by agents of the Communist regime in Bulgaria they might remember his wonderful exposition of why the Communist regimes loved writers conferences, readings, writers visiting factories, writers retreats: the regime always dreaded the appearance of another book and the inevitable task of having to read it so why not find agreeable and progressive ways to hinder the writing of books and maybe even hinder the reading of books for probably the best way to discourage reading is to have writers read their own works in public along with colleagues, one of which always goes on for too long

30---

I went to a sad lunch for Dirk Wittenborn at The Museum, a restaurant connected to that dreary junk shop MOMA. The dining room was large for the one round table so it seems that they had at one time expected more people. Never having met Wittenborn, never having read a word he has written or seen the film he wrote THE FIERCE PEOPLE--- like most people, as it seems to have gone direct to DVD, or seen another documentary he produced about the hard lives of rich kids and will I be going to see a new film he wrote that is due in the summer The Lucky Ones, something about Iraq War and I am sure it is not celebrating the American effort there---

These lunches happen all the time. They are designed to get word of mouth going... the occasion for this is the publication in August of PHARMAKON.. murder, drugs, rich people, fathers, children, privilege, cover-ups, pain, anger, sex...

Why write a novel instead of a screen play, I asked Dirk. "In a novel you can show thinking," Dirk replied

At the actual lunch of course the question who will write the screenplay and I was wondering, again, why bother with the novel as only then did people at the table seem animated: the movies are the reel world. Why do writers set themselves up like this? Well, money of course and the rich are as grubby as the next person and probably even more so...

Dirk was talking about his three therapists and I could hear them as they alternatively moved through his little talk: the one who dealt with his father/son issues, the next one who dealt with his intimacy/women issues and the last with the issues of drugs...

The pork loin was dried out and without flavour.

PHARMAKON has an opening line that the author is proud of: I was born because a man came to kill my father.

31--- I was reading THE WAGES OF EXPECTATION the biography of Edward Dahlberg by Charles DeFanti... DeFanti quotes as his concluding lines the epitaph that William O'Rourke had written for Dahlberg, For whatever Dear Readers there are now, or are to come Edward Dahlberg wrote 18 books and one masterpiece that will endure; at the end of his long life he had less than six people he would have called friend."

In a Village Voice review of this biography also written by O'Rourke:

"Dahlberg's bile was in direct proportion to the neglect he felt, which of course was enormous. Even if you produce a master work--- which Because I was Flesh surely is--- you can be ignored because literature plays little role int he life of the commonwealth."

And:

"Dahlberg led his life seemingly enunciating one state above all, that of the writer as pariah, the glorious nay-sayer unsullied by commerce, fashion and vain success."

And:
Dahlberg was payed the wages of his own expectations: rejection, isolation, and the curse of superfluity."

O'Rourke's review appeared in the Village Voice on April 16, 1979.

Can anyone imagine such writing in the newspaper that goes by that name today in the year 2008?

32 PS---

We were in Enzo's (Second Avenue between 2nd and 3rd Streets) for pizza this afternoon.

The guy from the funeral parlor across the street was in for a slice.

After he left I mentioned to Mike that I usually see him standing in front of the parlor waiting for a delivery.

If you shake hands with him watch his eyes. They start from your eyes and go down. He's measuring you. If you've shaken hands with him scratch your balls three times that'll keep him away for now.

As I was leaving Mike was looking in the Village Voice at a profile of Philip Glass. Enzo's is mentioned. Glass is a nice guy, Mike says. He comes here.

I tell Mike I see Glass around, sometimes up at the Domincans' bodega.