NO CURIOSITY

NO CURIOSITY: the present as the future after a visit to the University of Notre Dame

ST. PATRICK’S DAY another day in Dublin is the 2016 Notre Dame Review Book Prize winner and as such was published by the University of Notre Dame Press.  Additionally, I received $1000.00 and there was to be a reading at the university for which I would receive $500.00, a round trip airplane ticket and, at first, only one night in a motel that was extended to two nights. 

Originally, I had been scheduled to fly out Wednesday (the day after Election Day in November) have a meal with some people from the university, do the reading and then fly back to New York on the 6AM flight Thursday.

Looking back, I guess, I should have stuck with the original plan.  But I suggested it might be nice to meet with students and I had wanted to hear Nuala Ni Dhomnaill read on the Friday as she was a very old friend and been kind enough to be a very early supporter of my book, so my host William O’Rourke offered to put me up in his own house for the third night.

WEDNESDAY.  

Flight from Newark to South Bend is fine.  The room where I am to stay is in an extended stay motel, the perfect setting for slow suicides by solitary drinking or just a quick slash of the wrists in the bathtub: you know the sort of place, re-modeling going on, low ceilings and desk clerks always on the phone…  the place is definitely off-campus…there is a very nice hotel on campus but that is only for big contributing alumni and IMPORTANT PEOPLE (something I was told in a sort of consoling tone of voice)

So quickly to dinner.  A fancy restaurant on campus: French, I guess, expensive… okay, Nuala and her daughter were there, which was nice, the former chair of the creative writing program was there and a recent hire, a war veteran from Princeton… the former chair, Steve Tomasula, was under treatment because of Donald Trump’s victory and has asked to be excused and it is possible other people were asked but…

We had to eat quickly as the reading is coming on…  The veteran bails out before dessert.  I had bought his book WAR PORN [Roy Scranton] and thought it would be interesting to talk about Ernst Junger... but he ate and ran.  The former chair had gone to Columbia a few years after I had gone there.  We probably have at least 50 friends in common as she came from the South and with so many other overlapping interests but she couldn’t come to the reading and no coffee or anything was suggested.  The busy provincial lives, I was thinking.

 [on a break from re-writing this piece I stopped into Mercer Street Books and found a copy of Valery Sayers’ most recent novel THE POWERS. Published by Northwestern in 2012, from the pages inserted: Northwestern University Press got it reviewed by Publishers Weekly and Booklist and it was not done as a print-on-demand book so it at least had the chance of finding an audience, something my own book was denied.  This book buying is an act of curiosity I cannot believe would ever happen with any current student or faculty at Notre Dame]

My host who had given my book the prize took me, Nuala and her daughter to the reading in the bookstore, which is part of a Chicago based chain of college bookstores and Notre Dame stuff was obvious the biggest seller.  We were behind a series of folding screens which separated the reading from at least 25 cash registers just waiting for a footfall weekend… 

Maybe 15 people showed up.  The event was recorded for You Tube  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4MHAYOXTwo&t=3s //

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRbIFem-zRI&t=44s  //     with a stationary camera…the noise from the bookstore was constant.  

My host made a good introduction and I read and tried to present the book.  

Two people bought books and woman from the press—the only person at the press to have read it as she did the proofreading came and asked me to sign a copy of the book. 

There were no questions.

No one lingered, no one hesitated.

It was over with. 

No one from the creative writing program, no one from the English department as far as I could  tell.

William drove Nuala and her daughter home (a squalid looking Cape Cod house on a dark street that Notre Dame must have gotten in a mortgage default sale) and me to the extended stay motel. 

Later, I ventured out across these wide empty dark streets to the gas station to get some Coke…  the broad deserted roads with only the bright lights of a gas-station.., the eyes of the clerk showed he was glad just an old white man and not a guy with a gun in hand… as was more likely.

So to come this distance to read in a chain-store bookstore and not in a proper academic hall. 

Such is… places like Notre Dame are run by people always alert to the reality of dollars and cents and to nothing that can be claimed as some higher purpose, I guess…

THURSDAY.

The next day I wasn’t invited to the university press to meet the book acquisition editor or the publicity director or anyone. 

I was not invited to any classes and I was not asked to stop by to visit with faculty or the new editor of the Review. 

But a lunch had been arranged so I could meet any interested students who had been told of my reading, told of the lunch and had even been provided with a selection of my writings that I had been asked to supply.

A large not too noisy sports bar on campus.  My host, Nuala, her daughter were there and two students showed up.  I guess free food and drink is no longer a sufficient lure for today’s students.

Two students: the guy sat on my right and the woman on my left. They had not been to the reading, they asked no questions… so I asked what they did… the young man said he was writing a novel about killing a father…I asked really, yes, I kill him 56 times—I might have the number wrong…but that was that… he already had a graduate degree from a university in Kansas and was getting another one from Notre Dame as it was more prestigious, it seems.

           INTERUPTION

           AS can happen after I wrote the post the following was brought to my attention so I take the liberty of here including it

Today, I had the opportunity to have lunch with visiting author Thomas McGonigle; poet and Patrick B. O'Donnell Distinguished Visitor, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill; MFA candidate, Bailey Pittenger; and ND's MFA founding director, William O'Rourke. Over the course of the ranging conversations we had, I came to the realization that I don't think a true creative writing education comes from workshops, but from an accumulation of intimate moments between writers.
And I am including the little biographical statement he has on the page of the Creative Writing Program at Notre Dame:
After graduating high school in northern Michigan, Daniel Tharp attended Kirtland Community College for a year before moving half way across the country and graduating from Pittsburg State University with a Bachelors of Arts degree. A Teaching Assistantship, over a hundred students, and two years later, Daniel Tharp graduated from Pittsburg State University with a Masters of Arts degree with emphasis in fiction. His thesis entitled “Home,” which is currently under review for the Distinguish Thesis Award at his Alma Mater, depicts a complex and brutal world where characters struggle not with outside forces but with themselves and what it means to be human. Tharp attends the University of Notre Dame’s MFA program on a Prose Fellowship.

A life story of an atomization so terribly typical of the age we live in...        (back to the original version)
The woman to my left, the same questions… she asked did I know the writer Clarice Lispector?  I said  of course doesn’t everyone?.Did I know of the biography of this woman which had come out?  I did.  It was by a man, she said, so I have decided to write the real stories of this woman, aspects of her  no man could write…  I did not ask if this woman had read Lispector in Portugese, maybe I should have.

I asked if she knew Nelida Pinon? No.  I say, Nelida was Clarice’s last protégé… and then I probably made the mistake of saying I had heard about Clarice from Nelida back in 1971 and knew actually of her work from before then thanks to a book translated by Gregory Rabassa…

I  even went on to mention THE REPUBLIC OF DREAMS by Nelida  as having both a wonderful story and a perfect title for everything we try to do but I guess I was being intimidating as both the woman and the man got away from the lunch as fast as humanly possible.

Am I wrong to think all the students at Notre Dame are so busy, so lacking in even being curious about a book that has at least the minor qualification of getting the designation of the Notre Dame Review Book  Prize… but maybe… who knows? 

All students in the graduate writing program are fully funded as they say so they do not have to work at some disagreeable job in order to eat.

I did run into the distinguished critic and professor, Declan Kiberd in the bookstore of Notre Dame… he has one of the big chairs at the university and I know his books and I mentioned after being introduced that I too had gone to UCD where he had taught--- but I then made what I was told later was a fatal mistake thus triggering BEGRUDGERY--- that I had studied with Denis Donoghue and still visit with Denis who lives in North Carolina…  a provocation that can not go unanswered even though Declan has a very big and lucrative chair at Notre Dame he did not become the Henry James Professor at NYU…

Later that day Bill took me to the Studebaker museum, the art museum at the university and sand dunes up on Lake Michigan… we went to a nice Italian restaurant and talked of the years gone by and how few to come. The last time I had been to the shore of Lake Michigan was in 1968 when I had gone to visit my parents in exile in Menasha, Wisconsin and Lilia and I had to go to see the Lake… but there were no dunes along that shore.

FRIDAY 

I went to Nuala’s reading in a beautiful hall and while not packed, a decent size crowd…  A polite introduction---a recital of her real fame and a listing of the translators (a roll call of all the well known names) as she writes only in Irish and then Nuala read both in Irish and English.  She read from THE FIFTY MINUTE MERMAID.  It is probably the most provocative and emotionally demanding  books in modern Irish poetry, equaled only and then in English by the Peppercanister Poems of Thomas Kinsella.  She was well received.  Questions were asked for and I asked both Nuala and the person introducing her—I think he is the director of the Irish Center---////  It has to be always understood such centers while usually extravagantly funded by Irish Americans have institutionally zero interest in that group known as Irish American or as American Irish--- whose only purpose to is to supply the cash to be spent on THE IRISH(this is not unusual as the same goes for Polish and even in a much more smaller way Estonian centers///    why in the litany--- which it seems like--- of the famous Irish poets who have translated her work into English the name of Michael Hartnett had not been mentioned as he was her first translator… Nuala answered and very  kindly profiled Michael and revealed the reason why but only I knew this is why he was not mentioned:  Michael Hartnett, Nuala said, sadly drank himself to death.

You must understand that such reality is never allowed in any established Irish center—one is never to talk of the consequences of the drink.  The only things more taboo are the high unacknowledged suicide rate and a pervasive criminal underworld in Ireland (north and south) funded by the drug trade in which all the now dormant underground para-military organizations have always been involved.

There was a reception with very good food and drink. 

Declan Kiberd did not talk with me…

I did ask a graduate student what he did?  I am working on Post-colonial Irish and Libyan literature to give it a broader than usual dimension… I felt like bringing up Gaddafi and the IRA but thought better of it…

 No one else approached me or I them---who can blame them—just another old guy--- and since none of them probably knew of my book…who could blame them…everything is so compartmentalized…  why would an English language journal do a book with a title like ST. PATRICK’S… that’s not their territory… 

So, I sat on the sofa and was joined by a woman in the uniform of a domestic worker…. To make longer a story… Nuala a few years before had given this woman  a copy of her book and they had become friends as both were widows…  this woman had been the cleaning lady for the apartment where Nuala has stayed two years ago…  she had seen the signs and came to the reading directly from work… she asked why I was there and she asked after my book so I could say it grew out of the using of the little money from the death of my father to go back to Ireland and we walked about how she and Nuala both being widows knew something and she said it was hard and we both know it.  I am proud Italian woman and my husband was a proud Black man and we had two proud MIXED children… the vehemence of her  voice was so filled with a delicious defiance of a refusal to choose.

         Later, I thought only one person was curious about me and my book and that was a house servant.  Little did she know I was the grandson of two people pushed out of Ireland at age 12 to be servants in New York, and I was still there comfortable really only with this woman…

NEXT MORNING

Up at four A.M. to think and then to get the 6 A.M. flight back to Newark.  It would be useless to remember that more than 50 years before even at a small college like Beloit,  writers like Dickey, Kinnell, Rexroth, Spender, Auden came and had lunch with students and we read their books, sought them out… they seemed to have time… of course people can say: those people are famous but not back then: Dickey and Kinnell were just starting … but the past as L.P. Hartley has it, is foreign country…

My host was very kind but he is retired from Notre Dame so none of this now matters… he has his own books, the memory of his friendship with Edward Dahlberg and I guess the lesson comes from Dahlberg: it takes a long time to understand nothing. And I must, as they say, remember  I was lucky to have 15 students to the reading and those two students were two more than after another reading 20 years before at U of Illinois at Carbondale where no one came to meet me for lunch… after I had read from GOING TO PATCHOGUE.

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And the woman on the couch had a more glowing reality within her life than all the…  she is probably one of the very very few at Notre Dame who can say she is pretty happy with her life… as she knows the sure brevity of all human happiness.

DID SCHEHERAZADE'S VAGINA LUBRICATE AT THE...

The other night Denis Donoghue was over for dinner and the unspoken or the unsaid was talked about. When he was growing up in Northern Ireland religion and politics for obvious reasons were not talked about. Many think that race is another more American thing not spoken about but he suggested that taste was the most unspoken thing today. We are not prepared to challenge another's taste in anything. I discovered something else inside the world of the unsaid. The copy desk at the Los Angeles Times made me aware that one is not allowed in that paper to write this sentence: Did Scheherazade's vagina lubricate at the approach of the caliph?


(from JACKET COPY the book blog at the LOS ANGELES TIMES)

(please insert my sentence at the appropriate moment)

Thomas McGonigle, an occasional contributor to the book review, caught Nélida Piñon in New York City.

Does Scheherazade get aroused at the thought of having sex with the Caliph?

That was the unexpected question Brazilian writer Nélida Piñon recently explored with preeminent translator Gregory Rabassa before an audience in New York on the occasion of her controversial new novel “Voices of the Desert.” The novel, which is an erotic retelling of “One Thousand and One Nights,” led Piñon and Rabassa to a question no one in the assembly hall of the Americas Society on Park Avenue could have expected. (The original question, I assure you, was even saltier.)

At 73, Piñon seems the elegant epitome of anyone’s favorite aunt — but appearances are deceptive. She was the first female president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters (elected in 1996). A protégé of Clarice Lispector and her last literary confidant, Piñon said she did not talk to Lispector’s recent biographer, Benjamin Moser, because a confidant should not give up her confidences.

Piñon is the author of numerous novels, now published in all the major languages. English translations of her work include “The Republic of Dreams” and “Caetana’s Sweet Song.” In discussing “Voice of the Desert,” she denies that the novel is a radical critique of the situation of a woman in Muslim society -- rather, Piñon is a novelist rooted in the actuality of a woman’s flesh. This is why the answer she gave, to the question mentioned above, was powerful in its simplicity. How could Scheherazade be aroused?

“A woman does not make love under compulsion to a tyrant,” she explained.

Later, after the talk, I wanted to see how Piñon’s views may have changed over the years. I reminded her that Scheherazade had surfaced in another interview she’d had — 17 years ago — with me about writing and the sources of one’s inspiration. She had been talking about what it was like to care for her mother when she was gravely ill — and how that experience led to another memory of her being sick as a child and being cared for by her mother:

My mother would follow me about the house, in the garden always presenting me with food, trying to get me to eat. For some reason I was refusing to eat. In order to seduce me she started to tell me a story. For each spoon of food I accepted, she was obliged to advance the story. As soon as I had a portion of words that corresponded with the spoonful of food, I immediately refused to open my mouth unless she would deliver more words. It was a verbal game: My mother at that time was a Scheherazade eager to protect my life instead of stealing it. She was my first living writer.

“Yes,” she said, after the talk, “That was true: But it was really my mother’s loving words that opened my mouth.”

Also during that earlier conversation, years ago, Piñon had mentioned how difficult it was to be a writer in a country like Brazil where half the population did not own a pair of shoes. Today, she says the situation is even worse -- not only in Brazil, but the world at large.
“Today our whole attitude toward money has changed," she said. "From the newspapers it would seem that, in America, even a mediocre actor expects to get a million dollars for a movie, and a ticket for 'Tosca' in New York can cost more than $1,200! It is terrible to be a young person in such an atmosphere.”

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

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

seven

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

Frankfurter Rundschau 18.11.2008

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

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

eight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

nine

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

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

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

ten

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

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

YEAR END, PHILIP ROTH, NELIDA PINON, ROBERT PINGET, BARBARA WRIGHT

63

This is the week when the English and Irish newspapers and magazines run their BOOKS OF THE YEAR. I read the sections in the TLS, The Spectator and The Irish Times. The TLS like The Spectator and The IrishTimes has a gang of writers writing little essays about their year's best books.

I will not make one of those lists of who said what. Most of the writers who contribute to these sections are or will eventually be just names: publicists, academics, once popular novelists and poets. My one exception will be to notice that George Steiner did not report that he had read, as in previous years, with a passionate and defining interest, 10,000 pages of Heidegger manuscripts.

I was saddened, a little--- one always hopes for some evidence of change but of course--- to realize the dread Philip Roth's latest had been read by a number of these people. Roth is a perfect example of POSHLOST, that wonderful Russian term made popular by Vladimir Nabokov:

Corny trash, vulgar cliches, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishonest pseudo-literature--- these are obvious examples. Now if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, over concern with class and race and the journalistic generalities we all know. Poshlost speaks in such concepts as "America is no different than Russia" or "we all share in Germany's guilt. The flowers of poshlost bloom in such phrases and terms as "the moment of truth," "charisma," "existential" (used seriously), "dialogue" (as applied to political talks between nations), and vocabulary (as applied to the dauber). Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Vietnam is seditious poshlost.

Of course, any reasonably well informed person can make a list of contemporary writers who personify POSHLOST: Toni Morrison, Russell Banks, Rick Moody, Joyce Carol Oates, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, James Patterson... I can't go on with this list. I guess if you see a course listing for the contemporary novel at a college or university... 90 percent of the writers will exemplify Mr Nabokov's...

As to Roth...
It must have been in 1971 when I first met Nelida Pinon. You might remember her as the Brazilian writer whose REPUBLIC OF DREAMS came out some years ago... she was included in that defining anthology of South American writing published by Tri-Quarterly... there was a short story of a woman who gave birth to an egg... she was a close friend of Clarice Lispector...

Pinon is still alive, travels constantly-- was the first woman to be the President of the Brazilian Academy... she visited back then a class given by Hannah Green at Columbia University. She must have come to Columbia at the invitation of Frank MacShane who was probably one of the best writing program directors in the country at that time or since. Nelida was only one of the many who came to Columbia at MacShane's invitation: Niconor Parra, Jorge Luis Borges, Jose Donoso... that apologist for Stalin, Pablo Neruda...

... but the point. Nelida was telling me that on this her second visit she was only meeting writers and people who are not famous. On her first visit she had been forced to meet the famous. Then when she met Roth at a restaurant on 8th Street in Manhattan she learned that famous American writers are very different from... all Mr Roth could talk about other than his own writing and the sense of himself as an important writer was that this was to be his year to make a million dollars. Nelida learned from Roth that in America it is somehow decided that each year one writer will make a million dollars. Two years before it had been Saul Bellow and then William Styron and this was to be his year. Of course she was talking about Portnoy's Complaint.

66

Elsewhere in the Books of the Year issue of the TLS is an article by Gabriel Josipovici in which there is:

what has happened to our culture such that serious critics and intelligent well-read reviewers, many of whom studied the poems of Eliot, the stories of Kafka and the plays of Beckett at University, should go into ecstasies over Atonement or Suite Francaise while ignoring the work of marvelous novelists such as Robert Pinget and Gert Hofmann?

Mr. Josipovici must be living in some fantasy world. You can get out of many good colleges and universities without ever having read the three authors he mentioned and I can well assure him if a reviewer ever talked about such writers or of holding them in esteem-- they would simply be thought to be sadly out of touch with the needs of the newspaper or magazine.

745

FORTUNATE READERS: there is no excuse not to read Robert Pinget's books. Almost all of them are available in English. I was reminded of this by seeing Joanne Gunderson at the 20th Annual Independent and Small Press Book Fair. She has through her small press RED DUST made available all of Pinget's small prose books and his plays. DALKEY ARCHIVE has his great work THE INQUISITORY available. A reader might find MONSIEUR SONGE who in some way is of the same family as MONSEIEUR TESTE by Paul Valery... but both Mr Pinget and Mr Songe are, as they say in Ireland, their own man... or those other late books THEO OR THE NEW ERA or BE BRAVE or THE ENEMY--- all well translated by the great Barbara Wright...

in THEO OF THE NEW ERA:

Still the same old thing. He's read so many books that he tries to remember them all together I think.
Why all together.
Because he's in a hurry, he hasn't got time now to reread them one after the other so as to write his own.
What is his own?
That bundle of pages he gets you to read bit by bit.
That isn't a book it's just scribble you can't understand a word.
It's the best he can do.

or in Pinget's last published book TRACES OF INK:

And then the years pass.
Anxiety.
What can he do to overcome it?
One line plus one line. and keep going at all costs.


And from earlier in the book: Mortin says I'm waiting for the rats of memory.