KULTURA INTERVIEW ABOUT THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV

This interview appeared in KULTURA, the most important monthly Bulgarian magazine of culture (October 2019) in a Bulgarian translation.  The interviewer is Dimiter Kenarov one of the very best Bulgarian poets, journalists and is author of the forthcoming biography of the murdered Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov to be published by GROVE PRESS in the US.  He suggested we do a Nabokov style interview and supplied a few questions to which I wrote answers.  Again his suggestion reflects the very sophisticated literary culture of Bulgaria.  I doubt that very many American writers or journalists would know what a "Nabokov style" interview was.

1--     Your first trip to Bulgaria was in 1967. How did it come about? What was it like for a young American to visit communist Bulgaria and what were your first impressions? Did they change over time?


       I got off the train at Sofia in September of 1967 and walked up what I now know is Hristo Botev Boulevard. It was getting dark and I had a map carefully transliterated into the Latin alphabet from the Bulgarian tourist office in London. I stop at a kiosk and asked the girl, tourist information? She replied, I speak English a little. I married this girl, Lilia and we left Bulgaria in the following spring on our way to Dublin by way of Venice, Paris and London.
      I won’t go into the complexity of getting married in Bulgaria in 1967 or about being arrested for writing on a tablecloth.
      But my life in Bulgaria was with that first walking on a street in Sofia.


2--    When did you first hear about Nikola Petkov?


       Lilia and I lived in a bedsit on Grosvenor Square in Dublin, a good address but the wrong city. I taught English to foreign students and Lilia served lunch in the lunch room of this Dublin Tuition Centre. At night the lunch room became a late night supper club with a  menu of which no prices were listed.
      We got a call from Michael O’Riordain who was a bus driver and head of the Irish Communist Party. He explained that his son had been approached by Lilia’s mother in Sofia as she had something for her daughter who was living in Dublin. The boy was in Sofia for a world youth conference for peace organized by the Bulgarian communist party . We went to see O’Riordain and he apologized as we came into his house saying, “My son, the son of a revolutionary had lost the sausage your wife’s mother had sent to her daughter by way of his son. He was embarrassed and as compensation he said, I want to give you a book about that great Bulgarian revolutionary, George Dimitrov and it is the only book I have in my library about Bulgaria. 
      We thanked him and of course regretted the loss of the lokanka.
      On the way home I read in the book DIMITROV WASTES  NO BULLETS by Michael Padev. Yes, it was about Bulgaria but it was a careful expose of the trial and execution of a Bulgarian Nikola Petkov. So Lilia and I had a good laugh at how could this communist give us such a startling anti-communist book…? 
      I guess O’Riordain had not gotten beyond the title… which was a quote from the debate in the communist controlled parliament leading up to Petkov’s show trial and execution.


3--   What was it about Nikola Petkov that piqued your interest?



        As you might know in the 1960s there were few books about Bulgaria and this book moved with us to America and moved with us between Wisconsin and Virginia and on to Manhattan.
        I was in Bulgaria again in 1973, two times...once in the spring to visit Lilia’s mother and a second visit in December as Lilia was concerned about her mother in Sofia and then her sister and nephew who had fled Bulgaria for Yugoslavia and going on eventually to the refugee camp near Vienna. 
       But that is another long story... I could tell you of visiting my nephew and his mother in a gypsy village in Yugoslavia as they had escaped the Yugoslav bounty hungry police and the only people in Yugoslavia at that time who a person on the run could turn to were the gypsies…
         I could recite all the peculiar aspects of life in Bulgaria, the shops where Bulgarians shopped with dollars…the lack of shoes of large sizes…the desire for American chewing gum, a girl named Harritena Beleva who I never forget who I met as we sat in a café on then Plastat Lenin inhabited by deaf-mutes but that book on Petkov was always patiently waiting…
        Finally in the late 70s and in the early 1980s when I worked as foot messenger (for more than 20 years in fact) and having written and written what now looking back were holding actions, as it were, since they lacked the arrived spark of the inevitable, essential and necessary vision: the hanging of Nikola Petkov… and deeper down I had remembered a note which Hannah Green had affixed to her very great short novel The Dead of the House, three words: vision, record, memory.
         And now years later I can think the book came from being Roman Catholic born, and of course concerned with one’s soul and I had read the exercise in Ignatius Loyola’s SPIRITUAL EXERCISES in which one is told to imagine being on your death bed and looking into the faces of those looking on and imagining what they are thinking about… and from somewhere I knew that these hangings in eastern Europe were not clean executions--- if something like that can be said to happen though maybe in England with their history of professional hangmen who write their memoirs--- I knew there in the East, a person was suspended from a rope and allowed to slowly strangle to death and I remember Hitler taking pleasure in looking at the films of the suspects in the failed attempt on his life in 1944 being hanged with piano wire and slowly strangling to death.



4--   Your book, among many other things, includes a collage of newspaper clippings, official press releases, memoirs of Petkov's contemporaries, and personal interviews that you did. How did you set about your research?


I have always been attached to the first person narrator and was told by my friend the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra in a bar The Only Child on West 79th Street near Broadway in Manhattan, the simple line, “I” is the other…” Nicanor went on that night about the accident of our meeting and how we would meet at the oddest times then and much later but I heard that line, I am the other and he quickly told me he was not being original, “Who wants to be original…” there was a pause and he said one word, “Rimbaud.”
        So of course the book begins, “I Nikola Petkov was hanged…”


5--    Did you feel you had access to enough sources? Could you talk about your writing process? What were the biggest challenges?



         One aspect of having then a Bulgarian wife was that there were few Bulgarians in the US but gradually one somehow meets many of them and that lead to Petkov’s nephew confined to a nursing home in Brooklyn by a unhealing wound on the bottom of his foot that kept him bed-bound--- he talked of his uncle while I listened--- and to Cyril Black, a half Bulgarian who had set up the School of International Affairs at Princeton, replied to my letters…          I was nobody but probably few knew of his connection to Bulgaria, so I was not just a stranger… maybe this has disappeared today when everyone relies on cell phones and Google and the internet… and there are books--- imagine that--- in libraries and fortunately not a lot of books back then on Bulgaria… sometimes obscurity has its advantages… Princeton University Library (probably because of Black being on the faculty) had a copy of Petkov’s trial as the communist regime was proud of this trial and published translations in all the major world languages transcripts of the trial…the book had never been checked out as I remember…and of course I had my wife, her mother and her nephew… as sources… what more did I need?


6--   What was it like, on a psychological level, to imagine the voice of the dying Nikola Petkov in an apartment in Manhattan?


         I had the good fortune to have older parents and as a child we spent a lot of time going to funerals and my parents did not believe in baby sitters so we were taken along to these funerals which seemed always at Christmas time… I remember hearing my parents and the relatives talking about the deceased as she or he lay in his coffin—usually there were two days of this and then the funeral Mass… so death was not un-common but even then I wondered why would a person eat breakfast since I remember hearing an aunt saying her father had just dropped dead an hour or so after eating breakfast… My child mind never came to really understand this… and neither does my adult mind.

7--   Your book reworks the grey facts of history into something close to literary myth. Could you talk a little about the relationship in your fiction between facts and imagination? What does fiction give us that non-fiction fails at?


       When it comes to words like myth, even fiction for that matter --- literature professors are always asking kids to trace myth and this or this or that and of course Joyce had great fun having on the critics… but you got to give these dogs a bone… and students chew the chewed over remains. I think I would rather stick to my apostolic namesake THOMAS who said he would believe when he could put his fist finger into the actual wound of the Risen Christ… of course when he does see the Risen Christ…I just accept the body and allow myself to be consumed by jealousy of someone like Hermann Broch who writes The Death of Virgil…and see if I can nudge myself into his company with my own sentences and of course it is probably delusional but I gave a reading at the 192 Bookshop in Manhattan and they gave ma shoulder bag with a sentence on it from Borges, “I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.” 
        Maybe another time, if there is another time, I will tell what Borges and I talked about at Columbia in 1972---there has to be some loose strings... and I have never read from my novel in Bulgaria… a few sentences it is true… but maybe a Bulgarian will be reading it now in Bulgarian and I might one day be able to hear of that… with a biography we always skip ahead to the death scene as it were by an express train, as if that is the only reason for a biography… while with a novel we read or should read sentence, paragraph by sentence, by paragraph.



8--  You seem to work in the tradition of modernist, avant-garde literature exemplified by writers like James Joyce and Flann O'Brien. Could you talk a little about your literary influences? What do you think is ultimately the task of literature?


The first novel I actually read was LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL by Thomas Wolfe... in high school in Patchogue on Long Island we were forced to read crap by Thomas Hardy and George Eliot—but there were comic book versions of these books and fortunately back then there was no obsession with getting students to be writing essays..
Thomas Wolfe is not much read though I was happy to discover that one of the greatest German language writers Thomas Bernhard did a translation of a play by Wolfe and Peter Handke (almost his equal) says he loved LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL so maybe these two writers knew something far more important than the dumb professors who now enforce draconian politically correct required reading lists that avoid writers like Wolfe... but I will give you a list of writers I think should be read if one wants not to be illiterate: T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Hannah Green, James Joyce, Thomas Bernhard, Juan Carlos Onetti, Jose Lezama Lima, Flann O’Brien, Louis FerdinandCeline, Ernst Junger, Miquel de Unamuno, E.M. Cioran…Max Stirner…Faulkner…Kerouac…Turgenev… Uwe Johnson, Nelida Pinon, Blanchot… Julian Green, Edward Dahlberg, Jean Rhys, and get a copy of Ezra Pound’s ABC OF READING…there it all is…


9--    Why do you think it took such a long time for your book to be published in Bulgaria?


          When my book was published in 1987 in the USA the socialist/communist regime was looking forward to celebrating 50 years of 9 IX… in 1992 my book did appear in Svremenik but to find a copy of that--- in 2010 the Sofia city library couldn’t find their copy--- but it was one of the first signs of a change though in the early years of the changes people wanted to catch up with the avalanche of crap literature the communists had denied them--- they wanted to eat to their fill the shit the mass-market ate in in the West…but such runs its way and now finally maybe there is a change… people, young people want to know—the best of the young---others just want to get on with the forgetfulness and I wonder: what is wrong with that… yet, I am pleased by the few young who do want to know—but that is always the case…Julian Rios said better to say “long seller” than “best seller”...in the US and I am sure soon enough in Bulgaria the charity shops and second hand shops won’t stock yesterday’s best sellers as a best seller is always being replaced by another best seller… all that happens is they replace the supposed author with another name and the suckers fall for it every time.



10--  I've noticed you're following closely Bulgarian literature and have read most of what's available in English translation. Who are the Bulgarian writers that you find most interesting and why? In your view, what are the failings of Bulgarian writing?


          Georgi Gospodinov and Victor Paskov… they trust and trusted what they actually saw… Paskov I think drank himself to death and that probably meant he was very much alone…I have no gift for languages… but the books that get translated seem too often to be imitations of what is fashionable in the grotesque world of the small presses which could be better described as coterie presses—I’ll publish you if you publish me…
         I would rather read a novel by a Bulgarian writer who carefully catalogued all the variety of destroyed sidewalks in Sofia… I love walking about the streets off of Botev maybe because that is the first street I walked on in Sofia but then I discovered that Romain Gary lived on that street with Lesley Branch when he was the French consul in Sofia after WW2... why hasn’t a Bulgarian written about that… I hope some Bulgarian writer will write about the little houses that used to be Nadeshda that got torn down to build another complex… or who has celebrated limonada, that unique Bulgarian soft drink that came in a clear bottle with no label… or the walking back from the local bakery eating the warm heart of a loaf of bread before he or she gets it home.
       But I must not forget Zachary Karabashliev whose novel 18% GRAY is very very good and is one of the very rare books about life in the United States which actually gets an America I recognize... I would like him to Michel Butor's MOBILE another unique novel centered on the United States and absolutely essential for understanding the United States of America.


11--    Do you think Bulgaria has failed to work through its communist past? What are your impressions of Bulgaria today?


         Of course four weeks and two more weeks make me an authority on such… I am shocked at the huge gap in every art museum I visited in Varna and Sofia: where did all those paintings from say 1944 to about 1980 go to… you have paintings pointing to those years and then you get the reaction to those years but... no paintings…
        The Germans suffer from the same problem: where are their paintings from1933 to 1944… we all know why... but still the absence tells me something serious has been avoided and possibly it has something to do with the fact that the changes in Bulgaria did not come about from below… but… that is all beyond this conversation though I could point to the unpublished psychological reports of Dr. George Kamen who did write an unpublished report, “The Rulers, The Victims And The Silence” ( A Possible Outline Towards a Psychoanalytic Understanding of Post- Totalitarianism).           I doubt there is little interest in such in the Bulgaria of today.


12--    Short newsy texts and social media are filling up most of our reading time and our attention span is close to zero? Is there a future for books and particularly for the more challenging, experimental tradition that requires deeper engagement with the text? Is the Republic of Letters dead?


        I would need a large fee to answer such a question…that’s a question for six figured salaried academics to answer in their professional capacity as masturbators of the significant commentary while on the EU financed gravy train... but of course long ago the American academic world entered into a paralyzed sterility which is the condition of 99% of literature departments in the USA and I guess their Bulgarian counterparts are rushing to catch up… books have always been a small part of a nation’s imaginative world… and today real books are read but never within the academic world… real books are passed one to one between individuals… and it was such individuals who remembered Hermann Melville long after he had disappeared into the customs shed, it is individuals who know that James Thomson BV wrote the two greatest poems in 19th Century England, Insomnia and The City of Dreadful Night. It is individuals who pass along Gathering Evidence by Thomas Bernhard, it’s individuals who pass along Juan Carlos Onetti’s A Brief Life and I am telling you to read Parallel Lives by Peter Nadas and Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson and I do so on the basis of my book The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov.  Take it or leave it.

DEBILITATING SELF-ABSORPTION

                                                    

(THIS IS AN augmented and slightly different post of the previous one)  

                                                           8
Last week I signed the contract for the Bulgarian translation of my 1987 novel THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV.  It is scheduled to appear in Sofia in the Spring from CIELA a large Bulgarian publisher which also owns a chain of bookstores in Bulgaria.  

                                                           14

In preparation for this publication I found two letters which read the book from first  an American point of view and what is new with this post a second letter reads the book from a Polish point of view which concerns itself with the self-absorption of countries and in particular in the East.

                                                           18
  
I found a letter from David Rattray who some might remember as poet, as the first major translator of Artaud--- still the best--- and DIFFICULT DEATH a disturbing novel by Rene Creval in particular.  

Semiotext published a wonderful collection of  David's writings put together by Chris Kraus, HOW I BECAME ONE OF THE INVISIBLE

David read my novel and sent me the following letter which also included a page of typos in the book that should be fixed in a new edition which happened when Northwestern University Press did the paperback version:

June 18, 1987
Dear Tom, The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov is a tour de force.  I was riveted as they say, although it is a tale I wouldn't want to identify with, I guess I am forced to, willy-nilly.  The 12-minute interior monologue of a man being strangled, compressed into 120 pages or less---I count the dozen-odd pages of documents  as something that  might flash past in a split second--- then the many pages of your autobiographical track, and the interviews, which further whittle it down--- less than half is straight Petkov--- so I tried to imagine all this as a speeded-up tape actually being spoken in the 12 minutes and I believe it is possible even if in a Martian Donald Duck falsetto--- provided Piko's thoughts and rejoinders run in tandem, and the author's voice and documents are flashed onto a wall--- it would fit ---a tight fit, but so is that noose or loop as you consistently call it.  Like Piko I am a raki man; it takes one to appreciate one. The ignoble is also in a state of humiliation.  Apart from this book I had never read a line about Petkov that fool who persisted in showing character. The dream of dying in one's bed with one's hand held is in the papers, on TV, in Reader's Digest. The puff of wind exploding the speck of ash into the air is the reality hitherto reserved for the few, now made available for all.  Have you heard of Bogdan Borkowski's film Le Poeme which shows a dissection in progress to a sound track consisting of an actor's voice declaiming Rimbaud'sDrunken Boat in impassioned tones?   For the man being hanged to imagine a major earthquake reminds me of Kleist's  novella "The Earthquake in Chile" in which the young man has just climbed  upon a stool n his dungeon cell to hang himself on a noose he has fashioned somehow, when the first giant tremor of the great earthquake of sixteen-something causes the building to collapse and lands him unscathed in the street.  Therefore I at first misread your line "An earthquake would get him out of there."  Obviously you are referring to getting Dimitrov out of the saddle, not Petkov out of the noose.  I loved the Hyperborean or Austral icecap fantasy on p62.  Having spent half my life worrying  the lie that creeps i when we are speaking and the abyss between thought, word, and ear, I have to plead for Gosho and Petko and their liking for the sound of their own voice.  Maybe that was their direction finder  as it is in a way our direction finder when we share in meetings.  We are all as blind as bats in many ways, and I read that that is precisely how bats do find their way through the maze of pitch blackness--- the sound of their own voice bouncing off obstacles---  it is shows them where to go and where not to go.  "Fly my little bird but remember no bird makes a nest in a cloud."  I was put in mind of Gilbert White in Selkirk the speculation on whether sparrows migrate south in winter or were ravished up into the empyrean where they somehow levitated on the highest clouds.  I really loved your book.
                                             DAVID (Rattray)



                                   TWO
A letter from Tomasz Mirkowicz who I was introduced to by Steve Moore who had met Tomasz at Joseph McElroy's loft in New York City.  He was one of the most distinguished translators of American fiction...you must remember he was working during the long drawn out changes in Poland in the late 1980s... (his Wikepedia bio follows) 

                                                                    
                                                 WARSAW    31 January 1987

Dear Thomas ,
My apologies for responding so late, but I was out of Warsaw when your book and letter came... Driving is hell (in the winter here) and even using a word processor  is hard, since because of the electricity shortages my screen gets kind of wobbly during most of the day, and I've even lost a few pages when the current was cut outright.
I was fascinated by your book [THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV] and vast questions it opens, how little is remembered  and how little do we now of what has been happening elsewhere; much as we here try to restructure  our own history and not allow it be forgotten, know quite a bit about Russia Hungary, Czechoslovakia, nobody I asked has ever heard of Petkov--- the name draws a blank, and so does recent Bulgarian history, other than what we get in the papers.  The standard opinion is that Bulgarias love Russians (the only country with no Russian troops), and somehow no one has questioned this concept.  And--- not suprising ---it's really sad how the histories of each country in the block resemble each other:we too had a Petkov, but he was lucky to escape across the border in the boot of a foreign diplomat's car.  And he too is forgotten, and so are others... SO in a sense your book is not only about Bulgaria and Petkov, he is more of an archetype standing for the countless figures unjustly murdered and unjustly forgotten.  I'd like to talk to you about this sometime.  And I hope the book is a success when it comes out.  It deserves it! (And I'll be letting some friends read it here.)

Here is a machine translated Tomasz Mirkowicz entry in Wikipedia:

Tomasz Mirkowicz [edytuj]

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Tomasz Mirkowicz (born 1953 in Warsaw , died on May 7, 2003 ) - Polish translator of English-language literature, literary critic and writer. As a critic, he specialized in American postmodernism . During the martial law he actively supported the democratic opposition - Zbigniew Bujak was hiding in his apartment.

He translated, among others Ken Kesey 's Ken- ONE FLEW OTHER THE COOCOO'S NEST , 1984 George Orwell , Midnight Cowboy James Leo Herlihy , and the prose of Alistair MacLean , Stephen King , Robert Ludlum, and Charles Bukowski . He also translated from English. English novel The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski .

He translated two books by Marek Hłasko into English.

Book author [ edit | edit code ]

• Geography lesson: lipograms
• Pilgrimage to the Holy Land of Egypt: a lipocephalous novel (1999)
• an extensive 3-part article The Golden Age of the American Novel (" Ex Libris " 1994 from nru 60)

YES, ANOTHER NEW YEAR... but a glance from DAVID RATTRAY

This is the contract for the Bulgarian version of THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV which is to be published as a book by Ciela in Sofia in the late Spring of this year.  

After "the changes" in Bulgaria in 1990, a translation of my novel appeared in a "thick" journal, Svremenik #2, 1991.  The journal was modeled on the famous Russian journal which of course was known for publishing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

There were discussions of the novel in the newspapers of the moment, but it never appeared as book for too many reasons to go into but I am pleased that finally it is to appear and I appreciate the trust that the editors and certain writers both in English and in Bulgarian who have read the novel in either both languages or only one and who have that it has not dated, that it is not a book of a moment but written inside the attempt to pass beyond the moment of its creation.  

              7-- In preparation for the Bulgarian version I found a letter from David Rattray who some might remember as poet, as the first major translator of Artaud--and still the best--- and Rene Creval in particular.  Semiotext published a wonderful collection of  David's writings put together by Chris Kraus, HOW I BECAME ONE OF THE INVISIBLE

David read my novel and sent me the following letter which also included a page of typos in the book that should be fixed in a new edition which happened when Northwestern University Press did the paperback version:

June 18, 1987
Dear Tom, The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov is a tour de force.  I was riveted as they say, although it is a tale I wouldn't want to identify with, I guess I am forced to, willy-nilly.  The 12-minute interior monologue of a man being strangled, compressed into 120 pages or less---I count the dozen-odd pages of documents  as something that  might flash past in a split second--- then the many pages of your autobiographical track, and the interviews, which further whittle it down--- less than half is straight Petkov--- so I tried to imagine all this as a speeded-up tape actually being spoken in the 12 minutes and I believe it is possible even if in a Martian Donald Duck falsetto--- provided Piko's thoughts and rejoinders run in tandem, and the author's voice and documents are flashed onto a wall--- it would fit ---a tight fit, but so is that noose or loop as you consistently call it.  Like Piko I am a raki man; it takes one to appreciate one. The ignoble is also in a state of humiliation.  Apart from this book I had never read a line about Petkov that fool who persisted in showing character. The dream of dying in one's bed with one's hand held is in the papers, on TV, in Reader's Digest. The puff of wind exploding the speck of ash into the air is the reality hitherto reserved for the few, now made available for all.  Have you heard of Bogdan Borkowski's film Le Poeme which shows a dissection in progress to a sound track consisting of an actor's voice declaiming Rimbaud's Drunken Boat in impassioned tones?   For the man being hanged to imagine a major earthquake reminds me of Kleist's  novella "The Earthquake in Chile" in which the young man has just climbed  upon a stool n his dungeon cell to hang himself on a noose he has fashioned somehow, when the first giant tremor of the great earthquake of sixteen-something causes the building to collapse and lands him unscathed in the street.  Therefore I at first misread your line "An earthquake would get him out of there."  Obviously you are referring to getting Dimitrov out of the saddle, not Petkov out of the noose.  I loved the Hyperborean or Austral icecap fantasy on p62.  Having spent half my life worrying  the lie that creeps i when we are speaking and the abyss between thought, word, and ear, I have to plead for Gosho and Petko and their liking for the sound of their own voice.  Maybe that was their direction finder  as it is in a way our direction finder when we share in meetings.  We are all as blind as bats in many ways, and I read that that is precisely how bats do find their way through the maze of pitch blackness--- the sound of their own voice bouncing off obstacles---  it is shows them where to go and where not to go.  "Fly my little bird but remember no bird makes a nest in a cloud."  I was put in mind of Gilbert White in Selkirk the speculation on whether sparrows migrate south in winter or were ravished up into the empyrean where they somehow levitated on the highest clouds.  I really loved your book.
                                             DAVID (Rattray)

DEVASTATION of a sorts

     This post is to serve as a preface to a short voyage to California and on to the Arizona desert...

1 AND AGAIN CHANGED: JOHN WESLEY

2 EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS a Bulgarian novel written in English

3 JUST LIKE THAT

4 TRAVELS WITH ELIZABETH

5 FORGET THE FUURE

6 NOTHING DOING

7THE END AND A BEGINNING

8DIPTYCH BEFORE DYING

       By making the list I see what I have done... but I also see what has not happened: these manuscripts have not been seen into print.  
      Of course the fault is mine.  
      Yet.
      Yet.
      To even hesitate about: of course the fault is mine

                                         34
        
      Most  of these manuscripts have been seen by editors---guys like like Richard Seaver, Daniel Halpern, and others whose names... who claimed they admired my work, guys who I knew for more than 35 years at least but the excuse: sales and being dictated to by the sales department... for whatever reason they were not prepared to suspect the books might sell well as happened at DALKEY ARCHIVE, where John O'Brien under-estimated sales and reviews so had to go back to press for GOING TO PATCHOGUE. 

                                                     35

      Sections, parts, prepared slides from the following books have been published:  FORGET THE FUTURE in BOMB as well as in THE CREAM CITY REVIEW...  AND AGAIN CHANGE: JOHN WESLEY in THE NOTRE DAME REVIEW, as was THE END AND A BEGINNING...  JUST LIKE THAT--- the opening and the conclusion appeared in THE READING ROOM edited by Barbara Probst Solomon.

AND so, even I, a connoisseur of self-loathing  can't go on with this and was thinking of the positive response to the selection from EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS an Bulgarian novel in English that I read at the Bulgarian Consulate in New York City and I will not refrain from mentioning the sort of thumbs-up from Georgia Gospodinov and his wife Biliana Kourtasheva who introduced the reading  which lead me to realize that both THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV and EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS a Bulgarian novel written in English revolve or are instigated by the contemplation of a dead person.  PETKOV found a home in both English at Dalkey Archive Press and at Northwestern University Press and even in a  Bulgarian journal Svreminik , a "thick" journal much like Novy Mir, the famous Russian journal, upon which it was modeled while EMPTY... is a pile of pages on the desk by which I type this and in a digital form within the machine... but the corpse that launched this manuscript was turned to ashes for which there was no burial site in Upstate New York, while that narrator journeys on the aerial  toll-way of a soul within the Orthodox Christian belief looking for a place to... in Bulgaria. 

A NEW YEAR JUST LIKE LAST YEAR and most likely like next year

Summer 1978 in THE GOREY DETAIL (Ireland)   Francis Stuart writes, All the  best fiction lately, and this will be evident in the future, is a criticism and extension of the novel form.  No good piece of fiction can now be self-contained, it is open to the world outside at both ends.

AND:   Knowledge, as Blake said is love. Knowledge that is not love, and that is almost all contemporary knowledge is illusion.

AND:  The serious novel is negative to popular ideas, is alienated  from the general assumptions of its society, gives an unequivocable ‘No’ to all general ideas and ideals.  Only in the style in which this “No” is annunciated is there a positive glimmer.

One could quote the whole short article but why bother as we live In a culture that has grown only worse from this moment  back when Stuart writes, The real enemy of art is not general indifference or widespread public ignorance.  It is culture, what passes for culture among any of the so-called well-educated.  For them art is an adjunct to their successful lives; it is positive and reassuring, confirming them in their intellectual assumptions. This kind of culture, that incidentally, prefers biographies and even travel books to fiction, is rampant in the literary supplements of the English Sunday papers. 

Of course Stuart if he was still alive would add: this is still  true and maybe even more dire now with the partial disappearance of literary supplements in the United States and the growing importance of  the on-line substitutes such as The Daily Beast and The Huffington Post which are even worse in their sheer knowing ignorant stupidity.  These supplements, these organs of power have made us aware of and popularized the fakery represented by: Paul Auster, Jonathan Franzen, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Martin Amis… each of which is an incitement to never admit that one writes or reads as too many consciously think of these as being what is good and drop sad inevitable necessary comparisons, the trying to explain… better give it up! As you will only be thought to pressing sour grapes as opposed to…

The BLACKLIST SECTION H by Francis Stuart is his authority for what I am quoting  above and my GOING TO PATCHOGUE and THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV is my cliaim upon you to make this post

BOOKS ARE RELICS

.Books are relics.

.In no way is this disturbing or sad or a cause for the usual dismay.

.Most of my life was spent in the time of typewriters but now the use of the typewriter is as common and as interesting as man bites dog.

.The owner of St. Mark’s Bookshop--- the great literary bookshop within walking distance and heir to the 8th Street Bookstore of memory--- was telling me a few weeks ago: there is no longer a book culture. No one waits for a new book as of old by certain authors. They had a midnight opening for the new Thomas Pynchon novel but it had the feel of something from the past… and even smelled of the fake world of publicity more associated now with sexy vampire books.

.I suppose I could tease out analogies with the culture of the relic in the middle ages… and fabrication of, the trade in, the veneration of, the function of… but that would take us into areas of theology…

.I suppose, I began to see the book as a relic as I was driving around in southern Arizona last January. Except for Tombstone, book stores are few and very far apart. But I did notice in places like Ajo, AZ and Rodeo, New Mexico and in particular in the latter place secondhand shops that also sold books. In the small grocery store, junk shop and café in Rodeo were a couple of cases of books for sale. Most of them were mass market paperbacks that I surmised had been left behind by people using the trailer parks in the area… people are reluctant to throw away books… so they pile up in Rodeo in Ajo and in many of the little towns that one stops at… I guess I should have asked if anyone ever buys a book…

.I had celebrated Tombstone as a town full of books but they were of local interest, < the Gunfight at the OK Corral> some published by university and NY publishers but many by very small publishers locally… there was one bookstore owned by a prolific western themed books writer who published his own books… you see the staged gun fight and want to know more and you think a book: but in actuality all the information is on the computer right now and you can watch on You Tube various versions of the recreated gunfight you saw and you have yourself probably like I did made a littler movie… but did I buy a book?... yes, a reprint of an article about the surrender of Geronimo complete with the original photographs but then all those picture are on the computer and… but I had the feeling I was doing this more as memorial to my previous habit and this was underlined when I did buy in the Tombstone courthouse bookstore A TENDERFOOT IN TOMBSTONE The Private Journal of Geore Whitwell Parsons: The Turbulent Years: 1880-82.. I bought it because in the index it revealed the name: Endicott Peabody who had established the first Episcopal church in Tombstone and who later would go back East and establish the Groton School which my son was at that moment a student. IS it possible that anyone under the age of forty who would have done what I had done in the courthouse?

.A friend who doing the revisions of his book on a writer who originally well published in the United States in English now finds that only the French are interested in his books and are even prepared to translate his unpublished English language books. A new book by this author had appeared on the internet in an English version and my friend wrote that he was not really prepared to re-write the whole manuscript of his book unless someone was prepared to pay him to do it and since as he is subsidizing the publication of his own book he didn’t see much reason because in reality how many people will actually read a book about an author who now only has one book in print in the United States and even though it is published by a major NY publisher…

.This is a long roundabout way of getting to the idea that it is only very recently really in the course of human history that writers expect or are known for living off the books they write…. I won’t rehearse the whole history of authorship but we all well know those dedications to patrons, protectors that introduce books of poetry and prose that used to introduce the book before they were replaced with long lists of people that the author lists as helpers, friends etc ,etc, an incredible display of narcissistic anxiety. Did Horace, Catullus or Virgil have agents and receive royalty statements?

.So now that books are relics: what to do with this impulse to write… and to have read what one writes: now you are reading these words which cost you nothing and cost me nothing…

.Is it reasonable anymore to expect to receive money for what one writes?

.Of course: how is the writer to live?

.There are those relic embellishers: foundation prizes or fellowships, welfare grants from the government, teaching sinecures for those creating aspirant relic makers by passing on “tips” of how it is done.

.A POSITIVE NOTE. Denis Donoghue wrote an essay about how Ezra Pound through the writing of The Cantos was trying to urge into existence an ideal prince patron. I would do so also but well know that any prince patron who came along would quickly be ensnared in making sure the patronage would be distributed in the correct proportions along ethnic, racial sexual lines of retreat from any true excellence if there was any public hint of such largess.

.Now, I have been writing for some time a much longer thing for lack of a better word and soon it will be finished and it will be about 300 pages. I received no money in advance for writing this thing but I would like it to be read.

.In the old days two of my things--- THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV and GOING TO PATCHOGUE were made into books and that is that..

.Since then I have written many things but they have not been made into books because editors like the late Richard Seaver for instance once said he could not make any money off of it as did Robert Weil etc…and a young guy at Harper Collins and Overlook…

.I suppose I could have gone down the list but some years ago after those two books were “published” and widely and well reviewed I had approached an agent who was honest enough to say, I cannot eat lunch off of you.

.And that is really what Richard Seaver, Robert Weil and the kid at Harper Collins were really saying: they could not eat lunch off of me or it… At the moment Weill is sitting pretty, someone said because he published a book of cartoons by R Crumb based on the first books of the Bible--- though Norton’s sales are off 25% last year--- what a fall off from the days of ZAP, for Crumb... but that is publishing : digging up the almost dead and seeing if you can make some money off of them if you teach teach them some sort of trick.

.In the mail the other day, a truly pathetic book by Patti Smith writing about her “relationship” with Robert Mapplethorpe. Smith once tried to convince people she was in the incarnation of Rimbaud but now she is wrinkled, long of tooth and should have remembered Rimbaud was finished with this stuff by the age of 21: and a memoir of a man whose claim upon posterity is the picture of himself with a bull whip shoved up his rectum…

.Of course publishers know they are a dying breed, both physically and metaphorically. No young person of a right mind would go into publishing unless possessed of a large trust fund and needed something to do to avoid the drug habit. That is the great fear stalking publishing: they know it is dying industry as they like to fashion themselves.. but are all hoping there are a few more years in the old way of doing things…

.But you are thinking of those electronic gadgets that are now appearing in the hands of people on the subway: Kindle, Sony readers and the awaited Nook? On the weekend I was in the Barnes and Noble on Union Square and asked the kid to demonstrate the Nook for me. I asked to see if Ulysses was available. HE tried to find the free sample but something happened and he couldn’t find it. He said this doesn’t usually happen but there are still some glitches… I can well imagine that these things are the future and people will learn to read “books” on their cell phones. The kid offered that while he didn’t use these electronic readers he also did not read books much anymore though he thought there would always be people interested in big old important books. The kid was Asian and I am sure he was trying to show some sort of respect for my obviously aged face…

.Just before Christmas the Los Angeles Times saw the book page staff reduced to two people… I expect it will soon be one person who will produce a page much like the page in the Newark Star Ledger…: it will mostly be a page of announcements… a telling of readers where to go and find out about new written things and where to read about these new written things or it will be… who really knows.

.Nowhere in the country is anyone adding staff to the book pages. In my short experience I have seen the Washington Post, Newsday and now the Los Angeles Times fade and fade

.HOWEVER, once again I turn when I finish this little thing to:::: NOTHING DOING because I am interested in recording these lives I met on the page: Herbert T. Lange, Al Wells, George Kamenov, Sean Patrick, the voice which has gone looking for its own grave and how it all began when once in The National Gallery, London standing in front of Nicholas Poussin’s LANDSCAPE WITH TRAVELLERS RESTING…

PS. I am a relic collector, a relic producer and from the mail as I am typing this: four equisite books: THE OTHER SLEEP by Julian Green, CHATEAU d'Argol by Julien Gracq, A JOURNEY TO MOUNT ATHOS amd THE SORCERER"S APPRENTICE both by Francois Augieras... 6 1/2 inches by 4 7/8 inches, paperback with flaps...books of a voice indifferent to time, without insidious reference to the present moment, consolations for aging flesh encasing minds that do not fade,... published by Pushkin Press in London, the only publisher ALIVE in London at the moment.

.Why am I not dead so that Pushkin Press or _____________ might think to publish my words?... (Edward Dahlberg told me in 1971 that he had been writing posthumously for most of his life. I now know what he means, maybe.)