ONE
ROBERT EARL KEEN is a singer from Texas and did a show at Fillmore East on Irving Place in New York City Saturday night. I knew of him because of his song, "The Road Goes on Forever," which is one of those songs that once heard is never forgotten. Celebrating two young people: drugs, cars, guns...Bombay Gin... and then there is Gringo Honeymoon and Merry Christmas from the Family which has the endearing lyrics: Send somebody to the Quik-Pak store/ We need some ice and an extension cord/ A can of beandip and some Diet Rite/ A box of Tampons and some Marlboro Lights...
The best Keen CDs: Gringo Honeymoon
West Textures
TWO
Pete Miller a publicist at Bloomsbury has in addition to that job taken over a used bookshop in Brooklyn: FREEBIRD 123 Columbia Street. He had a party Sunday night celebrating this and had along the French author, PIERRE BAYARD whose new book HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN'T READ is just that: a self-help book for people who don't read.
On my way there Anna the wife told me her cousin was reading the book having been given it by his father who works for Barnes and Noble. According to the cousin all the employees of Barnes and Noble are being given copies of this book. His father didn't have time to read the book so be passed it to his son... of course all those people you see working at Barnes and Noble are not employed because they like to read books. Their chief job is alphabetizing the stock and adding and removing titles based on printouts that come from the central office...
THREE
At the concert two details: an awful lot of the audience spent much of their time talking to each other, working their cellphones, IPhones, Blackberries--- all the while that Keen was singing just like the multi-tasking students in Denis Donoghue's classes. However a lot of people in the audience to which I joined sang along with Keen as we all knew the lyrics from having heard them many many times... something that ding happen many times when I was going to MAGAZINE , JOHN CALE or NICO concerts
FOUR
Brooklyn seemed like a far away place from here on East First Street in Manhattan. Having been one of the very few people at the party who was actually born in Brooklyn-- if maybe the only one--- those long dark streets from the subway station at Bergen, those carved up Browstones all tastefully decorated, the spare modern restaurants good for a pre-suicide snack were pointedly juxtaposed for me by walking over the Brooklyn Queens Expressway... the sound of the noise of rushing cars... the music that a Stockhausen might have appreciated that begins as...
None of those people at the party or in those brownstones were thinking of why as Thomas Wolfe said, only the dead know Brooklyn...
Or as Celine was saying, you have to be a little bit dead to be really funny
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Friday, November 16, 2007
MARIO VARGAS LLOSA, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW, MELINDA
Later today the Los Angeles Times Book Review section for Sunday will be posted and a version of my review of THE BAD GIRL, the new novel by Mario Vargas Llosa will be there.
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-bk-mcgonigle
Readers might be interested in my version of the review before it had to be fitted into the available space on the printed page. I will provide the opening and the final paragraphs. Both versions will be published when my collected works are published in heaven to echo Jack Kerouac
There is nothing wrong with the Los Angeles Times version of the review. It reflects the careful work of the Deputy Editor Nick Owchar, former student of both Christopher Ricks and Geoffrey Hill. The editor of the Book Review David Ulin continues to maintain the Los Angeles Times Book Review as the only genuine alternative to the New York Times Book Review. Many readers will remember how Steve Wasserman actually put the Los Angeles Times Book Review into the center of what passes for thinking in the world of book reviewing. Ulin, Owchar and the other editors continue that difficult work.
THE BAD GIRL by Mario Vargas Llosa.
Boy meets girl. Girl disappears. Boy meets the same girl again and again through all the remaining years of their lives that restlessly travel the world from Peru, to France, to England, to Japan, and finally ending in Spain. While such a story is easily capable of dragging the reader through a long sentimental swim in a sea of bathos, Mario Vargas Llosa by close attention to the historical and political detail of the years from 1950 to the last decade of the Twentieth Century has provided a compelling hypnotic updating of the classic SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION and at th same time has created through his narrator the translator Ricardo Somocurico and the genuinely mysterious and ever tantalizing "Bad Girl" characters who will possibly stock out imaginations when it comes to describing this most awful and exciting moment of recent history much as does Flaubert's novel provide a window in to mid-Nineteenth Century France
But THE BAD GIRL is first and foremost the story of this love or rather of Ricardo's lifelong love for Lily and of course that can touch a nerve for many people. I only have to say the name MELINDA and I have replaced Ricardo in the novel much as when I read SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION I became Frederick in his hopeless life long attachment to Madame Arnoux. I do not know if this is an exclusively male thing but all suspension of disbelief happened once I understand the dilemma of Ricardo. How a woman might read this novel I do not know and can not know.
It is unlikely that THE BAD GIRL will be re-read by many people. It is, and should be read, as they say, because it is a compelling mixing of the public and the private, the intimate with a sure understanding of how the world really works but it is an entertainment: it does not become a great mountain to which the reader must return again and again-- as with Cortazar's HOPSCOTCH, Lezama Lima's PARADISO or A BRIEF LIFE by Juan Carlos Onetti.
PS:
As I was re-reading the above paragraphs and in particular the final paragraph it could possibly be read as the insertion of a dagger into the heart of the book since people are always looking for reasons to avoid reading. I might be guilty of a venial sin of over-scrupulosity but I am happy to report at St Marks Bookshop it is faced out and seems to be selling... I cannot help but be jealous of people who have launched themselves into reading THE BAD GIRL. They have begun to create a constant faithful memory of a happy time well spent.
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-bk-mcgonigle
Readers might be interested in my version of the review before it had to be fitted into the available space on the printed page. I will provide the opening and the final paragraphs. Both versions will be published when my collected works are published in heaven to echo Jack Kerouac
There is nothing wrong with the Los Angeles Times version of the review. It reflects the careful work of the Deputy Editor Nick Owchar, former student of both Christopher Ricks and Geoffrey Hill. The editor of the Book Review David Ulin continues to maintain the Los Angeles Times Book Review as the only genuine alternative to the New York Times Book Review. Many readers will remember how Steve Wasserman actually put the Los Angeles Times Book Review into the center of what passes for thinking in the world of book reviewing. Ulin, Owchar and the other editors continue that difficult work.
THE BAD GIRL by Mario Vargas Llosa.
Boy meets girl. Girl disappears. Boy meets the same girl again and again through all the remaining years of their lives that restlessly travel the world from Peru, to France, to England, to Japan, and finally ending in Spain. While such a story is easily capable of dragging the reader through a long sentimental swim in a sea of bathos, Mario Vargas Llosa by close attention to the historical and political detail of the years from 1950 to the last decade of the Twentieth Century has provided a compelling hypnotic updating of the classic SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION and at th same time has created through his narrator the translator Ricardo Somocurico and the genuinely mysterious and ever tantalizing "Bad Girl" characters who will possibly stock out imaginations when it comes to describing this most awful and exciting moment of recent history much as does Flaubert's novel provide a window in to mid-Nineteenth Century France
But THE BAD GIRL is first and foremost the story of this love or rather of Ricardo's lifelong love for Lily and of course that can touch a nerve for many people. I only have to say the name MELINDA and I have replaced Ricardo in the novel much as when I read SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION I became Frederick in his hopeless life long attachment to Madame Arnoux. I do not know if this is an exclusively male thing but all suspension of disbelief happened once I understand the dilemma of Ricardo. How a woman might read this novel I do not know and can not know.
It is unlikely that THE BAD GIRL will be re-read by many people. It is, and should be read, as they say, because it is a compelling mixing of the public and the private, the intimate with a sure understanding of how the world really works but it is an entertainment: it does not become a great mountain to which the reader must return again and again-- as with Cortazar's HOPSCOTCH, Lezama Lima's PARADISO or A BRIEF LIFE by Juan Carlos Onetti.
PS:
As I was re-reading the above paragraphs and in particular the final paragraph it could possibly be read as the insertion of a dagger into the heart of the book since people are always looking for reasons to avoid reading. I might be guilty of a venial sin of over-scrupulosity but I am happy to report at St Marks Bookshop it is faced out and seems to be selling... I cannot help but be jealous of people who have launched themselves into reading THE BAD GIRL. They have begun to create a constant faithful memory of a happy time well spent.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS, PAUL VALERY, THE PAST
In the front hall of John Jay College of Criminal Justice CUNY were two young men recruiting for the Marine Corps officer's training program. I asked if this was the PLC course. They said it was and that I might be a little too young for it. I said, I had been once very favorably disposed to that course.
I am sure they did not know what to make of this man walking away.
In a letter (January 25, 1963) home from Beloit College I wrote to my parents back in Patchogue:
USMC. I'm going to Rockford to take the test as this will be my last chance and I want to take the training this summer the first half... Last night and most of the day it hovered around -10. Today it is a little warmer but not much
A second letter (February 1, 1963) I wrote:
I am giving up the USMC deal. It was so cold and sluggish that it is almost impossible to get to that center in Rockford that is like a corpse and as cold as Arctic. As a result I'll work this summer if I cant get an invitation to bum around the country which would be ideal.
From PAUL VALERY Note and Digression to THE METHOD OF LEONARDO:
To reread, then; to reread after having forgotten-- to reread oneself, without a hint of tenderness, or fatherly feeling; coldly and with critical acumen and in a mood terribly conducive to ridicule and contempt, with an alien gaze, and a destructive eye-- is to recast one's work, or feel that it should be recast, into a very different mold.
*
The personality is composed of memories, habits, inclinations responses...
*
In each of our individual lives, at the depth where treasures are buried, there is the fundamental permanence of a consciousness that depends on nothing
*
Nothing is so strange as lucidity at grips with inadequacy.
*
I knew that the works are always falsifications or contrivances; fortunately the author is never the man. The life of one is never the life of the other; no matter how many details we accumulate on the life of Racine, they will not teach us the art of writing his verse.
*
Nor is the life of author ever the life of the man he is
*
I was yearning for a splendid theme. How little that amounts to, on the page!
*
... it is ignoble to write from enthuiasm alone. Enthusiasm is not a state of mind for a writer.
I am sure they did not know what to make of this man walking away.
In a letter (January 25, 1963) home from Beloit College I wrote to my parents back in Patchogue:
USMC. I'm going to Rockford
A second letter (February 1, 1963) I wrote:
I am giving up the USMC deal. It was so cold and sluggish that it is almost impossible to get to that center in Rockford that is like a corpse and as cold as Arctic. As a result I'll work this summer if I cant get an invitation to bum around the country which would be ideal.
From PAUL VALERY Note and Digression to THE METHOD OF LEONARDO:
To reread, then; to reread after having forgotten-- to reread oneself, without a hint of tenderness, or fatherly feeling; coldly and with critical acumen and in a mood terribly conducive to ridicule and contempt, with an alien gaze, and a destructive eye-- is to recast one's work, or feel that it should be recast, into a very different mold.
*
The personality is composed of memories, habits, inclinations responses...
*
In each of our individual lives, at the depth where treasures are buried, there is the fundamental permanence of a consciousness that depends on nothing
*
Nothing is so strange as lucidity at grips with inadequacy.
*
I knew that the works
*
Nor is the life of author ever the life of the man he is
*
I was yearning for a splendid theme. How little that amounts to, on the page!
*
... it is ignoble to write from enthuiasm alone. Enthusiasm is not a state of mind for a writer.
Monday, November 12, 2007
THOMAS MCGONIGLE, JOHN (JACK) O'BRIEN, SANDOR MARAI, GYULA KRUDY
To begin with the last.
Gyula Krudy died in 1933 and his last day was imagined by Sandor Marai in SINBAD COMES HOME.
New York Review Books has just published Krudy's SUNFLOWER with a beautifully written and informative introduction by John Lukacs.
In 1910 Ezra Pound writes: All ages are contemporaneous. However the full force of the 20th century had not fallen down upon his head and our heads such that for the vast majority of people, to speak of yesterday is to speak historically, to speak of last week is to talk of ancient history and to mention something that happened last month is suddenly to enter pre-historic time
If you have discovered Sandor Marai: EMBERS, CASANOVA IN BOLZANO and most recently THE REBELS...and have maybe found Marai's MEMOIR OF HUNGARY (Central European University Press) and excerpts from his California journals published in The Hungarian Quarterly, you know how special Marai is.
I tried to explain Marai in the LATimes, "Thanks to this first English translation of EMBERS, our ever-shrinking world of culture seems a little bigger... The statues in the famous metaphorical garden of T.S. Eliot's literary tradition will have to be re-arranged to make room for this powerful work."
Krudy writes a prose that has never been read in English--- even in translation this is evident---
Three passages:
For his afternoon naps at home his head reposed on a silken cushion stuffed with female hair, curls that women bestow only on especially favored lovers; he had also collected in his apartment and held in the most sentimental regard various feminine mementos, such as ladies' shoes, forgotten petticoats, unforgettable hosiery, shifts, handkerchiefs, and hat feathers...
It was a clock face worn out by all the expectant, desperate, fatal glances cast by eyes that ahd long ago turned into varicolored pebbles along the Upper Tisza. The Roman numerals had faded, the hands were bent like a drooping mustache, the circumbalent pilgrims' robes tattered. But the tireless mechanism labored on, it still had so much left to accomplish here on earth: such as marking the hour of someone's death.
... this extraordinary woman left the door ajar, and woke from a deep slumber to a heavy hand on the nape of her neck, a trembling, joyously quivering palm cleaving to the mound, not unlike the mons veneris, found in buxom women below their neck vertebrae and from where miraculous cables and telegraph wires signal the nuptial moment. An ancient minstrel song already calls the nape the most desirable and most vulnerable bastion of that splendid castle known as the female physique. Eveline had a neck equally suited to the necklace and the noose.
Another novel by Krudy THE CRIMSON COACH was published in an English translation in Hungary in 1967. The introduction does not mention Marai because under the Communism he was a non-person. Krudy is presented as a progressive writer interested in the powerless and obscure.
Lukacs, mentions in his introduction to KRUDY'S CHRONICLES, a selection of Krudy's journalism, that Krudy was "deeply conservative and a traditionalist. He had a great and abiding respect (more: a love) for old standards, old customs, older people. (His favorite season, as he himself often wrote was autumn-- and after that, winter)... like the greatest historians of mankind, he was essentially a Prophet of a Past."
But the day wears on...
I had wanted to talk about how Thomas McGonigle came to know John (Jack) O'Brien, the founder of Dalkey Archive.
McGonigle happened to read in the May 31, 1981 New York Times that Gilbert Sorrentino would be reading that coming summer: Lawrence Sterne, books by Zukofsky, Pinget, Eastlake, Cela, Calvino and a novel CADENZA by Ralph Cusack. The last time McGonigle had heard that name Cusack was in the back room of Grogan's in Dublin in 1974. A guy was talking about having visited Cusack in France and that Cusack had published CADENZA the only novel that could be compared to the best of Flann O'Brien.
Sorrentino was written to and in reply mentioned a John O'Brien, had begun to publish a magazine, The Review of Contemporary Fiction out in the Chicago suburbs and that might be of interest...
Thomas McGonigle thought he was about to write about John (Jack) O'Brien. He thought he was going to write about writing for The Review of Contemporary Fiction. And there would be the story about how Dalkey Archive came to be and how Dalkey Archive published THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV and GOING TO PATCHOGUE and how it did not publish ST. PATRICK'S DAY (Dublin, 1974) but Thomas McGonigle at the moment has hesitated not from any sense of fear but from a certain slight fever of reluctance...
Gyula Krudy died in 1933 and his last day was imagined by Sandor Marai in SINBAD COMES HOME.
New York Review Books has just published Krudy's SUNFLOWER with a beautifully written and informative introduction by John Lukacs.
In 1910 Ezra Pound writes: All ages are contemporaneous. However the full force of the 20th century had not fallen down upon his head and our heads such that for the vast majority of people, to speak of yesterday is to speak historically, to speak of last week is to talk of ancient history and to mention something that happened last month is suddenly to enter pre-historic time
If you have discovered Sandor Marai: EMBERS, CASANOVA IN BOLZANO and most recently THE REBELS...and have maybe found Marai's MEMOIR OF HUNGARY (Central European University Press) and excerpts from his California journals published in The Hungarian Quarterly, you know how special Marai is.
I tried to explain Marai in the LATimes, "Thanks to this first English translation of EMBERS, our ever-shrinking world of culture seems a little bigger... The statues in the famous metaphorical garden of T.S. Eliot's literary tradition will have to be re-arranged to make room for this powerful work."
Krudy writes a prose that has never been read in English--- even in translation this is evident---
Three passages:
For his afternoon naps at home his head reposed on a silken cushion stuffed with female hair, curls that women bestow only on especially favored lovers; he had also collected in his apartment and held in the most sentimental regard various feminine mementos, such as ladies' shoes, forgotten petticoats, unforgettable hosiery, shifts, handkerchiefs, and hat feathers...
It was a clock face worn out by all the expectant, desperate, fatal glances cast by eyes that ahd long ago turned into varicolored pebbles along the Upper Tisza. The Roman numerals had faded, the hands were bent like a drooping mustache, the circumbalent pilgrims' robes tattered. But the tireless mechanism labored on, it still had so much left to accomplish here on earth: such as marking the hour of someone's death.
... this extraordinary woman left the door ajar, and woke from a deep slumber to a heavy hand on the nape of her neck, a trembling, joyously quivering palm cleaving to the mound, not unlike the mons veneris, found in buxom women below their neck vertebrae and from where miraculous cables and telegraph wires signal the nuptial moment. An ancient minstrel song already calls the nape the most desirable and most vulnerable bastion of that splendid castle known as the female physique. Eveline had a neck equally suited to the necklace and the noose.
Another novel by Krudy THE CRIMSON COACH was published in an English translation in Hungary in 1967. The introduction does not mention Marai because under the Communism he was a non-person. Krudy is presented as a progressive writer interested in the powerless and obscure.
Lukacs, mentions in his introduction to KRUDY'S CHRONICLES, a selection of Krudy's journalism, that Krudy was "deeply conservative and a traditionalist. He had a great and abiding respect (more: a love) for old standards, old customs, older people. (His favorite season, as he himself often wrote was autumn-- and after that, winter)... like the greatest historians of mankind, he was essentially a Prophet of a Past."
But the day wears on...
I had wanted to talk about how Thomas McGonigle came to know John (Jack) O'Brien, the founder of Dalkey Archive.
McGonigle happened to read in the May 31, 1981 New York Times that Gilbert Sorrentino would be reading that coming summer: Lawrence Sterne, books by Zukofsky, Pinget, Eastlake, Cela, Calvino and a novel CADENZA by Ralph Cusack. The last time McGonigle had heard that name Cusack was in the back room of Grogan's in Dublin in 1974. A guy was talking about having visited Cusack in France and that Cusack had published CADENZA the only novel that could be compared to the best of Flann O'Brien.
Sorrentino was written to and in reply mentioned a John O'Brien, had begun to publish a magazine, The Review of Contemporary Fiction out in the Chicago suburbs and that might be of interest...
Thomas McGonigle thought he was about to write about John (Jack) O'Brien. He thought he was going to write about writing for The Review of Contemporary Fiction. And there would be the story about how Dalkey Archive came to be and how Dalkey Archive published THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV and GOING TO PATCHOGUE and how it did not publish ST. PATRICK'S DAY (Dublin, 1974) but Thomas McGonigle at the moment has hesitated not from any sense of fear but from a certain slight fever of reluctance...
MIRCEA CARTARESCU, THOMAS BERNHARD, ERNST JUNGER< JOHN JAY COLLEGE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE CUNY, TRISTRAM SHANDY
The Romanian writer Mircea Cartarescu is interviewed and profiled in the latest post at www.signandsight.com, which is the most important culture site in the world. It is based on the best cultural articles from the three major German newspapers and is one of the very very rare sites that seems to be genuinely interested in a real cross-section of political and aesthetic view points. It used to come every morning, five times a week, but now it is only comes twice or so a week.
The site was celebrating Cartarescu's trilogy ORBITOR (Glaring) originally published in 1996, 2002 and now finished in 2007. The site reports that it, "describes a city awash with thrills and nightmares... captures the socialist capital (Bucharest) in the moment of its downfall. His magical realism gives a prefab block--- in reality a celebration of the perpendicular--- on oval window and the socialist years a metaphysical superstructure. Bucharest becomes a mystical city." Cartarescu says of his book, "Sometimes I explain my book as a mystical butterfly or a flying cathedral."
In 2005, I reviewed for the LATimes Cartarescu's first book to be translated into English, NOSTALGIA. (New Directions) I talked in terms of Joyce, Pessoa, Hamsun and could have easily gone on to Faulkner. And if you may forgive the blurb I buried in the review, "NOSTALGIA is gripping, impassioned, unexpected--- the qualities the best in literature possesses."
Earlier in the review I had gone on about reverberating nuance and self-consciousness but I tried to lure readers into the book with: "NOSTALGIA opens with "The Roulette Player, a hypnotic suspenseful prologue in which a man rises to an unimaginable level of success playing Russian roulette and, when no longer facing any challenger, decides to challenge himself by adding bullets to the revolver."
After reading the interview profile of Cartarescu I got in touch with New Directions his American publisher and heard back that it is unlikely that they will be doing any more of his books as NOSTALGIA has sold only around 500 copies.
No reader should think that figure is unusual. Back in 1979/80 I remember talking with the publisher of Alfred A. Knopf after CORRECTION by Thomas Bernhard had been published. This guy reported to me that to date they had sold a combined grand total of around a thousand copies of all three Bernhard books they had published, GARGOYLES, THE LIME WORKS AND CORRECTIONS.
Happily, Knopf was not discouraged by that figure and maybe New Directions will have a change of heart.
I had wanted to talk about my own books but that will have to be for another day.
Before I go, I was also thinking that today in two sections of a freshman composition course at John Jay College of Criminal Justice CUNY, students were describing their experience of reading Ernst Junger's STORM OF STEEL. I also was re-reading it in preparation for talking about it on Wednesday and found this tiny bit that seems to be a fitting end to this writing.
It is from late in the book in the year 1918:
"I led my three platoons string out in file a cross the terrain, with circling aeroplanes bombing and strafing overhead. When we reached our objective, we dispersed into shell-holes and dug-outs, as occasional shells came lobbing over the road.
I felt so bad that day that I lay down in a little piece of trench and fell asleep right away. When I woke up, I read a few pages of TRISTRAM SHANDY, which I had with me in my map case, and so apathetically, like an invalid, I spent the sunny afternoon."
The site was celebrating Cartarescu's trilogy ORBITOR (Glaring) originally published in 1996, 2002 and now finished in 2007. The site reports that it, "describes a city awash with thrills and nightmares... captures the socialist capital (Bucharest) in the moment of its downfall. His magical realism gives a prefab block--- in reality a celebration of the perpendicular--- on oval window and the socialist years a metaphysical superstructure. Bucharest becomes a mystical city." Cartarescu says of his book, "Sometimes I explain my book as a mystical butterfly or a flying cathedral."
In 2005, I reviewed for the LATimes Cartarescu's first book to be translated into English, NOSTALGIA. (New Directions) I talked in terms of Joyce, Pessoa, Hamsun and could have easily gone on to Faulkner. And if you may forgive the blurb I buried in the review, "NOSTALGIA is gripping, impassioned, unexpected--- the qualities the best in literature possesses."
Earlier in the review I had gone on about reverberating nuance and self-consciousness but I tried to lure readers into the book with: "NOSTALGIA opens with "The Roulette Player, a hypnotic suspenseful prologue in which a man rises to an unimaginable level of success playing Russian roulette and, when no longer facing any challenger, decides to challenge himself by adding bullets to the revolver."
After reading the interview profile of Cartarescu I got in touch with New Directions his American publisher and heard back that it is unlikely that they will be doing any more of his books as NOSTALGIA has sold only around 500 copies.
No reader should think that figure is unusual. Back in 1979/80 I remember talking with the publisher of Alfred A. Knopf after CORRECTION by Thomas Bernhard had been published. This guy reported to me that to date they had sold a combined grand total of around a thousand copies of all three Bernhard books they had published, GARGOYLES, THE LIME WORKS AND CORRECTIONS.
Happily, Knopf was not discouraged by that figure and maybe New Directions will have a change of heart.
I had wanted to talk about my own books but that will have to be for another day.
Before I go, I was also thinking that today in two sections of a freshman composition course at John Jay College of Criminal Justice CUNY, students were describing their experience of reading Ernst Junger's STORM OF STEEL. I also was re-reading it in preparation for talking about it on Wednesday and found this tiny bit that seems to be a fitting end to this writing.
It is from late in the book in the year 1918:
"I led my three platoons string out in file a cross the terrain, with circling aeroplanes bombing and strafing overhead. When we reached our objective, we dispersed into shell-holes and dug-outs, as occasional shells came lobbing over the road.
I felt so bad that day that I lay down in a little piece of trench and fell asleep right away. When I woke up, I read a few pages of TRISTRAM SHANDY, which I had with me in my map case, and so apathetically, like an invalid, I spent the sunny afternoon."
Sunday, November 11, 2007
MAILER, NINA BERBEROVA, PUBLICITY VERSUS LITERATURE, PETER DIMOCK
ONE
The death of Norman Mailer was announced in the newspapers today--- "I thought he was dead a long time ago," a woman was saying this afternoon--- brought to mind a conversation I had with Nina Berberova--- you remember her I trust for her short novels and her magisterial memoir, THE ITALICS ARE MINE,--- a few years before she died. We were talking about well known writers and less known writers and how so much of American literary life is based upon the manipulation of the machinery of publicity. "In Russian," I remember Berberova saying, "we always make the distinction between a history of publicity and the history of literature. We make an absolute distinction between publicists and writers. On one hand you have people like Yevtushenko and certainly Mayakovsky and others I can't be bothered to mention who belong to a history of publicity and on the other hand there are those such as Mandelstam, Khodasevich, Nabokov and Akhmatova who of course belong to the history of literature."
Obviously, Norman Mailer is now a mere mention in a history of publicity as is the recently dead Susan Sontag. I am sure the obituary writers are fine tuning their obits for Tom Wolfe who is part and parcel of that world and come to think of it: isn't it about time that he passed beyond?--- or maybe he is already dead... as surely as are the guys who wrote THE WHITE HOTEL and THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP
TWO
Peter Dimock is a writer. Dimock has also been an editor at Knopf and is currently an executive editor at Columbia University Press. Dimock is a writer who wrote one of the very few books to bear re-reading that came out of the experience of the Vietnam War: A SHORT RHETORIC FOR LEAVING THE FAMILY. I mention this because his book gives authority to the warning that he sent me after reading a few of my previous blogs, "It's good to hear your voice in this possible non-air of literature. I hope you don't give in to the temptations of being swept away by this virtual world unless you are sure that's what you want--- how to gauge such a calculation or choice (if it is one), I have no idea. There is probably no reliable language for such a decision."
I have no immediate answer if indeed an answer is possible or needed. I am aware that I began doing this sort of writing within the moment of my own recognition that something was done with... and maybe it has been done with for many years and only now am I getting around to knowing this. I am aware that I can not live beyond my immediate moment.
Read A SHORT RHETORIC FOR LEAVING THE FAMILY by Peter Dimock, published 1998 by Dalkey Archive; probably not available at your local bookstore... but I am sure you can get it from Amazon.
The death of Norman Mailer was announced in the newspapers today--- "I thought he was dead a long time ago," a woman was saying this afternoon--- brought to mind a conversation I had with Nina Berberova--- you remember her I trust for her short novels and her magisterial memoir, THE ITALICS ARE MINE,--- a few years before she died. We were talking about well known writers and less known writers and how so much of American literary life is based upon the manipulation of the machinery of publicity. "In Russian," I remember Berberova saying, "we always make the distinction between a history of publicity and the history of literature. We make an absolute distinction between publicists and writers. On one hand you have people like Yevtushenko and certainly Mayakovsky and others I can't be bothered to mention who belong to a history of publicity and on the other hand there are those such as Mandelstam, Khodasevich, Nabokov and Akhmatova who of course belong to the history of literature."
Obviously, Norman Mailer is now a mere mention in a history of publicity as is the recently dead Susan Sontag. I am sure the obituary writers are fine tuning their obits for Tom Wolfe who is part and parcel of that world and come to think of it: isn't it about time that he passed beyond?--- or maybe he is already dead... as surely as are the guys who wrote THE WHITE HOTEL and THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP
TWO
Peter Dimock is a writer. Dimock has also been an editor at Knopf and is currently an executive editor at Columbia University Press. Dimock is a writer who wrote one of the very few books to bear re-reading that came out of the experience of the Vietnam War: A SHORT RHETORIC FOR LEAVING THE FAMILY. I mention this because his book gives authority to the warning that he sent me after reading a few of my previous blogs, "It's good to hear your voice in this possible non-air of literature. I hope you don't give in to the temptations of being swept away by this virtual world unless you are sure that's what you want--- how to gauge such a calculation or choice (if it is one), I have no idea. There is probably no reliable language for such a decision."
I have no immediate answer if indeed an answer is possible or needed. I am aware that I began doing this sort of writing within the moment of my own recognition that something was done with... and maybe it has been done with for many years and only now am I getting around to knowing this. I am aware that I can not live beyond my immediate moment.
Read A SHORT RHETORIC FOR LEAVING THE FAMILY by Peter Dimock, published 1998 by Dalkey Archive; probably not available at your local bookstore... but I am sure you can get it from Amazon.
Thursday, November 8, 2007
KING LEAR, DENIS DONOGHUE, DISTRACTED STUDENTS, QUALITY OF NOTHING
Denis Donoghue has concluded his two lectures on KING LEAR. He drew this listener's attention to an essay by Sigurd Burckhardt, "The Quality of Nothing" by adding that the author had been a friend and was a suicide. I have not read the article yet. Of course the essay is about the use of the word nothing in the play.
Donoghue also quoted from the famous Auden essay on the fool in Shakespeare. And he again quoted from Kenneth Burke and R. P. Blackmur. I mention these names because Donoghue is the sort of lecturer who is generous in his quotation and I have always found these leads to be productive of thought.
Most of Donoghue's lecture was composed of quotation from the final three acts of the play. It was an almost a perfect act of Walter Benjamin criticism: you will remember that Benjamin argued that the perfect act of criticism was quotation from the text under discussion and by the very quotations the critic's meaning would be made clear....
If I was a better typist I would quote at length in the same way...
I sat in the last row of that converted movie house on 8th Street. I noticed three students about me: the girl sitting next to me did not have the text before her. She took some notes and then stopped. The young man to her left typed on his laptop all through the lecture. He looked to be doing an assignment for another class. He also did not have the text with him. Immediately in front of me was a young lady also hard at work on her laptop scanning through the whole of the 75 minutes site after site... if you say I was not myself paying attention to the lecture by being distracted by these young people you would be wrong.
Now as then I have been thinking about whatever was going on in their heads? I do not know what to make of them. You just remember that no attendance is taken in this class so why do they go along to the class? Surely Donoghue's voice must serve as some sort of distraction... Donoghue is not bothered by this, he says and to be fair to the room at large there are some students who do read along with him and are taking notes...
"Certain things must happen..." Donoghue is saying as he launches into the lecture... "Certain things," I repeat to myself... and I take away the memory of tenderness of Donoghue's voice as he begins to read the passages when Cordelia and Lear are reconciled.
And then as the 75 minutes come to a close Donoghue is reading the last lines of the play when Edgar is saying, "The weight of this sad time, we must obey
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest have borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long."
and Donoghue adds: "that is that with a minute or two to spare."
Donoghue also quoted from the famous Auden essay on the fool in Shakespeare. And he again quoted from Kenneth Burke and R. P. Blackmur. I mention these names because Donoghue is the sort of lecturer who is generous in his quotation and I have always found these leads to be productive of thought.
Most of Donoghue's lecture was composed of quotation from the final three acts of the play. It was an almost a perfect act of Walter Benjamin criticism: you will remember that Benjamin argued that the perfect act of criticism was quotation from the text under discussion and by the very quotations the critic's meaning would be made clear....
If I was a better typist I would quote at length in the same way...
I sat in the last row of that converted movie house on 8th Street. I noticed three students about me: the girl sitting next to me did not have the text before her. She took some notes and then stopped. The young man to her left typed on his laptop all through the lecture. He looked to be doing an assignment for another class. He also did not have the text with him. Immediately in front of me was a young lady also hard at work on her laptop scanning through the whole of the 75 minutes site after site... if you say I was not myself paying attention to the lecture by being distracted by these young people you would be wrong.
Now as then I have been thinking about whatever was going on in their heads? I do not know what to make of them. You just remember that no attendance is taken in this class so why do they go along to the class? Surely Donoghue's voice must serve as some sort of distraction... Donoghue is not bothered by this, he says and to be fair to the room at large there are some students who do read along with him and are taking notes...
"Certain things must happen..." Donoghue is saying as he launches into the lecture... "Certain things," I repeat to myself... and I take away the memory of tenderness of Donoghue's voice as he begins to read the passages when Cordelia and Lear are reconciled.
And then as the 75 minutes come to a close Donoghue is reading the last lines of the play when Edgar is saying, "The weight of this sad time, we must obey
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest have borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long."
and Donoghue adds: "that is that with a minute or two to spare."
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