20
Well, I did hear from Europa Editions about my manuscript:
"I read your fiction with interest. You write with style and verve but, alas, I don't believe I could publish either JUST LIKE THAT or THE END OF A BEGINNING with success. I do hope that you are able to place the novels at another house.
21
Well, I did probably expect such a letter.
So then why did you send them out?
Because the writing is not finished until the book is read... even if one understands as a Paul Valery might write that no book is ever finished it is...
And as Turgenev: for those five unknown readers.
22
Well, I might posit the belief that publishers are the last believers in fortune tellers, though the proliferations of storefront psychics, personal advisors and other manipulators of the future, would indicate they are just a branch of a much larger industry represented by your local woman with the strange Egyptian props, sitting in a tiny storefront in the back of which is an over-weight gentleman watching a foreign language video on a flat screen TV.
23
Well, one does know the publisher/editor sits at her/his desk--- a desk strewn with magazines--- with a physical or mental form always near at hand on which they calculate the costs and future of whatever book they might be considering. They have to be able to come up with numbers for advanced copies to all the usual outlets and then calculate first month, first quarter, first half, first year and then subsequent sales figures... of course all these numbers are grabbed from the thickened air through which they move...
24
Well, we all remember Krapp in KRAPP'S LAST TAPE recording himself: Seventeen copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries beyond the seas. Getting known. (Pause) One pound six and something, eight I have little doubt. (Pause) Crawled out once or twice, before the summer was cold. Sat shivering in the park, drowned in dreams and burning to be gone.
25
Well, I simply know on the day that Kent Carroll wrote his note to me, he was not in the mood to make up the necessary figures for these manuscripts just as Robert Weil, Richard Dick Seaver and John O'Brien before him...
26
Well, I had tried to describe the beginnings and the ends of that thing called The 60s. I had divided that one book into two books though they are or could be combined into one book. The first line of JUST LIKE THAT A Moment in 1965: Are you a Jew.
The second line: I was asked this question 35 years ago in Leipzig.
And from the last line of that book: ...all shaped up into the journey and the what had happened on my Spring holiday that year in Leipzig in the German Democratic Republic when I went over from Dublin to get away from it all, as I ad thought, but stocking the future when, dear one, you ask, and I begin...
THE END OF A BEGINNING is more complicated bound as it is by the fragments of a play about the death of a father and beginning after a moment from the play where a daughter and son are talking about the funeral preparations the reader is then dropped into the Upper West Side of Manhattan, into a moment after when the reader will move midst the sexual appetites of the Sullivanians, conversing with a strange world re-enacting the life and times of Charles Manson while Anthony Burgess sits in The Gold Rail on Broadway between 110th and 111th Streets complaining of the rudeness of Princeton while next door Johnny Greene of Greene County Alabama is remembering early in the morning the civil rights movement as it moved through bedrooms and in fields of Southern flesh which he is trying to re-create as Billy, fascinated by Ali McGraw's brother is washing dishes in Times Square after reading Rimbaud but tired of women who want him to tie them up...
27
Well,
Friday, April 11, 2008
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
POSTHUMOUS pleasure?
---9---
Again, I am moving into the posthumous life Edward Dahlberg talked about in 1970 in his windowless apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. There would be the necessary ironic moment of public recognition of Dahlberg with the publication of his confessions in that year but by the time of his death (1977) even the New York Times obituary managed to avoid mentioning his BECAUSE I WAS FLESH.
---10---
Not for no reason have I been thinking of Dahlberg as it is now three weeks that a publisher has had a manuscript. True to most publishers I am sure the manuscript is in a pile. The occasion for requesting it a little dim so now it is just one of those things. Too much experience of being in publishers' offices or in book review section offices and noticing the piles and piles and how whim directs the hand to whatever is right in front of a person.
---11---
Of course it is hard to face the truth that all of life is whim, accident... thus the elaborate schemes to describe, to falsify...
---13---
To forget the whim, the accident is the sitting down to write. At lunch yesterday with the Asst Consul General of Norway the talk turned to blogs and while she admitted that she was too old-fashioned to really be able to read these blogs she still wondered why one would write them?
---14---
He---to distance myself from the I who does this--- turned to the blog as a physical reminder of his own powerlessness but of course packaged within the most modern of technologies. I would rather be writing directly here what I will turn to when I finish typing this, but I too am old-fashioned enough to be at work on what is to be a book that is now in AJO, ARIZONA on the edge of the hole that was once the largest open pit copper mine, listening to a man who was just back from Belize, having cashed in his property there in order to return to... both of us it turned out were staying in the Marine Motel---Still for sale when looked recently again at the website--- both of us participating in the absence of any nearby body of water or boats tied to a dock out back of the motel...
---15---
Easily distracting me from the other project of reading Yasmina Reza's DAWN, DUSK or NIGHT so that I can chat with her at the beginning of May and to be able to contrast her book with William F. Buckley's little book about Barry Goldwater entitled FLYING HIGH.
---16---
Running at the same time into getting ready to read WELCOME TO SHIRLEY so as to find 800 words which will begin: You should know that a piece of white trash is writing this review.
---17---
Eagerly I embrace these tasks as they dilute the cloying sentimentality of my situation for did not E.M. Cioran once write that each book is a postponed suicide?
---18---
Never forgetting that Edward Dahlberg was very fond of reminding his listener that it takes a long time to understand nothing.
---19.
Didn't I know from the very beginning it would be like this?
Again, I am moving into the posthumous life Edward Dahlberg talked about in 1970 in his windowless apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. There would be the necessary ironic moment of public recognition of Dahlberg with the publication of his confessions in that year but by the time of his death (1977) even the New York Times obituary managed to avoid mentioning his BECAUSE I WAS FLESH.
---10---
Not for no reason have I been thinking of Dahlberg as it is now three weeks that a publisher has had a manuscript. True to most publishers I am sure the manuscript is in a pile. The occasion for requesting it a little dim so now it is just one of those things. Too much experience of being in publishers' offices or in book review section offices and noticing the piles and piles and how whim directs the hand to whatever is right in front of a person.
---11---
Of course it is hard to face the truth that all of life is whim, accident... thus the elaborate schemes to describe, to falsify...
---13---
To forget the whim, the accident is the sitting down to write. At lunch yesterday with the Asst Consul General of Norway the talk turned to blogs and while she admitted that she was too old-fashioned to really be able to read these blogs she still wondered why one would write them?
---14---
He---to distance myself from the I who does this--- turned to the blog as a physical reminder of his own powerlessness but of course packaged within the most modern of technologies. I would rather be writing directly here what I will turn to when I finish typing this, but I too am old-fashioned enough to be at work on what is to be a book that is now in AJO, ARIZONA on the edge of the hole that was once the largest open pit copper mine, listening to a man who was just back from Belize, having cashed in his property there in order to return to... both of us it turned out were staying in the Marine Motel---Still for sale when looked recently again at the website--- both of us participating in the absence of any nearby body of water or boats tied to a dock out back of the motel...
---15---
Easily distracting me from the other project of reading Yasmina Reza's DAWN, DUSK or NIGHT so that I can chat with her at the beginning of May and to be able to contrast her book with William F. Buckley's little book about Barry Goldwater entitled FLYING HIGH.
---16---
Running at the same time into getting ready to read WELCOME TO SHIRLEY so as to find 800 words which will begin: You should know that a piece of white trash is writing this review.
---17---
Eagerly I embrace these tasks as they dilute the cloying sentimentality of my situation for did not E.M. Cioran once write that each book is a postponed suicide?
---18---
Never forgetting that Edward Dahlberg was very fond of reminding his listener that it takes a long time to understand nothing.
---19.
Didn't I know from the very beginning it would be like this?
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
WEEPING AND VOMITING: ethnicity, race and Borges
THIS IS UNFINISHED,INCOMPLETE... A START:
---pre---
"Are we going around in circles? We're going around, perhaps, but not in circles."
"Doesn't that make you want to vomit, too? To weep while you're vomiting."
from SOMEONE by Robert Pinget.
Translated by Barbara Wright
---pre---
Celine mentions that we are all students of religion now. His now was the 1930s, 1940s.
Of course we are still students of religion and...
---pre---
In 1983 I began to publish and edit: ADRIFT WRITINGS: IRISH, IRISH AMERICAN AND... I published three issues and then stopped. ADRIFT is now in the important libraries gathering dust.
I stopped publishing ADRIFT because I could no longer support the idea of an ethnicity based journal of writing.
After three issues of ADRIFT I had published all the important, significant and worthy writers who identified themselves as Irish or Irish American. In a folder I had poems from Thomas Kinsella which had arrived too late. I had not asked Denis Donoghue for a piece of writing for no reason but he should be included along with Desmond O'Grady and John Jordan... as examples of regret.
Because of the ethnic label attached to ADRIFT I received hundreds and hundreds of submissions all demanding publication because they took up so-called Irish themes, were set in Ireland or were describing what it means to be Irish American. By and large that is all these pieces of writing had going for them. I had hoped that the writing I had published existed independent of the ethnic label. These new submissions demanded publication because of their ethnicity... and I was invited to over-look their flaws as literature. I chose not to and the journal ceased.
The letters and submissons from Francis Stuart, Samuel Beckett, Brian Coffey, James Liddy and others await their transportation to some library.
This was a visceral understanding of the limitations of ethnicity.
---pre---
Another aspect of ethnicity and literature. Many years ago I was in to see the publisher of Alfred A. Knopf. We were talking about Thomas Bernhard. Knopf had published three novels of his in translation and the combined sales of those three books was in the very very low four figures. Knopf persisted in publishing Bernhard to their credit. But this is not about the problem of translation of foreign writers. This publisher explained to me how Knopf thought about foreign writers. We imagine, you could say, that we preside over a sort of motel and each country has a room in it. For many years Thomas Mann occupied the German room. Camus had the French room along with Gide and Sartre. Hamsun had the Norwegian room. Sigrid Unsted had the Swedish room.
So of course I understood that Bernhard would have the Austrian room and that Julian Rios was being tried out for the Spanish room when Knopf published his novels... and Nelida Pinon was tried out for the Brazilian room.
But with the rise of mandatory diversity, publishing was quite prepared for that and of course served up the necessary Dominican Writer Junot Diaz... Sandra Cisneros as the needed Mexican-American writer... while the American-Indian writer was Sherman Alexie and all the while the dread Toni Morrison lurked... and publishing has been happily continuing on with newly discovered ethnics, Indians from India, Pakistani, Arab, Chinese, Japanese... and the list goes on... with the message that one is to read these writers as representatives of their ethnicity and only secondarily as literature... and you are to over-look the usual glaring evident flaws in the writing...
---pre---
There was a way out of this awful mess via what Pascale Casanova called the World Republic of Letters but that didn't go very far because her two modern examples were William Faulkner and Samuel Beckett... education in America is wedded to the idea of ethnic diversity no matter the drivel being served up...
---pre---
And while I am in this terrible bog I might as well bring up that other word: race.
Black and White or Colored and White or Negro and White or African American and White...
In Patchogue on Furman Lane in the 1950s, a Negro family moved in next to us. Neighbors came over and asked my father was he worried. He said they were cleaner than most of the white people in Patchogue.
In my high school class of 1962 there were no Negro students. There was one Negro teacher in the high school.
(I have used the word Negro as I remember Ralph Ellison talking about why he preferred it when he came to visit Hollins College in 1970... it was a step up from colored and... seemed a better word than Black. Of course in Patchogue the accepted word was colored and the formal word was Negro. My father used the word colored.
---pre---
This weekend I was talking with Anna's mother who is 87 and originally from Estonia. She was saying that when she came from the camps in the early 50s it was understood that you wanted to have a Negro doctor as there were so few of them and they must have worked very hard to have gone to medical school and as a result they were the best doctors.
---pre---
Michelle Obama was widely reported to have felt uncomfortable at that liberal bastion of affirmative action Princeton University. No one has, as far as I know, suggested the reason she felt uncomfortable was at Princeton she was directly confronted by the evidence that at the elite colleges Blacks or African Americans as a group are less gifted than their White or Oriental fellow students... a statistical fact that every one knows is true....
---pre---
I have long believed that affirmative action is probably the single most destructive policy ever put into practice in this country.
Never again will there be women like Anna's mother believing as she did...
Affirmative action, I have also come to believe was the rich white liberal's way to get back at the source of his or her guilt--- growing up in a family where the maid, the cook or the house cleaner was Negro or Black or African American and then suddenly he or she is made to feel guilty about this during the so-called 60s-- what better way to get at the guilt than by permanently ruining the future of any Black or African American child by allowing him to advance thanks to affirmative action with the inevitable whisper behind his or her back... well, you know he or she is actually not as... even the most diabolical die- hard segregationist could not have come up with a better revenge for having been made to feel bad about... all the while being seen as doing such a good thing...
---pre---
Remember back to the days of George Wallace? I seem to remember that an awful lot of Negroes or Blacks or African Americans used to vote for George Wallace even up North when he ran for President. When asked why they would say that you know where Wallace stands but he spreads the money around to everybody not like them liberals who tell you how much they understand your situation and then forget about you right after election day because you don't have the right college degree in how to steal the welfare monies under the guise of doing a study or consulting about the future.
---after---
I was asking my son why is that the Americans didn't kill all the Indians? We have both been reading of late about Geronimo and the terrible fate of the Apaches... I mentioned to him that I had thought of this question even back when Jorge Luis Borges came to Columbia University in the early 1970s. Richard M. Elman challenged Borges about his cruel portrayal of the Gauchos. Borges had replied along the lines that gauchos did not feel pain like you or I.. Later in the discussion that moved to 110th Street Borges again took up the question of Indians in Argentina by simply saying: there are none. They were all killed.
My son said the other day, you can't ask questions like that.
---pre---
"Are we going around in circles? We're going around, perhaps, but not in circles."
"Doesn't that make you want to vomit, too? To weep while you're vomiting."
from SOMEONE by Robert Pinget.
Translated by Barbara Wright
---pre---
Celine mentions that we are all students of religion now. His now was the 1930s, 1940s.
Of course we are still students of religion and...
---pre---
In 1983 I began to publish and edit: ADRIFT WRITINGS: IRISH, IRISH AMERICAN AND... I published three issues and then stopped. ADRIFT is now in the important libraries gathering dust.
I stopped publishing ADRIFT because I could no longer support the idea of an ethnicity based journal of writing.
After three issues of ADRIFT I had published all the important, significant and worthy writers who identified themselves as Irish or Irish American. In a folder I had poems from Thomas Kinsella which had arrived too late. I had not asked Denis Donoghue for a piece of writing for no reason but he should be included along with Desmond O'Grady and John Jordan... as examples of regret.
Because of the ethnic label attached to ADRIFT I received hundreds and hundreds of submissions all demanding publication because they took up so-called Irish themes, were set in Ireland or were describing what it means to be Irish American. By and large that is all these pieces of writing had going for them. I had hoped that the writing I had published existed independent of the ethnic label. These new submissions demanded publication because of their ethnicity... and I was invited to over-look their flaws as literature. I chose not to and the journal ceased.
The letters and submissons from Francis Stuart, Samuel Beckett, Brian Coffey, James Liddy and others await their transportation to some library.
This was a visceral understanding of the limitations of ethnicity.
---pre---
Another aspect of ethnicity and literature. Many years ago I was in to see the publisher of Alfred A. Knopf. We were talking about Thomas Bernhard. Knopf had published three novels of his in translation and the combined sales of those three books was in the very very low four figures. Knopf persisted in publishing Bernhard to their credit. But this is not about the problem of translation of foreign writers. This publisher explained to me how Knopf thought about foreign writers. We imagine, you could say, that we preside over a sort of motel and each country has a room in it. For many years Thomas Mann occupied the German room. Camus had the French room along with Gide and Sartre. Hamsun had the Norwegian room. Sigrid Unsted had the Swedish room.
So of course I understood that Bernhard would have the Austrian room and that Julian Rios was being tried out for the Spanish room when Knopf published his novels... and Nelida Pinon was tried out for the Brazilian room.
But with the rise of mandatory diversity, publishing was quite prepared for that and of course served up the necessary Dominican Writer Junot Diaz... Sandra Cisneros as the needed Mexican-American writer... while the American-Indian writer was Sherman Alexie and all the while the dread Toni Morrison lurked... and publishing has been happily continuing on with newly discovered ethnics, Indians from India, Pakistani, Arab, Chinese, Japanese... and the list goes on... with the message that one is to read these writers as representatives of their ethnicity and only secondarily as literature... and you are to over-look the usual glaring evident flaws in the writing...
---pre---
There was a way out of this awful mess via what Pascale Casanova called the World Republic of Letters but that didn't go very far because her two modern examples were William Faulkner and Samuel Beckett... education in America is wedded to the idea of ethnic diversity no matter the drivel being served up...
---pre---
And while I am in this terrible bog I might as well bring up that other word: race.
Black and White or Colored and White or Negro and White or African American and White...
In Patchogue on Furman Lane in the 1950s, a Negro family moved in next to us. Neighbors came over and asked my father was he worried. He said they were cleaner than most of the white people in Patchogue.
In my high school class of 1962 there were no Negro students. There was one Negro teacher in the high school.
(I have used the word Negro as I remember Ralph Ellison talking about why he preferred it when he came to visit Hollins College in 1970... it was a step up from colored and... seemed a better word than Black. Of course in Patchogue the accepted word was colored and the formal word was Negro. My father used the word colored.
---pre---
This weekend I was talking with Anna's mother who is 87 and originally from Estonia. She was saying that when she came from the camps in the early 50s it was understood that you wanted to have a Negro doctor as there were so few of them and they must have worked very hard to have gone to medical school and as a result they were the best doctors.
---pre---
Michelle Obama was widely reported to have felt uncomfortable at that liberal bastion of affirmative action Princeton University. No one has, as far as I know, suggested the reason she felt uncomfortable was at Princeton she was directly confronted by the evidence that at the elite colleges Blacks or African Americans as a group are less gifted than their White or Oriental fellow students... a statistical fact that every one knows is true....
---pre---
I have long believed that affirmative action is probably the single most destructive policy ever put into practice in this country.
Never again will there be women like Anna's mother believing as she did...
Affirmative action, I have also come to believe was the rich white liberal's way to get back at the source of his or her guilt--- growing up in a family where the maid, the cook or the house cleaner was Negro or Black or African American and then suddenly he or she is made to feel guilty about this during the so-called 60s-- what better way to get at the guilt than by permanently ruining the future of any Black or African American child by allowing him to advance thanks to affirmative action with the inevitable whisper behind his or her back... well, you know he or she is actually not as... even the most diabolical die- hard segregationist could not have come up with a better revenge for having been made to feel bad about... all the while being seen as doing such a good thing...
---pre---
Remember back to the days of George Wallace? I seem to remember that an awful lot of Negroes or Blacks or African Americans used to vote for George Wallace even up North when he ran for President. When asked why they would say that you know where Wallace stands but he spreads the money around to everybody not like them liberals who tell you how much they understand your situation and then forget about you right after election day because you don't have the right college degree in how to steal the welfare monies under the guise of doing a study or consulting about the future.
---after---
I was asking my son why is that the Americans didn't kill all the Indians? We have both been reading of late about Geronimo and the terrible fate of the Apaches... I mentioned to him that I had thought of this question even back when Jorge Luis Borges came to Columbia University in the early 1970s. Richard M. Elman challenged Borges about his cruel portrayal of the Gauchos. Borges had replied along the lines that gauchos did not feel pain like you or I.. Later in the discussion that moved to 110th Street Borges again took up the question of Indians in Argentina by simply saying: there are none. They were all killed.
My son said the other day, you can't ask questions like that.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
GORKY, TOM WHALEN, EDWARD DAHLBERG along with old complaints
---morning---
In New York City if you have a car you have to move it twice a week for street cleaning. On the street where I live that means sitting in the car from 9-10:30AM two mornings. This morning I was reading in a new book from Yale University Press: GORKY'S TOLSTOY & OTHER REMINISCENCES edited by Donald Fanger. GORKY'S TOLSTOY is a new annotated edition of a book that I have carried with me and read for more than 35 years. I have had different editions of it: one a Viking Compass edition and another from an English language publisher in Russia that dropped the chapter on Andreyev.
My knowing and having read this book was one of the frail foundations for being able to have conversations with Edward Dahlberg as it was one of the few modern books that Dahlberg approved of. It was also a book that was close to the heart of Hannah Green... and Nina Berberova.
Of course in Bulgaria when I mentioned the name of Gorky it was because of this book and then the first volumes of his autobiography but for Lilia, Gorky was synonymous with the dread and required novel MOTHER, a model of what Socialist writing was supposed to be and which she was required to admire in secondary school...
Now as I was again reading Gorky's book I was trying to remember what had caught me so and what continues to hold me. I think it has something to do with how Gorky in this book--- which details in a frank and fragmented way his friendships with Tolstoy, Chekhov, Sulerzhitsky, Andreyev and Blok--- the creation of that special country where writing is the center of the universe, where books are living presences and the whole world revolves around them and their creation... but in no way was this some sort of world removed from the actuality of living human beings in all their messy particularity, perversity and just being different. It was a world where friendship did not demand complete agreement in all matters but where there was a complex mutual understanding of the resilient frailty of the individual.
In a more perfect world I would suggest that all of the so-called creative writing courses require this book as a central text... of course you, patient reader, understand how radical this suggestion is because you know that these courses are now training courses in the stalking of success and have very little to do with literature, with the real living presence of a book...
---Mourning---
Yesterday as I was waiting to send my son back to The Groton School where he in the Fifth Form and the dread college application process has slowly begun I was talking with him about vocation as opposed to jobs--- education as opposed to training--- but mostly I was talking about vocation and about how rare it is and why colleges and the world at large talks very little about it. I was talking, maybe too much, about how hard it is to know if you have a vocation and how hard it is to live it out if it does happen.
Of course I reminded him of Baudelaire's thought of there are only three beings worthy of respect, the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create... and I mentioned that when I wrote about Ernst Junger I suggested that he was the only complete person in the 20th Century but you had to substitute his scientific work for the fact that he had not been a priest...
My son knows the quality of Junger about which I spoke through STORM OF STEEL. You always have to give a writer's credentials: his actual books, not his opinions.
I suggested to my son to watch how the future will be presented to you by these dread colleges and universities which are mostly training camps for a job that you would not do if they did not pay you money... and to ask questions to see if these colleges are communities of scholars as Paul Goodman suggests in the very title of his book on the university COMMUNITY OF SCHOLARS or are they just another step in postponing as in when you are in kindergarten they tell you it really begins in school and then they tell you it begins in high school and then in college and then in graduate school and then in post-graduate school and then it begins after you retire and and and...
---morning---
In the mail from Obscure Publications number 57 in an edition of 70: "What an Edifice of Artifice!" Russell H. Greenan's It Happened in Boston?by TOM WHALEN. In 61 pages Whalen describes a novel by Russell H. Greenan that while recently reprinted has not become a central text of world literature. However I am not really concerned with that at this moment but with the fact that Tom Whalen does not have a book of his own stories in print from one of the major publishing houses in spite of publishing hundreds and hundreds of stories and poems in nearly every magazine in the United States
I remember back in 1970/71Richard M. Elman pronouncing that there are no undiscovered geniuses in the United States. It was always unclear to me whether he was mimicking what publishers believed about themselves or if Richard believed this himself. I am sure publishers do believe this and the evidence is all about us and this why there are so few interesting books being published. Publishers mostly no longer know how to read or have the time to read... it is after all a business and it is not based upon reading but upon the creation of copyrights of intellectual properties that can be... enough of this...
For 12 academic years which translates into 24 semesters and with two classes of Freshman composition I have read Tom Whalen's story End of Term now 48 times and each time I have read that story new nuance have shown themselves and each time the story stands revealed as one of the very very few stories that actually describes the powerlessness of a teacher in trying to explain why a student has not done as well as she might have and in turn the story becomes a meditation on what to do with the most awful information that is always coming our way...
In the current THE LITERARY REVIEW Vol 51/2 there is a new story by Whalen, The Effect which is a meditation on a sentence the narrator's wife says as she leaves him for work one morning, "Good luck with your work today." If only Blanchot was alive today to do justice to this story which is able within seven pages to suggest the vulnerable foundation upon which all story resides and in turn all of human life...
---mourning---
The obscurity of Whalen will be held against him. I can not imagine-- though by writing this I of course hope I am wrong-- any editor or other so-called powerful person reading these words and seeking out the story or going to www.tomwhalen.com.
But this afternoon I can go again at random to read Gorky on Tolstoy, "And I see how much life the man embraced, how inhumanly intelligent he was, and how awful." Or an exchange with Suler, to whom he says, "You know how to love all right. But you don't know how to choose and you'll fritter away your energy on trifles." "Isn't everybody like that?" "Everybody?" L.N. repeated. "No, not everybody."
---mourning---
As I have mentioned previously I have been awaiting word myself from a publisher, now revealed, Europa Editions. Day 11 and no word.
a PS. On Friday an email. Manuscript received. Now day 13.
In New York City if you have a car you have to move it twice a week for street cleaning. On the street where I live that means sitting in the car from 9-10:30AM two mornings. This morning I was reading in a new book from Yale University Press: GORKY'S TOLSTOY & OTHER REMINISCENCES edited by Donald Fanger. GORKY'S TOLSTOY is a new annotated edition of a book that I have carried with me and read for more than 35 years. I have had different editions of it: one a Viking Compass edition and another from an English language publisher in Russia that dropped the chapter on Andreyev.
My knowing and having read this book was one of the frail foundations for being able to have conversations with Edward Dahlberg as it was one of the few modern books that Dahlberg approved of. It was also a book that was close to the heart of Hannah Green... and Nina Berberova.
Of course in Bulgaria when I mentioned the name of Gorky it was because of this book and then the first volumes of his autobiography but for Lilia, Gorky was synonymous with the dread and required novel MOTHER, a model of what Socialist writing was supposed to be and which she was required to admire in secondary school...
Now as I was again reading Gorky's book I was trying to remember what had caught me so and what continues to hold me. I think it has something to do with how Gorky in this book--- which details in a frank and fragmented way his friendships with Tolstoy, Chekhov, Sulerzhitsky, Andreyev and Blok--- the creation of that special country where writing is the center of the universe, where books are living presences and the whole world revolves around them and their creation... but in no way was this some sort of world removed from the actuality of living human beings in all their messy particularity, perversity and just being different. It was a world where friendship did not demand complete agreement in all matters but where there was a complex mutual understanding of the resilient frailty of the individual.
In a more perfect world I would suggest that all of the so-called creative writing courses require this book as a central text... of course you, patient reader, understand how radical this suggestion is because you know that these courses are now training courses in the stalking of success and have very little to do with literature, with the real living presence of a book...
---Mourning---
Yesterday as I was waiting to send my son back to The Groton School where he in the Fifth Form and the dread college application process has slowly begun I was talking with him about vocation as opposed to jobs--- education as opposed to training--- but mostly I was talking about vocation and about how rare it is and why colleges and the world at large talks very little about it. I was talking, maybe too much, about how hard it is to know if you have a vocation and how hard it is to live it out if it does happen.
Of course I reminded him of Baudelaire's thought of there are only three beings worthy of respect, the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create... and I mentioned that when I wrote about Ernst Junger I suggested that he was the only complete person in the 20th Century but you had to substitute his scientific work for the fact that he had not been a priest...
My son knows the quality of Junger about which I spoke through STORM OF STEEL. You always have to give a writer's credentials: his actual books, not his opinions.
I suggested to my son to watch how the future will be presented to you by these dread colleges and universities which are mostly training camps for a job that you would not do if they did not pay you money... and to ask questions to see if these colleges are communities of scholars as Paul Goodman suggests in the very title of his book on the university COMMUNITY OF SCHOLARS or are they just another step in postponing as in when you are in kindergarten they tell you it really begins in school and then they tell you it begins in high school and then in college and then in graduate school and then in post-graduate school and then it begins after you retire and and and...
---morning---
In the mail from Obscure Publications number 57 in an edition of 70: "What an Edifice of Artifice!" Russell H. Greenan's It Happened in Boston?by TOM WHALEN. In 61 pages Whalen describes a novel by Russell H. Greenan that while recently reprinted has not become a central text of world literature. However I am not really concerned with that at this moment but with the fact that Tom Whalen does not have a book of his own stories in print from one of the major publishing houses in spite of publishing hundreds and hundreds of stories and poems in nearly every magazine in the United States
I remember back in 1970/71Richard M. Elman pronouncing that there are no undiscovered geniuses in the United States. It was always unclear to me whether he was mimicking what publishers believed about themselves or if Richard believed this himself. I am sure publishers do believe this and the evidence is all about us and this why there are so few interesting books being published. Publishers mostly no longer know how to read or have the time to read... it is after all a business and it is not based upon reading but upon the creation of copyrights of intellectual properties that can be... enough of this...
For 12 academic years which translates into 24 semesters and with two classes of Freshman composition I have read Tom Whalen's story End of Term now 48 times and each time I have read that story new nuance have shown themselves and each time the story stands revealed as one of the very very few stories that actually describes the powerlessness of a teacher in trying to explain why a student has not done as well as she might have and in turn the story becomes a meditation on what to do with the most awful information that is always coming our way...
In the current THE LITERARY REVIEW Vol 51/2 there is a new story by Whalen, The Effect which is a meditation on a sentence the narrator's wife says as she leaves him for work one morning, "Good luck with your work today." If only Blanchot was alive today to do justice to this story which is able within seven pages to suggest the vulnerable foundation upon which all story resides and in turn all of human life...
---mourning---
The obscurity of Whalen will be held against him. I can not imagine-- though by writing this I of course hope I am wrong-- any editor or other so-called powerful person reading these words and seeking out the story or going to www.tomwhalen.com.
But this afternoon I can go again at random to read Gorky on Tolstoy, "And I see how much life the man embraced, how inhumanly intelligent he was, and how awful." Or an exchange with Suler, to whom he says, "You know how to love all right. But you don't know how to choose and you'll fritter away your energy on trifles." "Isn't everybody like that?" "Everybody?" L.N. repeated. "No, not everybody."
---mourning---
As I have mentioned previously I have been awaiting word myself from a publisher, now revealed, Europa Editions. Day 11 and no word.
a PS. On Friday an email. Manuscript received. Now day 13.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
GOOD NEWS: ANNE STEVENSON, SAMUEL MENASHE and YASMINA REZA
---some---
A rare moment in publishing. The Library of America has published a very very good book: SELECTED POEMS by ANNE STEVENSON, the second of its Neglected Masters Award volumes. The previous one by Samuel Menashe was long overdue as they say. Menashe was much praised by Denis Donoghue, Derek Mahon, Donald Davie... it sometimes seemed that Menashe existed in England and Ireland but not in the United States. His poems are all very short and resisted paraphrase.
American critics and poets did not know what to make of Menashe so ignored him. Of course he did not teach creative writing which for a poet is always destructive. One could probably make a rule and say,if a poet has been teaching creative writing that is a reason not to read him or her. One thinks of fakes like Sharon Olds, Mark Strand, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine...so many years teaching, semester after semester, and nothing much to show for it except a slue of books that are copies of copies of copies of copies of previous books: each of these academic poets turned out faithful disciples who could be counted on to praise their master by writing poems in imitation of their master's imitations...
---good---
The Library of America has published the SELECTED POEMS of Anne Stevenson. An American long resident of England... biographer of Sylvia Plath along with two studies of Elizabeth Bishop... many books of poetry: and now this invitation to discover...
Might as well quote two short poems:
On Going Deaf
I've lost a sense. Why should I care?
Searching myself, I find a spare.
I keep that sixth sense in repair
And set it deftly, like a spare.
Haunted
It's not when you walk through my sleep
That I'm haunted most.
I am most alive where you were.
And my own ghost.
That's a taste of a selected. The editor also includes the whole of CORRESPONDENCES A Family History in Letters. Ranging back to the early 19th century and on into the second half of the 20th...reads like something that should have been done many times before... but a rare precise rapt attention to detail and the suggestiveness of the constant loss which is life. One long section rooted in Cincinnati reminded me of Hannah Green's great visionary book THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE and other parts of Glenway Wescott's THE GRANDMOTHERS... that casual way Americans just move on and on, all the time losing.
Let us hope that this Library of America book will have rescued Anne Stevenson, at least, for a little while. I have a place for her next to LIFE SUPPORTS by William Bronk and ARK by Ronald Johnson.
Anne Stevenson's poetry will shadow your life, a little.
---NEWS---
DAWN, DUSK or NIGHT A year with Nicolas Sarkozy. By Yasmina Reza.
I am a Francophile without a sentence of French in my head.
Everything that I know about contemporary France comes from having gone to Verdun, Lourdes and Paris and having read all the available translations of books by Celine, Gracq, Genet, Green, Perec. Drieu La Rochelle, Pascal.
I am probably over-qualified to comment on Yasmina Reza's impressionistic fragmented writing based on the year she traveled with Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior, while he campaigned for the presidency of France.
Such a book is totally unimaginable in the United States where we expect our political commentators to produce tomes that are more like tombstones for whomever they are writing about and stuffed with endless re-creations of events and personalities serving as a thousand tiny stakes into their subject's heart.
While I would have given--- as they say--- anything to have been invited to write a book like Reza's about either Richard Nixon or George W. Bush--- one quickly realizes the sheer impossibility of such a book... and I have selected these two men because they are the only really interesting presidents of recent years... that have the necessary complexity as to suggest a possibility for literature.
Reza mentions early on that she is interested in politics, "as a way of being." You now know this is a special sort of book... and her freedom from the receive wisdom comes quickly as she does not give the expected slurring with recounting a visit Sarkozy makes to George W... and while Reza's applying the word splendid as an adjective to Obama after a visit to his office is cause for possible alarm one is pleasantly surprised to note the following: "What makes you(Sarkozy)different from George Bush? How am I different from Bush? He was elected president of the United States twice. None of the journalists present in the room at the Sofitel seems to appreciate the intelligence of this response, and I will not see if quoted anywhere in the French press.
Reza notes "He (Sarkozy) seeems more elegant these days...He is elegant, yes, he's gone back to Dior. Before he wore Lanvin, Lanvin is normally the thing, but it has to be tailored, the sleeves cut, all kinds of alterations, Dior suits him better."
Even I note this detail and the observing eye...
I hope I will be given the chance to write more about Reza. Her book is to be published on May 3rd. Alfred A. Knopf.
---old news---
Now six days have gone by since that publisher has had my book in front of him...
A rare moment in publishing. The Library of America has published a very very good book: SELECTED POEMS by ANNE STEVENSON, the second of its Neglected Masters Award volumes. The previous one by Samuel Menashe was long overdue as they say. Menashe was much praised by Denis Donoghue, Derek Mahon, Donald Davie... it sometimes seemed that Menashe existed in England and Ireland but not in the United States. His poems are all very short and resisted paraphrase.
American critics and poets did not know what to make of Menashe so ignored him. Of course he did not teach creative writing which for a poet is always destructive. One could probably make a rule and say,if a poet has been teaching creative writing that is a reason not to read him or her. One thinks of fakes like Sharon Olds, Mark Strand, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine...so many years teaching, semester after semester, and nothing much to show for it except a slue of books that are copies of copies of copies of copies of previous books: each of these academic poets turned out faithful disciples who could be counted on to praise their master by writing poems in imitation of their master's imitations...
---good---
The Library of America has published the SELECTED POEMS of Anne Stevenson. An American long resident of England... biographer of Sylvia Plath along with two studies of Elizabeth Bishop... many books of poetry: and now this invitation to discover...
Might as well quote two short poems:
On Going Deaf
I've lost a sense. Why should I care?
Searching myself, I find a spare.
I keep that sixth sense in repair
And set it deftly, like a spare.
Haunted
It's not when you walk through my sleep
That I'm haunted most.
I am most alive where you were.
And my own ghost.
That's a taste of a selected. The editor also includes the whole of CORRESPONDENCES A Family History in Letters. Ranging back to the early 19th century and on into the second half of the 20th...reads like something that should have been done many times before... but a rare precise rapt attention to detail and the suggestiveness of the constant loss which is life. One long section rooted in Cincinnati reminded me of Hannah Green's great visionary book THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE and other parts of Glenway Wescott's THE GRANDMOTHERS... that casual way Americans just move on and on, all the time losing.
Let us hope that this Library of America book will have rescued Anne Stevenson, at least, for a little while. I have a place for her next to LIFE SUPPORTS by William Bronk and ARK by Ronald Johnson.
Anne Stevenson's poetry will shadow your life, a little.
---NEWS---
DAWN, DUSK or NIGHT A year with Nicolas Sarkozy. By Yasmina Reza.
I am a Francophile without a sentence of French in my head.
Everything that I know about contemporary France comes from having gone to Verdun, Lourdes and Paris and having read all the available translations of books by Celine, Gracq, Genet, Green, Perec. Drieu La Rochelle, Pascal.
I am probably over-qualified to comment on Yasmina Reza's impressionistic fragmented writing based on the year she traveled with Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior, while he campaigned for the presidency of France.
Such a book is totally unimaginable in the United States where we expect our political commentators to produce tomes that are more like tombstones for whomever they are writing about and stuffed with endless re-creations of events and personalities serving as a thousand tiny stakes into their subject's heart.
While I would have given--- as they say--- anything to have been invited to write a book like Reza's about either Richard Nixon or George W. Bush--- one quickly realizes the sheer impossibility of such a book... and I have selected these two men because they are the only really interesting presidents of recent years... that have the necessary complexity as to suggest a possibility for literature.
Reza mentions early on that she is interested in politics, "as a way of being." You now know this is a special sort of book... and her freedom from the receive wisdom comes quickly as she does not give the expected slurring with recounting a visit Sarkozy makes to George W... and while Reza's applying the word splendid as an adjective to Obama after a visit to his office is cause for possible alarm one is pleasantly surprised to note the following: "What makes you(Sarkozy)different from George Bush? How am I different from Bush? He was elected president of the United States twice. None of the journalists present in the room at the Sofitel seems to appreciate the intelligence of this response, and I will not see if quoted anywhere in the French press.
Reza notes "He (Sarkozy) seeems more elegant these days...He is elegant, yes, he's gone back to Dior. Before he wore Lanvin, Lanvin is normally the thing, but it has to be tailored, the sleeves cut, all kinds of alterations, Dior suits him better."
Even I note this detail and the observing eye...
I hope I will be given the chance to write more about Reza. Her book is to be published on May 3rd. Alfred A. Knopf.
---old news---
Now six days have gone by since that publisher has had my book in front of him...
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
WAITING TO HEAR with consoling readings from ROBERT PINGET and LOUIS MARIN
---preface---
"But who stuffed our heads full of these images? The people we saw in offices? Our reading matter? It must be our reading matter. If I had my life to live over again, as they say, I'd use all that reading matter to wipe myself with. I rather think I said in one of my exposes that every time I caught people reading I had them shot. It was a fantasy, it wasn't serious, but it said exactly what it meant to say. In short, even though those previous compositions weren't any use to me, I notice that I refer to them."
---from SOMEONE by Robert Pinget. Translated by Barbara Wright.
---second preface---
I hoped to transcribe the strange murmuring inside my head, inside your head, as you or I look at paintings, the "noise" that conveys a piece of a poem, a fragment of a story, a chunk from an article, an incomplete reference, the echo of a conversation, or a sudden memory. I wanted to capture the noise that exists only to soften the pain that is an integral part of the pleasure (or thrill /jouissance/) of mutely seeing forms and colors gathered on a canvas."
---from TO DESTROY PAINTING by Louis Marin. Translated by Mette Hjort. (Marin (1931-92) was director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
---17---
By now a publisher has had a manuscript of mine for two days. I have published two books, THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV and GOING TO PATCHOGUE. Both books were reviewed across the country and I must be one of the few writers who has no complaints about the New York Times Book Review. There were also long articles in both Newsday and in the actual New York Times about GOING TO PATCHOGUE. Dalkey Archive only did the books in hardcover and they remain in print with them. Northwestern University Press did THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV in paperback and that is available from them.
Of course there have been other books but as Kerouac said once about his own books, they are probably to be published in heaven: ST. PATRICK'S DAY, Dublin 1974, FORGET THE FUTURE, TRAVELS WITH A DAUGHTER, SATURDAY, SUNDAY and MONDAY, EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS...and there is one I dare not even mention to myself anymore, but of course I know the title, LOSS OF DIGNITY: if you know the book LAST DIARIES by Leo Tolstoy you will have some idea as to the content and form of this book.
I have given the title THE BEGINNING AND AN END or JUST LIKE THAT or THE END OF A BEGINNING... to the book that is now off being read... I found myself describing the book in the cover letter and I mentioned the name Charles Manson... but I had the heart beaten moment when I discovered in the blurb for a recent success from this publisher also a mention of Charles Manson. This publisher does many European authors and a few American writers. This manuscript is not isolated in the United states...
---18---
Barbara Probst Solomon published the opening and the concluding pages to JUST LIKE THAT in her journal THE READING ROOM. No pages from the second part of the manuscript have been published. In this book I have been writing about what I take is now the beginning and the end of the so-called 60s... or at least the voices are from that moment or moments.
---19---
I decided to mention all of this because I wanted to write this before I heard whether this manuscript will make the transition into being a bound book.
At the moment it is beyond any suggestion of success or failure. If the manuscript is rejected anything I might say about the book takes on the burden of sour grapes.
I wanted to affirm a deeply held belief of mine: if a manuscript that has been requested is not immediately read by the person asking to see it... and I mean immediately--- a week to 10 days--- the manuscript's chance has vanished. The manuscript goes on the pile of to do and only awaits the order to be returned.
It has been my experience with Dalkey Archive and Northwestern University Press that I did hear within the week of the arrival of the manuscript at the publisher's desk. At Northwestern there was the ritual of an outside reader but the editor selected the reader who would approve the book.
---20---
I have written a book that I have not read before. There are enough books, really, in the world but as I found with THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV and GOING TO PATCHOGUE a little room was found for them and they were read and I do believe this new little book will find a tiny corner unless the publisher retreats into the usual... and I will invite you my readers to suggest which excuse will be made by this person if it is to be returned.
---21---
Of course as Anna said, you would not know what to do if... and I tried to suggest to her that...
So we shall see.
"But who stuffed our heads full of these images? The people we saw in offices? Our reading matter? It must be our reading matter. If I had my life to live over again, as they say, I'd use all that reading matter to wipe myself with. I rather think I said in one of my exposes that every time I caught people reading I had them shot. It was a fantasy, it wasn't serious, but it said exactly what it meant to say. In short, even though those previous compositions weren't any use to me, I notice that I refer to them."
---from SOMEONE by Robert Pinget. Translated by Barbara Wright.
---second preface---
I hoped to transcribe the strange murmuring inside my head, inside your head, as you or I look at paintings, the "noise" that conveys a piece of a poem, a fragment of a story, a chunk from an article, an incomplete reference, the echo of a conversation, or a sudden memory. I wanted to capture the noise that exists only to soften the pain that is an integral part of the pleasure (or thrill /jouissance/) of mutely seeing forms and colors gathered on a canvas."
---from TO DESTROY PAINTING by Louis Marin. Translated by Mette Hjort. (Marin (1931-92) was director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
---17---
By now a publisher has had a manuscript of mine for two days. I have published two books, THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV and GOING TO PATCHOGUE. Both books were reviewed across the country and I must be one of the few writers who has no complaints about the New York Times Book Review. There were also long articles in both Newsday and in the actual New York Times about GOING TO PATCHOGUE. Dalkey Archive only did the books in hardcover and they remain in print with them. Northwestern University Press did THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV in paperback and that is available from them.
Of course there have been other books but as Kerouac said once about his own books, they are probably to be published in heaven: ST. PATRICK'S DAY, Dublin 1974, FORGET THE FUTURE, TRAVELS WITH A DAUGHTER, SATURDAY, SUNDAY and MONDAY, EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS...and there is one I dare not even mention to myself anymore, but of course I know the title, LOSS OF DIGNITY: if you know the book LAST DIARIES by Leo Tolstoy you will have some idea as to the content and form of this book.
I have given the title THE BEGINNING AND AN END or JUST LIKE THAT or THE END OF A BEGINNING... to the book that is now off being read... I found myself describing the book in the cover letter and I mentioned the name Charles Manson... but I had the heart beaten moment when I discovered in the blurb for a recent success from this publisher also a mention of Charles Manson. This publisher does many European authors and a few American writers. This manuscript is not isolated in the United states...
---18---
Barbara Probst Solomon published the opening and the concluding pages to JUST LIKE THAT in her journal THE READING ROOM. No pages from the second part of the manuscript have been published. In this book I have been writing about what I take is now the beginning and the end of the so-called 60s... or at least the voices are from that moment or moments.
---19---
I decided to mention all of this because I wanted to write this before I heard whether this manuscript will make the transition into being a bound book.
At the moment it is beyond any suggestion of success or failure. If the manuscript is rejected anything I might say about the book takes on the burden of sour grapes.
I wanted to affirm a deeply held belief of mine: if a manuscript that has been requested is not immediately read by the person asking to see it... and I mean immediately--- a week to 10 days--- the manuscript's chance has vanished. The manuscript goes on the pile of to do and only awaits the order to be returned.
It has been my experience with Dalkey Archive and Northwestern University Press that I did hear within the week of the arrival of the manuscript at the publisher's desk. At Northwestern there was the ritual of an outside reader but the editor selected the reader who would approve the book.
---20---
I have written a book that I have not read before. There are enough books, really, in the world but as I found with THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV and GOING TO PATCHOGUE a little room was found for them and they were read and I do believe this new little book will find a tiny corner unless the publisher retreats into the usual... and I will invite you my readers to suggest which excuse will be made by this person if it is to be returned.
---21---
Of course as Anna said, you would not know what to do if... and I tried to suggest to her that...
So we shall see.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
THE IRISH TIMES IS THE FUNNIEST NEWSPAPER IN THE WORLD WITH AN AFTERWORD FROM ROBERT PINGET
---forward---
The Saturday Irish Times arrives in New York on Sunday morning. At one time The Irish Times was one of the greatest newspapers in the world and home to Flann O'Brien. Now it is the most appalling and complete celebration of every loony idea of political correctness imaginable. In the world of The Irish Times there are only victims and those confessing their previous status as exploiters awaiting their moment of being reborn as victims. The jellyfish has become a victim of the tides and its own tentacles...
In the most recent issue "Nobel Laureate" Seamus Heaney---long ago having forsaken poetry in favour of... can anyone suggest what he does now?--- though emblematic as a leading world class victim since he won one of the very big lotteries is writing to celebrate the universal declaration of human rights and will in future weeks be joined by Roddy Doyle, Maeve Binchy, Neil Jordan, Joseph O'Connor and Anne Enright who in the immortal words of The Irish Times have, "donated their time and creativity to a series created by the Amnesty International Irish Section..."
If you have long suspected that these writers were much less than they appeared to be this is a final seal of approval that you never ever have to give a thought to anything they might write in the future or for that matter in the past.
The only antidote for the experience of reading Seamus Heaney was going to Russ and Daughters Appetizing whose slogan is Lox et Veritas and which is more or less across the street from where I am typing this and getting for Anna a Heeb sandwich on an everything bagel. She had decided that she would forgo the Super Heeb in anticipation of having it next Sunday, Easter Sunday as it will turn out to be, and I know that the walking over then would be as efficient a remedy as it was this Sunday...
----march---
I had a lingering mental reservation about the above because I saw that Gabriel Josipovici was writing about Julian Barnes and as we all know Josipovici is one of the most loyal of readers of Robert Pinget's work but even Josipovici has given into The Irish Times and can write a sentence, "The English have always been repressed and ironical but there was never that sense of prep school boys showing off..."
Of course--- ho ho ho--- we all know English are repressed: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Blake, James Thomson BV, B.S. Johnson...and while Josipovici is annoyed with Barnes and announced as a result that the English have always been repressed, he will list the death of Cordelia as one of the greatest literary encounters with death forgetting of course that the scene was written by that repressed Englishman...
---after word---
In one of my other lives, hang on, I've only ever had one, I mean my other exposes, I said I was king of my own filth. Which came to the same thing, reading between the lines. In short, I observe that I'm not out of it. Can one be responsible for an observation? Of course, alas. At least in the current acceptance. I say that one is not responsible for anything. But whatever you do, don't ask me to prove it. I don't want to spend my life with my back to the wall. Because people who are, with their backs to the wall, they're there to be shot. Get away, with your foul rifles. Get way. There are meadows to gambol in, and I have just as much right to them as anyone else I want my place in the sun. For the moment it's in this garden. Very funny."
---SOMEONE by Robert Pinget. Trans. Barbara Wright.
The Saturday Irish Times arrives in New York on Sunday morning. At one time The Irish Times was one of the greatest newspapers in the world and home to Flann O'Brien. Now it is the most appalling and complete celebration of every loony idea of political correctness imaginable. In the world of The Irish Times there are only victims and those confessing their previous status as exploiters awaiting their moment of being reborn as victims. The jellyfish has become a victim of the tides and its own tentacles...
In the most recent issue "Nobel Laureate" Seamus Heaney---long ago having forsaken poetry in favour of... can anyone suggest what he does now?--- though emblematic as a leading world class victim since he won one of the very big lotteries is writing to celebrate the universal declaration of human rights and will in future weeks be joined by Roddy Doyle, Maeve Binchy, Neil Jordan, Joseph O'Connor and Anne Enright who in the immortal words of The Irish Times have, "donated their time and creativity to a series created by the Amnesty International Irish Section..."
If you have long suspected that these writers were much less than they appeared to be this is a final seal of approval that you never ever have to give a thought to anything they might write in the future or for that matter in the past.
The only antidote for the experience of reading Seamus Heaney was going to Russ and Daughters Appetizing whose slogan is Lox et Veritas and which is more or less across the street from where I am typing this and getting for Anna a Heeb sandwich on an everything bagel. She had decided that she would forgo the Super Heeb in anticipation of having it next Sunday, Easter Sunday as it will turn out to be, and I know that the walking over then would be as efficient a remedy as it was this Sunday...
----march---
I had a lingering mental reservation about the above because I saw that Gabriel Josipovici was writing about Julian Barnes and as we all know Josipovici is one of the most loyal of readers of Robert Pinget's work but even Josipovici has given into The Irish Times and can write a sentence, "The English have always been repressed and ironical but there was never that sense of prep school boys showing off..."
Of course--- ho ho ho--- we all know English are repressed: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Blake, James Thomson BV, B.S. Johnson...and while Josipovici is annoyed with Barnes and announced as a result that the English have always been repressed, he will list the death of Cordelia as one of the greatest literary encounters with death forgetting of course that the scene was written by that repressed Englishman...
---after word---
In one of my other lives, hang on, I've only ever had one, I mean my other exposes, I said I was king of my own filth. Which came to the same thing, reading between the lines. In short, I observe that I'm not out of it. Can one be responsible for an observation? Of course, alas. At least in the current acceptance. I say that one is not responsible for anything. But whatever you do, don't ask me to prove it. I don't want to spend my life with my back to the wall. Because people who are, with their backs to the wall, they're there to be shot. Get away, with your foul rifles. Get way. There are meadows to gambol in, and I have just as much right to them as anyone else I want my place in the sun. For the moment it's in this garden. Very funny."
---SOMEONE by Robert Pinget. Trans. Barbara Wright.
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