IN spite of what some might think I am still caught up in books and live in a state of actual anticipation. The other day is no exception. A publicist at FSG sent an email reminding me about some book or another and I replied asking if the Roberto Bolano galleys had shown up--- FSG is publishing 2666 in November 2008--- He wrote back saying they had and he'd put them in the mail to me. I called and said could I just walk over as FSG is nearby.
The 18 blocks over there, thinking will there be that awful disappointment... which is always possible...
Next to FSG is Academy Records on 18th Street and for some reason they have a pretty good selection of VHS tapes and WEEKEND was in... for a few bucks... there is a Godard festival coming to NY in a few weeks. I had seen all the Godard films, like anyone actually alive in NY in the 60s 70s-- right down to Vladimir and Rosa--- if you want to know... but anyway up to the 8th floor and the package is waiting.
Do I open it or wait for the street? The circulation department of the New York Post shares the building with FSG and some guys from there got on and one does not want to read with strangers looking on in the intimate confines of an elevator.
So to the street and in the shade as the noise of the city counterpoints, carefully opening, avoiding the staples and then the fat galleys 898 pages: and that first line-- okay a note from the heirs as the book is posthumous then a quote from Baudelaire: An Oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.
A good sign to be sure... but the first line of the novel::: The first time that Jean-Claude Pelletier read Benno von Archimboldi was Christmas 1980, in Paris, when he was nineteen years old and studying German literature. The book in question...
I closed the galleys, carefully put them back into the envelope and walked home through Union Square knowing that I had a reason to postpone suicide for more than one day as we must always keep in mind as Cioran says each book is a postponed suicide and the comfort of knowing that a great book will be my companion for many months... even the annoying fake artists, merchants of political trivia and tourists taking pictures of each other seemed as rich a material as any scene in Chaucer... the shishkabob seller on the other side of 14th Street, the large black woman with the dollar bottles of water in front of the discount shoe store... the pretty girls going into Whole Foods thus endangering their lives because who knows what homicidal maniacs lurk in the aisles of that institution... but in my hand the package containing 2666 Roberto Bolano's last novel... the proper names approximating, the specific dates, age of the boy, the city...those very sharp hooks.
To quote blurbs from my own review of THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES that appeared in the LA Times: The Savage Detectives throws down a great clunking formal gauntlet to the reader's conventional expectations... Only time will supply the adjective great to what is a very good novel.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Sunday, April 20, 2008
PAY THEM NOT TO WRITE
Vantzeti Vassilev reminded us that the Bulgarian communist regime in addition to helping writers not to write by sending them to luxurious writer's retreats on the Black Sea or in the mountains outside Sofia, to conferences concerned with progressive whatevers, to readings in factories, mines and other work places ALSO simply paid them not to write according to Georgi Markov who as you all know was murdered by the Bulgarian secret police in London.
This strikes me as the first thing I have ever heard that was actually a good thing the communists did and think how much good it would do in this country and in the World Republic of Letters if for instance George Soros instead of wasting vast sums of money attacking Republicans--- who enjoy his attention too much--- would set up a fund for paying writers not to write.
The fund would have to specify in return for a considerable sum that the writer would cease immediately all publication and would destroy all notebooks, all unpublished works, all journals and diaries and all letters... and as a result these writers could move on to some other inviting area of self-abuse in the years left to them.
Just imagine the resulting clear literary air and the future beckoning--- see, even I can get into the spirit of the good old communist days...
Just imagine never having to read a new book or even entertaining the possibility of a new book by: (there is no ranking in the list) Don DeLillo, John Updike, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Mary Gordon, Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Charles Baxter, Galway Kinnell, Salman Rushdie, Bernard Henri-Levy, Gunter Grass, Sherman Alexie, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, W.S. Merwin, Jhumpa Lahiri, Paul Auster, Sharon Olds, Junot Diaz, Jane Smiley, Francine Prose, Seamus Heaney, Katha Pollitt, Paul Muldoon, Umberto Eco, Amy Hempel, Dale Peck, Rick Moody, Barry Hannah, Edmund White, Billy Collins, Robert Stone, Anne Waldeman, John Edgar Wideman, Jonathan Franzen, Kevin Young, Mary Gaitskill, Russell Banks, Derek Walcott, Cynthia Ozick, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Lynne Tillman, Franz Wright, Carlos Fuentes, Louise Gluck, Philip Levine, Tim O'Brien, Martin Amis, Roddy Doyle, J. D. McClatchy, Mark Strand, John Irving, A.M. Homes, Alice Walker, William Boyd, Bell Hooks, E.L. Doctorow, Ian McEwan, Nikki Giovanni, Peter Carey, John Banville, Nadine Gordimer, William Gass, Lydia Davis, Margaret Atwood...
Once the program was in place Mr Soros might contemplate extending this program to include anyone who has ever published a book and somehow achieved a tenured position in the creative writing business in our universities. The colleges and universities do a pretty good job of discouraging publication but this would provide a modicum more of security against the possibility that any of these....(fill in any word you might like) will commit a book.
I confess I do not know what to do with genre writers. They like cockroaches and ants will always be with us.
Some people might be surprised to learn that a few of the writers listed above are still among the living... but the dread remains still.
If anyone doubts the benefits of my proposal just step back and think of the small pleasure knowing that there are no more novels from Saul Bellow and Susan Sontag! No more short stories from Raymond Carver! No more... I was going to mention a poet or two but
If anyone would like to nominate a writer for one of these Soros grants please let me know and I will silently add the name to the list.
AND BEFORE anyone says:::::: at a future moment I will write out a list of those writers whose books I am looking forward to.
This strikes me as the first thing I have ever heard that was actually a good thing the communists did and think how much good it would do in this country and in the World Republic of Letters if for instance George Soros instead of wasting vast sums of money attacking Republicans--- who enjoy his attention too much--- would set up a fund for paying writers not to write.
The fund would have to specify in return for a considerable sum that the writer would cease immediately all publication and would destroy all notebooks, all unpublished works, all journals and diaries and all letters... and as a result these writers could move on to some other inviting area of self-abuse in the years left to them.
Just imagine the resulting clear literary air and the future beckoning--- see, even I can get into the spirit of the good old communist days...
Just imagine never having to read a new book or even entertaining the possibility of a new book by: (there is no ranking in the list) Don DeLillo, John Updike, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Mary Gordon, Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Charles Baxter, Galway Kinnell, Salman Rushdie, Bernard Henri-Levy, Gunter Grass, Sherman Alexie, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, W.S. Merwin, Jhumpa Lahiri, Paul Auster, Sharon Olds, Junot Diaz, Jane Smiley, Francine Prose, Seamus Heaney, Katha Pollitt, Paul Muldoon, Umberto Eco, Amy Hempel, Dale Peck, Rick Moody, Barry Hannah, Edmund White, Billy Collins, Robert Stone, Anne Waldeman, John Edgar Wideman, Jonathan Franzen, Kevin Young, Mary Gaitskill, Russell Banks, Derek Walcott, Cynthia Ozick, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Lynne Tillman, Franz Wright, Carlos Fuentes, Louise Gluck, Philip Levine, Tim O'Brien, Martin Amis, Roddy Doyle, J. D. McClatchy, Mark Strand, John Irving, A.M. Homes, Alice Walker, William Boyd, Bell Hooks, E.L. Doctorow, Ian McEwan, Nikki Giovanni, Peter Carey, John Banville, Nadine Gordimer, William Gass, Lydia Davis, Margaret Atwood...
Once the program was in place Mr Soros might contemplate extending this program to include anyone who has ever published a book and somehow achieved a tenured position in the creative writing business in our universities. The colleges and universities do a pretty good job of discouraging publication but this would provide a modicum more of security against the possibility that any of these....(fill in any word you might like) will commit a book.
I confess I do not know what to do with genre writers. They like cockroaches and ants will always be with us.
Some people might be surprised to learn that a few of the writers listed above are still among the living... but the dread remains still.
If anyone doubts the benefits of my proposal just step back and think of the small pleasure knowing that there are no more novels from Saul Bellow and Susan Sontag! No more short stories from Raymond Carver! No more... I was going to mention a poet or two but
If anyone would like to nominate a writer for one of these Soros grants please let me know and I will silently add the name to the list.
AND BEFORE anyone says:::::: at a future moment I will write out a list of those writers whose books I am looking forward to.
Friday, April 18, 2008
LIBRARY OF AMERICA and LIEBLING and CELINE and DAHLBERG and a SAD LUNCH and a NOT SO SAD LUNCH
28---
The publicity people for the Library of America must have missed sending me a copy of A.J. Liebling that just came out. An editor at a newspaper sent me a copy as they were not going to review the book.
I always look forward to the Library of America books and in the Fall they have some interesting ones: the second William Maxwell, a Philip Roth and a book of poetry by Ashbery. I hope I will not be over-looked as the bound galleys should be coming shortly. In the summer they are doing a second book by Philip Dick which I will talk about one of these days.
But to the Liebling. If this editor had not sent the book to me I would not have discovered this meeting with Louis Ferdinand Celine:
For myself, I shall always remember him as a big-shouldered man, unexpectedly rugged and tweedy for a Frenchman, sitting in the dining room of the Vanderbilt Hotel in New York in 1934, eating strawberry ice cream after rare roast beef and at intervals pausing between enormous mouthfuls and great, grasping swallows to shout obscene regret for the Middle Ages, when the Church assured the common people that they would go to hell after death and be miserable in the meantime. "Then, at least, there were no false hopes," he said.
So, while I might have been skeptical of why the LOA was doing Liebling, I have been won over. The book is a compilation of all his writings during the Second World War and while it is a little marred with the fakery of having a celebrity editor whose name I will not mention it is a real book.
Many of us are waiting for the LOA to do the collected poetry of Melville, the books of Sherwood Anderson, the work of T.S. Eliot and of course: Where is Hemingway? Where is Glenway Wescott? Edward Dahlberg? William Carlos Williams?
29---
In THE WRITER'S CHRONICLE, the trade journal of the creative writing business there was an announcement of the PEN WORLD VOICES FESTIVAL. "Over 200 members of the publishing industry attended a reception for the festival in March, boarding the ocean liner Queen Mary 2 to celebrate the upcoming event"--- hours waiting in a vast storage facility to board, searched as if getting on a plane, a thousand waiting to sail... lines like entering a detention camp--- "the on-board luncheon featured readings"---before the food people were ordered into a stadium seating theater to hear speeches about how the Cunard lines (remember they gave us the Titanic: the ship that God couldn't sink, as they say but as Julian Green once told me, "As they were saying that the iceberg was making its way..." were in favor of crossings, communication... And then there was a pathetic rock band with dragooned "writers" singing anti-George W Bush lyrics; I kid you not, and then the President of PEN was going on about the impending dawn of fascism in the US as witnessed by the denial of entry to a convicted criminal writer at Newark airport. The decor of the boat is down-market Las Vegas. "was hosted by Salman Rushdie, the festival chair"--- no, he did not show up as he had more important things to do: he was in London shilling for another of his unreadable novels.
Two writers by chance this week asked me if I had received the brochure for the PEN conference. Did you do what we did: throw them out? I did not ask why they had thrown them out but can only guess---
If anyone remembers Georgi Markov, the exiled Bulgarian writer who was murdered in London by agents of the Communist regime in Bulgaria they might remember his wonderful exposition of why the Communist regimes loved writers conferences, readings, writers visiting factories, writers retreats: the regime always dreaded the appearance of another book and the inevitable task of having to read it so why not find agreeable and progressive ways to hinder the writing of books and maybe even hinder the reading of books for probably the best way to discourage reading is to have writers read their own works in public along with colleagues, one of which always goes on for too long
30---
I went to a sad lunch for Dirk Wittenborn at The Museum, a restaurant connected to that dreary junk shop MOMA. The dining room was large for the one round table so it seems that they had at one time expected more people. Never having met Wittenborn, never having read a word he has written or seen the film he wrote THE FIERCE PEOPLE--- like most people, as it seems to have gone direct to DVD, or seen another documentary he produced about the hard lives of rich kids and will I be going to see a new film he wrote that is due in the summer The Lucky Ones, something about Iraq War and I am sure it is not celebrating the American effort there---
These lunches happen all the time. They are designed to get word of mouth going... the occasion for this is the publication in August of PHARMAKON.. murder, drugs, rich people, fathers, children, privilege, cover-ups, pain, anger, sex...
Why write a novel instead of a screen play, I asked Dirk. "In a novel you can show thinking," Dirk replied
At the actual lunch of course the question who will write the screenplay and I was wondering, again, why bother with the novel as only then did people at the table seem animated: the movies are the reel world. Why do writers set themselves up like this? Well, money of course and the rich are as grubby as the next person and probably even more so...
Dirk was talking about his three therapists and I could hear them as they alternatively moved through his little talk: the one who dealt with his father/son issues, the next one who dealt with his intimacy/women issues and the last with the issues of drugs...
The pork loin was dried out and without flavour.
PHARMAKON has an opening line that the author is proud of: I was born because a man came to kill my father.
31--- I was reading THE WAGES OF EXPECTATION the biography of Edward Dahlberg by Charles DeFanti... DeFanti quotes as his concluding lines the epitaph that William O'Rourke had written for Dahlberg, For whatever Dear Readers there are now, or are to come Edward Dahlberg wrote 18 books and one masterpiece that will endure; at the end of his long life he had less than six people he would have called friend."
In a Village Voice review of this biography also written by O'Rourke:
"Dahlberg's bile was in direct proportion to the neglect he felt, which of course was enormous. Even if you produce a master work--- which Because I was Flesh surely is--- you can be ignored because literature plays little role int he life of the commonwealth."
And:
"Dahlberg led his life seemingly enunciating one state above all, that of the writer as pariah, the glorious nay-sayer unsullied by commerce, fashion and vain success."
And:
Dahlberg was payed the wages of his own expectations: rejection, isolation, and the curse of superfluity."
O'Rourke's review appeared in the Village Voice on April 16, 1979.
Can anyone imagine such writing in the newspaper that goes by that name today in the year 2008?
32 PS---
We were in Enzo's (Second Avenue between 2nd and 3rd Streets) for pizza this afternoon.
The guy from the funeral parlor across the street was in for a slice.
After he left I mentioned to Mike that I usually see him standing in front of the parlor waiting for a delivery.
If you shake hands with him watch his eyes. They start from your eyes and go down. He's measuring you. If you've shaken hands with him scratch your balls three times that'll keep him away for now.
As I was leaving Mike was looking in the Village Voice at a profile of Philip Glass. Enzo's is mentioned. Glass is a nice guy, Mike says. He comes here.
I tell Mike I see Glass around, sometimes up at the Domincans' bodega.
The publicity people for the Library of America must have missed sending me a copy of A.J. Liebling that just came out. An editor at a newspaper sent me a copy as they were not going to review the book.
I always look forward to the Library of America books and in the Fall they have some interesting ones: the second William Maxwell, a Philip Roth and a book of poetry by Ashbery. I hope I will not be over-looked as the bound galleys should be coming shortly. In the summer they are doing a second book by Philip Dick which I will talk about one of these days.
But to the Liebling. If this editor had not sent the book to me I would not have discovered this meeting with Louis Ferdinand Celine:
For myself, I shall always remember him as a big-shouldered man, unexpectedly rugged and tweedy for a Frenchman, sitting in the dining room of the Vanderbilt Hotel in New York in 1934, eating strawberry ice cream after rare roast beef and at intervals pausing between enormous mouthfuls and great, grasping swallows to shout obscene regret for the Middle Ages, when the Church assured the common people that they would go to hell after death and be miserable in the meantime. "Then, at least, there were no false hopes," he said.
So, while I might have been skeptical of why the LOA was doing Liebling, I have been won over. The book is a compilation of all his writings during the Second World War and while it is a little marred with the fakery of having a celebrity editor whose name I will not mention it is a real book.
Many of us are waiting for the LOA to do the collected poetry of Melville, the books of Sherwood Anderson, the work of T.S. Eliot and of course: Where is Hemingway? Where is Glenway Wescott? Edward Dahlberg? William Carlos Williams?
29---
In THE WRITER'S CHRONICLE, the trade journal of the creative writing business there was an announcement of the PEN WORLD VOICES FESTIVAL. "Over 200 members of the publishing industry attended a reception for the festival in March, boarding the ocean liner Queen Mary 2 to celebrate the upcoming event"--- hours waiting in a vast storage facility to board, searched as if getting on a plane, a thousand waiting to sail... lines like entering a detention camp--- "the on-board luncheon featured readings"---before the food people were ordered into a stadium seating theater to hear speeches about how the Cunard lines (remember they gave us the Titanic: the ship that God couldn't sink, as they say but as Julian Green once told me, "As they were saying that the iceberg was making its way..." were in favor of crossings, communication... And then there was a pathetic rock band with dragooned "writers" singing anti-George W Bush lyrics; I kid you not, and then the President of PEN was going on about the impending dawn of fascism in the US as witnessed by the denial of entry to a convicted criminal writer at Newark airport. The decor of the boat is down-market Las Vegas. "was hosted by Salman Rushdie, the festival chair"--- no, he did not show up as he had more important things to do: he was in London shilling for another of his unreadable novels.
Two writers by chance this week asked me if I had received the brochure for the PEN conference. Did you do what we did: throw them out? I did not ask why they had thrown them out but can only guess---
If anyone remembers Georgi Markov, the exiled Bulgarian writer who was murdered in London by agents of the Communist regime in Bulgaria they might remember his wonderful exposition of why the Communist regimes loved writers conferences, readings, writers visiting factories, writers retreats: the regime always dreaded the appearance of another book and the inevitable task of having to read it so why not find agreeable and progressive ways to hinder the writing of books and maybe even hinder the reading of books for probably the best way to discourage reading is to have writers read their own works in public along with colleagues, one of which always goes on for too long
30---
I went to a sad lunch for Dirk Wittenborn at The Museum, a restaurant connected to that dreary junk shop MOMA. The dining room was large for the one round table so it seems that they had at one time expected more people. Never having met Wittenborn, never having read a word he has written or seen the film he wrote THE FIERCE PEOPLE--- like most people, as it seems to have gone direct to DVD, or seen another documentary he produced about the hard lives of rich kids and will I be going to see a new film he wrote that is due in the summer The Lucky Ones, something about Iraq War and I am sure it is not celebrating the American effort there---
These lunches happen all the time. They are designed to get word of mouth going... the occasion for this is the publication in August of PHARMAKON.. murder, drugs, rich people, fathers, children, privilege, cover-ups, pain, anger, sex...
Why write a novel instead of a screen play, I asked Dirk. "In a novel you can show thinking," Dirk replied
At the actual lunch of course the question who will write the screenplay and I was wondering, again, why bother with the novel as only then did people at the table seem animated: the movies are the reel world. Why do writers set themselves up like this? Well, money of course and the rich are as grubby as the next person and probably even more so...
Dirk was talking about his three therapists and I could hear them as they alternatively moved through his little talk: the one who dealt with his father/son issues, the next one who dealt with his intimacy/women issues and the last with the issues of drugs...
The pork loin was dried out and without flavour.
PHARMAKON has an opening line that the author is proud of: I was born because a man came to kill my father.
31--- I was reading THE WAGES OF EXPECTATION the biography of Edward Dahlberg by Charles DeFanti... DeFanti quotes as his concluding lines the epitaph that William O'Rourke had written for Dahlberg, For whatever Dear Readers there are now, or are to come Edward Dahlberg wrote 18 books and one masterpiece that will endure; at the end of his long life he had less than six people he would have called friend."
In a Village Voice review of this biography also written by O'Rourke:
"Dahlberg's bile was in direct proportion to the neglect he felt, which of course was enormous. Even if you produce a master work--- which Because I was Flesh surely is--- you can be ignored because literature plays little role int he life of the commonwealth."
And:
"Dahlberg led his life seemingly enunciating one state above all, that of the writer as pariah, the glorious nay-sayer unsullied by commerce, fashion and vain success."
And:
Dahlberg was payed the wages of his own expectations: rejection, isolation, and the curse of superfluity."
O'Rourke's review appeared in the Village Voice on April 16, 1979.
Can anyone imagine such writing in the newspaper that goes by that name today in the year 2008?
32 PS---
We were in Enzo's (Second Avenue between 2nd and 3rd Streets) for pizza this afternoon.
The guy from the funeral parlor across the street was in for a slice.
After he left I mentioned to Mike that I usually see him standing in front of the parlor waiting for a delivery.
If you shake hands with him watch his eyes. They start from your eyes and go down. He's measuring you. If you've shaken hands with him scratch your balls three times that'll keep him away for now.
As I was leaving Mike was looking in the Village Voice at a profile of Philip Glass. Enzo's is mentioned. Glass is a nice guy, Mike says. He comes here.
I tell Mike I see Glass around, sometimes up at the Domincans' bodega.
Friday, April 11, 2008
PUBLISHING: WHAT THE WORLD IS MISSING
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,
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,
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.
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