Of course it is a bit of joke when the newspapers and schools hand out reading lists for the summer but many years ago The New York Times did run a feature and writers talked about what they were planning to read and Gilbert Sorrentino talked about CADENZA by Ralph Cusack a book I had learned of in Grogan's in Dublin which in turn lead to knowing Jack O'Brien just as he was launching the Review of Contemporary Fiction and then Dalkey Archive some years later...
So I was thinking about this summer and suggesting that my kids and others might enjoy some suggestions:
---JOURNEY TO THE END OF NIGHT by Louis Ferdinand Celine is the only book I know that describes the actual constant state of war that I (born in 1944) have lived through as has the world and which looks like continuing into the long future.
To have not read this book is to...
---STORM OF STEEL by Ernst Junger. While describing Junger's experience in World War One it is the best description of combat as it is actually experienced and even though the war he describes is seemingly of a long gone moment the experience of combat has not dated and this has been confirmed to me by young men who have come back from service in Iraq who are glad to have found a book that captures what they felt. Unlike Junger they did not have as he did the pleasure of reading TRISTRAM SHANDY while they served in Iraq but that is a commentary on the sad stupidity of American education...
---ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac is--- if we need one--- the great modern American novel but of course it is more than that. Finally about the idea of going and going and going and our need for friendship even if in the end...
Loathed by academics and so-called well-read readers of The New York Review of Books ON THE ROAD is the most cheerful book I know because it is rooted in Kerouac's genuine understanding of the brevity of life
---THE MELANCHOLY OF RESISTANCE and WAR & WAR by Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Hungary is now the most interesting country in Europe in terms of literature. Just to mention Peter Nadas, Peter Esterhazy, Imre Kertesz, Sandor Marai, Zsuzsa Bank (THE SWIMMER) and the soon to be published Attila Bartis (TRANQUILITY)... and you can begin with any of these writers and we are fortunate with a number of their books now available but it is KRASZNAHORKAI who has been a little over-looked though many know him indirectly through the movies of Bela Tarr and in particular his WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES--- the two opening scenes of this movie are to my mind among the greatest moments I have ever experienced in all of my years---
... it is KRASZNAHORKAI who shoves over Joyce, Faulkner, Beckett, Bernhard... I could go on with the listing... and I could well imagine listening to someone reading him to me on my deathbed. Sadly I had hoped that my daughter who is nearly bilingual in French and English would be able to sit down and read to me the banned books of Celine in my senility but I now realize she should have been learning Hungarian
instead of French
Let me quote a passage from WAR & WAR: he understood nothing, nothing at all about anything, for Christ's sake, nothing at all about the world, which was the most terrifying realization, he said, especially in the way it came to him in all its banality, vulgarity, at a sickeningly ridiculous level, but this was the point, he said, the way that he, at the age of forty-four, had become aware of how utterly stupid he seemed to himself, how empty, how utterly blockheaded he had been in his understanding of the world these last forty-four years, for, as he realized by the river, he had not only misunderstood it, but had not understood anything about anything, the worst part being that for forty-four years he thought he had understood it, while in reality...
---GOING TO PATCHOGUE by Thomas McGonigle. I re-read this book last night and while originally published in 1992 and well reviewed it was never done into paperback so now exists in a certain limbo... about a young man going out to Patchogue a village on Long Island near New York City... about being in the village and the coming back to the city by way of Bulgaria.
A sort of commentary on Turgenev's and Beckett's FIRST LOVE...
the perfect travel book while being also a celebration of what did not seem to be there until written about.
Devoid of filler GOING TO PATCHOGUE demands attention line by line and each of those lines was written in the hope that the reader has not read them before.
Lord Patchogue would approve if allowed to by Jacques Rigaut
And now just a list:
---ABSALOM, ABSALOM! by William Faulkner
---SOMEONE by Robert Pinget
---HOPSCOTCH by Julio Cortazar
---PARADISO by Jose Lezama Lima
---LIFE A USER'S MANUAL By Georges Perec
---THE UNFORTUNATES by B.S. Johnson
---A BRIEF LIFE by Juan Carlos Onetti
---LARVA by Julian Rios
---THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES BY Roberto Bolano
---CORRECTION by Thomas Bernhard
---THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE by Hannah Green
---GATHERING EVIDENCE by Thomas Bernhard
Friday, June 27, 2008
Saturday, June 14, 2008
ONLY THE DEAD ARE IN BROOKLYN but READ BEIJING COMA
58
I go to Brooklyn to visit the dead. That is when I was younger and we would go into Brooklyn to go to funerals. On the wall of a room in a great aunt's house was a tinted photograph of a relative who had lost his arm at Gettysburg.
53
I was telling a clerk in a bookstore that is getting ready to leave Manhattan for Brooklyn---after asking, Why? The lease is up.--- that I well know the trivial reasons why people move to Brooklyn but my parents fled that place in the winter of 46/47.
---You sound like it is war torn zone...
(I was in the bookstore to look for THE ORPHIC VOICE by Elizabeth Sewell which I had read about in an article by Mark Scroggins on Ronald Johnson.
Earlier that day in The Strand I bought a little book by her on Paul Valery which has a suggestive opening which reveals how far we have come from what writing about books was all about:
Magic mirror on the wall,/Who is the fairest one of all?
There are some people who cannot pass a looking-glass without a slight disturbance in their imagination...
Sewell will go on to write about mirrors as a way into Valery...)
54
To live in New York City is to live in Manhattan.
58
Going to Brooklyn by subway is coming up the stairs to the provinces.
64
In the newspapers there is talk of writers living in Brooklyn, a literary community in Brooklyn and a community of writers living in Brooklyn or we are a community of writers in Brooklyn... you get the drift of the dreariness: anyone uttering phrases like these is of the dead, or rather dead of ear, dead to history.
Imagine Joyce or Proust saying something along the lines: I am a member of the Paris community of writers or I am part of the community of writers in Paris...
60
Of course these writers--- usually "successful" whatever that might mean--- and we know what it usually means: I got a lot of money for something of an accident and then there are the hangers on, the servants of accident.
62
But Brooklyn: a thin population of white people who could live anywhere--- and a couple so-called successful Black folk and all the rest who do not look like them and who are waiting, waiting... patiently being studied by the Bagatelles pour un massacre
63
So go to Brooklyn to visit the dead and dying.
94
A momentary fit.
34
Ezra Pound would demand: and by what standards do you dismiss books written by people who live in Brooklyn?
Arbitrary to be sure.
Does anyone read books written by people who claim to live in Canada?
35
The late George Garrett told a story of being hired by the Ford Foundation the year they decided to give grants to writers. The foundation was swamped with thousands and thousands of applications. George and another person were hired to screen these piles in a weekend. Two guys and the director. The director announced: toss out all the male applicants for the first two hours. George thought to himself: well, he's the director and he must know what he is doing so they did it for the two hours and now had a much reduced pile of applicants in front of him. The director then said as you open the applications toss out all the women and anyone over 65.
You get the drift. The piles as the two days went on became manageable and the money was gotten rid of.
What I learned from that experience, George said, it would have been fairer to toss all the applications down the stairs and the ones that happened to reach the bottom would get the money.
THE LESSON: when you read an author blurb glowing with grants--- how do you think about the guy who just won the lottery?
27
A literary standard by which I slur the writers who admit to living in Brooklyn.
I have been reading the recently published BEIJING COMA by Ma Jian. (FSG) The novel tries to describe all of the recent history of China through the imagined life of a man who has been in a coma since the massacre at Tiananmen Square and as he gradually comes back to the world he relives his and his family's existence in China and by implication the whole modern history of China. The man's father was sent to a re-education camp for 22 years..."My father had long since severed his ties with his elder brother...during the reform movement in the early 1950s, when Mao ordered land to be redistributed to the poor and classified landowners as the enemy of the people, my grandfather, who owned two fields and three cows, was branded an 'evil tyrant'. My father's brother was forced to bury him alive. Had he refused, he himself would have been executed."
By comparison Brooklyn writers to a man or to a woman seem trivial.
I have spared you the taste of the dirt in the grandfather's mouth...
And don't mention Paul Auster and and and... not even his publisher reads Paul Auster's new books.
I go to Brooklyn to visit the dead. That is when I was younger and we would go into Brooklyn to go to funerals. On the wall of a room in a great aunt's house was a tinted photograph of a relative who had lost his arm at Gettysburg.
53
I was telling a clerk in a bookstore that is getting ready to leave Manhattan for Brooklyn---after asking, Why? The lease is up.--- that I well know the trivial reasons why people move to Brooklyn but my parents fled that place in the winter of 46/47.
---You sound like it is war torn zone...
(I was in the bookstore to look for THE ORPHIC VOICE by Elizabeth Sewell which I had read about in an article by Mark Scroggins on Ronald Johnson.
Earlier that day in The Strand I bought a little book by her on Paul Valery which has a suggestive opening which reveals how far we have come from what writing about books was all about:
Magic mirror on the wall,/Who is the fairest one of all?
There are some people who cannot pass a looking-glass without a slight disturbance in their imagination...
Sewell will go on to write about mirrors as a way into Valery...)
54
To live in New York City is to live in Manhattan.
58
Going to Brooklyn by subway is coming up the stairs to the provinces.
64
In the newspapers there is talk of writers living in Brooklyn, a literary community in Brooklyn and a community of writers living in Brooklyn or we are a community of writers in Brooklyn... you get the drift of the dreariness: anyone uttering phrases like these is of the dead, or rather dead of ear, dead to history.
Imagine Joyce or Proust saying something along the lines: I am a member of the Paris community of writers or I am part of the community of writers in Paris...
60
Of course these writers--- usually "successful" whatever that might mean--- and we know what it usually means: I got a lot of money for something of an accident and then there are the hangers on, the servants of accident.
62
But Brooklyn: a thin population of white people who could live anywhere--- and a couple so-called successful Black folk and all the rest who do not look like them and who are waiting, waiting... patiently being studied by the Bagatelles pour un massacre
63
So go to Brooklyn to visit the dead and dying.
94
A momentary fit.
34
Ezra Pound would demand: and by what standards do you dismiss books written by people who live in Brooklyn?
Arbitrary to be sure.
Does anyone read books written by people who claim to live in Canada?
35
The late George Garrett told a story of being hired by the Ford Foundation the year they decided to give grants to writers. The foundation was swamped with thousands and thousands of applications. George and another person were hired to screen these piles in a weekend. Two guys and the director. The director announced: toss out all the male applicants for the first two hours. George thought to himself: well, he's the director and he must know what he is doing so they did it for the two hours and now had a much reduced pile of applicants in front of him. The director then said as you open the applications toss out all the women and anyone over 65.
You get the drift. The piles as the two days went on became manageable and the money was gotten rid of.
What I learned from that experience, George said, it would have been fairer to toss all the applications down the stairs and the ones that happened to reach the bottom would get the money.
THE LESSON: when you read an author blurb glowing with grants--- how do you think about the guy who just won the lottery?
27
A literary standard by which I slur the writers who admit to living in Brooklyn.
I have been reading the recently published BEIJING COMA by Ma Jian. (FSG) The novel tries to describe all of the recent history of China through the imagined life of a man who has been in a coma since the massacre at Tiananmen Square and as he gradually comes back to the world he relives his and his family's existence in China and by implication the whole modern history of China. The man's father was sent to a re-education camp for 22 years..."My father had long since severed his ties with his elder brother...during the reform movement in the early 1950s, when Mao ordered land to be redistributed to the poor and classified landowners as the enemy of the people, my grandfather, who owned two fields and three cows, was branded an 'evil tyrant'. My father's brother was forced to bury him alive. Had he refused, he himself would have been executed."
By comparison Brooklyn writers to a man or to a woman seem trivial.
I have spared you the taste of the dirt in the grandfather's mouth...
And don't mention Paul Auster and and and... not even his publisher reads Paul Auster's new books.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
THREE DEAD MEN. GEORGE GARRETT. CHAD WALSH. BINK NOLL.
four
Three dead men. The most recent in the evening of May 25,2008. George Garrett, Chad Walsh and Bink Noll. Three teachers. Three writers.
A person first becomes an adult when their parents die. They become old or older when their teachers die.
In 1962 professors read student applications to college. That is probably hard to believe today. Now professors have abdicated one of their essential roles: the selection of students they want to teach. I later learned that Chad Walsh had read my application to Beloit College. What stayed in his mind: in answer to the question: what was the last book you had read I had answered Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. And that was a fact. Walsh became my adviser and facilitated my dropping out of Beloit in order to spend my third year at University College, Dublin. This again was before the organized nonsense of sending large groups of American students abroad to waste a year getting drunk with each other. Walsh read with interest my writings and we remained friends until his death. I still look at a textbook he wrote, Doors Into Poetry, a genuine introduction to poetry. He edited an anthology which included the much overlooked work of Gil Orlovitz. While I was at the college Walsh published a book of poetry, The Unknowing Dance, and inscribed it, "I'll buy a copy of your first one and you can autograph it for me."
Two years ago when I drove through Marion, Virginia I remembered that Walsh was originally from that town and had worked on the newspaper there that Sherwood Anderson had edited at the end of his life. Anderson's fate was something Walsh hinted at in regards to the vagaries of fame... In the public library I was happy to discover a folder had been established to collect clippings about Chad Walsh. For a time Walsh was a frequent book reviewer and was one of the writers responsible for establishing C. S. Lewis in the United States...
When I was at loose ends and teaching seventh grade in a Catholic school in Menasha, Wisconsin where my parents had been exiled to from Patchogue, Walsh suggested I might go to Hollins College and get a MA. Walsh had been to Hollins the previous year and had met GEORGE GARRETT.
five
George Garrett was the best sort of a teacher: worldly wise and widely read. He sought no disciples and only tried to help a student find his own voice. Happily he leaves no school behind, no quirks or attitudes or themes that students can easily mimic.
The best memorial for Garrett can be found in reading his novel, Death of the Fox, a poem, Three Night Poems, the story, A Wreath for Garibaldi. These three works will send you to sample his 34 books.
Again at loose ends now in February 1970 only wanting to continue writing I was sitting in Garrett's office at Hollins College and he suggested that I should go to Columbia. Two years in New York City. I agreed and he called right there and then Frank MacShane the head of the graduate writing program. After a few minutes of talk Garrett got off the phone and said, "You've been accepted, now fill out the application and tell them how much money you want." I went to Columbia for two years. I published two little stories in The Village Voice--- Goodbye W.H. Auden and A Son's Father's Day--- and could not be bothered to re-type my writings on the special paper Columbia demanded for the MFA degree.
So now I had learned in America what I had learned really and not theoretically in the People's Republic of Bulgaria: it is all a matter of connections.
Five years ago which is the last time I saw Garrett he had me invited to the University of Tennessee for a conference celebrating his life and work. He arranged that the university give me a honorarium and he himself paid for the plane ticket as he knew I did not have the money. I gave a little talk. It along with the other talks was to have been published in a book by the university but Garrett was a realist and knew that the book was only talk and that the conference itself had been a dry run in the hopes of running a conference for a far more famous writer who was obviously Cormac McCarthy. George accepted this situation as it allowed people like me to come down to Tennessee and allowed his friends to meet each other.
Just after receiving the e-mail on May 24, 2008 explaining that Garrett was at home under hospice care I wrote to George and Susan his wife of so many years what I knew was likely to be a farewell letter... telling them of sitting earlier that day on the aluminum bleachers watching my son playing baseball at Groton School with an unobstructed view of the chapel across a far field and later trying to tell the headmaster (who well knew the history) of how I was then also remembering standing in front of the Episcopal church in Tombstone and how in less than two months I would be standing in front of that church again with my son and how it seemed to be beyond words to describe this linking of the founder of Groton School with the same man, Endicott Peabody, who had actually built that first church in Tombstone having arrived in that notorious town just after the famous gunfight and how he had collected the money for the church from participants and observers of that gun fight... but in the actual writing to George and Susan, I wrote, George had shown the way in his own writing and with much effort and a deep trust in words that it was possible to link the present to the ever present past as surely as Peabody's chapel on that sunny Saturday in New England was intimately related to a church now just around the corner from the site of the gunfight at the OK Corral, in Tombstone, the town too tough to die.
Maybe in my letter I should have just remembered Garrett's last published book, Double Vision, which is about a writer named George Garrett who asked to review a biography of a former neighbor Peter Taylor in turn invents another character who in turn is reviewing a book about a neighbor. Late in the book Garrett had his fictional character, "Frank also copies down one sentence from a piece, "The writer's Life" by Thomas McGonigle: The dead are always with us...
In the morning of what turned out to be the day of Garrett's death, Susan wrote to me that she appreciated my letter and would read it to George. I wonder if it was one of the last things he heard...
six
Always linked to these two men is Bink Noll who was a professor of English at Beloit College. Noll was an elegant poet with an impeccable Ivy League background who published three books of poetry---The Center of the Circle, The Feast and The House--- in his life time. As he got older he became gay and lived with a man named Wayne who was from the hometown of Ed Gein the inspiration for Psycho. In Bink's basement Wayne edited a magazine EDINITE which was devoted to the male nipple and those who treasured them. Garrett had been the sponsor of Noll's third book of poetry published by Louisiana State University Press, The House.
As his life wore on Noll was afflicted with much illness: he made light of his colostomy and how changing the bag was just one more item in his morning ritual. Noll was always a good host when in the early 1980s I used to make a pilgrimage about the Midwest visiting Chicago (Jack O'Brien), Milwaukee (James Liddy), Madison (Paul Rux)... Bloomington (Marcia Cebulska) Baltimore (Jenny Burdick) Washington (Lucja)...
Noll told me a very good story about his experience when invited to read his poetry at Princeton. At the train station he was met by a student as his host had been called away. When they got to the hall--- more a lounge, Noll noticed and with only four or so kids in attendance. The show must go on The young man told Bink that the host had given him a paragraph to read as an apology and introduction. Even before that happened one of the four left the room. As the introduction was being read two more students left. The host student left as he had a class to get to. So Bink was standing at the podium with his one man audience. Noll began to read from The House. He read two poems and then noticed that the student in the audience had raised his hand. Bink asked, Yes? and the young man replied, Sir, no disrespect but I was wondering how long you planned to go on because I am studying for a physics final.
Bink concluded his story by saying, and that is how I came to give a reading at Princeton with no one in the audience. Princeton did send him a check, he was happy to note, only two months after the reading. The student host had forgotten to give it to him.
That story was repeated by George Garrett at the celebration at the University of Tennessee and is known as the Bink Noll at Princeton story. It is the great consolation story and underlines what is all so obvious...
PS: a version of this has appeared at the Jacket Copy blog of the book section of the Los Angeles Times. June 4, 2008
Three dead men. The most recent in the evening of May 25,2008. George Garrett, Chad Walsh and Bink Noll. Three teachers. Three writers.
A person first becomes an adult when their parents die. They become old or older when their teachers die.
In 1962 professors read student applications to college. That is probably hard to believe today. Now professors have abdicated one of their essential roles: the selection of students they want to teach. I later learned that Chad Walsh had read my application to Beloit College. What stayed in his mind: in answer to the question: what was the last book you had read I had answered Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. And that was a fact. Walsh became my adviser and facilitated my dropping out of Beloit in order to spend my third year at University College, Dublin. This again was before the organized nonsense of sending large groups of American students abroad to waste a year getting drunk with each other. Walsh read with interest my writings and we remained friends until his death. I still look at a textbook he wrote, Doors Into Poetry, a genuine introduction to poetry. He edited an anthology which included the much overlooked work of Gil Orlovitz. While I was at the college Walsh published a book of poetry, The Unknowing Dance, and inscribed it, "I'll buy a copy of your first one and you can autograph it for me."
Two years ago when I drove through Marion, Virginia I remembered that Walsh was originally from that town and had worked on the newspaper there that Sherwood Anderson had edited at the end of his life. Anderson's fate was something Walsh hinted at in regards to the vagaries of fame... In the public library I was happy to discover a folder had been established to collect clippings about Chad Walsh. For a time Walsh was a frequent book reviewer and was one of the writers responsible for establishing C. S. Lewis in the United States...
When I was at loose ends and teaching seventh grade in a Catholic school in Menasha, Wisconsin where my parents had been exiled to from Patchogue, Walsh suggested I might go to Hollins College and get a MA. Walsh had been to Hollins the previous year and had met GEORGE GARRETT.
five
George Garrett was the best sort of a teacher: worldly wise and widely read. He sought no disciples and only tried to help a student find his own voice. Happily he leaves no school behind, no quirks or attitudes or themes that students can easily mimic.
The best memorial for Garrett can be found in reading his novel, Death of the Fox, a poem, Three Night Poems, the story, A Wreath for Garibaldi. These three works will send you to sample his 34 books.
Again at loose ends now in February 1970 only wanting to continue writing I was sitting in Garrett's office at Hollins College and he suggested that I should go to Columbia. Two years in New York City. I agreed and he called right there and then Frank MacShane the head of the graduate writing program. After a few minutes of talk Garrett got off the phone and said, "You've been accepted, now fill out the application and tell them how much money you want." I went to Columbia for two years. I published two little stories in The Village Voice--- Goodbye W.H. Auden and A Son's Father's Day--- and could not be bothered to re-type my writings on the special paper Columbia demanded for the MFA degree.
So now I had learned in America what I had learned really and not theoretically in the People's Republic of Bulgaria: it is all a matter of connections.
Five years ago which is the last time I saw Garrett he had me invited to the University of Tennessee for a conference celebrating his life and work. He arranged that the university give me a honorarium and he himself paid for the plane ticket as he knew I did not have the money. I gave a little talk. It along with the other talks was to have been published in a book by the university but Garrett was a realist and knew that the book was only talk and that the conference itself had been a dry run in the hopes of running a conference for a far more famous writer who was obviously Cormac McCarthy. George accepted this situation as it allowed people like me to come down to Tennessee and allowed his friends to meet each other.
Just after receiving the e-mail on May 24, 2008 explaining that Garrett was at home under hospice care I wrote to George and Susan his wife of so many years what I knew was likely to be a farewell letter... telling them of sitting earlier that day on the aluminum bleachers watching my son playing baseball at Groton School with an unobstructed view of the chapel across a far field and later trying to tell the headmaster (who well knew the history) of how I was then also remembering standing in front of the Episcopal church in Tombstone and how in less than two months I would be standing in front of that church again with my son and how it seemed to be beyond words to describe this linking of the founder of Groton School with the same man, Endicott Peabody, who had actually built that first church in Tombstone having arrived in that notorious town just after the famous gunfight and how he had collected the money for the church from participants and observers of that gun fight... but in the actual writing to George and Susan, I wrote, George had shown the way in his own writing and with much effort and a deep trust in words that it was possible to link the present to the ever present past as surely as Peabody's chapel on that sunny Saturday in New England was intimately related to a church now just around the corner from the site of the gunfight at the OK Corral, in Tombstone, the town too tough to die.
Maybe in my letter I should have just remembered Garrett's last published book, Double Vision, which is about a writer named George Garrett who asked to review a biography of a former neighbor Peter Taylor in turn invents another character who in turn is reviewing a book about a neighbor. Late in the book Garrett had his fictional character, "Frank also copies down one sentence from a piece, "The writer's Life" by Thomas McGonigle: The dead are always with us...
In the morning of what turned out to be the day of Garrett's death, Susan wrote to me that she appreciated my letter and would read it to George. I wonder if it was one of the last things he heard...
six
Always linked to these two men is Bink Noll who was a professor of English at Beloit College. Noll was an elegant poet with an impeccable Ivy League background who published three books of poetry---The Center of the Circle, The Feast and The House--- in his life time. As he got older he became gay and lived with a man named Wayne who was from the hometown of Ed Gein the inspiration for Psycho. In Bink's basement Wayne edited a magazine EDINITE which was devoted to the male nipple and those who treasured them. Garrett had been the sponsor of Noll's third book of poetry published by Louisiana State University Press, The House.
As his life wore on Noll was afflicted with much illness: he made light of his colostomy and how changing the bag was just one more item in his morning ritual. Noll was always a good host when in the early 1980s I used to make a pilgrimage about the Midwest visiting Chicago (Jack O'Brien), Milwaukee (James Liddy), Madison (Paul Rux)... Bloomington (Marcia Cebulska) Baltimore (Jenny Burdick) Washington (Lucja)...
Noll told me a very good story about his experience when invited to read his poetry at Princeton. At the train station he was met by a student as his host had been called away. When they got to the hall--- more a lounge, Noll noticed and with only four or so kids in attendance. The show must go on The young man told Bink that the host had given him a paragraph to read as an apology and introduction. Even before that happened one of the four left the room. As the introduction was being read two more students left. The host student left as he had a class to get to. So Bink was standing at the podium with his one man audience. Noll began to read from The House. He read two poems and then noticed that the student in the audience had raised his hand. Bink asked, Yes? and the young man replied, Sir, no disrespect but I was wondering how long you planned to go on because I am studying for a physics final.
Bink concluded his story by saying, and that is how I came to give a reading at Princeton with no one in the audience. Princeton did send him a check, he was happy to note, only two months after the reading. The student host had forgotten to give it to him.
That story was repeated by George Garrett at the celebration at the University of Tennessee and is known as the Bink Noll at Princeton story. It is the great consolation story and underlines what is all so obvious...
PS: a version of this has appeared at the Jacket Copy blog of the book section of the Los Angeles Times. June 4, 2008
Monday, May 12, 2008
WHO SHOULD BE PUBLISHED FROM HERE AND ABROAD
k..
"Frank also copies down one sentence from a piece, "The Writing Life," by Thomas McGonigle: The dead are always with us.from DOUBLE VISION by George Garrett, The University of Alabama Press, 2004.
This can serve as a preface to what follows. Of course the important detail is the publisher...
j..
Translation has been in the news. Much of what is translated in junk. All too often the stuff is re-cycled drivel that admits in both form and content that it has been influenced by certain American writers who in turn are already second and third rate versions of in many cases foreign sources. Or the work is published to validate some progressive cause or viewpoint and then the writing is usually of a tedious realistic nature designed to teach a lesson or make us sympathetic for some new victim.
As a rule of thumb--- to fall into a cliche--- translators should avoid the new and the young for a certain period of time... all too often these young writers merely echo the newspaper headlines of the moment and simply put, there are too many works of literature that have been over-looked and which if translated will actually broaden our understanding of what literature is and what can be done beyond the dreary realism that is still the benchmark of ninety five percent of what passes for American writing.
My list of writers whose works should be published, newly translated or republished in new translations, or brought back into print if originally written in English/American must include:::: if I could, I would alter this list every time you look at it since they are listed not in any particular order and any order that is here should be read without significance:::
Louis Ferdinand Celine
Hal Bennett
Pierre Drieu La Rochelle
Juan Carlos Onetti
Georgi Ivanov
Jose Lezama Lima
Julien Gracq
Julian Rios
Julian Green
Uwe Johnson
Glenway Wescott
Robert Brasillach
Marcel Jouhandeau
Ernst Junger
Nina Berberova
Heimito Von Doderer
Edward Dahlberg
Thomas McGonigle
Francis Stuart
Robert Pinget
James Hanley
Robert Walser
Peter Handke
Thomas Bernhard
Walter Kempowski
Gerhard Roth
George Garrett
Claude Simon
Arno Schmidt
Giuseppe Berto
David Slavitt
Tom Whalen
Botho Strauss
Pati Hill
Hannah Green
Kenneth Tindall
Gil Orlovitz
Miroslav Krelza
Alberto Savinio
Hector Bianciotti
Jacques Rigaut
k..
If a publisher came along and said what would you publish and why should I make you an editor I would answer with this list...
"Frank also copies down one sentence from a piece, "The Writing Life," by Thomas McGonigle: The dead are always with us.from DOUBLE VISION by George Garrett, The University of Alabama Press, 2004.
This can serve as a preface to what follows. Of course the important detail is the publisher...
j..
Translation has been in the news. Much of what is translated in junk. All too often the stuff is re-cycled drivel that admits in both form and content that it has been influenced by certain American writers who in turn are already second and third rate versions of in many cases foreign sources. Or the work is published to validate some progressive cause or viewpoint and then the writing is usually of a tedious realistic nature designed to teach a lesson or make us sympathetic for some new victim.
As a rule of thumb--- to fall into a cliche--- translators should avoid the new and the young for a certain period of time... all too often these young writers merely echo the newspaper headlines of the moment and simply put, there are too many works of literature that have been over-looked and which if translated will actually broaden our understanding of what literature is and what can be done beyond the dreary realism that is still the benchmark of ninety five percent of what passes for American writing.
My list of writers whose works should be published, newly translated or republished in new translations, or brought back into print if originally written in English/American must include:::: if I could, I would alter this list every time you look at it since they are listed not in any particular order and any order that is here should be read without significance:::
Louis Ferdinand Celine
Hal Bennett
Pierre Drieu La Rochelle
Juan Carlos Onetti
Georgi Ivanov
Jose Lezama Lima
Julien Gracq
Julian Rios
Julian Green
Uwe Johnson
Glenway Wescott
Robert Brasillach
Marcel Jouhandeau
Ernst Junger
Nina Berberova
Heimito Von Doderer
Edward Dahlberg
Thomas McGonigle
Francis Stuart
Robert Pinget
James Hanley
Robert Walser
Peter Handke
Thomas Bernhard
Walter Kempowski
Gerhard Roth
George Garrett
Claude Simon
Arno Schmidt
Giuseppe Berto
David Slavitt
Tom Whalen
Botho Strauss
Pati Hill
Hannah Green
Kenneth Tindall
Gil Orlovitz
Miroslav Krelza
Alberto Savinio
Hector Bianciotti
Jacques Rigaut
k..
If a publisher came along and said what would you publish and why should I make you an editor I would answer with this list...
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
2666 BY ROBERTO BOLANO or HOW TO POSTPONE SUICIDE
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.
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.
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.
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