reading
reading
not to be read
reading
not to be read
not to be read.
Increasingly, I have given up any thought that my manuscripts will ever be read and then published. From everything I know about publishing I no longer believe that there are editors capable of reading and publishing what I have written. I am sure there are editors who know how to read but they are no longer willing to go through the necessary motions of preparing the way for the publication of my manuscripts. Most editors defer to either the sales force or their imagined sales force when deciding on the possibility of publishing a manuscript.
An editor when considering a manuscript is always dealing with the thought of filling out the projected sales figures for the book: copies advanced, first month sales, three months, six months, year one sales, year two sales...
Of course these figures are all imaginary and they are closer to the reality of the lottery where it is more likely you will be hit by lightning than winning one of the big lotteries... as they say in New York a dollar and a dream...
As we all know lotteries are a wonderful tax on the poor who are the biggest suckers for this form of gambling. And so you might say the sales projection form is a sort of tax on the imagination or maybe better it is the closing of the imagination.
And do not think that there is any hope in the smaller independent presses. They now operate along the same lines and in many cases are even less adventurous than houses like Knopf or FSG. They are even more given to suppose trends and all too often gone over into the multi-cultural sham as they know it is way to squeeze money out of the government or foundations.
Agents are not much better. When my books were published and well reviewed across the country, including the all important New York Times,I made the rounds agents with a list provided by Sam Vaughan then a senior editor at Random House and the former publisher of Doubleday. The most honest agent simply said, I can not eat lunch off of you... and that is the bottom line with agents.
Of course there are still accidents and that is how they have to be characterized when actual literary books are published today. If you have been reading this blog you know what I mean by literary books. I am not talking about fake books by Paul Auster and Don DeLillo... and the list of these is too long to go into... again.
Truth be told: some of the impetus for these thoughts came as a result of driving last week to and from Nashville where I returned my daughter to her third year at Vanderbilt. The poverty of Vanderbilt in terms of literature is legendary... the academic bookstore is more interesting in selling t-shirts and water bowls for dogs... but Vanderbilt is not as awful as Harvard as it lacks the actual hatred of the imagination which is the hallmark of Harvard and the city of its location, Cambridge.
As we were driving along 40 we saw the signs for the Book Cellar in Crossville, Tennessee. Located in a down-at-the-heels mall, the shop is a huge barn of a building with a vast collection of mostly mass market paperbacks. A large section of Christian Fiction and self help books that were of help another year. There was a stand alone bookcase with multiple copies of all of Danielle Steel books. A daughter was calling her mom on a cell phone while standing in front of the James Patterson collection. She did not know if they had read this title and her mother thought they might as well read it again as she also had forgotten if they had read it...
I could go on and make lists of the various collections in the shop... but it was the tiredness, the ache of what could be that tore at me.
I think it would be better if there was more illiteracy in the country. Remember some time ago I mentioned Albert Jay Nock noting that the best bookstores in Europe were in Portugal which at that time had the highest rate of illiteracy: there was no market for books geared for the semi-literate.
In Virginia just off 81 we were drawn to the Green Valley Book Fair which is open for a week or so at different times throughout the year. Again a vast size and all the books are newly remaindered. Stuff that doesn't sell... and in every category... last season's self help books and it was nice to see a very big pile of the last novel by Rick Moody but of course that will not stop his stupid publisher from printing more and more books by this guy... of course seeing these piles you realize that those wonderful sales figure projections must not have worked... it was a shop as testament to the fallibility of these editors... yet they continue to be guided by them when it comes to the sort of manuscripts that I have produced...
reading
reading
not to be read
not to be read
not to be read
AND A TINY PIECE OF GOOD NEWS
Finally I found a copy of ISLANDS by Jean Grenier published by Green Integer in 2003. Of course it was not much talked about. Grenier (1898-1971) is unknown in the US thanks to the genuine stupidity of American publishing.
ISLANDS is a book essentially of essays introduced by Albert Camus. Camus writes in his introduction about what this book did to him, "Suddenly a great theme of all the ages began to resound in us as a disturbing novelty. The sea, the sun, the faces from which we were suddenly separated by a kind of invisible barrier, removed themselves from us without ceasing to fascinate us. In sum ISLANDS initiated us in disenchantment; we had discovered culture... (Grenier) prefers to speak of the death of a cat, of a butcher's illness or the fragrance of flowers of passing time. Nothing is really said in this book. All is suggested with incomparable force and delicacy. This nimble and agile language at once exact and dreamy has all the fluidity if music."
And so the opening line of ISLANDS in the chapter The Attractions of the Void: "In each life, particularly at its dawn, there exists an instant which determines everything..."
A little later, " I was one of those men predestined to wonder why they live instead of actually living or at most living only on the margins."
The second essay Mouloud the Cat begins, "The world of animals is made of silences and leaps."
The death that will eventually come to this cat is the stuff of the most awful nightmare that any horror novel you might have ever read... pales by comparison.. while I had to read Grenier's words, and as you must, and not for a second regretting reading them, I do not know what to make of this new understanding... the only consolation is that I still have more pages of Grenier to read...
I hope you will find ISLANDS and also be on this voyage.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Thursday, August 14, 2008
WHEN A WRITER STOPS WRITING NOVELS: MARK DINTENFASS
93
In 1968 when Lilia and I went from Sofia via Dublin to join my parents in their exile in Menasha, Wisconsin I came to learn the name of a young writer who had just taken up teaching at Lawrence University (then College) in nearby Appleton, Mark Dintenfass. In the following year he would publish a novel MAKE YOURSELF AN EARTHQUAKE. I never met MD as I was teaching seventh grade at St John's Polish Catholic Church School and getting ready to escape to Hollins College via George Garrett and Chad Walsh. I did go to listen to Kenneth Burke, I think in that year, but I might have gone to see Burke a few years later up in Appleton...
MD typified what I thought was going to happen to me: I would contrive to publish a novel, have some sort of MA and end up teaching and living out my life as a writer in residence at some leafy college like Lawrence, teaching a writing course, teaching a course of my own creation on writers I liked and meeting visiting writers... having a house within walking distance of the college... growing old with many trips to Europe and eventually a second home somewhere or other to provide a contrast to the winters of Wisconsin or the north or maybe it would be the reverse in terms of weather if i lived in the South.
Of course that did not come to pass. The white male writer with tenure at a small college is now nearly an extinct creature having been replaced by various women and the far more fashionable and necessary ethnic writers of whatever sex.
The occasion for these "thoughts" was finding MONTGOMERY STREET by Dintenfass among the books in my storage unit. It is a surprisingly good book that is of necessity and sure fragmentation as his narrator assembles a possible film from his memories of growing up in Brooklyn.
Of course like all of Dintenfass's books---THE CASE AGAINST ORG, OLD WORLD NEW WORLD, A LOVING PLACE, MAKE YOURSELF AN EARTHQUAKE--- it is out of print and I went to the computer to see if he was still among the living. On the jacket of MONTGOMERY STREET there is a photogrpah of a chunky dark haired man with dark glasses, heavy eye brows and brooding moustache.
MD is still among the living at least according to an article from the Lawrence University magazine: which writes of his many years of teaching and how twentyfive years ago the novels stopped and he was teaching writing, directing plays and is now a professor emeritus: it is mentioned that his favorite novel came within a few thousand copies of making the NY Times best seller list... one or two students talked about him as a good teacher and he remembered playing softball for Lawrence for 20 years. His hair is now white or gray; he has softened at the edges and he is remembering that one of his novels came within a few thousand copies of making the New York Times best seller list
94
I have not been able to write of my parents' exile in Menasha,Wisconsin and I do not use the word exile lightly as it was an exile from Patchogue and my father's job in New York City. He was sent there by the American Can Company which owned his flesh as was very common back then.
Menasha is a factory city on Little Lake Butte des Mortes... a city of taverns, factories, next door to Neenah home of Kimberly Clark and a museum devoted to paper weights. My father and I went up to stand by the grave of Joe McCarthy who is buried in Appleton... I published a poem or two in the local newspaper... I remember Roger who worked part time at the funeral parlor who had the job of making sure that eyelids did not pop open during viewings... he had taught eighth grade in the same school and his mother listened to country/western music...
95
All writers prepare today to be forgotten if they have any brains about them. The books are on library shelves. The books are in the fewer and fewer second hand book stores. The books are in the rather insulting or humiliating listings at Amazon where prices start at .01 cents plus postage.
96
If a book does not generate some sort of critical response it is doomed to disappear into the...
97
One could write and essay on MONTGOMERY STREET and nothing would happen... maybe MONTGOMERY STREET would no longer retail for .01 cents for brief moment.
One could celebrate the quality of the writing, the writing as an attempt to deal with the persistence of memory and the attempt at shaping of memory into film.. and while the novel leaves it open at the end, the reader is left with the exhilarating feeling that this book is an actual real substitude for what would only be a very derivative movie... MD creates in MONTOMERY STREET that miracle of demonstrating that the read word has advantages over the word that has been used to provoke moving pictures...
98
I wonder if MD ever tried to describe the winters in the Fox Valley where Appleton along with Menasha and Neenah are? Did he try to describe the smells of the paper manufacturing plants? Did he try to describe the go-go bars up on the highway or the taverns that seemed to be on every corner of those cities? Did he think of Glenway Wescott who came from near there in Kewaskum and wrote a book of stories GOODBYE WISCONSIN and just maybe the great American novel if such needs to be mentioned, THE GRANDMOTHERS? Did he think of Lorine Niedecker also living nearby and working in hospitals as a cleaning lady while corresponding with Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky?
Or did he think too much of Brooklyn or waste a lot of time thinking about being so far away from...
Or has he been saving himself, for that moment when he will be free of students, and now able to once again...
In 1968 when Lilia and I went from Sofia via Dublin to join my parents in their exile in Menasha, Wisconsin I came to learn the name of a young writer who had just taken up teaching at Lawrence University (then College) in nearby Appleton, Mark Dintenfass. In the following year he would publish a novel MAKE YOURSELF AN EARTHQUAKE. I never met MD as I was teaching seventh grade at St John's Polish Catholic Church School and getting ready to escape to Hollins College via George Garrett and Chad Walsh. I did go to listen to Kenneth Burke, I think in that year, but I might have gone to see Burke a few years later up in Appleton...
MD typified what I thought was going to happen to me: I would contrive to publish a novel, have some sort of MA and end up teaching and living out my life as a writer in residence at some leafy college like Lawrence, teaching a writing course, teaching a course of my own creation on writers I liked and meeting visiting writers... having a house within walking distance of the college... growing old with many trips to Europe and eventually a second home somewhere or other to provide a contrast to the winters of Wisconsin or the north or maybe it would be the reverse in terms of weather if i lived in the South.
Of course that did not come to pass. The white male writer with tenure at a small college is now nearly an extinct creature having been replaced by various women and the far more fashionable and necessary ethnic writers of whatever sex.
The occasion for these "thoughts" was finding MONTGOMERY STREET by Dintenfass among the books in my storage unit. It is a surprisingly good book that is of necessity and sure fragmentation as his narrator assembles a possible film from his memories of growing up in Brooklyn.
Of course like all of Dintenfass's books---THE CASE AGAINST ORG, OLD WORLD NEW WORLD, A LOVING PLACE, MAKE YOURSELF AN EARTHQUAKE--- it is out of print and I went to the computer to see if he was still among the living. On the jacket of MONTGOMERY STREET there is a photogrpah of a chunky dark haired man with dark glasses, heavy eye brows and brooding moustache.
MD is still among the living at least according to an article from the Lawrence University magazine: which writes of his many years of teaching and how twentyfive years ago the novels stopped and he was teaching writing, directing plays and is now a professor emeritus: it is mentioned that his favorite novel came within a few thousand copies of making the NY Times best seller list... one or two students talked about him as a good teacher and he remembered playing softball for Lawrence for 20 years. His hair is now white or gray; he has softened at the edges and he is remembering that one of his novels came within a few thousand copies of making the New York Times best seller list
94
I have not been able to write of my parents' exile in Menasha,Wisconsin and I do not use the word exile lightly as it was an exile from Patchogue and my father's job in New York City. He was sent there by the American Can Company which owned his flesh as was very common back then.
Menasha is a factory city on Little Lake Butte des Mortes... a city of taverns, factories, next door to Neenah home of Kimberly Clark and a museum devoted to paper weights. My father and I went up to stand by the grave of Joe McCarthy who is buried in Appleton... I published a poem or two in the local newspaper... I remember Roger who worked part time at the funeral parlor who had the job of making sure that eyelids did not pop open during viewings... he had taught eighth grade in the same school and his mother listened to country/western music...
95
All writers prepare today to be forgotten if they have any brains about them. The books are on library shelves. The books are in the fewer and fewer second hand book stores. The books are in the rather insulting or humiliating listings at Amazon where prices start at .01 cents plus postage.
96
If a book does not generate some sort of critical response it is doomed to disappear into the...
97
One could write and essay on MONTGOMERY STREET and nothing would happen... maybe MONTGOMERY STREET would no longer retail for .01 cents for brief moment.
One could celebrate the quality of the writing, the writing as an attempt to deal with the persistence of memory and the attempt at shaping of memory into film.. and while the novel leaves it open at the end, the reader is left with the exhilarating feeling that this book is an actual real substitude for what would only be a very derivative movie... MD creates in MONTOMERY STREET that miracle of demonstrating that the read word has advantages over the word that has been used to provoke moving pictures...
98
I wonder if MD ever tried to describe the winters in the Fox Valley where Appleton along with Menasha and Neenah are? Did he try to describe the smells of the paper manufacturing plants? Did he try to describe the go-go bars up on the highway or the taverns that seemed to be on every corner of those cities? Did he think of Glenway Wescott who came from near there in Kewaskum and wrote a book of stories GOODBYE WISCONSIN and just maybe the great American novel if such needs to be mentioned, THE GRANDMOTHERS? Did he think of Lorine Niedecker also living nearby and working in hospitals as a cleaning lady while corresponding with Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky?
Or did he think too much of Brooklyn or waste a lot of time thinking about being so far away from...
Or has he been saving himself, for that moment when he will be free of students, and now able to once again...
Friday, August 1, 2008
A RETURNING FROM THE VOYAGE WORSE FOR THE WEAR
19
--Fragments which in many ways exemplify the total powerlessness of writing in such a medium.
--Back from a voyage with my son through the deserts of Arizona and California and from being at Hermosa Beach, near Los Angeles.
--I did not know my son very well because he lives four streets away from me in New York City, with his mother, because many years ago she decided her feelings had changed and she wanted to grow spiritually.
18
--I came back with few words that insisted on being written down.
--I did not know the names of the plants through which we walked or drove by.
--I did not know the names of the geological formations we passed through or upon.
--I could not say one word of the language of the Tohono O'odham nation through we drove.
17
--We toured Pomona College as my son is entering his last year at a prep school in New England.
--Pomona College seemed to be a little paradise whose whole educational purpose was centered upon the actual individual student.
--I would hope my son would go to Pomona.
I do not know if he will be able to resist the well cultivated seductive attractive illusions of the Ivy League.
If he falls for one of those colleges or universities it will be too late.
He will discover as countless students have done that the undergraduate student at these institutions is always an afterthought to the professors they encounter.
They will discover their role of being the student as nigger as was said in the so-called Sixties.
Of course for the vast dull majority of such students they will be too embarrassed to ever admit their mistake in going to these so-called institutions of higher education.
16
--In Los Angeles the book section of the Los Angles Times was being merged into the larger Arts and Entertainment section. There were the usual protests. Most over-looked the one fringe benefit: books would no longer be segregated from the other arts. It will be the duty of the book section editor to assert the absolute necessity of books and that books of course are intimately connected to the other arts as indeed they in turn are connected to books. Books for too many people are seen as just stepping stones to the supposedly higher realm of movies. No good writer really wants to see his book translated to the silver screen.
15
In Long Beach, Acres of Books, a vast second hand bookshop, is closing to make way for an arts complex in an area of Long Beach called the East Village. Only a real estate genius could not see the humour of such a situation.
14
We voyaged through the land about the Salton Sea on our way to Palm Springs.
Both places are two sides of a coin that should provide the setting for a great novel.
I would love to have a house in Salton City or Salton Sea Beach.
I would think living midst what was once promised to be a great resort would be like living in Year Zero in Berlin in 1945.
13
But it might also be nice to have also another house in Palm Springs or Rancho Mirage (again the genius of the real estate wonder workers) as I could imagine myself as being Ingmar Bergman or Max Frisch traveling from their Palm Springs or Rancho Mirage (Sweden and Switzerland) through the devastated landscape of Germany in 1945. How these places are the necessary complements of each other.
12
I came back to New York City knowing that there was no purpose in my unpublished books.
We had lunch with the owner of Green Integer Books (Sun and Moon Press) Douglas Messerli. Conversation turned to Richard M. Elman. Messerli had published TAR BEACH the last novel of Elman who is now dead. Messerli has two unpublished novels by Elman in his files. He showed me one with the title LOVE HANDLES.
If you have to ask who is Richard M. Elman? If you don't know who Richard M.Elman is or if his name is obscure you know why those two manuscripts have not been published.
11
How to imagine, again, the possibility of ever publishing another book?
10
I wanted to
9
SATANTANGO the great seven hour film by Bela Tarr was waiting for me when I got home.
8
I had wanted to talk about the Library of America books devoted to Katherine Ann Porter and William Maxwell and John Ashbery.
7
I had wanted to talk about the new Collected Poems of Jack Spicer.
6
I had wanted to talk about MUTE OBJECTS OF EXPRESSION by Francis Ponge (Archipelago)
5
I had wanted to talk about SENS-PLASTIQUE by Malcolm de Chazal. (Green Integer)
4
I had wanted to talk about TRANQUILITY by Attila Bartis. (Archipelago)
3
I had wanted to talk about THE UNIMAGINABLE MATHEMATICS OF BORGES' LIBRARY OF BABEL by William Goldbloom Bloch (Oxford University Press)
2
I had wanted to talk about ESTHER'S INHERITANCE by Sandor Marai (Knopf)
1
But I did finish reading Robert Pinget's SOMONEONE (Red Dust, 1984): "That's my own personal and private blessing, to forget and to lose my papers. If I had a good memory I wouldn't lose anything and then I wouldn't know what to do, I'd be bored rigid. Always having to ask yourself what have I forgotten, this keeps you going. And when you find something you'd forgotten to look for, what joy. This is very frequent."
In an afterword Pinget mentions, "As for the subjects treated in my novels, they are taken from the most banal, apparently derisory, everyday events in which there is nothing than can make a novel,
but which I have chosen for my material.
-1
I had wanted also to talk about ON THE BRINK by Gerhard Roth (Atlas Press) and HOMAGE TO CZERNY: STUDIES IN VIRTUOSO TECHNIQUE by Gert Jonke (Dalkey Archive)
-1
Ed Burns came back from Paris with a report on the actual death of Albert Cossary. The titles of two of his little books can sum up all these words: MEN GOD FORGOT and THE HOUSE OF CERTAIN DEATH
--Fragments which in many ways exemplify the total powerlessness of writing in such a medium.
--Back from a voyage with my son through the deserts of Arizona and California and from being at Hermosa Beach, near Los Angeles.
--I did not know my son very well because he lives four streets away from me in New York City, with his mother, because many years ago she decided her feelings had changed and she wanted to grow spiritually.
18
--I came back with few words that insisted on being written down.
--I did not know the names of the plants through which we walked or drove by.
--I did not know the names of the geological formations we passed through or upon.
--I could not say one word of the language of the Tohono O'odham nation through we drove.
17
--We toured Pomona College as my son is entering his last year at a prep school in New England.
--Pomona College seemed to be a little paradise whose whole educational purpose was centered upon the actual individual student.
--I would hope my son would go to Pomona.
I do not know if he will be able to resist the well cultivated seductive attractive illusions of the Ivy League.
If he falls for one of those colleges or universities it will be too late.
He will discover as countless students have done that the undergraduate student at these institutions is always an afterthought to the professors they encounter.
They will discover their role of being the student as nigger as was said in the so-called Sixties.
Of course for the vast dull majority of such students they will be too embarrassed to ever admit their mistake in going to these so-called institutions of higher education.
16
--In Los Angeles the book section of the Los Angles Times was being merged into the larger Arts and Entertainment section. There were the usual protests. Most over-looked the one fringe benefit: books would no longer be segregated from the other arts. It will be the duty of the book section editor to assert the absolute necessity of books and that books of course are intimately connected to the other arts as indeed they in turn are connected to books. Books for too many people are seen as just stepping stones to the supposedly higher realm of movies. No good writer really wants to see his book translated to the silver screen.
15
In Long Beach, Acres of Books, a vast second hand bookshop, is closing to make way for an arts complex in an area of Long Beach called the East Village. Only a real estate genius could not see the humour of such a situation.
14
We voyaged through the land about the Salton Sea on our way to Palm Springs.
Both places are two sides of a coin that should provide the setting for a great novel.
I would love to have a house in Salton City or Salton Sea Beach.
I would think living midst what was once promised to be a great resort would be like living in Year Zero in Berlin in 1945.
13
But it might also be nice to have also another house in Palm Springs or Rancho Mirage (again the genius of the real estate wonder workers) as I could imagine myself as being Ingmar Bergman or Max Frisch traveling from their Palm Springs or Rancho Mirage (Sweden and Switzerland) through the devastated landscape of Germany in 1945. How these places are the necessary complements of each other.
12
I came back to New York City knowing that there was no purpose in my unpublished books.
We had lunch with the owner of Green Integer Books (Sun and Moon Press) Douglas Messerli. Conversation turned to Richard M. Elman. Messerli had published TAR BEACH the last novel of Elman who is now dead. Messerli has two unpublished novels by Elman in his files. He showed me one with the title LOVE HANDLES.
If you have to ask who is Richard M. Elman? If you don't know who Richard M.Elman is or if his name is obscure you know why those two manuscripts have not been published.
11
How to imagine, again, the possibility of ever publishing another book?
10
I wanted to
9
SATANTANGO the great seven hour film by Bela Tarr was waiting for me when I got home.
8
I had wanted to talk about the Library of America books devoted to Katherine Ann Porter and William Maxwell and John Ashbery.
7
I had wanted to talk about the new Collected Poems of Jack Spicer.
6
I had wanted to talk about MUTE OBJECTS OF EXPRESSION by Francis Ponge (Archipelago)
5
I had wanted to talk about SENS-PLASTIQUE by Malcolm de Chazal. (Green Integer)
4
I had wanted to talk about TRANQUILITY by Attila Bartis. (Archipelago)
3
I had wanted to talk about THE UNIMAGINABLE MATHEMATICS OF BORGES' LIBRARY OF BABEL by William Goldbloom Bloch (Oxford University Press)
2
I had wanted to talk about ESTHER'S INHERITANCE by Sandor Marai (Knopf)
1
But I did finish reading Robert Pinget's SOMONEONE (Red Dust, 1984): "That's my own personal and private blessing, to forget and to lose my papers. If I had a good memory I wouldn't lose anything and then I wouldn't know what to do, I'd be bored rigid. Always having to ask yourself what have I forgotten, this keeps you going. And when you find something you'd forgotten to look for, what joy. This is very frequent."
In an afterword Pinget mentions, "As for the subjects treated in my novels, they are taken from the most banal, apparently derisory, everyday events in which there is nothing than can make a novel,
but which I have chosen for my material.
-1
I had wanted also to talk about ON THE BRINK by Gerhard Roth (Atlas Press) and HOMAGE TO CZERNY: STUDIES IN VIRTUOSO TECHNIQUE by Gert Jonke (Dalkey Archive)
-1
Ed Burns came back from Paris with a report on the actual death of Albert Cossary. The titles of two of his little books can sum up all these words: MEN GOD FORGOT and THE HOUSE OF CERTAIN DEATH
Friday, July 11, 2008
GOING AWAY MIDST PRINTED PAGES: a voyage with my son
Going away always provokes the question: what to read?
Next week we set out on a voyage to Arizona and California.
I have been sorting out journals, books, papers, all the refuse of a life...
Literary journals pile up and even to talk about literary journals is to seriously date me.
Literary journals are mostly now electronic journals though from the evidence in St. Marks Bookstore some are still being published.
I must have gone through maybe two hundred of these mostly thick things. I did keep the entire run of PROSE, one of the most beautiful and elegant journals which existed to publish the work of Edward Dahlberg, Glenway Wescott and a select few writers whose claim to fame is their prose style. And I kept all the issues of the REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION because for the most part they have not dated at all and remain the best introduction to what should and by implication should not be read.
I will make a list of the articles I did save. There is a certain pleasure in ripping these things apart...
---"In A Completely Unknown Region: On Gerhard Roth's Novel Landlaufiger Tod" by W.G. Sebald (Gerhard Roth is a writer who unless more of his books are translated and in particular the book that is the subject of this essay we in America must consider ourselves to be hopelessly provincial. Gerhard Roth is the best writer who writes in German and if you do not believe me seek out this essay by Sebald.
---"The Effect" by Tom Whalen. To remind any and all that it continues to be...
where is the publisher who knows how to read and knows that Tom Whalen's stories, novels, criticism and poetry cries out for being bound into books that are widely read
---"Ortega y Gasset's "Revolt" and the Problem of Mass Rule" by E. Robert Statham, Jr.
---"The Boy on the Swing (Barcelona, 1981)" by Enrique Vila-Matas. (Of course You have read BARTLEBY & Co.
---"A Stroll with Albert Jay Nock" by Robert M. Thornton. Is not the title of his defining autobiography the fate of all of us Memoirs of a Superfluous Man?
---"The Dead Won't Let Us Go" by Linda Le. You might know her SCANDAL--- she is the genuine writer from Vietnam whose work can be read by someone interested in literature and not politics and guilt
---"Hats for Alice" by Julian Rios. LARVA! !!!!!!!
---"Fighters for Anarchism" by Sam Dolgoff
---"Marc Saporta: The Novel as Card Game" by Reinhold Grimm I had just reviewed THE UNFORTUNATES by B.S. Johnson that novel in a box: Saporta had gone a step beyond Johnson.
---"From Tales of Samora Machel" by Pierre Guyotat--- the only French writer who has really moved beyond what Celine was able to do. TOMB FOR 500,000 SOLDIERS, EDEN EDEN EDEB, LE LIVRE
---"Bulgaria, My Suffering" by Julia Kristeva. JK is usually incoherent in a way that the academics treasure but here she finally begins to write--- sadly only a brief moment
---"Juan Goytisolo and the Honor of the Novel" by Carlos Fuentes.
---"The Ambush" by Donna Tartt
---"A Rejected Chapter from Hopsotch" by Julio Cortazar.
---"Aaron Rosenblum" by J. Rodolfo Wilcock
---"Florida Vacations" by Paul Metcalf
---"Preparations" for Search by Joseph McElroy
---"Poe in Vietnam" by Robert Nedelkoff
seven
And I should make a list of the books that I have to decide from to take on our voyage:
THE JOURNAL OF JULIUS RODMAN by Edgar Allan Poe
TRANQUILITY by Attila Bartis
COLLECTED STORES AND OTHER WRITINGS by Katherine Anne Porter (Library of America)
THE COLLECTED POETRY OF JACK SPICER Edited by Gizzi and Killian
LATER NOVELS AND STORIES by William MAxwell (Library of America)
COLLECTED POEMS 1956- 1987 by John Ashbery (Library of America)
THE CALM OCEAN by Gerhard Roth
THE SICKNESS CALLED MAN by Ferdinando Camon
HOMAGE TO CZERNY: Studies in Virtuoso Technique by Gert Jonke
HITLER'S PRIVATE LIBRARY by Timothy W. Ryback
THE TEMPLE OF ICONCLASTS by J Rodolfo Wilcock
---this list is not complete as there are still some days before our departure---
EIGHT
I have been reading THE DESERT PEOPLE by Joseph, Spicer and Chesky and EARTH AND LITTLE RAIN by Bernard L. Fontana. These books begin to describe the Tohono O'odham Nation which we plan to visit after stopping at Tombstone...
NINE
We are voyaging into our ignorance when we fly off to Phoenix with the intention of driving south.
I have no vocabulary for the land through which we will travel.
I hope to find a book to describe the plants and soil and geology.
We have read some into the history but...
TEN
On the same day we set forth my friend Edward Burns goes off to Paris. Burns has just published a carefully annotated collection of letters between Hugh Kenner and Adaline Glashen, A PASSION FOR JOYCE His literary interests and his travels are at such an extreme from our own setting forth for southern Arizona--- maybe only in Finnegans Wake such disparate travels could be compassed.
While we will end up walking along the beach at Hermosa Beach in Los Angeles Ed will be walking from his hotel where Albert Cossary recently died, having lived there for 50 years--- you remember? his books: MEN GOD FORGOT, THE HOUSE OF CERTAIN DEATH, PROUD BEGGARS--- will be walking down to the Seine accompanied by the shades of his friends Michel Leiris and Alice B. Toklas
We return to New York on the same day.
Next week we set out on a voyage to Arizona and California.
I have been sorting out journals, books, papers, all the refuse of a life...
Literary journals pile up and even to talk about literary journals is to seriously date me.
Literary journals are mostly now electronic journals though from the evidence in St. Marks Bookstore some are still being published.
I must have gone through maybe two hundred of these mostly thick things. I did keep the entire run of PROSE, one of the most beautiful and elegant journals which existed to publish the work of Edward Dahlberg, Glenway Wescott and a select few writers whose claim to fame is their prose style. And I kept all the issues of the REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION because for the most part they have not dated at all and remain the best introduction to what should and by implication should not be read.
I will make a list of the articles I did save. There is a certain pleasure in ripping these things apart...
---"In A Completely Unknown Region: On Gerhard Roth's Novel Landlaufiger Tod" by W.G. Sebald (Gerhard Roth is a writer who unless more of his books are translated and in particular the book that is the subject of this essay we in America must consider ourselves to be hopelessly provincial. Gerhard Roth is the best writer who writes in German and if you do not believe me seek out this essay by Sebald.
---"The Effect" by Tom Whalen. To remind any and all that it continues to be...
where is the publisher who knows how to read and knows that Tom Whalen's stories, novels, criticism and poetry cries out for being bound into books that are widely read
---"Ortega y Gasset's "Revolt" and the Problem of Mass Rule" by E. Robert Statham, Jr.
---"The Boy on the Swing (Barcelona, 1981)" by Enrique Vila-Matas. (Of course You have read BARTLEBY & Co.
---"A Stroll with Albert Jay Nock" by Robert M. Thornton. Is not the title of his defining autobiography the fate of all of us Memoirs of a Superfluous Man?
---"The Dead Won't Let Us Go" by Linda Le. You might know her SCANDAL--- she is the genuine writer from Vietnam whose work can be read by someone interested in literature and not politics and guilt
---"Hats for Alice" by Julian Rios. LARVA! !!!!!!!
---"Fighters for Anarchism" by Sam Dolgoff
---"Marc Saporta: The Novel as Card Game" by Reinhold Grimm I had just reviewed THE UNFORTUNATES by B.S. Johnson that novel in a box: Saporta had gone a step beyond Johnson.
---"From Tales of Samora Machel" by Pierre Guyotat--- the only French writer who has really moved beyond what Celine was able to do. TOMB FOR 500,000 SOLDIERS, EDEN EDEN EDEB, LE LIVRE
---"Bulgaria, My Suffering" by Julia Kristeva. JK is usually incoherent in a way that the academics treasure but here she finally begins to write--- sadly only a brief moment
---"Juan Goytisolo and the Honor of the Novel" by Carlos Fuentes.
---"The Ambush" by Donna Tartt
---"A Rejected Chapter from Hopsotch" by Julio Cortazar.
---"Aaron Rosenblum" by J. Rodolfo Wilcock
---"Florida Vacations" by Paul Metcalf
---"Preparations" for Search by Joseph McElroy
---"Poe in Vietnam" by Robert Nedelkoff
seven
And I should make a list of the books that I have to decide from to take on our voyage:
THE JOURNAL OF JULIUS RODMAN by Edgar Allan Poe
TRANQUILITY by Attila Bartis
COLLECTED STORES AND OTHER WRITINGS by Katherine Anne Porter (Library of America)
THE COLLECTED POETRY OF JACK SPICER Edited by Gizzi and Killian
LATER NOVELS AND STORIES by William MAxwell (Library of America)
COLLECTED POEMS 1956- 1987 by John Ashbery (Library of America)
THE CALM OCEAN by Gerhard Roth
THE SICKNESS CALLED MAN by Ferdinando Camon
HOMAGE TO CZERNY: Studies in Virtuoso Technique by Gert Jonke
HITLER'S PRIVATE LIBRARY by Timothy W. Ryback
THE TEMPLE OF ICONCLASTS by J Rodolfo Wilcock
---this list is not complete as there are still some days before our departure---
EIGHT
I have been reading THE DESERT PEOPLE by Joseph, Spicer and Chesky and EARTH AND LITTLE RAIN by Bernard L. Fontana. These books begin to describe the Tohono O'odham Nation which we plan to visit after stopping at Tombstone...
NINE
We are voyaging into our ignorance when we fly off to Phoenix with the intention of driving south.
I have no vocabulary for the land through which we will travel.
I hope to find a book to describe the plants and soil and geology.
We have read some into the history but...
TEN
On the same day we set forth my friend Edward Burns goes off to Paris. Burns has just published a carefully annotated collection of letters between Hugh Kenner and Adaline Glashen, A PASSION FOR JOYCE His literary interests and his travels are at such an extreme from our own setting forth for southern Arizona--- maybe only in Finnegans Wake such disparate travels could be compassed.
While we will end up walking along the beach at Hermosa Beach in Los Angeles Ed will be walking from his hotel where Albert Cossary recently died, having lived there for 50 years--- you remember? his books: MEN GOD FORGOT, THE HOUSE OF CERTAIN DEATH, PROUD BEGGARS--- will be walking down to the Seine accompanied by the shades of his friends Michel Leiris and Alice B. Toklas
We return to New York on the same day.
Friday, June 27, 2008
SUMMER or anytime READING LIST
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
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
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
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