Another aspect of the dumbness of Elaine Showalter became apparent when a friend, TW sent me a list of his favorite novels written by women--- his list by gender which he did with the provocation that ES probably did not include them in her book--- but the listing was something he would not normally do as he like myself is uninterested in the sexual equipment of a writer:
Barbara Pym - Quartet in Autumn
Barbara Comyns - Who Was Changed and Who Who Was Dead
Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Anna Kavan - Ice
Penelope Mortimer - The Handyman
Penelope Fitzgerald - Gate of Angels
Anita Brookner - Incident in the Rue Langier
Hannah Green - The Dead of the House
Shirley Jackson - We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Tremor of Forgery - Patricia Highsmith
Ilse Aichinger - The Greater Hope
Margarita Karapanou - Kassandra and the Wolf
Espido Freire – Irlanda
TW added for completeness in a subsequent email, THE GATE OF ANGELS by Penelope Fitzgerald.
The Aichinger novel in particular reminded me of another further dumbness of books like ES’s.
It is bad enough that she has chosen to write only about writers who possess a vagina but she was also requiring them to have American passports… so of course she is limited to writing for example about a pathetic and minor writer like Sylvia Plath when she could have been able to write a far more interesting book if she had gone beyond the narrow focus based upon the passports or self-declared ethnicity of her writers.
I was thinking of novels, stories and poems by writers like Ingeborg Bachmann, Marina Tsvetaeva, Clarice Lispector, Nelida Pinon, Jean Rhys, Violette Leduc …
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
A GREAT MODEL OF ACADEMIC STUPIDITY: Elaine Showalter
An underlining idea of what I have been trying to do is that one should never really trust academics when it comes to literary matters. They mostly get everything wrong and this has always been so in the modern age. Today,no sane person would ever seriously expect to study literature at an American university as that is the one thing that is not studied in English and foreign language departments at 99% of American universities.
A very good example of your typical tenured, honoured, respected academic is Elaine Showalter. She has chosen to publish A JURY IF HER PEERS, a 608 page study of American women writers. Of course the absurdity of such a book is self-evident as if it was really of interest to study writers on the basis of whether or not they have a vagina or a penis... but even allowing for this sort of trivializing ghettoization is the simple fact that she overlooks Evelyn Scott whose body of work from the 1920's 30s, 40s is far superior to any of the writers she does actually pretend to discuss: most of them are minor to say the least and deserving of their obscurity when compared to so many other writers who happen to have other physical attributes... but it is in wondering how she could overlook Evelyn Scott.. who introduced Faulkner's THE SOUND AND THE FURY and received for her troubles his back-handed compliment, as being pretty good for a woman.. though Faulkner well knew Scott was in so many ways his equal through her actual books: THE WAVE, A CALENDAR OF SIN, BREAD AND A SWORD, THE NARROW HOUSE, BACKGROUND IN TENNESSEE, ESCAPADE...
Of course the real reason Showalter is afraid of such a writer as Scott is simple laziness and tenured academics always avoid the difficult as that is never a good career move. Showalter will drivel on and on about Sylvia Plath, Sara Teasdale and Adrienne Rich...
If a young person wants to actually study literature at a college or university they should probably study geology or botany or chemistry or mathematics... in the former Soviet Union where literature departments were as awful and as stupid as your typical American literature departments the real readers were in the sciences and it was these people who kept alive for instance the work of Mandelstam and many others...
A very good example of your typical tenured, honoured, respected academic is Elaine Showalter. She has chosen to publish A JURY IF HER PEERS, a 608 page study of American women writers. Of course the absurdity of such a book is self-evident as if it was really of interest to study writers on the basis of whether or not they have a vagina or a penis... but even allowing for this sort of trivializing ghettoization is the simple fact that she overlooks Evelyn Scott whose body of work from the 1920's 30s, 40s is far superior to any of the writers she does actually pretend to discuss: most of them are minor to say the least and deserving of their obscurity when compared to so many other writers who happen to have other physical attributes... but it is in wondering how she could overlook Evelyn Scott.. who introduced Faulkner's THE SOUND AND THE FURY and received for her troubles his back-handed compliment, as being pretty good for a woman.. though Faulkner well knew Scott was in so many ways his equal through her actual books: THE WAVE, A CALENDAR OF SIN, BREAD AND A SWORD, THE NARROW HOUSE, BACKGROUND IN TENNESSEE, ESCAPADE...
Of course the real reason Showalter is afraid of such a writer as Scott is simple laziness and tenured academics always avoid the difficult as that is never a good career move. Showalter will drivel on and on about Sylvia Plath, Sara Teasdale and Adrienne Rich...
If a young person wants to actually study literature at a college or university they should probably study geology or botany or chemistry or mathematics... in the former Soviet Union where literature departments were as awful and as stupid as your typical American literature departments the real readers were in the sciences and it was these people who kept alive for instance the work of Mandelstam and many others...
Friday, April 3, 2009
THE SADDEST NEWS: The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Sadder even than the famous three saddest words in the English language according to Gore Vidal--- Joyce Carol Oates--- I see that Farrar, Straus & Giroux is about to unleash the collected stories of Lydia Davis in the Fall.
Sad, so sad that Lydia Davis was caught by the virus of wanting to be a so-called creative writer and this virus has for the most part stopped her from being truly socially useful as a translator, a vocation that she was so good in and if she had persisted she could easily be ranked with those other two great translators Helen Lane and Barbara Wright to whom all English speakers are indebted to for having providing some of the most important translations in modern times.
This all too common virus has stopped Davis from finishing her translation of Michel Leiris’s great autobiography RULES OF THE GAME of which she masterfully translated two of the four volumes. RULES OF THE GAME is the most important autobiography in modern literature.
And one can only deeply and profoundly regret the writing of these pathetic pale exhibitions of experimental prose has taken the place of Davis possibly translating Leiris’s PHANTOM AFRICA or some of the many books by Marcel Jouhandeau whose life and work embodied all the terrible modern dilemmas of trust, sexuality, religion and the temptations of extremist politics.
And I am sure I have only scratched the surface of what should be made available in English and sadly it seems that Davis will not have a leading role in that but instead: almost 700 pages of creative writing… Maybe the publishers should have held out for another two hundred pages and Davis could challenge James Joyce’s Ulysses at least in the matter of length.
Interestingly,the publishers have also decided that Davis's work should be compared to the Velvet Underground and helpfully note that the Velvet Underground is a rock band. Nico the most important member of that band is rolling in derisions of laughter in her Berlin grave at the impertinence of this comparison.
Sad, so sad that Lydia Davis was caught by the virus of wanting to be a so-called creative writer and this virus has for the most part stopped her from being truly socially useful as a translator, a vocation that she was so good in and if she had persisted she could easily be ranked with those other two great translators Helen Lane and Barbara Wright to whom all English speakers are indebted to for having providing some of the most important translations in modern times.
This all too common virus has stopped Davis from finishing her translation of Michel Leiris’s great autobiography RULES OF THE GAME of which she masterfully translated two of the four volumes. RULES OF THE GAME is the most important autobiography in modern literature.
And one can only deeply and profoundly regret the writing of these pathetic pale exhibitions of experimental prose has taken the place of Davis possibly translating Leiris’s PHANTOM AFRICA or some of the many books by Marcel Jouhandeau whose life and work embodied all the terrible modern dilemmas of trust, sexuality, religion and the temptations of extremist politics.
And I am sure I have only scratched the surface of what should be made available in English and sadly it seems that Davis will not have a leading role in that but instead: almost 700 pages of creative writing… Maybe the publishers should have held out for another two hundred pages and Davis could challenge James Joyce’s Ulysses at least in the matter of length.
Interestingly,the publishers have also decided that Davis's work should be compared to the Velvet Underground and helpfully note that the Velvet Underground is a rock band. Nico the most important member of that band is rolling in derisions of laughter in her Berlin grave at the impertinence of this comparison.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
NEW and OLD: Lim, Marten and Fine
In the background Joy Division as I type.
SECTION ONE
In the mail:
WASTE by EUGENE MARTEN
and
FOG & CAR by EUGENE LIM.
They came to me with compliments about this blog.
I have tried to read each of the books.
I know that Marten has published an earlier book with Turtle Point Press.
I am interested in why I have not read more.
The Marten book is in the tradition of Bataille’s The Story of the Eye.
I am probably not strong enough to read about a janitor and what he collects.
FOG & CAR by LIM is more appealing but I can’t get beyond the names: MR FOG and SARAH CAR.
Names.
Publishers objected to MURPHY and SB was willing to change it to any name they wanted.
I liked the short paragraphs, the short chapters. And I liked the reported reading within the book.
No blurb from Gordon Lish who I had thought dead but whose ghost must have blurbed Marten’s book and I guess it would be inevitable that such a person is one of the undead.
Steve Katz blurbed the Lim book.
Boy, he’s been around a long time. In 1968 I had liked his EXAGGERATIONS OF PETER PRINCE. But then he went on and on writing and even becoming a tenured professor and director of creative writing didn’t stop him and was published in all those places that specialize in log-rolling--- you publish my book and I’ll publish your book…
BUT: FOG & CAR seems to be a book that has to be gotten out of the way. It is too long and not for a moment do I like the division into a sort of his and her version. At least many pages have a lot of which space but that forces the reader to look at each and every word, and probably with the eraser part of the pencil…
BUT now that the book is done with and one is heartened to see that Mr. Lim is a high school librarian, a socially useful profession.
SECTION TWO
In the early 1970s Alfred Knopf published four novels in illustrated laminated hard covers without dust jackets. They charged $3.50 each. It was an attempt to bridge the gap between hard covers and paperbacks. There was a book each from David Ohle and Kathy Black and two novels by Warren Fine. Fine had previous published THE ARTIFICIAL TRAVELER and a tale in the New American Review, The Mousechildren and The Famous Collector. The two Knopf novels are: IN THE ANIMAL KINGDOM and THEIR FAMILY. Both novels are in the imagined voices of settlers on the early American frontier in 1779 and 1800… The books gathered tiny reviews… they did not seem relevant in that time in which Ellen Willis, a then prominent Village Voice writer, could seriously write that good writing is counter-revolutionary.
IN THE ANIMAL KINGDOM and THEIR FAMILY sit on my shelf next to IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN.
How to persuade people to read them, find them…
Greg Kuzma, a poet who once knew Fine, wrote me of Fine’s drinking himself to death in the 1980s having finished one more still unpublished novel, THIRST, though Kuzma couldn’t find it when he went to look for the manuscript.
Kuzma send me a poem he had written about Fine which contains these lines that can serve both as a commentary on SECTION ONE OF THIS POST and on…
I read/ another book of his (Fine’s) after his death/ forty pages of In The Animal Kingdom./ There were no two sentences alike,/ and not a single one I’d ever seen/ That’s the sort of writer he was./ Daring and original and strange./ I stopped reading the book. It was/ too much work. Besides, I said/ Warren’s dead. What does it matter?
SECTION ONE
In the mail:
WASTE by EUGENE MARTEN
and
FOG & CAR by EUGENE LIM.
They came to me with compliments about this blog.
I have tried to read each of the books.
I know that Marten has published an earlier book with Turtle Point Press.
I am interested in why I have not read more.
The Marten book is in the tradition of Bataille’s The Story of the Eye.
I am probably not strong enough to read about a janitor and what he collects.
FOG & CAR by LIM is more appealing but I can’t get beyond the names: MR FOG and SARAH CAR.
Names.
Publishers objected to MURPHY and SB was willing to change it to any name they wanted.
I liked the short paragraphs, the short chapters. And I liked the reported reading within the book.
No blurb from Gordon Lish who I had thought dead but whose ghost must have blurbed Marten’s book and I guess it would be inevitable that such a person is one of the undead.
Steve Katz blurbed the Lim book.
Boy, he’s been around a long time. In 1968 I had liked his EXAGGERATIONS OF PETER PRINCE. But then he went on and on writing and even becoming a tenured professor and director of creative writing didn’t stop him and was published in all those places that specialize in log-rolling--- you publish my book and I’ll publish your book…
BUT: FOG & CAR seems to be a book that has to be gotten out of the way. It is too long and not for a moment do I like the division into a sort of his and her version. At least many pages have a lot of which space but that forces the reader to look at each and every word, and probably with the eraser part of the pencil…
BUT now that the book is done with and one is heartened to see that Mr. Lim is a high school librarian, a socially useful profession.
SECTION TWO
In the early 1970s Alfred Knopf published four novels in illustrated laminated hard covers without dust jackets. They charged $3.50 each. It was an attempt to bridge the gap between hard covers and paperbacks. There was a book each from David Ohle and Kathy Black and two novels by Warren Fine. Fine had previous published THE ARTIFICIAL TRAVELER and a tale in the New American Review, The Mousechildren and The Famous Collector. The two Knopf novels are: IN THE ANIMAL KINGDOM and THEIR FAMILY. Both novels are in the imagined voices of settlers on the early American frontier in 1779 and 1800… The books gathered tiny reviews… they did not seem relevant in that time in which Ellen Willis, a then prominent Village Voice writer, could seriously write that good writing is counter-revolutionary.
IN THE ANIMAL KINGDOM and THEIR FAMILY sit on my shelf next to IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN.
How to persuade people to read them, find them…
Greg Kuzma, a poet who once knew Fine, wrote me of Fine’s drinking himself to death in the 1980s having finished one more still unpublished novel, THIRST, though Kuzma couldn’t find it when he went to look for the manuscript.
Kuzma send me a poem he had written about Fine which contains these lines that can serve both as a commentary on SECTION ONE OF THIS POST and on…
I read/ another book of his (Fine’s) after his death/ forty pages of In The Animal Kingdom./ There were no two sentences alike,/ and not a single one I’d ever seen/ That’s the sort of writer he was./ Daring and original and strange./ I stopped reading the book. It was/ too much work. Besides, I said/ Warren’s dead. What does it matter?
Monday, March 16, 2009
GHOSTS by CESAR AIRA with an afterword about teaching
(a version of this review was published in the Los Angeles Times
GHOSTS
By Cesar Aira
Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews
New Directions: 139pps, $12.95.
Are there ghosts in “Ghosts?” Short answer: you betcha. Long answer: well that is what reading this wonderful novel is finally all about: what is a ghost?
Or maybe not. The fourth of the Argentinean Cesar Aira’s more than seventy books to be translated into English (the third to be available in the United States) is an incitement to the sensuality of thought, of wonder, of questioning, of anticipation.
Beware: some novels are quite shy about announcing their intentions, the greatness that lies within. “Ghosts” is a model of such reticence , “ On the morning of the 31st of December, the Pagaldays visited the apartment they already owned in the building under construction at 2161 Callle Jose Bonifacio, along with Bartolo Sacristan Olmedo, the landscape gardener they had hired to arrange plants on the two broad balconies, front and rear.”
Admittedly not the most gripping of opening sentences but readers who have had the good fortune of reading the two recently published Aira novels and their opening lines, “Western art can boast few documentary painters of true distinction.” (“An Incident in the Life of a Landscape Painter.”) or “My story, the story of “how I became a nun,” began very early in my life; I had just turned six.” (“How I Became a Nun”) will remember their own startling realization, as they began to read on, that the brevity of these novels and the inauspicious opening were all aspects of the ingenuity of the author who has established himself as one of the greatest writers and it is not ludicrous to place him in the same garden with Nabokov and Borges--- both masterful insinuating charmers.
“Ghosts” takes place in the construction site for a luxury apartment building in Buena Aires on New Year’s Eve. And the first deception is that it does not concern itself with the owners of the apartment building but with the men who are building it and in particular the large family of one of the workers who is living in one of the half finished apartments and acting as watchmen. Much of the novel is taken up with the comings and goings of the preparations for and the actual party welcoming in the new year. This being in the southern hemisphere there is an oppressive heat wave on and there are many mischievous children and assorted relatives, lovers and hangers on milling about. While always interesting, the conversations ,the careful detailing of the uneventful activities complete with the letting go of fireworks seems random yet there is a great delight in the ordinariness of life complete with the gentle though pointed rivalry between the Chilean workers and their Argentinean surroundings. Of course one is reminded of early novels of Manuel Puig such as Betrayed by Rita Hayworth which saturated itself in the rhythms of ordinary speech and left the meaning to the reader…
However the distractions, the ruminations hold the reader and one which begins with trying to to tease out the difference between the built and the unbuilt continues, “The unbuilt is characteristic of those arts whose realization requires the remunerated work of many people, the purchase of materials, the use of expensive equipment, etc. Cinema is the paradigmatic case: anyone can have an idea for a film but then you need expertise finance, personnel, and these obstacles mean that ninety-nine times out of a hundred the film doesn’t get made. Which might make you wonder if the prodigious bother of it all--- which technological advances have exacerbated if anything--- isn’t actually an essential part of cinema’s charm, since, paradoxically, it gives everyone access to movie- making in the form of pure daydreaming. It’s the same in the other arts, to a greater or lesser extent. And yet it is possible to imagine an art in which the limitations of reality would be minimized, in which the made and unmade would be indistinct, an art that would be instantaneously real without ghosts. And perhaps that art exists under the name of literature. “
My reason for this long excerpt is to both hint at the genius of Aira and to preserve the plot of the novel which concerns itself with Patri--- the increasingly obvious center of the novel--- the eldest daughter, but not that old, though burdened with looking after those mischievous children, shopping, chores but who has seen the ghosts, “they (the ghosts)seemed to be making an exception for her, as if she were the object of their ostentatious senseless amusements. She didn’t take offense, because it wasn’t serious. It was more like a flying puppet show, a out-of-place, unseemly kind of theater. She had seen naked men before of course (although not many); she didn’t find that especially frightening. But there was something implausible about it since you wouldn’t normally see men without clothes except in particular situations. The way they were floating in the air accentuated the ambivalent impression…”
A final reviewer's sigh: the charm--- if that is still meaningful--- so refreshing and what a gift in such trying times, looking forward to reading a new Aira novel every year for the rest of our lives!
An afterword ON TEACHING.
( By Auberon Waugh quoted by his son Alexander in the book FATHERS AND SONS The Autobiography of a Family)
Teachers live in a small world and their job is an unpleasant one. Among the few consolations it offers is an aura of semi-divine omniscience which enables them to patronize and feel important. This is what is threatened every time a pupil raises his hand with the correct answer. How pleasant it must be for a teacher, as he ignores the raised hands in front and approaches some bemused oaf in the back who hasn't the faintest idea what he's talking about, to imagine he is making his contribution towards a fairer, more equal, society in the future.
GHOSTS
By Cesar Aira
Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews
New Directions: 139pps, $12.95.
Are there ghosts in “Ghosts?” Short answer: you betcha. Long answer: well that is what reading this wonderful novel is finally all about: what is a ghost?
Or maybe not. The fourth of the Argentinean Cesar Aira’s more than seventy books to be translated into English (the third to be available in the United States) is an incitement to the sensuality of thought, of wonder, of questioning, of anticipation.
Beware: some novels are quite shy about announcing their intentions, the greatness that lies within. “Ghosts” is a model of such reticence , “ On the morning of the 31st of December, the Pagaldays visited the apartment they already owned in the building under construction at 2161 Callle Jose Bonifacio, along with Bartolo Sacristan Olmedo, the landscape gardener they had hired to arrange plants on the two broad balconies, front and rear.”
Admittedly not the most gripping of opening sentences but readers who have had the good fortune of reading the two recently published Aira novels and their opening lines, “Western art can boast few documentary painters of true distinction.” (“An Incident in the Life of a Landscape Painter.”) or “My story, the story of “how I became a nun,” began very early in my life; I had just turned six.” (“How I Became a Nun”) will remember their own startling realization, as they began to read on, that the brevity of these novels and the inauspicious opening were all aspects of the ingenuity of the author who has established himself as one of the greatest writers and it is not ludicrous to place him in the same garden with Nabokov and Borges--- both masterful insinuating charmers.
“Ghosts” takes place in the construction site for a luxury apartment building in Buena Aires on New Year’s Eve. And the first deception is that it does not concern itself with the owners of the apartment building but with the men who are building it and in particular the large family of one of the workers who is living in one of the half finished apartments and acting as watchmen. Much of the novel is taken up with the comings and goings of the preparations for and the actual party welcoming in the new year. This being in the southern hemisphere there is an oppressive heat wave on and there are many mischievous children and assorted relatives, lovers and hangers on milling about. While always interesting, the conversations ,the careful detailing of the uneventful activities complete with the letting go of fireworks seems random yet there is a great delight in the ordinariness of life complete with the gentle though pointed rivalry between the Chilean workers and their Argentinean surroundings. Of course one is reminded of early novels of Manuel Puig such as Betrayed by Rita Hayworth which saturated itself in the rhythms of ordinary speech and left the meaning to the reader…
However the distractions, the ruminations hold the reader and one which begins with trying to to tease out the difference between the built and the unbuilt continues, “The unbuilt is characteristic of those arts whose realization requires the remunerated work of many people, the purchase of materials, the use of expensive equipment, etc. Cinema is the paradigmatic case: anyone can have an idea for a film but then you need expertise finance, personnel, and these obstacles mean that ninety-nine times out of a hundred the film doesn’t get made. Which might make you wonder if the prodigious bother of it all--- which technological advances have exacerbated if anything--- isn’t actually an essential part of cinema’s charm, since, paradoxically, it gives everyone access to movie- making in the form of pure daydreaming. It’s the same in the other arts, to a greater or lesser extent. And yet it is possible to imagine an art in which the limitations of reality would be minimized, in which the made and unmade would be indistinct, an art that would be instantaneously real without ghosts. And perhaps that art exists under the name of literature. “
My reason for this long excerpt is to both hint at the genius of Aira and to preserve the plot of the novel which concerns itself with Patri--- the increasingly obvious center of the novel--- the eldest daughter, but not that old, though burdened with looking after those mischievous children, shopping, chores but who has seen the ghosts, “they (the ghosts)seemed to be making an exception for her, as if she were the object of their ostentatious senseless amusements. She didn’t take offense, because it wasn’t serious. It was more like a flying puppet show, a out-of-place, unseemly kind of theater. She had seen naked men before of course (although not many); she didn’t find that especially frightening. But there was something implausible about it since you wouldn’t normally see men without clothes except in particular situations. The way they were floating in the air accentuated the ambivalent impression…”
A final reviewer's sigh: the charm--- if that is still meaningful--- so refreshing and what a gift in such trying times, looking forward to reading a new Aira novel every year for the rest of our lives!
An afterword ON TEACHING.
( By Auberon Waugh quoted by his son Alexander in the book FATHERS AND SONS The Autobiography of a Family)
Teachers live in a small world and their job is an unpleasant one. Among the few consolations it offers is an aura of semi-divine omniscience which enables them to patronize and feel important. This is what is threatened every time a pupil raises his hand with the correct answer. How pleasant it must be for a teacher, as he ignores the raised hands in front and approaches some bemused oaf in the back who hasn't the faintest idea what he's talking about, to imagine he is making his contribution towards a fairer, more equal, society in the future.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
THE TWO GREATEST WRITERS and THE UTTERLY FORGOTTEN
All of this is a gesture
1.
The two greatest living writers who happen to be American are William T. Vollmann and James McCourt. I should really have included myself in that by saying the three greatest writers… because if you are not prepared to assert this self-evaluation you might as well stop right now. I also do not like giving into mentioning that McCourt and Vollmann are American. Writing is only writing and once a writer is provided with a nationality he ceases to matter in some essential way.
But I have given in and the occasion is the forthcoming publication of Vollmann’s IMPERIAL and within the year the second volume of McCourt’s great novel , NOW VOYAGERS which joins TIME REMAINING as being his claims upon the world’s attention
Vollmann of course has been far more prolific and I won’t bother to list all his books citing only : his three thousand page seven volume RISING UP AND RISING DOWN meditation on violent death and THE ROYAL FAMILY a novel loosely centered upon northern California now joined by IMPERIAL which creates the far south of California, which will appear in the summer.
Vollmann is our Balzac, our Tolstoy--- since people like such comparisons--- though I should avoid the our since Vollmann belongs to the world as surely as does Faulkner and Beckett. Soon enough his worlds will seem a permanent part of the world’s imagination.
James McCourt creates in TIME REMAINING the existence, the fate of what it means to be homosexual in the modern world… as it journeys forth on a train from New York to the Hamptons… in NOW VOYAGERS the journey is through both time and space and imagines a world that will never pass away even as it is so obviously dead, remembering as Celine has remarked, you have to be a little bit dead to be really funny.
Happily neither Vollmann nor McCourt's work can be enlisted in any cause outside of literature.
One can well imagine Vladimir Nabokov on a rainy day in Portal, Arizona housebound and turning away from the note cards for LOLITA picking up the latest from Vollmann, remarking how heavy the bound galleys are of IMPERIAL and saying to Vera that Georgi Ivanov would have liked this book, this sordid march, this squishing of language and how anyone who reads surely remembers Nina Berberova's portrait of the Ivanov's existence in Paris that she re-counted in THE ITALICS ARE MINE
One can well imagine Nabokov as he journeyed away from Portal and stopping say in Douglas for a night at the Gadsden Hotel, squeezing it into their budget as the hotel seemed so right after that version of the Alps that they had passed through circuitously leaving Portal and finding the first volume of McCourt's NOW VOYAGERS left there by Thornton Wilder in the dream that is time, and remarking again to Vera here like that McGonigle is another writer who has learned from Andrei Bely how to be truly in a city as was Bely in PETERSBURG.
UTTERLY FORGOTTEN.
While praising these writers I was thinking of writers who I knew who seemed to be well published, even known but now… utterly forgotten…
Chad Walsh and Bink Noll were poets both nationally published, reviewed and now gone… they had stocked my life at Beloit College 1962-
I used to tell a Bink Noll story and I went to Marion, Virginia where Walsh had been a boy and a proof reader for Sherwood Anderson’s last newspaper. Another gone writer. In the public library was a folder for Chad Walsh but nothing of course recently in it.
Richard M. Elman had been a professor at Columbia. He had my fellow students write my obituary. He had been a teacher to Richard Price but then had a falling out… he published more than 20 books and all of them are gone… a book of memoir/criticism was published and is vaguely in print Sun and Moon Press has two unpublished books in its file cabinets. No one has been knocking on their door demanding they appear…
George Garrett will shortly be a year dead and he seems on the way to being forgotten… his editors are all dead, his students remember him but none of them are powerful publishers… by the of his life he had been honored, feted and now… gone. he is mostly an anecdote instead of a read writer.
Chandler Brossard: in spite of Dalkey Archive, Steve Moore and others this man who invented the beat world and who was victim of the worst instance of the malicious power of a vengeful stupid reviewer, Anatole Broyard...
BS Johnson… is nearly gone away…
James Liddy will be remembered for maybe another year.. there might be a posthumous collected poems but then… can a hole be made for him in the history of Irish poets.. is there a need for another Irish poet?
UWE Johnson will never be republished in the US… the dreariest Palestinian propagandist will be published by the new publishers of translations before they get around to this writer who found a form for precisely describing the consequences of the divison of Germany and the how of history working on a person’s mind…
Glenway Wescott will never get pushed into world literature.. he has become a regionalist writer, something he despised
John Hawkes once a required writer in nearly every introduction to literature course in American universities in the 1960s... being forced to read him destroyed many a person's interest in modern writing
Louis Bromfield...
Ellen Glasgow...
Paul Metcalf...
Francis Stuart...
Wright Morris...
1.
The two greatest living writers who happen to be American are William T. Vollmann and James McCourt. I should really have included myself in that by saying the three greatest writers… because if you are not prepared to assert this self-evaluation you might as well stop right now. I also do not like giving into mentioning that McCourt and Vollmann are American. Writing is only writing and once a writer is provided with a nationality he ceases to matter in some essential way.
But I have given in and the occasion is the forthcoming publication of Vollmann’s IMPERIAL and within the year the second volume of McCourt’s great novel , NOW VOYAGERS which joins TIME REMAINING as being his claims upon the world’s attention
Vollmann of course has been far more prolific and I won’t bother to list all his books citing only : his three thousand page seven volume RISING UP AND RISING DOWN meditation on violent death and THE ROYAL FAMILY a novel loosely centered upon northern California now joined by IMPERIAL which creates the far south of California, which will appear in the summer.
Vollmann is our Balzac, our Tolstoy--- since people like such comparisons--- though I should avoid the our since Vollmann belongs to the world as surely as does Faulkner and Beckett. Soon enough his worlds will seem a permanent part of the world’s imagination.
James McCourt creates in TIME REMAINING the existence, the fate of what it means to be homosexual in the modern world… as it journeys forth on a train from New York to the Hamptons… in NOW VOYAGERS the journey is through both time and space and imagines a world that will never pass away even as it is so obviously dead, remembering as Celine has remarked, you have to be a little bit dead to be really funny.
Happily neither Vollmann nor McCourt's work can be enlisted in any cause outside of literature.
One can well imagine Vladimir Nabokov on a rainy day in Portal, Arizona housebound and turning away from the note cards for LOLITA picking up the latest from Vollmann, remarking how heavy the bound galleys are of IMPERIAL and saying to Vera that Georgi Ivanov would have liked this book, this sordid march, this squishing of language and how anyone who reads surely remembers Nina Berberova's portrait of the Ivanov's existence in Paris that she re-counted in THE ITALICS ARE MINE
One can well imagine Nabokov as he journeyed away from Portal and stopping say in Douglas for a night at the Gadsden Hotel, squeezing it into their budget as the hotel seemed so right after that version of the Alps that they had passed through circuitously leaving Portal and finding the first volume of McCourt's NOW VOYAGERS left there by Thornton Wilder in the dream that is time, and remarking again to Vera here like that McGonigle is another writer who has learned from Andrei Bely how to be truly in a city as was Bely in PETERSBURG.
UTTERLY FORGOTTEN.
While praising these writers I was thinking of writers who I knew who seemed to be well published, even known but now… utterly forgotten…
Chad Walsh and Bink Noll were poets both nationally published, reviewed and now gone… they had stocked my life at Beloit College 1962-
I used to tell a Bink Noll story and I went to Marion, Virginia where Walsh had been a boy and a proof reader for Sherwood Anderson’s last newspaper. Another gone writer. In the public library was a folder for Chad Walsh but nothing of course recently in it.
Richard M. Elman had been a professor at Columbia. He had my fellow students write my obituary. He had been a teacher to Richard Price but then had a falling out… he published more than 20 books and all of them are gone… a book of memoir/criticism was published and is vaguely in print Sun and Moon Press has two unpublished books in its file cabinets. No one has been knocking on their door demanding they appear…
George Garrett will shortly be a year dead and he seems on the way to being forgotten… his editors are all dead, his students remember him but none of them are powerful publishers… by the of his life he had been honored, feted and now… gone. he is mostly an anecdote instead of a read writer.
Chandler Brossard: in spite of Dalkey Archive, Steve Moore and others this man who invented the beat world and who was victim of the worst instance of the malicious power of a vengeful stupid reviewer, Anatole Broyard...
BS Johnson… is nearly gone away…
James Liddy will be remembered for maybe another year.. there might be a posthumous collected poems but then… can a hole be made for him in the history of Irish poets.. is there a need for another Irish poet?
UWE Johnson will never be republished in the US… the dreariest Palestinian propagandist will be published by the new publishers of translations before they get around to this writer who found a form for precisely describing the consequences of the divison of Germany and the how of history working on a person’s mind…
Glenway Wescott will never get pushed into world literature.. he has become a regionalist writer, something he despised
John Hawkes once a required writer in nearly every introduction to literature course in American universities in the 1960s... being forced to read him destroyed many a person's interest in modern writing
Louis Bromfield...
Ellen Glasgow...
Paul Metcalf...
Francis Stuart...
Wright Morris...
Saturday, January 31, 2009
WHAT YOU DON'T HAVE TO READ and a few suggestions of what to read
THE FIRST
An Avalanche of shit is about the only way to think of the new books that are scheduled to come out in the near future even as publishers see themselves going out of business, cutting back and moaning that this is the most difficult time they have ever faced.
Of course people are not reading. That is nothing new. In the 1920s a literary book was lucky to sell and I mean really lucky two thousand copies… today with the population almost tripled things have not changed: a literary book still sells two thousand copies over a certain number of years.
What has changed is the sheer amount of crap that the publishers keep shoveling out. The big publishers have a large core of six figure salaried pencil pushers who have to be wined and dined to suit their personae as wise leaders who know what is good for the reading public.
As a guide to how to sift through the crap that is on offer and in the bookstores just beyond where they keep all the non-book stuff which of course is usually of more interest to the people who wander into a Borders or Barnes and Nobel I offer these tips:
You don’t have to read any novel or memoir by a person who claims to be a script writer.
You don’t have to read anything at all by anyone who appears with some regularity on television…
You don’t have to read anything that purports to tell you the real story behind whatever it is…
You don’t have to read anything by a person who has the indecency to admit that they are recent graduates of an Ivy League college or university…
You don’t have to read anything by a person who claims to be a journalist working for some major newspaper or of course television. By writing a book they are shortchanging their employers and anything that they really know is in the newspapers or at least should be…
You don’t have to read any novel or book of poetry in which the race or ethnicity of the author or of his or her characters is mentioned on the dust jacket. The book will be inevitably be second rate and compromised by this limitation
THE SECOND
HOWEVER there are a few tiny glimmers of literature that will be shyly taking themselves into the world:
From the Library of America : The American Writings of Lafcadio Hearn who was well known once upon a time for his writings about New Orleans and Japan… but in this volume of his writing about New Orleans, his travels in the West Indies and his miscellaneous journalism there is a story that is so startling and moving that once read you will have hard time going to bed for their you know you will be finding yourself either as a witness or as the center of the story:
Gibbeted Execution of a Youthful Murderer
“The execution of James Murphy yesterday at Dayton for the murder of Colonel William Dawson in that city on the night of August 31, 1875 was an event it must be said which the people of Montgomery County had long looked forward to with no small degree of satisfaction…”
The subtitle of the story gives a hint: A Broken Rope and a Double Hanging…
The story concludes: “The rope has cut deeply into the flesh of the neck, and the very texture of the hemp was redly imprinted on the the skin. A medical examination showed that the neck to have been broken.”
AND from Dalkey Archive: NOTES FROM THE EMPIRE by Fernando Del Paso… a meditation at 716 pages of the fates of Maximilian and his eventual widow… that French emperor of Mexico… You will remember the painting by Manet… a model of what an historical writing can and should be
AND also from Dalkey the last of Louis Ferdinand Celine’s great novels to be translated NORMANCE
AND AGAIN from Dalkey: THE LOOP by Jacques Roubaud , a companion to his THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON.
AN ASIDE: There is not a publisher in the English speaking world with such a selection of books to be published in this season and that is just a few of them…
NOT TO forget GHOSTS by Cesar Aira which I am reviewing for the Los Angeles Times… from New Directions, one of the few publishers that has never forgotten what their job really is…
Unlike 95 percent--- maybe I could push that to 98 percent--- of what will be published in the coming months will not be remembered a year from publication… I can guarantee that these five books will be still be read as long as books are being read and you will be able to re-read them with increased enjoyment...
THE THIRD
Contrary to the delirium of delusion that seems to have gripped the hacks who write for the newspapers, that teach in our universities and inhabit the television networks, I do think we are about to enter a truly dark period of history with only an increasing tide of terrible news.
I have begun to read again Ernst Robert Curtius’s EUROPEAN LITERATURE AND THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES which he began to write as Adolf Hitler took control ---in the midst of scenes of delirious hope for change--- of Germany.
I do so as a personal answer to this moment and as a way to remain sane midst the increasing barbarism which is our sure fate as things will get inevitably worse and worse.
What Curtius was trying to remind his readers is that while the Twentieth Century saw its progressive fruition in Auschwitz, in The Gulag, and at Hiroshima, there was still some tiny possibility that this might eventually be a continuing otherwise.
As someone living in New York City who lived through 9/11 and now in February 2009, as we are in the midst of the 19th year of the Iraqi War, I will refuse the easy temptation to despair and at the same time forsake the consolation of optimism.
THE FOURTH
I did take a little pleasure in seeing that the Book World of the Washington Post is about to cease publication. The last book I reviewed for them in 2002, commissioned by Michael Dirda, was Maurice Blanchot’s AMINDAB.
I never reviewed for them again and when I asked I was told that Marie Arana and the younger editors at the paper decided that my review of this novel by the most influential French critic of the 20th century was exactly the sort of book they never wanted reviewed in the paper. It was too intellectual, too obscure, too foreign. It sent the wrong message as to what they were really interested in.
Of course Blanchot is represented by 15 titles in St Marks Book Store and is even well stocked by Politics and Prose in Washington… but what the geniuses at the Washington Post decided was: they wanted to truly embrace their public of semi-literate political junkies whose only interest is in the aggregation of personal political power, forgetting that when you suck up to the public that public has to evacauate its bowels once a day, and the tongue attempting to block that path is no match for the…
An Avalanche of shit is about the only way to think of the new books that are scheduled to come out in the near future even as publishers see themselves going out of business, cutting back and moaning that this is the most difficult time they have ever faced.
Of course people are not reading. That is nothing new. In the 1920s a literary book was lucky to sell and I mean really lucky two thousand copies… today with the population almost tripled things have not changed: a literary book still sells two thousand copies over a certain number of years.
What has changed is the sheer amount of crap that the publishers keep shoveling out. The big publishers have a large core of six figure salaried pencil pushers who have to be wined and dined to suit their personae as wise leaders who know what is good for the reading public.
As a guide to how to sift through the crap that is on offer and in the bookstores just beyond where they keep all the non-book stuff which of course is usually of more interest to the people who wander into a Borders or Barnes and Nobel I offer these tips:
You don’t have to read any novel or memoir by a person who claims to be a script writer.
You don’t have to read anything at all by anyone who appears with some regularity on television…
You don’t have to read anything that purports to tell you the real story behind whatever it is…
You don’t have to read anything by a person who has the indecency to admit that they are recent graduates of an Ivy League college or university…
You don’t have to read anything by a person who claims to be a journalist working for some major newspaper or of course television. By writing a book they are shortchanging their employers and anything that they really know is in the newspapers or at least should be…
You don’t have to read any novel or book of poetry in which the race or ethnicity of the author or of his or her characters is mentioned on the dust jacket. The book will be inevitably be second rate and compromised by this limitation
THE SECOND
HOWEVER there are a few tiny glimmers of literature that will be shyly taking themselves into the world:
From the Library of America : The American Writings of Lafcadio Hearn who was well known once upon a time for his writings about New Orleans and Japan… but in this volume of his writing about New Orleans, his travels in the West Indies and his miscellaneous journalism there is a story that is so startling and moving that once read you will have hard time going to bed for their you know you will be finding yourself either as a witness or as the center of the story:
Gibbeted Execution of a Youthful Murderer
“The execution of James Murphy yesterday at Dayton for the murder of Colonel William Dawson in that city on the night of August 31, 1875 was an event it must be said which the people of Montgomery County had long looked forward to with no small degree of satisfaction…”
The subtitle of the story gives a hint: A Broken Rope and a Double Hanging…
The story concludes: “The rope has cut deeply into the flesh of the neck, and the very texture of the hemp was redly imprinted on the the skin. A medical examination showed that the neck to have been broken.”
AND from Dalkey Archive: NOTES FROM THE EMPIRE by Fernando Del Paso… a meditation at 716 pages of the fates of Maximilian and his eventual widow… that French emperor of Mexico… You will remember the painting by Manet… a model of what an historical writing can and should be
AND also from Dalkey the last of Louis Ferdinand Celine’s great novels to be translated NORMANCE
AND AGAIN from Dalkey: THE LOOP by Jacques Roubaud , a companion to his THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON.
AN ASIDE: There is not a publisher in the English speaking world with such a selection of books to be published in this season and that is just a few of them…
NOT TO forget GHOSTS by Cesar Aira which I am reviewing for the Los Angeles Times… from New Directions, one of the few publishers that has never forgotten what their job really is…
Unlike 95 percent--- maybe I could push that to 98 percent--- of what will be published in the coming months will not be remembered a year from publication… I can guarantee that these five books will be still be read as long as books are being read and you will be able to re-read them with increased enjoyment...
THE THIRD
Contrary to the delirium of delusion that seems to have gripped the hacks who write for the newspapers, that teach in our universities and inhabit the television networks, I do think we are about to enter a truly dark period of history with only an increasing tide of terrible news.
I have begun to read again Ernst Robert Curtius’s EUROPEAN LITERATURE AND THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES which he began to write as Adolf Hitler took control ---in the midst of scenes of delirious hope for change--- of Germany.
I do so as a personal answer to this moment and as a way to remain sane midst the increasing barbarism which is our sure fate as things will get inevitably worse and worse.
What Curtius was trying to remind his readers is that while the Twentieth Century saw its progressive fruition in Auschwitz, in The Gulag, and at Hiroshima, there was still some tiny possibility that this might eventually be a continuing otherwise.
As someone living in New York City who lived through 9/11 and now in February 2009, as we are in the midst of the 19th year of the Iraqi War, I will refuse the easy temptation to despair and at the same time forsake the consolation of optimism.
THE FOURTH
I did take a little pleasure in seeing that the Book World of the Washington Post is about to cease publication. The last book I reviewed for them in 2002, commissioned by Michael Dirda, was Maurice Blanchot’s AMINDAB.
I never reviewed for them again and when I asked I was told that Marie Arana and the younger editors at the paper decided that my review of this novel by the most influential French critic of the 20th century was exactly the sort of book they never wanted reviewed in the paper. It was too intellectual, too obscure, too foreign. It sent the wrong message as to what they were really interested in.
Of course Blanchot is represented by 15 titles in St Marks Book Store and is even well stocked by Politics and Prose in Washington… but what the geniuses at the Washington Post decided was: they wanted to truly embrace their public of semi-literate political junkies whose only interest is in the aggregation of personal political power, forgetting that when you suck up to the public that public has to evacauate its bowels once a day, and the tongue attempting to block that path is no match for the…
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