BRECHT AT NIGHT
MATI UNT
Translated from the Estonian
By Eric Dickens
Dalket Archive: 208pp., $13.95
In 1940, Helsinki received an unexpected visitor: Bertold Brecht. Eventually to be known as the most famous German playwright after Goethe, author of The Three Penny Opera, The Caucasian Chalk Circle and numerous other plays, a vast array of poetry, Brecht was also a committed Communist who was on the run from Nazi Germany, believing Hitler personally wanted him dead. The scene is almost comical: he arrived with his wife, his mistress, his children and twenty-six bags of luggage.
Just another traveler, you understand, appreciative when someone speaks good German but convinced he or she might be a Nazi agent. His protector was the very wealthy Estonian playwright then living in Finland, Hella Wuolijoki, with whom he will collaborate on a number of plays and will eventually plagiarize from but who more importantly has a direct link to Stalin and his secret police. (Brecht, if you aren’t familiar with him was an ardent defender of Stalin and all his murderous acts, glibly arguing that Finland should have given into Stalin, “whereby the Finnish workers and peasants must exchange their national freedom for social freedom (inside the Soviet system).”
But why Helsinki? Why go there in the midst of the aftermath of The Winter War? It is a way station on Brecht’s journey to of all places: Hollywood which he intends to get to by way of Moscow and Siberia!
In “Brecht at Night,” his fourth novel to be translated into English, Estonian author and innovative stage director, Mati Unt makes Brecht a curiously compelling contradictory character and very appealing as a reflection of the alienating reality of his plays which highlighting their artificiality allows the reader the necessary distance to think and with the information, with the feelings provide by what he or she might witness, to act…
All this might seem tedious in the extreme but Unt is simply too good of a writer to allow that to happen. The connection between an epitome of irony, Hella Wuolijoki, this wealthy patron, committed communist and the owner of a vast estate provides Unt with the jump cut to that place where she comes from: two hours today by high speed ferry, across the Baltic Sea. If I give you one country (Latvia) that borders on it I am sure you can name the other country that borders on Estonia and of course you remember that in August 1939 you again remember that Hitler and Stalin agreed to the occupation of Estonia by the Red Army…
It is in this lurch that Unt’s novel becomes both a witty portrait of Brecht and is a model of how to understand the devastating effects of Stalinism. Unt well knows, as did Brecht, if you focus too much on details of human awfulness it becomes debilitating but if you find a way…
Unt particularizes the murders, by way of quotation from now available documents and through imagination of how the Communist takeover of Estonia was implemented allowing the euphonious M Unt (no relation) who was the communist appointed Minister of the Interior to say, “With good luck, you have the choice between life and death, and it is not sure which is better.” Or, “Then I had to dismiss all the elders of the various Estonian provinces. There were no doubt decent people among them, but in times like the present you can’t pay too much attention to individuals.”
History records that M. Unt was shot in his turn but no date was recorded.
(A version of this appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
Friday, August 21, 2009
Monday, August 10, 2009
REALMS OF MEMORY, RETHINKING FRANCE and A.J. LIEBLING
6
A celebration of REALMS OF MEMORY and RETHINKING FRANCE or LES LEIUX DE MEMOIRE but not forgetting A.J. Liebling
Terrible things are always being said about the French and France but like Auberon Waugh who was once saying--- and I agree with him--- the real problem with the French is that they really do some things so extraordinarily well. Waugh was referring to the French education system and food. I would add literature, the trains, the preservation of the countryside and when it comes to writing modern history the vast project under the direction of Philip Nora knows no parallel in the United States…
Published in a series of what will be seven vast books and that is only a third! of the original project published in French as Les Lieux de Memoire, which I am told to the French ear means more than what has been given as a title of the first three volumes published some years ago by Columbia University Press. It is is a magisterial overview of that thing called France and the French. The three volumes were focused on in Nora’s words: “ in accord with the specificity of memory: (REALMS OF MEMORY) is modeled on organizations found in nature: first its fractures, then its true and false continuities and finally its symbolic attachments.”
In the reality of the printed page volume one took up for instance, Right and Left, Catholics and Seculars, Gaullists and Communists, then the minority religions and lastly the question of time and space. The second volume took up The Traditions: The Land, The Cathedral, The Court, etc and went on to discuss individual writers, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Vidal de La Blache’s Georgraphy of France among others and then concluded with Singularities, LA Coupole, Street Names, The Tour de France, etc… The Third volume took up the Symbols: The Three Colors, Liberty, Equality and Fraternitie , then The Places: Lascaux, Rheims, Verdun etc, and then of course Identifications: from The Gallic Cock via Joan of Arc to Descartes and beyond…
9
But Columbia University Press got tired and four more volumes are now being published by the University of Chicago Press—the third is just out and a fourth is coming next year under the general title RETHINKING FRANCE… and these are to be focused on specific elements of national identity in their material dimensions. Volume One took up The State starting with a chapter, The State: The Tool of the Common Good and on through the formation of the idea of the state with essays on Charlemagne, The King… ending with an essay on the Memoirs of Men of State… The second volume is a book of place, ranging from North-South, France, the Coast, and the Sea, to The Forest , The Region, The Department, The Painter’s Landscaper and ending with A Frontier Memory: Alsace.. the perfect book to actually take when travelling in France when you want to go beyond the facts, just the facts: what -to–see-what- to-eat-where-to-sleep…
The current volume (out this summer) takes us into what many of us experience in France and which cannot be found elsewhere: The Café, The Village Church, Conversation, Gallantry, Notre Dame of Paris and Sacred Coeur of Montmartre…
75
(Now, I have done probably a bad job of it and I know I am spitting into the wind
---this is a good example of the normal self-pity that attaches itself to the bone of any sort of writing that I dare to take up within the terrible isolation that comes to the living curator of a few too many unpublished books---
but I wanted to just mention these books and this project and what a comfort it is to have such books on my shelf and I love the fragmented form of these books and while they are a product of that movement that killed narrative history and while I do know in a half assed sort of way the basic narrative of French history which you need to read in some fashion in these books but I guess now anyone can get that from Wikidepia…)
9
As we are entering a long and great depression under BO, no matter what the newspapers are saying ,it will be good to have such books on the shelf.. books of a demanding nature, filled with many stories, many things as is EMPIRE by William Vollmann which I wrote (again badly) about recently. None of these books --- throw in the ARCADE S PROJECT of Walter Benjamin---are meant to be read in a sitting or a hundred sittings((((also include THE COLLECTED WORKS of Paul Metcalf in 3 volumes))).. they do not grab you and refuse to let you go, as the blurbs would have it when a you are sentenced to read a so-called beach book by say Jonathan Franzen or James Patterson…
In the Essay on The Café the subtitles hold one: A Counteracademy, A Factory for Thought, An Intellectual Laboratory… try imagine that at Applebees America’s Neighborhood what not… or I do remember a professor explaining once upon a time why they did not once upon a time lecture on modern literature In French universities, that’s what is talked about in the cafes… why do we have to repeat it here…
46
Originally, I was supposed to do a Bastille Day post and mention the RETHINKING FRANCE along with the Library of America’s A. J. Liebling volumes devoted to eating or at least in part to eating in France… with the title Between Meals contained in the volume THE SWEET SCIENCE AND OTHER WRITINGS and in an earlier volume WORLD WAR II WRITINGS which contained The Road Back to Paris both of these books are old time celebrations of France, a France that no longer exists, of course, but which hint at what still send young people still to France as Liebling writes, “The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite…”
Of course once having been to France one never seriously read the food writing in the United States… you can dismiss me when I go down this path… and I would dismiss myself if I was reading this in the Gadsden Hotel in Douglas, Arizona, that tiny intimation of the promised paradise that can also be found in the Marine Motel in Ajo, Arizona… but Liebling creates in the reader a need to believe that time is not gone, time is not moving on… and of course it does not move… as long as the books remain to be read and re-read: the passage of time is defeated. Really?
A celebration of REALMS OF MEMORY and RETHINKING FRANCE or LES LEIUX DE MEMOIRE but not forgetting A.J. Liebling
Terrible things are always being said about the French and France but like Auberon Waugh who was once saying--- and I agree with him--- the real problem with the French is that they really do some things so extraordinarily well. Waugh was referring to the French education system and food. I would add literature, the trains, the preservation of the countryside and when it comes to writing modern history the vast project under the direction of Philip Nora knows no parallel in the United States…
Published in a series of what will be seven vast books and that is only a third! of the original project published in French as Les Lieux de Memoire, which I am told to the French ear means more than what has been given as a title of the first three volumes published some years ago by Columbia University Press. It is is a magisterial overview of that thing called France and the French. The three volumes were focused on in Nora’s words: “ in accord with the specificity of memory: (REALMS OF MEMORY) is modeled on organizations found in nature: first its fractures, then its true and false continuities and finally its symbolic attachments.”
In the reality of the printed page volume one took up for instance, Right and Left, Catholics and Seculars, Gaullists and Communists, then the minority religions and lastly the question of time and space. The second volume took up The Traditions: The Land, The Cathedral, The Court, etc and went on to discuss individual writers, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Vidal de La Blache’s Georgraphy of France among others and then concluded with Singularities, LA Coupole, Street Names, The Tour de France, etc… The Third volume took up the Symbols: The Three Colors, Liberty, Equality and Fraternitie , then The Places: Lascaux, Rheims, Verdun etc, and then of course Identifications: from The Gallic Cock via Joan of Arc to Descartes and beyond…
9
But Columbia University Press got tired and four more volumes are now being published by the University of Chicago Press—the third is just out and a fourth is coming next year under the general title RETHINKING FRANCE… and these are to be focused on specific elements of national identity in their material dimensions. Volume One took up The State starting with a chapter, The State: The Tool of the Common Good and on through the formation of the idea of the state with essays on Charlemagne, The King… ending with an essay on the Memoirs of Men of State… The second volume is a book of place, ranging from North-South, France, the Coast, and the Sea, to The Forest , The Region, The Department, The Painter’s Landscaper and ending with A Frontier Memory: Alsace.. the perfect book to actually take when travelling in France when you want to go beyond the facts, just the facts: what -to–see-what- to-eat-where-to-sleep…
The current volume (out this summer) takes us into what many of us experience in France and which cannot be found elsewhere: The Café, The Village Church, Conversation, Gallantry, Notre Dame of Paris and Sacred Coeur of Montmartre…
75
(Now, I have done probably a bad job of it and I know I am spitting into the wind
---this is a good example of the normal self-pity that attaches itself to the bone of any sort of writing that I dare to take up within the terrible isolation that comes to the living curator of a few too many unpublished books---
but I wanted to just mention these books and this project and what a comfort it is to have such books on my shelf and I love the fragmented form of these books and while they are a product of that movement that killed narrative history and while I do know in a half assed sort of way the basic narrative of French history which you need to read in some fashion in these books but I guess now anyone can get that from Wikidepia…)
9
As we are entering a long and great depression under BO, no matter what the newspapers are saying ,it will be good to have such books on the shelf.. books of a demanding nature, filled with many stories, many things as is EMPIRE by William Vollmann which I wrote (again badly) about recently. None of these books --- throw in the ARCADE S PROJECT of Walter Benjamin---are meant to be read in a sitting or a hundred sittings((((also include THE COLLECTED WORKS of Paul Metcalf in 3 volumes))).. they do not grab you and refuse to let you go, as the blurbs would have it when a you are sentenced to read a so-called beach book by say Jonathan Franzen or James Patterson…
In the Essay on The Café the subtitles hold one: A Counteracademy, A Factory for Thought, An Intellectual Laboratory… try imagine that at Applebees America’s Neighborhood what not… or I do remember a professor explaining once upon a time why they did not once upon a time lecture on modern literature In French universities, that’s what is talked about in the cafes… why do we have to repeat it here…
46
Originally, I was supposed to do a Bastille Day post and mention the RETHINKING FRANCE along with the Library of America’s A. J. Liebling volumes devoted to eating or at least in part to eating in France… with the title Between Meals contained in the volume THE SWEET SCIENCE AND OTHER WRITINGS and in an earlier volume WORLD WAR II WRITINGS which contained The Road Back to Paris both of these books are old time celebrations of France, a France that no longer exists, of course, but which hint at what still send young people still to France as Liebling writes, “The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite…”
Of course once having been to France one never seriously read the food writing in the United States… you can dismiss me when I go down this path… and I would dismiss myself if I was reading this in the Gadsden Hotel in Douglas, Arizona, that tiny intimation of the promised paradise that can also be found in the Marine Motel in Ajo, Arizona… but Liebling creates in the reader a need to believe that time is not gone, time is not moving on… and of course it does not move… as long as the books remain to be read and re-read: the passage of time is defeated. Really?
Sunday, July 26, 2009
RUSH OUT AND BUY IMPERIAL BY WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN
If America needs, as is often said A WRITER that one writer is: WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN.
At the moment he is the only writer in America whose death I would mourn.
Vollmann is the only writer who might and might already be a genuine world writer to whom it would not be necessary to attach mention of his nationality.
No living writer in America can equal his accomplishments and of course you can go to Wikipedia or any of the other sources for all the back ground.
But I stake out my claim by listing:
THE ROYAL FAMILY
RISING UP AND RISING DOWN: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means
AN AFGHANISTAN PICTURE SHOW
YOU BRIGHT AND RISEN ANGELS
EUROPE CENTRAL
(and I would also mention that there are 12, yes, 12 other books that flesh out… and do not clutter…
And NOW AND NOW AND NOW::: IMPERIAL
IMPERIAL
IMPERIAL
IMPERIAL
And its companion book IMPERIAL Photograpy by William T Vollmann
((((and I well know that eventually there is always a qualification so I will put it up front but the very qualification indicates the seriousness with which I take Vollmann.
As I read Vollmann I am reminded of :
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Ernst Junger.
Vollmann, Solzhenitsyn, Dostoevsky, Junger: the same mixture of riveting objectivity, the same urge to document, the same unashamed emotional identification with whatever they are writing about, the same acidic intellect, the same access to a language unafraid of a genuine apprehension of an always very real possibility of a crippling silence just ahead
And now the distinctions: Solzhenitsyn was actually a prisoner in the Gulag.
Dostoevsky was stood up against a wall and fully expected to be shot for his political beliefs.
Junger fought for five years in World War One in the trenches (receiving the pour le Merite) and was again in the army in World War Two, he actually did drop LSD with Albert Hoffmann, he did do real science as a ……..
And that is the vital difference.
Vollmann has been looking and always there is that distance… things have happened to him but they are a consequence of his looking… and this leads at time to a nagging sense of self-hatred that introduces a tiny thread of distrust into this reader’s consideration of his work…
BUT that is it… so as we move to why he is so central to my understanding of his importance. He is not part of the academy, he is not off in some drearily famous college teaching creative writing or literature, he is no darling of the academy, no one looks up to him, he is not cited as a good role model… he is discovered by word of mouth by readers passing on his books.
Sadly, he does have a literary prize but I am sure he knows just how worthless that is and is appropriately embarrassed by it: the only thing you get from having any sort of literary prize is that it guarantees an obit in the NY Times…
So, IMPERIAL
1306 pages about that part of California centered upon the Imperial Valley… you know where: south of Palm Springs, north of the Mexican border, west of the Colorado River, out there east of LA… a pendant to THE ROYAL FAMILY which was located up there around SF…
You open the book: grey pages black type… white squiggly maps… WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN. IMPERIAL.
A reproduction of a death certificate for a John Doe, Unknown Mexican issued by the County of Imperial, dated 7/29/24 but the copy was issued on Oct 22, 2002.
In Memory of SERAFIN RAMIREZ HERNANDZ unknown, missing, illegal, Mexican. CONTENTS
10 pages worth. More maps drawn by WTV.
Part One
INTRODUCTIONS.
A photograph of a huge cross on a hillside in Slab City.
Chapter 1. THE GARDENS OF PARADISE (1999)
I think we all feel sorry for ‘em
---Border Patrol Officer Gloria I. Chavez, on the subject of illegal aliens.
BODY-SNATCHERS
The All-American Canal was now dark black with phosphorescent streaks where the border’s eyes stained it with yellow tears. --- These lights have been up for about two years. Officer Dan Murray said. Before that, it was generators. Before that, it was pitch black.
He was an older man, getting big in the waist, whose face had been hardened by knowledge into something legendary. For years he’d played his part in the work first begun by Eden’s angel with the flaming sword…
It is RIGHT THERE with the “flaming sword” with “Eden’s angel” that my case rests for the genius of William T. Vollmann and if you do not get it, I probably cannot convince you of it though I will try in future posts … but you should get yourself to a bookstore to get a copy of IMPERIAL. I don’t think Viking is printing up a whole lot of this book and I am sure the book of photographs by Vollmann published by Power House books will also disappear very quickly…
I well know that a new Thomas Pynchon novel is coming out next week but I do know Pynchon is reading Vollmann’s book. Pynchon is self aware enough to regret the poor timing of these two books coming out at the same time. Just one of those things.
At the moment he is the only writer in America whose death I would mourn.
Vollmann is the only writer who might and might already be a genuine world writer to whom it would not be necessary to attach mention of his nationality.
No living writer in America can equal his accomplishments and of course you can go to Wikipedia or any of the other sources for all the back ground.
But I stake out my claim by listing:
THE ROYAL FAMILY
RISING UP AND RISING DOWN: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means
AN AFGHANISTAN PICTURE SHOW
YOU BRIGHT AND RISEN ANGELS
EUROPE CENTRAL
(and I would also mention that there are 12, yes, 12 other books that flesh out… and do not clutter…
And NOW AND NOW AND NOW::: IMPERIAL
IMPERIAL
IMPERIAL
IMPERIAL
And its companion book IMPERIAL Photograpy by William T Vollmann
((((and I well know that eventually there is always a qualification so I will put it up front but the very qualification indicates the seriousness with which I take Vollmann.
As I read Vollmann I am reminded of :
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Ernst Junger.
Vollmann, Solzhenitsyn, Dostoevsky, Junger: the same mixture of riveting objectivity, the same urge to document, the same unashamed emotional identification with whatever they are writing about, the same acidic intellect, the same access to a language unafraid of a genuine apprehension of an always very real possibility of a crippling silence just ahead
And now the distinctions: Solzhenitsyn was actually a prisoner in the Gulag.
Dostoevsky was stood up against a wall and fully expected to be shot for his political beliefs.
Junger fought for five years in World War One in the trenches (receiving the pour le Merite) and was again in the army in World War Two, he actually did drop LSD with Albert Hoffmann, he did do real science as a ……..
And that is the vital difference.
Vollmann has been looking and always there is that distance… things have happened to him but they are a consequence of his looking… and this leads at time to a nagging sense of self-hatred that introduces a tiny thread of distrust into this reader’s consideration of his work…
BUT that is it… so as we move to why he is so central to my understanding of his importance. He is not part of the academy, he is not off in some drearily famous college teaching creative writing or literature, he is no darling of the academy, no one looks up to him, he is not cited as a good role model… he is discovered by word of mouth by readers passing on his books.
Sadly, he does have a literary prize but I am sure he knows just how worthless that is and is appropriately embarrassed by it: the only thing you get from having any sort of literary prize is that it guarantees an obit in the NY Times…
So, IMPERIAL
1306 pages about that part of California centered upon the Imperial Valley… you know where: south of Palm Springs, north of the Mexican border, west of the Colorado River, out there east of LA… a pendant to THE ROYAL FAMILY which was located up there around SF…
You open the book: grey pages black type… white squiggly maps… WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN. IMPERIAL.
A reproduction of a death certificate for a John Doe, Unknown Mexican issued by the County of Imperial, dated 7/29/24 but the copy was issued on Oct 22, 2002.
In Memory of SERAFIN RAMIREZ HERNANDZ unknown, missing, illegal, Mexican. CONTENTS
10 pages worth. More maps drawn by WTV.
Part One
INTRODUCTIONS.
A photograph of a huge cross on a hillside in Slab City.
Chapter 1. THE GARDENS OF PARADISE (1999)
I think we all feel sorry for ‘em
---Border Patrol Officer Gloria I. Chavez, on the subject of illegal aliens.
BODY-SNATCHERS
The All-American Canal was now dark black with phosphorescent streaks where the border’s eyes stained it with yellow tears. --- These lights have been up for about two years. Officer Dan Murray said. Before that, it was generators. Before that, it was pitch black.
He was an older man, getting big in the waist, whose face had been hardened by knowledge into something legendary. For years he’d played his part in the work first begun by Eden’s angel with the flaming sword…
It is RIGHT THERE with the “flaming sword” with “Eden’s angel” that my case rests for the genius of William T. Vollmann and if you do not get it, I probably cannot convince you of it though I will try in future posts … but you should get yourself to a bookstore to get a copy of IMPERIAL. I don’t think Viking is printing up a whole lot of this book and I am sure the book of photographs by Vollmann published by Power House books will also disappear very quickly…
I well know that a new Thomas Pynchon novel is coming out next week but I do know Pynchon is reading Vollmann’s book. Pynchon is self aware enough to regret the poor timing of these two books coming out at the same time. Just one of those things.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
FRANK MCCOURT IS FINALLY DEAD
The news has come that Frank McCourt is dead. I have heard of him and that is sufficient as Edward Dahlberg would say.
Denis Donoghue was never asked to review a book for The New York Times after he panned McCourt's first and much lamented Angela's Ashes. His crime was to have questioned the literary merit of the memoir and to point out the unearned bathos of much of the writing.
McCourt's work quickly became the token white male contribution to the great ethnic sweepstakes that is contemporary American literature. He is the official Irish delegate joining those other profitable and endlessly self-important scribes such as Sherman Alexie, Toni Morrison, Junot Diaz... who sniffing out a soap box even a hundred miles away never fail to rush themselves to the necessary cause of fattening their bank accounts on behalf of....
It is known that McCourt first tried out his routines on his captive New York City high school students and they unable to escape had to endure his endless revising of his Irish saga... his leaving the New York City school system was one of the few blessings of his success
Finally, what is lost in the elevation of such a writer as McCourt is the availability of much greater writers, happening to be Irish but without the degraded sensibility so in evidence in his and the work of his ever expanding family of scribes.
I am thinking of writers such as John McGahren, Francis Stuart, Denis Donoghue and even Seamus Deane whose memoirs easily stand comparison to memoirs by writers like Michel Leiris and Thomas Bernhard... and sadly the novels of James McCourt are shaded by the mistaken notion that he is part of the Frank McCourt family.
Denis Donoghue was never asked to review a book for The New York Times after he panned McCourt's first and much lamented Angela's Ashes. His crime was to have questioned the literary merit of the memoir and to point out the unearned bathos of much of the writing.
McCourt's work quickly became the token white male contribution to the great ethnic sweepstakes that is contemporary American literature. He is the official Irish delegate joining those other profitable and endlessly self-important scribes such as Sherman Alexie, Toni Morrison, Junot Diaz... who sniffing out a soap box even a hundred miles away never fail to rush themselves to the necessary cause of fattening their bank accounts on behalf of....
It is known that McCourt first tried out his routines on his captive New York City high school students and they unable to escape had to endure his endless revising of his Irish saga... his leaving the New York City school system was one of the few blessings of his success
Finally, what is lost in the elevation of such a writer as McCourt is the availability of much greater writers, happening to be Irish but without the degraded sensibility so in evidence in his and the work of his ever expanding family of scribes.
I am thinking of writers such as John McGahren, Francis Stuart, Denis Donoghue and even Seamus Deane whose memoirs easily stand comparison to memoirs by writers like Michel Leiris and Thomas Bernhard... and sadly the novels of James McCourt are shaded by the mistaken notion that he is part of the Frank McCourt family.
Monday, July 13, 2009
YOUR LIPS ROTTED AWAY
In FADO a book of essays by Andrzej Stasiuk that Dalkey Archive is to publish in September there is a short essay on the Yugoslavian--- as they were once called--- writer Miodrag Bulatovic. Of course the name was not unfamiliar as he had once been as well published as any foreign writer ever is in the United States. I remembered his A HERO ON A DONKEY and another title which I had never read but which Stasiuk mentions WAR WAS BETTER.
In an anthology of Yugoslav stories DEATH OF A SIMPLE GIANT I found a story by Bulatovic, The Lovers. Two lines: "It was definitely a form of illness to want anything." and the last line of the story, "I remember how your lips rotted away."
I do not think that any story published by an American author in the last 50 years comes close to the sensibility that would allow for two lines like these to appear in a story that is 15 pages of type. I can not imagine an editor who would have the courage or the taste to publish such a story today.
In an anthology of Yugoslav stories DEATH OF A SIMPLE GIANT I found a story by Bulatovic, The Lovers. Two lines: "It was definitely a form of illness to want anything." and the last line of the story, "I remember how your lips rotted away."
I do not think that any story published by an American author in the last 50 years comes close to the sensibility that would allow for two lines like these to appear in a story that is 15 pages of type. I can not imagine an editor who would have the courage or the taste to publish such a story today.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
A NOTE FROM ESTONIA
No longer that possibility to write as I do not have the connection.
What do I mean?
In every country of the former Soviet Empire from Bulgaria to Estonia there is a word for connection, for that person who will help you in whatever matter is at hand
If a person does not have a connection there is the shaking of the head and the lowering of the voice: it is or was very sad, he or she did not have a connection so it was not possible.
I have come to that moment in writing.
While in memory the pleasure of writing remains… the reality is that I do not have a connection that would allow my words to be read.
Dalkey Archive, Turtle Point, Harper Collins, Arcade, Melville, FSG have found even JUST LIKE THAT my most accessible novel and the one with the easy hook of being a book from the so-called Sixties to be too something or other…
I could delineate the reasons these publishers found for… but what is the point.. I could show the whim that lead them to whatever it was that they actually did publish…
I have no connection… and everyone should understand that publishing is a simple a matter of whim.. just as in the life in Estonia under communism: whim masqueraded as political reasoning…
So…
Even reading becomes difficult.
For two weeks I have been reading the new translation of PORNOGRAFIA by Witold Gombrowicz that Grove will publish in the fall, published only to maintain some connection to the reputation that made that publisher.. but when our hostess in Helsinki falls asleep looking into the poster of a pensive PAUL AUSTER… what hope is there for reading?
Anyone who might think that Paul Auster is a writer is beyond help… even my reading of PORNOGRAFIA is shadowed by the fact that Grove feels it must foreword the book by a popular writer like Sam Lipsyte--- who is supposed to write funny stuff about “losers” though his press agent seems to get him space in popular magazines to look down upon… but the bound galleys are not burdened by his words except for the blank space where the Foreword is supposed to be…
Even mentioning Auster’s name is a victory for Auster…
I wrote a review of NORMANCE by Celine for the Los Angeles Times... it might appear on 12 July... of course I remember and Celine’s words shadow these: you have to be a little bit dead to be really funny…
What do I mean?
In every country of the former Soviet Empire from Bulgaria to Estonia there is a word for connection, for that person who will help you in whatever matter is at hand
If a person does not have a connection there is the shaking of the head and the lowering of the voice: it is or was very sad, he or she did not have a connection so it was not possible.
I have come to that moment in writing.
While in memory the pleasure of writing remains… the reality is that I do not have a connection that would allow my words to be read.
Dalkey Archive, Turtle Point, Harper Collins, Arcade, Melville, FSG have found even JUST LIKE THAT my most accessible novel and the one with the easy hook of being a book from the so-called Sixties to be too something or other…
I could delineate the reasons these publishers found for… but what is the point.. I could show the whim that lead them to whatever it was that they actually did publish…
I have no connection… and everyone should understand that publishing is a simple a matter of whim.. just as in the life in Estonia under communism: whim masqueraded as political reasoning…
So…
Even reading becomes difficult.
For two weeks I have been reading the new translation of PORNOGRAFIA by Witold Gombrowicz that Grove will publish in the fall, published only to maintain some connection to the reputation that made that publisher.. but when our hostess in Helsinki falls asleep looking into the poster of a pensive PAUL AUSTER… what hope is there for reading?
Anyone who might think that Paul Auster is a writer is beyond help… even my reading of PORNOGRAFIA is shadowed by the fact that Grove feels it must foreword the book by a popular writer like Sam Lipsyte--- who is supposed to write funny stuff about “losers” though his press agent seems to get him space in popular magazines to look down upon… but the bound galleys are not burdened by his words except for the blank space where the Foreword is supposed to be…
Even mentioning Auster’s name is a victory for Auster…
I wrote a review of NORMANCE by Celine for the Los Angeles Times... it might appear on 12 July... of course I remember and Celine’s words shadow these: you have to be a little bit dead to be really funny…
Thursday, June 18, 2009
GOING EAST or NORTH (2)
54
Leaving one’s room to go travelling is probably always a mistake and to go to Europe, to go to the East one cannot avoid committing an injustice, to be not aware enough, to know that one does not know enough…
In FADO, a forthcoming book of travel essays, the Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk writes. “To travel is to live. Or in any case to live doubly, triply, multiple times.
I am surprised by Stasiuk’s lack of hesitation in his assertion. Surely memory would assert itself… for to travel is to be killed, to die en route… surely he must be aware of those tiny towns that were set in motion and I am not just thinking of the recent century… but to leave those villages for the new world. It was not an accident of hyperbole that the Irish talked of coffin ships sailing from Europe… did not those from Poland, from Germany… of course many did not die crossing over and I live here on East First Street in Manhattan midst the remains, still of their arrival…
55
This morning, Anna says she had an email: her grandfather was killed on 2 October, 1941 in Kirov. He had been set in motion on 25 June 1941, from Tartu in Estonia. His bag had been packed for weeks… our bags have been packed for three days… Anna did not know her grandfather, Richard Raago’s death day. My mother heard many stories… I think we will learn many things in Estonia… they had come to get him… no one knew where he was taken, there was no one to ask…
32
I would say Eastern Europe began for me in 1960. Bear with me. The year is arbitrary but on Sunday in the Cranbury book store for fifty cents an Avon Original paperback EICHMANN MAN OF SLAUGHTER by John Donovan with the blurb: The murder of 6,000,000 Jews: Hitler demanded it, Himmler ordered it--- ADOLF EICHMANN DID IT!
I am sure I bought this book in 1960 or in 1961. I remembered the photos on the inside of the cover a large hole filled with dead bodies, one body in convict clothes pulled out and lying on the incline leading into the hole filed with dead bodies. Another picture of people getting into a freight car… On the inside of the back cover: a box of wedding rings; the three ovens in a crematoria with human remain; a prisoner pointing his finger at a German soldier wearing a cloth cap while another German soldier wearing a more formal hat looks on…
In those years I had other books: THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF HELL, THE SCOURGE OF THE SWASTIKA… I had sometime later …. THE KNIGHTS OF BOSHIDO but that didn’t have the same impact.
Those years I followed the trial and then the execution of Eichmann… the holocaust had arrived in the Unites States.
89
Until the early 60s World War Two had been in the Pacific for most Americans, I dare say. My grandfather had build airfields in Burma I was told. Other uncles had been in the Marines in the Pacific. In their houses they had picture histories of those island campaigns but did not talk about… one of them had a tattoo on his arm and smoked Camels…
Pearl Harbor and Tokyo Harbor and Douglas MacArthur summed up WW2…
In Europe--- if we thought about it: Hitler and Rommel and little later reading the books of Willi Heinrich: CROSS OF IRON, CRACK OF DOOM and MARK OF SHAME and another because it was about young boys my own age I read many times: THE BRIDGE by Manfred Gregor… I do not think I was atypical…
Why I didn’t I read THE NAKED AND THE DEAD or FROM HERE TO ETERNITY? Maybe they were too long or… and in the case of Heinrich and the Gregor? They were about the other as I would probably be forced to describe them later on.
Because of Eichmann’s capture I bought my first hardcover: Hitler a Study I Tyranny by Allan Bullock and then a copy of Mein Kampf from Ben who ran The Patchogue Book Store, a secondhand book store on Main Street that was owned by Ben a guy who worked on a town sanitation truck and the opened the shop after work. He had thick glasses and sat in his shop in his green sanitation department uniform. John tells me Ben sold everything. It is where people went to get titty magazines… my copy of KAPUTT was bought there. Ben is long dead and the store torn down to be replaced by a court building.
Literature had no appeal for me. How could it? In high school they wanted us to read the novels of Thomas Hardy and SILAS MARNER and plays of Shakespeare: Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Julius Caesar and Macbeth… that was literature. The Shakespeare was explained via film clips… now kids are drowned in ethnic literature and surely never read that sort of junk ever again… who wants to learn life lessons from Korean prostitutes as they interact with Hispanic reformed drug dealers who live to support their sisters created by Toni Morrison
48
These paperbacks about Jew killing… that is what one now thought World War Two was all about… what was going on over there in Eastern Europe and would still be going on if there were Jews left to kill.
44
The Hungarian Uprising in 1956 had confused me.… the pictures in LIFE Magazine and I guess at 12 I didn’t understand why the US didn’t help the Hungarians… THE BRIDGE AT ANDAU by James Michener… describe the new travelers who were fleeing the failed uprising… we read of Pal Maleter and Cardinal Mindszenty living on in the American Embassy
23
Do I know anything more about Eastern Europe now?
I have read Tadeusz Borowski: THIS WAY FOR THE GAS LADIES AND GENTLEMEN.. about the famous soccer match and Borowski’s suicide by gas after the war, after a friend had been imprisoned and tortured by the communist regime that now used Auschwitz for its own prisoners much as the Communists re-opened Buchenwald for its own prisoners of the German Democratic Republic…
And I have read KAPUTT of course…
I have read The Gulag Archipelago…
I have read THE FINAL STATION: UMSCHLAGPLATZ by Jaroslav M. Rymkiewicz which describes the limits of being able or not being able to describe the Warsaw ghetto…
No, I will not go on and make a list of books…
I know nothing about life in Eastern Europe.
Leaving one’s room to go travelling is probably always a mistake and to go to Europe, to go to the East one cannot avoid committing an injustice, to be not aware enough, to know that one does not know enough…
In FADO, a forthcoming book of travel essays, the Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk writes. “To travel is to live. Or in any case to live doubly, triply, multiple times.
I am surprised by Stasiuk’s lack of hesitation in his assertion. Surely memory would assert itself… for to travel is to be killed, to die en route… surely he must be aware of those tiny towns that were set in motion and I am not just thinking of the recent century… but to leave those villages for the new world. It was not an accident of hyperbole that the Irish talked of coffin ships sailing from Europe… did not those from Poland, from Germany… of course many did not die crossing over and I live here on East First Street in Manhattan midst the remains, still of their arrival…
55
This morning, Anna says she had an email: her grandfather was killed on 2 October, 1941 in Kirov. He had been set in motion on 25 June 1941, from Tartu in Estonia. His bag had been packed for weeks… our bags have been packed for three days… Anna did not know her grandfather, Richard Raago’s death day. My mother heard many stories… I think we will learn many things in Estonia… they had come to get him… no one knew where he was taken, there was no one to ask…
32
I would say Eastern Europe began for me in 1960. Bear with me. The year is arbitrary but on Sunday in the Cranbury book store for fifty cents an Avon Original paperback EICHMANN MAN OF SLAUGHTER by John Donovan with the blurb: The murder of 6,000,000 Jews: Hitler demanded it, Himmler ordered it--- ADOLF EICHMANN DID IT!
I am sure I bought this book in 1960 or in 1961. I remembered the photos on the inside of the cover a large hole filled with dead bodies, one body in convict clothes pulled out and lying on the incline leading into the hole filed with dead bodies. Another picture of people getting into a freight car… On the inside of the back cover: a box of wedding rings; the three ovens in a crematoria with human remain; a prisoner pointing his finger at a German soldier wearing a cloth cap while another German soldier wearing a more formal hat looks on…
In those years I had other books: THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF HELL, THE SCOURGE OF THE SWASTIKA… I had sometime later …. THE KNIGHTS OF BOSHIDO but that didn’t have the same impact.
Those years I followed the trial and then the execution of Eichmann… the holocaust had arrived in the Unites States.
89
Until the early 60s World War Two had been in the Pacific for most Americans, I dare say. My grandfather had build airfields in Burma I was told. Other uncles had been in the Marines in the Pacific. In their houses they had picture histories of those island campaigns but did not talk about… one of them had a tattoo on his arm and smoked Camels…
Pearl Harbor and Tokyo Harbor and Douglas MacArthur summed up WW2…
In Europe--- if we thought about it: Hitler and Rommel and little later reading the books of Willi Heinrich: CROSS OF IRON, CRACK OF DOOM and MARK OF SHAME and another because it was about young boys my own age I read many times: THE BRIDGE by Manfred Gregor… I do not think I was atypical…
Why I didn’t I read THE NAKED AND THE DEAD or FROM HERE TO ETERNITY? Maybe they were too long or… and in the case of Heinrich and the Gregor? They were about the other as I would probably be forced to describe them later on.
Because of Eichmann’s capture I bought my first hardcover: Hitler a Study I Tyranny by Allan Bullock and then a copy of Mein Kampf from Ben who ran The Patchogue Book Store, a secondhand book store on Main Street that was owned by Ben a guy who worked on a town sanitation truck and the opened the shop after work. He had thick glasses and sat in his shop in his green sanitation department uniform. John tells me Ben sold everything. It is where people went to get titty magazines… my copy of KAPUTT was bought there. Ben is long dead and the store torn down to be replaced by a court building.
Literature had no appeal for me. How could it? In high school they wanted us to read the novels of Thomas Hardy and SILAS MARNER and plays of Shakespeare: Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Julius Caesar and Macbeth… that was literature. The Shakespeare was explained via film clips… now kids are drowned in ethnic literature and surely never read that sort of junk ever again… who wants to learn life lessons from Korean prostitutes as they interact with Hispanic reformed drug dealers who live to support their sisters created by Toni Morrison
48
These paperbacks about Jew killing… that is what one now thought World War Two was all about… what was going on over there in Eastern Europe and would still be going on if there were Jews left to kill.
44
The Hungarian Uprising in 1956 had confused me.… the pictures in LIFE Magazine and I guess at 12 I didn’t understand why the US didn’t help the Hungarians… THE BRIDGE AT ANDAU by James Michener… describe the new travelers who were fleeing the failed uprising… we read of Pal Maleter and Cardinal Mindszenty living on in the American Embassy
23
Do I know anything more about Eastern Europe now?
I have read Tadeusz Borowski: THIS WAY FOR THE GAS LADIES AND GENTLEMEN.. about the famous soccer match and Borowski’s suicide by gas after the war, after a friend had been imprisoned and tortured by the communist regime that now used Auschwitz for its own prisoners much as the Communists re-opened Buchenwald for its own prisoners of the German Democratic Republic…
And I have read KAPUTT of course…
I have read The Gulag Archipelago…
I have read THE FINAL STATION: UMSCHLAGPLATZ by Jaroslav M. Rymkiewicz which describes the limits of being able or not being able to describe the Warsaw ghetto…
No, I will not go on and make a list of books…
I know nothing about life in Eastern Europe.
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