I received this from Farrar,Straus & Giroux.
It’s not the internships. It’s not the MFA programs. It’s not the time you spend at MacDowell. It may just be where you logged in your first days of employment. Twenty-some years ago, Evgenia Citkowitz worked as the assistant to the Director of Contracts at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
She also applied to be Jonathan Galassi’s assistant, and David Rieff, then a senior editor, induced Joseph Brodsky to write her a letter of recommendation. It’s a wonderful letter in which Brodsky writes, “Let me take the liberty of suggesting that you would be a fool to hire anybody else . . . I do understand that I may be encroaching on some sensitive territory, however what alleviates my scruples is the consideration that you, she, I and everybody who is worthy of our consideration will profit from your making her being your subordinate. She is tremendously intelligent, cute beyond belief and Cal Lowell liked her . . . Yours (as long as you make the right decision).” Galassi didn’t hire her, but is the proud editor of her first book, Ether: Seven Stories and a Novella.
I will let the early blurbs tell you more about this luminous collection:
“These stories are totally unique: they’re at once strange and graceful, macabre and funny. Evgenia Citkovitz burrows so deep inside her characters’ heads, she evokes feelings and impulses that become impossible to distinguish from our own. She understands that deep down, even in our own homes, we all feel like outsiders.”
—Noah Baumbach
“These stories are so funny and electric and honest, so beautifully and artfully done, you barely notice, until you feel that slow pain in your throat, they’re absolutely breaking your heart.”
—Katherine Taylor, author of Rules for Saying Goodbye
Evgenia Citkowitz was born in New York and was educated in London and the United States. Her short stories have been published in various British magazines. Her screenplay The House in Paris, based on Elizabeth Bowen’s novel, is currently in development, and her adaptation of Marek van der Jagt’s The Story of My Baldness has been taken on by the producers of Juno. Ether (Farrar, Straus and Giroux | May 4, 2010 | ISBN: 978-0-374-29887-6 | $25.00) is her first book. She is married to the actor Julian Sands and they live in Los Angeles with their two children.
COMMENTARY: Cal Lowell of course is Robert Lowell.
Brodsky's use of the word cute.
Brodsky would know--- priding himself indeed on knowing this--- what any Dubliner would know that only one noun comes after this word no matter the context.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Saturday, February 6, 2010
WHAT I AM PROBABLY NOT DOING, sadly
PREFACE:
To begin with a quote from: WWW Signandsight.com which is possibly the best literary cultural site in the world. Though mildly leftist and infected with a common European deathwish embodied in a constant genuflection to multi-culturalism which can only lead to the desired slaughter or self-slaughter the site remains at the highest levels of thought.
Jörg Sundermeier, himself a publisher and author, examines the state of literary criticism. In the media, he says there is a lack of literary debate: "The reviews pile up but there is no recognisable criteria behind them. So much seems utterly arbitrary. But this arbitrariness cannot be explained by market pressure alone. After all, journalists offer themselves up as slaves to the publishing PR and marketing departments, they are falling over themselves to review any potentially successful book on its first day in the shops. But this is not just about landing a scoop. It's more as if the journalists have internalised the marketing mechanisms of the publishing industry. When unplugged from the market, literature is largely ignored these days."
PREFACE:
During the last couple of months I have wanted to write about some books but I can’t seem to find anyone else interested, really, in these books:
THE UNION JACK by Imre Kertesz (Melville House)
DON JUAN HIS OWN VERSION by Peter Handke (Farrar Straus and Giroux)
CORRESPONDENCE Georges Bataille Michel Leiris (Seagull Books)
THE WEDDING IN AUSCHWITZ by Erich Hackl (Serpent’s Tail)
SMALL-TOWN RUSSIA Childhood Memories of the Final Soviet Decade by Anton Weiss-Wendt (Florida Academic Press)
THE MUSEUM OF ETERNA’S NOVEL by Macedonio Fernandez (Open Letter)
GENERAL PIESC of The Case of the Forgotten Mission by Stefan Themerson (Gaberbocchus)
THREE DAYS BEFORE THE SHOOTING by Ralph Ellison (The Modern Library)
SHADOWS AT DAWN A Borderland Massacre and the Violence of History by Karl Jacoby (Penguin Press)
THE CRISIS IN BULGARIA or Ibsen to the Rescue by Jocelyn Brooke (Chatto & Windus)
THE ABYSS OF HUMAN ILLUSION by Gilbert Sorrentino (Coffee House Press)
CHILDREN OF THE GULAG by Cathy A. Frierson and Semyon A.Vilensky (Yale University Press)
GEORGE LETHAM Pysician and Murderer by Ernst Weiss (Archepelago Books)
THE THREE FATES by Linda Le (New Directions)
NOT ART by Peter Esterhazy (Ecco)
THE SILENCES OF HAMMERSTEIN A German Story by Hans Magnus Enzenberger (S eagull Books)
THE SMELL OF HUMANS A Memoir of the Holocaust in Hungary by Erno Szep (Central European University Press)
BERNANOS An Ecclesial Existence by Hans Urs von Balthasar (Ignatius Press)
A SPLENDID CONSPIRACY by Albert Cossary (New Directions)
VIOLENCE AND DERISION by Albert Cossery
CASE CLOSED by Patrik Ourednik (Dalkey Archive)
BONES OF CONTENTION The Living Archive of Vasil Levski and the Making of Bulgaria’s National Hero by Maria Todorova (Central European University Press)
SELECTED JOURNALS by Ralph Waldo Emerson (Library of America
A TRAMP ABROAD, FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR, OTHER TRAVELS by Mark Twain (Library of America)
THE SIGHT OF DEATH by T. J. Clark (Yale University Press)
DUBLIN 1916 The Siege of the GPO by Clair Wills (Harvard University Press)
PREFACE:
“…A wooden cross stands over a grave in Vologda, one of Russia’s medieval cities, eight hours by train north of Moscow. The small plot lies in an overgrown courtyard facing the crumbling walls…The site is the former Gorne-Uspensky monastery. The post-Soviet government of the Russian Federation gave the buildings back to the Russian Orthodox Church in 1995. Beneath the bellflowers lie the skeletons of hundreds of infants and toddlers. Church officials discovered the bones when they pulled up the floorboards in the sanctuary to begin restoration that summer. Vologda soil is swampy. The skeletons were in a state of remarkable preservation that intensified the shock for those who first spotted their creamy shapes in moist earth and watched their transfer into three large metal storage bins. Forensics experts soon confirmed what elderly Vologda citizens remembered: thousands of young children had died of exposure, hunger, typhus in February and March 1930 in their city, when it served as the chief transit point in the deportation by cattle cars of so-called kulak (wealthy peasant) families to the uninhabited regions of the far north…”
from CHILDREN OF THE GULAG by Cathy A. Frierso and Semyon S.Viensky Yale University Press) 400 pages of original documents written by those responsible for this slaughter, from those experiencing it, compete with photographs of the sites and reports on the efforts to remember… and since there has never been the holding of anyone responsible for these murders: to remember and to know that those who come after will not believe, not care, not want to know… but those words…creamy shapes…metal storage containers…thousands… three blocks from where I write there is a bar named in honour of these child killers: the KGB BAR, one of whose owners is the writer Melvin Jules Bukiet
PREFACE:
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
BOOKS ARE RELICS
.Books are relics.
.In no way is this disturbing or sad or a cause for the usual dismay.
.Most of my life was spent in the time of typewriters but now the use of the typewriter is as common and as interesting as man bites dog.
.The owner of St. Mark’s Bookshop--- the great literary bookshop within walking distance and heir to the 8th Street Bookstore of memory--- was telling me a few weeks ago: there is no longer a book culture. No one waits for a new book as of old by certain authors. They had a midnight opening for the new Thomas Pynchon novel but it had the feel of something from the past… and even smelled of the fake world of publicity more associated now with sexy vampire books.
.I suppose I could tease out analogies with the culture of the relic in the middle ages… and fabrication of, the trade in, the veneration of, the function of… but that would take us into areas of theology…
.I suppose, I began to see the book as a relic as I was driving around in southern Arizona last January. Except for Tombstone, book stores are few and very far apart. But I did notice in places like Ajo, AZ and Rodeo, New Mexico and in particular in the latter place secondhand shops that also sold books. In the small grocery store, junk shop and café in Rodeo were a couple of cases of books for sale. Most of them were mass market paperbacks that I surmised had been left behind by people using the trailer parks in the area… people are reluctant to throw away books… so they pile up in Rodeo in Ajo and in many of the little towns that one stops at… I guess I should have asked if anyone ever buys a book…
.I had celebrated Tombstone as a town full of books but they were of local interest, < the Gunfight at the OK Corral> some published by university and NY publishers but many by very small publishers locally… there was one bookstore owned by a prolific western themed books writer who published his own books… you see the staged gun fight and want to know more and you think a book: but in actuality all the information is on the computer right now and you can watch on You Tube various versions of the recreated gunfight you saw and you have yourself probably like I did made a littler movie… but did I buy a book?... yes, a reprint of an article about the surrender of Geronimo complete with the original photographs but then all those picture are on the computer and… but I had the feeling I was doing this more as memorial to my previous habit and this was underlined when I did buy in the Tombstone courthouse bookstore A TENDERFOOT IN TOMBSTONE The Private Journal of Geore Whitwell Parsons: The Turbulent Years: 1880-82.. I bought it because in the index it revealed the name: Endicott Peabody who had established the first Episcopal church in Tombstone and who later would go back East and establish the Groton School which my son was at that moment a student. IS it possible that anyone under the age of forty who would have done what I had done in the courthouse?
.A friend who doing the revisions of his book on a writer who originally well published in the United States in English now finds that only the French are interested in his books and are even prepared to translate his unpublished English language books. A new book by this author had appeared on the internet in an English version and my friend wrote that he was not really prepared to re-write the whole manuscript of his book unless someone was prepared to pay him to do it and since as he is subsidizing the publication of his own book he didn’t see much reason because in reality how many people will actually read a book about an author who now only has one book in print in the United States and even though it is published by a major NY publisher…
.This is a long roundabout way of getting to the idea that it is only very recently really in the course of human history that writers expect or are known for living off the books they write…. I won’t rehearse the whole history of authorship but we all well know those dedications to patrons, protectors that introduce books of poetry and prose that used to introduce the book before they were replaced with long lists of people that the author lists as helpers, friends etc ,etc, an incredible display of narcissistic anxiety. Did Horace, Catullus or Virgil have agents and receive royalty statements?
.So now that books are relics: what to do with this impulse to write… and to have read what one writes: now you are reading these words which cost you nothing and cost me nothing…
.Is it reasonable anymore to expect to receive money for what one writes?
.Of course: how is the writer to live?
.There are those relic embellishers: foundation prizes or fellowships, welfare grants from the government, teaching sinecures for those creating aspirant relic makers by passing on “tips” of how it is done.
.A POSITIVE NOTE. Denis Donoghue wrote an essay about how Ezra Pound through the writing of The Cantos was trying to urge into existence an ideal prince patron. I would do so also but well know that any prince patron who came along would quickly be ensnared in making sure the patronage would be distributed in the correct proportions along ethnic, racial sexual lines of retreat from any true excellence if there was any public hint of such largess.
.Now, I have been writing for some time a much longer thing for lack of a better word and soon it will be finished and it will be about 300 pages. I received no money in advance for writing this thing but I would like it to be read.
.In the old days two of my things--- THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV and GOING TO PATCHOGUE were made into books and that is that..
.Since then I have written many things but they have not been made into books because editors like the late Richard Seaver for instance once said he could not make any money off of it as did Robert Weil etc…and a young guy at Harper Collins and Overlook…
.I suppose I could have gone down the list but some years ago after those two books were “published” and widely and well reviewed I had approached an agent who was honest enough to say, I cannot eat lunch off of you.
.And that is really what Richard Seaver, Robert Weil and the kid at Harper Collins were really saying: they could not eat lunch off of me or it… At the moment Weill is sitting pretty, someone said because he published a book of cartoons by R Crumb based on the first books of the Bible--- though Norton’s sales are off 25% last year--- what a fall off from the days of ZAP, for Crumb... but that is publishing : digging up the almost dead and seeing if you can make some money off of them if you teach teach them some sort of trick.
.In the mail the other day, a truly pathetic book by Patti Smith writing about her “relationship” with Robert Mapplethorpe. Smith once tried to convince people she was in the incarnation of Rimbaud but now she is wrinkled, long of tooth and should have remembered Rimbaud was finished with this stuff by the age of 21: and a memoir of a man whose claim upon posterity is the picture of himself with a bull whip shoved up his rectum…
.Of course publishers know they are a dying breed, both physically and metaphorically. No young person of a right mind would go into publishing unless possessed of a large trust fund and needed something to do to avoid the drug habit. That is the great fear stalking publishing: they know it is dying industry as they like to fashion themselves.. but are all hoping there are a few more years in the old way of doing things…
.But you are thinking of those electronic gadgets that are now appearing in the hands of people on the subway: Kindle, Sony readers and the awaited Nook? On the weekend I was in the Barnes and Noble on Union Square and asked the kid to demonstrate the Nook for me. I asked to see if Ulysses was available. HE tried to find the free sample but something happened and he couldn’t find it. He said this doesn’t usually happen but there are still some glitches… I can well imagine that these things are the future and people will learn to read “books” on their cell phones. The kid offered that while he didn’t use these electronic readers he also did not read books much anymore though he thought there would always be people interested in big old important books. The kid was Asian and I am sure he was trying to show some sort of respect for my obviously aged face…
.Just before Christmas the Los Angeles Times saw the book page staff reduced to two people… I expect it will soon be one person who will produce a page much like the page in the Newark Star Ledger…: it will mostly be a page of announcements… a telling of readers where to go and find out about new written things and where to read about these new written things or it will be… who really knows.
.Nowhere in the country is anyone adding staff to the book pages. In my short experience I have seen the Washington Post, Newsday and now the Los Angeles Times fade and fade
.HOWEVER, once again I turn when I finish this little thing to:::: NOTHING DOING because I am interested in recording these lives I met on the page: Herbert T. Lange, Al Wells, George Kamenov, Sean Patrick, the voice which has gone looking for its own grave and how it all began when once in The National Gallery, London standing in front of Nicholas Poussin’s LANDSCAPE WITH TRAVELLERS RESTING…
PS. I am a relic collector, a relic producer and from the mail as I am typing this: four equisite books: THE OTHER SLEEP by Julian Green, CHATEAU d'Argol by Julien Gracq, A JOURNEY TO MOUNT ATHOS amd THE SORCERER"S APPRENTICE both by Francois Augieras... 6 1/2 inches by 4 7/8 inches, paperback with flaps...books of a voice indifferent to time, without insidious reference to the present moment, consolations for aging flesh encasing minds that do not fade,... published by Pushkin Press in London, the only publisher ALIVE in London at the moment.
.Why am I not dead so that Pushkin Press or _____________ might think to publish my words?... (Edward Dahlberg told me in 1971 that he had been writing posthumously for most of his life. I now know what he means, maybe.)
.In no way is this disturbing or sad or a cause for the usual dismay.
.Most of my life was spent in the time of typewriters but now the use of the typewriter is as common and as interesting as man bites dog.
.The owner of St. Mark’s Bookshop--- the great literary bookshop within walking distance and heir to the 8th Street Bookstore of memory--- was telling me a few weeks ago: there is no longer a book culture. No one waits for a new book as of old by certain authors. They had a midnight opening for the new Thomas Pynchon novel but it had the feel of something from the past… and even smelled of the fake world of publicity more associated now with sexy vampire books.
.I suppose I could tease out analogies with the culture of the relic in the middle ages… and fabrication of, the trade in, the veneration of, the function of… but that would take us into areas of theology…
.I suppose, I began to see the book as a relic as I was driving around in southern Arizona last January. Except for Tombstone, book stores are few and very far apart. But I did notice in places like Ajo, AZ and Rodeo, New Mexico and in particular in the latter place secondhand shops that also sold books. In the small grocery store, junk shop and café in Rodeo were a couple of cases of books for sale. Most of them were mass market paperbacks that I surmised had been left behind by people using the trailer parks in the area… people are reluctant to throw away books… so they pile up in Rodeo in Ajo and in many of the little towns that one stops at… I guess I should have asked if anyone ever buys a book…
.I had celebrated Tombstone as a town full of books but they were of local interest, < the Gunfight at the OK Corral> some published by university and NY publishers but many by very small publishers locally… there was one bookstore owned by a prolific western themed books writer who published his own books… you see the staged gun fight and want to know more and you think a book: but in actuality all the information is on the computer right now and you can watch on You Tube various versions of the recreated gunfight you saw and you have yourself probably like I did made a littler movie… but did I buy a book?... yes, a reprint of an article about the surrender of Geronimo complete with the original photographs but then all those picture are on the computer and… but I had the feeling I was doing this more as memorial to my previous habit and this was underlined when I did buy in the Tombstone courthouse bookstore A TENDERFOOT IN TOMBSTONE The Private Journal of Geore Whitwell Parsons: The Turbulent Years: 1880-82.. I bought it because in the index it revealed the name: Endicott Peabody who had established the first Episcopal church in Tombstone and who later would go back East and establish the Groton School which my son was at that moment a student. IS it possible that anyone under the age of forty who would have done what I had done in the courthouse?
.A friend who doing the revisions of his book on a writer who originally well published in the United States in English now finds that only the French are interested in his books and are even prepared to translate his unpublished English language books. A new book by this author had appeared on the internet in an English version and my friend wrote that he was not really prepared to re-write the whole manuscript of his book unless someone was prepared to pay him to do it and since as he is subsidizing the publication of his own book he didn’t see much reason because in reality how many people will actually read a book about an author who now only has one book in print in the United States and even though it is published by a major NY publisher…
.This is a long roundabout way of getting to the idea that it is only very recently really in the course of human history that writers expect or are known for living off the books they write…. I won’t rehearse the whole history of authorship but we all well know those dedications to patrons, protectors that introduce books of poetry and prose that used to introduce the book before they were replaced with long lists of people that the author lists as helpers, friends etc ,etc, an incredible display of narcissistic anxiety. Did Horace, Catullus or Virgil have agents and receive royalty statements?
.So now that books are relics: what to do with this impulse to write… and to have read what one writes: now you are reading these words which cost you nothing and cost me nothing…
.Is it reasonable anymore to expect to receive money for what one writes?
.Of course: how is the writer to live?
.There are those relic embellishers: foundation prizes or fellowships, welfare grants from the government, teaching sinecures for those creating aspirant relic makers by passing on “tips” of how it is done.
.A POSITIVE NOTE. Denis Donoghue wrote an essay about how Ezra Pound through the writing of The Cantos was trying to urge into existence an ideal prince patron. I would do so also but well know that any prince patron who came along would quickly be ensnared in making sure the patronage would be distributed in the correct proportions along ethnic, racial sexual lines of retreat from any true excellence if there was any public hint of such largess.
.Now, I have been writing for some time a much longer thing for lack of a better word and soon it will be finished and it will be about 300 pages. I received no money in advance for writing this thing but I would like it to be read.
.In the old days two of my things--- THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV and GOING TO PATCHOGUE were made into books and that is that..
.Since then I have written many things but they have not been made into books because editors like the late Richard Seaver for instance once said he could not make any money off of it as did Robert Weil etc…and a young guy at Harper Collins and Overlook…
.I suppose I could have gone down the list but some years ago after those two books were “published” and widely and well reviewed I had approached an agent who was honest enough to say, I cannot eat lunch off of you.
.And that is really what Richard Seaver, Robert Weil and the kid at Harper Collins were really saying: they could not eat lunch off of me or it… At the moment Weill is sitting pretty, someone said because he published a book of cartoons by R Crumb based on the first books of the Bible--- though Norton’s sales are off 25% last year--- what a fall off from the days of ZAP, for Crumb... but that is publishing : digging up the almost dead and seeing if you can make some money off of them if you teach teach them some sort of trick.
.In the mail the other day, a truly pathetic book by Patti Smith writing about her “relationship” with Robert Mapplethorpe. Smith once tried to convince people she was in the incarnation of Rimbaud but now she is wrinkled, long of tooth and should have remembered Rimbaud was finished with this stuff by the age of 21: and a memoir of a man whose claim upon posterity is the picture of himself with a bull whip shoved up his rectum…
.Of course publishers know they are a dying breed, both physically and metaphorically. No young person of a right mind would go into publishing unless possessed of a large trust fund and needed something to do to avoid the drug habit. That is the great fear stalking publishing: they know it is dying industry as they like to fashion themselves.. but are all hoping there are a few more years in the old way of doing things…
.But you are thinking of those electronic gadgets that are now appearing in the hands of people on the subway: Kindle, Sony readers and the awaited Nook? On the weekend I was in the Barnes and Noble on Union Square and asked the kid to demonstrate the Nook for me. I asked to see if Ulysses was available. HE tried to find the free sample but something happened and he couldn’t find it. He said this doesn’t usually happen but there are still some glitches… I can well imagine that these things are the future and people will learn to read “books” on their cell phones. The kid offered that while he didn’t use these electronic readers he also did not read books much anymore though he thought there would always be people interested in big old important books. The kid was Asian and I am sure he was trying to show some sort of respect for my obviously aged face…
.Just before Christmas the Los Angeles Times saw the book page staff reduced to two people… I expect it will soon be one person who will produce a page much like the page in the Newark Star Ledger…: it will mostly be a page of announcements… a telling of readers where to go and find out about new written things and where to read about these new written things or it will be… who really knows.
.Nowhere in the country is anyone adding staff to the book pages. In my short experience I have seen the Washington Post, Newsday and now the Los Angeles Times fade and fade
.HOWEVER, once again I turn when I finish this little thing to:::: NOTHING DOING because I am interested in recording these lives I met on the page: Herbert T. Lange, Al Wells, George Kamenov, Sean Patrick, the voice which has gone looking for its own grave and how it all began when once in The National Gallery, London standing in front of Nicholas Poussin’s LANDSCAPE WITH TRAVELLERS RESTING…
PS. I am a relic collector, a relic producer and from the mail as I am typing this: four equisite books: THE OTHER SLEEP by Julian Green, CHATEAU d'Argol by Julien Gracq, A JOURNEY TO MOUNT ATHOS amd THE SORCERER"S APPRENTICE both by Francois Augieras... 6 1/2 inches by 4 7/8 inches, paperback with flaps...books of a voice indifferent to time, without insidious reference to the present moment, consolations for aging flesh encasing minds that do not fade,... published by Pushkin Press in London, the only publisher ALIVE in London at the moment.
.Why am I not dead so that Pushkin Press or _____________ might think to publish my words?... (Edward Dahlberg told me in 1971 that he had been writing posthumously for most of his life. I now know what he means, maybe.)
Friday, December 18, 2009
STILL READING AGAINST and the MOST IMPORTANT book about the novel to be published
8--Since my mother died on December 21, 1972 the Christmas holidays and the end of the year have been drained of some of the dreary levity that infects much of the population. I remember taken the undecorated Christmas tree and placing it next to the stable set up in front of the Catholic Church in Saugerties, NY.
9--Some books seemed to be of value this year--- giving into the convention of the moment--- and the listing is to the purpose of seeing if in a year or in five years they still remain in my mind, if I am still about because there comes a moment when the life turns and what is to be always expected gains a tiny bit more of focus.
10--TIEPOLO PINK by Robert Calasso (Knopf) was the book that gave me the most intellectual pleasure, a book to go back to again and again as I have done with THE RUINS OF KASCH, KA and THE FORTY-NINE STEPS.
11--Finally, someone --- Calasso--- by looking closely at the work of Tiepolo explained why after him and after the French Revolution and continuing to this day art seems to be not very interesting, beyond being a sort of brain vomit from the solitary imaginations of the artists.
12--BRECHT AT NIGHT by Mati Unt (Dalkey Archive) was the first Estonian novel I have reviewed. By connecting Brecht’s stay in Helsinki on the run from Hitler in 1940/41 with the Soviet destruction of Estonia Unt shapes his visionary novel into a commentary on the obscurity of history while not for a line avoiding the particulars. Brecht waiting for a visa and permission to travel across the Soviet Union to the paradise of Hollywood, all the while cheering on the murderous thugs of Stalin is the highest comedy that crucifies one with one’s own powerlessness
13--VOYAGE BY DUGOUT OR THE PLAY OF THE FILM OF THE WAR by Peter Handke is his final comment on the breakup Yugoslavia in the form of play. I read it in manuscript in a translation by Scott Abbott. That it has not been published is a scandal and shame. Brad Morrow at CONJUNCTIONS chickened out of publishing it even after he had announced it for publication some years ago when he became aware of the intellectual lynch mob lead by the happily dead Susan Sontag who wanted to drum Handke out of literary existence. Happily that has not happened and Handke has a short novel DON JUAN HIS OWN VERSION (FSG) coming out in February, reminding us that he is one of the few world writers who has been mostly available to American readers. One hopes that some genuinely daring publisher will do the play along with reprinting A JOURNEY TO THE RIVERS Justice for Serbia that Viking had the courage to publish in 1997. Not for a moment should anyone think that things have been settled in the Balkans.
14---THE STRUDLHOF STEPS by Heimoto Von DODERER, translated by Vincetn Kling is another book I read in manuscript. If you know Von Doderer’s THE DEMONS, EVERY MAN A MURDERER and THE WTAREFALLS OF SLUNJ you know why this should be available. He is equal of Robert Musil and has the advantage of having completed his great books. This is not to put Musil down in anyway but to suggest that Musil is not the only classic Austrian writer form the earlier part of the 20th Century. Kling has translated more than half of THE STRUDLEHOF STEPS but sadly our literary publishers like skinny novels so how long will we wait?
15---In manuscript form though happily scheduled to appear in the New Year is a short novel by Imre Kertesz, THE UNION JACK… Kertesz is in the pantheon of Hungarian writing that has to include Sandor Mari, Antal Szerb, Peter Nadas, Peter Esterhazy and Attila Bartis.
16/16--One should not hold the Nobel Prize against Kertesz in the same way that one should not hold the same prize against Herta Muller. While they might get things really wrong with writers like Pearl Buck and Toni Morrison in this case the Nobel committee did a real service to the book. In a hundred pages Kertesz gets exactly right the dreary deadening reality of socialist Hungary and at the moment he is causing an uproar for mentioning that one really can’t read those Hungarian writers who were published during the communist times without thinking about what they had to do in order to function as writers… who did they sell out, who did they stab in the back, what lies did they tell or tell by omission… and this is the truth for all of Eastern Europe. The communists made mistakes and infrequently allowed a good book to slip through but you probably have more fingers on your hands than you would need to enumerate these writers or books.
17/18--The one American book… but you know I dislike mentioning the nationality of a writer… that I continue to read is IMPERIAL by William K. Vollmann (Viking). I would even say it is THE American book and will be read or at least I read it along with Henry James’s THE AMERICAN SCENE and two books about the west of Ireland by Tim Robinson STONES OF ARAN and CONNEMARA. I am taking IMPERIAL with me in January when I drive about Imperial, the Salton Sea on my way to Douglas and Tombstone where once again I will take up CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA by Camilo Jose Cela which is the best book ever written about the American West.
19—Coming: THE THREE FATES by Linda Le. (New Directions) I reviewed an earlier novel of hers, SCANDAL… part of the Vietnamese diaspora in France... while her books are rooted in personal experience they have a visionary quality that leaves her on the edge of a terrifying possible descent and it is only her continued ability to find words that keeps her among the living.
19---Coming: PURGE by Sofia Oksanen. (Grove) Estonian Finnish writer who writes of the terrible consequences of the Soviet occupation of Estonia and the attemps to live with the consequences. I wish they had started with STALIN’S COWS and can only hope that will appear eventually.
19---Coming: NOT ART by Peter Esterhazy (Ecco) Stupidly Ecco skipped the essential sequel to CELESTIAL HARMONIES that called into question everything that Esterhazy had so confidently written about his father. This book continues the story of his mother from HELPING VERBS OF THE HEART, an earlier book which published in a very poor translation.
19---Coming: THE MUSEUM OF ETERNA’S NOVEL by Macedonio Fernandez (Open Letter). Do not be put off by the rather common introductions but find the wonderful essay by Jorge Luis Borges who acknowledges that Fernandez taught him everything , well in a fashion… Finally a genuine step beyond TRISTRAM SHANDY.
20—RIGHT NOW: ROBERT BRESSON A Passion for Film by Tony Pipolo (Oxford) Pipolo writes without the usual film critical theory rubbish but happily he guides the viewer into the greatest ( why not) movie director… Don’t worry I know: John Ford, Dumont, Bela Tarr… but last night I Saw The Trial of Joan of Arc… the opening is so intimidating, so devastating as an image of angry power on the march… and we know it will be met by Joan in all her complexity about to be reduced to ashes except
20—RIGHT NOW. I have been reading the four novels by Juan Jose Saer that are available in English. THE WITNESS, THE INVESTIGATION, NOBODY NOTHING NEVER, THE EVENT. I came to Saer by way of a visit with Alain Robbe-Grillet who on the floor had a book by Saer opened and underlined. I wish I could remember which one it was but Robbe-Grillet mentioned that Saer had been much influenced by his work and now upon reading him I can well see that and if only more writers were so wonderfully influenced. Saer is a lefty writer whose literary work exist first as literature--- well aware of the need for a genuine modern approach since the realist novel is a dead relic of a miserable moment in literary history--- and whose radical politics discreetly underlines the force of his sentences and forms and the reader is convinced of the terror that gripped parts of South America. In contrast I do not for moment believe a word Eduard Galeano writes because he is so crude in form and thought: just another leftist hatchet man.
And I would pay a quick homage to the single greatest novel to come out of South America I THE SUPREME by Augusto Roa Bastos, another lefty but with this novel he is in my personal pantheon with ULYSSES, JOURNEY TO THE END OF NIGHT, EUMESWIL and…
20--- As it is so demanding, … I have only tried again and again to read BLOOD FROM THE SKY by Piotr Rawicz as I have been forced to think closely about the murder of the Jews of Europe and this came about by reading MURDER WITHOUT HATRED Estonians and the Holocaust by Anton Weiss Wendt.
I had known nothing about how Estonians in order to please their German friends went about killing all the Jews and gypsies who remained in Estonia in 1941. The now knowing about the cool murdering, the distributing of the murdered children’s clothing and toys to Estonian children, happening even in the smallest towns, towns we had gone through this summer where there is no memory of these terrible events has changed my wife whose first language is Estonian and as a result it becomes hard to think about going back to Estonia until we have thought more about these events…
21 I am writing the last pages of NOTHING DOING which began with three men traveling in a painting by Poussin and has move about and through Douglas and Ajo, Arizona, been to Hermosa Beach, to Sofia, to Paris, to Patchogue… three men--- soldier priest poet--- described by Baudelaire, transformed by paralysis all looking for where they are to be buried. Of course it is a comedy trying to avoid in Denis Donoghue’s phrase, the penury of fact.
The best news only for those who read the whole post: IN APRIL Continuum will publish Steve Moore's THE NOVEL AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY. Moore begins with the first novels written in 1190-1800 BC in Egypt and so unlike all the other books about the novel I have ever read he has genuinely tried to read every major novel published in ALL the world's languages, north, south, west and east. This is the first part and he stops in 16/17 century in China. He will continue with the so-called modern. But just from this work, you will never ever again think that Flaubert, Austen, Dickens, Eliot etc etc are the be all and all... never ever again will you think that 300 pages is a long novel... Moore will create a revolution in how we think about the novel or at least that is my hope...
9--Some books seemed to be of value this year--- giving into the convention of the moment--- and the listing is to the purpose of seeing if in a year or in five years they still remain in my mind, if I am still about because there comes a moment when the life turns and what is to be always expected gains a tiny bit more of focus.
10--TIEPOLO PINK by Robert Calasso (Knopf) was the book that gave me the most intellectual pleasure, a book to go back to again and again as I have done with THE RUINS OF KASCH, KA and THE FORTY-NINE STEPS.
11--Finally, someone --- Calasso--- by looking closely at the work of Tiepolo explained why after him and after the French Revolution and continuing to this day art seems to be not very interesting, beyond being a sort of brain vomit from the solitary imaginations of the artists.
12--BRECHT AT NIGHT by Mati Unt (Dalkey Archive) was the first Estonian novel I have reviewed. By connecting Brecht’s stay in Helsinki on the run from Hitler in 1940/41 with the Soviet destruction of Estonia Unt shapes his visionary novel into a commentary on the obscurity of history while not for a line avoiding the particulars. Brecht waiting for a visa and permission to travel across the Soviet Union to the paradise of Hollywood, all the while cheering on the murderous thugs of Stalin is the highest comedy that crucifies one with one’s own powerlessness
13--VOYAGE BY DUGOUT OR THE PLAY OF THE FILM OF THE WAR by Peter Handke is his final comment on the breakup Yugoslavia in the form of play. I read it in manuscript in a translation by Scott Abbott. That it has not been published is a scandal and shame. Brad Morrow at CONJUNCTIONS chickened out of publishing it even after he had announced it for publication some years ago when he became aware of the intellectual lynch mob lead by the happily dead Susan Sontag who wanted to drum Handke out of literary existence. Happily that has not happened and Handke has a short novel DON JUAN HIS OWN VERSION (FSG) coming out in February, reminding us that he is one of the few world writers who has been mostly available to American readers. One hopes that some genuinely daring publisher will do the play along with reprinting A JOURNEY TO THE RIVERS Justice for Serbia that Viking had the courage to publish in 1997. Not for a moment should anyone think that things have been settled in the Balkans.
14---THE STRUDLHOF STEPS by Heimoto Von DODERER, translated by Vincetn Kling is another book I read in manuscript. If you know Von Doderer’s THE DEMONS, EVERY MAN A MURDERER and THE WTAREFALLS OF SLUNJ you know why this should be available. He is equal of Robert Musil and has the advantage of having completed his great books. This is not to put Musil down in anyway but to suggest that Musil is not the only classic Austrian writer form the earlier part of the 20th Century. Kling has translated more than half of THE STRUDLEHOF STEPS but sadly our literary publishers like skinny novels so how long will we wait?
15---In manuscript form though happily scheduled to appear in the New Year is a short novel by Imre Kertesz, THE UNION JACK… Kertesz is in the pantheon of Hungarian writing that has to include Sandor Mari, Antal Szerb, Peter Nadas, Peter Esterhazy and Attila Bartis.
16/16--One should not hold the Nobel Prize against Kertesz in the same way that one should not hold the same prize against Herta Muller. While they might get things really wrong with writers like Pearl Buck and Toni Morrison in this case the Nobel committee did a real service to the book. In a hundred pages Kertesz gets exactly right the dreary deadening reality of socialist Hungary and at the moment he is causing an uproar for mentioning that one really can’t read those Hungarian writers who were published during the communist times without thinking about what they had to do in order to function as writers… who did they sell out, who did they stab in the back, what lies did they tell or tell by omission… and this is the truth for all of Eastern Europe. The communists made mistakes and infrequently allowed a good book to slip through but you probably have more fingers on your hands than you would need to enumerate these writers or books.
17/18--The one American book… but you know I dislike mentioning the nationality of a writer… that I continue to read is IMPERIAL by William K. Vollmann (Viking). I would even say it is THE American book and will be read or at least I read it along with Henry James’s THE AMERICAN SCENE and two books about the west of Ireland by Tim Robinson STONES OF ARAN and CONNEMARA. I am taking IMPERIAL with me in January when I drive about Imperial, the Salton Sea on my way to Douglas and Tombstone where once again I will take up CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA by Camilo Jose Cela which is the best book ever written about the American West.
19—Coming: THE THREE FATES by Linda Le. (New Directions) I reviewed an earlier novel of hers, SCANDAL… part of the Vietnamese diaspora in France... while her books are rooted in personal experience they have a visionary quality that leaves her on the edge of a terrifying possible descent and it is only her continued ability to find words that keeps her among the living.
19---Coming: PURGE by Sofia Oksanen. (Grove) Estonian Finnish writer who writes of the terrible consequences of the Soviet occupation of Estonia and the attemps to live with the consequences. I wish they had started with STALIN’S COWS and can only hope that will appear eventually.
19---Coming: NOT ART by Peter Esterhazy (Ecco) Stupidly Ecco skipped the essential sequel to CELESTIAL HARMONIES that called into question everything that Esterhazy had so confidently written about his father. This book continues the story of his mother from HELPING VERBS OF THE HEART, an earlier book which published in a very poor translation.
19---Coming: THE MUSEUM OF ETERNA’S NOVEL by Macedonio Fernandez (Open Letter). Do not be put off by the rather common introductions but find the wonderful essay by Jorge Luis Borges who acknowledges that Fernandez taught him everything , well in a fashion… Finally a genuine step beyond TRISTRAM SHANDY.
20—RIGHT NOW: ROBERT BRESSON A Passion for Film by Tony Pipolo (Oxford) Pipolo writes without the usual film critical theory rubbish but happily he guides the viewer into the greatest ( why not) movie director… Don’t worry I know: John Ford, Dumont, Bela Tarr… but last night I Saw The Trial of Joan of Arc… the opening is so intimidating, so devastating as an image of angry power on the march… and we know it will be met by Joan in all her complexity about to be reduced to ashes except
20—RIGHT NOW. I have been reading the four novels by Juan Jose Saer that are available in English. THE WITNESS, THE INVESTIGATION, NOBODY NOTHING NEVER, THE EVENT. I came to Saer by way of a visit with Alain Robbe-Grillet who on the floor had a book by Saer opened and underlined. I wish I could remember which one it was but Robbe-Grillet mentioned that Saer had been much influenced by his work and now upon reading him I can well see that and if only more writers were so wonderfully influenced. Saer is a lefty writer whose literary work exist first as literature--- well aware of the need for a genuine modern approach since the realist novel is a dead relic of a miserable moment in literary history--- and whose radical politics discreetly underlines the force of his sentences and forms and the reader is convinced of the terror that gripped parts of South America. In contrast I do not for moment believe a word Eduard Galeano writes because he is so crude in form and thought: just another leftist hatchet man.
And I would pay a quick homage to the single greatest novel to come out of South America I THE SUPREME by Augusto Roa Bastos, another lefty but with this novel he is in my personal pantheon with ULYSSES, JOURNEY TO THE END OF NIGHT, EUMESWIL and…
20--- As it is so demanding, … I have only tried again and again to read BLOOD FROM THE SKY by Piotr Rawicz as I have been forced to think closely about the murder of the Jews of Europe and this came about by reading MURDER WITHOUT HATRED Estonians and the Holocaust by Anton Weiss Wendt.
I had known nothing about how Estonians in order to please their German friends went about killing all the Jews and gypsies who remained in Estonia in 1941. The now knowing about the cool murdering, the distributing of the murdered children’s clothing and toys to Estonian children, happening even in the smallest towns, towns we had gone through this summer where there is no memory of these terrible events has changed my wife whose first language is Estonian and as a result it becomes hard to think about going back to Estonia until we have thought more about these events…
21 I am writing the last pages of NOTHING DOING which began with three men traveling in a painting by Poussin and has move about and through Douglas and Ajo, Arizona, been to Hermosa Beach, to Sofia, to Paris, to Patchogue… three men--- soldier priest poet--- described by Baudelaire, transformed by paralysis all looking for where they are to be buried. Of course it is a comedy trying to avoid in Denis Donoghue’s phrase, the penury of fact.
The best news only for those who read the whole post: IN APRIL Continuum will publish Steve Moore's THE NOVEL AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY. Moore begins with the first novels written in 1190-1800 BC in Egypt and so unlike all the other books about the novel I have ever read he has genuinely tried to read every major novel published in ALL the world's languages, north, south, west and east. This is the first part and he stops in 16/17 century in China. He will continue with the so-called modern. But just from this work, you will never ever again think that Flaubert, Austen, Dickens, Eliot etc etc are the be all and all... never ever again will you think that 300 pages is a long novel... Moore will create a revolution in how we think about the novel or at least that is my hope...
Thursday, November 12, 2009
PAUL MORAND, ANTAL SZERB, JULIAN GREEN: Essential Books from PUSHKIN PRESS
C
On my shelves by PAUL MORAND:
Black Magic
Earth Girdled
Green Shoots (Preface by Marcel Proust)
Fancy Goods and Open All Night (translated by Ezra Pound)
Open All Night (translated by HBV)
Closed All Night
The Living Buddha (two different translations)
1900 A.D.
World Champions
Nothing but the Earth
Lewis and Irene
Europe at Love
East India and Company
Orient Air Express
Indian Air
The Captive Princess
Montociel
New York
Le Voyage (a photocopy)
All of these books are out of print though the New Directions’ edition of Ezra Pound’s translation of Fancy Goods/ Open All Night is available.
This IS NOT to go on about out of print books.
D
New York though published in 1930 is still a good guide book for New York, much in the same way that The American Scene by Henry James is a good introduction to the United States if read with Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.
E
Pushkin Press based in London publishes what are the prettiest and most elegant books in the English language world. Readers already well know this,one hopes, and have read for instance the four novels by Antal Szerb that they have brought over into English and by so doing restored or placed them and him into the pantheon of world literature: JOURNEY BY MIDNIGHT, THE PENDRAGON LEGEND, THE QUEEN’S NECKLACE, and OLIVER VII. Like Sandor Marai, Szerb came to an awful end but their books and those of certain contemporary Hungarian writers would suggest that Hungarian is one of the great world literary languages…
From JOURNEY BY MIDNIGHT: “He was a really devout Catholic, as Jewish converts often are. Their centuries of tradition haven’t been eroded the way they have for us… He cut out of his life everything that was not purely Catholic. He guarded his soul’s salvation with a revolver.”
F
But it is Paul Morand at the moment that Pushkin Press is revealing anew to the English speaking (reading?) world .
They started with VENICES. Note the plural. A book of fragments memories both from reading and from life: An overcast October sky this morning; an opaline grey, the colour of old chandeliers so fragile that they sell marabou feathers with which to dust them …
Then on to THE ALLURE OF CHANEL, the notes to a biography never written, from the time when he was seeing her after World War Two, after that moment when they had both chosen the wrong side, as history revealed only later…
Chanel is speaking: I have dressed the world and today it goes about naked.
All of that delights me. All of that satisfies this deep taste for destruction and evolution that is within me. Life is recognizable through its inconsistencies
G
(Both books were translated by Euan Cameron who also translated for Pushkin Press Julian Green’s THE OTHER SLEEP.
Green is another writer who seems so essential and one finds every once in the while another who dips, as do I, into his Diary and finds no matter what passage is read that as a result the world seems a little larger and not really as... it surely is…)
H
And now HECATE AND HER DOGS:
“What are you thinking?”
“Nothing.”
“And you?”
“Nothing.”
This was the distilled essence of all our conversations, the words most frequently used by lovers everywhere, emblem of the total vacuum in which they coexist.
On my shelves by PAUL MORAND:
Black Magic
Earth Girdled
Green Shoots (Preface by Marcel Proust)
Fancy Goods and Open All Night (translated by Ezra Pound)
Open All Night (translated by HBV)
Closed All Night
The Living Buddha (two different translations)
1900 A.D.
World Champions
Nothing but the Earth
Lewis and Irene
Europe at Love
East India and Company
Orient Air Express
Indian Air
The Captive Princess
Montociel
New York
Le Voyage (a photocopy)
All of these books are out of print though the New Directions’ edition of Ezra Pound’s translation of Fancy Goods/ Open All Night is available.
This IS NOT to go on about out of print books.
D
New York though published in 1930 is still a good guide book for New York, much in the same way that The American Scene by Henry James is a good introduction to the United States if read with Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.
E
Pushkin Press based in London publishes what are the prettiest and most elegant books in the English language world. Readers already well know this,one hopes, and have read for instance the four novels by Antal Szerb that they have brought over into English and by so doing restored or placed them and him into the pantheon of world literature: JOURNEY BY MIDNIGHT, THE PENDRAGON LEGEND, THE QUEEN’S NECKLACE, and OLIVER VII. Like Sandor Marai, Szerb came to an awful end but their books and those of certain contemporary Hungarian writers would suggest that Hungarian is one of the great world literary languages…
From JOURNEY BY MIDNIGHT: “He was a really devout Catholic, as Jewish converts often are. Their centuries of tradition haven’t been eroded the way they have for us… He cut out of his life everything that was not purely Catholic. He guarded his soul’s salvation with a revolver.”
F
But it is Paul Morand at the moment that Pushkin Press is revealing anew to the English speaking (reading?) world .
They started with VENICES. Note the plural. A book of fragments memories both from reading and from life: An overcast October sky this morning; an opaline grey, the colour of old chandeliers so fragile that they sell marabou feathers with which to dust them …
Then on to THE ALLURE OF CHANEL, the notes to a biography never written, from the time when he was seeing her after World War Two, after that moment when they had both chosen the wrong side, as history revealed only later…
Chanel is speaking: I have dressed the world and today it goes about naked.
All of that delights me. All of that satisfies this deep taste for destruction and evolution that is within me. Life is recognizable through its inconsistencies
G
(Both books were translated by Euan Cameron who also translated for Pushkin Press Julian Green’s THE OTHER SLEEP.
Green is another writer who seems so essential and one finds every once in the while another who dips, as do I, into his Diary and finds no matter what passage is read that as a result the world seems a little larger and not really as... it surely is…)
H
And now HECATE AND HER DOGS:
“What are you thinking?”
“Nothing.”
“And you?”
“Nothing.”
This was the distilled essence of all our conversations, the words most frequently used by lovers everywhere, emblem of the total vacuum in which they coexist.
Friday, October 23, 2009
BEST READ WRITER IN THE WORLD: ROBERTO CALASSO
(a ghost of these words appears in the 25 October 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Section)
The Venetian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo is hardly a household name in the United States. A few of his paintings, drawings and etchings are scattered in major museums in the country but to see his work in its fullness one has to have gone to Venice, Wurzburg, Germany and Madrid to view the magnificent ceiling paintings and frescos crowded with either religious or classical figures captured with a dazzling sense of color that easily rival Michelangelo in their grandeur and complexity. His name became an adjective for a fabric shade of pink. He is included in all the standard histories of art and his name is always linked to Veronese and others in that cast of prolific painters who can easily be confused by a visitor to Venice. Possibly, this necessary introductory paragraph runs the risk of providing an excuse for both skipping what is to follow and the book that occasioned the review. However, to miss rushing out to get the latest book by Roberto Calasso would be a terrible intellectual disaster and it is the next best thing to actually going to Europe to see Tiepolo’s work for yourself.
Calasso is the most interesting, demanding, inquisitively intoxicating critic writing anywhere in the world today. This claim is based upon his books, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, The Ruins of Kasch, Ka, The Forty-Nine Steps, Literature and the Gods , K and his newest one devoted to describing the life and work of a painter who seems so obscure as to be invisible even though his work has been seen by millions. The word critic does little justice to a writer like Calasso whose every sentence is rooted in a profound understanding and discerning appreciation of all the major literatures of the world both ancient and modern and these sentences always entice their readers to more thought, more reading, to reflection, to wonder.
Early on he tosses down the gauntlet, the intellectual dare, “Tiepolo: the last breath of happiness in Europe. And like all true happiness, it was full of dark sides destined not to fade away, but to get the upper hand.” Remembering Tiepolo’s dates (1696-1770) and what comes after which is really the time we still live in, “Painting steadily became a monologizing activity, a calm delirium that started and stopped every day, with the hours of daylight behind the windows of a studio. Artists remained brimming with moods, whims, caprices, and idiosyncrasies. And in the end even they risked disappearing.”
Providing a complete survey of Tiepolo’s work from the prolific beginnings in Venice and then his productive travels across Europe, Calasso is not for a moment deterred by the fact that there is not a single bit of self commentary and never resorting to any sort of crude historic guess work he is elegant in his generalizing and astonishing in the particularities as when commenting upon a painting depicting Antony and Cleopatra at the moment when she is about to dissolve her priceless earring in a glass of vinegar, “Anthony represents the power that invades the world but he does not possess the two pearls. Only one of which is sufficient to vanquish him. What happens to the other? It was sawn in two--- and the two halves were attached to the ears of the statue of Venus in the Pantheon. There is decidedly something paltry about that Western Power, obliged to adorn one of its goddesses with two half pearls that the Oriental queen was prepared to swallow in a sip of vinegar.”
Aptly and beautifully illustrated it should be mentioned, Calasso centers his book about an attempt at explicating--- though never committing the vulgar sin of doing a definitive version--- of the Caprricci and the Scherzi, two series of etchings packed with a cast of mysterious characters, who much like a company of a great Hollywood studio in the old days: magicians, Magi and other visitors from the East, beautiful young men and women, and a plethora of other creatures in particular snakes and owls who will and have appeared in many disparate roles in the great paintings that enclose this mysterious center of mystifying events, which have defied understanding until this moment. Calasso’s explication with the constant crossing and re-crossing of these characters and creatures is written in a style that evokes the reading of a deeply compelling novel and that skill can be seen in his teasing out of the proliferation of snakes in the etchings and their constant re-appearance in the paintings. Of course he starts from the Garden of Eden on to the magical transformation of a staff into a snake during the Egyptian captivity, the plague of snakes in the desert and then, “Moses’s gesture when he brandished a bronze serpent and told the murmuring Jews to look at it, was a gesture that marked the discovery that evil can be cured by its image… It was the discovery of the image, of its healing power. It is one of the supreme Jewish paradoxes that this discovery was made by he who would be remembered and celebrated as the enemy of images…”
However, Calasso pushes his insight into an intriguing engaging way into Tiepolo’s work, “Salvation through looking which the Fathers of the Church would ignore because the only thing that truly concerned them about the story of the brazen serpent was the prefiguration of the Cross was recognized by a painter before any theologian… hence the serpents: horror, fascination perhaps even revelation.. A tangle that no one can loosen unless he joins those Orientals, youths and Satyresses under a dazzling noonday sun as in the desert (in the Capricci and Scherzi).”
Finally Calasso takes leave of his readers while describing one of Tiepolo’s last paintings, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, “Mary, Joseph, the child and the donkey can barely be seen in a corner. They are anonymous extras, absorbed in the landscape. The vision is still to come. There is an intact stasis—and the wonderful silence of the world.” Where the attentive reader has always been remembering Calasso’s quoting the great French reactionary Joseph De Maistre, “I have read millions of witticisms about the ignorance of the ancients who saw spirits everywhere: it seems to me that we who see them nowhere are much more foolish.”
The Venetian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo is hardly a household name in the United States. A few of his paintings, drawings and etchings are scattered in major museums in the country but to see his work in its fullness one has to have gone to Venice, Wurzburg, Germany and Madrid to view the magnificent ceiling paintings and frescos crowded with either religious or classical figures captured with a dazzling sense of color that easily rival Michelangelo in their grandeur and complexity. His name became an adjective for a fabric shade of pink. He is included in all the standard histories of art and his name is always linked to Veronese and others in that cast of prolific painters who can easily be confused by a visitor to Venice. Possibly, this necessary introductory paragraph runs the risk of providing an excuse for both skipping what is to follow and the book that occasioned the review. However, to miss rushing out to get the latest book by Roberto Calasso would be a terrible intellectual disaster and it is the next best thing to actually going to Europe to see Tiepolo’s work for yourself.
Calasso is the most interesting, demanding, inquisitively intoxicating critic writing anywhere in the world today. This claim is based upon his books, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, The Ruins of Kasch, Ka, The Forty-Nine Steps, Literature and the Gods , K and his newest one devoted to describing the life and work of a painter who seems so obscure as to be invisible even though his work has been seen by millions. The word critic does little justice to a writer like Calasso whose every sentence is rooted in a profound understanding and discerning appreciation of all the major literatures of the world both ancient and modern and these sentences always entice their readers to more thought, more reading, to reflection, to wonder.
Early on he tosses down the gauntlet, the intellectual dare, “Tiepolo: the last breath of happiness in Europe. And like all true happiness, it was full of dark sides destined not to fade away, but to get the upper hand.” Remembering Tiepolo’s dates (1696-1770) and what comes after which is really the time we still live in, “Painting steadily became a monologizing activity, a calm delirium that started and stopped every day, with the hours of daylight behind the windows of a studio. Artists remained brimming with moods, whims, caprices, and idiosyncrasies. And in the end even they risked disappearing.”
Providing a complete survey of Tiepolo’s work from the prolific beginnings in Venice and then his productive travels across Europe, Calasso is not for a moment deterred by the fact that there is not a single bit of self commentary and never resorting to any sort of crude historic guess work he is elegant in his generalizing and astonishing in the particularities as when commenting upon a painting depicting Antony and Cleopatra at the moment when she is about to dissolve her priceless earring in a glass of vinegar, “Anthony represents the power that invades the world but he does not possess the two pearls. Only one of which is sufficient to vanquish him. What happens to the other? It was sawn in two--- and the two halves were attached to the ears of the statue of Venus in the Pantheon. There is decidedly something paltry about that Western Power, obliged to adorn one of its goddesses with two half pearls that the Oriental queen was prepared to swallow in a sip of vinegar.”
Aptly and beautifully illustrated it should be mentioned, Calasso centers his book about an attempt at explicating--- though never committing the vulgar sin of doing a definitive version--- of the Caprricci and the Scherzi, two series of etchings packed with a cast of mysterious characters, who much like a company of a great Hollywood studio in the old days: magicians, Magi and other visitors from the East, beautiful young men and women, and a plethora of other creatures in particular snakes and owls who will and have appeared in many disparate roles in the great paintings that enclose this mysterious center of mystifying events, which have defied understanding until this moment. Calasso’s explication with the constant crossing and re-crossing of these characters and creatures is written in a style that evokes the reading of a deeply compelling novel and that skill can be seen in his teasing out of the proliferation of snakes in the etchings and their constant re-appearance in the paintings. Of course he starts from the Garden of Eden on to the magical transformation of a staff into a snake during the Egyptian captivity, the plague of snakes in the desert and then, “Moses’s gesture when he brandished a bronze serpent and told the murmuring Jews to look at it, was a gesture that marked the discovery that evil can be cured by its image… It was the discovery of the image, of its healing power. It is one of the supreme Jewish paradoxes that this discovery was made by he who would be remembered and celebrated as the enemy of images…”
However, Calasso pushes his insight into an intriguing engaging way into Tiepolo’s work, “Salvation through looking which the Fathers of the Church would ignore because the only thing that truly concerned them about the story of the brazen serpent was the prefiguration of the Cross was recognized by a painter before any theologian… hence the serpents: horror, fascination perhaps even revelation.. A tangle that no one can loosen unless he joins those Orientals, youths and Satyresses under a dazzling noonday sun as in the desert (in the Capricci and Scherzi).”
Finally Calasso takes leave of his readers while describing one of Tiepolo’s last paintings, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, “Mary, Joseph, the child and the donkey can barely be seen in a corner. They are anonymous extras, absorbed in the landscape. The vision is still to come. There is an intact stasis—and the wonderful silence of the world.” Where the attentive reader has always been remembering Calasso’s quoting the great French reactionary Joseph De Maistre, “I have read millions of witticisms about the ignorance of the ancients who saw spirits everywhere: it seems to me that we who see them nowhere are much more foolish.”
Thursday, October 15, 2009
JAMES WOOD and HAROLD BRODKEY
---To write of Harold Brodkey is to speak of the dead and I fear of the really dead in the sense that he is now a forgotten writer... and so quickly he is gone into both the real and the metaphorical earth.
---I was thinking this as I was reading James Wood on the collected so-called stories of Lydia Davis. I can't be bothered to even describe his writing or Davis. It is all a question of sheer human perversity: how can this very good translator be wasting her time writing so-called stories that will not survive a moment beyond her death when she could have been finishing her translations of Michel Leiris, for instance?
---But I have before me a photo-copy of the five tabloid pages that James Wood devoted to a review and interview with Harold Brodkey in The Guardian (London, July 20-21, 1991.
---I must assume anyone reading this blog knows the work of Brodkey and keeps in a treasured place at least two of his books: STORIES IN AN ALMOST CLASSICAL MODE and THE RUNAWAY SOUL. Right there near THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE BY Hannah Green and PARADISO by Jose Lezama Lima
---The interview and then the review is startling because the name of Brodkey never passes through Wood's typewriter since he moved to the US and began his slog through the pages of The New Republic, The New Yorker and into the damp boring rooms of Harvard. To have an enthusiasim for a writer like Brodkey would be the kiss of the death as it seems the consensus is sadly that we (they) were all mistaken abouthim and his writing; it is just a bad memory and a man like Wood can make no mistakes, not one. He well knows that if there is that one mistake as happened to Denis Donoghue when he panned rightly the dread Frank McCourt's first novel for the New York Times, he will not be asked back to write for whichever organ he is caressing at the moment.
---In the course of the Guardian article: "I had managed to get hold of the typescript of The Runaway Soul, had read its 1,300 pages and was over-whelmed with it.... unlike anything in contemporary fiction. It is nakedly original."
or
"Brodkey's prose is unlike any other writer's in the English language. It is intensely personal(most of his writing is about his childhood) and shockingly obsessive. Its originality, which is oppressive in its density..."
"a man whose writing is courageous and original and possibly great...
"Brodkey's novel certainly has the reek of glory. But greatness is like the Seraph. How can we know it? How can we know yet if Brodkey's novel is great? It has the ambition of greatness, the daring. But its oddity and its singularity bewilder the reader. It needs the sifting of posterity...
---Well, I guess Wood has done that.
---Have you noticed that when a writer gets to a certain place, in particular into the places such as where Wood has taken up residence something is always lost and that something is evident in James Wood on Lydia Davis in The New Yorker. Only John Updike ever escaped this well-lit prison and then only rarely as for instance when he would take up the books of Robert Pinget.
---I was thinking this as I was reading James Wood on the collected so-called stories of Lydia Davis. I can't be bothered to even describe his writing or Davis. It is all a question of sheer human perversity: how can this very good translator be wasting her time writing so-called stories that will not survive a moment beyond her death when she could have been finishing her translations of Michel Leiris, for instance?
---But I have before me a photo-copy of the five tabloid pages that James Wood devoted to a review and interview with Harold Brodkey in The Guardian (London, July 20-21, 1991.
---I must assume anyone reading this blog knows the work of Brodkey and keeps in a treasured place at least two of his books: STORIES IN AN ALMOST CLASSICAL MODE and THE RUNAWAY SOUL. Right there near THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE BY Hannah Green and PARADISO by Jose Lezama Lima
---The interview and then the review is startling because the name of Brodkey never passes through Wood's typewriter since he moved to the US and began his slog through the pages of The New Republic, The New Yorker and into the damp boring rooms of Harvard. To have an enthusiasim for a writer like Brodkey would be the kiss of the death as it seems the consensus is sadly that we (they) were all mistaken abouthim and his writing; it is just a bad memory and a man like Wood can make no mistakes, not one. He well knows that if there is that one mistake as happened to Denis Donoghue when he panned rightly the dread Frank McCourt's first novel for the New York Times, he will not be asked back to write for whichever organ he is caressing at the moment.
---In the course of the Guardian article: "I had managed to get hold of the typescript of The Runaway Soul, had read its 1,300 pages and was over-whelmed with it.... unlike anything in contemporary fiction. It is nakedly original."
or
"Brodkey's prose is unlike any other writer's in the English language. It is intensely personal(most of his writing is about his childhood) and shockingly obsessive. Its originality, which is oppressive in its density..."
"a man whose writing is courageous and original and possibly great...
"Brodkey's novel certainly has the reek of glory. But greatness is like the Seraph. How can we know it? How can we know yet if Brodkey's novel is great? It has the ambition of greatness, the daring. But its oddity and its singularity bewilder the reader. It needs the sifting of posterity...
---Well, I guess Wood has done that.
---Have you noticed that when a writer gets to a certain place, in particular into the places such as where Wood has taken up residence something is always lost and that something is evident in James Wood on Lydia Davis in The New Yorker. Only John Updike ever escaped this well-lit prison and then only rarely as for instance when he would take up the books of Robert Pinget.
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