Fifteen years ago---August 9, 1995--- I published the following review in the daily edition of the Chicago Tribune. It had been trimmed for length and was over-looked by Carson’s publishers, and probably by the public at large. I am reprinting it for two reasons: Anne Carson is publishing through New Directions a new work equal to the power of her first, this month, entitled NOX and as a little reminder of what was lost when Larry Kart was dismissed as book editor of the Chicago Tribune, some time after this review was published. He was replace by a female friend of either the wife or the mistress of the man who ran the Tribune, a woman whose sole qualification was that she “was interested in books.” Kart was one of the great editors who while covering the trivial books of the day allowed me and certainly others to write in addition to this review one of the very first reviews of Sebald’s The Emigrants. Kart’s taste could be summed up in his enthusiasm for the work of Anthony Powell, Jack Kerouac and Douglas Woolf and in that selection you can detect the value of such an editor.
Anne Carson is a classicist formerly teaching at Princeton, now at McGill, who some years ago published “Bittersweet,” a short magisterial study of the concept of the bittersweet in Greek and Roman love poetry. From her study of the classical languages Carson now has taken up the challenge to write in a way that can be favorably compared to those works that have endured for more than 2,000 years.
There are five parts to “Plainwater,” and the first, “Mimnermos: The Brainsex Paintings,” is composed of purported fragments by a Classical Greek poet, complete with scholarly commentary and imaginary interviews. One is reminded of the imaginary schools of French poetry that Samuel Beckett lectured on in Dublin in his youth: the unwary were easily taken in.
Part Two, “Short Talks,” consists of snatches of prose with titles such as “On Defloration,” “On the Youth at Night,” “On Waterproofing” (about Kafka and his sister Ottla) and “On Reading,” which begins, “Some children hate trips but love to read. Funny how often these find themselves passengers in the same automobile…”
The third part, “Canicula di Anna,” looks like poetry but reads like well written prose. It is concerned with an artist Pietri Vannucci (c. 1445-1523), called Perugino, “a contemporary of Michelangelo and teacher if Raphael,” who “is not a happy man” because of a woman named Anna.
“The Life of Towns,” the fourth part, probably owes some of it playfulness to Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” and seems a little forced. In any chase it leaves one unprepared for the grandeur of “The Anthropology of Water,” which opens, “Water is something you cannot hold. Like men. I have tried. Father, brother, lover, true friends, hungry ghosts, and God, one by one all took themselves out of my hands.”
The language is startling in its clarity: “Morning is cutting open its blue eyes.” “The moon makes a traveler hungry for something bitter in the world, what is it? I will vanish; others will come here, what is that? An old question.” “What is it that men want? They talk of pleasure. They go wild, then limp, then fall asleep. Is there something I’m not getting?”
The tale--- of an older woman and her young Oriental lover on a journey through Indiana to the West Coast--- is told in a diary-like form and is remarkable in its inventiveness as in Ray Charles’ remark heard by the woman on the radio: “When I do song, I like to make it stink in my own way.”
Taking what might be regarded as a rather ordinary situation, Carson proceeds to give us a text whose meaning seems to increase each time one reads it. For example: “Men are always in pain, aren’t they in some sense. The mischief of desire is vital to them. How women avoid this suffering is a question I have, without conclusion but not without interest, long entertained.
Read Anne Carson now, before the crowd rushes in.
NOW
The crowd did discover Carson and she has been very productive with many books that were always necessary and essential books to be read as they appeared. She was a MacArthur fellow but sadly she has recently become poet in residence at NYU. Such a fate should befall no one. How she could forgo the teaching of the classics for such a trivial appointment is beyond me. To give up a socially useful position in order to become a freak on display in the monster’s mouth is simply sad. But didn’t Renoir say, Everyone has their reasons… so even sideshow freaks… and that is how NYU thinks of such people…
A wonderful by-product of Carson’s fame is that New Directions has ventured NOX… a long fold out scroll-like work of writing and assemblage--- packaged in an elegant box--- which is concerned with the disappearance and death of the poet’s brother, twined with a commentary on Catullus’ poem 101 which begin, ”Multas per gentes et multa per aequora uectus. (“A journey across many seas and through many nations” in the translation by Peter Green whose commentary includes” “For (M.B.) Skinner its position in the connection suggests closure “involving the failure of art to bridge the chasm between life and death, the illusory nature of Callimachean poet immortality.”
Of course, the brother was present in her first book as I quoted from Plainwater… the very best writers do not grow as if they are some sort of plant but rather their work seems to radiate out from a stone dropped into a pool of water… which I am sure is some sort of worn cliché.
I would add: to be alive is to be necessarily in mourning.
And for the writer today mourning is both for what he or she has lost and also now for probability that their own work will not be published given the calamity which has befallen the so-called publishing industry.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Saturday, March 20, 2010
JACK KEROUAC, ANNIE DILLARD, ALLEN GINSBERG and Jake Silverstein: what comes in the mail
One day this week two books arrive in the mail: from the height to the murky other region of the book world.
JACK KEROUAC AND ALLEN GINSBERG: THE LETTERS which is to be published by Penguin in July.
NOTHING AND THEN IT DID by Jake Silverstein now published by WW. Norton.
Of course any season that has a book of letters by Jack Kerouac and in particular when those letters are from the beginning of his literary career is a blessed time.
Finally, the world well knows—even if all the usual stupid academics have not figure it out: ON THE ROAD is one of the very very few novels published in the United States after World War Two that is actually a great world novel in the same way that Celine’s JOURNEY TO THE END OF NIGHT and why not: Turgenev’s FIRST LOVE.
The biggest mis-understanding about Kerouac is that he was some sort of poorly read hick who wrote a novel about guys having fun. The truth is Kerouac even at 22 was saturated with literature, extremely well read and from the first letter (1944) in the collection in which Ginsberg reports on seeing JK’s girl friend bringing him while in jail a copy of Gogol’s DEAD SOULS that he requested to the second letter in which Kerouac writes, “I prefer the new vision in terms of art---I believe, I smugly cling to the belief that art is the potential ultimate out of humankind materials of art, I tell myself, the new vision springs. Look at FINNEGANS WAKE and ULYSSES and THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN. Lord only knows the truth! Lord only can tell! “
Garden variety alcoholism will kill Kerouac at 47. Ginsberg will drag out his own life until 71--- after the writing of the still memorable HOWL and KADDISH--- as a disagreeable aggressive pederast who preyed upon the confused and vulnerable. I will type up one of these days the interview I did with Ginsberg and which was published in The Guardian in London some years before his death.
And the murk
NOTHING HAPPENED AND THAN IT DID by Jake Silverstein is as the subtitle has it “A chronicle in fact and fiction” set in the far west of Texas and Mexico. By the fourth and fifth line of the preface: “long lonesome highways and quiet main streets” have appeared. It is a place where, “thoughts twist like timbers.” < how is that possible?> And we are told people, “speak of its unspoiled beauty.” Though we will be given some sort of history, “Spanish conquistadors clanked across this land, looking for gold to pillage and Indians to baptize or slay.”
I did read on a bit more but the will was not really there because after hearing about vast ranches in West Texas with few cattle there is this sentence: “The human population throughout the region is as sparse as that of the bovine.”
I closed the book and noted all the blurbs by my I assume betters: Douglas Brinkley, Sherman Alexie, Antonya Nelson, Tony Girardina and my favorite and old friend Annie Dillard.
I decided that possibly since they blurb so many books, Brinkley, Alexie and Nelson --- maybe mixed up books as it so often happens…
I do not know Tony Giradina but the people at Norton write that he is the author of WHITE GUYS but what can you say about someone who can type: “a gorgeous, hilarious romp of a book?”
But about Annie Dillard?
I have known Annie since 1969 at Hollins College. She heard me tell a story about my father and seagulls and she quoted it later in PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK.
When I got around to publishing a book in which I would quote myself I asked Annie for a blurb she replied that I should go ahead and write my own blurb for the book but not to compare myself to Shakespeare. I should assign her name to those words and then she would read my book when she had time and with pleasure. I didn’t do as she suggested and maybe I should have.
On the press release Mr. Silverstein has Annie Dillard comparing his work to Dickens, Tolstoy, Gorki. Laxness and Chen Congwen… but he too did not compare his work to Shakespeare so I guess he was just following her suggestion though the Chinese guy… well, the Asian market is expanding…
Mr Silversetin is the editor of THE TEXAS MONTHLY and has time to be a contributing editor to HARPER’S magazine but since he writes with such facility in the English language he should also become a food writer for The New York Times as Sherman Alexie writes about NOTHING HAPPENED AND THEN IT DID: “It’s a eulogy for dead American towns, dead American ideas and dead American jobs… You’ll devour it.”
I am sure Mr. Silverstein will not turn down a large pile of dead American dollars for his labors as Mr. Alexie is also a recipient of big piles of dead American dollars for his own labors in the field of dead American ideas and dead American jobs.
JACK KEROUAC AND ALLEN GINSBERG: THE LETTERS which is to be published by Penguin in July.
NOTHING AND THEN IT DID by Jake Silverstein now published by WW. Norton.
Of course any season that has a book of letters by Jack Kerouac and in particular when those letters are from the beginning of his literary career is a blessed time.
Finally, the world well knows—even if all the usual stupid academics have not figure it out: ON THE ROAD is one of the very very few novels published in the United States after World War Two that is actually a great world novel in the same way that Celine’s JOURNEY TO THE END OF NIGHT and why not: Turgenev’s FIRST LOVE.
The biggest mis-understanding about Kerouac is that he was some sort of poorly read hick who wrote a novel about guys having fun. The truth is Kerouac even at 22 was saturated with literature, extremely well read and from the first letter (1944) in the collection in which Ginsberg reports on seeing JK’s girl friend bringing him while in jail a copy of Gogol’s DEAD SOULS that he requested to the second letter in which Kerouac writes, “I prefer the new vision in terms of art---I believe, I smugly cling to the belief that art is the potential ultimate out of humankind materials of art, I tell myself, the new vision springs. Look at FINNEGANS WAKE and ULYSSES and THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN. Lord only knows the truth! Lord only can tell! “
Garden variety alcoholism will kill Kerouac at 47. Ginsberg will drag out his own life until 71--- after the writing of the still memorable HOWL and KADDISH--- as a disagreeable aggressive pederast who preyed upon the confused and vulnerable. I will type up one of these days the interview I did with Ginsberg and which was published in The Guardian in London some years before his death.
And the murk
NOTHING HAPPENED AND THAN IT DID by Jake Silverstein is as the subtitle has it “A chronicle in fact and fiction” set in the far west of Texas and Mexico. By the fourth and fifth line of the preface: “long lonesome highways and quiet main streets” have appeared. It is a place where, “thoughts twist like timbers.” < how is that possible?> And we are told people, “speak of its unspoiled beauty.” Though we will be given some sort of history, “Spanish conquistadors clanked across this land, looking for gold to pillage and Indians to baptize or slay.”
I did read on a bit more but the will was not really there because after hearing about vast ranches in West Texas with few cattle there is this sentence: “The human population throughout the region is as sparse as that of the bovine.”
I closed the book and noted all the blurbs by my I assume betters: Douglas Brinkley, Sherman Alexie, Antonya Nelson, Tony Girardina and my favorite and old friend Annie Dillard.
I decided that possibly since they blurb so many books, Brinkley, Alexie and Nelson
I do not know Tony Giradina but the people at Norton write that he is the author of WHITE GUYS but what can you say about someone who can type: “a gorgeous, hilarious romp of a book?”
But about Annie Dillard?
I have known Annie since 1969 at Hollins College. She heard me tell a story about my father and seagulls and she quoted it later in PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK.
When I got around to publishing a book in which I would quote myself I asked Annie for a blurb she replied that I should go ahead and write my own blurb for the book but not to compare myself to Shakespeare. I should assign her name to those words and then she would read my book when she had time and with pleasure. I didn’t do as she suggested and maybe I should have.
On the press release Mr. Silverstein has Annie Dillard comparing his work to Dickens, Tolstoy, Gorki. Laxness and Chen Congwen… but he too did not compare his work to Shakespeare so I guess he was just following her suggestion though the Chinese guy… well, the Asian market is expanding…
Mr Silversetin is the editor of THE TEXAS MONTHLY and has time to be a contributing editor to HARPER’S magazine but since he writes with such facility in the English language he should also become a food writer for The New York Times as Sherman Alexie writes about NOTHING HAPPENED AND THEN IT DID: “It’s a eulogy for dead American towns, dead American ideas and dead American jobs… You’ll devour it.”
I am sure Mr. Silverstein will not turn down a large pile of dead American dollars for his labors as Mr. Alexie is also a recipient of big piles of dead American dollars for his own labors in the field of dead American ideas and dead American jobs.
Monday, March 8, 2010
COMING! COMING! Reading LINDA LE'S Previous Novel in Preperation for What is Coming: THE THREE FATES
In May, New Directions will be publishing Linda Le’s novel THE THREE FATES. To prepare the way I am publishing a review I wrote for the Washington Post in 1997 when her novel SLANDER was published. I hope it is obvious why I am eagerly awaiting this new novel and why I hope you will read SLANDER between now and then…
THEN
The Vietnam War, no matter what we might think about it, is now just another historical fact. Vietnam is once again an obscure country that rarely appears in the news and is present now mostly in the form of Vietnamese restaurants in larger American cities. Our ignorance of this country and its people is nearly perfect in spite of (or because of) our entanglement with it.
So it is startling, revealing, humiliating and pleasant to read the first of Vietnamese-born Linda Le’s six novels to be translated into English. Le, who immigrated to France at the age of 14 and writes in French, produced these six novels before the age of 30 and now dismisses her first here as just the sort of books anyone could produce at that age.
SLANDER, her fifth novel, entwines and merges two distinct and contrasting voices: that of an old man, just released after a long incarceration in a mental hospital and now working in a library; and that of a young woman, his niece, who is trying to make sense of their world. It is a world of exile, an exile that is both physical—they have each been living in France for the last 15 years--- and linguistic: Each now thinks in French, and she writes in French further distancing themselves from that country called Vietnam.
It must be happily said that nothing “happens" in SLANDER. The niece does discover that the father she grew up with is not her biological father. But there is none of that muck of dreary realistic incident and story that clogs so much recent American fiction. Instead we are given the pleasure and texture of voice. Here the uncle hints at the complexities of Vietnamese history and of the recent past as personified by the niece’s real father, a Westerner who came to Vietnam with the war and had an affair with her mother: “Her mother says, a man full of pride and courage. (The man of courage braved ambushes, defied snipers, visited the front lines but he beat a hasty retreat as soon as he was threatened by fatherhood.) He said, I cannot know if this child is mine or your husband’s--- my enemy’s. The man of courage dropped out of the game. Before leaving the Country, he chose an international name for the unborn child. Later, he grew brave enough to send her a pink layette.”
Linda Le aspires to be a writer, neither a Vietnamese writer nor a French writer but simply a writer, so it is ironic to see her ghettoized in Nebraska’s “European Women Writers” series. But that is easily overlooked in light of the book itself, which is wonderfully designed object. And of course no conventional publisher would have the courage to do such a hard lucid book, which contains this voice: “You forget that love is nothing but sweat, secretions, rancor. A simple matter of perspiration that begins in a nervous moment called coup de foudre, continues between sour-smelling sheets, and in the long run can only conclude in the proximity of two bad moods by day and two bad smells by night, until the final bankruptcy, the last lather, which is worked up by the fear of longer having anyone to sweat with.
However, SLANDER is no novel of mere exotic heartbreak like Marguerite Duras’s THE LOVER. Rather it is a novel about the how to search for a father. It asks the unanswerable real question: Why was I born? Le knows that, “she will have to choose between these two specimens of father. Between the best- selling novelist’s book, a book that puts on a showy display of erudition and seduction, a book written with facility, a book that enchants the reader, a book padded out with frivolous phrases and ending with a pirouette— she has to choose between that charming book and the other specimen, an austere book that encloses nothing but a little dried blood.”
Probably only in heaven will this book be a best-seller. But SLANDER takes up residence in the emotions of the reader and creates a literary country one wants to visit and revisit. As Le’s protagonist says, “I look in books for a sign of recognition. I leaf through a lot of them. Most of the time I see nothing other than a book, some paragraphs, some words. I get tired of turning the pages. I‘m ready to stop. Then the miracle happens. I pick up a book. I open it and something there makes a sign to me. In those moments I feel like a shipwrecked man who sees a hand on the horizon, a hand waving on the surface of the water, a living hand. A hand that can do nothing for me. But still a hand that signals to tell that at least there are two of shipwrecked here on this sea of solitude.
AFTER
Today, if you know the Washington Post you realize they no longer have an interest in books.
While they still publish reviews by Michael Dirda--- and he is very good--- he is published more out of nostalgia for the Pulitzer Prize he earned a long time ago for them than as part of any genuine interest in the word. The newspaper now reflects only the boredom of chronicling the political ruling class.
THEN
The Vietnam War, no matter what we might think about it, is now just another historical fact. Vietnam is once again an obscure country that rarely appears in the news and is present now mostly in the form of Vietnamese restaurants in larger American cities. Our ignorance of this country and its people is nearly perfect in spite of (or because of) our entanglement with it.
So it is startling, revealing, humiliating and pleasant to read the first of Vietnamese-born Linda Le’s six novels to be translated into English. Le, who immigrated to France at the age of 14 and writes in French, produced these six novels before the age of 30 and now dismisses her first here as just the sort of books anyone could produce at that age.
SLANDER, her fifth novel, entwines and merges two distinct and contrasting voices: that of an old man, just released after a long incarceration in a mental hospital and now working in a library; and that of a young woman, his niece, who is trying to make sense of their world. It is a world of exile, an exile that is both physical—they have each been living in France for the last 15 years--- and linguistic: Each now thinks in French, and she writes in French further distancing themselves from that country called Vietnam.
It must be happily said that nothing “happens" in SLANDER. The niece does discover that the father she grew up with is not her biological father. But there is none of that muck of dreary realistic incident and story that clogs so much recent American fiction. Instead we are given the pleasure and texture of voice. Here the uncle hints at the complexities of Vietnamese history and of the recent past as personified by the niece’s real father, a Westerner who came to Vietnam with the war and had an affair with her mother: “Her mother says, a man full of pride and courage. (The man of courage braved ambushes, defied snipers, visited the front lines but he beat a hasty retreat as soon as he was threatened by fatherhood.) He said, I cannot know if this child is mine or your husband’s--- my enemy’s. The man of courage dropped out of the game. Before leaving the Country, he chose an international name for the unborn child. Later, he grew brave enough to send her a pink layette.”
Linda Le aspires to be a writer, neither a Vietnamese writer nor a French writer but simply a writer, so it is ironic to see her ghettoized in Nebraska’s “European Women Writers” series. But that is easily overlooked in light of the book itself, which is wonderfully designed object. And of course no conventional publisher would have the courage to do such a hard lucid book, which contains this voice: “You forget that love is nothing but sweat, secretions, rancor. A simple matter of perspiration that begins in a nervous moment called coup de foudre, continues between sour-smelling sheets, and in the long run can only conclude in the proximity of two bad moods by day and two bad smells by night, until the final bankruptcy, the last lather, which is worked up by the fear of longer having anyone to sweat with.
However, SLANDER is no novel of mere exotic heartbreak like Marguerite Duras’s THE LOVER. Rather it is a novel about the how to search for a father. It asks the unanswerable real question: Why was I born? Le knows that, “she will have to choose between these two specimens of father. Between the best- selling novelist’s book, a book that puts on a showy display of erudition and seduction, a book written with facility, a book that enchants the reader, a book padded out with frivolous phrases and ending with a pirouette— she has to choose between that charming book and the other specimen, an austere book that encloses nothing but a little dried blood.”
Probably only in heaven will this book be a best-seller. But SLANDER takes up residence in the emotions of the reader and creates a literary country one wants to visit and revisit. As Le’s protagonist says, “I look in books for a sign of recognition. I leaf through a lot of them. Most of the time I see nothing other than a book, some paragraphs, some words. I get tired of turning the pages. I‘m ready to stop. Then the miracle happens. I pick up a book. I open it and something there makes a sign to me. In those moments I feel like a shipwrecked man who sees a hand on the horizon, a hand waving on the surface of the water, a living hand. A hand that can do nothing for me. But still a hand that signals to tell that at least there are two of shipwrecked here on this sea of solitude.
AFTER
Today, if you know the Washington Post you realize they no longer have an interest in books.
While they still publish reviews by Michael Dirda--- and he is very good--- he is published more out of nostalgia for the Pulitzer Prize he earned a long time ago for them than as part of any genuine interest in the word. The newspaper now reflects only the boredom of chronicling the political ruling class.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
TWO ILLUMINATING AND NECESSARY details from the Selected Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson
The following entry from the SELECTED JOURNALS of Ralph Waldo Emerson just out from the Library of America is one of the most touching paragraphs I have read in a long time.
ONE
Wednesday, 8 July, 1857. This morning I had the remains my mother & and of my son Waldo removed from the tomb of Mrs Ripley to my lot in "Sleepy Hollow." The sun shone brightly on the coffins, of which Waldo's was well preserved--- now of fifteen years. I ventured to look into the coffin. I gave a few white oak leaves to each coffin, after they were put in the new vault, & the vault then covered with two slabs of granite.
Note: the son was five years of when he died
My ignorance: I could not tell you white a white oak leaf looked like.
A question What did Emerson see when he looked?
TWO
31 January 1841
Yet a novel may teach one thing as well as my choosings at the corner of the street which way to go,--- whether to my errand or whether to the woods, --- this, namely, that action inspires respect, action, makes character, power, man, God.
These novels will give way by & by to diaries or autobiographies,--- captivating books if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly!
Note: while there is comfort for the the novel haters...but THAT WHICH IS REALLY HIS EXPERIENCE and then HOW TO RECORD...
Very high standards are set...
I would erect five examples:
THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE by Hannah Green
WARRENPOINT by Denis Donoghue
CASTLE TO CASTLE by Louis Ferdinand Celine
STORM OF STEEL by Ernst Junger
GOING TO PATCHOGUE by Thomas McGonigle
ONE
Wednesday, 8 July, 1857. This morning I had the remains my mother & and of my son Waldo removed from the tomb of Mrs Ripley to my lot in "Sleepy Hollow." The sun shone brightly on the coffins, of which Waldo's was well preserved--- now of fifteen years. I ventured to look into the coffin. I gave a few white oak leaves to each coffin, after they were put in the new vault, & the vault then covered with two slabs of granite.
Note: the son was five years of when he died
My ignorance: I could not tell you white a white oak leaf looked like.
A question What did Emerson see when he looked?
TWO
31 January 1841
Yet a novel may teach one thing as well as my choosings at the corner of the street which way to go,--- whether to my errand or whether to the woods, --- this, namely, that action inspires respect, action, makes character, power, man, God.
These novels will give way by & by to diaries or autobiographies,--- captivating books if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly!
Note: while there is comfort for the the novel haters...but THAT WHICH IS REALLY HIS EXPERIENCE and then HOW TO RECORD...
Very high standards are set...
I would erect five examples:
THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE by Hannah Green
WARRENPOINT by Denis Donoghue
CASTLE TO CASTLE by Louis Ferdinand Celine
STORM OF STEEL by Ernst Junger
GOING TO PATCHOGUE by Thomas McGonigle
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
The Most Demeaning Publicity Letter
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.
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.
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.)
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