1::::
A Murderous Encounter
A Novella by Ya. A.
St. Petersburg, 1836
This little book has appeared, consequently somewhere in this wide world there must be a reader for it.
---Nikolai Gogol
(Now, that is a model review.)
2:::
As the so-called literary world is swept with interest in a recent book by the sociologist Jonathan Franzen, some have remarked that it’s sad that saps in COSTCO or BJ’s who buying their literature will be very disappointed by something called FREEDOM which seems on closer inspection to be inferior to the great work of Vance Packard whose what-can-you- call- them?: novels, sociological novels are the benchmark for such “examinations of the American condition.” You remember them with fondness: The Status Seekers, The Hidden Persuaders, The Waste Makers, The Naked Society, The Sexual Wilderness, The People Shapers… though his life could be summed up by an early title: How to Pick a Mate. These books were met with the same controversy and profound concern for the state of the American family etc etc.
3:::
A great thanks to the Library of America for reissuing H. L. Mencken’s PREJUDICES In two delicious volumes.
If you have a child off in that swamp called American higher education this is the perfect gift. But is a mixed blessing in the sense that while Mencken is wholy exhilarating and nearly every page has something to quote and savor , even dipping into it will make the child possibly intemperate, and even unwilling to suffer the idiocy which is the much of what they will have to endure while prisoners of these institutions in particular when taking introductory courses in the liberal arts. Never have we---or I’ll speak for myself--- been in need of his clarity of writing and of his awareness of the nonsense that passes for politics in the US. Just the idea that a man once had the freedom to publish a book called Prejudices is cause enough to wonder at how far we have fallen in our sophistication.
At random:
“This talk of sincerity, I confess, fatigues me.”
*
“Democracy is that system of government under which the people, having 35,717,342 native-born adult whites to choose from, including thousands, who are handsome and many who are wise pick out a Coolidge to be head of the state. It is as if a hungry man, set before a banquet prepared by master cooks and covering a table an acre in area, should turn his back upon the feast and stay his stomach by catching and eating flies.”
(If anyone thinks the current holder of that office is any bit better than Coolidge then the delusional grandeur of the American mind is greater than can be imagined…)
*
“What ails the world mainly, at least in the political sense, is that its governments are too strong. It has been a recurrent pest since the dawn of civilization… The men who constitute the government always try to make it appear, of course, that they carry on their activities in a patriotic and altruistic way—in brief, they are full of public spirit. But that pretension deceives no one, not even Homo boobiens. The average man, whatever his errors otherwise, at least sees clearly that the government is something outside of him and outside the generality of his fellow men--- that i t is a separate independent and often hostile power, only partly under his control, and capable on occasion of doing him great harm.”
(On occasion would have to be changed today to: Often doing him great harm)
*
MARTYRS
To die for an idea: it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if man died for ideas that they were true. Searching history, I can find no such case. All the great martyrs of the books died for sheer nonsense—often for trivial matters of doctrine and ceremonial, too absurd to be state in plain terms. But what of the countless thousands who have perished in the wars, fighting magnificently for their country? Well, show me one who knew precisely what the war he died in was about and could put into a simple and plausible proposition.
(Has this changed: WW2, The Korean War, The Vietnam War, The Iraq War. The Afghanistan War and all the other delightful actions of the US: the attacks on Serbia, Panama, Grenada, Lebanon… the current gearing up for war in Africa)
4:::
Farrar Straus & Giroux of course is the publisher of the sociology of Jonathan Franzen and I have to wish them tons of luck and bushels and bushels of dollars to fall into their offices as it allows them to publish real books.
While not from this season I have been reading with profound gratitude the Selected Poems of Giuseppe Ungaretti, the one poet other than Eugenio Montale that I read with real pleasure from Italy… I learn from Ungaretti. I am inspired by him:
In veins already almost empty tombs
The still galloping longing,
In my bones that are frozen, stone,
In the soul the choked regret,
Untamable iniquity: dissolve them;
From remorse, endless howl,
Terrible seclusion
In the unspeakable dark,
Redeem me and rouse your merciful
Lashes from your long sleep
May your sudden pinkish trace
Mother mind, ascend again,
And return to amaze me;
Come back to life, unhoped for,
Measure inconceivable, peace
Make it so I, in the balanced landscape,
May mouth again the sounds of artless speech.
(translated by Andrew Frisardi)
5:::
But what had reminded me, again, of Ungaretti was reading also from FSG, THE BARS OF ATLANTIS by the German poet Durs Grunbein. It is a book of essays that is surely the best book of prose written by a poet in many years. He has that ability to quote, that ability to make fresh and it was in an essay on Pompeii that he quoted from Ungaretti, “Life is nothing but a process of decay decorating itself with illusions.”
In that essay on Pompeii, “Volcano and Poem” a tiny hint as to why I read slowly, ever so slowly THE BARS OF ATLANTIS, “Each individual had been sealed up in lava and debris by the volcano, and now they all were returned to the present, the portraits of the gods and the pornographic doodles, the frieze of the mysteries and the latest slogans, the board game and the papyrus scroll and that fragment from the book of one Philodemus of Gadara On Poems--- the ape of Classical poetics.”
“…and now they all were returned to the present” This is genius.
6:::
Another book to be made possible by the Franzen booty.
In November CANTI by Giacomo LEOPARDI,translated by Jonathan Galassi. That Italian poet who comes between Dante and Montale and Ungaretti… Leopardi that poet who sang through James Thomson BV once upon a time…never exhausted.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
THE BEST BOOK PUBLISHED THIS SUMMER AND FOR MANY A SUMMER (maybe) AND A WARNING TO AVOID FRANZEN
You hear it all the time: someone should write a book about it, someone should make a movie about it.
Well, Emmanuel Carrere author of the THE ADVERSARY, CLASS TRIP, THE MUSTACHE, GOTHIC ROMANCE has just done both of those things with MY LIFE AS A RUSSIAN NOVEL. A title every writer would kill to have thought up.
Having read a brief news item about the repatriation of aged mentally broken Hungarian who had lived in a small Russian city since being swept up in the aftermath of World War Two ...got Carrere to thinking of what it must have been like for this guy to have lived in a provincial Russian city all those years as a stranger, never learning Russian. The thinking called up his own long dormant Russian (his mother is the leading authority on Russia and a member of the French Academy)… and the family unspoken about secret: her father having been a Georgian refugee in France after World War One became a translator for the Germans during the occupation and was disappeared by the Resistance at the end of the Second World War...
Carrere writes easily about all of this and with his own obsessive problems of the heart--- he reprints an incredibly erotic story he published in a summer supplement of Le Monde the best newspaper in France in an attempt to keep a woman he was desperately in love with--- a story so explicit it is unpublishable in the LATIMES (and I would hesitate to quote some passages on this blog)--- and then there are the multiple journeys to Russia.. the meetings with the ordinary people of Kotelnitch, a precise and not so much caring as a simple honest description of ordinary life and the girl who speaks and sings in French, the wife of the KGB boss of the town.. a vicious unexplained murder, the abyss that this opens at the center of the book is frigidly disturbing and one which will never leave your imagination or memory.
The scrupulosity of Carrere is remarkable in its self-questioning, his fear of exploiting the people he meets... and far more than just a book about the making of a movie the book is wonderfully independent of the movie as is the movie independent of the book. Both exist true to their own forms.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x38jrd_retour-a-kotelnitch_news
Sadly, the movie is only available in French but the trailer captures the deep and profound sadness that is at the center of Carrere's book...a sadness of a great Russian novel --- Turgenev in particular comes to mind... or the DEAD SOULS of Gogol and you can even write to Carrere--- I hope after you have read MY LIFE AS A RUSSIAN NOVEL as he supplies in his text a email address: emmanuelcarrere@yahoo.fr (I checked and it works)
SAVE MONEY. SAVE YOUR TIME. Don’t rush out like a lemming and buy Franzen’s FREEDOM. If you are tempted, RESIST and if you must you can read any old book by Vance Packard, THE HIDDEN PERSUADERS, THE STATUS SEEKERS… Packard was writing popular sociology studies of the so-called American people. Don’t be a sucker for the old packaged up as interesting and controversial sociology. You have read this book in any “deep think” piece in PARADE, the Sunday newspaper supplement. And it has as much lasting ”value.” It is the perfect grist for the addled reading groups. Big ideas. Big ideas. Who needs them.
Well, Emmanuel Carrere author of the THE ADVERSARY, CLASS TRIP, THE MUSTACHE, GOTHIC ROMANCE has just done both of those things with MY LIFE AS A RUSSIAN NOVEL. A title every writer would kill to have thought up.
Having read a brief news item about the repatriation of aged mentally broken Hungarian who had lived in a small Russian city since being swept up in the aftermath of World War Two ...got Carrere to thinking of what it must have been like for this guy to have lived in a provincial Russian city all those years as a stranger, never learning Russian. The thinking called up his own long dormant Russian (his mother is the leading authority on Russia and a member of the French Academy)… and the family unspoken about secret: her father having been a Georgian refugee in France after World War One became a translator for the Germans during the occupation and was disappeared by the Resistance at the end of the Second World War...
Carrere writes easily about all of this and with his own obsessive problems of the heart--- he reprints an incredibly erotic story he published in a summer supplement of Le Monde the best newspaper in France in an attempt to keep a woman he was desperately in love with--- a story so explicit it is unpublishable in the LATIMES (and I would hesitate to quote some passages on this blog)--- and then there are the multiple journeys to Russia.. the meetings with the ordinary people of Kotelnitch, a precise and not so much caring as a simple honest description of ordinary life and the girl who speaks and sings in French, the wife of the KGB boss of the town.. a vicious unexplained murder, the abyss that this opens at the center of the book is frigidly disturbing and one which will never leave your imagination or memory.
The scrupulosity of Carrere is remarkable in its self-questioning, his fear of exploiting the people he meets... and far more than just a book about the making of a movie the book is wonderfully independent of the movie as is the movie independent of the book. Both exist true to their own forms.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x38jrd_retour-a-kotelnitch_news
Sadly, the movie is only available in French but the trailer captures the deep and profound sadness that is at the center of Carrere's book...a sadness of a great Russian novel --- Turgenev in particular comes to mind... or the DEAD SOULS of Gogol and you can even write to Carrere--- I hope after you have read MY LIFE AS A RUSSIAN NOVEL as he supplies in his text a email address: emmanuelcarrere@yahoo.fr (I checked and it works)
SAVE MONEY. SAVE YOUR TIME. Don’t rush out like a lemming and buy Franzen’s FREEDOM. If you are tempted, RESIST and if you must you can read any old book by Vance Packard, THE HIDDEN PERSUADERS, THE STATUS SEEKERS… Packard was writing popular sociology studies of the so-called American people. Don’t be a sucker for the old packaged up as interesting and controversial sociology. You have read this book in any “deep think” piece in PARADE, the Sunday newspaper supplement. And it has as much lasting ”value.” It is the perfect grist for the addled reading groups. Big ideas. Big ideas. Who needs them.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
THE STRAND LOSERS: books they don't buy
I have a friend who works for one of the Conde Nast magazines. Every few weeks he takes some shopping bags of review copies to The Strand to sell. At one time they bought everything but now with the computers there is always a reject pile of books they have too many copies of and which are unlikely to sell. This week he showed me the pile:
WORLD ENOUGH. Maureen N. Mclane. Poetry. FSG
GO, MUTANTS. Larry Doyle. Novel. ECCO
MOSCOW STING. Alex Dryden. Novel. ECCO
PERCIVAL’S PLANET. Michael Byers. Novel. HENRY HOLT
THE GOOD PSYCHOLOGIST. Noam Shpancer. Novel. HENRY HOLT
BANANA REPUBLICAN. Eric Rauchway. Novel. FSG.
BEACH WEEK. Susan Coll. Novel. FSG
DANCING BACKWARDS. Salley Vickers. Novel. FSG
PIERCE THE SKIN. Henri Cole. Poetry. FSG
The novels he gives to the building super who sells them for a dollar when he has a sale for cleaning out the basemen storage. My friend has put the poetry in the entranceway of his building where people leave magazines they are finished with. Eventually, the super has to throw them away with the three week old Barron’s Weeklys.
Friday late afternoon at The Strand is when you see the kids at their first jobs in publishing selling their weekly stash of books at The Strand. Most of the kids don’t stick around very long in publishing. They are newly graduated from Ivy League or pretend Ivy League schools, still living off of Mom and Dad, but they need some money for cocktails.
Eventually they get tired of publishing: the smell of formaldehyde is finally too over-powering. They go into real estate or into God knows what else but they have had their year or two years at a New York publisher and now they can think barely about being alive since to be within the walls of a New York publishing house is like being in a South American morgue where it is hard to tell the difference between the living and the dead.
Now that these kids have left New York and can resume reading, something that is not really encouraged in New York publishing, they will look back with a certain fondness at their year or two and realize that it was probably better than working in a bottling plant but they know that if they have children they will not have to discourage them from working in publishing since the publishing of what is now called a book no longer exists.
WORLD ENOUGH. Maureen N. Mclane. Poetry. FSG
GO, MUTANTS. Larry Doyle. Novel. ECCO
MOSCOW STING. Alex Dryden. Novel. ECCO
PERCIVAL’S PLANET. Michael Byers. Novel. HENRY HOLT
THE GOOD PSYCHOLOGIST. Noam Shpancer. Novel. HENRY HOLT
BANANA REPUBLICAN. Eric Rauchway. Novel. FSG.
BEACH WEEK. Susan Coll. Novel. FSG
DANCING BACKWARDS. Salley Vickers. Novel. FSG
PIERCE THE SKIN. Henri Cole. Poetry. FSG
The novels he gives to the building super who sells them for a dollar when he has a sale for cleaning out the basemen storage. My friend has put the poetry in the entranceway of his building where people leave magazines they are finished with. Eventually, the super has to throw them away with the three week old Barron’s Weeklys.
Friday late afternoon at The Strand is when you see the kids at their first jobs in publishing selling their weekly stash of books at The Strand. Most of the kids don’t stick around very long in publishing. They are newly graduated from Ivy League or pretend Ivy League schools, still living off of Mom and Dad, but they need some money for cocktails.
Eventually they get tired of publishing: the smell of formaldehyde is finally too over-powering. They go into real estate or into God knows what else but they have had their year or two years at a New York publisher and now they can think barely about being alive since to be within the walls of a New York publishing house is like being in a South American morgue where it is hard to tell the difference between the living and the dead.
Now that these kids have left New York and can resume reading, something that is not really encouraged in New York publishing, they will look back with a certain fondness at their year or two and realize that it was probably better than working in a bottling plant but they know that if they have children they will not have to discourage them from working in publishing since the publishing of what is now called a book no longer exists.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
WHY POETRY DOES NOT REALLY EXIST IN THE UNITED STATES
ONE I noticed a flier for something that sounds truly revolting as the old comedian might have said: THE ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS PRESENTS THE 2010 POETS FORUM and then the listing of the verse makers is even more revolting: Anne Carson Ron Padgett Victor Hernández Cruz Marie Ponsot Marilyn Hacker Carl Phillips Lyn Hejinian Robert Pinsky Edward Hirsch Kay Ryan Galway Kinnell Gerald Stern Khaled Mattawa Susan Stewart Naomi Shihab Nye C.K. Williams Sharon Olds.
TWO It will cost $110 dollars to attend all the events. I have left out the list of the “critics” and others--- ass kissers to the post--- who will talk in a language ever more remote from the trivial squeaking of the carefully multi-ethnic- gendered-balanced verse makers.
THREE I’ll except Anne Carson---though the more Carson appears in public the more she diminishes her claim to my attention and maybe Ron Padgett though in the latter case I am dreading the probable forthcoming collected works which will run for many hundreds of pages… all reminding one of his attachment to the so-called New York school presided over by XandYandZ or should it be AandB andC? but of the others: have they in their collective endeavors which must now amount to thousands of pages of “verse” come up with a line that moves over ever so slightly slightly the line of T.S. Eliot, “April is the cruelest month” or even approached within a mile the memorable title of Eliot’s THE HOLLOW MEN… most of these “poets” are on the academic gravy train with six figure salaries for doing remarkably little--- a couple of hours a week preparing candidates for the gravy train… they are all in Flann O’Brien’s phrase members of the “standing army of American poets”… ever prepared to collaborate with the powers to be and never more fervently with the current regime in Washington, collaborators with the status quo, ever remarkable for the banality of their “verse”…. ever prepared to take part in “discussions” with each other and the other writers of “verse”… now that there are no longer any readers of “verse.” In the announcement there is mention of previous years when verse makers such as Gluck, Bidart, Hass, Dove were present though one can be sure that their spirits will also be present…
TWO It will cost $110 dollars to attend all the events. I have left out the list of the “critics” and others--- ass kissers to the post--- who will talk in a language ever more remote from the trivial squeaking of the carefully multi-ethnic- gendered-balanced verse makers.
THREE I’ll except Anne Carson---though the more Carson appears in public the more she diminishes her claim to my attention and maybe Ron Padgett though in the latter case I am dreading the probable forthcoming collected works which will run for many hundreds of pages… all reminding one of his attachment to the so-called New York school presided over by XandYandZ or should it be AandB andC? but of the others: have they in their collective endeavors which must now amount to thousands of pages of “verse” come up with a line that moves over ever so slightly slightly the line of T.S. Eliot, “April is the cruelest month” or even approached within a mile the memorable title of Eliot’s THE HOLLOW MEN… most of these “poets” are on the academic gravy train with six figure salaries for doing remarkably little--- a couple of hours a week preparing candidates for the gravy train… they are all in Flann O’Brien’s phrase members of the “standing army of American poets”… ever prepared to collaborate with the powers to be and never more fervently with the current regime in Washington, collaborators with the status quo, ever remarkable for the banality of their “verse”…. ever prepared to take part in “discussions” with each other and the other writers of “verse”… now that there are no longer any readers of “verse.” In the announcement there is mention of previous years when verse makers such as Gluck, Bidart, Hass, Dove were present though one can be sure that their spirits will also be present…
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
WHAT'S A LTTLE EXCREMENT EATING: the Brett Easton Ellis Story
===At the LA Times website there was a very convincing video for Bret Easton Ellis’s IMPERIAL BEDROOMS which Knopf was publishing.
===I am listening to a compilation of Nico’s greatest songs: it starts with “I’m Not Saying”… it will move through “Janitor of Lunacy” and end with “The End”… does one need to say more…
===I should be reading Philippe Sollers’ MYSTERIOUS MOZART or maybe looking again at David Galloway’s A FAMILY ALBUM…
===But I have been reading IMPERIAL BEDROOMS. A sequel to LESS THAN ZERO.
===I have skipped to the scene toward the end as directed by the NY Times review where the narrator hires a man and woman and does things to them in Palm Springs. You can read the opening chapter. He has learned from Joan Didion and Truman Capote: may their example be forgiven! Skip to the last one.
===People will do anything for a buck, is the usual moral lesson.
===But I guess we all know that.. even stuff with excrement and beatings and all the rest of it.
===The questions: how much per welt?
===How much excrement must be consumed or used?
===How much per insertion of penis?
===Does the receptacle matter in these calculations?
===Do tears cost extra or are they a deduction from the negotiated fee?
===Who cleaned up the mess?
===You might say it is all an incitement to revolution.. .and to think of Ellis as being a revolutionary writer probably takes a little effort but why not?
===Such writing was used to undermine the aristocracy in France before the revolution
===None of the people Ellis--- here I have momentarily forgotten that these are invented characters though the appeal of Ellis is in his being one of those guys like Jay McInerney and all the rest of the crew celebrated in VANITY FAIR to be known as one of the “insiders”--- writes about deserve to live a moment longer and of course he shows what can happen to someone who is tortured to death… but again we now know all about that.. so one thinks of revolution… what a little Maosim could do or how about a Holiday in Cambodia and a little mind cleaning by the Khmer Rouge—those well educated intellectuals, graduates of good French schools--- but then Mao just used revolution so he could infect 12 year old girls with syphilis and kill more than 40 million people: the great helmsman at work...
===So what’s a little shiteating among the rich, I guess is the lesson of Brett Easton Ellis
==================None of this is out of the ordinary. Ed Sanders in the early 70s when he did his book about Charlie Manson THE FAMILY was telling me he discovered far worse things than Manson in Hollywood but the publisher wouldn’t allow him to report on it: thrill killings and the usual corpse fucking among the Hollywood elite, as Sanders said at that party for the Hell’s Angels sponsored by John Lennon (I kid you not)…
===and that is what was scary about Manson and the people he had ordered killed… the then pregnant wife of a rapist now still on the lam… what do you expect?… Hollywood people were afraid their secrets would come out an Manson was part of them at the time… but Manson kept his mouth shut and was grist enough for the mill.. too much reality is more than most people can stand as recently in the Grass Roots a guy was telling me about the distinguished biographer of Picasso who had a thing for dead bodies in the south of France….
===So a great video and writing that reads like a forensics report…
===Maybe it leads to Michael Breslow--- whose LIFE LINE about a guy faking medical research and which came with a nice blurb from Anthony Burgess+++ look for it if you can find it++++ went on to write the unpublished novel POLIO but he himself got killed by throat cancer--- had a girl friend who he wanted to write about who was a lawyer defending guys in a prison riot and how she got a guy off of a rape charge because she was able to prove he fucked the guy after the guy was dead so the charge had to be reduced to just corpse abuse…
===Knopf of course is publishing Thomas Bernhard’s MY PRIZES in a few months and I am sure the great sales of this book will support the disappointing sales of IMPERIAL BEDROOMS…
===One shouldn’t forget that Brett Easton Ellis was unleashed upon the world by Joe McGuiness who stabbed--- how ironic--- Jeffrey McDonald in the back with his book FATAL VISION.
=You remember the case? Green Beret doctor kills his family. Claims it was a Mansonlike gang that did it.. but case re-opened and McDonald went down and is still in jail. The BBC did a documentary suggesting there was reasonable doubt, but no luck, the knife was firmly in the McDonald’s back thanks to Joe McGuiness.
=I can tell you this: I'd rather read Bret Easton Ellis than Raymond Carver or the dread Toni Morrison who I fear is always lurking with another book...Imperial Bedrooms
Life Line: 2
My Prizes: An Accounting
===I am listening to a compilation of Nico’s greatest songs: it starts with “I’m Not Saying”… it will move through “Janitor of Lunacy” and end with “The End”… does one need to say more…
===I should be reading Philippe Sollers’ MYSTERIOUS MOZART or maybe looking again at David Galloway’s A FAMILY ALBUM…
===But I have been reading IMPERIAL BEDROOMS. A sequel to LESS THAN ZERO.
===I have skipped to the scene toward the end as directed by the NY Times review where the narrator hires a man and woman and does things to them in Palm Springs. You can read the opening chapter. He has learned from Joan Didion and Truman Capote: may their example be forgiven! Skip to the last one.
===People will do anything for a buck, is the usual moral lesson.
===But I guess we all know that.. even stuff with excrement and beatings and all the rest of it.
===The questions: how much per welt?
===How much excrement must be consumed or used?
===How much per insertion of penis?
===Does the receptacle matter in these calculations?
===Do tears cost extra or are they a deduction from the negotiated fee?
===Who cleaned up the mess?
===You might say it is all an incitement to revolution.. .and to think of Ellis as being a revolutionary writer probably takes a little effort but why not?
===Such writing was used to undermine the aristocracy in France before the revolution
===None of the people Ellis--- here I have momentarily forgotten that these are invented characters though the appeal of Ellis is in his being one of those guys like Jay McInerney and all the rest of the crew celebrated in VANITY FAIR to be known as one of the “insiders”--- writes about deserve to live a moment longer and of course he shows what can happen to someone who is tortured to death… but again we now know all about that.. so one thinks of revolution… what a little Maosim could do or how about a Holiday in Cambodia and a little mind cleaning by the Khmer Rouge—those well educated intellectuals, graduates of good French schools--- but then Mao just used revolution so he could infect 12 year old girls with syphilis and kill more than 40 million people: the great helmsman at work...
===So what’s a little shiteating among the rich, I guess is the lesson of Brett Easton Ellis
==================None of this is out of the ordinary. Ed Sanders in the early 70s when he did his book about Charlie Manson THE FAMILY was telling me he discovered far worse things than Manson in Hollywood but the publisher wouldn’t allow him to report on it: thrill killings and the usual corpse fucking among the Hollywood elite, as Sanders said at that party for the Hell’s Angels sponsored by John Lennon (I kid you not)…
===and that is what was scary about Manson and the people he had ordered killed… the then pregnant wife of a rapist now still on the lam
===So a great video and writing that reads like a forensics report…
===Maybe it leads to Michael Breslow--- whose LIFE LINE about a guy faking medical research and which came with a nice blurb from Anthony Burgess+++ look for it if you can find it++++ went on to write the unpublished novel POLIO but he himself got killed by throat cancer--- had a girl friend who he wanted to write about who was a lawyer defending guys in a prison riot and how she got a guy off of a rape charge because she was able to prove he fucked the guy after the guy was dead so the charge had to be reduced to just corpse abuse…
===Knopf of course is publishing Thomas Bernhard’s MY PRIZES in a few months and I am sure the great sales of this book will support the disappointing sales of IMPERIAL BEDROOMS…
===One shouldn’t forget that Brett Easton Ellis was unleashed upon the world by Joe McGuiness who stabbed--- how ironic--- Jeffrey McDonald in the back with his book FATAL VISION.
=You remember the case? Green Beret doctor kills his family. Claims it was a Mansonlike gang that did it.. but case re-opened and McDonald went down and is still in jail. The BBC did a documentary suggesting there was reasonable doubt, but no luck, the knife was firmly in the McDonald’s back thanks to Joe McGuiness.
=I can tell you this: I'd rather read Bret Easton Ellis than Raymond Carver or the dread Toni Morrison who I fear is always lurking with another book...Imperial Bedrooms
Life Line: 2My Prizes: An Accounting
Thursday, July 22, 2010
A LITTLE HOPE IN THE HEAT OF THE SUMMER WITH A CLOUD
21 July 2010… 66 years ago this week, Count Claus von Stauffenberg tried to kill Hitler. A few years ago a good movie VALKYRIE came out and is still watchable.
Of course why would I begin with such a detail?
The dreary time of the summer.
THREE
I have been begging the LATimes to review MY LIFE AS A RUSSIAN NOVEL (Metropolitan Books Henry Holt and Company) by Emmanuel Carrere and while I have not given up hope the publication date in early August is a-comin-in and they have a new editor and who knows what direction the section is about to take and again: how to interest anyone in a book about a man who notices a little news item in a French newspaper, digs a bit deeper and then the thought why not go to that small obscure Russian town that was the site of the article and of course the next and very common thought: well, that might make an interesting movie and then on to an intriguing book because since that news item was about something in a Russian town and, you, the author Emmanuel Carrere has a Russian speaking mother who is the leading French expert on Russian matters and is a member of the French Academy, and you Emmanuel Carrere have grown up in that rarefied world of wealth and intellectual privilege with the require grand apartment and summer homes but there is the family secret of your mother’s father who was from Georgia and who was “disappeared” at the end of WW2 by the resistance as he was a translator for the Germans… and your book will be full of sex with a French woman who comes from another class and who… and there will be one incredible terrible act of real violence in that obscure Russian town and its consequences and yet: ::: a book translated from the French about something happening in an obscure Russian town….
And I have the dvd of the resulting movie RETOUR A KOTELNITCH which I am waiting to watch with my daughter who can do the simultaneous translation as I had to order the dvd from French Amazon, since it is not available in the US…
And I can well imagine the sheer jealousy of all who never gave thought to such a great title for a book…
FOUR
May I suggest that you order ARRIVING IN AVIGNON by Daniel Robberechts to be published by Dalkey Archive in October. This is the most interesting book they are doing so far this season though I have not read the new Julian Rios or a few other books they are doing and everyone knows that Knopf is doing in November Thomas Bernhard’s MY PRIZES which joins PROSE which Seagull Books published this month--- which to many is the highpoint of Knopf’s FALL LIST
(as an aside Seagull is also doing the collected correspondence between Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann and a play by Peter Handke--- Seagull, based in India but distributed by U of Chicago---
But back to ROBBERECHTS: ARRIVING IN AVIGNON is the first of what one hopes will be his collected works. Totally unknown in the US and mostly unknown in his native Belgium… there is a heart breaking moment in the introduction by his publisher, who I assume in John O’Brien, who mentions meeting Robberechts’ daughter , the daughter of a suicide father, who did not have most of her father’s books and all of his books were out of print in Belgium.. but from a selection from another of Robberechts' books published in the Flemish issue of the RCF one knew that this was the real thing and that was the first inclining of what was to come.
ARRIVING IN AVIGNON, refusing to admit to being fiction, non-fiction, biography, autobiography, travel narrative, recite becomes the perfect book, a book that flies all categorization and easy description but is easily readable…the opening, “In the diary that he has kept since he was eighteen… (but we his readers know that he will be a suicide when he is 55)… as if Rimbaud had really returned and not in a parody as represented by Patti Smith’s self-ID but in Rimbaud’s total abjection though invigorated as if possessed by Celine… Robberechts will trace all his connection to this French city… it must be stated that ARRIVING IN AVIGNON was originally published in 1970.. so more strikes against it… giving lie to all those who say there are no undiscovered great writers in the world today because we are all so well informed.. any culture that considers Paul Auster, Ricky Moody, Don DeLillo and they are just the figureheads of the well known bad writers in Edward Dahlberg’s phrase… but now ARRIVING IN AVIGNON is there --- with more to come--- along with that other great and unique book Dalkey published some years ago: CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA by Camilo Jose Cela and which I think is the best book they have published and the most essential, the most innovative, the most daring…
FIVE
But at the same time you should not be tempted by another title Dalkey Archive is publishing. The more books a publisher publishes the possibility of some duds creeping in… and this season coming Dalkey Archive has found an Irish dud in the form of SLEEPWALKER by John Toomey which is nothing more than another adolescent coming of age novel set in the present time with a gesture at distancing but for the publisher of Flann O’Brien and Aidan Higgins this is an embarrassing fall into trying to find the equal of a Jay McInerney, one of those books that seeks to explain the so-called contemporary…
Until Dalkey Archive begins to publish and republish the work of Desmond Hogan , the only genuine successor to Joyce, Beckett, O’Brien, Higgins now writing in Ireland they can not be taken seriously when it comes to Irish matters….
Yes, they did do Dorothy Nelson’s IN NIGHT’S CITY at my long ago suggestion and still a sadly over-looked novel to come from Ireland when compared to the trivial exercises of Colm Toibin or the blurb writer for Toomey’s book .
But it is DESMOND HOGAN in books such as A FAREWLEL TO PRAGUE and THE EDGE OF THE CITY that claim his place in that pantheon of Irish writing to which I would also add Francis Stuart via his BLACK LIST SECTION H... there is nothing else in Ireland at the moment…My Life as a Russian Novel: A Memoir
My Life as a Russian Novel: A MemoirMy Life as a Russian Novel: A MemoirArriving in Avignon
Arriving in Avignon
Of course why would I begin with such a detail?
The dreary time of the summer.
THREE
I have been begging the LATimes to review MY LIFE AS A RUSSIAN NOVEL (Metropolitan Books Henry Holt and Company) by Emmanuel Carrere and while I have not given up hope the publication date in early August is a-comin-in and they have a new editor and who knows what direction the section is about to take and again: how to interest anyone in a book about a man who notices a little news item in a French newspaper, digs a bit deeper and then the thought why not go to that small obscure Russian town that was the site of the article and of course the next and very common thought: well, that might make an interesting movie and then on to an intriguing book because since that news item was about something in a Russian town and, you, the author Emmanuel Carrere has a Russian speaking mother who is the leading French expert on Russian matters and is a member of the French Academy, and you Emmanuel Carrere have grown up in that rarefied world of wealth and intellectual privilege with the require grand apartment and summer homes but there is the family secret of your mother’s father who was from Georgia and who was “disappeared” at the end of WW2 by the resistance as he was a translator for the Germans… and your book will be full of sex with a French woman who comes from another class and who… and there will be one incredible terrible act of real violence in that obscure Russian town and its consequences and yet: ::: a book translated from the French about something happening in an obscure Russian town….
And I have the dvd of the resulting movie RETOUR A KOTELNITCH which I am waiting to watch with my daughter who can do the simultaneous translation as I had to order the dvd from French Amazon, since it is not available in the US…
And I can well imagine the sheer jealousy of all who never gave thought to such a great title for a book…
FOUR
May I suggest that you order ARRIVING IN AVIGNON by Daniel Robberechts to be published by Dalkey Archive in October. This is the most interesting book they are doing so far this season though I have not read the new Julian Rios or a few other books they are doing and everyone knows that Knopf is doing in November Thomas Bernhard’s MY PRIZES which joins PROSE which Seagull Books published this month--- which to many is the highpoint of Knopf’s FALL LIST
(as an aside Seagull is also doing the collected correspondence between Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann and a play by Peter Handke--- Seagull, based in India but distributed by U of Chicago---
But back to ROBBERECHTS: ARRIVING IN AVIGNON is the first of what one hopes will be his collected works. Totally unknown in the US and mostly unknown in his native Belgium… there is a heart breaking moment in the introduction by his publisher, who I assume in John O’Brien, who mentions meeting Robberechts’ daughter , the daughter of a suicide father, who did not have most of her father’s books and all of his books were out of print in Belgium.. but from a selection from another of Robberechts' books published in the Flemish issue of the RCF one knew that this was the real thing and that was the first inclining of what was to come.
ARRIVING IN AVIGNON, refusing to admit to being fiction, non-fiction, biography, autobiography, travel narrative, recite becomes the perfect book, a book that flies all categorization and easy description but is easily readable…the opening, “In the diary that he has kept since he was eighteen… (but we his readers know that he will be a suicide when he is 55)… as if Rimbaud had really returned and not in a parody as represented by Patti Smith’s self-ID but in Rimbaud’s total abjection though invigorated as if possessed by Celine… Robberechts will trace all his connection to this French city… it must be stated that ARRIVING IN AVIGNON was originally published in 1970.. so more strikes against it… giving lie to all those who say there are no undiscovered great writers in the world today because we are all so well informed.. any culture that considers Paul Auster, Ricky Moody, Don DeLillo and they are just the figureheads of the well known bad writers in Edward Dahlberg’s phrase… but now ARRIVING IN AVIGNON is there --- with more to come--- along with that other great and unique book Dalkey published some years ago: CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA by Camilo Jose Cela and which I think is the best book they have published and the most essential, the most innovative, the most daring…
FIVE
But at the same time you should not be tempted by another title Dalkey Archive is publishing. The more books a publisher publishes the possibility of some duds creeping in… and this season coming Dalkey Archive has found an Irish dud in the form of SLEEPWALKER by John Toomey which is nothing more than another adolescent coming of age novel set in the present time with a gesture at distancing but for the publisher of Flann O’Brien and Aidan Higgins this is an embarrassing fall into trying to find the equal of a Jay McInerney, one of those books that seeks to explain the so-called contemporary…
Until Dalkey Archive begins to publish and republish the work of Desmond Hogan , the only genuine successor to Joyce, Beckett, O’Brien, Higgins now writing in Ireland they can not be taken seriously when it comes to Irish matters….
Yes, they did do Dorothy Nelson’s IN NIGHT’S CITY at my long ago suggestion and still a sadly over-looked novel to come from Ireland when compared to the trivial exercises of Colm Toibin or the blurb writer for Toomey’s book .
But it is DESMOND HOGAN in books such as A FAREWLEL TO PRAGUE and THE EDGE OF THE CITY that claim his place in that pantheon of Irish writing to which I would also add Francis Stuart via his BLACK LIST SECTION H... there is nothing else in Ireland at the moment…My Life as a Russian Novel: A Memoir
My Life as a Russian Novel: A MemoirMy Life as a Russian Novel: A MemoirArriving in AvignonArriving in Avignon
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
WHY PAUL AUSTER SHOULD HAVE STOPPED WRITING AFTER HIS FIRST BOOK
It was bad enough last week to discover in the bookstore next to McDonald’s on Vitosha Boulevard in Sofia that Faber in London had published the complete works of Paul Auster in a multi-volume hard cover edition as here it sat on the shelf awaiting a buyer.
Later on the plane to New York I began to read the bound galleys of his most recent novel SUNSET PARK (to be published in the US in November). The novel concerns a man who is fixing up foreclosed houses in Florida. By coincidence his publisher is also publishing a non-fiction book about the same subject, EXILES IN EDEN, Life Among the Ruins of Florida’s Great Recession by Paul Reyes.
Of course anyone who could seriously consider Florida an Eden is probably beyond help… but by now it is all old news and there have been the long human interest stories in the quality newspapers… but book publishers seem to have an addiction to news that would not now be fit wrapper for dead fish…
But, Auster: SUNSET PARK. I will type out why exactly why I did not continue reading the novel that wants the reader to be interested in this guy Miles who has taken up with some jail-bait:
“The first time they went to bed together, she assured him she was no longer a virgin. He took her at her word, but when the moment came for him to enter her, she pushed him away a told him he mustn’t do that. The mommy hole was off-limits, she said, absolutely forbidden to male members. Tongues and fingers were acceptable but not members, under no condition at any time, not ever… Did he understand? Yes, he understood but war was the alternative? The funny hole, she said. Angela had told him all about it and he had to admit that from a strictly biological and medical standpoint it was the one truly safe form of birth control in the world. For six months now he has abided by her wishes, restricting all member penetration to her funny hole and putting nothing more than tongue and fingers in her mommy hole.”
But why stop? Isn't it obvious?: the deadness of the ear, the condescending vulgarity, the knowing nudge to the shoulder: I know these people are… and then the fact that most likely no one at the publisher even read the manuscript since they were just publishing another Auster book, another book that will be reviewed… and no matter the quality of the reviews SUNSET PARK is another bit of product to keep alive the brand, keep the brand in the marketplace, occupy the shelf space, provide an excuse to re-republish in paper some earlier equally forgettable books .
SUNSET PARK is a squeamish bit of rubbish from Paul Auster who is writing an old guy’s book about a lecher who wants to fuck a teenager who really only wants to get fucked in the ass…
AUSTER wrote one good book, THE INVENTION OF SOLITUDE and should have stopped right there in 1982. Nothing has been added to that book by all these subsequent books. He knows this...
Later on the plane to New York I began to read the bound galleys of his most recent novel SUNSET PARK (to be published in the US in November). The novel concerns a man who is fixing up foreclosed houses in Florida. By coincidence his publisher is also publishing a non-fiction book about the same subject, EXILES IN EDEN, Life Among the Ruins of Florida’s Great Recession by Paul Reyes.
Of course anyone who could seriously consider Florida an Eden is probably beyond help… but by now it is all old news and there have been the long human interest stories in the quality newspapers… but book publishers seem to have an addiction to news that would not now be fit wrapper for dead fish…
But, Auster: SUNSET PARK. I will type out why exactly why I did not continue reading the novel that wants the reader to be interested in this guy Miles who has taken up with some jail-bait:
“The first time they went to bed together, she assured him she was no longer a virgin. He took her at her word, but when the moment came for him to enter her, she pushed him away a told him he mustn’t do that. The mommy hole was off-limits, she said, absolutely forbidden to male members. Tongues and fingers were acceptable but not members, under no condition at any time, not ever… Did he understand? Yes, he understood but war was the alternative? The funny hole, she said. Angela had told him all about it and he had to admit that from a strictly biological and medical standpoint it was the one truly safe form of birth control in the world. For six months now he has abided by her wishes, restricting all member penetration to her funny hole and putting nothing more than tongue and fingers in her mommy hole.”
But why stop? Isn't it obvious?: the deadness of the ear, the condescending vulgarity, the knowing nudge to the shoulder: I know these people are… and then the fact that most likely no one at the publisher even read the manuscript since they were just publishing another Auster book, another book that will be reviewed… and no matter the quality of the reviews SUNSET PARK is another bit of product to keep alive the brand, keep the brand in the marketplace, occupy the shelf space, provide an excuse to re-republish in paper some earlier equally forgettable books .
SUNSET PARK is a squeamish bit of rubbish from Paul Auster who is writing an old guy’s book about a lecher who wants to fuck a teenager who really only wants to get fucked in the ass…
AUSTER wrote one good book, THE INVENTION OF SOLITUDE and should have stopped right there in 1982. Nothing has been added to that book by all these subsequent books. He knows this...
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