ESSENTIAL PUBLISHERS anti-vomiting remedies

---Like many who read, I remember certain publishing houses as being of importance: Scribners, Little Brown, Viking, Coward McCann, Vanguard, Norton, Braziller, Arcade, Simon & Schuster, Doubleday, Bantam, Avon, Harcourt Brace… but while some of these still exist in form, can it be said they are really essential since it is obvious they publish what might be considered of literary interest only by accident

----Other publishers remain of interest: Knopf, Farrar Straus & Giroux, Grove Press, Bloomsbury but even they are incredibly erratic and no longer reliable in terms of what can be thought of as being publishers of books that are meant to be read by those of us who hold to the method of comparison and tradition--- as Eliot and Pound would suggest--- so that when I begin to read a prose book I always ask myself in what way does this nudge against say for sake of argument: Ulysses by James Joyce, Journey to the End of Night by Louis Ferdinand Celine, The Jardin Des Plantes by Claude Simon, Correction or Gathering Evidence by Thomas Bernhard, First Love by Ivan Turgenev, The Dead of the House by Hannah Green, Life A User’s Manual by Georges Perec, Absalom Absalom by William Faulkner, Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar, Paradisio by Jose Lezama Lima, I The Supreme by Augusto Roa Bastos, At Swim Two Birds by Flann O’Brien… I could go on and throw in Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and Petersburg by Andrei Bely and Larva by Julian Rios and Evening Edged with Gold by Arno Schmidt and Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne…

---So, we come to the essential publishers… does anyone remember when bookstores used to display books based upon publishers, so that when you went into the Eighth Street Bookstore in Manhattan or the main Krochs and Brentano’s in Chicago you would find all the New Directions books in one place and nearby the Grove Press books… so I was thinking in my ideal bookstore only five publishers can still be thought of in such terms and have a sufficient number of titles that it is evident that they can be trusted as reliable publishers of what is the very best:

::::New Directions remains still the absolute gold standard of what a publisher is supposed to be doing and in the Spring 2011 catalog the evidence is plain for everyone to see: ANIMALISSIDE by Laszio Krasnahorkai who is it should be said the only writer who can be listed precisely as coming in that list which begins, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard… and they announce that both Seiobo and the long anticipated SATANTANGO will eventually be published to join his two earlier books WAR & WAR and THE MELANCHOLY OF RESISTANCE

And they are also doing a newly translated Enrique Vila-Matas, NEVER ANY END TO PARIS and Cesaw Aira’s THE SEAMSTRESS AND THE WIND.. and it should be mentioned that ND is also doing a new Susan Howe a new Roberto Bolano…which reminds this reader that ND in addition to introducing the world to Bolano also introduced W.G.Sebald to the world…

And of course the reason for ND doing these books is that the house inspired by the spirit of Ezra Pound who while not telling the founder of the press James Laughlin what to do showed him the necessary method which I echoed in my first sentences: the method of comparison and tradition…

::::I do not have to discuss DALKEY PRESS again but it is simply a truism: they continue and more rigorously follow in the steps of New Directions and my own GOING TO PATCHOGUE, finally in paper from DA is clinching evidence and I would suggest three books in their Spring catalogue which would indicate the tradition into which my little book falls: EXILED FROM ALMOST EVERYWHERE by Juan Goytisolo, WERT AND THE LIFE WITHOUT END by Claude Ollier and IMPRESSIONS OF AFRICA by Raymond Roussel

:::: then there is NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS, a sort of spinoff from the New York Review of Books which while once upon a time of interest now seems more like a corpse wrapper in the guise of a book review in which the same boring professors are still going on about the same “relevant” books as 40 years ago , edited by a man who seems like the little guy you meet in derelict cemeteries down South, who for a dollar will show you around…

HOWEVER, the book publisher New York Review Books can be seen as an equal partner with the other four publishers and they seem to hold that their job is to return to print the necessary background to understanding where we are in the present: I value in particular: THE GLASS BEES by ERNST JUNGER, MAWRDEW CZGOWCHWZ , SHORT LETTER, LONG FAREWEELL by PETERHANKDE, PRISONER OF LOVE by JEAN GENET, WITCH GRASS BY RAYMOND QUENEAU, THAT AWFUL MESS ON THE VIA MERULANA by Carlo EMILIO GADDA

And they have been bringing back into print and newly publishing the work of VASILY GROSSMAN and in particular his EVERYTHING FLOWS which is the most revelatory book about the Gulag, at least for me, as it talks about what happens when a victim of the Gulag comes back and confronts the man who sent him to the Gulag. This book encapsulated the sheer awfulness of the moral life of recent times in what was once the Soviet Union and how that awfulness remains that defining characteristic of lfe in Russia today.

The most recent book I have read from NYRB is THE ROAD by VASSILY GROSSMAN and it is the last selection, ETERNAL REST, a meditation on cemeteries in Russia… do I need to write more: Russia, the Soviet Union that vast cemetery and the question is always: how do we treat the dead… which an astute reader would recognize as the theme of ERNST JUNGER’S ALADDIN’S PROBLEM…

And I shouldn’t forget that NYRB in the summer brought out ALBERT COSSERY’s THE JOKERS which might have reminded people of an earlier books by COSSERY MEN GOD FORGOT and THE HOUSE OF CERTAIN DEATH… and which at least for me competed with Lawrence Durrell in forming my imaginary Egypt.

AND NOT TO FORGET two smaller houses, delicate essential flowers:

::::ARCHIPELAGO BOOKS does translations mostly and I will be eternally grateful to them for having done CORTAZAR’s last boo AUTONAUTS OF THE COSMOROUTE which is JC’s report of his journey down a toll road to the south of France from Paris, or never leaving the highway, eating and sleeping in the various rest areas.. I love the use of drawing, photographs and of course the words… such an obvious book and such a critique of all such travel… much as HOPSCOTCH remains ever young, ever the subversive book for those tempted by the autobiographical impulse.

And ARCHIPELAGO also revealed GEORGE LETHAM PYSICIAN AND MURDERER by ERNST WEISS, this is a book I am really afraid of.. I have dipped into it, I am scared of what I am going to find… never have I felt like this except when reading the chapters devoted to Moosbrugger who stalks Robert Musil’s A MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES in the same way that Charles Manson continues to stalk the American imagination

Finally, from England: Pushkin Press is now the only English publisher readers have to give any thought to. There are no other publishers, really, in England which are neither clones of their dreary American/German owners nor perpetuaters of the English novel that has been asleep for hundreds of years ago with the bright exceptions of B. S. Johnson, Ivy Compton Burnett and the example of Anthony Burgess.

Pushkin Press brought to the world Julian Green’s THE OTHER SLEEP, a new translation of Julien Gracq’s A DARK STRANGER and finally we are reading again in English PAUL MORAND via his VENICES and HECATE AND HER DOGS… also they have surely supplied the other Hungarian writer to join Sandor Marai when we try to imagine that country: ANTAL SZERB whose JOURNEY BY MOONLIGHT: “In the deepest stupidity there is a king of dizzying, whirlpool attractions, like death: the pull of the vacuum.”

And Pushkin Press had been faithful to SZERB and three further books have appeared and they are all now joined by LOVE IN A BOTTLE.. a collection of stories and short novels, including the one he was writing in 1943 as the net which would sweep him up to be killed in a Nazi labor camp, but this story, The Duke, An Imaginary Portrait, set in the 16th Century is not escapism but the pitting of the author’s imagination against what of course was death but to which the imagination cannot capitulate… an uneasy consolation which allowed for instance the far more famous Nabokov to survive as a writer: imagination rooted in experience but not beholding to it explains a little why Nabokov did not cease to be a writer when living in exile and SZERB is as alive today as he was then and maybe even more so given the pathetic nature of what passes for literature in the US…

the other day I had the awful experience in the subway of seeing someone reading a novel by Franzen… I wished I could have been transformed into a six foot six Black alcoholic reeking derelict who had just eaten a plate of rice and beans and finding the meal had not agreed with his stomach deposited the masticated mess in the lap of this “reader.”

DALKEY ARCHIVE'S GLORIOUS SPRING LIST: Going to Patchogue to Appear

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I received an early copy of the Spring 2011 Catalogue from Dalkey Archive because after 18 years they are publishing GOING TO PATCHOGUE finally in paperback. Of course I am very pleased and happy that this is happening but what is far more important is the context in which GOING TO PATCHOGUE is to appear.
9
The perfect modern publishing house was Shakespeare & Co since they published only one book, James Joyce’s Ulysses. They had to do no other. For all of my life there have only really been three publishers: New Directions, the original Grove Press and Alfred A. Knopf. Of course there are many other honorable houses, many others, but in particular with the first two, can there be any question, really.
10
Today one can say: New Directions and Dalkey Archive and some of the back list of Grove Press but of course good real books get published but they are published almost by accident or forgetfulness on the part of editors. There are in truth some others but their lists are still too short and time will tell…
11
But the context: in the coming season Dalkey Archive will publish or reprint or republish book by: (and here I just list the author names): Ishmael Reed, Jean Rolin, Edouard Leve, Patrick Ourednik, Juan Goytisolo, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Julian Rios, Mina Loy, Luisa Valenzuela, Asaf Schurr, Gabriela Avigur-Rotem, Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro, Eric Chevillard, Viktor Shklovsky, Tom Whalen, Laura Pavel, Jaques Jouet, Gerard Gavarry, Herve Le Tellier, Kazushi Hosaka, Claude Ollier, Raymond Roussel, Nicholas Delbanco, Goncalo M. Tavares, Arno Schmidt, David Markson, Djuana Barnes, Christine Brooke-Rose, Jacques Roubaud.
12
What I am getting at: GOING TO PATCHOGUE is not appearing by accident, as a quirk, as a mistake, as a reward for a so-called literary editor for having brought in millions of dollars by discovering some bit of garbage that made millions of dollars by accident so now he or she can go and do a “literary” book.
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Of course like many readers I grew up reading for instance Juan Goytisolo, Raymond Roussel, Viktor Shklovsky Claude Ollier but very few of their books were translated (Goytisolo is the exception though most of his books quickly went out of print) but GOING TO PATCHOGUE will appear midst their new books and their other books that have already been published by Dalkey Archive and they will be joined by new books by these authors in the future.

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GOING TO PATCHOGUE is appearing with new books by Ishmael Reed and Tom Whalen and Arno Schmidt and Julian Rios and Luisa Valenzuela and Christine Brooke-Rose and Djuana Barnes… down here on East First Street in Manhattan that is pretty fine company for it.
26
Seeing Nicholas Delbanco’s name was a pleasant surprise as I had met him for the first and only time when we were in Knoxville now a a few years ago to honor George Garrett who would have easily understood both the comic tone of this post and the wonderful critique of the publishing world this catalogue represents.
27
I am sure the publisher of Dalkey Archive is waiting for me to remind him that I do have a book NOTHING DOING that he can ask to read but that is another day and in other days I would hope to see books by Ernst Junger, Julian Green, Robert Pinget, Georgi Ivanov but if I had to suggest one book it would be BAKUNIN An Invention by Horst Bienek, a perfect book novel, a whatnot, as it takes up the questions how to act, how to be, how to write, how to live… and Bienek does it in 119 pages…

THE PERFECT BOOK REVIEW #2

Being that there was a vast outpouring of support and a myriad number of demands I am here doing a new version of a PERFECT BOOK REVIEW.

The PERFECT BOOK REVIEW #2.

From MAN AND THE SACRED by Roger Caillois

The sacred is what gives life and takes it away, it is the source from which it flows, and the estuary in which it is lost.
But the sacred is also that which one would not know how to possess simultaneously with life.
Life is wear and tear, and waste.
It vainly strives to persevere and to refuse every expenditure so as to be preserved.
Death lies in wait for it.

(One discovered Caillois via Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille: the how authors and books lead to other books and other authors. )

64.

THE STORY OF THE EYE by Georges Batialle as anyone knows stands in a tiny circle of books with Hedayat’s THE BLIND OWL and I would add now thanks to Dalkey Archive: ON ELEGANCE WHILE SLEEPING by Viscount Lascano Tegui (1887-1966) who and which exists in that world populated by Macedonio Fernandez’s THE MUSEUM OF ETERNA’S NOVEL all of which are ruled by the shade of the Comte de Lautramont whose MALDOROR never ages, never grows young…

But Tegui: “When my mother died, my father, who was busy dyeing his sideburns, looked me over from head to toe and, finding my hair wasn’t sufficiently serious for the occasion dyed it black.”

Or.

As the river crossed our town it jammed the millwheel with the bodies of drowning victims, bashful beneath its surface.

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Yale University Press sent me three books.

WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO MODERNISM by Gabriel Josipovici was that rarest of all critical books: it is helpful. Helpful in a similar way to ABC OF READING by Ezra Pound and while pointing to the essential books it is also a consolation: I felt less alone reading it, less alone in finding someone else who has wondered how readers could actually think that Franzen, McEwen, Rushdie, Amis, Barnes (FILL IN 95 percent at least of the novels reviewed in the last few years by the NY Times)… the list goes on and on… how can they be taken seriously as they are week after week when Josipovici knows that if you have not read deeply in Claude Simon, Robert Pinget, Thomas Bernhard, just for starters, you might as well have died in 1900. You have not read Joyce or Proust or Eliot if you can think that what passes for literature in the United States is of any real interest beyond who knows what…

THE GLADSTEIN CHRONICLES by Jacob Glatstein. Living on the Lower East Side in New York City I am always aware of what is not here… The people who used to be here… Glatstein’s two short novels describe the Jewish world of Europe in 1934 with the foreboding that it will not be there sooner rather than later… now living in New York and American citizens Glatstein’s narrators return to Europe from which they had left many years before. As I read I am reading at the same time Joseph Roth and I know he will drink himself to death in a room above that café in Paris holding in his mind what Glatstein also well knew through foreboding…

CYCLOPS by Ranko Marinkovic is translated from the Croatian and appears in the Margellos World Republic of Letters series. While it might have been popular when it appeared in 1965 it seems more a relic… the jacket blurb accurately both consciously and unconscipously the problem with the book, “Melkior encounters a colorful circus of characters… all living in a fragile dream.” Two of Marinkovic’s stories appeared in a long gone anthology DREAM OF A SIMPLE GIUAN and OTHER MODERN YUGOSLAV STOIRES edited by Branko Lenski. They are not about “colourful” characters but about pain, imagined to be sure or observed to be sure, but actual and hauked to the page by chosen words.

It would have been better if Yale had published a book by Miroslav Krleza.

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GREEN INTEGER sent me PENTHOUSE F by Richard Kalich which comes with an off-putting grotesque cover but going beyond the cover and I hope you will the novel or book, since it exists somewhere between those two words: “At a certain point in writing, a Writer becomes his character and from that time on, as already mentioned, does little more than take dictation.”

The book seems to tease out: “DRINKING WITH YOU WOULD BE LIKE DRINKING WITH MY MOTHER.

The book is from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. A place that used to have building supers with concentration camp numbers on their arms, visible in the summer: "Now, notwithstanding the splattered bodies of the boy and girl found lying on the concrete in front of my building."

Gil Orlovitz, author of MILKBOTTLE H threw himself to his death, I believe, as did another writer Richard M. Elman once knew… and Evelyn Scott died up there in a borrow room in an SRO… the author of Calendar of Sin.. the woman Faulkner said was pretty good for a woman.

This is what one thinks about reading this novel.

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Oxford University Press sent me:

GULAG BOSS A Soviet Memoir by Fyodor Vasilevich Mochulsky. This is the first memoir by someone who had worked in the vast murderous camp system of communism. Of course, one remembers that no one was ever, NO ONE was ever held accountable for all the millions upon millions innocent victim--- including the grandfather of my wife--- to make it personal.

After six years of working in the camps Mochulsky went on to a long career in the Soviet Diplomatic service… giving lie to all those who thought Soviet diplomats were only diplomats and not members of the NKVD or KGB. It is the coldness, the obliviousness as in the memoir of Rudolf Hoess that impresses this reader…: the re-incarnation of bastardized versions of Pontius Pilate, that very good hand washer.

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From Farrar Straus Giroux: CANTI by Giacomo Leopardi translated by the boss there, Jonathan Galassi.

And good work it is as it was allowed to be published because they had pulled in great sacks of dollars from the yokels who have rushed out for the Franzen.

And in three lines the distance between literature and rubbish:

Happy indeed if you’re allowed/relief from sorrow, blessed when/death cures you of all sorrow.

POSTSCRIPT. POSTSCRIPT

Again from MAN AND THE SACRED by Roger Caillois:

There is no artifice that is as good.
Every living being knows it sense it.
It knows the choice remaining to it.
It dreads give itself, sacrificing itself and is aware of this wasting its very being.
But to retain its gifts, energies and resources, to use them prudently for all practical and selfish goals—
as a consequence, profane--- saves no one in the final analysis from decrepitude and the tomb.
Everything that is not consumed rots away.
Furthermore, the abiding truth of the sacred resides simultaneously in the fascination of flame and the
horror or putrification

A PERFECT BOOK REVIEW and a lunch

Many people have noticed that most book reviews are really boring. The same books by the same authors and I won’t contribute to the clutter by mentioning the same well known bad writers all getting reviewed during the same week--- the problem is even worse in Paris and London where there are only national newspapers and they are sitting on each other’s lap when it comes to book reviews--- but the problem is that book reviews sadly buy into the idea that they are just reporting the news, book news, in the form of reviews of the newly published. They are the prisoners of the accident of the day, much as the The New Yorker is prisoner to its weekly schedule and never do they explain that: well, this week we just have a lot of crap on hand so bear with us… and maybe next week will be a bit better.

So, I thought to show a schedule if I was a book editor of major newspaper: This week we are reviewing and as I start to realize that one of the advantages of internet versions of newspapers is that we don’t have to have a lead review, a cover story. 99% of the time the lead review is of a book that will be surely forgotten within the next couple of years… just as a sure recipe for being forgotten: win the Pulitzer prize for anything.

This week: (I’ll put a one or two line summary which of course is a disservice but I hope to come back to these books. All of these books are at the moment scattered across the table and floor of my cell here on the lower east side of Manhattan)

FOUR YEARS IN EUROPE WITH BUFFALO BILL by Charles Eldridge Griffin ((University of Nebraska Press) A contemporary description of Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show in Europe before the European civil war better known at World War One.

JOINER by James Whitehead (Alfred A. Knopf) One of the few novels that can actually stand comparison to the best in Faulkner.

CANTI by Giacomo Leopardi. Translated from the Italian. Farrar Straus & Giroux. A series of hymns to the absolute hopelessness of the human condition.

THE HOUSE OF ULYSSES by Julian Rios. Translated from the Spanish (Dalkey Archive). A wandering through Ulysses by James Joyce by a writer who exists in the small world described by FINNEGANS WAKE, AN EVENING EDGED WITH GOLD and LIFE A USER’S MANUAL

ANGINA DAYS by Gunter Eich. Translated from the German. (Princeton University Press) An opening to one poem An Inventory: This is my cap,/mycoat,/my shaving kit/in the burlap bag.

IBSEN AND HITLER by Steven F. Sage (Carroll and Graf) A close reading of both men as writers so as to explain what the single most famous person in the Twentieth Century did.

RICHARD YATES by Tao Lin (Melville House) The only American writer who has actually been able to become a nihilist and this is another petal on the flower of his succcess

WHO CHOSE THE GOSPELS? Probing the Great Gospel Conspiracy by C.E. Hill. Oxford University Press. Since the trash by Dan Brown has replaced all actual Biblical study and history a reminder of just how stupid are those who have read his novels and think they have learned anything at all

THE MOMENT OF CARAVAGGIO by Michael Fried (Princeton University Press). A making clear, a trying to show… the near impossibility of finding words to describe a painterly gesture.

CORRESPONDANCE: Ingeborg Bachmann Paul Celan. Translated from the German (Seagull Books Dist U if Chicago Press). A model of editing of two of the very best writers in the German language always shadowed by their terrible deaths

TEXAS SCHOOL BOOK DEPOSITORY by Catherine Hankla (Louisiana State University Press. Prose poems which should be read as models of what all prose should be.

Yes and what about the following week?:

THE SIXTY-FIVE YEARS OF WASHINGTON by Juan Jose Saer. Translated from the Spanish (Open Letter) following upon Juan Carlos Onetti and not afraid to have been influenced for the better by Alain Robbe-Grillet

THE ARCHITECTURE OF PARADISE Survivals of Eden and Jerusalem by William Alexander McClung (University of California Press) What it looks like.

NOVEL 11, BOOK 18 by Dag Solstad. Translated from the Norwegian (Harvill Secker) Comes as close to Thomas Bernhard yet remaining his own man

ZONE by Mathias Enard. Translated from the French. (Open Letter). 500 page sentence that encompasses the whole of the late Twentieth Century’s horror as played out on the battlefields of the former Yugoslavia without forgetting the Middle East and even the Spanish Moroccan war of 1921… will send a good reader to find DRIFTING CITIES by STRATIS TSIRKAS (Alfred A. Knopf)

REVOLT AGAINST THE MODERN WORLD by Julius Evola. Translated from the Italian. (Inner Traditions International) A necessary provocation.

AND WHY NOT? here is another week’s books:

LIFE ON SANDPAPER by Yoram Kaniuk. Translated from the Hebrew. (Dalkey Archive). Life in Greenwich Village when that place was not home to Marc Jacob and the editor of Vanity Fair.

ANOTHER FREEDOM by Svetlana Boym (Harvard University Press) Any book that tries to understand the best literary critic to come out of 20th century Russia Viktor Shklovsky is essential reading.

THE BOX by Gunter Grass. Translated from the German. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) Grass tries to imagine what his kids think of him.

THE WITNESS HOUSE by Christine Kohl. Translated from the German. (Other Press) An odd book of witnesses for both the defense and prosecution waiting to testify at the Nuremberg Trials.

ZEN AND JAPANESE CULTURE by Daisetz T. Suzuki (Princeton University Press). While it might echo too much a relic of the so-called 60s how to account for why Japan is still a pleasurable thought and actual destination.

SOLO by Rana Dasgupta (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) A one hundred year old Bulgarian man describes his world.

NIGHT SOUL AND OTHER STORIES by Joseph McElroy (Dalkey Archive). Short stories as complex as his great WOMEN AND MEN

THE SIGHT OF DEATH by T.J. Clark. (Yale University Press) A looking at Poussin.


I’d have a feature about books that have not been made into books: THE WORKER by Ernst Junger which only exists in an un-authorized translation. A visionary description of where we have actually ended up though the book was written in 1932 by the only Twentieth Century German writer who can be compared to Goethe


Yesterday I went to a lunch sponsored by William Morror at at the Rubin Museum of Art (of course I wondered what crime Rubin was doing penance for by opening such a museum), which was wonderfully luxurious and the food was very good. I was well prepared for this experience as I had just been watching the English TV series, The Gravy Train, written by Malcolm Bradbury which was about how the European Community actually worked to enrich its employees. The central character is a guy named Dortmund who had been known as the UNESCO official who brought Nietzsche to Zaire and in the episodes I had been watching he came up with a scheme to export plums to Bulgaria… So I guess I was well prepared to hear about a book by a guy, the son of a second string Irish poet, who had been giving out money to the various gangs in the former Yugoslavia so they would postpone killing each other while he was giving out the money. He has now moved on to raising money for an orphanage in Nepal, a cause he cares a lot about and has of course written a book about this: LITTLE PRINCES… but no real taking care of kids: he is a fund raiser, a job creator for himself…

Here is the writer in his own words.

I’m Conor, my name is spelled with one “n”, because my father is from Ireland and that’s how they do it there.
Let’s see…what else…….what………else……..
I am originally from Poughkeepsie, New York, which is the same place that Snookie is from. (I imagine that by the time I post this updated About Me section - it is August 2010 - nobody will remember who Snookie was. Ahhh, Snookie…)
I went to college at the University of Virginia, graduated in 1996 jobless and panicky, and made a rather quick and rash decision to move to Prague, in the Czech Republic. I liked it (beer and fried cheese - what’s not to like?) so I stayed about six and a half years, working for a public policy think tank called the EastWest Institute, focused mostly in Balkan security (back when that meant something.) I moved to Brussels for another year and a half or so in 2002 doing the same work. I liked it but I didn’t speak Flemish and in my neighborhood it meant that it was hard to order the right kind of sandwich so I ate some weird stuff for lunch that year.
In 2004, I took off for France alone for about six weeks to volunteer and trek, then did that solo trip around the world. I volunteered in a children’s home in Nepal for trafficked children, and loved it so much that I returned a year later, and then a few months later, when I started an organization called Next Generation Nepal.
At the end of 2006, in Kathmandu, I met the most wonderful woman in the world, Liz, from California. By coincidence, she also happened to be the most beautiful woman in the world. I immediately informed her that she would be hearing from me on an hourly basis, despite the fact that we lived 9000 miles apart.
Liz found I am a man of my word. After six months of talking non-stop (love that Skype) and emailing equally non-stopfully, I came back to the US and asked her to marry me. She said yes (woo hoo!). A little more long distance relationshipping, and in October 2007 I moved back to the US to be with Liz in Washington DC. We were married in New York City on March 1st of 2008, and it is the best thing of all time.
The next best thing is that our son Finn was born in February 2009. We’re huge fans.
In 2008 I went to business school at NYU Stern, which was totally cool and pretty hard but mostly cool. I graduated in May of 2010. In August we moved to Connecticut.
I also wrote a book, it’s called Little Princes, about my time in Nepal, published by HarperCollins, due out January, 2011. Can you buy a copy of that? Great, thanks.
Lastly: the kids in Nepal really need a lot of support. If you think you might like to support them, I would really be grateful. Please visit our website at www.nextgenerationnepal.org.

HOW TO SURVIVE THE POLITICAL MOMENT AND THE GOLD LINING OF THE FRANZEN BOOTY

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.

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.

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.