---scanned to be available, to be part of something much longer or shorter, a life tangential, intercepted, intercepting, as a way to or from, constantly the double vision---
In a magazine looked at in the bookstore on St Marks, George Garrett is to edit an issue of Southern Writing and I'm thinking as I walk home along Second Avenue, now remembering walking home along Second Avenue because already it was last week this is happening, this walking, however it is now weeks ago and eventually when this is done, this writing, it will be months ago and then years later to be read...I know or knew George Garrett and last saw him maybe four years ago (then) in The West End Bar up on Broadway across from Columbia, in there, at the bar, standing with back to the food counter, drinking I was, soda water with slice of lime and George was knocking back a bourbon or it could have been a Scotch though I am sure it wasn't a beer or A Scots or a gin and something...The West End...I had lived around the corner from it thanks to George who got me a fellowship to Columbia, now almost twelve years ago,(then) to come up from Virginia for the two years to get away or rather to move away from The Bulgarian who was going to stay on at Hollins College and there was nothing for me to do in Virginia and George himself was leaving town to go further south, closer to the clay of Florida, no, they ain't got clay in Florida, clay is for Georgia, but I have him getting closer to THE FINISHED MAN, had to look up the title, climb on the chair because the Garrett books are up on the top shelf due to the rigor of the alphabet, that book is very rare...off the subject, as we say, okay, I'm around the corner from The West End of Kerouac fame, got to mention that, don't ask why, please, something I do know for sure, the last stop in the night after hitting The Gold Rail, now turned into a chink place with plastic lace curtains, and Forlini's, a mafia heroin in the bathroom drop, but serving maybe the best veal in New York according to this Rumanian guy who now lives in Washington, now a little to the right of The Klan...The West End was the last stop just after two in the morning and sometimes it was three in the morning, though
this last time I was seeing George it was sometime in the afternoon,maybe even as early as one and I was thinking that was about the time I was in there up front, crying, even, it was awful, in a front booth because of the available sunlight, reading, over and over the first paragraph of Issac Singer's OLD LOVES and it must have been due to Lucja or that other woman who stole my inscribed copy of Dahlberg's BECAUSE I WAS FLESH
but remember this was myself walking back from the bookstore on St. Marks with the idea of The South and how in Ireland they refer to The Republic as The South and just yesterday (repeat first paragraph for detail of time) not going into which yesterday, I was told people in The North say they are going up to Dublin even though they are in fact going south to Dublin... this had come up because this Irish poet was reading in New York and when I asked him what he was going to do next, said he was going up to Washington... I corrected him, in New York you say you are going down to Washington... though if you lived in The South you could say you were going up to Washington--- or going up North which was what George allowed me to do, go up North to Columbia and leave Lilia st Hollins, not leave her behind, just leave maybe for both our sakes, leave, no, move apart and hope time would take care of, but it don't work like, and I was just thinking, if I am going on 38, Melinda is going to be 36 and she has
this is very subjective
where is the reader's interest?
a kid and a husband with a hearing aid who the last time I saw them was then celebrating, he was, not having to pay alimony to his third wife who had just died from cancer, such an end
try to imagine Petrarch or Dante coming up with such an end to the heart burst with love, sitting those nights while my parents were in shopping and I in the car waiting and wish I was not alone and Melinda was out there...
so Dublin has been suggested, hinted at, if I would drag in popular critical language, and I am not teasing it out. too much, now, however, there has been no contact with George for years because either he originated or just picked it up when he was there, the policy of Hollins College professors to like to get letters coming but write in the newsletter that we are to keep those letters coming but they as in all the years gone by, you can't expect to get an answer, sorry, but that is just the way and they each have their individual reasons but I guess it just comes down to the waste of energy, something like reading magazines and how once began there is no end to them and you get nothing from a magazine: so much cutting, cut and cut...but I ain't about to give you the English sermon against new books as being like buying gin in a pub: always overpriced and shortshotted...while getting from Hollins to Columbia serves me up the chance to link Johnny Greene of Greene County, Alabama with John Green met in Dublin...but first Johnny Greene was up in New York at Columbia University writing and doing research on his recent past in the civil rights movement and holding up his end of The Gold Rail Bar---bar now gone into a Chinese restaurant chain...just the other day walking passed and on the spur of the moment I was walking in and sitting up at the bar to look out at the sidewalk and street and how bright the sun is in the afternoon at that bit of Broadway: Lois who stole the Dahlberg book comes in--- she had the last name of the man who wrote THE SEVEN WHO WERE HANGED and it seems she is also now but a shade on a memorial site---
and Johnny Greene walks passed to take a table at the back of the room: to be hated by the whites and blacks back home, a Greene of Greene County, Alabama, and for all the wrong reasons and he once described the role of the cousin in the sexual rites of The Deep South: having no cousins I can only listen with envy... much like all those boys who have gone to fuck in motel rooms or in the back seats of Chevys with the woman's pants hanging from the ankle because you never know, silly boy, when you're gonna have to pull trou and make a quick getaway, little kids being the worst of the lot...but better than the kids who piss from the balcony
of theatres in Dublin on the smooching couples in the stalls...you can explain away hickeys and lipstick but the smell of urine on your coat as usual, just back from the cleaners, a once a year activity.
Talking about Dublin as if you couldn't tell...and John Green drank for a time in O'Dwyer’s, there on the corner of Leeson Street and The Green and moved across the street to another pub because he was now playing Gaelic football and was said to be quite good at it and even his lessons in the Irish language were said to be going good... going WELL,dummy! if you had done more than just buy the Irish grammar book and IRISH MADE EASY...you wouldn't feel so left out, so cut off from those articles in THE IRISH TIMES (this article was transmitted in Irish and translated here in the Dublin office into English)...I don't know my grandfather's name....The McGonigle grandfather, the one who came over from Ireland, shipped over since he came as a young teenager to work...sent out to America, he was, the whole world for
his asking...and with about as much luck as the coloured guy standing down in front of the gated supermarket on Second Avenue looking up:
IT TAKES THREE DAYS TO GET TO THE MOON
but I ain't looking for the moon or even an acre of land just to bring into this room either of the Green(e) boys and I am not about to forget I did go to see Julian Green in Paris since he was the only American in the French Academy and I had liked his diary and... this gets too far from the point which is a way of saying I have gone too far from The South and am stuck with no, I am not stuck with,rather growing old with: I had been able to talk with Johnny Greene in New York about my year in The South at Hollins College and that lead to thinking that John Green in Dublin had a father who was something in the military and was living in Arlington or one of those other military suburbs around Washington--- quick change of gears--- once knew a girl now a woman at Beloit College and this is around 1964 or 65 or maybe even as late as 65 or 66 because I know I was living in North Hall and her father was a pilot for the Strategic Air Command flying around and around in circles over North Dakota... I am not about to tell you about the daughter of the Senator from North Dakota...leave it, leave it alone, please, leave it alone...her Dad was flying, she said, as we lay upon the made-up bed, around and around...the linen had just been changed for the week, waiting--- that was why it was just made up--- for the command. . .I saw no point in making up a bed, Mom always made up the beds, for well, I was also going to excuse myself for talking about this girl, but back then she was knowing this other guy, so anyway, we were lying on top of the made-up bed, the lights were out we could hear kids pass on the walk in front of the window. . . our hands were touching, warm, hot, damp, flesh, wet, don't worry no clothing is gonna come off, finger inserted under buttoned shirt, behind belted pants: it was all so uncomfortable but neither of us could just take our clothes off and jump into bed then there is a big gap looking back that is and she has gone off to Chicago with this guy and he bought her a ring in Woolworth's and they said to everybody that they had gone to Chicago and gotten engaged and had stayed at this nice hotel and then went to the museum and David wanted to look at the Crucifixion scenes, wanting to see how exact medically they were... she disappears from the story and David years later will be the one who fills out a statement saying he will guarantee Lilia's stay in the USA since he had a job and bank account and I didn’t have either, in the USA, us living in Dublin, not having seen John Green in some time
so this does tie in Hollins College and you thought I was just on a long-winded round about as a way to getting you no-where-fast. . .Johnny Greene, last I heard was back Down South on the masthead of INQUIRY (at the final typing he is off it) though I had always thought he was of some sect on The Left. . . could have been the distortion of the drink--- and as I am typing this again in something called the present--- at this moment--- Johnny Greene died of AIDS after writing something about it in PEOPLE---
but back: and my waiting to play Kit Marlowe in the back of The Gold Rail, George enters from the sun, with knife in eye socket, on the other hand, maybe, we were agreeing all along and just didn't know it about what how can I say at such a late date was it the other afternoon at Frank's Roadhouse, down the road from Hollins, I was sitting there with John Currier and Mike Mayo, I was telling George as I was raking his leaves, drinking a small Rolling Rock, this black guy, or coloured guy or negro shuffled himself into the bar through the back door. These other guys sitting on the other side see him when he finally gets himself up to the bar and yell, Hey, Rastos you got to have some money if you wants a beer. I have it, he shouts back and starts to go through his coat and eventually pulls out this woman's purse. One of the guys sees it and yells, You fool around with those women, you're gonna get knots all over your head. There's a pause. Theys don't call them knots no more, Rastos says, They call them no-you-donts.
those panties… remember those panties? hanging on the ankle of that woman will just have to wait for another time. awful trying to find your life in the alumni
magazine? or looking up biographies of writers known just to remember which ones are the enemy bang down the memory bank to Trieste and getting off the train and the rush to find the canal that gave the name of Little Venice to Trieste and couldn't find the house where Mr. Joyce lived but anyway George had written about this city last one visited before heading off to Sofia and the meeting with Lilia on Botev Boulevard which will though George never asked Lilia if she had been to Trieste maybe he wasn't interested in comparing geography lessons though he did know where Bulgaria was beyond saying it was east of the statue for the wreath for Garibaldi which is better than most Americans who I tell calmly: Bulgaria is north of Greece, east of Yugoslavia, somewhat south of Hungary and a little to the west of Romania all more or less; of course north of Turkey less more or less because Frank's Roadhouse ain't there anymore: soft music in the cocktail lounge, please, getting in ten frames of bowling before church, heavy on the whiskey, Joe, light on the ginger, while just down from the guy who is musing on the days of the journey to the moon are more guys standing in front of the liquor store who have already said as I pass
"I am tired off"
"Yes, I am tired off, too"
"Is this Nighttrain?"
"No, this is the real Thunderbird."
"Better watch out for them birds, they’ll crap all over your head.”
Which is where this should end, but BUT I didn't work in the fact, are you chewing your cabbage twice could be because when I lived around the corner from The West End where I am still standing with George, I had a Japanese room-mate who told me Japanese Moms are always telling their little children to chew each grain of the rice three times to get all the flavor: from on the first chew, nothing, to the second which is sour to the third which is sweet and how many times have I used George's line of poetry: when the heart breaks it doesn't make a sound, there it goes again. me back there in the Rialto Theatre in Patchogue watching what I later found out to be a movie written by George, THE PLAYGROUND, that clapboard house near the canals in Los Angeles how important those canals in Trieste, that canal in Trieste which is another story of waking up in the morning light not yet in the sky with a South African woman in a beach house and this Swedish guy still had a bottle of wine so we three go walking along the coast road looking for the boat to Pula... having turend from the direction of Miramar, where the widow of Maximillian...
So, still in The West End George Garrett takes a sip of that drink ice has melted a bit there was this guy from Patchogue who was telling a story and the way he was telling the story was another way of describing the guy he was telling the story to and I guess about
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Friday, December 31, 2010
TINY GASPS OF HOPE
Walking around in the snow in the East Village on the last day of the year and soon into the next there are the constants of this time of the year: the lemming-like pursuit of crap and a discussion of crap… and we all know what I am writing about and knowing they and their fans do not care and they sit with the smug confidence that as long as you spell the name right even the most vicious criticism only adds to the ever growing mountain of shit that are as Edward Dahlberg might say: I have heard of him and that is sufficient… another one our well known bad writers…
On the other hand or going into a pleasant room:
58
THE H.D. BOOK by Robert Duncan. University of California Press. Written over many years and now published long after his death: was it so long ago, 1988?, though he was part of the background at least for me since 1962 or 63 or 64 when reading the Donald Allen anthology of the real poets, because actually alive unlike the academics who seem to sadly, have long lives and are still tormenting us by their presence… W.S. Merwin… comes to mind and Galway Kinnell and Philip Levine… Mark Strand… think of their wretched lives, teaching young people to be poets… the sheer fakery of it all and not an honest line in any poem of theirs--- these so-called teacher poets--- even by accident because always paying homage to their tenured futility they dared not not write, dared not give up their sinecures that dulled their pencils…
THE H.D. BOOK in honor of Hilda Doolittle and we are back in the world of Pound and Eliot and Williams… a book to be read or entered at any page and every sentence gives rise to thought as in: “The heart of the poem (The Waste Land) was the unbearable mixing of things.” But against his wishes, “The fame of the poet (Eliot) itself had triumphed over the pain of the poem. Eliot, was not in the outcome stricken but celebrated.”
A book to read slowly, a page a day. A sentence a day, sometimes…
I doubt there will be a better book written about poetry when looking back to 2010 or even looking forward to 2011…
And two perfect sentences from Duncan: “As I write now, I am in the waiting room again. I do not see any more than my eyes saw.”
62
ZONE by MATHIAS ENARD. Open Letter. 517 pages as a man sits on a train going from Milano to Rome, carrying documents and memories of the obscure and familiar horrors of the last century. Each page sent me to look for a further book, to look up some historic event I was unfamiliar with: the war in Morocco in the 1920s for instance or photographers in the Nazi camps both guards and prisoners… Atilla Josef, the Hungarian poet, who lay down on the tracks to be cut in half or the detail about Palestinian suicide bombers who went the belt of explosives went off propelled the head high into the sky… the 517 pages of basically one sentence broken into discrete bits: never for a moment does the reader lose his or her place since we never forget we are on a train inside the voice of an appealing narrator who sent me to…
75
DRIFTING CITIES by STRATIS TSIRKAS, published by Knopf in 1974…703 pages… starting in wartime Jerusalem.. Refugees…echoes of Durrell, again an imagined because real history of the times that shaped me and you: out of Alexandria.. and yet why is this not in paper and easy to find?
Well translated by Kay Cicellis who is till translating Greek books for Dalkey Archive and who even published a novel with Grove Press years ago… the sureness the grandeur of the DRIFTING CITIES.. like I THE SUPREME by Roa Bastos… back when Knopf could publish such books…
Okay, so the opening sentences: “A rustle, a rippling springtime effervescence came in from the window with the pine-scented breeze. And a voice from another age spoke of the perfume of a golden lily unfolding over the river.”
Today an editor would decide that the word effervescence would have to go as it was unlikely that readers of some of the well known bad writers would not know the word or “be comfortable” encountering such a word in the first line of a novel.
77
Alexandria was not mentioned without the purpose of celebrating the publication of SELECTED PROSE WORKS by C.P. CAVAFY by the University of Michigan Press.
Cavafy is probably the only Greek poet anyone reads, really in English with a few who know the work of GEORGE SEFERIS. And there is nothing really terrible about that. There is a Greek guy who sacrificed his talent on the altar of communism and enjoyed a little fame but again there is Cavafy and Seferis but this is a moment for Cavafy and the revelation of his prose: “On the Poet C.P. Cavafy,” (An anonymous piece): “Rare poets like Cavafy will thus secure a primary position in a world that thinks far more than does the world of today.”
Written in 1930… how he flatters us, how he will be mistaken… the purity of whim is never to be over-looked when talking about writers and about the works that endure…
It is probably true that Philip Roth will disappear within ten years of his death and the fact that the Library of America is publishing his collected work before he is dead is my evidence for this assertion. He is dead.
But Cavafy lives on: On Saint Simeon the Stylite : “This great, this wonderful saint is surely an object to be singled out in ecclesiastical history for admiration and study. He had been perhaps, the only man who has dared to be really alone.”
Not by accident is SIMON OF THE DESERT possibly the best film by Luis Bunuel.. well, along with The MILKY WAY.
81
PANORAMA by H.G. Adler. Random House. I have only dipped into this novel… Happily as Nabokov might have remarked I have noticed that it is not a play in disguise. There are no long reported conversations.
Mentioned by W.G. Sebald, Adler has slowly begun to make his appearance in English. Of course his great work on the Nazi camp THERESIENSTADT 1941-1945 is not in English while so much… and it seems that this is his great claim upon out attention…
PANORAMA is an attempt to re-create a childhood; it tries to argue with the opening pages of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man… and that is a worthy ambition.
I will report back on this book as I will on his THE JOURNEY and I feel guilt in not having read THE JOURNEY because how could I have avoids a book that Veza Canetti writes is, “too beautiful for words and too sad.”
83
Dalkey Archive has three books both published and to be published. GOING TO PATCHOGUE by THOMAS MCGONIGLE.
I have established a group on Facebook called Lord Patchogue and people are invited to join…
while that has something to do with GOING TO PATCHOGUE the re-appearance of this book is incredibly sad for me. It came out 18 years ago.
I have written many other books but they have not been seen into print and that will include the one I am working on now EXIT IS FINAL… and just before that I wrote NOTHING DOING…
Both Richard Seaver and Daniel Halpern confessed their powerlessness to publish the more recent books, even Dalkey Archive joined in this group confession and before that there was Sam Vaughan and Alice Quinn and a guy at Norton whose name I have forgotten… they invited my consolation and understanding and how shabby their deaths will be and have been…
GOING TO PATCHOGUE is available but officially from Borders it comes out in April though Amazon and Barnes and Noble have it…
YES, those other Dalkey books: ISLE OF DREAMS by KEIZO HINO made me get a map of Tokyo. That is how good it is. In the same way that one gets a map of Dublin when taking up ULYSSES: a man wants something, but what does he want?:
“He thought of nothing in particular, nor did he reminisce.”
“Though covered with dirt, none of this refuse, including tools and other bits of clothing, appeared the least decayed. Indeed, there was something starkly vivid about it. He was startled to find kindled in him a feeling bordering on the sexual, something which, since the death of his wife, he had thought irrelevant to him.”
AND in April, the cruelest month as Mr Eliot wrote DALKEY ARCHIVE will bring out: SUICIDE by EDOUARD LEVE. A novel about the suicide of a friend of the author. A week after handing in the manuscript the author killed himself. Told in the second person pronoun, that insinuating manner, that refutation of fiction in the death of the actual author, how fortunate for the reader to have a distanced suicide note, a gift to the funeral museum in Vienna, with the author’s death no need to ask if he knew what he was writing about. I do hope Dalkey Archive will publish his four books of writing and…
84
I didn’t write about GOGOL’S ARTISTRY by ANDREI BELY, heroically translated by CHRISTOPHER COLBATH and published by Northwestern University Press. It is the necessary compliment to Nabokov’s little book on Gogol. What I have most liked about the book is Bely’s actual discussion of the sentences of Gogol, right down to diagramming them so as to show how Gogol created his fiction.
I wish there were more books like this. I wish there was one written on Faulkner like this but I can’t imagine any major writer doing this in the United States of this moment.
Bely of course is the author of ST. PETERSBURG, the major Russian novel of the 20th Century, right there with Bulgakov’s THE MASTER AND MARGARITA…. can anyone imagine a so-called famous contemporary American writer taking the time to write such a book?
Case rested for the unimportance of you can name them…
(However, Tom Whalen who sadly happily, I can’t make up my mind but surely sadly, almost totally unknown has taken up the task and has written a very fine book on Russell H. Greenan… Dalkey will be bringing that out in the Spring.)
INTENTIONS INTENTIONS
I am going to read THREE DAYS BEFORE THE SHOOTING by RALPH ELLISON. Since Ellison wrote the best novel by a man who happened to be Black or as he preferred Negro--- though I do think LORD OF DARK PLACES by HAL BENNETT gives him the only real competition in that rather narrow marketing niche… it can’t be avoided, but it is no accident that the schools never urge students to read INVISABLE MAN because the quality of that novel is simply too intimidating by comparison to the crap they shove down students throats in the interests of diversity… and reading THREE DAYS BEFORE THE SHOOTING allows me to live again in the moment of hearing Ellison read from an early version of this book at Hollins College In the summer of 1970…
And to be a better reader of ORANGES AND SNOW by MILAN DJORDJEVIC. Translated by Charles Simic. Princeton University Press:
My sweet and formless,
Bloodless and colorless,
Best-loved Nothing,
With what eyes shall I look at you
To see you truly
and remember your face forever.
---or---
tonight someone will fuck someone
while statesmen negotiate
untie the knots on neckties long underwear
and tense international situations
while secretly they scratch their balls under the table
---or----
“Garlic”
Or are you the edible miracle that couples
foolishness and depth, like penis and vagina,
in the midst of our electronic Paradise?
On the other hand or going into a pleasant room:
58
THE H.D. BOOK by Robert Duncan. University of California Press. Written over many years and now published long after his death: was it so long ago, 1988?, though he was part of the background at least for me since 1962 or 63 or 64 when reading the Donald Allen anthology of the real poets, because actually alive unlike the academics who seem to sadly, have long lives and are still tormenting us by their presence… W.S. Merwin… comes to mind and Galway Kinnell and Philip Levine… Mark Strand… think of their wretched lives, teaching young people to be poets… the sheer fakery of it all and not an honest line in any poem of theirs--- these so-called teacher poets--- even by accident because always paying homage to their tenured futility they dared not not write, dared not give up their sinecures that dulled their pencils…
THE H.D. BOOK in honor of Hilda Doolittle and we are back in the world of Pound and Eliot and Williams… a book to be read or entered at any page and every sentence gives rise to thought as in: “The heart of the poem (The Waste Land) was the unbearable mixing of things.” But against his wishes, “The fame of the poet (Eliot) itself had triumphed over the pain of the poem. Eliot, was not in the outcome stricken but celebrated.”
A book to read slowly, a page a day. A sentence a day, sometimes…
I doubt there will be a better book written about poetry when looking back to 2010 or even looking forward to 2011…
And two perfect sentences from Duncan: “As I write now, I am in the waiting room again. I do not see any more than my eyes saw.”
62
ZONE by MATHIAS ENARD. Open Letter. 517 pages as a man sits on a train going from Milano to Rome, carrying documents and memories of the obscure and familiar horrors of the last century. Each page sent me to look for a further book, to look up some historic event I was unfamiliar with: the war in Morocco in the 1920s for instance or photographers in the Nazi camps both guards and prisoners… Atilla Josef, the Hungarian poet, who lay down on the tracks to be cut in half or the detail about Palestinian suicide bombers who went the belt of explosives went off propelled the head high into the sky… the 517 pages of basically one sentence broken into discrete bits: never for a moment does the reader lose his or her place since we never forget we are on a train inside the voice of an appealing narrator who sent me to…
75
DRIFTING CITIES by STRATIS TSIRKAS, published by Knopf in 1974…703 pages… starting in wartime Jerusalem.. Refugees…echoes of Durrell, again an imagined because real history of the times that shaped me and you: out of Alexandria.. and yet why is this not in paper and easy to find?
Well translated by Kay Cicellis who is till translating Greek books for Dalkey Archive and who even published a novel with Grove Press years ago… the sureness the grandeur of the DRIFTING CITIES.. like I THE SUPREME by Roa Bastos… back when Knopf could publish such books…
Okay, so the opening sentences: “A rustle, a rippling springtime effervescence came in from the window with the pine-scented breeze. And a voice from another age spoke of the perfume of a golden lily unfolding over the river.”
Today an editor would decide that the word effervescence would have to go as it was unlikely that readers of some of the well known bad writers would not know the word or “be comfortable” encountering such a word in the first line of a novel.
77
Alexandria was not mentioned without the purpose of celebrating the publication of SELECTED PROSE WORKS by C.P. CAVAFY by the University of Michigan Press.
Cavafy is probably the only Greek poet anyone reads, really in English with a few who know the work of GEORGE SEFERIS. And there is nothing really terrible about that. There is a Greek guy who sacrificed his talent on the altar of communism and enjoyed a little fame but again there is Cavafy and Seferis but this is a moment for Cavafy and the revelation of his prose: “On the Poet C.P. Cavafy,” (An anonymous piece): “Rare poets like Cavafy will thus secure a primary position in a world that thinks far more than does the world of today.”
Written in 1930… how he flatters us, how he will be mistaken… the purity of whim is never to be over-looked when talking about writers and about the works that endure…
It is probably true that Philip Roth will disappear within ten years of his death and the fact that the Library of America is publishing his collected work before he is dead is my evidence for this assertion. He is dead.
But Cavafy lives on: On Saint Simeon the Stylite : “This great, this wonderful saint is surely an object to be singled out in ecclesiastical history for admiration and study. He had been perhaps, the only man who has dared to be really alone.”
Not by accident is SIMON OF THE DESERT possibly the best film by Luis Bunuel.. well, along with The MILKY WAY.
81
PANORAMA by H.G. Adler. Random House. I have only dipped into this novel… Happily as Nabokov might have remarked I have noticed that it is not a play in disguise. There are no long reported conversations.
Mentioned by W.G. Sebald, Adler has slowly begun to make his appearance in English. Of course his great work on the Nazi camp THERESIENSTADT 1941-1945 is not in English while so much… and it seems that this is his great claim upon out attention…
PANORAMA is an attempt to re-create a childhood; it tries to argue with the opening pages of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man… and that is a worthy ambition.
I will report back on this book as I will on his THE JOURNEY and I feel guilt in not having read THE JOURNEY because how could I have avoids a book that Veza Canetti writes is, “too beautiful for words and too sad.”
83
Dalkey Archive has three books both published and to be published. GOING TO PATCHOGUE by THOMAS MCGONIGLE.
I have established a group on Facebook called Lord Patchogue and people are invited to join…
while that has something to do with GOING TO PATCHOGUE the re-appearance of this book is incredibly sad for me. It came out 18 years ago.
I have written many other books but they have not been seen into print and that will include the one I am working on now EXIT IS FINAL… and just before that I wrote NOTHING DOING…
Both Richard Seaver and Daniel Halpern confessed their powerlessness to publish the more recent books, even Dalkey Archive joined in this group confession and before that there was Sam Vaughan and Alice Quinn and a guy at Norton whose name I have forgotten… they invited my consolation and understanding and how shabby their deaths will be and have been…
GOING TO PATCHOGUE is available but officially from Borders it comes out in April though Amazon and Barnes and Noble have it…
YES, those other Dalkey books: ISLE OF DREAMS by KEIZO HINO made me get a map of Tokyo. That is how good it is. In the same way that one gets a map of Dublin when taking up ULYSSES: a man wants something, but what does he want?:
“He thought of nothing in particular, nor did he reminisce.”
“Though covered with dirt, none of this refuse, including tools and other bits of clothing, appeared the least decayed. Indeed, there was something starkly vivid about it. He was startled to find kindled in him a feeling bordering on the sexual, something which, since the death of his wife, he had thought irrelevant to him.”
AND in April, the cruelest month as Mr Eliot wrote DALKEY ARCHIVE will bring out: SUICIDE by EDOUARD LEVE. A novel about the suicide of a friend of the author. A week after handing in the manuscript the author killed himself. Told in the second person pronoun, that insinuating manner, that refutation of fiction in the death of the actual author, how fortunate for the reader to have a distanced suicide note, a gift to the funeral museum in Vienna, with the author’s death no need to ask if he knew what he was writing about. I do hope Dalkey Archive will publish his four books of writing and…
84
I didn’t write about GOGOL’S ARTISTRY by ANDREI BELY, heroically translated by CHRISTOPHER COLBATH and published by Northwestern University Press. It is the necessary compliment to Nabokov’s little book on Gogol. What I have most liked about the book is Bely’s actual discussion of the sentences of Gogol, right down to diagramming them so as to show how Gogol created his fiction.
I wish there were more books like this. I wish there was one written on Faulkner like this but I can’t imagine any major writer doing this in the United States of this moment.
Bely of course is the author of ST. PETERSBURG, the major Russian novel of the 20th Century, right there with Bulgakov’s THE MASTER AND MARGARITA…. can anyone imagine a so-called famous contemporary American writer taking the time to write such a book?
Case rested for the unimportance of you can name them…
(However, Tom Whalen who sadly happily, I can’t make up my mind but surely sadly, almost totally unknown has taken up the task and has written a very fine book on Russell H. Greenan… Dalkey will be bringing that out in the Spring.)
INTENTIONS INTENTIONS
I am going to read THREE DAYS BEFORE THE SHOOTING by RALPH ELLISON. Since Ellison wrote the best novel by a man who happened to be Black or as he preferred Negro--- though I do think LORD OF DARK PLACES by HAL BENNETT gives him the only real competition in that rather narrow marketing niche… it can’t be avoided, but it is no accident that the schools never urge students to read INVISABLE MAN because the quality of that novel is simply too intimidating by comparison to the crap they shove down students throats in the interests of diversity… and reading THREE DAYS BEFORE THE SHOOTING allows me to live again in the moment of hearing Ellison read from an early version of this book at Hollins College In the summer of 1970…
And to be a better reader of ORANGES AND SNOW by MILAN DJORDJEVIC. Translated by Charles Simic. Princeton University Press:
My sweet and formless,
Bloodless and colorless,
Best-loved Nothing,
With what eyes shall I look at you
To see you truly
and remember your face forever.
---or---
tonight someone will fuck someone
while statesmen negotiate
untie the knots on neckties long underwear
and tense international situations
while secretly they scratch their balls under the table
---or----
“Garlic”
Or are you the edible miracle that couples
foolishness and depth, like penis and vagina,
in the midst of our electronic Paradise?
Friday, December 24, 2010
COALS FOR A STOCKING: a dash of the dreary
I ran into Sam who lives two doors away in a big loft above Arlo and Esme, a bar, that evolved into a young people’s bar where kids go to get drunk here on East First Street.
Sam teaches a how to course in porn writing for women and others at the New School and a poetry writing class at NYU. He also reviews books and as a result gets piles of the stuff. I wish I got as many as he does, but he has broader interests than I do.
He was coming back from The Strand Bookstore where he has been to sell review copies. They don’t buy everything the way they used to he was telling me. Years ago they bought everything and would give you are a quarter on the dollar but not anymore. The give no where near that and now are picky.
Sam showed me the books they didn’t want. He was saying this is the shit that publishers are now publishing and it is such shit that even the Strand can’t get rid of it. And if they can’t get rid of it no one can.
Here is a list of “shit that no one wants” according to The Strand Bookstore, today 24 December 2010.
WALKING PAPERS. Poems. Thomas Lynch, WW Norton. I guess that is understandable. Lynch wrote one good book of poems and then discovered his Irish heritage and sunk into the bog and got buried which is an easy irony since he is an undertaker and wrote some prose about it, but never about the actual draining, cutting, pasting…
UNDIVIDED SELF. Selected Stories by Will Self. Bloomsbury. Complete with an introduction by Ricky Moody. The English were desperate for a writer they could promote as an antidote to some real writers, like William Burroughs, Hunter Thompson… you get the picture… created by back scratching English hacks and by their Anglophile American cousins, so Self is yesterday’s wild man with a dash of the Jewish thrown in for good measure…
SIGN OF LIFE. Hilary Williams. A Story of family, tragedy, music, and healing. DaCapo. Can any rational person keep a straight face reading the sub-title? In the footsteps of her grandfather, father… this gives nepotism a bad name… Old Hank Williams most have twirled so much in the grave there can’t be much left of him now with what came after him in the family.
REASONS TO KILL. Why Americans Choose War. Richard E. Rubenstein. “Undeniably important,” Publishers Weekly.
TRESSPASS. Rose Tremain. A novel. W.W. Norton. Winner of the Orange Prize. As if anyone knows what that means. Another dreary English novel American publishers decide American ought to read but obviously American still have some sense…
THE GREAT FIRE OF ROME. Stephen Dando-Collins. DaCapo. A prize winning Australian author living in Tasmania who according to the notes is basically paraphrasing, Tacitus and Suetonius…
And maybe the saddest book because it is so typical of what passes as taste and awareness of the world and literature or who knows what: TAKE ME HOME. Brian Leung. A novel. Harper. A third book. “Award winning…takes his reader to the desolate and wild terrain of the nascent Wyoming territory… strong willed young woman…the Chinese man she dares to love… LEUNG who is half Chinese…” An associate professor of creative writing.
Sam teaches a how to course in porn writing for women and others at the New School and a poetry writing class at NYU. He also reviews books and as a result gets piles of the stuff. I wish I got as many as he does, but he has broader interests than I do.
He was coming back from The Strand Bookstore where he has been to sell review copies. They don’t buy everything the way they used to he was telling me. Years ago they bought everything and would give you are a quarter on the dollar but not anymore. The give no where near that and now are picky.
Sam showed me the books they didn’t want. He was saying this is the shit that publishers are now publishing and it is such shit that even the Strand can’t get rid of it. And if they can’t get rid of it no one can.
Here is a list of “shit that no one wants” according to The Strand Bookstore, today 24 December 2010.
WALKING PAPERS. Poems. Thomas Lynch, WW Norton. I guess that is understandable. Lynch wrote one good book of poems and then discovered his Irish heritage and sunk into the bog and got buried which is an easy irony since he is an undertaker and wrote some prose about it, but never about the actual draining, cutting, pasting…
UNDIVIDED SELF. Selected Stories by Will Self. Bloomsbury. Complete with an introduction by Ricky Moody. The English were desperate for a writer they could promote as an antidote to some real writers, like William Burroughs, Hunter Thompson… you get the picture… created by back scratching English hacks and by their Anglophile American cousins, so Self is yesterday’s wild man with a dash of the Jewish thrown in for good measure…
SIGN OF LIFE. Hilary Williams. A Story of family, tragedy, music, and healing. DaCapo. Can any rational person keep a straight face reading the sub-title? In the footsteps of her grandfather, father… this gives nepotism a bad name… Old Hank Williams most have twirled so much in the grave there can’t be much left of him now with what came after him in the family.
REASONS TO KILL. Why Americans Choose War. Richard E. Rubenstein. “Undeniably important,” Publishers Weekly.
TRESSPASS. Rose Tremain. A novel. W.W. Norton. Winner of the Orange Prize. As if anyone knows what that means. Another dreary English novel American publishers decide American ought to read but obviously American still have some sense…
THE GREAT FIRE OF ROME. Stephen Dando-Collins. DaCapo. A prize winning Australian author living in Tasmania who according to the notes is basically paraphrasing, Tacitus and Suetonius…
And maybe the saddest book because it is so typical of what passes as taste and awareness of the world and literature or who knows what: TAKE ME HOME. Brian Leung. A novel. Harper. A third book. “Award winning…takes his reader to the desolate and wild terrain of the nascent Wyoming territory… strong willed young woman…the Chinese man she dares to love… LEUNG who is half Chinese…” An associate professor of creative writing.
Friday, November 26, 2010
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.”
----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.”
Saturday, October 30, 2010
DALKEY ARCHIVE'S GLORIOUS SPRING LIST: Going to Patchogue to Appear
8
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.
24
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.
35
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…
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.
24
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.
35
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…
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
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.
68
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.
74
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.
73
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.
80
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
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.
68
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.
74
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.
73
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.
80
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
Friday, September 24, 2010
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.
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.
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