FROM HERE TO HERE: aspects of a self-portrait

Irish Writers Online asked for a link in which I can write something of how one got from there to here or here to there or there to there or here to here.

1--- In my last year of high school  I saw a blonde girl in the second floor of the school  taking something out of her school locker.  I did not talk to her.  I learned her name: Melinda. I wrote a story set during World War One in which a man dies.  In the second story, from the viewpoint of Melinda, she is waiting for a man who doesn’t come home from war. Years later I discovered that the boy had died on Melinda’s birthday, something I did not know at the time of writing.

2--- I was now a writer when Al Willis published both stories in the student newspaper.

3--- Two books have seen their way into print via Dalkey Archive: THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV and GOING TO PATCHOGUE.

4--- A conversation in Grogan’s Castle Lounge about Ralph Cusack and his novel CADENZA remembered from back many years and called to mind when Gilbert Sorrentino mentioned in an article in The New York Times that he was going to re-read CADENZA that summer.  I wrote to him care of his publisher that I was editing and publishing ADRIFT, the first and still only magazine which announced itself as ADRIFT    WRITINGS: IRISH, IRISH AMERICAN AND.  He suggested I get in touch with John O’Brien who was starting the Review of Contemporary Fiction with an issue devoted to Sorrentino’s  work…  over the years I wrote for the review and discussed the first lists of what would become DALKEY ARCHIVE  which was founded to reprint books that were out of print but still of great value starting with CADENZA in that first list… and from there to original books of which THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV was one of the first and then GOING TO PATCHOGUE appeared a few years later and even went to a second printing, being reviewed across the country. 

4--- ADRIFT   WRITINGS: IRISH, IRISH AMERICAN AND had the ambition and the realized it of publishing all the major writers who happened to identify themselves in some way as Irish, centered upon Francis Stuart and James Liddy, both of whom remain as constant though shaded centers of what came after Joyce and Beckett.  I had poems from both Thomas Kinsella and John Montague that arrived too late.  Aidan Higgins and Desmond Hogan were beyond my reach.   Francis Stuart identified two essential points for readers and writers: opposition to the soft center of Irish writing, the knitting, that seems to have expanded beyond his worst forebodings and the writer, as did Stuart going to Berlin in 1939, has the duty to seek out the place of the greatest moral ambiguity.  Liddy in his long productive years created  a body of visionary poetry unequaled by any other Irish poet, rooted in the felt experience of the real world, twisted by grace and a love of boy angels, he liberated more space for individual freedom than all the politicians and revolutionaries in Ireland’s  splattered history

5--- THE CORPSE DREAM OF N.PETKOV has been reviewed by Andrei Codrescu in The New York Times with glowing knowledgeable praise.  I discovered that the so-called major publishers were happy for me and agents were also but as one honestly said, I can’t eat lunch off of you and that is the only thing that matters… At that time the agent was eating off of Paul Auster.

5---  While I was writing GOING TO PATCHOGUE I was also writing ST.PATRICK’S DAY, Dublin 1974 and pieces of it appeared in The Gorey Detail and in the Review of Contemporary Fiction.  The manuscript was marked up for typesetting by Steve Moore who was then the second in command at Dalkey Archive but it did not appear in print.  For some reason and it was never really clear in spite  of the evidence of this marked up manuscript why John O’Brien  turned against publishing the book, but that is what happened.  Simple as that.  We have written back and forth but as is said something happened and now it is beyond… even Steve Moore confirmed these details: something…

5--- ST PATRICK’S DAY, Dublin 1974 is just that:  a walking around on that day beginning in a room in The Russell Hotel with a man looking down at the end or the beginning of the parade… he walks out to the pubs and walks through all the years of his life in Dublin beginning, 1964, in a little club behind a chip shop diagonal to the hotel ... with a long excursion to Bulgaria… he goes to the memorial reading for Patrick Kavanagh where John Jordan attempts to read a memorial address… and on to life in the Corn Exchange Building and on to … the first long book about actually being in Dublin since ULYSSES. 

5--- Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill was a great champion of ST PATRICK’S DAY Dublin, 1974 offering  to write an introduction in addition to the blurb she wrote but the gang at Lilliput rejected it, out of hand since I was not prepared to pay them to publish it  (one of the secrets of then publishing in Ireland) (Alice Quinn lost the manuscript at Alfred A. Knopf: a sweet woman who went on to being poetry editor of The NEW YORKER)…so the book lingers on and on…

6--- More books… FORGET THE FUTURE  another travel book.. summer in England, 1990  the hottest summer on record.. war getting ready to happen in Kuwait… the life of James Thomson BV...the how to write about a dead poet, THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT, without the fakery of re-creation yet at the same  time entering his head… a long section when the drunken Thomson assaults the blind poet Marston appeared in BOMB  thanks to David Rattray… and another section in another magazine… but again…  there was a voyage midst the book to Bulgaria during the time of the City of Truth… but the narrator is going a little mad

7--- FRIDAY SATURDAY SUNDAY With a Little Bit of Monday.. in Dublin 1999, a man goes over from London to die again in Dublin, he thinks… visiting with the Irish poet N Ni… visiting with Barbara… “A Painful Case”…  who knew him in Dublin in 1964.. but also a memorial to a marriage sunk by a wife who decided her feeling had changed, that she wanted to grow spiritually and she was now comparing her husband and the soon to be former husband to the UPS driver…  the husband’s life with the young children... remembered what had been in the now increasingly wealthy streets of Dublin.. marked by imagined tombs for all the dead of years gone by

8--- LOSS OF DIGNITY… the falling in love.. there has to be a book to be published posthumously... and this is it… not a nice book, a book about lust, nastiness, meanness… within the narrator’s mind

9--- now to:  JUST LIKE THAT A Book From the So-called 60s: A Beginning and  THE END.. a university student over from Dublin, Spring 1965, is in bed with another man who asks in Leipzig in the DDR, Are you Jewish?…  while traveling in the DDR.. all the themes of the so-called 60s are revealed at their beginnings: conflicted  sexual experimentation, intoxication,  the war in Vietnam HANDS OFF VIETNAM... the division of the world… paranoia reflected in the shiny stocks of the MK47s, while the second half of the book is about how those 60s ended on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the early 70s, presided over by the talk of Anthony Burgess, imitations  of Charles Manson,  the dead end of Sullivanian sex and the death of the Father and the birth of the man as an adult… both the ending and the beginning sections were published by Barbara Probst Solomon in THE READING ROOM… but as is the fate of most writings in little magazines…

10--- Richard Seaver, Daniel Halpern, , FSG, Knopf,  WW Norton, Dalkey Archive decided  they couldn’t afford to do  JUST LIKE THAT…  the vast sums of money… or maybe they just didn’t like it… though they regretted their decisions and said they admired the prose and the ambition

11--- NOTHING DOING. A man has fallen in love with the Arizona desert and goes looking for a place to be buried… he goes with the stories.. .of a Bulgarian exiled psychoanalyst arriving in the US with only a suitcase of ties, with a Marine veteran who becomes a priest and is accused of molesting boys, yet…there is the doubt.. and American man wakes up in Paris to find his wife saying, I am going to kill our son and ruin your life…and an old man in Douglas, Arizona  teases out the last bits of his life after leaving  New York for the Gadsden Hotel…

12---NOTHING DOING could be seen as a long commentary on Samuel Beckett’s answer to John Montague’s question toward the end of Beckett’s life:

And the arrangements?

In the ground.

1313--- At the moment , being written:  EXIT IS FINAL.. a journey around Bulgaria and why the narrator wants to be living in Strashiza, since it is as beautiful  as Venice or any other obvious place you might mention… the book was to have gone to Estonia but that seems unlikely because in Bulgaria the narrator comes upon the remains of forgotten children who might have been…

131313--- Three other books:    JUST ENOUGH, strangers on the train starting in the 55 Bar on Christopher Street in NYC to a death at the feet of a statue of the Sacred Heart at Bleecker and Bowery.

                                                       THE PLASTIC SLAUGHTERHOUSE begun in Sofia in the winter of 1967/68 and finished in Normandy at Easter of 1968.

                                                                EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS a long document of my life as foot messenger for almost 25 years in New York City, all in lieu of those portraits of Abe Lincoln.

14--- I have also written introductions to AVARICE HOUSE BY Julien Green, to ANATHEMAS AND ADMIRATIONS by  E.M. CIORAN  published by Quartet in London    and an afterword to SEASON AT COOLE by Michael Stephens published by Dalkey Archive.

  

15--- I have written for The Guardian, for Newsday, for the Washingto  Post, the Chicago Tribune the Los Angeles Times…  There is a good article on comparing Graceland and Rowan Oak.  There is a disturbing profile of Allen Ginsberg…

1515---  THE VILLAGE VOICE in New York City when it was a real weekly newspaper published two stories of mine: “Goodbye W.H. Auden” which was about the poet leaving his apartment on St Mark’s Place, about his lice powder, about the fucking that happened afterward.  Appearing on the front page I was famous for a week meeting as a result John Lennon who had to give me money--- prompted by Yoko Ono--- to buy beer for the party which was defending the right of the Hell’s Angels and listening to Ed Sanders who was just back from writing THE FAMILY and discovering that the latest kink among the Hollywood movie stars was fucking actual corpses and that one should never forget that Manson had been one of those pet dogs which turned on his masters.  And a second story “A Son’s Father’s Day” in which I predicted that I would drink myself to death as would my father drink himself to death: dying as he did in a parking lot two years after the article appeared... I have postponed my own fate and won’t be going that way, at least for today

16---I did interview profiles of Julian Green, Nina Berberova, Julian Rios, , Carlos Fuentes, Tatyana Tolstoya… .Cees Nooteboom and Alain Robbe Grillet…also Harold Brodkey and Nelida Pinon 

17--- I have written many many book reviews, usually doing foreign writers, non-Americans… anything to flee the jacket of ethnicity…

18--- in mind I have interviewed Ernst Junger, Francis Stuart, Ezra Pound, Juan Carlos Onetti, Louis Ferdinand Celine, Julien Gracq, Gyorgy Ivanov, Ivan Turgenev, Herman Melville when he had stopped writing novels… Hannah Green, Jean Rhys, Uwe Johnson in his English exile, Thomas Bernhard, Miroslav Krleza, Joseph Roth in that café in Paris, Eugenio Montale in a billiard parlor in Milano and Giuseppi  Berto interrupted us as he came in with George Garrett who was saying this Cuban writer Jose Lezama Lima was asking for you in paradise.

ANOTHER MODEL BOOK SECTION: the best and

Here is an example of what a typical issue of a book section of a newspaper or magazine or whatever you want to call it should contain in this last week of May, 2011.  It is seriously lacking  in books dealing with aspects of the various physical sciences and mathematics.

15- reviews

16- announcements

  17- just  telling

 18- selecting

 19- sheer freedom of it all

 20- but as one man, with no gold in the pocket, so can’t commission a few paragraphs about what I am going to list

21- would people like to follow up with little paragraphs

22- last week before Memorial  Day weekend

(have myself been laid up)

23- Summer reading suggestions are always crap…

24- The cover announcement--- if this was a review section relic---:: two more volumes of Paul Valery’s CAHIERS/NOTEBOOKS ( 4,5) are now available from Peter Lang. 

25- I do guarantee you not a single newspaper, not even the TLS has written about this.  1300 more pages of Valery available in English joining the 1800 pages previously translated.  Of course everyone thinks…who knows if they do or not… but the prose is more accessible than the poetry in many ways  so for those who live within the fortress of American English… skeptical of all translation after reading a very disturbing book by Jordan Stump, THE OTHER BOOK, which while not really in any way an attack on the idea of translation does  fit into my head a very real impediment when thinking about all the translated books I have read or will read… but I have the feeling Stump didn’t intend this though I know it is a real issue  and most people are skeptical of translations…

26- Anyway:  Paul Valery: 

27- Of death and the afterlife.     — Scarcely any though has been given to the afterlife, of a dog or a hen.  It’s dead it’s dead.  And yet the dog was trained, he had a memory and a kind of intelligence and an education. By common consent the dog’s memory is allowed to perish but not a man’s. 

29- The superiority of  man is due to his useless thoughts.  

30-The age of why. Children ask, “why?” So we send them to school which cures them of this instinct and conquers curiosity with boredom.

31-Could have picked a hundred more:  the sections in these volumes: language, bios, mathematics, science, time, homo, history-politics, education, system, philosophy, consciousness, theta…

32- Just that listing shows the range:  why I am reluctant to even contemplate reading an American writer,,,

33-THE OTHER BOOK by Jordan Stump. University of Nebraska Press.  A description of different versions of Raymond Queneau’s  Le Chiendent: a copy, the manuscript, a translation, a critical edition.  The same translation existing with two titles, two publishers but same translator, Barbara Wright… Either:  Witch Grass or The Bark Tree. 

34- Stump discusses a few of the sentences Wright just did not translate.  Nothing seems to have been lost, nothing has been gained.  The sentence just did not get into English and as a result you can begin to see the problems or as the subtitle has it “Bewildermets of Fiction.” 

35- So when I read The Bark Tree and when I am thinking about reading the Witch Grass… am I reading Raymond Queneau’s Le Chiendent?

36- That question becomes the impediment.  One understands why publishers hide even for a writer like W G Sebald the fact that Austerlitz was a translation… was something missing from the dust jacket of the hardcover edition.  If it had said on the dust jacket that would have been a discouragement in the view of the chain stores… and Random House wanted to protect its investment: translation hurts that investment.

37- ROBERTO BOLANO   is at the moment really part of the imagination of Americans who read… I won’t list all the little books that New Directions published that established him and upon which Farrar Straus & Giroux was able to launch his two “big” book THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES and 2066. 

38-Of the New Directions books I like NAZI LITERATURE IN AMERICA the best.  Because of the great success of all of these books by Bolano we are now at toward the end of his works and in no way is there a falling off:  BETWEEN PARENTHESES a large collection of his essays, articles and speeches deserves more than a glancing read:  I was taken by a tiny review of two books, Experience by Martin Amis and My Dark Places by James Ellroy:  “Amis’s book ends with children.  It ends with peace and love.  Ellroy’s book ends with tears and shit.  It ends with a man alone, standing tall.  It ends with blood.  In other words, it never ends.”

39- I wanted very much,  I wanted and hoped  A THOUSAND DARKNESSES by Ruth Franklin was going to be something more than a collection of reprinted revised essays that  had appeared in magazines.  That it is still mostly is rather sad.  I had wanted her to begin the nudging over of Roberto Calasso--- there is a hint that maybe she is of that fine a sensibility--- who sits in my mind as the best literary critic writing today.  The adjective literary seems not to do justice, and the word critic seems to need some sort of adjective and  I cannot tell you why.  Calasso of course ranges across the world and while he has not yet gotten to China I can imagine in his old age, China is his destination. 

40-Ruth Franklin’s book is a collection of essay about books about the Holocaust.  She divides the book into witnesses and Those Who Came after which concludes with an ominous phrase:  The Third Generation.  Of course living in New York City we know all about survivors, then the children of survivors and now we have the grandchildren on and on into…  Individually each essay is fine enough, a book is reviewed the author’s whole career is rehashed and on to the next one.  But that is all the book is.  I wanted for Franklin to have maybe forgotten those original reviews, called up what remained from them in her own memory and now to see what remains… at  the end of the book, she is reduced to writing about a kid’s book by Tony Kushner and Maurice Sendak, BRUNDIBAR.  She ends with one of those near impenetrably vague but probably profound lines by Elie Wiesel, ”’A novel about Auschwitz is not a novel, or else it is not about Auschwitz.”  For a novel about Auschwitz can never only be a novel about Auschwitz: it is a novel also about Armenia, about Siberia, about Cambodia, about Bosnia, about Darfur, “Though I go, I won’t go far…I’ll be back. Love. Brundibar.”    

41- That is a line which either Franklin will soon realize is a line to be embarrassed about or a line to be ruthlessly subjected to thinking and to an understand that such lines have nothing to do with the putting words on a page… and while she writes wonderfully about Imre Kertesz she might have learned that such a line is not worthy of her intelligence.

42- One reason to read criticism to find out more about authors we have liked and in particular about books of theirs that have not been translated.  I have read everything that is available in English by Michel Leiris…

43- I am sure my readers know who Leiris is:  MANHOOD, RULES OF THE GAME… one of those singular French writers who shaped much of one aspect of my mind… JOHN CULBERT in PARALYSES writes about Michel Leiris’s travel book, though that is such an approximation as to be almost insulting, about his report on a ethnographic voyage into Africa called L’Afrique fantome… why no one has translated this book is beyond me.  As well written as any of Leiris’s books I have been assured by those who have read it in French and about a part of the world that is so poorly represented in world literature and in the world’s imagination and to have a book written by a writer like Leiris…  just beyond my simple comprehension…  Culbert makes this book temporarily available as I am reading his description of L’Afrique fantom.

44-University of Nebraska has a very good line of history books devoted to the West of the United States.  THE JOAQUIN BAND by Lori Lee Wilson is no exception to this.  Telling the complex story of an early outlaw band lead by Joaquin Murrieta which operated in California during the time of the Gold Rush leads her deep into the our now much more complex understanding of the West and much of our current understanding of the complexity is due to of course a refined interest in how many different groups, interests etc.  were involved. 

45- Usually the movies are accused of catering to a narrow stereotyped view of the West but as those who have actually seen a great number of Westerns well know this is not the case.  TV might have presented an often simple minded view of the West but the actual movies were always much more interesting and a very good book along those lines was recently out from YALE  HOLLYWOOD WESTERNS AND AMERICAN MYTH by Robert B. Pippin.. and once I got beyond the horde of people he owes debts to and the fact that he seemed to have had every breath of his life subsidized by some academic slush fund or another Pippen has actually written a fine book, fine in that he has actually watched for instance THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE and THE SEARCHERS and saw how in so many ways these are genuine American masterpieces that like each new reading King Lear reveals something new.. and as a result remain ever new…

46- But THE JOAQUIN BAND invites the reader into the heart of the complexity of what actually did happen… she provides, guides but ultimately allows the reader to try to make sense of the material…  the complex story of robbery, murder, hangings, lynchings, prejudice and hatred on all sides… this withholding is a genuine departure from most history writing, where the author is so concerned with sorting out and revealing THE truth that error always has to creep in when the final verdict comes down from the authorial high. 

47- But do not think this is some dry theoretical academic exercise in linguistic torture:    “One of his (newspaper) staff members covered the hangings.   The young fugitive “ spoke a few words asking for forgiveness and confessing that he had committed crimes.”  He died hard because his hands had not been tied lightly due to his wrist wound.  His good hand instinctively yanked free and grabbed the noose. For ten minutes he struggled. Finally the executioner stepped forward and pried his hand out of the noose so that he could expire.

48- THE LAND AT THE END OF THE WORLD  by Antonio Lobo Antunes…   W.W. NORTON is finally making available in a newly translated version and one only has to compare the new version to the one published so confidently many years ago by Random House as being shocking, revelatory of the terrible wars in the Portuguese colonies in Africa…  modeled  I am sure on Albert Camus’ THE FALL, a man is telling of his experiences as a  doctor in these wars…with the new version the book grows, longer, more complex and one has a real sense of what Antunes was all about….

49- Again the problem of translation.  Which book today published in translation and well received is going to be revealed as being only half done and that half done poorly done… 

50- I had reviewed a later book by Antunes which of course makes me grateful this new version of his first book as it goes some distance to explain the style of Antunes and that he did not evolve from a rather ordinary realistic writer of short declarative sentences as that first incompetent version had allowed for…

http://articles.latimes.com/2003/jan/26/books/bk-mcgonigle26

51- Never do reviewers or writers ever admit defeat or failure or incompetence or inability but I stand before you in all of those aspects of shame when trying to describe the experience of attempting to read: IMPRESSIONS OF AFRICA by  Raymond Roussel and NEW IMPRESSIONS OF AFRICA by Raymond Roussel

52- The IMPRESSIONS OF AFRICA is translated by Mark Polzzotti and looks and is surely prose.   Polizzotti quotes Harry Mathews as saying that Roussel’s language taught him how “writing could provide me with the means of so radically outwitting myself that I could bring my hidden experience, my unadmitted self into view.”

53- The NEW IMPRESSIONS OF AFRICA is translated by Mark Ford and looks like poetry with the French on one side and the English on the other. The book is illustrated and one can see that the French poetry rhymes while the English does not.  John Ashbery says, “Poets especially will be in Mark Ford’s debt and it is a “valuable resource for contemporary English-speaking readers.”

54-Summer travel.

55- Well, as awful as any other time but good for any season:  ENGINEERS OF THE SOUL by Frank Westerman… the reader gets a chance to follow Westerman as he uses some books by Russian writers to visit the sites of some of great projects--- during which hundreds of thousands of men women and children were murdered--- that Stalin launched in the building of the communism or socialism in the Soviet Union  and guided by the books that a variety of communist writers wrote about these projects Westerman travels to see the consequences, walking in the footsteps of these engineers of the soul, which in itself is such a wonderful  knot of words within the atheist world of Soviet communism… such writers, Gorky, Babel, Pilynik, Paustovsky…

56-But for another version of travel: here fiction leads to a so-called non-fiction book.

57- As I mentioned in another post THE SLY COMPANY OF PEOPLE WHO CARE by Rahul Bhattacharya  from FSG was one of the nicest reads these past few months--- about a young man finding himself in and trying to get about in Guyana…well, that leads to the accident of a book Knopf sent over: WILD COAST ,Travels on South America’s Untamed Edge,  by John Gimlette who is one of those English writers, a lawyer in another life, who goes off to places, writes about them and people buy the books instead of going there and like Paul Theroux and a myriad of other travel writers.. one always wonders how it happens… how these writers like the magnet and iron filings…the finding  of the characters, the weaving in of some history but all the interesting stuff, not the boring stuff and then how do they remember all of this stuff?

58- I open the book see the photograps--- the little collage as film script---: Devil’s Island, then the Dutch part with strange murders, the Guyana bit with Jim Jones…

59- But will I go on with the reading?...  A Bulgarian friend, a writer was saying to me once that he was astonished that I or anyone in the US would be interested in Bulgaria!

60- One of those comments, said probably just in passing but it does contain  the nub of the whole matter: how do we become interested in places, the other place, one’s own place…

61- So toward the end

62- As there is no real end and within theto be continued: DARK DESIRES AND THE OTHERS by Luisa Valenzuela.  She was an early Dalkey Archive author with HE WHO SEARCHES while being published by the so-called big publishers who now in the present moment have allowed all her books to go out of print.  This new book which set out to describe through indirection the ten years she lived in New York City, a woman with no city other than academic appointments.. on the speech making circuit and gradually fading away so I was surprised by this book appearing… for all these years I have read a short story of hers with students THE VERB TO KILL and it continues to be of interest, all those readings, good bad ,indifferent ,required have not dulled the story…

63- DARK DESIRES AND THE OTHERS is neither journal nor collection of essays but more a pile of paragraphs some connected, others  just that, a paragraph followed by another paragraph.. notebooks are indicated by cover color, with the possible echo of Kafka… but ten years of a person’s life.  I might be the only person who can say: I want my paragraphs to be so published…

64- How to decide if you want to be inside the mind of LV:

A== and working alongside international  human-rights organizations

B==The Guggenheim grant that I’ve always dreamed of and have now pocketed is burning a hole in my pocket

C== Badly written notebooks, like the result of someone “getting rid of lice,”as Cortazar put it

D==  writer in residence at the Center for Inter-American Relations, at NYU and Columbia

E== I confess that I have lives, said the other; I confess that I have fucked.  I say and what luck.  The odor coming to me now from between my legs is mixed, it is my gift and the other’s too, rather acrid, sharp, not entirely pleasant, but the best you can ask for on this earth.

So much sperm!  I love it when I go to the bathroom and I loosen my muscles and it comes out of me as if it was mine.  A white gush, something with a life of it own.  Though not all of them give it to me.  And not all of them have so much.  But this one does,,.

65- And truly to be continued:::::  THE SEAMSTRESS AND THE WIND  by Cesar Aira.

66-Again, startled by,”.. (Aira is)one of the most prolific writers in Argentina having published  more than eighty books.

67- Another way to try to close:  shall we proclaim this THE SUMMER OF DAVID STACTON as the New York Review Books is issuing his THE JUDGES OF THE SECRET COURT which is centered upon the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth who was the brother of then much more famous Edwin Booth who was considered by many of the time as the greatest actor alive and in particular for his performance as Hamlet.

68- David Stacton (1923-68) was a prolific novelist given to writing novels usually based within history.  When you look at old issues of book reviews his name is a constant presence  and then he died.  He wrote novels set in feudal Japan ancient Egypt, Europe during the 30 Years war, and he wrote genre westerns, mysteries and even soft-core gay porn… 

69- Who could resist a novel such as THE JUDGES OF THE SECRET COURT where the last page reads:  It was Julia Ward Howe who once asked Charles Sumner if he had  heard of young Booth yet.“Why no, Madam,” said Sumner, I long since ceased to take any interest in individuals.” “You have made great progress, sir,” Julia told him.  “God has not yet gone so far---at least according to the last accounts.”  Tucson November 1959- April 1960

70- I was thinking the New York Review Books  is dedicated to making available the background to the literary history of the United States of the late Twentieth Century which could be said to have two mountain peaks: Saul Bellow on one hand and on the other, Jack Kerouac and off to himself William Gaddis.  Of course I am disregarding Faulkner, Hemingway and Dos Passos but they are there in the moment before what we call the late Twentieth Century…  all the other scribblers find themselves in the shade or shadow or sunbeam or moonbeam of these guys.

71- THE BIRTH OF DEATH AND OTHER COMEDIES The Novels of Russell H. Greenan by TOM WHALEN.  From Dalkey Archive.  While it probably helps to have read the novels of Russell Greenan---IT HAPPENED IN BOSTON, THE SECRET LIFE OF ALGERNON PENDELTON, THE BRIC-A-BAC MAN, among others---  Whalen’s book is an introduction to an American writer who probably few have read though all his books were well published, well reviewed and continue to remain in print in France where a few of his books have appeared even though they are not available in their original English versions… you might think of Whalen’s book as an invitation to read the books of Greenan’s as he makes them into compelling temptations… but of course you wonder who, who.  Well, www.tomwhalen.com takes care of the author and I’d suggest reading any of the available essays if you want to know why this book is to be read but more importantly you might want to read the fiction and then the poetry and  while you can see the hundreds of stories, poems and their publication information it continues to be one of those dreary and typical mysteries: why… start with the story End of Term.”  This is for one of Whalen’s best stories and captures perfectly the impossibility of the teaching profession…

72- So that is a good way to end: go to www.tomwhalen.com and report back to me what you have discovered.  You don’t have to write a thousand word essay.

On into the future:  PARALLEL STORIES by PETER NADAS. THE DEVIL’S CAPTAIN Ernst Junger in Nazi Paris 1941-1944 by Allan Mitchell. HAMLET OR HECUBA by Carl Schmitt. FROM THE OBSERVATORY by JULIO CORTAZAR

A PERFECT BOOK SECTION

If I was editing a book section right now these are the books I would have written about or have had written about.

9--In 1950 when my sister came down with polio a cloistered nun sent her a 1/4inch square of cloth attached to a card.  The fabric had come from the dressing gown worn at the moment of death by Pope Pius X--- who was known to take a great interest in children---

9--I also knew that in each altar of a Catholic church was embedded a relic of the saint to whom the church was dedicated.  I did wonder about churches named for the Sacred Heart or the various aspects of the Virgin Mary, but did not ask too closely.

9--When in European museums and in the Met in New York on display were beautiful containers for relics and always looked closely if it was possible to see exactly what human remain was encased usually in gold.  The fascination was always compromised by an understanding that when a religious object becomes a mere object of art some irreparable has been lost and I guess about the only person who knows what I am talking about would be Julian Green and he is now dead.

9--HOLY BONES,HOLY DUST How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe by Charles Freeman (Yale University Press) is exactly what it says it is.  Wonderfully written and inviting:  “The first downward slice of the sword glanced off the archbishop’s skull and cut through to the shoulder bone, almost severing the arm of one of his attendants as the weapon fell.”

 

9--The passage ends, “Two more slashing cuts on his head followed and the archbishop slumped dying to the ground.  The top of his head was sliced off and finally the exposed brains were scraped out of  the skull and scattered on the cathedral floor.”  Freeman than goes on to explain how this murdered archbishop became St Thomas Becket and his relics an object of pilgrimage as in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales…

9--How far most people have come from any interest in relics unless they are the possessions of a pop singer like Elvis Presley… But Freeman right down to the notes for his illustrations fascinates:  “These early saints’ tombs were given holes into the space under the body and often sacred dust was collected from below and mixed with water to drink.”

9--A model for how history is to be written and happily for those who know Hannah Green’s “Little Saint,” the town of Conques is described and the great reliquary of St. Foy is pictured.

 

9—Hannah Green wrote THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE.

10—This is the year Kurt Vonnegut gets the authorized biography.  Of course it will be widely reviewed as it is the easiest sort of books to review: a potted mini bio of the author and one or two little bits of info and the reviewer is done.  But remember literary biographies are always the first books that get tossed from personal libraries, followed by books of literary criticism.

10—the Library of America is publishing the first of a series of volumes devoted to  Kurt Vonnegut.  I wish they would tell us what the remaining volumes will contain.  This one has SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, GOD BLESS YOU, MR. ROSEWATER, CAT’S CRADLE and BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS.  These are the books that make his claim to be remembered.  I did not read them as they were being published.  I heard about them, as one could say.  But, now, finally, I realize:  SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE together with Joseph Heller’s CATCH 22  for the European theatre and  with two novels by James Jones, THE THIN RED LINE and FROM HERE TO ETERNITY covering the Pacific theatre that this is how an American imagines that thing called World War Two.  I would add only Curzio Malaparte’s KAPUTT and THE SKIN along with Celine’s CASTLE TO CASTLE  and RIGADOON to fill in a little shading.  RIGADOON comes with an introduction by Kurt Vonnegut.

10-- The Library of America volume devoted to Vonnegut is the best way to experience Vonnegut if like me you didn’t read him the first time around and even if you did, this is a way to over-come the prejudice that always surrounded his career: an entertaining ScFi scribbler.

11--The only competition for the Library of America is the EVERYMAN series of books from Knopf.  In the Strand I notice that EVERYMAN books do not linger on the shelves and they seem to be read when they do end up there, while the Library of America books tend to gather unread.  Both series are actually one of the few bright spots of publishing.

 

1--THE EVERYMAN CHESTERTON, George Orwell’s BURMESE DAYS, KEEP THE APIDISTRA FLYING, COMING UP FOR AIR in one volume and the COLLECTED SHORT FICTION by V.S. NAIPAUL are the three latest books in EVERYMAN.  I cannot pretend to have read all three but I can tell you that these books do invite reading.  The Chesterton does not have some of his classic short essays such as Writing on the Ceiling, What I Found in my Pocket or Advantages of One Leg but this made up by including his ever new ORTHODOXY, THE EVERLASTING MAN and a large collection of Father Brown Stories, which as everyone knows always delighted Jorge Luis Borges…  remember always it was Robert Louis Stevenson and Chesterton to which Borges always returned and provided the constant clarity to the typical Borgesian story.

11--When 1984 came and went as a year Orwell seemed to dim a bit and while ANIMAL FARM remains it is good to have the chance to read these three books again.  My own Penguin versions have become brittle and brown.  Burmese Days does little for me while the other two novels constantly remind of just how dreary life was and is for the most part in England, right down to the present moment which while slightly more glammed up remains at its core,  still a plate of over-cooked  take-away food washed down by watery beer, that is if you got back to the dingy over-priced hotel room without being set upon by drunken soccer thugs.

11—A few factual details to remember according to the Note on the Text.    BURMESE DAYS was published in England in an edition of 2500 copies with an additional 500 were called for. KEEP THE APIDISTRA FLYING  was published in an edition of 3000 copies of which 2194 were sold.  COMING UP FOR AIR was published in an edition of 2000 copies and an additional 1000 were called for.

11—These numbers for most books of fiction are still the reality even in the US where the population is now 300 million.  And in fact might be considered rather remarkable.

11—V.S. Naipaul has become a little eclipsed though given the reality in what used to be called the Third World he is as relevant, as understandable, as necessary.  Though things in that part of the world have become even worse… but these stories fill in his permanent place in the world imagination… but come to them after A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS.

12—No one would let me write about THE SLY COMPANY OF PEOPLE WHO CARE by Rahul Bhattacharya (Farrar Straus & Giroux).  How to say the guy’s last name was a starter and then if I mentioned it’s a novel set in Guyana… quickly the conversation would yo-yo between my talking about the Guyanese students at the various colleges in NYC and Reverend Jim Jones who as you remember put that country on the map with his Kool-Aid transportation into the next world.  An opening line, “Life, as we know, is a living, shrinking affair and somewhere down the line I became taken with the idea…”

                12—A closing few lines from SLY COMPANY OF PEOPLE WHO CARE: “Light crept like a thief out of the fragile wet houses.  Somewhere in the drip drop dark a maga dog whined.  And my tears, they kept returning at intervals, and I purse them to no avail.  Dayclean.  Gone.”

                12—I would go to Guyana in the morning if given the chance and while I would not use this book as a guide I would go because of this book.

                13—Reviewing Enrique Vila-Matas’s BARTLEBY & CO  for the Los Angeles Times (http://articles.latimes.com/2004/dec/19/books/bk-mcgonigle19) and declaring that it is: Perfect. Beautiful. ..what can I claim for his new book, NEVER ANY END TO PARIS? (New Directions)  Well, I am jealous of every single line of this book, of every gesture he makes.  In memory Vila Matas is back in the attic of Duras, back in his youth in Paris, back midst names of the famous…circling constantly about Hemingway who while it seems  at this moment as I am typing to have disappeared is still of course ever present--- I have thought to seek out the man who wrote BARTLEBY & CO and MONTANO’S MALADY and now NEVER ANY END TO PARIS but I have not.  How could I, since I have been in Nantes with my daughter as Vila Matas has also been there--- though did we pass in the street?---Vila-Matas gives one the illusion that anyone could write like he does  but like the lottery in New York State…the dollar, the dream… I am not sure you have to have gone to Paris to read NEVER ANY END TO PARIS but it is probably necessary but only if you do not speak French.  You must become the perfect French tourist in the Unites States: not speaking a single word of English but understanding everything because you have seen Vertigo, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, DOA…

                14—Nantes always calls up Julien Gracq and Green Integer has released a short novel of his THE PENINSULA.  Again I have reviewed and written about him. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2007/12/the-passing-of.html  Each of Gracq’s books is distinct and while I am not going to ever know French and live in constant poverty as a result and why I take pride in my daughter who is very fluent in French with a good accent but who is not living in France so can I ever look forward to listening to her reading Gracq to me in French and then translating his travel journal from his voyage through the American Midwest?

                14—In THE PENINSULA  a man is waiting for a woman to arrive at a train station.  She does not come on the morning train.  He sets out driving waiting to come back to see if she will be on the evening train.  “She had become simply the force that was hurling him towards their impending meeting, and what he felt was the passive well-being of a pebble skidding down a slope and whose onlt sensation of existence comes from the ever-increasing acceleration.”

                14— from THE PENINSULA, “He would let himself be swallowed up by the wide lazy yawn of the countryside.”

                14—from THE PENINSULA:  (The girl in memory)”What a prude!” delivered with a school girl sententiousness from behind thee tangled barrier of blonde hair through which only the end of her very small nose emerged and which always made him want to kiss her.

                15—if you want to have my literary references for writing these sentences you should know that GOING TO PATCHOGUE is again available and now in paper from Dalkey Archive and THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV is still available from Northwestern University Press.  My other books--- among others---   JUST LIKE THAT, NOTHING DOING, FORGET THE FUTURE have not found a courageous reader.

BANNED: a detour and the back

 4-There is only one banned book in the world today and that is Louis Ferdinand Celine’s “Bagatelles pour une Massacre.”  Via the internet a reader can read a translation by Anonymous who has entitled the book Trifles for a Massacre.  The source seems to be in South America. The other two pamphlets of Celine have not been translated. 

5-Of course Maldoror also came out of South America from the imagination of Lautremont.  A detail by an obscurantist, to be sure.

6-I am not naïve as to why this book has never appeared from a conventional publisher while all of Celine’s  other books are  easily and widely available with great blurbs from Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut among others. 

7-But is the Bagatelles, like the collected works of de Sade with their detailed descriptions of child rape, torture and murder, a something that is beyond the pale as it were? 

9-De Sade of course is celebrated by liberal academics as being transgressive and given pride of place in Queer Studies programs as a misunderstood pioneer into the unthinkable.

9-The Bagatelles is a nasty book and very very funny in the way that A Modest Proposal by Swift is funny… but it is argued that it is an incitement to murder but the same could be said of the Koran or The Bible. for that matter.

8-So forget those nice little displays of Banned Books which allow people to cluck their tongues at the idiots who take offense at words like nigger, cock, pussy, shit, fuck….

7-The word in Bagattelles that causes offense is Jew and the various derogatory equivalents… and the same is true for a book by  that other complicated writer, Ezra Pound, but his Radio Speeches is easily available and again the word that causes difficulty is the word Jew.

6-Only one writer in the US has written about the Bagatelles:  Alice Kaplan, but she has both tenure and a professorship though when I went to look she is no longer at Duke.  I reviewed long ago (http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1994-02-01/features/9402010105_1_alice-kaplan-french-lessons-french-boy)  her little memoir French Lessons and have followed her career but I missed that she was one of those who rushed to judgment about the Lacrosse players in the famous scandal of recent memory. 

5-You remember that? 

4-A black woman claimed she was raped by some Duke Lacrosse players.  Liberal academics, including Kaplan, and among other s those stalwart guardians of progressive literary thinking,  Frank Lentrecchia and Ariel Dorfman,  rushed to judgment  by signing a petition protesting the racist nature of Duke society and deciding the case before  a jury had  even  heard the case.  

4-I was thinking recently while driving around in North Carolina that those three academics probably wanted to participate in a lynch mob but lacking, thankfully, such opportunities in the real world, took the plunge and signed this petition: imagine the thrill of it, a risk free membership in a lynch mob and while those Lacrosse players were probably not the sort of guys I would want in my house, one still wonders about the men who had been lynched and the smiling faces of the members of the lynch mobs…  

5-Of course driving around in North Carolina thoughts of the Civil War, the War Between the States, the KKK, lynch mobs, Sherman, Lee, Grant.. .no wonder these liberal academics took the plunge.  What could be more transgressive than wondering what it felt like to be a member of a lynch mob and suddenly being given the chance…  as the kids say: go for it!

6-Kaplan is now at Yale.

7-But to come back to the Bagatelles… the book is seriously funny and while a friend has criticized the translation as being rather wooden, I do find the book as being the only book that it is necessary to read if a reader is to think of him or herself as a reader.  It is the equivalent of that mean cartoon in THE REALIST of long ago which depicted an obviously Jewish guy in prison garb pointing his finger at a Nazi guard saying, Wait until the Pope hears about this.

8-Did Celine’s book send a single Jew to be murdered?  Not as far as I know while De Sade’s books with some regularity show up as the favorite readings of particularly gruesome murderers, usually in the British Isles.

9-I was thinking of Celine when I went to Auschwitz and Birkenau…  I wish I had had his satirical flair, his nastiness to describe the museum at Auschwitz, where mass killing is packaged up in a neat parcel for easy consumption… but Celine would have been stopped as I was by Birkenau…  the size, the desolation, the drawings on the wall in the children’s barracks…

9-Beyond the memoir books, beyond the history books, beyond all the explanations one arrives at the Bagatelles pour une Massacre.

8-The only thing that comes a distant second is to read the writings by that famous New York Times correspondent on the “supposed” famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s.  Walter Duranty is a study in not seeing… a characteristic of most journalists to be sure.

7-Celine sees. Celine hates.

6-If you go looking for Celine’s grave in the cemetery in Meudon there are no directions provided. The ship sails on.

5- Even in this day literary tourists come from as far away as Bulgaria looking for the greatest shit house in the world described by Celine in  the Journey to the End of Night as being located near City Hall in New York City... finding it is for those who know where to look.