HOW NOTHING CALLS

3---The world is calling is a cliché of what the young experience.  As one gets older increasingly it is the world within that calls and that is finally the only reason that explains how the books pile up about me and I thought this time out to explain how the NEW and the older books arrived here on East First Street at this moment or I might not as I begin to move through them as they are arrayed about me here.

((((music being played as this is being typed   THE COMPLETE WORKS FOR STRING QUARTET  by Ggorgy Kurtag  by the Athena Quartett , from NEOS)))

4--- I placed this comment after David Ulin’s forecasting article in next Sunday’s ( 18 IX 2011) LA TIMES: Thomas McGonigle at 6:31 PM September 15, 2011 

Glad to see that David Ulin mentioned Peter Nadas's PARALLEL STORIES... don't worry about the length and the glib commentary about the sudden coincidence of a few long novels:  PARALLEL STORIES is one of the greatest books that I have had the privilege to read:  it is the most demanding, emotionally, intellectually and dare I say spiritually... in a better world people would be lining up to buy it when it is published in November 2011...I thought Bolano's SAVAGE DETECTIVES was a great book and wrote so in this paper...Nadas is even better... right there with Musil's MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES and Joyce's ULYSSES... and Plutarch would not be insulted...

4--- Two sentences from PARALLEL STORIES are two among the most riveting and revelatory  sentences that both describe a woman in the novel and by implication or inference the reality of life in what used to be called Communist Hungary:  “She had lived in workers’ hostels, abandoned farms; for months she slept on a folding cot in the locker room of a gym, and sometimes, for a single night or a few weeks, she would find shelter in the beds of pitiful, questionable, or revolting characters, about whom no one would ever know.  In those places, her held high, she had to let her hosts ejaculate into her body.

5--- I have been reading--- very slowly--- now that I am old enough: THE INQUISITORY by Robert Pinget.  He had signed it for me back in 1988.  The nice Grove hardcover with the remainder pricing from Marlboro: 59cents//2/&1.00.  Cordialment…

As you know the novel is the questioning of one characters for  400 pages…  he is talking about the streets of a local town and the local newspaper:   the history of these streets and houses that’s so fascinating they’d do far better to run a regular column in the Echo on the Fantoniard instead of those articles by that Lorpailleur woman on the new novel as she calls it her theories dot interest anyone, yes the old streets.

Beckett, to name drop, was a great supporter of Pinget and he had probably the greatest translator from the French Barbara Wright, who translated him nearly without pay as there was no way that anyone could pay someone to translate a writer like Pinget… fortunately the dread Richard Howard only mangled one of Pinget’s books, unlike the savaging that he was allowed to administer to and nearly destroy with Claude Simon. 

I am partial to Pinget’s APOCRYPHA  and the various small books devoted to MONISEUR SONGE.  In 1988 was at a tiny, no longer here, bookshop in the East Village, there were four other people in the shop for the reading and signing.  He and Wright stayed at the Earle Hotel, now the Washington Square Hotel and if I could I would have a plaque on the wall of that establishment attesting to that fact.

6--- Barbara Wright translated a few of Michel Tournier’s books but not THE WIND SPIRIT which has the memorable meditation on a bloody removal of his tonsils:  I have never stopped ruminating on that bloody mishap that left my childhood splattered as thought it had bathed in a huge red sun…Childhood is given to us as confusion, and the rest of life is not time enough to make sense of it or explain to ourselves what happened. 

6--- Tournier also mentioned another mutilation that man is subjected to:  “an anti-erotic mutilation, a symbolic castration, which seriously and irremediably reduces genital sensitivity as a result of keratinization of the epidermis of the glans.  Fellatio becomes impossible or at least so laborious that it loses all its charm.  The prepuce is like the lid of an eye, and the glans of a circumcised male resembles an eye whose lid has been torn off.”

7--- SEAGULL BOOKS  joins DALKEY ARCHIVE and PUSHKIN PRESS to the old reliable NEW DIRECTIONS as the essential publishers of books companies like Knopf, Random House, Penguin, Harpers can no longer afford to do since these so called large publishers are now committed to keeping the shelves of Wal-Mart, Target, Big Lots stocked with books.  Literature is mostly done by accident at these so-called larger publishers. 

7--- Seagull is re-introducing PASCAL QUIGNARD to American and world English readers.  Some might have read his THE SALON IN WURTTENBERG (1991) but that does not prepare for the singular beauty, originality and consoling ability of THE ROVING SHADOWS.  I went down to J and R and purchased the short piano piece by Couperin…  with this book we are back in the familiar--- and to some, like myself--- comforting rooms of Jansenism being talked of…as did Calasso in THE RUINS OF KASCH… years before… the most modern, still, way of remaining within Catholicism, to remain within an orbit of thinking that has never lead to murder… but I probably do violence to THE ROVING SHADOWS:  it is a full orchestral parade of genuine learning, thought, reflection: a moment when the old books are still, really alive.. as indeed they are… when Gibbons is the only text you need to understand the contemporary moment.

7--- More about and by Quignard as the weeks go on…

8---Also, from Seagull two books by AnneMarie Schwaryzenbach:  ALL THE ROADS ARE OPEN An Afghan Journey in June 1939.  Published now for the first time in English a short novel LYRIC NOVELLA… again  I will write about these little books at another time…

9--- UPROOTED  How Breslau Became WROCLAW DURING THE CENTURY OF EXPULSIONS… by GREGOR THUM.  Princeton.  I am a close reader of publishers catalogues and this is the sort of treasure that one finds.

I have always been vaguely aware of these expulsions…  these shoving of one group people out and the putting in of another.  When I had part time library job at Beloit College I remember always checking in a journal published in West Germany about the culture of the Germans who had been expel from Bohemia in what is Czechoslovakia.  So one was ready in some way for complexity when it came to Kafka…a Czech writer who wrote in German or a Jewish writer who wrote in German… of course one sympathized with “poor Czechoslovakia” first victims of the Nazis and the  Communists… but what about those Germans who had once lived in Bohemia.. was the same as Sudetenland?... so now UPROOTED…why was Poland given a slice of Germany… but that brings up the uncomfortable fact of which other country invaded Poland in 1939?  And why did that country get a chunk of Poland after World War Two…

So, UPROOTED is the perfect European history book to be reading, right now, because everyone thinks that all the old questions in Europe were all settled not a long time ago and of course I am not suggesting that something awful is about to descend upon Europe… but the past as Quignard well shows…shadows…

10--- That explaining.  BY WORD OF MOUTH Poems from the Spanish by William Carlos Williams.  Long ago Julio Marzan pointed to that middle of name.  This was back in 1970 or 71 at Columbia when I knew Julio as we sat in classes in the School of the Arts  Columbia.  He like I enjoyed the accident created by Frank MacShane in those days when writers like Borges, Parra, even Neruda were not infrequent visitors to Columbia…  even then I loathed Neruda, that good Stalin Prize winner and sought out Parra who I remember telling me in THE ONLY CHILD on 79^th Street: that to write “I” is not to speak for Nicanor or Thomas as the case may be…so that is why BY WORD OF MOUTH….  I have always been astonished that PATERSON is not a required book for all residents of New Jersey…  in the back of my mind GOING TO PATCHOGUE tries to do what WCW did for Paterson… replaced the so-called real place with a book.

11--- CALLING MR. KING  by Ronald De Feo.  I first found his name in the REVIEW  the journal of Center of Inter-American Relations…  there was a real time when Americans cared about books from South America but that was replaced with rise of ethnic literature in the US  and publishers didn’t have to pay translators… that 99% or more of the Hispanic ethnic US writing was and is junk is not a problem as it serves a purpose--- to provide lousy role modes for  Hispanic surnamed students…  at the moment De Feo’s novel  seems more conventional than might have expected but it is from the Other Press , one of the most consistently disappointing publishers…their books seem interesting--- in particular the translations--- but inevitably the books are committed to a debilitating realism…

12---LUMINOUS AIRPLANES by Paul La Farge… who I sadly see is teaching at Bard College, never a good sign, has made the move to publish a novel that is then continued on-line.  This will be hailed as innovative though the Hungarian novelist Krasznahorkai had been there with his WAR & WAR back in 2006…I will be trying to read his novel… there seems a modesty to his ambition and at least he does not pretend to being socially useful as the dire Russell Banks would claim.

13---Today, as on other days, going to and from places of my employment I have been reading ISLE OF THE DEAD BY Gerhard Meier  that Dalkey Archive will publish in November.  114 pages long.  Two elderly men walk about a Swiss town on November 11, 1977.  Does a novel need more than that?  For instance, Baur is saying to his friend Bindschadler, “At that time the wind still blew through the two elms in the cemetery.  And here was where my father was moldering.  In the meantime he has been cleared off, that is, the gravestone had be leveled.  The grave of Lina, Philipp’s first wife, is also gone…

The epitaph for the book is from Flaubert, “What seems to me beautiful and what I would like to do is a book about nothing.”

SOME REMAINS WORTH READING:: STILL

2===Within my brief interest the book sections of newspapers in the US have shrank, become nearly extinct, are barely holding on…while new  books continue to appear and will go un-noticed and while most book deserve to go un-noticed it is now to our slightly new gain that it is possible to share the appearance of some books both new and old that deserve to be read and held to one’s self… and even the Library of America which is well established has coming in the Fall two books and a collection of novels that deserve to be discussed or noted

3===I was thinking, as I held the latest in the collected Philip Roth,  that I was the man with nail and hammer moving about his casket at the last moment so with the 7^th… but I had to be honest:  Julien Gren had the honour of having the most in-print volumes in the Pleiade while still alive and while Roth will never be the equal of Green in the real  cosmopolitan world for too many reasons to go into…  but Roth is an honorable writer and there is a little unfairness to choosing him for this lavish attention and ignoring to date John Updike, Ernest Hemingway, and the famously missing poetry of Herman Melville, but better Roth than the announcement of the collected Toni Morrison or Don DeLillo…

4=== but the LOA has done a wonderful service  with a volume devoted to the writings of AMBROSE BIERCE including his essential Devil’s Dictionary from which I will quote a word much on my mind as I am recovering from spine surgery---making progress--- but ever mindful of my fate: OBLIVION, n. The state or condition in which the wicked cease from struggling and the dreary are at rest.  Fame’s eternal dumping ground.  Cold storage for high hopes.  A place where ambitious authors meet their works without pride and their betters without envy.   A dormitory without an alarm clock.

6=== race, skin colour… as with everything in the United States all institutions  seem to wobble a little when it comes to the colour of the author’s skin.  The LOA of course gave in to the normal segregation impulse by having Toni Morrison “edit” the two books of James Baldwin while friends noted long ago.. now,  40 years ago at Columbia: why is that the NYTimes only had negroes reviewing negroes?   This thought lingered after reading the obit for the death of George Cain, whose novel BLUESCHILD BABY came out and of course it was reviewed by the appropriate negro and there would not be a second book.

7=== so with no Langston Hughes, no Ralph Ellison, a seriously compromised Richard Wright, a stalled James Baldwin, we are presented  with HARLEM RENAISSANCE NOVELS, nine novels ranging from the visible to the obscure.  I will list the titles and the authors: CANE by Jean Toomer, HOME TO HARLEM by Claude McKay, QUICKSAND by Nella Larsen, PLUM BUN by Jessie Redmon Fauset, THE BLACKER THE BERRY by Wallace Thurman, NOT WITHOUT LAUGHTER by Langston Hughes, BLACK NO MORE by George S. Schuyler, THE CONJURE-MAN DIES by Rudolph Fisher and BLACK THUDER by Arna Bontemps.  A celebration of academic packaging, and while I am grateful for the chance to read BLACK NO MORE and THE CONJURE-MAN DIES I think  I would rather have had volumes devoted to Nella Larsen, to Jeam Toomer…

9=== of course my voice is small but I am making the point that LOA is one of the few positive aspects of publishing today and as a result I take it seriously and only wish that the LOA… had more courage and filled their volumes with more texts so as to my nearly approach the grandeur of the Pleiade  by which it is still so over-shadowed, so incompetent  when compared with what the French so ably do in the Pleiade which is a commercial venture, we must remember.

10=== a little nutty you might think but then I am running the shop.  Here are some new and forthcoming books that I hope some readers might want to write about as I will also be writing about them:

789: THE ROVING SHADOWS and SEX AND TERROR by Pascal Quignard.  Coming from Seagull Books, the essential publishing house today which together with DALKEY ARCHIVE  and ARCHIPELAGO BOOKS and NEW DIRECTIONS are probably the only actual living publishers today with an occasional alive books from FSG and Knopf.  I am sure you have read Quignard’s THE SALON IN WURTTEMBERG, ALBUCIUS , ON WOODEN TABLETS APRONENIA  AVITIA.

790:  PARALLEL STORIES by Peter Nadas, at more than 110 pages, with not a single page that can be skipped.  If I was an editor I would devote a whole issue to this book and Nadas’s other books, but mainly this book.  It is totally accessible, readerly, complicated only in that you the serious reader will only be able to read a page or two at a time… so you see the problem--- there will be many fake reviews of this book, cribbing from various handout from publishers…

791: again from SEAGULL, two books by Annemarie Schwarzenbach: ALL ROUTES ARE OPEN, in Juner 1939 two women drive to Afghanistan…  enough said .  Also, published is LYRIC NOVELLA  which disguises a lesbian subtext as the two protagonists of this novel should have been women…

793: from Yale, Two volumes of the Letters of T. S. Eliot so with finally the publication of the letters bck on track one can read for him or herself the life of the author of the only poem that is likely to survive the 20^th Century, THE WASTE LAND.  Well annotated and indexed the reader has been freed from the sleazy popularizations of aspects of Eliot’s life in favor of reading it from his own view point and then the making up of the mind

794:  from New Directions: NEVER ANY END TO PARIS by ENRIQUE  Vila-Matas.  I began reading this before I went to hospital for surgery; I read it in recovery and continue to read it: I am rationing it out one chapter a day.  I do not want it to end.  You most likely have his Bartleby & Co, which I reviewed but in this one we are with Vila-Matas, living in Marguerite Duras’s attic room and discovering Paris as a poor young man, using sometimes texts from Hemingway as his reliable guide, as his treasured guide… a perfect book as it depends upon its readers in a comforting sort of way.

795:  from DALKEY ARCHIVE: Gerald Murnane is from Australia and while that is reason enough to never read him as it is for the poor slobs who call Canada home, MURNANE is an exception.  Years ago Braziller published a little book of his THE PLAINS which was his hook and people thought of course he was writing about the plains in the US… but no, he is the only writer in Australia who writes as if he is living in Paris, in London, In New York, never provincial, never isolated, he becomes universal by his complete attention to what is in front of him… BARLEY PATCH:  the first line:  Must I write?

796: from DALKEY ARCHIVE:  DUKLA by Andzej Stasiuk. DUKLA deals with light, a journey to discover light, to describe light, whatever do we mean when we talk about the light of a certain place…

I reviewed his ON THE ROAD TO BABADAG for the LATimes:  here is my version---- ON THE ROAD TO BABADAG Travels in the Other Europe by Andrzej  Stasiuk

The best travel books like “On the Road to Babadag” are read for more than mere information, they are read in order to go.  Setting out from his tiny village of Czarny near the Polish Slovakian border , Andrzej Stasiuk heads for that area where the Ukraine, Romania, Slovakia and Hungary come together, not a exactly a destination  immediately called to mind when we say a person went traveling in Europe.  And from there he goes on to further reaches of an obscure Europe, Albania and eventually the coast of Romania where the Danube dissipates into the Black Sea near the town of Babadag.

Stasiuk, now the most prolifically translated Polish writer with six other books in English, is a patient traveler, “Sometimes in the dark, you saw sparks from a horseshoe.”  As Whitman was Kerouac’s Shade in “On the Road” E.M. Cioran  (“The Short History of Decay”) is Stasiuk’s  welcome literary ghost, for  in the Cioran’s native village, he notices the smells, ” the soil between the cobblestones had collected a century of horse piss; wisps of the stable from innumerable harnesses; from the fields came the choking air of pasture, from the gutters the cesspool seep of barns and sties; and one day in the river I saw entrails floating.”  Hard stuff, but the genius of Stasiuk is in the necessary contrasting quote from Cioran,” It would have been better for me had I never left this village.  I’ll never forget the day my parents put me on the cart and took me to the lyceum in town.  That was the end of my beautiful dream, the destruction of my world.” 

Of course the reader is entering a place where all familiar landmarks are gone, a place where, “For us everything starts or ends with a war.”  It is place where work is still real, a place where one feels “the enormity and continuity of the world.”  A place where one sees, “between two rows of houses moved a herd of sated cattle.  They were accompanied by women in kerchiefs  and worn boots or by children.  No isolated island of industrialization, no sleepless metropolis no spiderweb of roads  and railroad lines could block out this image as old as the world,  The human joined with the bestial to wait out the night together.”

Stasiuk takes us to real places and on the Day of the Dead he lights candles in a war cemetery, ”the roots of these trees have been  feeding for more than seventy years on the bodies of Estonians and Croats, in a corner of the world no one visits.” 

Go travel with Stasiuk this summer.  You don’t need a plane ticket.

So what remains? 

Tell me what you have found!

HAVE YOU READ A GOOD BOOK?

The Los Angeles Times Book Section has officially become a ghost of its own self and while there will be no attempt to reproduce that newspaper’s section, or indeed all the various book sections which at one time filled newspapers across the country with an interest in books: think if you are old enough:  Newsday, The New York Herald Tribune, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun Times ( and please provide me with more newspapers) I was thinking of a shade, a far more intimate connection to a once living reality  may be brought back to life.  

So, if readers have found books that have not been reviewed or if they were reviewed, were reviewed badly, readers can use some of the space  ABCOFREADING.blogspace.com has carved from the fields of forgetfulness, to share these reports with the vast audience that is ever awaiting  new appearances  by mrans of  a new post at      ABCOFREADING.blogspot.com.

Readers should send their reviews to me at tmcgonigle@hotmail.com and if I agree with your report I will put it up as soon as I can. 

The question of course is:  what will I put up at ABCOFREADING.blogpspot.com.  The best way to determine if you are within the orbit of this moon, this shade, is by having wadded through several posts  where the writer’s prejudices are quite evident and I operate always at the level  of refined prejudice. 

Most of these newspapers continue on in their ghostly way, but as the audience for newspapers continues to disappear into the earth, I thought for a few more brief moments to keep  alive that sense of finally here is a book I have been waiting  all these years for … this happened to me and it is in the book columns I discovered: Thomas Bernhard, Gerhard Roth, Peter Nadas, Joseph Roth, Robert Pinget, Claude Simon, Alain Robbe-Grillet. Yashar Kemal, Yukio Mishima … most of what I learned in school and in America school goes from pre-kindergarten to post docs in nuclear physics…

  

You can share your own book but if you do that you have to share a book  you have discovered on the way to your own book…

Like Ezra Pound who provided the title for this blog, we are not interested in the starters of crazes, we know there are many writers of belles-lettres, and those who make up probably the bulk of the published, m good writers without salient qualities, and a trickier bunch, the diluters who water down as it were the masters and at those  at the top, the inventors, who are few in memory

PAIN IS BORING: some reading and the opening paragraph from ST. PATRICK'S DAY Dublin 1974

c--- Pain is boring and for the last six months I have been having pain in my lower right leg.  Seems I fell in the winter and now there will be an operation on the spine:  some have suggested I will end up in a wheelchair with loss of bowel and bladder while others have been more hopeful, including the Xray technician who said Good Luck after taking the final X-rays.

d--- More than forty years ago when I would talk with Edward Dahlberg is in windowless rooms on the Upper West Side of Manhattan he would complain about being posthumous.  He was exaggerating  a little as his Confessions  were about to be published but indeed he knew what he was speaking of because in the obit the NY Times, stupid as always, missed his real claim to the future: BECAUSE I WAS FLESH.

    

--- I have inherited this knowing  from Dahlberg…  and one can feel the stomping feet upon the grave… but I read his inscription: FOR THOMAS, WHOM I LIKE VERY MUCH AND WHO, I HOPE WILL BE MY FRIEND. DEC 21, 1970 NYC.  That friendship endured until the late Spring.  I published excerpts from an interview I did with him in the University Review, a free newspaper distributed on college campuses…I learned that you should not use the same noun twice in one paragraph, that you will always feel that you are be inflicted upon by the well known by writers of the day, and that you should never begin to write without first reading a book by a writer greater than you will ever be since writing should be a constant state of humiliation

---Today,  a list of well known bad writers would have to include Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Safran Foer … and they share the characteristics of all well known bad writers: relevance, imitation, fakery, pseudo profundity

E ---But I have  been reading a little and that is what I wanted to report.

And I will be reading for a long time: PARALLEL STORIES by PETER NADAS.  The bound galleys are more than 1100 pages and require the greatest possible concentration and so far each chapter opens another story and all the while I am aware that parallel lines do not meet except in the highest math… 

--- Finally a book that might nudge over ULYSSES though so far I have not found the classical allusions that stalk Joyce’s book to either a reader’s distraction or delight.

---When PARALLEL STORIES is published in November read carefully the reviews and see who is faking their reading of this book, who has skimmed it, who has copied from the publicity and if you think this won’t happen you should read  FIRE THE BASTARDS by Jack Green (Dalkey Archive) a book that shows exactly how far too many reviewers did not read William Gaddis’s THE RECOGNITIONS and even when copying  the publicity for it could not get that straight.  I have also heard that one of the straws upon the back of David Foster Wallace was his sure knowledge that many of those who had praised his INFINITE JEST had not read it and he well knew Samuel Johnson’s remark, it is better to praise than to read.

---I can only begin to hint at my own reading of PARALLEL STORIES by quoting the chapter title, “Everyone in Their Own Darkness”, as a possible way into the originality of the narrative but remembering as I discovered a quote I had inserted into my ST. PATRICK’S DAY Dublin 1974, “not to put too fine a print on it, Tolstoy did not believe in people.  The more closely his read characters…are examined, the clearer it becomes that the celebrated moralist was a determinist, a materialist, a behaviorist.  Although his eye for surface variations was so wonderfully acute that there is not a character in all his output who is not apparently unique, all are nothing but flesh, and all flesh is grass.  The flesh may lead to despair, but it is the only form in which fiction can so amply clothe itself…” 

---when I wrote about Nadas’s BOOK OF MEMORIES I mentioned the startling physicality of his characters, how their words were enshrined in a flesh that has so rarely been described and the same must be said for PARALLEL STORIES:  never have I read a description of male body hair to compare…but not in the service of pornography, to be sure…

--- the books of Nadas along with those of Roberto Calasso and the pleasure they give to me as a reader are reasons enough to want to survive this operation… I cannot escape the fact of writing before an operation is inevitably a before and the awaited after looms… Nadas well understands the need for such a sentence as he has also written a painful book about his own heart attack OWN DEATH, but has the mind to distance himself from this by publishing his text midst hundreds of photographs of the same tree on his property as that tree changes with the season…

--- which leads, again, to my assertion that T.S. Eliot’s THE WASTE LAND is the only poem in English to survive the 20^th Century for:  April is the cruelest month

F ---I am also more grimly aware than ever before of the dire fate of the book.  The number of book shelves continues to shrink at St. Marks Bookstore and at the Strand more and more space is given over to non-book items and now the store is just a tourist destination to buy things with the STRAND name on them.  Of course they cannot compete with the used books at Amazon, but what is sadder is that for those of us who walk in the city, there are now fewer and fewer places to walk to… the boulevardier of Baudelaire has now lost his purpose, there is no longer a place for him… even in New York City.

G ---Blogs are an end in themselves, a constant item of frustration and isolation…they really mean that we are now approaching total atomization.. there are no longer public places where one gets together to talk…  one thinks of the great and famous pubs, bars, cafes… all gone no matter where you look in thr world.. all turned into tourist sites with fading pictures of authors… authors of books no one reads.. I am told Beckett’s picture is all over Dublin and it was in the airport in Dublin 20 years ago even, welcoming people to Ireland, to a country that hates its writers and makes a mockery of them by turning them into employees of the state, receiving monthly payments to make sure they never write anything of real significance… remember that was the purpose of the writers unions in the socialist countries:  give the writers so many perks, so many benefits that they would write less and less or they would writer more and more insignificant poetry… nearly every poet you can think of in Ireland now has a collected volume of more than 600 pages in length…  so those monthly checks coming from Aosdana buy the compliant silence and in the US the silence is bought with tenure from colleges and universities where the function of these writers is to turn out more writers who in turn will…

H---the most mysterious book this time around is FROM THE OBSERVATORY (Archipelago)  by Julio Cortazar combining prose and photographs by Cortazar himself of an observatory built in Jaipur by an Indian prince.  I have long been awaiting this English version as I picked up a long time ago in Paris the French version which is far grander with the photographs bled to the edge of the page and some pictures spread over two pages.  The American version is little meaner: the photographs are isolated by wide white frames, diminished in a way, as I do think we are supposed to be swept somewhere by the photographs, swept away from the determinism of the science that is discussed about the habits of eels, but the fragmented text, hallucinated in its rebellion: “that the redheaded night should see us walking with our face to the breeze, favoring the apparition of dream and insomnia figures, that one hand should slowly slip down naked back until coaxing out the moan of love…

---but I am willing to go most anywhere with Cortazar whose HOPSCOTCH, ever young, ever youthful, ever a model for what can be and what is no longer, and happily ARCHIPELAGO also has Cortazar’s  AUTONAUTS OF THE COSMOROUTE, the THE THE perfect book to buy before setting out on any long car trip, as that is what it is, a report on a car trip between Paris and Marseilles, where the rest stops, the accidents of the road become the… I like the dailyness of it, the photographs, the drawings, the accidents, the sadness that both Cortazar and his companion are both dead, this is a perfect memorial, but telling anyone who can read that it is what you are doing right now is of interest, if only you step back, one tiny step…

---I am not prepared to forget that Cortazar had the most repulsive activist political beliefs:  every murderous leftist regime drew his support  but in so much of his writing this did not contaminate his imagination, so in the way that we have learned to read Pound or Celine…

J--- HELDENPLATZ, by Thomas Bernhard (Oberon)  Bernhard’s last play.  A professor has returned to Vienna from Oxford and thrown himself out of the window…realizing  Austria today is no different than it was in 1930s when the Viennese quite happily cheered Hitler and to this day are little changed… familiar to readers of Bernhard but still as fresh as, and the surviving brother of the suicide is saying, “so you won’t think/I’m dead already which I am not on the contrary/the body is finished but the head is newborn/every day/ that’s a terrible situation…

---there is a very funny exchange between two of the servants of the suicided professor talking of his views of his children:  Suddenly one day you discover your own children/are non-humans he said/we think we are raising human beings/and then  they’re just carnivorous cretins/hysterics megalomaniacs  chaotic

---and how we are inflicted upon by actors, actresses, rock stars, do-gooders of every sort:  the whole world nothing but cynicism/megalomaniac actors/ abusing the Sahel-region/perverse Caritas directors/flying first class to Eritrea/posing with starving people/for the world press

---or as any thoughtful person knows every morning should begin with the New York Post and not the New York Times:  The so-called quality papers have always been boring/What we seek in the newspapers/is precisely the scum/I don’t need newspapers as my daily intellectual diet/it’s the absolute primitiveness of the Austrian  gutter press/ that I need every morning/I admit I would rather steep myself in that filth / than in the tasteless culture section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine (New York Times, right!) 

K ---   a few more books  that I have been reading and which increasingly look to being over-looked:

…BARLEY PATCH by Gerald Murnane.  Some of us discovered Murnane a long time ago when Braziller published THE PLAINS, and discovered finally an Australian writer of prose that could be read… but with the BARLEY PATCH Murnane  becomes a world class writer, someone who does fit into Dalkey Archive’s list with me, with Goytisolo, with Roa Bastos, with Lezama Lima… yeah ,and I threw in my own books because I forget that is my claim upon you my few readers and I wanted you to know the context of my books… along with Claude Simon, Robert Pinget, Andrei Bitov.

…Murnane prefaces BARLEY PATCH with a quote from Kerouac’s Doctor Sax--- just in that gesture alone shows we are dealing with a writer of a genuine independent spirit:  The Turf was so complicated it went on forever.”

…the first line of the book is: Must I write?  The second section a few pages later begins: Why had I written?  TO PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 20, 2011

L--- WERT AND THE LIFE WITHOUT END by Claude Ollier (Dalkey Archive).  I asked to review this for the LA TIMES and still might be given the chance but who knows… set within the mind of a soldier who has survived…” Stricken for life, shut away inside themselves, emptied, surrounded by paleness, place shadows, such is the fate of the living who must still live.”

…”All outbursts, fits of temper, and screams banished, permanent silence reigns, a great respect for others, here the meeting  place of the silent ones, the taciturn, the discreet.

In recent years I have had many students who have been in the terrible wars the US has been engaged in for the last 20 years.  In some of these classes the students get a chance to read STORM OF STEEL by Ernst Junger and discover that they are not alone… they see through the tawdriness of  the well meaning  writing that is cranked out attempting to describe their experiences but once they have read Junger they discover a context, they are not alone.. they are not…

M ---the best memoir books for the Fall: THE LETTERS OF T.S. ELIOT Volume i and Volume 2, far more interesting than any book written about Eliot.

N--- ST. PATRICK'S DAY Dublin 1974

AFTER  for a while, until discouraged by technology failure I was trying to scan ST PATRICK’S DAY Dublin 1974 so as to make it possible to be read in out new world.  Here is the opening

That spring I was staying at The Russell in the cheapest or as I have been taught to say, the most reasonable available room. The ones in the pubs think I'm loaded and they are almost right:  I am loaded but not always with money and there have been too many times or not enough of those times to put me at perfect ease with the idea of always being loaded and so what? When?  I have sat before the fire in the lobby of the hotel, a cold glass of Carlsberg in hand, realizing a lot of other sons have done and are doing at this moment what I am doing: drinking and travelling out the patrimony, a gift in my case, from all the years of my father's fear of doing anything which would endanger his retirement.

After forty-nine years of work at the American Can Company he survived only two years of doing as he put it: nothing.

Died, he did, alone in a parking lot with strangers looking on at his performance.

I, the son, will have gone through the small sum of money in less than a year.  There is no revealing the exact sum because money together with sex, religion and politics are all things the son was taught not to talk about with strangers because one never knew.

The future holds only watching each and every dollar spent