WHAT OUGHT TO BE ON YOUR READING DESK

A list for the Spring and Summer  2012 or really any season for that matter

--From the Library of America:   

---THE CIVIL WAR The First Year

---THE CIVIL WAR The Second Year

---KURT VONNEGUT  Novels and Stories 1950-1962      

---KURT VONNEGUT  Novels and Stories 1963-1973

---DAVID GOODIS  Five Noir Novels of the 1940s &50s

And then...

-- STOLEN AIR Selected poems of Osip Mandelstam  translated by Christian Wiman. (Ecco Press)

 --A TIME FOR EVERYTHING by Karl O. Knausgaard.  Archipelago

 --MY STRUGGLE by Karl Ove Knausgaard.  Archipelago

 --SATANTANGO by Laszlo Krasznahorkai  New Directions

 --PARALLEL LIVES by Peter Nadas.  Farra Straus & Giroux

 --SEX AND TERROR by Pascal Quignard.   Seagull Press

 --THE ROVING SHADOWS by Pascal Quignard.  Seagull Press

 --AS CONSCIOUSESS IS HARNESSED TO FLESH  Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980

    by Susan Sontag.  Farrar Straus & Giroux

 --THE HUNGER ARTIST by Herta Muller.  Metropolitan Books

 --TRANSPARENCY by Marek Bienzyk.  Dalkey Archive

 --ON THE MARBLE CLIFFS  by Ernst Junger.  New Directions  (out of print)

 --SONG BOOK.  The Selected Poems of Umberto Saba.  Yale University Press

 --ON THE BORDER OF SNOW AND MELT.  Selected Poems of Georgy Ivanov. Perceval Press

 --JAMES JOYCE.  A New Biography by Gordon Bowker.  Farrar Straus & Giroux

                     NOTICE

The American writers on the this list are all dead.  

Is that saying something? 

More, maybe than I would like to say, really: but does anyone look forward to any American writer’s newest book with the eager anticipation that the announcement of a new translation of a book by THOMAS BERNHARD or ROBERT PINGET or ERNST JUNGER or MICHEL LEIRIS would create?

(there is William T. Vollmann and then...)

50 Years Ago: it begins this writing

ONE

How it began.  Patchogue High School.  My Senior year.  I saw a blonde girl taking books out of a locker on the second floor.  I found out her name, Melinda Brady.  She was two years younger than me.  I could not figure out how to talk to her.  I had been reading about World War One and I had a picture history THE FIRST WORLD WAR edited by Laurence Stallings...

I began to write and a young man dies in France in the trenches on 6 November 1918, though the author recorded that he did have a thought of a girl back home....  

I no longer remember how I came to give the story to Alfred Willis who was the editor of The Red and the Black but I must have and he published it.

I would see Melinda in school and I even danced with her once in gym class, never telling her of the story or what I... but then I thought surely she must have read it and while I added an L to the last name of the girl in the story who does not know what has happened to the young man in France.

TWO

As writers do, I now realize, her silence or the silence of everyone else in the school did not stop me and so the second story, now told from her viewpoint of when this young woman goes down to the train  station in a small Indiana town hoping to meet her returning friend, who of course is not on the train... 

I had seen these small Indiana towns when I had been driven out to Beloit,Wisconsin that previous summer to look at Beloit College and I longed to live in one of those tiny town, no more than one stop light and to be sitting on a porch and now many years later, what I now know, I was thinking of being on that porch alone without my father, drunk in the afternoon yelling at the doctor next door to us on Furman Lane in Patchogue, my drunken father yelling at the MD MD mental deficient mental deficient.   

And of course Melinda would be forever walking across the lawn and I would know and maybe she would know that on one of the maple trees in front of the house I had carved her name and the year 1962.

THREE

The other week I drove by that house on Furman Lane in Patchogue and the tree is gone.  Alfred Willis did not go to college but enlisted in the USMC and served two tours on the front line in Vietnam.  He came back entered the Catholic priesthood and then left.  He lives far away from Patchogue.  Melinda lives in Vermont with her third husband.  I live on East First Street with my wife Anna Saar  with whom I am very happy yet I remain faithful, still, for better or worse, and it is mostly for the worse, as any writer really knows, as the years go by, to that first moment in the second floor corridor of Patchogue High School when unable... I turned to the written word.

FOUR

The inevitable post script.  I did see Melinda when I came back to Patchogue from Dublin for the summer of 1965 just before my parents were sent into exile in northern Wisconsin.  Many years later...how I hate those words---many years later--- as they do not accord with how I hold all of this in my mind Melinda asked me how did you know my birthday? 

I did not know that November 6 was Melinda's birthday but now I guess I know that she had read the story fifty years ago.

THE NAGGING TOMBSTONES: hesitations

Before ONE::::::  on the E train, NYC, 21 February, 2012 around 130PM  not a single newspaper being read.  Electronic gadgets and actual books.  Later talking with Hughes P. Garcia, editor and founder of ARTERY, an electronic journal of art and culture (www.arterynyc.com) who is saying, I remember the day in 2000 when I did not buy the New York Times.  I had been buying and reading it every day since I arrived in New York City in the early 1970s.  Of course I look at it now online.

Before ONE::::  Edward Burns has been showing me some of the letters that he is editing between Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport.  A book to be one of the most important books of letters to be published.  Both authors while not as well known as they should be are superb letter writers… and the book becomes at least for me a shadow reproduction of the time when I was first really reading, learning to read as a so-called adult.  The books and ideas they discuss create  a now written commentary on that time from the late 50s into the 60s,70s,80s…I would justify the genius of the book in one sentence from Kenner to Davenport 9 March 1963:  WHOLE POINT OF A BOOK IS WHAT HAPPENS IN THE FIVE MINUTES AFTER ONE HAS FINSHED READING IT

ONE.  Samuel Beckett to Robert Pinget: Don't lose heart: plug yourself into despair and sing it for us.

TWO.  Found myself again quoting from NOTTURNO by Gabrielle D’Annunzio who you might remember was a romantic flamboyant Italian poet novelist and dramatist at the turn of the century (!900).. the sort now long out of fashion, cut in the mold of Byron.. active in World War One as a pilot…as remote from later Italian poets  such as Montale as one can imagine.. closer to Pasolini in the confusions of his life.  Injured it seems in a propaganda flying mission against the Austrians. D’Annunzio was forced to lie in  bed in a darkened room, forbidden to move so as to prevent the detached retina from fully detaching and blinding him…

But that is just biography and I wasn’t quoting the biography but the lines from NOTTURNO… translated by Stephen Sartarelli.  Published it must be said heroically by Yale University Press in its Margellos World Republic of Letters Books...a rare exception to the usual political correct translations that make up so many of these series…  probably an accident, it must be said.

A meditation on the usual things, death, sight, night, but while occasionally the language gives way to his moment, a  moment before the purifying flame of Ernest Hemingway and TS Eliot changed how we read, but once that is admitted what remains is as gripping…  you must get the picture.  A man confined to bed in a darkened room, his eyes bandaged, told never to move, to refrain from talking… but the lines in no particular order:

Everything is dark.  I am at the bottom of a hypogeum.

 I am in a coffin of painted wood, narrow and fitted to my body like a sheath. 

The other dead are brought fruit and focaccia by their families. 

I, the scribe, am given the tools of  my office by my compassionate daughter

I am thirsty. I ask for a sip of water.

The nurse refuses as I am forbidden to drink.

“You shall quench your thirst with sweat and tears.”

The sheet sticks to my body like the shroud that swathes the salt-speckled drowned man hauled to shore  and left on the sand until someone comes to identify him, to close his frothy lids sand bewail his silence.

I am blindfolded,

I lie supine in bed, my torso immobile, head thrown back, a little lower than mny feet.

I raise my knees slightly, to tilt the board propped up on them, 

I am writing on a narrow strip of paper with space for one line.  In my hand is a soft-leaded pencil.  The thumb and middle finger of my right hand rest on the edges of the paper and it it slide away as each word is written…

The room is devoid of light.  I write in the dark. I trace my signs in the night which lies solid against both thighs like a board nailed in place

Then I remembered the way the sibyls used to write their brief auguries on leaves to be scattered by the winds of fate.

He looks at me from the depths of  a desperate sadness.

THREE.   NOTTURNO is unimaginable in a world of poetry dominated by saps like Galway KInnell, Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Mark Strand, C.K. Williams… how many years they have spent teaching kids to write poetry like the poetry they write since these students are supposed to pay the constant flattery of imitation and who then In turn can be imitated and these saps  themselves writing and writing and living in the academic splendor of their uselessness…  and the hordes of lesser names  no better no worse but all of them teaching teaching and living lives of manufactured unease for  finally with tenure… never again a single worry not even a doubt when the collected poems will appear in how many hundreds and hundreds of pages never really to be read like those millions of volumes of the collected writings of the various communist bosses in Eastern Europe… that is what these collected poems feel and are like… pages and pages of poetry… and and

FOUR.   A  secret of Dalkey Archive is contained in 4:46 by Carlos Fuentes Lemus.. the collected poems of Carlos Fuentes’s son who died at 19 of the complications of hemophilia and meningitis and HIV… genetics, plus accident and thus an early death: some poems, scraps of films and photographs all enabled by the fame of his father… but the poems are readable and come with an afterword by Juan Goytisolo… but death is ever present and no matter the connections, the privileged life.. no minimum wage job at McDonalds or at the local supermarket… but the book is a monument and one does not begrudge anyone a monument, even a monument as fragile as a thin book of poems, so one does not envy the marble tombstones or even the plastic flowers that decorate the soon to be swept away graves one sees in southern Arizona where the constant wind becomes the perfect mourner treating each in the same sure way

While his father is well published, respected, honored… but there is about him a perfection  for   he was such a good subject for an interview profile I did once of him for Newsday— every line he said was calculated to make my little job easier so nothing to complain of… or even to be resentful of… and even fond memories of reading TERRA NOSTRA in Istanbul in 1984… in a English paperback… can take away the suspicion that Carlos Fuentes is finally not a very great writer…  as everything is too perfect, too calculated to fulfilling of all the normal expectations.. Carlos Fuentes is the perfect A student, the perfect Summa Cum Laude student, the perfect diplomat… with no secret life.. no daily church going like Queneau  to be revealed at his death.. he is not Juan Carlos Onetti or Juan Rulfo  to take two in contrast… but his books and his fame lend credibility to Dalkey Archive but  his son’s book  has more life in it, strangely,  than all of his father’s heaped up  so-called major works of art

FIVE.   Going along the Arizona and New Mexico border between Douglas, AZ and Columbus NM, one feels very far away…and while I know this is both reality and the product of living on East First Street, in Manhattan in New York, there is no denying that driving from Douglas AZ to Columbus NM.. one drives through a mostly deserted landscape.., but a contested landscape, a place both left behind, a place that people pass through and other people try to stop people passing from south to North…

But books seem very far away…  in a little grocery store and restaurant in Rodeo a few rows of beaten up massmarket paperbacks…  in Douglas a rather good public library...where books rest quite contented not  to be moved too much as I must have been the first  to look through the Arizona history journals for an article about the invention of Boot Hill in Tombstone.. but still many books though the computers are what people seem to treasure though I do know I wish I had a book in that library.. to be in the same room with the best American novel of many many years, CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA by  Camilo Jose Cela (Dalkey Archive 2007)… well , American in content as I know primitive provincial people will point out that Cela is Spanish and is dead and writes in Spanish  and even has a Nobel prize--- though that is no  recommendation when you think of Pearl Buck and Toni Morrison and Mikhail Sholokhov and Sinclair Lewis--- but they make mistakes in Sweden and Cela is probably one of them… as was Beckett and Simon; if you get my drift… but Cela’s novel free of plot development, free of character development, free of beginning middle and end.. free of relationships, free of setting the scene… free and yet honed so as to populate one’s imagination with both the actuality of what it means to find one’s self in these United States both in and around Tombstone… is that not what life is:  in and around one’s tombstone.

SIX.    From the Library of America… THE CIVIL WAR  The Second Year Told by Those Who lived it…  like the first volume, It is a book to be opened at random… but then the minutes turn into hours…  that you are there of memory… to the side are   chronology, causes, results etc 

More on this at a future post as I want to write about it in conjunction with the David Goodis and Joe Brainard volumes.  The Library of America is a constant criticism of the present moment. 

And  I have been reading THE LOSS LIBRARY by Ivan Vladislavic, published by Seagull Press, which together with Dalkey Archive and New Directions  and Archipelago might be the last publishing houses in the United States.  Of course people will ask: what about Random House, Penguin.. you know THEM… but does anyone have the sneaky suspicion that their days are numbered as are the days remaining for  Barnes and Nobel.  Is it now just a question of when?   What will remain..that tiny band of independent bookstores who long ago cut their dependence… and the more completely they cut their dependence on the big publishers, the sounder their chances of surviving….

ANOTHER NEW YEAR

z--- I realize that the vast majority of Americans do not live in Manhattan so… (you can skip to fragment U… but)

y--- Anna was talking about David Bowie’s  Berlin Trilogy and not having Station to Station my first impulse was to check Amazon and of course it is there but then I remembered J&R downtown on Park Row which must be one of the very last cd/dvd stores in the country  with a huge selection of all types of music from classical via country to gospel to… and so a subway ride away I was able to go down town and get the CD.  A pleasant smile from the girl at the checkout also looked into the classical selection to see if any new CDs from ECM and then to the basement where I always look through the westerns hoping for one I have never heard of but need to watch… 

x-- I came back  via The Strand where I found the bound galley ($2.00) for David Slavitt’s translations of Petrarch which Harvard is publishing in February. 

w-- The Strand was stuffed with tourists on the main floor mostly looking at displays of new books that are surrounded by  large areas displaying candy, cooking gadgets, t-shirts, shoulder bags, strange spur of the moment purchases… but very few looking at the  secondhand books further back in the store.  One notices that lit criticism has been moved to the basement.  The Strand is now a destination store.  A little like Macy’s for the literate or those who still like to think of themselves as booklovers or who have friends who are booklovers

 v--- I also looked into St Marks Bookshop whose fate is still precarious.  There had been protests and a rent reduction was given to them by their landlord but and more books have been faced out and there are  fewer and fewer individual titles… unless someone gives them a very large chunk of cash so that they can again purchase books directly from publishers their fate is most likely sadly evident…when one starts to see the 20% off everything…and then that number begins to change… one takes no pleasure in this and tonight (3 January 2012) Patti Smith is reading there and there will be many people in attendance and they will all feel good about being there but the store like Patti Smith herself is from another time.  UPDATE, I later walked by the shop and saw that she did have indeed a packed house, complete with people standing around outside the shop hoping for whatever it is when people come to see a celebrity.  Now if rock millionaires like Smith and superrich leftist film makers like Michael Moore, who read recently at the shop, really wanted to put their money where their mouths are always going, they would help a place like St. Marks by arranging credit for the store… but hey…  that is not very likely:  for Smith it has been a long and steady downhill slide from her first so-called hit “Piss Factory.”

u-- The December 25, 2011 New York Times Book Review SHOULD BE PRESERVED.  It is probably the 32 page impending death notice for what we have known as the world of books and bookstores like St. Marks.

Pages  2 and 3--- from The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group:  JUST UNWRAPPED A NEW E-READER?  TIME TO UNWIND WITH A GREAT BOOK.   20 intellectual properties are illustrated and plus one illustrated inside an e-reader.  There is one of those curious designs:  Scan here to read more… 

Page 4 DOWN load a bestseller for your new eReader today!  From Simon and Schuster…

Page 25 Amazon takes a whole page to advertize its Kindle fire

Page 27another full page from Random House advertizing Download ebooks for every reader is your family.

And Page 7 from Zagat which used to publish books of restaurant rating and toilets around the world is now in the wine business :  BEST CELLAR LIST  Enjoy 15 Outstanding Reds Worth $219.99—Jut $69.99

There was another full page ad from Xlibris of 15 titles available in hardcover, paper and electronic form.  None of these books will be reviewed in the New York Times or in any of the few remaining book sections being published in major American newspapers but their individual authors have paid good money to be able to say that their book was published and advertized in The New York Times.  It is unlikey that any of these books will be available from any public library.  Their authors will have received a few copies of the book.  They will give them to close family members and hope and hope

t--Even Anna received a Kindle for Christmas and promptly downloaded a Norwegian mystery by a woman and the how:  she wanted to see the process and what determined the purchase: a mystery, cheapness, Norway, a woman…  she quickly read the e-book and then moved on to a book by a popular Brooklyn writer whose name I won’t mention as he is not worthy of being mentioned… but I think of Anna is the same way that James Joyce thought of Nora… but Anna will one of these days publish a book that will come as a great surprise…

S-- I was talking with Jeremy Davies, an editor at Dalkey Archive (which publishes my own books) about the difference between the sort of books that work on e-readers and those that work best on paper.    I had discovered this by being unable to read the e-reader version of the bound galleys for the second volume of THE CIVIL WAR  written by those who had lived it that the Library of America is publishing.  I had read with great interest the first year and wrote about  it.  I had failed in reading and have had to ask for the actual book when it is available.  I will long think of this experience and very quickly such a description will be read with a condescending smirk by those coming quickly behind me.  I missed in the e-reader the easy of turn from selection to selection, back and forth and with equal ease going to the table of contents to see what to read next… maybe my computer literacy leaves something to be desired.  With the e-reader you can only read A PAGE AT A TIME… and there is implied in the electrification of  the text: move on, wipe your finger across the screen…

R--- But to make it a bit more complex.  A guy at Library of America sent me the e-galleys for the DAVID GOODIS volume and I started to read DARK PASSAGE as I had seen the Bogart movie version.  Boy, my index finger swiped those pages away and I found that it was really easy to read and I decided to save the remaining four novels to read for later in the month as I drive along the southern border of Arizona and New Mexico…

Q—The first person to go on with me about how much she loved her e-reader was my dental hygienist who had a long subway ride morning and evening.  She read mostly best sellers.  Those fat books , brand names really one for every season and…  she mentioned how cheap they were, how easy to carry and you don’t have to figure out what to do with the book after you ave read it…

P- books to most people have become things, those things you want to get rid of…

O--  the guys at Dalkey say that for the most part their readers are not wanting to read the books on e-readers but gradually the books will all be on e-readers…

N---I suspect that eventually there will eventually be books that will remain books and one can safely say the majority of books on   the lists at Dalkey Archive, at New Directions, at Pushkin Press, at Archipelago, at Library of America will remain as books.  The people who read “best sellers”, genre books… as in  a customer walks into a shop and says give me three new mystery books or sci-fi books or crossword puzzle books… the e-reader will be for them…

M—Jeremy mentioned that one of the problems  no very good writer has written a book designed to be read on an e-reader…  maybe that is coming and I have already seen what can be done with T.S Eliot’s THE WASTE LAND…  the app made for my iPad makes really available this poem as it always was the one essential poem of the Twentieth Century and is now the first fully realized poem for the 21^st Century… combining the orginal text which can be read by itself or it can be read silently while listening to two readings by Eliot himself  or then by a professional actor or then by a modern poet or then read and viewed while listening to a staged reading with a woman reading the poem and then there is the edited version by Ezra Pound and then there are complete notes as well as filmed commentaries by the likes of Seamus Heaney… if this was a print book it is the sort of book sentenced to the basement of the Strand…   

L ---Eventually my own books will make the transition but for now they are only in paper.  But if given the chance I think I would like to add to GOING TO PATCHOGUE… and the same would go for THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV

k---One of the problems is that the texts available for e-readers are still predicated upon our memory of the printed page...  they do not take advantage of the actual capabilities of the e-reader and this was apparent with an e-galley Dalkey sent me of MATHEMATIQUE: by Jacques Roubaud that expects the reader to move back and forth through different sections of the book.  This is something easily done with the printed book but would only be possible if they programmed the text to respond to a command mimicking that movement… but if in my primitive understanding can state this I am sure we will be seeing at first junk books that will easily be capable of doing this but that is some time away… Farrar Straus published a novel , LUMINOUS AIRPLANES, by Paul LaFarge with a notice on the last page that the reader could go to a website where the novel would be continued…  but it seemed not…  and the same happened when I was reading  WAR & WAR by Laszlo Krasznahorkai. A web address was given and it seems that the site has been turned off due to lack of payment…

LAST WORD for now:  I am reading SATANTANGO by Laszlo Krasznahorkai.  I am continuing to read PARALLEL LIVES by Peter Nadas.  I am reading The AVIGNON QUINTET by Laurence Durrell.  But I am thinking it is time to re-read Gottfried Benn…