ABC OF READING

ANOTHER NEW YEAR

2012-01-04T11:27:00.000-05:00

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…

KAPUTT: bookstores, book reviews, writing, my own

2011-11-22T09:14:00.001-05:00

KAPUTT (due homage to Malaparte):Bookstores Book reviews, writing , my own .

ONE “If I hadplanned it, I should not have made the sun at all. See! How beautiful! The sun is too bright and too hot… And ifthere were only the moon there would be no reading and writing,” LudwigWittgenstein quote in a biography by Edward Kanterian (Reaktion Books)

TWO “ …and he saw himself nailed to the cross of his own cradle and coffin,painfully trying to tear his body away only, eventually, to deliver himself---utterly naked, without identifying mark, stripped down to essentials--- intothe care of the people whose duty it was to wash the corpses, people obeying an order snapped out in the dryair against a background loud with torturers ad flayers of skin,” fromSATANTANGO by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, to be published by New Directions inFebruary, 2012 (these quoted words show why I can write that there is not aliving American writer who comes anywhere close to Krasznahorkai in ability orin genius.

1- DEATH is the most mind concentrating word in theEnglish language… in all languages. To evenbegin to write why is to attempt to dilute… but death is never diluted.

2-- The death of abookstore has been on the mind here in Manhattan, NY, US. Having lived through the death of New MorningBookstore on Spring Street in SOHO--- given what SOHO has become--- it is a littlehard to imagine at one time there were seven bookstores within that area andNew Morning was the one where I worked. The film director Nicholas Ray lived upstairs from it and wasdying.

3-- New Morningwas owned by the guys who put out HIGH TIMES… it was both very literary and adestination store for what was new in every aspect of that word. But it died. The founder of HIGH TIMES blew his brains out… other people ran it… moneyproblems… the stock begins to shrink… shelves disappear, individual books beginto be faced out…book stock has to be bought from wholesalers… magazines are nolonger being delivered for sale… smaller presses start to see their books facedout—since they are really unaware of the lack of credit they advance books andso become the last in and the last screwed… and then eventually the markingdown of books…

4-- I went throughthe agony down to collecting a few of the metal book ends made in thesilhouettes of airplanes.. . hinting at the planes used to airlift essentialsupplies from South America or Mexico… the quick money fortunes that bought thefirst lofts in SOHO …

5-- New Morningpioneered the idea of having low tables on which piles of new books would bedisplayed, mixing new with the old, fiction with nonfiction… a demonstration of the eclectic taste of themanagers…on Saturday nights the three Old Testament prophets as they were calledwould come in: Samuel Menashe, Tuli Kupferberg and Sidney Bernand… I hopeeveryone who might read this knows who they are… as they Irish would say, theirlike will not be seen again

6-- After NewMorning closed, I worked at the oldestbookshop in what became the East Village: East Side Bookstore… by the time Iworked for them they were in a tiny shop on the north side of St Marks Place,next door to St Marks Bookshop. The ownerwas a professor at Pace but was dying and after he died his widow kept it goingfor a time… the same thing happened… thestock shrank etc…

7--St Mark’sBookshop prospered and then moved across the street to larger quarters, hadsome problems and moved again to its current location on Third Avenue afterreceiving help from the founder of Rodale who was sadly killed in an autoaccident in Moscow

8-- Currently, thestore’s stock is shrinking, shelves from sections have been removed, books getfaced out, smaller presses see theirbooks being prominently displayed and one is aware that the shop does not havecredit to order directly from the big publishers and they are having problemsmeeting the rent… and for a while that problem has been met with a temporaryreduction but I would think by the time the lease comes for renewal in two yearsSt. Marks will be but a memory unless they find a rich leftist--- and there aremany many of them--- who is prepared to stake them to a chunk of cash… thelatest estimate from an employee: six months more… I suspect and hope I am wrong but March will see theend…

9-- The bestbookstore of recent memory was Books & Co. up on Madison Avenue but thatwas supported by the heir to IBM though even she eventually got tired of putting up buckets of cash… of courselandlords, gentrification, the economy are always dragged into play but thereality is that we are living through the waning time for the book andbookstores… even The Strand which according to tax returns still producesmillions of dollars in profits for it owners is now a tourist destination thatis thriving just on that… secondhand books are a shrinking part of its businessand the selling of shoulder bags, candy, cooking gadgets and a myriad number ofother spur of the moment purchases along with well discounted new books is whatis keeping that show going, plus they own the building.

10- I treasure St.Mark’s but I see my own mortality in it. The ageing owners who have heroically kept the store going—even stockingmy own books from Dalkey Archive--- have a long and honorable life of sellingbooks and making available books that would not normally be available… going asfar back as when one of the owners then learning the trade by working at theEast Side Bookshop was arrested for selling the infamous ZAP comic book thatfeatured incest as a pleasurable activity and as a way to keep familiestogether… and more recently they even sold THE TURNER DIARIES, a verycontroversial book that showed in glowing terms the triumph of a Nazi ruled US…written by a man who was not being ironic.

11- The owners ofSt Mark’s deserve to have that one rich person help them… that is what theyreally need… but I have a feeling it is like hoping to find that last seat on alife raft after an iceberg as done its work and echoing William Burroughs these guys are not going to put on dresses tosave their skins--- for many years thebest-selling novel at St Marks was William Burroughs’ NAKED LUNCH… but now youcan see I have been writing about the past and a past fondly remembered as thesemi-literate youth have other things ontheir mind or minds…

12- Books havebeen shoved to the side and for a long time when the conversation turns tobooks they are quickly exhausted and replaced by the latest movie or movieavailable on DVD…

13 --The US hasonly newspaper book review section that deserves that title and it is therather pathetic New York Times… but I have no real complaints, both of my bookswere well reviewed there but when the burden falls upon them as being the solebook section one is disheartened by the pages of the review given up to bestseller lists and articles of a general interest… so in a sense even they are alittle embarrassed by having to actually run reviews.

14--The WallStreet Journal on Saturdays now has a large book section but the editorobviously is interested in non-fiction which seems naturally to revolved aroundand around business, war… and eccentric lives… literature is treated in columns…

15—Newspapersstill review books but most are like the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune,Boston Globe… a couple of books reviewed usually by staff on the newspaper…there is no personality, no feel that there is much thinking going on… and whileit is true that far more books are reviewed on the basis of whim than anyonerealizes, now all to often it is a simple of matter of seeing if someone can becajoled into saying something, anything really, just as long as it vaguelymakes sense.

16—But is there afuture ON LINE? Isn’t that the desperatehope… blogs, online reviewing sites… I myself read some of these but I stillwant those words on actual paper though I will also admit that while I have asubscription from my sister for The New Yorker I download it and read it on myiPAd and then the actual print version arrives in the mailbox and is notusually opened…

17-- For a long time I have noticed thedisappearance of news papers from the subway here in NYC and I have begun tonotice people reading on handheld devises… and they seem to be reading whatlooks like novels.

BUT I AM STILLANNOYED BY THE CRAP THAT GETS PUBLISHED IN BOOK FORM… So I guess you can say Istill have an interest in books

(I have privileged moments ofcriticality)(I especially regret the lack of women and minorities in this book)(Tomake matters worse mine is a small canon of only of white men) These words arefrom the Townsend Martin Class of 1917 Professor of Art and Archeology atPrinceton University who has published a book THE FIRST POP AGE which is packedwith full colour reproductions but no thinking… a book about Warhol,Lichtenstein, Hamilton, Richter and Ruscha… the selection of course isarbitrary but so ordinary… all the complaining or excusing, all so much throatclearing… I guess if he had at leastmentioned John Wesley, I would not have been so annoyed, but Princeton doesthat to its tenured professoriate who it seems spend too much time thinking andtalking about their favorite Chinese and Indian restaurants in the Princetonarea as reported by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill who had the well paid accident ofspending some time among this human society, a place, as Anthony Burgess noted,even the bank tellers are rude…

18-- HOWEVER there are a few tiny scraps ofinterest available: THE POETRY OFTHOUGHT FROM HELLENISM TO CELAN by George Steiner which is published by NewDirections…just mentioning the publisher is designed to show how that word haschanged. The so-called larger publisherscannot afford to publish a book like… Steiner well understands, “this littlebook, the interest and focus it hopes for from its readers--- statistically a tinyminority--- the vocabulary and grammar in which it is set out are alreadyarchaic.”

And the reason forthat is quite simple: the universitiesare controlled by those who write inside the thinking exemplified by the Townsend Martin Class of 1917 Professor ofArt and Archeology at Princeton University and we all live in a world where the young (8-18) devote eleven hours of their day to their engagement with electronic media ofone sort or another and where they use a vocabulary of approximately 65 words…

There are thesewords by Steiner: “… the “discovery” ofmetaphor ignited abstract disinterested thought. Does any animal metaphorize? It is not only language which is saturated bymetaphor. It is our compulsion, ourcapacity to devise and examine alternative worlds, to construe logical andnarrative possibilities beyond any empirical constraints. Metaphor defies, surmounts death—as in thetale of Orpheus out of Thrace…”

JOURNEY OF THE DEAD or the ALMOST DEAD

2011-10-26T14:58:00.000-04:00

Q Theworld is calling is a cliché of what the young experience. As one gets older increasingly it is theworld within calling and that is finally the only to explain how the books pileup about me since it gets a little more difficult to go out into the world…

Q Lastnight Denis Donoghue was here for dinner and I showed him a line in a new bookfrom George Steiner that is coming from New Directions: THE POETRY OF THOUGHTFrom Hellenism to Celan. I also mentionedthat Steiner was the only critic today who did what Denis does: close readingof texts and writing for the general educated population… Denis did not dispute this but did mention thathe thought Steiner far better read andin fact much more erudite… and then Denis mentioned the loathing that peoplefelt for Steiner when he was a professor at Cambridge and the ridicule he wasexposed to if not to his face than firmly to his back. And I was saying I thought it no accidentthat Steiner was now being published by New Directions since that publishing isone of the very few that is still engaged in publishing what is genuinely ofinterest in terms of literary originality. Happily Denis Donoghue’s WARRENPOINT is being reprinted in the nearfuture by Dalkey Archive, the only other American publisher what keep to thePoundian way of : MAKE IT NEW.

Q Butthat line from Steiner: WHERE EVERFEASIBLE ADORNO YIELDED TO THE CHARMS OF OBSCURITY.

Q Ofcourse Steiner’s touchstones are those epitomes of the obscure: Heidegger,Hegel, Celan, Holderlin, Plato but healso fears not to venture into the works of Genet, Valery, Strindberg,Goebbels, Marx and the list goes on… I am willing to follow him as I am Pound… becausethe question is what to read next, or re-read next.

Q Steineralso knows that things have changed: “Inthe “free world” license has often been indifference. What potentate in the White House would takenote of, let alone dread a Mandelstam epigram?” But is he saying that George W and BO are incarnations of Stalin… thecomedy of it all…

Q Thesentence after the one just quoted: “Theimage of Marx in the British Library rotunda is totem. It is a celebration, now virtually erased, ofthe belief that “In the beginning was the Word.”

Q Anaside: Heidegger is the great seducer ofJewish intellectuals, both mentally and physically, if I mention Steiner onehas to also mention Levinas and of course Hannah Arendt

Q SoSteiner has sent me back to the dialogues of Valery, he has returned me toFaulkner--- though never far from him to be sure and Poe as they are really theonly American prose writers he is interested in while of the poets there areonly Eliot and Pound…

Q Myonly contact with Steiner was in a classroom--- too many years ago--- atColumbia and he was mentioning how fortunate I was to have been talking withAnthony Burgess who was the only English writer who was not an English writer,because to be an English writer was almost a term of abuse in Steiner’svocabulary of criticism, Burgess if he wanted to, if he had not given intobeing an entertainer ,might have been a very great writer, he was the only one inTwentieth Century England who had this potential, all the rest of them wereminor regional provincials…

R Iprefer Steiner’s pompous attituding (which is probably the worst that can be said.. but I still readcarefully as he like Calasso are even at their most pompous are not devoid ofinterest) when compared to Geoff Dyer whose bound galleys for ZONA a bookhe has written about STALKER fell into my hands and I tried to read in it going to and from doctor... I wasgoing to write about it on this blog but I type so slowly.... i thinkthat Geoff Dyer writes all the reviews in all the English newspapers andmagazines... all the culture pages, all the commentary pages.

R Atone time I looked forward to London because of the number of nationalnewspapers and their book pages… but that is no longer so and the reason isthat Geoff Dyer is writing all those pages. In the first few pages of ZONA myeyes ran into or were run over by these phrases that I circled as evidence formy contention that he is solely responsible for all the book pages of the Englishnewspapers: 1, the barman's jacket coulddo with a good clean ,2, as anyone whohas enjoyed a couple of bong hits already knows ,3, Tarkovsky couldn't give a toss about the audience ,4, the screen was no bigger than a big telly,5, we were able to have a discreetly good gawp, 6,sitting near her at a lavishfund-raiser.
It is the phrase, “no bigger than abig telly” that did it for me. Theinstant response: Dyer writes all the English newspapers

S Ihave been reading PARALLEL LIVES by Peter Nadas since the summer… and have madeit to about page 200 with another 900 pages. Some of that time was taken up with surgery and recovery but the actualreading of this novel by Peter Nadas is the most difficult, the mostcomplicated, most demanding of my life. And not being done inside a class, not being read against a deadline andnot worried that I would have to fake the in depth review.. but already I knowthis is a terribly great novel, beyond probably my ability, but still demandingand I will not be able to show how he used Plutarch’s lives to structure hisnovel, I will not be able to talk about the use of time: Is it taking place on 16 June as Peter Esterhazysuggested all novels now take place: Ispend three weeks reading the section:

Two women are in acab on the way to the hospital where the older woman’s husband is dying, orabout to die.. the younger woman is in love with this woman’s son… There is aterrible rain storm going on and the driver of the taxi has difficulty driving…it is possible the driver is an agent as this is still communist Hungary… theolder woman loathes the younger woman, the younger woman is in awe of the olderwoman… the older woman and the younger woman eventually clutch each other andthe older woman is remembering long ago another clutching as she was nursing arecently born child and the younger woman is described as having been used andabused since she could not get a residency permit to live in Budapest… All of this is told with the objectivity anddistance of Plutarch… almost as if we forget we are reading invented lives:while Plutarch was describing mostly historical figures, but which in somecases would not exist unless he had described them… Now what to made ofPARALLEL LIVES… the discovery of a murdered man in a Berlin park and theinsinuation that a young man did it… We creep on into the book ,900 pages to goand off to the side I am aware of a huge Murakami and even a Stephen King… butall three didn’t get the Nobel Prize and the mind drift as to which will bereally talked about, reviewed, and most importantly like the movie box officeresults on Monday morning…

T FrancoisAugieras is not a household name. Probably and sadly for a good reason, but on the other hand I wish Icould give his JOURNEY OF THE DEAD to every smart kid I know or will know and Iwish some had given me this book many many years ago… I had read his JOUNREY TO MOUNT ATHOSand THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE which likeJOUNREY TO THE DEAD were published by Pushkin Press in London, the only Englishpublisher that can stand with Dalkey Archive and New Directions when it comesto being perfectly essential to anyone who might in any way describe themselvesas interested in reading, in being well read or…

JOURNEYOF THE DEAD is Augieras long life as wandering shepherd in Algeria in the early1950s… he rivals Genet for the clarity of his writing, for the ordinariness ofhis understanding of human nature, for his acceptance and fearless confidence… as Genet mentioned when he was in Chicago for the Democratic Conventionin 1968: the only sexy people were the leather clad police… all the merepolitical became uninteresting… Augieras writes, “Whenever the moonlight offeredthem up to my sense of purity and wonder, I loved these symbols of thetwentieth century, the perfection of things that were easy to come by—guns, gramophonerecords.” OR “What makes Africa enchanting? Is it the sound of dogs barking at night?” OR three incidents: “What whet my appetite was just being withwomen,; prostitution appealed to me, I didn’t find submissive young women sothreatening. Europeans didn’t interest me:they knew nothing of the steppe, the animals I loved, they had no smell… How fine it was to be twenty and between agirl’s legs! OR I noticed a tall Arab boy of about eighteenwith beautiful well rounded shoulders… I followed him into the darkness. I kissed him in the lips but instead ofkissing me in return he told me to meet him some distance away… He returned mykisses so passionately that my eyesfilled with tears… We stayed where we were, leaning against a boulder . At my waist the pistol gleamed in the darkness OR OR Iwent into the sheepfold grabbed one of the lambs by its fleece. I had my favorites and as the rest of theflock retreated to the far end of their prison with a great rumbling sound,kneeling on the urine soaked bedding and holding its head down , I imitated therams and made violent love to him. The wool rubbed against my belly…”

U Fargentler is another Pushkin title HYMN TOOLD AGE by Hermann Hesse… but that isfor another time as is THE UNCANNILY STRANGE AND BRIEF LIFE OF AMEDEIMODIGLIANI by Velibor Colic. Just by mentioningthe Hesse and the book by a Bosnia writer living in France, one can see the range of PUSHKIN PRESS

V ISLEOF THE DEAD by GERHARD MEIER is a perfect Dalkey Archive book: two old men walk around a city in Switzerland, one of the guys talksa great part of the novel and the other guy listens and observes… 110 pages: “Whathas time, what has life done with these faces?”

Butmore from ISLE OF THE DEAD on another day… what an act of optimism…

W Hardto believe but back in 1963 SIMON AND SCHUSTER actually occasionally published real literature. In addition to Michel Butor they published COMPOSITIONNO.1 by Marc Saporta. The book wasunbound and came packaged in a bright orange, black white glossy box. There was a sort of introduction on theinside front of the box telling readers what to do and reminding them that “alife is composed of many elements. Butthe number of possible combinations is infinite. He pages were wrapped in a narrow orange bandwith instructions: The pages of thisbook may be read in any order. Thereader is requested to shuffle the like a deck of cards.

VISUALEDITIONS in London has reissued the book in a yellow box but does not mention onthe title that it was translated by Richard Howard or the date of its originalpublication. Two introductions to the box are now included and a grey illustrationis printed on the back of each page… the illustrations seem very intrusive anddistract from the confrontation with words on a page and the shuffling of thosepages as we are now also shuffling these illustrations.

Ofcourse COMPOSITION No. 1 preceded THE UNFORTUNATES by B.S. Johnson but in oneessential way these are quite different. The Saporta is more radical in that individual pages are shuffled whilewith Johnson’s box it contained signatures of pages… and it seemed that he wasshuffling events while Saporta was moving about elements… however in no wayshould one be discouraged from getting a copy or getting the box by MarcSaporta… this gauntlet remains ever new which cannot be said for ALL the booksthat Simon Schuster published in 1963, all of which are dead and gone.

HOW NOTHING CALLS

2011-09-16T18:31:00.000-04:00

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

2011-08-12T17:44:00.000-04:00

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?

2011-08-05T10:46:00.001-04:00

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

2011-07-20T11:20:00.000-04:00

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

FROM HERE TO HERE: aspects of a self-portrait

2011-06-08T12:56:00.000-04:00

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

2011-05-27T12:05:00.001-04:00

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

2011-04-27T16:11:00.000-04:00

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

2011-04-25T18:00:00.000-04:00

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.

OSWIECIM

2011-03-30T11:28:00.001-04:00

He is not going to write about going to Oswiecim.
I am not going to write about going to Oswiecim.
Being in Krakow, taking a local train.
To and from.
A local train that stops at every station.
It seems to take forever.

Is there any pre-conceived idea of what will be seen?
He thinks since it is June there will be a lot of people about.
There will be signs all about telling a person what to do.
He is both hungry and not hungry and plans to eat when he gets back to Krakow where Piret is working at a conference devoted to ceramics.

There are always directions.

Krakow is both a living city and a show city. Much like New York or Paris, even if it is not the capital, there is a "feel" which launches a thousand brochures, so I took the train to Osviewim.

Eating.

Staying/not staying.

Here

Here.

Eating.

Living.

Living

When are you coming back.

Been there.

Being taken.

Been there.

What I learned today.

Necessary.

Waiting.

Going.

Coming.

Waiting.

Waiting

Waiting.

How to fill up the time.

I know I have been there and you know I have been there.

And.

and

going to Oswiecim...
only tourists can see this view,those who came here before would not have been able to see this from where they were enclosed in those boxcars...

Copyright 2011 Thomas McGonigle

BEING CAUGHT UP by the Nazis and the Soviets

2011-03-05T18:23:00.006-05:00

BEING CAUGHT UP

8--In Patchogue, growing up, in my experience, remembered, World War Two was mostly in the Pacific, being of the Class of ’44 and thus born in the last year of the war, the memory is of uncles who had been in the Navy and Marines in the Pacific, my mother’s father was a Colonel in the engineers building airfields in Burma and China,

9--Never was the adjective “good” ever attached to the noun war, that was a distortion applied long afterward as a way to make those who had served feel good as they were dying, never once did anyone ever say: it was a good war, they all knew better, the why was unspoken and in the pictures of dead American Japanese in the various blue covered picture histories that were published after the war for an audience of veterans and those who were related to them

10--Of course we all knew about the war in Europe: D-DAY, the Afrika Korps, the Battle of the Bulge, Erwin Rommel , Adolf Hitler, FDR, Eisenhower, Churchill, (I was going to add Stalin but his name was very obscure in memory)

11--What World War Two would almost solely become arrived via: Eugen Kogan’s THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF HELL, Lord Russell of Liverpool’s THE SCOURGE OF THE SWASTIKA… as now in the early 60’s along with one name: Adolf Eichmann

12--With the knowing about the camps and the killing of millions of Jews there were two disturbing elements in: the Scourge of the Swastika there are photographs of Jews about to be murdered and the pubic hair of one of the women is very evident---as everyone knows pubic hair was relentlessly persecuted in publications in the Unites States until Penthouse broke the taboo many years later—and the second detail is in memory: a short reference in Kogan’s book to a Romanian boy being sent to Buchenwald for being a compulsive masturbater as a favor to the ruler of Romania---i have not read this book now for many years and will stand corrected: though of course it is the memory I am writing about---

13—in the Coram Drive-in with my family we saw A TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE. There was probably a second movie but this film has remained with me because of the ending.

13---Later, when I began to use the word film interchangeably with movie, I discovered that this was directed by Douglas Sirk ( as was another film or movie that is permanently lodged in memory TAZA SON OF COCHISE)--- I guess I was getting ready for being able to watch nearly all of the films of Fassbinder many years later---

13--- the ending, the hero of the film, played by John Gavin is on leave from the German army and at home---the love--- goes back to the war on the Eastern Front and the last thing he will see in the film is the muzzle of the rifle pointed at him by a Russian he had previously saved from being killed: that gaping abyss into which his life is being sent.

13--- never having seen in a movie in which the sympathetic lead character is killed was both incredibly upsetting though I was unable to explain why and to this day: of course being the good guy and all the rest of it, so I suppose…
---14 Princeton University Press has added to the complexity of World War Two another tiny element in the letters of a ordinary German soldier sent to the Russian front, RELUCTANT ACCOMPLICE edited by Konrad H. Jarusch, the son of the letter writer of the same name Konrad Jarusch who had been a high school teacher of religion and history and who find himself in charge of a large field kitchen behind the German lines…the very domestic tone of the letters is of real interest and the constant awareness of even as early as the latter part of 1941 with the winter arriving, there is the sense of the fatal consequences of the German invasion of Russia. Konrad will die of typhus on January 27, 1942…

---14, so Konrad served, essentially an older man, what was he to do, he served, he tried to feed the horde of Russian prisoners, he was not heroic, he didn’t place his life in front of… in order to stop any action, he knew the fate of the Jews, he knew that many of the Russia had welcomed the Germans as liberators, he saw their betrayal, a little guy without a sense of humor, another little guy doing what he had to do, but nothing bad--- really--- and he wrote these letters… “we live from that which we have brought from home, and nurture ourselves with what we hear from home. Most of us can only stand it here, because they see their time here as merely a temporary thing. But we don’t make any plans about the future…

---14 reminded that most soldiers just got through the war, to be remembered only by their relatives and when they were gone not even… the fortunate father in having a son who will become a professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, not to be forgotten, not a hero, not a victim, not a criminal, not a… just another dead soldier who wrote letters making things complex

---14 complex as when my first boss who had lost his arm in the Battle of Bulge was talking about how he had been spared the job of killing some German prisoners as the sergeant was afraid they would make a noise, and how Jim was glad he didn’t have to lead a German in to the dark and cut his throat form behind, with no bitterness at the loss of his arm, thankful he didn’t have to do that job, but for me hearing it: the complexity of the war, did Americans do such things, that wasn’t part of the story…

---15 Jarusch’s letters joins a tiny tradition of books by those who did not inwardly go along and at time publicly did not go along though remaining in Germany. DIARY OF A MAN IN DESPAIR by Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen is one such book, by this Prussian aristocrat who always disdainful of the Nazis and who recounting his contact with Oswald Spengler a writer always beloved of by those who enjoy predicting the decline of the West and a stalwart of the Knopf publishing company for many years it should be remembered… anyway to get a sense of the internal emigration: (Spengler) he was truly the most humorless man I have ever met; in this respect he is surpassed only by Herr Hitler and his Nazis who have ever prospect of dying of a wretchedness compounded by their own deep-rooted humorlessness and the dreary monotony of public life which under their domination has taken on the rigidity of a corpse and is now in its fourth year of suffocating us to death (this is in May, 1936)

Reck-Malleczewen will be murdered in Dachau in February 1945.

There is a wonderful apt entry from 20 July 1944. Maria Olczewska ( an opera star) has come for a visit. We talked about Furtwangler—a subject I hardly want to touch on. There is, evidently, a way of conducting in a “blonde” manner. And the favouring of this shade, whether in fact or as a concept, is something which in itself compromises the man who does it. I can’t help it

---15 Norman Stone who writes an introduction to this book points out that one of the great failures of history was that the Prussian aristocrats did not understand that their natural allies were the ordinary Catholics who according to the most reliable research were more likely to be anti-Nazi or not susceptible to the Nazis unlike their Protestant countrymen… and it is this prejudice that proved fatal to them in the long run though it should be remembered that Von Stauffenberg was a Catholic aristocrat who almost did kill Hitler

---16 and a more obscure though more important book: JOURNAL IN THE NIGHT by Theordore Haeker who it seems was in contact with the Scholl, those young people in White Rose, the few who dared to not remain silent.

Some notes:
1940. (399)In addition to his particular knowledge the historian today needs above all to know his catechism and in addition perhaps a smattering of criminal psychology, That is much more important than a knowledge of German Idealism

1944. (698) The Germans tend by nature to the heresy of Pelagius and of Arius, by nature that is by your own ability that makes them proud and by their own pride that makes the intellectually shallow.

1940 (292) The soul of the man who only has ears for the noise of the times will soon be miserably impoverished. He will soon be found to be deaf to all reasonable language.

1940 (469) I wrote so to speak, because I am a reader and always profit by my writing. But now that you ask me, I have to admit that whoever writes wants to be read, and not only by himself.

1940 (87) It is difficult to know one’s way about in one’s own thoughts; how muh more difficult where one’s feelings are concerned.

1940 (80) To many, war is a satisfactory alibi before the world, even though not before one’s conscience or before God.

16--- the LAST LETTERS FROM STALINGRAD was a little collage of letters published in the US in 1962. It is made up of letters soldiers wrote from besieged Stalingrad when the writers knew that they were lost. Preserved by the propaganda ministry who had wanted to possibly use them as a memorial, the actual content was too sad, too human, too lacking in…

But for me when read in the context of A TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE:

---Around me everything is collapsing, a while army is dying, day and night are on fire, and four men busy themselves with daily reports on temperature and cloud ceilings. I don’t know much about war. No human being has died by my hand. I have even fired live ammunition

---Don’t forget me too quickly

---I will not surrender; yesterday, after our infantry had retaken a positinm I saw four men who had been taken prisoner by the Russians. No we shall not go into captivity. When Stalingrad has fallen you'll hear and read it. And then yo;ll know that I shall not come back

---if I could have made it through this war safely, I would have understood for the first time what it means to be a man and wife in is true and deepest sense. I also know it now—now that these last lines are going to you

17---and awkwardly I cut to Wendy Lesser’s book on listening and trying to understand Dmitry Shostakovich’s string quartets, MUSIC FOR SILENCED VOICES. For myself who am musically illiterate Lesser’s commentary on the quartets is illuminating and foregoing the usual technical language makes accessible the structure and how the quartets work ---the 15th is my favorite, the saddest--- as individual works of art and how the quartets, all 15 of them, seem to take on a life of their own. It is helpful to read the book before and after listening to each quartet.

18---at one time one could hear people saying, the one advantage of the communist regimes was if you were a writer your work got taken seriously if only by the police who read with greater care than any garden variety editor in the West who was only looking for a way to make money. And the same was said about music and Lesser is very good on just how seriously the communist regime was interested in Shostakovich’s work and how he reciprocated that interest and how he sought to create a space to work in his own way. Lesser falters a little when she acknowledges that he was well rewarded, Three Stalin Prizes among them and all the usual materials rewards though of course he was never really free to come and go as he pleased. She tries hard to avoid dealing with what Shostakovich knew or didn’t know about the untold millions who were murdered by the regime he never publically rebuked and she is reduced to finding irony in certain of his public statement and of course his silence is seen as his way of protesting and yet and yet.

Of course if we are to be tolerant of Ezra Pound’s war time speeches, Celine’s pamphlets, Heidegger’s silence, I suppose we can accept Shostakovich into their ranks but I am well aware that this is no real answer.

Tyrants have always had their artists. And the nature of the tyrant is to be arbitrary. It takes a lot of forgetting to listen to Shostakovich just as it does to read Pound, Heidegger, Celine but they did not so thoroughly serve the tyrant and that is what Lesser avoids. Pound, Celine and Heidegger had lapses, while the whole of Shostakovich’s life was given over to support for the tyrant.

THE PREPARATION OF THE NOVEL: Roland Barthes

2011-02-27T15:07:00.000-05:00

56---In the late 20th Century, three French intellectuals---Derrida, Foucault and Barthes destroyed--- via their eager gullible American acolytes--- most English and literature departments of American universities and when they were contemporaneously joined by the feminists, queer study folk and Marxists of various persuasions smart sensitive students departed to science and math if they wanted to preserve any real interest In the reading of literature.

33---Derrida was a huckster of the first order who in reality was your typical Gnostic adept possessed of a specialist vocabulary who initiated disciples into his supposed esoteric wisdom who in turn in a traditional Ponzi scheme recruited unsuspecting students who in turn…

89--Foucault worked the psychology side of the street and poorly read and disciplined set out to undermine supposedly received ideas about madness, incarceration and sex. His life ended in squalor after aggressively infecting young men in San Francisco and other cities with the AIDS virus while on tour in the United States.

67---Barthes launched a thousand students of signs and with the same abstruse language making common a line I heard in Dublin pubs: Who’s reading the telephone directory… the reading of telephone directories becoming equal to reading Shakespeare in many American universities since Barthes had argued that there was no real difference, there is only reading…

99---However, Barthes did create two books that will endure: Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes and A LOVER’S DISCOURSE. Finally the rubbish of what had made him in demand was cleared away and Barthes was able to write about as someone might have said. His real subject: himself.

I have been reading with great pleasure and actual anguish THE PREPARATION OF THE NOVEL by Barthes published by Columbia University Press. Made up of the notes for the lectures Barthes gave in the College de France in the years just before his death in 1980 they take up the question of what it means to want to write a novel.
At first I didn’t get far as I got bogged down in the prefaces but as I read the first lecture which comes with very good annotations as do all the lectures, I discovered that miraculous moment again… the reading slowed, so that I could read only a paragraph at a sitting… I was moved to the center of my being.

So the question of how to share this and Benjamin at hand: just quote what I have underlined from that lecture of December 2, 1978:

a---Each year, when beginning a new course, I think it apt to recall the pedagogical principle stated programmatically in the “Inaugural Lecture”: “I sincerely believe that at the origin of teaching such as this we must always locate a fantasy, which can vary from year to year…

b---The subject is not to be suppressed

c---Better the illusions of subjectivity than the impostures of objectivity. Better the Imaginary of the Subject…

d---Dante:”Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.” Dante was thirty-five. I’m much older

e---Age is a constituent part of the subject who writes

f---I’ve gone far beyond the arithmetical middle of my life, it’s today that I’m experiencing the sensation- certainty of living out the middle-of-the- journey

g--- Having reached a certain age, “our days are numbered”

h---This reference to age is often taken the wrong way, misunderstood—it’s seen as coquetry: “but you’re not old

i---There comes a time what you’ve done , written (past labors and practices) looks like repeated material, doomed to repetition, to the lassitude of repetition

j--- The self-evident truth: “I am mortal” comes with age

k---Foreclosure of anything New (= the definition of “Doing Time”)

l---I have no time left life to try out several different lives: I have to choose my last life, my new life, Vita Nova (Dante)

m---I have to get out of this gloomy state of mind that the wearing effects of repetitive work and mourning have disposed me to, This running aground, this slow entrenching in the quicksand (which isn’t quick!) this drawn out death of staying in the same place

n---So to change, that is to give a content to the “jolt” of the middle of life

o---But to change idea is banal; it’s as natural as breathing

p---From Blanchot: There is a moment in the life of a man--- consequently, in the life of men--- when everything is completed, the books written, the universe silent ...there is left only the task of announcing it

q---Either retreat into silence, rest, retreat

r---Or to start walking in another direction, that is to battle, to invest, to plant with the well known paradox: Building a house makes sense but to start planting

s---Part of a life’s activity should always be set aside for the Ephemeral: what happens only once and vanishes, the necessary share of the Rejected Monument, and therein lies the vocation of the Course

t---The same uninterrupted sadness, a kind of listlessness… a difficult afternoon: the afternoon … I reflect with enough intensity. The beginning of an idea, something like a literary conversion--- it’s those very old words that occur to me to enter into literature, into writing, to write, as if I’d never written before to do only that

u---To want to write

v---To say that you want to write--- there, in fact, you have the very material of writing; thus only literary works attest to Wanting-to-Write--- not scientific discourses. This could even serve as am apposite definition of writing (of literature) as opposed to Science

w---The proof that In Search of Lost Time is the narrative of Wanting-to-Write resides in this paradox: the book is supposed to begin at the point when it’s already written

FROM THE WASTES OF TIME: THE CIVIL WAR The First Year Told By Those Who Lived It

2011-02-24T14:51:00.000-05:00

7- Today, given that too many college students in the various colleges of the City University of New York have much difficulty figuring which came first, World War One or World War Two (and I am not putting you on) it is with some trepidation that I mention that in April begins the 150th anniversary of the Civil War with the remembering of the firing upon Fort Sumter.

2--I doubt many college students could make a list of three Civil War battles or even associate Lincoln in some way with the war. These students can go on at some length about the racist nature of American society since they will be reciting in a rather rote fashion the obsessions of their professors and like students in the former Soviet Empire they know what they have to do to get ahead: never argue, never question just repeat after me.

3--I am of an age that I do remember the 100th anniversary of the Civil War as I was working at Francis Bannerman Sons out in Blue Point and that company, you might know had long before bought up 90 % of the war surplus from the Spanish American War and still had in Blue Point and up in the castle on an island in the Hudson River a vast assortment of the necessary parts and other gear to outfit those who were now collecting the various weapons and accouterments. It was a great first job for a 16 year old. (for another day)

4—My own connection to the Civil War was via a picture on a great aunt’s wall in her apartment in Brooklyn where I was told of this man: a great-great uncle who had lost his army at Gettysburg fighting on the Union side. This aunt was from my mother’s side of the family and was a Whitney which lead to the family legend that Eli Whitney was a relative and as I learned incorporated the whole of the Civil War within his biography. Having invented the cotton gin he made cotton profitable and slavery necessary in the South but being cheated out of any profit from his invention went North where he perfected the process of interchangeable parts in the manufacturing of muskets thus giving the North the reason why they would win the Civil War: industrial might of an inexhaustible magnitude. Aunt Marie had met this man and remembered only the pinned-up empty sleeve of his suit jacket.

11--On my father’s side of the family, the Irish side--- was made complex because of the Draft Riots that occurred almost around the corner from where I am typing these lines: recent Irish immigrants unable to buy their way out of Mr. Lincoln’s draft rebelled against being forced to serve in an army that represented a country that saw them as agents of the Vatican. A country where there were plenty of places: dogs and Irish not allowed--- and why should they go off to die to free the coloured people? But the history knowing came only came later since my grandfather had been sent out of Ireland as a 12 year old boy to work as best he could and this was well after the Civil War. Ireland meant, really only a place you left. If you are 12 the history of a new place does not matter.

12--When I think back to reading the 100th anniversary celebration it seems that the war was described by Bruce Catton but which now when read is the sort of official version of Union triumphalism and was blessed by Life Magazine and who was to argue with that authority, then?

15--Times change. THE CIVIL WAR , A NARRATIVE by Shelby Foote was read. Twenty years of writing 3000 pages, one man---not an academic committee, not a gang of indentured student assistants--- the masterful opening as Foote delights in the genius of Lincoln’s calculating the necessity of getting the South to fire first…
Shelby Foote is America’s Edward Gibbon and he provides the grand narrative of the Civil War. There is no need for any other, probably.

15--AND there is great news RIGHT NOW from the Library of America: they have begun to publish a series of books made up of near contemporary writings based upon a chronological account of the war. With a great breadth of sources one hears the actual voices, remembering that this was the first war in which most of the soldiers on both sides were literate and many of them wrote letters home and these letters were preserved. The Library of America book: THE CIVIL WAR The First Year Told by Those Who Lived it. It is edited by three academics but excusing this I do wonder why one couldn’t have done the job but that would lead to the usual discussion of the decline of education…

34--Since I am writing this toward the end of February: one hundred and fifty years ago Jefferson Davis (February 18, 1861) is giving his Inaugural Address: We have entered upon the career of independence, and it must be inflexibly pursued…As a necessity, not a choice, we have resorted to the remedy of separation, and henceforth our energies …It is joyous in the midst of perilous times to look around upon a people united in heart…

16--Given my own predisposition I did skip ahead and read a letter from a surgeon ( Lunsford P. Yandell Jr) writing about what he saw at the Battle of Belmont in November of 1861: “The gun had exploded into a thousand atoms. One of the men had his right arm torn to pieces, and the ribs on that side pulpified, though the skin was not broken. He breathed half an hour. The other poor fellow received a piece of iron under the chin which passed up into the brain—the blood gushing from his nose and ears. He never breathed afterward…”

"As to the variety of expression depicted upon the faces of the corpses, of which I heard so much I saw nothing of it They all looked pretty much alike---as much alike as dead men from any other cause. Some had their eyes open, some closed, some had their mouths open, and others had them closed. There is a terrible sameness in the appearance of the dead men I have ever seen.

"My friend Captain Billy Jackson was shot in the hip while led a portion of the Russell’s brigade. I think he will recover. I am afraid Jimmy Walker (James’ son) will not recover. I think he is shot through the rectum.

19-- So to Shelby Foote where you can read his eloquent description of this minor battle of the Civil War, a battle that in no way changed the war, no way either shortened it lengthen it: just a brief moment of slaughter… but seen as one of the first steppings of Grant from the obscurity which had been his fate until…

17—The selections in THE CIVIL WAR THE FIRST YEAR TOLD BY THOSE WHO LIVED IT and only my poor typing skill prevents me from making a simple list of all the contributors to this wonderful book so you probably should go to the Library of American website and see for yourself. They do quote from a poem by Hermann Melville written after the Civil War as to his premonition of what as to be come. One line holds me:
The tempest bursting from the waste of Time.

18--Of course as I type I am nearly buried by the waste of time and in that waste I remember walking , six, seven years ago was it, with my wife and son and daughter across the field which Pickett send his men in 1863 at Gettysburg and here we were walking in the hot sun of a similar July and I was asking Lorcan could he imagine what it must have been like for young men not much older than his 12 years of age or his sisters 15 years… but he had not great defining sentence.. and the daughter and wife were there only because after you promised we were then going to the wholesale outlet mall built it seems on the side of a Confederate hospital but Lorcan did mention he would have taken shelter behind the one tree that we could see and I was asking but what about the other hundreds of men would they all lie up behind him, and his silence seems to have born some fruit as he has a remarkable narrative gift when writing on historical events but that is all off the subject which in some way is the problem of the Civil War: how to talk about it, about this something that happened and still resonates in our daily life even if unacknowledged, and that silence evident in all our modern major poets and save for Faulkner all out major prose writers…

20—THE CIVIL WAR THE FIRST YEAR TOLD BY THOSE WHO LIVED IT. What a wonderful title. Maybe someone will find a way to use it in imagination, but it has the practical value of putting the reader really there back then in the waste of time.

AFTER--And I should mention that Madison Smartt Bell has written a provocative novel based on the life of Nathan Bedford Forrest which Pantheon published two years ago, DEVIL’S DREAM. So it can be said that the Civil War still is news. The provocation comes from the fact that Forrest was an early supporter of the Ku Klux Klan but on the other hand Bell is probably the single most interesting writer at the moment in the US based on his more than 2000 page trilogy based on the life of Toussant L’Ouverture and other books now too many to mention… another day, then.

GRADITUDE: Miguel de Unamuno and Elizabeth Bishop

2011-02-10T13:10:00.000-05:00

46

At one time, even within my lifetime, all thoughtful persons would have read before they had turned twenty-one, Miguel de Unamuno’s THE TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE.

And once read it could be said , THE TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE set me on a course.

Homo sum nihil humani a me alienum puto, said the Latin playwright. For my part I would rather say: Nullum hominem a me alienum puto: I am a man; no other man I deem a stranger. For in my eyes the adjective humanus is no less suspect than its abstract substantive humanitas, humanity. I would choose neither “the human” nor “humanity,” neither the simple adjective nor the substantive adjective, but the concrete substantive: man, the man of flesh and blood, the man who is born, suffers and dies---above all, who does; the man who eats and drinks ad plays and sleeps and thinks and loves; the man who is seen and heard; one’s brother, the real brother.

As long as one held tightly to this paragraph one was preserved from the murderous illusions of Marxism, fascism and all the other isms that seek to replace a man in the centrality of his nervous system with fascinating plans for the future.

The University of Illinois Press has published in translation an unpublished early work of de Unamuno’s TREATISE ON LOVE OF GOD. Never really finished it prefigures what is to come in his great work and as such is of interest as are the wonderful novels and fictions which can be found in Bollingen Series years ago published by Princeton University Press: novels as innovative as the novels of Joyce Rios, or Schmidt.

The TREATISE is provocative In the best sense of that over-used word:
---Every cultured European of our days is Christian, willingly or not, knowingly or not. Among us one is born Christian and breathes Christianity, and this applies no less to those who most abominate it. The paganism of those that want to oppose Christ is a paganism that would scandalize a pre-Christian pagan, of resurrected and able t see it.

---The originality, the deep truth of Christianity has been to make God a human being, the Human Being, that suffers passion and dies. Such is the madness and the scandal of the Cross (I Corinthians I: 23)

I doubt you will be seeing this book reviewed in the New York Times.

47

Farrar Straus & Giroux have with the publication of two books this season done something that rarely happens in the world of publishing: they have demonstrated loyality, keeping faith, being true.

Both of these books are handsome, beautiful in their plainness: the brightness of the yellow cover of PROSE and the deep blue of POEMS both by Elizabeth Bishop. The poetry is well known and through the years FSG kept faith with Elizabeth Bishop. They kept all her books in print and collected them as needed. She herself avoided the feminist or women’s ghetto by refusing to allow her poetry to appear in anthologies restricted by gender, knowing that such a restriction is always demeaning even if good for the mediocre who huddle together on the basis of gender race or ethnicity in their pursuit of lifetime sinecures in those concentration camps of the intellect: our universities and colleges.

And while I respect Bishop, I personally find myself going with more excitement to the collected poems of Lorine Niedecker whose fate, life and career demonstrate the opposite of Bishop’s. And while finally a Collected Works of Niedecker is available from the University of California Press for most of her life her work appeared from small presses in small editions and they were only sporadically available. Here this woman, washing floors in a hospital in Wisconsin, while writing poetry that can be easily compared to Paul Celan and at the same time conducting correspondences with Louis Zukofsky and Ezra Pound, a woman who had to work for a living in isolation save for a few supporters... with no sinecures at Harvard or those monies that are always known but not talked about… how different our literary world view would be if otherwise.

In the Bishop PROSE the discovery for me is her text BRAZIL that was written to a Time Life series… and in her letters there is a reference to Nelida Pinon… but that is for another day.

To repeat: celebrate FSG for its faithfulness, a virtue rare indeed today in the world of publishing.. and a few lines from Bishop:

From “Dead” The Winter is her lover now,/A brilliant one and bold;/And sbge has gone away from me,/Estranged and white and cold.

From “Sleeping on the Ceiling” It is so peaceful on the celing!/ It is the Place de la Concorde./The little crystal chandelier/ is off, the fountain is in the dark./Not a soul is in the park./ … We must go under the wallpaper/to meet the insect gladiator,/ to battle with a net and trident,/ and leave the fountain and square./ But oh, that we would sleep up there…

GOING TO PATCHOGUE and ZUKOFSKY

2011-02-02T15:19:00.000-05:00

Last night I was in The Strand and noticed on the new books table this fortuitous juxtaposition.

Most likely it will not be there a day later and within the week both books will no longer be "new."

Zukofsky was an early subject of this blog since he was born a few streets south of where I sit.

Zukofsky had a summer bungalow in a town across Long Island from Patchogue.

Zukofsky has gradually found readers.

GOING TO PATCHOGUE has found fewer readers. I did meet once a young man on Fifth Street who stopped me asking if I was who he thought I was and I asked him why he was stopping me: I had been looking for the blood near the police-station on Fifth Street, that you had written about.

Of course I am happy to see GOING TO PATCHOGUE again available but it is a source of an aching sadness as no one has been willing to publish what comes after: FORGET THE FUTURE, NOTHING DOING, JUST LIKE THAT (A Beginning and an End of the so-called 60s) or what I am working on now EXIT IS FINAL

THE LEPER'S BELL: what new and old books tell us

2011-01-18T15:15:00.000-05:00

"There is no literature anymore, there are just single books that arrive in bookstores, just as letters, newspapers, advertising pamphlets arrive in mailboxes."
— Tõnu Õnnepalu (Border State)

PART SIXTY-TWO

For $3.30 plus postage you can buy the collected works in hardcover of Jay Cantor.

Do you remember his works: The Death of Che, Great Neck, Krazy Kat, On Giving Birth to One’s Mother, The Space Between : Literature and Politics?

I am thinking about him because like Leopold Bloom I was looking at the book carts of dollar books in front of the Strand and found GREAT NECK.

Here is a man who is a tenured professor at Tufts who runs a program in creative writing. He is also a MacArthur Fellow and as such is certified to be a genius.

He has written a comic book that is to be published in the Spring.

Great Neck is 703 pages long and published by Knopf in 2003. The copy I purchased from the Strand was unread.

I stopped reading

The leper’s bell was heard before the leper appeared. But today it seems that the leper bell has acquired multiple voices and publishers ever at the ready for the next or last thing… and of course compassion is the order of the day but what to make of LOUD IN THE HOUSE OF MYSELF Memoir of a Strange Girl by Stacy Pershall… who you will be happy to know is an artist and a belly dancer living in New York City.

28 people are credited by the author for helping her being her book to market and that does not include anonymous others and beasts…

The woman got a lot of problems but her prose is very orderly: “Still, I spend a lot of time wondering if I’d have been a borderline if I’d been raised by liberal artists in New York City. In Prairie Grove, if you don’t bow your head and pray to Jesus you’re culturally transgressive. In New York, I have yet to hear anyone say grace before every meal, but my parents pray before eating a McDonald’s cheeseburger…”

A good line and sure to get a chuckle in parts of New York City but I wonder if she would get a laugh at the storefront churches down here on the lower east side of Manhattan?

But it is the orderly prose that has been carefully prepared by her publishers at Norton which is the problem…

The leper’s bell

If someone you love dies, you mourn . If you are a writer you then probably write about it. Even James Joyce did this. You might remember his beautiful little poem on the death of his father and the birth of his first grandson.

The concluding lines:
A child is sleeping:
An old man is gone.
O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son!

The poem is a model of what ought to be done.

If one is writing prose, Uwe Johnson’s memorial to his friend Ingeborg Bachmann, A TRIP TO KLAGENFURT In the Footsteps of Ingeborg Bachmann, is a suitable example.

80 or so pages and we feel both Johnson’s personal loss and the loss to the world at large but we are given reasons for feeling this grief. The sculptured prose, the shaping, the selection of detail and the brevity all contribute to making Johnson’s book a model memorial.

Sadly, Francisco Goldman in SAY HER NAME chose to go simply with the emotion, with the feeling and allowed the words to flow on and on…

Starting in promise with a series of quotes which sadly go down hill into banality, but the start is from Waiting for Godot:

Vladimir: Suppose we repented…
Estragon: Our being born?

Goldman’s own text also begins in promise: “Aura died on July 25, 2007. I went back to Mexico for the first anniversary because I wanted to be where it had happened at that beach on the Pacific Coast. Now, for the second time in a year I had come home again to Brooklyn without her.

Three months before she died, April 24, Aura had turned thirty. We’d been marred twenty-six days shy of two years."

There are a few more little snips and then as they say the plunge, fall, descend into a cellar of the text. Opened at random: “That first winter of Aura’s death I was fixated on not losing my gloves, my hat, or my scarf… “

350 pages and it seems Goldman has been a guest in Berlin, in Mexico and continues I guess to live and possibly teach in New York… the book comes with many blurbs…

On and on.

He is evidentialy a man of feeling but he is still able to operate in the world with some efficiency, it would seem. Goldman is a fortunate man. But now he has to carry this book around on his back. Might it not have been better to carry the memory of his love since he has replaced this love with this book, a book of 350 pages about himself, which is perfectly sterile.

PART TWENTY

Those dollar book carts also provided: THE SECRET LIFE OF OUR TIMES. New Fiction from ESQUIRE edited by Gordon Lish. Introduction by Tom Wolfe and dedicated to Lish’s son who is named Attituc. Lish mentions Captain Midnight and he became as I remember it, Captain Fiction, and charged rich people a lot of money to listen to him and to read their ”fiction” --- the bait being he was an editor at Knopf and if you kissed the magical prose orifice you got a book published but then he ran into accounting problems and what happened to Gordon Lish? which echoes a novel by Charles Simmons in which the refrain is Who the fuck is Harold Brodkey?

Tom Wolfe mentions in his intro: “ I do not detect the slightest shred of despair. I detect something buoyant and fun-loving.

This is in 1973.

Now, you know why something was going to go wrong. Esquire, Lish, Wolfe prided themselves on picking the best writers, writing available.

Let’s make list.

Raymond Carver (2 Stories), Don DeLillo, Joy Williams (2 stories), Bruce Jay Friedman, Joyce Carol Oates, Bernard Malamud, GABRIEL Garcia Marquez, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, A.B. Yehoshua, Richard Brautigan, John Barth, John Gardiner (2 stories) Gail Godwin, John Irving, Hilma Wolitzer, Raymond Kennedy, Earl Thompson, William Harrison (2 stories) Richard Brautigan, James Purdy, David Ohle, David Huddle, Michael Rogers, John Deck, James S. Reinbold (2 stories), Jerry Bumpus, Robert Ullian, Thomas Bontly, David Kranes, Alan V. Hewat

I have arranged the names from the familiar, the vaguely familiar to the…

Of course we are all destined to be forgotten but already some of these names are forgotten except to their few close ones… but these were thought by GL and TW to be the future or at the very least a marker of that moment 1973-7, no despair, buoyant, fun-loving.

We can see now the perils of trusting those who are : fun-loving and buoyant and not given to despair.

A page by Dahlberg, Kerouac, Burrough, Wescott, Julian Green…

I know or knew a few of the less known names in this list: William Harrison taught at the University of Arkansas for many years and had no interest in what I was writing, but he was well liked by George Garrett and Tom Whalen: he had some very popular novels but then dropped to the side… much in the way of how it happens in Hollywood: one day they stop returning your phone calls… it is not because of any great failure but something happens and the phone no longer rings and eventually: I wonder what happened to?... He wrote a novel about a suicide plot of students at the University of Chicago, IN THE WILD SANCTUARY. which should have been made into a movie but that didn’t happen… he began writing novels set in Africa, realistic novels with movie potential… and I guess he will be best known for ROLLERBALL which was made into a movie… he was incredibly handsome, movie star looks, rare in the world of writing

Robert Ullian was a friend of David Black who was one of the very few of the people I met when I came to NY who went on to great success not with his books of which there were many and still of much interest but as a TV writer and producer… so made lots of money… got awards for Law and Order. Miami Vice episodes… you can look him up in IMDB… but he is one of the few who I thought would write a great book… he read much more smartly than I did and was much more intelligent: I still remember him talking about how Nabokov did it… I even went to a freshman comp course he taught at one of the city colleges… he wrote and wrote and got awards for journalism but that real book has eluded him--- he tried with a book about his father: a detail of which I remember, the father hitting someone who was tormenting him and this person in turn permanently paralyzed--- that certain nightmare for anyone who had a relative who had polio and seeing people who were paralyzed… but it was the matter-of-fact cruelty of this moment in the book that has lingered all these years and I am sure DB has long forgotten in… but has gone across into the land of TV and movies but he has that lingering understanding that even more than the book writers: how perishable it all is…:

I forgot … Robert Ullian? I don’t know what happened to him--- Richard Elman said his family sod mattresses or something: how’s that for idle gossip?

Well, anyway, Ullian and a guy named Craig Nova and William O’Rourke were friends of David Black… Nova was married to Irini Spanindau and that ended… she became a Knopf writer… and he went off to the wilderness after writing three fierce little book sbut he quickly started writing novels that were supposed to be popular…

William O’Rourke was a disciple of Edward Dahlberg and wrote a very good firt novel MEEKNESS OF ISAAC and then some powerful essays and then seemed to move aside after some “popular” novels and ended up at Notre Dame, at least with a warm room and a place to go for some hours every week as a professor… he does political writing or commentary…

David Huddle used to invite me and David Black over to his apartment on West End Avenue where we tried to write a group porn novel inspired by both Anthony Burgess’s suggestion and the success of a novel by some Newsday writers… David had been a torturer in Vietnam.. sorry ,interrogator, in Vietnam since he had a little college.. but he got the story in this anthology published and got tenure at the University of Vermont…. He taught creative writing for 30 some years and I guess still does… he keeps writing poetry and stories and novels… but they all avoid the central event of his life: what he did or didn’t do in Vietnam, which is probably understandable…. But he is the epitome of the cheerful, the posiitve, the friendly...

PART THIRTY FOUR

“I do not detect the slightest shred of despair. I detect something buoyant and fun-loving.”

HAS GEORGE GARRETT BEEN FORGOTTEN or WHO IS GEORGE GARRETT?

2011-01-11T15:09:00.001-05:00

---scanned to be available, to be part of something much longer or shorter, a life tangential, intercepted, intercepting, as a way to or from, constantly the double vision---

In a magazine looked at in the bookstore on St Marks, George Garrett is to edit an issue of Southern Writing and I'm thinking as I walk home along Second Avenue, now remembering walking home along Second Avenue because already it was last week this is happening, this walking, however it is now weeks ago and eventually when this is done, this writing, it will be months ago and then years later to be read...I know or knew George Garrett and last saw him maybe four years ago (then) in The West End Bar up on Broadway across from Columbia, in there, at the bar, standing with back to the food counter, drinking I was, soda water with slice of lime and George was knocking back a bourbon or it could have been a Scotch though I am sure it wasn't a beer or A Scots or a gin and something...The West End...I had lived around the corner from it thanks to George who got me a fellowship to Columbia, now almost twelve years ago,(then) to come up from Virginia for the two years to get away or rather to move away from The Bulgarian who was going to stay on at Hollins College and there was nothing for me to do in Virginia and George himself was leaving town to go further south, closer to the clay of Florida, no, they ain't got clay in Florida, clay is for Georgia, but I have him getting closer to THE FINISHED MAN, had to look up the title, climb on the chair because the Garrett books are up on the top shelf due to the rigor of the alphabet, that book is very rare...off the subject, as we say, okay, I'm around the corner from The West End of Kerouac fame, got to mention that, don't ask why, please, something I do know for sure, the last stop in the night after hitting The Gold Rail, now turned into a chink place with plastic lace curtains, and Forlini's, a mafia heroin in the bathroom drop, but serving maybe the best veal in New York according to this Rumanian guy who now lives in Washington, now a little to the right of The Klan...The West End was the last stop just after two in the morning and sometimes it was three in the morning, though
this last time I was seeing George it was sometime in the afternoon,maybe even as early as one and I was thinking that was about the time I was in there up front, crying, even, it was awful, in a front booth because of the available sunlight, reading, over and over the first paragraph of Issac Singer's OLD LOVES and it must have been due to Lucja or that other woman who stole my inscribed copy of Dahlberg's BECAUSE I WAS FLESH

but remember this was myself walking back from the bookstore on St. Marks with the idea of The South and how in Ireland they refer to The Republic as The South and just yesterday (repeat first paragraph for detail of time) not going into which yesterday, I was told people in The North say they are going up to Dublin even though they are in fact going south to Dublin... this had come up because this Irish poet was reading in New York and when I asked him what he was going to do next, said he was going up to Washington... I corrected him, in New York you say you are going down to Washington... though if you lived in The South you could say you were going up to Washington--- or going up North which was what George allowed me to do, go up North to Columbia and leave Lilia st Hollins, not leave her behind, just leave maybe for both our sakes, leave, no, move apart and hope time would take care of, but it don't work like, and I was just thinking, if I am going on 38, Melinda is going to be 36 and she has

this is very subjective
where is the reader's interest?

a kid and a husband with a hearing aid who the last time I saw them was then celebrating, he was, not having to pay alimony to his third wife who had just died from cancer, such an end

try to imagine Petrarch or Dante coming up with such an end to the heart burst with love, sitting those nights while my parents were in shopping and I in the car waiting and wish I was not alone and Melinda was out there...

so Dublin has been suggested, hinted at, if I would drag in popular critical language, and I am not teasing it out. too much, now, however, there has been no contact with George for years because either he originated or just picked it up when he was there, the policy of Hollins College professors to like to get letters coming but write in the newsletter that we are to keep those letters coming but they as in all the years gone by, you can't expect to get an answer, sorry, but that is just the way and they each have their individual reasons but I guess it just comes down to the waste of energy, something like reading magazines and how once began there is no end to them and you get nothing from a magazine: so much cutting, cut and cut...but I ain't about to give you the English sermon against new books as being like buying gin in a pub: always overpriced and shortshotted...while getting from Hollins to Columbia serves me up the chance to link Johnny Greene of Greene County, Alabama with John Green met in Dublin...but first Johnny Greene was up in New York at Columbia University writing and doing research on his recent past in the civil rights movement and holding up his end of The Gold Rail Bar---bar now gone into a Chinese restaurant chain...just the other day walking passed and on the spur of the moment I was walking in and sitting up at the bar to look out at the sidewalk and street and how bright the sun is in the afternoon at that bit of Broadway: Lois who stole the Dahlberg book comes in--- she had the last name of the man who wrote THE SEVEN WHO WERE HANGED and it seems she is also now but a shade on a memorial site---

and Johnny Greene walks passed to take a table at the back of the room: to be hated by the whites and blacks back home, a Greene of Greene County, Alabama, and for all the wrong reasons and he once described the role of the cousin in the sexual rites of The Deep South: having no cousins I can only listen with envy... much like all those boys who have gone to fuck in motel rooms or in the back seats of Chevys with the woman's pants hanging from the ankle because you never know, silly boy, when you're gonna have to pull trou and make a quick getaway, little kids being the worst of the lot...but better than the kids who piss from the balcony
of theatres in Dublin on the smooching couples in the stalls...you can explain away hickeys and lipstick but the smell of urine on your coat as usual, just back from the cleaners, a once a year activity.

Talking about Dublin as if you couldn't tell...and John Green drank for a time in O'Dwyer’s, there on the corner of Leeson Street and The Green and moved across the street to another pub because he was now playing Gaelic football and was said to be quite good at it and even his lessons in the Irish language were said to be going good... going WELL,dummy! if you had done more than just buy the Irish grammar book and IRISH MADE EASY...you wouldn't feel so left out, so cut off from those articles in THE IRISH TIMES (this article was transmitted in Irish and translated here in the Dublin office into English)...I don't know my grandfather's name....The McGonigle grandfather, the one who came over from Ireland, shipped over since he came as a young teenager to work...sent out to America, he was, the whole world for
his asking...and with about as much luck as the coloured guy standing down in front of the gated supermarket on Second Avenue looking up:

IT TAKES THREE DAYS TO GET TO THE MOON

but I ain't looking for the moon or even an acre of land just to bring into this room either of the Green(e) boys and I am not about to forget I did go to see Julian Green in Paris since he was the only American in the French Academy and I had liked his diary and... this gets too far from the point which is a way of saying I have gone too far from The South and am stuck with no, I am not stuck with,rather growing old with: I had been able to talk with Johnny Greene in New York about my year in The South at Hollins College and that lead to thinking that John Green in Dublin had a father who was something in the military and was living in Arlington or one of those other military suburbs around Washington--- quick change of gears--- once knew a girl now a woman at Beloit College and this is around 1964 or 65 or maybe even as late as 65 or 66 because I know I was living in North Hall and her father was a pilot for the Strategic Air Command flying around and around in circles over North Dakota... I am not about to tell you about the daughter of the Senator from North Dakota...leave it, leave it alone, please, leave it alone...her Dad was flying, she said, as we lay upon the made-up bed, around and around...the linen had just been changed for the week, waiting--- that was why it was just made up--- for the command. . .I saw no point in making up a bed, Mom always made up the beds, for well, I was also going to excuse myself for talking about this girl, but back then she was knowing this other guy, so anyway, we were lying on top of the made-up bed, the lights were out we could hear kids pass on the walk in front of the window. . . our hands were touching, warm, hot, damp, flesh, wet, don't worry no clothing is gonna come off, finger inserted under buttoned shirt, behind belted pants: it was all so uncomfortable but neither of us could just take our clothes off and jump into bed then there is a big gap looking back that is and she has gone off to Chicago with this guy and he bought her a ring in Woolworth's and they said to everybody that they had gone to Chicago and gotten engaged and had stayed at this nice hotel and then went to the museum and David wanted to look at the Crucifixion scenes, wanting to see how exact medically they were... she disappears from the story and David years later will be the one who fills out a statement saying he will guarantee Lilia's stay in the USA since he had a job and bank account and I didn’t have either, in the USA, us living in Dublin, not having seen John Green in some time

so this does tie in Hollins College and you thought I was just on a long-winded round about as a way to getting you no-where-fast. . .Johnny Greene, last I heard was back Down South on the masthead of INQUIRY (at the final typing he is off it) though I had always thought he was of some sect on The Left. . . could have been the distortion of the drink--- and as I am typing this again in something called the present--- at this moment--- Johnny Greene died of AIDS after writing something about it in PEOPLE---

but back: and my waiting to play Kit Marlowe in the back of The Gold Rail, George enters from the sun, with knife in eye socket, on the other hand, maybe, we were agreeing all along and just didn't know it about what how can I say at such a late date was it the other afternoon at Frank's Roadhouse, down the road from Hollins, I was sitting there with John Currier and Mike Mayo, I was telling George as I was raking his leaves, drinking a small Rolling Rock, this black guy, or coloured guy or negro shuffled himself into the bar through the back door. These other guys sitting on the other side see him when he finally gets himself up to the bar and yell, Hey, Rastos you got to have some money if you wants a beer. I have it, he shouts back and starts to go through his coat and eventually pulls out this woman's purse. One of the guys sees it and yells, You fool around with those women, you're gonna get knots all over your head. There's a pause. Theys don't call them knots no more, Rastos says, They call them no-you-donts.

those panties… remember those panties? hanging on the ankle of that woman will just have to wait for another time. awful trying to find your life in the alumni
magazine? or looking up biographies of writers known just to remember which ones are the enemy bang down the memory bank to Trieste and getting off the train and the rush to find the canal that gave the name of Little Venice to Trieste and couldn't find the house where Mr. Joyce lived but anyway George had written about this city last one visited before heading off to Sofia and the meeting with Lilia on Botev Boulevard which will though George never asked Lilia if she had been to Trieste maybe he wasn't interested in comparing geography lessons though he did know where Bulgaria was beyond saying it was east of the statue for the wreath for Garibaldi which is better than most Americans who I tell calmly: Bulgaria is north of Greece, east of Yugoslavia, somewhat south of Hungary and a little to the west of Romania all more or less; of course north of Turkey less more or less because Frank's Roadhouse ain't there anymore: soft music in the cocktail lounge, please, getting in ten frames of bowling before church, heavy on the whiskey, Joe, light on the ginger, while just down from the guy who is musing on the days of the journey to the moon are more guys standing in front of the liquor store who have already said as I pass

"I am tired off"

"Yes, I am tired off, too"

"Is this Nighttrain?"

"No, this is the real Thunderbird."

"Better watch out for them birds, they’ll crap all over your head.”

Which is where this should end, but BUT I didn't work in the fact, are you chewing your cabbage twice could be because when I lived around the corner from The West End where I am still standing with George, I had a Japanese room-mate who told me Japanese Moms are always telling their little children to chew each grain of the rice three times to get all the flavor: from on the first chew, nothing, to the second which is sour to the third which is sweet and how many times have I used George's line of poetry: when the heart breaks it doesn't make a sound, there it goes again. me back there in the Rialto Theatre in Patchogue watching what I later found out to be a movie written by George, THE PLAYGROUND, that clapboard house near the canals in Los Angeles how important those canals in Trieste, that canal in Trieste which is another story of waking up in the morning light not yet in the sky with a South African woman in a beach house and this Swedish guy still had a bottle of wine so we three go walking along the coast road looking for the boat to Pula... having turend from the direction of Miramar, where the widow of Maximillian...

So, still in The West End George Garrett takes a sip of that drink ice has melted a bit there was this guy from Patchogue who was telling a story and the way he was telling the story was another way of describing the guy he was telling the story to and I guess about

TINY GASPS OF HOPE

2010-12-31T17:21:00.001-05:00

Walking around in the snow in the East Village on the last day of the year and soon into the next there are the constants of this time of the year: the lemming-like pursuit of crap and a discussion of crap… and we all know what I am writing about and knowing they and their fans do not care and they sit with the smug confidence that as long as you spell the name right even the most vicious criticism only adds to the ever growing mountain of shit that are as Edward Dahlberg might say: I have heard of him and that is sufficient… another one our well known bad writers…

On the other hand or going into a pleasant room:

58

THE H.D. BOOK by Robert Duncan. University of California Press. Written over many years and now published long after his death: was it so long ago, 1988?, though he was part of the background at least for me since 1962 or 63 or 64 when reading the Donald Allen anthology of the real poets, because actually alive unlike the academics who seem to sadly, have long lives and are still tormenting us by their presence… W.S. Merwin… comes to mind and Galway Kinnell and Philip Levine… Mark Strand… think of their wretched lives, teaching young people to be poets… the sheer fakery of it all and not an honest line in any poem of theirs--- these so-called teacher poets--- even by accident because always paying homage to their tenured futility they dared not not write, dared not give up their sinecures that dulled their pencils…

THE H.D. BOOK in honor of Hilda Doolittle and we are back in the world of Pound and Eliot and Williams… a book to be read or entered at any page and every sentence gives rise to thought as in: “The heart of the poem (The Waste Land) was the unbearable mixing of things.” But against his wishes, “The fame of the poet (Eliot) itself had triumphed over the pain of the poem. Eliot, was not in the outcome stricken but celebrated.”

A book to read slowly, a page a day. A sentence a day, sometimes…

I doubt there will be a better book written about poetry when looking back to 2010 or even looking forward to 2011…

And two perfect sentences from Duncan: “As I write now, I am in the waiting room again. I do not see any more than my eyes saw.”

62

ZONE by MATHIAS ENARD. Open Letter. 517 pages as a man sits on a train going from Milano to Rome, carrying documents and memories of the obscure and familiar horrors of the last century. Each page sent me to look for a further book, to look up some historic event I was unfamiliar with: the war in Morocco in the 1920s for instance or photographers in the Nazi camps both guards and prisoners… Atilla Josef, the Hungarian poet, who lay down on the tracks to be cut in half or the detail about Palestinian suicide bombers who went the belt of explosives went off propelled the head high into the sky… the 517 pages of basically one sentence broken into discrete bits: never for a moment does the reader lose his or her place since we never forget we are on a train inside the voice of an appealing narrator who sent me to…

75

DRIFTING CITIES by STRATIS TSIRKAS, published by Knopf in 1974…703 pages… starting in wartime Jerusalem.. Refugees…echoes of Durrell, again an imagined because real history of the times that shaped me and you: out of Alexandria.. and yet why is this not in paper and easy to find?

Well translated by Kay Cicellis who is till translating Greek books for Dalkey Archive and who even published a novel with Grove Press years ago… the sureness the grandeur of the DRIFTING CITIES.. like I THE SUPREME by Roa Bastos… back when Knopf could publish such books…

Okay, so the opening sentences: “A rustle, a rippling springtime effervescence came in from the window with the pine-scented breeze. And a voice from another age spoke of the perfume of a golden lily unfolding over the river.”

Today an editor would decide that the word effervescence would have to go as it was unlikely that readers of some of the well known bad writers would not know the word or “be comfortable” encountering such a word in the first line of a novel.

77

Alexandria was not mentioned without the purpose of celebrating the publication of SELECTED PROSE WORKS by C.P. CAVAFY by the University of Michigan Press.

Cavafy is probably the only Greek poet anyone reads, really in English with a few who know the work of GEORGE SEFERIS. And there is nothing really terrible about that. There is a Greek guy who sacrificed his talent on the altar of communism and enjoyed a little fame but again there is Cavafy and Seferis but this is a moment for Cavafy and the revelation of his prose: “On the Poet C.P. Cavafy,” (An anonymous piece): “Rare poets like Cavafy will thus secure a primary position in a world that thinks far more than does the world of today.”
Written in 1930… how he flatters us, how he will be mistaken… the purity of whim is never to be over-looked when talking about writers and about the works that endure…

It is probably true that Philip Roth will disappear within ten years of his death and the fact that the Library of America is publishing his collected work before he is dead is my evidence for this assertion. He is dead.

But Cavafy lives on: On Saint Simeon the Stylite : “This great, this wonderful saint is surely an object to be singled out in ecclesiastical history for admiration and study. He had been perhaps, the only man who has dared to be really alone.”

Not by accident is SIMON OF THE DESERT possibly the best film by Luis Bunuel.. well, along with The MILKY WAY.

81

PANORAMA by H.G. Adler. Random House. I have only dipped into this novel… Happily as Nabokov might have remarked I have noticed that it is not a play in disguise. There are no long reported conversations.

Mentioned by W.G. Sebald, Adler has slowly begun to make his appearance in English. Of course his great work on the Nazi camp THERESIENSTADT 1941-1945 is not in English while so much… and it seems that this is his great claim upon out attention…

PANORAMA is an attempt to re-create a childhood; it tries to argue with the opening pages of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man… and that is a worthy ambition.

I will report back on this book as I will on his THE JOURNEY and I feel guilt in not having read THE JOURNEY because how could I have avoids a book that Veza Canetti writes is, “too beautiful for words and too sad.”

83

Dalkey Archive has three books both published and to be published. GOING TO PATCHOGUE by THOMAS MCGONIGLE.

I have established a group on Facebook called Lord Patchogue and people are invited to join…

while that has something to do with GOING TO PATCHOGUE the re-appearance of this book is incredibly sad for me. It came out 18 years ago.

I have written many other books but they have not been seen into print and that will include the one I am working on now EXIT IS FINAL… and just before that I wrote NOTHING DOING…

Both Richard Seaver and Daniel Halpern confessed their powerlessness to publish the more recent books, even Dalkey Archive joined in this group confession and before that there was Sam Vaughan and Alice Quinn and a guy at Norton whose name I have forgotten… they invited my consolation and understanding and how shabby their deaths will be and have been…

GOING TO PATCHOGUE is available but officially from Borders it comes out in April though Amazon and Barnes and Noble have it…

YES, those other Dalkey books: ISLE OF DREAMS by KEIZO HINO made me get a map of Tokyo. That is how good it is. In the same way that one gets a map of Dublin when taking up ULYSSES: a man wants something, but what does he want?:
“He thought of nothing in particular, nor did he reminisce.”

“Though covered with dirt, none of this refuse, including tools and other bits of clothing, appeared the least decayed. Indeed, there was something starkly vivid about it. He was startled to find kindled in him a feeling bordering on the sexual, something which, since the death of his wife, he had thought irrelevant to him.”

AND in April, the cruelest month as Mr Eliot wrote DALKEY ARCHIVE will bring out: SUICIDE by EDOUARD LEVE. A novel about the suicide of a friend of the author. A week after handing in the manuscript the author killed himself. Told in the second person pronoun, that insinuating manner, that refutation of fiction in the death of the actual author, how fortunate for the reader to have a distanced suicide note, a gift to the funeral museum in Vienna, with the author’s death no need to ask if he knew what he was writing about. I do hope Dalkey Archive will publish his four books of writing and…

84

I didn’t write about GOGOL’S ARTISTRY by ANDREI BELY, heroically translated by CHRISTOPHER COLBATH and published by Northwestern University Press. It is the necessary compliment to Nabokov’s little book on Gogol. What I have most liked about the book is Bely’s actual discussion of the sentences of Gogol, right down to diagramming them so as to show how Gogol created his fiction.

I wish there were more books like this. I wish there was one written on Faulkner like this but I can’t imagine any major writer doing this in the United States of this moment.

Bely of course is the author of ST. PETERSBURG, the major Russian novel of the 20th Century, right there with Bulgakov’s THE MASTER AND MARGARITA…. can anyone imagine a so-called famous contemporary American writer taking the time to write such a book?

Case rested for the unimportance of you can name them…

(However, Tom Whalen who sadly happily, I can’t make up my mind but surely sadly, almost totally unknown has taken up the task and has written a very fine book on Russell H. Greenan… Dalkey will be bringing that out in the Spring.)

INTENTIONS INTENTIONS

I am going to read THREE DAYS BEFORE THE SHOOTING by RALPH ELLISON. Since Ellison wrote the best novel by a man who happened to be Black or as he preferred Negro--- though I do think LORD OF DARK PLACES by HAL BENNETT gives him the only real competition in that rather narrow marketing niche… it can’t be avoided, but it is no accident that the schools never urge students to read INVISABLE MAN because the quality of that novel is simply too intimidating by comparison to the crap they shove down students throats in the interests of diversity… and reading THREE DAYS BEFORE THE SHOOTING allows me to live again in the moment of hearing Ellison read from an early version of this book at Hollins College In the summer of 1970…

And to be a better reader of ORANGES AND SNOW by MILAN DJORDJEVIC. Translated by Charles Simic. Princeton University Press:

My sweet and formless,
Bloodless and colorless,
Best-loved Nothing,
With what eyes shall I look at you
To see you truly
and remember your face forever.

---or---

tonight someone will fuck someone
while statesmen negotiate
untie the knots on neckties long underwear
and tense international situations
while secretly they scratch their balls under the table

---or----

“Garlic”
Or are you the edible miracle that couples
foolishness and depth, like penis and vagina,
in the midst of our electronic Paradise?

COALS FOR A STOCKING: a dash of the dreary

2010-12-24T13:14:00.000-05:00

I ran into Sam who lives two doors away in a big loft above Arlo and Esme, a bar, that evolved into a young people’s bar where kids go to get drunk here on East First Street.

Sam teaches a how to course in porn writing for women and others at the New School and a poetry writing class at NYU. He also reviews books and as a result gets piles of the stuff. I wish I got as many as he does, but he has broader interests than I do.

He was coming back from The Strand Bookstore where he has been to sell review copies. They don’t buy everything the way they used to he was telling me. Years ago they bought everything and would give you are a quarter on the dollar but not anymore. The give no where near that and now are picky.

Sam showed me the books they didn’t want. He was saying this is the shit that publishers are now publishing and it is such shit that even the Strand can’t get rid of it. And if they can’t get rid of it no one can.

Here is a list of “shit that no one wants” according to The Strand Bookstore, today 24 December 2010.

WALKING PAPERS. Poems. Thomas Lynch, WW Norton. I guess that is understandable. Lynch wrote one good book of poems and then discovered his Irish heritage and sunk into the bog and got buried which is an easy irony since he is an undertaker and wrote some prose about it, but never about the actual draining, cutting, pasting…

UNDIVIDED SELF. Selected Stories by Will Self. Bloomsbury. Complete with an introduction by Ricky Moody. The English were desperate for a writer they could promote as an antidote to some real writers, like William Burroughs, Hunter Thompson… you get the picture… created by back scratching English hacks and by their Anglophile American cousins, so Self is yesterday’s wild man with a dash of the Jewish thrown in for good measure…

SIGN OF LIFE. Hilary Williams. A Story of family, tragedy, music, and healing. DaCapo. Can any rational person keep a straight face reading the sub-title? In the footsteps of her grandfather, father… this gives nepotism a bad name… Old Hank Williams most have twirled so much in the grave there can’t be much left of him now with what came after him in the family.

REASONS TO KILL. Why Americans Choose War. Richard E. Rubenstein. “Undeniably important,” Publishers Weekly.

TRESSPASS. Rose Tremain. A novel. W.W. Norton. Winner of the Orange Prize. As if anyone knows what that means. Another dreary English novel American publishers decide American ought to read but obviously American still have some sense…

THE GREAT FIRE OF ROME. Stephen Dando-Collins. DaCapo. A prize winning Australian author living in Tasmania who according to the notes is basically paraphrasing, Tacitus and Suetonius…

And maybe the saddest book because it is so typical of what passes as taste and awareness of the world and literature or who knows what: TAKE ME HOME. Brian Leung. A novel. Harper. A third book. “Award winning…takes his reader to the desolate and wild terrain of the nascent Wyoming territory… strong willed young woman…the Chinese man she dares to love… LEUNG who is half Chinese…” An associate professor of creative writing.