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Monday, August 16th, 2010
  Javier Cercas and Joan Ollé, who directed the film adaptation of Soldiers of Salamis, appeared on the Catalan TV program La Mandrà gora; some of the actors from the movie were also there. Stills and quotes (in a mix of Spanish and Catalan) here; Ollé says, "The letters of the novel do not move, do not dance. This is not a fault: the movement is internal. One word provokes ten thousand images of everything you have lived." An earlier appearance of Cercas' (from 2002) is written up here, and video of that interview is in three parts starting here.
posted evening of August 16th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, August 15th, 2010
Cercas' Soldados de Salamina is one of the most difficult books to put down that I've read in recent memory. (And thanks for turning me on to Cercas, Rise!) I'm fascinated by how he is putting his book together -- at every moment the focus is strongly on whatever bit he is talking about at the moment, rather than on fitting it in to the rest of the book; and yet the quite diverse elements of the book seem to be fitting together well, in an almost instinctive way. I really enjoyed his note about the composition process at the beginning of part 3:
| EscribÃa de forma obsesiva, con un empuje y una constancia que ignoraba que poseÃa; también sin demasiada claridad de propósito. ...Por descontado, yo suponÃa que, a medida que el libro avanzase, este designio se alterarÃa, porque los libros siempre acaban cobrando vida propia, y porque uno no escribe acerca de lo que quiere sino de lo que puede; también suponÃa que, aunque todo lo que con el tiempo habÃa averiguado sobre Sánchez Mazas iba a constituir el núcleo de mi libro, lo que me permitÃa sentirme seguro, llegarÃa un momento en que tendrÃa que prescindir de esas andaderas, porque -- si es que lo escribe va a tener verdadero interés -- un escritor no escribe nunca acerca de lo que conoce, sino precisamente de lo que ignora.
| | I was writing obsessively, with a drive and a constancy which I had not known I possessed; but also without too clear of a thesis. ...Needless to say, I figured that as the book progressed, its design would come clear; books always end up taking charge of themselves -- one does not write about what one wants to write but about what one is able to write. I was also thinking that, although what I had learned about Sánchez Mazas would make up the nucleus of my book, the core that would let me feel safe, there would come a moment when I would have to dispense with this safety net: If the writing is to hold any real interest, an author never writes about what he knows, but precisely about what he does not know.
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In this book the composition process is extremely visible on the surface of the reading. It is beautiful to watch the book taking charge of itself...
posted morning of August 15th, 2010: 1 response
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Saturday, August 14th, 2010
Two readings that were rattling around my brain this past week as I practiced understanding Spanish:
| ¿Que lee? Novelas policiales en francés, un idioma que apenas entiende, lo que hace que las novelas sean aún más interesantes. Aun asà siempre descubre al asesino antes de la última página. | | What is B reading? Detective stories in French -- a language he scarcely understands, which makes the novels even more interesting. And even so, he always figures out who was the killer before he reaches the last page. |
This is from Bolaño's "Wandering in France and Belgium" -- I like the way he points out that not fully understanding the language can make the reading experience (even) more interesting. This ties in very nicely with B getting interested in Altmann's asemic writing later in the story.And a longer passage, from Borges' lecture on Dante published in Seven Nights -- Borges is talking ("now that we are among friends") about his own introduction to the Comedia:
| El azar (salvo que no hay azar, salvo que lo que llamamos azar es nuestra ignorancia de la compleja maquinaria de la causalidad) me hizo encontrar tres pequeños volúmenes... los tomos del Infierno, del Purgatorio y del ParaÃso, vertido al inglés por Carlyle, no por Thomas Carlyle, del que hablaré luego. Eran libros muy cómodos, editados por Dent. CabÃan en mi bolsillo. En una página estaba el texto italiano y en la otra el texto en inglés, vertido literalmente. Imaginé este modus operandi: leÃa primero un versÃculo, un terceto, en prosa inglesa; luego leÃa el mismo versÃculo, el mismo terceto, en italiano; iba siguiendo asà hasta llegar al fin del canto. ... He leÃdo muchas veces la Comedia. La verdad es que no sé italiano, no sé otro italiano que el que me enseñó Dante y que el que me enseñó, después, Ariosto cuando leà el Furioso. | |
Fate (except of course there is no Fate, of course what we call Fate is our failure to understand the complex machinery of causality) led me to three slim volumes... the books of Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise, rendered in English by Carlyle (not by Thomas Carlyle, of whom we will speak later). They were lovely little books, published by Dent. They fit in my pocket. On one page would be the Italian text and facing it, the text in English, rendered literally. Picture this modus operandi: first I would read a verse, a tercet, in English; then I would read the same verse, the same tercet, in Italian; and I went on this way until I reached the end of the canto. ... I have read the Comedia many times. But the truth is, I don't know Italian, I don't know any more Italian than what Dante has taught me, and what Ariosto taught me later, when I read the Furioso.
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Cool! Borges learned to read Dante the same way I learned to read Borges!I'm interested in the point about not knowing "any more Italian than what Dante has taught me" -- I think that this method of learning to read a foreign language teaches a particular voice before it teaches the language in a more general sense. I am at this point extremely comfortable with Borges' voice, and pretty comfortable with Bolaño's; but opening up a book in Spanish by some other author, I may understand it (like Soldados de Salamina, which I picked up yesterday and have just been breezing through), or it may be like reading Greek (like Hernández' La paloma, el sótano y la torre, which I opened a few days ago and could not make head or tail of).
posted morning of August 14th, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, August 7th, 2010
Today, I finished reading Super Sad True Love Story. Today, Michael Woods reviews Super Sad True Love Story for the Times Book Review (inspiring Molly Fischer to wish for "someone to love me as the Times loves Gary Shteyngart"). It's a good, insightful review of a good, insightful book. (I wish the review did a little less summarizing of the story-line though.) When I opened the book and read the first pages, I was thinking this was going to be a magnificent book. It started feeling overly scripted, a little plodding, somewhere in the first third of the book... but by the last hundred or so utterly gripping pages, it had won me back completely. I find the Times' love for Shteyngart well directed.
posted morning of August 7th, 2010: Respond
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Wednesday, August 4th, 2010
 | So we all think we don't want genre, we want to be anti-genre or perhaps hybrid, but since these are genres too, let us think about what it means to really go genreless. To go genreless in our contemporary publishing environment is to make a work without a ‘document map', without a diagram, without a blueprint. Without a sales category. A work such as this has no overview or topography. It can't be nicely summarized. It cannot be publicized, because it lacks ‘publicity'. In place of publicity it has secrecy, distortion, obscurity, waste. It is a waste product. | |
Así pensamos todos que no queramos gnero, queremos ser contra-género, tal vez híbrido. Pero como esas también son géneros, consideramos qué significa él, actualmente sin género. Ser sin género en la industría editorial contemporanea es escribir una obra sin «mapa de documento» o programa, sin diagrama. Sin categoría de venta. Tal texto no tiene ningún descripción topográfica. Y no se puede buen reducir. No se publica porque la «publicidad» lo falta. En lugar de publicidad tiene silencio, deformación, oscuridad, desperdicio. Es basura. |
Looking at Christopher Higgs' post today at bright stupid confetti led me along to this essay, "Problems after genre" by Jovelle McSweeney, and somehow hit on the idea of rendering it in Spanish. I wonder if this will improve my ability to speak and compose in Spanish. The first effort sounds a little strained, not such a natural tone. More of the essay below the fold.
El problema genérico
por Jovelle McSweeney
Así pensamos todos que no queramos género, queremos ser contra-género, tal vez híbrido. Pero como esas también son géneros, consideramos qué significa, actualmente sin género. Ser sin género en la industría editorial contemporanea es escribir una obra sin «mapa de documento» o programa, sin diagrama. Sin categoría de venta. Tal texto no tiene ningún descripción topográfica. Y no se puede buen reducir. No se publica porque la «publicidad» lo falta. En lugar de publicidad tiene silencio, deformación, oscuridad, desperdicio. Es basura.
Ser sin género no tiene por supuesto ningún lugar acerca de la editorial tradicional, convencional; y es también afuera de la rúbrica formalista que gobierna la publicación de la más prosa «vanguardista.» Esquematicia es lo que da «rigor» lógica al escrito vanguardista. Sin género es sin rigor, claro. Salvo el rigor mortis. Muchos de los sinónimos con los cuales la vanguardia se llama arreglanselas con coger el movimiento sobre la basura, limitado a los intersticios confusos de la mente. Aún la hibridación trae con si un sabor muy ordenado, un sabor exonorando del corporate-scientismo verde y izquierdo.
Todo quieren un género, aunque uno novelo, sobre todo uno novelo. Género parece un equipo; puedes batear para tú género.
Ser desfallecendo, siendo sin forma y sin género -- comer la placenta, mierda en las cejas obtener... ahora te metes de verdad en líos. Para obtener un número ISBN, la editorial debe a ti un género marcar. La falta de género significa que tus obras no se venden. Para tener lugar en los catálogos y indicias debes parecido algún género realizar. Uno sin género no entra nunca en el registro. Para pedir una estación en la conferencia AWP, debes marcar a cuál género pertenece la lectura. Sin género no puedes hablar. Solicitud de trabajo requiere una prueba de algún competencia genérica. La falta de género expone incompetencia.
Pero ¿qué es la escritura sin género? ¿Qué puede ser? Se ve el más fácil un montón de escritura tenienda género, género tan excesivo, tan plural que es sencillamente desordenado y incoherente. Es decir, «it's whack, like crack», como nos asegura Whitney Houston. Y (como ella también afirma) si era adicta, ¿dónde estan los recibos? No cuadrandose las cuentas, faltan los recibos. Ahora se hace uno un tipo adicto. Solipsismo y retardación reemplazan la forma ortodoxa. Vergüenza, deterioración, decadencia. Y sin embargo ese problema diagnosticar requiere usar palabras de finanza: tal cuentas son desequilibradas. No pueden explicarse. No se ganan compensación; o peor, no tienen ninguna compensación propia. Pierden tiempo, pierden el tiempo del público.
Si una obra era infestada por género hasta que no tiene género, tal vez no puede mantenerse. Puede suicidarse muchas veces, pero cada vez despierta y descubre que aún existe -- lo cual le da asco, y tambíen a todos otros.
↻...done
posted evening of August 4th, 2010: 1 response
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Tuesday, August third, 2010
Reading Super Sad True Love Story is a bit like going to the sauna -- the steamy immediacy of Lenny's diary entries alternating with the icy removal of Eunice's GlobalTeens account. I had been thinking the diary entries were not believable as diary entries and the GlobalTeens not believable as chat/e-mail messages; but halfway through I'm re-thinking this. I realized today that I don't have any clear idea what the method for entering text into one's äppärät is; the verbosity and the correct spelling of the GlobalTeens messages becomes much more believable when I take into account that Eunice and her friends are not using keyboards, that some kind of word recognition is happening inside the computer. I'm curious now about what it might be -- I'm pretty sure they are not composing the messages by speaking to their äppäräts.
posted morning of August third, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, August first, 2010
Lönnrot: Hello, Zunz --
Zunz: Inspector Lönnrot?
L: Yeah -- I hope you don't mind me calling at this hour, but ah... I was just wondering if you managed to turn up anything on the ninth attribute of God yet.
Z: The ninth attribute of God?... Well yes, it's the immediate knowledge of everything that will exist, exists or has existed. ...Is everything all right, inspector?
I was interested to find out the other day that Death and the Compass had been adapted into a movie a few years ago, and that the movie is watchable online. It is adapted by Alex Cox, who directed Repo Man, and the (amazing) soundtrack is by Pray for Rain, a band which has apparently been around since the eighties.Cox directs this piece masterfully -- I am in awe of his adaptation, which took off in a direction I was not expecting at all, but which had me believing by the end of the movie that Scharlach was speaking words Borges had written -- Cox' screenplay has drunk of the same well Borges was going to when he wrote this. The radical deviations from Borges' storyline only serve to make it a better movie, truer to the original. You can watch the movie online at dailymotion.com; I recommend it highly.
 An interview with Cox about how he picked this story.
posted evening of August first, 2010: 7 responses
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In today's New York Times, Orhan Pamuk describes the view of Istanbul that he sees through his office window -- the Blue Mosque and behind it the opening of the Bosporus. "To the popular question inquisitive guests and visiting journalists ask — 'Doesn’t this wonderful view distract you?' — my answer is no. But I know some part of me is always busy with some part of the landscape, following the movements of the seagulls, trees and shadows, spotting boats and checking to see that the world is always there..." Illustration by Matteo Pericoli.
posted morning of August first, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, July 31st, 2010
I'm eating up Super Sad True Love Story.... A couple of reactions to it, but first a brief passage that I think illustrates what a great rush reading this book is. (i.e. if you don't like this, don't bother with the book, and vice versa.)
My äppärät pinged.
CrisisNet: DOLLAR LOSES OVER 3% IN LONDON TRADING TO FINISH AT HISTORIC LOW OF 1€ = $8.64 IN ADVANCE OF CHINESE CENTRAL BANKER ARRIVAL U.S.; LIBOR RATE FALLS 57 BASIS POINTS; DOLLAR LOWER BY 2.3% AGAINST YUAN AT 1¥* = $4.90
I really needed to figure out what this LIBOR thing was and why it was falling by fifty-seven basis points. But, honestly, how little I cared about all these difficult economic details! How desperately I wanted to forsake these facts, to open a smelly book or to go down on a pretty young girl instead. Why couldn't I have been born to a better world?
I can honestly see how I could go either way about this -- it could seem self-indulgent and silly; but instead I'm feeling for Lenny, caring about his histrionic soliloquies. Rayyan Al-Shawaf at The Millions complains that Shteyngart's broad satire produces one-dimensional, artificial characters -- but to be honest that's sort of what I'm expecting from Shteyngart based on Absurdistan and The Russian Debutante's Handbook -- it's a feature, not a bug.
Possibly of interest in this connection, I'm seeing some points of connection between this book and A Visit From the Goon Squad -- a hugely different book, and one comparatively much more concerned with drawing characters than with biting social satire. It's possible I'm making this up -- but there seems to be a common theme between the two of them. In both books authentic communication is dying, its place being taken over by superficial, thoughtlessly immediate texting.
 * (No explanation at this point in the text, why ¥ is being used as a symbol for Yuan instead of å…ƒ. Perhaps just sloppy copy-editing...)
posted evening of July 31st, 2010: Respond
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I went to Brooklyn yesterday evening to hear Gary Shteyngart reading from Super Sad True Love Story (about which more later -- it looks from the first pages and from the portion he read like it is going to be a magnificent book) at Greenlight Books,  which turns out to be a lovely independent book shop in Fort Greene... I got there early enough to take the train to Grand Army Plaza and walk through Prospect Heights, and by serendipity discovered a second bookshop that I'm adding to my list of destinations, which is Unnameable Books. The reading was packed -- easily 75 people were there, filling up the seating area, spilling onto the floor and into the aisles of the shop. One of the most fun readings I can remember. I met up with Dave and Greg, and went out for dinner with them afterwards. Got my book inscribed. (And by a funny coincidence, I bought an inscribed book at Unnameable Books, a little booklet of poetry by José Pubén -- it is signed "with brotherly amity" to Adela Muñoz.)
posted morning of July 31st, 2010: 1 response
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