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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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Tuesday, July 27th, 2010
 Wow, it seems like all of my favorite young novelists are releasing new books all of a sudden! Today I come to find out (via NPR's The Takeaway) that Gary Shteyngart has a new book coming out, set in a near-future dystopia in NYC. Here is his interview from this morning:
On Friday, Shteyngart's release party is happening at Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene. I am trying to figure out if I can make it over there...
posted evening of July 27th, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, July 24th, 2010
Gareth Hinds' graphic novel* of King Lear is a fine accomplishment; I recommend it. I see among his other works are The Merchant of Venice and Beowulf -- both look pretty intriguing -- and a forthcoming edition of The Odyssey -- which I am hard put not to find implausible. (But who knows! The cover certainly looks beautiful.)
 * It seems to me like Shakespeare -- and plays in general -- are uniquely well suited to the graphic novel format; and yet I think this is the first time I have read a graphic novel based on a play. Conceptually, this book has much in common with a staged production of the play.
posted morning of July 24th, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, July 20th, 2010
Driving to pick up his son, Bennie alternated between the Sleepers and the Dead Kennedys, San Francisco bands he'd grown up with. He listened for muddiness, the sense of musicians playing actual instruments in an actual room. Nowadays that quality (if it existed at all) was usually an effect of analogue signaling rather than bona fide tape -- everything was an effect in the bloodless constructions Bennie and his peers were churning out.
I finally picked up Jennifer Egan's new book today -- am finding the first few chapters pleasant and stimulating without them exactly grabbing me the way The Keep and Look at Me did. Definitely interesting enough to keep me reading.
...And, by the end of Chapter 4 I realize I am completely hooked in. A glorious, hypnotic read.
posted evening of July 20th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, July 18th, 2010
...truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.
This catalog of attributes, written in the seventeenth century, and written by the "ingenious layman" Miguel de Cervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history.-- "Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote" (Hurley's translation)
It was not until I was reading the Quixote this evening and happened on the quoted line (near the end of the ninth chapter) that I realized it is not a mere rhetorical flourish, that Borges is calling attention to the line for his own reasons. (Still not exactly sure what those reasons are...; but the line comes at the end of bit of meta-storytelling that sounds to my ear very Borgesian, about the discovery and translation of Benengeli's history. When I'm reading it now it sounds like Cervantes is being ironic about the truth-value of his story.)
posted evening of July 18th, 2010: 4 responses
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Wednesday, July 14th, 2010
I've started reading Richard Slotkin's Regeneration through violence with the idea that I might be able to draw some parallels between his narrative of myth formation and Borges' stories... In service of that end, here is a passage from "Narrative of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden" (from The Aleph) and one from Slotkin's book.
John Williams' narrative, The Redeemed Captive, taught that the ultimate salvation of the soul itself was really at stake in the trial by captivity. One of Williams' daughters, who was very young when captured, could not be won from her captors in time for repatriation with her father. The result was typical of the fate of many captives: she forgot her language and her catechism and became at once a papist and a pagan savage, married to an Indian. Despite the efforts of her father and her family to bring her back, she refused all opportunities to resume her former life. On one occasion she returned to the neighborhood of her birthplace (Deerfield, MA) dressed as an Indian. Her friends clothed her in the English fashion and sent her to meeting, but she "indignantly threw off her clothes in the afternoon, and resumed the Indian blanket." By her own declaration she preferred the Indian way of life. ...she declared that she would never move again from Canada to New England because to do so would "endanger her soul."
Her visit occurred in 1740-41 at the height of the Great Awakening, and her presence in the congregation had been the occasion for "A Sermon Preached at Mansfield, August 4, 1741, at a Time set apart for Prayer for the Revival of Religion," by Pastor Solomon Williams. It was perhaps Williams' attempt to use her as an example of God's delivering a soul from bondage to the devil that made her afraid of "losing" in New England the "soul" she had developed in thirty-eight years of captivity.
-- Chapter 4, "Israel in Babylon"
Perhaps for one instant the two women saw that they were sisters; they were far from their beloved island in an incredible land. My grandmother, enunciating carefully, asked some question or other; the other woman replied haltingly, searching for the words and then repeating them, as though astonished at the old taste of them. It must have been fifteen years since she'd spoken her native language, and it was not easy to recover it. She said she was from Yorkshire, that her parents had emigrated out to Buenos Aires, that she had lost them in an Indian raid, that she had been carried off by the Indians, and that now she was the wife of a minor chieftain -- she'd given him two sons; he was very brave. She said all this little by little, in a clumsy sort of English interlarded with words from the Auracan or Pampas tongue, and behind the tale one caught glimpses of a savage and uncouth life... An Englishwoman, reduced to such barbarism! Moved by outrage and pity, my grandmother urged her not to go back. She swore to help her, swore to rescue her children. The other woman answered that she was happy, and she returned that night to the desert.
--"The Warrior and the Captive Maiden" (Hurley's translation)
Further reading -- The Redeemed Captive; Narrative of the Captivity of Mary Rowlandson
posted evening of July 14th, 2010: Respond
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 Harvey Pekar passed away on Monday at the age of 70. I'm sorry he is gone; loved to read his comix. I was never a fan, exactly -- I think I only own one collection of American Splendor, plus The Quitter -- it was always something I read at somebody else's recommendation. Still, worth noting his passing, and pointing out some particularly good memorial writing I've seen around the blogosphere this week:
 Another artist who died on Monday (at the age of 86), who did not get as much attention in the subset of blogs that I read but whom I am in mourning for as well, is Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs. Albert Amateau has written his obituary at The Villager; more write-ups and more links at The Allen Ginsberg Project. (And a fine remembrance of Tuli from Mary Lyn Maiscott at Vanity Fair.) A memorial service for Tuli will be held at St. Mark's church on Saturday, from 12-3 pm, with a reception to follow. There will be no religious element to the service, and Coby, Steve and Ed of the Fugs will be the main speakers. Afterwards, anyone who wants to can talk, sing, recite poetry, or whatever they like.
posted evening of July 14th, 2010: Respond
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Monday, July 12th, 2010
On WNYC this morning, Leonard Lopate interviewed Edith Grossman and Lawrence Senelick on the importance of translation.
(You can also read a nice interview with Grossman from a few years back, in Guernica magazine.)
posted evening of July 12th, 2010: Respond
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Monday, July 5th, 2010
| Hace ya tantos años que Carlos Reyles, hijo del novelista, me refirió la historia en Adrogué, en un atardecer de verano. En mi recuerdo se confunden ahora la larga crónica de un odio y su trágico fin con el olor medicinal de los eucaliptos y la voz de los pájaros. | | It's been many years already since Carlos Reyles, son of the novelist, told me this story -- in Adrogué, one evening in the summer. In my memory are muddled now the long story of a hatred and its tragic ending, with the sickly odor of the eucalyptuses, the cry of birds. -- beginning of "The Other Duel" |
This beginning is fairly characteristic of the stories in Brodie's Report -- the narrator (who is often identifiably Borges) distances himself from the story he is telling. He introduces it as a story he heard years ago, that he doesn't remember, quite, and is embroidering with his own inventions -- sometimes (eg "Unworthy") the character who is telling the enclosed story explicitly expects Borges to weave a story out of it, to decorate it with knife fights and lawlessness.
posted evening of July 5th, 2010: Respond
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