Bilocations

Notes on the third part of Against the Day (see also Part One and Part Two).

~ p. 431: Light as a "secret determinant of history"

~ p. 437: Using Iceland spar to read by...and the polarization of light in time as well as space

~ p. 438: The Manichæans make an appearance:

"Everything you appreciate with your senses, all there is in the given world to hold dear, the faces of your children, sunsets, rain, fragrances of earth, a good laugh, the touch of a lover, the blood of an enemy, your mother's cooking, wine, music, athletic triumphs, desirable strangers, the body you feel at home in, a sea-breeze flowing over unclothed skin--all these for the devout Manichæan are evil, creations of an evil deity, phantoms and masks that have always belonged to time and excrement and darkness."

"But it's everything that matters," protested Chick Counterfly.

Indeed. I could go on about how the Manichæan heresy has invaded fundamentalist Christianity, causing many "Christers" to miss the entire point of the Incarnation and the holiness of day-to-day existence...but I won't. Chick said it all.

~ p. 452-53: On the nature of Time (beneath a whirling tornado)

~ p. 456: Roswell and Merle discuss the lure of light--and its future in the movies, "'the whole idea of a movie projector being built like a clock,'" how Time is "'vulnerable to the force of gravity,'" and the need of making gravity "'impervious to time.'" Merle asks why, and

Roswell shrugged. "It's that one-way business again. They're both forces that act in one direction only. Gravity pulls along the third dimension, up to down, time pulls along the fourth, birth to death."

"Rotate something through space-time so it assumes all positions relative to the one-way vector 'time.'"

"There you go."

~ p. 458: The connection to "'all those Æther folks'" is pointed out: "'We were all probably on to somethin then, didn't know it.'"

~ p. 471: Pynchon draws an interesting parallel between the mothers Mayva and Erlys (who ran off with a magician):

"All the time we were growing up," Frank said, "you wanted to run away and join the carnival?"

"Yes, and there I was with all o' you, right in the carnival, and didn't even know it." And he hoped he'd always be able to recall the way she laughed then.

~ p. 476 & 503: He has "Wall o' Death, Missouri, built around the remains of a carnival, one of many inspired by the old Chicago Fair" where our story begins. Have things come full circle? On p. 503,

The world, since the Chicago Fair of 1893, had undergone a sudden craze for vertical rotation on the grand scale. The cycle, Yashmeen speculated, might only seem reversible, for once to the top and down again, one would be changed "forever." Wouldn't one.

~ p. 498: Yashmeen's preoccupation with Riemann's "Zeta-function problem" has proven to be one of the most thought-provoking elements of the book. I know virtually nothing about higher math, but Pynchon has got me thinking that I'm capable of filling in the blanks of explanations he all but spells out. There are certain connections that I'm just not making...but then, Yashmeen herself is on the verge of understanding as well:

[S]he was not quite able to ignore the question, almost as if he were whispering to her, of why Riemann had simply asserted the figure of one-half at the outset instead of deriving it later.... "One would of course like to have a rigorous proof of this," he wrote, "but I have put aside the search...after some fleeting vain attempts because it is not necessary for the immediate objective of my investigation."

But didn't that then imply...the tantalizing possibility was just out of reach...

...and suppose that at Göttingen [...] he had actually been unable not to go back to it, haunted as anyone since, back to the maddeningly simple series he had found in Gauss and expanded to take account of the whole "imaginary" mirror-world which even Ramanujan here at Trinity had ignored until Hardy pointed it out to him--revisited, in some way relighted the scene, making it possible to prove the conjecture as rigorously as anyone might wish...

(And it's only now that David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk goes into my TBR list...)

~ p. 525: Around the time I reached this page, I heard a reference made to Quaternions on Futurama and realized (I'm embarrassed to admit) that Pynchon did not just make them up. In fact, most of the fun of posting these notes comes from the discoveries of the real personalities and concepts that Pynchon writes about. It's been quite an education. I'd really love to read a mathematician's take on this novel.

~ p. 534: A Quaternioneer's lament:

"Actually Quaternions failed because they perverted what the Vectorists thought they know of God's intention--that space be simple, three-dimensional, and real, and if there must be a fourth term, an imaginary, that it be assigned to Time. But Quaternions came in and turned that all end for end, defining the axes of space as imaginary and leaving Time to be the real term, and a scalar as well--simply inadmissible. Of course the Vectorists went to war. Nothing they knew of Time allowed it to be that simple, any more than they could allow space to be compromised by impossible numbers, earthly space they had fought over uncounted generations to penetrate, to occupy, to defend."

~ pp. 535-36: There is no way I can not quote this:

"Heaviside was once termed 'the Walt Whitman of English Physics'--"

"What...excuse me...does that mean?"

"Open question. Some have found in Heaviside a level of passion or maybe just energy, beyond the truculence already prevailing among the different camps in those days."

"Well if Heaviside's the Whitman," remarked a British attendee nearby in a striking yellow ensemble, "who's the Tennyson, you see?"

"Clerk Maxwell, wouldn't you say?" suggested someone else, as others joined in.

"Making Hamilton I imagine the Swinburne."

"Yes and who'd be Wordsworth then?"

"Grassmann!"

"I say, what an amusing game. And Gibbs? The Longfellow?"

"Is there an Oscar Wilde, by any chance?"

"Let's all go to the Casino!" someone invisible screamed.

~ pp. 538-39: More of Pynchon's little jokes:

"Cambridge personality Bertie ('Mad Dog') Russell observed," observed Barry Nebulay, "that most of Hegel's arguments come down to puns on the word 'is.'"

Due to its "'altogether disquieting square root of minus one,'"

"If you were a vector, mademoiselle, you would begin in the 'real' world, change your length, enter an 'imaginary' reference system, rotate up to three different ways, and return to 'reality' a new person. Or vector."

From one who practices this:

"Each time I become somebody else. It is like reincarnation on a budget, without the element of karma to worry about."

~ p. 543: The phrase "against the day" has a variety of meanings and interpretations, depending on when it appears in the story. This seems to be a central one:

"It's a peculiar game we all play. Against what looms in the twilight of the European future, it doesn't make much sense, this pretending to carry on with the day, you know, just waiting. Everyone waiting."

~ p. 554: Ryder Thorn visits Miles from the future and tells him that

"Flanders will be the mass grave of History."

"Well."

"And that is not the most perverse part of it. They will all embrace death. Passionately."

"The Flemish."

"The world."

The foreshadowing of WWI runs all through the novel, but this is one of the more specific moments.

~ p. 558: The inevitable next step emerges: "'A weapon based on Time.'"

~ pp. 564-5: The terrible weapon is described and it involves light, lenses, and calcite (Iceland spar).

~ p. 571: Luca Zombini's process of creating doubles is a result of a three-dimensional mirror:

"We pass from a system of three purely spatial axes to one with four--space plus time. In this way time enters the effect. The doubles you report having produced are actually the original subjects themselves, slightly displaced in time."

~ p. 577: Hunter Penhallow agonizes:

"Political space has its neutral ground. But does Time? is there such a thing as the neutral hour? one that goes neither forward nor back? is that too much to hope?"

~ pp. 579-80: Penhallow on art (to Dally):

"The body, it's another way to get past the body."

"To the spirit behind it--"

"But not to deny the body--to reimagine it. Even"--nodding over at the Titian on the far wall--"if it's 'really' just different kinds of greased mud smeared on cloth--to reimagine it as light."

This leads into a discussion of a story about Jesus from the "Infancy Gospel of Thomas" that reminds Dally of "that Pentecost story in Acts of the Apostles":

"Apostles are meeting in a house in Jerusalem, you'll recall, Holy Ghost comes down like a mighty wind, tongues of fire and all, the fellas come out and start talking to the crowd outside, who've all been jabbering away in different tongues, there's Romans and Jews, Egyptians and Arabians, Mesopotamians and Cappadocians and folks from east Texas, all expecting to hear just the same old Galilean dialect--but instead this time each one is amazed to hear those Apostles speaking to him in his own language."

Hunter saw her point. "Yes, well it's redemption, isn't it, you expect chaos, you get order instead. Unmet expectations. Miracles."

~ p. 596: Is this describing the coin shown on the jacket cover and the page preceding Part One?

Today [Yashmeen] wore an ancient coin, pierced and simply suspended from a fine silver chain around that ever-fascinating neck.... "It's an Afghani dirhan, from the early days of the Ghaznivid Empire. He gave it to me, for luck."

Is Pynchon slipping us a good-luck charm against the day?

~ p. 613: Lamont Replevin and his religious persuasion:

"They worship it, this empty space, it's their highest form of worship. This volume, or I suppose nonvolume, of pure Akaša--being the Sanskrit for what we'd call Æther, the element closest to the all-pervading Atman, from which everything else has arisen--which in Greek obviously then becomes 'Chaos,' and so down to van Helmont in his alchemist's workshop, who being Dutch writes the opening fricative as a G instead of a Chi, giving us Gas, our own modern Chaos, our bearer of sound and light, the Akaša flowing from our sacred spring, the local Gasworks. Do you wonder that for some the Gas Oven is worshipped at, as a sort of shrine?"

~ p. 616: Yashmeen:

"Lenin himself is said to be writing a gigantic book now, attempting to refute the 'fourth dimension,' his position being, from what I can gather, that the Tsar can only be overthrown in three."

~ p. 633: Another joke at Bertrand's expense--a certain mural depicts: "a mischievously hydrophobic Bertrand Russell actually entering and departing the scene, depending on the viewer's position and velocity." Yes, that's right--rabid Russell.

~ p. 675: Vectors fail Kit: they "had not shown Kit, after all, a way to escape the world governed by real numbers."

~ pp. 678-79: "At the moment the two were on their way to see the comic operetta Waltzing in Whitechapel, or, A Ripping Romance, based loosely, and according to some reviews tastelessly, on the Whitechapel murders of the late '80s."

~ p. 681: This, of course, brings up a whole government conspiracy that links Franz Ferdinand's ascension to Jack the Ripper,

"working under contract. Considering that he disappeared from London around November of '88, and Mayerling was at the end of January '89--time enough for Jack to get to Austria and become familiar with his target, yes?"

"They were shot, Max," protested Werfner with exaggerated gentleness, "not butchered. Jack was not a firearms person, the only similarity is that the list of suspects in the 'Ripper' case is also long enough to populate a small city [...]. Hundreds, by now thousands, of narratives, all equally valid--what can this mean?"

"Multiple worlds," blurted Nigel, who had floated in from elsewhere.

"Precisely!" cried the Professor. "The Ripper's 'Whitechapel' was a sort of momentary antechamber in space-time...one might imagine a giant railway-depot, with thousands of gates disposed radially in all dimensions, leading to tracks of departure to all manner of alternate Histories...."

~ pp. 685-86: The Truth about Renfrew and Werfner. Despite all of the clues, I didn't see it coming. The answer to the mystery is even the title of this section of the book (!). And Light is at the heart of it all.

~ pp. 687-88: This extends into the Cohen's explanation:

"We are light, you see, all of light--we are the light offered the batsmen at the end of the day [...]. When we lost our æthereal being and became embodied, we slowed, thickened, congealed to"--grabbing each side of his face and wobbling it back and forth--"this. The soul itself is a memory we carry of having once moved at the speed and density of light."

He explains how they try to regain

"that condition of light, to become once more able to pass where we will, through lantern-horn, through window-glass, eventually, though we risk being divided in two, through Iceland spar, which is an expression in crystal form of Earth's velocity as it rushes through the Æther, altering dimensions, and creating double refraction...." He paused at the door. "Atonement, in any case, comes much later in the journey."

This is a key to understanding Yashmeen's pseudo-corporeal condition, and reminds me of the Genesis story of man being made "in the image" of God. If he is light, so are we. But it seems that all threads of this novel lead back to this--the fascination with light and its uses (for both good and evil). Again, science and religion weave in and out of the ideas expressed--some supernatural, some science fiction. But Pynchon makes the "fiction" bit seem very possible.

I was also strongly reminded of lines from Edgar Lee Masters' poem, "Emily Sparks":

That all the clay of you, all of the dross of you,
May yield to the fire of you,
Till the fire is nothing but light!...
Nothing but light!

~ p. 689: The railroad as the key to the "gigantic ten-miles-to-the-inch wall map of the Balkans," as it defines

"patterns of flow, not only actual but also invisible, potential, and such rates of change as how quickly one's relevant masses can be moved to a given frontier...and beyond that the teleology at work [...]."

Thursday links

• The London Review of Books hosts a literary contest that asks entrants to list as many literary allusions as they can find in Adrian McKinty's thriller The Bloomsday Dead (to be published in June).
• Michelle of in the Lourve discovers George MacDonald's fairy tales.
• Ed is back to his old posting habits. He officially made my day. (And I must once again say how much I love the ever-fascinating Bat Segundo.)
• I'm watching John Berger's Ways of Seeing right now, which leaves me in debt to both Marks.
• I also enjoyed the fifth episode of Titlepage.tv in between classes this morning. So many great books to get to!
• Garrick Davis of the Contemporary Poetry Review has edited Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism, the "first anthology of New Criticism to be printed in fifty years."
  
• Meanwhile, I'm nearing p. 950 of Against the Day (plan on finishing it during the three-day weekend) and am feeling positively nostalgic about leaving it behind. I can barely remember a time when I wasn't reading this book...
  

Blindess at Cannes

So apparently there were quite a lot of negative opinions about the new adaptation of José Saramago's Blindness. But Saramago is reported as saying that he wants Meirelles to adapt another of his novels as well and that he liked it very much:

El pasado 14 de mayo, la cinta del brasileño Fernando Meirelles, Blindness -basada en Ensayo sobre la ceguera, del nobel José Saramago-, que inauguró la muestra, recibió una lluvia de opiniones en contra.

Tras asistir a la proyección del largometraje, Saramago aseguró que quisiera que Meirelles volviera a adaptar otra de sus novelas y les restó importancia a las opiniones negativas que ha recibido la cinta por parte de los críticos. El autor de la novela aseguró a los medios acreditados que: "Me gustó mucho, mucho. Me emocioné algunas veces".

Blindness (Ceguera), protagonizada por Julianne Moore y Mark Ruffalo, el mexicano Gael García Bernal y la brasileña Alice Braga, es una aterradora fábula sobre cómo sobreviviría la gente cuando una plaga de ceguera los azote. "Hay distintos tipos de ceguera. Hay 2.000 millones de personas que se están muriendo de hambre en el mundo. Esto está ocurriendo. No hace falta una catástrofe. Está pasando, y debido a que no hay un evento como Katrina, no lo estamos viendo", aseguró el director Meirelles. La cinta tendrá su estreno en Estados Unidos el próximo 19 de septiembre.

I look forward to seeing it, regardless of its reputed quality.

Alonso Quijano would be proud

In commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the publication of Amadís de Gaula, Grupo Editorial Norma is publishing an anthology of Spanish chivalry from the 16th century. Colombian literature professor María del Rosario Aguilar is co-editor of the project and discusses their "best seller" status, as well as Cervantes' historic criticisms:

"La perspectiva de Cervantes es revolucionaria, en el sentido de que hay por primera vez un héroe que se enfrenta con el mundo que lo rodea, que quiere hacer del mundo lo que a él le parece y se estrella constantemente con la realidad, lo que abre la concepción moderna del mundo", explica Aguilar.

Three things

that have helped ease me into the weekend:

• José Saramago's declaration that he hasn't been resurrected, he's simply returned and feels "extraordinarily well" after his bout with an illness that brought him to the brink of death at the age of 85.
  
• The Literary Saloon's posting of the photo of The Original of Laura.
• Sara Ivry's conversation with Aleksandar Hemon about The Lazarus Project.

Iceland Spar

Notes on the second part of Against the Day (see also Part One). As I continue reading the fourth part, putting down these stray thoughts has really helped me get a better handle on the numerous things Pynchon is up to.

~ p. 125: the mythic "extra man" (someone's doppelgänger?) appears aboard the Inconvenience

~ p. 126: How Iceland spar polarizes light

~ p. 127: "Of course he would leave--that was only fortune-telling--it could not interfere with her love."

~ p. 131: An academic argument for the colonization of Time (and "'additional dimensions beyond the third'"): "'Why not?'"

~ p. 132: The math of Time travel

~ p. 133: The Librarian on Iceland spar:

"It's the genuine article, and the sub-structure of reality. The doubling of the Creation, each image clear and believable.... And you being mathematical gentlemen, it can hardly have escaped your attention that its curious advent into the world occurred within only a few years of the discovery of Imaginary Numbers, which also provided a doubling of the mathematical Creation."

~ p. 143: Throyle explains bilocation and how the shamans' "'notion of time is spread out not in a single dimension but over many, which all exist in a single, timeless instant.'" Interestingly, this is also the perspective of light. In other words, if one were traveling at the speed of light, past and future would merge into "a single, timeless instant" (or an eternal now). Light is completely "present"--as well as being both particle and wave.

~ p. 176: Lew and the social invisibles:

There was always some Forty-seventh Street, always some legion of invisible on the one side of the account book, set opposite a handful on the other who were getting very, if not incalculably, rich at their expense.

~ p. 198: "Web found himself crying out the names of his sons. From inside the pain, he was distantly surprised at a note of reproach in his voice, though not sure if it had been out loud or inside his thoughts. He watched the light over the ranges slowly draining away."

~ p. 228: Madame Eskimoff on how she records her séances:

"We take electros of the original wax impressions immediately after every sitting. Part of the routine. I have listened to these tonight already several times, and even if details are here and there obscure, I felt it a grave enough development to summon you here."

I immediately thought of William Gass quoting Rilke:

"The coronal suture of the skull...has...a certain similarity to the closely wavy line which the needle of the phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder.... What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of a sound, but existed of itself naturally...along the coronal suture, for example." At the present time technicians have done something similar for the movement of the heart, so that death is seen as a straight line, or heard as a continuous drone.

It is of course a fanciful project: to fill the world's cracks with needles that will let us hear those cracks speak.

~ p. 237: Anarchists as Trekkies! This is classic Pynchon:

This person greeted the Cohen by raising his left hand, then spreading the fingers two and two away from the thumb so as to form the Hebrew letter shin, signifying the initial letter of one of the pre-Mosaic (that is, plural) names of God, which may never be spoken.

"Basically wishing long life and prosperity," explained the Cohen, answering with the same gesture.

Also acknowledging sci-fi fans as a subversive element?

~ p. 242: Renfrew on Werfner: "'keen-witted but unheimlich'". Thanks to Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, I know that this last word means "uncanny." That whole digression of his about this word was one of the best parts of the book (that and "Echo"). I really should reread it sometime (and toss in The Whalestoe Letters while I'm at it).

~ p. 250: The complex combination of light, Iceland spar, lenses, and mirrors "'reveal the architecture of dream,'" allowing one to see into the Invisible.

~ p. 251: Miles sets them straight (yet again):

"As the Franciscans developed the Stations of the Cross to allow any parishioner to journey to Jerusalem without leaving his church-grounds, so have we been brought up and down the paths and aisles of what we take to be the all-but-boundless world, but which in reality are only a circuit of humble images reflecting a glory greater than we can imagine--to save us from the blinding terror of having to make the real journey, from one episode to the next of the last day of Christ on Earth, and at last to the real, unbearable Jerusalem."

~ p. 256: Pynchon describes artillery fire as "abolishing Time":

what they saw "now" in the sights was in fact what did not yet exist but what would only be a few seconds from "now"

~ p. 257: More mama jokes:

"Hey, Lindsay, you can still catch 'em if you hurry," taunted Darby.

"Or we might send in pursuit your maternal relation, Suckling, one glimpse of whom should prove more than sufficient fatally to compromise their morale, if not indeed transform them all into masonry--"

"Well, your mother," riposted the readily nettled youth, "is so ugly--"

"Gentlemen," implored Randolph [...]

Apparently, these date back to Shakespeare.

~ p. 306: Merle's idea of Iceland spar's potential is similar to Tesla's ideas for electricity. In this reading, "anarchy" simply means offering something that would make life easier for all--except the Powers That Be.

~ p. 312: "If she was not to be the great lost love of his life, she could've perhaps been the great unlistened-to commentator upon it."

~ p. 323: The true Anarchists revealed as Vibe's bombers.

~ p. 324: Kit's new direction:

"Dr. Hilbert at Göttingen is developing his 'Spectral Theory,' which requires a vector space of infinite dimensions. His co-adjutor Minkowski thinks that dimensions will eventually all just fade away into a Kontinuum of space and time."

~ p. 354-55: Magician Luca Zombini:

"Remember, God didn't say, 'I'm gonna make light now,' he said, 'Let there be light.' His first act was to allow light in to what had been Nothing. Like God, you also have to always work with the light, make it do only what you want it to."

His trade also involves strategic uses of the Nicol prism, double refraction, and the ubiquitous Iceland spar, which

"Doubles the image, the two overlap, with the right sort of light, the right lenses, you can separate them in stages, a little further each time, step by step till in fact it becomes possible to saw somebody in half optically, and instead of two different pieces of one body, there are now two complete individuals walking around, who are identical in every way, capisci?"

Of course, this creates other problems. Like having multiple versions of the same person roaming the world simultaneously.

~ p. 370: How music trumps Anarchist theory:

"Yet I've noticed the same thing when your band plays--the most amazing social coherence, as if you all shared the same brain."

"Sure," agreed "Dope," "but you can't call that organization."

"What do you call it?"

"Jass."

~ p. 375: Ewball Oust on Iceland spar in Mexico:

"Espato is what they call it down there. Sometimes you hear espanto, which is something either horrifying or amazing, depending."

"Like looking at somebody through a pure enough specimen and seeing not just the man but his ghost alongside him?"

Ewball regarded Frank with some curiosity. "Plenty occasions for goose bumps down in those drifts as it is. Espantoso, hombre."

~ p. 377: Pynchon invokes Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury:

They climbed up the red-brown mountainside, into sunlight and purple artemisia, where wild dogs wandered the roofless stones, till they were high enough to see, beneath the harsh radiance of the Good Friday sky, where cirrus clouds were blown to long, fine parallel streaks, the city below, spread east to west, stunned as if by mysterious rays to a silence even Frank and Ewball must honor--the passion of Christ, the windless hush...even the stamping mills were silent, even Silver itself taking its day of rest, as if to recognize the price Judas Iscariot received. Sunlight in the trees.

~ p. 391: More Iceland spar: "And there was this deep glow, though not enough ambient light in here to account for it--as if there were a soul harbored within."

~ p. 410: G.K. Chesterton references?:

The boys found their way down to West Symmes Street and into the Ball in Hand, which proved to be a particularly low and disreputable haunt.

For some reason, this line made me think of The Man Who Was Thursday's Gabriel Syme and The Ball and the Cross.

~ p. 415: Does Mr. Ace reveal the true motive of the existence of the Chums of Chance?

"You are not aware that each of your mission assignments is intended to prevent some attempt of our own to enter your time-regime?"

A conceptual poem

(Eliza Triana as Sierva María de Todos los Ángeles--aka María Mandinga. Foto: Olga Paulihiac, CMO Producciones, Alicia Films)

Director Felipe Aljure visited the set of the current production of Del amor y otros demonios and was impressed by what he discovered:

Las tres productoras coinciden en que uno de los ingredientes que hace parte de su apuesta es el no haber acudido a ningún coproductor extranjero para que entrara en esta producción. Es un concepto lleno de poesía, los buenos productores no se limitan a hablar de plata, pues reconoce una unidad cultural latinoamericana y más aún caribeña, por ser Colombia, Costa Rica y México las tres nacionalidades más activas en el proyecto. Tres productoras, de tres países, pensándose como de una misma nación, es un poema conceptual sobre el cual se erigen otras fortalezas de esta adaptación, como por ejemplo usar actores de la misma nacionalidad de los personajes de la novela para evitar acentos falsos e impostados; o usar a Cartagena como escenario central del rodaje, por ser allí en donde la novela transcurre; o filmarla en español, idioma en el que la novela está escrita. Aunque la película aún no está terminada, Del amor y otros demonios tiene todos los ingredientes para ser un delicado espejo audiovisual capaz de reflejar con fuerza todas las sutilezas del libro.

Needless to say, I'm very excited about the potential of this film.

In the meantime, I was delighted to discover A.S. Byatt's 1995 review of Edith Grossman's English translation of the novel:

Mr. Garcia Marquez's pointed and resonant epigraph is from St. Thomas Aquinas's treatise "On the Integrity of Resurrected Bodies": "For the hair, it seems, is less concerned in the resurrection than other parts of the body."

What is body and what survives? What is flesh and what is spirit and what is demonic? Mr. Garcia Marquez's answer is an almost didactic, yet brilliantly moving, tour de force.

Also, I wonder if the opera will be released as an album someday. I look forward to reading reviews of the future performances.

Teaching oneself

Another excellent point about litblogs from Dan Green:

The question is not whether another "opinion" is needed but whether that opinion is linked to a specific analysis of the book--pointing out specific attributes of form, style, or theme through quotation or extended description--that might reveal to other readers some angle of understanding or interpetation they haven't previously considered.

In addition, I think writing one's thoughts down in this medium can be a way of teaching oneself. I know that I can have many ideas and impressions about a text, but it isn't until I flesh them out in black and white that I can fully comprehend the nuances and implications of these thoughts--which sometimes extend into even more illumination and ultimately lead to a better understanding of the text itself.

This ties in to what Darby wrote about "the notion of overpopularity." If you love something, why shut up about it simply because others already love it too? It isn't the topic or work that should be accepted or rejected, only the way in which we write about it. There can never be enough "specific analysis" of a text's merits.

Intertextual intermarriage

Eric Griffiths' "Dante, Primo Levi and the intertextualists" is a wonderful essay that explores the erstwhile uses, true definitions, and revelatory functions of intertextuality. Perhaps I'm quoting too liberally here, but I suppose it's more for myself than anyone else. This is the sort of writing I never tire of rereading:

At one point during Dante’s impersonation of Arnaut Daniel, in Purgatorio 26, there occurs a word, “escalina”, which, Prue Shaw points out, “exists neither in Provençal nor Italian”. Amid the gloss of the mosaic, her knowledgeable eye singles out, as it were, one square of matted chewing gum. Maybe the agent Dante mistakenly believed there was such a word; maybe he thought it ought to exist and made it up (neologism is a permanent possibility in any language, reluctantly though langue admits this); maybe a corrupt scribe had a hand in the text, and Arnaut was not describing Dante as “al som de l’escalina” – “on the highest pavement of the stair”, as T. S. Eliot, whom the phrase haunted, once translated it – but as “ses dol e ses calina” (“without pain and without heat”). No system can spare us these “maybe”s. You may call this “literary word” an “intersection of textual surfaces”, but that will not help you cope with the fact that what we come across at this intersection is a crux.

And

Milton’s great poem is not, as Bakhtin was inclined to label all epics, “monological” but in dialogue over time with himself, both intersubjective and intra-subjective. This is why it often sounds like a play by Shakespeare. Sometimes the resemblances are probably happenstances. When, at the outset, he promises his readers “things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme”, we had better not hear “unattempted yet” as an echo of the same words from King John, Act Two, scene one (line 601), where the Bastard torrentially reflects that the only reason he is railing against bribery is that nobody has so far troubled to try greasing his palm. We discount this as “static”, interference from a shared, but insignificantly shared, atmosphere, unless we impute to Milton a desire to hint with inordinate faintness that we should think of him as a bastard, too. But when Satan leads Eve to the forbidden tree, and she explains that it is off-limits to her, “To whom the tempter guilefully replied. / Indeed?”, a family resemblance between two tempters may strike us. We can hear here an echo of that “Indeed?” with which in Act Three, Scene Three, Iago initiates Othello’s downfall. Textually, and a fortiori intertextually, there is more in common between Milton and the Bastard than between Satan and Iago – two words rather than one – but if we personify “Indeed?”, embody it with camp surprise and mock solicitude, with the paraded reasonableness that comes pat to both these insinuators, we find they are a match for each other.

And

An unargued preference for “more general discursive structure” over attention to a “particular intertextual source” or two has the further drawback that it conduces to fetishism of the categories brought to bear on utterances. “Structure”, “system”, “genre” and “discursive formation” remain drastically under-described pseudo-entities; like nation states, their existence and frontiers acquire a bogus solidity. As in nationalist historiography, sham demarcations are established; a weird protectionism envelops the resultant intellectual domains, so that when a writer like Primo Levi alludes in one of his poems to the “Shema Yisrael” this is called “appropriation” (who was expropriated by it ?). Contributors to the Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi think it odd that Levi, a “secular humanist”, according to them, “nonetheless uses the language of the Hebrew Bible in his poetry”. Yet Levi “uses” terms, cadences and their implied commitments from Diodati’s 1603 Italian version of the Scriptures (he does not quote Hebrew) throughout his prose as well as his poetry. When he speaks of the “shame which il giusto experiences facing a crime committed by someone else”, the Italian word is the equivalent of the King James’s “the righteous”. When he is drawn, as he so often is, to people who are “mite”, like his best friend, Alberto, “la rara figura dell’uomo forte e mite, contro cui si spuntano le armi della notte” (“the rare example of a man at once strong and meek, against whom the weapons of the night fall away blunted”), the magnificence of his phrase stems from Wisdom 2:19 and Matthew 21:5 and the many other places where that notable intersection, Judaeo-Christianity, transvalued meekness. You don’t learn about these detailed realities of Levi’s writing from the Cambridge Companion; the contributors’ attachment to their own labels is such that they even describe “compassion and forgiveness” as “Christian virtues”, a slur on the Hebrew Bible if ever I heard one. For them, an iron curtain has fallen between the “cultural” and the “religious”, so they imagine Levi must be a double agent, engaged in “ironic rewriting of divine utterances in secular terms” (they do not mention what the point of his irony is), whereas, in fact, the Scriptures are already written in “secular terms”, there being no other terms available even to God, supposing he wishes to speak with his creatures. The Word itself, as Bakhtin said, has to be “embodied”, “enter another sphere of existence” and “become discourse”.

And

To hear why Levi in the camp heard Ulysses’s injunction “Considerate la vostra semenza” (“ask yourselves what seed you spring from”) as “come uno squillo di tromba, come la voce di Dio” (“like the sound of the trumpet, like the voice of God”: Deuteronomy 4:33, Jeremiah 4:19), you need to bear in ear the continuity of promise carried through the word “seed” from Genesis to the offertory of the Roman Catholic Requiem where it begs God to be freed from death “which of old you promised to Abraham and his seed”. You need to recognize this “seed” as enshrining a concept of human solidarity across times and frontiers, a concept at the heart of Levi’s resistance to the violence unleashed upon the “human” by pseudoscientific expertise about “race”, for example, by Mussolini’s hireling academics who in 1938 issued a manifesto proclaiming that “we must regard as dangerous theories which . . . include Semitic groupings within the scope of a common Mediterranean race . . . . The Jews do not belong to the Italian race”. When Levi describes in the words of Diodati’s version of Scripture his response to Dante, an unbelieving Jewish Piedmontese writer (exiled in Poland), nourished on the words of a bible translation made by a devout Tuscan Protestant (exiled in Switzerland), comes to life at the sound from his own mouth of the account given by a Florentine Catholic poet (exiled somewhere in what was not yet known as “Italy”) of the response given to a Roman pagan by a Greek pagan (self-exiled till drowned in the antipodes). I don’t think “intersection” is a good enough word for what happens here; “intermarriage” would be better.

(via Light Reading)

Present concerns

• A new free international e-mail list co-hosted by the Universities of East Anglia, Warwick and London Metropolitan has just been launched. STRAP - Stage Translation Research Adaptation and Practice - aims to promote collaboration and discussion between academics and practitioners working in the field of stage translation and adaptation. It is intended that this facility will help subscribers create networks and further the discipline of stage translation and adaptation.

• García Márquez's Of Love and Other Demons has become an opera.

• Bud Parr has a few things to say about John O'Brien's recent screed, "Scamming in Translation: The Philistines Have Arrived." As a fledgling translator about to begin an MA program in the fall, my immediate reaction was a sad disappointment and confusion. How did it come to this?

• Darby has spoken:

  I hereby propose that we banish the notion of overpopularity from the litblogosphere. Surely it's an idea that can do well on its without further help from us.

  Hear hear!
  

• A friend introduced me to Better World Books--an "online bookstore with a soul." Definitely worth your time.

Erickson's Soledad

I've been busy with freelance work, during the completion of which I discovered a few interesting things about Christopher Lee and his fidelity to Bram Stoker (in his opinion, a faithful adaptation has yet to be made). I also had to do some fact-checking and was surprised to see the name of Soledad Miranda in a film they did together.

So I discovered something that I probably should have already known: Soledad Miranda seems to have provided the inspiration for the character of Soledad Palladin in Steve Erickson's Zeroville. I haven't seen anyone ask him about this in the few interviews I've read. (Then again, I haven't seen anyone ask him about the Van Gogh connection, either.) It would be interesting to hear more about this connection, especially since Soledad's character is the mother of Zazi. Vikar's reactions to Soledad mirror his internal evolution (and not only because "soledad" is Spanish for "loneliness" or "solitude"), but it is Zazi who is the lynchpin of the novel.

Gabo's at it again

García Márquez to publish another novel before the end of the year:

BOGOTÁ (Reuters) - El escritor colombiano Gabriel García Márquez publicará antes de finalizar este año una nueva novela sobre el amor, informó el martes un periodista cercano al Premio Nobel de Literatura.

El director de los servicios informativos de la cadena radial Caracol, Darío Arizmendi, dijo que se reunió el fin de semana en México con el afamado escritor, quien le contó que está dando los últimos toques a su novela, cuyo título aún no está definido.

"Se trata de una novela que García Márquez tenía en la nevera. La sacó, escribió un borrador, no le gustó, luego otro y otro y llegó hasta a un quinto borrador. Ya está listo. Es una novela sobre el tema del amor y saldrá antes que termine el 2008, en agosto o septiembre", aseguró Arizmendi a través de Caracol radio.

El periodista, un amigo cercano al autor de "Cien años de soledad" y "El amor en los tiempos del cólera", precisó que la nueva novela del escritor colombiano, ganador del Nobel de Literatura en 1982, tendrá unas 250 páginas y sostuvo que está plenamente lúcido a sus 81 años.

(With thanks to A.)

UPDATE: Marcelo at Sancho's Panza offers a reality check. We'll wait and see. I think of the Gabo who changed the ending to Memoria de mis putas tristes at the very last minute after pirated copies hit the streets of Bogotá. But I don't think we'll be seeing anything new before the end of the year.

More on Pynchon and Henry Adams

As I mentioned on Wednesday, I decided to post anything from this marvelous group discussion of The Education of Henry Adams that reminded me of Pynchon. Against the Day got me thinking of Adams right off the bat, and my suspicions were confirmed by Jennifer Schuessler's introductory post, in which she states that "Adams’s ideas of inertia and entropy profoundly influenced Thomas Pynchon." (But how does she know this? Is it common knowledge? Does Pynchon discuss this somewhere? I'd love to find out.)

Here's something Thomas Mallon wrote next:

Adams’s “Dynamic Theory of History,” developed during a decade in which he was also playing with magnets and seeking revelation in the statistics of coal production, proceeds from a late-life awareness of himself a “a conscious ball of vibrating motions, traversed in every direction by infinite lines of rotation or vibration.” His discovery that, as of 1900, the world would “not be a unity but a multiple” freed him to write a memoir whose own ever-increasing entropy could be rationalized as a shape to suit the times.

I immediately thought of Skip (Pynchon's "ball lightning" that befriends Merle). I'm fascinated by the similarity of language and ideas. It appears that Pynchon carries Adams' ideas to another level (dimension!) and continues to consistently explore them.

Jill Abramson later observed:

It is mind-bending to think that the little boy marched to school by John Quincy Adams lived to see both the discovery of radium and the invention of the motorcar. He was prophetic and saw that American life was going to be completely transformed by technology, and not always for the better. He recognized the deeply disruptive potential of technology and internalized how modernity itself often inspires deep longing for spirituality.

In addition to this, I would add a "longing for mystery"--another aspect of the Virgin. The way in which Pynchon melds religion and science, addressing not only existential dilemmas but the ways in which these two spheres overlap, is truly revelatory. One cannot wholly exist without the other. Where would science be without an affinity for mystery to propel it? And religion gives to some a structure or "worldview" from which to interpret the evidence of the eyes (or at least the visible aspect of "reality").

What's most amazing to me is the artistic harmony that emerges. Of course, these issues aren't without their conflicts and contradictions. But I am in awe of the way in which Pynchon creates (mirrors?) a world in which they coexist, in which the questions are valid. This seemingly whole-hearted embrace of paradox is part of his genius. I feel honored to be reading him.

UPDATE: I've just discovered (thanks to Bud Parr) that today is Pynchon's 71st birthday. If I were in NYC and could send a fax to him, it would probably resemble aspects of this post. Many happy returns to one of the greatest writers in history!

The Light Over the Ranges

"What better place for the keepers of the seals and codes to convene?"

I've reached the half-way point of Against the Day. This last line of p. 542's section gives me as good an excuse as any to celebrate the achievement by posting my scribblings thus far. Since reading Janet Malcolm's Two Lives, I've often thought of how she took a kitchen knife to The Making of Americans (in order to make it more manageable) and have considered following her example with Against the Day. But this sage hardback is too lovely--I couldn't bring myself to do it. So my progress is slow...but it is progress!

What follows are musings from the first of its five parts:

~ From the very beginning, with his Thelonious Monk epigraph ("It's always night, or we wouldn't need light") Pynchon lets the reader in on the extended riff that awaits--a jazz-like work of digressions upon multiple themes (the nature of reality, existence, and truth being just the beginning).

~ As I mentioned many moons ago, the first page's mention of the "World's Columbian Exposition" in Chicago made me go back and reread Henry Adams' "The Dynamo and the Virgin" (from The Education of Henry Adams). Does anyone know if any comparison of this work has been made to Against the Day? It would make a fascinating essay (or even book!). Electricity would only be the beginning... (I've just discovered this Adams group discussion. In the introductory post, Jennifer Schuessler remarks that "Adams’s ideas of inertia and entropy profoundly influenced Thomas Pynchon". Ah ha! I'll put any further developments into another post.)

~ p. 19: Zip:

"There's lights, but there's sound, too. Mostly in the upper altitudes, where it gets that dark blue in the day-time? Voices calling out together. All directions at once. Like a school choir, only no tune, just these--"

"Warnings," said Riley.

~ p. 20: Penny:

"Nobody saw any projectiles, but there was...a kind of force...energy we could feel, directed personally at us...."

"Somebody out there," Zip said solemnly. "Empty space. But inhabited."

~ p. 24: Miles' confession:

"Sometimes [...] these peculiar feelings will surround me, Lindsay...like the electricity coming on--as if I can see everything just as clear as day, how...how everything fits together, connects. It doesn't last long, though. Pretty soon I'm just back to tripping over my feet again."

~ p. 33: Tesla is bound up in this, of course--his "World-System" of free energy gets the usual reaction:

The Professor was literally having an attack of nausea. Every time Tesla's name came up, this was the predictable outcome. Vomit.

(This reminds me that I should try to read Samantha Hunt's The Invention of Everything Else soon. Her interview at Bat Segundo's was fun to listen to.)

~ p. 34: Of course, Edison's name isn't far behind--also,

"Bankrolling Tesla has given Morgan's access to all Tesla's engineering secrets. And he has operatives on the spot [...]".

~ p. 48: The hilarious (previously cited) scuffle with Franz Ferdinand.

~ pp. 49-50: William Blake's Jerusalem makes a logical appearance as an adapted hymn out of "the Workers' Own Songbook." A former professor of mine has a personal theory about Blake pre-envisioning quantum physics in some of his more complex (esoteric?) work. So it makes perfect sense to me that Pynchon generously includes him here. Makes me think that there's much more method to his "madness" than this sprawling novel divulges at first glance.

~ p. 58: Tesla's experimentation linked to "the luminiferous Æther"? The substance "'which can vibrate light...be sheared into positive and negative electricity'" and takes the form of a "religious question."

~ p. 60: Interesting to compare Lew and the Anarchists and their "church" (and Blake hymns) with Merle and the Ætherist community--"maybe as close as Merle ever came to joining a church."

~ p. 73: Merle becomes "sidekicks" with a "ball lightning" named Skip. Light communicating...

~ p. 97: Kit Traverse works for Tesla and considers himself a "Vectorist."

~ p. 99: Kit sees into

the Invisible, and a voice, or something like a voice, whispered unto him, saying, "Water falls, electricity flows--one flow becomes another, and thence into light. So is altitude transformed, continuously, to light."

This becomes a life-altering experience and the

vectoral expressions in the books, surface integrals and potential functions and such, would henceforth figure as clumsier repetitions of the truth he now possessed in his personal interior, certain and unshakable.

The faith-like language Pynchon uses suits the work perfectly. It blends well with the idea of "Word" being at the beginning of existence--Word and Light both taking on continuous reverberations of meaning in Pynchon's universe.

~ p. 104: Tesla to Kit:

"The same began happening to me also at your age," Tesla recalled. "When I could find the time to sit still, the images would come. But it's always finding the time, isn't it."

"Sure, always something.... Chores, something."

"Tithing," Tesla said, "giving back to the day."

~ p. 108: "As, no longer named, one by one the islets vanished from the nautical charts, and one day from the lighted world as well, to rejoin the Invisible."

~ p. 110: Miles drifts...

Wandering corridors of the spectral, Miles had begun, increasingly, to alarm his shipmates. Mealtimes too often were apt to revert to exercises in deep, even mortal, uncertainty, depending where Miles had been that day to procure his ingredients. Sometimes his cooking was pure cordon bleu, sometimes it was inedible, due to excursions of spirit whose polarity was never entirely predictable from one day to the next. Not that Miles would deliberately set out to wreck the soup or burn the meat loves--he seldom got that overt, tending more to forgetful omissions, or misreadings of quantity and timing.

~ p. 114: The first mention of Iceland spar:

Ordinary light, passing through this mineral, was divided into two separate rays, termed "ordinary" and "extraordinary," a property which the Japanese scientists had then exploited to create an additional channel of optical communication wherever in the layered structure of the pearl one of the thousands of tiny, cunningly-arranged crystals might occur. When illuminated in a certain way, and the intricately refracted light projected upon a suitable surface, any pearl so modified could thus be made to yield a message.

I hope to post on part two ("Iceland Spar") later this week--more bread crumbs to help me find my way back to present meaning.

Rimbaud's end?

While watching news coverage of the ongoing book fair in Bogotá, I was intrigued by an interview with Orlando Mejía Rivera, author of El enfermo de Abisinia. This novelization of the last few years of Rimbaud's life also proposes an alternate theory regarding the illness that eventually caused his death.

Mejía Rivera draws on "fierce articles by the critic Lepelletier (which the author reproduces) and an invented correspondence between Verlaine and Nikos Sotiro [Rimbaud's doctor]." The text "presents all of the pieces of the puzzle that continue to constitute the life and personality of the visionary poet." Definitely a book I'll be keeping an eye out for on my next trip to the bookstore.

Playing catch-up

• Francisco Goldman has won the Index on Censorship TR Fyvel Book Award for The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? Watch his heartfelt acceptance speech. (via Logophilia)
• The Bookstrust Translated Fiction site gets added to my sidebar, thanks to The Literary Saloon.
• Chad Post's account of his recent publisher conference in Argentina gives much-needed insight into how publishers get connected to unstranslated authors.
  
• Nigel Beale posted his fascinating interview with Irene Gammel last week. She addresses many thoughts I've always had about L.M. Montgomery and Anne, but have never found expressed. Her Looking for Anne: How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed Up A Literary Classic has gone straight to my TBR list. Her website is pretty impressive as well.
• Also, Kate plans to discuss Gammel's book in the future and has created a group blog for Anne of Green Gables--the discussion is set to begin on 1 June.

Great answers to a favorite question

Carolyn Kellogg interviews Steve Erickson (author of the amazing Zeroville) in preparation for this weekend's LA Festival of Books:

Jacket Copy: In "Zeroville," your most recent novel, movies shape the way the main character perceives the world. Are there any books that do the same for you?

Steve Erickson: I'm not sure there's a difference between books that affected the way I see the world and books that influenced me as a writer. The first books I remember having an impact on me when I was a kid were L. Frank Baum's "Oz" books, which were much stranger than the movie, at once rather whimsical and really dark. Later Faulkner's novels made sense to me for the way time was never literal, the way it seemed hot-wired to memory rather than experience, and Henry Miller's early work was revelatory for the way it so willfully assaulted all the formalist notions about literature that get taught in English classes. There was something very punk about Miller's juxtaposition of the transcendent with the primal, the sky with the gutter. When I was 25, during one scorching summer when I was house-sitting for a buddy, I read Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights." Dostoevsky is considered the first "modern" writer, but I vote to Emily -- one of the most subversive novels ever made, with a sexually obsessed main character whose object of desire is a dead woman, an utterly unreliable narrator, a structure built on a psychological interior that shifts like a house with moving walls. I had fever dreams that whole month. Gabriel Garcia Marquez influenced me for the way he applied Faulkner to his own landscape. All of these books, I think, were most influential in that, as far-flung as they were, there was something in them I instinctively recognized, something about them that confirmed what I already knew about the world but didn't know I knew.

World Book Day

• World Book Day in Bogotá is just the beginning of a 13-day book fair that showcases over 500 national and international events and exhibits, with Japan as the guest of honor.
• In addition to this, 5,000 books will be left in the city's parks, shopping centers, restuarants, transportation sites, elevators, building entrances, movie theatres, and even in some public restrooms. Instructions are left in each book as to what the finder can do: read the book, write notes in it, and leave it somewhere else--or email the organizers with the reader's thoughts. The twenty titles include works by Jorge Franco, Mario Benedetti, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Elfriede Jelinek, Juan Gossaín, Oscar Collazos, Elliot Perlman, Gustavo Piero, and Matthew Pearl. There's even a list of the most likely places to find these books.
• I'm very excited that Open Letter is finally up and running. The catalogue is brilliant and I look forward to reading them. Dubravka Ugrešić's Nobody's Home (reviewed at The Literary Saloon) will be the first to become available.

No more depression

Thankfully, the editors of No Depression are finding other ways of keeping the publication alive:

As noted when we posted the news about the magazine, we'll be continuing with our website. Hopefully you've noticed that we've already begun adding fresh content to the site, with our recently-introduced sections for reviews of new releases, reissues, and live shows. We're also working on a new, enhanced website -- and to that end, we'd be interested in hearing what you might want to see on it. [...]

There's also news on the print front. While our May-June issue will be our last in bimonthly-magazine form, we're very happy to announce that we will be teaming up with University of Texas Press to present a semiannual "bookazine." Envisioned as a sort of hybrid between a book and a magazine, this new No Depression creation will make its debut in the fall. Look for #1 (or "#76", as we'll dub it, in deference to the magazine's precedence) in the music-books section of your local bookstore -- and also watch this space for upcoming details about ordering subscriptions. [...]

Some of the details will become clearer as we get further into the process of creating the first edition. Generally speaking, what we envision is that the bookazine will continue to provide a home for our long-form pieces which have less chance of transitioning to the website, where the editorial focus will be on more timely elements such as live reviews, record reviews, and news reports.

This is really wonderful news with a lot of great potential.

This Wednesday

Over 40,000 books will be given away this Wednesday as Colombia celebrates the national Día del Libro:

Por primera vez y de manera simultánea, Colombia celebrará el Día del Libro. Quince ciudades del país se unirán a esta fecha con ferias callejeras del libro, actividades de lectura para niños, jóvenes y adultos, recitales, horas del cuento y un sinnúmero de eventos, que invitarán a los colombianos a disfrutar de la lectura y a motivar la costumbre de regalarse libros.

En Bogotá, la celebración estará precedida por el primer Bogotá Despierta (19 a 20 de abril) del año y el 23 el evento enmarcará el cierre de la designación de la ciudad como Capital Mundial del Libro.

El empresariado se ha unido a esta campaña regalando más de 40.000 libros.

I'm looking forward to the Book Fair we'll host here at school and the special events we have planned for the kids this week.

Beyond yourself

Matthew Cheney posts a really wonderful snippet from Lydia Millet's conversation with Jonathan Lethem (found in the current issue of BOMB Magazine):

Novels should do anything and everything they can pull off. The pulling off is the hard part, of course, but my feeling is if you don't walk a line where you're struggling to make things work, struggling with the ideas and shape and tone, you're not doing art. Art is the struggle to get beyond yourself. And if you want to use talking animals to do that, and you can make them beautiful, nothing is verboten.

Glad that somebody believed

Nextbook has three poems by Adam Zagajewski (translated by Clare Cavanagh)--keys to an imaginary map:

“The Church of Corpus Christi” is a part of a sequence of poems which are supposed to provide the reader with an imaginary map of Krakow. The Gothic church of Corpus Christi stands next to the Jewish quarter—and this makes me think, whenever I visit the church, that its inner space is of double nature, that some dark signals from the neighboring body of Judaism have been registered here and produced a unique mix of cultures. Also, I always think this Krakow church is the closest analog of the church in Prague in which wanders the hero of Kafka’s The Castle . . . For me the the church of Corpus Christi is one of the magical spots on my personal plan of Krakow.

Elsewhere, Jorie Graham reads at Border's (as well as Paul Muldoon, Robert Pinsky, and others).

Milestones

• A long time coming: Petrona notes that UK publishers Penguin, Pan Macmillan, and Bloomsbury are taking steps towards converting their titles into e-books.
• Hearty congratulations to Ed for Bat Segundo's 200th episode!
• The highly-linked post-Pulitzer Junot Díaz interview in which he shares "some opening throat-clearing" from his next novel.
• The Literary Saloon points to the promising beginnings of the English Pen Online World Atlas. I'm impressed by how they're soliciting recommendations--I've just registered and look forward to spending more time on it.
  
• Anne Fernald now also has a diary at the Daily Kos.

Narrow and constraining

Dan Green rolls up his sleeves:

In a recent profile in The Chronicle of Higher Education of M.H. Abrams, Jeffrey Williams comments in passing that "Today the New Criticism, the dominant approach to close reading from the 1940s until the 1960s, seems narrow and constraining." New Criticism was constraining only to the extent that to use it meant to attend entirely to the literary qualities of literature, to withhold biography, history, and politics as subjects tangential to the focused analysis of literary writing. Presumably those more interested in history or politics than in literature would indeed find New Critical close reading "narrow and constraining," although one could ask why such scholars chose literature as their course of study as opposed to, say, history or politics.

The cultural apparatus and "French Theory"

Scott McLemee on François Cusset's French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (translated by Jeff Fort):

To put it another way: the very category of “French Theory” itself is socially constructed. Explaining how that construction came to pass is Cusset’s project. He looks at the process as it unfolded at various levels of academic culture: via translations and anthologies, in certain disciplines, with particular sponsors, and so on. Along the way, he recounts the American debates over postmodernism, poststructuralism, and whatnot. But those disputes are part of his story, not the point of it. While offering an outsider’s perspective on our interminable culture wars, it is more than just a chronicle of them.

Instead, it would be much more fitting to say that French Theory is an investigation of the workings of what C. Wright Mills called the “cultural apparatus.” This term, as Mills defined it some 50 years ago, subsumes all the institutions and forms of communication through which “learning, entertainment, malarky, and information are produced and distributed ... the medium by which [people] interpret and report what they see.” The academic world is part of this “apparatus,” but the scope of the concept is much broader; it also includes the arts and letters, as well as the media, both mass and niche.

Dillard, O'Connor, Whitman

A couple of very marvelous discoveries have dramatically increased the quality of this day. Annie Dillard's The Writing Life was translated into Spanish last year by Miguel Martínez-Lage. Here is an old favorite passage, rendered anew in Vivir, escribir:

Una de las pocas cosas que sé acerca de la escritura es ésta: gástalo todo, dispáralo a bocajarro, piérdelo sobre la marcha, una y todas las veces que sea preciso. No conserves lo que parece provechoso para más adelante, para otra fase del libro: dalo, dalo todo, dalo ahora. El impulso de reservar algo bueno para un lugar aparentemente mejor es la señal que se necesita para gastarlo ahora, sin tardanza. Ya aparecerá algo distinto, puede que mejor, más adelante. Estas cosas se llenan por detrás, por abajo, como el agua de un pozo. Del mismo modo, el impulso de guardar para uno lo que ha aprendido no sólo es vergonzoso, sino que es destructivo. Todo lo que no dé uno libre y abundantemente termina por perdérsele. Uno abre un buen día la caja fuerte y se encuentra con cenizas.

La palabra escrita es débil. Son muchas las personas que prefieren la vida. La vida mueve la sangre en tus venas. Huele de maravilla. Escribir es la mera escritura, la literatura es poca cosa. Apela únicamente a los más sutiles sentidos -la visión y el oído de la imaginación-, al sentido de la moral, al intelecto. Esta escritura a la que te entregas, y que tanto te emociona, que tanto te conmueve y te alboroza, casi como si estuvieras bailando junto a la banda de música, es apenas audible para cualquier otra persona.
El oído del lector ha de ajustarse, rebajarse, para pasar del estruendo de la vida a la sutileza de los sonidos imaginarios que se desprenden de la palabra escrita.

This reminds me that yet another important work has recently been translated into Spanish--Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners as Misterio y maneras by Esther Navío Castellano. (Thanks for the news, Nora!)

And I've had Whitman's Canto a mi mismo (Song of Myself) for a while now (A. is currently reading it), but this is the perfect opportunity to mention that the entire American Experience Whitman documentary is now online. (Thanks for posting this, Jeff.) I hope to check it out later tonight.

You know you're incurably addicted to litblogs when...

...you can imagine exactly what Dan Green would have to say to this:

'The novel is dead. As dead as alchemy.' He cut out with his hands, with the calipers, dismissing that as well. 'I realized that one day before the war. Do you know what I did? I burnt every novel I possessed. Dickens. Cervantes. Dostoievsky. Flaubert. All the great and all the small. I even burnt something I wrote myself when I was too young to know better. I burnt them out there. It took me all day. The sky took their smoke, the earth their ashes. It was a fumigation. I have been happier and healthier ever since.' I remembered my own small destroying; and thought, grand gestures are splendid--if you can afford them. He picked up a book and slapped the dust off it. 'Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?'

'For fun?'

'Fun!' He pounced on the word. 'Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.'

'I see.'

'For this.' A life of Franklin Roosevelt. 'This.' A French paperback on astrophysics. 'This. Look at this.' It was an old pamphlet--An Alarme for Sinners, Containing the Last Words of the Murderer Robert Foulkes, 1679. 'There, take that and read it over the week-end. See if it is not more real than all the historical novels ever written.'

Naturally, I wrote "Pure Evil" in the margin.

It's been surprisingly difficult to get into The Magus. Nicholas is a self-deluded cad--but he's supposed to be. It's Conchis I'm having trouble with. The guy is not impressing me at all and strikes me as inanely juvenile. A third of the way through, and the novel still feels hollow to me.

But I'm sticking with it. Fowles is definitely up to something--and I've found more references to the central idea of the above passage. I'll say more when I've safely gotten through it (and try not to choke on all the egotism and pseudo-intellectual fakery in the meantime).

The greatest

Cat Power and The Dirty Delta Blues are doing a show in Bogotá on the 25th!

Of course, there's no way I can make it down, but this is very promising news. José González put on a successful show there this past January, so hopefully this is the beginning of a new trend.

A handful of links

• Inside Higher Ed discusses the "Next Chapter for E-books"--affordable text access for university students. Although I loved the legitimate "excuse" for buying expensive Norton Anthologies and other lit texts, this sure could've come in handy for Psych 101!
• Mark Thwaite mentions Yale's exciting move of putting certain Open Courses online. Sit in on intro classes in Astronomy, English, Philosophy, Physics, Political Science, Psychology, and Religious Studies. This reminds me that a while back I found out about Harvard@Home--a similar idea. (My favorite is Helen Vendler's lecture on Yeats.)
• The Literary Saloon announces that Reading the World 2008 has gone live. Many wonderful books will finally be getting the attention they deserve.
  
• They also mention that the new issue of Poetry magazine is devoted to translated works. (I do miss being able to read the original Spanish, though. They should consider putting them up on the website, if nothing else--like the Poetry International Web does. But adding the translators' notes is a very nice touch.)

Another look

Marcelo Ballvé explores how García Márquez subverts cliché in an essay on Love in the Time of Cholera:

García Márquez is not shy about exploiting a metaphor; but this cholera trope, unlike the quickly wilted rose metaphor, survives its multiple uses. The reason is that it points to a natural and classic symmetry, that between love and death, Eros and thanatos. So despite the fact that the metaphor is used not only frequently but for multiple purposes—to bring characters together or to highlight their emotional states—it continues to ring true. Love and death dance together in the novel, and it is a close dance.

In fact, García Márquez lets us know that nothing the novel describes, none of its loves, would have happened were it not for cholera. One of the 19th century cholera epidemics, we are told, wiped out a quarter of Cartagena’s population in only three months. And it is right after this particularly deadly cholera outbreak that Lorenzo Daza, a shady, widowed trader, arrives in Cartagena, like an opportunistic buzzard.

Here's hoping he finishes

Natalia Solzhenitsyn talks to the Guardian about their constant work pace, in spite of her husband's health problems (he turns 90 in December):

'He hasn't left the house for five years. He has several serious problems, including with his spine - he's missing a vertebra - and he practically can't walk. Physically it's very difficult for him. His health is weak. But every day he sits and works,' she said.

'He writes on his own. His 30-volume selected works are currently being published; seven volumes are already out and five are appearing this year. This doesn't include his letters and notes, only finished books.' [...]

Solzhenitsyn's most recent years have been characterised by frantic activity - and an austere preoccupation with historical patterns rather than fleeting events, she added.

'We don't use the internet. We only watch the news in the evenings. We don't allow ourselves to look at it any earlier. We work. That's it,' she said.

(via Sarah Weinman)

Jorge Edwards wins

Chilean author Jorge Edwards has won the Planeta-Casa de América de Narrativa prize for his novel La casa de Dostoievsky (written under the pseudonym Juan el Indiano). His novel honors an era of idealist poets in 1950's Santiago:

"Esta novela es sobre la poesía, los poetas y las ganas de ser poeta. Porque en el tiempo mío, los que no eran poetas--y yo finalmente no fui poeta--queríamos ser poetas. Y los que no querían ser poetas eran personajes que no mirábamos; que pertenecían a algunos fondos grises del paisaje santiagueño".

Aside from being a novelist, Jorge Edwards was Chile's ambassador to Cuba during Allende's presidency, which resulted in his being kicked out by Fidel in 1971. His subsequent memoir, Persona non grata, was controversial as the first leftist critique of the Cuban Revolution:

In 1970 Jorge Edwards was sent by socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende as his country’s first envoy to break the diplomatic blockade that had sealed Cuba for over a decade. His arrival coincided with the turning point of the revolution, when Castro began to repress the very intellectuals he once courted. In Kafkaesque detail, Edwards records the four explosive months he spent in Havana trying to open a Chilean embassy and his disenchantment with the revolution. His stay culminated in the arrest of his friend Heberto Padilla—the first imprisonment of a well-known writer by the regime—for giving Edwards a “negative view of the revolution.” In a menacing midnight political debate with Edwards immediately after Padilla’s arrest, Castro argued that in this phase of the revolution, bourgeois writers would no longer have “anything to do in Cuba.” Castro accused Edwards of “conduct hostile to the revolution” and declared him “persona non grata.” The winner of the Cervantes prize—the Spanish language equivalent to the Nobel Prize for literature—Jorge Edwards' memoir splendidly recounts this time and the wrath of Castro.

He recently shared his thoughts on Cuba's current transition phase.

Edwards was also a friend and personal secretary to Pablo Neruda and wrote Adios, Poeta, an anecdote-filled biography of Neruda's life and work.

Keeping a low profile

El Tiempo links to an article discussing Hilda Hidalgo's adaptation of Del amor y otros demonios (Of Love and Other Demons). The "day on the set" piece describes the modest ambitions and artistic heart of the project, currently in its fourth week of filming in Cartagena.

Here's some additional (English) information:

Already Hidalgo has been treated more generously by the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author; while Garcia Marquez sold the rights to "Cholera" to Hollywood for $3 million, he was rumored to have given away the rights to "Of Love and Other Demons" to his fellow Latin American artist. "We agreed on a symbolic figure, an amount I'm not going to reveal," said Hidalgo, who is Costa Rican.

Hidalgo met the author when she took a class he taught in Cuba two years ago on "how to tell a tale."

Anne turns 100

Margaret Atwood has penned a lovely, forthright essay on Anne Shirley's 100th year:

"God's in his heaven, all's right with the world," Anne whispers in the very last lines of Anne of Green Gables. She's fond of Victorian poetry, so it's appropriate that she ends her story by quoting from a song sung by the optimistic heroine of Robert Browning's dramatic poem "Pippa Passes"; doubly appropriate because Anne Shirley herself acts a kind of Pippa throughout the book. Pippa is a poor Italian orphan girl who slaves away in a silk-spinning mill, yet manages to preserve a pure imagination and a love of nature despite her lowly status. Like Pippa, Anne is an unselfconscious innocent who, unbeknownst to herself, brings joy, imagination and the occasional epiphany to the citizenry of Avonlea, who are inclined to be practical but drear.

It would be interesting to read more on the literary references in Montgomery's books. Aside from Browning, she also cites Dickens, Thackeray, Shakespeare, Pope, the Bible, Tennyson, the Greeks, and many others. Since I read these books as a child, I often learned the references before the source material. It was funny studying literature in college and finally coming across many of these quotations in the originals. The discovery of this familiarity made the classics seem like old friends (as Anne herself would say).

(via Sarah Weinman)

The reversal of alienation

Last Thursday, Maud brought up a telling issue:

American creative writing instruction, in my experience, tends to discourage would-be novelists from working with philosophical concepts. Large, abstract ideas are seen as the province of scientists and Nobel laureates. Everyone else, the thinking goes, should stay squarely in the realm of concrete troubles like adultery or thievery or murder.

But don’t the best novels — Crime and Punishment, for instance, or The Sea, The Sea or Disgrace — blend the two? Aren’t we interested in the reasons for and implications of characters’ predicaments and actions?

She went on to cite an interview of Walker Percy's where he explained how Kierkegaard had already laid the philosophical foundation for what he wanted to do in The Moviegoer.

Paul Elie's group biography, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, takes a good, long look at the abstract ideas behind Percy's fiction (as well as the work of Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day).

In his essay, "The Man on the Train," (republished in The Message in the Bottle), Percy begins by explaining,

There is no such thing, strictly speaking, as a literature of alienation. In the re-presenting of alienation the category is reversed and becomes something entirely different. There is a great deal of difference between an alienated commuter riding a train and this same commuter reading a book about an alienated commuter riding a train. (On the other hand, Huck Finn's drifting down the river is somewhat the same as a reader's reading about Huck Finn drifting down the river.) The nonreading commuter exists in true alienation, which is unspeakable; the reading commuter rejoices in the speakability of his alienation and in the new triple alliance of himself, the alienated character and the author.

Elie further explains the difference (using Percy's essay):

Put a novel in the commuter’s hand and things get more complicated. The train rounds a bend. Sunlight glints off the glass. There is a pretty girl waiting to board on the platform up ahead. Still, the novel is absorbing. This is what art does: it lets us escape our alienation temporarily. But some works of art do this better than others. Some banish our alienation; others distract us from it; some show it to us without offering any consolation. Whether they do so is a matter not only of quality, but of kind.

Making these distinctions, Percy is oddly assured: he seems to be writing from experience, even though [at this point] he has never completed a novel to his satisfaction. Repetition, he declares, is usually diminished in a work of art; as the hero goes home again his passionate quest for the meaning of his life will strike the reader as interesting at best, because the reader wasn’t there the first time. Alienation, in a novel, becomes something else: the novel of alienation, like a symbol, re-presents alienation, and so will dispel it in the reader, and as the alienated reader recognizes his condition in the text, the book "heals the very wound it re-presents."

This achievement, Percy says, "is an aesthetic victory of comradeliness, a recognition of plight in common. Its motto is not 'I despair and do not know that I despair' but 'At least we know that we are lost to ourselves'--which is very great knowledge indeed." Whereas "the nonreading commuter exists in true alienation, which is unspeakable," Percy goes on to explain, "the reading commuter rejoices in the speakability of his alienation and in the new triple alliance of himself, the alienated character, and the author. His mood is affirmatory and glad: Yes! That’s how it is!"

That is ecstatically said, and for a moment the insight banishes alienation in just the way Percy claims it does. It also suggests that Percy is celebrating the novel of alienation. After all, he says the reversal of alienation is "the supreme intersubjective achievement of art," which is to "set forth the truth of it: how it stands with both of us."

Best news of the week

Sancho's Panza is back--in a very big, vibrant, and true way:

We need Oiticica and Frida Kahlo, Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Luis Guerra and Juana Molina, etc. etc. Not Macondo or McOndo. But Más Hondo, deep, deep enough to contain everything, and more, y siempre, algo más. Admit it, the baroque always was a congenital thing in Latin America, a baroque built around the depth of the culture's carrying sack, which has no breaking point, just eternal inordinate strain. One thing is marketing exoticism, another is indulging in it because it's in your bones; one thing is marketing a universalist's sophistication and dominion of forms being trafficked in Paris-New York-London-Berlin-Rome, another is actually having that sophistication, effortlessly. And being secure enough in your possession of it to not require the upturned nose when in range of a Frida's or a Gabo's flowers.

Yes, yes, yes.

Here's hoping he never goes away again.

Personal revolution

Tore through Revolutionary Road in three days. Yates perfectly captures the delicate balance between responsibility and personal satisfaction, locating the dilemma in the decisions of a young couple in 1955. I'm still thinking about it... (Can one ever really know the difference between gut instinct and self-delusion?) Although it's your standard realist novel, the ambiguity of the causes and effects of the Wheelers' disastrous relationship make it more mirror than cautionary tale--its issues are just as vital and necessary as they were then. I hope the upcoming film maintains this ambiguity.

As Blake Bailey says in a 2007 article,

Were Yates alive to advise Mendes, I daresay he'd insist that the movie begin, as the novel does, with April's mortifyingly awful performance in an amateur production of The Petrified Forest. In other words, the Wheelers' doom should never be in doubt because they can't help being themselves. "When the curtain fell at last," Yates wrote, at the end of one of the most excruciating scenes in American literature, "it was an act of mercy."

Short and sweet

• The ten finalists for the Iberoamericano Planeta-Casa de América de Narrativa prize this year include two Colombians, two Chileans, one Argentinian, two Spaniards, two Uruguayans, and an Ecuadorian. A $200,000 (USD) prize goes to the winner and $50,000 to the runner-up.
  
• The Guardian examines the state of libraries in Colombia. Aside from the mistake about García Márquez's birthplace (he was born in Aracataca, not Cartagena--although he has a house there and it's served as the setting for many a story), it's a wonderful article that illustrates the various ways the country is promoting literature. (via Conversational Reading)
• Speaking of Gabo, he and Mercedes celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary this past weekend. (Beautiful.)