From one more girl who loves Pynchon

What she said.

This is ridiculous. (And what's even more heinous is the fact that--at this posting--42% agree with him...)

Highlight of the month

Being confused with Darby Dixon of Thumb drives and oven clocks. Every time I visit his place, I feel better about my inconsequential keyboard tapping--more inspired and more willing to venture out with my own thoughts on what I've been reading.

It's an honor, sir.

Lost and found

How is it some authors inspire absolute trust? How is it that after reading "Lost in the Funhouse" I want to give John Barth a huge hug, while after reading, say, The Exquisite, I would give Laird Hunt a friendly handshake and happily consider reading more of his writing?

It's different for everyone, I know--the subtle somethings that win your confidence and hand you a lovely sense of relief (a cool breeze in locked room). Many have already written on Barth's particular brilliance and this tale's perfected melding of form and content (at least I imagine they have). But what struck me was the spot-on articulation of...this:

Strive as he might to be transported, he heard his mind take notes upon the scene: This is what they call passion. I am experiencing it.

and

[...] he has...some sort of receivers in his head; things speak to him, he understands more than he should, the world winks at him through its objects, grabs grinning at his coat. Everybody else is in on some secret he doesn't know; they've forgotten to tell him.

and

He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he's not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator--though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.

But what is it? The chronic experiential detachment of... Whom? Writers who don't know they're writers? Over-analytical types? Artistically precise crazies who should all live on their own deserted islands? Emotionally constipated naturalists? Bicultural bookworms with nomadic tendencies?

There was some simple, radical difference about him; he hoped it was genius, feared it was madness, devoted himself to amiability and inconspicuousness. Alone on the seawall near his house he was seized by the terrifying transports he'd thought to find in toolshed, in Communion-cup. The grass was alive! The town, the river, himself, were not imaginary; time roared in his ears like wind; the world was going on! This part ought to be dramatized. The Irish author James Joyce once wrote. Ambrose M____ is going to scream.

Sex and spirituality fail, while the ordinary sings loud and clear. Why are some like this? Why can't we be struck likewise? Why do I find cause for concern in the fact that it only happens sometimes--that I'm neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring?

Best ponder this:

When you're lost, the smartest thing to do is stay put till you're found, hollering if necessary. But to holler guarantees humiliation as well as rescue; keeping silent permits some saving of face--you can act surprised at the fuss when your rescuers find you and swear you weren't lost, if they do. What's more you might find your own way yet, however belatedly.

Maybe it just means I'm an incorrigible reader.

(Art by Kozlov Nickolay: "Three". Indian ink on paper. 1995.)

UPDATE: Ed steps up...

I too want to give John Barth a huge hug. If I had been at AWP, I would have given John Barth a huge hug. He may have been weary of this. He may have thought me insane or a fanboy to be avoided at all costs. But in Barth’s case, the hug is necessary. I encourage you to read John Barth (particularly, The Sot-Weed Factor), so that you too can feel compelled to give John Barth a huge hug. I think more writers can really use huge hugs. If you know an author who hasn’t been hugged, please hug them. Or promise to hug them. Or if the writer is shy about hugs, hug someone else in the author’s presence and tell the writer, “You see, I would apply this affection to you, but I understand your position about hugs. And I have no wish to invade your personal boundaries. So perhaps you can live vicariously through this third party, who is also deserving of a hug for his own achievements.”

That piece of paper

An inspiring interview with Anne Carson:

Carson took Latin in high school because it was the alternative to typing. Her Latin teacher was also conversant in ancient Greek, so Carson took Greek lessons in her lunch hour. "Greek is one of those things that, when you do it, you realise it's the best experience in the world, there's no reason ever to stop. It's just some amazing combination of the kind of puzzle-solving that goes into crosswords and amazing literature. You think, well, they're nerds, they were born that way. But they're not just nerds, they're all kinds of people who stumble into this happy field of endeavour and stay there." To her parents' alarm, she announced that she was going to pursue these two, entirely impractical dead languages at university. "My father kept telling me to get a marketable skill on the side. He suggested typing. He was worried for some time. And then I got a job at Princeton and he sort of calmed down."

If her study of Greek and Latin has affected her own writing style, Carson suspects it is to be found in the way she makes patterns between things. "There is something about the way that Greek poets, say Aeschylus, use metaphor that really attracts me. I don't think I can imitate it, but there's a density to it that I think I'm always trying to push towards in English. It's a kind of compacting of metaphor, without a concern for making sense ... it's just on the edge of sense and on the edge of the way language should operate."

The danger with this, and with Carson's writing, is that it drifts into whimsy or nonsense. "It does fall apart a lot. It gets just too weird for anyone to care about reading, or else it gets diluted into a sort of parody of itself. Intuition is the only way to keep on the line between them. And also focusing back on to the first time the idea came into your head has some kind of pristine conviction that it gradually loses." Carson returns to the actual piece of paper on which she wrote down the beginning of the idea, usually a coffee-stained back of an envelope. "Because there's something almost magically convincing about that piece of paper. The same words typed on a nice clean piece of paper wouldn't have whatever it is - fidelity, to your original thought."

(via The Page)

When you run out of books

I knew there had to be more of us out there--readers without adequate access to books. In her post "Reading as an Expat," Gretchen of Readers Without Borders (a site I just discovered last week) proposes that the Sony Portable Reader is a potential solution for those of us who can't pay the hefty shipping costs (or wait the extra month) for new books. It sounds like a good idea and has the potential to provide a quick fix for stranded bibliophiles. However, the selection doesn't look all that fantastic and not quite worth the investment at this point. Hopefully, this changes in the next couple of years. It would be amazing to have near-instant access to new books: the perfect motivation for concentrating on getting through my current stacks and not worrying about running out.

That said, there's still plenty for me to read and investigate in my second language. My present practice of always having two books on hand--one in English, one in Spanish--is helping considerably. I'm hoping (as ever) to be able to share some coherent thoughts on John Barth and José Edilberto Zuluaga soon. (I read a critique that complained of certain aspects of the latter, including the fact that after finishing the novella, the reader still couldn't understand what the title referred to. Needless to say, I felt pretty happy about figuring out the title's double meaning by page 15, but that doesn't necessarily mean I understand it any better than he does.)

But for now, there are report cards to do. I let Pandora play as I sit here on the tile floor and revel in my newly-acquired broadband connection. Yes. I am actually typing this from home.

A new leaf.

The apartment I'm renting was sold, and although I'll be here till November, the former owner had her furniture hauled away last week. It's nice, though. Very clean and minimalist. (I am currently typing away on top of a cardboard box.) I regret the loss of the cheap, black bookcase, but my stacks now surround me as I sit here and hope to write some sense into things.

Sunlight in March

The Innocence Mission--one of my all-time favorite bands (I've been a fan since the age of 15)--just released a new album yesterday: We Walked in Song. Once a upon a time, I penned a brief review of their previous album, which was posted online in the days before I started this little blog. I can't say enough about the spare beauty of their music, with lyrics that tap into the literary influences of Eudora Welty, William Maxwell, and Gerard Manley Hopkins (among others).

Give a listen to "Into Brooklyn, Early in the Morning". Fragments of "Brotherhood of Man," "Lake Shore Drive," and older favorites "Tomorrow on the Runway" and "You Are the Light" can be found here.

The finite within the infinite

Nabokov, Speak, Memory:

Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love--from my heart, from the tender nucleus of a personal matter--to monstrously remote points of the universe. Something impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behavior of nebulae (whose very remoteness seems a form of insanity), the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helplessness, the cold, the sickening involutions and interpenetrations of space and time. It is a pernicious habit, but I can do nothing about it. [...] I have to make a rapid inventory of the universe, just as a man in a dream tries to condone the absurdity of his position by making sure he is dreaming. I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence.

I was going to add some sort of personal comment to this passage, but rapidly realized there was nothing to say. Even in posting it, I feel as though I'm intruding on something sacred (which it is), and still marvel that I held these words in my hands at all.

Love etches itself into our skin, then down into the bone. We smell a fragrance in a recently-entered room and after a decent period, adjust. It no longer stands out, calls the attention. It becomes a part of us even as we begin to forget it's there. We know we need all the help we can get to help us see what's right in front of our faces.

And so we read.

Coffee, coffee, coffee

A new Juan Valdez has recently opened in one of our two local malls. I'm there nearly every other day reading, writing, grading, or planning classes. The coffee is amazing. I've never had such marvelous espresso. Now all we need is another bookstore and I could live here forever...

(Outside Colombia, there are locations in Philadelphia, New York, Seattle, Washington D.C., and Madrid, Spain.)

A world unto themselves

This weekend, I picked up a copy of Diners. There's a marvelous homage to Gabriel García Márquez, which includes the words and works of

Paul Auster - John Updike - Gay Talese - Norman Mailer - Gregory Rabassa - Jon Lee Anderson - David Manzur - Ana Mercedes Hoyos - Maripaz Jaramillo - Omar Rayo - Carlos Jacanamijoy - Darío Ortiz - Lorenza Panero - Enrique Grau - Juan Goytisolo - Manuel Vicent - Belisario Betancur - Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza - Juan Carlos Botero - Héctor Abad Faciolince - Mario Mendoza - Jorge Franco - Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda - Ruven Afanador - Richard Avedon - Carlos Duque - Nereo López - Hernán Díaz - Indira Restrepo

It's a gorgeous issue.

Here's Paul Auster's contribution, "A Memory":

It was the spring of 1970. I was twenty-three years old, writing and translating poems, writing essays and reviews, but also dreaming of one day being able to write novels. By then, I had read nearly all the masters of the twentieth century--Joyce and Proust, Kafka and Beckett, Faulkner and Nabokov, Fitzgerald and Céline--and was feeling a little crushed. How on earth could one ever get out from under those giants?

One day, I read a highly enthusiastic review of a novel by a South American writer whose name was unknown to me. At the time, thirty-seven years ago, buying hardcover books was an extravagance I could scarcely afford, but my curiosity had been aroused to such a degree that I went out and sprang for the book anyway. I started reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in the early afternoon and I didn't put it down until I had finished reading it late that night. Here was soemthing new and fresh and altogether mesmerizing: an imagination, a voice, a sensibility that resembled nothing I had encountered before. And yet Gabriel García Márquez's novel, in the masterful translation by Gregory Rabassa, contained many old-fashioned virtues as well, most of which can be summed up in a single phrase: love of storytelling.

This love is what creates pleasure in the reader, the sense of amazement and happiness that washes over us whenever we stumble upon one of those rare books that changes the way we look at the world, exposes us to the infinite possibilities of what a book can be. Every passionate reader has had that experience, and each time it happens, we understand that books are a world unto themselves and that world is better and richer than any we have traveled in before. That is why we become readers in the first place. That is why we turn away from the vanities of the material world and begin to love books above all other things.

(Painting by Darío Ortiz)

Bilingual blogging

After having ruminated on one day making this blog more bilingual (rather than just the odd Spanish quote--kind of like the opposite of what Mauricio Salvador does, but much less extensively), I finally discovered The Book's Den. A very happy development, which bears futher investigation...

Any more Spanish-English bilingual litblogs out there? Or, for that matter, any more Spanish-language litblogs? I'd love to link to you.

Happiness is...

...finding copies of Gabriel García Márquez's novels at supermarket check-out counters. (Have I mentioned how much I love living here?)

The coverage continues...

~ 21 articles up at Semana.

~ The cover of Cromos was a delightful photo and article ("Los 80 años del niño de Aracataca").

(I picked up copies of both of these magazines last night. Joy!)

Mysteries practical and profound

From Colleen Mondor's Bookslut interview with Scarlett Thomas:

I have always been a bit of a geek, I suppose, and I have been helped in this by not having any desire to marry or have children or get swamped by any of the domestic stuff that often (but by no means always) snaps women out of their geekdom and forces them to think in terms of nappies and bottles of baby oil and to be normal for God’s sake because if you’re not normal other parents will look at you funny and eventually someone will come and take your kids away...

Aristotle says that fiction should do one of two things: reflect the world as it is, or make it better. While this is a little too cheerful for where I am at the moment, there’s a lot of truth in it nevertheless. People sometimes forget that real women, even ones covered in nappies and shit and bleach etc., do not spend all their time thinking about dresses and princesses and kisses--it’s women in stories that do that. And these are stories that make things worse. So my stories seem different because they’re not like other stories, perhaps. I don’t know. Most women out there are geeky in some way, and you’re right that not much fiction reflects this. I guess the more common experience is for women to be somehow restricted by domestic life or to live under the threat of this restriction, and of course there’s a lot of fiction that reflects this beautifully--like The Bell Jar, which is probably my favorite novel, in which Esther Greenwood pretty much has to stop being a geek or else. Oranges are Not The Only Fruit does something similar, too, where the character Jeanette has to try to find a new way of inhabiting all the fairy stories and religious myths she’s grown up with.

(Emphasis mine.) As a fellow geek, I think many women (fully aware of their geekiness), are finding ways to not be caught up in either of the two extremes that Thomas articulates so well. A kind of non-domestic domesticity exists, where responsibilities are met, but in liberating and non-restrictive ways. I would hazard to guess that it all depends on the type of spouse and on the joy one takes in "nappies and shit and bleach". Elements of non-traditional "domesticity" can survive if one refuses to sacrifice personal geekiness and the desire to live an authentic life.

Incidentally, Happy Women's Day! The Guardian has a smart quiz on female authors, in honor of today (via Books, Words, and Writing). Funny how having spent most of my life in the U.S., I was completely surprised by the hugs and kisses from my students celebrating today. (Evidently, there are many things right about Colombia.)

Another aspect of the Thomas interview I loved is this:

All learning is independent. However, I’m not really striving to make any point about this. But now I think about it I realise that almost all "knowledge" I’ve been given within an institution is to serve someone else’s purpose, not mine, and most of it is just wrong, or not even wrong. I work in a university now, and the only way my students learn is by doing things themselves or by reading complicated writing that doesn’t give them any facts. I actually have some sort of undiagnosed medical condition, I think, because I am incapable of remembering any dates, facts or figures -- even ones I make up myself! I can remember long strings of abstract numbers, but not ever four figure dates. When I was younger I felt stupid all the time because I didn’t know Latin and Greek, and my mathematical skills weren’t that great, and I hadn’t read enough "classic literature." I think I’ll always feel like that, but now I am learning bits of Greek, and I’m reading stuff I missed out on at school, and I am finding that what all good professors and lecturers tell you is true: read books, all by yourself, and work out why they are or are not important yourself.

Truer than true.

The End of Mr. Y sparked many long-held thoughts of mine, and was just the thing to validate personal theories and inspire further thought. When I read lines like, "Thought is what encodes matter," I'm reminded of Genesis and the narrative of how spoken words brought matter into being. Be it myth, literature, or a matter of faith (or all three at once), I find it fascinating that this common idea/thread is found in literature, ancient and contemporary. There is harmony in paradox.

I also found myself wondering about the cause and effect nature of this (word or thought) does that (encode or create matter) and the possibility of everything happening at once...light as particle and wave...how traveling at the speed of light would show you reality as a cubist painting: an all-encompassing present, an eternal Now....

Birthday wishes

El Tiempo has a lovely spread on Gabriel García Márquez, who turns 80 today. Aside from the six (Spanish) articles, which include an interview with fellow author Álvaro Mutis, there are also six interesting photo albums containing recent pictures, snapshots during his acceptance of the Nobel Prize, and various book covers. There are also recent shots of Aracataca, a few movie stills, and many from last year's Hay Festival in Cartagena.

Many happy returns to the man who celebrates four times this year. Not only is it his birthday, but it is also 60 years since he published his first story, 40 years since the publication of Cien años de soledad, and 25 years since winning the Nobel Prize.

Catala tregua tregua espera

It’s taken me ages to find the quiet mental space in which to reflect on Julio Cortázar’s marvelous Historias de cronopios y de famas, but I finally sat at a small table in the corner (next to the bookcase by the balcony) and scribbled a draft of this post with pen and ink. For now, it’s the only way. (We’ll see what happens afterwards in this new month.)

In the opening pages, Cortázar confronts us with the sad reflection of our hopes and the crystal brick in which we live. But it isn’t all bad:

Y no que esté mal si las cosas nos encuentran otra vez cada día y son las mismas. Que a nuestro lado haya la misma mujer, el mismo reloj, y que la novela abierta sobre la mesa eche a andar otra vez en la bicicleta de nuestros anteojos, ¿por qué estaría mal?

The ordinary both hides and reveals struggle (as the open novel on the table remounts the bicycle of our reading glasses). And so he offers us instructions on how to cry, how to be afraid, how to understand three famous paintings (by Titan, Rafael, and Holbein, respectively), how to kill ants in Rome, how to climb stairs, and how to wind a watch (“No te regalan un reloj, tú eres el regalado, a ti te ofrecen para el cumpleaños del reloj.”).

Then there are the “strange occupations” of the extended family that build a gallows in their garden and drop strands of hair down bathroom drains in order to recover them. An aunt has an unholy fear of falling on her back, to such a degree that the father accompanies her throughout the house to examine the floor for potential trouble, the mother sweeps the patio several times a day, the sisters go around picking up stray tennis balls, and the cousins eradicate any trace left by the various dogs, cats, turtles, and chickens that wander the house. Her obsessive terror is a mystery--especially since she’s darkly hinted at never being able to get up again, even though there are 32 other people in the house to help her. That is, of course, until the night the eldest brother finds a helpless cockroach stranded on its back on the kitchen floor.

Aside from Kafka’s kitchen, there’s the room where they trap tigers (celebrating afterwards), and the strategic and carefully dramatized way in which they crash local funerals and wakes. But none of this is a big deal. As he puts it, all that matters is doing something, which is why his only motive for this telling is to prevent the rain from getting too oppressive on an empty afternoon.

Next come the discursive notes on “unstable stuff” (according to translator Paul Blackburn). We are given instructions on singing (and admonished to leave Schumann in peace), notes on office work, the nobility of bicycles, how mirrors behave on Easter Island, the possibilities of abstraction, the interchangeable lives and deaths of a newspaper, a satire on bureaucracy, the sensory experiences of a headless man, a theme for a tapestry, history as perceived by a chair, a wise man with a hole in his memory, plans for a poem, an undesirable camel, a bear’s discourse, a portrait of a cassowary, the tragedy of falling raindrops, a story without a moral, and the portentous journey of the lines of a hand. My favorite piece is “Fin del mundo del fin,” a fanciful exploration of the consequences of writers writing without end and what happens when books multiply like rabbits. The poor use books for bricks to build cabins and the books eventually create new land masses. Boats are no longer able to sail, so they’re converted into casinos and the public walks to them on foot over the bibliographic (or well-versed) sea. I also love “Qué tal, López”, which contains a line I believe to be part of Cortázar’s artistic motivation:

Pero las cosas invisibles necesitan encarnarse, las ideas caen a la tierra como palomas muertas.

“But invisible things need to become incarnate, ideas fall to earth like dead doves.”

And so we find ourselves at the book’s last section, “Historias de cronopios y de famas,” which is divided into two. After a brief primer on the nature and customs of famas, cronopios, and esperanzas (where we learn of their habits, joys, and griefs), we come to the little tales of their “days and ways”--slight vignettes which whimsically capture their essence. There’s an indefinable delicacy about the way in which Cortázar recounts these stories. Dry wit mingles with compassion, leaving an indelible impression on the imagination that is stronger than mere mental pictures.

Famas conserve their memories carefully, wrapping them (from head to foot) in black sheets and placing them upright against the living room wall with small place cards attached. Cronopios are disorderly and let their memories wander about the house amid happy shouting, and when they run into one, they softly caress it and tell it to take care.

They all go on trips, wind clocks, eat lunch, own handkerchiefs, start businesses, conduct experiments, sing and dance, walk down streets, have trouble with utility companies, build houses, treat psychiatric patients, entertain academics, explore caverns (with tragic results for the intrepid cronopio who was given ham sandwiches instead of his beloved cheese), mail letters, send telegrams, and have encounters with flora and fauna. Hence:

TORTOISES AND CRONOPIOS

Now tortoises are great admirers of speed, as is natural.

The esperanzas know it, and don’t give it another thought.

The famas know it, and make fun.

The cronopios know it, and every time they meet a tortoise, they take out a box of colored chalk, and on the tortoises’ round blackboard, draw a swallow.

I miss reading about them and wish it wasn’t finished.

(Image via UNESCO)

Ink and paper

I discovered this lovely Catalog Card Generator over at fade theory. Nice way to affix reading-notes-to-self or marginalia on blog posts.

Everything Gabo

The website of Cambio, a Colombian magazine, has 17 articles on Gabriel García Márquez, in celebration of his 80th birthday in March. Covering topics that range from film to Fidel, the site also showcases a short story originally published in Cambio, "En agosto nos vemos" ("We'll Meet in August").

One point of time

Nearing the end of Nabokov's Speak, Memory I come across his beginnings in poetry as a teenager (remembering my own overly-earnest false starts) and listen his thoughts on the matter:

But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members. Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. Lost in thought, he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighboring porch, and old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-gray sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur--all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair, at Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus.

That summer I was still far too young to evolve any wealth of "cosmic synchronization" (to quote my philosopher again). But I did discover, at least, that a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.

Ashes

There was a brief respite yesterday when we interrupted classes for an Ash Wednesday mass. It was as if someone poked holes in the crystal brick (see Cortázar) in which I live. Later, I wanted to sit in this room and write about Eliot's poem, but (of course) there was no time. Even now, there are only small scraps of it.

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And so in two seconds I tried and found something more to think about...

The first long poem after his conversion was "Ash Wednesday" (1930), a religious meditation in a style entirely different from that of any of the earlier poems. "Ash Wednesday" expresses the pangs and the strain involved in the acceptance of religious belief and religious discipline. This and subsequent poems were written in a more relaxed, musical, and meditative style than his earlier works, in which the dramatic element had been stronger than the lyrical. "Ash Wednesday" was not well received in an era that held that poetry, though autonomous, is strictly secular in its outlook; it was misinterpreted by some critics as an expression of personal disillusion.

I love this tension between the content of "strain" and the form of "a more relaxed [...] style". Both and. All at once. At the same time. Opposites only helping each other...

Oh to lock myself away with a stack of books for days on end! But for now there is this, and it will have to be enough.

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.

Of note

It's been virtually impossible to get much done around here without having the internet at home. I'm currently on a waiting list that may take another month (!), so posting will continue to be sporadic for awhile. Nevertheless, I still have the notes from my favorite session at Cartagena to post...and I'm enjoying Cortázar hugely. What saves my sanity during the workday are the brief times I can duck into this cool, quiet computer room and read what's going on at the blogs over on the left... Here are a few bits and pieces that caught my eye today.

~ Tori Amos talks to Alan Light about putting together A Piano: The Collection. (I've always loved the comparison of songs on an album to chapters in a book.)

~ I have to agree with the esteemed proprietor of The Literary Saloon--putting all world literature onto separate shelves isn't the way to go. (I'd even say that the existing shelves would be gutted too significantly--what's the point?) But I loved exploring the site he recommended as an alternative: Reading the World.

~ Bud Parr points to an excellent piece on The Slow Reading Movement. Waters writes,

I am convinced that most speed-reading is impaired reading, just like the sort you do when you have a fever or are tired or engaged in other tasks at the same time you are supposed to be reading. Unless you are very smart, speed-reading forces you to ignore all but one dimension of a literary work, the simplest information. What we lose is the enjoyment that made people turn to literature in the first place. [...]

There is something similar between a reading method that focuses primarily on the bottom-line meaning of a story in a novel and the economic emphasis on the bottom line that makes automobile manufacturers speed up assembly lines. If there is any truth to the analogy, it provides grounds for concern. [...]

The issue is more than just savoring literary experience. I am suggesting that there is more than meets the eye in reading, literally. If we attend to the time of reading, we might notice that our relationship to a literary work changes over time. One consequence is that we begin to be charitable to "bad" readers, whether they are our students, our acquaintances, or our former selves. Most important, though, we learn to drop the idea that we can neatly distinguish good from bad reading because we realize that, at some time in the past, we were not up to reading a particular work. Or perhaps we see that while we missed a great deal, we did respond strongly to parts of the work. It begins to make sense, then, to track our career with a certain work, in order to open it up as literature.

UPDATE: The Little Professor offers a sound critique of this piece, questioning the connection between speed reading and literary criticism. Although I agree with her points, I must confess that what really appealed to me about the article was his stance regarding certain academic approaches to literature (and the dearth of close reading): "Thematic approaches to literature have triumphed, emphasizing the moral of the story over formal and aesthetic analyses. At the college level, earnestly moral or political readings have pushed aside the pleasure of waywardness in plot and rhyme." I think the connection between the mentality behind "bottom-line" capitalism and these "thematic approaches" to literature is valid. Reducing works of art to culture, morals, or politics is similar to how erroneous readings surface in other camps (such as with certain right-wing fundamentalists). People ban books (in part) because of simplistic approaches to literature. Why not encourage the complexity of authentic reading experiences? (This is probably what I should've said in the first place!)

Event #25: Wole Soyinka...

...in conversation with Colombian author Juan Manuel Roca.

We didn't think we'd be able to attend this one since the bookstore in Barranquilla where we bought event tickets said it was sold out. Unbeknownst to us, it was only "sold out" as far as the number of tickets sold at that particular bookstore. So a tip to future festival-goers: try to get tickets the day of, even if they tell you it's sold out. (It still hurts to think that I missed out on seeing Chimamanda Adichie speak due to a technicality, but I'll be much wiser next time.)

What follows is basically a neatened version of my notes. Since the events had simultaneous translation (both in English and in Spanish), it was interesting to watch the exchanges on stage. Both Soyinka and Roca wore headsets. This is the first interview I've witnessed where neither party could speak the other's language. They both did a remarkable job: Roca was very well-informed and perceptive as the interviewer and Soyinka was gracious and nuanced in his responses. (A. had a headset and I listened in on the Spanish translator a bit--she was excellent.)

Soyinka had visited a barrio of Cartagena earlier in the day, and when asked about his experience, he spoke of how much he loved being with the children--how natural it feels to him to enter into their world. He said that it is a big mistake on the part of the Western world to pretend that children are the same as adults. They should be respected for the worlds they create.

He spoke of growing up in a Christian family in Nigeria under colonial rule and how inspired he became by regionalism. He did not find much contradiction between the mix of religions. The religious traditions of Nigeria were seen as "cultural," and so there was not much conflict with the Christianity he was raised with. (This site gives good background.) The role of tribal historians was never questioned--certain individuals able to recite the names of all members of the tribe for up to two generations back. He or she was viewed as the voice of the tribe (and it was a musical one as well).

Roca asked him about the part played by women in the fight for liberation in Nigeria. He talked about how they led open rebellions...how the bearing of breasts was an act of resistance...and how many were shot by colonial officers. In spite of this, the women of his region drove the local monarch off his throne.

Roca then asked about his view of democratic monarchies. (I got the feeling he actually meant democracies that become monarchical in nature--perhaps alluding to the U.S. in Iraq.) Soyinka talked about constitutional monarchies--how in England, Spain, and Sweden, having a king or queen is ok, but that such situations in Africa are seen as examples of feudalism. He said that constitutional monarchy in Africa is actually a controlled system.

Every society has its poets (oral tradition, etc.)... UNESCO's current fight regarding immaterial intellectual property is particularly important for the preservation of oral tradition.

When asked about his connection to Caribbean writers, he launched into an interesting discussion about the terms "blackness" and "negritude" and how they were invented by expatriate intellectuals in Paris as an act of resistance against the cultural colonialism of a specific time and place. (At one point, the exam for citizenship to a French colony required a dinner invitation at the home of a colonial officer. The applicant's table manners were carefully studied and taken into account.) Although the terms helped combat the existing oversimplifications of cultural differences (e.g., "reason" is Greek, "emotion" is African), the term "negritude" came to substitute real ideologies.

A "radicalization of sensibilities" occurred in the U.S. and people were forced to choose sides on issues of "black" and "white." Much of it came down to the correct "look" or style. But exploitation exists on both sides, so Marxism came in. Writers like LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka helped the focus move from race to class. Soon after the advent of groups such as the Black Panthers in the '60s, white and black radicals found themselves on the same side. "Liberation" was defined in different ways by different movements, confusing the original issue.

Roca then asked Soyinka about his thoughts on the humor in African poetry. Soyinka admitted a personal theory that he thinks he'll one day be able to prove: that the humorous archetypes of commedia dell'arte began with the arrival of a certain African slave to Italy. (I wish I could remember more of his examples--it was obvious he's been thinking about this a long time, and there was much encouraging laughter from the audience.)

He observed that many liberation movements (which also included the feminist movement) had no sense of irony...and he loves the idea of the African figure Exu, whose role is to deflate pomposity (quietly laying down banana peels before the self-important).

Roca asked him about his love of film, and he confessed his penchant for the "frailty and tenderness" of Fellini's work.

Soyinka was then asked about his role in the International Parliament of Writers. He explained that during the time of the fatwa against Rushdie, many were finally made aware that his was not a unique situation. Many writers have always been living under these kinds of situations. While Rushdie had asylum in Strausburg, a group of writers worked together so that now, all over the world, there is a network of safe places for writers in exile or in hiding due to political persecution.

During the Q&A, he was asked about the place (or role) of writers in "Third World" countries. He said that more organic development must happen if the effects of colonialism are to be counteracted. Many countries are bedeviled by the East vs. West struggle and that this sort of focus only produces wasted energy. He says we're not looking inward to what we already have and so become surrogates of other blocs. After gaining independence, many African nations became dependencies because they relied on the economic power of others. Civil wars have drained away many countries' own resources--this is a direct result of the insecure foundations built during the original liberations. He declared that what's needed is leadership that is ready to completely break with the past. This is why current efforts are so important: the answers lie in the history of the liberations of these countries.

The last question was asked by a young boy in the balcony who asked, "What can children give to literature?" Soyinka gazed up at him and--without the least bit of hesitation--said, "Write."

He encouraged him to start now and never stop. The packed theatre errupted in hearty applause.

On a related note, this week over at The Litblog Co-op, they've been discussing an absolutely marvelous novel: Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. It was one of the few that I was able to read while up north, and I strongly recommend it to everyone. (I was reminded of it many times while listening to Wole Soyinka. It was the perfect book to have read just before hearing him speak.) Check out the book discussions and interviews with the author. It will be time well-spent.

Epilogue

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

~ Robert Lowell


Never thought writing could be such a battle. Time tears away every last pure motive and leaves the skid marks of desire in its wake. Black stains and empty space. But...

The boxes are back in the apartment. Will begin unpacking my books today. Hope to get connected to the internet later this week. Still have those notes to post. So many ideas, never enough energy or time. But this will change soon... It must if I'm to make it out of here alive.

Event #23: Las dos orillas

Guillermo Arriaga (Mexico--absent), Luisa Valenzuela (Argentina), Tomás González (Colombia), and Horacio Vázquez Rial (Argentina)--moderated by Pere Sureda (Spanish editorial director of Editorial Belacqva), sponsored by La otra orilla, Grupo Editorial Norma

Pere Sureda began by commenting on the book as connection between reader and writer--that the tangible artifact is the point of unification between the two--and asked the writers their thoughts on this.

Louisa Valenzuela mentioned how she views books as cultural contraband--how writers sneak parts of themselves beneath country boundaries...and how it's always exciting to find out about alternate interpretations of her work. She finds the unexpected reverberations exciting.

Horacio Vázquez Rial commented on a book tour he'd done in Germany, and how startling and surprising it was to encounter his work in an entirely different context.

Tomás González discussed how literature is constantly contributing to the reunification of Latin America--how we share a common universe because of the books we read.

Sureda then talked about a tendency of Latin American writers wanting to be published in Spain, and Spanish writers wanting to be published in Latin America. He asked them, When do you feel fulfilled?--that you've reached far enough beyond your cultural sphere?

Valenzuela asserted that "it's our language that both unifies and separates us". She's against a neutral (which I initially understood as "neutered"!), standardized Spanish and loves regionalisms... That there were huge Spanish publishing houses in Latin America during the epoch of the Spanish Civil War and there was much cultural interchange during that era as a result. She also said that this "fulfillment" really depends on one's own view of it. Some even dream of being translated into English! (This provoked a lot of laughter onstage and off, which I found really interesting. Would my hope of one day translating Latin American novels into English be viewed as an essentially commercial one?)

But Vázquez Rial remarked that things have changed a lot since the '30s--that the perception of the book is very different today from what it was then. He debated a bit in favor of the use of a "standard" or neutral Spanish and stressed its "unifying" effect on readers.

González took the middle ground, saying that either have the potential to be powerful. Valenzuela went on to expound on her origial statements. She considers Argentinians ("mi gente") to be people of exile, which is why it's important to communicate to your own as well as the rest of the world. It's about honesty, not about trying to gain readers by changing your own voice. She believes that identity is part of truth and she refuses to betray her language for the sake of a greater readership. She longs to write ("me muere escribir") for the sake of discovery. This is what impells her.

Vázquez Rial concurred, but continued to say that it's important to reach beyond your own audience as well, while González reiterated that he would never change anything merely for the sake of the commercial.

It was interesting to see how the conversation of the editor and the writers proved how at cross-purposes they can be. Even the tenor of the questions was something that the writers used as springboards to assert different opinions than the editor was (perhaps) expecting. Sureda admitted that his interest is somewhat opposite to that of the writers, but he then asked them which writers outside their community have influenced them.

Valenzuela immediately listed Nabokov, Kafka, Beckett, and Woolf, particularly stressing that Woolf's love of writing is one of the things she loves most about her. (She also mentioned Cortázar, but then withdrew him because he's a fellow Argentinian.)

Somehow the conversation veered toward the issue of translation. González admitted that it was a problem--that writers are at the mercy of their translators. Vázquez Rial wasn't much worried by it. He quoted something Machado said about Tolstoy--that it had been translated from Russian to French to Spanish and it was still great. (That greatness isn't necessarily affected by translation.) Valenzuela again mentioned how she wants regionalisms in the books she reads--she loves discovering new things, new turns of phrase. Vázquez Rial added that the issue of translation itself is exciting because everyone says things in different ways.

Sureda then asked about their thoughts on modern-day bookstores. Readers are growing in numbers... He asked if Spanish-language writers feel threatened by the work of writers of other languages in Spanish bookstores?

Valenzuela doesn't think it's an issue--but she does have a problem with the fact that most Argentinian bookstores don't have display tables for new books by Argentinian writers. It's her big complaint. She admires how bookstores in Colombia (particularly Bogotá) do display new work by Colombian writers, and wishes it were this way in Argentina. She also remarked that she does not think that people read as much today. Vázquez Rial observed that it really doesn't matter that there are so many bookstores these days because they all offer the same things...that the lack of diversity is a sad development. And González said he was more optimistic regarding the modern reader.

Sureda then asked about the tension between reader and writer--which side of themselves robs from the other?

Valenzuela said that the passion is the same for both, but it's difficult to find the same amount of time for reading as it is for her writing. Vázquez Rial (as a literary critic) declared that new books don't excite him much anymore. With most he can't get past the first few pages. But he said that readers and writers in general are much closer to each other now--that the "other shore" is not so far away.

There may have been one last question--all I have here are Valenzuela's comments regarding what her initial thoughts were on hearing that the session was to be about "the two shores." She immediately thought of Henry James' short story "The Private Life" (she referred to it as "Vidas íntimas," so I believe this is the story she meant). She was also reminded of Rabindranath Tagore's "The Other Shore" and her desire to not have to pick sides, but to be everywhere at once, like God. Not wanting to settle anywhere... Her enthusiasm and candor made me smile--she was a joy to listen to.

Then the floor was opened for questions from the audience. Someone asked if there are valid respectful limits for a writer to maintain concerning the reader. Valenzuela commented on how being banned by a dictatorship didn't stop her from writing--that censorship takes all forms and that literature is about confronting our own demons. Vázquez Rial clarified earlier statments and said that his remark in favor of a more standardized Spanish is for the sake of reader understanding, not commercialism.

There was a question for Sureda about translations and he replied that he assigns books to translators whom he believes are appropriate for the respective works, and puts them in contact with the authors. His aim is a rendition that's as faithful as possible to the author's original intent, but with a certain space for creative freedom. González remarked that books that are translated into Spanish must use standard Spanish--that it isn't a bad thing at all in this sense.

Interestingly, later that day, I found a Spanish copy of Flannery O'Connor's Complete Stories at the Ábaco bookstore (and coffee shop!) down the street from the theatre. A. began "Parker's Back" immediately, but it wasn't until he was halfway through with "Revelation" that he pointed out what the translator had done to the speech of O'Connor's southerners. The dialogue was full of the costeño way of speaking--dropped consonants and half-spoken words. I'm still not sure if this is an entirely appropriate equivalent...but I think it was a good idea to do something to communicate the "regional" manner of speaking... (Still thinking about this.)

Also (as another aside), here's a recent Semana article on the question as to why Spanish writers aren't read much in Latin America (in general) and Colombia (in particular). Responses come from various participants in this year's festival.

Weekend in Cartagena

Having been lost to the litblogosphere for nearly two months (due to life changes and certain bizarre experiences that stem from my current situation as a nomadic educator), I now attempt to post something worth your while. I sadly could not contribute to Jeff and Trevor's marvelous Underrated Writers Project 2006, but I think there'll be some names from this post that will crop up in next year's list.

A. and I hopped the bus up to Cartagena this weekend for the Hay Festival, and were able to make it to five sessions. It was a glorious and complex experience. I hadn't been to Cartagena since I was 3, but the circle finally swung 'round and found us exhausted and happy, our heads buzzing with new authors, titles, and renewed longing to spend hours reading in quiet corners.

The weather was perfect--clear sky over a wide sea--and the walled colonial city held lovely sights around every corner: huge wooden gates with life-sized iron lizard knockers, balconies overflowing with flowers and ivy over narrow streets, and people from all over the world conversing about literature.

So this week I hope to post some notes from the many Moleskine pages I filled... (For each events' blurb, see the original program.) Although three of the writers I'd hoped the most to see were inexplicably absent at their respective sessions (Guillermo Arriaga, David Mitchell, and Chimamanda Adichie), my disappointment vanished as soon as the sessions began.

One sip of an answer

The program for January's Hay Festival in Cartagena was finally posted on Friday of last week! I am going to do my best to make it up for at least one of the days over the weekend. It would be nothing short of amazing to see Wole Soyinka, David Mitchell, and Chimamanda Adichie here in Colombia. (Other speakers include Junot Díaz, Guillermo Arriaga, Christopher Hitchens, Mario Mendoza, Santiago Gamboa, Bob Geldof, David Starkey, and Guillermo Martínez.)

School is out, the apartment is emtpy and clean, and I am finally beginning to recover my sanity after one hell of a year. Hope to read the few books that are not packed away in storage before I head north for a month of family reunions, reading, and true winter. Interestingly, someone slipped me a copy of a local writer's novella for commentary, and I am contemplating a bilingual review. Also, there is Stendhal waiting--I'd done ok reading it online, but now that my internet access is intermittent, I'll have to stay silent until I can pick up my own copy next week (!). And so it goes...

There's a lovely little thread on literary allusions of a favorite band that brought a certain poem to my attention: Rumi's "Who Says Words With My Mouth?" translated by Coleman Barks (with thanks to Katherine):

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I'll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I'm like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

This poetry, I never know what I'm going to say.
I don't plan it.
When I'm outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

Bears repeating

I've been taking time out from writing an exam (on Holes no less) to explore a few new (to me) litblogs, and loved reading these thoughts by Darby Dixon on "difficult" books and those who read them:

Now--slight but personally important aside begins here--this isn't about being part of "the literary smart set." Rather, I think it's good practice for anyone who wants to talk shop about literature and the reading of it to engage with books from across, and sometimes off, their personal taste radars. Which, okay, maybe is about being part of the literary smart set. What I think I'm getting at is that I'm not comfortable with the sort of value judgment implied by a discussion of "the smart sets," in a sort of snoot-vs-snooty-antisnoot sense, or a hipper-than-thou-hipster sense. As if the "smart set" were a self-important, exclusionary organization, populated by nothing but smug bastards who scoff at those on the outside. I'm not so naive as to suggest it doesn't happen, consciously or not, but I'm also bold enough to suggest that people who are like that ought to be bopped on the nose, because thinking that way is a bunch of horsepucky. Reading literature and talking about it is as inclusive an activity as I can think of, asking of those who wish to take part in it only that they do it as much as they like, to whatever extent or end they like. I like to think (hope) that the "literary smart set"--and yes, you can read "litbloggers" there if you want--is by and large an encouraging group; that the discussion, debate, and disagreements are friendly in nature; and that I'm contributing to that in my own way. At least, I hope my professed love of and enthusiasm for big hard books--as well as for all books I like--is as evidently well-intentioned (an entertaining) as I desire it to be.

In any case--literary or not--I do think it's healthy to stretch beyond yourself from time to time. In a literary sense, a book like Gravity's Rainbow becomes a portable education in close reading, forcing you--if you accept the challenge--into a deeper headspace that both shifts and intensifies your relationship with the words on the page.

(Emphasis mine.) I've said it before and I'll say it again: a lack of willingness to submit oneself to "difficulty" can be just as snobbish as the attitude of ivory-tower types who look down on "the masses." We are the ones who deny ourselves opportunities to grow beyond our personal boundaries.

As Flannery O'Connor said,

Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it. We hear a great deal about humility being required to lower oneself, but it requires an equal humility and a real love of the truth to raise oneself and by hard labor to acquire higher standards.

Winding down

Next week is our last full week of school, and although I won't be heading up north until the middle of December, I'm already making my reading list for the month I'll be away. The problem is that there are 20 titles on it already...

However, the LBC have posted this winter's nominations, and I'm fully determined to use this time to read them. They all look fascinating:

Scott McKenzie of Slushpile nominated Demon Theory by Stephen Graham Jones - MacAdam/Cage

Anne Fernald of Fernham nominated Seven Loves by Valerie Trueblood - Little Brown

CAAF of Tingle Alley nominated Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi Wa'Thiong'O - Pantheon

I fly back on 15 January, just when they announce the selection. I'm happy about finally being able to participate--it feels like Christmas already.

"For surely there will be an end...

...and thine expectation shall not be cut off."

MOSCOW: The wife of Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn on Thursday presented the initial three volumes of the first full collection of his works to be published in Russia — a country still struggling with the legacy of the oppressive era he documented.

It was a cherished moment for the aging writer, who has been through prison camps and exile and, Natalya Solzhenitsyn said, feels the "draining of the life force" as his 88th birthday approaches. He was not at the presentation.

"Alexander Isayevich told me that the French have a saying: 'Nothing comes too late for he who is able to wait,'" Natalya Solzhenitsyn, who has nurtured her husband's work and protected his privacy, told a news conference, using his first name and patronymic.

With financial support from a state-owned bank, the 30-volume project marks the latest twist in what Solzhenitsyn's wife called the "very dramatic fate of Solzhenitsyn's books," which helped reveal the brutality of the Soviet system and dictator Josef Stalin's labor camps.

(via TEV)

A new vice

I stumbled across this word-game site while creating a web quest for my class, and have become addicted to popword, which is basically Tetris with letters (made it to Level 10 in under a week!--yes, lots of "research" going on in my spare time). The storyman with classic novel titles was fun for a while, too.

Also, there is a contest afoot for the 16 and under set, but the mad-lib style of this Beatrice letter is fun to play with in any case.

You say crazy, I say sublime

Matthew Cheney on teaching Nabokov:

Inevitably, there were students who were convinced Nabokov was insane or a drug addict or both. This accusation comes up all the time when we read anyone who is not among the hardest of hardcore realists, because imagination is something that has come to be associated only with the stimulus of drugs or madness. That someone could think up a story like Invitation to a Beheading -- where a man is imprisoned for "gnostic turpitude" in a fortress of porous walls and fake windows and rules against improper dreams -- without being addicted to hallucinogens or lacking a couple of screws is at best inconceivable to many people, if not threatening. The people who issue these accusations would never think of such a story or such imagery themselves, and therefore they can't imagine how anyone else could, unless there was something wrong with their brains. I am sad to see this way of thinking in my students, because it means they are suspicious of one of the fundamental techniques of art, but at least in the classroom I am able to challenge and undermine those beliefs; the effect of such suspicion on the world at large is depressing to contemplate.

Thank God there are teachers like this still out there. I've personally observed too much accomodation of the outside realm to suit students, rather than adequate preparation of students for the world beyond the classroom. This is where it all begins...but willingness to look beyond immediate perceptions is all too rare.

Magic carpet

Halfway through Speak, Memory and I am confronted with constant reminders as to why I love Nabokov.

I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness--in a landscape selected at random--is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern--to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.

(Someday...)

Of interest

• Literature Matters (e-zine of the British Council's literature department) enumerates their "Projects in Prospect," where I discover some extremely interesting news...

  Hay Festival
  Where: Cartagena
  When: Jan 2007
  Three UK writers (tbc) invited to perform.

  UPDATE: Found the site for the new program, although the schedule has not yet been posted.
• Some timely discussion of Helen Vendler at The Reading Experience
• The Complete Review analyzes Against the Day.
• Scott McLemee recalls his discovery of a letter by Thomas Pynchon.
• Maud draws attention to some troubling background information on the state of literature in translation; The Literary Saloon offers more. (Thank God for Words Without Borders!)
• A Curious Singularity has pressed on to Katherine Mansfield.
• We've embarked upon the next section of chapters in Reading... The Red and the Black. (Stendhal was a pretty funny guy--never expected to grin so much while reading this one!)
• Anne has begun collecting "mentions of, allusions to, and debts to Woolf in contemporary culture."
  
• Joanna Newsome's new album, Ys, has finally arrived! Largehearted Boy raves.

Excellent question

Steve Mitchelmore catches a misuse of T.S. Eliot's words about how modern poetry "must be difficult":

That line of Eliot's comes from his long essay on Dante in which he admits to have been "passionately fond of certain French poetry long before I could have translated two verses of it correctly" and that obtaining "an immense amount of knowledge" about Dante before reading him "is positively undesirable". So Ford's contention that "Eliot and Stevens shivered with distaste at the idea of writing poetry that was intelligible to the masses" is a snotty misrepresentation of the meaning of difficulty. Their poetry might puzzle its explicators but it still gives me, a mere reader, immense reading pleasure. Maybe, I think now after reading the review, it's because their poetry contains (and uncontains) that "bursting unity of opposites". One has to read the words - leap aboard the roller coaster of language - to experience those complexities in all their reality. There are few poets who do this. So why are we being constantly warned off?

The idea that something must be fully comprehended before it can be appreciated flies in the face of one of art's primary functions--to inspire wonder. I believe that anyone could pick up work by "Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and of Eliot himself" and get something out of it. The problem is that most are either too lazy or scared to try...or share this misapprehension of what "difficulty" means.

Tolling bells

From Jenny Davidson I learn that Ernestine Gilbreth Carey died on Saturday:

[Her father] Frank Bunker Gilbreth believed that the factory management principles he espoused to his clients could also be applied to his family of six girls and six boys, produced in 17 years; Lillian Moller Gilbreth, who had a Ph.D. from Brown University (earned around 1915, while she had several children at home), was an industrial psychologist and an engineering expert. Mr. Gilbreth died of a heart attack in 1924 at 55, the day after Mrs. Carey graduated from high school; his wife died in 1972 at 93.

Mrs. Carey’s brother Frank Bunker Gilbreth Jr. received first billing as a co-author, and the book’s narrative voice is decidedly unified, never betraying who wrote what. Nevertheless, Mrs. Carey wrote other books (as did her brother, who died in 2001), including “Jumping Jupiter,” “Rings Around Us” and “Giddy Moment.”

If you have no idea who I'm talking about, go pick up copies of Cheaper by the Dozen, Belles on Their Toes, and Time Out for Happiness *immediately*. A while ago I mentioned how much funnier a book can be when read aloud as opposed to read to oneself. The first two in this list definitely fit that category. Growing up in a family of seven, it was a joy and relief to read about the exploits of the pioneers of motion study. We owe the Gilbreths quite a lot--everything from the modern kitchen to flip-top garbage cans!

"Anything but bored"

Blackbird, the literary journal of Virginia Commonwealth University, has published the newly-discovered Sylvia Plath poem online:

Anna Journey, Contributing Editor of Blackbird, discovered that this poem was unpublished, and brought it to the attention of our editorial staff, along with a number of additional reasons why it is a poem of interest. Her essay, “Dragon Goes to Bed with Princess: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Influence on Sylvia Plath” (forthcoming in Notes on Contemporary Literature), explores in detail how “Ennui” germinated from Plath’s creative response to The Great Gatsby, as evidenced by her handwritten notes in her personal copy of that novel, as well as an essay she wrote on Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. Fitzgerald’s lingering influence continued to produce echoes in Plath’s work, even in such a later poem as “Daddy,” whose last line may recall Dick Diver’s farewell to his dead father in Tender Is the Night. Plath’s broad range of allusions in “Ennui” also includes Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, “The Lady or the Tiger?” by Frank R. Stockton, and “The Beast in the Jungle” by Henry James, as well as providing an indirect response to that “delicate monster,” Ennui, as it was famously described in “Au Lecteur” (“To the Reader”) by Charles Baudelaire, a poem whose sardonic tone matches Plath’s own.

I find the combination of allusions to Stockton, James, and Cervantes especially intriguing. The juxtapositions open up many other possibilities...

(via Maud)

Wonderful

Scott Esposito on Richard Powers:

But if in Powers we lose a sense of mystery, we gain a sense of wonder. One of the most striking aspects of a Powers novel is the sense of genuine amazement at the natural world that the reader is left with. This is no small achievement tn an era in which it is often remarked that space shuttle flights are no longer televised because they have become so commonplace, so banal. Powers reveals a very real, very necessary awe at science and nature. This is no preachy exercise, no citing of facts and figures; it is something that is communicated through the stories and metaphors, something that takes hold of you as you read without Powers needing to lay it out for you. It is humbling, which I believe is exactly Powers's point, to re-instill a needed sense of humility as humans gain truly God-like powers over their environment. This is something that neither Pynchon nor DeLillo does, something I think only a Richard Powers could do.

Excellent observation. I think this is one of the reasons I enjoy his novels so much--I come away with a very Chestertonian sense of wonder.

Of lightning and lightning bugs

As Mark Twain famously quipped, "The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter--’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning."

Margaret Jull Costa (translator of books by José Saramago, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Luis Fernando Verissimo, Javier Marías, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, and Fernando Pessoa) offers a fascinating translation exercise, based on one of my favorite passages of Pessoa's:

Pasmo sempre quando acabo qualquer coisa. Pasmo e desolo-me. O meu instinto de perfeição deveria inhibir-me de acabar; deveria inhibir-me de dar começo. Mas distraio-me e faço. O que consigo é um produto, em mim, não de uma aplicação da vontade, mas de uma cedência dela. Começo porque não tenho força para pensar; acabo porque não tenho alma oara suspender. Este livro é a minha cobardia.

She offers a literal translation (for those of us who don't speak Portuguese), with multiple word-choice options, and asks:

How will you translate 'alma' - 'soul' 'heart', 'courage', 'guts'? What should you do with the last sentence?

Read your finished version of the whole text out loud. Does the language flow, does it have the right cadence and rhythm?

Are there any awkward juxtapositions of sounds or unnecessary repetitions of words?

What can you come up with?

After a brief discussion on the points raised, she offers some final thoughts:

What I hope this workshop has made clear is that while there is no single correct translation or version of a text, that certainly does not mean that any translation will do. Translation is always a balancing act between faithfulness to letter and faithfulness to spirit. You have to understand what the author means not only at the level of denotation, but also of connotation. You have to be aware of the sound of words and their register, as well as the rhythm and sound of the sentence in the translated version, so that the finished product is as cogent, fluent and convincing in the new language as it is in the original.

When fidelity is treasonous

Don Paterson's brief piece on translating Rilke explains,

The one thing a poet must avoid, however, is pretending that both the meaning and the music of the original poem can be carried into the new language. Because a poem works on the heretical principle that sound and sense are the same thing, a poem is locked for ever in its original form. The poem's effect, which is all there is of it, can no more be "translated" than can a piece of music.

Yet we are compelled to seek some new incarnation for foreign poems in our own language. The two main strategies are the "translation" and the "version". In the translation, you work on accurately representing the words and their systems of relations; here, the integrity of the means (your skill and qualifications as a translator, say) justify the end. In the version, you work on representing the poem's idea and "spirit"; here, the integrity of the end (your inner conviction that this somehow "captures the vibe" of the original) justifies the means. A translation mirrors the original and stands alongside it; but a version tries to be a new, free-standing poem in its own right. In order to achieve that level of semantic and musical integration, it has, at some point, to forget the original and complete the course on its own.

As frightening a prospect as this sounds, it does make a lot of sense. I'm willing to admit that my predisposition has always been to the more "literal" side, but perhaps I owe this to a somewhat Romantic notion of authorial inspiration? That is, the closer something sticks to the literal meaning, the closer we are to authorial intent. But is this merely an almost mystical trust in the efficacy of words? (Especially as Paterson himself admits that Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus "appear to have been less composed than dictated to the German poet - as if they had been sitting around elsewhere, waiting for someone to channel them into speech. In an earlier time, we would have had no trouble in describing the Sonnets - in their oracularity and their visionary power - as a prophetic work.") On the other hand, I'm beginning to see such an attitude as exhibiting a lack of trust: authorial intent is far from the only issue that must be examined when analyzing a work of literature.

Meanwhile, Bud comments on this other excellent article and explains how "even reading in your own language is a translation":

What is translation if not an interpretation? Once we think in those terms, we've opened the door for the sometimes less than literal result of different translations over time. [...]

If I read a book in English (the only language I can read in) and I look up a word, aren't I then imposing Mr. Webster's and my own meaning on that word and therefore the author's intent? [...]

The best analogy comes from music - a performance of a symphony is a translation of a composer's music (often with the help of notes, either latin notation or annotations). At one level each conductor's music may sound the same - ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta (can't you tell, that's Ode to Joy), but listening more closely, changes in timing or tone (not to mention possible reinstrumentation) can make the music sound quite different.

Angel Gurria-Quintana (in the article Bud quotes) points out the interesting dichotomy between "clarity" and "precision," ultimately deciding that

In the best literature, form is substance. Similarly with translations. Puritans may take issue, but it is undoubtedly a translation’s beauty - rather than its careful imitation of an original - that finally nudges it across the language barrier and enhances the pleasure it provides. Even if translation is treason, it is a necessary form of treachery on which readers of world literature depend.

Interestingly, it's my father (a native Spanish-speaker) who has opened up my mind to the reason clarity *must* supercede precision in a translation. Communication doesn't always have to indicate a loss of fidelity. Literalism (whether it be whimsical or heavy-handed) is ultimately more about not offending the author than it is about fully serving the work. And if fidelity means putting the essence (or meaning) of a work in second place, who or what is actually being betrayed?

And last--but far from least!--Jeff announces that The Unbearable Lightness of Being is finally (!!) being released in the Czech Republic. (I somehow think that a retranslation into English is now called-for...although that might take another ten years!)

(The two articles came via The Literary Saloon and were posted on my birthday. I'll take that as a nod that I'm heading in the right direction...)

Green

My last post was about Jealousy, but this one is about envy.

Today marks the beginning of the Echo Maker Roundtable #1 over at Ed's. Looks like it's going to turn out to be an incredible discussion, with Powers himself joining in on Friday.

Also, the Litblog Co-op has chosen their Autumn selection (which looks fascinating, as ever).

I'm going to do my best to bury myself in what I still have to read here rather than complaining about what I'm missing... At least I'll have a chance to read these when I fly north for a visit in December!

Trapped in text

Between reading Richard Powers, Virginia Woolf, Stephen Hawking, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, my mind is buzzing with thoughts on space/time/perspective/the nature of reality and the way in which we attempt to apprehend it with words. All of these texts inform each other in one way or another--I'm sure someone in some grad school somewhere has probably written a thesis that encapsulates these works, linking a private human understanding of "truth" with books that plumb the depths of reality's features in one way or another. I have always found books that tinker with space and time to be fascinating experiments where words are the tools that scratch at the skin of truth.

I've just finished Jealousy (Maud piqued my curiosity), and although I have no experience in talking about this sort of writing at all, here are some preliminary neophyte thoughts...

The first-person narrator (who never says "I") meticulously describes everything he sees and hears, while the reader becomes rapidly aware that he suspects his wife of having an affair with a neighbor from the next plantation. Certain events are described over and over again in the narrative (with slight differences each time) and I felt like I was witnessing an endless memory-loop in an obsessive mind. The narrator's almost clinical detachment becomes increasingly creepy as the excuses he makes for the other two ("It was only a piece of bad luck, without consequences, an incident of no seriousness, one of the minor inconveniences of colonial life.") slowly give way to descriptive fixations that become slightly more obscure and chaotic the more his selective memory jumps around. The coldly "objective" observations undermine themselves as linear time is confused for absolute space. (Precise location and situation are the only things that can be known through his gaze--there is even a diagram mapping out the house and the locations repeatedly mentioned in the novel. Time becomes hazy and one has to read carefully to distinguish between 6.30am and 6.30pm.)

With each paragraph, I had to reorient myself to the narrator's switched subjects and erratic descriptions--my only immediate point of reference for this was The Waves (and, basically, Virginia Woolf's writing in general). The reader has to be constantly alert to subtle cues and shifts in the observations, because the shocks are sudden and come without much warning. I went into the novel with the understanding that a murder takes place. After finishing it, I can't even tell you if that's true or if one or even two people are murdered. But I love this sort of thing--when an author demands to be read carefully, creating close readers of us all. I know that if I'd paid closer attention, compared each page of "action" (or nonaction, as the case may be) with the diagram, counted the number of times that smashed centipede was mentioned (and the single mention of its removal), and noted the discrepancies among the narrator's own versions of events, a much more defined story would've emerged.

In his essay "Objective Literature: Alain Robbe-Grillet," Roland Barthes declares:

For Robbe-Grillet, the function of language is not a raid on the absolute, a violation of the abyss, but a progression of names over a surface, a patient unfolding that will gradually "paint" the object, caress it, and along its whole extent deposit a patina of tentative identifications, no single term of which could stand by itself for the presented object. [...]

Robbe-Grillet is important because he has attacked the last bastion of the traditional art of writing: the organization of literary space.

Meanwhile, the internal is externalized to the extent that all supposed "subjectivity" is banished to nearly scientific precision of visual description. It's uncanny to read, but a remarkable glimpse into yet another way of viewing the world.

Here is a 2003 interview with Robbe-Grillet (via This Space).