More on Lerner

I'm thinking that in ten or fifteen years Ben Lerner might write a big novel somewhat like the one I just read by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles' ---Where Tigers Are at Home  which won France's 2008 Prix Medicis.  Similar poetic sensibilities at work.  Layerings of various voices and characters and time frames.  More anthropology than Lerner will get into, but he can replace that with his attentions to cultural events and behaviors.  Where Lerner has Whitman for the historial base, Blas de Robles has Athanasius Kircher.  That gives the book a narrative thread around which the contemporary events are embroidered.  

On Ben Lerner's Second Novel

"Harmony was established at last, and only one straggler continues to disrupt it with his anxieties, his shames, his endlessly reiterated adolescences.  Only man was unable to do away with his consciousness".   Eric Chevillard, The Crab Nebula 101

This book has such good lines every page or so.  Nearing the end now.  

Great German movie last night I had read about and Dennis reminded me of.  We get to finish it this evening.  Very funny.  So hard to explain humor.  Schussmacher.  Break Up Manager.  

Sunday night  we even watched a second of his movies--the red baron and started a third before giving up.  Talented and cute young German actor Mattias Schweighöfer.   Beer with Feeny at Fosters.  His GRE scores are nice and high--96 percentile.  He’s ready to get out of here and on to grad school full-time.  

Am I liking Lerner’s second novel as much as I had liked his first?  Don’t think so but that could be because he has matured and grown up more, both the person and the writer.  

Jeff Armstrong.  Fifteen years my senior.  Fascinating in his own right and yet also that appeal of the much older.  Not quite fatherly, too young for that, and yet much older than brotherly.  Senior, authoritative, experienced, wiser than one’s peers or near-peers.  The charm of the older maybe paragon of something or other.  At the same time, responses that still seem very young---the eternal student with his professor,  English majors in the grad student lounge.  

Lerner puts into his novel the story he published in the new yorker after he talked about how it came about.  Cool and yet it gives us the differences in voice and tone and purpose.  Further deepens all the themes he’s already got going.  He is good.  

 1:34 Monday A longed-for day off of sorts and now I don’t know what to do with myself so I will write and be glad all the while that I’m not currently as famous as the young literary lion of Kansas and Manhattan who I am glad as well that I am not.  About two-thirds through his 10:04.  He is now in Marfa, has been there a week or maybe two.  He is over thirty but he is young still and spooked still by his success with New York publishers and agents and the lure of more money than he’d expected to have by this age--two hundred and seventy thousand dollars after fees and stuff.  Probably a 300k advance which maybe has been standard for a while in new york for promising writers of his first and second book stature.  Poor Sebastiano had to be glad to get that measly little check from the writer’s union second or third book fund, was it $7500. ?  And earlier one of his acquaintances from Iowa, she had gotten the big 300k advance for her first book and where is she now?  A name I’ve not heard anything of since, since her story was in the New Yorker and her advance was news for five minutes among her Iowa peers back in, was it 2005, or 06 or 07?  How quickly the famous pass through the veils of fame back into quietude like the rest.  I think of Jamaica Kincaid, the bright light of a few years back,  New Yorker family connections and all.  Where have we heard of her of late?  

Now at this juncture, would I, should I, put this passage into my so-called novel, even the very very bad one I had hoped to write in vague imitation of Lerner’s new book?  Remember how excited I was two months ago to get it?  How much I needed to have it at once just to see it and start it and use it as my essential prompt and template for getting my own work started and finishes.  Now that I am two-thirds through the very book itself I can pause and stand back and wonder what was I thinking?  A kind of mania in and of itself that covers over, stands in for, the absence of genuine motivation, of a genuine pressure of creativity.  

Now the sunshine is super-bright out in the early afternoon backyard.  I’ve caught up on the laundry.  Rick and I took a short walk earlier before lunch.  Heated up fajitas from last night for lunch.  Bad apple pie, for me, but at least not pecan cake or fruit cake.  Believe it or not I am fruit-caked up.  Excess never lets you down.  The palace of wisdom beckons as reliably as ever.

Sweet emails from Nicholas inviting us to be part of his honour at Buckingham Palace on February 6.  Party at the Sloane Club after the palace.  Not sure whether this is his private party or if the palace also throws a number of parites around town to round off the day for everyone.  Have to ask.  

Petie took Willow off swimming early and they planned to go on to Tilton to the Paris nail salon on main street for their beautification rituals centered around the shell-like growths humans have at the ends of their upper and lower extremities.  Nails they call them, as in “as hard as”  those devices they make and use to fasten together pieces of material used to build things, houses, furniture, roof tiles.  

I give a kudo to Lerner for this phrase on page 182 where he enters into a building or house in Marfa where a party is taking place:  “There was a sense of incoherent opulence.”  Yes.  That’s Texas and every art scene therein.  

Page 183 Lerner uses the word “dissect.”  He’s used the word or a variant too many times now, in the whole book.  If he uses it once more in the remaining forty pages I’ll have to take him off all my lists.  

Now 3:16  Nice nap.  Feel sort of sorry for Lerner.  Nervous for him, at this point, as though I’m watching to see if he will complete his assignment(s) or not?  As though we are watching the normally unreported, inside process of someone who is writing a dissertation in order to gain the doctorate. I can guess where that comes from in my own experience analogically, since I wrote such a thing so many years ago and felt the pressures of having to do so.  But all this is there in Lerner’s book and I guess he knows it and has decided to make all of that the book itself.  Now I probably will go back and look at the piece in the NYRB that Phil sent some months ago that had prompted him to rant a bit against Lerner and against which rant I defended Lerner based only on my enjoyment of his first book, a surprise enjoyment, maybe like everyone who had read Lerner’s first book and which skyrocketed him out of the middle of his generation’s first writers into instant stardom within the tiny worlds of big success poets (where is Campbell McGrath when we need him? huh?) when they are young.  Double-checking here---the internet yet another instrument of cruelty in our hands.  On Goodreads, McGrath’s 1996 book had 92 ratings.  Peak, there.  His 2012 book got forty-one ratings.  

But it is time for goûter,  almost 3:30 and perhaps I’m being harsh on both Ben Lerner and other writers.  

Still, what a luxury it is to be home and nothing much to do but nap, wake slightly, and nap a bit more again.  Winter.  

Tuesday  Dec 30  Rick found a Northeastern Huskies mug at the dump which has become his prize souvenir.  Agenda for this bright day is to see the Hobbit movie in Imax 3D at 3:30 in Hooksett.  

Finished Lerner last night and yes I guess if I were reviewing it for a major publication I would give it all the glow it has already gotten and that it deserves.  Lerner let me down by repeating “dissect” yet again and another variant in the remaining third but of course he is doing so on purpose as part of his poetic constructivist license.  Main thing is that by the final few pages you do feel the joy of his having pulled it all off after all.  I picked a few more nits before we got there.  Some phrases that grated on me, but I suspect I was being generationist there and not allowing the youngsters their new vocabularies for old things. 

10:04 risks having the “concept” or concepts overpower everything, all the stuff about time past and future and present and it risks being too clever by half and too precious and too young and too savy---it risks these things and almost loses it as a high-wire act but yes at last it does pull it all together and it is the achievement few manage in their second important literary work.  It does not read as lightly and as exuberantly as Atocha did.  That was just unexpected pleasure.  This is self-conscious and anxious and careful and risky---all those things but not a great pleasure, somehow.  Enjoyable pretty much, but you’re too aware that the book is too aware that so much is at stake here and we’d better not blow it.  The Marfa scenes could have been elided a bit more.  The whacked out college student in his office might have been cut altogether--but both went too well with Whitman and the wounded soldiers to have lost them.  Still, they almost don’t work and maybe one of them doesn’t.  It’s that sort of book.  But after a debut like Atocha how can you do a next.  Now Lerner has to keep it going.  Or invent something further.  Now I can return to vol. 3 of Knausgaard and relax again and enjoy a work that does not raise all these temporary nervousnesses but which carries us through with the desperate confidence of a forty-year old master rather than a thirty year old wannabe who is, for sure, pretty much there already too.  

First began to discuss Lerner on the first of this month.  Fred sent me a query from DC about it, and a link to the review in the New York Review of Books.

I replied at length.  First Fred and then me in what I paste in below:

1. Poetry: Have you ever taught a course on poetry?   If so, what kind of poetry - 20th century or what?

2.  I just sent you a review of the latest novel by Ben Lerner, the author of "Leaving Atocha Station" and a grad of the Brown U MFA program.   I have such a hard time believing that anyone would publish his kind of "post modern" diffident self-absorption.   The reviewer even admits that there is no story.  It's just a collection of vignettes of slightly fictionalized events in Lerner's life.  But then the reviewer, "a senior editor at Harper's" calls Lerner's writing brilliant and not to be missed.   I'm left thinking that Lerner and this reviewer are two NYC bright lights whose families are related.   

The review reminds me of the NYer review of the Turing film.  After panning the script, the NYer reviewer says one should see it for the "acting."   Oh please!!!!   In films, the casting director and director always select "actors" who fit the role, so that the actor does very little, if any, acting.  

So going to a film because of the acting or reading a novel because the author tosses out a few similes is, to me, scraping the bottom of the barrel for reasons to like the work.

Brown is something very different from when I attended.  I'm not saying I liked Brown back then, but ever since it got to be ultra politically correct and produced writers like Lerner, it has become an embarrassment, I think, to anyone who is truly serious. 

Dec 1

to FJ

1. Well, as Clinton and many other guilty parties would say, depends what you mean by "taught," depends what you mean by "poetry," depends what you mean by "a course."  

. . . .

All that said, I liked this review of Lerner's book and I agree with the writer, Harvey, that Lerner has earned himself a place in some yardstick.  Remember twenty years ago the great white 35 year old writers where the American Psycho guy and such.  Cocaine and wild nights in the city.  I really liked Lerner's first book and I've actually read the first ten or so pages of this new one.  

Why?  He's distinguished himself from the run-of-the-mill products of the creative writing schools of his generation.  Franzen is now 45, even close to 50?  So Lerner is younger and you have to allow him those things we allow the kids.  He's so much better than other recents writers of his age group.  I think because of what Nab said about Gogol---Gogol, Nabokov says that Gogol’s plots are unimportant: “The real plot…lies in the style."  Nowadays I think we like to say because of the voice.  Lerner breaks all the so-called rules of the creative writing classes and trusts his voice, the voice he knows he's making up, as voice.  

By the way I've never read Gogol.  Yikes.  I would much rather read Lerner than try to plow through a new novel by Franzen.  I think spending a lot of time with ol' K Burke warped me in these ways too because his books are offbeat and ultra-capacious, he can throw almost the kitchen sink into his later books and has this habit of stopping after one thought seems finished and saying in print to his reader "So, where are we then?" Sort of like "what shall we do next to pass the time?"  Beckett-like, all of this.  

I did stop trying to be excited by contemporary poetry after a while, though, and went back to prose and novels.  The poets seem to go for instant dazzle as shamelessly as French theorists do.  I'd almost say that Leonard Cohen is the best poet of his/our generation.  Forget Ashbery---he's simply at the top of his coterie, or was.  Coterie politics, that's what so much of what we have been fed as "culture" seems to come down to.  

Could well be that Lerner has been "tapped" by friends of his family in some vein of the publicity biz, but I have enjoyed what I've read so far.  It's fresher than what fills the young writers magazines, as far as I can tell.  By the way, have to send you our friend, Ed Schwartz's, book, "Jews that I knew."  Createspace and very short and fast read.  Catskills humor from his childhood growing up there.  Best section are some Shakespeare plays re-told in yiddishesque dialogues.  

Monday  evening  Nov 10

Big day.  

Decided in the pool this morning to imitate Ben Lerner’s new, second novel.  Reviewer in Bookforum gave it a sweet review and even said “this is a beautiful novel.”  Something like that.  “This is a beautiful and original novel.”  Christian Lorentzen, editor of London Review of Books  Decided that was the trigger my creative process was looking for.  I will buy it, even in hardback, and imitate it, paragraph by paragraph, translate it, that is, “translate” it, ok, from age 35 to age 70.  Why the heck not?  Am looking for a winter project, a wintery project, and have always wanted to do this, to copy someone else’s novel. And I like Lerner, liked his first book a lot because he covered so much of living in Spain that I recognized and liked from my own many times of living in Spain, in Madrid.  Wondered if the title is a direct echo of another book but could only come up with “Leaving the Finland Station” but just checked and the real title of Edmund Wilson’s history of socialism is “To the Finland Station.”  Any way, there it is .  Major writing decision, major moment in this writer’s long and storied life.  

In popular music a cover version or cover song, or simply cover, is a new performance or recording of a previously recorded, commercially released (or unreleased) song, by someone other than the original artist or composer.

Why don’t writers do covers?

Paste in here Calasso’s passage about plagiarism in writing.  

---------

The entire history of literature--a secret history that no one will ever be able to write except in part, because authors are too skillful at obscuring themselves--can be seen as a sinuous garland of plagiarism.  By this I do not mean functional plagiarism, due to haste and laziness such as Stendhal’s plundering of Lanzi; but the other kind, based on admiration and a process of physiological assimilation that is one of the best protected mysteries of literature.  The two passages that Baudelaire took from Stendhal are perfectly in tune with his prose and come at a crucial point of his argument.  Writing, like eros, is what makes the bulkheads of the ego sway and become porous.  And every style is formed by successive campaigns--with squads of raiders or entire armies--in the territory of others.  

    --Roberto Calasso, La folie Baudelaire 2008  Trans. Alastair McEwen 2012

One of the great small passages in Roché’s novel that could never make it into the movie, any movie:  

“Jim had a private emotional life of his own which was entirely French and which didn’t intersect the field of their friendship; Jules didn’t want to be concerned in it in any way.”  73  Jules et Jim by Henri-Pierre Roché

Valeria Luiselli brings St John of the Cross into her rich mix early in the “novel.”  Good for her.  Awesome in fact.  Brilliant.  The book seems to grow steadily, slowly, even slyly, more and more astonishing.  

“That’s the way literary recognition works, at least to a certain degree.  It’s all a matter of rumor, a rumor that multiplies like a virus until it becomes a collective affinity.”  Luiselli 35

More on Salter.

The early novel, A Sport and Pastime, seems flawless.  And like much afterwards in Salter's work.  I came into Salter through the letters with Robert Phelps and as I finished reading his memoir, Burning the Days, I wished Salter had had Phelps help him edit the book.  I will admit that it did give me me one thing I was looking for---a personal view on the whole of mid-century (20th) of our lives.  He is about twenty years older than me.  He can write passages of great beauty.  A romantic sensibility at work.  And yet a narrowness of vision and focus.  Maybe also a lack of depth and humor.  A day or so after finishing the book, I heard Leonard Cohen singing one of his classics on the Live in London album.  His spoken introduction is wonderful and funny.  He jokes about taking the full gamut of anti-depressants and says he has studied deeply in all the world's great religions.  "But cheerfulness kept breaking through."  Yeah, I thought.  Come on, James Salter, you say you want us to envy your life but you are never as funny or as charming or as deep, really, as Leonard Cohen.  "We are each of us an eventual tragedy." Salter says two pages from the end of his autobiography.  Well, ok, I see what you mean but, geez, put a bit more of a spin on it.  Shakespeare, Leonard Cohen, Beckett, even Bernhard, manage to do so.  

Perhaps enough Salter for a while.  Finished Part I of his memoir, Burning the Days.  Reminds me somehow of Conrad, why not sure.  Probably never thought I would read so much about flying jets during the Korean war.  Someone will have to write a thesis about the military esthetic in Salter's work.  Conrad, Melville, maybe it is the all-male world portrayed.  Jet pilots, sea captains, crews, military hierarchies, alpha anxieties and performances.

july 2014

Tuesday

I was pleased to read this “It was the voice of the writer, he insisted, that was the first and definitive thing. I had, around this time, seen a van-Gogh exhibition, paintings of his and his contemporaries discussed in his own words, and was struck by his saying, in a letter to his brother, What is alive in art, and eternally alive, is in the first place the painter and in the second place the picture.  Phelps would agree.”  344   Phelps-Salter letters Memorable Days

I came to this conviction.  It might be in fact why I came to like travel lit books over thirty years ago---without knowing why.  I liked the voice of the writer, if I did, no matter what events he described, or where she was, or what meaning the trip had for him or for me.  It is the voice we read for.  

so hot and humid not worth trying to do anything but breathe.  Va swam with Kathie this morning.  Barbara Thierry and her son-in-law to be (perhaps) Sam stopped by to look at the garden work Va would like to have done.  Kirsten Land has not been around that we know but I found one of her big tools in the grass.  Wonder what’s going on with her?  

No arrest yet in the Rumney murder.  Strange.  

Weds  night  super hot day.  Put in the air conditioner all by myself.  Don’t seem to have busted a gut.  Eye doctors in the morning for both of us.  

Can I return to Knausgaard after so much Phelps and Salter?  Have they changed my taste forever?  Ordered a bunch of Salter and Phelps and their favorites.  

I read S & P slowly because they pack in so much.  Here is S on Redford and envy:  very rare to hear someone admit to and discuss Envy.  

“One thing I admire very much about you, {Redford} I said, is how dangerously close you stay to the line between what you might have been and what you are.  That interests me, what do you mean by that? he demanded.  That’s all I can say, I told him.  Something there is in me that hates famous men.  Envy is what it is.”  (161-162)  

Hmm, still Salter was on his own way to becoming such, so what would he think some years later on ?  

Thurs late afternoon.  Guess where Sport and Pastime is set?  Atun!   And Paris, of course.  Perfect passage about Atun being nowhere and therefore of the essence.  Le Chezet looks over to Autun.  Cécile’s grandparents said they had never been there.  At least they had not been in forty or so years.  Ten miles away.  

Wonder if I read it years and years ago?  Or does it just seem so perfect and beautiful as to take your breath away?   Almost every page I want to copy out whole paragraphs.  Read most of today’s chunk at the bottom of the stairs in air conditioned comfort in the village bookstore building, between the crafts shop and the quilt shop.  Toy store now in half of the old bookstore which clerks said went through foreclosure this winter.  Other half being remodeled.  Littleton, proclaim the decorative lamp post flags in pale yellow, is Glad Town.  Be Glad!  

Also set in Nancy.  Have to look that location up.  No, by the end of 11 I know I have not read it before.  Sumptuous.  

4th  Mid-way into Salter’s novel and finished reading his Paris Review interview.  He has mentioned envy more often than any one I’ve ever noticed mentioning it before.  Interesting.  Given him enough time for now.  As much as I like the novel, do I like it as much as I want to like it?  Or as I really like it?  

The interview wasn’t as fascinating as I would have wanted.  Might have been Edward Hirsch’s fault.  Or Salter on deep guard.  Or high guard.  No interest in reading his first two novels about the war and the military.  Fighter pilot.  

well, here and we find another Hooray for Salter.  Last summer in the Aspen Sojourner he says 

“When I was young, I was influenced by the American writers of the time, especially Thomas Wolfe. I’ve gone back and read him, even though he hasn’t remained popular. He also influenced Jack Kerouac [who went to Horace Mann ahead of Salter]. The world really was enlarged for me in my forties when I met Robert Phelps, who was a writer and critic with a particular level of taste. He introduced me to Colette and Isaac Babel. He brought to maturity my interest in reading.”

Wonder what they would both think of Knausgaard?  He might serve as a polar opposite to Salter in so many ways.  One or two generations apart too.  But Wolfe was for a while our Knausgaard.  Like much how Salter dismisses Hemingway in the Paris Review interview.  

Here’s another piece, this one from The Guardian---where he says he’s not at all envious of the usual material goods of fame and fortune.  Turns out the New Yorker gave him a snitty profile last year.  This is from last year, 2013

“Luckily, he is not one for envy, at least not when it comes to material things. "I was talking to my son the other day about yachts and money," he says. "We were discussing some stupendously rich man, with a crew of 10 for his boat. My son was telling me how much it cost just to fill its tank. Well, I couldn't possibly write a line on a boat like that. I'm not equipped to live in such a way. My requirements seem to be much smaller." The New Yorker accused him of nostalgia for a way of life now passed (an accusation based on the fact he once asked guests coming to a New Year's Eve dinner to wear black tie). But this is not the case at all. How could it be? "I'm not nostalgic for it because I have it," he says, waving an arm at the books on the shelf, the pictures on the wall (I meet him in Bridgehampton). His view of American culture? "It's got louder, but it's probably not any worse.”  Guardian

Reading now the New Yorker piece by the same Nick Paumgarten who’s piece on techno music in Berlin I did read a few weeks ago and got irritated by because it seemed to veer way away from the scene in Berlin and not really describe what we all wanted to read about it in the first place.  

Anyway---note:  Salter’s parents named George and Mildred !  

And in 1951 $60,000 would be about 500k today (says Paumgarten).  

Paumgarten really does condescend in the piece---about the novel he says “It’s and odd little book.”  And  “The novel is an Alhambra of narcissism and self-erasure.” [For how long did Paumgarten long to use that image, turn of phrase, and where did he invent it? borrow it?  Is it vaguely anti-Arabic?  It sounds so derived, from somewhere/someone.]  

Having had a wee bit of experience with Saul Bellow myself, though of a much different sort, yet, still, at the same time in Bellow’s life and Salter’s, (1970-72ish) I love this detail:  

“For a while, he and Saul Bellow were close, until Salter felt that the deficit in their relative literary stature gave rise to condescension on Bellow’s part, whereupon he let the friendship die.  ‘I don’t like being a wing man,’ Salter said.” page 9 April 15 2013

Now the closing passage of the piece plays right into my observations about Salter and envy.  In fact I was going to say earlier and I wish I had, that even though he downplays the structure of Sport as just a narrative device, it is clear that

the role of the narrator is to envy Philip Dean his affair with Ann and he says explicitly at the outset that he envies the sort of guy he is long before the affair starts.  So envy for Salter is what he desires others to feel for him and here it comes---the final passage

of Paumgarten’s piece:

“ Salter once told his close friend the poet and novelist William Benton that one of the functions of a writer is to create envy in the reader---envy of the life that the writer is living.  His life and his books have been full of fine hotels and meals, entrancing women and singular men, sophisticated friendships, idle moments in marvelous weather.  He records it coolly, like a star forward who does not celebrate scoring goals:  he acts like he’s been there before.  He also conveys the knowledge that it will add up to nothing.  Everyone and everything will be forgotten.  You come away from his work wondering if you should have lived more, even if living more, in his work, often leads to ruin.”   --Paumgarten  page 10

This could well have been about Bellow by the way.  Probably the whole generation of WWII children and survivors?  

“Snitty” is the complaint I think that Salter used to complain about this profile of his life and career.  

maybe the author of the guardian piece uses that word---I can’t quite locate it in the piece

May 11, 2013 - The New Yorker, for instance, chose to call its long and rather snitty profile of him "The Last Book", which was kind of bald. "I suppose it's a fair ...    May 11, 2013 Rachel Cooke 

Paumgarten makes clear he will refuse to envy Salter and lets show that he does resent him and resents having to write this profile about him.  He does this by emphasizing the way Salter “stole” the marriage of his neighbors, the Rosenthals, and stole details of their own lives.  

Now it is Saturday the 5th.  Just read one next paragraph in Pastime.

Wow.  Talk about the killer placement of one sentence, right in another tender description of anal intercourse:  

“. . . The orchestras of the world beat softly.  The muscle in her behind is tight.  It feels like a string around the shaft.  He pushes in slowly and then, at last, plunges, like the bottom dropping out.  Anne-Marie moans, her head buried in her arms.  After he was dead I thought often of these moments, of this one.  Perhaps it is her moan, her face pressing against the sheet.  He can feel her tight around him, like a noose.  He closes her legs and lies there contented, looking out the window, feeling the tender spasms. “

(130)

Yes, she is content, happy.  

‘I thought of this often after he was dead’ ----  ok first mention of Philip Dean being dead.  

Now I can imagine directing some grad student who is doing a dissertation on Envy in the Novels of James Salter.  Or maybe the Seven Sins, and this particular paragraph makes me say “This is straight out of Genet.  Check it out.”

The other source would be the Irwin Shaw story Salter used to write the movie “Three.”  The three-way structure also suggests the movie Jules and Jim, 1962 movie.  [based on Henri-Pierre Roché's 1953 semi-autobiographical novel about his relationship when young with writer Franz Hessel and Helen Grund, whom Hessel married.  Truffaut came across the book in the mid-1950s whilst browsing through some secondhand books at a bookseller along the Seine in Paris. Later he befriended the elderly Roché, who published his first novel at the age of 74. ]

More importantly, perhaps, it reminds me of Bernhard’s The Loser.  Salter might be good but he’s no Thomas Bernhard.  Maybe.  Have to finish reading the novel.  

“You are lazy, passive, concave, restless,” I would assure myself.  “Darcy’s astrology is right.  You are all water.  You have no earth and no fire, no ballast and no leap.  You just eddy and swirl and drip, seeking the lowest level, the minimum requirement.  Unless someone pushes you, or channels you, you’ll come to nothing.”   Robert Phelps, Heroes and Orators 54

Knausgaard vs St Aubyn, via Deleuze

St Aubyn has produced the (contemporary) classic about sadism for sadists, whereas Knausgaard’s classic is about masochism for masochists.  

At first glance, pretty simplistic, perhaps, but how well this would demonstrate Deleuze.  The essay published in English by MIT press in the edition of Venus in Furs.  There Deleuze argues that masochists and sadists live in entirely separate worlds.  Hence they would write literary works for separate reading audiences.  

Note how in interviews with these writers the one terms shows up, but not the other.  I just read the New Yorker piece on St Aubyn.  Lots of interviews with Knausgaard of late.  

Karl Ove Knausgaard -- That Slow Storm That Blows Through Our Lives

Knausgaard   That Slow Storm

Here are the best passages in the wonderful Conversation Scott Esposito conducted with Karl Ove Knausgaard online and published in Tin House Summer 2014 Volume 15, Number 4: 88-105.

What I’m interested in are the feelings.  Not the thoughts or the reflections, they are wildly overrated.  But the complexity of feelings.  Everything we see, everything we think, everything we hear, all our experiences, are filtered through our feelings.  . . . . so what I tried to do was to get into the situations, into their concreteness and idiosyncrasy, and try to evoke the feelings from them, that slow storm that blows through our lives.  (104)

It has nothing to do with masochism.  It has to do with the thrill of the forbidden, crossing that line between what you are and are not supposed to do.  But I would say that it also has a comic element to it.  Writing involves irony, no matter what kind of writing--and by irony I mean basically the differences between the author, the writer, and the protagonist.  . . . . Something’s comic when it’s seen differently from the outside and inside at the same time.  And I do find this ‘I’ in these books comic---it wasn’t funny when it happened in real life, but the text gives everything a certain perspective, and that irony, that gap, that double self, it isn’t masochistic but deeply and fundamentally literary.  (105)

It’s the offspring, the in-between thing, the arrow that misses its target, that is the real thing.  (92)

I almost never let thinking interfere with writing, or at least, I try to avoid it.  (95)

One of the subjects of these books is the feeling of losing the world, that the world has changed into images of the world-- (96)

Monday night Feb 24 almost 5:30

Need to post a Midway Review because I’m past midway in Hollinghurst’s novel, The Stranger’s Child.  I’m on page 240 in the 435 page Vintager paperback.  Paul the bank clerk is fantasizing about having the school teacher, Peter Rowe, as a lover.  Peter and Corinna teach at the preparatory school for boys that occupies Corley Court, which was of course the childhood home of Corinna.  Paul is helping the arriving crowd park their cars for an event taking place at the school, or are they at the town square?  We are in 1967 and we started back in 19? 1910 perhaps.  So we are in the third or fourth of the five generations who are being portrayed. Totally enjoyable book, so exquisitely well-written that I read more slowly than usual and often pause and re-read just to be sure I’m getting details.  And to enjoy them once more.  Half-way into it, I realize that the most interesting quality about it is that even by now I don’t really know what the book is about. It is about the family, the families intertwined, in some ways by the great house itself, Corley Court, and it is about the passage of time, the generations, and history but history in the proper sense is very much in the far background.  With each section or book, Five of them, there is a shift to a character around whom the rest of the story revolves.  Paul seems to be the one in Book Three we have seen the most of, so far, although Peter also seems featured and the possibility of their romance or flirtation might be what will be the central even.  But even if it is, we know that in the next two Books, the saga will move onward, and exactly how and where we don’t yet know.  The pleasure in this reading feels at once very familiar---British novel of manners, sort of, and family-historical sweep, but again, sort of.  Hollinghurst discovers in here perhaps something as new-familiar as any other writer working today.  We could even place him favorable next to his younger generation Norwegian compeer, Karl Ove Knausgaard.  But where K has taken six volumes, Hollinghurst, the older master, has found how to do his tale in one volume of five slim near-novellas, linked. Even enwebbed.  In each section we enjoy a full portrait of the family as it works within the larger community, not of the nation but of the local region.  A rich cast of characters, memorably drawn in spare lines, and a narrator’s presence as enjoyable as any novel you can recall.  Many reviewers mention James.  Yes, but I have not read James in such a long while I can say I can see why but I won’t attempt to chime in on that point.  I have not read early Hollinghurst either.  I read his Booker prize novel, The Line of Beauty.  

Last Night:  Finished Sex is Forbidden.  Here is a short passage on page 251:

         The liquid swirled white and brown. Ralph was solemn, moving the heavy motor round and round while I kept the bowl still.  I could see the concentration in his jaw.  There was a veil of cocoa on his young man’s stubble.  Honey on a razor’s edge.  The heavy mix was lifting and falling in soft slaps.  Under cover of the noise, he asked: ‘Can I kiss you again, Bess?’

Ok, Parks, you win.  To explain how well placed, how well poised this seemingly small, unimportant little passage is would take half a book.  With Beth saying to herself “young man’s stubble” we see without yet fully seeing how much she has grown, is growing.  

Parks brings off the final fifty pages of the book with the aplomb of a magician, master of his repertoire of tricks. The book ends with all elements balanced and counterbalanced, maddeningly delightful in a romantic sit-com sort of way.  We smile, we are charmed, all our resistance has fallen, what a wonderful story of Beth growing beyond her recent spate of bad luck and tragic suffering.  How ready she is to embrace life more fully, celebrating by changing her name from Beth to Lisa.  Her temptation for a fling, the diarist Geoff H. is entranced by the ashram and plans to stay on as the sort of Server Beth has been for the past nine months.  They flirt with each other but they don’t give in.  Beth goes to help her mother after news reaches her that her dad has finally left his unhappy wife after thirty-one years of marital less-than-bliss.  Was the Dasgupta Institute helpful to Beth in helping her find her way?  How can she know, how can we know, it was something she tried and failed at and succeeded at and she left when life took her forward.  

Parks has a great knack for this kind of novel or story-spinning. The passage I quoted above shows this--the brilliant detail of the cocoa on young Ralph’s stubble, the inventiveness of the whole mini-scene in the larger scheme of the book.  Entertainment in our contemporary modes.  The Spectator blurb on the back cover says: “eminently readable” and “teases you” to the end.  Yes, it is all true, the book is like that and as I said sort of irritatingly so.  A set of captivating tricks and the satisfaction of finding out everything you hungered to find out about, once all of the keys are struck, the effect evaporates.  Quickly.  Too quickly. To whom am I anxious to say, You’ve got to read this book?  Can’t think of anyone.  

I worry today that I'm being too harsh here.  Maybe, maybe not.   

“But the true voyagers are only those who leave just to be leaving; hearts light, like balloons, they never turn aside from their fatality and without knowing why they always say: Let’s go!”  --Baudelaire

from Flaneur--suitable for this last week of waiting before we fly.  

9:30 pm  Now I have read every word in the whole issue #2 of Flaneur and I’ve even seen a brief interview with the publisher, Ricarda Messner, on YouTube filmed in Montreal which issue no. 3 will feature.  And I read an interview with Fabian Saul on Magculture.com/blog. Pretty satisfying reading experience.  Learned a bit about Leipzig, of which I knew nothing.  Through the fragments we glimpse history and people.  It helped or was just fun to look up places on the street on Google street view.  

Beautiful design work throughout.  Very enjoyable.  On Facebook there is a little window for suggesting an edit.  I could suggest Avenida Menendez Pelayo in Madrid.  Or Rue Viala in Paris.  Or --- I was trying to think of a street in Boston but I can't come up with one---the ones I think of are way too major.  It will be interesting to see what they choose for Montreal.  

Arapiles in Madrid could be good too.  Or Condesa de Venadito.  

Now I am on page 192 in Sex is Forbidden by Tim Parks.  I'm through the Middle.  And I have had the feeling for the past thirty or so pages that the Middle has been too long, too much Middle.

Will Beth accept and practice all the teachings of Dasgupta Institute, Buddhist practice and that way of dealing with life, or will she not?  Same question more or less for the older guy she has been stalking by reading his diary, GH.  We don't quite know his real name yet.  We have gotten more of her story and more of his story.  Both are going back and forth, back and forth, trying to decide, trying to find out, if they can really buy into, achieve, the teachings of the Buddhist practice preached in this ten day retreat.

My experience of the book has been ruined, of course, somewhat, by the fact that I read a little bit about it before I started it.  But it was that prior attention that made me decide to give it a look in the first place.  Parks has made some new statement in his life's work, or some Turn in his interpretation, his attitude, toward what stances he wants to take towards all of these big questions in life.  But the book now feels like it is trying too hard to dramatize the back and forth of indecision, of the confusions experienced in all such retreats and meditative withdrawals from ordinary life.  What we have underscored is the fact that we are reading, after all, a sort of tract or pamphlet and not so much a novel as we want to think we enjoy novels.  We are in the midst of a teaching fable, a novel-like koan, another imitation of one of the Buddha's teaching tales, or even those of Jesus.  We are being made to think, to search for meaning just as the characters themselves are searching for meaning, but we're more clear now that they are not characters but aspects of our own minds, our own selves, of EverySelf.  Beth, GH, woman, man, lives messed up, mid-way into their own trajectories, we are deep into spiritual reading, or what is a simulacrum of such for hip contemporary readers, but as lively as the writing is, as clever and with-it the descriptions of ashram detail and as inventive the life stories are, we feel delayed and blocked with each passing page.  Was this really the best way to present all of this?  Why not have started with the new position rather than re-enact the discovery of it, the journey of it?  However Parks in real life did go through major phases, major changes of view, can he effectively capture that in the style of this kind of fictional re-telling?  I am much more skeptical than I was at the outset, and I don't think that is what he wanted from me by the time I've gotten to this stage of the book.

About seventy-five pages to go.  I will enjoy them, the book is a pleasure, but will I smile in utter admiration.  I don't think so.  Come on, Tim, surprise me.

Now I am on page 192 in Sex is Forbidden by Tim Parks.  I'm through the Middle.  And I have had the feeling for the past thirty or so pages that the Middle has been too long, too much Middle.

Will Beth accept and practice all the teachings of Dasgupta Institute, Buddhist practice and that way of dealing with life, or will she not?  Same question more or less for the older guy she has been stalking by reading his diary, GH.  We don't quite know his real name yet.  We have gotten more of her story and more of his story.  Both are going back and forth, back and forth, trying to decide, trying to find out, if they can really buy into, achieve, the teachings of the Buddhist practice preached in this ten day retreat.

My experience of the book has been ruined, of course, somewhat, by the fact that I read a little bit about it before I started it.  But it was that prior attention that made me decide to give it a look in the first place.  Parks has made some new statement in his life's work, or some Turn in his interpretation, his attitude, toward what stances he wants to take towards all of these big questions in life.  But the book now feels like it is trying too hard to dramatize the back and forth of indecision, of the confusions experienced in all such retreats and meditative withdrawals from ordinary life.  What we have underscored is the fact that we are reading, after all, a sort of tract or pamphlet and not so much a novel as we want to think we enjoy novels.  We are in the midst of a teaching fable, a novel-like koan, another imitation of one of the Buddha's teaching tales, or even those of Jesus.  We are being made to think, to search for meaning just as the characters themselves are searching for meaning, but we're more clear now that they are not characters but aspects of our own minds, our own selves, of EverySelf.  Beth, GH, woman, man, lives messed up, mid-way into their own trajectories, we are deep into spiritual reading, or what is a simulacrum of such for hip contemporary readers, but as lively as the writing is, as clever and with-it the descriptions of ashram detail and as inventive the life stories are, we feel delayed and blocked with each passing page.  Was this really the best way to present all of this?  Why not have started with the new position rather than re-enact the discovery of it, the journey of it?  However Parks in real life did go through major phases, major changes of view, can he effectively capture that in the style of this kind of fictional re-telling?  I am much more skeptical than I was at the outset, and I don't think that is what he wanted from me by the time I've gotten to this stage of the book.

About seventy-five pages to go.  I will enjoy them, the book is a pleasure, but will I smile in utter admiration.  I don't think so.  Come on, Tim, surprise me.

Wonderful and beautiful snow day here in Center Central, New Hampshire.  

You’ve heard of Goodreads and of course book reviews on Amazon etc.

I’m inventing Midreads or the Midway Review——reviews of books when one is about half-way in.  I’m on page 92 of 278 pages of Tim Parks “Sex is Forbidden,”

the novel about the ashram where he supposedly changes his life and changes

the kind of novel he now wants to write.   By page 92 the book is humming along

nicely.  He clearly has written lots of books and is confident in every move the

book makes.  He’s got a clever set-up, Beth the woman who works as the ashram,

the newcomer visitor she is sort of stalking and secretly reading his secret and

forbidden diary, the other characters in the ashram, both permanent and visiting, the guru himself and his main disciple, the whole scene of people coming to find ways to deal with their terrible lives.  

Beth is funny and the book is bound to get funnier, we think.  She is plagued by

all the same human failings we all would have if we tried hard to get into the

devotedness of ashram life but just, finally, couldn’t.  She has tried, tries, to be

competely calm, meditative, simple, focused, mindful, charitable, in the moment.

But she can’t quite bring it off.  She hungers, again, for male relationship in spite of the ruined ones she has tried to move on from.  She loves the illicitness of reading the strange man’s diary, which she had found and keeps going back to

whenever the forbidden chance to do so presents itself.  His life as he writes it

in his diary book is a mess.  He scourges himself with remorse and confusion

about what to do next, who to try to be, who he wishes he had not been.  

Beth dislikes fat Marcia but is forced to help her and be kind to her.  She is 

learning a bit more about the saintly Mi Nu who lives apart in the bungalow

and not with the community proper.  Beth is not as much a mess as she thinks

she is, and we forgive her her faults more than she does so far.  

After I contact my website developer in Silicon V, I will finish this brilliant

midway review.   First I will get the website up and running, with all future rights in my name alone, all profits and tie-ins will link to my financial accounts, and then everyone can sign up, a new social media site will be born and people

will relish talking to each other about the books they’ve started but not yet

finished and they will feel doubly liberated to know they need never finish the

book to enjoy all the rights and privileges of MidReads and the MidwayReview.

I might eventually sell the rights to MidwayReview to the University of Chicago since they often use Midway as one of their tags for themselves.  

Tim Parks will have to keep googling his book to find out sometime in the future

just how much I liked it or not after I’ve finally finished it.  

all of the above copyrighted and registered to me; all rights reserved; all legalities certified and justified.  No poaching.  Only filty lucre and praise.  

Started Tim Parks’ novel “Sex is Forbidden” to see what his recent big change is about.  His true fans didn’t like it.  But so far it seems pretty ordinary and is starting to be funny---when our heroine, Beth, finally writes her own entry in the forbidden journal of the guy she is stalking in the meditation ashram.  

Read more of Hollinghurst yesterday and then re-read much of it last night to be sure I caught every nuance.  Am sure I did not, quite.  Have to be a Brit of his generation to catch more of it.  But he is exquistely good, Jamesean for sure and feels more lucid because contemporary.  Downton Abbey has helped me slide into Hollinghurst---same period more or less and formality and all that.  Britishness.  As foreign as every other foreign.  Somehow the tv show demonstrates that even more than novels do.  The pacing of the dialogue, the non-sequiturs that pass for dialogue and conversation between, among, characters.  American writers would just not do it that way.  Not sure if Julian Fellowes writes every single word.  That might be how and why it is so strange.  Liturgical really.  I’ve decided that--that Masterpiece T is not theater at all but liturgy.  Worship ritual.  If you don’t go to church every sunday morning, PBS gives you a virtual liturgical fix every sunday evening. 

Most interesting thing all day, few days ago, may have been in the Dunkin Donuts before the movie.  Twin brothers in their late 30s, each with neatly trimmed heavy black beard, talking Christian theology and church, the dominant twin lecturing the quiet twin about the true nature of Christian interpretation and worship.  Mentioned the Church of the Sepulchre and realized they meant the one in Jerusalem.  That and the fact that they looked Greek-American made me decide they were Greek Orthodox.  I think there is a large population in and around Nashua. Something rather touching about it.  “It is all still going on.”  

“In any reconstruction, it is always only what is pleasing that emerges, while that which genuinely existed eludes demonstration.”   113 Walser

“The author of the clown essay deserves recognition in my view because he takes seriously the good cheer that stems from immediacy.  I am just reading a book by a celebrated novelist who cold-bloodedly antagonized yet another celebrated novelist by one day writing him a letter that accused him of having a “sycophantic soul.”  In truth he merely envied him his open, carefree mode of artistic production.”   112 Walser

That carefree mode seems apt with regard to the work of César Aira.  

The Hare feels longer and “earlier” than other Aira books I’ve enjoyed.  I suppose I am staying with it more because I’m now, have long been, a “fan” and so I give him all the benefits of the doubt.  With Sergio De La Pava, though, I loved A Naked Singularity but had to finally speed through the end of Personae.  But I’m still a fan of De La Pava, too.  He writes in American English and he’s terrific.  

Been thinking about the start of interest in translated lit.  Catholic childhood in western Maryland, on West Virginia line.  Everything was in Latin in church so prayer books etc were Latin and English.  That must be the “source.”  Learned to sing Gregorian chant in college just a year or two before the Vatican did away with it.  La Salle college in Philadelphia.  Standard English major with a touch of French but not enough to do more than stumble through L’Etranger and barely make sense of it.  Married Virginia a few years later, however, and she was a Spanish major and since then she has taken me to Spain lots of times and in ’98 all through lots of Latin America.  

After a few weeks in a Spanish-speaking country I can get back into it but I’ve never had more than the present tense.  Zen Spanish I call it. Strange as to why I never fully dove in and mastered Spanish enough to read the lit.  We made money on our travels by teaching English conversation classes.  Then in my teaching at Plymouth State I fell into teaching the world lit, global lit, classes in translation.  Plus I started a course in Travel Lit that I taught for years.  Somewhere along the way I decided to make a positive out of “flaneuresque” reading and decided that translated English tends to have its own tics and textures of style and even thought.  By then I had found out more about Beckett’s whole project of going into French and back into English.  And by then I had more of a sense that staying in one language could be fully justified from various (bogus and possibly valid) angles.  I could tell too from reading Spanish authors in English such as Javier Marías just how good a translator Margaret Jull Costa is.  She also does Pessoa.  etc etc

One sideline:  we took our son to Spain when he was 10-11 for our longest stay there—16 months.  He became perfectly fluent and started correcting his mother’s use of the tilde—after she hung up the phone one day.    Fifteen years later he married a French woman and now has perfect French too.  He has a musician’s ear for it.  His wife speaks English, and German too.  Those darned Europeans.  Her mother is a German teacher.  

Virginia is a scholar of Ramon Maria del Valle-Inclán—Spain’s great Modernist writer— impossible, yes, to translate.  Joyce/Pound/Yeats/Pessoa rolled up into one.  Maybe that helped keep me from trying, or confirmed me in my laziness. I had never heard the word “flaneur” until I was maybe 45? or even 50.  But I was already a confirmed wandering layabout by then.