Conversational Reading

On Joining Oulipo by Accident

admin — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:19:43 +0000

From Harry Mathews’ excellent, engaging Paris Review interview.

Is that when you found out about the Oulipo?

MATHEWS

I had first heard about the Oulipo from a friend who mentioned Georges’s novel A Void, which is written without the letter e. The idea of not using the letter e made no sense to me. I was not intrigued, I was horrified.

After Georges and I became friends, he asked me if I’d be interested in joining. After all, he said, I had unwittingly written some purely Oulipian pieces. One of them was excruciatingly hard to do: I took two texts, Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and a cauliflower recipe from a Julia Child cookbook. I made a list of the vocabularies in each piece and I rewrote the poem using the vocabulary of the recipe and vice versa. It was agony. But I discovered something very important, which is that once you start on a project like that, no matter how insane it is, you rapidly become convinced that there’s a solution, which is, of course, nonsense. You have to make it happen. When I first visited the Oulipo, I told them about this. And what I had thought had been a shameful, secret habit was, to them, perfectly fine. I won the approval of these august people and I was elected in 1973, around the same time as Italo Calvino.

INTERVIEWER

What exactly happens at an Oulipo meeting?

MATHEWS

We have a very strict agenda. First there’s “creation.” A member will propose a new method and supply a description and an example. There has to be at least one new creation per meeting. Then comes “rumination,” which means possible creations that you have not yet fully worked out. Then “erudition,” which is discussion of Oulipian works by writers who are not members of the group. Then “action, past and future,” which describes Oulipian activities around the globe—a brief report on, say, a presentation of Oulipian texts in Warsaw. And then “small talk.” At the last meeting, during small talk, I pulled out my old Florida license plate, which read oulipo and which I donated to the archives, and they were thrilled with that. And then I told them about somebody I know in Scotland who always buys houses for palindromic sums. He claims that he gets good deals that way. Say it’s £30,003—although these days that’s probably not enough for a crofter’s hut in the Orkneys.

If there’s time, more later this week on his excellent Sinking of The Odradek Stadium, kind of an Oulipoian Crying of Lot 49.

Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

admin — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:16:33 +0000

My review of The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky runs today in The National.

Krzhizhanovsky falls under the rubric of the “discovered in translation” authors, as he wrote in the early 20th century, wasn’t published till the ’80s, and is only getting translated into English now. This is the second of his books to be translated, following Memories of the Future.

Letter Killers was a strong book, although one I had some real reservations over. More on that in the review. Here’s a quote:

The notion of how authors dissolve into their creations forms the backbone of the latest of Krzhizhanovsky’s books to be translated, The Letter Killers Club, another successful synthesis of his passions for experimental narratives and traditional literary pleasures. It begins with the narrator visiting the house of a successful Russian author, who tells him his parable-like story of how he achieved success only after emptying his bookshelves, in effect freeing himself from the influence of others.

But success rings hollow. “Writers, in essence, are professional word tamers,” he declares. “I knew that I was turning into a professional killer of conceptions.”

As his fame broadens he once again fills his shelves, but the oppressive weight of all these books surrounding him suffocates his inspiration. At length, books lose all their pleasure: “I felt that both I and my literature had been trampled and made meaningless.”

Lifespan of a Fact

admin — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:59:31 +0000

Harper’s serializes a little of John D’Agata’s latest book, Lifespan of a Fact. Though I had some serious reservations about D’Agata’s previous, About a Mountain, that book was nonetheless one of the freshest, most interesting things I’d read in a while, back then I read it. Among nonfiction authors he’s clearly a guy to watch, and I look forward to reading this latest one.

From The Lifespan of a Fact, by writer John D’Agata and Jim Fingal, published in February 2012 by W. W. Norton. In 2005, as an intern at The Believer, Fingal began fact-checking D’Agata’s article on the 2002 suicide of Las Vegas teenager Levi Presley. The book is based on emails exchanged by D’Agata and Fingal. The fact-checked article appeared in The Believer in 2010.

JIM FINGAL: Hi, John. I’m the intern who’s been assigned to fact-check your article. I was hoping you could clarify how you determined that there are thirty-four strip clubs in the city while the source you’re using says thirty-one.
JOHN D’AGATA: Hi, Jim. I think maybe there’s some sort of miscommunication, because the “article,” as you call it, is fine. It shouldn’t need a fact-checker. I have taken some liberties in the essay here and there, but none of them are harmful. I’m not sure it’s going to be worth your time to fact-check this.

Your Day of Gaddis

admin — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:54:29 +0000

A ton of Gaddis links right here on the eve of the republication of The Recognitions and JR by the Dalkey Archive.

They include Gaddis’ Paris Review interview and the below video interview between Gaddis and Malcolm Bradbury.

Ahh for the days American authors would smoke on-stage

Patience (After Sebald) Trailer

admin — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:48:26 +0000

Because I’m very curious about this film

Reliably Bad Roiphe

admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:38:23 +0000

The always cranky (and just as often on-target) Steve Donoghue takes apart the word salad that is Katie Roiphe’s latest attempt at literary criticism.

Our old nemesis Katie Roiphe fires off a piece wailing about the dimming of John Updike’s literary reputation in the three years since his death – at least, I think that’s what she’s wailing about (the essay is more eager to push all the buttons than a kid in a department store elevator). She begins:

Exactly three years after his death, it’s sad to see that John Updike has subtly fallen out of fashion, that he is left off best novels lists like the Modern Library’s, and that a faint sense of disapproval clings to his reputation, even as his immense talent is recognized.

It’s obviously not a promising beginning (‘subtly’? ‘faint’?), and things only get worse – Roiphe spends her next two paragraphs demonstrating how a faint sense of disapproval has always clung to Updike’s work, mainly “harbored” by carping critics who are unnerved by just how exquisite that work is:

Critics and writers hold the fact that he writes beautiful sentences against him, as if his writing is too well crafted, too flamboyantly, extravagantly good.

To put it mildly, extravagant goodness was never something I associated with Updike

I bring it up since Barrett Hathcock showed similar exasperation with Roiphe’s writing in Lady Chatterley’s Brother (PDF, Amazon), where he discussed her consideration of the Updike-idolizing Nicholson Baker. Here’s Barrett on her “strange nostalgia” for the good old sex writing of John Updike:

In the Times Sunday Book Review, Katie Roiphe published “The Naked and the Conflicted,” an essay that glibly took contemporary male writers like Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, and Michael Chabon to task for failing to depict sex with anything near the verve and heroic grandeur of their generational forebearers, such as Mailer, Roth, and Updike. It’s an odd essay, even for a contemporary post-feminist scandal-magnet like Roiphe. The argument is so counterintuitive that it bends its way back to idiocy. The essay also makes the same rhetorical moves of many Times essays: it takes a convenient sampling of recent literature and plucks quotations completely out of context to constitute a trend piece from the trimmings. I call it Trend Sausage.

It’s true that the contemporary authors Roiphe cites don’t write about sex in the way that Roth and Updike did. Why should they? Times have, indeed, changed. What’s more, the books she quotes from are interested in different subjects; they might contain sexual scenes or details but they are not like Portnoy’s Complaint, which is about sex at almost all points. It’s like going to the ballet and complaining how there isn’t nearly enough kissing going on.

But aside from Roiphe’s strange nostalgia for a more brutally frank time, one might suggest that the reason these contemporary novelists aren’t discussing sex in the same way is that they are simply not as interested in sex as their taboo-busting forefathers. For Updike, there was news to be made in Couples. With Lawrence breaking down the gate, there was a quick harvest in the newly liberated field of sex studies. But now, describing the sexual act in multiple paragraphs of compound-complex English prose seems like a waste of time, or a willfully blind ignorance of what is on our televisions and computer screens, or an excursion into one’s own mental adult theater.

Cronenberg on Genre

admin — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:57:24 +0000

From his interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books.

The difference between approaching themes in art and in genre is a matter of comfort. And I think that it’s a matter of intellect. For example, what happens in The Fly would be very hard to take in a normal drama. Basically an attractive guy meets an attractive girl and then contracts a terrible wasting disease and the girl watches as he deteriorates and ultimately she helps to kill him. That’s really the plot of The Fly on an emotional level and that would be very hard to take if it were just a realistic drama. But when it’s a sci-fi horror mix, it sort of allows the audience to have some distance and they still feel the emotional impact of those things, but it gives them a little bit of safety, you know? But in terms of a movie like Naked Lunch or Crash, it’s just a question of what people are used to and what they expect from a movie. And when they’re not getting the structure that they’re familiar with, or an aesthetic approach that they understand, then there is a distance there but it’s not a good distance. It’s off-putting to them. So at that point the appeal is to a much narrower audience that can understand you and engage with the movie that you’ve made.

And just for fun, on making art and getting paid:

But movies like Crash or Naked Lunch — they can’t cost a hundred million dollars and you must make sure they don’t. You accept the limitations of the budget when you make an extreme or difficult movie – it’s whatever it is you can raise. And then of course, there’s a certain point where you say: can I actually make it well, for that money? Do I have to sacrifice any quality? And there are moments where I’ve said, about projects: I can’t raise enough money to actually make the movie well, so therefore I’m not going to make it. I have to consider the outcome. Or for instance Spider. I really wanted ten million dollars to make Spider and we could only raise eight. And at that point it was, okay, do we make this movie or not? You know, if we make it for eight then it means we all literally have to not get paid. And I include there, Ralph Fiennes, Miranda Richardson, and the Producer and the Writer and the Director — me, but we all loved the project so much and we were already so far engaged in it, that we all agreed to do that. So we literally all of us, and Patrick McGrath the writer of the novel, we all literally didn’t get paid and we made the movie for eight million, but we really needed ten. So that’s an unusual moment, and just in terms of financial survival you can’t do that very often, because you’re spending two years of your life making a movie and you’re making zero money during those two years. But that was sort of a happy case because we managed to survive it. Ralph went off and did Red Dragon and got a big payday. I didn’t! But one thing that’s interesting is, since we’re showing A Dangerous Method to Jungians and Freudians, I’ve discovered that they and psychiatrists often show Spider to students and other doctors as an illustration of what schizophrenia might feel like from the inside. From the point of view of a schizophrenic. They feel that it’s an incredibly accurate depiction of the experience of schizophrenia and that it’s very useful for doctors and psychiatrists so I kinda like that.

The Omission of Desire

admin — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:46:04 +0000

From Charles Baxter’s review of The Angel Esmeralda:

This omission of any markers of the narrator’s desire is one of the signs that we are inside a posthumanist fiction. In an earlier style—a style still very much on the menu in American creative writing programs—the narrator would register his attraction to the German woman, then mull over the possibilities of sleeping with her, worry over his possible guilt and potential betrayal, then write about his approach to her as he shares with us, his readers, his complicated personal feelings (if he has any), all in preparation for the encounter with its conventional meanings. We would be given his motivations, and the story would carefully “lay pipe,” as Hollywood scriptwriters say, as it goes about its business of patiently disclosing expository material and the markers of his individuality.

But this is not that kind of story. None of the stories in this book are like that. The encounter of the narrator and the German woman in “Creation” isn’t especially significant or meaningful. It’s just there, and the reason it’s there has very little to do with the specifically erotic content of the scene or the narrator’s character, such as it is. DeLillo’s (or the narrator’s) refusal to supply the reader with any emotional filler or exposition radically cools down the emotional temperature of the story and gives it a pleasingly zero-degree defamiliarized tone of floating detachment.

But even so, “Creation” would remain a conventional story about a semianonymous one-night stand that anybody might have written were it not for the final scene, where Christa, the German woman, now decoupled from her usual routines, lapses into a kind of blank impassivity. This impassivity gives the story a sudden intensity. It is the true DeLillo moment, the one toward which the story has been aimed. “Her face went slowly dead. All the selves collapsing inward. She was inaccessible and utterly still.” The narrator goes on talking to her, “slowly and distinctly,” but Christa herself is beyond speech: “Christa’s lips moved, although she didn’t say anything.”

Patience (After Sebald)

admin — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:59:23 +0000

It gets a rather tiny and inconsequential review in The Guardian.

Impressions of Africa

admin — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:43:24 +0000

Nice to see this piece on Raymond Roussel over at the Poetry Foundation (and Chad’s enthusiastic response to it). Both Impressions of Africa and New Impressions of Africa were re-released last year by quality presses in fine new translations, but the books were largely ignored.

In his lifetime, the French poet, playwright, and novelist never did find a mainstream audience, or any audience really. He remained buoyant, though, paying Lemerre—the then-stylish French publishing house known for its pale yellow covers—to print his books. And Roussel always worked with devilish focus: New Impressions of Africa, his illustrated poly-parenthetical alexandrine in four cantos, took him seventeen years to write (15 hours per line, by his calculation). But almost 100 years later, Roussel’s labor is still paying off. New editions of his books come out with relative frequency. In June of last year, Mark Polizzotti’s much-awaited new version of Impressions of Africa was finally published by the Dalkey Archive Press. In a Harper’s Magazine review, Ben Marcus referred to Polizzotti as Roussel’s “immaculate translator.”

Roussel’s posthumous reception is almost as predictable as the critical neglect he experienced when alive. That he was seized upon by the Surrealists as a patron saint is no surprise—his tacking sentences accumulate like iterations of an exquisite corpse. Marcel Duchamp adapted his plays, and the poet/ethnographer Michel Leiris cites Roussel’s puns and unhinged logic as his most major inspirations. Word games were the foundational principle of Roussel’s compositions, and they are an obvious precedent to the Oulipo (an acronym for what translates into English as “workshop of potential literature”), whose members ascribed to mathematical theories of writing and produced a body of work brimming with palindromes, lipograms, and acrostics. Locus Solus was the subject of Michel Foucault’s only extended work of literary criticism, in which he writes that Roussel “forces the reader to learn a secret that he had not recognized and to feel trapped in an anonymous, amorphous, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t, never really demonstrable type of secret.” John Ashbery, not only one of our most acclaimed contemporary poets but a heralded translator of French, gives Roussel as the reason he studied the language in the first place. . . .