Conversational Reading

96 Percent Stupid

admin — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:32:55 +0000

Dalkey is getting some great coverage for their Gaddis re-releases. The New Yorker picks out a gem anecdote:

William Gaddis, in the closing pages of his colossal 1955 novel “The Recognitions,” inserts a brief scene that manages to be at once rancorously funny, brazenly self-referential, and spookily prescient about the critical fate that lay in store for his work. A book reviewer and a poet meet in a tailor’s shop; both are sitting pantsless while they wait for their respective garments to be adjusted. The poet notices an unusually thick book under the critic’s arm and asks him if he’s reading it. No, says the critic, he’s not reading it, “just reviewing it.” He complains that he’s getting paid “a lousy twenty-five bucks for the job” and that “it’ll take me the whole evening tonight.” He then tells his acquaintance that he hopes he hasn’t gone and bought the book. “Christ,” he says, “I could have given it to you, all I need is the jacket blurb to write the review.”

Though the name of the book is never mentioned, it’s fairly obviously “The Recognitions.” It’s as though Gaddis was already convinced, before he even completed his nine hundred and fifty-six-page début, that the novel was going to be treated with contempt or indifference by the literary press, and had decided to work in this gag as a sort of futile, preëmptive revenge on the critics who would never get far enough into the text to notice. His apparent pessimism was borne out: the book was reviewed quite widely, but the overwhelming majority of reviews were either dismissive of its blatant ambition or frustrated by its length and frequent impenetrability. As the novelist William H. Gass put it in his introduction to the 1993 edition of the book, “Its arrival was duly newsed in fifty-five papers and periodicals. Only fifty-three of these notices were stupid.”

Yet Another One-Sentence Book

admin — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 14:22:10 +0000

Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius. Reviewed.

Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman, it is important to mention, is a single, 115-page sentence. While reading it, however, this doesn’t feel unusual: it seems as though Delius simply sought and found the perfect form for his material. (It’s a testament to the work of the translator, Jamie Bulloch, that the form remains powerful in the English version.) The succession of commas echoes our protagonist’s steps as she takes us not only through Rome but also through her looping and circuitous inner monologue.

DFW 50th Birthday Notes

admin — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 12:14:20 +0000

Yesterday would have been David Foster Wallace’s 50th birthday. Some interesting resources from around the web:

Who Was David Foster Wallace? — The Quarterly Conversation’s DFW symposium from last summer, comprising seven essays covering a number of his major works: Wallace’s Masterpiece; (An Homage to) the Difficult Birth and Endless Death of Attention; All its horror and unbound power: David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men; Beautiful Oblivion: Eighteen Notes; Better Left Unfed: Consider the Lobster and the Late Nonfiction; The Pale King and the Terrifying Demands Upon It; The Management of Insignificance: Thoughts on “The Suffering Channel,” Reality, and Shit

The David Foster Wallace Audio Project — tons of Wallace audio, broken out into Interviews & Profiles, Readings, Eulogies & Remembrances, and ‘Brief Interviews’ Staged Readings

Wallace’s library, as collected by the Harry Ransom Center, cataloged on LibraryThing

Review of Proud Beggars by Albert Cossery

admin — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:23:34 +0000

At The National, my review of Proud Beggars, the latest in the miniature explosion of the resurrect-Albert-Cossery industry.

The characters in Albert Cossery’s novels are not judged according to concepts of moral superiority or inferiority. Instead, for Cossery, there are merely degrees of cooperation that operate with or against the social system. This was very much in accordance with the values of this lifelong flâneur, who began life in 1913 in Cairo and passed away in 2008, scattering almost a dozen books of fiction, poetry and theatre across the decades. Claiming that he only wrote out of boredom, he consistently hewed to a philosophy of laziness that would not be out of place among one of the many self-respecting dispossessed that regularly inhabit his fiction.
Topic

In his 1955 novel Proud Beggars, the fourth of Cossery’s books to be republished or retranslated from the original French in the last two years, few words figure so prominently as dignity. The plot centres on a clique of three destitute men in midcentury Cairo who have no inclination to seek wealth. Impoverishment is their chosen status, and they organise their social hierarchy not on money but their ability to look askance at authority, to preserve their pride despite their lowly status . . .

The Next Generation of Cultural Criticism

admin — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 11:59:07 +0000

Another nice article on Zero books, this one in The Guardian. It’s well worth checking out.

Yet talk to smaller radical publishers and a less doomy picture emerges. Whether it’s Verso (who brought out Owen Jones’s Chavs and Paul Mason’s Meltdown), The New Press (Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, a study of the mass incarceration of black Americans, has become a New York Times bestseller), or OR Books (whose titles include the well-received, rapid-response Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America), progressive houses are finding that readers are hungry for incisive analyses of capitalism’s failures, exposés of the flawed infrastructure of liberal democracy, passionate dispatches from the frontlines of social change.

One of the most exciting radical presses at the moment is Zer0 books. A shoestring operation begun in 2009 by the novelist Tariq Goddard, its impressive backlist covers philosophy, political theory, music criticism, contemporary cinema and much more. Its highlights include: Ivor Southwood’s mordant Non-Stop Inertia, about the culture of precariousness that defines the modern workplace; and Marcello Carlin’s The Blue In The Air, gorgeously constructed essays about pop, written by a widower while waiting for his new wife to fly over from Toronto so that they can start their new life together.

Zer0 has been particularly good at identifying a nexus of young, savvy writers – such as Owen Hatherley, Laurie Penny, Nina Power and Mark Fisher (better known as K-Punk) – whose work had previously surfaced mainly on blogs and whose bylines now regularly appear but in mainstream newspapers and journals.

Zer0 titles are commissioned, edited and published quickly – and that energy and velocity carries through to the writing itself. Zer0 writers share an ability to write passionately, avoiding the clunky prose of academia and generating new lines of inquiry rather than just regurgitating critical clichés.

On Those Pleasures Particular to Printed Books

admin — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 14:18:19 +0000

I’m not sure anyone who has tried to read Comic Sans would agree with this:

Literature is made up of words. They can be spoken or written. If spoken, volume and speed and accent can vary. If written, the words can appear in this or that type-face on any material, with any impagination. Joyce is as much Joyce in Baskerville as in Times New Roman. And we can read these words at any speed, interrupt our reading as frequently as we choose. Somebody who reads Ulysses in two weeks hasn’t read it any more or less than someone who reads it in three months, or three years.

It’s somewhat strange to see Tim Parks making what feels like a Luddite case for ebooks. I just came back from a conference where everyone who knew anything about ebooks with in attendance and pontificating endlessly. They didn’t agree on much, but here’s one thing that they did agree on: one of the biggest questions on the minds of people who create ebooks for a living is delivering a good experience to consumers—in other words, the people who think about this stuff the hardest and longest are saying just the opposite of Parks. For them, it’s not a matter of words being words being words; for them, it’s a matter of the printed book being a much more pleasant, intuitive experience than an ebook, and wanting to figure out how to replicate that on ereading platforms.

Likewise, I find this a strange argument:

The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.

I wonder, did Tim Parks ever call for this ultimate, mature experience of prose before he knew he could experience it in an ebook? Perhaps he did, but I doubt it, because before ebooks it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to want some strangely disembodied experience of words on a page. It’s a clever argument, turning the standard critique of ebooks on its head, but I don’t buy it. I’d much rather feel my book (printed or electronic) as an object and have a sense of text before and after that I can flip through as I like. That’s frequently something I do with books as I read them, and I feel the loss when I can’t do it with electronic books.

And lastly, this sentence is simply beneath the intellect of a man as smart as Parks:

Add to that the e-book’s ease of transport, its international vocation (could the Iron Curtain have kept out e-books?), its indestructibility (you can’t burn e-books), its promise that all books will be able to remain forever in print and what is more available at reasonable prices, and it becomes harder and harder to see why the literati are not giving the phenomenon a more generous welcome.

He writes this while: 1) China continues to ban the ebooks it wants to ban; 2) Amazon et al. can strip ebooks from your device and/or alter them per their whim; and 3) how do ebooks remain “in print” forever—that simply makes no sense.

But most importantly, what evidence does Parks have that the literati are not giving ebooks a warm welcome? I just got through watching Bowker report that the strongest (and virtually only) growth in ebook sales is in fiction. Moreover, Bowker tells us that the people who are responsible for the lion’s share of ebook purchases are the same people who buy most of the printed books. If this is the literati shunning ebooks, then I wonder what it would take for them to embrace them.

Varamo by Cesar Aira Publishing Next Week

admin — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 12:06:57 +0000

The latest translation of Cesar Aira—Varamo—is publishing next week. (Too bad they didn’t pub it this week, then everyone could download it and read it over the Presidents’ Day weekend.) This is another strong work from Aira, definitely one of the most distinct of his books to have been translated so far.

For more you can have a look at the review of Varamo we ran in The Quarterly Conversation. And whle you’re there, have a look at more of our Aira coverage:

The Seamstress and the Wind

Ghosts

The Literary Alchemy of César Aira

The Chris Andrews Interview

Review of Anti-Matter

admin — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 17:25:09 +0000

Yesterday my review of Ben Jeffrey’s Anti-Matter: Michel Houellebecq and Depressive Realism ran at Bookforum. It’s a great read and I definitely recommend it, even if I had some disagreements with Ben and his conclusions. For more on that, read the review.

Just as Houellebecq is obsessed with what he considers art’s inability to help us transcend the empty materiality of our lives, Jeffery is fascinated with the problem of what he calls “our inarticulacy” in the face of great art—the inability to express what exactly we find so compelling about a painting or work of literature. This aphasia, Jeffery contends, can sap the work’s “transformational power”; it can make us feel unworthy or pretentious and force us to resort to baser pleasures, like sex. Like anything that exerts power over us, great art has the capacity to unsettle if we cannot satisfactorily account for it. This “is the fundamental reason why deep attachment to art can seem so stupid,” Jeffery writes, “why it gets so frustrating to try to explain what the ‘real’ worth of art is, even to oneself.” The problem, then, is this: In order to adequately explain your love of Beckett’s The Unnamable, wouldn’t you have to be at least as good a writer as Beckett?

Deafness to the First-Person

admin — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:37:58 +0000

John Jeremiah Sullivan at the LARoB discussing Pulphead.

Jonathan Franzen and several other authors made a list of the ten things they’ve learned in writing fiction for The Guardian a year or so ago, and he suggested reserving use of the first person only for an “irresistible” or “distinctive” voice. You’ve made ample use of the first person pronoun in your pieces, and have been praised for your skillful use of it. How do you manage it?

Well, it’s something that has taken me a long time to get to. It certainly wasn’t like that in the beginning. I sort of had to tame the first person I guess. It’s a process of training your ear. You know when you listen to your own voice on a tape it sounds strange? You can’t really hear it the way other people hear it. You’re trying to do the exact same thing with the first person. You want to hear it the way a disembodied third person observer would hear it. What does it sound like in the larger scrum of human communication? You’re trying to tune in to that and it takes time.

Also, I think Franzen there is registering the power of the first person to sink a piece, and I share that; I’m hyper-sensitive to that. Sometimes it’s one of those things where you think you’re vigilante about it, but you can have a deafness to your own first person, even though the first person of another person shrieks at you. I try to stay on guard toward the first person wanting to be there for it’s own sake. It’s one of those things. It’s good for your writing to have a healthy skepticism of the first person and to want to make it work for its pay. It’s like, okay, if you’re going to come in here and start talking in the middle of my piece, saying “I” and pretending to be me, then you better be working, you better be taking me somewhere the piece couldn’t go. So when I use it in my pieces, it’s usually when I feel something in my experience is going to give the reader access to the subject. For example, in the Christian Rock piece, I get into my high school evangelical phase because I feel like this is an experience I shared with these kids. I don’t have to pretend sympathy with them. I was there. And, for instance, in the Axl piece, writing about growing up in rural, white-trash, Southern Indiana suddenly became quite relevant to understanding Axl Rose.

The Value of a Good Writer-Editor Relationship

admin — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 11:59:08 +0000

Right here.

This diffidence never left him: when he was preparing his last book for the press, Leibowitz writes, Williams grew so anguished that he “tore the manuscript to pieces and dumped them in the trash.” His wife had to fish out the fragments and mail them to his publisher, James Laughlin of New Directions, “who put them together like a jigsaw puzzle.”

And then this:

Laughlin referred to Williams, one of his most prized authors, as “a non-cutaneous man.” So are most poets, perhaps, but not many have had to contend with the degree of neglect and condescension that plagued Williams throughout his career. Spring and All, the 1923 collection that included three of his masterpieces—”By the road to the contagious hospital,” “The Red Wheelbarrow,” and “To Elsie”—was published by a small press in an edition of 324 copies, “most of which went unsold.” A collection of stories called The Knife of the Times appeared in 1932; a doctor friend of Williams’s later found a hundred of them being sold by a hawker on the Atlantic City boardwalk for 15 cents apiece.