House of Mirth

The dignity of decay

2010-10-21T09:40:00.005-04:00

Here's Joseph Brodsky chatting with Sven Birkerts back in 1979. The subject is Venice, whose ample and aqueous charms the poet would later chronicle in Watermark. The main thing about Venice, explains Brodsky, "is that the place is so beautiful that you can live there without being in love." He goes on to explore the diminishing effects of all that beauty, which is intertwined with the city's perennial, time-lapse decay:

It is interesting to watch the tourists who arrive there. The beauty is such that they get somewhat dumbfounded. What they do initially is hit the stores to dress themselves--Venice has the best boutiques in Europe--but when they emerge with all those things on, still there is an unbearable incongruity between the people, the crowd, and what's around. Because no matter how well they're dressed and how well they're endowed by nature, they lack the dignity, which is partially the dignity of decay, of that artifice around them. It makes you realize that what people can make with their hands is a lot better than they are themselves.

Django

2010-10-20T11:16:00.005-04:00

Ever since I came across this tremendous photo, I've been on a Django Reinhardt jag (the latest one, anyway). It dates from 1946, when the Gypsy wizard made his only visit to the United States and toured with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. In the photo, Reinhardt watches several of the band's virtuosi play cards, while the great Johnny Hodges works on his patented expression of boredom. As a guest artist, Reinhardt wasn't obliged to don the white jacket and playful tie. Nor, supposedly, could he handle the colorful boxer shorts worn by his American colleagues. Discovering these florid undergarments during a train trip with the band, he dropped by Ellington's compartment to ask about them--and found the maestro sporting an even gaudier pair.

Reinhardt expected to be greeted as a celebrity in America. For that reason, he didn't bother to bring one of his trademark Selmer Modèle Jazz guitars with him--surely he would be showered with instruments by American manufacturers. He was not. The disappointed Reinhardt made do with borrowed Gibson L-5, an amplified hollow-body whose fat sound was worlds away from the cutting, silvery Selmer. He considered the American guitar a giant step down, and practically swooned with gratitude when his manager showed up with the Selmer several weeks later: "At least it's got tone, you can hear the chords like you can on the piano. Don't talk to me any more about their casseroles--their 'tinpot' guitars! Listen to this, it speaks like a cathedral!" (The latter quote, along with the anecdote about the undies above, comes from this fascinating site.)

In any case, Reinhardt worked wonders with the casserole. Two of his performances with the Ellington orchestra were recorded onto acetate disks, and one of them--at the Civic Opera House in Chicago on November 10--is unusually crisp and vivid for the era, thanks to the use of overhead microphones. You can hear Django's entire four-song set on Duke Ellington: The Great Concerts, Chicago 1946 (Nimbus). But his scintillating take on "Honeysuckle Rose" is also available on this YouTube video. Listen to him adapting his style to the amplified instrument, with much less vibrato and a stripped-down approach to harmony (on the acoustic, he's always buttressing his single-note fireworks with chordal accents). Check out the roller-coaster runs at 1:01, and the sheer suavity of his sound. Reinhardt hung around Manhattan for a couple of weeks when the tour was over, performing at Cafe Society Uptown, and expressed interest in playing with the bebop vanguard, including Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. Neither were in town at the time (just imagine Parker and Reinhardt trading fours, not to mention the cloudy acetates that would have long since become a jazz collector's Holy Grail.) A number of promised engagements in California fell through. And meanwhile, Reinhardt had found America itself wanting. Charles Delaunay, the guitarist's manager and eventual biographer, put it this way:

When I asked him later for his impressions of America, Django seemed to me to have lost most of his illusions. He was far from impressed by the American mentality, above all that of the women. Even the cars no longer had their old appeal for him; they were all too much alike.

The bit about the cars is particularly poignant. Clearly the Art Deco curves and chrome accents of the previous decade had turned Django's head. If he had stuck around two more years, he could have seen the sui generis 1948 Tucker Torpedo roll out of the showroom. Instead the disillusioned guitarist sailed back to France in early 1947, never to return.

Occupational hazards

2010-10-19T10:24:00.006-04:00

Just as there is no reason to start blogging, there is no reason to stop. So I'll get rolling again with two savory snippets. First, an observation: there are moments when the writing life seems like a parade of small degradations. Can any other profession take such a toll on the ego? Well, yes. This is from William Knoedelseder's I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era. The year is 1977, and Richard Lewis is on the road, opening for Sonny and Cher. The golden duo is paid up to $175,000 per night, while Lewis is on a weekly salary of $500. No, that's not the degrading part. This is:

At the state fair in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he had to perform outdoors at 4:00 PM with a roller coaster running full bore behind him and circus animals being paraded around a race track between him and the audience. He was supposed to do thirty minutes, but the distractions were so extreme that he raced through his routine and bolted from the stage after ten minutes, sure that it meant the end of his career. He was consoled by a grizzled patron who told him, "Trust me, kid. Bill Cosby was here last week, and he only did fifteen minutes."

Next up, E. Howard Hunt. To be honest, I'm not shedding any tears for this fixture of Richard Nixon's Praetorian Guard and goon squad. I don't really care about his self-esteem. Yet I experienced just a hint of fellow feeling when I read about his 1972 visit to ITT lobbyist Dita Beard, who had implicated the Nixon Administration in some antitrust monkey business. Beard was in a Denver hospital, being "treated for a heart ailment" (if you believe Time) or simply keeping her head down. Hunt's mission was to pressure her into retracting her story. Here's the account from Mark Feldstein's Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture:

Hunt was warned to approach Beard in a physical disguise with a phony ID because "we don't want you traced back to the White House." To pay for his expenses, he was handed an envelope filled with cash from Nixon's reelection campaign: his flight to Denver was booked by a White House secretary. Hunt arrived at Beard's hospital room near midnight wearing makeup and an ill-fitting reddish brown wig, his voice disguised by an electronic alteration device provided by the CIA. The not-so-covert operative looked "very eerie," Beard's son remembered, with his hairpiece on "cockeyed, like he put it on in a dark car."

Actually, the cockeyed toupee would seem to be the most normal part of Hunt's outfit. Reading about these Keystone Kops antics, you don't know whether to be amused or horrified--this was the so-called unitary executive in action. Hunt went on to serve 33 months in prison for his role in the Watergate burglaries, then wrote a gazillion spy novels after his release. (Gore Vidal reviewed a baker's dozen of Hunt's novels in this 1973 essay, along with, uh, related titles by Arthur Bremer and Tad Szulc. NYRB subscribers only, alas.)

And now for something completely different. My review of We Were There: An Eyewitness History of the Twentieth Century recently appeared on the The Book, a literary blog launched last year by The New Republic. I enjoyed this composite portrait, but grumbled about the editor's U.K.-flavored favoritism:

It is also no surprise that Fox views the century through a British lens. There is no need to complain about the preponderance of English voices, not when the likes of Robert Graves, Evelyn Waugh, Robert Byron, Ronald Blythe, Gertrude Bell, George Orwell, and James Fenton are in the choir. Still, it is a little strange to see Britain’s reconquest of the Falkland Islands in 1982 trotted out as a major event of the century and "the last of the British imperial wars." Why not include the American invasion of Grenada the following year, or the toppling of Manuel Noriega and his capture as part of Operation Nifty Package (really) in 1989?

You can read the whole thing here.

Double trouble: Jalopy clip, Please Please Me

2010-04-30T11:06:00.006-04:00

The clip below, expertly shot and edited by Jay Irani, captures the very first (and rather rickety) song in the set, "My One And Only Love." Karen is right on target, spreading her mystic charms. The rest of us are taking a freestyle approach to tempo, as if we all just finished reading I'm Okay, You're Okay. Things did get a little tighter in subsequent songs--really. The highlight for me is my panicky look right before my two solo choruses. The routine I had worked out, a simple paraphrase of the melody, had vanished from my brain. I got through it anyway.

Since this other clip is already a worldwide smash over on Facebook, I thought I would add it here as well. I was trying for a solemn, sweet, Mormon Tabernacle Choir effect. There's some poetic justice at work, since the Beatles originally conceived of this song as slow ballad, in the ripe-but-not-rotting manner of Roy Orbison. George Martin told them to speed it up: a smart move. Still, I like this approach as well. Every man his own glee club, is my motto.

Jalopy gig, Ives: Part the Second

2010-04-26T08:38:00.005-04:00

With alarming frequency, I have dreams in which I'm prepping for a musical performance, then show up for the actual event with no idea what I'm doing. This is, of course, just one more variation on the panicky, deer-in-the-headlights dream that most sentient human beings have from time to time. But I have it often, and in fairly grandiose forms. Sometimes I'm supposed to have composed an entire symphonic piece, something dense and gnarled and Mahlerian, with a long orgasmic adagio at the end. I have, in the dream, a very detailed sense of the music and am looking forward to conducting it, scrunching up my face in that Leonard Bernstein fashion during the big brass fanfares but mainly smiling. On other occasions I'm playing in a rock band. At least once that I can remember, I was in the Beatles. Sadly, I can't recall whether I was a fifth Beatle, in an intrusive, parasitical, Murray-the-K kind of way, or whether I was being welcomed aboard with full Fab Four privileges. (Come to think of it, there's a third option: I could have been a temp, a white Billy Preston.) But at the moment of truth, when the audience has filed in and the lights have gone down, I realize that I've screwed up. I can't do it. Either I fudge my way through the opening bars or wake up with a powerful sense of disappointment. Oh, I'm often partially dressed or naked during that final sequence. I never said I was subtle.

Anyway, I kept my clothes on during the Jalopy gig last night. And despite the lack of rehearsal, and the sometimes mushy groove, and my failure to cue Seth Fahey for his clarinet solo on "Mistress and Maid" with a brisk, whiplash-inducing snap of my head, it was still pretty fun. I got through my vocal performance with only one botched line (I think). In the photo, I'm looking at some sheet music on the floor, trying to figure out exactly where we are. Karen has her hands locked together in a prayerful, Mahalia Jackson manner and is probably punching out "My One and Only Love"--the kind of song I would have considered sheer treacle in my foolish youth but now adore. It's funny, that softening of sensibility, which comes from an increasing sense that people are delicate constructions and that you don't need to poke them in the ribs to communicate. I'll get back to that. The brief film clip below is from "Dream A Little Dream of Me." Again, the Mamas and the Papas recorded this Thirties chestnut as a campy frolic, and something odd happened: it came out straight and strangely heart-lifting, with its wistful adumbration of fading stars and sunbeams and sycamore trees. We did it faster, and the clip includes just a little bit of my guitar solo.

And what, you ask, does Charles Ives have to do with this? Well, last night, after beating a quick retreat from the theater, and after Nina and Nat and Caroline and Kerry told me it really hadn't gone that badly after all, I opened up Jan Swafford's biography again. I was hoping to find some more material about the hidden charms of amateur performance. Screwing up is good, right? ("A man of genius makes no mistakes," wrote Joyce, in a passage I memorized as a teenager, never imagining it would come in so handy as I pondered the daisy chain of mistakes that more or less makes up my life, forgetting that this get-out-of-jail-free card applied only to men of genius. "His errors are volitional and are the portals to discovery.") Instead, what I found in the Ives was this paragraph from the introduction the composer wrote to 114 Songs. Some of the items in this collection are virtually impossible to sing. Even Yma Sumac would have bowed her head and cried at the impacted tone clusters of "Majority." But Ives, his tongue firmly in cheek, defends the right of a song to be unsingable:

A song has a few rights, the same as other ordinary citizens. If it feels like walking along the left-hand side of the street, passing the door of physiology or sitting on the curb, why not let it?... Should it not be free at times from the dominion of the thorax, the diaphragm, the ear, and other points of interest? If it wants to beat around the valley, to throw stones up at the pyramids, or to sleep in the park, should it not have some immunity from a Nemesis, a Remeses, or a policeman? Should it not have a chance to sing to itself, if it can sing?... If it happens to feel like trying to fly where humans cannot fly, to sing what cannot be sung, to walk in a cave on all fours, or to tighten up its girth in blind hope and faith and try to scale mountains that are not, who shall stop it?

Who indeed? Don't look at me.

Jalopy gig, Ives

2010-04-20T08:40:00.008-04:00

Despite my shy and reclusive nature, I'll be appearing at 6:00 PM this Sunday, April 25, at the Jalopy Theater in Brooklyn. The stars of the show are David Hajdu, reading selections from Heroes and Villains, and Karen Oberlin, doing the vocal voodoo that she does so well. But I'll be supplying grace notes on the electric guitar and lap steel, along with my fellow sideman Seth Fahey on bass and clarinet. God willing, I'll also be singing on one song--something not heard in public since the early days of the Reagan administration. You can see three-quarters of the ensemble in this photo, taken by the very able Tom Stoelker, on a zany rooftop construction of girders and water pipes that resembled a set for Love, American Style.

If you're concerned about my singing (I certainly am), just bear in mind this bit from Jan Swafford's Charles Ives: A Life in Music. As a child, Ives was urged by his father to appreciate the rough-hewn aspect of amateur performance. Referring to an acquaintance's tuneless bellowing at a camp meeting, George Ives told his son: "Watch him closely and reverently, look into his face and hear the music of the ages. Don't pay too much attention to the sounds--for if you do, you may miss the music. You won't get a wild, heroic ride to heaven on pretty little sounds." Swafford goes on to add:

His father's cues turned those experiences of amateur music, especially hymn singing, into some of the elemental impressions of Charles Ives's boyhood. He could not separate the music on the page from the way people sang or played it. Even the coarseness of amateur performance seemed to Ives a sign of authenticity. The mistakes were part of the music; sometimes the mistakes were the music of the ages.

Perhaps I'm raising the bar too high here. In any case, come one, come all! It should be fun.

Sticking up for hubby

2010-04-18T21:33:00.005-04:00

I've written before about the potential pitfalls of the Amazon customer review system: namely, the opportunities for logrolling, anonymous attacks, and nepotistic boosterism. Back in 2004, when the company's Canadian's site temporarily (and accidentally) disclosed the identities of its citizen critics, I noted:

A fairly large number of authors had gotten glowing testimonials from friends, husbands, wives, colleagues and paid flacks. A few had "reviewed" their own books. The novelist John Rechy, among those caught in flagrante, pleaded the equivalent of self-defense: He was simply fighting fire with anonymous fire. Other miscreants cited the ancient tradition of self-puffery, practiced by both Walt Whitman (who wrote not one but three unsigned reviews of Leaves of Grass, and quoted them all in the second edition) and Anthony Burgess (who paid for the stunt with his job).

None of these practices, which exist to a lesser degree in the archaic world of ink-and-paper journalism, will bring the world crashing down on our heads. And caveat lector is always a useful mantra to keep in mind when reading anonymous comments on any website or blog. Still, according to these pieces in the Guardian and the Telegraph, a British attorney and senior law lecturer at Cambridge University has now set the bar just a wee bit higher when it comes to customer-reviewing pratfalls. The perp, Stephanie Palmer, is married to the distinguished historian Orlando Figes. In an excess, perhaps, of conjugal zeal, she has made a habit of praising her husband's books on Amazon's UK site, signing these assessments as "Historian."

Of The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (2008), for example, she writes: "The opportunity to hear these Russians speak of these things as individuals, in their own voices, is overwhelming, and a gift to all of us. Orlando Figes visits their ordeals with enormous compassion, and he brings their history to life with his superb story-telling skills. I hope he writes forever." On Amazon's American site, "Historian" supplied a different but no less glowing review, which included plugs for her husband's earlier books: "Figes is a great writer--anyone who has read Natasha's Dance or the multi prize-winning A People's Tragedy will tell you that." (The British reviews were promptly scrubbed from the Amazon site, but can still be seen on this cached page. For the moment, the American review remains on the site.)

If Palmer had limited herself to puffing her husband's books, she probably would have gone undetected. And really, who would have blamed her for fending off his equally anonymous detractors? Unfortunately, she took to drubbing books by his academic rivals, including Robert Service, whose history of world communism, Comrades, she flicked away as impenetrable dross: "This is an awful book. It is very poorly written and dull to read." Turning to the same author's Stalin: A Biography, she engaged in a similar round of ankle-biting before recommending some alternate choices to consumers: "This is not a book that places Stalin in the context of his times, or makes his rise to power, his terror and his cult, understandable. For that it is better to go to Montefiore and to Figes's The Whisperers."

Well, she got busted. For the full details, see the articles mentioned above--the short version is that after several of Palmer's victims complained, and suggested that Figes himself was the culprit, she confessed. Her husband supposedly knew nothing of her online advocacy. Amazon pulled the actual reviews off the site. No doubt some very interesting conversations have been going on in the Figes-Palmer breakfast nook. Meanwhile, the Telegraph quotes critic, novelist, and Mahler fiend Norman Lebrecht on the outcome: "This cuts to the heart of the shady pseudonymous culture of Amazon reviews. This is a real breakthrough, an unprecedented triumph for truth and transparency online." I wish I could share his sense of triumph. But this is essentially a hiccup, just like the Canadian fracas back in 2004, and will do nothing to change the duck-and-cover style of reviewing at Amazon, nor the deeply entrenched role of anonymity on the Web.

UPDATE: Whoops, Orlando Figes has now confessed to writing the carping reviews himself, according to this AP dispatch. Presumably he found the spectacle of his wife falling on her sword too distasteful, and decided to fess up. In a written statement, he took "full responsibility" for the sock-puppet fiasco:

I am ashamed of my behavior, and don't entirely understand why I acted as I did. It was stupid--some of the reviews I now see were small-minded and ungenerous but they were not intended to harm. This crisis has exposed some health problems, though I offer that more as explanation than excuse. I need some time now to reflect on what I have done and the consequences of my actions with medical help.

Recording the Duke, gravity

2010-04-08T08:39:00.004-04:00

If I start messing with YouTube videos again, I'll never stop, but I'm making an exception for this 1937 Paramount short, "Record Making With Duke Ellington." It's a delicious document for two reasons. First, it offers a rare glimpse of a stellar ensemble in the studio, rehearsing the train-whistle mimesis at the beginning of "Daybreak Express." Ellington had made his classic recording of this piece four years earlier for RCA Victor, not long before his fraying relationship with the label unraveled completely. In his notes to the Centennial Edition, Steven Lasker recounts the coup de grace: "A recording supervisor had inadvertently left the talk button on in the control booth. Not realizing that this enabled the musicians to hear him, the executive advised the engineer to get set for 'some Saturday night nigger music.' The band packed up and left." Having temporarily parted ways with RCA Victor, Ellington spent the next few years as something of an artistic itinerant, recording for a smorgasbord of small and large labels, including two set up by his manager, Irving Mills: Master and Variety. Which brings us back to the short, a promotional vehicle for Variety. I wish there was more footage of the rehearsal, with Ellington chiding the band ("This is not a freight train!") and Johnny Hodges and Freddie Guy vying for the most bored facial expression. Still, it's a precious glimpse of history--and the pep-rally narration of the recording process is nothing to sneeze at. I like the moment at 4:04, when a blob of "special plastic material" is placed into the waffle-iron-like stamping press:

Given the date, the recording technology looks surprisingly spiffy. Thirteen years later, when a young George Martin began his career at EMI, he was surprised to discover the Dickensian apparatus under the hood:

The routine of another recording take began again. Charlie Anderson, the engineer, began winding a large crank, and a heavy weight rose slowly to the ceiling. As he did so, Oscar walked through to tell the musicians that he wanted another performance, murmuring a few words of encouragement to them. In the control room a fresh warm wax disc was taken from the cabinet and placed on the turntable, and the engineer checked his settings. Then he shut his little window, released a brake, and spun the turntable. Slowly the weight began to fall....

To my new and untutored eye, the whole set-up seemed incredibly crude. I had thought, for instance, that the use of falling weights for motive power had gone out with Galileo. The answer, it seemed, was that electric motors in those days were not reliable enough to guarantee a completely steady and "wow-free" 78 revolutions a minute. Gravity, on the other hand, knew no hiccups.

The manufacturing process was even cruder, Martin recalls. Now, the factory pictured in the video is hardly a high-tech clean room. There were probably enough chemical spills and environmental hazards to give a latter-day OSHA official the cold sweats. But Oliver Twist could have worked in the facility Martin describes:

Before I visited the works where the records were pressed, I expected immaculate, white-coated operatives standing by stainless steel, plastic-topped counters, pressing buttons and watching the automatic moulding of the discs. How wrong I was. Reality was a hot and dirty factory, with men stripped to the waist, bathed in sweat and forever grimy with the black carbon dust which hung in the air.

Debenedetti affair

2010-04-06T11:33:00.006-04:00

I'm late to this particular party, which has already been thoroughly explored by Judith Thurman at The New Yorker (here and here), but it's an irresistible scenario: a young Italian journalist publishes controversial interviews with a host of big names, including Philip Roth, John Grisham, Gore Vidal, Toni Morrison, Gunter Grass, and Nadine Gordimer. In several cases, these interviews include ideological spitballs aimed at American political culture in general or Barack Obama in particular. And then, lo and behold, it appears that the journalist, Tomasso Debenedetti, was making up these conversations out of whole cloth. Roth and Grisham immediately denied ever having met him, and since then, numerous other interview subjects have denounced his work as pure ventriloquism.

Thurman contacted Debenedetti in Rome via cell phone. In the course of their exchange, he engaged in some hilarious ducking and weaving, while insisting that the interviews were all genuine:

Debenedetti said he was completely "shocked and saddened" that all these writers would have denied the veracity of his reporting. When I asked him about the interviews with Roth and Grisham, he flatly denied having invented them, and told me that Roth and Grisham were lying for "political" reasons--because their views on Obama would make them unpopular with left-leaning intellectuals. Roth, he added, might have decided that it was impolitic to express hostility toward Obama because it might spoil his chances for the Nobel.

I then read the list of other writers who had denied or questioned his conversations with them. In every case, Debenedetti asserted that he had invented nothing. When I asked if he could produce any recordings or notes from his interviews, he laughed and, admitting that it sounded like a "tired" excuse, told me that he had lost the tapes in some cases, and in others had "thrown them away."

That's right, the dog ate his homework. What's most interesting to ponder at this point is Debenedetti's motive for this journalistic crime spree. He was paid peanuts for the interviews, so we can rule out filthy lucre as a driving force. There is also the modest (unless you're Oriana Fallaci) fame that accrues to an interviewer of the high and mighty, or at least extravagantly talented.

But no, Thurman pointed to more fertile ground when she noted that Debenedetti represents the third generation of an Italian literary dynasty. His grandfather, Giacomo Debenedetti, was a celebrated critic, translator of Proust, and an editor at Meridiano di Roma, whose two short books on the deportation of Roman Jews by the Germans are still in print. (He was also an early booster of the poet Umberto Saba, whose daughter kept this photo of the critic in a subsequently destroyed diary.)

Next came the fabricator's father, Antonio Debenedetti, the author not only of several works of fiction but of a highly regarded memoir of his own father, Giacomino. His fiction wears its postmodernist heart on its sleeve, with such titles as Monsieur Kitsch and In the Absence of Mister Plot. But he is also a regular contributor to Corriere della sera, where the prose tends to be less puckish, and may have actually offered his son a paradoxical role model in the course of this 2002 interview in Italia Libri. How, the interviewer asked, did he first get interested in writing?

You could say that I began to write before I knew how to write. That will sound like a curious statement--but at the age of five, I was already assembling little notebooks out of folded paper, which I clipped together and pretended were my own books.... I dreamed of becoming a writer: in an essay I wrote in the third grade, I foresaw my own literary glory in the guise of a future Pascoli or Carducci, the authors I knew at the time. I still remember this episode well, because my essay was published in the school magazine.

My suggestion about the anxiety of influence was tongue-in-cheek. Yet it's almost as if Tomasso Debenedetti inherited his father's dreams without the actual will to carry them out. Or more likely, the long string of bogus interviews was a deliberate attempt to blow the family legacy to smithereens. After all, in the age of the Internet, such dissembling couldn't be hidden forever. Sooner or later, one of his imaginary interlocutors would catch wind of the fakery, and then Debenedetti's work would be exposed for what it was: a game of pretend, no different than his father's childish ouevre, without the excuse of being a toddler. The Oedipal fallout from this mess will be no fun at all (according to Thurman's interview, father and son were no longer on speaking terms even prior to Tomasso's exposure.)

Meanwhile, I found myself wondering whether a shred of Debenedetti's interviews could be authentic. Couldn't he have spoken to somebody, at least as a break from the hard labor of making up conversations from scratch? I posed the question to a prominent Italian journalist, who preferred not to be identified, and in his eloquent if idiosyncratic English, he dismissed the very idea:

[Debenedetti] is a complete fabulist. Not even [the] smell of journalism here (he cannot explain why there is no voice record of his skyrocketing interviews.) The asshole thinks that if he keeps denying, he could get out of this mess in a way or another. Please don't let him.

friendship, goose eyes

2010-04-01T16:28:00.007-04:00

A while back I was reading Phillip Lopate's Notes On Sontag, a compact mixture of criticism (some of it fairly critical, especially when it comes to Sontag's fiction) and personal reminiscence. It was the latter that really grabbed me. I had a single encounter with Susan Sontag in January 2000, about five years before she died. It was in the midst of an extraordinary cold snap in Manhattan, and her publicist had given me the incorrect address, so I found myself wandering the frigid blocks to the west of her apartment building. There were loading docks, parking lots, a factory that made products out of injected plastic--surely Sontag couldn't live in such a place? Feeling increasingly anxious, I located a pay phone, whose square metal buttons were frozen and non-responsive. I took my gloves off, warmed the buttons with my hand, dialed the publicist, and was directed to the correct address. And there Sontag, who I imagined to be a forbidding figure, was kind and welcoming. Within a few minutes, in fact, I was thoroughly irradiated by what I can only call charisma. She made you want to be her friend. This didn't mean you were her friend--only that you felt an irresistible urge to become one. And that brings me back to Lopate, who was repeatedly hit by the same urge, then left out in the cold:

Over the years, whenever I would read an essay of hers praising some writer or filmmaker I loved, I would think, "My God, we have so many tastes in common! We both care about the same things! Wouldn't it be nice if we could be friends?" I would fantasize having our dinners around town or dropping in at her apartment and comparing notes on the latest cultural doings. But of course any friendship would have to be predicated on mutual respect, since I could never bring myself to play the flunky. On my end, I would also have to surrender some of my own judgmental wariness about her and trust her more. Above all, you look into the eyes of an acquaintance and see permission to take it further, or not; I never saw that permission in Sontag's eyes. I don't think she was even looking for it in my eyes. So a friendship between us never came to pass.

He's correct. There is a moment in any embryonic friendship when things change. A subliminal signal is passed back and forth. You drop your guard, you feel an instinctive and possibly foolish affinity for a person who, after all, you hardly know. It's a rare and beautiful sensation. I would call it a painless version of falling in love--love plus Novocaine--except that the end of a friendship can be very rough.

I was sure that Diana Athill had described something similar in Stet, her superb memoir of life in the editorial trenches. But where? I scanned the entire book in a mindless way, trying to read and not read at the same time. To my annoyance, I kept getting detained by paragraphs like this one, which details the acquisition of a stuffy British publishing operation by Athill's own firm:

One of the more burdensome books we inherited from [the old firm] was a pointless compilation called Memorable Balls, a title so much tittered over that we thought of leaving it out when we were arranging our stand at The Sunday Times's first book fair. Finally one copy was shoved into an inconspicuous corner--where the Queen Mother, who had opened the fair, instantly noticed it. Picking it up, she exclaimed with delight: "Oh, what a tempting title!"

Priceless. Still, I couldn't afford to read the whole book, I didn't have time, and redoubled my efforts to stop latching onto particular bits of text. I was, as I discovered in William Langewiesche's Fly By Wire: The Geese, The Glide, The Miracle on the Hudson, behaving like a goose--at least an aspiring goose. The author (who I once interviewed) reports:

[B]ecause geese lack foveae (the part of the eye in humans and birds of prey that is responsible for sharply focused central vision) it is believed that they may see everything with equal sharpness without having to move their eyes. This means they would see every word on this page simultaneously, though comprehension would be a problem.

Now I know who, or what, to blame: those damn foveae. I was beginning to wonder if I had simply made up the passage in the Athill book. It's happened before: I have a very distinct memory of some pithy formulation, some vivid image, that turns out not to exist. I've dreamed it up, then longed for the imprimatur of somebody smarter than me to say it. Reverse plagiarism: attributing your words to another person. Try it, you'll like it. But wait--I found the passage! It's about Alfred Chester, the charismatic, wig-wearing enfant terrible of postwar American letters. Athill was the British editor for his books, which sold no copies. This can put a crimp in a relationship. Yet she found his friendship an enthralling experience, with its instant, almost reckless lowering of the drawbridge:

Meeting him, whether alone or at parties, reminded me of the excitement and alarm felt by Tolstoy's Natasha Rostov on meeting her seducer and knowing at once that between her and this man there were none of the usual barriers. Something like that shock of sexual accessibility can exist on the level of friendship: an instant recognition that with this person nothing need be hidden. I felt this with Alfred (although there was a small dark pit of secrecy in the middle of the openness: I would never have spoken to him about his wig).

plunging, Kincaid

2010-03-31T10:32:00.004-04:00

I noted yesterday that I couldn't cut my finger without thinking of Randall Jarrell cutting his finger. For better or worse, I seem to be constant (and sometimes reluctant) communion with the books I've read. There's that great line of Milosz's: "[F]or our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, / and invisible guests come in and out at will." Interviewing the poet in 2000, I asked him about that very line, and he replied: "When writing [Milosz's ABC's], I tried to be as passive and open as possible to the haphazard appearances of persons who are no longer alive. In other words, I treated myself as an instrument that would serve to mark their existence." This is a little different from what I'm describing--he's allowing the honored dead to use him as a megaphone--but many of those departed voices are writers, so I suppose it comes to the same thing.

In my previous post, for example, I mentioned my father plunging the drain in our shower. It is impossible for me to picture that scene without a passage from Nicholson Baker's A Book of Matches flitting through my brain. The drain in the narrator's shower has clogged. He grabs the nearby plunger and goes to work, with results that are almost sensually gratifying:

It made the most wonderful deep squirting noises--huge sucking, bubbling gulps and gasps and noggin-snorts as several pounds of water were thrust down into the drain and forced up in a foul fountain out the overflow valve higher up on the top. I began working with the water, as if I were rocking a car when it's stuck in the driveway, sucking, pushing, sucking, pushing. At one point the drain seemed even worse, and I found that all the turbulence had caused the drain lid to turn and fall shut. When I opened it again and was more careful to center the plunger over the mouth of the drain, I got real results: after one blast, to which I gave the full might of my arms, a supernova of black fragments came up, God, and then more with a second plunge, and I knew that without chemicals, without rooting snakes, with only strength and cunning, I had made that water move. I held still for a second to listen: yes, the purling of water curving away into the pipes. Later there was even a brief vortex, like a rainbow after a storm.

"Noggin-snorts" might be my favorite touch here: a noggin is a person's head, of course, but also a small quantity of booze. It's one of those multiplex metaphors, staggering around with its shirttails out. The drain is a drunk; no, the drain is a drink. I also like the rooting snake and the rainbow--bits of biblical frosting. But why should this scene have stuck in my head, along with the narrator's earlier, shower-related disclosure that he likes to sing "Eight Days A Week" to the drone of the ceiling fan? It's not logical.

Nor is the fact that I've been haunted by the first sentence of Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother ever since I read it in 1996: "My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind." The first half, up to the semicolon, is bad and sad. The second half is frightening, both for what it says and how it says it. What I mean is, there's a formal perfection to those words: "bleak" and "black" have an almost familial relationship, very appropriate to the matter at hand, while the rhyme of "back" and "black" seals up the sentence in a kind of sonic casket. None of this would matter if Kincaid hadn't cut right to the heart of a scary, permanent emptiness. Beyond repair. At moments of major or minor desolation, the sentence tends to float into view.

Charles Darwin = Travis Bickle, cut, stato d'animo

2010-03-30T11:06:00.003-04:00

Last night I was walking down the hallway, and for no particular reason I grabbed The Autobiography of Charles Darwin off the shelf. Well, perhaps there was a reason: I had recently watched Master and Commander with a feverish teenager, and the scenes in the Galápagos Islands--shot, to my amazement, on location, with authentically freaky lizards and flightless cormorants--must have stuck in my head. I opened the Darwin to page 10, and found this recollection of the author's trigger-happy youth:

When at Cambridge I used to practice throwing up my gun to my shoulder before a looking glass to see that I threw it up straight. Another and better plan was to get a friend to wave about a lighted candle, and then to fire at it with a cap on the nipple, and if the aim was accurate the little puff of air would blow out the candle. The explosion of the cap caused a sharp crack, and I was told that the tutor of the college remarked, "What an extraordinary thing it is, Mr Darwin seems to spend hours in cracking a horse-whip in his room, for I often hear the crack when I pass under his windows."

As any musket geek will tell you, this Victorian Travis Bickle was firing his weapon with a percussion cap, but no ammunition. The nipple is a hollow metal passage at the rear of the barrel, through which the flame from the percussion cap would ordinarily travel and ignite the main powder charge. Sigh. Later in life, a disgusted Darwin gave up hunting. It wasn't the sight of blood that turned him off. It was the discovery of a small bird on the forest floor, which had been shot the day before and was now just barely hanging on. Hope was not the thing with feathers. Darwin, who loved nothing better than to gun down an entire posse of snipe in one go, resolved to hunt no more.

For me, on the other hand, the sight of blood is an ongoing problem. Two weeks ago, I gashed my right pinky while washing out a drinking glass. The glass was an old one, from the Fifties, and came apart very neatly into two sharp-edged fragments. I bled and bled, even as I applied pressure with dozens of paper towels and tried to quell my racing, wimpy heart. A phrase from one of Randall Jarrell's letters came to mind--he had cut his own finger, and exclaimed at the cheerful red color of the blood. Do I live so vicariously through books that I really needed to borrow my reaction from somebody else? Perhaps. (I just thumbed through Randall Jarrell's Letters, and couldn't find the passage: drat. But I was floored once again by his 1951 letters to Mary Von Schrader, who he would marry the following year. Such love! Such elation! A small blaze of wit and metaphor-making seems to be burning continuously in his head--maybe an inspirational flame was traveling through a nipple at the base of his hypothalamus. It's a self-portrait of a happy man. You don't encounter so many of them. Plus this penetrating sentence, which made me wonder about myself: "Really complete egotism is so hard on you because you feel that everybody else is, essentially is or should be, like you--so you're alone, really alone.")

Anyway, I applied pressure. The bloody towels accumulated in the wastebasket. Nina got me to sit down, dabbled an antibiotic ointment on the gash, then dressed the whole thing very professionally with gauze and tape. A subsequent trip to the doctor was anticlimactic: no sutures necessary, the cut would close on its own (and it has, there's a pink, innocent, V-shaped patch of skin on my finger.) For a few days, however, I wasn't allowed to get the dressing wet. I showered with a plastic bag wrapped around my right hand, which I held aloft at all times, resembling a cranky, hirsute Statue of Liberty. And for some reason this ridiculous image began to strike me as meaningful. Representative of my stato d'animo. What was I doing? What did it all mean? I lift my lamp beside the golden door--also beside the perpetually stopped-up drain, which my 84-year-old father insisted on plunging the other week, in a nostalgic nod to his youthful stint as a plumber's assistant.

Since everybody may not care to have that image stuck in their heads for the rest of the day, I'll leave you with another. I already posted my micro-speech from the NBCC anniversary bash back in November. I just discovered that the video is now available, so I'll share it below. The audio is out of synch. At one point I have five o'clock shadow, then it disappears, in an eerie time-lapse effect, and I'll admit that the dime-store reading glasses are not flattering. Whatever. I had fun. At 1:06 you can see John Ashbery in the front row, wearing a jacket and tie:

James Marcus at NBCC's 35th from NBCC on Vimeo.

Insatiable

2010-02-04T08:34:00.006-05:00

I'm immersed in NBCC reading, but every now and then this cheating heart picks up a non-NBCC title for some spiritual refreshment. This morning it was Elif Batuman's The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, which looks right up my alley (maybe in March). I was relishing a passage about Tolstoy and Chekhov, the two mighty poles of Russian letters, roughly representing wild-eyed spirit and unflappable matter, when I came across this gem:

The last meetings between Tolstoy and Chekhov took place in Yalta, where Chekhov had gone to die. One day in Yalta, Tolstoy put his arm around Chehkov. "My dear friend, I beg of you," he said, "do stop writing plays!" Another time, when the two writers were gazing at the sea, Tolstoy demanded, "Were you very profligate in your youth?" Chekhov was speechless with embarrassment. Tolstoy, glaring out at the horizon, announced, "I was insatiable!"

A little more on Salinger

2010-02-03T09:48:00.004-05:00

I'm not actually a Salinger obsessive and don't have much to add to my previous post. However, the New Yorker round-robin of Salinger pieces did include this very interesting paragraph, in Lillian Ross's brief remembrance:

At one point during the more than half century of our friendship, J.D. Salinger told me he had an idea that someday, when "all the fiction had run out," he might try to do something straight, "really factual, formally distinguishing myself from the Glass boys and Holden Caulfield and the other first-person narrators I've used." It might be readable, maybe funny, he said, and "not just smell like a regular autobiography." That main thing was that he would use straight facts and "thereby put off or stymie one or two vultures--freelancers or English-department scavengers--who might come around and bother the children and the family before the body is even cold."

It's a tantalizing thought: Salinger Unplugged, with all the deflector shields down and the inconvenient facts to wrestle with. Of course it's possible that this very manuscript exists, stowed down in the bombproof vault with the hundreds of unpublished stories and the author's own, proprietary sequel to Catcher in the Rye, in which the middle-aged hero teaches English and Industrial Arts at a Connecticut high school. I hope it does.

When you think of it, Salinger's recipe isn't so different from what Philip Roth dreamed up for The Facts. The problem in that case was that Roth (for whom the fiction had at least temporarily run out) couldn't quite find the right tone. His sworn testimony sounded oddly sedated--only Zuckerman's acerbic afterword got the electricity flowing again, meanwhile muddying the very waters this "factual" account was supposed to clarify.

Finally: for an interesting take on Salinger's work (and Spike Milligan's) as a reaction to post-WWII shell shock, stop by Baroque in Hackney.

Palms, Logan

2010-01-29T10:30:00.003-05:00

I just flew in from Abu Dhabi, and boy, my arms are tired. Before Abu Dhabi it was Mumbai, where the long list of forbidden weaponry on the plane included not only bazookas and hand grenades but pickles and pickling spices. Before Mumbai it was a resort on the Arabian Sea. As we approached the resort in a rented car, the terrain grew more and more tropical, and the road itself reverted to loose gravel, then dirt. The vegetation was thick but much of it seemed desiccated and drooping--strange, since there had been no drought. I saw, for the first time, somebody using a small elephant as a domestic animal, to move what looked like construction supplies. We approached a low wall of cinder blocks. Beyond it, we assumed, would be a South Indian Club Med. But no, beyond the wall was the exact same vegetation, and a row of bamboo bungalows, in one of which we watched Robocop later that night, as the rain pattered on our bamboo roof and the movie was interrupted by numerous commercials for skin-lightening compounds.

The next morning, in the hazy sunlight, I studied the ferns, the low deciduous trees I couldn't identify, and especially the palms. Despite the rain last night, they looked thirsty, in need of assistance--they brought to mind Bellow's famous line in Humboldt's Gift, where "the very bushes might have been on welfare." Yet in some odd way, they compelled your respect. And just the other day, I came across a perfect, metaphor-mad description of them by Henry James, who was discussing the Florida variety in The American Scene. Buckle your seatbelts, folks:

I found myself loving, quite fraternally, the palms, which had struck me at first, for all their human-headed gravity, as merely dry and taciturn, but which became finally as sympathetic as so many rows of puzzled philosophers, dishevelled, shock-pated, with the riddle of the universe.

Human-headed gravity--exactly what I have been aiming for all these years. Now, I cannot tell a lie: I didn't encounter that Henry James quote in The American Scene itself. It occurs in "The State with the Prettiest Name," from William Logan's latest, Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue. I know what you're thinking: more critical mayhem. But what struck me, as I read through the tongue-lashing assessments of our wittiest critic, is that many of Logan's best lines are directed at poets who have earned his exasperated admiration.

Take John Ashbery. Logan has sometimes grumbled about Ashbery, whose playful convolutions of the American language have poured out, with hardly a pause for station identification, since the appearance of Turandot and Other Poems in 1953. It's like one long, sad, waking dream; it's like a game of tiddlywinks that goes on for fifty years. But in a single paragraph, Logan nails his signal strength (his absolute mastery of the American idiom, which he plays like a pipe organ) and his weakness (he can't stop playing, like E. Power Biggs with a stash of pep pills). I will now yield the floor to Logan:

John Ashbery was born when Pola Negri was still box office, yet his poems are more in touch with the American demotic--the tongue most of us speak and few of us write--than any near-octogenarian has the right to be. He has published more than a thousand pages in the last fifteen years, almost twice as many as Wallace Stevens wrote in half a century--and Stevens was no slouch. Ashbery's poems are like widgets manufactured to the most peculiar specifications and in such great numbers the whole world widget market has collapsed.

It's that final sentence that kills me: perfect. I will quote just one more, on Frederick Seidel, whose elegant, icky verse would sooner die than beguile the reader. Writes Logan: "It's hard to get the radical sympathy and aristo loathing in focus--Seidel's an original, but you're glad there aren't more like him."

J.D. Salinger is gone

2010-01-28T13:13:00.008-05:00

I just heard the news about the death of J.D. Salinger at 91. The author of The Catcher in the Rye and one of my favorite portraits of callow self-fabrication, "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period," had been in seclusion so long that I tended to forget he was still alive: he seemed to occupy some silent Purgatorio in Cornish, N.H., to which the occasional plucky journalist ventured in hopes of ambushing him at the general store.

Yet he never vanished from the public consciousness. His detractors wrote him off as a precious purveyor of "New Yorker fiction." (Even John Cheever, often lumped in the same group, let fly at Salinger during a bad hair day in 1961, ranting at William Maxwell's proposed cuts to a recent story submission: "You cut that short story... and I'll never write another story for you or anybody else. You can get that Godamned sixth-rate Salinger to write your Godamned short stories but don't expect anything more from me." In his journal, however, Cheever was quick to recant, noting that "I admire Salinger... and I think I know where his giftedness lies and how rare it is.") In more recent years, memoirs by Joyce Maynard (the author's teen concubine in the early 1970s) and Margaret Salinger (the author's daughter) have smudged his reputation further. The New York Times has conveniently compressed these disclosures, along with Salinger's spiritual dabblings, into a single, savory paragraph:

Mr. Salinger pursued Scientology, homeopathy and Christian Science, according to the daughter. He also drank urine, and sat in a Reichian orgone box, Ms. Salinger wrote. He spoke in tongues, fasted until he turned greenish and as an older man had pen pal relationships with teenage girls.

So much for the life (and let's recall that Saul Bellow and many other heavy hitters did their time in the orgone box during the Fifties). That leaves the work. Salinger's books have never stopped selling--especially Catcher in the Rye, which remains a touchstone for chafing adolescents worldwide. And he continues to earn praise from other quarters, too, some of them quite unexpected. When I covered an appearance by J.M.G. Le Clezio last April, I was surprised to hear that the Hermit of Cornish had a prominent spot in the Noble laureate's pantheon:

At this point the two writers shared a moment of lexicological bliss (Gopnik indicated a preference for the big illustrated Larousse). Then they moved on to another of Le Clézio's early infatuations: J.D. Salinger, who Gopnik described as "one of the local gods" at The New Yorker. What the French author loved about Salinger was, in a sense, what he loved about the dictionary: an accumulation of luminous details, and the feeling that "each word is a world by itself." He had particular praise for "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," which he called "one of the best short stories ever written."

ADDENDUM: My pal David Shields has been working on a secret biographical project for some time. Now Nikki Finke has finally revealed his subject (which turned out not to be David Hasselhoff after all): yes, folks, it's J.D. Salinger. The book has been assembled in tandem with an equally hush-hush documentary by 37-year-old screenwriter Shane Salerno. You can get all the details here.

Card trick

2009-11-15T09:57:00.005-05:00

My piece on Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura has been posted over at the Los Angeles Times Book Review. I found the book something of a damp fizzle. I'm glad Dmitri Nabokov didn't accede to his father's wishes and destroy the manuscript (actually a pile of index cards), since it's fascinating to see what was on Nabokov's mind during his final months: death and its opposite, sex. But to my mind, Chip Kidd's lavish design has the strange effect of diminishing The Original of Laura. You pick up the 277-page volume expecting it to contain an actual book, and what you find is a fragment: a toothpick pretending to be a tree. I began this way:

In the fall of 1976, a newspaper contacted Vladimir Nabokov in his Swiss refuge and asked him which books he had recently read. He responded with three typical titles: Dante's "Inferno" (in Charles Singleton's deliciously literal translation), a big, fat book about butterflies and his own work-in-progress, "The Original of Laura."

The latter project had preoccupied him over the summer, despite a serious illness. It was, he told his correspondent, "completed in my mind." The revisions went on while he was confined to a hospital bed, a febrile process he describes in some detail in his "Selected Letters": "I must have gone through it some fifty times and in my diurnal delirium kept reading it aloud to a small dream audience in a walled garden. My audience consisted of peacocks, pigeons, my long dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible."

You can read the rest here. To judge from this handy roundup in the paper's Jacket Copy blog, most critics seem to share my disappointment. Aleksander Hemon, who reviewed the book in Slate, went one step further, characterizing the very publication of the TOOL as a barrel-scraping betrayal of its author: "It is safe to say that what is published as the novel titled The Original of Laura (Dying Is Fun) is not a result Nabokov desired or would welcome.... [The book] can't escape the musty air of an estate sale: The trinkets that piled up in the attic; the damp books from the basement; the old man's stained cravat; the lonely figurines that used to be part of a cherished set; the mismatched, overworn clothing -- all are brought out in the hope that there might appear a buyer for those sad objects, someone blinded by literary nostalgia and willing to rescue the family possessions from the waste basket."

My three minutes, my two cents

2009-11-05T09:13:00.004-05:00

The NBCC threw itself a nifty 35th anniversary bash a few weeks ago. The highlights were speeches by two of the earliest winners, John Ashbery (antic) and E.L. Doctorow (gloomy), as well as shorter addresses by a cavalcade of former board members. I was among that cavalcade, toward the end, when there was no time left. That obliged me to speak very quickly, with no pauses between the words, like the man disclosing the side effects on the Viagra commercial. (If you have an erection lasting longer than four hours....) My remarks have now been posted over at Critical Mass, along with those of many other board members. I'll paste in the mini-speech here, but I urge visitors to check out the proceedings of the entire evening, including video of Ashbery and Doctorow:

According to tonight's program, I'm batting for the 21st century. In fact I was on the NBCC Board back in the storied Nineties. I left the board in 2001, spent some time in detox, and have now fallen off the wagon again. So here I am.

Anyway, I think this positions me nicely to note the sea change that has taken place here over the past decade. During my first tenure on the board, things had gotten a little sleepy. This is no criticism of my excellent and energetic colleagues of that era. But I think we all had a premonition that the old world of print and Sunday book supplements was about to go the way of the dodo. None of us knew exactly how fast that transformation would take place. Nobody operating a butter churn foresees the advent of margarine, either. Before we knew it, the Age of Margarine was upon us--not golden, but bright yellow, and full of suspicious adulterants.

Now, I know that sounds awfully negative. So I will change tack, retire the margarine metaphor, and argue that the NBCC is now a much more vibrant organization than it was ten years ago. The Internet, which was supposed to torpedo what was left of our trade and leave us on par with thimble makers, has given the conversation about books a massive shot in the arm.

Yes, the dust is still settling. The shrinkage or outright disappearance of the old reviewing outlets is painful to watch. The drastic redefinition of those cherished terms, professional and amateur, has given many a seasoned critic a bad case of the psychological bends. But the audience has multiplied, and gone global, and the barriers to entry for a young critic have fallen. So I'm going to look on the bright side, and argue that the best work still rise to the top--like cream, or margarine. I promise.

Afterwards, while I fought my way toward the wine-and-cheese area, a member of the audience told me margarine was a very, very bad substance. I countered with a fact I had just learned from Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist (I think): unsalted butter often has butter flavoring in it. And with that, the War of the Condiments was over.

"We long for each other...."

2009-11-03T10:53:00.004-05:00

Last night I had a delightful conversation with Lore Segal. We sat before a small but attentive audience (including the author's grandson, who looks to have inherited her curly hair) and she patiently fielded my questions, which I read like an automaton from the sheet of paper on my lap. I loved hearing her voice. Segal has said she was "naturalized" in Manhattan, and of course she spent much of her childhood in Britain, but to my ear there is always a hint of Vienna in her inflections. At the back of the room, Kelly Burdick from Melville House shot this video clip. The audio isn't so great, but you'll get the gist of it.

I wanted to transcribe just one tiny bit, about six minutes into the clip, where we're talking about the abundance of parties in Lucinella. The characters, mostly literary types, spend much of this slender book tramping from one small, crowded, inebriated party to another. It's a natural setting for satire--how else do you write about a herd of poets in their peculiar corral?--but Segal was at pains to establish that her aims were not entirely satirical. She began with a comical quote about party-going from Emma, but then continued: "And yet, our desire for each other... well, the reason we go to parties is that we long for each other. Which is not a satirical point: that's for real. That's true. And it's funny."

Chatting with Lore Segal

2009-10-30T07:44:00.004-04:00

Certain writers are easy to characterize. They're quotable. What they do, they do in every paragraph, every phrase--you could clone the entire novel from a stray syllable. Others are more elusive. Their quicksilver charms make it hard to pin them down, and to get the real flavor of the novel, you have no choice but to read the whole thing. No substitutions accepted. Anyway, Lore Segal belongs to the second group. On at least one prior occasion I've written about her work--the fluid, funny, heartbreaking Shakespeare's Kitchen--and am now reading Lucinella, an earlier novella that Melville House has just reprinted. It's about poetry, parties, herd behavior, sex, and the infinitely fragile human ego. (To write about such things, of course, you must have a sturdier ego than you think.) Here's a bit about Zeus, who's just a guy but also a god, at least when you're in love with him:

I used to laugh at gods and kings. I'd imagined Zeus muscle-bound, stupid with power, rattling his enormous thunder, unable to control the whims and spectacular tempers of his oversized relations, but in my bed his mind moves feelingly. It's just that mine, being Jewish and from New York, leaps more nimbly, which he enjoys. I sense his smiling in the darkness. When I get silly he reaches out laughingly to fetch me home to good sense and we make love again, sleep awhile, and more love and more talking.

More love, more talking: maybe that was Segal's original title. The narrator is happy and in a hurry to convey her happiness, hence the missing verb in the last clause. Who needs it? But two pages later she's less happy, anticipating the end, making a clumsy stab at defensive irony, which never works when you need it most:

I'm crying for the day when Zeus will not be holding me like this, or will be holding me like this while I am scheming to inch myself out of the constriction of his arms. He doesn't ask me what's the matter. Think of all the women, mortal and the others, who've wept in Zeus's arms and he perhaps, when he was young, in theirs. He strokes my hair and keeps holding me. My tears grow cozy. For sophistication's sake I'll tell you the nature of ardor is to cool, but I can't believe it.

Aside from the sheer, elliptical speed of her narratives--Segal simply leaves out whatever isn't interesting--her brand of irony may be the most distinctive thing about her work. Her nimble, Jewish, New York-by-way-of-Vienna mind inclines her toward gentle mockery. Yet her ardor is genuine: she treats love as fact, not delusional fiction, and three cheers for that.

This is all by way of saying that I'll be chatting with Lore Segal this coming Monday night at McNally Jackson Books in Soho. Well, mostly she'll be reading and taking questions from the audience, but in the brief interlude between those activities, I'll be asking her about Lucinella and other more general matters. More details here. Come one, come all--not for my questions, but for her answers!

Leaf

2009-10-28T11:57:00.004-04:00

Walking home this morning after a meeting, I came across this splendid specimen stuck to the sidewalk. There were plenty of leaves to choose from, heaped up in their damp, golden anonymity, but this one caught my eye. I liked its air of indecision. Not quite red, not quite yellow, clinging to its last-ditch quotient of green. Mostly dead, but incrementally alive. Or perhaps not, I'm probably projecting there. It's hard to avoid the temptation with leaves, they're metaphorical magnets. And by coincidence, I just came across an excellent example of leafy metaphor-making on Patrick Kurp's Anecdotal Evidence. He's quoting from a poem I've never read, R.S. Thomas's "Autumn," which is actually an argument against the sort of anthropomorphic mischief I've just been engaging in:

Happy the leaves
burnishing their own
downfall. Life dances
upon life's grave.
It is we who inject
sadness into the migrant’s
cry. We are so long
in dying -- time granted
to discover a purpose
in our decay?

With a grain of salt

2009-10-26T10:00:00.008-04:00

When a writer dies, you look at the work and see valedictory notes everywhere. Last week I picked up Aldo Buzzi's A Weakness for Almost Everything (a great title, especially for a man who could become downright rhapsodic about the correct way to dress a salad) and stopped when I came to this passage about his mother, a painter who kept her talent under wraps:

Some small paintings of hers keep me company at home, although it's painful to recall that while she was alive she was not appreciated as she deserved. Who knows where those paintings will be in a few years, I think, if they still exist--in what houses, entrusted to whose hands. Best not to think about it.

One painting shows the window of the room in Via Santo Garovaglio, in Como, where I was born, open onto the looming face of the mountain of Brunate, in shadow, where some black swallows are flying.

I must have seen some of those paintings during my visit. There were small landscapes on the wall in the living room, and more in the bedroom, but it didn't occur to me to ask who had painted them. Meanwhile, that brings me to another paragraph in the same book, where he bids his native city goodbye as a passenger on a celestial locomotive, ending (as must we all) in silence:

The train leaving Como travels slowly along one of the main streets of the city, as if it were in America; the jolts are muffled by the red velvet of first class, with the embroidered cover for the head. Farewell, royal city of missoltitt, and town of the onions. Farewell, my fellow citizens, freshwater sailors and mountaineers of the plain. The Palazzo Terrragni, rationalist dream of the Como architect Terragni, passes wavering before my eyes; rising steeply behind it is the mountain of Brunate, Como's arcropolis, where the place of the Parthenon is occupied by the former annex of the Hotel Milano, whose facade, faded by the distance, sticks up continuously above the roofs of the city. The duomo goes by, and the famous frog, carved in the fifteenth century by the brothers Tomaso and Jacopo Rodari (by which of the two we will never know) and decapitated by a fanatic with a hammer in 1912; which should be seen not, as some believe, as a mark of the level reached by the lakewater during a big flood, or as a descendant of the large tadpole carved at the bottom of one of the holy-water basins in the duomo, but, as the back legs, which seem to be extended in a spasm, clearly indicate, as the prefiguration of the frog of Galvani, who was to open the way to the artificial electric organ, later called appareil a colonne, then appareil a pile, and finally pile. And here again are the white neon lights of the ancient Cinema Plinio (the Elder), and, almost at the end of the street, the mysterious sign of the Silenzio restaurant: as if the blessed god of silence himself, the boy Arpocrates, were to suddenly appear among the laid tables in his usual pose, with the index finger of his right hand on his lips.

The passage is beautiful. Perhaps it wanders too far afield during the froggy bit, and Ann Goldstein, who has done an otherwise elegant job, introduces an error when she talks about the "artificial electric organ"--an image that made me think of a lounge player hunched over his B-3. Here's the deal: Galvani's experiments led his occasional adversary Alessandro Volta to invent the first electric battery. Volta had based his design on the shock-inducing apparatus of the torpedo fish or ray, which he considered to possess an organe electrique naturel--hence he called his own creation an organe electrique artificiel. He was talking about a battery. An appareil a pile is also a battery. Sigh. It seems blasphemous to be mucking around with trivia here, but trivia was, in some sense, Aldo's meat and drink.

Another thing, which struck me only as I typed the sentences myself, is that the passage slyly recapitulates the author's career. You have the early, architectural phase, with a tip of the hat to Giuseppe Terragni. Then, after the galvanizing transition, we're suddenly at the cinema, where Aldo spent the second phase of his professional life. And where, you ask, is the final phase of literary production? Note the name of the movie theater. Pliny the Elder was, like Aldo, a son of Como who turned to writing after a long life spent on other pursuits. He had a similar attachment to the homely detail, the telling fact, which he collected by the bushel in his Natural History. It was Pliny who wrote: "Indeed, what is there that does not appear marvelous when it comes to our knowledge for the first time?" Aldo could have written that, if Pliny hadn't beaten him to the punch, but he would have seasoned it a bit more. Cum grano salis.

Dream house

2009-10-17T13:57:00.004-04:00

In my never-ending battle with the torrent of books, I was about to take the major step a few days ago of throwing out a galley: Letters of Ted Hughes. I've got the finished book, and disposing of the galley would free up a few extra inches of floor space in my office. Alas, I started skimming: mistake. First I came across this, from a 1961 letter to the newly married Daniel Weissbort: "Marriage is a nest of small scorpions, but it kills the big dragons. I'm an advocate, so have nothing but congratulations & good wishes, my very best wishes, for both of you." Hmmm. With advocates like these.... On the opposite page, he's trying to make up with Leonard Baskin, who illustrated many of his books. (Which reminds me, I recently declined to throw away a copy of Baskin's Figures of Dead Men, which had been sitting in my old bedroom at my parents' house since 1978. Oh boy.) Anyway, Baskin, who's seen here with the poet, clearly had a rocky visit to the Hughes-Plath menage:

Ever since you went I've been wondering if you'd write, since that last day was unpleasant for us too. If you're still curious to know the cause--or what was probably the main cause--it was that Sylvia hadn't been able to do any work all week in the middle of her first longish work which had been going like gunpowder up to that point, and she was upset at the same time at taking no part in your visit except to cook and so on. So your sharp remarks to her on that Friday hit her with a special irony.

Just a little later in the same letter, Hughes explains that he and Plath have fled the literary life in London (which he elsewhere defines as "a chance juxtaposition of individuals who wish to be known as 'writers' held in a semblance of community by the watchfulness of their mutual envy and malice.") Where they have fled to is a property in Devon. Yes, the two poets have pooled their resources and bought

a house with 6 bedrooms, a stable with 3 stalls, a spare 2 room cottage, a big vegetable garden, an extensive orchard and 2 1/2 acres of land. Also a thatched roof. It's an old farm--part of it 11th Century. There's a prehistoric tumulus or fort-mound in the orchard. It's a knock-out. We're having the owner clear out the population of woodworm and death-watch beetles before we move in, this weekend.

I know, I know, the place was probably tumbling down, and the insect population had been breeding in the beams for the last millennium. Still, it sounds like quite a retreat, doesn't it? They even got a tumulus at no extra charge. The description made me envious, as it must every New Yorker, grateful for every miserable square foot of living space. It also made me ponder my own dream house, which is not nearly so extensive. It seems to be located in a pine grove, simply because I like the smell of pines and the springy feeling of walking on the fallen needles. No stable. An orchard would be nice--pears and apples--as would a flat grassy area in back, cleared of deer ticks and other pests by the Army Corps of Engineers. I could write sestinas at the kitchen table. The living room, the biggest in the house, would be rustic but also modern and comfortable, like the interior of Davy Crockett's cabin with high-speed Internet access. I sound like I'm joking, but I'm not. Outside at night I would be spared the shouting and high-decibel flirtation from the singles bars out on Second Avenue. Just quiet, and velvety darkness, and a solid complement of stars on cloudless nights, which I could study with a Sears and Roebuck telescope on the front porch. I could go on.

Aldo Buzzi 1910-2009

2009-10-09T21:12:00.005-04:00

I was terribly sad to learn that Aldo Buzzi died earlier today in Milan. The news shouldn't have surprised me--he was a very old man, less than a year shy of 100, and he had grown weaker over the last few months. I met him only once, a meeting I described not long ago on this blog. As I said then, it was a privilege to chat with him, a privilege to receive his letters in their spidery, errant, characteristic script. Most of all I felt lucky to have read his work, and to have translated a tiny fraction of it. I will miss him. I will miss, too, the reassuring sensation that he was alive and reasonably well on Via Bassini, still relishing the small things he chronicled so beautifully during his last three decades as a self-described "young writer."

ADDENDUM: The Washington Post has run a lovely and informative obituary by Emily Langer. It includes a comment from me (heartfelt, if none too eloquent) and one of the photos Nina took during our visit. I was especially touched by this final paragraph. Six years later, I found his apartment simply furnished but not sparse: it seemed to contain those objects that mattered to Aldo and not much else. Anyway:

As Italian newspapers noted after his death, Mr. Buzzi was appreciated less at home than abroad. A reporter for the Rome-based La Repubblica recalled meeting Mr. Buzzi at the author's home in Milan and finding the 91-year-old Buzzi living in unexpectedly sparse surroundings. "This is a house that has been emptied out a little at a time," he told the visitor, "... full of holes, like the memory of an old man."

Blogging: my two cents

2009-09-22T10:13:00.003-04:00

Earlier this month, I participated in a kind of virtual seminar, "The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time." The moderators, Patrick Kurp and D.G. Myers, were very tolerant of my lollygagging ways, and eventually posted my thoughts at A Commonplace Blog, cheek-by-jowl with responses from Terry Teachout, Frank Wilson, Mark Athitakis, and various other worthies. Here's a sampling of what I had to say:

Q: How do you respond to this statement? "Blogging is just another hobby, like stamp collecting or hockey."

A: Or like fishing, chess, cooking, sex, music, scrimshaw, gardening.... The statement is quasi-true but its assumptions are pathetic: that anything you do outside of your professional life is trivial. Many people are at their happiest and most fulfilled when practicing their so-called hobbies.

Q: How has the experience of blogging changed the way you write?

A: It hasn't.

Q: What about the sometimes vicious nature of the beast?--the ad hominem attacks, and the widespread tendency to confuse harsh disagreement with such ad hominem attacks.

A: The Internet is real life on steroids--unless it's not. I don't think people are any kinder or more vicious online than they are in real life, but the remote nature of their interactions, and the absence of adult supervision, turns many human beings into assholes. Even Pericles might have behaved like a frat boy under such circumstances. The great thing is that you can delete comments, trash emails, and generally ignore the stuff that bothers you. I was on a panel with Lee Siegel a couple of years ago, and he was complaining about the coercive nature of the Web. I said that I didn't find it any more coercive than the radio. If you don't like it, pull the plug.

Q: Some say the golden age of blogging has already passed, that blogging has failed to fulfill its early promise; and the evidence which is given is that no one becomes famous from blogging any longer. Do you agree?

A: This question made me smile. Blogging is in its infancy, still (as my father likes to say) on the nipple. In fifty years, to pass the time in our warren of underground, climate-controlled fallout shelters, we can muse over whether blogging lived up to its delightful promise. Hell, we can blog about it. As for the fame thing--outside of gossip, gadgets, and porn, the mighty Internet trifecta, bloggers tend to address a small audience. The level of fame is minuscule. So the lack of fame is meaningless.

You can read my entire thing here. And please do check out the entire series of thoughtful, mostly non-ornery responses.

Baker, again

2009-09-17T08:48:00.003-04:00

My review of Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist has just been posted over at the B&N Review. While I was writing it, I felt like I was wrestling with a long, complicated piece. Now that it's been posted, it looks compact and straightforward, with nary an ace up its sleeve. Perhaps what I was wrestling with was sleep deprivation. In any case, here's a sample bit:

This brings us to the crux of the matter. For Paul, like all of Baker's narrators, is a man with an idée fixe -- a man firmly mounted atop his hobby horse. (The same might said of Baker himself, whose fascination with, say, old newspapers led him to accumulate an entire warehouse of them. But his fixations keep changing, as per his smorgasbord metaphor above.) And what Paul really hates is blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter, the sort of thing Shakespeare found perfectly serviceable for 18,000 lines of dramatic poetry. The modern, footless, freewheeling stuff favored by so many American poets is bad enough, "merely a heartfelt arrangement of plummy words requesting to be read slowly." But blank verse (and even rhyming iambic pentameter) is worse: another kinky French import, like structuralism or Béarnaise sauce. In Paul's view it has warped the progress of English poetry, by drawing it out of its natural four-beat orbit.

You can read the whole thing here.

Truth or consequences

2009-08-14T11:39:00.004-04:00

I meant to point out this excellent CJR piece by Nicholson Baker some time ago. It's about Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, whose agonized tone and apocalyptic detail Baker finds utterly convincing. The fly in the ointment: Defoe was a tiny child when the plague hit London in 1665. So he cobbled together his first-person, "nonfiction" account from contemporary sources, family reminiscences, and so forth. In our era, beset as we are with the post-James-Frey jitters, such a tossed salad of fact and fiction can be, in Baker's phrase, a "thorny shrub."

But the other interesting aspect of the piece is Baker's own ambivalence toward Defoe's methods. He doesn't believe that journalists or other purveyors of truth (put whatever words you like in quotation marks) should ever invent. The minute an author tampers with a single verifiable detail, he or she must stamp the resulting work as fiction. That seems pretty clear, doesn't it? No ambiguities. No loopholes. No gray zone where fib and fact can merrily cohabit, confusing the daylights out of the reader.

On the other hand, when I interviewed Baker in 1999 (or whenever it was), he wearily asserted that novels had a higher reality quotient than we gave them credit for. "I get tired of writers who insist on the fictionality of their work," he said. "Even Nabokov, who's an exceptionally autobiographical writer, made a big deal about how he invented his people and then dismissed them from the stage. He was forced to do that, in a way, because he'd written Lolita, so I forgive him. But I'm certainly not going to pretend that the thoughts in my books would never enter my own head.... When I read Updike, I assume what he's writing happened to him--unless he's going to the moon or something. And I think that especially with the first two books, people should be entitled to think that about my own work."

Still, in theory, Baker should be recoiling from Defoe's book--or at the very least, from its mendacious packaging as a memoir. Instead, its brilliant ventriloquism draws him in. Perhaps the ultimate lesson is: don't lie unless you're a genius. In any case, Baker begins his piece like this:

I first read Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year on a train from Boston to New York. That's the truth. It's not a very interesting truth, but it's true. I could say that I first read it sitting on a low green couch in the old smoking room of the Cincinnati Palladium, across from a rather glum-looking Henry Kissinger. Or that I found a beat-up Longman's 1895 edition of Defoe's Plague Year in a dumpster near the Recycle-a-Bicycle shop on Pearl Street when I was high on Guinness and roxies, and I opened it and was drawn into its singular, fearful world, and I sat right down in my own vomit and read the book straight through. It would be easy for me to say these things. But if I did, I would be inventing—and, as John Hersey wrote, the sacred rule for the journalist (or the memoirist, or indeed for any nonfiction writer) is: Never Invent.

You can read the rest here.

Farewell, Les Paul

2009-08-13T13:18:00.006-04:00

I just read about the death of guitar god and hi-fi wizard Les Paul. He was 94, and passed away due to complications of pneumonia. Another giant shuffles offstage! In October of last year, after decades of thumb-twiddling delay, I finally caught one of Paul's Monday night shows at Iridium. I had waited so long because once an artist achieves that sort of Great Sequoia status, you assume he or she will be around forever, benignly crowding out the second-growth artists below. Not true!

Anyway, Paul was in fine form that night. The lights went down, and you could just barely make out his handlers assisting the arthritic leader onstage. The camera flashes started popping. And Paul, still seated in the dark with his iconic guitar propped in his lap, exclaimed, "I feel like Ray Charles up here!" That was a pretty good index of his wisecracking repartee--a key element of his performance. (At one point, noting that he sometimes employed a female bassist, he identified that configuration as the "Less Balls Quartet." Rim shot!) And what about the actual playing? Arthritis and old age had slowed him, of course. His youthful, sometimes prolix style had to be simplified, like it or not. But his tone--that bright, gleaming sound with its dollop of reverb, still strangely redolent of the Fifties, the era of spit curls and Sputniks--was intact. And when he led the band through a revved-up "Tennessee Waltz" at the end, his squiggly licks seemed to shoot around the room like Roman candles. Equally touching was his role as universal mentor. At one point heavy-metal shredder Zakk Wylde wandered onstage and belted out some Ralph-Cramden-inflected blues with the master. Wylde's music isn't especially to my taste, but his hero-worshipping attitude was completely winning. There was also a cameo from the suave jazz player Eric Johnson, who was no less in Paul's thrall. As were we all. (More on this subject later. For now, you can read the New York Times obituary here.)

HB, AB

2009-08-10T08:47:00.011-04:00

It is now nearly two years since I went to see Aldo Buzzi in Milan. I'm not sure I can recommend late December to prospective visitors of that brisk, brusque city. The days are short. The holidays are upon you. The Milanese, quite sensibly, are at home celebrating them, which means that much of the city is shut down. You can wander through the opulence of the Galleria, where thoughtful locals have ground out their cigarettes on the tile floors, but the shops are shuttered. La Scala: closed. The Duomo is open for business. But the façade is covered by scaffolding, which is covered in turn by a photographic reproduction of the façade: the architectural equivalent of a white lie. At least there are tourists in front of the Duomo, radiating heat and fellow feeling. The famous avenues devoted to fashion, meanwhile, are empty. It looks like somebody dropped the neutron bomb in the neighborhood: human life is gone, but the garish goods with their heart-stopping price tags are still on display. There are items not meant to be worn. There are furs not meant to be bought--coats clearly made from an entire conclave of minks--except possibly by Russian gangsters and their significant others.

We hadn't come to see the sites, though. We had come to see Aldo. Beforehand we bought a pandoro, a Milanese holiday cake like a porous bowling ball. He lives on Via Bassini: the cab driver corrected my insufficiently sibilant pronunciation. That made me even more nervous about my bumpy Italian, but surely we could speak in English part of the time? Aldo seemed to have no problem understanding the English in my letters--although he wrote back in Italian, in the sort of spidery, correct calligraphy that you don't see much of these days.

In fact Aldo uttered only one phrase in English throughout the entire visit, which I will get to in a moment. It didn't matter. He greeted us at the door to the apartment in a red cardigan, white shirt, tortoise-shell glasses. I had wondered what sort of shape he might be in at age 97. The human body is not designed to last a century--the biological warranty expires much, much earlier, and then you are on borrowed time. But he seemed impressively spry, hobbling forward on a cane, thanking us for the cake.

More to the point was his mental agility. I was half his age and was half as lucid. He was funny, self-effacing, and remarkably patient as I scrambled verb tenses. He didn't mind. In one's tenth decade, perhaps, the past, the present, and the future have long since turned into malleable categories. The only tense you can truly rely upon: the imperfect.

We proceeded directly into the living room, where Aldo's work table was set up. He wanted to get some minor business out of the way: final corrections to my translation of some short Saul Steinberg pieces, which hadn't fit into the roughly autobiographical boundaries of Reflections and Shadows. On the table were papers, books, pens, and an impressive Japanese carving knife, which looked like it had just been removed from the box. There was also a heavy glass paperweight resembling a human eyeball. Nina snapped some photos with a digital camera as we sat at the table working. In one, the blue eyeball gazed out of the corner with an imploring look, and when Nina showed Aldo the image, he found it hilarious. Molto steinberghiano, he declared.

With the business done, we visited for a while. Would we like some coffee? Sure, we said. Aldo looked around the room, failed to find what he was seeking. Vanessa, he called out, summoning the nurse we had briefly met when we first showed up. When she arrived, they had a rapid conversation and she pointed out the small bell he had been looking for. She left. He lifted the bell and softly rang it. Vanessa! This time he divided the name into three affectionate syllables. She entered once more, looking amused by the whole vaudeville routine, and went off to make the coffee.

Aldo sprawled in a chair upholstered with pink roses. Nearby he had positioned his cane and a green walker, which he sadly noted had belonged to his companion Bianca. The two had been together for about 60 years: she was the sister of the director Alberto Lattuada, with whom Aldo worked during his sojourn in the postwar Italian film industry, and had died in December 2005. He hadn't needed such a device while she was still alive, he said. Now he was weaker.

But not, again, in mind. Despite the linguistic hurdles I had a number of questions for him. Why, after studying architecture during the Thirties, had he never practiced as an architect? Oh, he had tried, he said. But the beginning of his architectural career had coincided with the early years of the Second World War, and the materials--the steel, the concrete--were often diverted to military purposes. While he worked in the cinema, I asked, had he encountered Dino De Laurentiis? (I had recently translated a biography of the producer and legendary finagler, and was curious to hear any triangulating data.)

Of course he had, on several occasions. He was, for example, the assistant director on Il bandito, which Lattuada directed and De Laurentiis produced in 1946. This was evidently a seat-of-the-pants enterprise. According to the biography, "the shooting began in May, on a series of almost arbitrary locations, without any sound equipment. The dialogue was then deciphered from the script girl's notes and dubbed in at the Moviola, via a sort of reverse lip-reading." But Aldo recalled a different collaboration with DDL, during the early Fifties, in Yugoslavia. He had a vivid memory of the producer driving his big American car across the crunching snow, probably to harass the director or hit on some of the female talent.

The discussion of his film career brought us around to the very first book Aldo ever wrote: An Assistant Director's Notebook, published in 1944. It's never been translated into English, nor could the text really be extracted from the illustrations and design, which were assembled by the great Bruno Munari. (It has been reprinted in Italian, however, by the a small press called Ponte alle Grazie, which has resurrected several of Aldo's books.) When he realized I didn't have a copy, he went into the bedroom to retrieve one, waving his hand to invite us along.

In the bedroom there was a narrow bed with a carved headboard, and an old photo of Aldo with the screenwriter Ennio Flaiano, and a big, handsome Saul Steinberg watercolor hanging over the bed. It was one of Steinberg's landscapes, in which even the artist seems unsure as to whether he's creating a beautiful object or a parody of a beautiful object. Perhaps it's both at once. From a large wooden armoire Aldo withdrew a copy of his small book with its red cover. He inscribed it for me: a treasured item.

Back in the living room, we chatted some more. I sensed that he was tiring, but still game. I think he relished the company. With me translating, Nina asked if he was writing something new, and just once, he resorted to English: his pen, he said, was "in the garage." Nicely idiomatic. Sad, too, but Aldo didn't seem the type to dwell on the flagging voltage of old age, nor on the fact, noted in his letters, that almost all of his friends, family, and contemporaries were gone. He asked me what sort of work Nina did, and I explained that she wrote about esoteric financial topics, only a smattering of which I could understand. I admitted that she was smarter than I was, and Aldo smiled. È sempre cosi, he said. It's always that way.

At the doorway, adjacent to which he had jotted various phone numbers and bits of valued information on the wall with a pencil, we said goodbye. I was absolutely confident that I would see Aldo again. When I returned to the U.S., I sent him a few photos from our visit, and he wrote back: "You look so young, and I look so old!"

We correspond. His handwriting has gotten shakier, and in recent months his diminished eyesight has made it much harder for him to read--a terrible affliction for a writer. But even the briefest communications, often on tiny pieces of paper, have their glints of good humor, their impress of personality. I can't say I know Aldo well. I still hope I will see him again. It has been a privilege, in any case, to translate some of his work, to shake his hand, to observe his routine with the sweetly tolerant Vanessa (who was just filling in, it turns out, while the regular nurse was visiting her family in Bolivia). And if none of that had happened, it would have been a privilege just to read his books.

Today Aldo turns 99. I wish this marvelous man the happiest of birthdays.

Jewish shouting: the last gasp, the club mix

2009-07-26T22:08:00.009-04:00

As I'm well aware, there's not much more to say about the Jewish shouting mix. After the initial nudge from Melville House, the yappy little artifact made its way around the world, with coverage in the Guardian, the New York Times, the National Post, Gawker, and Harper's. There were hospitable responses from around the Web, with Jewish bloggers in the pole position: I tip my hat (or yarmulke) to Tablet, For Zion's Sake, and Jewlicious, from whom I've borrowed the stellar graphic in this post. Flavorwire and American Short Fiction flagged me down for short interviews. My pal Katy Evans-Bush at Baroque in Hackney sent up an amusing signal flare. And outside the English-speaking world, the Dutch, Germans, Romanians, Swedes, Italians, and French weighed in with presumably pungent commentary. (Say, what does merdique mean?)

So what's the purpose of this post? Well, after several weeks of tinkering, I finished the nine-and-a-half-minute Jewish Shouting Cantina Club Mix. It's got lap steel, church bells, a danceable beat suitable for your next bar mitzvah or Rotary Club meeting, and (again) the inimitable vocalise of Philip Roth. You can listen to it or download the convenient, spill-resistant MP3 file here. As always, feel free to pass it along: sharing is caring. And now I will resume normal broadcasting. I promise.

The joys of Liebling

2009-07-22T12:49:00.003-04:00

Over at CJR, I chat with Pete Hamill about the joys of A.J. Liebling, whose work has recently been reissued in two fat volumes by the Library of America. The older writer's raffish universe of lowlifes, bookies, flacks, and grifters (not to mention the elected governor of Louisiana) was already vanishing by the time Hamill began his career as a journalist. But there was a brief overlap, and a momentary pressing of the flesh in 1962. Here's a sample bit:

Marcus: Questions of style aside, then, what did you take away from him as a young reporter?

Hamill: His delight in the raffish. My second year at the Post, I pulled the 8:00-to-3:00 shift, covering Broadway. I’d go to Lindy’s, where I would nurse a single cup of coffee because I was broke, and talk to the press agents and the flacks. These were the kind of characters that Liebling would write about. By 1962, of course, they had mostly disappeared. They had gone to Vegas to do legally what was illegal in New York.

Marcus: So you caught the tail end of that scene.

Hamill: I did. But it taught me to pay attention. Once I found a house detective at the Hotel Taft named Tiptoe Tannenbaum. If Liebling didn’t invent him, Runyon did.

You can read the whole thing here. The conversation sent me straight back to Liebling's work, always a good thing. I read the first page of "The Earl of Louisiana," his 175-page portrait of Huey Long's kid brother, and just kept going. I defy anybody to turn away after this opening salvo:

Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas--stale and unprofitable. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes differently where it grows.

Roth: the dance mix

2009-06-25T15:28:00.002-04:00

It was not quite a year ago that the Los Angeles Times published my interview with Philip Roth. In the course of our conversation, we chatted about the film adaptations of his earlier books, most of which struck the author as pretty dodgy:

Indignation will be the fifth of Roth's novels to be made into a film. I ask what he thought of the earlier adaptations, and he gives high marks to Jack Klugman and Ali MacGraw in Goodbye, Columbus, while ruefully acknowledging the cartoonish tone: "A little vulgarity goes a long way, and they did lay it on pretty heavily." And what about Ernest Lehman's version of Portnoy's Complaint, which brought back Richard Benjamin for a second turn as the author's cinematic proxy? "Unspeakable," Roth declares. "It's a movie about shouting. Jewish shouting." (He proceeds to give a brief, comical example, which strikes me as a specimen of literary history, like Thoreau demonstrating how to peel the bark off a birch tree.)

Clearly his ululating outburst impressed me. Later on, listening to the file, I decided to transform it into a brief dance mix. And now the kind folks at Melville House, always on the alert for booty-shaking literary artifacts, have posted the mix as a playable file or download. Please, check out their post and feast your ears. And feel free to spread this file far and wide. If it catches on, look out for the 15-minute club version, with additional shouting from Bernard Malamud and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

My last post, really, on the Battle of the Bards

2009-05-26T21:35:00.005-04:00

My friend Katy Evans-Bush published a piece in the Guardian a few days ago about the Walcott Affair, in which she quoted my earlier (and jocular) remark about the Nobel laureate chasing his female students around the coffee table. One anonymous reader in the comment thread alluded to my "locker-room inanities." That aside, I figured the whole fuss was over and I would never utter another syllable about it. But now I see that Ruth Padel, who was elected to the post after Walcott withdrew, has herself resigned. According to the Guardian (again):

Padel won the vote nine days ago. But in a statement tonight she said: "I genuinely believe that I did nothing intentional that led to Derek Walcott's withdrawal from the election. I wish he had not pulled out. I did not engage in a smear campaign against him, but, as a result of student concern, I naively--and with hindsight unwisely--passed on to two journalists, whom I believed to be covering the whole election responsibly, information that was already in the public domain."

She said she had acted in "good faith" and would have been "happy to lose to Derek, but I can see that people might interpret my actions otherwise. I wish to do what is best for the university and I understand that opinion there is divided. I therefore resign from the chair of poetry."

In subsequent remarks made earlier today at the Hay Festival, Padel suggested she may have been the victim of a Machiavellian conspiracy. She was meanwhile "trailed by security guards, a measure usually reserved for ex-presidents and pop stars. An event that she chaired this afternoon--a conversation with Emma Darwin, on the latter's latest novel--was monitored by four stewards, a press officer and two guards." I find the Praetorian Guard routine a little weird. What I find even weirder is the idea of a poet having a campaign manager for the Oxford post.

Stalking heads

2009-05-18T10:58:00.007-04:00

Meaning is what we arrive at after the fact--an obsessive glance in the rear-view mirror. Or so I would argue. Jung felt differently, and loved to cite a favorite line from Through the Looking-Glass: "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards." I am inclined to wonder when I come across two stories like these on the same day. First, from Der Spiegel:

Last July, just minutes after a branch of Madame Tussaud's opened in the German capital, a 41-year-old former policeman leaped over the table at which [Adolf] Hitler was sitting. He shouted "No more war!" and beheaded the doll by twisting its beeswax head from its fiberglass body. The left hand of the figure, worth around $274,000 in total, also broke off.

Police briefly detained the man, known only as Frank L., on suspicion of damaging property and causing injury--he lightly wounded one of the two security guards who tried to stop him--and he was eventually fined $2,423. The ex-policeman said he found it inappropriate to display an exhibit showing the Nazi leader only some 500 meters from Berlin’s Holocaust memorial.

And there's this:

Someone has beheaded a statue of President James Garfield that was installed last week at an Ohio college. Hiram College spokesman Shawn Brown says the vandalism was discovered Friday morning, just a day after the sandstone statue was dedicated on the campus in Hiram, 30 miles southeast of Cleveland. Brown says the college is hoping the head will be recovered so the 95-year-old statue can be restored, but police have no leads in their investigation.

Okay, one is a political statement (a misguided one, in my opinion), and the other sounds like a frat-boy prank (unless it was a principled shot at the Crédit Mobilier scandal). Still, the human brain, if it happens to be mine, struggles to draw some poetic lesson from these distant decapitations. And let's not omit a third example, which took place back in 1969, when Abbey Road was released in the United States. Capitol put up a promotional billboard in Los Angeles, and soon after Paul McCartney's head went missing. I like the photo above for its washed-out quality and Polaroid pigments; I relish the sunlight on the scrubby vegetation and the date in the right margin. If I'm remembering correctly, Macca's head turned up some teenager's bedroom. Garfield's is still missing. Mine, whose innards resemble a perpetually agitated snow globe, is still attached.

Walsh, Auto-Tune

2009-05-15T07:59:00.006-04:00

I thought I had sworn off the whole Walcott mess--and really, I have, aside from this gossipy codicil, which surfaced in the Evening Standard last night. Readers will recall that John Walsh not only campaigned on Ruth Padel's behalf but also dredged up Walcott's record of harassment in the Independent. Now it seems that his relationship with Padel, to whom he referred as "my friend," has been rather more intimate than that. According to the paper: "Rumors have long abounded that Walsh's relationship with Padel has, in the past, been a close one. Readers of Padel's collection The Soho Leopard suggest the devilish lover in fake Armani is none other than the Independent writer himself." Indeed. Here's a specimen of the poem in question, although the identity of the speaker is certainly fluid, and may include the poet herself:

I was never your devoted lover. It was gossip,
That. All wrong, I am the Amur leopard no
One knows about, the thirty-fifth; each eye
An emerald. I'm passing by Quo
Vadis, St Anne's Court and Sunset Strip

On a summer evening trembling--water muscle
Breaking on the knife--
Edge of a dam--with promises of headlong
Encounters that might change a life.

If Walsh is Padel's ex-lover, that doesn't bar him from speaking up on her behalf. But a little more transparency might be welcome--perhaps a heart-shaped dingbat in the margin of his column. Meanwhile, he has backpedaled just a bit from his earlier assault on Walcott. "I'm sorry he's withdrawn," Walsh told the Evening Standard. "I just thought it was worth bringing up that, while he is a brilliant poet, his attitudes towards teaching poetry to young people--with a relationship that was overly close--were wrong. It was a moral rush of blood to the head."

To change the subject, at least for a few minutes: I just read a fascinating Frieze piece by Jace Clayton in defense of Auto-Tune. I'll let the author explain what he's talking about:

The most important piece of musical equipment of the last 10 years is not an instrument or a physical object. It's called Auto-Tune and is used on roughly 90 per cent of all pop songs. It is what's known as a 'plug-in,' a specialized piece of software made to be inserted into other, bigger pieces of audio software. Auto-Tune bends off-key notes into pitch perfection.

Of course I knew about the existence of Auto-Tune, and that it was used even by artists with quasi-perfect pitch (check out this recent dust-up between Billy Joel and the pugnacious Ed Champion, who needled the singer for touching up a performance of the national anthem). But I didn't realize how pervasive it was. And yes, off the top of my head, I would have considered it a crutch--a crude cosmetic for vocal blemishes. Clayton argues that in the hands of its most skilled practitioners, Auto-Tune is simply one more expansion of the palette. The human voice is not at war with this vaguely robotic technology. It's "more like glossy coexistence, a strange new dance of give-and-take," with the performer and the algorithm following each other's lead.

I was immediately reminded of the ancient prejudice against microphones, which were also once regarded as a form of cheating. As Gary Giddins pointed out in the first volume of his massive Bing Crosby biography:

According to an old theatrical shibboleth, an entertainer who could not project to the balcony's last row was not ready for the big time; Jolson exemplified the leather-lunged belter of songs. With the arrival of the microphone--and the instant exit of the preposterous megaphone--a new and more intimate kind of singing for larger audiences was made possible. Technology changed music. Ironically, mechanics led to a more human and honest transaction between singers and their listeners.

For me, the analogy holds until the last sentence. Which is to say that the microphone allowed greater intimacy between the audience and the singer, whose very intake of breath was now part of the performance. Whereas Auto-Tune still strikes me as distancing device, with the performer's humanity appearing in galvanizing glimpses. But Clayton makes the opposite argument:

Rather than novelty or some warped mimetic response to computers, Auto-Tune is a contemporary strategy for intimacy with the digital. As such, it becomes quite humanizing. Auto-Tune operates as a duet between the electronics and the personal. A reconciliation with technology. This development was sparked by a sexagenarian pop star [i.e., Cher] and spread like wildfire across genre, language, and geography. We live in a world saturated by electronics and we're finding ways to make that situation sing.

I would say more, but I can't be hanging around much longer in my striped bathrobe (the blogger's equivalent of a gray flannel suit, and yes, autographed 8X10 glossies are available on request). But if you're following the Auto-Tune debate, you should also check out the smart, quirky Artificating blog. There you can download one of the freakier products discussed in Clayton's article: DJ Champion's "Baako," where a crying baby is fed through the wicked plug-in and sounds like a set of extraterrestrial bagpipes.

Walcott: the last word (from me, anyway)

2009-05-13T08:16:00.006-04:00

Walcott has folded his tent, and this Saturday either Ruth Padel or Arvind Mehrotra will be elected the Oxford professor of poetry. I am grateful that this fuss pointed me toward Hilton Als's 2004 profile of the poet in the New Yorker--a vivid, non-hagiographic piece of work. Als admires Walcott and has some smart things to say about his poetry, especially its protracted lover's quarrel with his birthplace: St. Lucia in the Lesser Antilles. He quotes an early piece from Sea Grapes, in which Walcott's pictorial sense and peculiar music (I love "the house-shadow / where the children played house") are already on display:

Laborie, Choiseul, Vieuxfort, Dennery,
from these sun-bleached villages
where the church bell caves in the sides
of one grey-scurfed shack that is shuttered
with warped boards, with rust,
with crabs crawling under the house-shadow
where the children played house;
a net rotting among cans, the sea-net
of sunlight trolling the shallows
catching nothing all afternoon.

But Als also notes the push-and-pull aspect of Walcott's personality, which made me glad I wasn't on the long drive to Soufrière:

After what seemed like many hours, we passed the tiny town of Anse la Raye and reached the shack where Walcott wanted to stop. The ride had been awkward, full of long silences. When Walcott spoke, he was brusque but never exactly rude: he has a British penchant for distancing through politeness, and for teasing as a means of expressing hurt, anger, and resentment. There is something unforgiving in his person that is reflected in the poems. [Seamus] Heaney writes that what he loves about Walcott's poems is "the writerly fearlessness... the readiness to lift the baton and tune the big orchestra--and there's always just that hint of a possibility that if things get out of hand the baton could turn into a nightstick."

This took me straight back to my personal exposure to the poet. As I already noted on this blog, I signed up for one of his seminars at Columbia in 1983. Back then he talked a great deal about diction, especially in verse drama: he would hand out an example and we would take its rhetorical pulse as it downshifted from top-hatted formality to curt colloquialism and back again. Fascinating stuff (and very germane to Walcott's own work). He jetted down from Boston once a week, a glamorous figure, and since I usually kept my mouth shut in class, I had little direction interaction with him. But one day, he was trying to recall the opening lines of Auden's "In Praise of Limestone." By coincidence I had just been reading that very poem, and was quick to pipe up with the missing words: "If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones, / Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly / Because it dissolves in water." Perhaps I looked pleased at this minor feat of memory. In any case, Walcott glanced at me for a moment and said, "Oh, you're one of those guys who studies the index of first lines at the back of the book." Generous, no? Not to worry, I survived and thrived. And I could have done far worse, to judge from this vignette in the Hilton Als piece, in which Walcott, accompanied by Als and his companion Sigrid, maintains quality control at a St. Lucia restaurant:

We sat down. On the menu there was a dish called "Derek Walcott Acra"--a salt fish cake with Creole sauce served with sweet-potato fries.

"Hello, Mr. Walcott," the waitress said, approaching. She was young and pretty and thin, and was dressed in a skimpy piece of madras cloth. She reminded me of Walcott’s Helen. Walcott turned away from her, mock dismissive.

"I'm not speaking to you, you know," he said.

"Oh! Mr. Walcott! Why?" She seemed legitimately concerned.

"Dodo!" Sigrid said, chuckling, toying with her camera.

"You're rude to me, you know," Walcott said to the young girl, who did not laugh. "You deserve lash! You want lash!"

Walcott pulled the girl over his knee and began to spank her. The girl squealed. Now she was laughing. Her fear had turned to relief.

Walcott let the girl up. "Now you're rude no more, huh?"

"Oh, Dodo!" Sigrid said, laughing, before turning her attention to what she and Walcott could and should not eat, given their diet.

I'll have one Derek Walcott special, please. With shafafa on the side.

ADDENDUM: After posting the above, I was alerted to a 2004 Poetry Daily essay by David Orr, which addresses the broader question of why we forgive some poets their day-to-day sins and apply the bastinado to others who are surely no better. Here's the pungent opening salvo:

In response to the question, "Can a bad man be a good poet?" there are only two things to be said: "Yes" and "obviously." In part, that's because the poetry world sets the bar fairly low for "badness"--when we say a poet was a "bad man," we don't mean that he was a shotgun-toting, baby-kicking monster; we mean that he was unpleasant, disturbed, or a jerk. And considering that poetry's history is thick with unpleasant, disturbed jerks, the question would seem to answer itself.

Still, smart readers continue to bemoan the disgraceful behavior of poets, and to ask how it possibly can be reconciled with their art. In a recent New York Times review of Philip Larkin's Collected Poems, for example, Stephen Metcalf tells us that "poets are expected to be more than first-rate talents" and then asks, "How do we square this with Larkin, with his bitterness, his commitment to masturbatory solitude and his slide into gross political reaction?" In raising this question, Metcalf, a Larkin fan, is simply acceding to critical reality--if you're going to review a Larkin book, you're going to do a lot of sighing over the poet's racial slurs, spiteful quips, and dirty magazines. But why is that? Why do we feel the need to judge a Larkin or a Lowell or a Pound--or at least to judge them morally? What do we mean by "bad," anyway? And why continue to ask a question about poetic morality whose answer--"Yes, obviously"--has been proven over and over and over again, century after century, from Blake to Shelley to Rimbaud to Frost?

I should note that Derek Walcott is not on trial in Orr's article. Look for the usual suspects, cited in the excerpt above: Larkin, Lowell, Pound. Still, Orr's arguments are completely relevant, and he makes an often overlooked point--we're more shocked by the bad behavior of poets whose work has cast over the reader at least an elementary spell of self-identification.

Walcott: the plot thickens

2009-05-11T14:31:00.007-04:00

Last week I posted a few thoughts about the white-hot battle for the Oxford professorship in poetry. In a nutshell, I felt that Derek Walcott's accomplishment as a poet easily qualified him for the gig, despite his unsavory history of hitting on female students. It wasn't as if Oxford were hiring him to teach--the professorship is an honorary position, with a small stipend and few duties beyond a handful of lectures. I think that is still a defensible position. Yet I was also too cavalier about Walcott's skirt-chasing, and Seth Abramson at Suburban Ecstasies took me to task for that. For perhaps the first time in my life, I had become the poster boy for retrograde male chauvinism. There ensued an exchange of views in the comment thread, and rather than endlessly rephrasing, I'll just post some of the salient bits:

JM: As the author of that sick defense (I'll omit the quotation marks around both words), I thought I would put in my two cents here. In the very same blog post you quote, I said that if Walcott had truly blackmailed students into sleeping with him, he should have been kicked to the curb back in the 1980s. What to do about his rotten behavior twenty or thirty years after the fact is a little more complicated. As for admiration turning into intimacy, I wasn't blaming his female students (although I can see why it might have appeared that way). I was speaking more generally about Walcott coveting Robert Lowell's tie, or me coveting Richard Ford's fork. I don't in any way endorse sexual harassment. I consider it a great relief that the fuzzy rules governing such conduct, which allowed Walcott a free pass twenty-five years ago, have gotten much tighter.

SA: I'm glad you mentioned Walcott deserving the employment axe in the 1980s, though in saying "to be fair, he was hardly the only poet to take advantage of his harem of youthful admirers," I'm not sure I see the relevance--it's not about fairness to Walcott, but the students, and every single professor who "took advantage of his harem" needed to be axed, period. If Walcott had been the only one caught, then Walcott should have gone, and that would have been fair. If twenty professors had been caught, then twenty should have been axed, and that would have been fair. Each act would have an inherent fairness not diminished by any failure to root out additional violators.

Had Walcott apologized publicly and amended his behavior, twenty or thirty years might change this story somewhat. But there's been no apology, and no particular reason to think the behavior's been amended, either, so Walcott is (it seems to me) as deserving of censure now as ever--he's done nothing to heal the wounds he caused or to rehabilitate himself.

As for Lowell and Ford, my feeling is that poets are just people--typically more flawed than most, and less giving of themselves than most (because poetry engenders its own sort of egotism), and therefore hardly worthy of any sort of blind admiration. I'm certain I've met several hundred men in my life who are greater men than Walcott, and none of them were famous.

JM: As for my comment about the long, pathetic practice of American poets sleeping with their students--I wasn't trying exonerate Walcott. I was only suggesting that the laxity applied to his case in the 1980s may have stemmed in part from the sense that this was going on all over. (And yes, from the fact that he was a celebrated black poet and likely Nobel laureate.)

If Walcott had apologized or made some public show of contrition, that indeed would have changed matters (somewhat, anyway). Since he didn't--and since he was still making like a lounge lizard as recently as 1998--I should amend my earlier blog post and concede that he's probably not the right guy for the Oxford job. To hire him would send a bad, destructive message. Meanwhile, here's another question: in fifty years, would you rather read the great poetry of an asshole or the capable poetry of a really good person? The answer sticks in my craw. It doesn't persuade me that Walcott should get the Oxford professorship.

Finally, Lowell's tie and Ford's fork. I don't consider poets to be better or less fallible than other people. There are many shining examples of cruel, selfish, and manipulative poets. But we could probably find similar percentages among garbage men and paleontologists. So, no blind admiration, just a human (and humorous) itch to borrow a little magic from your hero. That's why I took Ford's fork (although he's not my hero) and that's why I considered stealing a plum from the tree in front of Keats' house in Hampstead (although it wasn't the original tree).

I have no reason to doubt Abramson's claim that he's up to his neck in great men. I would also suggest that he's confusing different sorts of greatness. We don't admire (or even worship) poets for their strength of character, but for their demonic negotiation of language and experience--which, as Abramson concedes, is often at odds with their scuzzy day-to-day behavior. That said, I did come around to his point of view. In other words, I think that Walcott's history of sexual harassment does make him a less-than-attractive candidate for the professorship.

Meanwhile, according to the Times Online, Walcott's history as a "sex pest" is now being anonymously circulated to potential voters:

The race to win poetry's most prestigious academic post has turned dirty after Oxford academics were anonymously sent a lurid dossier accusing Derek Walcott, the front runner and Nobel laureate, of being a sex pest. The package was circulated last week to staff and graduates eligible to vote in next Saturday's election for the Oxford professorship of poetry, as well as to the offices of Cherwell, a student newspaper.

Straight out of The Human Stain, isn't it? Further down, the Times article includes some extra detail about the anonymous dossier:

About 50-100 electors, including dons and heads of colleges, have been sent the Walcott dossier, posted from London. The only clue to the sender’s identity came in a note with Cherwell’s package. It was signed "Sandra and Jane."

The envelopes contain photocopied pages from an obscure academic work, The Lecherous Professor, which detail Walcott's attempts to lure the Harvard student into bed.

The Daily Mail quotes Hermione Lee, who has been one of Walcott's most prominent supporters (and is also a professor at Oxford). She has a starchy reaction to the poison-pen maneuvering behind the dossier ("an unpleasant way of carrying on") and goes on to reiterate many of the same arguments I initially made. "Should great poets who behave badly be locked away from social interaction?" she asks. "We are acting as purveyors of poetry, not of chastity." Addressing Cherwell, the eminent biographer of Edith Wharton (certainly not chaste) and Philip Roth (even less so) also compared Walcott to some of his randy predecessors: "You might ask yourself as a student body whether you wanted Byron or Shelley as a professor of poetry, neither of whom had personal lives free from criticism."

UPDATE: According to the Guardian, Walcott has withdrawn from the race. "I am disappointed that such low tactics have been used in this election and I do not want to get into a race for a post where it causes embarrassment to those who have chosen to support me for the role or to myself," he told the Evening Standard. "I already have a great many work commitments and while I was happy to be put forward for the post, if it has degenerated into a low and degrading attempt at character assassination, I do not want to be part of it."

"Blumine" and Budweiser

2009-05-07T21:05:00.007-04:00

This morning I cabbed it over to Avery Fisher Hall and attended an open rehearsal by the New York Philharmonic, under the baton of its incoming conductor Alan Gilbert. What a pleasure to stand out in the lobby beforehand, drinking gratis coffee and enjoying the self-selecting company of hundreds of Mahler fiends. When I eased into my tenth-row seat, just a few of the orchestra members were visible: a couple of cellists were practicing bits of the Mahler One. It's strange and touching to see the performers in their street clothes. They seem less heroic, less elevated, more like normal human beings, each of whom happens to be endowed with an extraordinary power: X-Men, X-Women.

Gradually the entire orchestra trickled onstage, followed by the conductor in a black shirt and dark slacks. Without much preamble, Gilbert cued the A-natural drone that begins the symphony--nearly a minute of pure suspension, with the reeds, brass, and flutes passing around one of those two-note cuckoo calls that should sound like nature kitsch but never do. The trumpets played their fanfare offstage, possibly from a room with a soda machine in it (or so I like to imagine), then quietly snuck into their seats. And off we went. Two or three times I thought the string section--which includes the conductor's mother, Yoke Takebe--was shouted down by rest of the ensemble. I heard a single fluffed note during a brass entrance. Otherwise the performance was a treat, imbued with the sort of ardent precision that would have made Mahler faint with pleasure. It certainly put to shame the agreeable shambles he described in an 1894 letter to Arnold Berliner, when he conducted the piece in Weimar:

Performance, after utterly inadequate rehearsal, extremely shoddy. Orchestra retrospectively extremely satisfied with symphony as result of barrel of free beer, also their affections won by my style of conducting. My brother was there--extremely satisfied with demi-failure--myself ditto with semi-success!

I won't go through the performance bar by bar (or beer by beer). I will note Gilbert's supple handling of the third movement, especially that hushed passage smack in the middle, which David Hurwitz (in The Mahler Symphonies: An Owner's Manual) calls "one of those Mahlerian oases of peace, made all the more gripping by appearing in such lurid surroundings." That sounds about right. The effect is like emerging into a clearing after a long trudge through the woods, with diffuse sunlight everywhere and no motion of any kind. So beautiful, and so brief--after a couple of minutes, it's back into the rough, with Frère Jacques and a klezmer band ringing in your ears.

After the intermission, the orchestra played "Blumine," an eight-minute-long pastoral that was originally the second movement of the symphony we had just heard. It's Mahler in a mellow mood, with none of the manic alternation that is his greatest virtue and intermittent vice. What I wanted to dwell on, though, is the fact that after struggling for seven years to incorporate this palate-cleanser into the symphony, he dropped it entirely in 1896. At that point "Blumine" vanished. It didn't resurface until 1959, when the manuscript went up for sale at Sotheby's. It was published as a freestanding piece in 1968, and is occasionally, blasphemously inserted back into the symphony by a renegade conductor. The general feeling is that it extended the bucolic vibe of the first movement for too long, and thereby violated the overall trajectory of the symphony. In other words, its exclusion was logical, even inevitable.

Critics (myself included) love to talk about the inevitability of a work of art. For the most part, that is absolute crap. Art is created by fickle, fallible human beings, who may well make the most momentous decisions about their work on a bad hair day. Mahler is a great example, since he was constantly shuffling movements around, thinning and thickening his orchestrations, trying to turn demi-failure into semi-success. Sure, there is such a thing as formal perfection, to which we listeners respond with a kind of cooing satisfaction. But plenty of the biggest thrills--the moments that give you goosebumps and palpitations and the distinct, almost perverse sense that you are peering directly into another person's consciousness--come when the artist tosses logic out the window. "A work of art is never finished, only abandoned," said Paul Valéry (or Edgar Degas or Leonardo Da Vinci, depending on which unreliable website you consult). I'm hoping it was Da Vinci, since he seemed allergic to finishing anything, including a meal. But it's correct in any case. The only inevitability is that sooner or later, the artist will cry uncle and resolve to do better next time.

NBCC Reads: Works in Translation

2009-05-06T21:12:00.004-04:00

The latest installment of NBCC Reads, which is all about works in translation, has now been posted over at Critical Mass. It entailed boiling down about 9,000 words of copy into a dapper post a third of that size--and I admit I like the carpentry involved in such a task. I crammed as many of the responses as I could in there. The rest will appear on Critical Mass as freestanding Long Tail posts, and there are definitely some treats to come. Here's an example (in which very few of the words are mine):

Then there was that Everest of French letters, whose vertiginous heights and winding descents have bested many a translator: Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Daniel Dyer saw the multi-volume monster as an absolute summit. "I am in my sixties," he said, "and recovering from prostate cancer surgery. I decided it was, well… time. I read 100 pages a day, every day, until I finished the volumes. I think these are the greatest literary works ever written by a human being. I've not read everything, of course--not even everything that's celebrated. But I cannot imagine anything better."

Michael Sims agreed, praising the magic-lantern quality of Proust's imagery and his prodigal, preening cast of characters. "Most of the time," he concedes, "I find the characters maddening--petty, self-absorbed, posturing, judgmental, although of course often hilarious and sometimes tragic. But I don't read for the characters. I read, I think, for the cinematography. Has there ever been such loving attention to the sensualities of the moment? 'It was on the Méséglise way that I first noticed the round shadow that apple trees make on the sunny earth and those silks of impalpable gold which the sunset weaves obliquely under the leaves, and which I saw my father interrupt with his stick without deflecting them.' I quote this almost random selection (from the Lydia Davis translation) as an example of the kind of snapshot imagery that Proust seems to casually exhale without thinking: the glimpse immortalized. So generous is his encyclopedic curiosity, so Olympian his empathy, that even passing shadows have personality."

Please do take a look at the entire omnium gatherum here. And stop by Critical Mass over the next month for the dessert course.

Wright stuff

2009-05-01T10:03:00.007-04:00

My interview with Evan Wright, author of Generation Kill and Hella Nation (not my favorite title, but an excellent and entertaining collection) has been posted over at CJR. We talked about Hunter S. Thompson, the insidious power of televised imagery, and the author's transformative experience on the set of The World's Biggest Gang Bang II. Here's a sample, in which Wright discusses his youthful infatuation with Eldridge Cleaver:

CJR: What else draws you to these voiceless subjects, whom you call "rejectionists" in your introduction?

Wright: Well, here’s a little personal narrative that I didn’t put into the introduction. In a nutshell: when I was thirteen, I was insanely obsessed with Eldridge Cleaver's Soul On Ice. This was in rural Ohio, where I wanted to lead a Black Panther revolution. I ran away, and was sent to a home for troubled kids. That all resolved itself, years ago, but I still have a real affection for people struggling with some ridiculous obsession. I want to be a voice for the voiceless--you know, that noble thing--but I also have a personal affinity for rejectionists.

CJR: One great strength of the book is that you can write about Wingnut and his comical cadre without making fun of them.

Wright: I’m glad that comes across. I’m trying to reject the whole hipster irony culture. You know the idea: you leave New York or Los Angeles (two places where I’ve spent most of my adult life), and then you find idiots in the hinterlands, and show what buffoons they are. I suppose that because I actually am from the hinterlands, I dislike that kind of journalism.

You can read the rest here.

Al is gone

2009-04-29T08:02:00.005-04:00

I'm very sad to say that Al died last night. He was twenty years old, a venerable age for a cat, and had already survived more than one brush with death. His kidney was failing, and over the last few months he had become increasingly gaunt, but he remained a sociable little being to the very end. I do believe he had a soul--a small one, no bigger than an apricot--and that's what I will miss.

I keep thinking of Wislawa Szymborska's "Cat in an Empty Apartment," which I wrote about on this blog once before. The situation in the poem is different: the cat has survived its master (not an appropriate word, given the upper hand many felines have in the household). But the sensation of grief, and of an inexplicable vacancy, feels just right. So I'll quote it again in its entirety:

Die--you can't do that to a cat.
Since what can a cat do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls?
Rub up against the furniture?
Nothing seems different here,
but nothing is the same.
Nothing has been moved,
but there's more space.
And at nighttime no lamps are lit.

Footsteps on the staircase,
but they're new ones.
The hand that puts fish on the saucer
has changed, too.

Something doesn't start
at its usual time.
Something doesn't happen
as it should.
Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared
and stubbornly stays disappeared.

Every closet has been examined.
Every shelf has been explored.
Excavations under the carpet turned up nothing.
A commandment was even broken,
papers scattered everywhere.
What remains to be done.
Just sleep and wait.

Just wait till he turns up,
just let him show his face.
Will he ever get a lesson
on what not to do to a cat.
Sidle toward him
as if unwilling
and ever so slow
on visibly offended paws,
and no leaps or squeals at least to start.

Walcott: the chair, the tie, plus Ford's fork

2009-04-28T09:36:00.004-04:00

Over at the Independent, John Walsh wonders whether Derek Walcott's long history of skirt-chasing should prevent him from assuming the Oxford professorship in poetry. This isn't your average academic gig: the holder has few duties and a measly salary (£6,901, the equivalent of $10,000 and change). But there are some glorious predecessors, including Matthew Arnold--who inaugurated in the chair in 1865--Robert Graves, and W.H. Auden. The other peculiarity is that the professor is elected by Oxford graduates, instead of being selected by the usual conclave of backstabbing colleagues. In his piece, Walsh handicaps the race, which has narrowed to just two candidates:

[Christopher] Ricks steps down next month, and Oxford graduates are lining up like pompom-waving cheerleaders to vote their favourite candidates into his vacated throne: supporting my old friend Ruth Padel will be the biographer Victoria Glendinning, the philosopher AC Grayling, and Sir Jeremy Isaacs. Against her in this two-horse Parnassian gallop is Derek Walcott, the St Lucia-born poet and 1992 Nobel literature laureate. His fans include Marina Warner, Hermione Lee and the Booker prize-winner Alan Hollinghurst.

The chair of the English faculty board, Dr Sally Mapstone, has said: "The two candidates... both have excellent credentials for the post, and each has an outstanding record as an ambassador for the subject. It would be a great privilege to have either of them as Oxford's professor of poetry for the next five years."

Have Walcott's fans all forgotten the shadows of sexual harassment allegations that have swirled around their man over the years? Should one not mention Ms Nicole Niemi, 30 years his junior, who came forward in 1995 to claim that, when she was a creative writing graduate student in the 1980s, Walcott threatened to fail her unless she went to bed with him? When she declined, she alleged that he told her the play she'd written for the course couldn't, in that case, be produced. Years after the event, Ms Niemi was looking for half a million dollars in compensation and punitive damages before the claim was eventually settled.

I briefly studied with Derek Walcott during the early 1980s. Being male, hirsute, and non-blond, I didn't have to worry about him hitting on me, and found him an inspiring teacher. But there were always rumors about his dalliances with female students. To be fair, he was hardly the only poet to take advantage of his harem of youthful admirers. And one acquaintance, who apparently declined his physical advances but still fraternized with the future Nobelist during the off hours, conceded that he had a certain "integrity" even when he was chasing you around the coffee table.

Now, if Walcott truly threatened to fail a student unless she slept with him, he should have been kicked out of the university at once. And the Niemi dispute is not an isolated incident. Still, one hopes that a genius would have eventually learned his lesson. The other problem is that in the long run, poetic accomplishment trumps bad behavior. Also: admiration is always itching to turn into intimacy. Walcott himself, early in his career, had a thing for Robert Lowell's ties, as he recounts in What the Twilight Says:

In his apartment, about to go out somewhere with him, I fix the knot of Cal's tie. He returns the knot to its loose tilt. "Casual elegance," he says, his hands too large to be those of a boulevardier. The correction was technical, one moment's revelation of style. His verse, in that period of two close books, Near the Ocean and For the Union Dead, had the casual symmetry of a jacket draped on a chair, genius in shirtsleeves. He had written about the stiffness that paralyzed his metre, how he found its rigidities unbearable to recite, skipping words when he read in public to contract them like asides. He had learned this from Beat poetry and William Carlos Williams. Still, his free verse was not a tieless metre....

On another occasion, and the reader must not think that I have a fetish about poets' ties, I admired, with casualness, a pale orange-and-brown-figured tie he wore. He took it off and gave it to me. I did not fawn on Lowell the poet. I did not collect bits of his clothing like his valet. Yet he once made a terrible accusation as if I were. "You use people," he told me. It was a night when he was "going off." Darkness hadn't yet come, but the light was dimming. I didn't know, as his older friends knew, how to recognize the spark that meant that, like Hieronymo, he would be mad again.

Regarding the ties, I believe that Walcott doth protest too much. It's not a fetish, just a desire to make off with a tiny splinter of your household god. One of my college professors owned a chocolate-brown suit that had belonged to Wallace Stevens. How he got hold of this item I don't recall, but I often pictured it hanging in his closet, possibly in an archival garment bag. What was it good for? Did the owner put it on when he wrote his own poetry, praying that the tropical wool still retained some juju in its stiff, bronze-decor-colored folds? And finally, a mea culpa: once, having recently read and admired The Sportswriter, I found myself sitting at a restaurant table adjacent to Richard Ford's. When his party left, I leaned over and swiped his fork. I was young, I was tipsy, and yes, I gave the tines a quick wipe with my napkin, then stuck the fork in my jacket pocket. I don't know what that was good for either. Later on, with a strange twinge of guilt, I threw it away.

Straight Outta Albuquerque: J.M.G. Le Clézio at the Y

2009-04-27T10:29:00.005-04:00

My report on J.M.G. Le Clézio's appearance at the 92nd Street Y has been posted over at Words Without Borders. The author was tall, dignified, and self-deprecating. There was no conversation about whether he had been surprised by the Nobel, but his wife, in Le Clézio's telling, knew exactly how to handle the long-distance call: "Someone said, This is so-and-so from the Swedish Academy, and she said to me, This is for you." The excellent interlocutor was Adam Gopnik (small, elated, with a slight Dick Cavett vibe), and here's a sample bit:

Travel seemed to be in his DNA, suggested Gopnik, not merely a matter of circumstance. Le Clézio agreed. His ancestors were from Brittany, which he compared to Ireland: a land whose perennial poverty caused its people to leave "whenever they could." Yet the one constant, no matter where Le Clézio ended up, was the French language. This first love, this loyalty, began during his childhood. "I very much enjoyed going through dictionaries," he recalled. "I still see life through those page, those definitions."

At this point the two writers shared a moment of lexicological bliss (Gopnik indicated a preference for the big illustrated Larousse). Then they moved on to another of Le Clézio’s early infatuations: J.D. Salinger, who Gopnik described as "one of the local gods" at The New Yorker. What the French author loved about Salinger was, in a sense, what he loved about the dictionary: an accumulation of luminous details, and the feeling that "each word is a world by itself." He had particular praise for "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," which he called "one of the best short stories ever written." Albert Camus also got high marks from his fellow Nobel laureate, for his refusal to deliver knee-jerk messages of affirmation.

You can read the rest here.

Mary, Mary

2009-04-21T08:42:00.000-04:00

Lately I've seen a run of bad plays. I don't go to the theater that much, and certainly don't get comp tickets, but it wasn't really the wasted cash that bothered me. It was the suspicion that I was turning into one of those cranky, anhedonic types--I always think of Max von Sydow in Hannah and Her Sisters, eating a tuna sandwich and pouring out his Scandavian scorn upon whatever happened to be on the television. First there was Irena's Vow, a specimen of Holocaust kitsch only halfway redeemed by Tovah Feldshuh's performance in the lead role. (Talk about typecasting: Feldshuh cut her teeth playing Golda Meir, and now she's the first call when you need a resilient Jewish female--although Irena Gut Opdkye, the real-life Pole whose heroics form the basis of the play, was not herself Jewish.) Before we even set foot in the theater, I made a prediction to my companion: there would be a moment where the heroine confronted a Nazi officer and said, "I know there is good in you." When that moment came, she gave a little inward groan, and I just smiled.

Then there was Impressionism, which marked the first appearance of Jeremy Irons on Broadway in 25 years. The last time around, he won a Tony for his role in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing. If I simultaneously squint and do the multiplication tables in my head, I can just about see how Irons was fooled into thinking that Mark Jacobs' script had a Stoppardian stamp to it. There is a good deal of structural trickery, the actors speak in mild paradoxes, and Jacobs does attempt to monkey with the art-and-life equation. One problem is that the metaphorical lesson he gleans from the Impressionists--that you have to stand way, way back to see the pretty picture, and that goes double for the emotional picture--is completely banal. The other problem is that there is zero chemistry between Irons and his leading lady, the excellent Joan Allen. And compressing this two-act stinker into a single act doesn't help. (I'm being very negative, aren't I? Bring me my tuna sandwich.)

What snapped this losing streak was an imported British production of Friedrich von Schiller's Mary Stuart. The staging--including a search-and-destroy raid by Elizabethan security men that commences while the lights are still up, and a sizzling onstage downpour--is consistently striking. I've never read the original play (surprise), but Peter Oswald's adaptation hits the sweet spot between period flavor and contemporary jazziness: you sense the archaic idiom without getting bogged down in it. And the leading ladies, Janet McTeer and Harriet Walter, are perfectly matched in their passive-aggressive battle for the British throne. Walter's Elizabeth I has the whip hand, of course--she's already queen. So what we get is asymmetrical warfare, with McTeer's Mary Stuart deploying the weaker party's favorite weapons: guilt, guile, morality. The play is perhaps too talky, especially in the first act. One senses the heavy hand of Basil Exposition for the first fifteen minutes, filling in the blanks. But it the end, Mary Stuart does cast its swift, cerebral spell. And there's an additional novelty to the female cut-and-thrust. In an era of rigid patriarchy, these women are contending for absolute power, while the coterie of scheming men, who seem to have taken a management course with Niccolò Machiavelli, scuttle around their feet.

J.G. Ballard departs

2009-04-20T16:14:00.003-04:00

While I wasn't looking, the 78-year-old J.G. Ballard died on Sunday. The BBC obituary quotes his agent to the effect that he been sick "for several years," and notes that Ballard himself, while frequently pigeonholed as a science fiction writer, described his books as "picturing the psychology of the future." I find it telling, and poignant, that although two of Ballard's books (Empire of the Sun and Crash) had been made into high-visibility films, the obituary's headline still calls him a "cult author." Perhaps his penchant for dystopian grime and queasy sexuality (which was surely part of the allure for Crash director David Cronenberg) kept the masses at a suitable distance. So did his cool sensibility, which occasionally tilted toward flat-affect, chrome-plated minimalism.

Still, Ballard strikes me as one of those authors with a distinctive enough vision of the world that his name is ripe for transformation into an adjective. (Whoops: it already happened.) I wrote about his work twice. The first time, I reviewed what must have been an American reissue of The Drowned World. The novel, Ballard's second, first appeared in England in 1962. By then the author had quit his assistant editor gig at Chemistry and Industry, a trade journal whose clinical tone may have crept into his own prose, keeping his sometimes florid surrealism in check. Where that piece I appeared I can no longer recall, but I did like the book's evocation of a drenched and diluvial planet--which, in the age of Katrina and a melting polar ice cap, seems less science-fictional with each passing year.

Later on, in 1989, I reviewed Running Wild for the New York Times. Reading the tiny piece now, I feel slightly embarrassed by my dismissive tone, but I doubt that this particular book will loom very large in the Ballardian (there we go) canon. Here's the piece in its entirety:

Over the last 25 years, the British writer J. G. Ballard has touched a great many stylistic bases, ranging from straight science fiction (The Drowned World) to abrasive experimentalism (Crash) to autobiographical realism (Empire of the Sun). But regardless of genre, Mr. Ballard's books have tended to share certain qualities, including a fascination with electronic media, a taste for black-comic paradox and, most of all, an ability to immerse the reader in different fictional worlds. Running Wild, which is presented as the forensic diaries of Dr. Richard Greville, a psychiatric adviser to the London police, certainly bears the first two of these trademarks. Greville has been asked to investigate the Pangbourne Massacre, a mysterious tragedy in which the 32 adult residents of an exclusive community 30 miles west of London have been murdered, and their 13 children apparently abducted. Who could have carried out such an atrocity? And why? Greville lists the various theories put forth by the authorities, in order of escalating absurdity. He watches hours of videotaped evidence and ponders the community's way of life, one in which "scarcely a minute of the children's lives had not been intelligently planned." Slowly--more slowly, in any case, than most readers--he comes to the conclusion that the assassins were the children themselves. The Pangbourne offspring, he concludes, "were rebelling against... a despotism of kindness. They killed to free themselves from a tyranny of love and care." Really? The assumptions Running Wild is supposed to challenge, such as the fairy-tale version of family happiness, haven't been widely accepted for decades. Nor has Mr. Ballard given himself ample space to compensate for his warmed-over concept: the novel's 104 pages immerse us no deeper than the ankles. Running Wild has its pleasures, but it's J. G. Ballard at his scantiest, his most reduced. What he gives us here is a dream communicated in Morse code.

Finally, I must note the existence of a superb fan site: Ballardian, already cited above. The archives include an excellent and expansive interview with the author. There is a chortling discussion of how one publisher's reader rejected the Crash manuscript with a couple of curt, diagnostic sentences: "This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish." More to the point, Ballard defends even his darkest work as covertly affirmative:

You know, to be a human being is quite a role to play. Each of us wakes up in the morning and we inhabit a very dangerous creature capable of brilliance in many ways, but capable also of huge self-destructive episodes. And we live with this dangerous creature every minute we're awake. Something like The Atrocity Exhibition sums up my fiction: the attempt by a rather wounded character--in this case, a psychiatrist having a nervous breakdown; there are similar figures throughout the rest of my fiction--to make something positive out of the chaos that surrounds him, to create some sort of positive mythology that can sustain one's confidence in the world. Even something like Kingdom Come is affirmative, where I show a clear and present danger being dealt with, and one of the key figures responsible realizing the error of his ways. So in that respect, I agree with you completely: my fiction is affirmative.

"A sober, concrete, and symmetrical city"

2009-04-20T13:57:00.003-04:00

Last week, in a minor fit of completism, I ordered The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi. No doubt I'll find some edifying things in the book, along with a certain amount of scholarly desiccation. Thumbing through it the other day, I came across this quote from a 1976 panel discussion in Switzerland, where Levi talked about his attachment to Turin and the surrounding Piedmont:

My bond to my "little homeland" [piccola patria] is very strong. I came into the world in Turin, my forebears were all Piedmontese; I found my vocation in Turin, I studied there, I've always lived there, I've worked, had a family, written and published all my books there, with a publisher deeply rooted in the local soil, for all its international renown. I love the city, its dialect, its streets, its pavements, its avenues, the hill and the mountains that surround it, which I climbed as a boy, I like the rural and hill-dweller roots of its people, the conscientiousness of its workers, the flair of its artisans, the rigor of its technicians.... My way of writing is influenced for certain in no small degree by my chemical profession but also in part by having been formed in a sober, concrete, and symmetrical city, a technical city where I have carved out my own niche.

Living as he did in the same apartment where he was born (and where he would later die), Levi was unusually entrenched in his native soil. I visited Turin just once, when I was researching my abortive biography of Levi. It was February, the skies were overcast, the trees dripped and a thick fog alternately hid and revealed bits of the surrounding hills. I found Turin beautiful, but it had the introverted appeal of a Northern European city. Since it kept raining, and since both my wife and myself were nursing colds, we spent much of the time in the low-end hotel near the railroad station, watching snowy RAI broadcasts on television. But I did meet with Levi's son, Renzo, who told me in the kindest possible way that his family was opposed to the prying efforts of biographers like myself. Now I can see that it was much, much too soon: the author had died, an almost certain suicide, less than two years before. The family was still absorbing the shock, and closing ranks at the mere thought of an outsider airing its none-too-dirty laundry. So I halted my research. Yet my memory of Levi's symmetrical city, where everything seemed to be gray or black or the soft green of oxidized metal, remains vivid.

Their glittering eyes are gay

2009-04-13T16:52:00.002-04:00

My days as an Amazon pundit are pretty much behind me, but I couldn't resist wading in when I heard about the company's new anti-gay algorithm. That's right, it seems that hundreds of books by (mostly) gay authors have been stripped of their sales rankings and excluded, in some cases, from product searches. I can hardly imagine somebody at Amazon dreaming up this retail pogrom, and assume it was either a botched implementation of a different initiative or some hacker's idea of a great joke. In either case, the company has some explaining to do. Here's a bit from my post over on the Propeller blog:

A cursory trawl of the Amazon site reveals a crazy quilt of exclusionary bloopers. John Fox's The Boys on the Rocks, a gay coming-of-age story that is not remotely pornographic, with a cover endorsement by the straight-as-an-arrow Richard Price, has no sales ranking. Meanwhile, something called Slave Boy, whose surfeit of graphic detail has caused even the publisher to issue a consumer alert, is still ranked (at a very decent 3,296, by the way).

As noted by the Jacket Copy blog at the Los Angeles Times, Paul Monette's Becoming a Man, which won the 1992 National Book Award, has been bumped to the back of the bus. So has Radclyffe Hall's 1928 classic The Well of Loneliness. Now, the sexual content in Hall's novel, which occasioned a public scandal and lengthy court battle before it could be passed through U.S. Customs, is limited to seven words: "and that night, they were not divided." Something tells me that Lights, Camera, Sex!, by porn star Christy Canyon, has a much higher smut ratio. Shouldn't this fall under the proud, saucy banner of "adult" content? Yet it retains its sales ranking, possibly because the star of I Like To Be Watched settled down into a healthy monogamous relationship at the end of the book.

You can read the whole thing, which includes a misty-eyed glimpse down Memory Lane to my own tenure at the company, here.

The Beatles finally go digital!

2009-04-07T10:51:00.007-04:00

After years of grumbling and repeated false alarms, EMI has finally announced that the full Beatles catalog will be released in spanking-new, digitally remastered versions on September 9, 2009. Folks, let's go straight to the press release:

Apple Corps Ltd. and EMI Music are delighted to announce the release of the original Beatles catalogue, which has been digitally re-mastered for the first time, for worldwide CD release on Wednesday, September 9, 2009 (9-9-09), the same date as the release of the widely anticipated "The Beatles: Rock Band" video game. Each of the CDs is packaged with replicated original UK album art, including expanded booklets containing original and newly written liner notes and rare photos. For a limited period, each CD will also be embedded with a brief documentary film about the album. On the same date, two new Beatles boxed CD collections will also be released.

The albums have been re-mastered by a dedicated team of engineers at EMI's Abbey Road Studios in London over a four year period utilising state of the art recording technology alongside vintage studio equipment, carefully maintaining the authenticity and integrity of the original analogue recordings. The result of this painstaking process is the highest fidelity the catalogue has seen since its original release.

The collection comprises all 12 Beatles albums in stereo, with track listings and artwork as originally released in the UK, and Magical Mystery Tour, which became part of The Beatles' core catalogue when the CDs were first released in 1987. In addition, the collections Past Masters Vol. I and II are now combined as one title, for a total of 14 titles over 16 discs. This will mark the first time that the first four Beatles albums will be available in stereo in their entirety on compact disc. These 14 albums, along with a DVD collection of the documentaries, will also be available for purchase together in a stereo boxed set.

Within each CD's new packaging, booklets include detailed historical notes along with informative recording notes. With the exception of the Past Masters set, newly produced mini-documentaries on the making of each album, directed by Bob Smeaton, are included as QuickTime files on each album. The documentaries contain archival footage, rare photographs and never-before-heard studio chat from The Beatles, offering a unique and very personal insight into the studio atmosphere.

It seems like only yesterday that Allan Kozinn was griping about EMI's intransigence, and suggesting that DIY product from Dr. Ebbetts or Purple Chick would have to satisfy our longings for the conceivable future. Now comes this delightful cornucopia, which will siphon a great many dollars from my pocket and put my old 1987 CDs into permanent storage. Just for the record, I will not be buying the additional box of mono mixes, described by EMI as "for collectors only." A second codicil: I am ecstatic to see these remasters under any circumstances, but very faintly indignant that they have been timed to coincide with the release of the "Beatles: Rock Band" video game. Why not just skip this asinine (and, I'm sure, enormously lucrative) merchandising gimmick, declare a bank holiday on September 9, and be done with it?

A few additional details. EMI has supplied some information about the mastering process itself (I assume this exists on the official Beatles site, but I found on Steve Marinucci's Fab-intensive Examiner blog). Good to know they're blowing dust off the tape heads between each song. Even more interesting is the discussion of audio restoration and noise reduction:

Transferring was a lengthy procedure done a track at a time. Although EMI tape does not suffer the oxide loss associated with some later analogue tapes, there was nevertheless a slight build up of dust, which was removed from the tape machine heads between each title.

From the onset, considerable thought was given to what audio restorative processes were going to be allowed. It was agreed that electrical clicks, microphone vocal pops, excessive sibilance and bad edits should be improved where possible, so long as it didn't impact on the original integrity of the songs.

In addition, de-noising technology, which is often associated with remastering, was to be used, but subtly and sparingly. Eventually, less than five of the 525 minutes of Beatles music was subjected to this process. Finally, as is common with today’s music, overall limiting--to increase the volume level of the CD--has been used, but on the stereo versions only. However, it was unanimously agreed that because of the importance of The Beatles' music, limiting would be used moderately, so as to retain the original dynamics of the recordings.

My hackles rose (quite a sight, by the way) at the part about microphone vocal pops. For the uninitiated, non-geek visitors to HOM: when a singer records in a studio, a thin sheet of nylon mesh is positioned in front of the microphone. This prevents plosive consonants like "P" and "B" from overloading the recording and causing distortion. Back in the glory days at EMI, the Beatles actually used a more substantial variety of screen: a curved rectangle of metallic mesh that was snapped right onto the microphone. And they mostly worked. That's why the "P" in "Sergeant Pepper" doesn't sound like a champagne cork exploding next to your ear. Now, I know the engineers supervising these remasters have the right, reverent attitude toward their source material. But the idea of muffling vocal pops and sibilance does raise some interesting questions about how much tinkering is permissible. Will the sharp intake of breath in "Girl" lose any of its agonized languor? I hope not.

Finally: many fans will assume that this great leap forward will also open to the door to track-by-track sales of Beatles music at online stores. Apparently that's not the case. According to this piece by Robert Andrews at paidContent.org, the longstanding wrangles between EMI and the surviving Beatles about online sales have not yet been resolved. The issue seems to be, uh, money. Andrews does speculate about which format will eventually give Beatles fans the most bang for their buck when online distribution does get underway. In the end, however, this quibbling over compression formats is getting less relevant by the minute. The bad news for the Beatles--and for every other recording artist--is that once the remasters go on sale, FLAC versions will immediately pop up on torrent sites around the globe. Me, I want the fancy package and the legit discs, but I'm a little old-fashioned that way. Meanwhile, lossy formats like MP3 and AAC work just fine for anybody born after, say, 1987. There's no turning back the clock:

But the Rock Band project is clearly about more than just the game, and the harmony that broke out between EMI, Apple Corps and new game partner Harmonix for the game will have had an interesting side-effect. Producer Giles Martin, son of Beatles producer Sir George, had said the game will adhere to his father's original mixes. Tidied up with today's audio editing software for the game and now the CD reissue, they may also sound good enough to take advantage of modern, digital sound systems. Distributed online, however, the new high fidelity would be all lost as MP3 or AAC and would depend on high-quality FLAC files, still used only by audiophiles.

Scofield's good news

2009-04-06T08:22:00.005-04:00

When four guys pull into town to play New Orleans-style funk, and one of them is ex-Meters bassist George Porter Jr., the bar is set very high. And during John Scofield's show last night at B.B. King's, I was initially disappointed by drummer Ricky Fataar's more relaxed groove. This is unfair: the guy is not Ziggy Modeliste. (Nor was Ziggy Modeliste a member of both the Beach Boys and the Rutles.) More to the point, Scofield isn't after a jazzier version of "Look-Ka Py Py"--his new recording, Piety Street, is an exploration of the gospel repertory, with a big dash of R&B and second-line levitation. John Cleary, a mainstay of Bonnie Raitt's band, handled most of the vocals, with a couple of contributions from the eternally young (he's 62) Porter. On organ and piano, Cleary also provided a solid foundation for the star of the night, the faintly professorial Scofield, who powered his way through "Walk With Me," "Ninety Nine And A Half Won't Do," "His Eye Is On The Sparrow," and a strutting "Something's Got A Hold On Me."

There were a couple of deviations from the gospel theme, most notably Hank Williams' "The Angel of Death," which the leader pronounced "the scariest song I've ever heard." It wasn't all that scary, to be honest, and it also seemed outside Cleary's comfort zone as a vocalist. But Scofield played an eloquent intro and some stabbing fills throughout, and was at the top of his game all evening. Most of his statements began with the blues, then branched out into trickier harmonic territory. Despite his level of drop-dead proficiency (which would probably give Leo Nocentelli nightmares), he never appeared to be phoning it in: the fireworks were genuine. And the crowd responded. The dance floor in front of the stage was packed with bobbing heads and swaying bodies, and even the hipster directly in front of me, with his shaved head and ironically clunky glasses, took off his jacket at one point and began some mild testifying. Can any performer ask for more?

Guardian, Gaye

2009-04-02T11:25:00.005-04:00

A little bit of April Fools' mirth can go a long, long way. Still, I was tickled by the Guardian's bogus announcement of yet another technological watershed: "Consolidating its position at the cutting edge of new media technology, the Guardian today announces that it will become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter, the sensationally popular social networking service that has transformed online communication." The piece includes just enough blather about democratization to sound legit, if you happened to be glancing at it on the treadmill. But the antic spirit soon rears its head again:

"[Celebrated Guardian editor] CP Scott would have warmly endorsed this--his well-known observation 'Comment is free but facts are sacred' is only 36 characters long," a spokesman said in a tweet that was itself only 135 characters long.

A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper's archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include "1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!"; "OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more"; and "JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?"

Sigh. I set up a Twitter account myself the other day. I had no followers--isn't that the saddest statement you've ever heard?--and contented myself with a few brief bulletins about my mood, bathrobe, impending shave and shower, etc.

Elsewhere, Obit has posted a solid piece by Gigi Anders about the late, great Marvin Gaye, 25 years to the day after he was shot through the heart by his own father. She recounts his ascent at Motown--where he functioned as a kind of crown prince, having married Berry Gordy's sister, Anna--and his druggy, depressing splashdown in the early 1980s. Gaye did enjoy an interval of glory before the end. "Sexual Healing," which united the singer's erotic vocalise with some churchy harmonies, put him back on the charts. And when I saw him on his final tour, on July 9, 1983, he seemed to be relishing his return to the stage. Granted, he was performing at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, a vast steel-and-concrete shed with ringing, wretched acoustics. (The opening act, Ashford & Simpson, sounded like they were performing in an oil drum.) But his voice was in excellent shape, he obligingly dropped his drawers to moon the audience during "Sexual Healing," and when he pulled up a stool to sing a couple of hushed ballads, even that aircraft hangar of a venue took on a sweet intimacy. Anders includes a suave video of Gaye singing "What's Going On." I'll opt for this sweatier item from the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1980, with the singer pleading, crooning, shouting, and wheedling his way through "Let's Get It On." It doesn't get any better than this. Extra points for the Cholly-Atkins-style choreography by the background singers:

Biss, Bob

2009-03-31T17:46:00.008-04:00

There is an assumption that essayists must be introverts. It probably starts with Montaigne, who retired from public life and more or less pulled up the drawbridge in order to write his fat volume of essays. He went so far as to have a navel-gazing mission statement inscribed on the walls of his study: "In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michael de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out." Still, there is an equal and opposite tradition of the essayist as fact finder. The late David Foster Wallace, whose sprawling novels always beat with an essayistic heart, noted that practitioners of the genre "watch over other humans sort of the way gapers slow down for car wrecks: they covet a vision of themselves as witnesses."

In any case, these thoughts were occasioned by a paragraph I came across last night in Eula Biss's Notes from No Man's Land. Her topic, often, is race--still a thorn in the side of America's collective consciousness, even with Barack Obama securely lodged in the Oval Office. Yet her approach is highly varied, mingling the personal and historical as if to insist that only an amnesiac would do otherwise. And her research does bear some amazing fruits. "Relations," for example, is about dolls--black ones and white ones. Biss discusses her own girlish pastimes with the doll she named, in an engagingly no-frills style, Black Doll. Inevitably she grapples with Barbie and her multi-hued entourage, and it was the sheer, comic compression of these sentences that caught my eye:

In 1959, Mattel introduced a doll that was, unlike most dolls marketed for children, not a baby doll. This doll had breasts and makeup and was modeled after a doll sold in Germany as a gag gift for grown men. The man who designed the American version of the doll, a man who had formerly designed Sparrow and Hawk missiles for the Pentagon and was briefly married to Zsa Zsa Gabor, was charged with making the new Barbie look less like a "German street walker," which he attempted in part by filing off her nipples.

I doubt that Biss accumulated those facts in some dusty archive at the International Center for Barbie Studies. If she did, bravo. But what really impresses me is the way they're deployed--at a brisk clip we get the transition from baby to miniature bombshell, which seems weirdly appropriate given the designer's resume. (So does his brief union with Zsa Zsa Gabor, whose hourglass figure may be lingering in the background.) That leaves the filed-off nipples, at which point the comedy is terminated and Barbie becomes, well, respectable. Perhaps Biss can be persuaded to add an envoi about the transformation of the Obama girls into Beanie Babies.

On another note (but give me time, maybe I can come up with a Barbie connection), I'm hugely thrilled at the prospect of the new Bob Dylan CD, Together Through Life. With his gambler's mustache and cowboy wardrobe, he seems to be on a roll, serenely unconcerned with fame (he's had it spades), wealth (ditto), or the overwhelming shadow of his own creative past. The disc doesn't come out until April 28 (and yes, I already pre-ordered the deluxe edition with a bonus CD, a bonus DVD, collectible poster, sticker, and what is rumored to be an actual lock of Dylan's hair). Meanwhile, the label threw a listening party for a select group of lucky ducks, Alex Ross and Ann Powers among them. On the strength of single spin, they both gave the Bard of Hibbing high marks. Said Ross: "To my ears it was no letdown after Dylan's recent trilogy of new material--Time Out of Mind, Love & Theft, and Modern Times." Added Powers: "Bob Dylan can do whatever the bejeezus he wants."

Dylan himself chimes in via an interview on his official website. At one point the interviewer suggests that Together Through Life has an old-fashioned immediacy associated with early Sun or Chess recordings:

Flanagan: You like that sound?

Dylan: Oh yeah, very much so... the old Chess records, the Sun records... I think that's my favorite sound for a record.

Flanagan: What do you like about that sound?

Dylan: I like the mood of those records--the intensity. The sound is uncluttered. There's power and suspense. The whole vibration feels like it could be coming from inside your mind. It's alive. It's right there. Kind of sticks in your head like a toothache.

If you absolutely must experience that toothache prior to April 28--and I'm afraid I fit into that category--you can purchase the first cut, "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'," as a single. It is, as Powers notes, "a celebration of the Latin influence that also shaped early rock," with a percussive swagger and Dave Hidalgo's norteño-flavored accordion (evidently a sonic trademark throughout). The lyrics lean toward the generic, but what the hell--this is intensely atmospheric music, with a period flavor you can't quite identify and Dylan's grizzled voice alternately parting the fog and darting back into its recesses. I can't wait to hear the rest of it.

Random task

2009-03-30T10:36:00.005-04:00

While I was tracking down that J.F. Powers photo in my previous post, I came across this image, also in the Life archives. In the context of today's self-immolating publishing industry, it seems not only anachronistic but extraterrestrial: the man in the overcoat is a Random House talent scout. That's right, a roving operative with a sharp eye for the sleek sentence, the pungent predicate. "This kid is something," you can almost hear him saying, addressing his words into one of those old-fashioned crank-driven telephones, or maybe jotting them down on the back of an envelope as he hurries over to the Western Union branch. And what about the hot prospect standing on the stairs? She turns out to be Brenda Ueland--journalist, feminist, bohemian (one of her numerous lovers, an anarchist named Raoul Hendricson, left her for Isadora Duncan), and an exercise fanatic who set at least one international swimming record when she was in her eighties. If somebody can supply some accurate dialogue here, I'll be extremely grateful.

A book for animals

2009-03-27T09:26:00.004-04:00

Books tend to collect in what Max Reger famously called the smallest room in the house. Yesterday morning there were three, daintily stacked behind the door: The Hero and the Blues, The Deaths of Louis XVI: Regicide and the French Political Imagination (you'll have to ask Nina about that one), and Prince of Darkness and Other Stories. The latter is a favorite of mine, by J.F. Powers, and during the afternoon I rescued it from its purgatory and reread "The Old Bird, A Love Story." With the economy still drooping, I was struck by one paragraph in particular. The protagonist, an aging businessman who has lost his job, is offered a lowly gig in the shipping room of a department store. Powers nails his response--the flicker of pride, the rapid surrender--to perfection:

For an instant Mr. Newman succeeded in making it plain that he, like any man of his business experience, was meant for better things. A moment later, in an interesting ceremony which took place in his heart, Mr. Newman surrendered his well-loved white collar. He knew that Mr. Shanahan, with that dark vision peculiar to personnel men, had witnessed the whole thing.

Powers knew exactly what he was talking about, having held down a succession of small-potatoes jobs: "He worked as a salesman for Fidelity Insurance, a sales clerk at Marshall Field’s, a chauffeur for a wealthy investor touring the South, an editor for the Chicago Historical Records Survey, and a clerk at Brentano’s bookstore--where he used the shelves to complete his education and to force his favorites on the customers." (The quote is from Joseph Bottum's excellent piece in First Things. There, too, you can find Powers's exasperated response when Morte D'Urban was categorized as a book for Catholics: "Would you say that The Wind in the Willows is a book for animals?") But in the photo here, dredged up from the fascinating Life archives, the youthful, pipe-smoking author seems to be in excellent form, far from the madding crowd at Marshall Field's. There is snow on the ground, a book under his arm, a mild halo of Midwestern light around his head. Those interesting ceremonials of surrender, the ones in the heart, had yet to take place.

Elevator music

2009-03-25T19:03:00.006-04:00

Strange. I was just in the elevator, having made a thrilling trip to the ATM and supermarket, when I heard something familiar playing on the recessed speakers. There is always music in the elevator, and the volume is always turned down to the ghostly edge of audibility. You don't hear it--you sense it through your pores. Still, I swore they were playing Sibelius's "Valse Triste." To make sure, I hit the Open Door button and held it until the alarm bell went off. Yep, it was the Sibelius. I had never heard this lovely, wistful fragment (I think of it as a 45 RPM single with a big hole in the middle) before March 2, when I attended a concert at the refurbished Alice Tully Hall. Paavo Jarvi led the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, and the bulk of the program was Beethoven: Symphony No. 1 and Symphony No. 3. Jarvi is a small, highly energetic figure. At some moments he seemed almost stiff, with a carriage not unlike a toy soldier. Then he would erupt into ferocious body language, including a great deal of micro-managerial action with the left hand.

I enjoyed the Beethoven--it was swift, vigorous, non-reverential. In his review, Allan Kozinn beat up on the hall's retooled acoustics, which he found too dry. It's true that the opening salvo of the Eroica just vanished into thin air, with no reverberation. But what you lose in grandeur, you gain in intimacy. In any case, once the program was over, Jarvi returned to the podium for a performance of "Valse Triste." I didn't know what it was. I did know that it was beautiful, and that I had never heard a symphony orchestra play that quietly before. It was almost like being in the elevator. The entire audience leaned forward in its seats. Now, as I would subsequently discover, some critics have taken Jarvi to task for this extravagance. In August 2007, James Oestreich gave him a thorough scolding:

An occasional showiness on Mr. Jarvi’s part came to the fore not, oddly, in a gaudy moment but in a quiet one. In an otherwise lovely encore, Sibelius’s “Valse Triste,” he reduced a string passage to a pianissimo on the very edge of audibility. (Pianissimos of any kind had not been prominent in the Beethoven.)

This brings up an interesting point. To my vulgar ear, Jarvi's tamped-down dynamics sounded wonderfully expressive, not showy. Of course I've never seen the score and have no idea what Sibelius called for. But I'm not a strict constructionist and assume that even the most manically exact composers (Mahler is a classic example) will elicit a range of interpretations. Speaking of which, I downloaded a version of "Valse Triste" the moment I figured out what it was. As it happened, the performance by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Neeme Jarvi, the father of Paavo. And you certainly couldn't accuse the elder Jarvi of dabbling in sound-of-silence gimmickry. Compared to his son's delicate reading, this one sounds more like falling down a flight of stairs. Still pretty, though.

PS After I wrote the preceding, I came across this clip of Jarvi leading the same orchestra through "Valse Triste" in 2006. At the 1:30 mark he dials down the ensemble to near silence, and thirty seconds later, he and the orchestra appear to be posing for a still photograph. The clip has been viewed 68,120 times, which suggests that I'm a little late to the party on this one:

CJR: Denby versus snark

2009-01-21T09:23:00.007-05:00

Over at CJR, we've just unveiled Page Views, a Web-only expansion of the books coverage in the magazine. To kick things off, I interviewed David Denby about Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation. The tut-tutting subtitle says it all, but Denby does have a more nuanced view of his subject, and even includes a mea culpa moment: his chortling riff on Ben Stiller's face, which strikes me as less snarky than Arcimboldo-like in its ingenuity. (Owen Wilson threatened to beat Denby up after the original piece ran.) Here's a sample exchange:

Marcus: Were you returning fire in any sense?

Denby: There was no personal motive. I mean, I’ve been snarked like everybody else, but no more than other people. I just kept seeing the same kind of formulation in all sorts of places, including The New York Times. I sensed that Gresham’s Law was beginning to operate: because everyone wants to be funny in this country--which is actually very hard--the bad stuff was driving out the good stuff. And there’s going to be more and more of this, particularly because everyone in journalism is anxious. Older journalists are terrified of being left out of it, of not seeming hip, while the younger ones are battering at the gates trying to get in.

Marcus: You write that one of the optimum cultural conditions for snark occurs when “a dying class of the powerful, or would-be powerful, struggles to keep the barbarians from entering the hallowed halls.” Are traditional journalists such an embattled class?

Denby: I think so. I just feel this tremendous collective anxiety among established journalists that somehow they’ll be left out. There will be a game of musical chairs and they’re not going to get a chair. So one way of seeming to embrace new media, one way of staying in the game, is to get snippy and sarcastic and snarky. They’re certainly not encouraged to be more analytic, more intelligent. I adore Josh Marshall--he’s the best thing to come along in years. But for every one like him, there are five who are just fucking around, trying to grab a little piece of our attention.

You can read the rest here. And please do keep on eye on Page Views, where we'll be posting new reviews, interviews, and reportage at least once a week.

Slip it to me, Bert

2008-12-17T15:42:00.005-05:00

As I noted in a recent post, Paul McCartney is still on the revisionist warpath. First he asserted his cred as a sonic pioneer (apparently choosing to ignore John Lennon's sardonic definition of avant-garde as "French for bullshit," which Lennon also ignored when it came time to make his own musique concrète mudpies). Now he claims to have been the first of the Fabs to take a stand against the Vietnam war, egged on by a visit with Bertrand Russell. In an interview with Prospect magazine (excerpted here in the Telegraph) he recalls the galvanizing effect of his conversation with the 92-year-old philosopher and peace advocate: "He was fabulous. He told me about the Vietnam war--most of us didn't know about it, it wasn't yet in the papers--and also that it was a very bad war. I remember going back to the studio either that evening or the next day and telling the guys, particularly John, about this meeting and saying what a bad war this was."

What is poignant here is Macca's need, more than forty years after the fact, to demonstrate he was no mere camp follower. Surely he must understand that he's got nothing to prove? Perhaps not. As a friend said to me the other day: "I've got plenty of grievances from last week, but I've got millions of grievances from back when I was in my twenties." The first cut--or, let's say, the first thousand cuts--may well be the deepest after all. In any case, McCartney's close encounter with the kingpin of analytic philosophy is not really news. He discussed it in Many Years From Now (1996), in very similar terms but with an extra dash of detail:

Bertrand Russell lived in Chelsea in one of those little terrace houses, I think it was Flood Street. He had the archetypal American assistant who seemed always to be at everyone's door that you wanted to meet.

I sat round waiting, then went in and had a great little talk with him. Nothing earth-shattering. He just clued me in to the fact that Vietnam was a very bad war, it was an imperialist war and American vested interests were really all it was all about. It was a bad war and we should be against it. That was all I needed. It was pretty good from the mouth of the great philosopher: "Slip it to me, Bert."

I reported back to John, "I met this Bertrand Russell guy, John," and I did all the big rap about the Vietnam war and stuff, and John really came in on it all. And then he did How I Won the War.

It can't be an easy task to settle psychic accounts with your dear friend, ferocious rival, and eternal (in every sense of the word) big brother. We can forgive the petulance in deference to the real pain behind it. On the other hand, Macca should stop strafing the Dalai Lama for eating an occasional hamburger. The guy needs his protein.

Turangalîla or bust

2008-12-16T08:53:00.015-05:00

"You never know what is enough," declared Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "unless you know what is more than enough." Whether Olivier Messiaen was familiar with Blake is anybody's guess, but this over-the-top aesthetic would have suited him to perfection. Certainly it applies to his Turangalîla Symphony, which I heard at Carnegie Hall on Sunday night, in a sizzling performance by the Yale Philharmonia and pianist Wei-Yi Yang. The piece, like many of Messiaen's compositions, is a genre-busting whopper: nearly 80 minutes of music, with a rainbow palette and wild-and-crazy rhythmic displacements that make Stravinsky sound positively sedate. There's also the ondes Martenot, a Jazz Age electronic keyboard whose swooping glissandi evoke both the typewriter-and-klaxon instrumentation of the Futurists and "Good Vibrations." Oh, and let's not forget the formidable percussion battery, which you can learn about in this excellent video. The composer even specified the configuration of percussionists, in a diagram that resembles some sort of tricky French polymer:

The result, divided into ten sections, is a hymn to God. That is no surprise: Messiaen may have been the most devout of the great modernists, who played organ every Sunday at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Paris. Alex Ross quotes a great bit from Aaron Copland about the organist's less-than-conventional offerings: "Visited Messiaen in the organ loft at Trinité. Heard him improvise at noon. Everything from the 'devil' in the bass, to Radio City Music Hall harmonies in the treble. Why the Church allows it during service is a mystery." Diabolical tritones, sugary sixths--they all fit the bill, since Messiaen's Catholicism was as unorthodox as his harmonic theories. He was a musical pantheist, who saw the Creator's fingerprints everywhere but also imagined a world enveloped in sound. "The tonic triad, the dominant, the ninth chord are not theories," he wrote, "but phenomena that manifest themselves spontaneously around us and that we cannot deny." (Tell that to Pierre Boulez!)

Anyway, the performance was raucous, sprawling, jubilant, insistently physical--which is to say, also a hymn to earthly love. (The title is pidgin Sanskrit, a kitchen-sink formulation that the composer translated as "love song and hymn of joy, time, movement, rhythm, life, and death.") Messiaen lashes together his unruly creation with a handful of melodic motifs. The most memorable, perhaps, is the sawtooth figure above, which he called the "statue theme." Scored initially for trombones and tuba, it's one menacing fanfare. Yet it keeps resurfacing throughout the symphony, often shouldering its way into more gentle passages with huge sunburst unisons. The piece proceeds from climax to climax, sometimes a little mercilessly. You want to catch your breath before the next jouissance. Yet there are also delicate, floating interludes--Messiaen's version of the pastoral, or possibly afterglow, depending on your metaphor--the most notable of which is the sixth movement, "Jardin du sommeil d'amour." The shimmering string washes and tiptoeing commentary from the piano suggest Ives, particularly the diaphanous textures of The Unanswered Question. But the mood, compounded of sweetness and metaphysical awe, is Messiaen's alone.

Words and music: Klein, Deep Listening

2008-12-08T09:39:00.010-05:00

Over at Obit, an online magazine devoted to the dearly departed, Julia Klein laments the impending extinction of traditional journalism. This will be news to nobody who, well, reads the news--a demographic that keeps narrowing with each passing month. But Klein (a friend of mine) takes a more personal approach. She tosses a few brickbats at management, but mainly she's mourning the loss of a subculture, a way of life. And the death rattle, in her view, was clearly audible more than a decade ago:

One day in the mid-1990s, I remember sitting in the office of then-Philadelphia Inquirer editor Maxwell E.P. King, preparing to discuss my future at the paper. Another editor popped in to exult over a lucrative split in the stock of corporate parent Knight Ridder. When he was gone, I turned to Max, the grandson of legendary book editor Maxwell Perkins. "It's a dying profession," I said, with my customary tact. Max looked appalled.

Our leaders, even the most gifted of them, failed us; they refused to see what lay ahead. At best, they were practicing denial. The Internet? Not a threat, they said, but an opportunity; giving away our content online would serve to reinforce our brand, to woo new print readers. Did they truly believe that? Another former editor told me recently that he remembers saying the words and knowing they were lies.

At the end of 2000, after 17 years on staff, I took a buyout from the newspaper. It was a painful decision, but by then the trends were clear, and many of us were bailing out. Max, tired of endless cost-cutting demands, was long gone, to a foundation job in Pittsburgh, and so, too, was the editor who’d been toting up his stock profits that day.

At the Inquirer, two more buyouts would follow in quick succession. Soon, it seemed, Philadelphia was populated by ghost journalists, some retired or in new professions. We would meet unexpectedly on street corners and ask, tentatively, "Where are you now?" We might also have said, "Who are you?"

You can read the whole thing here. Meanwhile, I was prepared for a similarly funereal atmosphere at a panel I attended this weekend, "Deep Listening: Why Audio Quality Matters." The event was sponsored by the Philoctetes Center, which is an arm of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and as I entered the somber NYPI building on East 82nd Street, I immediately felt some anxiety about locating the right room. Would I wander into some starchy discussion about Little Hans? But no, the room I eventually entered had a record player sitting on a low table in front of the participants. That archaic machine (I speak as the proud owner of a Rega P-1 with the groovy glass platter upgrade) sealed the deal.

The panelists were an impressive bunch. Greg Calbi, Steve Berkowitz, Kevin Killen, and Craig Street have collectively produced, engineered, mixed, or mastered thousands of records, including more desert island discs than you can shake a palm frond at. Michael Fremer is the kingpin of today's back-to-vinyl movement, as well as a senior contributing editor at Stereophile. And Evan Cornog (who is incidentally the publisher of CJR) was there to represent that chimerical figure, the Listener--more specifically, the audio freak who spends every last dime to ascend the Everest of high fidelity. (For him, Cornog noted, the event was more or less "an intervention.")

And what did they have to say? Calbi, who functioned as the moderator, praised the sensuous and transcendent powers of music, then let the hammer fall on "the alienating and off-putting effects of this age of bad sound." The culprit, of course, was the compressed audio formats favored by the latest generation of listeners. Trading portability for sonic opulence, many may never have heard an LP or even a SACD, with its surfeit of living, breathing, three-dimensional sound. Fremer struck a more optimistic note. He saw vinyl making a comeback among teenagers and college students--a phenomenon I would doubt, if it hadn't been widely noted elsewhere. Whether the shiny, flexible, pop-and-tick-prone platters of my youth will ever become a mass medium again is still an open question. After all, high fidelity was a minority taste even during the golden age of the long player. And Stereophile (to which, mea culpa, I subscribe) often resembles audio porn--a province of wealthy nutters, who think nothing of dropping $32,900 on the ASR Emitter II Exclusive Amplifier, with its sexy, heatsink-capped main chassis.

I should be clear: the thirst for high fidelity is in my blood. When he was a penniless medical student, my father sold his stomach acids to buy his first stereo. A tube up the nose, down the esophagus--all for some extra midrange! I grew up surrounded by high-end components, including a looming pair of KLH Model Nines (now nestling in the vault of some Japanese collector). So I've been spoiled. I listen to compressed files on my iPod and wistfully nod my head, knowing that the air is vibrating between each instrument, that the saliva is rattling around in Ben Webster's mouthpiece and that the famous splice on "Strawberry Fields" is coming up--but that these nuances are seriously muffled by the magic of MP3. Will the expanding storage capacity of portable audio players eventually allow us to carry these nuances around in our pocket? I hope so. Mahler sounds awfully depleted coming through those headphones; it's as if you diverted the Nile through a garden hose.

Later in the conversation, the panelists dwelled on particular benchmark recordings. Killen admitted that the vinyl version of Roxy Music's Avalon was what had first hooked him on music. Berkowitz, who has worked on Miles Davis reissues for the last twenty years, played the opening minute or so of "'Round Midnight"--a very relevant example, since I've always thought that digital remastering was particularly cruel to the sound of Davis's Harmon-muted horn. Deprived of its analog intricacies, that hushed, intimate, breathy sound turns screechy and metallic. (It's like listening to somebody play "Summertime" on a pencil sharpener.) Fremer stumped for Sufjan Stevens, who he called "the Aaron Copland of our era," while Street discussed the no-muss-no-fuss recording techniques he used for Chris Whitley's Dirt Floor: a single stereo ribbon mic hung from the ceiling of a garage with baling wire.

Now Killen was recalling the session for Elvis Costello's "God Give Me Strength." He noted that the song had been conceived for a crappy movie whose title he couldn't remember. At once the image of Illeana Douglas singing the piece (actually she was lip-synching to a version by Kristen Vigard) popped into my head: it was the only memorable moment of the film, which was otherwise redeemed by John Turturro's amusing turn as a faux Phil Spector. "Wasn't that You Light Up My Life?" I called out, instantly realizing I had the title wrong. Folks, it was Grace of My Heart. Cringing with embarrassment, I certainly wasn't going to add that I had some problems with Elvis Costello's own version: the man is a genius, but his latter-day vocal style, with its adenoidal croon and wide, mawkish vibrato, doesn't always work for me. So I kept my mouth shut. Luckily or unluckily my goofy interjection will soon be available on streaming audio and video here. In this case low resolution will do quite nicely, thanks.

Barcelona!

2008-11-26T23:09:00.006-05:00

After having his will flouted more than a decade ago, when George Harrison, Ringo Starr, and Yoko Ono all refused to let "Carnival of Light" surface on the multivolume Anthology, Paul McCartney is once again agitating to release this 14-minute relic of the Aquarian Age. According to a piece in the Guardian (itself piggybacking on a BBC interview), Macca described the track this way: "I said to the guys, this is a bit indulgent but would you mind giving me 10 minutes? I've been asked to do this thing. All I want you to do is just wander round all of the stuff and bang it, shout, play it. It doesn't need to make any sense. Hit a drum, wander to the piano, hit a few notes… and then we put a bit of echo on it. It's very free." The resulting bacchanalia was committed to tape on January 5, 1967. It was a gift of sorts from McCartney to the organizers of the Carnival of Light Rave, a mixed-media event staged at London's Roundhouse later the same month.

Very few people have ever heard the master tape of "Carnival," which is still in McCartney's possession. But Mark Lewisohn did, and his description in The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions is none too encouraging:

[It was] the longest uninterrupted Beatles recording to date, and it was the combination of a basic track and numerous overdubs. Track one of the tape was full of distorted, hypnotic drum and organ sounds; track two had a distorted lead guitar; track three had the sounds of a church organ, various effects (the gargling with water was one) and voices; track four featured various indescribable sound effects with heaps of tape echo and manic tambourine.

But of all the frightening sounds it was the voices on track three which really set the scene. John and Paul screaming dementedly and bawling aloud random phrases like "Are you alright?" and "Barcelona!"

Paul terminated the proceedings after almost 14 minutes with one final shout up in the control room: "Can we hear it back now?" They did just that, a rough mono remix was made and Paul took away the tapes to hand over to the Carnival of Light organizers, doubtless pleased that the Beatles had produced for them such an avante garde recording.

Geoff Emerick recalls this most unusual session. "When they had finished, George Martin said to me, 'This is ridiculous, we've got to get out teeth into something a little more constructive.' Twenty years on, George had obviously driven the session entirely from his mind, for when reminded of the sounds on the tape and asked whether he could recall it, he replied, "'No, and it sounds like I don’t want to, either.'"

My guess is that we're talking about a period piece (to put it kindly), more interesting for its evocation of the stoned, aleatory moment than for any musical value. McCartney's motive is pretty clear: he's always been at pains to demonstrate his role as the sonically adventurous Beatle, the early fan of Stockhausen and Luciano Berio whose eerie fluency with more melodic material ended up typecasting him as the middle-class patsy of the group. Of course no intelligent Beatles fan has believed that scenario for many, many years. It was McCartney who recorded the tape loops for "Tomorrow Never Knows," just as he contributed the wistful Mellotron riff to "Strawberry Fields" and the swampy bass figures to "Come Together." Yet he still wants to earn his spurs as a musical egghead, even forty years after the fact. To my ear, the homemade textures on the Fireman's Electric Arguments--released just yesterday--are a much better testimony to McCartney's relentless ingenuity in the studio. The recording isn't perfect, but it brings to the ambient mood of the previous two Fireman outings an extra dose of melody and formal concision. Which is to say: Macca's traditional strengths.

If Ringo and the remaining Beatle wives can be persuaded, my advice would be to release "Carnival of Light" as a free, live-streaming bonus. Otherwise I foresee a great many angry consumers, most of whom will have anticipated a reprise of the Abbey Road medley and will get the cannabis-scented equivalent of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music instead. And what does this suggest about the remaining treasures in the EMI vaults? The cream of the crop appeared on the Anthology volumes. Endless snippets and alternate performances could certainly be culled from the morass of the Let It Be sessions. But at least one insider, Geoff Emerick, has declared that the cupboard is empty. Back in April, Emerick gave a talk over at Legacy Studios on Manhattan's West Side. Before he began his lecture (actually an interview with Howard Massey, his collaborator on Here, There, and Everywhere), the audience was warned against using recording devices of any kind. The crowd, composed largely of recording engineers, immediately produced a formidable array of cameras and cell phones and began, well, recording. I shot the grainy video below, in which the boy wonder of the Revolver sessions opined that there wasn't much top-drawer stuff left amidst the hundreds of reels at Abbey Road.

Roth: the outtakes

2008-09-25T08:42:00.005-04:00

The Los Angeles Times ran my interview with Philip Roth on September 14. After the piece was published, though, I realized that I had plenty of unused material. What follows, then, is the stuff from the cutting-room floor, much of it quite interesting. We begin by discussing the diminutive scale of Indignation, Roth's latest novel, and proceed to touch on memoirs, inspiration, and the "dreadful state" of the nation.

James Marcus: You've now done three smaller, less panoptic books in a row. Is that a reaction to the previous books, or does the form simply feel congenial to you?

Philip Roth: I'd say the latter. About four or five years ago, I wondered if I could something about 125 to 150 pages long.

JM: As a formal challenge?

PR: As a formal challenge, yes. I don't write short stories, I don't know how to write them.

JM: Not anymore, anyway.

PR: Well, I did at the very beginning, but very few--maybe a half a dozen. This length is something I've done before, in The Breast, Goodbye, Columbus, and The Ghost Writer. I like it. It's a marriage, really, of the novel and short story. You have some of the depth of the novel, but you can use the effects, the means, of the short story.

JM: Meaning the compression?

PR: The compression, yes. The events are more telling. You have to pick the right event, of course--if you pick the wrong one, you're diminishing the power.

JM: Do you feel the itch now to write another big-canvas novel?

PR: Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do. You're guessing very well. I've been thinking about it, I have to find the subject. I'm interested in finding a moment in twentieth-century American history that I haven't used either as background or something essential to the book.

JM: During this period of your career, you're inspired by historical moments, while your earlier books seemed to emerge from a personal urgency of one kind or another. Aside from that shift, how has writing changed for you?

PR: As I've gotten older?

JM: Yes.

PR: Well, it's given me a new subject, which is getting older. I couldn’t have begun to write about that earlier. Otherwise, I seem to have the same writing patterns.

JM: You still write seven days a week?

PR: Yes, unless I’m between books, as I am now. Then it's just a lot of reading, and a lot of struggling to come up with something, which is often fruitless.

JM: But it's not easier?

PR: I've always found it difficult, and it's just as difficult.

JM: Any major distractions? For example, do you watch much television?

PR: No, I don't. I watch the news, occasionally. I read the paper every day. In the summertime, I watch more innings of baseball than I should.

JM: That's a minor vice--if you must have one.

PR: There's a pleasure in that. I've been watching a few nights of the Olympics. But otherwise, the television set is off.

JM: Let's turn to Indignation. It seemed to me that the first fifty pages or so of the book were written in a more subdued style--

PR: More subdued than the remaining pages?

JM: Yes, exactly. Well, let me put it this way. Joseph Brodsky once said: "The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie." Your protagonist's history of consciousness seems to start with his first blowjob.

PR: [Laughs] Brodsky would have liked that!

JM: But I wondered whether there was a deliberate effort to tamp down the prose until the book came alive in this way.

PR: There was no conscious attempt to do one thing or the other--just to tell the story.

JM: It's right after his first encounter with Olivia that we discover that Marcus is dead. In a certain way this unites him with, say, the postmortem protagonist of Everyman, as well as Zuckerman in Exit Ghost.

PR: My intention is that he dies twice, as it were. When he's under the morphine, he imagines he's dead: he's conscious of nothing around him, only his memory is active.

JM: And he feels like he's in the afterlife.

PR: That's right. He imagines he's in the afterlife. Then he actually does die, and the memory shuts down. That was just my conceit.

JM: And did that conceit precede the rest of the book, or did you discover it as you went along?

PR: Oh, I think I discovered a lot of it as I was writing drafts of the book. I had no plan. It just dawned on me as I was going along.

JM: So what did you start with?

PR: What did I start with? I started with the Korean War, and somebody coming of age during that period. And then I started with this place--the college--and rather quickly I thought of the butcher shop. I had those things, like pegs on a board, and then I came up with the character and the family.

JM: You've spoken of your interest in the catastrophic. Obviously Marcus Messner's fate in Indignation falls into that category. Is there a catastrophe in a book like Everyman?

PR: For the guy in Everyman, there's the long ordeal of illness, sporadic but continuous. I suppose the catastrophe for him is his isolation. It's very common with the elderly to be subjected to great solitude.

JM: Is Zuckerman's voluntary isolation any less catastrophic?

PR: That's a whole different story.

JM: In a way, it seems that coming back to other people is the catastrophic event of Exit Ghost.

PR: That's right, yes.

JM: Will we ever see Zuckerman again, or has he truly made his exit in that book?

PR: I think so.

JM: Have you been following the recent fuss about the veracity of memoirs such as James Frey's A Million Little Pieces?

PR: I wasn't aware of it. I have published two memoirs, The Facts and Patrimony, and tried to be as accurate as possible. So I don't really know about this controversy.

JM: Have you thought about writing another memoir?

PR: No, that doesn't seem in the cards. But who knows?

JM: It must have been a profoundly different impulse that led you to write those books.

PR: Yeah, different ones in each case. With The Facts, I was between books, wasn't in a novel mode, and decided to pursue that. Patrimony really grew out of the incident itself. I was taking notes while my father was ill, and when he died, I thought, let's see if I can make this into a book.

JM: I recently reviewed David Rieff's Swimming in a Sea of Death. Have you read that?

PR: Yes.

JM: He makes it clear from the beginning that he did not take notes on his mother's ordeal. He didn't want to report on it. That's an entirely honorable decision. But it left him very little to put in the book, which seemed more like an prolonged expression of guilt for not doing the right thing toward his mother--which was basically impossible to begin with.

PR: I agree with you. David is a friend of mine, and he was going through hell, and I could never quite get to the bottom of this guilt that he had. Because it seems to me that he did everything he possibly could. And as you say, there wasn't anything to do, except make decisions. You can always make the wrong decision, but he didn't make any of those. Why he was so plagued with guilt is, in a way, the uninvestigated subject of the book. It's declared repeatedly, but not investigated.

JM: One last question. Do you feel pressure to grapple with the political here-and-now? It seems to me that you're more interested in the civic uproars of the past at this point.

PR: I took a little swipe at it in Exit Ghost, with Bush's reelection--but no, I follow it as a citizen. I don't follow it as a novelist.

JM: And as a citizen, how does the state of the nation strike you?

PR: These last eight years have been dreadful. And I hope it changes.

Rigoni Stern departs

2008-07-10T10:01:00.005-04:00

I was saddened to read about the death of Mario Rigoni Stern on June 16. According to this report in La repubblica, the 86-year-old author had been ailing for some time. The obituary goes on to quote another Italian novelist and essayist, Ferdinando Camon, about Rigoni Stern's idiosyncratic gifts: "He was a very great writer--great in the way that solitary men are. When I was president of the Italian PEN Club, he was the first Italian that I nominated for the Nobel. He was a classic writer, with a lucid vision and a simple, powerful style, and a charismatic figure. His temperament was mild, good-natured, and he didn't give a damn about literary societies or meetings." (This description was certainly borne out by Rigoni Stern's cameo in a 2007 documentary, Primo Levi's Journey. Looking rather dapper, in an alpine sort of way, he discussed his old friend and fellow survivor with an appealing gravity and utter lack of self-regard.)

Rigoni Stern was probably best known in this country for The Sergeant in the Snow, his autobiographical account of the disastrous Italian retreat from the Russian front in late 1942. The author, who had enlisted in the Tridentina division, took part in this 300-mile death march, which killed about 90,000 men. He then spent two years in a German POW camp before returning to Asiago in 1945. His account of the catastrophe, published in 1953, became a bestseller and classroom staple in Italy. Yet most of his succeeding productions (he published 16 books, the most recent just a few weeks before his death) were considerably more bucolic. Rigoni Stern loved to write about the terrain, customs, and culture of the Altopiano, the mountainous region in northern Italy where he spent his entire life. I had hoped to translate one such novel, The Story of Tönle, back in the early 1990s. Instead my friend John Shepley did the honors, and I wrote a brief review of the book for a certain online bookseller. Rather than paraphrase, I'll just reproduce the bite-sized piece in its entirety:

Mario Rigoni Stern is best known in the English-speaking world for The Sergeant in the Snow, an account of combat--and brutal retreat--along the Russian front in 1942-43. But his novel The Story of Tönle is a miracle of narrative concision. In little more than a hundred pages, the author recounts a half-century in the life of Tönle Bintarn, a jack-of-all-trades living in the mountains of northern Italy. On one level, the book functions as a snapshot of a peculiar peasant culture, one whose very dialect is a mysterious stew of Italian and German syllables. Yet Stern is particularly good at capturing the steady incursion of modern life into these alpine reaches. By around 1900, for example, partisan politics finally reaches Tönle's neighborhood: "While the moderate side founded the Savings and Loan Association, the progressives founded the Workers' Association. While one side had a brass band with red caps, the other had one with green caps and pheasant feathers." (So much for the two-party system, which would get a lot more rancorous before Tönle's death in 1917.)

It's hard to describe the magic of this novel. Stern's prose, which has been very capably translated by John Shepley, is so artfully understated as to make Raymond Carver resemble William Faulkner. Yet Tönle's wanderings through Italy and Central Europe never lose their fascination. Nor do his emotions. When his mother dies, for example, his grief is almost wholly instinctual, almost unconscious: "He had been overcome by a strange feeling of apprehension, a sort of melancholy uneasiness, wanting to be by himself in the castle park among the tall trees, which were beginning to turn red, and with no desire to eat or drink: like that mild anxiety that sometimes overtakes animals, too." To convey such inarticulate feeling without a grain of condescension is a real feat. To telescope 50 years of such feelings into such a diminutive volume is an even greater one, which makes The Story of Tönle a necessary work of art.

Two summers ago, wandering the streets of Lucca and attempting to dodge the intense heat, I popped into a tiny bookstore. There I bought a copy of Aspettando l'alba (Waiting for Dawn), a 2005 collection of essays and stories. With a little luck (and some extra time), perhaps I can translate a couple of the pieces and post them here.

One from Montale

2008-06-26T10:57:00.002-04:00

Year in, year out, I never tire of Montale. He can be cryptic, yes, and you sense the ongoing effort as he digs himself out from under the avalanche of Italian literary culture. (Supposedly the first thing you do as the tsunami of snow overtakes you is make an air pocket in front of your face, so you can breathe until the rescuers show up. As a metaphor for writing poetry, that will do.) Anyway, here's one I happened across the other day. It's in Satura, one the poet's final collections, and by this time he had abandoned the clenched and crepuscular style that won him his early fame. This is Montale in a mellow mood, although he still felt that civilization was in the dumpster, and had been so for some time. The translation is William Arrowsmith's, and the (cheerful) title is "Götterdämmerung." God, how I love an umlaut:

We read that the twilight of the gods
is about to begin. A mistake.
Beginnings are always unrecognizable;
when an event is verified, it's been spotted before.
Twilight began when man thought
himself of greater dignity than moles or crickets.
A self-repeating hell is hardly the tryout
of a "grand première" long postponed
because the director's busy, sick, holed up
who knows where, and no one can sub for him.

"Nobody sought me out."

2008-06-25T19:07:00.004-04:00

I've been thumbing through Letters of Ted Hughes, a massive collection that FSG will publish in September. My only previous exposure to the poet's epistolary style was the blistering communique he sent to A. Alvarez when The Savage God was first serialized in the British papers--and that was only because Janet Malcolm quoted it in The Silent Woman. Glancing at it again, I'm still impressed by its tone of steel-belted outrage. "You saw little enough of us," writes Hughes. "Both of us regarded you as a friend, not a Daily Mirror T.V. key-hole rat-hole journalist snoop guaranteed to distort every observation and plaster us with his know-all pseudo-psychological theories, as if we were relics dug up from 10,000 BC. Of our marriage you know nothing--but you can't even give us the benefit of your ignorance." Elsewhere, eviscerating Alvarez for the effect his speculations might have on Sylvia Plath's (and his own) children, he writes: "You were searching out details to enthral your academic audience & didn't realise you were sticking electrodes in her children's brains." This masterpiece of pained invective resides, appropriately, in the British Museum.

But my eye was also caught by a later communication. In a letter written in the fall of 1986, Hughes corrected some mistakes he had found in the manuscript of Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath. Again, he noted the intense misery caused by the perennially prying eyes of Plath's biographers. What he has learned is that "no mistake can be corrected, no fantasy or lie can be extinguished, and that any attempt to correct the record only gives a weirder energy to the lies... Having the monkey world of all this play among one's nerves for twenty years induces a stupor of horror--it finally affects your judgment of mankind." Still, he offered quite a few pages of corrections, including this jaundiced account of his youthful notoriety:

Nobody sought me out. The only Journalist who ever came to see me, an Italian woman from some Italian glossy, was expecting to find the Fox In The Attic novelist and was disappointed. Though I was in the generation of the Angry Young Men, and felt I had better barbarian credentials than any of them except maybe Alan Sillitoe, I was never noticed even among their hindermost baggage train. I would have liked a bit of fame in those days, but it seemed far off. I was far more aware of being abused, by people I'd never met, for using the 'affected, proletarian familiar abbreviation' of my first name, and for 'using language above my station.' The Cultural Church, whose high priests were the Evelyn Waughs, didn't fall on its face to the North until the Beatles came along.

So: what Crow couldn't do, "Piggies" did quite nicely. Meanwhile, I'm fascinated by the idea that calling yourself Ted was once enough to earn you twenty lashes from some hi-cult Captain Bligh.

Topic A

2008-06-24T08:59:00.007-04:00

Lately I've fallen down on blogging. It's the usual combination of pre-summer doldrums plus the ongoing puzzlement about why I'm doing it in the first place. But if there's one thing that can jog me out of such a torpor, it's my favorite topic: me. So I thought I'd add a couple of updates. First: "Faint Music," an essay I wrote some time ago, then pulled out of the drawer for a few minutes of nip-and-tuck, recently appeared in The Harvard Review. The piece includes some whimsical speculation about the source of Mozart's dizzy spells:

I've thought about it, and I've come to ascribe Mozart's fainting to the impossible pressure of all that music on the inside of his skull. That flimsy chamber wasn't designed to house a fraction of what it did: the galloping tempos, the transparent woodwind and clarinet parts, the punchy D-minor trombone chords. The last act of Don Giovanni. The K. 626 Requiem. Those two sorrowing notes that begin "Masonic Funeral Music." Beauty, sublimity, and (this being Mozart) toilet humor. The overspill is what made him black out.

There's even a bit of corroborating evidence. As Mozart lay on his deathbed, roughing out the parts for the Requiem, he often summoned his friend Sussmayr to explain how the work should be performed. On one occasion he tried to clarify the role of the drums, "and was observed in doing this to blow out his cheeks, and express his meaning by a noise intelligible to the musician." Here is the very picture of music--highly pressurized music--escaping from the composer's skull, the way air might from a tire.

Although some of the current issue is available online, my own piece, alas, is not. So interested readers may be obliged to fork over ten dollars (it's for a good cause, folks!). Meanwhile, I gave a reading from my novel, The Only I News I Know, last Thursday. I was in excellent company, sharing the bill with Joshua Ferris and John Burnham Schwartz, and the narrow subterranean chamber at the Cake Shop was packed. I went first. Initially I was a little concerned about the stage lighting, which consisted of white Christmas bulbs stapled to the low ceiling. But the curators of this excellent series soon brought out a kind of Klieg lamp, suitable to an operating theater or antiaircraft barrage, and the problem was solved. In the short clip below, you can see me (just barely) reading a couple of short bits. In order to cram a longish passage into my 15-minute allotment, I read pretty damn fast. In the beginning I sounded like one of those breathless men listing the side effects on the Nexium commercials. But eventually I slowed down to the brisk canter in the video, like so:

PEN World Voices: Public Lives/Private Lives

2008-05-01T16:20:00.004-04:00

Although PEN World Voices had already gotten rolling with ten previous events--akin, perhaps, to spring training--"Public Lives/Private Lives" marked the official opening of the festival. Town Hall was packed, and as usual, a jolly Salman Rushdie emerged from the wings to welcome the crowd, meanwhile admonishing them to power down their electronic devices: "Please, turn your goddamn phones off!" He proceeded to sketch out the theme of this year's festival--namely, the intermingling of private and public life in the writer's imagination. In some eras, he suggested, it was easier for a writer to zoom in on the quotidian details. Rushdie cited Jane Austen as one of the most celebrated navel-gazers--while the Napoleonic wars raged on, she pretty much stuck to dating and mating in the English countryside. But these days, he argued, it was harder for writers to confine themselves to what Grace Paley described as the little disturbances of man. We are in an age, said Rushdie, "when great disturbances will intrude as well--when the subject is both war and peace." And with that, he yielded the stage to a truly impressive roster: Michael Ondaatje, Annie Proulx, A.B. Yehoshua, Peter Esterhazy, Coral Bracho, Rian Malan, Evelyn Schlag, Ian McEwan, and Francine Prose.

Not surprisingly, this motley crew was all over the map when it came to balancing public and private life. Ondaatje, with his white hair and elided consonants, shared a poem and an excerpt from Divisadero, whose tone of hushed intimacy would seem to preclude, say, the Battle of Waterloo. In a similar vein, the Austrian poet Evelyn Schlag treated the crowd to a series of short lyrics. Like several of the other participants, she stuck to her native language (i.e., German), while an English translation scrolled down the screen behind her. And generally she favored the mundane, the notational, although she did get at least one big laugh: "[I] had two friendly sheep / Named Susan and Sontag." (If there was ever an ideal audience for such a line, this was it.) Even Francine Prose, who wrapped up the program, kept her eye firmly fixed on the little disturbances of man--and woman. She read an excerpt from a new work of fiction, Goldengrove, which the Wal-Mart buyer had evidently bet big on "because it's not really like a Francine Prose novel." What we heard was a witty slice of bucolic life, with two sisters out on the water and the premonition of some familial disaster hanging in the air. The parents sounded like reconstructed hippies, though, so perhaps the novel is more of a wrestling match with the Sixties than we might suspect.

That leaves the more engagé members of the crew. Rian Malan read "a story about white Africans"--the specific white African being himself, speeding through Soweto in "the exoskeleton of a fast car." If this wasn't a snippet from My Traitor's Heart, it certainly sounded like one. There was the same speedy syntax, the same gift for self-flagellation: "I loved black people and yet I was scared of them." Yehoshua, a compact man in a dark suit, seemed equally unable (or unwilling) to separate himself from his homeland's agonies. He had selected an excerpt from A Woman in Jerusalem. First, however, he prefaced it with a few words about the historic situation (i.e., the first intifada) that had given birth to the novel. Israelis were used to mourning the casualties of war, Yehoshua explained, but the victims of terrorist bombings, blown to pieces while drinking their morning coffee, demanded a different sort of grief: "For the first time, we did not know how to cope with this kind of murder." Ian McEwan, meanwhile, read some sort of exploratory draft for his new novel about global warming. It was, he confessed, a sticky subject for a novelist: he could conceive of nobody being for global warming, and being against it was laudable but dull. No doubt McEwan will be able to sex up the material before he's through. Yet he did get in one Audenesque jab at the ineffectuality of political fiction, insisting that the best art is "splendidly useless."

Perhaps Peter Esterhazy, who read (I think) from Celestial Harmonies, would agree. His family occupied an exalted spot in Hungarian society for centuries, until the Communists reshuffled the deck in their typically brutal manner--and while this reversal of fortune has fueled some of the author's finest, most mordant prose, it will take more than a mot juste (or several hundred thousand of them) to repair the situation. In the meantime, Esterhazy has more elemental problems to deal with. As he told the audience, before launching into his rapid, incomprehensible speech: "I don't speak English, I speak Hungarian. You don't speak Hungarian, you speak English. This is the problem."

Re: LATFOB

2008-04-28T12:44:00.007-04:00

Given the sheer size of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which this year drew about 400 authors and 140,000 visitors, I'll have to limit myself to a highlights reel. So let's begin at the beginning: the Friday night awards ceremony, which one longtime guest referred to as "sort of like the Oscars for nerds." It's true, there's an extra quotient of glamor to the proceedings at Royce Hall, and I don't see the NBCC juicing up each announcement with a brief burst of triumphal, Rocky-like music on the PA. By now the actual winners have been widely reported, so I won't trot through all nine categories. A few observations, though. Stanley Plumly, who won the poetry award for Old Heart, also delivered the best anecdote of early privation: during his poetic salad days in small-town Ohio, his miniscule checks from magazines were routinely diverted to the Stanley Plumbing Company. Simon Sebag Montefiore accepted his award for Young Stalin via an effusive video, in which he slapped academics on the wrist for their terrible prose and admitted using his mother as a litmus test for readability. The fiction winner, Andrew O'Hagan, noted a common error (at least in Scotland): mistaking Los Angeles for "a suburb of Glasgow." And let us not overlook Maxine Hong Kingston, who won the Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement. At age 67, with a mane of white hair, she declared herself too young for such an honor, and went on to cite a favorite line from Thoreau: "I love a broad margin to my life." She seemed to admire the sentence both in its figurative sense--its suggestion that supposedly marginal matters may be more central than we care to admit--and in its literal one, since she's now writing a book-length poem with plenty of white space on every page.

In any case, the lights went up, and the massive crowd of nerds poured up the aisles, out into the lobby, and then through a narrow archway: a kind of physics experiment. Beyond that archway lay the reception area, with its rippling waterfall of chocolate fondue, its heaped-up pasta salads and sushi and SRO mob scene under the balmy Western skies. While I frantically forked up some farfalle in an open space by the door, I had a nice chat with Michael J. Neufeld, whose Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War was nominated for the biography award. But like many of the Easterners on hand, I had begun to fade. I climb aboard the shuttle back to the tall, round, traffic-beleaguered hotel--a former Holiday Inn hiding its shameful past behind a chic remodel. Yes, there are second acts in American life.

The first panel I attended on Saturday was, well, my own. Breaking the Mold was supposed to be a discussion of literature and the Internet, and since it included notorious Web hater Lee Siegel as well as technology fiends like myself and Shelley Jackson, some audience members girded themselves for a slapdown. In fact the conversation, moderated by David Kipen, remained civil throughout. Siegel did get in his digs at the coercive nature of the Web--surely no more coercive, I suggested, than the radio was in 1930--and its encouragement of duck-and-cover anonymity (yes, a tender topic). But he warmed to Jackson's remarks on hypertext and Tristram Shandy, to the point that Kipen wondered aloud whether this Peck's Bad Boy of cultural criticism had "mellowed." Well, let's not go overboard. After the panel, we were escorted outside to sign books. Not too many people had procured copies of Amazonia. However, a shy progression of 13-year-old girls approached my table and asked to have their pictures taken with me. Here, I thought, was a whole new demographic: these young ladies could go directly from some Hannah Montana Singing Doll to my own ironic ruminations on the Internet boom. As it turned out, they were all from the same school in Fontana, and were obliged to prove their attendance at the festival. Hence the photos with me--I was the equivalent of a rubber stamp on the back of their hands. The girls left. I hung around in the signing shed for a few more minutes, avoiding the sun and talking with Jackson (apparently she still wanted to be a rock star until sometime last week). Then, after a short stop at the authorial Green Room, we made our way through the tremendous, hearting crowds to hear Jane Smiley interview Gore Vidal.

I reviewed the most recent installment of Vidal's memoirs, Point to Point Navigation, and had noted a decline in what I can only call quality control. So I was a little nervous about attending this conversation: I didn't want to see one of my heroes stumble in public. I needn't have worried. Vidal, in a wheelchair, was at the top of his game, whether he was taking Exxon to task for its mendacious, nature-loving commercials ("I sit there and pound the floor with my stick") or putting George W. Bush through the wringer. His comic timing is better than ever--he works those pregnant pauses like a patrician Jack Benny. And as always, there's a sense that the dramatis personae of American history are Vidal's intimates, his playmates, his significant others. "I've been lying for a years about having read all of Aristotle," he mused at one point. "Now I see what I've been missing." For most writers, this would be an incidental mea culpa. But for Vidal, it's merely a means of contact with the most pragmatic of our founding fathers, as if they belonged to the same book club: "Now, Benjamin Franklin was also reading Aristotle at one point…." Egged on by Smiley, Vidal gave Thomas Jefferson high marks for his prose: "He was the poet of democracy--until Whitman, who wrote a bit better." He had less use for Ayn Rand: "Preaching greed? You don't do that to Americans. It was in our first Christmas stocking." Perhaps some of these zingers have been recycled from previous interviews, and as another friend (and Vidal zealot) later pointed out, he has "an entire herd of hobby horses tethered nearby." Still, I felt very fortunate to be in the same room with this phenomenal man, who saved some of his best lines for the Q-and-A. Did he have any final thoughts on the late William Buckley? Long pause. And then: "I hope it's not too hot."

Later on I dropped by Publishing: Where Do We Go From Here? Beneath a giant poster of the Periodic Table, four publishers--George Gibson, Johnny Temple, Susan Weinberg, and James Atlas--discussed the health of the business, which seems in need of some serious iron supplements. What's the bad news? "Publishers have not yet figured out how to use the Internet as a marketing tool, and as a way to build audiences," lamented Gibson. He also suggested that American readers had been "fighting a low-level depression" about reading itself since 9/11, and that our best hope for a literary SSRI would be the election of Barack Obama. For Temple, the problem was overabundance: "There's a glut of books being published, and that's clogging up things for everybody." But he also saw a silver lining in new technologies, which have lowered the barriers of entry for aspiring publishers, and urged his colleagues to make peace with the digital Visigoths. "We should not be afraid of the digitization of books," he said.

Weinberg, who spoke next, was absolutely on Temple's wavelength. She cited the "instant production" of a recent title by George Soros, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crash of 2008 and What It Means. The completed manuscript had shown up at PublicAffairs on March 24 of this year. By April 1, it was available in a host of e-book formats, and the print version goes on sale on May 12. Yet even as Weinberg embraced this Speedy Gonzales methodology, she minimized the gap between the old technologies and the new. Digital solutions, she argued, are ultimately "variations on those eternal verities that authors and publishers will always live by, no matter what the medium." In this context, her comments qualified as good cheer indeed. Still, James Atlas brought the dialogue back down to earth by reiterating the profoundly irrational underpinnings of the entire industry. Gibson had earlier struck a similar note, asserting that bankers and fiscal types (but presumably not mortgage brokers) "think that publishing is insane." Atlas upped the ante: "The idea that this is a business is just laughable," he said. Whenever he talks pecuniary nuts and bolts with his board members, many of whom work on Wall Street, continued Atlas, they "look at me funny."

Next door, at The Critics Voice, there was a similar whiff of Götterdämmerung in the air. Alex Ross, Richard Schickel, Albert Mobilio, and Nicholas Basbanes were hardly without hope for the critical enterprise. Yet Schickel, a wooly mammoth of popular criticism who has labored at Life, Time, and various other publications since 1965 (and who has also published more than 20 books), fired some curmudgeonly shafts at the defenseless blogosphere. Bloggers were ignorant and glib--and worst of all, they trafficked in opinion. At this point Mobilio did speak up on behalf of opinion. Wasn't it, well, useful? A similar tug of war took place when the conversation turned to the digital delivery of text. Basbanes, who is currently writing a history of paper, argued that books would be around for a long, long time. (Is this guy in bed with the pulp-and-paper lobby? I don't think so.) Mobilio countered that we were in the midst of a technological watershed, and that turning back the clock was no longer an option.

Ross remained on the sidelines to some extent, although he did cite Randall Jarrell's famous, deflationary line about the good old days: "The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks." But if we're wondering whether there are still zealous readers of criticism, that was put to rest during the Q-and-A, when one audience member griped at Ross for omitting Harry Partch from The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. "He's in there," the author doggedly insisted. For me that was a thrilling moment: a fan of just intonation wanting his just deserts (even if he happened to be wrong). Later, in the Green Room, I caught three of the panelists in a more casual mood. Here they are, folks, from left to right: Mobilio, Ross, Schickel. A formidable lineup, and surely proof that criticism is not dead--it's only playing possum.

Saved!

2008-04-23T15:54:00.001-04:00

According to this post on the Guardian blog, 73-year-old Dmitri Nabokov has finally decided to ignore his father's testamentary instructions and prepare the novelist's final, unfinished work, The Original of Laura, for publication. Apparently a visitation from the deceased was what tipped the scales for Dmitri:

From his winter home in Palm Beach, Dmitri justified his decision by saying, "I'm a loyal son and thought long and seriously about it, then my father appeared before me and said, with an ironic grin, 'You're stuck in a right old mess--just go ahead and publish!'"

He told the magazine that he had made up his mind to do so.

It was, Der Spiegel states, this "conversation" with his father that "persuaded him against assuming the role of literary arsonist."

We may assume that he will be widely thanked for his decision, even if the fragments of the novel--a collection of 50 index cards that has been languishing in a Swiss bank vault for three decades--are not of the standard of his other works.

But remarks like Dmitri's that The Original of Laura is in fact "the most concentrated distillation of [my father's] creativity" and Nabokov scholar Zoran Kuzmanovich's observation that what he had heard of The Original of Laura was "vintage Nabokov," are tantalizing enough to make one want to read it.

This dutiful son's most famous precursor would be Max Brod, who ignored Kafka's deathbed entreaties to burn his entire corpus of unpublished works. Similar (if not identical) issues were raised in 2006 with the publication of Elizabeth Bishop's Edgar Allan Poe and the Jukebox, which included drafts and discards. But Nabokov's novel, committed to the usual sequence of index cards, has attained Holy Grail status over the last few decades, and it should make for a fascinating read, even in its truncated form.

Heroes and villains

2008-04-23T10:09:00.005-04:00

Over at Propeller, I posted my interview with Errol Morris (which includes questions submitted by the community). The subject was Standard Operating Procedure, the director's new documentary about the Abu Ghraib scandal. The film is hypnotic and deeply disquieting. I'm not wild about Danny Elfman's score, whose amped-up melodrama seems ill-suited to Morris's cooler aesthetic. But this elegant meditation on crime and punishment--and on photography itself--has stuck with me since I saw it. Here's a salient bit from the conversation:

Morris: Everybody loves to imagine what these stories are. You see something really, really, really bad--and I would put Abu Ghraib in that category--and the natural human tendency is to imagine that these people are beyond the pale, they're not like you and me, they're in some deep sense subhuman. And on the flip side, there are the real heroes, who stood up and said, "I won't allow this to happen." Now, I'm not saying that there aren't people who are beyond the pale, and that there aren't real heroes. I just think that the story is far, far more complex.

For both the Left and Right, the bad apples are these odd constructions. Everybody has an investment in seeing them as bad. Part of what the movie is trying to do--and I think it's a risky thing to do--is to show people struggling with a kind of nightmare.

Propeller: The nightmare of Abu Ghraib itself?

Morris: Yes. I mean, the place was crazy. They put a prison in the middle of the Sunni Triangle! One of the standards of the Geneva Convention is that you do not put prisoners in a war zone, where they can be killed. You put them behind your own lines. Abu Ghraib, setting aside all its associations with Saddam's regime, was in a place that was just dangerous. There were two military intelligence officers who lost their lives that September during a mortar attack. Prisoners were killed, too. It was a dangerous place, ill-supplied, understaffed, with people pouring in from random sweeps. People coming into the place were unable to get out, due to endless bureaucratic rigmarole. For all intents and purposes, we were running a concentration camp in the middle of the Sunni Triangle. Congratulations!

Again, you can read the rest here. And for the visually inclined, here's a brief film clip of the director talking. Since he was leaning back in his chair, his shirt is crisply lit and his face is grainy, with a Francis Bacon-like swirling of reds and purples. (Fun fact: as a young man, Morris studied the cello with Nadia Boulanger, as did his frequent collaborator Philip Glass. Is she the mother of American minimalism? Aaron Copland studied with Boulanger as well, and I've always thought that his 1924 Symphony for Organ and Orchestra had a distinctly minimalist shimmer to it.) Anyway, here's Errol:

Bley time

2008-04-09T20:46:00.005-04:00

Last night I attended a performance by Carla Bley at Birdland. Although she has spent much of her career playing trios and duets, often with her longtime companion Steve Swallow, I still associate her with the plush sonics of Escalator Over The Hill or her arrangements for Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra. What we got instead was exquisite (but by no means bloodless) chamber jazz, which pitted the pianist against Swallow's bass and Andy Sheppard's tenor and soprano saxophone. No free blowing here: the pieces, which included both new compositions and some golden (more or less) oldies, were meticulously arranged. To kick things off, for example, the trio played a new suite called "The National Anthem." From time to time a phrase from "The Star Spangled Banner" would pop up, like an apparatchik on a reviewing stand, before vanishing back into the fray. Yet I wouldn't say that Bley was making any sort of snarky statement at the anthem's expense--her tinkering with harmony and cadence seemed entirely affectionate. And Swallow executed his funky double stops with audible gusto, bending at the waist and almost crouching as he made like one of the Famous Flames.

The program continued with such gems as "Awful Coffee," "Tropical Depression," and "Sidewinders in Paradise." At one point Bley mentioned that she had worked as a cigarette girl at the original Birdland--now an escort club, according to Swallow. In the light of these disclosures, was hard to figure out how good the good old days were supposed to be. In any case, the pianist's famous legs, so often on display in otherwise gender-neutral profiles and reviews, were under wraps. Bley wore a black suit, black socks, black shoes. Her touch on the keyboard is still wonderfully distinctive, as is her approach to arranging--she makes even a skeleton crew like this one sound like a miniature orchestra. And that ingenuity is hardly confined to her own pieces. It takes real gall to tamper with Monk, after all, but her version of "Misterioso," which closed the set, was a reverent deconstruction. There's no disguising those loping sixths, so Bley simply made herself at home in them. So did Sheppard, whose breathy tone didn't prevent him from channeling Charlie Rouse at the appropriate moments.

Queen Mary, she's my friend

2008-03-27T08:07:00.002-04:00

Exactly a week ago, PEN chose a rather grand location to announce the participants in the next World Voices Festival: that would be the Queen Mary 2, docked out in a shiny new Red Hook terminal. The ship is vast. Security is tight--this was probably the first literary soiree at which I had to sign a statement promising that I had experienced no diarrhea or vomiting in the last 48 hours. Once we were cleared for entry, we marched up an elaborate gangplank into what resembled a premiere shopping mall (and I mean that in the nicest possible way): lots of glass, indirect lighting, hardwood accents. Lots of stores, too, at least on the way to the auditorium. Inside, we sank into the comfy seats and were addressed by Bernard Warner, Commodore of the Cunard Fleet. This upright gentleman in his spotless uniform turned out to be a highly entertaining speaker. "We are not a cruise ship," he assured the crowd, in case anybody had mistaken his resplendent vessel for some downmarket tub. What did the Queen Mary 2 have that a cruise ship didn't have? "We have forty percent more steel," Warner noted. "We have a long bow, a deep draft, and a gorgeous streamlined hull."

The double entendres flew thick and fast, but Warner was too much of a pro to wink at the audience. Instead he brought out PEN Executive Director Michael Roberts, who spoke of "the essential oneness of countries and cultures." Surely, I thought, it would be his job to forge a metaphorical link between this gorgeous streamlined hull and the festival itself. Roberts did not disappoint. The Queen Mary 2, he said, "exists to bring people across the oceans that divide us, in the most beautiful way"--fulfilling the exact same purpose as the PEN World Voices Festival. Swish!

The fact soon came out that Salman Rushdie, who had been slated as ringmaster, was not present. He was in London, promoting his new novel. Luckily Francine Prose--introduced as "our ship's captain"--was on hand to do the honors. We had already been presented with some imposing numbers, inspired, perhaps, by the commodore's statistical snow job. The festival would boast 170 writers from 51 countries, speaking 23 different languages. But Prose went into more detail, listing the highlights of a mind-blowing schedule. It's a truly dazzling roster: from André Aciman to Lila Azam Zanganeh, no authorial stone has been left unturned. Prose mentioned "The Three Musketeers Reunited: Umberto Eco, Salman Rushdie and Mario Vargas Llosa," a May 2 recap of a 1995 event at London's Royal Festival Hall. No doubt this venerable power trio will cause the walls to bulge at the 92nd Street Y. (But will they play "White Room"?) Me, I'm psyched for the May 3 tete-a-tete between Ian McEwan and Steve Pinker, or the Robert Walser tribute later that same day at the Morgan Library.

Prose then surrendered the stage to what was described as "a musical collective of authors and artists"--which is to say, a pretty good band with a cute accordion player but no particular reason to be there. The crowd listened to the first tune with good-natured receptivity, but got a little twitchy as the show continued. "This next song is to mark the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war," we were told. I'm sure many of the audience members disapproved of the Iraqi adventure, but that didn't mean we had to enjoy the chorus, sung by the three female members of the band: "Die, motherfucker, die!" Only the last tune, "Paperback Writer" (witty choice, folks) won them back some points. What's more, Dale Peck and Jonathan Ames climbed onstage for the finale, gamely shaking their tambourines, while another, less identifiable audience member was dragooned into playing the kazoo. An excellent lunch followed, in a handsome dining room with multiple water views: here, at least, you knew you were on a boat, rather than in the guest quarters at Mar-A-Lago. And so, after a lengthy wait to retrieve our passports and driver licenses, ended our afternoon on the Queen Mary 2. The PEN World Voices Festival will be an obvious blast. As for the ship itself: despite my caustic tone, I could hardly bear to step off the gangplank and return to the grubby, non-nautical world from whence I came. I dearly wish to cross the Atlantic on the Queen Mary 2, paying for my bed and board by giving literary talks to all comers in the Veuve Clicquot Champagne Bar. Are you listening, Commodore Warner?

Shapiro

2008-03-19T08:10:00.004-04:00

The New York Sun ran my review of Alan Shapiro's Old War this morning. At first I was slightly resistant to the poet's thrifty methodology: he likes to recycle certain words in each poem, in the manner of such late Randall Jarrell pieces as "Well Water" or "Next Day." But I was won over. I began this way:

If you're lucky, the most fundamental lesson of life--the fact that we live on borrowed time, with the final foreclosure never more than a breath away--arrives in installments. Our loved ones disappear at a dignified pace, in single file. Each shock prepares us for the next. In this sense, the poet Alan Shapiro has been profoundly unlucky. During the late 1990s, he lost both his sister and brother to cancer. Meanwhile, he was beset by the scarcely more bearable trials of middle age: ailing parents, a crumbling marriage.

The poet's response, initially, was a book of essays about his sister's death, Vigil (1997). Yet he soon returned to verse with Song and Dance (2002), and in an interview that same year, he explained why: "I needed poetry then. I didn't need prose. I needed song. I needed art at its most elevated--as elevated as I could make it, anyway." The poems in that collection, which represented a quantum leap forward for Mr. Shapiro, both memorialized his brother and acknowledged just how meager the consolations of art could be. Poetry didn't kill the pain, and it didn't fill the void left by his brother's death. It simply allowed the poet to (in John Berryman's phrase) bear and be. No wonder he needed it so badly.

You can read the rest here. Also, check out David Ulin's review in the Los Angeles Times, which dwells briefly on the black comedy in Old War: "There is humor here, in an oddly fatalistic way, but even more there is acceptance, release almost, a kind of willful recognition of our ephemerality."

Two from Amis

2008-03-06T07:58:00.003-05:00

The experience of reading Experience never fails to surprise me. Martin Amis's fiction remains a mixed bag--his brilliant, buoyant comic novels are consistently dragged down by their ballast of Big Ideas. But his autobiography is sui generis: reflexive, fragmentary, self-mocking, and poignant in exactly the way his novels are not. Here are two bits that have stuck in my brain. The first is about Saul Bellow, a father figure he could emulate with any Oedipal entanglements--but about something more, too. Amis writes:

I see Bellow perhaps twice a year, and we call, and we write. But that accounts for only a fraction of the time I spend in his company. He is on the shelves, on the desk, he is all over the house, and always in the mood to talk. That's what writing is, not communication but a means of communion. And here are the other writers who swirl around you, like friends, patient, intimate, sleeplessly accessible, over centuries. This is the definition of literature.

That does it very nicely. Literature is a device for attaining (relative) immortality. But further down the same page, Amis is feeling all too mortal. He and Christopher Hitchens, returning from a tense visit with Bellow in his New England fastness, have a laughing jag in the car. Their hysterical mirth is clearly a cover for high anxiety. About what? Amis figures it out:

But feelings were being mourned: feelings about the first half of life. Youth can perhaps be defined as the illusion of your own durability. The final evaporation of this illusion parches the skin beneath the eyes and makes your hair crackle to the brush. It was over. There would be hell to pay. Dying suns of a certain size perform the alchemist's nightmare: they turn gold into lead. And there we were, in 1989, heading towards base metal. Transmutation had come to him, and would soon come to me.

Fitzgerald, G. Dead

2008-03-05T10:26:00.006-05:00

Good news (courtesy of Kerry Fried): in May, Fourth Estate will publish So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald. I think we're in for a treat. The late author never caught up with email, SMS, or emoticons--she corresponded in the classic manner, with a pen and paper and an instinctive command of English prose. Incidentally, she also had the sort of handwriting that is vanishing from the earth. The only reason I know this is because I own a tiny specimen of her calligraphy--a note tucked into my first edition of Offshore (for which I also have Kerry to thank). As can see, Fitzgerald was responding to a query from a bookshop owner, who thought she might be interested in a cache of books on Cairo. She directed him elsehwere: "I wonder whether you could be thinking of Penelope Lively, who lived in Egypt as a child?" Some authors might have been peevish about this case of mistaken identity. Fitzgerald was not. I also like that other line: "I don't collect books at all, they just seem to accumulate of their own accord." Here we go:

On another note entirely, I backslid and starting poking around YouTube again. This formidable time sink must be avoided at all costs. In the meantime, though, here's an ancient clip of the Grateful Dead, culled from an old broadcast of Playboy After Dark (I'm not making this up). Check out Jerry's serape, and Bob Weir's preppy outfit--he could have stepped out of a Gap ad, minus the psilocybin. Special period touch: the superimposed flashes of groovy dancers, which I initially thought were defects in the old film stock. They just don't make them like this anymore.

Baxter, Baker, faker

2008-03-04T21:11:00.006-05:00

Just some odds and ends. The Los Angeles Times Book Review ran my piece on Charles Baxter's The Soul Thief a couple of weeks ago. I'm a big fan of the author's and it pained me give the book a lukewarm reception. There were some fabulous set pieces (as always) and a good many elegant, rueful, circuitous sentences (as always), but I simply couldn't swallow the structural shenanigans at the end. Even some zesty potshotting at Los Angeles couldn't save this souffle:

His jaundiced view of Los Angeles, where the milk of human kindness seems to curdle before one's eyes, suggests a triangulation between Nathanael West and Nathaniel Hawthorne (perhaps Mason's first name is no accident). So it saddens me to report that the climax is a hackneyed bit of metafictional whimsy, which more or less sinks the novel. It would be unfair to give away the trick, although Baxter tips his hand in the opening pages. Suffice it to say that we're dealing with a supremely unreliable narrator, and that the theft alluded to in the title might more accurately be described as an exchange of prisoners.

My fellow critic and friend Art Winslow, writing in the Chicago Tribune, took a kinder view of the book. Yet he too complained about the flimsy contrivance at the end:

The external framing of the main story creates a perspectival shift, telegraphed subtly here and there but presented in sudden and leaden fashion near the novel's end. With enough detail to lend it narrative and emotional weight, it might have equaled effects achieved earlier in the novel. But that is not the case; it feels tacked on, like a sheet of plywood over the picture window to keep it from cracking.... In other respects, The Soul Thief, scene by scene and sentence by sentence, sparkles with a tender energy and a tongue-in-cheekiness, lending it a wry quality overall.

Over at the New York Review of Books, Nicholson Baker goes nuts over Wikipedia. You might expect at least a little hedging, some casual harrumphing--Baker is a man in love with minutiae, and certainly facts do go missing from time to time at Jimmy Wales's wild kingdom. But no, he adores the whole enterprise. Here's one of his numerous valentines, couched in a typical metaphor:

It was like a giant community leaf-raking project in which everyone was called a groundskeeper. Some brought very fancy professional metal rakes, or even back-mounted leaf-blowing systems, and some were just kids thrashing away with the sides of their feet or stuffing handfuls in the pockets of their sweatshirts, but all the leaves they brought to the pile were appreciated. And the pile grew and everyone jumped up and down in it having a wonderful time. And it grew some more, and it became the biggest leaf pile anyone had ever seen anywhere, a world wonder.

A world wonder! He's not kidding. Here's another salient paragraph:

Wikipedia was the point of convergence for the self-taught and the expensively educated. The cranks had to consort with the mainstreamers and hash it all out--and nobody knew who really knew what he or she was talking about, because everyone's identity was hidden behind a jokey username. All everyone knew was that the end product had to make legible sense and sound encyclopedic. It had to be a little flat--a little generic--fair-minded--compressed....

That last bit, about the deliberately tamped-down tone of Wikipedia, put me in mind of Baker's new book, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. Coming from a man who has changed stylistic gears with almost every production, this is the oddest duck yet: an alternate history of the interwar years, culled from old newspapers, magazines, documents, and a respectable heap of secondary sources.

Human Smoke is an argument for pacifism, and an intriguing reshuffle of the deck. No doubt it will ruffle many feathers, not the least for its suggestion that the Good War was an avoidable bloodbath--not so good after all. But the other point worth noting is that Baker has checked his mandarin style at the door. His voice is flat, generic, fair-minded. He wants the facts to speak for themselves. Here and there a glint of relish, a fascination with human folly, creeps in: "Goering, the master of ceremonies, was wearing short pants, lace-up boots, a strap-on dagger in a red sheath, and a green jacket with yellow leather buttons. Hitler was in the usual Nazi brown, standing by the grand piano, on which stood a bust of Richard Wagner." But mostly Baker wants to sound like one of those vast, non-vivacious oracles: an encyclopedia. (You can read Charles McGrath's New York Times piece about Baker and Human Smoke here.)

Finally: move over, James Frey. Your canny exaggeration of your time in the slammer is a mere peccadillo compared to the serial whoppers in the widely praised Love and Consequences. As it happens, Margaret B. Jones was not a child of the urban wasteland. She did not, contrary to this profile in the New York Times, deal "drugs on the streets of South Central Los Angeles before she hit puberty." Hell, her name isn't even Margaret B. Jones--it's Margaret Seltzer. According to this piece in the Los Angeles Times:

Instead of being a half-white, half-Native American who grew up in a foster home and once sold drugs for the Bloods street gang, she is a white woman who was raised with her biological family in Sherman Oaks and graduated from Campbell Hall, an exclusive private school in the San Fernando Valley. Her admission that she is a fake came in a tearful mea culpa to the New York Times, which last week published a profile of Seltzer using her pseudonym. It was accompanied by a photograph of the 33-year-old and her 8-year-old daughter in Eugene, Ore., where they now live.

Tsk tsk. And to think that it was her sister who blew the whistle on her, after seeing that very profile in the Times. This is making me think twice about my own memoir--the one about being a vicious gang member in Scarsdale, New York.

Man at work

2008-03-03T10:46:00.004-05:00

Disappointment artists

2008-01-24T09:19:00.000-05:00

The other day I dug out my copy of Prince of Darkness and Other Stories. In theory this yellowing Vintage edition has been put out to pasture by the spiffy NYRB reprint of The Stories of J.F. Powers. Yet I still like my old paperback, whose days on earth are surely numbered. I read "The Lord's Day" and "The Old Bird, A Love Story"--two very different tales of mortification--and then savored "Prince of Darkness," a kind of dress rehearsal for the author's subsequent novels about the American priesthood. Powers had an extraordinary gift: he was always satirical, and always in earnest. He also grasped the special torture of protracted disappointment. The protagonist of the title story, Father Burner, has spent at least twenty years longing for his own parish. In his personal hell (note the sulfurous connotations of his name), he meanwhile commits at least a couple of the Seven Deadly Sins on a daily basis, gluttony being his favorite. Here he is at breakfast:

Father Burner grimaced, the flesh rising in sweet, concentric tiers around his mouth, and said in a tone both entrusting and ennobling Keefe with his confidence, "The syrup, if you please, Father." Keefe passed the silver pitcher which was running at the mouth. Father Burner reimmersed the doughy remains on his plate until the butter began to float around the edges as in a moat. He felt them both watching the butter. Regretting that he had not foreseen this attraction, he cast about in his mind for something to divert them and found the morning sun coming in too strongly. He got up and pulled down the shade. He returned to his place and settled himself in such as way that a new chapter was indicated.

There will be no new chapter for Father Burner. Meanwhile, I was reading the new Charles Baxter novel, The Soul Thief, and came across this little riff about "God Only Knows," which the protagonist hears on his car radio:

The unearthly beauty of the music fills the car. Nathaniel listens: muted horns, strings, tapped blocks, sleigh bells, a linear vocal line lightly harmonized in thirds until, three-quarters of the way through, the music becomes vertical rather than horizontal, as the voices pile up in a series of increasingly complicated harmonies in a refrain--God only knows what I'd be without you--repeated and repeated and repeated, with a frightening emphasis on the word "what," until the voices fade out, having absolutely nowhere to go. This is the song, Nathaniel knows, in which Brian Wilson handed over his heart to God and simultaneously lost his mind. The song is Brian Wilson's favorite, the one he sold his soul for. After "God Only Knows" there were other songs, certainly, "Good Vibrations" and the rest of them, but the spirit had abandoned him: addressed not to a California girl, a sun-bleached surfer chick, the refrain had been spoken to his own spirit, his genius, which, in one of those ironies of which life is so fond, left him there and then.

Baxter's novel takes place in the glorious Seventies, so his protagonist couldn't have known that in the long run, Wilson fared slightly better than Father Burner. After decades of disarray and drug-induced sloth (Wilson has admitted that he didn't even bathe for years at a time), there was a new chapter: Smile. The angelic falsetto was gone, but somehow his "teenage symphony," with its zany bursts of Americana, now hung together. Will there be another chapter to come? God only knows.

Herbert, Frost, amateur hour, Amazonia

2008-01-23T09:51:00.001-05:00

I've decided to resume daily broadcasting. Today I'll have to limit myself to a few bulletins. First, the Zbigniew Herbert Book Club at WWB is still up and running, and we're adding new material, including this fascinating conversation with poet and scholar Anna Frajlich. Among many topics, she touches on the poet's intermittent hostility toward those Poles who left the country for good (despite the fact that Herbert himself spent quite a few years abroad after the ideological thaw of 1956.) It is, as Frajlich acknowledges, a sticky topic:

I think at a certain point, he developed a certain animosity towards émigrés. You can find a few examples in his poetry, and an aggressive attack on Miłosz is in one of his poems, “Khodasevich.” I think Khodasevich was a very honorable man. With all my admiration for Herbert’s poetry and for Herbert, this is the poem that I absolutely cannot agree with or forgive. This is a very cruel statement on Miłosz and on émigrés. I’m not the only one who feels this way. If not for these émigrés, Herbert could never have had such an easy landing abroad. Miłosz was the one who started translating Herbert’s poetry into English. Adam Czerniawski, in one of his articles, emphasizes that émigré poets did a lot to popularize Herbert abroad. Many vouched for Herbert, found him stipends or jobs abroad. Herbert had a personal problem, but he projected it on émigré writers and on Miłosz. This projection was hurtful. That’s it.

Again, I urge all readers to visit the WWB forum and wade right into the conversation. Next: yesterday's New York Times included this deliciously entertaining dispute over Robert Frost's penmanship. Apparently The Notebooks of Robert Frost, which the Harvard University Press published last year, may be rife with transcription errors. A glance at the poet's gnarly handwriting will confirm that Robert Faggen, who transcribed and edited the Harvard volume, had one hell of an Alp to climb:

Still, both literary scholar James Sitar and poet William Logan have raised some doubts about the book's reliability. Logan, who compared about 30 pages of the original notebooks with Faggen's version, delivers the bad news in an impending Parnassus review: "Obliged though readers must be for this unknown Frost, the transcription is a scandal. To read this volume is to believe that Frost was a dyslexic and deranged speller, that his brisk notes frequently made no sense, that he often traded the expected word for some fanciful or perverse alternative." Stay tuned for further updates.

Over at Slate, Garth Risk Hallberg ponders the army (more like a popular militia) of customer reviewers at Amazon and "the fate of the literary amateur." Along the way, he quotes my own description of this critical enterprise: "an intelligent and articulate conversation... conducted by a group of disinterested, disembodied spirits." Well, that wasn't all I had to say in Amazonia. My final word on the topic, and on the Stakhanovite ranking of reviewers, was less enchanted:

It represents the Culture of Metrics at its worst, with a dose of some managerial quackery like Six Sigma stirred in for good measure: the more you write, the better you are. Quantity equals quality.... A reminder: art is not a popularity contest. Taste, talent, and discrimination have nothing to do with numbers. Case closed.

Speaking of Stakhanov, I finally stumbled across the Russian edition of Amazonia. It came out some time ago, but the publisher never sent me a copy, perhaps to conceal the fact that the title has been changed to 32 Sales Per Second. This statistic appears nowhere in the English edition. Nor, claims a customer reviewer in sternly Cyrillic characters, does it appear in the Russian edition. No doubt a transcription error of some kind.

Let the games begin!

2008-01-08T16:02:00.000-05:00

The Zbigniew Herbert book club over at Words Without Borders has now begun. What follows is my introductory piece. But I urge all readers to visit the WWB site for the full treatment, which currently includes this fascinating interview with Peter Dale Scott, the poet's first English translator. And if you're tempted to leave a comment (pro or con), please leave it at WWB, where we're trying to foster a real conversation.

Zbigniew Herbert was born in 1924 in Lvov, Poland (now part of Ukraine). He seems to have a led an orderly middle-class life until 1939, when the Red Army rolled into Lvov. "The city was changed within a few days into a concentration camp," he later recalled. Worse was yet to come: within two years, Lvov fell into German hands, only to be regained by the Soviet Union at the end of the war.

It was during the Nazi occupation, which began in June 1941, that Herbert wrote his earliest poems. He also took part in the Polish resistance, which would complicate his life immeasurably once Lvov fell back under Soviet rule. Having sworn even token allegiance to the Polish government in exile, rather than throwing in his lot with communist partisans, he was now, barely into his twenties, persona non grata.

Herbert managed to attend the University of Krakow, where he earned a degree in economics, and later earned degrees in law and philosophy as well. Yet he moved around constantly, and as he later noted: "I began to putter around in a way that imitated work, just to keep alive." During one period, he helped to support himself by selling his blood. He also continued to write poetry. Due to his political status, publishing a book was out of the question. He did, however, begin to publish individual poems as well as reviews in such periodicals as Dziś i jutro and Tygodnik Powszechny.

In 1956, a political thaw allowed the appearance of Herbert’s first book, Chord of Light. The collection won him wide acclaim, and he was no longer confined to Poland. He traveled to London, Berlin, and Paris (where he first met his mentor, friend, and occasional bete nôire Czeslaw Milosz), and continued to publish such collections as Hermes, a Dog and a Star (1957) and The Study of an Object (1961). Herbert remained deeply involved with Polish poetry, serving as an editor at Poezja ("Poetry") magazine between 1965 and 1968. Yet his was a peripatetic existence, yielding such fruits as the wide-ranging essays gathered in Barbarian in the Garden (1962) and even a short teaching stint in Los Angeles in 1971.

It was during his California interlude that Herbert introduced Mr. Cogito--a musing (and frequently amusing) poetic mouthpiece. In the United States, the confessional poets were on the rise, and it's tempting to see Herbert's doppelganger as a distant relation of, say, John Berryman's Henry in The Dream Songs. But Berryman's autobiographical vaudeville, or Robert Lowell's hide-and-seek exercises in self-disclosure, had little to do with Herbert's enterprise. Mr. Cogito was primarily a creature of mind. He read the paper, he studied his face in the mirror, he smoked a cigarette, but as his name suggests, his main business was cogitation. (In the end, he may have more in common with Italo Calvino's Mr. Palomar, whose telescopic contemplations took in everything but the self.)

In 1981, after many sojourns abroad, Herbert made a permanent return to his homeland, "the treasure house / of all misfortune." It was a pivotal year in Polish history, as the government of Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law in December and began the biggest crackdown on civil liberties in recent memory. As a protracted tug-of-war got underway between the regime and the recently founded Solidarity, the 57-year-old poet threw his weight behind the dissidents.

For better or worse, this cemented Herbert's reputation as a poet of dissent. Yet he remained wary of mixing poetry and politics, famously clashing with a claque of younger writers at a 1972 poetry festival in Silesia. For a poet to flirt with ideology was, he insisted, a "punishable offense." Engagement was a dead end, possibly a childish one. "The poet's sphere of action," he declared, "if his attitude toward his work is serious, is not the 'contemporary'--which I take to mean the state of our current knowledge about society, politics, and science--but the real, the stubborn dialogue of man with the concrete reality surrounding him, with this table, with that neighbor, with this time of day: the cultivation of a dwindling capacity for contemplation." In a sense, Herbert was a philosopher with a distaste for abstractions: not an easy job description. Yet he stuck to his guns, and let the contradictions take care of themselves. As he wrote in “"Mr. Cogito and the Imagination":

he adored tautologies
explanations
idem per idem

a bird is a bird
slavery slavery
a knife a knife
death is death

Throughout the 1980s, Herbert lent his name and prestige to the Solidarity movement. It was a long, grinding decade, during which the increasingly ailing poet struggled with asthma, circulatory problems, and depression. His public pronouncements grew harsh. In 1989, Solidarity gave its assent to the so-called Round Table agreements, which stipulated that the movement would participate in elections that were patently rigged against it. Many critics, Herbert included, considered this a disastrous concession. Even after Solidarity trounced the Communist regime and essentially sounded its death knell, the poet remained skeptical. In a 1994 interview he noted his ongoing disillusion: "We did not believe that we could become free.... No one pondered the question of what to do after victory, or how to deal with the defeated adversary. Then came this fatal 'Round Table' delivery--it did not even involve a caesarian section, rather it ended up with the birth of a brainless baby.... Many people, including myself, felt an almost physical pressure of the political forceps at that time."

True to form, however, little of this bitterness found its way directly into Herbert's poetry. Mr. Cogito made his final appearances, "wearing his soul / on his arm," and elsewhere the poet regarded the failing apparatus of his own body with stoical regret. There was even a comical episode of navel gazing: "This is the most endearing spot the body's city / for nine months a blind telescope on the world / until at the last minute the fire brigade arrives / a sudden caesura / and it’s on its own doomed to love..." ("Navel").

For several years during 1990s, Herbert's health problems prevented him from writing any poetry at all. But in 1997 he was briefly able to resume, composing enough poems for a valedictory collection, Epilogue to a Storm. The book was published in early 1998. Just a few months later, on July 28 of the same year, Herbert died in Warsaw at the age of 73.

His reputation, predictably the target of some revisionist slings and arrows in his native Poland, has only grown since his death. Whether he should be viewed as a poet of resistance or an ontological Magellan--or both, just as Mr. Cogito was half Don Quixote, half Sancha Panza--is an issue his fans will be batting around for many decades. What is certain is his dogged striving for truth, that most formidable of moving targets. Poetry might not always be political, but it was always a matter of conscience. That was clear even to his Communist interrogators, who summoned him for the occasional chat throughout his long existence. After one such pointless Q-and-A, which found the poet dodging, weaving, or playing dumb, the weary apparatchik wrote: "After all, he is a man with a considerable dose of honor."

Heads up on Herbert

2008-01-03T17:35:00.000-05:00

Next week, Cynthia Haven and I will be overseeing a Words Without Borders book club--an online conversation, more or less--devoted to Zbigniew Herbert's The Collected Poems 1956-1998. I'd love to say that Herbert needs no introduction, but this giant of postwar poetry, who died in 1998, is still woefully undervalued in the English-speaking world. He is certainly on par with his compatriots Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska, even if the Swedish Academy declined to recognize that fact. And his poems, with their pained dignity and dearth of punctuation, deliver a frisson like no other. The WWB discussion will include contributions from a wide range of Herbert experts, including (so far) Peter Dale Scott, Anna Frajlich, Andrzej Franaszek, William Martin, and Alissa Valles (who translated most of the new Ecco collection). Come one, come all! In the meantime, I suppose the best possible advertisement would be a snippet of the poetry itself. Here's the first segment of "Mr Cogito and the Imagination," which features the poet's favorite mouthpiece, who walks and talks (but mostly thinks) like Herbert himself:

Mr Cogito has never trusted
the tricks of the imagination

the piano at the top of the Alps
played concerts false to his ear

he had no regard for labyrinths
the Sphinx filled him with disgust

he lived in a cellarless house
without mirrors or dialectics

jungles of tangled images
were never his homeland

he rarely got carried away
on the wings of a metaphor
he then plunged like Icarus
into the arms of the Great Mother

Stay tuned for more details, and a specific URL, early next week. And grab yourself a copy of The Collected Poems, or check out the superb essays collected in Barbarian in the Garden or The King of the Ants, which prompted the following micro-review from yours truly in 1999:

Although he never quite attained the fame of his compatriots Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska, the late Zbigniew Herbert was one of the giants of contemporary Polish letters--not to mention European literature at large. His witty, superbly ironical verse flourished in the face of totalitarian censorship: indeed, with its overlay of parable, allegory, and deadpan allusiveness, it seemed almost to be nourished by the ideological obstacle course of 20th-century Poland. But Herbert was an equally gifted essayist. The pieces collected in Barbarian in the Garden and Still Life with a Bridle are wickedly intelligent and unfailingly humane. And even when the author is letting loose with a satirical dart, his imagination always functions as "an instrument of compassion."

The King of the Ants combines his twin vocations. That is, these are short prose pieces, which Herbert called "mythological essays." Yet the form itself--in which he takes apart the classic myths and expertly tinkers with their innards--has the speed and epigrammatic suavity of his best poetry. Here, for example, is Herbert's take on Atlas, whom we might call the king of mythological heavy lifting.

"The whole character of Atlas, his entire being," Herbert writes, "is contained in the act of carrying. This has little pathos, and moreover it is quite common. The titan reminds us of poor people who are constantly wrestling with burdens. They carry chests, bundles, boxes on their backs, they push them, or carry them behind, all the way to mysterious caves, cellars, shacks, from which they come out after a moment even more loaded, and so on to infinity."

Herbert is no less intrigued by Antaeus, who went head to head with Heracles himself in a celebrated wrestling match. On one hand, he tries to visualize the actual bout, taking his clues from accounts by Plato, Pindar, and the Renaissance miniaturist Antonio Pollaiuolo. But it's the metaphorical implications of the match that really get him going--the way it reverses our usual image of victor and vanquished. His subject, he reminds us, "had to overcome the concept, deeply rooted in us all, of what we call high and low, the elevation of the victor and the throwing of the defeated down into the dust. For every time Antaeus was lifted up, it meant death for him." In the author's hands, these musty figures become almost alarmingly contemporary--and entertaining. And while he never weighs down his essays with philosophical ballast, they do contain more than their share of casual wisdom. Like the philosophers he mentions in the title essay, Herbert too had "the not very tactful habit of teaching others how to live."

A death in the family

2008-01-03T17:06:00.000-05:00

After a chilly but rewarding trip to Italy, I'm back. While I was away, the New York Sun ran my review of David Rieff's Swimming in a Sea of Death. This memoir of Susan Sontag's final illness is largely an exercise in self-flagellation, yet the author--a born reporter in precisely the way his late mother was not--manages some vivid, specific glimpses of what was clearly a terrible ordeal for all parties concerned. You feel for him, while regretting the muffled and meandering texture of the book itself. Here's a sample:

In situations such as these, the prospect of personal transcendence is largely a myth. Mr. Rieff, whose relationship with his famous mother remained on the rocky side, would operate within his own, very human limitations. So too would Sontag, whose confidence in her own survival amounted to a kind of personal religion. She simply would not accept the fact of her impending death. Back and forth Mr. Rieff goes, unable to decide whether her final struggle was admirable--a testament to her "childlike sense of wonder"--or a self-destructive folly.

The answer may be both. But that's not satisfactory for the author, who keeps dredging for something better, even as he admits that language is inadequate to the task. On the very day of her diagnosis, Mr. Rieff recalls, this weakness was cruelly exposed: "What my mother and I shared were words and yet now they felt all but valueless--like Confederate dollars or Soviet roubles."

You can read the rest here. You can also read the interview I conducted with Susan Sontag in 2000, just around the time she published her final work of fiction, In America.

Swedish deckhand

2007-12-19T09:29:00.000-05:00

The aging face of W.H. Auden--that implausibly wrinkled terrain, almost lunar in its creases and corrugations--is an iconic image. Seen in photos, the youthful poet is hard to recognize. Yet even then, he apparently had a striking physical presence. I came across this description the other day in my well-thumbed copy of Humphrey Carpenter's biography. The speaker is Harry Watt, an English film director who worked with Auden on the G.P.O. Film Unit in the early Thirties. They were collaborating on a documentary called "Night Mail," which called for the young (and already celebrated) poet to write a verse narrative (!) and function as a roadie:

He was just an assistant director, as far as I was concerned, and that meant humping the gear and walking miles, and he used to turn up late. Of course, he was an extraordinary looking young man. He looked exactly like a half-witted Swedish deckhand: his jacket was far too short in the sleeves, and he had huge, boney, red hands and big, lumpy wrists and dirty old flannel trousers and an old sports jacket and this blond towhead, and then the rather plummy, frightfully good accent, which was very surprising coming out of him.