Ars Prosa

The Bolaño Reading Challenge(and Other Obsessive Reading Lists)

2011-10-11T15:40:00.000-07:00

It seems that for the last year I have been unwittingly participating in the 2011 Roberto Bolaño Reading Challenge. Participants in the reading challenge, which started in January, have the fairly straightforward goal of reading a bunch of Bolaño's books, in any format or language, throughout the year.

the reading challenge badge

The participants are also assigned "levels" according to their accomplishments. In my case, for example, since I've read 7 books so far I would be considered a "Poet", which places me above a "Vagabond" (5 books) but below a "Detective" (7 books). There are also levels for rereading books and for reading books published in 2011 (two were published in recent months, two more are expected in November).

Bolaño books I've read

To place matters in perspective, Bolaño is hardly the first writer whose entire oeuvre was placed on my reading list. Kafka, Beckett, Camus, Borges, Pinter, Coetzee, and Nabokov were all there ahead of him. Frisch and Hemingway are also nudging me, "come on," I can hear them say, "you've already read so much of our work, just two or three more books and you'll be able to say you've read it all!" (though I'm not sure I can forgive Hemingway for the terrible triumvirate of To Have and Have Not, Across the River and Into the Trees, and The Torrents of Spring).

Bolaño is probably not even my most-read writer of the year (well, maybe in terms of word count, but certainly not in number of works read); that distinction goes to Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin (16 plays read this year, along with some prose, poetry, sketches...), which I have been reading a lot of in the last couple of weeks as I was finishing up my own play (my first!).

Bolaño books I haven't read

The Savage Detectives was my first encounter with Bolaño, it was a real discovery and remains my favorite. I've enjoyed all the others as well, some more (Distant Star), some less (Monsieur Pain), but I have to admit that in spite of all the breathless praise that's been piled upon him for the last few years, I don't consider him to be a literary genius, nor an heir to Borges. The excesses, surreal touches, and unflinching portraits of darkness, along with his outsider status, his intimate knowledge and profound love of literature, and his mashing together of literary and popular culture all work together to create the image of the romantic vagabond author. Thus, it's quite tempting to declare him the first international literary genius of the 21st century, a literary Che Guevara, perhaps, simultaneously an underdog and a bestseller as only a mostly posthumously published writer can be.

Of all the writers I've placed on my "must read everything" list I think Bolaño is most like Philip K. Dick. With both writers there is a certain familiarity among all the works, perhaps because both worked on the outskirts of certain genres (Sci-Fi for Dick, Hard-Boiled detective fiction with literary namedropping for Bolaño) never quite conforming to them but always aware of their rules. With Dick, after reading a slew of books in 2001-2002 a certain exhaustion set in, and now I only read about a book or two a year. I can almost feel it happening with Bolaño too, though 2666 is still waiting on my shelf and I'm looking forward to tackling it, I feel like I'm starting to see through him a little - the incessantly unsolved, perhaps unsolvable, mysteries, the repetition in certain character traits, certain moods. But I still enjoy it, and perhaps all I need to do is switch to his poetry or essays for for a while so my faith and passion may be restored

In the end, however, it's never really up to me; there will always be someone like Beckett saying, "Wait a minute, you still haven't read my letters!" or Faulkner teasing, "Only two novels? I've so much more to offer!" or even an indignant Andre Breton giving me harsh looks from the bookstore shelf since I've never read any of his works.

Israel's Charing CrossFinding English Books in Tel Aviv

2011-09-18T06:48:00.000-07:00

Last weekend my girlfriend and I visited every bookshop on Tel Aviv's Allenby Street for an article she wrote (in Hebrew) about this small, local version of London's Charing Cross Road. One of my constant gripes about Tel Aviv is that it's very difficult to find decent English books at a decent price, and this little tour served as a great example of this problem.

Steimatzky, lower level

There are 12 bookstores on this stretch of less than one Kilometer (a little more than half a mile), including three Russian bookstores (two new, one used), one Spanish bookstore, one store that specializes in music and chord books. There's also one independent store, Lotus Books (Allenby 101), that has a well-curated collection of new and used Hebrew books, and one chain store - Steimatzky (Allenby 107) which has a relatively large selection of English books on the lower level. Four more used book kiosks have mostly Hebrew books, with a few English paperbacks, usually in miserable condition.

Halper's Books

The main store on this street that caters to readers of English is Halper's Books (Allenby 87), which probably has the biggest selection of used English books in the city. I used to come here quite often when I was an undergrad at Tel Aviv University, but after living in New York City for almost 4 years, I guess my constant trips to the Strand have made me a bit spoiled. I try to avoid mass market paperbacks, especially used ones, and hardly ever purchase a book with markings inside. Halper's, unfortunately, has plenty of both. Granted, the really miserable looking books are usually very cheap, but I think every used bookstore should have some minimal standard for the books it sells, and heavily marked, crumbling, or torn books do not only make for a miserable shopping experience, but also reflect badly on the books around them.

Lev Hasefer (Heart of the Book), Allenby 97

The selection offered by Halper's, though broader than most other bookstores in Tel Aviv, is still fairly limited. I don't know whether they imported books at any point in the past, but it's certain that they have not done so in several years. You may find bestsellers from recent years, but don't expect to find any recent literary gems. This is also true of Israel's two bookstore chains - Steimatzky and Tzomet Sfarim (The Books Junction) - both have one or two flagship stores that contain a larger selection of English books (Steimatzky, aside from the Allenby branch, has another store at Dizengoff 109; Tzomet Sfarim has the "Library" branch at the Dizengoff shopping Center and the "Prose" bookstore at Dizengoff 163) but their selection is fairly hit or miss. You can find the "big" books of recent years - the best sellers, the prize winners, and so on - plus a selection of classics, some big name authors, some sci-fi / fantasy, lots of Grisham, Coban, etc. But don't come looking for anything too obscure or specific because you're bound to be disappointed, especially if you're looking for anything translated into English (other than books by Israeli authors).

An abandoned building right next to Bialik House
(current museum and former home of Israel's national poet);
what better place for a fiercely independent bookstore?

I've been dreaming of opening an independent English bookstore for years, but I realize this would be a significant investment in something that's probably not going to make a lot of money, and as a starving artist of sorts I can't really afford to do that. I envision this store as a sort of public service to fellow anglophile - bibliophiles, a place where they could also attend readings and other cultural events, so if there are any generous book-loving millionaires out there willing to invest, I'm open to all offers (as for a suggested location - see photo above).

What I've Been Reading (a lot)

2011-07-09T07:25:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I posted anything on this blog so I'll try to ease my way back into it by using the crutch of my recent readings. I've been reading about two books a week for the last couple of months, partially because I bought so many books on my recent trip to New York (over 30) that the proportion of unread books in my library started making me feel a little guilty. In addition, my insanely optimistic New Year's resolution to read 100 books this year seemed very far from being fulfilled (see table at right). Still, if I keep up this pace I might be able to get to 80, which is still over the annual average of about 50.

Some Short Novels

Nabokov's Mary, his first novel, very reminiscent of his early short stories, takes place in the Russian émigré community in Berlin and features a selection of mostly pathetic characters and situations, but not much of a plot. James M. Cain's Double Indemnity is as well written and tightly plotted as his earlier novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, though the characters seemed to me a little less alive and palpable, perhaps lacking that bit of existential angst which made Frank Chambers such a compelling character.

Mario Bellatin's Beauty Salon is an interesting take on the "mysterious plague" genre (from Camus's The Plague to every zombie fiction ever) focusing on a gay hairdresser who turns his beauty salon into a home for the dying. The plain language used to describe everything from the narrator's fish collection to his transvestite outings and the strange plague sweeping over the land (a metaphor for AIDS?) works remarkably well to ground the whole narrative in some sort of reality and, short as the work is, it makes a lasting impression. At the other end of the "mythical events interfering in humdrum reality" spectrum is David Garnett's Lady into Fox, where a British gentleman tries to deal, practically and calmly, with the fact that his dear wife had suddenly turned into a fox. Though this was a pleasant enough read, I kept waiting for something a little more interesting to occur, but aside from the initial transformation the whole narrative progressed quite sedately and sensibly towards its somewhat pat conclusion.

And Some Longer Novels

Steve Erickson's Tours of the Black Clock, #98 on Larry McCaffrey's list of the Twentieth Century's 100 greatest works of fiction, is an odd and sprawling narrative mixing alternative history, erotic fantasy, hard-boiled literary clichés, and melodrama, with a consistent but unconvincing underlying romantic/fantastic sensibility. There are at least three separate narratives here, all of them going on for far too long and connecting to each other very clumsily in terms of the overall narrative.

Francine Prose's Blue Angel presents itself (or its author and blurbs present it) as a biting satire of Creative Writing workshops, teachers, and attendees, but after a promising set up the story very quickly dissolves into a typical narrative of an older professor enamored with a mysterious young student who turns out to be, quite predictably, his undoing. The setting is a typical small New England college, the characters are pedestrian (the formerly successful writer turned professor, the supportive wife, the alienated daughter, the "not-as-innocent-as-she-seems" student, the man hating Über-feminist female literature professor, the gay deconstructionist who loathes books and writers, the moronic students and their terrible writing... believe me, I could go on), the writing is thankfully straightforward, which makes this a relatively the dénouement almost cringingly predictable. Throughout the novel seems more concerned with the challenges of teaching in the era of political correctness (though published in 2001 it feels very mid 90's, post Lewinsky scandal) than the actual personalities and motivations of the characters that inhabit it.

You don't need me to tell you that James Dickey's Deliverance is worth reading. Though at times it feels like Dickey is pushing the dramatic tension a bit too much, and I'd be hard pressed to find proof of its true literary merit, it's a gripping read nonetheless.

And Some Graphic Novels

This field is still relatively new to me and I'm still trying to figure out what's worth reading and what my personal preferences are. As for superhero comics it seems I'm far less tolerant of collected comics than one-shot narratives. the storylines in Doom Patrol's The Painting that Ate Paris, for example, were brought up and resolved far too quickly and easily for my taste, which is a shame since there were some pretty interesting ideas there (e.g. the villain who only has super-powers as long as they are unimagined by others, or the brotherhood of Dada which seeks to make the world more ludicrous).

That said, The Dark Knight Strikes Again proved an even bigger disappointment, a mostly uninteresting and incomprehensible sequel to The Dark Knight Returns. Both of these later Batman stories pale in comparison to Jeph Loeb's The Long Halloween and its sequel Dark Victory, the first is a well-constructed detective story which draws heavily (and successfully) on The Godfather film series and the latter, though heavily dependent on the former and almost imitative of its structure, is nonetheless a good read which, unlike The Dark Knight Strikes Again, does not require intimate knowledge of the DC universe in order to be enjoyed or understood.

Finally there's Dino Buzzati's 1969 Poem Strip, a beautiful and spare retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice through surreal and erotic drawings (recently republished in English as part of the NYRB classics list, of which I can't get enough).

The Great Gatsby - The Video Game

2011-02-16T00:58:00.000-08:00

You might have already heard about the new(ish) "hidden object" Great Gatsby video game, but did you know there is also an NES video game? You can play the game, allegedly found at a garage sale, online at GreatGatsbyGame.Com. Most people suspect this is not an authentic NES game but something made up by some Nintendo fans with too much time on their hands (actually, the website's contact page admits it's a fake created by Charlie Hoey and Pete Smith). At any rate, it's an enjoyable time-waster, with appropriately ridiculous touches such as a gold hat as the equivalent of Mario's mushrooms and Dr. Eckleburg's giant laser-shooting spectacles.

I haven't played the game through (those giant laser-shooting eyes are tricky, and I'm no gamer) so I don't know how it turns out for Nick, or who else he has to fight later on (Dutch ghosts, apparently). Now let's wait for the brave and bored fan who'll make Ulysses: The Game.

New Website!

2011-01-27T17:03:00.000-08:00

As part of my never-ending effort to look more like a real writer, I put up a minimal website where you can read the first 3 chapters of my novel, and a bunch of shorter, funnier texts as well:

http://skazoulay.com/

Minor Annoyances

2011-01-10T12:47:00.000-08:00

So every quasi-literary person I know seems to be in an uproar over the attempt to bowdlerize Huck Finn by replacing every instance of the word "Nigger" with the word "Slave." I almost feel sorry for the guy for this public and collective flogging he's receiving, though admittedly it's a pretty dumb thing to do. But in fact I think the backlash says far more about the current literary culture than the initial event - SO many people are SO outraged and spend SO much time debating something SO stupid. If it hadn't been brought to such broad public attention, who would have even heard of this person, or seen this version of the book? But by now the public outcry has been so vocal it even reached the Israeli news.

I haven't heard a single voice defending this edit, even if they do express some understanding of the logic behind it. I'm not surprised everyone's flocking to criticize him, as Jean-Baptiste Clamence says in Albert Camus's The Fall, there's nothing sweeter than attacking someone whose guilt is verified and agreed upon:

The essential thing, after all, is being able to get angry with someone who has no right to talk back.

There was certainly no such uproar when Joseph Conrad's 1897 novella was published as The N-word of the Narcissus in 2009 (and yes, all occurrences of the word inside the book were also changed to N-word). Why? Because no one heard about the publication.

Personally, I'm more annoyed at Peter Sís, whose dreadful illustrations fill my edition of Borges's The Book of Imaginary Beings. Seriously, who exactly decided that the great writer's compendium of fantastic creatures deserved such amateurish and childish illustrations as these:

The Leveler

Just think how much better it would have looked illustrated in the style of Albertus Seba's Cabinet of Natural Curiosities or Albrecht Dürer's woodcuts:

Dürer's Rhinoceros, woodcut, 1515.

Well, I'll be sure to hire a worthy illustrator when I finally have enough entries in Cycloped to fill a book (rather than rely on my own weak illustration / photo shopping / pilfering skills).

Dream the Impossible Dream + Musical Interlude XVI

2011-01-06T16:11:00.000-08:00

The start of a new year is always a good time to take on ridiculously ambitious tasks, since from this vantage point the year seems so long, so much of ahead of us, so much time to accomplish all the stuff we haven't accomplished this year. Well, if there's one thing my NaNoWriMo experience taught me it's that it's good to set these goals, because even in attempting to achieve them and failing, I usually get more done than I would have without said ridiculous goal.

So this year I'll set not one but two ridiculous goals, the first is to complete a full draft of the novel I started working on this past November. This might not seem that ridiculous, but considering how long it usually takes me to write (my first novel, which I admittedly did not work on constantly or exclusively, took over 3 years), and all the other stuff I'll be busy with (work, bloggings, hopefully a longish visit to NYC, maybe another trip somewhere else, my never-ending quest for love, plus my other ridiculous goal), it calls for a lot of commitment.

My second ridiculous goal is to read 100 books this year. This is about twice as much as what I usually read in a year (roughly a book a week), and on top of all the stuff I've mentioned earlier. Of course the purpose of blogging these intentions rather than keeping them to myself is the perceived public shaming I'll face if I fail to meet these goals (possibly imagined, but still a motivating force). I haven't chosen the 100 books yet, but I've decided to divide them into 10 (somewhat overlapping) categories to make them easier to handle:

10 books I haven't finished - I'm sure there are more than 10, including a lot of essay and story collections, but also some novels I have (shamefully) failed to complete and still haven't given up on.
10 novels by writers I've never read before (Philipp Meyer, Jane Bowles, Steve Erickson, Dino Buzzati...).
10 short story collections - some of these could fall under the first category as well, such as the collected stories of Malamud and Nabokov, but I'm sure there'll be enough books to fill both categories.
10 plays - admittedly these are usually not strictly book-length, but might balance out with the lengthy collected editions included in the previous category.
10 graphic novels - this will require some research.
10 books in Hebrew - continuing my mission of reading more Israeli literature.
10 books from the Modern Library's list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century.
10 books by/on Kafka - again, a lot of partials here - diaries, letters, notebooks - plus the three novels in their new translations. If there's any room left I'll add Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature.
10 books written before 1900 - Mostly 19th century, I guess, some Dostoevsky, Some French, some British, maybe some ancient Greek/Roman.
10 more novels - deliberately open category for whatever comes my way (I do plan to read Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas soon, not sure what category it would fall into).

And to make the guilt complete I'll add a little chart in the sidebar:

And since we already have the title...

This power pop rendition of "The Impossible Dream" by Carter USM is, in my humble opinion, the best version of the song - defiant rather than maudlin (like most stage and talent show versions) or downright silly (like Elvis's version). The video is also clever, and shows that at least someone there actually read the book.

Season's Greetings

2010-12-27T18:06:00.000-08:00

I don't usually cross-promote my bloggings, but it's the holidays and I'm sure everyone can appreciate a break from semi-serious literary matters for a short and humorous holiday-themed story I wrote for 2log (die hard literary nerds may also enjoy the references to James Joyce and Herman Melville). The story is part of a 12 part series my fellow 2log bloggers and I concocted, where each one of us wrote about one of the gifts named in the "12 days of Christmas" song; my contribution is for day 8:

Eight Maids a-Milking: A Story of Wall Street.

Enjoy.

NaNoWriMo recap

2010-12-09T12:08:00.000-08:00

Though a post summing up my NaNoWriMo experience is by now long overdue, I feel like I’ve already stated most of what I had to say on the matter in my last few posts, when it already seemed I was not going to successfully complete the task before me, and was already in an elegiac mood. I can offer the following image to sum up my successes and failures in the only field that actually counts:

As you can see, in spite of a significant gap between where I was and where I should have been, I had a pretty good pace there for a while, until I stopped completely (that little jump in the end came from bringing together all my various documents into a single MS Word file, and feeding that text into the NaNoWriMo site’s word counting feature (that feature, by the way, is notoriously severe, and shaved several hundred words off my MS Word counter's figure, which was almost 30,000).
So of course I’m glad I participated, and a little disappointed that I did not get to cross that finish line, but not too much. The main thing now is to find some way to keep writing with the same relish during the scattered days or hours that are available to me. Here’s hoping the (very) gradually cooling weather will find me at home and in front of the computer, writing furiously.

NaNoWriMo - Day 23 - Just As I've Feared

2010-11-23T10:59:00.000-08:00

Number of words translated today: 11,170.
Number of NaNoWriMo novel words written today: 160.

Barton Fink failing to write

Oh well, there's always the weekend. Or next month. Or next year.

NaNoWriMo - Day 22 - All is lost (?)

2010-11-22T11:56:00.000-08:00

There's hardly a writer, or any other user of a word processor, this has not happened to. You spend several hours writing something and then, due to some technical malfunction or human error, it's all gone. You try to restore it with every possible means at your disposal - technological, mental, spiritual, necromantic - but it is hopeless, your great burst of writing, its value heightened by its very loss, is gone forever.

This is exactly what happened to me last night - three hours of vigorous writing wiped out by a single moment of distraction. Then I naturally attempted to create exactly what I have written, with only partial success - the scenes are all there, but certain words and images still elude me. And of course, as I kept telling myself, if I was writing longhand or using a typewriter this could not have happened.

Miguel de Unamuno at his desk

This whole ordeal naturally led me to think of my numerous literary predecessors. In a certain way, I was my own person from Porlock, irretrievably disrupting the flow of words, just as that unnamed character had disrupted Coleridge's composition of Kubla Khan. A closer and more prosaic story involves the fate of the first volume of Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution, which was accidentally burned by John Stuart Mill's maid, forcing Carlyle to rewrite the whole thing from scratch.

Finally, of course, the attempt to rewrite the exact same words another has written before brings to mind the Borges story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (you may argue with me whether or not the person who wrote the first version of those lost thousand words is the same person as the one who wrote the second version; you will certainly grant me that the latter is somewhat more bitter, if none wiser).

So naturally yesterday's NaNoWriMo session did not amount to as much as it could have, and then today I was called back to a big translation project which will probably keep me very busy for the next few days or weeks, so it seems I won't reach the 50,000 word goal but, as I mentioned in my previous posts, I think this undertaking has already done a lot for this particular project and for my writing in general.

NaNoWriMo - Day 21 - Pinter on Writing

2010-11-21T02:14:00.000-08:00

Some words on writing from Harold Pinter's speech upon being awarded the German Shakespeare Prize (1970):

The language used, the opinions given, the approvals and objections engendered by one's work happen in a sense outside one's actual experience of it, since the core of that experience consists in writing the stuff. I have a particular relationship with the words I put down on paper and the characters which emerge from them which no one else can share with me...

I believe myself that when a writer looks at the blank of the word he has not yet written, or when actors and directors arrive at a given moment on stage, there is only one proper thing that can take place at that moment, and that that thing, that gesture, that word on the page, must alone be found, and once found, scrupulously protected...

...You create the word and in a certain way the word, in finding its own life, stares you out, is obdurate, and more often than not defeats you. You create the characters and they prove to be very tough. They observe you, their writer, warily...

I am aware, sometimes, of an insistence in my mind. Images, characters, insisting upon being written. You can pour a drink, make a telephone call or run round the park, and sometimes succeed in suffocating them. You know they're going to make your life hell. But at other times they're unavoidable and you're compelled to try to do them some kind of justice. And while it may be hell, it's certainly for me the best kind of hell to be in.

NaNoWriMo - Day 20 - The Present and the Future

2010-11-20T08:59:00.000-08:00

As far as I'm concerned NaNoWriMo has already achieved its purpose, I'm engaged with my novel on a daily basis, I've made significant progress, and I've already written a lot more than I would have written in this time if I was not participating in it. I'm still going to try to reach that 50,000 word goal, but given my current rate of about 1,500 words a day (which is actually pretty great when compared to previous successful writing streaks) and the gap between where I currently am and where I should have been by now (a pretty steady 10,000 words for the last week or so), chances are that's not going to happen.

J. M. Coetzee writing

I assume I'll be taking a break at the end of the month and turn to reading (I've hardly read anything other than short stories and articles since the month began; Coetzee's Summertime is at the top of my list) for at least a couple of weeks, then return to the material and hopefully complete a first readable draft (as opposed to the pre-first, or zero draft I'm currently composing) within a few weeks. Then it's revise revise and revise until I can't stand to look at it anymore.

NaNoWriMo - Day 19 - Musical Interlude XV + E. M. Forster

2010-11-19T11:16:00.000-08:00

Here's a song for the weekend:

And a few words from E.M. Forster about basing characters on people you know:

We all like to pretend we don’t use real people, but one does actually. I used some of my family... In no book have I got down more than the people I like, the person I think I am, and the people who irritate me. This puts me among the large body of authors who are not really novelists and have to get on as best they can with these three categories. We have not the power of observing the variety of life and describing it dispassionately. There are a few who have done this. Tolstoy was one, wasn’t he?

...A useful trick is to look back upon such a person with half-closed eyes, fully describing certain characteristics. I am left with about two-thirds of a human being and can get to work. A likeness isn’t aimed at, and couldn’t be obtained, because a man’s only himself amid the particular circumstances of his life and not amid other circumstances... When all goes well, the original material soon disappears, and a character who belongs to the book and nowhere else emerges.

NaNoWriMo - Day 18 - Over, Under and Around

2010-11-18T04:22:00.000-08:00

So turns out I was wrong. I didn't work on chapter 2 yesterday, since at some point I decided I would have to do some more research and take some more notes before I understand exactly what I want it to include and/or achieve. I did, however, make a lot of progress on chapter 3. The point, I guess, is that I have to choose my battles, and while writing will probably always be a struggle (for me, at least), sometimes when I find myself constantly avoiding a certain chapter or scene I have to recognize that it's because I'm not ready to write them just yet (this is not always easy to tell apart from my natural tendency towards procrastination).

John Gardner writing

This has sort of thing has happened before, with my first novel, and often delayed me for weeks or months, due to the linear and cumulative structure of that work, which did not allow me to skip ahead and work on a different part. The novel I'm currently working on is a bit looser and "jazzier" (a term borrowed from John Gardner's The Art of Fiction) so I am able to move about the various sections a little more freely.

P.S. If I wasn't doing NaNoWriMo this month I probably would have written something about Ben Greenman's article in The Daily Beast: Hey, That's My Line, and perhaps somehow applied it to my writing. Maybe I'll get to it in December.

NaNoWriMo - Day 17

2010-11-17T12:39:00.000-08:00

I think part of the problem in recent days had been the fact that I've been going back and forth, writing whatever scene I felt like and not really bothering to bring the whole thing together yet. while this was a good tactic to reach the almost 20,000 words I already have, I think now I should turn to putting all of these things in order and filling out the missing scenes in a more methodical manner.
I think chapter 1 is pretty much the way it's going to stay until I move towards reviewing the complete draft, today it's time to tackle chapter 2.

“I did not believe political directives could be successfully applied to creative writing . . . not to poetry or fiction, which to be valid had to express as truthfully as possible the individual emotions and reactions of the writer.” - Langston Hughes

NaNoWriMo - Day 16 - An Experiment with Time

2010-11-16T06:46:00.000-08:00

Where does the time go?

I'm almost 10,000 words behind where I should be so today I'm going to try something new - never-ending pressure. Once I'm done with all my errands and translation work, I'm going to keep meticulous track of my writing, reporting back to this blog every hour or so to see how I've advanced and/or wasted my time doing other stuff.

Starting point long delayed, due to translation work and other distractions. Nevertheless, about an hour into actual writing I'm up 400 words. I think I'll move to my friendly neighborhood coffee house soon.
Coffee House tactic seems to be working, up 700 more words. I think I'll order another whiskey.
500 more words at coffee house, though I feel I'm running out of steam, perhaps time for a change of scenery.
Calling it a night (at 4:38 AM) after 1,700 words. At least I surpassed the 1667 word minimum. Seems this constant pressure thing isn't any more effective than regular pressure, or perhaps it should be applied on less distracted days. Tomorrow looks pretty free. Wish me luck.

NaNoWriMo - Day 15 - Half way?

2010-11-15T07:13:00.000-08:00

It's day 15, which means by now I should have about 25,000 words written; in reality I have about 17,000 words, which is a little over a third. If I write 2200 words a day I should be able to finish on time, and that strikes me as doable, though I'd much rather have a couple of more 3500+ days to compensate for some future days I might not be feeling it.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez at his desk

I also feel like the novel will be much longer than 50,000 words (which would be a novella anyway, remember this post?) perhaps even longer than my previous novel (73,000 words), and it's making me think up of tactics for the future. Though reaching the 50K word count seems seems to be the right goal now, I think that at some point I'll have to stop, look back on the whole thing with a far more critical eye, and examine my notes to see how much the project has mutated since its first inception, and whether that's good or bad. For now, however, it's full speed ahead.

NaNoWriMo - Day 14 - "Write fast and get through it"

2010-11-14T04:18:00.000-08:00

You might consider him an unlikely source for writerly wisdom and inspiration, but Hunter S. Thompson knew how to twist and turn words (and reality) to suit his own needs, and how to crank out the pages.

My theory for years has been to write fast and get through it. I usually write five pages a night and leave them out for my assistant to type in the morning.

[asked about writers who claim they can't write under the influence of drugs or alcohol]

They lie. Or maybe you've been interviewing a very narrow spectrum of writers. It's like saying, “Almost without exception women we've interviewed over the years swear that they never indulge in sodomy”—without saying that you did all your interviews in a nunnery. Did you interview Coleridge? Did you interview Poe? Or Scott Fitzgerald? Or Mark Twain? Or Fred Exley? Did Faulkner tell you that what he was drinking all the time was really iced tea, not whiskey? Please. Who the fuck do you think wrote the Book of Revelation? A bunch of stone-sober clerics?

[asked about opening lines of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas]

[...] something else was written first, chronologically, but when I wrote that . . . well, there are moments . . . a lot of them happen when nothing else is going right . . . when you're being evicted from the hotel a day early in New York or you've just lost your girlfriend in Scottsdale. I know when I'm hitting it. I know when I'm on. I can usually tell because the copy's clean. [...] I never sit down and put on my white shirt and bow-tie and black business coat and think, Well, now's the time to write. I will simply get into it. [...] I'd say on a normal day I get up at noon or one. You have to feel sort of overwhelmed, I think, to start.

You've got to be able to have pages in the morning. I measure my life in pages. If I have pages at dawn, it's been a good night. There is no art until it's on paper, there is no art until it's sold. If I were a trust-fund baby, if I had any income from anything else . . . even fucking disability from a war or a pension . . . I have nothing like that, never did. So, of course, you have to get paid for your work. I envy people who don't have to . . .

NaNoWriMo - Day 13 - Outlining

2010-11-13T07:44:00.000-08:00

This is what progress looks like:

This is an outline of about 70-80% of my novel, organized with post-it notes (some cut into smaller strips) over the balcony door (they seem to stick better to glass than wood or a plain wall). I spent most of my writing time yesterday working on it, but I think it was worth it since I was able to arrange the scenes I'd already written in order, and into fewer documents, and hopefully being more aware of the narrative flow would also help its later construction. Besides, it's always good to verify that what you're writing is actually going somewhere.

F. Scott Fitzgerald writing

I know NaNoWriMo is all about rushing to the end, but I think it helps when you know where you're headed. Plus, an outline is not a contract, you can always change it later on to suit different needs as they arise. I also managed to write just a bit more than my suggested daily word count, so while I haven't closed the gap that had grown considerably over the week, at least I didn't expand it either.

NaNoWriMo - Day 12 - Damn the Torpedoes, Full Speed Ahead! (and other clichés)

2010-11-12T05:15:00.000-08:00

After a week full of distractions and abstractions, last night I was finally able to buckle down and write no less than 3,700 words. I'm still far from catching up to where I should be by now, and I'm resisting the urge to go over what I've written for fear that it'll be an awful mess, but for now I'm feeling rather optimistic about my prospects.
One thing that has helped me move forward is choosing the path of least resistance. If I feel like working on a scene that comes much later in the novel than where I am - either because it requires less research, seems more fun to write, or is already sketched out - then I just work on it. This method might come back to bite me on the ass when all that's left to write are complicated and hazy scenes, but that's something for future me to worry about. There's also the possibility that I'll reach the 50,000 word goal before getting to those scenes because, though I've written more than 50 pages so far, I still feel like I'm only scratching the surface of the material I have. Maybe this book won't be as short as I thought it would be.

John O'Hara at his desk

In other news, I just saw Galleycat is posting daily NaNoWriMo tips. Many of them are only relevant to a few writers, but some are worth glancing at. On day 3, for example, they suggest using cliché finder to weed out hackneyed phrases from your writing. The problem with the site is that you have to do it manually, meaning you have to suspect that something is a cliché already before checking to make sure. The worst clichés, however, are the ones we use all the time and are hardly aware of. A far more useful tool would be a website or program that scans your text and points out the clichés contained therein. Come on, computer and language geeks, there's your next million dollar idea - get on it.

Clichés contained just in that last paragraph:

in other news
worth glancing at
weed out
million dollar idea
get on it

See?

NaNoWriMo - Day 11 - Do Not Try to Beautify, or Even Understand

2010-11-10T22:18:00.000-08:00

Below is a tiny bit of writing advice excerpted from Jorge Luis Borges's series of lectures at Harvard in 1967-68. Though he was mainly speaking about the writing poetry and short stories (and as we all know he never wrote novels), I found certain passages to be very appropriate for NaNoWriMo writers:

When I write, I do not think of the reader (because the reader is an imaginary character), and I do not think of myself (perhaps I am an imaginary character also), but I think of what I am trying to convey and I do my best not to spoil it... When I am writing something, I try not to understand it. I do not think intelligence has much to do with the work of a writer...

When I write (of course, I may not be a fair example, but merely an awful warning), I try to forget all about myself. I forget about my personal circumstances. I do not try, as I tried once, to be a “South American writer.” I merely try to convey what the dream is. And if the dream be a dim one (in my case, it usually is), I do not try to beautify it, or even to understand it.

- Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse

NaNoWriMo - Day 10 - The NaNo Website

2010-11-10T09:13:00.000-08:00

I don't use the NaNoWriMo website for anything other than updating my word count and seeing my personal stats (which, I'll admit, aren't looking too great right about now). The site has a lot of other interesting and/or helpful stuff, but these all seem needless distractions from actually writing ("Oh, and blogging here isn't?" you ask, to which I respond, "Quiet, you!").
Some stuff offered by the site includes details of "write ins" where writers are invited to write in bookstores and libraries (which, even if it existed in Israel, wouldn't appeal to me - see my day 2 post about writing in public - though I have admittedly been seen writing in public recently), and of course the usual forums and pep talks for writers. It seems all I really need, though, is guilt, so please be sure to continually nag me on this blog, through Twitter, or if you're a friend, on Facebook or in person.

George Orwell Writing

Your inspirational quote of the day:

"All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."

- George Orwell, "Why I Write"

NaNoWriMo - Day 9 - To Blog or not to Blog?

2010-11-09T07:54:00.000-08:00

I must admit that I've been much better at posting a daily update on this blog than meeting the suggested 1,667 daily word count toward the novel. I'm at 8,700 words today, before my daily writing session, while I should be at about 15,000 by the end of the day. As I stated on day 5, a lot can happen in a month, often in matters entirely unrelated to the writing itself, and this is exactly what happened. Nonetheless, I figure that as long as my daily requirement to finish on time remains under 2,000 words there's still hope.

Roland Barthes at his desk

Worst case scenario, I'll add this month's bloggings to the overall word count, as footnotes, and call it Post-Modern.

NaNoWriMo - Day 8 - Signs of Weakness

2010-11-08T13:18:00.000-08:00

This must be what they call the hump (personal life not too helpful right now either). Time to call up Belle and Sebastian for a little bit of moral support:

and the obligatory image of a writer at work plus an inspirational quote:

"I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable."

- Woody Allen, Annie Hall (1977)

NaNoWriMo - Day 7 - "Never less than ten or twelve drafts"

2010-11-07T06:33:00.000-08:00

Some words about writing (and revising) from Raymond Carver's interview with the Paris Review:

When I'm writing, I write every day. It's lovely when that's happening. One day dovetailing into the next. Sometimes I don't even know what day of the week it is. The “paddle-wheel of days,” John Ashbery has called it. When I'm not writing, like now, when I'm tied up with teaching duties as I have been the last while, it's as if I've never written a word or had any desire to write. I fall into bad habits. I stay up too late and sleep in too long. But it's okay. I've learned to be patient and to bide my time. I had to learn that a long time ago. Patience. If I believed in signs, I suppose my sign would be the sign of the turtle. I write in fits and starts. But when I'm writing, I put in a lot of hours at the desk, ten or twelve or fifteen hours at a stretch, day after day. I love that, when that's happening. Much of this work time, understand, is given over to revising and rewriting. There's not much that I like better than to take a story that I've had around the house for a while and work it over again. It's the same with the poems I write. I'm in no hurry to send something off just after I write it, and I sometimes keep it around the house for months doing this or that to it, taking this out and putting that in. It doesn't take that long to do the first draft of the story, that usually happens in one sitting, but it does take a while to do the various versions of the story. I've done as many as twenty or thirty drafts of a story. Never less than ten or twelve drafts. It's instructive, and heartening both, to look at the early drafts of great writers. I'm thinking of the photographs of galleys belonging to Tolstoy, to name one writer who loved to revise. I mean, I don't know if he loved it or not, but he did a great deal of it. He was always revising, right down to the time of page proofs. He went through and rewrote War and Peace eight times and was still making corrections in the galleys. Things like this should hearten every writer whose first drafts are dreadful, like mine are.

Raymond Carver writing

I write the first draft quickly, as I said. This is most often done in longhand. I simply fill up the pages as rapidly as I can. In some cases, there's a kind of personal shorthand, notes to myself for what I will do later when I come back to it. Some scenes I have to leave unfinished, unwritten in some cases; the scenes that will require meticulous care later. I mean all of it requires meticulous care—but some scenes I save until the second or third draft, because to do them and do them right would take too much time on the first draft. With the first draft it's a question of getting down the outline, the scaffolding of the story. Then on subsequent revisions I'll see to the rest of it. When I've finished the longhand draft I'll type a version of the story and go from there. It always looks different to me, better, of course, after it's typed up. When I'm typing the first draft, I'll begin to rewrite and add and delete a little then. The real work comes later, after I've done three or four drafts of the story. It's the same with the poems, only the poems may go through forty or fifty drafts. Donald Hall told me he sometimes writes a hundred or so drafts of his poems. Can you imagine?

NaNoWriMo - Day 6 - Naysayers

2010-11-06T09:55:00.000-07:00

My friend Dave (who recently published a story in the Brooklyn Rail about Tacos) was kind enough to forward me Laura Miller's rant against NaNoWriMo on Salon.com. The main point of Miller's article is that people should not be encouraged to write - there are already far more novels out there than anyone can read - but rather encouraged to read, since many of those already published and worthy novels go widely unread. To her the whole enterprise seems to be a pointless effort, serving nothing but the "commerce" of writing since "far more money can be made out of people who want to write novels than out of people who want to read them."

While this is true, and I agree with her assessment that unfortunately far too many of the people who wish to write novels hardly ever read novels, I think she's going after the wrong target here. NaNoWriMo does not cost the writers anything and does not encourage its participants to buy writing guides or join expensive workshops. The availability of NaNoWriMo to anyone who wishes to take part is both its defining characteristic and, in the eyes of its critics, its biggest problem. In my eyes, however, NaNoWriMo is nothing more than a tool, a simple device to kickstart my novel, and like any tool it can be used for any purpose by whoever is holding it. You can use a hammer to build a table or to bash someone's head in, but whatever you choose to do with it, it's kind of stupid to hold the hammer accountable.

I also agree with Miller's assertion that good novels would get written anyway, with or without NaNoWriMo, but if this tool is a more effective means of reaching this goal for some, what's the harm of using it?

Ralph Ellison at his desk

What I particularly disliked about Miller's piece is the either/or approach - as if you can't read novels and write them, with the implication that most people shouldn't be writing at all. By a rough estimate, I think I read about 120 books while writing one novel (and at least some of those books I only read because I was writing the novel), and I can't think of a single worthy writer who does not believe that the foundation of writing is reading.

Overall, the piece smacks of a sort of elitism, of a "leave writing to the experts" approach, which for me also had a certain consumerist undertone - that we should applaud the purchasers of books, and all aspire to purchase more, rather than attempt to produce anything of our own, even if only for our own enjoyment or fulfillment.

NaNoWriMo - Day 5 - Why this might or might not work

2010-11-05T06:41:00.000-07:00

Why I might successfully complete NaNoWriMo:

I have the time - November is panning out as a month of little work, which is fine since I worked so much in October I don't really have to worry about getting by. This also seems to be a month where everyone around is busy so there aren't too many social obligations. Also, I'm not dating anyone, and have sort of decided to take a break from that whole scene for a while.
So far so good - 6,600 words written in the first four days, the writing's coming out relatively fluently and not too embarrassingly awful. Most importantly - the pressure to write is actually there, I feel it, I see it in those little NaNo stats and graphs, constantly challenging me with how much more I have to write to stay on schedule, to be ahead of schedule, to beat the average, and so on.
The goal is obtainable - In October I dedicated 14 days (6-8 hours of work a day) to translating and churned out over 100,000 words. I won't deny writing is much harder than translating, but since I have most of the plot worked out, and only have to write half as many words in twice the time, I'm optimistic.
It's been done before - Yes, everyone knows Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants was written as part of NaNoWriMo, but that's not what I'm talking about. Hemingway wrote the first draft of The Sun Also Rises in six weeks; Nabokov, after having the idea in his head for a long time, rushed to write Pnin through the summer of 1955. I specifically named those two since they have additional characteristics in common with my work-in-progress, and so give me hope that I could actually breeze my way through a first draft in a relatively short period of time.

Vladimir Nabokov writing

Why I might not complete NaNoWriMo:

It's bound to get a lot harder - Right now I'm writing scenes that I've already worked out in my mind, at some point I'll reach sections that are a little less clear and encounter problems that I could not have foreseen at the start. Plus, I'm sure a certain fatigue will set in, probably next week, and the urge to go back and rewrite will only increase.
The end is not the end, it's the means - Writing 50,000 words is just the start of the process, the novel itself will probably be longer, and will require editing, and additional research, so it is possible that at some point during the month I'll just decide that I've gotten as far as I can with this uncritical writing frenzy and turn to more research, or editing, or maybe even put the whole thing aside for a while to gain perspective.
A lot can happen in a month - I could receive job offers I can't refuse, I could find myself suddenly busy with something involving my completed novel (I probably wouldn't mind that as much), I could fall ill, meet someone, lose my mind, regain my senses, or all of the above. All I can say is, stay tuned.

NaNoWriMo - Day 4 - "Try to be better than yourself"

2010-11-04T04:41:00.000-07:00

Here is a longer excerpt of William Faulkner's thoughts about writing which I referenced a few posts earlier. This is taken from the Paris Review interviews which are now also available online (and included on Donald Barthelme's reading list)

[a writer] must never be satisfied with what he does. It never is as good as it can be done. Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done...

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies...

William Faulkner Writing

The writer doesn't need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper. I've never known anything good in writing to come from having accepted any free gift of money. The good writer never applies to a foundation. He's too busy writing something. If he isn't first rate he fools himself by saying he hasn't got time or economic freedom. Good art can come out of thieves, bootleggers, or horse swipes. People really are afraid to find out just how much hardship and poverty they can stand. They are afraid to find out how tough they are. Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich...

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

NaNoWriMo - Day 3 - Wait, So What Am I Writing About?

2010-11-03T10:54:00.000-07:00

The more perceptive readers of this blog might have already noticed that I never actually said anything about the novel I'm working on. I'm not usually paranoid about posting my ideas online, and in general I don't really believe that good literary ideas can be stolen. In this case, however, I'd rather err on the side of caution (and not be forced to repeatedly threaten my readers not to borrow or steal any of my ideas), and also try to avoid the danger of ruining it for you (this, I realize, is insanely optimistic since it not only presupposes the book will eventually get completed and published, but also that you would all read it). So forgive me for not divulging any plot details, or excerpting any scenes, or even telling you the title of the book; believe me that I'd really really like to tell you all about it because I think it's pretty interesting stuff, but right now I just can't do it.

Roberto Bolaño at his desk

This lack of response or feedback is one of the drawbacks of trying to write books instead of blog posts - you can be really excited about an idea or story and wish for everyone to know about it immediately, but in fact it'll probably be a couple of years (if not ten, if not twenty...) before it sees the light of day (plus, you'll probably never get a direct unfiltered response similar to blog comments; maybe an Amazon review if you're lucky).

NaNoWriMo - Day 2 - Why I Don't Write in Public

2010-11-02T05:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, en route from point A to point B, I found myself at a coffeehouse with my laptop, and so I did indeed sit down and crank out a few more words for my NaNoWriMo novel (now at 2100 words, with today's session still ahead of me), but in general I don't bring my laptop to coffeehouses. If I go alone I usually bring a book or a notebook, and in the latter case I usually write ideas and notes, but not fiction, and there are several very good reasons for this.

First, and there's no point denying it, people working on laptops in public places often look like complete tools, e.g.:

But I also have some personal, idiosyncratic reasons:

Though I usually write with some sort of noise in the background - talk radio, music, or even television - there are certain times when I have to shut off everything and sit in complete silence in order to focus on a particularly tricky or complex section/ scene/ idea/ whatever, which would be difficult to do in a crowded public setting.
I'm surprised a lot of "public writers" don't realize this about themselves, but I am fully aware of the fact that I do not make for an attractive specimen while writing. I scratch my head or beard, pull at my eyelids, bite my lip, yawn, stare blankly, and so on. All these natural tics that I don't need to worry about while I'm alone and focused on my writing suddenly become liabilities when I'm out in the world (and still single).
Most embarrassingly - when writing scenes and dialogue I tend to act out whatever the characters are doing, I'm not talking about pretending to drive a car or climb a mountain, but the little gestures that usually accompany a conversation. The character nods and I nod, he shrugs and I shrug, he winks and I wink, and so on, as if testing out if the gestures suit the words being spoken.
Finally, I sometimes have to read things I wrote out loud, to see how they sound and whether they make sense, but I know I'm not alone in doing this.

Walter Benjamin writing

More than anything, however, I don't like writing on a laptop in public because I feel that it makes me unapproachable, more unapproachable than if I was reading, or writing with pen and paper, because people on laptops are often assumed to be "working," in fact they're working so hard they can't even take a break for coffee or lunch, and have to keep working right through it.
Personally, there's nothing I like better than the casual conversations with strangers that develop around books or writing, and this just doesn't seem to happen with laptops (you can't really ask someone on a laptop what they're working on, what if it's their taxes? What if they're just tooling around on Facebook?). Anyway, if you happen to see me sitting somewhere in public, reading or writing, feel free to come up and talk to me, I really wouldn't mind.

And with all that in mind, here's your inspirational quote of the day:

"Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards." - Robert A. Heinlein

NaNoWriMo 2010 - Day 1

2010-11-01T09:17:00.000-07:00

I'm well aware of the bad reputation NaNoWriMo has in certain circles, particularly those of the haughty literary kind - that it prefers quantity over quality, that there's no minimal threshold, that it's easy to cheat, and so on. Of course, since there's no actual reward at the end other than the novel itself (or however much of it you complete) cheating is pretty pointless. As for the other points, while they're all true, it really shouldn't matter as long as the target - which in my case is to keep writing - is achieved.

Right now I'm not in an MFA program where I would have to churn out material, I don't have an agent and/or editor pressuring me to work, and I don't even have a significant other or some other friend pushing me forward by constantly demanding to see what I've done. All I have to keep me at my task is myself, and I'm a pretty lousy boss - I let myself slack off, dedicate time to side projects (including this very blog and 2log) and flit from one project to another without completing any of them. So for me NaNoWriMo is potentially perfect for several reasons:

It has an arbitrary deadline, which nonetheless seems more valid than all the other ones I've given myself in the past (perceived public shaming wins again).
The deadline is only for the word count - at that point the book does not have to be in any sort of reasonable shape - it's what you'd call a "Zero" draft, not even a first draft, no one is expected to read it.
The focus is on writing, which is what I have the most difficulty doing - I can come up with ideas and write super-specific notes for days on end in my notebooks, without ever reaching the point of opening up a Word document and saying, "Go!" NaNoWriMo actually shows me that none of that stuff counts if there's nothing on the page (you'd think I would have figured that out by now...)

Bottom line, if it gets me writing then it's worth it; why should I care if ten thousand hacks are doing the same thing at the same time? As Faulkner already said (in one of the quotes that appear on the sidebar) -

"The writer's only responsibility is to his art... Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written."

NaNoWriMo 2010 - Day 0

2010-10-31T10:29:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time since I've written here, and since I've written anything of value in general. But now, after a very big three-week translation project I finally have some time to work on my writing. Of course, the fact that I have the time does not necessarily mean that I will actually use this time to write. This is why I've decided to take the leap and sign up for National Novel Writing Month today. I still have my doubts, and might even delete this post (and the little in shame before the end of the week, but for now I'm optimistic about reaching the 50,000 word goal, mostly because I've already given myself a few breaks, such as:

Since the novel I'm working on is going to be somewhat complex, I'm not really shooting for a completed first draft by the end of the month, just to get a good chunk of it done.
I've been taking a lot of quite detailed notes over the last few months, so a lot of the writing will be developing the ideas into scenes and dialogues.
I've also been writing a lot of lines, short scenes, and so on in my notebooks, so at least some of the work will just consist of copying these into a single (somewhat) organized word document.

So basically, I'm going for 50,000 words of just about any form in a single document, so I could feel that I didn't spend all of 2010 either translating (my own work and others'), writing notes, or blogging. And hopefully, at the end of the month I'll have a large chunk behind me which will help me figure out exactly where this piece is headed and perhaps push me forward to finish it (I know I'm making a lot of very optimistic assumptions here, but the day before the start of a month-long writing project seems ideal for such rhetoric).

I'll try to document my progress on this blog, but naturally, if I only have a few hours a day to dedicate to my writing, working on the novel will always come first. At any rate, you can always check out the counter on the sidebar to the right, because if there's one thing I know for sure, it's that I'll be updating that thing constantly.

Musical Interlude XIII

2010-10-04T15:53:00.000-07:00

"All I Need" by Radiohead from In Rainbows (2007) performed live on Nigel Godrich's show From The Basement (2008)

Interpret relevancy of song to blogger's life at your own risk.

Unfamiliar Quotations - Leonora Carrington

2010-09-29T04:19:00.000-07:00

Back in Lancashire I got an attack of claustrophobia and tried to convince Mother to let me go and study painting in London. She thought this was a very idle and silly idea and gave me a lecture about artists. “There is nothing wrong about painting,” she told me. “I paint boxes myself for jumble sales. There is a difference though in being artistic and in actually being an artist. Your aunt Edgeworth wrote novels and was very friendly with Sir Walter Scott but she would never have called herself ‘an artist.’ It wouldn’t have been nice. Artists are immoral they live together in attics, you could never get used to an attic after all the luxury and comfort you have here. Besides what is there to prevent you painting at home, there are all sorts of picturesque nooks which would be delightful to paint.”

“I want to paint nude models,” I said. “You can’t get nude models here.”

“Why not?” replied mother with a flash of logic. “People are nude everywhere if they haven’t got any clothes on.” Finally I did go to London to study art and had a love affair with an Egyptian. A pity I never actually got to Egypt but thanks to mother I did see most of Europe during my youth.

René Magritte. The Portrait. Brussels 1935.

Art in London didn’t seem quite modern enough and I began to want to study in Paris where the Surrealists were in full cry. Surrealism is no longer considered modern today and almost every village rectory and girl’s school have surrealist pictures hanging on their walls. Even Buckingham Palace has a large reproduction of Magritte’s famous slice of ham with an eye peering out. It hangs, I believe, in the throne room. Times do change indeed. The Royal Academy recently gave a retrospective exhibition of Dada art and they decorated the gallery like a public lavatory. In my day people in London would have been shocked. Today the Lord Mayor opened the exhibition with a long speech about twentieth-century masters and the Queen Mother hung a wreath of gladiola on a piece of sculpture called “Navel” by Hans Arp.

- The Hearing Trumpet, Leonora Carrington, 1974.

Paper Trails

2010-09-23T06:54:00.000-07:00

In a recent New York Times article Elif Bautman offers a pretty good summation of the Kafka papers affair as it currently stands. The obligatory and almost offhanded statement that "most experts agree that the estate is unlikely to contain any unknown major work by Kafka," which has been attached to pretty much every report on the matter, has failed to calm anyone. This article is probably the first I have encountered that attempts to address the question of why there is such a frenzy to obtain the original manuscripts, and why this is also an ultimately pointless venture:

“With Kafka, people go crazy about getting the original manuscript — not a photocopy, not a facsimile,” Meir Heller [attorney for Israel's National Library] once remarked to me. “With most writers, once there’s a copy, nobody cares.” We fetishize the original manuscripts, because they seem to offer some access to a definitive Kafka — a Kafka beyond Brod. But this, too, is an illusion. The manuscripts aren’t definitive, because definitiveness, for better or worse, is the product of deadlines and editors and publishers: things Kafka either went out of his way not to have or ended up not having because of bad luck, tuberculosis and the First World War. When Kafka did prepare manuscripts for publication, he spent much time correcting mistakes and decoding his own abbreviations, sometimes even enlisting Brod’s help; one critic thus speculates that “Brod’s version might, in the end, look more like what Kafka would have published” than the most meticulous German scholarly editions. Maybe there is no Kafka beyond Brod.

Illustration by Carin Goldberg.

And, at the polar opposite of archiving a deceased author's papers, is the story of how David Markson's annotated books ended up at The Strand bookstore.

Addendum: I'll admit it, since I live in Tel Aviv, I did ride my bike up to Spinoza Street this evening to take a look at the house where the manuscripts were supposedly held. The lights were off and it's a pretty dark street so I couldn't see much of anything, but there were certainly a lot of cats around and it kind of smelled like a litter box.

What I've Been Reading - Going Through the Lists

2010-09-21T12:05:00.000-07:00

There are a few reasons why I haven't written about my recent readings in a while. First, I've been reading a lot of different things at once (which I usually try to avoid since it tends to dilute the effect of each individual work) and have been sort of universally stuck on the less interesting parts of each book for a while. Second, most of the books I've managed to finish failed to leave much of an impression on me. Nonetheless, now that enough of them have accumulated I might be able to cobble together some sort of blog post.

French Poetry

After reading and enjoying Baudelaire's works (Paris Spleen, and, to a slightly lesser extent, Flowers of Evil) I decided to explore some more 19th century French poetry, particularly the works of Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé (both in the Oxford World's Classics editions of their complete works) but in both cases I found myself in the same position I often find myself when reading poetry - confused and slightly bored. It was quite disappointing to find that the works of Rimbaud, the great romantic figure, the restless enfant terrible, did not strike me as anything extraordinary, and that the works of Mallarmé, who is considered such a influential innovator, seemed so run-of-the-mill and uninspired to me. Both lacked the passion and wit I found in Baudelaire (it's possible the translations are partially to blame; Mallarmé is notoriously hard to translate, but however he's translated many of his poems are still just drawn-out descriptions, or semi-witty dedications inscribed on fans).

Sometimes I think I should just cut my losses and give up on poetry altogether - I never write it, I rarely enjoy reading it, and I suspect that I often simply don't get it. Plus, there are so many novels, stories, and plays that I want to read, it'll hardly register on my ever-expanding "to read" list. But then I think of the poetry I've read and enjoyed (e.g. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Prufrock, Carver's collection All of Us, Ginsberg's Howl and Kaddish, some Coleridge and some Borges) and how meaningful those works have been for me, and inevitably pick up another collection (and of course, once I pick up a book I must finish it; it's a sickness, really). Next on my poetry list - Yeats, Mayakovsky, and Milosz. Wish me luck.

Lewis Carroll

I don't expect you to recall my longish post about the latest Alice adaptation, but one of the points I made there was that Lewis Carroll's two Alice books don't really work as novels, and are only interesting for their idiosyncratic components, not the overarching plot which tends to be rather pedestrian. Given this I was somewhat optimistic when approaching Carroll's short works, hoping to find the same wit and whimsy there, and while I certainly didn't suffer in their reading (a compliment I cannot give some of Mallarmé's longer prose-poems) I still came away mildly disappointed. excluding the poems which constitute parts of the Alice books (like "Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter") , Lewis Carroll wrote two more longish nonsense poems - "The Hunting of the Snark" and "Phantasmagoria" - and 30 other short poems, half of them whimsical and half of them serious.

"The Hunting of the Snark," which occasionally borrows from "Jabberwocky," is a fun short read, though not as inventive as the Alice books, while "Phantasmagoria" is a bit meandering and pointless (but not in the fun way, a bit too thinly spread). The other humorous poems usually hold a single idea each (e.g. "A Sea Dirge" expresses dislike for the beach, "Hiawatha's Photographing" presents a family's disastrous photo session) which are basically hit or miss, and the "serious" poems are rather typical romantic Victorian love poems,and thus pretty uninteresting. This basically leaves the two volumes of Sylvie and Bruno on my Carroll to-read list, and though it's not a top priority I'm sure my completist tendencies (a sickness, as admitted above) will lead me to them sooner rather than later.

Hebrew Literature

And while we're on the subject of my obsessive reading lists, I can revisit and revise the list of Hebrew literature I came up with for Hebrew Book Week a few months ago. After reading two of Yoel Hoffmann's books (Curriculum Vitae and The Heart is Katmandu) I can safely say that he is not my cup of tea - and "cup of tea" is a pretty good metaphor for his writing, it's very much like a dainty little porcelain cup of tea whose meaning lies not in content but in form, meant to convey culture, refinement and, above all, preciousness. If I wished to be a little less gentle in my review I could borrow the infamous title given to a 2005 Pitchfork review of indie pop - Twee as Fuck.

Encounter, Brief Encounter, a collection of short stories by Amalia Kahana-Carmon did not impress me much either, which is a disappointment because that leaves Orly Castel-Bloom as the only woman writer on my list. I have, however, been hearing good things about Ronit Matalon, so there's always hope.

Classics (?)

The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford, number 30 on the Modern Library's 100 best novels of the 20th century, is one of the dullest books I've ever read. It's kind of like a Henry James story - entirely concerned with the relationships between two wealthy and deceptive couples - as told by an unsympathetic and obtuse narrator. The characters are mostly annoying, the pacing lethargic, and the revelations unrevelatory. So once again I have to question my goal of reading the complete list of "best novels" as chosen by the Modern Library - of the 30 I've read so far 4 have been outright disappointments and 5 have been overrated, which I guess isn't that bad statistically, but the bad ones were really bad, and often placed in ridiculously high places (The Good Soldier appears in the list ahead of A Clockwork Orange, Portnoy's Complaint, Pale Fire, and anything by Hemingway)

Finally, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, number 8 on David Pringle's list of the 100 best Science Fiction novels (which I only mention since this whole post seems to gravitate towards lists) is a pretty good book which suffers a little from strict adherence to its genre. As with most dystopian novels, the ideas are more interesting than the execution - firemen employed at burning books, secret groups memorizing whole books to preserve them, pervasive interactive media used to sedate the masses (including an early version of reality TV) are all interesting ideas which are not explored fully.
I think the main problem is that we don't get a clear idea of why all of this is going on - what goal are all these disparate elements working towards? Unlike George Orwell's 1984, where all the horrific elements are logical expressions of the oppressive regime, here they all seem cobbled together somewhat haphazardly, which may be more realistic, but also dilutes the overall message of the text. There's a long chase scene towards the end of the novel which I found a little too pulpy, as if Bradbury had to inject some typical sci-fi action into the narrative - which made me think of the terrible slasher movie ending tacked on to Danny Boyle's otherwise interesting movie Sunshine - but thankfully the book goes on to explore more aspects of the world Bradbury created and has a far more satisfying ending.

I Think It Was His Eye

2010-09-05T14:28:00.000-07:00

Here's something I meant to post a while ago - a short animated film version of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" narrated by James Mason. This film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film (but lost to a didactic Disney film about Musical instruments) and was the first cartoon to be rated X by the British Board of Film Censors. I suggest you watch with the lights off.

Kafka. . . Borges. Benjamin . . Bloomberg?

2010-08-28T10:11:00.000-07:00

Jon Stewart's recent interview of Michael Bloomberg (which you can watch here) began with an interesting interaction between the two. Stewart asked the mayor for his autograph, which Bloomberg dutifully provided, leading Stewart to reveal that what he had actually signed was an "all access 5 borough parking pass." At this point Bloomberg told Stewart to look at the name he had signed, which turned out to be not Michael Bloomberg, but Jon Stewart. I'm not certain how much of this little scene was planned, and perhaps it's even more telling if it wasn't, but for me it had an immediate, albeit initially hazy, literary echo.

Walter Benjamin begins his essay on Kafka ("Franz Kafka, On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death," collected in Illuminations) with an anecdote about Grigory Potyomkin (spelled Potemkin below) relating a remarkably similar event (the anecdote is usually attributed to Pushkin):

It is related that Potemkin suffered from states of depression which recurred more or less regularly. At such times no one was allowed to go near him, and access to his room was strictly forbidden. This malady was never mentioned at court, and in particular it was known that any allusion to it incurred the disfavor of Empress Catherine. One of the Chancellor's depressions lasted for an extraordinary length of time and brought about serious difficulties; in the offices documents piled up that re quired Potemkin's signature, and the Empress pressed for their completion. The high officials were at their wits' end. One day an unimportant little clerk named Shuvalkin happened to enter the anteroom of the Chancellor's palace and found the councillors of state assembled there, moaning and groaning as usual. "What is the matter, Your Excellencies?" asked the obliging Shuvalkin. They explained things to him and regretted that they could not use his services. "If that's all it is," said Shuvalkin, "I beg you to let me have those papers." Having nothing to lose, the councillors of state let themselves be persuaded to do so, and with the sheaf of documents under his arm, Shuvalkin set out, through galleries and corridors, for Potemkin's bedroom. With out stopping or bothering to knock, he turned the door-handle;

portrait of Grigory Potyomkin by Johann-Baptist Lampi

the room was not locked. In semidarkness Potemkin was sitting on his bed in a threadbare nightshirt, biting his nails. Shuvalkin stepped up to the writing desk, dipped a pen in ink, and without saying a word pressed it into Potemkin's hand while putting one of the documents on his knees. Potemkin gave the intruder a vacant stare; then, as though in his sleep, he started to sign—first one paper, then a second, finally all of them. When the last signature had been affixed, Shuvalkin took the papers under his arm and left the room without further ado, just as he had entered it. Waving the papers triumpantly, he stepped into the anteroom. The councillors of state rushed toward him and tore the documents out of his hands. Breathlessly they bent over them. No one spoke a word; the whole group seemed paralyzed. Again Shuvalkin came closer and solicitously asked why the gentlemen seemed so upset. At that point he noticed the signatures. One document after another was signed Shuvalkin . . . Shuvalkin . . . Shuvalkin. . . .

Benjamin presented this story as a herald of Kafka's work, which is probably why, when I could not recall where I had read the story, the first place I thought to look for it was in Borges's essay "Kafka and His Precursors" (collected in Selected Non-Fictions). This mistake itself has also proven revelatory since, beyond Borges and Benjamin's shared desire to identify Kafka's forerunners, there is another reason this little scene led me to Borges. Bloomberg and Stewart's recreation of a scene (or a variation on a scene) which has occurred hundreds of years earlier, probably without even realizing that they were recreating it, is also the main point of Borges's short story "The Plot":

To make his horror complete, Caesar, pressed to the foot of a statue by his friends' impatient daggers, discovers among the blades and faces the face of Marcus Junius Brutus, his ward, perhaps his very son, and so Caesar stops defending himself , and cries out Et tu, Brute? Shakespeare and Quevedo record that pathetic cry.

Death of Caesar by Vincenzo Camuccini

Destiny takes pleasure in repetitions, variations, symmetries. Nineteen centuries later, in the southern part of the province of Buenos Aires, a gaucho is attacked by other gauchos, and as he falls he recognizes a godson of his and says to him in gentle remonstrance and slow surprise (these words must be heard, not read), Pero, ¡che! He dies, but he does not know that he has died so that a scene may be played out again.

This, in turn, is also the main concept behind James Joyce's Ulysses, where the events of one day in the life of a pudgy and unheroic Jewish man echo Odysseus's epic journey (and, in case you're wondering, it is for this reason that I gave this post its title, a reference to Samuel Beckett's essay on Joyce: "Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce").

Musical Interlude XII

2010-08-25T12:26:00.000-07:00

Jorge Luis Borges on the Task of Art

2010-08-16T17:41:00.000-07:00

Only rarely does it occur to me to look for videos relating to my favorite writers. This might have something to do with the fact that most of my favorites are from several generations ago, making videos of them rare or nonexistent (I still find it hard to accept that Beckett died 2 days before my 10th birthday - that we existed within the same world for such a long time), but occasionally I do stumble upon such a video, like this brief interview with Borges:

Overrated

2010-08-10T03:44:00.000-07:00

Over on The Huffington Post Anis Shivani presents an amusing and suitably vitriolic list of the 15 most overrated contemporary writers. The list includes six poets and a couple of critics, but seems to be chiefly directed at workshop-generated novels whose authors work with a checklist (family dysfunction, drug use, multiculturalism). He also proposes an interesting theory regarding the cause for the preeminence of these authors - the lack of major critics to champion the truly worthy:

since the onset of poststructuralist theory, humanist critics have been put to pasture. The academy is ruled by "theorists" who consider their work superior to the literature they deconstruct, and moreover they have no interest in contemporary literature. As for the reviewing establishment, it is no more than the blurbing arm for conglomerate publishing, offering unanalytical "reviews" announcing that the emperor is wearing clothes.

This assessment leads him to include The New York Times's critic Michiko Kakutani on the list as the "enabler-in-chief" for the rest, which I'm not sure I agree with. I think Kakutani, much like James Wood, tends to be excessively breathless when she encounters a book she really likes, but can also be insightful, and actually provides what reviews are supposed to, giving us a sense of what the book is about and whether it's worth reading (a surprisingly small amount of reviews actually do that). Plus, both Wood and Kakutani can be very amusing when they review a book they disliked (e.g. Kakutani's review of Beatrice and Virgil or Wood's review of Paul Auster's fiction).

So who else is on the list? the omnipresent Jonathan Safran Foer, of course. He's the only writer on both The New Yorker's "top 20 under 40" list and this one (though Wells Tower is parenthetically mentioned here as well), and Shivani offers an accurate summary of his career:

...gimmick after gimmick is what Foer excels at. Always quick to jump on to the bandwagon of the moment. Debuted with harmless multiculturalism for the perennially bored in Everything Is Illuminated, with cute lovable foreigners and the slacker generation digging lovableness; a more pretentious "magical realist" novel was never written. Rode the 9/11-novel gravy train with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, giving us a nine-year-old with the brain of a--twenty-eight-year-old Jonathan Safran Foer. Having cashed in on 9/11, and seeing no obvious fictional goldmine to plunder, moved on to nonfiction with Eating Animals, hanging on to J. M. Coetzee's coattails.

A few more irresistible quotes:

William T. Vollmann - "determined to churn out a full Pynchon a year."
Michael Cunningham - "Uses Mrs. Dalloway as a convenient modernist football to play with..."
Junot Diaz - "Might one day move beyond writing about pussy-hunting nerds and write in a language above that of his childish protagonists'..."

Shivani plans to present several more lists of the most overrated and underrated writers, so you can expect a few more response posts by me.

Ars Prosa Word Cloud

2010-08-08T17:07:00.000-07:00

A Short Story by Kafka You've Probably Never Seen Before

2010-08-06T18:15:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago there was some buzz regarding the opening of some safety deposit boxes containing Max Brod's papers, which include some writings by Franz Kafka. As I've mentioned in one of my previous posts, I find it quite difficult to believe that researchers would find anything there that has not already been published by Brod. I've also had a few e-mail correspondences with friends about this, one of whom expressed disappointment that there "won't be any new stories" to be found. I believe my response was something like:

"You say that as if you've already gone through his diaries, letters, and notebooks twice."

To which he replied:

"I have no intention of going through all his diaries and letters, I'm not a Kafka addict, like SOME people I know."

Which is a shame, but also touches on a rather common misconception that all of Kafka's short fiction is to be found in a volume like The Complete Stories (I'll admit, the title is misleading). In fact, even including the sporadically available Parables and Paradoxes, which collects some famous short works like "The Green Dragon" and "The Hunger Strike", some works are left out, particularly those that only appeared in Kafka's letters.
For example, Kafka's earliest surviving work of fiction, "Shamefaced Lanky and Impure in Heart," is not included in any collection of his stories that I've come across, and only survived because Kafka incorporated it into a 1902 letter to Oskar Pollak (included in Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors).
And since there's nothing I'd like better than to be sued by the greedy heirs of Max Brod and/or Oskar Pollak, here is the complete story for your enjoyment (click on the text for a better view):

Saved!

2010-08-04T10:07:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know, I've been neglecting my regular Tuesday news round ups. My excuses include a lot of work, general laziness, and the heat, dear god, the HEAT! I'll try to post more often, but no promises, work (both the paying and the writerly kinds) comes first.

Anyway, I just wanted to share this image of three great Modern Library books I rescued a couple of days ago, along with 18 paperbacks (including books by Pindar, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Andre Gide, Aldous Huxley and Carson McCullers), from four boxes of books someone on my street decided he (or she) no longer desired (I believe all the books eventually found homes, all of them were gone by the time I passed down the street several hours later). I think this, along with my recent purchases in Oxford, puts my library at about 900 books. I think I'll go read some right now.

The News on Tues - Kafka in Tel Aviv

2010-07-20T16:00:00.001-07:00

A deluge of work (the real kind, the kind I get paid for) has prevented me from posting anything new between the regular Tuesday news updates, which is rare, but will probably become more frequent, at least for a while. I'm still not sure how to incorporate this blog into my writing plans (or my writing plans into this blog) without it being a hindrance to both.

It seems the big story in the last few days (and I'm basing this simply on the fact that it has been forwarded to me by several people) is the opening of the vaults in Tel Aviv which contain Kafka's manuscripts. Though it's hard to find a bigger Kafka fan than me (see: Kafka's collected works), I'm finding it difficult to get excited. These papers were in Brod's possession for years, and he was notorious for obsessively publishing just about everything Kafka ever wrote, so there's virtually no chance that there's anything new there. The article claims that a never before seen short story is among the manuscripts but that does not seem likely. This is basically a fight over who has the right to the manuscripts, Brod's heirs (assuming Brod had the right to them to begin with) or the state of Israel, claiming the papers are "cultural assets belonging to the Jewish people." Anyone familiar with Kafka's works will recognize the irony of this situation. Maybe the most appropriate solution would be to finally respect Kafka's request and burn the papers.

The News on Tues

2010-07-13T04:36:00.000-07:00

I don't want to jinx it, but I must admit the last couple of days have been great in terms of my writing (after two weeks of near inactivity I can think of a few inappropriate metaphors for what this burst of activity is like). It seems everyone else is returning to life as well (following the end of the World Cup?) and so this week there's more than a bit of stuff going on, starting with some friends' news:

Dave Kim, writing in The Brooklyn Rail, questions why the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn bridge is so neglected, while the Brooklyn line flourishes.
The very same Dave Kim, writing in the very same publication, reviews Brando Skyhorse's novel The Madonnas of Echo Park.
Lou Perez writes about the “blood artist” Jordan Eagles in BRM, and offers some expurgated lines on his blog.

And on with the rest:

Harvey Pekar, of American Splendor fame, has passed away.
Nicole Krauss gushes over the upcoming book by David Grossman, in a blurb which drew some ridicule and prompted Salon's Laura Miller to issue a blanket warning concerning blurbs.
Mark Twain's unexpurgated biography is finally published; Is anyone surprised to learn he's as petty as the rest of us?
Christopher Hitchens reviews Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.
Possibly in honor of my favorite pastime while visiting Oxford, The Guardian offers a list of the top 10 pubs in literature.
And for those of you still stuck in the office through the long summer days, The Daily Beast presents 6 great business novels.
The chair of the Society of Authors protests that e-book deals as they currently stand are "not remotely fair" to authors.
Sophia Lear of The New Republic reviews James Shapiro's new book on Shakespeare, Contested Will, which tries to dispel the many conspiratorial theories regarding the bard's true identity.
Not sure if you want to read Gary Shteyngart's new novel Super Sad True Love Story? Maybe this book trailer will convince you:

Personally, I was much more compelled to read his work after reading the comforting interview he gave the newish website The Days of Yore, as well as the New York Magazine profile.

Flaubert, Nietzsche, Dentists, and Lobsters - Woody Allen's Prose

2010-07-12T06:53:00.000-07:00

I've recently read Woody Allen's 2007 collection of stories/ sketches/ articles Mere Anarchy, and while it is not as successful as his three earlier collections - Getting Even(1971), Without Feathers(1975) and Side Effects(1980), collected in a single volume under the title The Insanity Defense - I still have to wonder why Allen is often given the slightly dismissive title of "humor" writer, in the vein of Dave Barry, rather than simply a short story writer. While it's true that many of his pieces are not strictly stories, they all fall under the heading of "fiction," and are not much different in form than certain works by Donald Barthelme or Jorge Luis Borges. Many also have a decidedly literary pedigree, including the 1978 O. Henry Award winning story, "The Kugelmass Episode"(SE), Wherein a CCNY professor is magically injected into Madame Bovary to carry on an affair with Emma, much to the confusion of Flaubert scholars.

Other pieces which suggest Allen as a tongue-in-cheek Borges include "The Metterling Lists"(GE), a review of a book analyzing Hans Metterling's laundry lists, and "By Destiny Denied" (SE), containing notes towards the 800 page novel "they're all waiting for." Like Barthelme, Allen is also a fan of mixing high and low culture, as in "If the Impressionists Had Been Dentists"(WF), "Thus Ate Zarathustra"(MA), and "Notes from the Overfed"(GE), inspired by Dostoevsky and "a Weight Watchers magazine." Other pieces include comic variations on established genres like Hassidic tales, Detective fiction, Socratic dialogues, literary memoirs, and Kafkaesque parables and the plays "Death", "God" (both in WF), and "Death Knocks" (GE), which exhibit the familiar style and humor of Allen's early films.

You're bound to get some sense of repetitiveness if you read all four collections (perhaps even a certain motion sickness from too many one-liners, a sort of Schtick-nausea), but even the less successful pieces have at least a line or two of Woody Allenisms which make them worth reading, so if you find the following video enjoyable, I suggest you read them.

Some recent essays by Allen published in The New Yorker (where many of these collected pieces were originally published) are available online, including "Think Hard, It'll Come Back to You" and "Tails of Manhattan," which tells the story of two wealthy Manhattanites bilked by Madoff and reincarnated as lobsters.

Beckett on Screen V

2010-07-12T01:58:00.000-07:00

Following my post about Beckett's complete works I've decided to occasionally post filmed adaptations of Beckett's work available online, trying to find the best and most loyal adaptation for each work.

Catastrophe

From The Beckett on Film project;
performed by Harold Pinter, Rebecca Pidgeon and John Gielgud;
directed by David Mamet

Not the most loyal of adaptations (a couple of lines are altered and the applause at the end should be far off, not by the assistant) but who can resist Pinter, Gielgud (in his last screen appearance) and Mamet?

The (actual) News (but not) on Tues

2010-07-08T04:48:00.000-07:00

My two week break from pretty much everything is over and it's time to do some serious work. While this means that I'll be updating my blog more regularly, what I really should be working on is my writing (is it possible that at some point I forgot this was supposed to be a writer's blog and not just a reader's blog?). Ideally, I'd like this blog to serve as an aid to my writing rather than a distraction from it, but I'm still not sure how to accomplish that, so stay tuned. for now, here's some recent stuff published online by various sources (also known as "news"):

Flavorwire asks: when and why do authors turn reclusive?
Ben Brantly of The New York Times considers Al Pacino's Shylock and the issues involved in staging Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.
In Standpoint's July/August issue Lesley Chamberlain examines Vladimir Nabokov's life in Berlin.
Dave Eggers reviews David Mitchell's new novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

Chad W. Post offers a list of books for people who want to explore Latin American fiction "Beyond Bolaño" (a relatively old list but only recently discovered by me).
Tim Parks looks at Dalkey Archive's collection of Best European Fiction 2010 and finds they are not much different from recent American fiction and that "narrative experimentalism (which invariably undercuts certainties, rather than reinforcing them) has become a literary lingua franca, an international convention."

Beckett on Screen IV

2010-07-08T02:03:00.000-07:00

Act Without Words I (2 parts)

From The Beckett on Film project; performed by Sean Foley and directed by Karel Reisz

The News on Tues

2010-07-07T06:03:00.000-07:00

Well, It must be Tuesday somewhere...

My flight back to Israel was on Tuesday so I didn't have much time for updates, and the jet-lagged present moment (Wednesday) doesn't seem too promising either, but I promise I'll get to it soon (besides, most of you are probably still comatose from too many 4th of July hot dogs).

For now here's The Huffington Post's Independence Day list of "15 Feisty Small Presses And The Books You're Going To Want From Them."

Beckett on Screen III

2010-06-30T03:42:00.000-07:00

Play (2 parts)

From the Beckett on Film project;
performed Alan Rickman, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Juliet Stevenson;
directed by Anthony Minghella

The second part, you may have noticed, is a repetition of the first. According to the play's notes the repeat may be an exact replica or present some element of variation in lighting, delivery, etc.

The News on Tues

2010-06-29T04:24:00.000-07:00

I'm still in the UK, walking around Oxford and Bath (at least partially retracing the footsteps of the likes of Evelyn Waugh and Jane Austen) and buying far too many books. And now on with the news:

Jiayang Fan discusses the moral dilemmas of buying second hand books in shanghai.
To Kill a Mockingbird is celebrating 50 years and Harper Lee talks (barely) to a reporter. I think the real news here (for me, at least) is that Harper Lee is still alive.
The Washington D.C. bookstore Politics and Prose is looking for a buyer; Peter Osnos discusses this and 6 other independent U.S. bookstores that have mastered the art of hand-selling good books.
Rivka Galchen suggests that to understand Jorge Luis Borges we must read Robert Louis Stevenson.
The transition of correspondence to the digital sphere means that in the future we might not see more books like Saul Bellow: Letters.
Alexander Waugh writes about Kingsley Amis's dipsomania.
Rick Moody's new The Four Fingers of Death, a massive metafictional sci-fi novel based on the B-movie The Crawling Hand and influenced by Kurt Vonnegut, receives a full analysis on io9.

Beckett on Screen II

2010-06-23T15:23:00.000-07:00

Film (2 parts)

Performed by Buster Keaton and directed by Alan Schneider (1964)

Beckett originally wanted Charlie Chaplin for the part; though there are some slight differences from the original script, Beckett approved them as he was on set at all times. Gilles Deleuze has called it "The greatest Irish film."

The News on Tues

2010-06-22T02:20:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow morning I'm off to Oxford so don't be surprised if my posts are a little less frequent than usual for the next two weeks. You can always count on regular Tuesday updates, though.

Nobel laureate José Saramago died.
Joshua Cohen, author of Witz, lists 12 novels often considered to be the Ulysses of their respective countries, including Past Continuous, which I have discussed at length on this blog. Under the Volcano, however, is not on the list, probably because it is difficult to link it to a specific country (taking place in Mexico and providing a stunning image of the country, but written in English, with a British Consul as the protagonist, and written by a British writer that Canadians often like to claim as their own).
You should turn to this week's New Yorker if you wish to know what Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens discuss over dinner, or what some famous writers wrote in the margins of books they've read. Not included among them is Flannery O'Connor's scribble in the margins of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - "Awful. I wouldn't read this book." (Written when she was 12).
"Somewhere a dog barked" may be the most commonly used cliché in literature.
Authorities in Moscow are concerned that the recently opened Dostoyevskaya metro station might attract suicidal readers influenced with the great writer's works. The station is decorated with grey and black mosaics depicting scenes from Dostoevsky's best-known novels:

One controversial mural re-enacts the moment when the main character in the novel Crime and Punishment murders an elderly pawnbroker and her sister with an axe. Another shows a suicide-obsessed character in Dostoevsky's novel The Demons holding a pistol to his temple. If that was not enough to darken the mood, shadowlike characters are shown flitting across the cavernous new station's walls and a giant mosaic of a depressed-looking Dostoevsky stares out at passengers.

Michael Levenson tries to rescue E. M. Forster from being viewed through the single lens of his homosexuality.
Only Words to Play With has yet another wonderful essay on Russian literature, this time discussing Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls.

Unfamiliar Quotations - Harry Mathews

2010-06-20T06:42:00.000-07:00

- Tlooth, Harry Mathews, 1966

Beckett on Screen I

2010-06-18T07:37:00.000-07:00

Following my recent post about Beckett's complete works I've decided to occasionally post filmed adaptations of Beckett's work available online, trying to find the best and most loyal adaptation for each work.

Ohio Impromptu

From The Beckett on Film project; performed by Jeremy Irons and directed by Charles Sturridge

In the notes to the original play Beckett instructs that the two characters be "as alike in appearance as possible," which is why this cinematic adaptation cast the same actor as both Reader and Listener. Nevertheless, and in spite of one of the characters' fading away at dawn in the adaptation (which does not occur in the play), the two characters are not explicitly intended to be two components of the same person.

Beckett Entire

2010-06-17T15:16:00.000-07:00

The list of recommended readings Donald Barthelme gave his writing students includes one particularly laconic entry - "Beckett Entire;" no other writer on his list was awarded this honor. Since Barthelme's death in 1989 (almost five months to the day before Beckett's death) the definition of "entire" has grown, with the 1992 publication of Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Beckett's first novel, and the first volume of his letters, from 1929-1940, published in 2008.

Unrelated to Barthelme's list, I also decided at some point that I wanted to read Beckett's entire oeuvre (probably sometime in 2004/5 after reading the Molloy and Waiting for Godot), though in my case there were other writers I wished to read everything by (Kafka and Borges, both mentioned in earlier posts, as well as Pinter, Coetzee, Raymond Carver, Nathanael West, and Nabokov, some of which I assume will come up in future posts). The following list is for people who wish to do the same and want to know which books they should get, or people who just want to know which of his books are worth reading (unlike Barthelme, though I aim to read Beckett's complete works, I wouldn't recommend all of it).

You might assume that getting a hold of The Grove Centenary Editions of Samuel Beckett Four Volume Boxed Set is a simple, albeit expensive, way of getting all his works, but these editions do not include the posthumously published letters or first novel. Besides, what fun would that be? Wouldn't you rather discuss 17 books than 4?

In the following table books marked V under Bloom were included in Harold Bloom's inescapable Western Canon; books marked V under Me were read by me and are discussed below.

Books	Bloom	Me	Notes
Proust	-	-	Essay
Dream of Fair to Middling Women	-	-	Novel
More Pricks than Kicks	-	-	Stories
Murphy	V	V	Novel
Watt	V	-	Novel
Mercier and Camier	-	V	Novel
Three Novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable)	V	V	Also known as The Trilogy
Waiting for Godot	V	V	Play
Endgame	V	V	Play
Happy Days	-	-	Play
How It Is	V	-	Novel
Nohow On	-	V	3 Novellas
Disjecta	-	V	Various writings and a dramatic fragment
Complete Short Prose	-	V	Stories and texts
Collected Shorter Plays	"Krapp's Last Tape"	V	Short plays and scripts
Collected Poems in English and French	-	V	Poetry
Letters Volume 1	-	-	Letters

Novels:

Molloy is my personal favorite, and though the other two (Malone Dies and The Unnameable) gradually become more solipsistic and repetitive, all three novels are definitely at the top of my recommended list. The writing is brilliant in all three, funny and at times poignant, though very little ever seems to happen (and if something does happen the narrators often focus on its minutest details).

The other novels I've read are Murphy, which was enjoyable but didn't impress me as much as the others, and Mercier and Camier, which for some reason I found rather annoying and uninteresting (though written in 1946, Beckett withheld the novel from publication until 1970; perhaps he knew what he was doing).
The three novellas collected in Nohow On (Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho) are often set up in relation to the "Three Novels," as a further exploration of the same themes with even less of a plot and context, which is perhaps why I found them to be too abstract. Though some of the passages exhibit wonderful prose, without any real characters or events it's very hard for each of these pieces to coalesce into a recognizable whole.

Short Stories and Texts:

The Complete Short Prose includes all of Beckett's short fiction - excluding the ten stories concerned with the character Belacqua Shuah that make up the collection More Pricks than Kicks - spanning his entire career, from 1929 to 1989, thus offering an interesting view of his development. The stories "First Love," "The End," "The Expelled," and "The Calmative" are among his best fiction and, being short, offer the best introduction to his non-dramatic work. Later works in the collection, as in the case of the novels, tend towards greater abstraction and could often not even be classified as "stories" in the traditional sense - they are texts, fragments, "fizzles." This collection reveals, all within the space of a single volume, Beckett's movement from Modernist stories to Postmodernist fragments, where stories are no longer required, as one of the texts explicitly states:

...once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not cumpolsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.

Of these later writings the best are the 13 "Texts for Nothing," "Heard in the Dark" 1 & 2, and "Stirrings Still."

Plays:

I sincerely hope that I don't have to tell you how great Waiting for Godot is, or actually tell you anything about it. Even if I did need to acquaint you with this play I wouldn't say anything about it, I would just advise you to go read it. Or better yet, watch it (I was lucky enough to see it last summer at the Theatre Royal Haymarket with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen as Vladimir and Estragon). Endgame is also a masterpiece, though bleaker (I only fully appreciated it after seeing it on stage - at BAM in 2008, with John Turturro as Hamm).

The Collected Shorter Plays includes all of Beckett's dramatic work excluding the two plays mentioned above and Happy Days. It also includes his radio and television plays, mimes, and the screenplay for Film (a 25 minute movie starring Buster Keaton, which you can find on YouTube). Some of these texts are barely readable - consisting of a series of instructions for actors, directors, or lighting technicians, making it difficult to visualize exactly what Beckett was going for, and at any rate having much less of an effect than one would probably get from the actual performance. Of the 29 pieces collected here "Krapp's Last Tape" stands out as the best; other works worth reading are "Rough for Theater" 1 & 2, "Rough for Radio" 1 & 2, "A Piece of Monologue," "Ohio Impromptu," and "Play" (In the UK Beckett's Complete Dramatic Works are available in a single volume published by Faber & Faber).
All of Beckett's plays and playlets (a total of 19 works) were filmed as part of the Beckett on Film project (available as a DVD Box set) and videos of many of the other works can be found online (perhaps a separate Beckett YouTube post is in order).

Scene from Krapp's Last Tape, part of the Beckett on Film project,

directed by Atom Egoyan and starring John Hurt

The Rest:

Disjecta collects Beckett's miscellaneous writings, including "Dante ... Bruno . Vico ... Joyce" which he originally wrote for Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, a 1929 volume of laudatory essays about James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (at the time published serially under the title Work in Progress). Other works include essays on writers, artists, his own work, and a single scene from an unfinished (or mostly unwritten) play about Dr. Samuel Johnson. It is well documented that Beckett himself didn't think much of these pieces and nor do I. Some critics claim that these texts, particularly "Three Dialogues," provide a sort of self-commentary on Beckett's struggle with expression, but I find them superfluous - that struggle is expressed clearly enough through his fictional works.

I have not yet read Beckett's long essay Proust, perhaps because I was uninterested by the nonfiction pieces collected in Disjecta, perhaps because I have not yet read Proust (that's right, string me up!). Beckett's Collected Poems in English and French are decidedly minor, and the ones in French are not always translated, but a few are quite fun, such as the one with which I'll conclude my overlong brief survey, "gnome":

Spend the years of learning squandering

Courage for the years of wandering

Through a world politely turning

From the loutishness of learning

The News on Tues

2010-06-15T16:41:00.000-07:00

Is it Tuesday already?

Are we done talking about The New Yorker's 20 authors under 40? Nope, New York Times book review editor Sam Tanenhaus still has a few things to say.
John Feffer has made me feel better about the 300+ books I own but have not yet finished - he's still working on getting through the books he bought in his teens. However, if I run into Ralph Gardner, another bibliophile, at a used book store, there might be trouble - I can just see him reaching for that first edition Gide as I lunge at him from across the room in slo-mo.
Turns out J.G. Ballard, who claimed that he never held on to letters, reviews, or research materials, had a secret archive after all. His daughters donated it to the British Library - will we get to see online selections as in the case of David Foster Wallace's archives?
Want to read Tolstoy but worried about the length? The L.A. Times' Carolyn Kellogg has some suggestions.
With Bloomsday just around the corner, everyone in the lit media is trying to dig up some new Ulysses news, and so they all happily flocked to report that Apple had required Robert Berry, the artist behind the Ulysses Seen project, an online graphic adaptation of the novel, to censor all nude images, including nonsexual ones like Buck Mulligan taking a bath, from his iPad app. The story was covered by The New Yorker, The New York Times, Robot 6, and Slate, who nearly all referenced the landmark censorship case Ulysses won in 1933, when a federal judge ruled that it was not obscene, and allowed its publication in the United States. Though Mr. Berry said that he did not feel censored by Apple since “It’s their rules...We’re coming to their dinner party at their house,” Apple, perhaps fearing the wrath of English Department grad students (probably their loyalest customers), has invited him to resubmit the original images.
On Bookforum Alan Lucey recommends an antidote to the pervasive digital data encroaching on our lives - a dose of Dada; since registration to the site is required (albeit free), here are the four books he recommends (minus his descriptions):

The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess by Andrei Codrescu
Pppppp: Poems Performances Pieces Proses Plays Poetics by Kurt Schwitters
I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation by Francis Picabia
Dada in Paris by Michel Sanouillet

Musical Interlude XI

2010-06-13T06:03:00.000-07:00

The Velvet Underground - "Sunday Morning," the final song recorded for their 1967 album The Velvet Underground & Nico.

What I've Been Reading - There's Got to be a Morning After (Hebrew Book Week)

2010-06-11T08:40:00.000-07:00

Sayed Kashua is an Arab-Israeli journalist and novelist whose third book, Second-Person Singular, came out recently, just in time for Hebrew Book Week. In this week's edition of his regular column, Kashua recounts his experiences at Tel Aviv's central book fair, taking the understandable albeit slightly hypercritical stance of "don't think of me as an Arab-Israel writer just because I'm an Arab-Israeli who writes about Arab-Israelis."

Being almost compulsively anachronistic, I chose to purchase and read his second novel, Let it be Morning. Before I go on to discuss the book let me give you the obligatory spoiler alert, though I find it somewhat irrelevant when reviewing literary fiction (can you really spoil The Brothers Karamazov or Under the Volcano by revealing what happens in the end?), the following review will tell you exactly what goes on in the book, including that ever-crucial plot twist at the end, though in this book you could see it coming a mile away.

The novel begins with the quasi-autobiographical story of a journalist returning with his wife and daughter to the Arab village where he grew up - this is an interesting touch since it roots the average contemporary reader, probably familiar with Kashua's biography through his personal column, in the very real world and leads him to expect the novel to be thinly-veiled autobiography, thus increasing the level of surprise when the events around the narrator/protagonist get gradually crazier. This approach, however, has its price since the story is written in a rather plain and colloquial style, which works fine for the breezy column and the mundane events of the earlier parts of the book, but falls short in the more dramatic scenes, and ultimately makes the whole book feel less like a carefully-considered and plotted work of fiction and more like a really fascinating idea executed almost haphazardly.

The fascinating idea at the core of this work is that, shortly after the journalist's return, the whole village is closed off from the rest of Israel, surrounded by tanks, its power and water cut off, and anyone trying to escape is shot. The story then advances as the protagonist and his family try to survive in this new situation, all the while trying to figure out what exactly is going on around them, and dealing with the problems of food and water shortages, (graphically) overflowing sewage, and eruptions of violence by street gangs and neighbors. I thought this set up had a lot of potential, and consistently wanted for it to develop and expand, thinking of works like Albert Camus's The Plague and even Aharon Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939, but Kashua doesn't venture too far into speculative territory, settling for several days of discomfort and strain, culminating in a violent confrontation between the protagonist's family and their neighbors, which is diffused relatively quickly.

Then, just as the situation becomes untenable, it is resolved by the sudden restoration of water and electricity, which makes way for the surprising (but predictable) twist - the reason for the siege was secret negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, who have now signed a peace agreement under which the village is transferred, in exchange for some Jewish settlements, to the Palestinian authority. Lieberman's dream has come true. And then... that's it. The book ends. Except for a couple of mild hints and incredulous reactions, there's no exploration of life under Palestinian authority. I agree this is a totally different issue and calls for a totally different novel to be written (a sequel perhaps? Let it be Night?), but the desire for a continuation of the narrative tells me something else about the novel - all through reading it, I was waiting for it to start. The book did provide a brief glimpse of what happens when the social order collapses, but it didn't go far enough, halting the plot with a sudden deus ex machina before things got too extreme, and failing to deeply explore the issues it touched upon.

So much for my general criticisms, now let me get a little more nitpicky and fanciful (which is always more fun). In the final scene the journalist talks with his editor at the Israeli paper he worked for, who wants him to write about the events of the last few days and become their regular correspondent in what is now Palestine. He promises him a regular job, but says:

"Listen, there might be a problem with the payment, because we're having crazy cutbacks. So it won't be as much as we used to pay you, but now the cost of living for you there is going to be much lower than here, no?"

This line, which is the final line of the book, made it clear to me that Kashua is more of a columnist than a novelist, or that at least his columnist instincts have taken over and he couldn't resist an easy joke (or a jab at Israeli hypocrisy). There are many things that could have been done differently in the book, but looking at the book on its own terms this last scene could have easily been done better, with the final line serving as both a joke and a sly metafictional wink, and here's how:
Since the book starts by presenting what we suspect is a thinly-veiled version of the author's life before gradually drawing us into the fictional world, I thought the best thing to do at the end would be to throw us back into the author's real world. Thus, when the editor asks the journalist if he could write a few words about what he'd been through, his response should be something like:

"Buddy, I could write a book."

The End.

Unfamiliar Quotations - Nathanael West

2010-06-11T03:12:00.000-07:00

- The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West, 1939.

Hebrew Book Week - Part VI: The End(?)

2010-06-10T05:38:00.000-07:00

This week the city of Ramat Gan awarded a lifetime achievement award to Prof. Menachem Perry, cantankerous and venerable editor of the "New Library" ("Hasifriya Hahadasha") imprint, who had some harsh words regarding the state of Israeli literature:

Today this complex known as Hebrew Literature, the literary system coming into being, no longer exists... The end of literature, the age of "like literature" and "like publishers," predates by far the end of good books. we have books, but we don't have literature. More than a few good books are published in Israel, sometimes even by the cynical commercial publishers, but they appear stealthily one by one, into a literary desert, and are decreed to exist, like a fish out of water, out of any context of a cultural-literary system, following the collapse of the literary republic's walls.

Books in the "New Library" imprint, clockwise from top left: Textile by Orly Castel Bloom, Friendly Fire: A Duet by A. B. Yehoshua, To the End of the Land by David Grossman, Finale by Hanoch Levin.

Perry did not exempt himself from criticism and admitted that his life's work is gone, did not survive, and accepted the award as "a consolation prize." Though it may seem that Perry is calling for a return to the canon and the dictation of tastes by a certain literary elite, he is actually lamenting the lack of active debate and argument:

Literature is not a democratic pile of books. It has a center and a periphery, it has judgments, rejections and revitalizations... Its hierarchies are never stable, they're always threatened. No one appointed its leading speakers, and no one grew them. These are critics that have won their status in the republic through hard work and constant activity; that have trained themselves by accumulating broad knowledge, and are tested according to the quality of their taste, the extent of their cultural responsibility, their ability to withstand constant challenges and ongoing debates.

Books have no life without the conversation around them. Without that kaleidoscope of creative narratives and competing narratives which the critical conversation supplies.

Perry's statements can be linked to global trends in literature,reading habits, and publishing, but they are also specifically related to the odd structure of the Israeli book market, wherein the two biggest bookstore chains are owned by the two biggest publishers, who in turn have a complex network of links to medium and small publishers, that are often reduced to de facto imprints of the bigger houses. The duopoly of the two bookstore chains (which makes up 80% of the book market) and the heated competition between them come at the expense of:

Independent bookstores that can't compete with their discounts and omnipresence (and therefore hardly exist in Israel).
Independent publishers that have to compete with the books published by the bigger, store-owning publisher, that are usually cheaper, more widely promoted, and always in stock.
Authors whose writing has to meet broad commercial standards and whose royalties are calculated as a percentage of the sale price, which due to excessive discounts amount to very little.
Readers who face a narrower, lower quality, and less diverse selection of titles to choose from.

Major publishing houses and bookstore chains in Israel (click image to enlarge)

Recently, one of the chain stores separated from its owner/publisher, and its CEO is now advocating the separation by law of publishing houses from book store chains, but even if this were accomplished the duopoly would remain, as would the intense competition which harms the authors most of all (already competing over a very small market). Other proposals include the limitation of discounts given by the chains (who sometimes have sales that offer as many as 3 or 4 books for the price of one), and setting the author's royalties at a minimum of 7% off the cover price (between $1.40-1.60, whereas now they average 18 cents per book sold at full price, and even less for books sold at a discount). The most ridiculous aspect of all this might be that there are still people like me who actually want to be published.

The News on Tues

2010-06-08T01:10:00.000-07:00

In case you were worried that this blog has turned exclusively to Israeli Literature, here's your regular dose of Tuesday updates:

Experimental novelist David Markson has passed away. Only Words to Play With (along with several of my former grad school friends) is devastated.
Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky, who did most of his writing in the post-Stalinist era, when poets were nationally celebrated and renowned figures, has also passed away.
As I mentioned in my last post - The New Yorker has named 20 writers under 40 that are "worth watching," and drew a predictable amount of criticism ("Despite earlier promises that the list would contain some surprises, there aren't very many here") and envy (“If you get on it, then it’s a nice confirmation. If you don’t get on it, then it doesn’t mean anything.”). The best response article I've read is over on The Haunted Library blog, which offers a counter list of a dozen "up and coming writers over 80." Such lists are always a source for endless (often pointless) debate but my main complaint has (almost) nothing to do with the writers chosen and everything to do with the highly stylized image accompanying the list:

Can you tell from this image that ZZ Packer (bottom left) is African American? Or that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (top left) is Nigerian?

Michael Chabon (too old for 20 under 40) responds to the Flotilla incident, and other stupid acts by Jews (incidentally, at least 5 of the 20 writers on the New Yorker list are Jewish).
Jonathan Franzen (also too old for 20 under 40) rereads Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children.
In a correspondence with David Gates, Jonathan Lethem (also too old for 20 under 40) reveals his secret for writing - no internet access on his laptop. Wells Tower (on the New Yorker list) has two separate desks - fiction (no internet access) and non-fiction (with internet access). Zadie Smith (not too old for 20 under 40, but left out; included on Granta's 2003 list of 20 best young British novelists) has also recommended working on an internet-free computer (if only I could afford to have two computers).
And finally, did you notice that there are a lot fewer cinematic adaptations of literary fiction? Variety certainly has.

Hebrew Book Week - Part V: A Dissenting Opinion on Etgar Keret

2010-06-07T12:13:00.000-07:00

Let me start by saying that I may not know what the hell I'm talking about. There's ample evidence of that, if one was to look for it. For example: I think Jonathan Safran Foer is a hack, and yet The New Yorker just chose him as one of the 20 best writers under 40. Another example: Yesterday I received yet another rejection letter from yet another publisher. A third and final example: I just finished reading Curriculum Vitae by Yoel Hoffmann, whom everyone has been swearing up and down is absolutely amazing, and I was utterly unimpressed. Hoffmann's seven or eight books, by the way, are all published by the same Israeli publisher that rejected me just yesterday.
So to reiterate - there's a very good chance I don't really know anything about literature, or at least good literature, and that no one is really interested in my meager appraisals or opinions, but that won't stop me from making them known. Isn't that what this whole blogosphere is about - voicing unpopular opinions?
And looking back on the long preparatory diatribe above, I now realize it might be a bit much for the none-too-harsh critique to follow, which could be summarized simply as: I don't think Etgar Keret is that great.

For the uninitiated, Etgar Keret is probably the most popular writer to come out of Israel in recent years. Thomas Beller, in a New York Times review of The Nimrod Flipout - Keret's second collection published in English - helpfully identifies him as a sort of latter-day Rod Serling (of Twilight Zone fame). Keret's stories often present a world that's off from our own by a few degrees, sometimes veering towards jokiness, sometimes towards modern fable, and almost always with a certain ironic wink, all within stories that are almost always very short, at times on the verge of flash fiction.
When Keret first started writing (and I'm a little flabbergasted to realize that his first book was published no less than 18 years ago) his colloquial language and breezy style were somewhat refreshing, and whatever occasional slip ups, or short pointless stories I came across were quickly forgiven (and forgotten), because he was young and cool and everyone was reading him. to criticize these things was to identify yourself as a stickler, and sticklers are no fun. But after reading his first three story collections, as well as some of his graphic novel collaborations (see Israeli Comix post below), I nevertheless grew tired of him - he never seems to develop, and aside from the originality and daring it took to write his first few stories, he never challenges himself anymore. That might be forgiven if he had spent this energy on perfecting and sharpening his style, but Keret has no style to speak of, or at least no literary style aside from a certain Israeli street dialect which almost all of his characters seem to share with the writer himself. A review of The Girl on the Fridge, an English collection of Keret's earlier stories, states that, "from the beginning, the most unmistakable aspect of Keret’s style has been the length of his stories." So while other writers struggle endlessly to work out a surreal, naturalistic, Gothic, or baroque style, all that Keret has to do to maintain his style is to frequently consult the wordcount feature on his word processor.

But the brevity of his work shouldn't necessarily be a hindrance. Far greater writers like Donald Barthelme and Raymond Carver were never better than when they were at their briefest. Keret, however, seems to be writing the same stories now that he did in the late eighties, and while he's not running out of steam, he might be running out of ideas. As a review in The Guardian once stated, "you get the impression that he throws three or four of these stories off on the bus to work every morning," and after a while you might also find yourself quickly breezing through one of his stories just because you want to know what it's "about" - what specific gimmick does he employ here, or what's the punchline (that has never been the case with even the shortest works of Barthelme or Borges, where every word counts). In my case at least, these gimmicks are often the only things I remember from the story afterwards - there's the one with the piggy bank, and the one with the super glue, and the one with the dead buses, and the one with the girl who turns into a fat guy, and the one where everyone's dead (that last one is "Kneller's Happy Campers", which some call a novella - though I think it's too short and slight - and has been loosely adapted into the movie Wristcutters).

It's also strange to realize that all of his characters are basically stupid, if not emotionally stunted. Perhaps the best way of putting it is that nearly all of his characters are, either literally or figuratively, children. Though Keret himself is a university lecturer, his characters are usually uneducated, a little backwards, and at times mindlessly violent (correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't read all of his stories), which allows him to maintain a constant ironic distance, even in the stories told in the first person, since the child or teenager narrating obviously isn't the sophisticated writer who also composed the stories before and after it (at least some of which involve gratuitous sex scenes, which are often, ironically, the most childish aspect of his writing).
Even in the face of the most extraordinary events and circumstances (death and madness, decapitated rabbits and dead babies, demons and angels) the language of both writer and characters fails to rise above straightforward and hackneyed phrases. Perhaps it is this simplicity that makes him so translatable and popular - there's no grappling with the text here, it's all surface - an unpredictable, amusing, and even unsettling surface. His stories, or at least the ones chosen for translation, have the kind of appeal that's made the works of Aesop, the brothers Grimm, and La Fontaine last across generations and languages, and perhaps that's why the actual stories as they are written don't matter as much as their basic outlines or ideas.

I don't want to give the impression that none of Keret's work is worth reading. Taken for what they are, these short stories can be quite fun, especially when he doesn't try to go for pathos, and their brevity often works in their favor - it's kind of like reading a book of jokes - you get the joke, or not, and move on to the next - often you don't have time to ask yourself whether or not you're having fun (incidentally, Nobody Said It Was Going to Be Fun is the name of a graphic novel by Keret and artist Rutu Modan). Perhaps at some point in the future specific stories could be culled from all of his collections to form a single praiseworthy volume, and perhaps he might surprise us yet and produce something new and daring (though either option might take a while - Keret's most recent Hebrew collection, Suddenly a Knock at the Door, came out just last month, and of the four stories I've read, it's not much better or different from the previous ones).

Hebrew Book Week - Part IV: Israeli Comix

2010-06-04T15:24:00.000-07:00

The Israeli Comix industry, though small, seems to be much more open towards, and interested in, foreign markets than other segments of the Israeli literary or publishing spheres. This must have something to do with the nature of the visual medium (though it's not without its share of problems - since Hebrew is written right to left panels often have to be reversed as well as translated, which could throw off the whole composition of the page), but I think a major factor was the foundation of the Actus Tragicus Comics Collective.

This group of five Israeli comics artists was founded in 1995 by Rutu Modan and Yirmi Pinkus (who first collaborated on the failed attempt to create an Israeli version of Mad magazine), with the explicit goal of enabling its members to reach an international audience by publishing their own books. These are usually anthologies including a single story by each writer, and often make their debut around the time of the Angoulême International Comics Festival in France.

Nine Actus Tragicus collections have been published so far, often in vastly different formats and styles, including Jetlag, based on stories written by Etgar Keret, and How To Love, their latest collection. The most successful of the group is Rutu Modan, who has also published Exit Wounds which won the 2008 Eisner Award for best new graphic novel (and is one of the best I've seen in recent years), as well as a graphic serial and a visual blog for The New York Times.

Other Israeli comix artists active abroad are twin brothers Asaf and Tomer Hanuka, the former known for Pizzeria Kamikaze, an adaptation of a story by Etgar Keret, and the latter for The Placebo Man.

It is my sad duty to report that Dudu Geva, the greatest of all Israeli Comics artists (and one of the greatest satirists in any medium), has never been translated into English (except for a short English-language cartoon called "Super Golda", published in1972 by some obscure Jewish student press service, wherein Golda-Meir must fight intellectuals who criticize her government's policies). There could be several reasons for this - perhaps because he is of a slightly older generation than the Actus group and never wrote extensively for an international audience, perhaps because most of his work was originally featured in newspapers and often commented on current events, or perhaps because his writing was quintessentially Israeli in language, subject matter, and tone.

Nevertheless, much of his work addressed universal themes of existential despair and the attempt to find happiness and meaning in an essentially meaningless and uncaring universe. This is most often expressed through the nameless duck character, which in time served as a stand-in for Geva himself.

Geva unfortunately passed away at a relatively young age and, as often happens with such figures, was quickly embraced by the establishment he rebelled against his whole life (including the erection of a statue of the duck in his honor). His early books, which he had to fight to get published (including a well-publicized case brought against him by Disney, who successfully sued him for the publication of Moby Duck, claiming it infringed on Donald Duck) are now sought-after collectors' editions, and several new books collecting his older works, and even unfinished sketches, came out since his passing. An English edition of his work, however, seems to be nowhere on the horizon (but if anyone's interested in the project, I'll gladly research, collect materials, edit, translate, or do anything else necessary to make this happen).

(translations mine)

Hebrew Book Week - Part III: The Great Israeli Novel

2010-06-03T09:09:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in my last post, there is one Hebrew novel that consistently takes the first spot on any list of best Israeli novels (including best book since 1948, best novel about Tel Aviv, favorite novel according to several Israeli reader surveys) - Past Continuous by Yaakov Shabtai (published in Hebrew in 1977; translated into English in 1983).

I don't particularly like the English title the novel was given, but otherwise the English translation by Dalya Bilu is quite good (yes, I've read the book in Hebrew and English, I liked it that much). The original title, Zikhron Devarim means "memorandum," though it could also be translated literally as "Remembrance of Things," which already gives you an idea of the work it relates to (Gabriel Josipovici, writing for The Independent, named it the greatest novel of the 1980's, explicitly comparing it to Proust's In Search of Lost Time).

The novel is Yaakov Shabtai’s first, and only completed, novel. Starting out as a playwright and translator, Shabtai then wrote several short stories (most of which are collected in Uncle Peretz Takes Off) before turning to the novel form. The novel is a unique work of Israeli modernism, often considered to be the first novel to be written in truly vernacular Hebrew, and is composed as a single paragraph (broken up in the English translation), with some sentences spanning several pages.

The novel is also revolutionary in content, being one of the first to openly criticize the Zionist ideals of the older generations, expressed by the despair and deep sense of personal loss felt by the three main characters, and echoed by the city around them. The most successful and haunting literary device employed in the novel is a unique rendition of stream-of-consciousness, where the characters' thoughts drift through past and present events, and through the landscape surrounding them, where certain objects and shared experiences connect them to the thoughts of others. This technique allows Shabtai to puncture all the great events and ideals through a subtle use of irony, as in the following section:

For more on the novel I can recommend the Wikipedia entry about it (which I contributed to extensively), though actually, I suggest you just go get yourself a copy. There are three English editions - the hardcover pictured above which came out in 1985, an edition published by Overlook Press which came out in 1983 and reissued in 2004, and a Schocken Modern Classics edition published in 1989 (on a recent Google products search I saw them selling for between $3-12).

Yaakov Shabtai

After completing Past Continuous, Shabtai began working on Past Perfect (Sof Davar, or "Epilogue"), whose earlier parts are similar to Past Continuous in style and themes, but later develops in a different direction, with a greater variety in narration and form. Unfortunately, Shabtai died of a heart attack in 1981, before completing a final draft of the book. Literary scholar Dan Miron, working with Shabtai's widow, compiled a full manuscript out of the novel, though according to Shabtai's notes it is evident that he was still not pleased with what he had as there were many parts he wanted to develop.

Unlike the constant discussions and arguments regarding "The Great American Novel" I don't think there's as much of a concern in Israel to name the great Israeli novel - perhaps because Israel is much smaller and younger, and perhaps because it has not really settled into its final state - but there is at least one more novel that I know of which should be mentioned in this context - Days of Ziklag (1958), by S. Yizhar, a massive novel of over 1,000 pages which describes seven days of fighting during Israel's war of independence. Unfortunately, the novel has never been translated into English (and I must admit I have not read it yet, but when I do you'll be the first to know).

Hebrew Book Week - Part II: My Reading List

2010-06-01T16:26:00.000-07:00

If we were to consult Harold Bloom's Western Canon in search of the best writers in Hebrew, and limited ourselves to writers of prose (sorry poetry lovers, but you should have seen this coming; this blog is named Ars Prosa, after all) we would come up with seven writers. Adding the writers of the 10 best works of fiction written in Hebrew since 1948 (according to an extensive 2007 survey of critics and intellectuals) only provides 4 new names for the list. My own readings, prejudices, and paltry knowledge somehow manage to round out the list to 20 writers, presented in the following table (author's names link to Wikipedia articles, book titles to Amazon pages, when available):

Writers	Harold Bloom's Western Canon	10 Best Books Since 1948	Other Notable Works
S.Y. Agnon	In the Heart of the Seas; Twenty-One Stories	Shira	To This Day; Only Yesterday
Aharon Appelfeld	The Immortal Bartfuss; Badenheim 1939	-	Blooms of Darkness; To the Land of the Cattails
Orly Castel Bloom	-	Dolly City	Human Parts
David Grossman	See Under: Love	See Under: Love; The Book of Intimate Grammar	The Zigzag Kid; Someone to Run With
Alon Hilu	-	-	Death of a Monk; The House of Rajani
Yoel Hoffmann	-	-	Curriculum Vitae; The Book of Joseph
Amalia Kahana-Carmon	-	Under One Roof	And Moon in the Valley of Ayalon
Yoram Kaniuk	His Daughter	-	Himmo, King of Jerusalem; The Last Jew
Sayed Kashua	-	-	Dancing Arabs; Let it Be Morning
Yehoshua Kenaz	-	Infiltration	After the Holidays; The Way to the Cats
Etgar Keret	-	-	The Nimrod Flipout; The Girl on the Fridge
Hanoch Levin	-	-	Selected Plays
Amos Oz	A Perfect Peace	A Tale of Love and Darkness	My Michael; Black Box
Yaakov Shabtai	Past Continuous	Past Continuous	Past Perfect; Uncle Peretz Takes Off
Meir Shalev	-	-	Esau; The Blue Mountain
Moshe Shamir	-	-	He Walked Through the Fields; The King of Flesh and Blood
Anton Shammas	-	-	Arabesques
David Vogel	-	-	Married Life; They All Went Out to Battle
A. B. Yehoshua	A Late Divorce	Five Seasons	Mr. Mani; The Liberated Bride
S. Yizhar	-	Days of Ziklag	Khirbet Khizeh; Midnight Convoy

So far I've only read works by nine of the writers listed above, so this seems like a pretty good reading list to start with (as well as a good shopping list for the upcoming Hebrew Book Week sales, since I only own 14 of the 52 titles listed above, though I could probably "borrow" a few from my parents). If this list seems too long and demanding for you, the generally agreed-upon "masters" of Hebrew literature are Grossman, Oz, Shalev, and A.B. Yehoshua, while Yaakov Shabtai's Past Continuous is consistently placed at the top of every list (including mine) as the single greatest Israeli novel (but more on that later...)

Hebrew Book Week - Part I: an Admission of Guilt

2010-06-01T11:30:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow marks the start of "Hebrew Book Week" in Israel - an annual week-long book selling event, held every year since 1961 (and often extended, especially in the bigger cities, to ten days of book fairs). As in previous years, one can expect the usual questions to be asked by the usual commentators - is this a cultural event or merely a marketing ploy? Is it fair to the authors to sell their books as if they were clothes (e.g. buy one get one free)? Are the big publishers burying the little ones? Are too many books being published? And finally, do people actually read all those books that they buy?

This year there's another twist added - e-books. Though the Amazon Kindle is unavailable and mostly unknown in Israel, the iPad made headlines over here (especially after there were some murmurs that customs agents might prevent imports of the device), though probably for non-reading related reasons. Last week, however, the first Hebrew language e-reader was unveiled - e-vrit (evrit means Hebrew), retailing at 1,400 NIS (about $360) marketed online and at the Steimatzky chain of bookstores.

I must admit I don't read enough Hebrew literature; there are a couple of authors I really admire (Yaakov Shabtai and Hanoch Levin, both deceased), and I occasionally pick up a book by one of the more famous writers, but other than that I'm not really well-versed in the field (only about 7% of my library is in Hebrew), and since I hope to publish my first book here, I should probably learn a little bit more about the market and my future peers (or competition), so I'm going to dedicate the next few days to Hebrew literature and publishing in Israel in general (because apparently the only thing that motivates me these days is doing research for this blog).

The News on Tues

2010-06-01T02:23:00.000-07:00

Another step in this blog's slow crawl towards wider internet relevance - a (reopened) twitter account. On the other hand, the animated GIF I used to have on the right disappeared off the make-a-gif website for some reason, so it has been replaced with a static image for now (technology is a harsh mistress).

In non-blog-related news:

Knopf publishes the first unabridged edition of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in English, translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. Francine du Plessix Gray, writing in the New York Times Book Review, is disappointed to find that the work is "in many ways dated" and its new translation "doesn’t begin to flow as nicely as Parshley’s."
Another thing we could lose in the transfer to e-books - inscriptions.
Recently exposed files reveal what apartheid-era censors thought of J.M. Coetzee's works. Waiting for the Barbarians, for example, was not suppressed since its sexual content was deemed “not lust-provoking.”
Some friends reminisce about Philip K. Dick at UC Irvine; according to James Blaylock, Dick would often "tell you things that were completely crazy to see your reaction. And he would tell you he was kidding two or three days later."
Writers answer question they've never been asked.
Summer will soon be upon us and for print media this inevitably means they have to offer a list of books to read on the beach - The New York Times offers a predictable selection of fluff, while New York Magazine is a bit more creative in asking six writers (including William Gibson and Peter Carey), divided up by genre, to name their favorite books, and NPR approaches independent booksellers.
Editorial Ass explains how to throw a great book launch

And finally, in not-exactly-literature related news:

Meghan Vicks, of the insightful Only Words to Play With, has a second online presence in the form of Gaga Stigmata - a journal of critical writings and art about Lady Gaga (co-edited with Kate Durbin), which has been receiving a lot of positive attention, including an interview on Salon (also mentioned on The Huffington Post).

Unfamiliar Quotations - Raymond Queneau

2010-05-30T03:11:00.000-07:00

- Odile, Raymond Queneau, 1937.

In the News - Elitist New Yorkers Attack Country Bumpkin

2010-05-27T16:07:00.000-07:00

The biggest new story in publishing this week seems to be the oldest as well - didn't you hear? Publishing is dead! At least that's what Garrison Keillor, NPR mainstay and county-fair-styled variety show creator, said in a recent New York Times op-ed (I picture him slowly shaking his jowls in disappointment). His biggest concern is with self-publishing, which will lead us to a future of:

18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $1.75.

He's hardly the first person to come out with these statements, but for some reason he's getting a hell of a lot of flak for it. I guess a lot of people are taking advantage of his anecdotal and unsubtle analysis to take a few jabs at the quaint, moldy storyteller. Responders include Jon Stewart who, speaking at a Book Expo breakfast panel he was hosting, said:

Garrison Keillor wrote in a Times op-ed yesterday that the publishing industry is dead... Funny, I thought [Keillor] was dead … No one understands cutting-edge media like a man who does written radio plays about a fictitious town.

Flavorwire went all out, approaching a dozen industry professional to get their response to Keillor's dire predictions, which included one anonymous publishing insider who quipped:

I think someone in publishing should do an op-ed on the death of radio. I won’t talk about Lutherans in Minnesota if Garrison won’t talk about publishing.

Incidentally, when I lived in NYC and was somehow aware of Garrison Keillor's existence, I never realized that he also wrote books. It was only when I came to Oxford that I saw a lot of his books in used book stores, and since then have also come across them in English book stores here in Israel (didn't buy any, though). I wonder if he's more popular as a writer outside the states (on second thought, if people really liked his books they wouldn't be donating them to Oxfam, would they?) (on third thought, perhaps all those copies were dumped there by American tourists).

Musical Interlude X

2010-05-27T10:33:00.000-07:00

"Seen the Light" by Supergrass, off their album Life on Other Planets - both the song and the music video draw comparison between rock'n'roll fandom and the followers of religious preachers, or as the band's drummer said:

It's all really old footage of religious preachers mixed in with old footage of rock and roll audiences, and what's interesting is they react in the same way. They both go into these convulsions and pull their hair out and stuff. It's quite mad.