The Introducing Series

I'm currently reading Introducing Hegel, from the Totem Books Introducing series (published by Icon Books in the UK, older editions sometimes have the alternative title "for Beginners"). These books offer concise illustrated guides to key figures and concepts in science and the humanities. Some are almost written like graphic novels, while other are more focused on the text, with the illustrations as a mere visual reprieve. As far as I know, and according to the publisher's website, this series is the first one to utilize this format, with other less successful attempts, like the Writers & Readers "For Beginners" series, copying their format almost exactly, though far less successfully (Writers and Readers is about to release Barack Obama for Beginners, which seems a bit premature to me).



The current format of the Totem Books Introducing series has attractively stylized black covers, which I think are far nicer than the original printings with their cartoonish drawings and yellow logo. Twelve titles are now being reprinted in a brand-new, pocket-sized format, with far less original and interesting covers, which I hope won't become the standard from now on.



As for the content, it naturally varies by writer and artist. Usually, the books dealing with people are better than the ones dealing with theories and concepts, which often betray the writer's own theoretical slant. The most successful book in the series, and my personal favorite, is Introducing Kafka, written by David Zane Mairowitz and illustrated by Robert Crumb. It includes comic adaptations of some of Kafka's most famous short works (Metamorphosis, A Hunger Artist, In the Penal Colony, and The Judgment) as well as brief sketches of his three novels. The popularity of Crumb's unique rendition of Kafka's works led to additional printings under the title R. Crumb's Kafka, which I think is a little unfair since Mairowitz did a great job on the book as well. (The latest edition, published by Fanatagraphics Books and named simply Kafka, gives Mairowitz equal credit, though his name is listed after Crumb's.)




from Introducing Kafka

Introducing Camus, also by Mairowitz, is quite good, as are the books dedicated to Friedrich Nietzsche, Zigmund Freud, Roland Barthes, Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Benjamin, Carl Jung, and the Marquis De Sade, which offer a good combination of brief biography and general overview of their major works and ideas. Introducing Joyce is particularly successful in giving readers an idea of what the Irish writer was trying to accomplish in his work, as well as encouraging them to explore more of his work. The books on Shakespeare and Picasso are less successful, the former getting lost in the biography without saying much about the works, and the latter focusing too much on deconstructing the myth of the genius artist.




from Introducing Joyce

I found that the books dedicated to concepts are usually better when dealing with subjects I know nothing about, which I guess is exactly the way it should be; I shouldn't criticize an introductory book on a topic I am familiar with for not going into more detail about things I already know about. Nevertheless, I think Introducing Media Studies is far too simplistic, and Introducing Critical Theory, though comprehensive and well-written, is tinted by the author's Marxist leanings. The books on Evolutionary Psychology and Ecology, however, are quite good.




from Introducing Evolutionary Psychology

The book on Hegel, so far, seems to be unbalanced, focusing too much on his friends and predecessors. I am, however, looking forward to reading the books on Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan. The Introducing series has a brand new blog where you can read a full book from the series electronically. They are planning to offer a new book every month; this month, it's Introducing Romanticism by Duncan Heath and Judy Boreham.

Literary Encounters

My 29th birthday was two weeks ago, on Christmas Eve. A day before my birthday I got into an introspective mood, thinking of what I've done in the last year (received my Master's degree, finished a novel, friended more than 50 people on Facebook, overall not too bad), and what I'd like to get done in the next one (get my novel published, finish a collection of short stories, get into a normal relationship, better health, personal growth, win the lottery, et cetera). I also thought, vain as I am, whether there are any living writers I would like to meet (as if all it took is my desire to meet them and they would appear before me, smoking a pipe and eager to discuss Kafka).



Unfortunately, my literary tastes are unfashionable, trailing behind the rest of the world by about half a century, so there are very few living writers I would be interested in meeting. Even of the few living writers that I admire, I wouldn't necessarily want to meet any of them. For example, I think J. M. Coetzee is a brilliant writer, but he also seems to be a morose and pompous windbag (though I identified deeply with the protagonist of his third-person autobiography Youth; so much so, in fact, that I had to discard the novel I was working on at the time because the protagonist seemed too similar).



I did happen to see Philip Roth walking down Broadway a few months ago, and though I'm not his biggest fan (The Zuckerman Trilogy, which I read all at once, exhausted me, each book being worse than the last, with the Prague Orgy epilogue its only saving grace), I would have liked to talk to him. Here, however, is the problem - even if you do meet some writer randomly, what the hell are you supposed to tell him? That you like his work? I'm sure he's heard that before. That you're a writer too? Whoopdee-freakin'-do. Are you supposed to start critiquing his work to show that you get it, that you're not just another sycophantic suck up?



Anyway, getting back to the day before my birthday, imagining the best of all circumstances, I finally hit upon one living writer I admire greatly and would like to meet without reservations - Harold Pinter. I've been a Pinter fan since my first year as an undergrad, when I read The Birthday Party in my Intro to Drama class. Since then I haven't read anything by him that I did not like, or at least appreciated on some level. Furthermore, from everything I've read about him, he seemed to be engaging and friendly. Meeting him is probably the closest thing to meeting Beckett. Then, on my birthday, Harold Pinter passed away, and I felt worse than on any previous birthday. I'm afraid to name any other living writer I'd like to meet for fear that I might kill him.




Pinter as Krapp in Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape

Later that night I had dinner with a couple of friends, then we went from bar to bar, looking for Christmas cheer. At one bar we ran into Gary Shteyngart (author of Absurdistan), but we were all too drunk to say anything clever or meaningful, and after exchanging bland words (it was one of his friends' birthday too) we moved on to the next bar.

For more about Harold Pinter I suggest two articles:

• "Playwright of the Pause" - The New York Times Obituary
• "Demolition Man - Harold Pinter and 'The Homecoming'" - by John Lahr, The New Yorker (eerily published exactly one year before Pinter's death).

Best of... Most of...

There seems to be a growing trend in publishing, wherein a selection of minor works by certain famous writers are collected, ostensibly in an attempt to get a more comprehensive view of their lives. Walter Benjamin's Archive (2007), for example, consists largely of photographs of pages from his notebooks, where every conceivable space is covered with handwriting, as well as postcards, photographs, and seemingly random lists. This seems appropriate for a writer like Benjamin, who was a compulsive collector of books and quotes, and held a kaleidoscopic view of society and culture.


These "new" collections are usually reserved for writers who died young, at times only achieving their fame posthumously, and did not have a chance to canonize their work, or at least decide which of it was worth preserving. Thus, we get collections like Donald Barthelme's The Teachings of Don B. (1992), which gathers his offhanded and dated anonymous comments from the seventies, hopelessly truncated short works, and old stories needlessly rehashed in the form of plays. This book only serves to diminish his achievements and importance in my eyes. Last year's Flying to America: 45 More Stories (2008) seems to be a better collection, mostly focusing on hard-to-find stories from his earlier collections, but I have to wonder how many more gems there might still be in Barthelme's oeuvre which were not already included in Sixty Stories (1981) or Forty Stories (1987), both compiled by Barthelme himself.



Personally, I'm a huge fan of the massive single-volume collections of The Complete works of... such as Jorge Luis Borges's Collected Fictions, The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, and the American Library's comprehensive collections of works by Nathanael West and Flannery O'Connor. As Harold Bloom stated:

"It is a deep pleasure to read the Collected Fictions of Borges... There is also a particular satisfaction in having all the stories in one volume."

Thus, as a somewhat compulsive completist Like Benjamin, I often find myself equally excited and annoyed when I find out about a new book by a writer I had previously thought I already had everything by. I'm happy to discover there's more stuff out there, but I'm annoyed that I either did not know about it, or else might have to buy another book (these new volumes are often expensive; Walter Benjamin's Archive costs almost $30). However, I must admit it's even more frustrating when you know of a certain work that isn't available anywhere, like Even Stephen, a play written by Nathanael West and S. J. Perelman in 1934, which has never been published or performed, and only exists in manuscript form at the Brown University Library.



Nathanael West and S. J. Perelman

I am particularly obsessed with acquiring and reading all of Franz Kafka's works, and was somewhat proud when I managed to gather decent copies of his sporadically available collections of letters (5 books - Letter to His Father, Letters to Felice, Letters to Milena, Letters to Ottla, and Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors).

Recently, I came across Franz Kafka: The Office Writings (2008), which brings together some of Kafka's professional writings, composed during his years as a high-ranking lawyer with a Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute. This book includes an appeal for the founding of a psychiatric hospital for shell-shocked veterans, as well as articles and letters dealing with issues like workmen's compensation and workplace safety.



If this was by anyone other than Kafka I would not be interested, And if it wasn't so prohibitively expensive (the book costs $45; $36 on Amazon) I would have purchased it immediately, even if I didn't intend to read it all the way through. This made me think of an old satirical essay by Woody Allen "The Metterling Lists" (Getting Even, 1978), which is a fake review of The Collected Laundry Lists of Hans Metterling, Vol. I.

While I'm sure Kafka's professional writing was quite important to him (he cared a lot about his job, though he didn't enjoy much of it, and was even credited by certain scholars for developing the first civilian hard hat), I don't know how much reading these reports would illuminate his life or literature.



Detail of a drawing by Kafka

I also wonder how much of these new collections are simply attempts to squeeze more money out of a dead writer. There are countless bad editions and translations out there of authors whose work is no longer protected by copyright (for Kafka I prefer Schocken Books, who were the first to publish his work, edited by the excellent Nahum Glatzer, and have in the last ten years put out commendable new translations of his novels).



This naturally relates to the cross-industry tendency to rehash, reissue, and repackage the same material over and over again, as was identified so appropriately in relation to the music industry by The Smiths in the song "Paint a Vulgar Picture" from their final studio album Strangeways, Here We Come (1987):

At the record company meeting
On their hands - a dead star
And oh, the plans they weave
And oh, the sickening greed

At the record company party
On their hands - a dead star
The sycophantic slags all say :
"I knew him first, and I knew him well"

Re-issue, Re-package, Re-package,
Re-evaluate the songs
Double-pack with a photograph
Extra track and a tacky badge...