“The White Fires of Venus” by Denis Johnson—
We mourn this senseless planet of regret,
droughts, rust, rain, cadavers
that can’t tell us, but I promise
you one day the white fires
of Venus shall rage: the dead,
feeling that power, shall be lifted, and each
of us will have his resurrected one to tell him,
“Greetings. You will recover
or die. The simple cure
for everything is to destroy
all the stethoscopes that will transmit
silence occasionally. The remedy for loneliness
is in learning to admit
solitude as one admits
the bayonet: gracefully,
now that already
it pierces the heart.
Living one: you move among many
dancers and don’t know which
you are the shadow of;
you want to kiss your own face in the mirror
but do not approach,
knowing you must not touch one
like that. Living
one, while Venus flares
O set the cereal afire,
O the refrigerator harboring things
that live on into death unchanged.”They know all about us on Andromeda,
they peek at us, they see us
in this world illumined and pasteled
phonily like a bus station,
they are with us when the streets fall down fraught
with laundromats and each of us
closes himself in his small
San Francisco without recourse.
They see you with your face of fingerprints
carrying your instructions in gloved hands
trying to touch things, and know you
for one despairing, trying to touch the curtains,
trying to get your reflection mired in alarm tape
past the window of this then that dark
closed business establishment.
The Andromedans hear your voice like distant amusement park music
converged on by ambulance sirens
and they understand everything.
They’re on your side. They forgive you.I want to turn for a moment to those my heart loves,
who are as diamonds to the Andromedans,
who shimmer for them, lovely and useless, like diamonds:
namely, those who take their meals at soda fountains,
their expressions lodged among the drugs
and sunglasses, each gazing down too long
into the coffee as though from a ruined balcony.
O Andromedans they don’t know what to do
with themselves and so they sit there
until they go home where they lie down
until they get up, and you beyond the light years know
that if sleeping is dying, then waking
is birth, and a life
is many lives. I love them because they know how
to manipulate change
in the pockets musically, these whose faces the seasons
never give a kiss, these
who are always courteous to the faces
of presumptions, the presuming streets,
the hotels, the presumption of rain in the streets.
I’m telling you it’s cold inside the body that is not the body,
lonesome behind the face
that is certainly not the face
of the person one meant to become.
“He who lives amongst men will be irremediably vexed” — Goya
Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry is a 1976 documentary by directors Donald Brittain and John Kramer. Featuring Richard Burton reading from Lowry’s work. (Via).
“Your Dog Dies” by Raymond Carver–
It gets run over by a van.
you find it at the side of the road
and bury it.
you feel bad about it.
you feel bad personally,
but you feel bad for your daughter
because it was her pet,
and she loved it so.
she used to croon to it
and let it sleep in her bed.
you write a poem about it.
you call it a poem for your daughter,
about the dog getting run over by a van
and how you looked after it,
took it out into the woods
and buried it deep, deep,
and that poem turns out so good
you’re almost glad the little dog
was run over, or else you’d never
have written that good poem.
then you sit down to write
a poem about writing a poem
about the death of that dog,
but while you’re writing you
hear a woman scream
your name, your first name,
both syllables,
and your heart stops.
after a minute, you continue writing.
she screams again.
you wonder how long this can go on.
I’d never heard of Vasily Grossman until Timothy Snyder referred to him, briefly, as a Soviet journalist who published some of the first unflinching reports of atrocities committed by Nazi soldiers and Hitler’s secret police during their conquest of eastern Europe. In Bloodlands, Snyder lauded Grossman as a reporter guided by a clear moral vision and a keen understanding of the tenuousness of human life. A Ukrainian Jew who rhapsodized the Red Army’s defense of Stalingrad and then followed it all the way to Berlin, he built a literary career under the Soviet system before passing away with little fanfare. Although his early novels sold in the millions, at the time of his death in 1964 his reputation in his homeland was shattered, his health had deteriorated, and his final novels were blacklisted. He could count himself lucky to have lived through a number of purges of the U.S.S.R.’s literary elite. Edited and compiled by Robert Chandler for the impressive New York Review Books imprint, The Road collects of a number of his short stories, essays, letters, and articles in one well-curated volume, an excellent introduction to an important but neglected voice.
Organized chronologically, Grossman’s stories are separated by brief biographical notes thoughtfully included by Chandler. Although the selections fall into early, middle, and later works, it becomes clear that Grossman’s life as a man and as a writer (at least how it is presented here) can be broken up into distinct periods marked by increasing dissatisfaction with life under Soviet rule. Chandler labels the periods, from earliest to latest: “The 1930s,” The War, The Shoah,” and “Late Stories.” The works in this collection are sad—truly sad—but throughout he returns to remembrances of love and small gestures of tenderness. He is marked by the excesses of the totalitarian regimes he waged war upon and lived under. As a result, his writing demonstrates an appreciation of kindness that could only arise from a true comprehension of both humanity’s potential for cruelty and the limitless power of an autonomous mind.
The first short section, “The 1930s,” collects three concise stories concerning the creation and dissolution of family bonds. “A Small Life” describes a couple that decides to foster a child from their village orphanage who ultimately finds them weird and boring, while in “In the Town of Berdichev” a rough female commander in a military unit must take a forced leave when her pregnancy makes it impossible for her to fulfill her duties to her company. She fondly remembers the father who was shot down in battle, but struggles to balance her duty to protect her child against her duty to protect her county. Perhaps the most striking of the three stories is the last, titled “A Young Woman and an Old Woman.” The title characters are both rewarded by their state employers with a free trip to a seaside resort and share a train cabin as they journey to the coast. They talk. The young woman, enjoying her rise through the Soviet system, befriends the older woman who has been saddened by the surprising detention of her daughter and her own stalled professional ambitions. These two subtly drawn characters never fully understand the hidden mechanisms behind their fleeting instances of happiness. Perhaps these mechanisms have been hidden by the totalitarian state or, maybe because they’re people, they will always be doomed to wonder.
As the book transitions to its second section, Grossman seems torn between his duty as a reporter to inspire his fellow citizens to sacrifice for the greater good and his need to rail against the injustices perpetrated by warring totalitarian regimes. Like “In the Town of Berdichev,” “The Old Man” finds Grossman adopting a tone that might almost be described as propagandistic. A quiet old man, a beekeeper whose livelihood requires patience and silence, overcomes a lifetime of reticence by braining a German soldier with a shovel. Much better is “The Old Teacher,” a story about a village’s elderly teacher, a Jew. Distraught by what he sees as Nazi soldiers advance on his town—long simmering feuds settled by prompt denunciations, families thrown out of houses, all sorts of groveling and obsequiousness—the old man reflects on his failings and his fleeting successes. The teacher and the town’s other Jews are forcefully marched to a ravine. There they are made to lie down and wait for the firing squad, positioned above them on a hill, to reload. The victims, in their last moments, see brave assertions of individual dignity, dole out small kindnesses, and console each other with the hope that others will not suffer similar fates. “The Hell of Treblinka” and “The Sistene Madonna” close this section. The former is Grossman’s terrible and moving account of the discovery of the death camp at Treblinka, written while reporting the westward march of the Soviet Red Army. The latter is an attempt to explain the power of Raphael’s rendering of The Sistene Madonna. The Madonna and her child symbolize the universal mother’s struggle to protect a child — a child she must relinquish to the world. For Grossman, the mother and son are recurring historical figures who reappear wherever human life is reduced to a simple mathematical calculation: at the death camps; in blackened cities throughout Europe; in the famine-ravaged Ukraine; at Hiroshima. Freedom requires individuals to confront existential fears — “Their human strength triumphed over the violence. The Madonna walked toward the gas chamber, treading lightly on small bare feet. She carried her son over the swaying earth of Treblinka.”
The final section contains a number of staggering stories, the type you shove into a stranger’s hand with a wild look in your eye. These are stories that remind you of the masters of the form, writers like Hemingway, Chekov, Eudora Welty, and Cortazar. “The Elk” is a fantastic rumination on illness, love, and political repression. “The Road” is written from the vantage point of an Italian mule conscripted into the war on the side of the Axis powers. As he is forcefully marched through northern Africa and then the Russian steppe strapped to heavy artillery he forgets the pleasure taken from green shoots and visions of young mares. His indifference permits his survival. In “Mama,” one of Stalin’s top advisers adopts the orphaned child of parents he may have had a hand in killing. Grossman gives his readers a glance of the luxurious and precarious lives of those residing at the very top of the Soviet system. Even Isaac Babel makes an appearance (read Red Calvary if you haven’t already).
The Road brings together a number of works by an artist who deserves greater recognition. Grossman witnessed some of worst atrocities of the twentieth century, and his writing demonstrates a need to speak out against a particular brand of cruelty. His writing in The Road is brave not only because a number of these stories could probably have led to his imprisonment, exile, or condemnation, but also because he utilizes terrible situations to illustrate humanity’s best qualities. Without being obvious, he champions mercy, understanding, and unconditional love. Beautiful stuff. Pick it up if you can.
[Editorial note: Biblioklept originally published this post on March 3rd, 2009. We run it again today in anticipation of the publication of David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King, which is like, right around the corner].
The New Critics’ biggest contribution to literary criticism was the dictum that analysis was to be applied strictly to the text itself, without the muddying impurities of biography or any other outside knowledge influencing the reader. A context-free reading is pretty hard to come by, though, isn’t it? School syllabi are arranged around era or genre, or both; our teachers preface each novel or poem or story or essay with a nod to its relevance; a friend hands us a book because it’s “good.” We furtively flip through Tropic of Capricorn, knowing its rep; we look down our noses at abstinence vampire novels. In short, it’s hard to get to that pure reading the New Critics favor. Still, I’ve always thought it’s a pretty good strategy to put aside biographical/author psychology, and just stick to a good close reading of the text. Today, reading David Foster Wallace’s “Wiggle Room,” I was completely unable to do that.The context of Wallace’s recentish suicide hung over each page, each sentence. It was a distraction that led to a (necessary) rereading, a distraction that colored the reading–and then the rereading. A strange little voice popped into Wallace’s dense narration that kept whispering, “posthumous, unfinished novel.” But now that I’ve complicated and contextualized and complained, perhaps I should simply comment a bit on the story now.
In dense, thick sentences, Wallace relates a work morning for Lane Dean, an IRS rote examiner who detests his Sisyphean job. Like many cubicle-dwellers, Lane spends much of his day trying not to look at the clock. He also tries to use an inspirational photo of his son sparingly, so that the effect might be more intense. However, the boredom on this particular day overwhelms Lane and he “had the sensation of a great type of hole or emptiness falling through him and continuing to fall and never hitting the floor. Never before in his life up to now had he once thought of suicide.” Trying to truck through it is no good: “Lane Dean summoned all his will and bore down and did three returns in a row, and began imagining different high places to jump off of.” These thoughts of suicide are mixed with a strange humor. As Lane’s depression becomes frantic, Wallace writes, “Unbidden came ways to kill himself with Jell-O.” As Lane becomes more and more anxious, it becomes apparent that–paradoxically–his boredom literally excites him. He gets all worked up about it, about the thought of having to devote a whole lifetime to such meaningless, boring work. The scene culminates in an horrific image:
When he started to see the baby’s photo face melting and lengthening and growing a long cleft jaw and aging years in just seconds and finally caving in from old age and falling away from the grinning yellow skull underneath, he knew he was half asleep and dreaming but did not know his own face was in his hands until he heard a human voice and opened his eyes but couldn’t see who it went with and then smelled the pinkie’s rubber right under his nose.
The “human voice” that wakes up Lane is a strange cyclopean figure, an older man who delivers a weird lecture on the origins of the word “bore.” The scene is pure Wallacian, filled with plenty of erudite references and jostling with a love for etymology. It literally zaps life-force back into the text, and punctuates Lane’s boring day–which Wallace has so expertly made the reader suffer as well–with some strange, frightening fun. Wallace’s narration makes clear that the appearance of this strange man is not simply Lane going crazy from his boredom–Lane clearly cannot understand half of what the man refers to. Instead, we are given this nugget: “The phantom of the hallucination of repetitive concentration held for too long a time, like saying a word over and over until it kind of melted and got foreign.” After philosophical reflection on why the need for a word for a condition like boredom might have arisen, the episode ends with the phantom leaving and Lane looking up to see that “no time had passed at all, again.”
The emphasis on the ways a person’s soul might be bored into, how one might become bored, and what that might mean, proliferates the short text, and perhaps evokes some of the themes we’ll find in the whole of The Pale King. As the quotes I pulled suggest, the idea that boredom might feed a suicidal impulse resonates strongly in light of Wallace’s unfortunate death. But there I go again, letting context color my analysis. But if we’re only left fragments, isn’t it natural to want to pull them together, to frame them–to give them order–context? It’s hard to say and probably not worth guessing if Lane Dean and the phantom will be major parts of The Pale King or not, but as the text progressed, I found myself more and more interested. Apparently, The Pale King will be published with notes and outlines–some bits of context–perhaps giving readers a clue as to how the text was meant to progress. Who knows. A lot of readers felt thatInfinite Jest didn’t have a proper ending (not me, though). While I think that the “Wiggle Room” episode stands well on its own, I’d certainly be happy to read more about the phantom. Still, Infinite Jest was larded with lots of little vignettes that added to the whole, but it’s important to point out that there was a whole to be added to–not just a series of vignettes. I’m really hoping that, even unfinished, Wallace has left us something of substance and depth, something that narrativizes—contextualizes—its themes into a meaningful work of art.
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A passage from Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano—
The Consul dropped his eyes at last. How many bottles since then? In how many glasses, how many bottles had he hidden himself, since then alone? Suddenly he saw them, the bottles of aguardiente, of anís, of jerez, of Highland Queen, the glasses, a babel of glasses—towering, like the smoke from the train that day—built to the sky, then falling, the glasses toppling and crashing, falling downhill from the Generalife Gardens, the bottles breaking, bottles of Oporto, tinto, bianco, bottles of Pernod, Oxygénée, absinthe, bottles smashing, bottles cast aside, falling with a thud on the ground in parks, under benches, beds, cinema seats, hidden in drawers at Consulates, bottles of Calvados dropped and broken, or bursting into smithereens, tossed into garbage heaps, flung into the sea, the Mediterranean, the Caspian, the Caribbean, bottles floating in the ocean, dead Scotchmen on the Atlantic highlands—and now he saw them, smelt them, all, from the very beginning-bottles, bottles, bottles, and glasses, glasses, glasses, of bitter, of Dubonnet, of Falstaff, Rye, Johnny Walker, Vieux Whisky, blanc Canadien, the aperitifs, the digestifs, the demis, the dobles, the noch ein Herr Obers, the et glas Araks, the tusen taks, the bottles, the bottles, the beautiful bottles of tequila, and the gourds, gourds, gourds, the millions of gourds of beautiful mescal… The Consul sat very still. His conscience sounded muffled with the roar of water. It whacked and whined round the wooden frame-house with the spasmodic breeze, massed, with the thunderclouds over the trees, seen through the windows, its factions. How indeed could he hope to find himself to begin again when, somewhere, perhaps, in one of those lost or broken bottles, in one of those glasses, lay, for ever, the solitary clue to his identity? How could he go back and look now, scrabble among the broken glass, under the eternal bars, under the oceans?
Stop! Look! Listen! How drunk, or how drunkly sober un-drunk, can you calculate you are now, at any rate?
The New Yorker publishes “Going for a Beer,” a very short story by Robert Coover. From the story–
He finds himself sitting in the neighborhood bar drinking a beer at about the same time that he began to think about going there for one. In fact, he has finished it. Perhaps he’ll have a second one, he thinks, as he downs it and asks for a third. There is a young woman sitting not far from him who is not exactly good-looking but good-looking enough, and probably good in bed, as indeed she is. Did he finish his beer? Can’t remember. What really matters is: Did he enjoy his orgasm? Or even have one?
Musician, writer, and filmmaker Paul Festa contacted me a few months ago to point out that I’d used a still of Harold Bloom from his film Apparition of the Eternal Church without crediting him. It was the nicest possible email in the world, and after a few pleasant exchanges, he sent me a copy of Apparition along with his new film, The Glitter Emergency. Both films are marked by humor, pathos, and a deep love for music. Paul was kind enough to talk with me about his work over a series of emails. For more info, check out his website.
Biblioklept: Your new film The Glitter Emergency is about a girl with a peg leg who dreams about being a ballerina. There’s a humor in the film that highlights some of the dramatic absurdity to the premise, but there’s also a lot of pathos there. How did the idea for the film come about?
Paul Festa: The germ of the plot itself came from an act Matthew Simmons had me accompany on violin many years ago, when his drag persona Peggy L’Eggs came out onstage as a one-legged ballerina on a rollerskate. But what precipitated the making of the film last year was a profound career crisis that came between the death of an extremely important and beloved mentor and my 40th birthday. I’d worked seriously – feverishly – to become a violinist, but a repetitive strain injury curtailed my musical career. Then I put all that energy and commitment into becoming a writer, but I didn’t achieve any success until almost by accident I became a filmmaker with my experimental documentary Apparition of the Eternal Church, a no-budget personal project that went on to screen throughout the US and Europe and win prizes and get very well reviewed. So at the age of 39 I found my energies and time divided between music, fiction and film, and none of the above had coalesced into a sustainable career and I still didn’t know, squarely into my middle age, what I was going to be when I grew up.
I spent December of 2009 and much of January lying awake through the night listening to my heart beat and it was in that period of grief for my mentor, and panic about my life, that I came up with the idea for this film that would be a comedic metaphor for my experience as an injured artist who finds his way back to his art through supernatural intervention. In the peg-leg ballerina’s case, it’s the vial of Enchanted Glitter; in my own case, it’s film, which enabled me to resume my life as a professional musician. And in both cases, it’s an enchantment much like Dumbo’s feather, a suspension of our self-doubt more than any external magical agent that permits us to do extraordinary things with our lives.
Biblioklept: The Glitter Emergency — at least most of it — is stylized as an early silent film: black and white, placards for dialog and titles, even the jumpiness of an old reel-to-reel machine is replicated. Was this form always part of the project? What prompted your decision to shoot the film this way?
PF: The silent-film aesthetic was there from the get-go, and for several reasons. First of all, the whole project is a star vehicle for Peggy L’Eggs, and as a film presence she was born sixty years too late — she’s Clara Bow and Lillian Gish and Stan Laurel all rolled into one. Second, the convention of silent film, with dialogue represented in intertitles, works perfectly with what I do at the intersection of music and film. In the usual relationship, music is there to serve film, to color it emotionally as soundtrack. What I do is the other way around – I’m using film to illuminate or dramatize music. And so the music has to play uninterrupted, and intertitles work perfectly. When you think of it, it happens in both my films – the last third of Apparition of the Eternal Church consists of silent images of the interview subjects, and text titles, and organ music accompanying.
I don’t have any formal education in film, but when I was a kid my father used to take me to the Avenue Theater out on San Bruno Avenue in San Francisco, where every Friday night they would show a silent film and an early talkie, the silent accompanied on the theater’s Wurlitzer by an old guy named Bob Vaughn who had accompanied these films when they first came out in the 20s. So the look and feel are second nature for me, as they are for my co-director Kevin Clarke, who came up with a lot of the signature silent-film flourishes in Glitter.
Biblioklept: You bring up your first film, Apparition of the Eternal Church, which again is obviously very much about music. The film begins by having a number of people listening to the music of Messiaen on headphones and reacting to it, discussing it, emoting to it, puzzling over it — but the music is withheld from the audience for quite some time. I found it very, very frustrating! Was this by design? What’s the story behind Apparition?
PF: I would never intentionally frustrate an audience, though I might withhold satisfaction for a half hour as Apparition does. The reason for the structure of that film is again to serve the music, to preserve our ability to hear it whole and to some extent on its own terms. I had filmmakers advise me that the film could only work if I dosed out the music in parcels, letting the audience hear it piece by piece, fading it in and out throughout the interviews. I never seriously considered this option – as the playwright Karen Hartman observes early in the film, you don’t talk over Messiaen! It’s not background music. So that is an experience – a trial – I reserved for the interview subjects and spared the audience. And I spared the music from being chopped up and presented piecemeal, which would have rendered it meaningless for the following reason: the piece is composed of two sonic pyramids, one short and preliminary, the next reaching up to what Messiaen understands to be God. If you present a pyramid in pieces, you have a pile of stones and they don’t do anything, much less ascend to heaven.
So my options were to play the music first, before the interviews, to play it after, or not to play it at all. I tend to think the option I chose results in the least frustration – but everyone experiences the film, and the music, differently.
Biblioklept: For the record, I don’t think the frustration is negative at all — the withholding primes anticipation to a level that passes, I don’t know, an itch, I suppose. I wanted to hear what your subjects were hearing. Speaking of the subjects, how did you get people involved in the film? There’s such a wide range of interviewees there, from Harold Bloom to Squeaky Blonde. How long did it all come together?
PF: The subject of frustration in Messiaen is interesting, because some people – including much more sophisticated musicians than I – find a disturbing lack of direction or resolution in his music. It’s static to them – it floats, an object in space that gets bigger or smaller as its relation to you changes, but beyond the change in that spatial relationship it’s not doing anything and it drives you bonkers. And I think that frustration is a species of the torture that eternity threatens, the emptiness of life without end. For theological reasons Messiaen can’t intend that dark gloss on eternal life, and it’s pretty far from my experience of the music, but plenty of people experience it. Hence John Rogers’s observation that despite what the composer intends to portray, “this is what hell is like.”
I interviewed 115 people for Apparition, and 31 are in the film — some of them for just one or two clips. The first interview was with the harpsichord virtuoso and early music guru Albert Fuller, who had taught me chamber music when I was a student at Juilliard in the early 90s, and who taught me in large part by putting on music and talking through it, describing what he heard in “the theater of his imagination,” as he called it. Albert’s interview was so great — so wide ranging ad surprising, starting in laughter and ending in tears — that I felt I needed to keep going. I interviewed pretty much everyone I could get to put on the headphones and sign a release – anyone who walked into my apartment. Several of my English mentors are in the film – I took Bloom’s Shakespeare seminar at Yale, and Rogers’s Milton and Spencer courses, and several classes with Wayne Koestenbaum. Michael Warner, who now heads the Yale English department, I met along with several other cast members in the woods of Tennessee at a gathering of the Radical Faeries. I spent most of three years collecting the interviews, a pace I recommend to anyone doing a project like this.
Biblioklept: You’ll be presenting both movies later this month (in Santa Cruz) with live musical accompaniment. Have you done that before? What can audiences hope to see and hear?
PF: Both Apparition of the Eternal Church and The Glitter Emergency are blessed with having had numerous screenings with live musical accompaniment. Apparition has screened accompanied by some great church organs in the US and Europe, including St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York and Grace Cathedral here in San Francisco. I’ve accompanied Glitter on violin at every public screening since we premiered the rough cut in May of last year. And while the two films have screened before as a double bill, this is the first time both will screen together with live music. In addition to the films and music, the audience should expect a robust discussion afterward. The screening is sponsored by UCSC, where both films screened last year to a terrific film history class where I got some of the most intelligent questions and commentary of any post-screening Q&A.
Biblioklept: Have you ever stolen a book?
PF: I’ve stolen a lot of books, most significantly Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Thomas di Cantimpre’s Life of Christina Mirabilis. I’ve been boiling them down with some Bible and Franzen and a pinch of Milton and dimly remembered Steinbeck and any year now am expecting it to yield my first novel, Heaven Descending, a sort of bildungsroman amid a world of Hollywood lowlives and Radical Faerie medical marijuana farmers that sparkles with magical realism and catastrophic drug busts. In the fall I had seven weeks at Yaddo in which I laid the foundation for the fourth draft but work on two new films has prevented me from making any progress since New Year’s. Next year is a big year for the project; it turns 10.
The Glitter Emergency will have its Midwest premiere at the Chicago International Movies & Music Festival on Thursday, April 14, at 7:30 p.m., at the Wicker Park Art Center, launching a program that features Kenneth Anger’s two masterpieces, Lucifer Rising and Scorpio Rising – all with live musical accompaniment.
Biblioklept 