To Study the Numbers, 1941 by Leonora Carrington (1917 – 2011)
Paul Griffiths’ Ophelia novels are collected in one volume from NYRB for a US release:
“So: now I come to speak.” With this line, Shakespeare’s Ophelia starts telling her story. In let me tell you, this newly revealed woman uses exactly the same words Shakespeare gave her in Hamlet, shifted as in a kaleidoscope to create a very different voice: her own. We hear her personal narrative from childhood to the moments before the start of the play, when she knows she has a fateful decision to make. Along the way, we discover whole new angles on her father, her brother, the prince, and other characters who come out from behind the curtain.
In let me go on, her decision made, she refashions herself. Emerging from her old world, she explores a new one, of magical variety yet coherent. As she goes in search of what she may still become, she meets a new cast of characters, some poignant, some hilarious. Paul Griffiths gives this remarkable protagonist—and us—a play-full of humor, poignancy, passion, adventure, and a great many surprises.
“The Last Contract: William T. Vollmann’s Battle to Publish an American Epic” is a nice long essay by Alexander Sorondo. First few paragraphs:
A few years ago, the novelist William T. Vollmann was diagnosed with colon cancer. The prognosis wasn’t great but he went ahead with the treatment. A length of intestine drawn out and snipped. It was awful but it worked. The cancer went into remission.
Then his daughter died.
Then he got dropped by his publisher.
Then he got hit by a car.
Then he got a pulmonary embolism.
But things are looking up.
William T. Vollmann spent “twelve or fifteen years” researching and writing a novel about the CIA called A Table for Fortune; as of this writing it has a few back-channel blurbs from editors and assistants who’ve caught glimpses and say it might be his masterpiece, or at the very least a new sort of achievement for him. But when he finished it, in 2022, he turned it over to his publisher, the final installment of a multi-book contract (although even that part gets complicated), and that’s when, to use Vollmann’s words, “Viking fired me.”
His publisher of thirty years.
It’s more complicated than that.
For starters, when he first turned it in, A Table for Fortune was 3,000 pages.
Read the rest of “The Last Contract: William T. Vollmann’s Battle to Publish an American Epic.”
A Dreambook for Our Time, 1963, Tadeusz Konwicki. Translation by David Welsh. Penguin Books (1976). Cover illustration by Christopher Davis; cover design by Walter Brooks. 282 pages.
I’ve been lucky over the last decade or so that my little college’s spring break almost always coincides with my children’s spring break. We aimed again this year at Georgia, spending a few days in a cabin outside the unfortunately named Whitesburg. Spring had not yet really sprung there yet. There was very little green about, but the hikes along and around Snake Creek through 20th century ruins were pleasant enough, and the kids enjoyed ziplining and aerial obstacle courses. In one of their sessions, I sneaked away to Harvey’s House of Books.
Harvey’s is, as far as I can tell, a Friends of the Library venture run by volunteers. I didn’t expect much, but the fiction section was surprisingly well populated. For around five bucks I picked up Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat, and two by Cristina Peri Rossi — The Ship of Fools and Dostoevsky’s Last Night.
I was happy and surprised to find Rossi’s The Ship of Fools (in translation by Psiche Hughes); I’ve had it on a mental list for a few months now. I started it that night and it’s really odd–reminds me a bit of Ann Quin’s stuff, very odd but fun. More thoughts to come.
The Ship of Fools proved a nice antidote to the books I’d brought with me, Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste, (in translation by Charlotte Mandell) and a Dino Buzzati collection translated by Lawrence Venuti, called The Bewitched Bourgeois. I’ve enjoyed the Buzzati stories, but piled up there’s a sameness here that cries for interruption. I love Borgesian riffs on “Before the Law” as much as the next nerd, but too many in a row (six, in my case this week) feels, I dunno, like, I get it. But to be clear, I’ve really liked most of The Bewitched Bourgeois. I think it’s better parceled out though. Monsieur Teste on the other hand…look, I don’t know, maybe I misunderstood the book entirely, but I really kinda sorta hated it. Was I supposed to hate the central persona, Mister Teste, who aims for precision in language but comes off as a bore? At least it was short.
While I didn’t have the time in Atlanta to hit multiple bookstores (like in past trips), I made a point to hit up A Capella Books, a well stocked indie joint with a great used collection. I didn’t score anything there, although I was thrilled to see Anders Nilsen’s Tongues prominently featured in the graphic novel section. The book is great — I got a review copy right before we left. Some asshole named Edwin Turner landed a blurb on the back under his hero Charles Burns’s much shorter, pithier, better blurb:
Our spring break culminated Saturday night at the Variety Playhouse in Little Five Points, where we saw the so-called indie supergroup The Hard Quartet play all of their songs. I really dig The Hard Quartet’s self-titled debut, and dragged my wife and son along. (My daughter declined but played taxi driver.) Some interesting looking children were exiting the theater (really more of a club, let’s be honest) as we were entering, assuring the concerned security guard that they’d be right back, they just needed to get some Gatorade at a corner store. These were Sharp Pins, or The Sharp Pins, or Thee Sharp Pins, a Chicago power pop trio fronted by a kid named Kai Slater. They played a tight thirty minute set (including a Byrds cover); young Slater knows how to tuck away middle eight. The band’s youth invigorated the crowd of indie oldheads, and if Sharp Pins were occasionally a little out of tune or a step behind on the count, what came through was a true joy for the pop song. My son went bananas from them, saying something like, I know that they aren’t as good at playing their instruments as the Hard Quartet guys, but I liked their songs more. He bought their album and their t-shirt.
I liked The Hard Quartet’s live show very much — these are some old, or let’s just say older guys — look, pretty much everyone at the show was old, older, etc., except the Sharp Pins, my son, and some other teens there with their folks — these guys, the HQ, are veterans of disorder, coming up in club shows and theaters and big stages and big big stages and so on. They seemed very comfortable in the quasi-theater club. It was a joy to watch and listen to them.
They are, as I mentioned before, a so-called “supergroup.” Stephen Malkmus was the sideman for David Berman in The Silver Jews; Matt Sweeney, a popular YouTube influencer, was a member of another infamous supergroup — David Pajo’s short-lived side project Zwan; Emmett Kelly is a former gang member and circus performer; Jim White is the best drummer I’ve ever seen live (I have no stupid joke here; he is amazing and I listened to Ocean Songs every night for two years in a row when I was 22 and that’s not an exaggeration.)
The Hard Quartet are clearly a “real” band and not anyone’s side project. Sonics live were richer, fuller, more expansive than on disc. Emmett Kelly sang his new song, which, as far as I can tell, is the only update to their setlist in the past year — basically the record played straight through — but they seemed to never remember who was playing bass on which song when. No one used a pick, ever, as far as I could tell. Sweeney broke a string and then claimed he’d never broken a string on stage, ever. (Dubious.) Malkmus said he was thinking about “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” but, what if it was, like, “The Devil Went Down on George.” Sweeney jokingly referred to Charlie Daniels as Chuck Daniels and at least two Atlanta audience members hissed foolish rejoinders. (Could’ve been those big beers, bald boys!) Jim White is both a gentle percussionist and a rawk gawd drummer. Malkmus’s, Kelly’s, and Sweeney’s singing in unison were some of the finest moments of the night, as in “Rio’s Song” and “Heel Highway.” The band’s weathered implementation of silence and space was also delicious and judicious in numbers like “Six Deaf Rats,” “Action for the Military Boys,” and “Hey.” Skronk and noodling were measured but never mannered. (Or the manners were there but they weren’t bad, unless they were meant to be bad.) Matt Sweeney’s left foot was the boss of the band, the bandleader, the clapper clopping down the count in a leopard print.
The Hard Quartet finished before eleven, having played all their songs. I think we all had a good time.
“Report on Heaven and Hell”
by
Silvina Ocampo
translation by Edith Grossman
Heaven and Hell, like the great auction galleries, have heaps of objects accumulated in their passageways, objects that will not surprise anyone because they are the same things usually found in the galleries of this world. But it is not enough to speak only of objects; there are also cities, towns, gardens, mountains, valleys, suns, moons, winds, seas, stars, reflections, temperatures, tastes, perfumes, sounds, for Eternity provides us with every kind of sensation and spectacle.
If it seems to you that the wind roars like a tiger and if in the glance of the heavenly dove you see the eyes of a hyena, if the well-dressed man who crosses the street is wearing shameless tatters, if the prize-winning rose offered to you is a faded rag as drab as a sparrow, if your wife’s face is dulled, raw, and angry-your eyes, and not God, have made them that way.
When you die the demons and the angels (they are equally intent and know that you are sleeping halfway between this world and some other one) will come to your bed in disguise and, stroking your head, will permit you to select the things you preferred during your lifetime. At first, in a kind of sample display, they will show you nutural objects. If they show you the sun, the moon, or the stars, you will see them in a painted crystal ball and you will think that the crystal sphere is the world; if they show you the sea or the mountains, you will see them in a stone and you will think that the stone is the sea and the mountains; if they show you a horse it will be a miniature, but you will think that the horse is real. The angels and the demons will distract your spirit with pictures of flowers, shining fruits, and candies; making you think that you are still a child, they will sit you in a kind of sedan chair, called the queen’s chair or the chair af gold, and they will carry you, their hands intertwined, down those corridors to the center of your life where your preferences dwell.
Be careful. If you select more things from Hell than from Heaven, you may go to Heaven; on the other hand, if you select more things from Heaven than from Hell, you run the risk of going to Hell since your love for celestial things will imply mere greed.
The laws of Heaven and Hell are capricious. Whether you go to one place or the other depends on the most insignificant detail. I know of people who have gone to Hell because of a broken key or a wicker cage and of others who have gone to Heaven because of a sheet of newspaper or a cup of milk.
Detail from The Temptation of Saint Anthony, с. 1625 by Pieter Breughel the Younger (1564- 1637/1638)
Stories and Plays, collected 1974, Flann O’Brien. Penguin Books (1977). Cover design by Neil Stuart. 208 pages.
From “A Bash in the Tunnel” —
James Joyce was an artist. He has said so himself. His was a case of Ars gratia Artist. He declared that he would pursue his artistic mission even if the penalty was as long as eternity itself. This seems to be an affirmation of belief in Hell, therefore of belief in Heaven and God.
“A Bash in the Tunnel”
by
Flann O’Brien
James Joyce was an artist. He has said so himself. His was a case of Ars gratia Artist. He declared that he would pursue his artistic mission even if the penalty was as long as eternity itself. This seems to be an affirmation of belief in Hell, therefore of belief in Heaven and God.
A better title of this piece might be: Was Joyce Mad? by Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Yet there is a reason for the present title.
Some thinkers-all Irish, all Catholic, some unlay—have confessed to discerning a resemblance between Joyce and Satan. True, resemblances there are. Both had other names, the one Stephen Dedalus, the other Lucifer; the latter name, meaning ‘Maker of Light’, was to attract later the ironical gloss ‘Prince of Darkness’! Both started off very well under unfaultable teachers, both were very proud, both had a fall. But they differed on one big, critical issue. Satan never denied the existence of the Almighty; indeed he acknowledged it by challenging merely His primacy. Joyce said there was no God, proving this by uttering various blasphemies and obscenities and not being instantly struck dead.
A man once said to me that he hated blasphemy, but on purely rational grounds. If there is no God, he said, the thing is stupid and unnecessary. If there is, it’s dangerous. Anatole France says this better. He relates how, one morning, a notorious agnostic called on a friend who was a devout Catholic. The devout Catholic was drunk and began to pour forth appalling blasphemies. Pale and shocked, the agnostic rushed from the house. Later, a third party challenged him on this incident.
‘You have been saying for years that there is no God. Why then should you be so frightened at somebody else insulting this God who doesn’t exist?’ ‘I still say there is no God. But that fellow thinks there is. Suppose a thunderbolt was sent down to strike him dead. How did I know I wouldn’t get killed as well? Wasn’t I standing beside him?’ Another blasphemy, perhaps-doubting the Almighty’s aim. Yet it is still true that all true blasphemers must be believers.
What is the position of the artist in Ireland? Just after the editors had asked me to try to assemble material for this issue of Envoy, I went into the Scotch House in Dublin to drink a bottle of stout and do some solitary thinking. Before any considerable thought had formed itself, a man-—then a complete stranger-came, accompanied by his drink, and stood beside me: addressing me by name, he said he was surprised to see a man like myselt drinking in a pub. My pub radar screen showed up the word ‘TOUCHER’. I was instantly on my guard. Continue reading ““James Joyce was an artist. He said so himself.” | Flann O’Brien’s “A Bash in the Tunnel” (Or, “Was Joyce Mad?” by Hamlet Prince of Denmark)”
Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch isn’t so much a novel as it is a delirium, a swamp fever, a sun-bleached hallucination stretched across centuries, a beast that coils and uncoils, bloated with its own rot, a thing that does not begin or end but only festers, looping back on itself in great, heaving tides of unpunctuated or undepunctuated or mispunctuated thought, García Márquez dragging us under, drowning us in the mind or minds of the titular dictator, a paranoid consciousness so swollen with its own power that it warps reality itself, a man who reigns forever and is always dying, whose past rewrites itself with every breath, whose power is infinite and yet always slipping, slipping, slipping through his fingers like the stolen sea, parceled off and shipped to Arizona, because why not, because what is truth if not what he declares it to be, because when you have lived for centuries, when your general is served up at a Thyestean feast, when your nation’s children are disappeared to an island, never to return, when the cattle are branded with your mark, when the very hour itself is subject to your whim, then nothing is real, nothing but the fear, the violence, the rape, the predation, the endless grinding machinery of power that must sustain itself, and so we cycle, we spiral, we convulse through six sections, six deaths, six endless iterations of his reign, six grotesque confirmations that absolute power is an ouroboros swallowing its own tail, devouring itself, erasing itself, until nothing is left but the silence of his ruin, the empty palace where his corpse will be found again and again, where his legacy is nothing but absence, and translator Gregory Rabassa—mad saint, linguistic necromancer—renders it all in English without breaking the spell, his translation a relentless incantation that doesn’t just mimic the novel’s crushing, hypnotic cadence but becomes it, suffocating, pressing, forcing you to inhabit the mind of this eternal, rotting god-tyrant, this cosmic mistake, this doomed and doom-dealing beast whose power, no matter how total, will crumble, will fade, will rot, will vanish into nothing, just like everything else.
A big thank you to one of my oldest friends, P. Tilford, for sending me a copy of Stephen Dixon’s Frog.
They stand still. “And Kafka?” Howard says.
“Kafka is not buried here.”
“No? Because I thought—what I mean is the lady at my hotel’s tourist information desk—the Intercontinental over there—and also the one who sold me the ticket now, both told me—”
The man’s shaking his head, looks at him straight-faced. It’s up to you, his look says, if you’re going to give me anything for this tour. I won’t ask. I won’t embarrass you if you don’t give me a crown. But I’m not going to stand here all day waiting for it.
“Here, I want to give you something for all this.” He looks in his wallet. Smallest is a fifty note. Even if he got three-to-one on the black market, it’s still too much. He feels the change in his pocket. Only small coins. This guy’s done this routine with plenty of people, that’s for sure, and he’d really like not to give him anything.
I got a review copy of Margie Sarsfield’s debut novel Beta Vulgaris the other week. It came with a little packet of beet seeds.
Publisher Norton’s blurb:
Elise and her boyfriend, Tom, set off for Minnesota, hoping the paycheck from the sugar beet harvest will cover the rent on their Brooklyn apartment. Amidst the grueling work and familiar anxieties about her finances, Elise starts noticing strange things: threatening phone calls, a mysterious rash, and snatches of an ominous voice coming from the beet pile.
When Tom and other coworkers begin to vanish, Elise is left alone to confront the weight of her past, the horrors of her uncertain future, and the menacing but enticing siren song of the beets. Biting, eerie, and confidently told, Beta Vulgaris harnesses a distinct voice and audacious premise to undermine straightforward narratives of class, trauma, consumption, and redemption.
I missed my window to plant beets here in north Florida.
Hello America, 1981, J.G. Ballard. Triad Grenada (1983). Cover illustration by Tim White. 236 pages.
Today’s mass-market Monday selection was inspired by last night’s rewatch of David Cronenberg’s 1975 film Shivers. Shivers’ first fortyish minutes play as one of the more persuasive Ballardian commitments to film—more Ballardian than Cronenberg’s Crash (2016) or Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise (2015). Indeed, Shivers is an aesthetic foster twin to Ballard’s novel High-Rise, born the same year. High-Rise is far superior to Hello America, but I think Hello America is probably better than it comes off in my short review from 2022:
You’d think a novel where President Manson wants to make America great Again would feel more prescient, but Ballard’s so in love here with the sparkle and pop of Pop Art America that he fails to attend to the dirt, grease, and grime that make the machine run. A fun novel, but its contemporary currency is squashed not so much by historical reality as the weight of Ballard’s oeuvre before it.
Megalomaniacs, 1967 by Bridget Tichenor (1917-1990)
Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, in translation by Sophie Hughes, is new from NYRB. Their blurb–
Anna and Tom, an expat couple, have fashioned a dream life for themselves in Berlin. They are young digital “creatives” exploring the excitements of the city, freelancers without too many constraints, who spend their free time cultivating house plants and their images online. At first, they reasonably deduce that they’ve turned their passion for aesthetics into a viable, even enviable career, but the years go by, and Anna and Tom grow bored. As their friends move back home or move on, so their own work and sex life—and the life of Berlin itself—begin to lose their luster. An attempt to put their politics into action fizzles in embarrassed self-doubt. Edging closer to forty, they try living as digital nomads only to discover that, wherever they go, “the brand of oat milk in their flat whites was the same.”
Perfection—Vincenzo Latronico’s first book to be translated into English—is a scathing novel about contemporary existence, a tale of two people gradually waking up to find themselves in various traps, wondering how it all came to be. Was it a lack of foresight, or were they just born too late?
“God to Hungry Child”
by
Langston Hughes
Hungry child,
I didn’t make this world for you.
You didn’t buy any stock in my railroad.
You didn’t invest in my corporation.
Where are your shares in standard oil?
I made the world for the rich
And the will-be-rich
And the have-always-been-rich.
Not for you,
Hungry child.
I’ve been listening to William Friedkin read his 2013 memoir The Friedkin Connection on my daily commute and loving it so far. The first chapter, “Chicago,” details the making of his first film, a 1962 documentary called The People vs. Paul Crump. A chance meeting with a death row priest at a cocktail party leads Friedkin to make his documentary, despite having no real knowledge of how to make a film at all. (He even claims to have never have seen a documentary film at that point in his life.) From his memoir:
[Cinematographer Wilmer] Butler and I were editing the film each night as we got the dailies from the lab. Most of the time we worked at my apartment. My mother would make us lunch and dinner, and we’d work on weekends twelve or fifteen hours a day, with an old pair of rewinds and a 16 mm. viewer and splicer we had “liberated” from the WGN-TV newsroom. Splicing was done with glue, not clear cellophane tape, which came in several years later.
One evening, Ernie Lucas, a veteran TV director, happened to pass by on his way to pick up copy for the ten o’clock news. He was surprised to see us in a film editing bay in the newsroom, since we were involved exclusively with “live” telecasts. He expressed shock that we were editing our negative, and that we were not handling it carefully with white cotton gloves. “What are you guys doing?” he asked. We told him we were working on a short film for our own amusement. “But you’re cutting the negative; you’re not supposed to even touch it.”
“Why not?” We were confused.
Ernie was patient.
“Don’t you know that camera negative is never touched until you have a final edited work print?” he asked.
“What’s a work print?”
Ernie explained that a work print was made immediately after the negative was developed, and that it was this work print that you cut and recut, and only when you were finished was the negative conformed to the work print version. Neither did we know that the work print, negative, and 16 mm. sound track had to be edge-numbered simultaneously, so that picture and sound could be synchronized. Consecutive serial numbers were printed on the edges of these elements at intervals of a foot. Since we didn’t realize this, parts of our negative were scratched and torn, spliced and respliced, until we could belatedly apply edge-numbering. We had to “match” our synch-sound interviews by lip-reading, which took weeks, and we had no idea how to achieve a final print.
Biblioklept 