The newest issue of the stylish and savvy online literary magazine, Wag’s Revue is out new this week. In addition to art, poetry, audio clips, and short fiction, the issue features a really cool essay by Robert Moor about Robert Coover’s groundbreaking hypertext exercise, The Hypertext Hotel. Fittingly, the essay is itself an exercise in ludic hyperlinked indeterminancy. Good stuff.
Marvelous post from Jimmy Chen at HTMLGIANT.
The Australian is running a new article about one of Roberto Bolaño’s English translators, Chris Andrews. Reporter Bernard Lane reveals that
Andrews had been badgering publishers for translation work. In 2001 he badgered the right publisher, Christopher MacLehose of Harvill Press in London, at the right time. MacLehose had just bought the first English rights to Bolano and his translator had fallen by the wayside. Andrews knew and admired Bolano’s [sic] writing, thanks to his acquisition of Spanish at the universities of Melbourne and La Trobe. He got the job and out came By Night in Chile.
Andrews on Bolaño–
“I think of him as a pan-American author, as an author of the western hemisphere,” says Andrews. Bolano’s reception in Britain had been slow at first, not that his prose was a problem.
“There are a lot of important features of Bolano’s style that can be transferred from one language to another,” Andrews says, “The big syntactic patterns, the patterns of repetition, the long sentences, the bursts, the parenthetical remarks; that comes across.”
The article centers around Andrews’s translation of Nazi Literature in the Americas. We absolutely love the Picador edition’s cover for the UK, Australia, and similar markets. It captures the book’s apocryphal tone, its violence–and also its sharp sense of humor. 
On that book specifically (and Bolaño’s work in general)–
In a sea of allusion, English readers may feel adrift. “I don’t think it matters very much,” says Andrews. “It’s probably going to be read by people who have already got an interest in Bolano.
“One of the nice things about those bits of Bolano that are full of references and allusions is that it is hard to draw the line between the historical characters and the fictional ones.
“In different literary cultures, there are different norms about what you need to explain. In the French translation of Bolano, there are footnotes.”
Wouldn’t readers halfway familiar with Bolano suspect they were dealing with yet another level of artifice? “I think they would,” Andrews says, “even if it said ‘translator’s note’.”
The article details what techniques Andrews employs when stuck, particularly with regional dialects and slang. Andrews also talks about his correspondence with Bolaño himself, in the last few years of the Chilean’s life. Here’s Andrews describing his attraction to Bolaño:
The prose has a mesmerising quality that intrigues Andrews.
“There’s a character in one of the stories I’ve just been translating who’s an actor called El Pajarito [Little Bird] Gomez. He’s a skinny, unimpressive-looking guy, but as soon as he appears on camera he vibrates in a weird way that almost hypnotises the viewer.
“When I read that, I thought, that’s a bit like what happens with Bolano’s prose for many readers, that it has a strange kind of vibration.”
In her novel Wealtheow, author Ashley Crownover retells Beowulf from Queen Wealtheow’s point of view. In the original epic poem, Wealtheow doesn’t have much of a voice. Her marriage to King Hrothgar is more a matter of politics than love, and her role in the poem is largely limited to an episode where she speaks up to secure her own genealogical futurity. Adopting a first-person voice, Crownover portrays Wealtheow as a young, somewhat naive bride thrown into a political marriage arranged to prevent war between the Danes and the Helmings. Wealtheow tries to fit into her new role as wife and queen, as well as her new culture, and strives to produce an heir for Hrothgar, suffering miscarriages and other adversities. Crownover parallels Wealthow’s plighted road to motherhood in the tale of Grendel and his mother (called Ginnar here). When Grendel is born deformed, his father rejects him and he is bound for infanticide–only Ginnar’s motherly instinct resists custom, and the pair become fugitives. Crownover’s technique here builds sympathy for Ginnar in echoing the narrative proper of Wealtheow. Ginnar in many ways is a far more sympathetic (and interesting) character than Wealtheow, and the counter-plot of her and her monster-spawn/beloved boy Grendel is the highlight of the book.
Inevitably, Wealtheow must invite comparison to John Gardner’s masterpiece Grendel, the 1971 cult novel that retells the story from the monster’s point of view. Unlike that work, which is densely poetic, ambiguous, and often lyrically experimental, Crownover relates Wealtheow in a simple, straightforward style. The writing is thrifty and competent, and propels the narrative forward with ease. It’s tempting to pigeonhole Crownover’s effort as a feminist revision of an overtly-masculine text, and there’s of course merit in such a description–she does, after all, take a woman’s viewpoint here (or, arguably, the viewpoints of two women). But Crownover’s depiction of Wealtheow–and the men in the narrative–never unravels into gender politics (or, worse, tempting revisionist caricatures). Instead, she keeps the narrative upfront. It’s not as subtle (or ironic) as The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood’s marvelous retelling of The Odyssey from Penelope’s perspective, but it does adhere to the same complex view of male-female relations. Fans of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Avalon series and Beowulf enthusiasts in general will want to check this out.
Wealtheow is available now from Iroquois Press.
In her article in yesterday’s New York Times, Patricia Cohen reports on Emory University’s efforts to preserve Salman Rushdie’s archive. In addition to the regular files, folders, books, and other paper materials one might expect, Rushdie gave Emory four Apple computers. The school decided to create an emulator that would allow visitors to see–and play with–Rushdie’s work:
At the Emory exhibition, visitors can log onto a computer and see the screen that Mr. Rushdie saw, search his file folders as he did, and find out what applications he used. (Mac Stickies were a favorite.) They can call up an early draft of Mr. Rushdie’s 1999 novel, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” and edit a sentence or post an editorial comment.
Pretty neat. I love the idea of interaction and it’s great how technology has allowed for wider audiences to access archival materials. I’ve really been enjoying looking over the David Foster Wallace archive at the Harry Ransom Center, for instance, something made entirely possible through digital archiving. But Cohen’s article also details some of the problems and limitations of the “digital-born” material:
Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s simply don’t exist anymore.
This got me thinking, again, about all the rosy-toned optimism surrounding e-readers like the Kindle and iPad. Marginalia, annotation, and scholia, whether from the quills of medieval monks, enlightenment scientists, or prickly book reviewers, has long served as a conduit of information and criticism often rivaling the importance of the document being marked. Kindle users can highlight, dog-ear, and annotate their e-texts now, but how permanent are these marginalia–especially when Amazon has already shown how easily the books can be removed from their owners (along with those owners’ notes!)? Given Apple’s penchant for DRM, it’s likely that you won’t be able to trust the iPad to secure your annotations either. And while my own paltry scribblings in the volumes I own are hardly on par with Coleridge’s annotations, the books that I have most heavily annotated are also those dearest to me. At best, my marginalia might call attention to some notable aspect of a great text; at least, they record something about the person I was when I saw fit to write in the book at that moment.
I’m halfway through David Shields’s much buzzed-about manifesto Reality Hunger, and it seems to me that the work is really an attempt at defining post-postmodernism, a term, I should clarify upfront, that he has not employed so far in the book. Shields tells us at the outset that his
intent is to write the ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated (but unconnected) artists in a multitude of forms and media (lyric essay, prose poem, collage novel, visual art, film, television, radio, performance art, rap, stand-up comedy, graffiti) who are breaking larger and larger chunks of “reality” into their work. (Reality, as Nabokov never got tired of reminding us, is the one word that is meaningless without quotation marks.)
Putting “reality” in quotation marks, under suspicion, or ironic scrutiny is one of core moves of postmodernist thought, and Shields relies on his audience to accept this premise, even as he repeatedly attempts to define what it means to break reality into art. The paradox inherent in the self-consciousness of the “burgeoning group” that Shields identifies evinces as a yearning for authenticity coupled with the need for the essential artifice of narrative. In a self-reflexive move that at once engenders and exemplifies the post-postmodern tension between authenticity and art that he is trying to describe, Shields comprises Reality Hunger out of hundreds and hundreds of citations from other authors. These quotations, literary samples, reconfigure into a new synthesis. Shields’s project is at once steeped in ambiguity–are these authors’ citations now his work? Do they simply lend credibility or actually create a new authenticity? Post-postmodernity then must always operate with “reality” under radical scrutiny but also primary privilege. Irony inheres but must be overcome somehow–winking at the audience is not enough. Artifice is necessary but must also be surpassed somehow. Shields’s post-postmodernism (again, I must stress that he does not use this term–he refers instead to an unnamed, organic group, a movement that is not a movement):
A deliberate unartiness: “raw” material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, unprofessional . . . Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation; an overly literal tone, as if a reporter were viewing a strange culture; plasticity of form, pointillism; criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity, self-ethnography, anthropological autobiography; a burring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real.
If Shields has possibly described two of his favorite examples throughout the book here, David Foster Wallace and W.G. Sebald, he’s also approached describing Laurence Sterne’s 18th-century (anti-)classic Tristram Shandy (a problematic volume thus-far unmentioned in Reality Hunger Shields cites in section 298).
I can’t help recalling the dreadful film Cloverfield here (again, so far unmentioned by Shields but hardly out of his scope). The film exemplifies the paradox between artificiality and authenticity that Shields sets out to carve-up: a major Hollywood monster-movie (could there be anything more unreal?) that predicates audience response on the “realism” of its medium–namely, the pretense that the entire film is shot on a hand-held digital camera by an amateur witness to the events. The film’s “art” then is to enact a manipulation of “authenticity”–the very “realness” and “rawness” of the document an utter construction. Reality Hunger traffics in whatever problems such a narrative construction might pose to a twenty-first-century audience. Full review when I finish.
The new issue of The Believer popped up in the mail today (just as I’m finishing up the art issue from way back in November). This issue announces the editors’ short list, full of books I haven’t read. Here’s the list with editors’ comments (from their website):
Christopher Miller, “The Cardboard Universe: A Guide to the World of Phoebus K. Dank” (Harper Perennial)
Miller’s second novel is a delight: an antic encyclopedia, a remarkably sustained (five-hundred-plus-page) riff on the life and work of Philip K. Dick, a Day-Glo Pale Fire, and maybe the best pure comic novel of the year. Dueling annotators pick over the writings of the late Phoebus K. Dank, endlessly drawing and erasing the line between genius and hack.Percival Everett, “I Am Not Sidney Poitier” (Graywolf)
With more than twenty books to his name, Percival Everett is not only one of the most prolific modern American writers, but one of the most diverse, tackling just about every genre there is, and freely mixing them. He is also one of our best: I Am Not Sidney Poitier is further proof of that. Not Sidney is the name of the modest, unflappable protagonist, who happens to inherit wealth at an early age and winds up spending a lot of time with Ted Turner. Race, class, TBS, the films of Sidney Poitier, and the value of a college education are but some of the themes. It’s also funny as hell.Mary Robison, “One D.O.A., One on the Way” (Counterpoint)
Eve Broussard is a Hollywood location scout in her post-apocalyptic hometown of New Orleans. Her experience in this profession is matched only by her cynicism. Eve is married to Adam Broussard, who has inherited land and money, is chronically ill, and has an identical (and mostly interchangeable) twin brother, Saunders. With Eve as our guide, we ride shotgun through kudzu-laden landscapes, bourbon-drenched love affairs, and an education in Louisiana gun laws. Robison’s ultraterse “chapters” and deadpan dialogue create a visceral New Orleans, and the effect of a morning-after Southern gothic.Blake Butler, “Scorch Atlas” (featherproof)
Like the best sur-reality, Butler’s alien world is made from the building blocks of everyday life—rooms filled with hair and “teeth that wouldn’t fit inside a car.” His novels and stories are linguistically twisted dispatches from a half-house, half-body in which the author himself seems to be imprisoned. While he struggles to escape into the outside world, he remains obsessed with what’s at the end of the next abysmal hallway.Padgett Powell, “The Interrogative Mood” (Ecco)
Padgett Powell’s newest novel is unlike his past novels, and is unlike any novel—every sentence in this 164-page book is a question directed at “you.” Prying, intimate, damning, insulting, inane, and innocent are these inquisitions. What at first might strike as a literary gimmick, impossible to sustain, becomes (as “you” surrender to it) an act of intense private meditation, as well as a flagrantly solipsistic display of your most private self.
Here’s David Shields talking about his new book Reality Hunger:
Here’s a review of the book at Times Flow Stemmed.
The New York Times and dozens of other sources reported yesterday that the University of Texas acquired David Foster Wallace’s papers, including his personal library. The Harry Ransom Center at UT already has lots of Wallace’s stuff up at their site and it’s frankly astounding. There are handwritten pages from Infinite Jest, images from annotated copies of some of Wallace’s novels, including Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree and Don DeLillo’s Players, and pictures of Wallace’s dictionary with words circled like neroli, cete, and suint. Begin exploring Wallace’s archive here.
In his recent essay, “Books in the Age of the iPad,” Craig Mod distinguishes between “Formless” and “Definite” content:
Formless Content is is unaware of the container. Definite Content embraces the container as a canvas. Formless content is usually only text. Definite content usually has some visual elements along with text. Much of what we consume happens to be Formless. The bulk of printed matter — novels and non-fiction — is Formless.
Mod argues that the rise of e-readers like the Kindle and (presumably) the iPad are harbingers of a new age in reading, where both formless and, now, definite content might be readily (and easily) displayed. He makes a brash judgment:
The convenience of digital text — on demand, lightweight (in file size and physicality), searchable — already far trumps that of traditional printed matter.
Really? On demand? For whom? “On demand” here presupposes a number of conditions, first and foremost, that each person who wishes to enjoy this new medium has the economic means to do so. The projected retail cost of the iPad is currently $500, a price that does not include monthly ISP fees, let alone the prices of e-books and other e-texts. The Kindle retails now for about half the price of the iPad. Although these prices will certainly fall over time, it is difficult to imagine that the “convenience of digital text” will trump equitable access to “traditional printed matter” — particularly for families with multiple children (at least any time soon).
Mod makes some good points about the future of printed, physical books in the age of e-readers (or, the iPad, a device he seems to think will normalize the medium):
I propose the following to be considered whenever we think of printing a book:
- The Books We Make embrace their physicality — working in concert with the content to illuminate the narrative.
- The Books We Make are confident in form and usage of material.
- The Books We Make exploit the advantages of print.
- The Books We Make are built to last.
The result of this is:
- The Books We Make will feel whole and solid in the hands.
- The Books We Make will smell like now forgotten, far away libraries.
- The Books We Make will be something of which even our children — who have fully embraced all things digital — will understand the worth.
- The Books We Make will always remind people that the printed book can be a sculpture for thoughts and ideas.
Anything less than this will be stepped over and promptly forgotten in the digital march forward.
Goodbye disposable books.
Hello new canvases.
Books as aesthetic, durable objects — great idea. But books as relics, as things to recall the smell of “now forgotten, far away libraries”? Really? Libraries function as an important space in communities that transcend the mediums of information in those libraries. It’s almost downright scary to posit some kind of project-utopia where a library becomes “digitized.” Also — and again, much of what Mod suggests here is great — but also, who are “our children” who “have fully embraced all things digital”? In the current geopolitical climate, Mod’s line of thinking can only realistically apply to “First World” countries. Even in our own beloved United States, first among the “First World,” we have difficulty feeding all of our children or funding their educations. E-readers like the iPad or Kindle could presumably do much to ameliorate the burgeoning education gap, but recent efforts haven’t gained much momentum or praise.
It’s not that I disagree with (what I perceive to be) Mod’s overall thesis — that the iPad and successive e-readers will revolutionize how we read, access, and store information. I do, however, think that his rosy-toned enthusiasm has led to a number of blind spots in his article. Why should e-readers eliminate libraries? What, exactly, are “disposable books”? Who will have access to these “new canvases,” and in what capacity? Why the implicit presumption that digital storage of media is fail safe, easier than current methods, and more permanent?
Finally, my biggest problem with the piece is the simple assumption that any e-reader could be more comfortable than a paperback book. Mod addresses arguments like mine:
When people lament the loss of the printed book, this — comfort — is usually what they’re talking about. My eyes tire more easily, they say. The batteries run out, the screen is tough to read in sunlight. It doesn’t like bath tubs.
Mod responds to these arguments:
Important to note is that these aren’t complaints about the text losing meaning. Books don’t become harder to understand, or confusing just because they’re digital. It’s mainly issues concerning quality. One inevitable property of the quality argument is that technology is closing the gap (through advancements in screens and batteries) and because of additional features (note taking, bookmarking, searching), will inevitably surpass the comfort level of reading on paper.
While Mod’s point of meaning vs. quality (what I’d refer to as readability) is certainly right, his assumption that technology “will inevitably surpass the comfort level of reading on paper” is wholly unfounded and unsupported. It’s exactly the kind of teleological claim we see too often about technology — that technology always progresses to an inevitable, good, and superior end point. Still, Apple can feel free to send me an iPad and I’ll be sure to test my own assumptions on the issue, and redress them here if need be.
Stéphane Massa-Bidal (aka Hulk4598, aka Rétrofuturs) created these fantastic “book covers” for internet services late last year, so you might’ve already seen them; anyway, they fit nicely into Biblioklept’s Book Covers Week. Massa-Bidal’s images of familiar web two point oh apps masquerading as book covers remind us that book covers are their own special medium, and that we perhaps read the information in book covers in its own special way, regardless of whether the book actually exists or not (or, in this case, exists as something other than a book. See also: Spacesick’s “I Can Read Movies” Series).
Is there anything worse than a beloved book sporting a movie tie-in cover? (Okay. Maybe Oprah’s blazon is worse).
It’s not like the original cover was that great, or that the movie was that bad, but the whole enterprise of slapping grim Viggo Mortensen all over Cormac McCarthy’s The Road doesn’t seem to make much sense (maybe they didn’t realize that the film was going to flop and hoped that it would re-energize book sales). It seems like a slight to any reader new to the book. The austere original cover omits all imagery and thus places McCarthy’s language front and center. Movie tie-ins tend to plaster major Hollywood actors all over the cover, making it difficult for readers to re-frame or re-image the characters that those actors are playing–it’s an egregious intrusion between the writer’s text and the reader. It disrupts visualization. It also tends to look tacky, even when it’s “classy.” Take for example this cover for Richard Yates’s novel Revolutionary Road —
I’ve never read the novel, although I’ve often heard it referred to as an under-read or “lost” classic (the film promos made it look dreadfully boring, but there is probably nothing more unfair than judging a book by its movie). Spying its spine, I picked the book up the other day at the bookstore but could not even flick through it. All I could see was Leo and Kate. Then there’s that Big Gold Sticker procliaimng the work is “Now A Major Motion Picture.” The statement, emboldened in all-caps seems set apart in its little golden sphere, but oddly enough there’s a clause that must logically follow it — “Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.” The aesthetic logic of the cover though seems to suggest, however ludicrous, that DiCaprio and Winslet actually star in the book. Were I to attempt to read this edition of the book my poor imagination, weakened by years of watery domestic beer and bad television, would not be able to surmount the challenge posed by the cover. Each time I dipped into its pages, surely Yates’s prose, no matter how descriptive or visceral or imagistic, must fall to the glamor of Leo and Kate.
Maybe it’s just me though–I can remember having this problem even in childhood, absolutely hating to read any book that proffered a photograph of a person, especially an actor, masquerading as a character that my imagination was supposed to bring to life. For some reason paintings and other stylized images didn’t –and don’t — offend me in this way.
I suppose that movie tie-in covers help sell books and, ultimately, that’s a good thing, but I can’t think of a single one I’ve ever seen that’s aesthetically pleasing. I’m reminded now of Spacesick’s “I Can Read Movies” Series, which achieves the opposite, turning movies into witty, wonderful book covers. Observe:
Thanks to C. Max Magee at The Millions for making Biblioklept’s Book Covers Week so much easier. What can we say, we’re lazy. Here’s his fun post on American book covers versus British editions. And, just to prove that we’re not that lazy, we did two of our own:
The American version of Don DeLillo’s Point Omega, on the left, attempts to capture some of the book’s wistful tone and convey its sense of desert geography and handling of epochal time. But against this background, the book’s vaguely military name enclosed by that infinity loop all sort of looks a bit like like an espionage thriller. We’re not really thrilled about the British cover either–black, white, and gray might look better than the cool blues here–but its energy and sense of disconnection better suit DeLillo’s spare, sad novella than the American cover.
We like both of these covers more than we liked the actual book, but damn if the British cover (on the right) isn’t one of the best editions we’ve ever seen. Someone give the designer a cookie. Or a prize. Or something.
Yesterday we griped about dustjackets and praised books bold enough to go nude. To see some really gorgeous bookbinding, check out this recent gallery from BibliOdyssey. Sample:
A kindly dude by the name of Ryan Walsh has launched a site called The David Foster Wallace Archive. The site collects in one place the loose mp3s that’ve been floating around the web, and includes the Brief Interviews with Hideous Men audiobook in its entirety. There are also interviews, profiles, eulogies, and more. A good starting place: an (as-yet) unpublished piece about a do-gooding boy detested by all. It’s hilarious.
So. It’s kinda sorta Book Covers Week at Biblioklept, and, in keeping with that theme, check out this new cover for Wallace’s debut novel, The Broom of the System. The edition is part of the forthcoming Penguin Ink series and should be available this summer. Art by Duke Riley. We love it.
Cover design for Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard by Jerome Moriarty, 1966 Time Reading Program edition.
Biblioklept 
