Category: Books

“Florida,” a Short Story by Mavis Gallant

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Marie Carette spent eight Christmases of her life in Florida, where her son was establishing a future in the motel industry. Every time Marie went down she found Raymond starting over in a new place: his motels seemed to die on his hands. She used to come back to Montreal riddled with static electricity. Her sister Berthe couldn’t hand her a teaspoon without receiving a shock, like a small silver bullet. Berthe believed the current was generated by a chemical change that occurred as she flew out of Fort Lauderdale toward a wet, dark, snowy city.

Marie had been living with Berthe ever since 1969, the year her husband died. She still expected what Berthe thought of as husband service: flights met, cabs hailed, doors held, tips attended to. Berthe had to take the bus out to Dorval Airport, with Marie’s second-best fur coat over her arm and her high-heeled boots in a plastic bag.

‘Don’t tell me it’s still winter,’ Marie would wail, kissing Berthe as if she had been away for months rather than just a few days. Guiding Marie’s arms into the second-best-mink sleeves (paws and piecework), Berthe would get the first of the silvery shocks.

 

“Concerning the Bodyguard” — Donald Barthelme

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“Concerning the Bodyguard” by Donald Bartheleme

Does the bodyguard scream at the woman who irons his shirts? Who has inflicted a brown burn on his yellow shirt purchased expensively from Yves St. Laurent? A great brown burn just over the heart?

Does the bodyguard’s principal make conversation with the bodyguard, as they wait for the light to change, in the dull gray Citroën? With the second bodyguard, who is driving? What is the tone? Does the bodyguard’s principal comment on the brown young women who flock along the boulevard? On the young men? On the traffic? Has the bodyguard ever enjoyed a serious political discussion with his principal?

Is the bodyguard frightened by the initials D.I.T.?

Is the bodyguard frightened by the initials C.N.D.?

Will the bodyguard be relieved, today, in time to see the film he has in mind – Emmanuelle Around the World? If the bodyguard is relieved in time to see Emmanuelle Around the World, will there be a queue for tickets? Will there be students in the queue?

Is the bodyguard frightened by the slogan Remember 17 June? Is the bodyguard frightened by black spray paint, tall letters ghostly at the edges, on this wall, on this wall? At what level of education did the bodyguard leave school?

Is the bodyguard sufficiently well-paid? Is he paid as well as a machinist? As well as a foreman? As well as an army sergeant? As well as a lieutenant? Is the Citroën armored? Is the Mercedes armored? What is the best speed of the Mercedes? Can it equal that of a BMW? A BMW motorcycle? Several BMW motorcycles?

Does the bodyguard gauge the importance of his principal in terms of the number of bodyguards he requires? Should there not be other cars leading and following his principals car, these also filled with bodyguards? Are there sometimes such additional precautions, and does the bodyguard, at these times, feel himself part of an ocean of bodyguards? Is he exalted at these times? Does he wish for even more bodyguards, possibly flanking cars to the right and left and a point car far, far ahead?

After leaving technical school, in what sort of enterprises did the bodyguard engage before accepting his present post? Has he ever been in jail? For what sort of offense? Has the bodyguard acquired a fondness for his principal? Is there mutual respect? Is there mutual contempt? When his principal takes tea, is the bodyguard offered tea? Beer? Who pays?

Can the bodyguard adduce instances of professional success?

Had he a previous client?

Is there a new bodyguard in the group of bodyguards? Why? Continue reading ““Concerning the Bodyguard” — Donald Barthelme” →

“Many ideas turn into lifelong disfigurements” (Thomas Bernhard)

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“Many ideas turn into lifelong disfigurements,” he said. The ideas often surprised one years later, but sooner or later they would always make the one who had had them look ridiculous. The ideas came from a place they never left. They would always remain there, in that place: it was the place of dreams. “The idea doesn’t exist that can be expunged or expunge itself. The idea is actual, and remains so.” Last night, he had been thinking about pain. “Pain doesn’t exist. A necessary illusion,” he said. Pain wasn’t pain, not in the way a cow was a cow. “The word ‘pain’ directs the attention of a feeling toward a feeling. Pain is overplus. But the illusion of it is real.” Accordingly, pain both was and was not. “But there is no pain,” he said. “Just as there is no happiness. Found an architecture on pain.” All thoughts and images were as involuntary as the concepts: chemistry, physics, geometry. “You have to understand these concepts to know something. To know everything.” Philosophy didn’t take you a single step nearer. “Nothing is progressive, but nothing is less progressive than philosophy. Progress is tripe. Impossible.” The observations of mathematics were foundational. “Oh, yes,” he said, “in mathematics everything’s child’s play.” And just like so-called child’s play, mathematics could finish you. “If you’ve crossed the border, and you suddenly no longer get the joke, and see what the world’s about, don’t see what anything’s about anymore. Everything’s just the imagining of pain. A dog has as much gravity as a human being, but he hasn’t lived, do you understand!” One day I would cross a threshold into an enormous park, an endless and beautiful park; in this park one ingenious invention would succeed another. Plants and music would follow in lovely mathematical alternation, delightful to the ear and answering to the utmost notions of delicacy; but this park was not there to be used, or wandered about in, because it consisted of a thousand and one small and minuscule square and rectilinear and circular islets, pieces of lawn, each of them so individual that I would be unable to leave the one on which I was standing. “In each case, there is a breadth and depth of water that prevents one from hopping from one island to another. In my imagining. On the piece of grass which one has reached, how is a mystery, on which one has woken up, and where one is compelled to stay,” one would finally perish of hunger and thirst. “One’s longing to be able to walk through the whole park is finally deadly.”

—From Thomas Bernhard’s novel Frost.

 

Eight Images and Ideas from Anton Chekhov’s Note-Books

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A schoolboy treats a lady to dinner in a restaurant. He has only one rouble, twenty kopecks. The bill comes to four roubles thirty kopecks. He has no money and begins to cry. The proprietor boxes his ears. He was talking to the lady about Abyssinia.

* * * * *

A man, who, to judge from his appearance, loves nothing but sausages and sauerkraut.

* * * * *

Terrible poverty, desperate situation. The mother a widow, her daughter a very ugly girl. At last the mother takes courage and advises the daughter to go on the streets. She herself when young went on the streets without her husband’s knowledge in order to get money for her dresses; she has some experience. She instructs her daughter. The latter goes out, walks all night; not a single man takes her; she is ugly. A couple of days later, three young rascals on the boulevard take her. She brought home a note which turned out to be a lottery ticket no longer valid.

* * * * *

Two wives: one in Petersburg, the other in Kertch. Constant rows, threats, telegrams. They nearly reduce him to suicide. At last he finds a way: he settles them both in the same house. They are perplexed, petrified; they grow silent and quiet down.

* * * * *

An officer and his wife went to the baths together, and both were bathed by the orderly, whom they evidently did not consider a man.

* * * * *

A government clerk gave his son a thrashing because he had only obtained five marks in all his subjects at school. It seemed to him not good enough. When he was told that he was in the wrong, that five is the highest mark obtainable, he thrashed his son again—out of vexation with himself.

* * * * *

A very good man has such a face that people take him for a detective; he is suspected of having stolen shirt-studs.

* * * * *

A serious phlegmatic doctor fell in love with a girl who danced very well, and, to please her, he started to learn a mazurka.

* * * * *

—From Anton Chekhov’s Note-Books.

W.G. Sebald Reads from His Novel Austerlitz at the 92nd Street Y (Video)

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W. G. Sebald reading from his novel Austerlitz at 92nd Street Y. October 15, 2001, just two months before his death.

He later takes questions (beginning at the 28 minute mark), including a discussion of how he uses photography in his work. Susan Sontag then takes a question in which she addresses “cowboy rhetoric” after 9/11. They then discuss which of their books might be their “favorite.”

(Via prefer-not-to on Twitter).

Double Borges (Books Acquired, 9.13.2013)

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I was lucky enough this past Friday the 13th to pick up two Borges volumes, lovely twins with tactile covers, running over 500 pages each—they swallow a lot of Borges books I already own (although curiously leave out entire collections). I found a heartfelt note from mother to son in one the nonfiction collection, where she explains the difficulty she had with the book. I have my own Borges anxieties. Two from the collections: first, from the fiction and then the start of a list from the nonfiction.

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“Bliss” (Donald Barthelme)

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Bliss: A condition of extreme happiness, euphoria. The nakedness of young women, especially in pairs (that is to say, a plenitude), often produces bliss in the eye of the beholder, male or female. A delight, let us confess the fact, and that is why we are considering all of the different ways in which this delight maybe conceptualized, in the privacy of our studies, or in airport bars where the dry, thin drinks cost too much. There is not enough delight. Doubtless naked young women think the same sort of thoughts, in the privacy of their studies,or other sorts of thoughts obscure to us. Maybe they just sit there, in their studies studying their own beauty, the beauty of a naked thumb, a passionate, interestingly historied wrist …

Recent Stuff I’ve Found in Books

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So this Friday, I bought two enormous fat thick Penguin volumes of Jorge Luis Borges in utterly pristine condition (fictions and non-). I own other books that cover some of the material here, but 1100+ pages of JLB is hard to pass up (especially used, especially when I have store credit).

And then today, I was made privy to this lovely Flickr set, “Things found in books,” and thought I’d play along.

So back to Borges: I was somewhat touched by this note (above) I found in the nonfiction collection: Mom sends the book to her son so he “may understand it,” “this most difficult book”; mom also reports it “very hard to read” and appends a frowny face.

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Maybe a week or two before, I found this lovely little wisp of paper:

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In Vlad Nabokov’s Lectures on Don Quixote:

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Which reminded me of this James Joyce clipping—not so recent, I’ll admit, but still carefully placed as a bookmark in a Finnegans Wake guide:

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Okay, annotations, more properly:

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Do most people leave stuff in books? I think most bibliophiles do. (Forgive the snobbish italics there. I’m sure there are bibliophiles who don’t, of course). I have a habit of never reusing a bookmark, so that when I pull out a volume there’s some little tag there that acts as a third point (along with the text and my addled brain) to help triangulate the reading experience (the concrete circumstances of the reading process, the where, the when, the how much, etc.).

And so, after finishing Pynchon’s Against the Day a few weeks ago, I resolved to return to Mason & Dixon. Pulling out my copy,  where I found an entry ticket to Wat Phra Ram in Ayutthaya. I’m pretty sure I bought the book in Chiang Mai (after buying V. in Bangkok; books were the only thing I ever thought were expensive in Thailand).

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A few weeks ago my grandmother let me take one of my grandfather’s favorite books with me when I left her house, a Walt Kelly collection.

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I was thrilled to find inside the Pogo volume the syllabus of my grandfather’s college chemistry class from the Fall of 1947:

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And some of his notes (cryptic to me, but endearing):

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I think the best part about finding my grandfather’s old syllabus tucked away into a book he loved is knowing that we shared a habit.

“The thingness of books” (From Chrostowska’s Novel Permission)

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The thingness of books, especially of many books kept in a small space, stacked high without rhyme or reason, can become impressive. I worry about being oppressed by the books I own––quite different from being oppressed by the ownership of books. There are days when I am certainly very oppressed by the presence of so many books in such a small space. There is really no more room for me with them around, just as there is no room for more books with me around. Yet I keep introducing new books, and reintroducing books that have either fallen or been misplaced and have now been picked up or found, or those I have lent (both with relief at the extra space and with apprehension at never seen them again) and that have just been returned to me. So now: loads and loads of books everywhere, and the fear that they will all come falling down one moment as I am passing through (or edging through) or sitting or (worse) dozing in my armchair, and that I or (more so) that they might be injured in the fall. The idea of all those books tipping over or (even) a shelf detaching itself from the wall and crashing to the floor, is positively nerve-wracking. Every time a book is taken off the shelf, transposed or put back I feel I am pushing my luck. I have so far been unusually lucky in avoiding an avalanche of book matter. I do believe a little order goes a long way, and that the ordering of books and maintaining always some semblance of order are possibly the best way of obviating the clutter typical of book-laden apartments. One really cannot speak of a book collection without having taken stock and organized and subjected one’s books to a more or less logical and consistent access-and-retrieval system. And apartments where the number of books impedes one’s access to them and exceeds a sustainable human-to-book ratio, books attract a frightful degree of clutter in a category unto itself. If it were merely dust and cobwebs everything would still be manageable; but a book heaven that has not been whipped into shape invites its owner to let go of themselves, is an invitation to physical sloth, if not intellectual sloth and downright mental confusion (too many books in too much chaos too often proves deadly for a thinking brain). The typical flat where books predominate, hence a space dominated by books, sooner or later adapts to the physical dimensions of books and reconfigures itself to accommodate even more of them––that is, ceases to be a flat and becomes a library. The sole occupant of such a space is, properly speaking, sharing accommodation. Without realizing it, this inhabitant has already given up many of the advantages of living alone. For starters, there is the uncontrollable, self-begetting clutter. You can deceive yourself that you could straighten up any day, but the mess that comes with the preponderance of books is addictive and ineradicable. It takes considerable exertion of the will to alter this reality. Similarly you may claim to be free to move out any day, to leave the mass and cramped conditions behind, but the truth is only too material: you are not going anywhere as long as you hold on to this many books. There is finally, the sheer lack of space for independent thought. These towers of intellect are known for their diminishing effects. You feel dwarfed both physically and mentally, and when this inequality in stature becomes too great you are done for as an independent thinker. Intellectual inferiority won’t let you scale the shoulders of giants to see further than them.

–From Sylwia Chrostowska’s novel Permission.