The Burial of the Sardine, c. 1812–19 by Francisco Goya (1746-1828)
Mardi Gras, 1943 by André Derain (1880 – 1954).
Small Portrait, 1950 by Kay Sage (1898-1963)
The Mysterious Garden, 1911 by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh (1864–1933)
The Doors of Perception, 1955, Aldous Huxley. Perennial Library (1970). Cover design by Pat Steir. 79 pages.
Here’s Huxley on mescaline, marveling at the folds of cloth in Botticelli’s Judith:
Civilized human beings wear clothes, therefore there can be no portraiture, no mythological or historical storytelling without representations of folded textiles. But though it may account for the origins, mere tailoring can never explain the luxuriant development of drapery as a major theme of all the plastic arts. Artists, it is obvious, have always loved drapery for its own sake – or, rather, for their own. When you paint or carve drapery, you are painting or carving forms which, for all practical purposes, are nonrepresentational-the kind of unconditioned forms on which artists even in the most naturalistic tradition like to let themselves go. In the average Madonna or Apostle the strictly human, fully representational element accounts for about ten per cent of the whole. All the rest consists of many colored variations on the inexhaustible theme of crumpled wool or linen. And these non-representational nine-tenths of a Madonna or an Apostle may be just as important qualitatively as they are in quantity. Very often they set the tone of the whole work of art, they state the key in which the theme is being rendered, they express the mood, the temperament, the attitude to life of the artist. Stoical serenity reveals itself in the smooth surfaces, the broad untortured folds of Piero’s draperies. Torn between fact and wish, between cynicism and idealism, Bernini tempers the all but caricatural verisimilitude of his faces with enormous sartorial abstractions, which are the embodiment, in stone or bronze, of the everlasting commonplaces of rhetoric – the heroism, the holiness, the sublimity to which mankind perpetually aspires, for the most part in vain. And here are El Greco’s disquietingly visceral skirts and mantles; here are the sharp, twisting, flame-like folds in which Cosimo Tura clothes his figures: in the first, traditional spirituality breaks down into a nameless physiological yearning; in the second, there writhes an agonized sense of the world’s essential strangeness and hostility. Or consider Watteau; his men and women play lutes, get ready for balls and harlequinades, embark, on velvet lawns and under noble trees, for the Cythera of every lover’s dream; their enormous melancholy and the flayed, excruciating sensibility of their creator find expression, not in the actions recorded, not in the gestures and the faces portrayed, but in the relief and texture of their taffeta skirts, their satin capes and doublets. Not an inch of smooth surface here, not a moment of peace or confidence, only a silken wilderness of countless tiny pleats and wrinkles, with an incessant modulation – inner uncertainty rendered with the perfect assurance of a master hand – of tone into tone, of one indeterminate color into another. In life, man proposes, God disposes. In the plastic arts the proposing is done by the subject matter; that which disposes is ultimately the artist’s temperament, proximately (at least in portraiture, history and genre) the carved or painted drapery. Between them, these two may decree that a fete galante shall move to tears, that a crucifixion shall be serene to the point of cheerfulness, that a stigmatization shall be almost intolerably sexy, that the likeness of a prodigy of female brainlessness (I am thinking now of Ingres’ incomparable Mme. Moitessier) shall express the austerest, the most uncompromising intellectuality.
The Portrait, 1935 by Rene Magritte (1898-1967)
The Frog in the Throat by Markus Werner is forthcoming in translation by Michael Hofmann. Publisher NYRB’s blurb:
In a small town in Switzerland, Franz—ex-clergyman, ex-husband, current counselor of locals at loose ends— is being haunted by his recently deceased father, Klement. In life, Franz was caught cheating on his wife and defrocked, after which Klement never spoke to him again. In death, Klement visits his son in the form of a frog in the throat, choking him, yes, but also giving voice to an old dairy farmer devoted to the old ways, forever railing against his son and the whole modern mess he represents.
The same can be said of this novel, in which these two voices clash, harmonize, and ultimately offer up all the mutual recognition and incomprehension that is family life. A miniature tragicomic masterpiece, Markus Werner’s second novel is as bursting with life as a Dickens novel: not only Franz’s high-strung shenanigans and the father’s settled life among the cattle, but the lives of his sister and brother and the land all around.
As in all of Werner’s work, the world looks grim (“I sit around, I drink, I brood, I pat myself down for flaws and find many and each evening I say: Starting tomorrow, I’m going to get a grip on myself”) but never less than comic—a view captured marvelously in Michael Hofmann’s vivid translation.
Rainbows: March, 1975 by Peter Lister (b. 1933)
March, 1979 by Alex Colville (1920-2013)
From The Royal Tenenbaums, 2001. Directed by Wes Anderson. Cinematography by Robert D. Yeoman. Via Screenmusings. RIP Gene Hackman.
“Conscience”
by
Italo Calvino
translated by Tim Parks
Came a war and a guy called Luigi asked if he could go, as a volunteer.
Everyone was full of praise. Luigi went to the place where they were handing out the rifles, took one and said: ‘Now I’m going to go and kill a guy called Alberto.’
They asked him who Alberto was.
‘An enemy,’ he answered, ‘an enemy of mine.’
They explained to him that he was supposed to be killing enemies of a certain type, not whoever he felt like.
‘So?’ said Luigi. ‘You think I’m dumb? This Alberto is precisely that type, one of them. When I heard you were going to war against that lot, I thought: I’ll go too, that way I can kill Alberto. That’s why I came. I know that Alberto: he’s a crook. He betrayed me, for next to nothing he made me make a fool of myself with a woman. It’s an old story. If you don’t believe me, I’ll tell you the whole thing.’
They said fine, it was okay.
‘Right then,’ said Luigi, ‘tell me where Alberto is and I’ll go there and I’ll fight.’
They said they didn’t know.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Luigi said. ‘I’ll find someone to tell me. Sooner or later I’ll catch up with him.’
They said he couldn’t do that, he had to go and fight where they sent him, and kill whoever happened to be there. They didn’t know anything about this Alberto.
‘You see,’ Luigi insisted, ‘I really will have to tell you the story. Because that guy is a real crook and you’re doing the right thing going to fight against him.’
But the others didn’t want to know.
Luigi couldn’t see reason: ‘Sorry, it may be all the same to you if I kill one enemy or another, but I’d be upset if I killed someone who had nothing to do with Alberto.’
The others lost their patience. One of them gave him a good talking to and explained what war was all about and how you couldn’t go and kill the particular enemy you wanted to.
Luigi shrugged. ‘If that’s how it is,’ he said, ‘you can count me out.’
‘You’re in and you’re staying in,’ they shouted.
‘Forward march, one-two, one-two!’ And they sent him off to war.
Luigi wasn’t happy. He’d kill people, offhand, just to see if he might get Alberto, or one of his family. They gave him a medal for every enemy he killed, but he wasn’t happy. ‘If I don’t kill Alberto,’ he thought, ‘I’ll have killed a load of people for nothing.’ And he felt bad.
Meantime they were giving him one medal after another, silver, gold, everything.
Luigi thought: ‘Kill some today, kill some tomorrow, there’ll be less of them, that crook’s turn is bound to come.’
But the enemy surrendered before Luigi could find Alberto. He felt bad he’d killed so many people for nothing, and since they were at peace now he put all his medals in a bag and went around enemy country giving them away to the wives and children of the dead.
Going around like this, he ran into Alberto.
‘Good,’ he said, ‘better late than never,’ and he killed him.
That was when they arrested him, tried him for murder and hanged him. At the trial he said over and over that he had done it to settle his conscience, but nobody listened to him.
El mundo mágico de los mayas (The Magical World of the Mayas), 1964 by Leonora Carrington (1917-2011)
A weeks-long back-and-forth with a colleague about certain flavors of Modernist novels led to this colleague, a friend really, to come by my office with a stack of about 80 pages he’d printed, front and back, demanding that I take a look at some utter nonsense, probably the kind of nonsense I’d abide. This particular nonsense was a printed .pdf of Camilo José Cela’s 1988 novel Cristo versus Arizona in the original Spanish. “It’s all just one long sentence!” my colleague declared. I was immediately intrigued, and am still on the lookout for Martin Sokolinsky’s 2007 English translation. Wikipedia, cribbing the Publisher’s Weekly review of that translation describes Christ Versus Arizona as “set in the American Old West during the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881. It consists of a monologue in one long sentence, inside the head of Wendell Liverpool Espana, who is the son of a prostitute and observes the gunfight.” I expressed my delight with the concept. My colleague then reverted to his argument, which, I will badly summarize as something like, All these Modernists tried this nonsense and some point just to show off at the expense of the reader. He extolled again the virtues of Dubliners over Ulysses, a book with its head in its ass; he decried Faulkner’s worst tendencies—a gifted writer who could offer up a perfect novel and then birth an abomination like The Sound and the Fury. Cristo versus Arizona, he assured me, was Cela’s abomination; he then urged me to read Cela’s masterpiece, La colmena, which he translated as The Beehive. And then I had an 11:00am class to attend to.
Driving home I realized that I might actually have a copy of an English translation of La colmena. I did: Anthony Kerrigan’s translation, The Hive. I pulled it out, started reading, and kept going. I love it! The next day my colleague brought in two Cela novels he’d read (and annotated the hell out of) in graduate school: La colmena and La familia de Pascual Duarte. I think that was on a Thursday. On Friday I browsed a used bookstore and picked up Kerrigan’s translation of Cela’s The Family of Pascual Duarte (with a cool Milton Glaser cover). I also picked up Ivan Ângelo’s novel The Celebration (in translation by Thomas Colchie); I’ve gotten to the point where I just scoop up any of the Avon Bard Latin American translations when I come across them — which is what I did a week later when I browsed a different used bookstore (or, really, a different location of the same booksellers; I was right next to this location because several of my son’s paintings were exhibited in a gallery nearby as part of a contest he had entered a few months ago without telling us (these details are not important to the story; my son is a talented painter though and I am proud).
Which is what I did a week later, scoop up another Avon Bard Latin American translation — this time Macho Camacho’s Beat by Luis Rafael Sánchez, in translation by Gregory Rabassa. I also picked up Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (trans. Lysander Kemp), which I’ve been meaning to read for a while now, and another Cela — Mrs. Caldwell Speaks to Her Son (trans. by J. S. Bernstein).
And so well back to Camilo José Cela then–I’m almost finished with The Hive, delayed at times by checking in against the original La colmena, mostly to get a sense of some of choices the translator made, a process I’m looking forward to repeating again with The Family of Pascual Duarte, a process that’s included riffing on the writing with my colleague, my friend who brought by a big stack of papers, a ridiculous pile of papers, that one-word sentence of a novel, Cristo versus Arizona, the novel I would love to acquire soon.
Pissing in the Snow & Other Ozark Folktales, collected and transcribed by Vance Randolph with annotations by Frank A. Hoffmann. Avon Bard (1977). No cover artist credited. 239 pages. A tale from the collection:
“Have You Ever Been Diddled?”
Told by J. L. Russell, Harrison, Ark., April, 1950. He heard this one near Berryville, Ark., in the 1890’s.
One time there was a town girl and a country girl got to talking about the boys they had went with. The town girl told what kind of a car her boyfriends used to drive, and how much money their folks has got. But the country girl didn’t take no interest in things like that, and she says the fellows are always trying to get into her pants.
So finally the town girl says, “Have you ever been diddled?” The country girl giggled, and she says yes, a little bit.
“How much?” says the town girl. “Oh, about like that,” says the country girl, and she held up her finger to show an inch, or maybe an inch and a half.
The town girl just laughed, and pretty soon the country girl says, “Have you ever been diddled?” The town girl says of course she has, lots of times. “How much?” says the country girl. “Oh, about like that,” says the town girl, and she marked off about eight inches, or maybe nine.
The country girl just set there goggle-eyed, and she drawed a deep breath. “My God,” says the country girl, “that ain’t diddling! Why, you’ve been fucked!”
[J1805.5]
1, It upset me deeply, reading Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate. It fucked me up a little bit, and then a little bit more, addicted to reading it as I was over two weeks in a new year.
2, What is it about, Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate? I mean, you probably won’t like it, but that wasn’t the stupid rhetorical question that led this point. (And also but maybe like, you will like it.) Interstate was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award. It didn’t win. The NBA’s website’s one-sentence summary fucks up: “In the author’s first novel since Frog, a Finalist for the National Book Award, a father mentally replays, in eight variations, the shooting of his daughters on an interstate highway.”
3, There is (or is it are?) one too many esses in the NBA’s summary of Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate—there are two daughters, plural, but only one is shot, and shot tragically, awfully, fatally—and really, as its variations play out, it’s not entirely clear if anyone was shot, if anyone was even on the highway, if anyone was even real. Are all the so-called events of the novel simply (there’s no simply about it) in the narrator’s imagination? “…but there I go again, the world’s easiest and most desirable copy out, the dream,” muses the narrator at one point. Not even a dream though, it’s all just words.
4, It’s all “just” words, and if someone told me they read and hated Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate, I’d shrug and ask if they made it all the way through all the words and still hated it. If someone told me that they made it all the way through Interstate and found it to be a strange and unappealing writing experiment, I’d mildly agree with them, and then tell them that I loved that particular flavor and if they didn’t like that particular flavor, well, cool.
5, If someone read all the words in Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate and concluded that it seemed like an ambitious and highly-achieved creative writing exercise — writing experiment, rather — I’d likely initially agree and then hedge a bit before mumbling something like, I don’t think it was an exercise or experiment on the author Stephen Dixon’s part. It might make for experimental reading, but I think he absolutely knew what he was doing; this wasn’t practice or exercise — it was the real thing.
6, I have, thus far, done a lousy job, not even really a job, of describing the force of language in Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate. Normally I’d crib a few choice passages—and to be clear, Interstate s fat and juicy with choice passages—but we are talking about long, twisty, tangled passages, sentences that go on for pages, sentences that find the predicate verb sundered for a few paragraphs from its eventual object, sentences that move us through thought, how divergent thought can be how, how imprecise, indirect, yet still sharp and often painful. An easy, lazy comparison would be to liken Dixon’s paragraphs to Thomas Bernhard’s (although Dixon denied the influence, much like William Gaddis did in his final novel)—there’s a different flavor here but our guys are working in a similar mode. (Think too of László Krasznahorkai or Gabriel García Márquez or Faulkner or Mauro Javier Cárdenas or any number of practitioners of the long paragraph). John Domini, in his contemporary review in the Portland Oregonian (reprinted in his excellent collection The Sea-God’s Herb) does a better job of describing Dixon’s style than I can do:
Characters talk themselves through backwaters of memory (sometimes creating comic relief) or sail into dreamy what-ifs, all in order to put off some looming and drear inevitability. In conversation, one may mention an important insight that he or she has to share, then spiral away through a half-dozen distractions before revealing what matters. The format feels like a natural fit to the shuttered claustrophobia of worry and loss. So do the jam-packed paragraphs, sometimes running several pages without a break. Better still, these blocks of talky phrasing flicker with light, even (every now and again) with happier possibilities.”
(Maybe I just wanted to quote that lovely phrase of Domini’s, “blocks of talky phrasing flicker with light.”)
7, “Better still, these blocks of talky phrasing flicker with light, even (every now and again) with happier possibilities,” Domini wrote of Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate. The last of Dixon’s eight Interstates is an unexpected gift — a happy ending, or, rather a banal ending, a plain ending, an ending without tragedy or comedy or epic heroism. An ending where everyone gets to bed in time to fit in a little light reading before shuteye. It sounds hokey when I write it out, but there’s nothing trite about the conclusion. The reader purchases this moment of catharsis from all the terror (and horrifying comedy, which I’ve neglected in this riff and will continue to neglect) — the reader purchases the cathartic conclusion from the preceding horror.
8, I wonder how I might have reacted to Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate if I had read it, say, when it was first published, back when I was a junior in high school. Or how would I have reacted to it ten years after that, not yet a parent? (And writing these thoughts out now, I realize that, more than anything by Bernhard or Krasznahorkai or Faulkner or the other Dixon I’ve read, Interstate most reminds me of (at least at this moment that I write) of Frank Capra’s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life. I’ve watched It’s a Wonderful Life once a year for the past four decades, finding it strangely different every few years — first baffling and even a bit scary, then boring, then exasperating, infuriating even, then schmaltzy, sentimental, ludicrous, and then magical, endearing, heartbreaking, perfect–I’ve veered off course, where was I?) I wonder how being a parent has colored my psychic engagement with the novel Interstate? I was not so much manipulated by the tragedy of losing a child through violent, chaotic, meaningless death but rather the more banal tragedy the novel repeatedly engages — losing a child through half-neglect, through half-listening, through selfishness, through an inability to focus on now — not really so much losing a child but losing out on connections, memories, time you’ll never get back. It fucked me up, Interstate, and I don’t think I’d like to go down its road again — but I loved it. Very highly recommended.
Simpatía (La rabia del gato) (Sympathy, the Cat’s Rage), 1955 by Remedios Varo (1908-1963)
On another distant December when the house was inaugurated, he had seen from that terrace the line of the hallucinated isles of the Antilles which someone pointed out to him in the showcase of the sea, he had seen the perfumed volcano of Martinique, over there general, he had seen the tuberculosis hospital, the gigantic black man with a lace blouse selling bouquets of gardenias to governors’ wives on the church steps, he had seen the infernal market of Paramaribo, there general, the crabs that came out of the sea and up through the toilets, climbing up onto the tables of ice cream parlors, the diamonds embedded in the teeth of black grandmothers who sold heads of Indians and ginger roots sitting on their safe buttocks under the drenching rain, he had see the solid gold cows on Tanaguarena beach general, the blind visionary of La Guayra who charged two reals to scare off the blandishments of death with a one-string violin, he had seen Trinidad’s burning August, automobiles going the wrong way, the green Hindus who shat in the middle of the street in front of their shops with genuine silkworm shirts and mandarins carved from the whole tusk of an elephant, he had seen Haiti’s nightmare, its blue dogs, the oxcart that collected the dead off the streets at dawn, he had seen the rebirth of Dutch tulips in the gasoline drums of Curacao, the windmill houses with roofs built for snow, the mysterious ocean liner that passed through the center of the city among the hotel kitchens, he had seen the stone enclosure of Cartagena de Indias, its bay closed off by a chain, the light lingering on the balconies, the filthy horses of the hacks who still yawned for the viceroys’ fodder, its smell of shit general sir, how marvelous, tell me, isn’t the world large, and it was, really, and not just large but insidious, because if he went up to the house on the reefs in December it was not to pass the time with those refugees whom he detested as much as his own image in the mirror of misfortune but to be there at the moment of miracles when the December light came out, mother—true and he could see once more the whole universe of the Antilles from Barbados to Veracruz, and then he would forget who had the double-three piece and go to the overlook to contemplate the line of islands as lunatic as sleeping crocodiles in the cistern of the sea, and contemplating the islands he evoked again and relived that historic October Friday when he left his room at dawn and discovered that everybody in the presidential palace was wearing a red biretta, that the new concubines were sweeping the parlors and changing the water in the cages wearing red birettas, that the milkers in the stables, the sentries in their boxes, the cripples on the stairs and the lepers in the rose beds were going about with the red birettas of a carnival Sunday, so he began to look into what had happened to the world while he was sleeping for the people in his house and the inhabitants of the city to be going around wearing red birettas and dragging a string of jingle bells everywhere, and finally he found someone to tell him the truth general sir, that some strangers had arrived who gabbled in funny old talk because they made the word for sea feminine and not masculine, they called macaws poll parrots, canoes rafts, harpoons javelins, and when they saw us going out to greet them and swim around their ships they climbed up onto the yardarms and shouted to each other look there how well-formed, of beauteous body and fine face, and thick-haired and almost like horsehair silk, and when they saw that we were painted so as not to get sunburned they got all excited like wet little parrots and shouted look there how they daub themselves gray, and they are the hue of canary birds, not white nor yet black, and what there be of them, and we didn’t understand why the hell they were making so much fun of us general sir since we were just as normal as the day our mothers bore us and on the other hand they were decked out like the jack of clubs in all that heat, which they made feminine the way Dutch smugglers do, and they wore their hair like women even though they were all men and they shouted that they didn’t understand us in Christian tongue when they were the ones who couldn’t understand what we were shouting, and then they came toward us in their canoes which they called rafts, as we said before, and they were amazed that our harpoons had a shad bone for a tip which they called a fishy tooth, and we traded everything we had for these red birettas and these strings of glass beads that we hung around our necks to please them, and also for these brass bells that can’t be worth more than a penny and for chamber pots and eyeglasses and other goods from Flanders, of the cheapest sort general sir, and since we saw that they were good people and men of good will we went on leading them to the beach without their realizing it, but the trouble was that among the I’ll swap you this for that and that for the other a wild motherfucking trade grew up and after a while everybody was swapping his parrots, his tobacco, his wads of chocolate, his iguana eggs, everything God ever created, because they took and gave everything willingly, and they even wanted to trade a velvet doublet for one of us to show off in Europeland, just imagine general, what a wild affair, but he was so confused that he could not decide whether that lunatic business came within the incumbency of his government, so he went back to his bedroom, opened the window that looked out onto the sea so that perhaps he might discover some new light to shed on the mix-up they had told him about, and he saw the usual battleship that the marines had left behind at the dock, and beyond the battleship, anchored in the shadowy sea, he saw the three caravels.
From Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch in translation by Gregory Rabassa.
Biblioklept 