Detail from photograph of William T. Vollmann by Alexander Sorondo
Just over a year ago, Alexander Sorondo published a long profile of William Vollmann in The Metropolitan Review. Today, at his website Big Reader Bad Grades, Sorondo has published an account of his recent visit to Vollmann out in Sacramento. Titled “We Always Leave Things Unfinished,” and ostensibly about Vollmann’s forthcoming CIA novel A Table for Fortune, Sorondo’s piece reads like a valediction to a departing hero. Vollmann, sick with cancer, laments his “chemo mind” throughout the interview — less a formal interview, really, than Sorondo taking with a brilliant and tired mind — he, Sorondo, captures in words what I think hanging out with Vollmann for a spell might feel like. Anger, sadness, and resignation weaves through the piece, but it’s leavened with moments of bright cheer (Vollmann blithely greeting everyone he passes) or deadpan humor. Consider this passage, where Vollmann recounts what has to have been the worst year of his life, beginning with the death of his daughter:
“In twenty-twenty-twooo,” like he’s climbing down into the memory, Lisa died, Viking fired me, and—for some reason I don’t understand—Ohio State fired me.” The school had been buying his manuscripts. That amounted to “ten thousand a year…less twenty percent for my manuscript dealer.”
We sit with that a moment. I’m thinking back to the profile I wrote last year. Trying to remember if he’s reciting these losses by sequence or scale.
“You got hit by a car, too, right?”
“Yeah that too.”
There’s so much pain and loss there, but the last bit of dialogue made me laugh out loud.
Perhaps the saddest bit in the interview, from a selfish reader’s perspective, is Vollmann acknowledging that he will likely not finish what is arguably his most ambitious project:
“Do you feel any pressure to finish Seven Dreams?”
“I’m not gonna touch it.” Resigned and certain. He says finishing even one of the two remaining volumes would likely take “more time than I have left.” Plus the fights it’ll prompt with his publishers. “About a quarter of the last one is completed, and then much less of the other one.”
“I don’t want it to come out looking like a piece of crap so,” he flaps a hand, hits a thigh, “just forget it.”
I was looking for something else when I found this brief profile of the Minutemen in the December 1985 issue of SPIN (I didn’t find the thing I was looking for). The article, by Forced Exposure stalwart Byron Coley, focuses on the Minutemen’s attempt to “sell out” with their record 3-Way Tie (For Last). The record, like the issue of SPIN, was released in December 1985.
3-Way Tie ended up being the last studio album by the Minutemen. Singer/guitarist D. Boon died tragically right after its release. From Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life:
[Mike] Watt’s phone rang early the following morning: December 23, 1985. It was D. Boon’s dad. Boon’s girlfriend had been driving the band’s tour van, her sister in the passenger seat and a feverish Boon sleeping in the back. At around four in the morning, Boon’s girlfriend fell asleep at the wheel. The van crashed and flipped; Boon was thrown out the back door and broke his neck. He died instantly.
I looked through the next two issues of SPIN to see if there was any mention of Boon’s passing but didn’t find anything (there was a feature on Mötley Crüe in the Jan. 1986 issue tastelessly titled “Asleep at the Wheel” and a long profile on crack (the drug) in the Feb. ’86 issue).
Here is the article (followed by a transcription):
“Minute by Minutemen”
Article by Byron “The Lunk” Coley
Born in the backyards of San Pedro, California, at the dawn of the ’80s, the Minutemen were weaned on a pabulum of juices milked from the brains of Blue Öyster Cult and Wire. Back then, the standard Minutemen song would nastily pebble your head like a short burst of fire from a BB machine gun. Lyrics were composed in a dreamy political shorthand that thrust a naked, pimply rump in the face of that New America taking shape under Reagan’s malignant tutelage.
“I believe that when General George A. Custer—American Indian fighter—died / He died with shit in his pants,” went one of their most verbose early numbers. Reading their lyrics, you got the impression that every other word had been removed. Symbol rubbed symbol without the protective casing of articles, verbs, or adjectives; bared nerve touched bared nerve and the listener shivered. The group’s early music was equally stark.
Bassist Mike Watt and drummer George Hurley threw out chunks of sustained beat, while guitarist/vocalist D. Boon spazzed atop this writhing platform like a whale undergoing electroshock. His guitar would spit out a riff, suck it back in, gag on it, stutter for a second, repeat this process once, and the song would be over. See, when the Minutemen began, their name referred as much to technique as it did to politics. They were literal sixty-second men.
And then they weren’t.
“We sold our souls to the dollar,” recalls Watt. “We knew we’d never have a hit unless we wrote some longer songs. So we did.” Canny capitalists that they are, the Minutemen’s drive to snare a buck included such sure-to-please titles as “Futurism Restated,” “Mutiny in Jonestown,” and “Dreams Are Free, Motherfucker.” Need I add that the band’s concept of compromised ethics has little to do with yours and mine?
While infra-unit arguments over which member is selling out harder and faster continue (“Watt, easily,” says Boon. “No question—Boon,” says Watt), the point is still basically moot. True, the band’s appeal has expanded as its sound encompassed funk and jazz elements, grafting these onto a sturdy, rockin’ body already in place. Even to suggest that they’ve made anything approaching a full-fledged commercial move, however, is to ignore their original material’s basic spiritual fiber.
The band’s last record, Project: Mersh, featured a cover painting by Boon that pictured record-company executives trying to figure out how to boost the Minutemen’s sales. From the standpoint of pure sonics, a casual listener might think this search had borne fruit. Mersh contains a sock-it-to-me remake of Steppenwolf’s “Hey Lawdy Mama” (which the band had hoped to record with original vocalist John Kay) and some playing that’s funkily catchy in extremis.
A video of “King of the Hill” graphically demonstrates just why the band sits so far from the mainstream. In it, D. Boon portrays the tyrant of a small country who tosses barbecue scraps to his people and sucks up to both the US and the USSR. Eventually, King Boon is overthrown (literally) and rolls down a hillside while his former subjects dodge his careening carcass and sing the praises of one-worldism. Its message is potent, direct, and far too radical for these namby-pamby times. You’ll not likely see it on MTV soon.
It’s equally unlikely that you’ll soon hear the Minutemen on your big local FM station, either, for no matter how snappy their material sounds, every syllable they sing begs you to shuck the chains that bind. Unfortunately, this is an activity for which few radio stations can find commercial sanction, so you’ll probably have to investigate the Minutemen’s powerful mojo in the privacy of your own home.
Start your reeducation with the band’s latest, Three Way Tie for Last (SST). Choice cover versions of Creedence’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” and Blue Öyster Cult’s “Red and the Black” provide easy handles with which to aurally grasp the slab, and it’s the Minutemen’s most profoundly populist effort yet. You really oughta hear it.
Five years ago, I was fortunate enough to interview Margaret Carson about her translation of a collection of the artist Remedios Varo’s written work. Margaret has since expanded on that collection, adding new material from her dive into Varo’s archives, resulting in On Homo rodans and Other Writings, new this summer from Wakefield Press.On Homo rodans and Other Writings offers readers a fascinating trip through Varo’s imagination. Brimming with impossible images, surreal jokes, and dreamy fragments, the work is more than just an addendum to Varo’s career as an artist. I highly recommend it to those interested in surrealist writing in general. Margaret was kind (and patient!) enough to talk with me again over the course of a few weeks via email. I am grateful for her generosity and for her work in bringing Varo’s words to monoglots such as myself.
In addition to her Varo books, Margaret Carson’s translations include Sergio Chejfec’s Baroni, A Journeyand My Two Worlds. She is Associate Professor in the Modern Languages Department at Borough of Manhattan Community College, The City University of New York.
Photograph of Margaret Carson by Beowulf Sheehan.
Biblioklept: Margaret, congratulations on the publication of On Homo rodans and Other Writings, the expanded edition of your English translation of Remedios Varo’s writings! Many of our readers might be familiar with Varo’s wonderful paintings but not know about her writing. How would you characterize the prose collected in On Homo rodans and Other Writings?
Margaret Carson: Thanks, it’s great to have the translation back in print! It’s mainly writings found after Remedios Varo’s death in notebooks and on loose pages. The writings are quite varied: several odd and delightful stories (three of them new to this edition), a fairy tale, letters to friends and strangers, her famous recipe “To Provoke Erotic Dreams,” a poem that invokes the moon, dream narratives, and a few other gems, such as the title piece, “On Homo rodans,” a faux anthropological treatise that accompanied her sculpture of a human-like torso on a giant wheel, made out of chicken, turkey and fish bones.
Homo rodans sculpture in its glass case. Photograph by Margaret Carson.
Varo’s extraordinary creativity and weird sense of humor come across just as much in her writings as in her paintings. I think readers fascinated by Varo, the artist, will also be won over by her gifts as a writer. Simply put, she’s as clever a writer as she is a painter.
Biblioklept: So, let’s get into the stories and other material new to this edition and how you came to translate it into English. Some of this material hasn’t been published before, even in Spanish. If my understanding is correct, Walter Gruen, Varo’s last life partner, donated a significant collection of her works to the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City in 2000. In 2018—after the publication of your translated collection Letters, Dreams & Other Writings—the Varo estate bequeathed more of Varo’s writings to the Museo de Arte Moderno. Is that right?
MC: Yes. In the early 2000s Walter Gruen and his wife Anna Alexandra Varsoviano (a friend of Varo’s who he married after the artist’s death) donated about thirty-eight of her works to the Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM), making it the largest repository of paintings by Varo in the world. Walter Gruen died in 2008, and Anna Alexandra Varsoviano in 2015. (I was lucky enough to meet them both in person: Walter Gruen in 2000 and Anna Alexandra Varsoviano some years later.) In her will, Anna Alexandra bequeathed a trove of Varo’s notebooks, letters, preparatory drawings, photos, and other items to MAM, many of which were displayed in 2018 in an exhibition celebrating the donation: Adictos A Remedios Varo: Nuevo Legado 2018. It was at that exhibition that I first saw Varo’s notebooks, open to pages containing narratives, letters and other pieces, in Varo’s own handwriting. I could instantly recognize them because I’d translated the same texts for Letters, Dreams and Other Writings, except for that book I used a collection of Varo’s writings published in Mexico in the 1990s, Cartas, sueños y otros textos, edited by the Spanish scholar Isabel Castells.
Because the new Wakefield edition mostly uses archival materials as its source, and isn’t a direct translation of texts from an existing book, the estate requested that we give it a new title. So, thinking about Varo’s tour-de-force anthropological spoof, we renamed it On Homo rodans and Other Writings.
A page from the Homo rodans manuscript. Photograph by Margaret Carson.
Biblioklept: What kind of access did the museum give you to the manuscript materials?
MC: When I requested an appointment to consult the archive at MAM, I indicated my area of interest: Varo’s notebooks and any stray papers relating to her writings. So when I visited for a few days in July 2022, an archivist assisted me by bringing out her notebooks one at a time as well as folders containing loose papers. You can’t imagine how excited I was not only to see but to touch these old, faded composition books and to turn their pages to discover what Varo had written or drawn on them. There are about a dozen notebooks in all, mostly school composition books for children. I was snapping photos right and left! I’m very grateful to the Museo and to their archivists for guiding me through the notebooks and for their interest in the project.
Cover of one of Varo’s notebooks. Photograph by Margaret Carson.
Biblioklept: Varo was born in Spain, and her painting career sparked in earnest in France, but she really flourished as a painter in Mexico. Her work seems to find a growing audience in the USA; do you have a sense of her reputation in Mexico?
MC: Remedios Varo came into her own as an artist in Mexico City; when she began to exhibit, she was an immediate success. Her first solo show, in 1956 at the Galería Diana, was a sell-out, as was a subsequent solo show in 1961. Sadly, Varo suddenly died in 1963. Her posthumous reputation is in large part due to Walter Gruen and his efforts to keep her in the public eye. The first catalog of her work, whose publication was overseen by Gruen and funded by Varo’s friend and patron Eva Sulzer, came out just three years after her death, in 1966, with contributions by some heavy hitters: the poet Octavio Paz, the French intellectual Roger Caillois, and the Mexican philosopher Juliana González, a personal friend of Varo’s. Since then, four editions of Varo’s catalogue raisonné have been published in Mexico, the last in 2008. (Alas, all are now out of print but available in many research libraries.) People are deeply fascinated by Varo’s paintings. Special exhibitions of her work at the Museo de Arte Moderno always draw record crowds (as they do in other cities as well, for example, the recent Remedios Varo: Science Fictions exhibition in Chicago, which was one of their best attended shows ever).
Biblioklept: Gruen seems to have led a fascinating life.
MC: Yes, but not without its tragedies. The little I know comes from Janet Kaplan’s biography of Varo, his obituary in the Mexican daily La Jornada, and from the Adictos a Remedios Varo catalog. Like Varo, he was fortunate to get out of war-torn Europe, but only after he experienced the worst. He was born in Austria, started medical school in the 1930s, got kicked out because he was Jewish, was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau and then Buchenwald. After liberation, he made his way to Mexico City with his wife Klari Willner and it was there that he met Varo and others in the European refugee community. His wife died in Mexico in a drowning accident in the late 1940s, while Varo was living in Venezuela. It was some time after Varo’s return to Mexico that she and Gruen got together. Gruen had established his record store by then, the Sala Margolín, which for decades was the essential go-to place for classical music fans in Mexico City.
A year after Varo’s death, in 1964, Gruen organized an exhibition of her work at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, and it’s at that show that Thomas Pynchon, on a trip to Mexico City, saw Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle /Bordando el manto terrestre, which was immortalized in the novel The Crying of Lot 49. Together with Anna Alexandra Varsoviano, Gruen worked to secure Varo’s legacy as an artist and to safeguard what she left behind. From the perspective of Varo’s writings, it was crucial that her notebooks and papers remain as a single cache of documents and not dispersed. After Varsoviano’s death, the entire archive including this collection of writings passed to the Museo de Arte Moderno.
Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle, 1961, Remedios Varo
Biblioklept: This new edition of Varo’s writings includes three stories that were previously unpublished, even in Spanish. Do you know why they weren’t published before now?
MC: No, I don’t know why. The stories are unquestionably in Varo’s handwriting, and they’re marvelous. It would be a good question to ask Walter Gruen or Anna Alexandra.
Biblioklept: Speaking of her handwriting—did you revise any of the material you’d already translated after seeing it in her manuscript?
MC: To some extent, yes. As I mentioned before, for Letters, Dreams …. (2018), I used as my source text a collection that had already been published in Mexico. As I was translating, I’d occasionally come across bracketed ellipses [. . .], and I wasn’t sure what was being signaled. Had a word or sentence in the original been cut, or was it illegible at that point? I found no editorial explanation, so I simply carried over the bracketed ellipses into the English.
In preparing this new edition, I made sure to look for those same bracketed passages in the manuscripts to see if I could discover what Varo had actually written. I found some wonderful things. All the ellipses in the Mistress Thrompston story, for example, were places where Varo had drawn weird mathematical formulas meant to be read as proper names. So now, instead of “[. . .] Magazine,” you’ll see that its name is “WTrons – X√yl Magazine.” The Marquis of Ornitobello’s daughter, whose name had been dropped completely, returns to the story: she’s called √Ax8. These are the little touches where you see Varo being Varo. She loved playing with math. In Disobedient Plant/Planta insumisashe even painted mathematical formulas into the hair of the scientist and into the tendrils of the plants. Happily, Wakefield Press was able to incorporate Varo’s mathematical doodles and other hand-drawn whimsies into the published book.
Disobedient Plant, 1958, Remedios Varo
Another kind of revision I made after seeing the manuscripts may seem trivial, but in all instances Varo wrote “etc.” not “et cetera,” so I restored “etc.” And in “On Homo rodans” she used the ligature “æ” in her invented Latin, so I restored that as well.
Something that surprised me on reading the original manuscripts was that Varo often wrote super-long sentences—what writing instructors would call “comma splices” or “run-ons.” I initially wanted to restore these sentences to their original length because in their raw state there’s a kind of fast-forward momentum. You get pulled along as she adds one thing after another to her narratives, almost breathlessly. But in the end, for the sake of readability, I normalized the punctuation a bit by breaking up some of the enormously long sentences.
There were maybe only one or two times when I changed the translation of a word after seeing that Varo had written something different from what the editor of the previous volume had transcribed. Nothing major. Of course, like all translators, I’m an obsessive reviser, so in preparing this new edition I couldn’t help but look over the previous translation to polish and tweak. I didn’t need the manuscripts for that. As they say, a translation is never finished….
Biblioklept: I’m curious if your “editor’s voice” clashed at all with your “translator’s voice” when it came to revising Varo’s comma splices and fused sentences. And were there clashes elsewhere, when it came to, say, new word choices?
MC: Hmm, I haven’t thought of the two roles clashing before. I think we worked pretty harmoniously together. The editor would have probably liked more time to revise the introduction and endnotes, and to think about the best way to order the texts within the book, while the translator, eager to get the translation back into print, was more like, “Let’s wrap up!”
Biblioklept: One section new to this edition are a handful of brief poemish texts collected as “Images in Words.” A few of these word-image-poem-texts (?!) contain strikethroughs and doodles, as you mentioned before. Many of these pieces feature phrases that correspond to motifs we see in Varo’s visual art (trees, pulleys, stars, knitters, etc.). To your knowledge, do these image fragments correspond to any of Varo’s paintings? Do you have a sense that these were “plans” for paintings–pieces of visual art that started in language first?
MC: It’s difficult to know with any certainty, but they do seem like plans for paintings that started off in language first. They could be Varo’s earliest ideas: flashes of images, possibly from dreams, that she developed as preliminary drawings and eventually, fully fleshed out in paintings.
When Varo was once asked if she was a writer as well as a painter, she replied, “I sometimes write as if I were making a sketch” (“A veces escribo como si trazase un boceto”).A lot has been made of that one sentence because it’s the only time we know of that Varo speaks of her writing. I used to think she was very modestly describing her writing as a whole, including her creative writing, but now I believe she was referring specifically to these poem-like fragments, these sketches in words. When an idea came to her, I imagine her grabbing her notebook and opening it to a blank page, sometimes to make a quick sketch, other times to jot down a few words. Sometimes she did both on the same page.
Do the fragments correspond to any paintings? Yes, if you’re familiar with her work, you can immediately make connections. For example, from the bottom of p. 131:
character from peeling wall participating in something with another character who is real
Metamorphosis
Mimicry
The abandoned room, someone inside the table, inside the armchair
as well, perhaps inside the wall — — — —
The first two lines seem to describe the painting Harmony / Armonía, in which there’s an ethereal figure emerging from a peeled-back wall to play with an object on a musical staff (a snail?). The other “real” character sits at a table across from the apparition and plays with a polyhedron-like object on the staff. Why did Varo cross the lines out? Walter Gruen speculated that it was because she had finished the painting.
Harmony, 1956, Remedios Varo
The next two lines refer to the well-known painting Mimesis / Mimetismo, in which she depicts a woman undergoing a metamorphosis – she’s taking on the characteristics of the chair she’s sitting in. (Side note: Varo’s catalogue raisonné translates the title of this painting as Mimesis, which isn’t wrong, but it makes me think more of the Erich Auerbach book and literary mimesis. I believe a better English translation would be “Mimicry,” as in insect mimicry, a phenomenon of particular interest to the surrealists. See Roger Caillois’s 1935 essay “Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire,” in the surrealist journal Minotaure).
They represent just one moment in the evolution of an artist’s idea. It’s said that Varo was very private in her studio practice. No one knows for sure, but it’s likely she used her notebooks (which also doubled as sketchbooks) at the earliest stages of a painting, when her ideas were hatching.
Biblioklept: Can you expand on how Varo was private in the studio?
MC: I can only talk about her studio in a limited way, from clues provided in photos and in a few accounts. I also talked a bit about Varo’s apartment-studio with Xabier Lizarraga Cruchaga, her godson, who as a boy used to visit Varo in her studio quite often (so she didn’t completely exclude visitors). Her studio was a room on the top floor of the building she lived in, accessible by a private flight of stairs. A wide doorway in the studio opened to a small, north-facing terrace where she kept plenty of plants. You can see the studio in a series of photos Kati Horna took of Varo for a magazine article that appeared in 1960. In the article, two photos show Varo at work, one at a drafting table and the other at her easel. The painting on the easel is Farewell /La despedida, with only the architectural elements of the painting in place (she would later add the departing lovers, their shadows, and the cat that looks on). Observe the white lump on the left side of the easel. That’s a piece of quartz. She apparently used quartz to incise fine lines into her paintings to expose the gesso underneath. Quartz comes up a few times in her writings as well. Let’s say she had an affinity for quartz and its mysterious qualities.
She also mentions her studio in one of her dream narratives, which begins like this:
“I dreamed I was asleep in my bedroom and a loud noise woke me up. The noise came from upstairs, from the studio, and it was as if someone were dragging a chair. I thought that this meant someone was trying to get in from the terrace and was pushing the armchair that was against the door.” (p. 100)
She goes on to narrate a terrifying dream, but note that she’s indirectly giving the basic layout of her apartment-studio.
As to her practices while at work in her studio, more and more is being written in English. In fact, for the first time ever, an in-depth investigation of her paintings by art conservators was done in connection with the recent Remedios Varo: Science Fictionsexhibition at the Art institute of Chicago. For an excellent overview of Varo’s approaches as an artist, and for descriptions of some of her techniques, check out this blog post by members of the AIC curatorial team.
Biblioklept: Varo didn’t strongly pursue exhibiting her art, and she didn’t publish any of her writing in her lifetime, right? Why do you think that was?
MC About her artwork, that’s not true. Varo was totally out there as an artist and very much interested throughout her career in exhibiting her work. As an emerging artist in the 1930s, she didn’t sit back and wait for things to happen. In the 1930s she moves to Barcelona, the home of the avant-garde in Spain, and joins artists who were radically breaking with whatever the conventions were back then. She’s on the map as an artist of note as early as 1936, when her paintings are included in the landmark Exposició Logicofobista in Barcelona. Later, after the Spanish Civil War breaks out and she moves to Paris, she’s in the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme and images of her work are published in important Surrealist journals such as Minotaure and Trajectoire du rêve. After the Nazi invasion of France, she flees Europe for Mexico City in 1941 and there’s a pause in her exhibitions (she turned to commercial art to make a living) until 1955, when she exhibits new paintings in a group show of women artists that includes Leonora Carrington and Alice Rahon.
Announcement for “Seis pintoras.” Photograph by Margaret Carson.
This is Varo’s breakthrough show in Mexico City. The following year she is offered her first solo show, which is a great success, leading to new commissions and to (among other things) the magazine article I mentioned above with photos by Kati Horna. In no way did she have a secret life as a painter.
Remedios Varo Wearing a Mask by Leonora Carrington, 1957. Photograph by Kati Horna.
We don’t know as much about her ambitions as a writer, but she wasn’t secretive about that, either. She definitely collaborated with Leonora Carrington on some writings—for example, they have a collaborative play, El santo cuerpo grasoso, not translated yet into English. In this new edition there’s Varo’s part of what I believe was an exquisite corpse novel written with Carrington. Another “public” writing is the title piece of the collection, On Homo rodans. It’s a handwritten manuscript that was never published in the marketplace sense of the word. But Varo certainly intended for others to read it, if only a small audience of friends. (After her death On Homo rodans would be published in a small facsimile edition of 250 copies, put out by a small press in Mexico City in 1970.)
The surprise is that Varo’s excellence as a writer and storyteller still goes unmentioned. It’s a small body of writings, but some of these stories are remarkable. For example, the first three: “In a field in the state of Morelos…,” “Dear friend, I believe it’s necessary to tell you…” “One day when Maria was coming back from school…” (They have no titles, so they’re identified by their opening lines.) I was astounded, amused, captivated when I first read them….talk about the pleasures of the text! Who knew she was such a talented writer? I’m hoping that people who are passionate about Varo, the artist, will be curious about her writings and will find some powerful connections there to her art—and that they’ll also stay with her for her writing alone.
Q: Do you find some such qualities in a neglected novel, William Gaddis’ The Recognitions?
Barth: I know that book only by sight. 950 pages: longer than The Sot-Weed Factor. Somebody asked me to review the new reprint of it, but I said I couldn’t think of anything worth saying in literature that can’t be said in 806 pages.
Q: You don’t consciously see yourself as John Barth, the postmodernist?
JOHN BARTH: Oh no, no, and the term now has become so stretched out of shape. I did a good deal of reading on the subject for a postmodernist conference in Stuttgart back in 1991, and I think I had a fairly solid grasp of the term then. At the time, there seemed to be a general agreement that, whatever postmodernism was, it was made in America and studied in Europe. At my end, I would say the definitions advanced by such European intellectuals as Jean Baudrillard and Jean- Francois Lyotard have only a kind of a grand overlap with what I think I mean when I am talking about it.g about it. They apply the term to disciplines and fields other than art-their thoughts about postmodern science, for instance, are very interesting-but when the subject is postmodern American fiction, things get murkier. So often we’re told, “You know, it’s Coover, Pynchon, Barth, and Barthelme,” but that’s just pointing at writers. Perhaps that’s all you can do. It led me to say once, “If postmodern is what I am, then postmodernism is whatever I do.” You get a bit wary about these terms. When The Floating Opera came out, Leslie Fiedler called it “provincial American existentialism.” With End of the Road, I was most often described as a black humorist, and with The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy, and Lost in the Funhouse, I became a fabulist. Bill Gass resists the term “postmodernist,” and I understand his resistance. But we need common words to talk about anything. “Impressionism” is a very useful term which helps describe the achievements of a number of important artists. But when you begin to look at individual impressionist painters, the term becomes less meaningful. You find yourself contemplating a group of artists who probably have as many differences as similarities. I recall a wonderful old philosophy professor of mine who used to talk about the difference between the synthetic temperament and the analytical temperament. With the synthetic, the similarities between things are more impressive than the differences; with the analytical, the differences are more impressive than the similarities. We need them both; you can’t do without either. In that context, once you’ve come up with some criteria that describe what has been going on in a certain type of fiction composed during the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties, I think the differences among Donald Barthelme, Angela Carter, and Italo Calvino are probably more interesting than the similarities.
From an interview with Barth conducted by Charlie Reilly in the journal Contemporary Literature, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Winter, 2000).
Max Lawton and Vladimir Sorokin, under a painting by Sorokin entitled Whether I Am a Trembling Creature. Photograph by Ecem Lawton.
My favorite book this year is Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Telluria, which is new in English thanks to NYRB and translator Max Lawton. I was deeply impressed with Lawton’s translation—lively, humorous, polyglossic, and lots of fucking fun. I was thrilled that Lawton agreed to an interview. We spent the last few weeks trading emails and also chatting via Twitter in what ended up being a very fun conversation for me.
While our interview takes Telluria as its starting point, Lawton talks at length about his other Sorokin translations, as well as forthcoming translations by Jonathan Littell, as well as his own fiction.
Biblioklept: Please: describe Telluria.
Max Lawton: TELLURIA is “Oxen of the Sun” as sci-fi novel, without any notion of a language’s generation—without any notion of “progress.” It is fractal and rhizome, scattered out over 50 chapters, with the only hint of redemption coming in a narcotic vision of Christ. TELLURIA is about pushing one’s mastery of style to the point where it begins to break down—in the mode of late Miles. It is at these moments of breaking down that something new begins to come into being. On the level of content, TELLURIA suggests that the small is always more charming—more desirable—than the master narrative. Nationalism, he suggests, can only be cute if it’s a doll-sized state that’s doing the nationalizing. Anything bigger is monstrous. The book, then, is an ode to difference. And a challenge to land-grabbing, logos-hijacking imperialists who believe in a single story. For Sorokin, the world is a million different textures, a million different languages, and no ONE can be said to triumph.
Biblioklept: I want to come back to notions of triumph and redemption later, particularly with the final chapter of Telluria in mind. But before we get in the weeds (a favorite place of mine), tell us a little bit about how you came to translate Sorokin. When did you first read him?
ML: I first read Sorokin after encountering a comparison made between him and Houellebecq in a review of ICE (probably in The New York Times). Angsty teen that I was, there could have been no higher praise. As it turned out, however, this was a red herring. Sorokin neither bore nor bears any resemblance to Houellebecq. Given that introduction, ICE was mostly confusing.
A few years after that, I dug into BLUE LARD in French, which was a truly formative reading experience. To read something so chilly, brutal, beautiful, and, most importantly, incomprehensible––it changed me entirely. I read it while teaching at a French immersion camp for children and a fellow counselor and I took to using neologisms from the book as slang between ourselves (“mais, c’est top-direct, mon brave!”). Embarrassing to think about now, but perhaps important.
During my four years of Russian study, then, at constant war with the thorniness of the language, Sorokin was the carrot on the stick that kept me going. All I wanted was to read him in the original. To read what hadn’t been translated. To translate him, perhaps. I bought BLUE LARD in Brighton Beach during a class field trip after one year of study and nearly wept when I tried to read it. It would take a great deal more work than I’d already done.
Immediately after college, my Russian good enough (I thought), I translated a big chunk of BLUE LARD and sent it to Sorokin. He liked it, impressed by whatever promise he saw in first swing, and we began to work together. It was then that I realized how ill-prepared I was for the job and, during the next few years at Oxford, Middlebury, and Columbia, I worked very hard to get my Russian up to snuff––to deserve the work I’d somehow lucked into.
Sorokin and I also began to become friends––a process that was crystallized by my first night in Russia: supper with Vladimir at Café Pushkin and a long stroll through the city.
For the next four years, we worked together relentlessly with no prospect of publication, emailing almost every day. I drafted four books before we eventually broke through with NYRB and Deep Vellum (which acquired Dalkey soon after we got in touch). While I would never recommend this approach to any other young translator, the drafts (fairly polished) helped get editors interested––no one really trusts the readers they hire to write reports about books in languages they can’t read…
Max Lawton. Photograph by Ecem Lawton.
Biblioklept: What I’ve read so far of Blue Lard has made my head spin. The idea of attempting it in a whole other alphabet seems unreal to me, so I could imagine going about translating it might be daunting at times–but also very rewarding.
When I was reading Telluria, I would often think, This seems like it would be really fun to translate! There’s all these different voices, registers, dialects, grammars, and so on bubbling along (I loved the centaur’s voice in particular).
ML: TELLURIA was a work that offered me immense freedom as I translated it. Sorokin’s conceit in writing the thing was not to symbolically represent a particular historical period or something like that, but to give voice to difference itself. 50 voices and 50 differences. Because of that, my task was monomaniacal in its complexity: to follow Sorokin out into deep waters of difference and, like him, give birth to 50 absolutely unique voices. I felt like a guitarist called up to play with Miles Davis on the DARK MAGUS tour. I had to be impenetrable where he was impenetrable, ungainly where he was ungainly, and senseless where he was senseless; anything less would have been a betrayal of what makes the book worth reading. As such, I appealed to Chaucer (for the centaur), Céline (for the bagmen), Turgenev translations (for the hunting), Faulkner and McCarthy (for the oral narratives about highly rural situations––what a blessing that we have a commensurate American tradition of SOUTHERN SKAZ FICTION able to render the Leskovian oral narratives that Sorokin fucks with), Ginsberg (for the “Howl” rip-off), Mervyn Peake (for the overripe fantasy-novel fun), and a great many others. Sometimes, Sorokin’s deranged signifiers come forth from very specific literary and historical phenomena. At others, he plays freely. In the former case, I tread very carefully (and Sorokin also watches my step). You’re right to say that TELLURIA was fun to translate for precisely that reason. And, indeed, BLUE LARD was also very fun to translate at certain points––dealing with the futuristic neologisms in the epistolary section and the Earthfuckers’ world––, but I had to tread carefully when dealing with the arch deconstructions of Soviet speech and the parodies of famous Russian writers.
Maybe the common trajectory of both Miles’s and Coltrane’s careers would be valuable to think of here. Playing in their early bands, you would have been constantly (and neurotically) thinking of the impending changes as you played. Later on, not so much… But that didn’t mean there wasn’t something rather precise at stake within the chaos… I too sometimes think and worry about impending changes––in THE NORM, certain sections of BLUE LARD, certain sections of MARINA’S 30TH LOVE… ––, whereas, at others, I am more free, but still after something very precise.
Biblioklept: Is Blue Lard the next one NYRB will publish?
ML: Yes, BLUE LARD is coming out in 2023, along with a collection of Soviet-themed short stories entitled DISPATCHES FROM THE DISTRICT COMMITTEE from Dalkey (the latter of which will also be illustrated by Greg Klassen).
Then THE NORM is coming out in 2024, along with ROMAN from Dalkey.
Then RED PYRAMID (selected stories) is coming out in 2025, along with MARINA’s 30TH LOVE from Dalkey. All dates are subject to change.
We have yet to place DOCTOR GARIN, THE SUGAR KREMLIN, MANARAGA, some of the short stories, and the complete plays. Sorokin is, thank God, still writing an awful lot. So there is much to look forward to.
In lining up this release schedule, our goal was to marry the extremity of Sorokin’s early work to the evenness and warmth of his later work. Leaving out either side of the equation creates an image that is simultaneously distorted and uninteresting. Insane, aberrant violence is just as valuable as Chekhovian sentence-surface.
Greg Klassen, illustration for “A Hearing of The Factory Committee.” From Dispatches from the District Committee.
Biblioklept: Your use of the adjective “Chekhovian” in your last sentence prompts me to ask where you situate Sorokin within (or perhaps against) the Russian literary tradition. You were quoted in a recent New York Times profile as saying, “Sorokin has earned his place in the canon.” Can you expand on that? How do you believe Sorokin sees himself with respect to the history of Russian literature?
ML: Canon-formation doesn’t depend so much on author as on reception––and, since BLUE LARD, Sorokin has been very lucky in that regard. So, whereas many people once treated Sorokin’s work with a high degree of suspicion, they no longer have that luxury. His influence on younger writers, on philosophers, on philologists, on cinema, on popular thought… his unbelievable ability in having predicted what Russia’s become… beyond the question of quality, Sorokin is simply too important not to be read.
He also happens to be the best writer writing in Russian since Nabokov, but I digress…
In a certain respect, one might think of him as a Sadean trickster who, in the second half of his career, developed a Chekhovian or Zhivago-esque soul… I’m not sure how Sorokin himself would respond to such a characterization. He’s been a very religious dude since he started writing, but I know he’s also highly cognizant of the difference between DOCTOR GARIN (which I’m very excited to translate) and THEIR FOUR HEARTS. His early work has a highly destructive relationship to the canon. For example, here’s the back-cover text of DISPATCHES FROM THE DISTRICT COMMITTEE as I wrote it (which means this will double as a record of the censorship imposed upon me by Dalkey (just kidding Will and Chad!):
For the new to come into being, the old must be destroyed: burnt to the ground. Cultural stagnation and unreflective canon-worship are a sure recipe for aesthetic decay. In the career-spanning Soviet-themed stories that make up DISPATCHES FROM THE DISTRICT COMMITTEE (many of which are drawn from his legendary collection MY FIRST WORKING SATURDAY), Sorokin eviscerates the old, the dull, and the calcified with a feces-dipped dagger. Once upon a time, it seemed that the coprophagia, necrophilia, grievous bodily harm, Joycean gibberish, transgressive sexuality, and aberrant Bataillean metaphysics that make up these stories might be a satanic incantation uttered to bring a New Russia into being. Alas, they’ve now become a monument to that which never was: a rune etched in PUS, SHIT, CUM, and LARD.
Sorokin’s later work still has this pus-, shit-, and cum-drenched side to it, but paired with a deep sort of Christian warmth––as in the chapter in TELLURIA that describes the man who spent a great deal of time with the apostles by way of tellurium-wedges. I can’t help but see Sorokin himself in that man. The latter mode of Christian mysticism is, of course, more in line with the Russian canon as a whole, but what happens when you combine it with the former impulse I describe in the back-cover text?
Greg Klassen, illustration for “Geologists.” From Dispatches from the District Committee.
Biblioklept: So, you’ve now brought up that particular late chapter of Telluria twice, where an exhausted man returns to his family after a long philosophical quest for meaning—the chapter ends in an affirmation, one delivered via a tellurium nail trip.
Many of the characters seek similar confirmations or comforts when they have tellurium nails hammered into their heads by the professional “carpenters” who are almost something like a class of monks. Other voices in the book search for escape or novelty via tellurium—not necessarily transcendence.
Do you think that the returning father in the particular chapter you’ve mentioned embodies a moral vision in Sorokin’s work?
And what do you make of the final chapter, where the driver — the same one we’ve seen earlier in the novel, if I’m not mistaken? — goes alone into the woods to make a new and solitary life for himself: “Seemed like my hands’d been longin’ for carpenters’ work,” he declares, before hewing logs and building a cabin.
ML: As for Sorokin’s moral compass, it’s hard to say. It seems to me that Sorokin mostly portrays God by way of His absence. THEIR FOUR HEARTS is a particularly striking example of this. But there’s also a strain of more old-fashioned Russian mysticism (which I’ve alluded to above) sometimes at play. The religious chapter is a good example of this (the Jesus trip), as is the hankering for a more simple rural life—the plagal cadence with which the novel comes to an end. That ending is a near-perfect rhyme with another Sorokin story called “The Governor,” which I’d be happy to send you. This longing for rural Russian Orthodoxy is often submitted to the same brutal criticism as everything else in his work is (like in ROMAN and THE NORM, in which Sorokin destroys his own personal ideal, just as the Bolsheviks destroyed the great cathedrals of Moscow).
At what point does violence intersect with God? If one were to strip out the explicitly religious and moral moments, what would it look like for a kind religious man to submit what he considers his highest impulses to a brutal species of live surgery—sort of like in the underwhelming [David Cronenberg film] CRIMES OF THE FUTURE? I don’t have the answer to this question. But it’s the same ambiguity that exists between Sorokin’s dissidence and his apolitical aestheticism: the driving enigma of his work.
Biblioklept:Telluria might be many English-language readers’ first introduction to Sorokin. How representative do you think it is of his work as a whole—thematically, formally, linguistically…?
ML: As I suggest above, TELLURIA is the work of a kinder and more gentle Sorokin—a Sorokin whose masterpiece is DOCTOR GARIN. His early work is far more likely to call forth an affective bodily rejection to the content that’s been read (a good, honest response to any work of literature: vomiting).
More than anything else, the early Sorokin responds to a single dictate: in an interview he gave when he was younger, he complains that Tolstoy was such a consummate God of his own creation in WAR AND PEACE that he should also have included descriptions of how Natasha Rostova shits and fucks—of how her sweaty underarms smell at the end of long balls. This is the mission of much of Sorokin’s early work: to become the God of every level of his literary creation.
The later Sorokin operates in a more logocentric world—one in which the body is not quite so overwhelmingly present (though it’s certainly still there…).
I recommend any new reader of Sorokin to immediately chase TELLURIA with THEIR FOUR HEARTS: those two combined give something like a complete picture of the master at work.
Biblioklept: In Telluria and Blue Lard, certain words and phrases are italicized, quoted, or capitalized—and particular voices tend to showcase this kind of emphasized phrasing more than others. Is this part of your translation technique? Something original to Sorokin’s typographic style?
ML: For the most part, I adhere quite rigidly to Sorokin’s own typographical choices. This is true without exception when it comes to boldface, quotes, and capital letters. However, the italics seem to play a more complex role in Sorokin’s voice. Sometimes, they’re merely used to indicate a sort of fantastical technology or a new concept. In those cases, I don’t fiddle. At other moments, they represent a kind of ironical intonation. Or… maybe not ironical. Let’s say: a very Sorokinian tone. As such, when this tone appears in the translation in a way that it didn’t in the original, I think the italics can be used as a powerful tool to smooth out some of the weirdnesses that might otherwise have been bothersome in the new text.
However, I use this technique sparingly. It’s something of an emergency fix––mimicking Sorokin’s sometimes overripe and ironical tone when normal language disappears in the interstitial moment between the two languages…
I’m generally very devoted to Sorokin’s original, but in spirit rather than letter. The experience of reading my translations should be much like that of reading Sorokin in the original; this goal necessitates creative solutions that are not––though fools may call them––mistranslations.
As a footnote: though my own fiction generally couldn’t be more different from Sorokin’s, I did take the italics and run with ’em––a feature of my style for which I’m also indebted to Will Self’s style in the Technology Trilogy––UMBRELLA, SHARK, and PHONE (three of my all-time favorites).
Biblioklept: I’m also curious about the footnotes in Telluria, which give a gloss for certain non-English words and phrases (usually Chinese). Are those Sorokin’s or yours?
ML: All of the footnotes dealing with other languages are Sorokin’s, all of the ones dealing with Russian are mine (I think there are two of the latter).
Biblioklept: There’s no introduction composed for Telluria, which is unusual for NYRB classics. Do you have any insight on that editorial choice?
ML: For a little while, I was rather taken up by the notion (one held very dearly by Vladimir) that the book should speak for itself entirely––without the intercession of any scholar or critic. Part of this has to do with the weird stranglehold held by Slavic scholars over the words of the writers they purport to explain to the world. In no other comparable world literature do scholars demand such a high degree of compliance from their authors. Sorokin has often complained to me that “Slavicists always want the forewords and never the afterwords.” And is it so insane that he should want the first word of the book to be… the first word of the book?
In this context, Sorokin and I love to bring up the anecdote of Pound showing Mussolini the Cantos and being so utterly delighted when il Duce exclaimed, “ma questo è divertente!”
This, then, is what the ideal reader of Sorokin’s work should immediately exclaim upon reading the first few lines of his texts. And his reader will surely not have such an unmediated reaction if, on the first page, he meets, not with the words of the author, but with a tangled gristle-bit of academic jargon:
TELLURIA exists in the interstitial space between the ultra-left Hegelian notion of the state’s disintegration as reinterpreted by Marx, but without reference to the monetary policy predominantly worked out in the initial chapters of DAS KAPTIAL, whereas the aberrant references to rightist dogma serve to underpin the fundamentally ambiguous approach to polyphony-as-palimpsest in the context of a global carnival utterly distinct from Dostoevskian scandal.
However, I’ve since softened.
Sorokin’s stuff could use a little explanation and, especially if we get interesting writers to engage with and write on Sorokin, the benefits of such critical apparati far outweigh the downsides. As such, Will Self will be introducing two of the coming short-story collections, Blake Butler will be introducing another, and I can’t yet reveal the other INCREDIBLE writers we have lined up.
Introductions dope enough to make the ideal reader also exclaim “ma questo è divertente!”
Biblioklept: I totally get Sorokin’s point. When I set out to read a book by an author I love or watch a film by filmmakers I love, I like to go in cold—no summaries or trailers. But the key there is that I already love (or pick your verb) the creator in question, which means at some point there’s already been an introduction. For a lot of us that’s as simple as a friend whose taste we trust (like my friend who insisted we see Fargo in the theater), or maybe a teacher who can present a frame for us to better understand the work (I can’t imagine reading The Sound and The Fury without at least a fuzzy precis). For the record, I think Telluria works great without an introduction, because the book’s shape (or “plot,” such as it is), reveals itself in the reading. And the reading is delicious. I do think though that Blue Lard might benefit from a brief introduction, so I’ll offer my unasked-for services: “This shit is wild. Just go for it. Don’t try to make it do what you think a novel should be doing. Just go with it.”
ML: BLUE LARD is about that state of confusion—ontological and linguistic—as it unfurls. To introduce the text beyond something like your pithy statement above might be a disservice to the book. The reader should be confused and it should hurt—then feel fucking good. This isn’t gloppy OLDOSEX; when reading Sorokin, we’re fucking nostrils with forked dicks (or—getting our nostrils fucked by the same).
The book’s real introduction is the Nietzsche quote at the beginning.
Does FINNEGANS WAKE need an introduction? Is one even possible?
I loved BLUE LARD when I first read it precisely because I had no point of reference for understanding it. Much like SCHATTENFROH (another text I’m working on).
Biblioklept: The Michael Lentz novel, right? Tell us about that one.
ML: Oh man… where to start. The book is a brick. The densest thing I’ve translated and among the densest things I’ve ever read. It’s a story about a Father. And Nazi Germany. And the Baroque (as such). And a chair. And online torture vids. It’s written in a very alienating mode. Like chewing on the blackest of black bread. And yet there’s something so enticing about the damn thing. As with BLUE LARD, a cliff face made of only black ice. I want to climb it, want not to slip, but the sliding down once I’ve lost hold is part of the pleasure. I’m honored to be working with the mighty Matthias Friedrich on this. Without him, I fear my German wouldn’t be quite up to the task.
I’m close online pals with Andrei of THE UNTRANSLATED and SCHATTENFROH is one of a few books he’s proselytized that I’m sampling. I’ll do the first that gets picked up. The others are: Moresco’s GAMES OF ETERNITY trilogy (with the great Francesco Pacifico on board as editor), Laiseca’s LOS SORIAS (would like an editor for this as well––ideally a Hispanophone translator from English into Spanish), and Goldshtein’s REMEMBER FAMAGUSTA. These books are not the easiest of reading (and they’re long––hence: expensive for me (us) to translate). If you’d like to see one of these samples, just ask! Especially if you work at a publishing house!
And there are more possible future plans in the works as well…
Biblioklept: You’re also translating titles by Jonathan Littell. Can you tell us a little about those?
ML: So I’ve just finished his short book on a Belgian Nazi entitled THE DAMP AND THE DRY (turned it in today). Despite all my little polemics with the notion of a Skeleton Key, one might be forgiven for reading THE DAMP AND THE DRY as a Skeleton Key for THE KINDLY ONES (one of my 30 fave books, for sure).
AN OLD STORY is the real juicy bit: a novel, 300-some pages of metaphysics in superposition—war, sex, death, solitude, orgy, pegging, self-dissection… as if Sade had happened to write the best nouveau roman ever put to page. The book absolutely rules. My first time through, I read it in a day. Vomiting, weeping, and throbbingly erect for ten hours straight.
It’s a great experience to work with Jonathan who edits my work a lot, as compared to Vladimir who just hands me the wheel. Two different styles, both with downsides and benefits.
I also want to translate a few old Russian novels: PETER THE FIRST by Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy, IT’S ME, EDDIE by Eduard Limonov, THE SILVER PRINCE by Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy, THE LESSER DEMON by Fyodor Sologub, and A HUNTER’S SKETCHES by Ivan Turgenev. And am determined to do two novels by the great Turkish novelist Oğuz Atay, working with the formidable Ralph Hubbell (whose translation of Atay’s stories coming out next year from NYRB is a must-read––WAITING FOR THE FEAR). And… and… maybe a few things by Céline, working with Iain Sinclair, one of my favorite novelists. And the three insanely fucked volumes of MICROFICTIONS––the most contemporary of abjectness in 10 frames or less, but 500 times––1000 pages per book. And Guyotat’s late novels––would kill to do those. And be killed by doing them. And… and…
Enough for now. Enough to keep me busy for decades. But also some things I’m not allowed to talk about.
Biblioklept:An Old Story sounds to be cut from the same cloth as The Kindly Ones, which I loved too. You mentioned your own fiction—can you touch on that some?
ML: The cool thing is how different UVH [Une vielle histoire; An Old Story] is from THE KINDLY ONES. It shows the extent to which Jonathan has legs as a writer. To do something that doesn’t deal in history or linear narrative AT ALL, then to succeed no less spectacularly than in THE KINDLY ONES… well, it rocks to have done something that dope.
My own fiction is difficult to talk about. Until it’s published, it really is unbecomingly vain to wax eloquent on the subject. I can say that I have two collections of intertwined stories (THE WORLD vols. 1+2)––tangled up in the same way A HUNTER’S SKETCHES and THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION are––and a novel (PROGRESS). In the interests of being as objective and unannoying as possible, here’s the synopsis of PROGRESS agents and publishers get:
It’s October, 2020. On a Saturday night, a college sophomore and his best friend engage in a radical act of sexual experimentation with their female acquaintance. The next day, a prolonged series of crashes heard through a dormitory window heralds the end of something. In simple terms: all wheels stop spinning and all screens stop shining. Afraid of this new world and the people they share a city with, the two boys make the precipitous decision to begin walking from their place of study in NYC to the narrator’s home in Ohio. As they walk, the formerly platonic contours of their relationship give way to something else. Maneuvering across the concrete skin of America, the boys slumber in the empty belly of a dead country in blissful ignorance of the threat hanging over them.
Opening as a campus novel, morphing into a melancholy psychogeographic exploration of a country-carcass, and ending as a psychedelic vision of the end of history, Progress is about what happens when rules change. Conceived of and started before the pandemic, this novel is a particularly relevant read in our current historical moment. Written with the chilly object-fixation of Peter Handke and the wry humor of Will Self, Progress is also deeply indebted to Vladimir Sorokin’s shamanistic and scatological engagements with Russian history. To put it another way: Progress is The Road meets Call Me By Your Name with a dash of Dhalgren. It is a transmission both awful and enormous from the heart of our new American age.
It’s not for me to say if it’s good or not. Hopefully it sees the light of day soon, then the Owl of Minerva shall get to flying… Greg Klassen will be illustrating both volumes of stories and I hope my friend Zoe Guttenplan, an amazing book designer who will be doing hyper-Soviet designs for four (or more) of the coming Sorokin books, will be doing abstract, pornographic photo-art to accompany them as well. PROGRESS will be simple in its publication: a normal book with only text. I want both volumes of THE WORLD to be hyper-decadent editions. Coming soon. I hope.
As it happens, Zoe might also be snapping pics for an article Will Self and I will hopefully be co-writing next year around Bloomsday… a throwback to a more Gonzo style of journalism… all I can say…
Greg Klassen, illustration for “My First Working Saturday.” From Dispatches from the District Committee.
Biblioklept: Have you ever stolen a book?
ML: For my translation process, digital texts are a necessity. They really do save me a lot of time. As such, the ready availability of Russian novels in PDF form on the internet has been an occasional boon to my work. However, I always then buy the physical copy too (if I don’t have it already).
Digital without physical is like body without soul. Feeling the translated pages tick up from 0 is also something I can’t do without (their almost furred texture on my right thumb as I flip through ‘em).
But I’ve never stolen a physical book. Never even lost a library book. A boring dude who saves his wildest transgressions for the printed page.
Max Lawton is not a boring dude. (Stealing books does not make you interesting, kids. Unless it does.)
Max Lawton is a translator, novelist, and musician. He received his BA in Russian Literature and Culture from Columbia University and his MPhil from Queen’s College, Oxford, where he wrote a dissertation comparing Céline and Dostoevsky. He has translated many books by Vladimir Sorokin and is currently translating works by Jonathan Littell. Max is also the author of a novel and two collections of stories currently awaiting publication. He is writing his doctoral dissertation on phenomenology and the twentieth-century novel at Columbia University, where he also teaches Russian. He is a member of four heavy-music groups.
There’s a nice new big fat interview with Ishmael Reed now up at The Collidescope. In the interview (conducted by George Salis), Reed discusses lots of stuff, including his love of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” (“one of the great short stories [by] the greatest of American white male writers for my money”), his contempt for David Simon’s The Wire, most of his novels, and his new play The Slave Who Loved Caviar.
Late in the interview, Salis asks Reed to name a novel he thinks deserves more attention. Here’s Reed’s reply:
IR: Let’s see, there’s a novel by Ron Sukenick, one of the experimental writers about the golden calf [Mosaic Man, 1999]. I can’t figure the title right now, but I think it deserves more readers. I think they like Philip Roth and pedestrian writers like him. But Ron Sukenick was an excellent writer and one of those experimental white writers who don’t get enough attention. I like also A Different Drummer by William Melvin Kelley which I have written a review about but it’s not published and there are a lot of excellent writers, excellent novelists, but the Anglo minds of reviewers is just preventing the public from having access to these writers.
What about the moral responsibility of the artist? I take it that you are a responsible artist (as opposed, say, to X, Y, and Z), but all is irony, comic distortion, foreign voices, fragmentation. Where in all this evasion of the straightforward does responsibility display itself?
BARTHELME
It’s not the straightforward that’s being evaded but the too true. I might fix your eye firmly and announce, “Thou shalt not mess around with thy neighbor’s wife.” You might then nod and say to yourself, Quite so. We might then lunch at the local chili parlor and say scurrilous things about X, Y, and Z. But it will not have escaped your notice that my statement has hardly enlarged your cosmos, that I’ve been, in the largest sense, responsible to neither art, life, nor adultery.
I believe that my every sentence trembles with morality in that each attempts to engage the problematic rather than to present a proposition to which all reasonable men must agree. The engagement might be very small, a word modifying another word, the substitution of “mess around” for “covet,” which undresses adultery a bit. I think the paraphrasable content in art is rather slight—“tiny,” as de Kooning puts it. The way things are done is crucial, as the inflection of a voice is crucial. The change of emphasis from the what to the how seems to me to be the major impulse in art since Flaubert, and it’s not merely formalism, it’s not at all superficial, it’s an attempt to reach truth, and a very rigorous one. You don’t get, following this path, a moral universe set out in ten propositions, but we already have that. And the attempt is sufficiently skeptical about itself. In this century there’s been much stress placed not upon what we know but on knowing that our methods are themselves questionable—our Song of Songs is the Uncertainty Principle.
Also, it’s entirely possible to fail to understand or actively misunderstand what an artist is doing. I remember going through a very large Barnett Newman show years ago with Tom Hess and Harold Rosenberg, we used to go to shows after long lunches, those wicked lunches, which are no more, and I walked through the show like a certifiable idiot, couldn’t understand their enthusiasm. I admired the boldness, the color and so on but inwardly I was muttering, Wallpaper, wallpaper, very fine wallpaper but wallpaper. I was wrong, didn’t get the core of Newman’s enterprise, what Tom called Newman’s effort toward the sublime. Later I began to understand. One doesn’t take in Proust or Canada on the basis of a single visit.
To return to your question: If I looked you straight in the eye and said, “The beauty of women makes of adultery a serious and painful duty,” then we’d have the beginning of a useful statement.
From Donald Barthelme’s 1981 interview in The Paris Review. The interlocutor is J.D. O’Hara. Read the full interview here.
Q: You don’t consciously see yourself as John Barth, the postmodernist?
JOHN BARTH: Oh no, no, and the term now has become so stretched out of shape. I did a good deal of reading on the subject for a postmodernist conference in Stuttgart back in 1991, and I think I had a fairly solid grasp of the term then. At the time, there seemed to be a general agreement that, whatever postmodernism was, it was made in America and studied in Europe. At my end, I would say the definitions advanced by such European intellectuals as Jean Baudrillard and Jean- Francois Lyotard have only a kind of a grand overlap with what I think I mean when I am talking about it.g about it. They apply the term to disciplines and fields other than art-their thoughts about postmodern science, for instance, are very interesting-but when the subject is postmodern American fiction, things get murkier. So often we’re told, “You know, it’s Coover, Pynchon, Barth, and Barthelme,” but that’s just pointing at writers. Perhaps that’s all you can do. It led me to say once, “If postmodern is what I am, then postmodernism is whatever I do.” You get a bit wary about these terms. When The Floating Opera came out, Leslie Fiedler called it “provincial American existentialism.” With End of the Road, I was most often described as a black humorist, and with The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy, and Lost in the Funhouse, I became a fabulist. Bill Gass resists the term “postmodernist,” and I understand his resistance. But we need common words to talk about anything. “Impressionism” is a very useful term which helps describe the achievements of a number of important artists. But when you begin to look at individual impressionist painters, the term becomes less meaningful. You find yourself contemplating a group of artists who probably have as many differences as similarities. I recall a wonderful old philosophy professor of mine who used to talk about the difference between the synthetic temperament and the analytical temperament. With the synthetic, the similarities between things are more impressive than the differences; with the analytical, the differences are more impressive than the similarities. We need them both; you can’t do without either. In that context, once you’ve come up with some criteria that describe what has been going on in a certain type of fiction composed during the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties, I think the differences among Donald Barthelme, Angela Carter, and Italo Calvino are probably more interesting than the similarities.
From an interview with Barth conducted by Charlie Reilly in the journal Contemporary Literature, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Winter, 2000).
Their discussion begins with Street Cop but expands much further, touching on postmodernism, realism (“Our Zeitgeist has left us mostly with shards of media as our reality,” says Spiegelman; “When people ask me, I say that I learned my realism from Kafka,” replies Coover”), time and space, the desire for happy endings, and more. But like I said, it begins with Street Cop:
ART SPIEGELMAN: So first: why a street cop?
ROBERT COOVER:Well, I wrote Street Cop in 2019. It emerged, like everything I write, from anxieties about the present. I had written about private eyes, but the dumb street cop was something new. I liked the idea of a guy who would be technologically inept. It’s about a bumbler who began his career as a crook and drug dealer, before accidentally becoming a cop who stumbles his way through a techno-city where the landscape changes daily thanks to 3D printing—blurring past, present and future. His job is to convict suspects rather than solve crimes, but all he wants, really, is to return to the old part of town, a seamy noir-like zone where his urges, and their many flaws, are permissible.
AS:When I first read and signed on to illustrate your story early in 2020’s quarantine, I was grateful to dive into a Dystopia Next Door and escape the one that surrounded us even in the bucolic bunker in the woods we’d retreated to from NYC. Choking on an overdose of toxic news, and compulsively “doom-scrolling”—I really love that phrase—I found the Covid-free air of Street Cop breathable because at least it didn’t have the twin viruses of the Covid pandemic and Trump directly confronting me. Still, the very first picture I drew had Covids in it—it was inevitable that they found their way into the prescient present of the story.
The profile is by Julian Lucas, who does an excellent job covering both Reed’s extensive literary output as well as his biography. While Lucas’s profile is generally sympathetic, he doesn’t shy away from Reed’s many (many) battles (Lin-Manuel Miranda, Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison, the New York literary establishment, etc. etc. etc.). The print edition of the article is titled “I Ain’t Been Mean Enough,” which comes from a line from Reed’s 1973 poem “The Author Reflects on His 35th Birthday”:
For half a century, he’s been American literature’s most fearless satirist, waging a cultural forever war against the media that spans a dozen novels, nine plays and essay collections, and hundreds of poems, one of which, written in anticipation of his thirty-fifth birthday, is a prayer to stay petty: “35? I ain’t been mean enough . . . Make me Tennessee mean . . . Miles Davis mean . . . Pawnbroker mean,” he writes. “Mean as the town Bessie sings about / ‘Where all the birds sing bass.’ ”
Lucas’s Reed is not a cantankerous caricature though. We get a nice survey of the man’s works situated against his ever-evolving politics and aesthetics. Nor does the profile dwell too long on Reed’s earlier novels (which I confess are my favorites—the most recent long work of Reed’s I’ve read was 2011’s Juice! I had absolutely no idea before reading the profile that Reed has a new novel out this summer, The Terrible Fours).
There’s a measure of defiance to his late-career productivity. Wary of being tethered to his great novels of the nineteen-seventies, Reed is spoiling for a comeback, and a younger generation receptive to his guerrilla media criticism may be along for the ride. “I’m getting called a curmudgeon or a fading anachronism, so I’m going back to my original literature,” Reed told me. “In the projects, we had access to a library, and I’d go get books by the Brothers Grimm.” Now, he says, “I’m reverting to my second childhood. I’m writing fairy tales.”
Brigitte Felix:If I may ask the same question, phrasing it differently: Jack Gibbs says at one point “Most god damned readers rather be at the movies because when you walk in to the movies you walk in empty-handed and leave much the same way.” What do you think your readers walk out with, after reading J R, for example?
William Gaddis: [after a long pause] I suppose . . . here’s the heart of the matter, he’s drawn a picture of . . . In J R someone is repeatedly saying “This is what America is all about.” It’s buried usually under paragraphs, but this is what America is all about. I suppose that one wants the reader to put the book down finally, having finished it — not after starting it, which is the case, frequently — and say, Yes, that’s what America is all about: it is a paper empire, it’s Gresham’s Law, the bad drives out the good, and so forth . . .
Who should be the next American Nobel Prize winner?
CORMAC McCARTHY: Would you wish the Nobel Prize off on a friend or an enemy?
What would you have done, do you think, if it hadn’t been for writing?
CORMAC McCARTHY: I think I can say that if I hadn’t been a writer I’d have been what I have been all my life anyway: one more unemployed person of dubious character.
The “article” consists of a ten-question questionnaire Esquire fiction editor Rust Hills sent to around fifty American writers. These are the only two answers from Cormac McCarthy.
There’s a “new” video interview with Barry Hannah and his wife Susan at Southwest Review. The interview was conducted by Southwest Review editor-in-chief Greg Brownderville some time in “the late aughts” in Hannah’s back yard, under his muscadine arbor. Brownderville and his friend Luke Duncan (both grad students at Ole Miss at the time) were trying to put together a film about muscadine grapes, and interviewed the Hannahs about the project. Hannah’s extemporaneous responses veer all over the place though, using muscadines as kind of kernels of memories from which to riff on: dead pets, boyhood oyster shell fights, and “the wonderful time my dad and I had at Arkansas drinking wine and watching the University of Arkansas, who was number one in the nation, whoop Texas, both of us high on wine from Altus.” The whole interview approaches something close to one of Hannah’s looser short stories, and is definitely worth the 20 minutes.
(Thanks to Patrick for sending me the link.)
(Tangential note: My wife’s grandmother makes her own muscadine wine. We get a bottle of it for Christmas every now and then. It’s pretty sweet stuff.)
Biblioklept 
