This Thursday: Conversations on Great Contemporary Literature on Yoko Ogawa’s The Diving Pool

 

The Diving Pool

Event details below. If any bloggers are attending this event and would like to submit a post for the Words Without Borders blog, please let me know: budparr@wordswithoutborders.org

Words Without Borders Presents: First Thursdays at Idlewild Books: Conversations on Great Contemporary Literature

On Thursday, January 8th, WWB and Idlewild Books presents a discussion of The Diving Pool, an evocative and haunting trio of novellas by Yoko Ogawa, one of Japan’s most celebrated and best-selling authors. This highly anticipated book is the first major English translation of her vast body of work. Discussion will be led by The Diving Pool-translator Stephen Snyder (also the translator of Ogawa’s Housekeeper and the Professor, due out in February) and Allison Powell, guest editor of the forthcoming issue on Japanese literature on www.WordsWithoutBorders.org.

“Still waters run dark in these bright yet eerie novellas, whose crisp, almost guileless prose hides unexpected menace…Stephen Snyder’s elegant translations from the Japanese whet the appetite for more.” – The New York Times Book Review

Portrait of Heaney

 

Stepping Stones

Bernhard O’Donahue says in the introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney that “no other current poet is nearly as much written about than Seamus Heaney has been” yet there has been no book length portrait of the man born on a farm in County Derry who came to win the Nobel Prize in 1995. Dennis O’Driscoll has created the first through a series of questions and answers compiled through about seven years of correspondence with Heaney. From the description of Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney:

Through his own lively and eloquent reminiscences, Stepping Stones retraces the poet’s steps from his first exploratory testing of the ground as an infant to what he called his “moon-walk” to the podium to receive the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. It also fascinatingly charts his post-Nobel life and is supplemented with a number of photographs, many from the Heaney family album and published here for the first time. In response to firm but subtle questioning from Dennis O’Driscoll, Heaney sheds a personal light on his work (poems, essays, translations, plays) and on the artistic and ethical challenges he faced during the dark years of the Ulster Troubles.

See also this Times Literary Supplement on the book, subtitled, “Steadfast and mutable, Seamus Famous can keep going and still reinvent himself.”

TLS on Pasternak, Tsvetayeva

 

Boris Pasternak



Last year I enjoyed grazing through Letters: Summer 1926, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, Rainer Maria Rilke. One thing that struck me, reading letters from when people wrote letters, how out of time it felt reading passages so elevated above the day-to-day, but also just how odd and funny this relationship was.

“At last I am with you. Since all is clear to me and I believe in fate, who serves me with an undeserved loyalty that makes me dizzy with joy. Yet this is joined to so much feeling for you – if not all of my feeling – that I can scarcely cope with it.” – Pasternak to Tsvetayeva, March 25, 1926.

A New Context

 

The latest issue of Context is out.

Well That’s That

 

Thanks to Sarah, I see that the the beloved Gotham Book Mart collection is being donated to the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. There really was no place like Gotham Book Mart for browsing and discovery, for a random conversation. I once met a man there, an old man although I couldn’t say how old, who was reading Dante for the first time. We got to talking and I was able to point him to The Poet’s Dante: Twentieth Century Responses but it was he who gave me something because his enthusiasm was so great. I’ve heard conversations on Milton there, talked about Borges, Guy Davenport, mused about the great literary figures that had been there. Today’s news – am I getting a little gushy here – I guess is closure on any hope that the shop would reopen in something like it’s old form.

Even though I’ve scanned every shelf – and there were many more books in the newer building than the old – there were many more in boxes and a great many more that were part of a proper collection that I knew I would never see and now most certainly will not. This will give you a sense of it:

The Gotham Book Mart Collection comprises some 200,000 items, primarily focused on modern and contemporary poetry and literature, but also encompassing art, architecture, jewelry, music, dance, theater, drama, and film. The collection includes many first editions, books from small presses, experimental literary magazines, outsider literature published by Black Sparrow Press, poetry published by St. Mark’s Church, books from the personal libraries of Truman Capote and Anais Nin, proofs, advance copies, pamphlets, photographs, posters, reference works and catalogs, broadsides, prints, postcards, and items signed by Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Robinson Jeffers, Woody Allen, Wallace Stevens, and John Updike.

My Account of the Discussion between Francisco Goldman and Natasha Wimmer on 2666

 


…is posted at Words Without Borders

Lots New at Words Without Borders, Including Me

 

altimage The new issue of Words Without Borders hit the site today, focusing on “international dispatches on domestic conflicts” and you’ll also find a blog post by yours truly as I am now Blog Editor at the Words Without Borders Blog. Fun! I’m just getting geared up now, but I’ll be more active there very soon. I should also note here the sad passing of MetaxuCafé. That was a long, difficult decision, but the site was not something I could devote time to because of my many other commitments and new projects coming. The one thing that kept me at it for a while is that it was home for our annual coverage of the PEN World Voices Festival. Now I intend to keep that up at the Words Without Borders Blog, which I think is quite a suitable home for it. See you there.

ThanksGiving

 

better world books
A while back I posted about how badly Amazon.com treats publishers (which is really just part of a trend that can best be summarized by the Wal-Mart effect). That post was picked up on another site where I was called smug (oddly), among other things for my position, partly because I live(d) in New York City where there are plenty of independent bookstores as alternatives (see my original post for context on this). I have very good reasons to support independent business in New York City or otherwise, bookstores among them, but I think the real point was lost in my anger over the recent news of Amazon’s behavior, and I think it’s all related to the titanic shift happening in our economy, back to something more sustainable.

I want to mention a company I’ve been linking to here lately who is broadening the definition of stakeholder and is sending a positive message about the role a business can take in the world: Better World Books. You can read here about their “Three Bottom Lines.” Better World is a “for-profit” enterprise who sells new and used books and donates part of their profit to charities as well as support books and literacy in other meaningful ways (including book drives, fund raising and donating over a million books so far to Books for Africa, among others). I say that rather matter-of-factly because to my mind they aren’t necessarily anything radical (which might mean their model wouldn’t be widely replicated), but they represent a shift in corporate values: they immerse themselves in the community they serve by supporting libraries, colleges and literacy programs around the world; by offsetting the environmental impact of their operations and doing all that on what looks like a workable business model.

If you think Better World Books is isolated, think again: The Social Capital Markets Conference last October was a huge success and my friend Allan’s SocialMarkets.org is setting out to change the way non-profits interact with the marketplace for capital. I think this convergence represents a sea-change in the business world, both for- and non-profit.

For my small part, every book I link to on this site will be to the Better World Books site. If you click on anything and buy it from them, I’d love to hear your feedback on how your experience went, or if you have any thoughts on this whole business. Here’s a promotional video from Better World:

Thomas Pynchon’s “Inherent Vice” Out Next Summer

 

altimage
Well that was quick, wasn’t it? Via Scott Esposito, I see that Pynchon has a new novel coming out next August (are we over our Against the Day hangover yet?). It’s a relatively slim 416 pages and sounds more like Elmore Leonard (perhaps) than Pynchon, but that’s no surprise.

Literary Fiction and Documentary Film, Twin Stepchildren of Different Mothers

 

altimage Thom Powers is the documentary film programmer of the Toronto International Film Festival and the artistic director for the documentary film series, Stranger than Fiction at the IFC Center in New York City (he is also my client). He recently posted an essay on his blog, Wanted: Documentary Film Critics that I thought hit close to home for those who write about or lament the lack of mainstream coverage for serious literary fiction and literature in translation. He begins:

In the past, nonfiction film has drawn the attention of a few notable critics. Starting in the 1920’s, John Grierson actively championed the form. His generation gave way to the breakthroughs in direct cinema, covered by Jonas Mekas for the Village Voice and the “Living Room War” of Vietnam, analyzed by Michael Arlen for The New Yorker. Back then, documentary filmmakers were still dreaming of a future when equipment would be cheaper and distribution more accessible. Now, thanks to digital technology, that future has arrived. But America’s critical arbiters have lagged behind. Newspapers and magazines still follow the customs of an old era, squeezing in the occasional documentary review between saturation coverage of Hollywood dramas and comedies.

If that doesn’t sound familar enough, Thom cites the New York Times as a proxy for the state of documentary film criticism. I commented on Thom’s post that he shouldn’t discount blogs, which he does, – of course that may be for good reason and I don’t really know too well the state of blogging/online criticism for doc film – putting on my cheerleader hat for blogs filling the gap. That’s a hat I’ve worn for years now and have always been slightly uncomfortable with because of all the self-promotion, thoughtlessness and other noise out there, which grows probably quicker than the terrific convergence of professional and avocationally avid writers who are finding new ways to critique and engage with literature that couldn’t exist in mainstream print.

What few blogs I’ve seen covering doc film are still “bloggy” with short posts, etc. but I don’t want to make the same mistake that outsiders always seem to make, thinking that they understand what’s happening by looking a few sites.

So my question to you is, if you follow film criticism online, are there “serious” writers covering documentary film? Is there the same sort of groundswell for doc film as there appears to be with literary fiction online?

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Recent Comments

Hi Bud,

This is so bittersweet to read. I wish U of Penn more than luck in tackling the collection and making an exhibit for the books. I can’t wait to see the store again. I used to work at Gotham (all too) briefly, from the summer of 2001 to the fall of 2002 when I was 19 and in school for illustration. The building, the books, and especially the people (I had amazing co-workers, plus some really lovely customers) have a special place in my heart. I’m was hoping the link would mention Andreas (Andy) Brown, the last owner of GBM, but no such luck.

I was going to venture a guess that if the old man you met at the store was a GBM employee it might have been Phillip Lyman, but my understanding was Mr. Lyman was notoriously well-read (and had substantial library himself) so I suppose he would not have been reading Dante for the first time when you met him. More likely it was one of our splendid customers. It happened more than once that one customer on the floor would ask me about an author or title and I would meet them with my perfectly hopeless stare ‘n stammer—until another customer that had overheard the plea would effortlessly proffer the desired answer or suggestion. I learned so much working there, from everyone, but was a pretty useless specimen while the learning percolated. One of the more useful employees (our resident poetry expert) recently got a shout-out over at the New Yorker’s book blog after being made famous at the splendiferous Kwik Meal #1 cart:

New Yorker Link

One more book nerdy bit before I cut off the nostalgia trip. The above-mentioned Marc was the first person to Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino in my hands; I read it up in the 2nd floor gallery on my lunch breaks (lunch from Kwik Meal #1, of course), surrounded by art books and Edward Gorey paraphernalia. That book took (and takes, I’ve re-read it many times) me so many places, but when I’m lucky it takes me back to Gotham’s gallery, by the 2nd floor window where the constant refrain of the gold and diamond sellers coming in through the window mingled with the dulcet tones of NPR from a radio bigger than a microwave and the smell of old paper—all unchanged almost more than a decade later. At least in my mind. It’s still one of my favorite books (and authors), ever. Marc also blessed me with recommendations of Wallace Stevens’ Palm At The End of the Mind, Moby Dick with the Rockwell Kent illustrations, and my first ever NYC apartment: a little studio over in Astoria, Queens. Everyone at that store was overflowing and generous with knowledge, stories and history.

Places like Gotham do more than provide fodder for sentimental blog comment drivel though; I hope the lessons learned from the ongoing troubles are shaping a new generation of booksellers and customers that can find ways to thrive. Bookstores don’t belong in museums. Wise men fish there.

– (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
on “Well That's That”


Best wishes for the holidays, Bud.

I used to work in the Pan Am/Met Life Building in Manhattan.  I would walk over to Gotham at lunch and browse, browse, browse.  Books were the only thing I ever bought on that stree.  It’s a shame it’s gone.  Thanks for the update for those of us no longer living in NYC.  Atlanta is not so much a book haven.

Best,
Jim H.

– Jim H.
on “Well That's That”


Yeah, for all of our technology - which is great - I mean you and I are talking about this from two ends of the country - but there’s nothing like being there.

– Bud Parr
on “Well That's That”