Chekhov’s Mistess

My friend Maud Newton was a finalist in Narrative Magazine’s 2008 Love Story contest. Congrats, Maud!

The PEN World Voices Festival got underway yesterday and once again we are bringing blogger coverage together at MetaxuCafé (Coverage page here). In the past two years we’ve posted over 40 pieces on the festival and this year we have a great group again.

So stop by. I’ve also been spiffing up the design at MetaxuCafé, so let me know what you think.

Ah, Earth Day. Like National Poetry Month, these days/months mean little if you are already in to them and once a lot of people become do aware they feel like they’ve outlived their usefulness at best and a little cheesy at worst (although who doesn’t enjoy a good poster now and then). I don’t think I’ve made even one mention of NPM this month, except for mentioning Greko’s annual blogging endeavor.

Tell you the truth, the only green I’ve been thinking of lately is the sort that spews out of ATMs. Funny how having three kids will do that to you. Nonetheless, Green, “for lack of a better word, is good” so I thought I’d revisit an organization I mentioned here once before:

EcoLibris says its aim is to “strive for a world where reading books doesn’t have adverse effects on the environment” by facilitating tree-planting offsets for book buyers. You pay a small fee according to the number of books you buy (“20 Million trees are cut down annually for virgin paper used for the production of books sold in the U.S. alone”), and they offset your use of trees by planting new ones. They also work as an advocacy group to encourage publishers to adopt good green practices.

I’ve thought a lot about the idea of offsets, an idea not without its detractors, but I like them (see the link on the word “offsets” for more information) because they foster awareness and an environment where individuals can take responsibility for their actions where otherwise we might feel overwhelmed by an inability to make an impact. On the downside of course, offsets may just be emotional salve and make us feel as though we are “doing something,” absolved of further responsibility.

Of course, I being the heretic, think that the best way to lesson the impact books make on the environment is to use electronic readers. Sure, we’re not there yet, but imagine at the least if the book industry were required to distribute advanced readers copies electronically. That kind of leads to a major problem with the adoption of e-readers: How do you market a book when the all look the same? Not all countries dress up their books the way we Americans do, so it may be doable, and then again, music marketing has managed to survive the minimization of album art (and Apple has turned cover art into a whole new electronic reality reviving dineresque jukebox coverflow).

At the very least I believe that all periodicals should be distributed solely through electronic means. My pledge to myself this year was to stop all paper-based subscriptions. That’s not easy to do. I’ve forever been a magazine/newspaper addict (although I gave up paper newspapers several years ago) and I get tons of free trade magazines as well as the ones I shell out for. I often have as many as 20 different subscriptions and more often than not I don’t bother to count. I just throw away the pile when it gets so big it topples.

Progress? Because I couldn’t resist the offer, I just subscribed to Fence for $1, already going back on my own pledge. And then there’s the fact that I have so many subscriptions that I can’t keep up with when some of them expire and several have pernicious auto-renew features that shock me when I get notice. So let’s just say it’s a work in progress. I should do what the government does: By 2012 I will phase out all paper-based subscriptions (grandfathering free trade subscriptions where there is no electronic alternative, small magazines who depend on subscriptions for their livelihood, important periodicals who deserve to be archived, and journals I want to save for my children). There, I feel better.

Seriously, there’s just no reason for all these piles of unread paper when the Web and other means are a viable and often better alternative. Print Periodicals, I put you on notice. We’ll talk about books later.

Sadly hilarious but true tales of a literary journal editor: Devolution of a Literary Correspondence

From the Criterion Collection

This weekend C-Span’s Book TV is airing clips from the Virginia Festival of the Book. Among the highlights are:

Adam Bradley, 2008 Virginia Festival of the Book – Discussion of Ralph Ellison’s Manuscripts for his Second Novel

From the 2008 Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, Virginia, a discussion by Adam Bradley on the unpublished second novel by Ralph Ellison.
This event took place at the Central Jefferson-Madison Library.

(Saturday 9:30 AM, Sunday 12:30 AM ET)

When they say “unpublished second novel” I take that to mean the novel that was published in its unfinished state Juneteenth.

I’m happy to see the possibility of a blog coming out of Dalkey Archive, one of my favorite publishers, but, I agree with Chad, the new Website is problematic. One to watch. Also from Chad Post’s Three Percent blog, I see the promise of a new internationally oriented bookstore opening in NYC that will organize their books by country. McNally Robinson used to have their books organized by country, but I don’t think they do now, although the most important thing is just to have a well-rounded selection in the first place and, in my view, treating books in translation the same as any other.

okay, all from me in my taxed haze. As soon as I muster some energy I’ll post about my reading last Sunday night.

The mythology surrounding Daniil Kharms’s death at the hands of the Soviets may or may not be based on hard facts, but Benjamin Paloff, a poetry editor at the Boston Review, is a little pissed off at his current place in literary history. I was drawn to this article I found in The Moscow Times first because Kharms is a great discovery of mine last year (for more on Kharms, who seems to have made his living as a children’s book author, at Wikipedia, or at this fan site). He’s enjoying a renaissance of sorts in English with a recent reissue of a 1993 translation of his work by Serpent’s Tail and a new translation by Matvei Yankelevich published – in hardback – last year by Overlook. But I was also drawn to this gem of Paloff’s that I love:

“Reading Russian poetry and aesthetic theory of the early Soviet period against the backdrop of the American poetry produced since then, one easily gets the feeling that a great deal of American paper could have been spared if these Russian texts had been available in English earlier.”

Ah, so true, so true, I suppose, but Paloff erodes his opportunity at making a point when he bullys a recent introduction to Kharms’ work with a cliche like “…reminiscent of a graduate seminar paper…” I do love that one because no matter how cliched, it stings, and it’s fun to watch poets gleefully spit at others with this sort of pseudo-intellectual name calling. Likewise, I remember a recent reviewer of Zbigniew Herbert’s The Collected Poems had a real problem with Adam Zagajewski’s rather short introduction to the book, which could only lead you to believe he, the reviewer, was either on a personal mission against the introducing author or just trying to make up for a lack of anything substantive to say about the work at hand.

So, back to Kharms. Paloff’s big problem seems to be the marketer’s tendency to pigeon-hole authors, as has been done with Kharms who is billed as an “absurdist” protest writer. Fair enough, but the truth is, despite the fact that “absurdist writer” might be as inept a name as “surrealist painter,” absurd as an artistic stance is a lot more impressive (and hard to pull off) than a lot of blathering political or philosophical writing. In short, if there is a political stance behind it, so called absurdist writing such as that of Kharms serves it well – as the only possible response to a sustained situation of unconscionable absurdity that is beyond any form of subversiveness – the artistic equivalent of a hunger strike. For instance, while the world will forever be engaged with Kafka, Camus will gradually fade away because his overt message is obscured by relatively dull writing (Camus fans, pummel me now, but I’ll tell you that I owe the good fortune of meeting my wife to Camus, but that’s another story). I don’t think Kafka’s work is labeled as absurd (because it’s not) but the adamantine absurdity that exists in his stories makes you feel the world that he was protesting against. Kharms’ writing does that too.

Kharms’ best known story “The Old Woman” features an old woman who appears in the narrator’s apartment and lays down and dies. The story begins like a parable:

In the courtyard stands an old woman holding in her hands a clock. I walk past the old woman, stop and ask her: “What time is it?”
“Take a look,” says the old woman.
I look and see that the clock has no hands.
“There are no hands there,” I say.
The old woman looks at the clock face and says to me:
“It’s a quarter to three.”
“So, that’s how it is? Thanks very much,” I say and leave.

If this were an American story it would have ended when the narrator saw there were no hands; he would have smiled and walked on. The Russian ending is “So, that’s how it is?” because it is. The rest of the story does that too – the narrator’s biggest problem is that the habits of those around him are so necessarily banal that when he has to consciously pay attention to them (because he has to rid himself of a dead body) his expectations are confounded by their slightest variation. Ultimately, the impossibility of his situation is so normal because normal is so impossible that it means nothing. I can’t think of a better description for for this than absurdist, can you? Or maybe I should just stick to the marketing department.

Where Paloff has a point is that not all of Kharms’ writing is absurdist. In fact, some of it is merely funny, childish or insouciantly pointless at best; something short of absurd, if that’s even what he was going for. To write that off as an American/Russian issue of sensibility is wrong. Paloff’s (and others’) idea that Kharms might have prefigured Russell Edson or Lydia Davis might be right, but those two, who weren’t killed under mysterious circumstances by the Soviets and therefore don’t enjoy a Russian mythology, have in my view an overall stronger body of work than Kharms, at least as he is translated into English, and at least standing outside of his own time.

I think a closer kin to Kharms is the Israeli writer of disarmingly curt stories, Etgar Keret, whose upcoming collection The Girl on the Fridge (actually a new release of his earlier work) features for example, a character who glues herself to the ceiling. His stories are so riddled with a humorous yet melancholy violence (a characteristic of Kharms’ writing) that you are engaged almost unwittingly with what it might be like for a person living a normal life of family, jobs and girlfriends, but with a subtext of stifling everyday violence. Being normal is a false response, yet the only way to get by. It’s an un-virtuous circle.

“And that’s it, more or less.”

Leave it to a publisher to so fundamentally misunderstand think up the idea of having a blog one month out of the year (where’s the myspace page?), but at the least it’s my amiga Ami Greko (say it like eekho) running the FSG poetry blog: http://www.fsgpoetry.com/

She says:

We’ll have a lot of great stuff, including:
An all new couplet composed by Robert Pinsky and available for download as your ringtone
A whole week devoted to poetry in translation, with posts from many of FSG’s award-winning translators
More original audio recorded exclusively for the blog by Frank Bidart, Les Murray, August Kleinzahler, Yusef Komunyakaa, and more
Free, downloadable broadsheets appropriate for brightening up even the most boring cubicle.

Laugh at the idea of a Pinsky couplet ringtone, but then again…

I recently watched some video footage of Sebastian Horsley having himself crucified. Really crucified, with nails on a cross. Right. Who is this guy? “My greatest work is my personality” he says. He seems to me to be the epitome or perhaps culmination of every overindulged rich person who mocks himself because he can. And I think he’s okay with that. At any rate, he’s an author of his own “unauthorized autobiography” Dandy in the Underworld and even better, he’s been banned from coming into the US for “moral turpitude.” It’s all so crazy. Flipping through his book randomly your met with plenty of cliche (“The best revenge is living well”), party scenes, navel gazing and something like rumination, yet it’s also a good reminder as I sit in front of my computer all day that I should go and have a drink, eh.

Here’s the press release from PEN:

New York, New York, March 31, 2008—PEN American Center is appealing to the Departments of Homeland Security and State to review the exclusion of British author Sebastian Horsley from the United States, calling the decision of Customs officials to bar him from entering the country on grounds of “moral turpitude” a “dangerous precedent that could be extended to bar scores of literary figures from a number of countries.”

Horsley, whose memoir Dandy in the Underworld was published last year in Britain and the U.S., arrived at Newark Liberty Airport on Tuesday, March 18, 2008. After Customs officials ran a Google search on him, he was questioned for several hours about his statements and writings and ultimately refused entry to the U.S. based on admissions of past involvement with drugs and prostitution, as well as his participation in a self-crucifixion in the Philippines in 2000. He was forced to return to the U.K.

PEN has invited Horsley back to the United States to participate in this year’s World Voices Festival of International Literature at the end of April, and is appealing to U.S. officials to facilitate his entry into the country

Read PEN’s letter to Secretary Rice and Secretary Chertoff here: http://pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/2139/prmID/172

What’s comical here is that a) I would gather Horsley’s delighted by this and b) had he not written this book, which The Rachels actually seem to have wrote, PEN wouldn’t be his champion; he’d fall under someone else’s jurisdiction – so it all comes together so nicely.

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