I’m Here
I rarely ever mention my absences here, which, after five years of blogging are not uncommon with me, but I do so now because I thought I’d mention that I’m Twittering (for god sakes!). I only recently got sucked into it because I was working on developing a “Human Rights Twitter Network” for a client (see the first of that on this site: Estado de Miedo about which I’m very proud to have taken part in). After a couple of days I said to myself that I can’t do it, I can’t just twitter my work day away, but now I’m hooked. I’ve also been fooling around with tumbler just because I like the interface, so not sure what I’m going to do with that.
At any rate I will soon have something to say about Javier Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow and I’m bound to have something to say about Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselesness, which I’m reading now, because so far, it’s devastating.
So, if you twitter (a far nicer word than ‘blog’ isn’t it), follow me and I’ll follow you and then we’ll all be following each other.
Here’s an excerpt from Senselessness (which I lifted from TEV where you can find the entire first chapter):
I am not complete in the mind, said the sentence I highlighted with the yellow marker and even copied into my personal notebook, because this wasn’t just any old sentence, much less some wisecrack, not by any means, but rather the sentence that astonished me more than any other sentence I read that first day on the job, the sentence that most dumbfounded me during my first incursion into those one thousand one hundred almost single-spaced printed pages dropped on what would be my desk by my friend Erick so I could get some idea of the task that awaited me. I am not complete in the mind, I repeated to myself, stunned by the extent of mental perturbation experienced by this Cakchiquel man who had witnessed his family’s murder, by the fact that this indigenous man was aware of the breakdown of his own psychic apparatus as a result of having watched, albeit wounded and powerless, as soldiers of his country’s army scornfully and in cold blood chopped each of his four small children to pieces with machetes, then turned on his wife, the poor woman already in shock because she too had been forced to watch as the soldiers turned her small children into palpitating pieces of human flesh.
Nobody can be complete in the mind after having survived such an ordeal, I said to myself, morbidly mulling it over, trying to imagine what waking up must have been like for this indigenous man, whom they had left for dead among chunks of the flesh of his wife and children and who then, many years later, had the opportunity to give his testimony so that I could read it and make stylistic corrections, a testimony that began, in fact, with the sentence I am not complete in the mind that so moved me because it summed up in the most concise manner possible the mental state tens of thousands of people who have suffered experiences similar to the ones recounted by this Cakchiquel man found themselves in, and also summed up the mental state of thousands of soldiers and paramilitary men who had with relish cut to pieces their so-called compatriots, though I must admit that it’s not the same to be incomplete in the mind after watching your own children drawn and quartered as after drawing and quartering other peoples’ children, I told myself before reaching the overwhelming conclusion that it was the entire population of this country that was not complete in the mind, which led me to an even worse conclusion, even more perturbing, and this was that only somebody completely out of his mind would be willing to move to a foreign country whose population was not complete in the mind to perform a task that consisted precisely of copyediting an extensive report of one thousand one hundred pages that documents the hundreds of massacres and proves the general perturbation.
Post on Green
“…This is the way that readers/reviewers/booksellers avoid ‘foreign’ books by essentially diminishing their importance. It’s the same sort of logic that dismisses the quality of something — like Cubs fans — by questioning it’s authenticity — even if they really don’t understand baseball — is a slippery slope.”
On Katrina: Trouble the Water
If you’re going to the New Stories from the South event that Maud’s emceeing tomorrow (or not), you might be interested in this film by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin: Trouble the Water, which just launched in NYC and the West Coast and is getting a big run throughout the country (it won the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary at Sundance). The trailer says it best:
This is Not the End of Bolano
I went through a period of literary despondency for days after finishing Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and there’s little of this infectous writer in English I haven’t read. The good news: We still have more to look forward to (contrary to this report in The New Yorker). This Fall New Directions is publishing The Romantic Dogs, Bolaño’s poems from 1980 to 1998. What I gather about Bolaño was that his heart was in poetry, so perhaps this will be a look into the real man, even if these are not the works he’s known for. The text in Spanish is out on the internet and New Directions has a poem from the new translation available from their Website (at the link above). Of course I’ll have more to say about 2666 in the coming months, but it’s not due out until November (lucky blog boy that I am) so it will be more fun to talk about then.
“Being around Willie is like being around Buddha…”
“Willie’s story is more of a tall tale. Like Daniel Boone, Willie belongs both to American history and American myth. Huckster. Trickster. Philanthropist. Pothead. Road dog. Genius. His nicknames read like godly epithets of a peculiarly American sort–Shotgun Willie, the Red Headed Stranger, Booger Red. Like Boone, in his own lifetime Nelson has become a living symbol of pioneering American virtues–individualism, integrity, survival, self-made commercial success. And the people around him speak of him as if he were the Yoda of Austin.”
- Jason Chervokas reviewing Joe Nick Patoski’s Willie Nelson: An Epic Life
McNally on Mediocrity
“I think industry mediocrity is more of a threat to the future of reading than television is.”
- Sarah McNally (owner of McNally Jackson books) quoted in the New York Observer
August 8th, 2008: Guantanamo from the Inside
The New York Times Book Review posted a review today of Mahvish Rukhsana Khan’s My Guantánamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me. Khan writes, according to the Times, “‘I came to believe that many, perhaps even most’ of the detainees were ‘innocent men who’d been swept up by mistake.’” Many of these prisoners were released, but only after years in some cases, and never knowing what they were charged with. The book sounds interesting, if for no other reason than an artifact recording how we freedom loving people treat other humans beings
For an empathetic view of one prisoner’s life in Guantánamo look to Dorothea Dieckmann’s Guantánamo: A Novel. It really is a fantastic and moving novel, reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
See also this virtualization from Unconstitutional: The War On Our Civil Liberties, A film by Nonny De La Pena covered also in this Vanity Fair article, Click here for Torture.
August 8th: Dylan
I’m going to see Bob Dylan next week in Prospect Park hooray!. You can download a free mp3 “Dreamin’ of You” from his Website.
Exercises in Listing: Translations of the past 50 Years
If you were looking for a reading list to keep you busy you wouldn’t do much better than the Translators Association of the Society of Authors list of 50 outstanding translations of the last half century. Running chronologically, it begins with Queneau’s Exercises in Style, translated by Barbara Wright from 1958, and ends with Tolstoy’s War and Peace translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky from 2007.
There are many fabulous books on the list and equally fabulous omissions, of course (isn’t that the fun of lists, after all?). It must have been tough as it would appear the Society tried to make sure they spread the list among translators instead of favoring the few who are most often singled out. Otherwise they would have noted Pevear’s and Volokhonsky’s Dostoevsky translations, which I think in whole are more notable than the War & Peace translation. The only two seriously glaring omissions (although, give me a minute, eh) that come to mind are Edith Grossman’s Don Quixote and Andrew Hurley’s collections of Jorge Luis Borges works (the Yates and Irby translation of Labyrinths is there). There have been quite a few translations of The Master and Margarita so Michael Glenny’s version is an interesting choice. Might as well stop now.
Among the books well known and for every one I’ve read there are others I’ve never even heard of, like Josef Skvorecky’s The Engineer of Human Souls translated by Paul Wilson or Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War, translated by Frank Palmos and Phan Thanh Hao although those titles sure do sound like ones we would have known for some reason.
August 6th, 2008: Boycott Amazon
I’ve long ago committed to buying a majority of my books at independent bookstores and I’ve mostly stopped linking to Amazon here in favor of linking directly to publishers even though that takes a bit more time (in fact I have mostly used Amazon lately just for its wishlist feature or publication information). I love the prices but after a while I realized that those discounts come at a cost: partly the value of selection of independent bookstore owners – I know when I walk into BookCourt or Three Lives that someone there has chosen interesting things that I might want to know about – but also the influence that Amazon wields in the book trade in general.
Dennis Loy Johnson, founder of Melville House Publishing first explained to me about the difficulties of dealing with the Amazonians several years ago, but it seems their dirty dealings never end. According to The Bookseller.com Amazon is fighting with Hachette Livre to extract more discounts from the publisher and has REMOVED THE BUY BUTTON from their titles on the site (this is, I understand, on the UK Website). Can you imagine walking into your favorite bookstore, picking up a title and heading to the cash register and being told “No. We won’t sell you that book. The publisher hasn’t given us a big enough discount.” I would walk out and never come back.
An article at The Society of Authors sums it up:
In order to bring pressure to bear on Hachette, Amazon has been removing the ‘buy button’ from some books and also taking some titles out of promotional positions. Authors are very concerned that they will be losing sales as a result of the hostile action by Amazon.
Tim Hely Hutchinson made a persuasive case for standing firm. Discounts to booksellers have been increasing by 1% per year over the last 10 years and this has had a major impact on authors’ royalties.
As seems to be company policy, Amazon has been remarkably uncommunicative, so it is impossible to assess the merits of its arguments (which presumably are linked to the much larger discounts available to supermarkets).
From what I can tell (see more at this International Herald Tribune article) this is common practice and I don’t see how on earth it benefits readers or writers. So that’s it. Unless I see something from Amazon proving that this is somehow justified I hereby boycott Amazon.com and suggest you do to.
p.s. If you want to read about Amazon’s early days, check out the memoir by my friend James Marcus, Amazonia.
RSSrandom longer posts/reviews
links saved, etc.
me posting elsewhere
You'll find me posting at the
Words Without Borders Blog
my twitter
find stuff at this site
- tags:
- don quixote
- dependent children of independent bookstores
- pen world voices festival
- william gaddis
- the paris review
- cervantes
- thomas pynchon
- roberto bolano
- william h. gass
- rilke
- zbigniew herbert
- osvaldo golijov
- daniil kharms
- laird hunt
- gotham book mart
- coffee
- anna deveare smith
- proust
- national slowetry month
- witold gombrowicz
- steve reich
- fence magazine
- paul muldoon
- seamus heaney
- brooklyn
- ecolibris
- death of print
- jorge luis borges
- cesar vallejo
- wiki
- flann o'brien
- joan didion
- national poetry month
- james meek
- italo calvino
- dubravka ugresic
- nathalie sarraute
- lydia davis
- community bookstore
- etgar keret
- marguerite duras
- harry mathews
- terezia mora
- amigos
- heights books
- everything for free
- death to print
- glyn maxwell
- cambridge companions to literature
- indra sinha
- cervantespen world voices festival
- marina tsvetayeva
- w.h. auden
- james joyce
- pevear/volokhonsky
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:
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”
