Chekhov’s Mistess

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.

Reading John Ashbery’s poetry is like floating on air. It makes you giddy, but your feet dangle, you don’t quite know what to do with them and after a while you start treading for solid ground. Of course you always go back for more, you know, for the giddy part.

Writing about his work must be no easy task either. Helen Vendler does it well. I read the Ashbery chapter in Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery with great hope, but she left me thinking I was still missing something.

Stephen Burt, writing in the “Times Literary Supplement” does a great job. Here’s just a bit:

For each poem that sticks to one clear topic, though, there are three that, on first reading, have none: some include language that sounds computer-generated (“Avuncular and teeming, the kind luggage / hosed down the original site”), though few remain in that frustrating mode for long. Ashbery’s non sequiturs throw us back on the reasons we have tried to follow them, on why we take, or try to take, an interest in any topic at all – on our desire for conversation, for companionship, for evidence that we are not entirely alone. He seeks such evidence in our artistic inheritance, and in the flimsiest components of daily speech, stitching into his shimmery fabric a host of phrases we might, without him, think incompatible with serious verse:

Surely, passing through the town,
we contributed a little to the regional economy,
received credit for showing our faces.
So what if the only theater in town
had been turned into a funeral parlor?
There are few things more theatrical than
death,
one supposes, though one doesn’t know.

No modern poetry half so original incorporates half so many clichés. I count at least five in those seven lines, each a reminder that our language – ugly or beautiful – is never ours alone. Rather, a language, a sociolect, a culture, is something that we inherit, something we then (after “passing through” and dying) bequeath.

Sorry to jump to the ending because you should read the entire article, but his conclusion is too good not to quote:

When you interpret Ashbery at all, you risk having sceptics tell you that you made it all up: that the poems demonstrate ingenuity not from the poet but from his interpreters, who find music in static, meaning in randomness, synthetic silk in a succession of sow’s ears. The same objections used to be (and occasionally still are) levelled at people who spent time rereading Eliot, or rereading Gertrude Stein (whom Ashbery admires). No one can prove that Ashbery’s poems mean anything. But no one can prove that your life means anything, either: on a good day, you feel able to keep on living it, as John Ashbery has kept on writing, following a plan where a plan seems to fit, but otherwise making it up as you go.

A Free book from Soft Skull

By way of building a little buzz in advance of the publication of our brilliant and, shockingly, not-widely-read cult author David Ohle, a free ad-supported eBook:

Advance orders for The Pisstown Chaos were so low last year, I canceled the original May 2007 publication, and tried again, this time for July 2008. And to pull out more stops, this preview eBook.

Here’s what folks had to say about his previous installment:

“…if—as was provocatively asserted in Don DeLillo’s Mao II—the terrorist has hijacked the novelist’s role within our culture, is it then somehow supercilious of me to report that Ohle has written a novel that will behead his readers? … I’d like to propose that getting your head lopped off by Ohle’s fiction is a strange and unforgettable experience….In The Age of Sinatra, Ohle has seemingly concocted some sort of covert Oulipian recipe regarding the fantastic versus realism….Think The Phantom Tollbooth in a Technicolor, head-on collision with the Book of Job….American readers should take note of this insurgent fiction writer, David Ohle, who flays the human condition to singular, hallucinatory effect.”—Village Voice, Best Books of 2004…

And don’t you love a publisher that isn’t afraid to say “Advance orders… were so low last year” Of course only someone who really believes in the books he publishes would say that, I think.

One note – I didn’t download the book. WOWIO, the service Soft Skull is using for the downloads doesn’t allow you to register for their free books unless you have an email address other than gmail, hotmail, yahoo, etc. or use a credit card for your free book or scan your drivers license. Hello? I’ll wait for that policy to change, as it surely will.

I feel a little bit like a schmuck. Given the choice to pay whatever I like, I just got a subscription to Fence Magazine for $1.00. Sound familiar? It is:

Dear Reader,

We at Fence love Radiohead, and so jumped at the chance to buy their newest album (I’m so old I call it an “album”) at the price of our choosing. One of us paid $1 for it; another of us paid $17 for it; these seemed like fair prices. We have heard some paid two months’ salary.

And now we’re offering a similar opportunity for you to choose your own price for subscribing to Fence (or re-upping your current subscription). It’s very important to us that Fence have readers—that the work inside Fence have readers, really—and so we want you to pay us whatever you want for your year’s subscription.

All you have to do is go here http://www.fenceportal.org/support/ and click on “donate,” then choose your level. Payments are processed by PayPal (it’s free and easy to set up an account if you don’t already have one: http://www.paypal.com). Anyone who chooses to pay $300 or more, god bless you, will, as always, become a lifetime subscriber, and receive a receipt for your tax-deductible donation.

This offer will be good from now through April 30th. If you take us up on it you will receive your brand new Spring/Summer 2008 issue of Fence sometime in May.

Okay, so they want readers and I’m a reader and I wouldn’t subscribe otherwise (because I’ve been cutting out all my print subscriptions), and I couldn’t resist. I’m one of those people that goes the CLMP litmag fair and loads the boat with cheap copies of journals.

Pen has posted this year’s Pen World Voices Festival schedule. More later and of course, you can expect full coverage at MetaxuCafe.

The beauty of Shakespeare’s language can weather any treatment. Evidence: Rupert Goold’s Macbeth at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a testament to that tenacity with which words can tower over an overwrought production.

Set against a backdrop of Stalinist Russia, Macbeth’s bloody ambition is indeed bloody, dripping bloody, amplified, lit up with horror-film inspired bloody backdrops, Orwellian film clips and rap-music flourishes. As movies go, it was thrilling, excepting of course that it was a play. At the end the audience stood and clapped, but not as excitedly as I’ve seen at some great performances, perhaps worn out by the three hours of intensity or perhaps confused at whether or not they were at the movies, clapping for absent actors and set directors.

But despite my feeling that we were being spoon-fed Shakespeare, Goold’s Macbeth was extraordinarily fun. The cast extracted every bit of drama from their roles, and Patrick Stewart honed in on a critical layer of Macbeth’s tragic character: the tyrant’s vision, that absolute belief in self, no matter how unnatural, no matter how many atrocities are required, no matter the price. Ben Brantley observes in the New York Times:

“This Macbeth has been cursed by a depth of vision, an ability to conjure up the rippling consequences of every action he undertakes, that eventually leads him to the bleak plains of existential emptiness. Mr. Goold and Mr. Stewart make it clear that Macbeth is really killed not by Macduff (Michael Feast) but by his own willingness to be killed. It’s suicide by nihilism.”

Clear indeed. The scene of Macbeth’s death was more reminiscent of the quiet acceptance of defeat by Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) in Star Wars than Shakespeare’s text: “Yet I will try the last…And damned be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’” Macbeth has Macduff under his knife, but then casually tosses it aside before ‘Exeunt, fighting.’

While Shakespeare’s plays are often given modern settings, few are as detailed or as effective as Goold’s. At times the tyrannical, paranoid Stalinist Macbeth seems eerily right on. During a banquet scene (where Macbeth’s ally Banquo is invited but does not appear because he’s been assassinated by Macbeth’s thugs who fail to kill Banquo’s son as well) Macbeth plays the role of unpredictable omni-powerful man, menacing to those even in his innermost circle. Watching that scene I was reminded of the story of Stalin’s death when he lay unconscious for hours because no doctor or even his family had the courage to knock on his door. Another scene, with Ross, who is a Thane by Shakespeare but appears here more as a bureaucrat or apparatchik, strongly evokes torture, entirely sealing the setting more so than the Russian music or other elements.

But the Stalinist setting is but one as Goold also plays with the underwold of Macbeth’s witches and ghosts. The morgue-like stage is the fitting backdrop for Damien-like Weïrd sisters (the witches) who dress in nurses habits and servants uniforms with the evil banality of the devil worshippers next door in Rosemary’s Baby. Their presence is sometimes comic, not always scripted, but always effective in reminding us that there is something more behind man’s evil. Seyton, who is one of Macbeth’s underlings, appears something like a gyrating Riff Raff (from The Rocky Horror Picture Show) in one scene, is also comically scary throughout.

But nowhere is the affect of an otherworldly evil portrayed more clearly than in Kate Fleetwood’s Lady Macbeth. Her first scene, set in stark light where her blood red lipstick leads the lines “Come, thick night, / And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, / that my keen knife see not the wound it makes, / Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, / To cry ‘Hold, hold!’” Fleetwood’s Lady Macbeth teetered between a desperate evil and ambitious housewife whose sexuality is a source of power and to my mind the play itself was not as strong after her last scene.

Mr. Goold’s ability to toy with evil and humor at the same time fits very much my impression of Shakespeare’s spirit. His production is what it is, excessive in a rich Julie Taymor-ish visual way, and every bit Shakespeare via Scorcese, yet I’d choose three hours at BAM’s Harvey Theater with this Shakespeare whose words are more vibrant still over what’s being written today.

The following is Laura’s response on seeing the Harlan Ellison video I posted yesterday, “Pay the Writer:”

LOL, well, I of course being a cynic—not without reason—love this, though it’s very un-politically-correct these days to say so. Bless Harlan for coming right out with it, expletives and all.

This whole thing about giving stuff away for free…Ellison uses the standard analogy of “would you work for nothing?” Writers gotta eat, and most people do (barely) acknowledge that.

But work is also a soul issue, and so is the money associated with it. People care about their salary for more reasons than just what it can buy. They care because it deeply matters in terms of human worth. The value of time, the value of mind, the value of self. I spend an average of a year, full-time, writing each of my books. I sweat the proverbial blood and tears; I have scars on my forehead from beating it against the screen. I always work intensely to make my writing the best that I can make it. I do not do this for the money. In fact the actual money is counter-productive—nothing produces writer’s block faster than thinking about advances and contracts and deadlines.

Once the book is finished, though, the money and the sense of proprietary ownership in my own work do matter. Just turning it loose, saying, “Here, I wrote this, you can read it if you want”—That is a de facto devaluation of not only the work itself, but of the time and the significant part of myself that I put into it. It says, I put all this time and work into this, but it has no specific value to me or to anyone else. It’s free. It belongs to everyone, and by belonging to everyone, it erases me. This may sound like an ego thing, but it’s deeper—it’s as if the clamor of demand from readers ends up an enslavement of working for them. I don’t exist, the effort I made never existed—it came into being because ten billion monkeys hit keys at random intervals and who do I think I am to charge money for it? Especially when readers need reading material and they have to order online and they don’t get a paycheck till next week and the price of gas has gone up.

Gaiman and many others say the value is that someone will come back and read my other stuff. I guess this is just too cerebral for me. I can grasp it intellectually but it’s too cold a calculation. It’s a sales pitch, a commodity strategy. And my books are not, to me, commodities. Even though as a genre author I am well aware that they must compete in a marketplace, that awareness is never good for my writing. Over in my part of the pond, some very intelligent and lively blogs hold discussions on how much the author=the book in marketing terms, and when I say no, books are not commodities, they are art, people argue with me. At length.

So perhaps that’s why I’m so cynical. I do what do within the slavering maw of commercial consumerism. So I know it pretty well, and it’s scary as h*ll.

Personally, I will not write novels anymore if they have to be supported by advertising. It just breaks the bond between me and the reader. There is a bond, with a print book, with something that is bought and paid for. There’s more than exchange of filthy lucre. There’s an exchange of effort, even if it’s just the effort of lugging a book home from the library. Come to think of it, maybe this is why readers become so irrationally infuriated when a book doesn’t live up to their expectations. It’s an insult to more than their pocketbooks. It’s an insult to =them=, to their self-worth. I the author have asked for their time and their mind, and I failed them.

Conversely, if the reader takes what I wrote for free, they take my time and my mind for free. They get the fun, or fulfillment, or just something to wonder about, and I get zip. This is a deeper violation than just a monetary one. I think it’s the real source of Ellison’s outrage.

Well, it’s late and doubtless this is incoherent. But thank you for the space because actually I think I figured something out for myself here—why it is I am unfitted for writing books for free.

This spot is to generate interest in a topic for anyone who wants to participate. We started off with a series of posts on Rilke. For now, we're coming up with something, so let us know if you want to make a suggestion »

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