Please Don't

John Banville threatens, I think is the proper term, to "bring back" Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. Why? If he wants to write a hard-boiled bit of noir that takes place in a "slightly surreal, or hyper-real, atmosphere," let him. But why bring Chandler and Marlowe into it? This doesn't sound like the creation of some kind of post-modern fiction built off or around a classic like Sargasso Sea, but rather like a stunt. Banville in both his high and middle brow literature is supposed to be quite the thing, as the kids say, this bit here seems like a waste of time, energy, and talent.

Historishically Thinking

The current The New Yorker there is a review (sub req) of a work of fiction the author of which once said

[i]creasingly, I am less interested in writing about fictional people because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story.

Her response to her lament was to write a work of fiction interlarded with "facts," we are supposed to believe.

I have said this before and I will say it again: if you don't want to write fiction don't but for god's sake stop pretending that fiction dedicated to factiness is somehow or another factual.

Were she really bored with fiction, instead of tired with all the hard work of making everything up, she could write, I don't know, a biography or a work of history. No really, I doubt, to be honest, that either would be any good as the discipline of either biography or history writing is rather different than the discipline required to write fiction but still.

Ray Bradbury

is, of course dead. I read and enjoyed all of his books that I read, which is to say some small percentage of all the books that he wrote. I can, fairly vividly, remember the essential strangeness of the texts and the thrill of his use of language.  What I did not know was that Bradbury was huge in the USSR.  As an added bonus a recipe for dandelion wine:

Once we made a bottle of dandelion wine. (Our “micro-district” on the western outskirts of Leningrad was fairly overrun with dandelions in the summer.) Every Soviet teen-ager worth his salt knew how to make a batch of moonshine: You took a pharmacy-bought, five-litre bottle with a narrow mouth; you filled it with four litres of water, added a kilo of sugar, and a stick of yeast. Then you fitted a garden-variety condom over the bottle’s mouth. . . . You pricked a tiny hole through the tip of the condom. Then you left the bottle alone for ten days or so, in some dark, inconspicuous, reasonably warm space. While the process of fermentation was in progress, the condom on top of the bottle remained stiffly erect, held up by the steady stream of outgoing air. Once it was over, the condom fell limply to the side, which was how one knew that the moonshine inside the bottle was ready for consumption. To the initial mix, we added one kilogram of dandelion petals.

The result was

the most revolting concoction imaginable, yet we downed it in swift, greedy gulps, dead drunk while still in the process of drinking.

 The essay is really quite lovely.

Odd Choices

Dr, Suess, it seems, once wanted to be taken seriously as an adult author.  Consequently, he wrote and illustrated a book on the Godiva sisters. The book disappeared without a whimper. Suess claimed that

[he] attempted to draw the sexiest babes [he] could, but they came out looking absurd.

Judge for yourself:

Valentine's Day

Franz Kafka writes a "love" letter, according to The Atlantic:

Last night I dreamed about you. What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me. Finally you somehow caught fire.

Remembering that one extinguished fire with clothing, I took an old coat and beat you with it.
But again the transmutations began and it went so far that you were no longer even there, instead it was I who was on fire and it was also I who beat the fire with the coat.

But the beating didn’t help and it only confirmed my old fear that such things can’t extinguish a fire.

In the meantime, however, the fire brigade arrived and somehow you were saved.

But you were different from before, spectral, as though drawn with chalk against the dark, and you fell, lifeless or perhaps having fainted from joy at having been saved, into my arms.

But here too the uncertainty of trans mutability entered, perhaps it was I who fell into someone’s arms.

Assuming, of course, it is a love letter, it may be the single greatest love letter ever written in that it makes little in the way of overt sense and its meaning rests almost entirely on the reader's response, which suggests that love, much like beauty, is the the eye of the beholder.

Little Journals

It's a sad fact of life that small literary journals, which I never read, are disappearing like dodos and passenger pigeons. If you want to read some of the more famous and now extinct versions from a period of literary experimentation that helped to shape the contemporary intellectual landscape go here.

Book Reveiw

Zift A Socialist Noir, Vladislav Todorov, trans Joseph Benatov (2010: Philadelphia, Paul Dry) (from library[1])

So this is the first Bulgarian text of any sort I have ever read. I thought that I had at least one Bulgarian student at Cave College, but now I think he was Albanian. In any event, this book won the prize for Bulgarian novel of the year and has been made into a movie. I cannot for the life of me remember where I heard about it but hear about it I had. I read id. Todorov teaches film and literature at the U Penn and it shows.  The  book, despite the back cover blurb's nonsense of its evocation of Sofia in 1963, is a pastiche of a couple of famous film noirs, DOA, OUt of the Past, Maltese Falcon, maybe Gilda, and the Ely comedy noir Kind Hearts and Coronets mashed up with Don Quixote or - at least - the picaresque novel.

The narrator moves from through a criminal underworld which is equal parts mafia and a corrupt Bulgarian nomenklatura that neatly recapitulates Raymond Chandler's claim, in one or another of the essays in The Simple Art of Murder, about the symbiotic relationship between criminals and the state, and he was talking about Los Angeles. The various scenes and characters are familiar to anyone mildly versed in the grammar of noir on film or the page. The prose is less lapidary than Chandler and more compelling than James M. Caine.

It is very much a MacGuffin novel in which who does what to whom and why are considerable less important than the aimless anecdotes the hero's various interlocutors provide. This means that all the characters are sharply drawn and the tales retold sound as if someone other than the author is speaking. The constant return to story telling and the consistently less than reliable narrators, for me -- in any event -- led to the book being less noir than quasi-philosophical discussion or, perhaps more precisely, invitation to contemplate the role of story-telling in the process of self creation as a means of escaping the future's uncertainty.

On the whole it is a clever little book, well written and well worth reading. It length, 185 pages, combined with the relatively lean but none-the-less convoluted prose means that its pages speed by. Not sure that I would buy it but I am definitely glad to have read it. Long live the library.

[1] About which more later.

Good Reads

This webazine is very good.

Books Are Forever

For a while now, I've been worried that the book, the physical printed book, was going to disappear. I use kindle and its perfectly adequate, but books are the bee's knees. I am, therefore, heartened by this from Megan McArdle:

I'm pretty sure the print book's days are numbered for anything except specialty applications.  The die-hards will cling for a while, but ultimately, book buyers are already an extremely affluent group, and the convenience in acquiring, porting, and storing your library simply overwhelms the drawbacks, especially as Amazon has introduced innovations like eBook lending.

Inasmuch as she is wrong about everything it follows that she is wrong about this. For my money, if you want to know, the book's future lies in ondemand printing services like the Espresso ondeman book making machine.

Ring Tones

Macy Halford over to The New Yorker's book bench mentions that there is a free translation of a Russian novel that recasts The Lord of the Rings novels.  I've read the books more than once and seen the movies, which are truly awful because their fidelity to the books exposes the impossibility of much if not all of the action, so I thought why not read The Last Ring Bearer?

It's a nice little book and the translator writes well and spins a nice story; I have no idea how much the same holds for the original Russian and to what extent the English-language version resembles its source material. One of the more interesting aspects of the LRB is recasting the conflict between east and west, leaving aside the now malevolent Elves, Gandalf, and Aragon, was the conflict between the pastoral and the mechanical on the question of progress. Mordor and its allies are, more or less, agents of industrialization, innovation, and enlightenment while the West, under the domination of the Elves, offers a cycle of stagnation and blissful ignorance. The novel is meant as a polemic against what its author sees as the agrarian authoritarianism, if not fascism, of Tolkien's master narrative.

The other aspect of this text as opposed to TLR is that its a spy story in which the tawdry and compromised world of Le Carre replaces Tolkien's gaudy two-toned world in which heroic heroism forthrightly battles the evil empire. It is, in other words, subtler and considerable funnier that TLR.

And the best sign from yesterday? Walker Take a Lesson From Palin: Quit

Border Wars

Border's is filing Chapter 11 and, according to this, will be closing some 30% of its least productive stores.  One of them is the Border's on University Ave in Madison WI.  Never once have I been in there when it didn't give every appearance of being busy, which is to say filled with customers buying books, magazines, and related etc; if they can't make it there; they can't make it anywhere, which is a depressing thought.