Condalmo

Lopate/McCarthy.

Leonard Lopate interviews Tom McCarthy.  McCarthy addresses Lethem's eyebrow-raising cover blurb.

State of the nation: related headlines.

One appears right after the other on my news page.  Just another day in America.

"Childrens do learn," Bush tells school kids (Reuters)

Court won't declare chimp a person (AP)

Inquiries and participation.

Darby begins a close look at Dhalgren and makes the following statement, which I feel reflects my own place as well:

But then, I don't come to literature as someone with answers but as someone who is trying to learn how to ask questions. I'm not even worried about learning to ask the right questions, or the best questions. It's just questions I'm after. Good questions, perhaps. Interesting questions, maybe. Questions, and the question of where they come from, and how they are found. Which is to say: I'm not here as an authority, but as a participant. I like it better that way.

Five Brock Clarkes.

Brock Clarke's "This is Not a Story About How Much I Love You" is serialized this week at Five Chapters.

Rest.

Characters are ghosts.

I'm grateful to have stumbled onto Lydie Salvayre's The Company of Ghosts (Dalkey Archive).  I remember reading something about it a while back; when I saw it in a bookstore recently, I picked it up on a whim.  Actually, reading the introduction helped put it over the top, which is unusual in the extreme;  introductions don't usually carry that much weight.

What a great read.  I'm a little less than halfway through, and only get scraps of time here and there to read it, what with one daughter changing schools, the other starting daycare, looking for new employment, juggling it all, and so on.  This has been a good book for this kind of situation - there's not a lot of movement, events-wise:  a daughter and mother are set upon by a process server (in France.  It's all in France) who impassively begins cataloging their  possessions for seizure.  The mother is deeply traumatized and the past and the present switch places on her at the snap of a finger, and so she recounts memories of past atrocities against her family, shouting that the process server is someone sent from the past to get her, while the daughter tries to contain her mother's emotions, shares her own experiences, and talks the ear off of the process-server.  There's some repetition in the way the characters move in and out of sequences in the story - the same thing happening, with the same accusations, bolstered by different memories from the mother - her brother being beaten, her mother learning about the world from sitting in a cafe.  The daughter muses on the positive and negative effects of television on her mother while also bemoaning the lack of truly passionate kisses on the shows.   

All in all it's wonderful, the writing is excellent and while you can't really tell, the cover's very nice (it matters) with lower case, ghostly letters placed around the capital letters of the title.  If Dalkey had published this book, I'd probably have read it by now. 

If I promise not to post about McCarthy next week, can I post today?

Thanks.

Tom McCarthy: You gotta read the Greeks if you want to understand how the whole symbolic order fits together; it’s like the main-frame from which all subsequent literature springs. Read the Oresteia, Oedipus, Antigone. Then the Renaissance writers, obviously. And the big modernists. Not reading Joyce if you want to be a serious writer would be kind of like not looking at Picasso if you want to paint. In terms of now, I think some of the most interesting literary figures (as I suggested earlier) aren’t necessarily writers. The films of David Lynch, for example, have an extremely literary logic; his latest, Inland Empire, is structured like Finnegans Wake or the novels of Robbe-Grillet, with a set of repetitions regressing inwards, modulating as they repeat. He’s grappling with questions of narrative and representation and identity in a way that mainstream novelists simply aren’t, and is therefore much more interesting as a ‘writer’, even if he isn’t strictly speaking one.

I've got Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy/In the Labrynth at home, but have you seen the print?  Who gave that atrocity the green light?  Do not open the book without ibuprofen. 

Inland Empire is not too far down our Netflix list, but there's a risk of spraining something, to go directly from the last disc of Arrested Development (I have never laughed so much) to Inland Empire, isn't there?

Forthcoming.

Dubious doesn't begin to describe my feeling about using this "tool" (though really, who's being used here?);  I may decide I'm disgusted by this "innovation" by day's end and pull this post, but of course you'll have this in your reader by then, and it'll be out of my control.

Meanwhile, uber-dubious (now that's a keeper!), I present:

Pessoa'd.

I'm looking for people interested in a side-project to this site, involving The Book of Disquiet.  If you haven't read it, that's the best; if you have, but are interested in re-reading it, that works as well.  I'm still working out the details and would welcome input from any interested parties.  I don't even know if this is the right time for me to start this, but I think this comment speaks well to the matter.

Remainder film.

The subject says it all.  Well, not all. 

MT: I understand the film rights for Remainder have been sold? What does this actually mean!? When might we see a film?

TM: A partnership of FilmFour and Cowboy Films have bought the rights and are producing the movie. They’re the partnership behind the recent adaptation of The Last King of Scotland, which was a huge success and won an oscar for Forrest Whittaker. The first draft of the script has been written, by John Hodge, who wrote the script for Trainspotting. I’m not technically involved, but the producer gave me a peek and it looked really good. Next they decide who the director will be. So maybe 2008/9 for the release date. It always takes longer and costs more than you think, apparently...

There are approximately 126 ways this could be bungled.  Lead actor?  I see Trainspotting mentioned, I think Ewan MacGregor, I shrug. 

The interview (part two; part one ran yesterday) also features McCarthy talking about similarities and differences between the first and second books.  My copy of MiS is en route from very, very far away.  This ends your weekly McCarthy update.

Short.

Short story lovers, unite. 

Via The Good Cheney.  Short stories have fallen a little bit out of favor for me lately - I need to be taken into something lengthier, the solace that comes from spending days with characters - strange, considering that I have so little time for reading lately, and the short story would fit perfectly.  Well, never mind, go buy some Lydia Davis.

Saunders in Portland.

Via Longfellow Books:

Thursday, September 27th
The Telling Room presents:
An Evening with George Saunders

at SPACE Gallery, 538 Congress Street
Doors open at 7:00 pm, reading starts at 7:30 pm, $7, All ages

Who else can pack so much dark humor, biting satire, and surreal madness in a piece of writing, bringing a sorry lot of characters to life amidst the chaos of the modern world, and through their struggles make us laugh, cry, but most of all question and think?

George Saunders is a one of a kind talent. His previous works (Civilwarland in Bad Decline and In Persuasion Nation among them) set a new standard for intelligent, irreverent storytelling, and his newly released collection of nonfiction, The Braindead Megaphone, continues down his path of insightful social critique. As a writer and a teacher, he’s a source of fearless inspiration, and thanks to the Telling Room, he’s coming to Portland.

For more information about George Saunders, this special event, and the Telling Room, visit www.tellingroom.org.

High school students interested in meeting with Saunders for a free talk on the craft of writing at 4 pm at The Telling Room should call (207) 321-2780 or email gibson@tellingroom.org.

ABCDEFG.

This looks like my kind of book:

ABC might have been subtitled "Difficult Letters," dealing as it does with Gerard Chauvin's sudden obsession with the origins of the alphabet. The novel opens with a terrifying, heartrending scene in which Gerard and his wife, Peggy, witness the death of their 6-year-old son, Harry, when the child plunges through the floor of an abandoned house during a sunlit summer outing. Moments before Harry's fall, Gerard notices a scrap of paper in the fireplace of the ruined building.

"On the top of the heap, not crumpled, was a sheet of writing, and Gerard leaned closer to try to decipher the meaning. He couldn't, and he reached down to pick it up. Frowning, he saw what he assumed must be letters, but he had no idea in what script, because it was not any he was familiar with. The letters were drawn very carefully, maybe by a child."

In the months that follow, Gerard grows increasingly estranged from Peggy. He is compelled to ask again and again the unanswerable question that surrounds his son's death: Why?

But that question gradually becomes subsumed into one he asks his wife as he broods about the scrap of paper with its indecipherable writing: "Have you ever wondered why the alphabet is set up the way it is? . . . Why does it start with A B C and not F D Q? Who arranged it the way it is, and when?" Gerard's obsession leads him back to the abandoned house where his son died. There he discovers that Harry's death was the result of a malicious act, no less terrible for being random. In the wake of this knowledge, Gerard's grief-driven detachment begins to resemble a sort of madness. He remains aware of his past and his identity, but neither bears any meaning for him now: He sheds them as though they were ruined clothing. His actions become dictated by impulse, by a sense of predestination that propels the novel more, and far more affectingly, than any conventional plot does.

Mitchell and Sebald.

On the connections between Joni Mitchell and W.G. Sebald (excerpt):

Mitchell and Sebald both project a persona that is perpetually on the road, although not exactly for the same reasons.When she is “porous with travel fever” the road for Joni Mitchell usually serves as the transition between past and future lovers. It provides the physical and temporal space for reflection and wild hopes.

A thunderhead of judgment was
Gathering in my gaze
And it made most people nervous
They just didn’t want to know
What I was seeing in the refuge of the roads
(from Refuge of the Roads)

For Sebald, the road provides the transition between projects and a release from periods that sound vaguely like depression.

In October 1980 I travelled from England, where I had then been living for nearly twenty-five years in a country which was almost always under grey skies, to Vienna, hoping that a change of place would help me get over a particularly difficult period in my life.  [All’estero, Vertigo]

In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.  [The Rings of Saturn]

Haus fire.

Okay, so I finished An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England last night, or the night before, I don't know.  Either way, I finished the review this afternoon (nine minutes ago) - coming soon to a publication near you.  The burning (!) question, of course, is: does a book with such a great title (and the cover!  the flaming woman! you want to hug the book) deliver the goods? 

It does, mostly.  I think there's a lot to be said for a book that can balance humor, literary commentary, and a plot that actually does keep you (well, me) guessing.  In the review I said that it does meet the expectations; given a word limitation, which I always should be (and time usually constrains me) it's hard to break down how a book did/did not meet expectations, where those expectations come from personally, how something that works as it was intended to work (at least how I interpret it as being intended to work) may be successful in that sense, but not fit the overall picture so well. 

Which probably comes across as a lot of blah blah blah, but when you read the review maybe it will make more sense - ?  There's just a few certain scenes and elements to the book that felt shoehorned in.  First and foremost in that category: the "Coleslaw" scene, toward the end - what?  (I know, this only makes sense if you've read the book.  Which you might as well, since you could do so much worse.)  It seems like one of those scenes that, in the movie version, would be cut out - if you saw the movie version first, and then went back and read the book, it'd have this additional bit, and you'd probably say "the book is always better than the movie" and congratulate yourself on being a smarty - except in this case, you'd be better off with the film version.  Like with Wonder Boys. 

Overall, though, great stuff.  Consider the goods to have been delivered to their destination.  Between this and the similar "What is the Cure for Meanness?", Brock Clarke's on my list of authors to follow.

Typewriter magic.

Are you kidding me?  This picture, and many more, made with a typewriter, only using the symbols @#$%^&*()_, by a man with cerebral palsy. 

Holy &%$!  (via.)

404: page not found.

 

If only.  (via.)

Somebody kill the hardcover.

I've written in the past about my preference for paperbacks over hardcovers - in fact, had to put down Black Swan Green over it, cursing the entrenched ways of doing business.  Scott brings it forth again, links to Levi Asher's recent investigations into the business of hardcovers and tosses in his two cents:

Actually, I must say that I prefer the paperback format. To me, hardcovers have always felt far too bulky, like some kind of ugly Volvo misbreed built with rivets in nations still on an Eastern Bloc footing. (The obvious exception to this are those lovely smallish Modern Library hardcovers that can almost fit in your pocket.) I also have some unfailing association of hardcovers with big, embossed gold lettering and a huge back-cover picture of some middle-aged dame, perhaps with a golden retriever in her lap. Obviously, this doesn't bring to mind good literature.

Needless to say, I have much more favorable associations with paperbacks, although I do definitely prefer the matte finish to the glossy. For some reason, glossy covers on paperbacks feel cheap to me, like they were just kind of pasted on at the end. (Maybe this has to do with the fact that ARCs tend to have glossy, pasted-on covers.) Inside flaps are also nice, and I do prefer a well-designed cover, even though I know this has nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of the writing and is terribly superficial of me.

I don't see it as superficial; it's part of the package.  It's only superficial if you judge a book solely on the cover/presentation.  It's why we prefer, say, a certain style of house over another - that inner need to have things around to look at that are pleasing to the eye.  If someone's preferred means of lightening an otherwise dark day is to pick up a book, it matters, the weight of the thing, the flexibility, the appeal of the cover: the whole package. 

More from Space.

More about Tom McCarthy's forthcoming Men in Space, which I promise will not be all I write about until (and after) I get my hands on a copy:

So what’s the book like? Pretentious and unreadable? Too ludic for its own good? Far from it. It is set in central Europe in the aftermath of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Much of the action takes place in Prague, where McCarthy lived for a couple of years in the early 1990s. The narrative progresses in fragmented chunks, each one written from loosely the point of view of one of the book’s motley characters.

The unifying element is a thriller-like plot concerning small-time Bulgarian mobsters who want to smuggle a stolen religious icon to the West. Working for this bunch of knuckleheads is a former referee called Anton Markov, who compulsively tells appalling jokes. His job is to find an artist who can make a copy of the painting accurate enough to fool the authorities, and he tracks down a talented bohemian called Ivan Manasek who says he’s up to it.

Manasek lives in a gloriously dilapidated Prague apartment with a young Englishman called Nicholas Boardaman, who is bumming around before starting a job at an art journal based in Amsterdam. Interspersed with these strands is the first-person narrative of an anonymous secret service operative monitoring Markov’s associates.

There are some priceless descriptions of counter-culture Prague, including a set-piece that details a Factory-style party in a French artist’s studio populated with beatniks, transvestites and an array of “artistic” types desperate to get wasted. There are also some tense moments when Markov is brutally interrogated by the police and then handed over to his gangster friends, who suspect him of double-crossing them.

But, really, the novel works best when viewed as a study of displacement and isolation, suggesting that we are all trapped within our own skulls like prisoners left to moulder in oubliettes. Few of the characters ever connect with one another. There are repeated images of planets hurtling through space, their orbits rarely intersecting with those of other celestial bodies.

The girl with the curious singularity.

A Curious Singularity has started a new round of short story discussion; this time around the focus is on Grace Paley's fine "A Conversation with My Father." 

Confluence of enjoyments.

(Also.)

Martin Frost.

More in the "early reviews" department, this time for Paul Auster's new film, "The Inner Life of Martin Frost," which can also be filed - along with his recent incredibly disappointing Travels in the Scriptorium - under "great concept, miserably executed," or so it seems.  The reviews I've read all say pretty much the same thing, so here's your excerpt from the NYT:

In the novelist and filmmaker Paul Auster’s new movie, the novelist Martin Frost (David Thewlis) holes up in a cabin, intending to begin a new work, and becomes embroiled in an affair with a woman named Claire Martin (Irène Jacob). She appears one morning in Martin’s bed, claiming to be the niece of one of the cabin’s owners. She might be a con artist, or she might be Martin’s muse.

The playfully oblique tone — which worked in Philip Haas’s movie adaptation of Mr. Auster’s novel “The Music of Chance” — seems merely coy here. The movie’s style is aggressively literary, with plummy third-person narration (read by Mr. Auster) that over-interrogates every development, and close-ups of significant objects (like a manual typewriter floating in black space) that aim for talismanic power but don’t get there. The result plays like a half-baked tribute to “Wings of Desire.”

I can't say as this movie has stirred up a lot of interest here, even before the reviews started coming in.  I haven't seen "Smoke" or "Blue in the Face" either - should I? 

Early review of Men in Space.

Lee Rourke is first up, and the review - of Tom McCarthy's forthcoming (soon in the UK, someday far too long away here) Men in Space - is sparkling.  Excerpt:

Tom McCarthy's second novel is an inspired shift from the cold, unidentified narrator's voice that was central to the success of Remainder, his startling debut of last year. In Men in Space we are treated to a cacophony of voices, accents, languages and dialogue in myriad forms. It is a novel that practically rattles with noise. Just like his debut, though, it is a studied novel of ideas that is unlike many others we might read this year.

Men in Space follows a gaggle of characters set adrift within a fragmenting world: a stranded cosmonaut who has no country to come back to, a misguided football referee who has lost all perspective, an unsettled police agent, self-indulgent drifters seeking authenticity, political refugees and Western hangers-on who just don't seem to grasp what is happening on the streets around them.

Each of these characters revolves around a stolen Byzantine painting that the mafia have paid the perfectionist Ivan Manasek to make an identical copy of in a bid to smuggle the original out of the country.

On a personal note.

I am seeking new employment.  Willing to move, particularly to eastern Canada.  Questions, ideas, offers, trails of bread crumbs to follow to lucrative opportunities, e-mail me at MatthewWFTiffany at gmail dot com.

"Derek's Dominoes / Fell on K and I, left my / new Bell Bottoms Blue"

The fine folks of Ruined Music would like you to participate in a contest.  (I may or may not submit my horrid entry, though this linkage would probably disqualify me.)  Write a haiku about a song that was ruined for you by a relationship gone south, or a job gone south, or a what have you gone you know where.  Details here.

Burning up.

Fever is broken, at least at this hour.  Thanks for the kind e-mails. 

Nice when I can tie it all together.  Very much enjoying Brock Clarke's An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, which I mentioned some time ago with regard to Algonquin's unusual publicity campaign.  The September issue of Bookslut has an interview with Mr. Clarke.  Tidbit:

In many places, An Arsonist’s Guide is explicitly about writing. The judge at Sam’s trial gives a short speech about stories and how they work and if they are good for anything or can do anything. And Sam is writing An  Arsonist’s Guide, which is a memoir but he also wrote the novel An Arsonist’s  Guide, which the reader is reading. And the title isn’t even his, it’s from the memoir-writing bond analysts he meets in prison. Were you worried about making the novel too explicitly postmodern or metatextual?

I was terrified of that. That was one of the problems I had writing the book. I ended up just bloviating about literature in the beginning. It was becoming awful. But I think about these things and I think the answers are usually too simplistic.

I hope my treatment of the issue is ambivalent enough that it’s not too academic. Sam, after all, isn’t a reader. I try to come at it sideways. Believe me, I read novels that cover this ground and I tend to loathe those books about what novels can do.

Revival.

The Modern Letter Project is once again open for new participants. 

If you're a participant in the Modern Letter Project you should have received your September address via email. Please email us at themodernletter(at)gmail(dot)com if you have not received the address. + We're looking for a few more people to fill open slots this month, so if you are interested in participating, read more about it here and send us an email with your address, birthdate, and the subject line: "I want to write letters."

Smart.

Scott Esposito's The Quarterly Conversation is back with the Fall 2007 issue.  Antoine Wilson's review of Remainder is the most intelligent look at the book I've read to date, and makes me want to read the book again, immediately. 

Lots of good reading here, including a lengthy look at the forthcoming Exit Ghost by Mr. Roth.

Dumb.

I'm home with a fever, which puts me in the right frame of mind for dropping the following excerpts and withholding comment in the time-honored lazy/irritable blogger tradition.  First via Maitresse and featuring Jeanette Winterson:

I suspect that the illiterate educated, who were given qualifications by a well-meaning government determined to prove that we are all equally bright and able, are now filtering through into the system, and that their illiteracy is going to affect us all. Many people in jobs that require a working knowledge of the English language really believe that their mixture of television, tabloid, and texting argot is as good an English as any...

It is impossible to have high standards if we have no standards. If language is evolving without grammar, without syntax, without spelling or punctuation, writers will have a harder time doing what literature does – expanding our emotional and imaginative range, by means of language. I have said before that if the language-base shrinks, then so does our capacity for complexity of any kind – complexity of feeling or of thought.

And on the failing libraries:

So what stays and what goes? In a nutshell, the least popular books get the chop. Have you ever heard such a recipe for dumbing down? Surely there is only so much Maeve Binchy and Wilbur Smith our library shelves can hold. I am not knocking those books or the people who read them - what needs a good kick is the criminal abnegation of authority, the lack of balls to say "this is on the shelf because it is the best and it will stay there for the same reason".

But then books-for-books'-sake has become less and less the raison d'être for libraries. I should be pleased that Lambeth libraries are finalists in the Love Libraries awards. But the reason they made the final has nothing to do with valiantly clinging to that shelf of classics. Apparently it's because Lambeth libraries put on evening variety shows for young people. Fandabidozi - but what has turning the local library into the Kids from Fame cafeteria got to do with reading or books? And it's not just Lambeth - none of the Love Libraries finalists list "promoting the best and most challenging literature" among their achievements.

A reminder of why this matters walked in as I was about to leave. Barely up to my waist, carrying a blue plastic bag bulging with books to be returned, she excitedly asked where she can find more. She deserves the best - doesn't she?

Bringing it all together, another bit from Winterson:

You can seek out books, and some of us do, but most of us don’t. It is because most of us don’t that I would argue for higher standards of the written and spoken word in the media – the false democracy of dumbing-down forces us all to the same abysmal low level, instead of encouraging a bit of effort, a bit of concentration, from everyone... Language is power, but language has to be learnt.

Roundup.

These roundups are increasingly becoming catch-alls for things I don't get to during the week, especially those things that don't really seem to fit in that well on a "literary web site".  Hope that's okay.  Happy Labor Day.

• It's about time.
• I've found the lolcats business only mildly amusing, at least until I read this article and scrolled down to "invisible bike."  Now that's entertainment.
• Slate suggests that Lynch's Inland Empire (now on DVD) is better viewed at home than in the theaters.  Lucky for me, then.
• Jonathan Goldstein goes camping.
• My favorite: roommate stop eating “my food” exlax