Stochastic Bookmark

Readings: Semiannual Year in Review

2011-12-23T22:30:00.003-05:00

Best book published in 2011: While it's not mentioned in any periodical's year-end best-ofs (not even among TLS's 72 contributors), in a rare and rarefied consensus (explicit at least between the first two interlocutors below), the bookchatroom I frequent converged on Gerald Murnane, from which I extract a minimally edited colloquy:
Funhouse: So Barley Patch. It's metafiction, but it's not like any other metafictional work that I've read. It's an extended meditation on why Murnane gave up writing fiction for fourteen years that begins with the question "Must I write?" This involves delving into his life story (while recognising that this is a fictional representation of his life). The life we glimpse is a prosaic one: attending Catholic school, feeling repressed, living in the suburbs of Melbourne and other towns around Victoria, reading books and eventually writing them. Murnane has never left Australia and has barely left Victoria, and physically this book doesn't leave those locations, but it feels expansive.
It's built on repetitions, both within the novel and within Murnane's body of work as a whole, as he returns to the plains and his timidity and the mental landscapes he constructs. Those mental landscapes that he finds lurking behind the words on the page of the books that he reads and writes are the key to answering the questions that he poses about the function of literature. You almost inevitably find yourself drawn into his fictional world in the way he describes being drawn into others. This is about what it's like to lose yourself in a book. Late in the book he talks about reading about the notion of the memory palace and recognising that he had stumbled upon something like that inadvertently in his own work, and it's true, he has:
Tract after tract of mostly level grassy countryside, each with trees on its farther side -- this would have been universe enough for me.
I had quite an emotional reaction to this book. It feels like Murnane is laying himself bare, exposing his personal inner world to us in an honest and generous way. I was moved.
nnyhav: Well put, better than I could've. There's something a little strange in his meditation on forgoing writing seeming at the same time the culmination of all that went before it (even if it isn't—I'll have to read more of him to find out, and since it sounds like Inland covers much the same territory if not metaterritory, I'm gonna hafta be patient ...). Also for all the comparisons it is truly sui generis (and generous).
Funhouse: Thanks, Dave. And you're right, it does feel like a culmination of what has come before and that is odd in the context of giving up what he had been doing.
And you're right about it being sui generis even as you can detect echoes of other writers and voices. I didn't mention before but I get something of Kurt Vonnegut in Murnane's tone, with the hint of naivety that belies the philosophical seriousness of the work. And Barley Patch in a way reminded me of Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, with horse racing instead of baseball, and the sense of descending into this fictional construct.
johnnywalkitoff: I'm with Dave...well put, man. Early on in my reading of the work I was thinking that it was like metafiction but not like the typical "you are reading a book, this is language, these are pages" type of way, because the fiction itself does not seem as important as compared to being aware of what images of the mind it gives the reader (sometimes there seems to be an absence of language when the reader/ writer get the images right) and thinking of the book as a book of strong and recurring images...and the religion or science of images.... and blahblahblah, but when I got to a certain point and quit thinking it was just beautiful.
(Great call on the Vonnegut, not explicit, but once you said it...reminded me of how Vonnegut always said he felt the most comfortable writing sentences that sounded like the way he talked as a person raised in INdianna (?)...I think that is in the collection of essays, Palm Sunday)
oneofmurphysbiscuits: It's a very long time since i've read a novel and determined from the first page that i was being spoken to, not told something or enjoined to listen—he has no need to command, i was being spoken to. As metafiction it is metafiction of the utmost care and intercession, free play in the novel is intercession and kindness, he watches after things and people as does Chekhov ( "if we can't talk about this, then it means we'll have to talk about that, and i don't want to, so did we mistime things after all?"—it's heartrending and i can't but thank him enough) There's also so much in the book that resonates with me as to his descriptions of topological and phenomenological space and my own commitments be they to prose or poetry. (for such a short novel there is so much room, so much textual space within which he's able to get to work, it's extraordinary, and extraordinarily loveable, given the book's contents). Above all, i was stunned by his apprehension of phenomenological space as a space of and for empathy and solicitude.

(My initial blurb: "fiction inhabited / inhibited". It's a sure thing that I had the book in mind in playing the horses' oddsmaker in my prior post. Also, from revivified Context: Nicholas Birns Reading Gerald Murnane. [Dalkey Archive])

Other notable readings (published whenever) not discussed here in the interim:
Laszlo Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance (George Szirtes) [NDP]: another figure my bookchatroom can agree on.
Fumiko Enchi, A Tale of False Fortunes (Roger K. Thomas) [UHawaii]: the medium is the message ... historical fiction framed around a supposed counter-perspective (ostensibly seen only by Enchi as a child in an antiquarian collection) to the millenium-old A Tale of Flowering Fortunes, panegyric to a regent, from the empress' side (inspired by Tanizaki's "A Portrait of Shunkin" but reaching much farther back, and with a classicist's authority). Spirit possession, both real and feigned, is a feature of Heian narrative and operates here as well, but with an implied modern aspect that tales serve a similar function. I'm only familiar with the titles of some of the works cited, but the story supplies enough background for that not to matter too much. Anyway, an impressive departure from the better-known Masks or The Waiting Years.
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, A Mind at Peace (Erdag Göknar) [Archipelago]: "The greatest novel ever written about Istanbul."—Orhan Pamuk, precisely: a lovesong [choose any preposition] Istanbul; a bit much of le café Aldous Huxley (but more charitable), but then the time (late interwar) and place were dialectical ... (paperback is re-edited; recommended).
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (Diana Burgin & Katherine Tiernan O'Connor) [Vintage]: sheer magic, best of USSR ... (Ellendea Proffer's commentary slants toward didactic); mostly reread (after Ginsburg's pre-uncensored version, long ago).

Overall this year, about half by writers I hadn't encountered before (and more than half translated, but that's par); authors indulged twice include Eric Chevillard, Fumiko Enchi, Cormac McCarthy, China Miéville, Umberto Eco (but one was the Confessions of a Young Novelist rehash) ... but among my favorite authors, after having read a dozen of his fictions (plus essays & poems), I finally lost all constraint and delved into:
Raymond Queneau, Exercises in Style (Barbara Wright) [NDP]: good fun and more but not so much so as to make it less good fun (read to accompaniment of The Art of the Fugue as performed by the Canadian Brass, as "Queneau explains that the idea for the Exercises came to him in the 1930s, after he and his friend Michel Leiris had attended a concert at the Salle Pleyel where Bach's The Art of the Fugue had been played. What particularly struck Queneau about this piece was that, although based on a rather slight theme, its variations 'proliferated almost to infinity'." [BW intro; o&btw WKCR[.org]'s Bachfest is running thru year-end]). Now it will be difficult to get my hands on any Englished Queneau I haven't already read ... tho I s'pose I should check out a newer translation of Zazie dans le métro, as the one I have is the Olympia Press Traveller's Companion edition (which had been "previously been announced under the title 'Zazie or the Sex of Angels'" ... The Blue Flowers still my fave, but back to the book at hand, how can I exercise resistance to temptation? By exorcising it:
Catskills
So I'm on this bus, the S bus, around lunchtime, it's really packed, and this guy gets on, just a pup, wet behind the ears, he's got a hat pulled down over them, jammed down like a cap on a long-necked bottle, with this cord like a twist-top around it. Discord, that's what he was about, standing in the aisle, getting jostled as people tried to get past, he turns on the guy next to him and sputters Get offa my feet! The guy says Get offa your own feet, and a seat opens up so he does.
Later, on the same bus, I see the same guy talking to a buddy over in the Cour de Rome. And this other guy really knows how to push his buttons.

For th' coming 2012
Jacques Roubaud, Mathematique (Ian Monk)
Gerald Murnane, Inland
Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Satantango (George Szirtes) (long anticipated)
Arno Schmidt, Bottom's Dream (John E. Woods) (not yet announced but due)
(I'm also hopeful the first installment of Cartarescu's Orbitor [Blinding] will make an appearance late next year, tho 2013 looks more likely ...)

Support Your Local Bookmaker

2011-11-14T00:13:00.001-05:00

As the year goes into the home stretch, what remains but to remind you to remand a consideration for those who keep independent nonprofit literary publishing in the running? What's at stake is their continuing ability to get dark horses out of the gate: individual donors are important for direct funding, but I'd wager they also improve the odds for winning foundation support.

The publisher I put my money on is Archipelago Books. They've long been on a winning streak; the last time I broached this topic was appended to my take on one of their earlier successes, and its successors haven't let me down. With my abiding interest in literary translations, they have the inside track, and annual donation is my means of following the tip to "think global, act local". (And tax-deductibility isn't limited to offsetting gambling winnings.) But for a bit of sport, they're also holding an auction and raffle at the start of December.

Of course, you may want to back a different entrant, or more than one, from the field below:
Archipelago Books about -$-
BOA Editions about -$-
Coffee House about -$-
Copper Canyon about -$-
Dalkey Archive about -$-
Dzanc Books about -$-
Indigo Ink about -$-
Library of America about -$-
Milkweed about -$-
Open Letter about -$-
Sarabande Books about -$-
Ugly Duckling about -$-
White Pine about
Zephyr about

(or you could play the field with Words Without Borders about -$- but I think that's off-track betting.)

back in form

2011-11-07T20:54:00.001-05:00

Umberto Eco's The Prague Cemetery is a historical novel about how novels make history. As with Baudolino, Eco chooses a focal point through which to bind disparate events, this time in the latter half of the 19th century (Risorgimento, Paris Commune, Dreyfus Affair, Protocols of the Elders of Zion), the protagonist, Simone Simonini (yes a simonist on the side, but primarily a forger under cover of notary, "falsifying legal deeds"), being the only invented character aside from a handful of minor ones. As with Foucault's Pendulum, secret societies, esoteric knowledge and conspiracies are in play, but here more as made use of by secret services, and more plot-driven (well, story-driven; plot a contrivance atop it). The novel takes on the guise of its forerunners, down to repurposing engraved illustrations from the period; the settings also suggestive (e.g., Simonini's front as a dealer in junk), itself suggesting the ironies inherent to its construction (Eco's remark about striving to create the most reprehensible character evah is of the same tenor as "I felt like poisoning a monk" driving his first novel).

A bit of fair use from Robert Gordon, TLS 18.2.11 (subscriptionly): "As we expect from Eco, this work of teasing historical pseudo-reconstruction combines an intriguing philosophy of history with an elaborate set of reflections on narrative and the nature of fiction. [...] It is in the exploration of the literary genesis and genre of the Protocols where novel and history meet most rewardingly. Eco argues that the power of the Protocols is derived from its deep links to the popular fiction of the day. Simonini calculates that those elements will make the work ring true, because they are loosely familiar from stories that are in the air and we take as true only what we already know. [...] Simonini finds the Ur-texts of his vision of conspiracy and ritual in the Prague cemetery early on in the novel, in Dumas père’s Joseph Balsamo and Eugène Sue’s Mystères du peuple. Simonini’s discovery is a reflection of Eco’s: Eco has claimed as his own the tracing of this line of genealogy behind the Protocols."

This won't be everyone's cuppa (some don't like the way his erudition wears, though more lightly in this instance[1]); it's not MAO's, at this writing updates there stale, so including links to Joshua Lustig [+], Theo Tait [-], Sam Sacks [+], and to a fellow bookchat fan; the site hosting the bookchat has added an interview with the translator and established an Umberto Eco wiki.

[1] an instance of inside-jokey throwaway allusion, given the underground setting criminal and otherwise: p332 Salon Adam: "Money, high politics and culture graced the house in boulevard Poissonnière (later in boulevard Malesherbes) ...": not only transiting from fishmonger to encyclopedia enabler, but also Paris Mètro stations recently opened (change at Opèra) ...

PS read immediately after Eric Chevillard's Demolishing Nisard (Jordan Stump), a delenda est to end all delendae sunt; furthermore, I think that it served as an apt appetizer.

Talking about books one hasn't read (in the original)

2011-10-17T01:35:00.001-04:00

Last Thurs-eve I attended a talk in the bridge series given by David Bellos, primary englisher and biographer of Georges Perec, promoting his latest book, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything. His tag-line: translation is the meaning of everything: inextricably tied to languages, cultures, and where they meet. Bellos' book is to translation as Crystal's "How Language Works" is to language, in fact encroaching on the latter's turf, blurring the boundaries; but it shoulders the additional burden of countering received pronouncements of ineffability (and other such stuff I just can't find the words for).

Rather than talking about the book, I'll talk the talk, beginning beyond the book: Bellos opened by recounting a recent trip to Estonia to assist a translator of La Vie mode d'emploi (Life: A User's Manual); upon visiting a market, he remarked to his host that the signage for wine (Wein, from the German) was close to that for distilled spirits (Viin), and was informed that the relationship was more than casual, that translation of the Bible into Estonian posed a problem in that the grape was unknown there, and so grain was substituted, leaving its trace in words such as viinapuu for grapevine (literally 'vodka-tree' (of course I mean 'literally' literally, even in referring to a figurative construction (one chapter is devoted to "The Myth of Literal Translation" (and the larger point is that there is no single definitive translation but many acceptable variants (okay, we're coming out of parentheses, brace yourselves!))))). Similar substitution (in the book) transformed the fig at the well into a banana in Malay. After a brief diversion into the H2G2 provenance of the title (and myths of untranslatability) it was back to the Bible and the Babel myth, the first verse of which falsely presupposes an Edenic language (divergence from a single root a persistent premisconception); some of the earliest cunieform tablets consist of dual word lists, cribs for translation.

On to a bit of Q&A: Asked for advice about starting out (he hates that question), Bellos said his own beginnings were "by accident": his interest in La Vie mode d'emploi led to his translation of it (the French publisher initially uninterested in granting language rights, as they considered it untranslatable), and Anthony Burgess' negative review brought it positive attention. My question about what distinguishes literary translation brought a response more provocative than in the book: "Nothing terribly important hangs on it", eliciting a collective yelp. (Of his own experience, he said La Vie mode d'emploi posed technical rather than stylistic challenges.)

My own interest is overwhelmingly in literary translation, as I depend upon it for access to innovative writing, which is not to say foreign, though in my experience ... to me, what distinguishes literature is that it creates its own context, in part in form, albeit within constraints imposed by larger contexts, so perhaps in part it's defamiliarization that makes the play more enticing. But developing the necessarily high degree of competence in other languages would restrict scope (already so many books so little time, one rendering of ars longa vita brevis). I have but small Latin and less German, but English serves me well due to its place in the translation hierarchy, and supports a reading habit more Continental than Anglospheric (over half my reading not from my language). Is That a Fish in Your Ear? has a sole chapter on "Literary Translation", but examples are more pervasive through the book, the main concern of which is not what makes a particular translation good or bad but to obviate the question of whether translation itself is good or not.

just so, you know

2011-09-09T20:21:00.003-04:00

So, not so soliloquacious of late, so sorry; sixth bloggiversary passing quietly, without warrant to update two year old yield curve meanderings (performing as before, inverted humped yield curve scenario remains much in play, moreso what with the Fed's ZIRP extension & sovereign downgrating presaging same for dollar reserve status; halfway to the horizon on that call, but then I'd expected the latest panic to manifest in late spring ...) As to other prior posting, Sam Johnson's Lives of the Poets shed little direct light on Nabokov's Pale Fire, more an ambient glow. So, so much for old business.

New business? Not so much, or rather too much for words: With the news is full of exposure to the elements (earthquake, windstorm, wildfire, flood), only the first two pertained, the former merely rattling windows, but more of a jolt from Irene, hardly irenic: the axe of God fell heavily on my street, rerouting trees into rooves all along my block (in my case, a centurion oak). My humbled abode:

Serving only to further postpone the end of procrastination on other fronts (eg bloggins) ... and so, more later.

When the prose turns weird, the weird get going

2011-06-30T23:44:00.002-04:00

The blog serves as a locus at which to collect one's thoughts; the chatroom is where one disperses them. Yes, no, it's not that simple; the accommodations overlap (shared bathos), but "extended argument" takes on differing meanings between them. But while blogs regularly provide chatfodder, I find I've reversed the process, my prior post herding chats into something more sustenant (I hope), but which may seem warmed-over to my fellow bookchatterers. Sorry 'bout that, here we go again ...

Giddy-upping my hobby-horse: I've finally finished Nabokov's list of the best of what the 20th century has to offer (when it was only 2/3 thru, and all from the first 1/4) by making it halfway through Proust, and reading John Elsworth's Pushkin Press translation of Andrei Bely's Petersburg: Bely did his own revision-excision of the 1916 (or 1913-14, depending on form) version in 1922, this latter what first Cournos ('59) then Maguire & Malmstad ('78) relied on, while McDuff ('95) and Elsworth ('09) go back to the former version (which explains relative lengths). The earlier one was first serialized in Sirin, which was the nom-de-plume Nabokov stuck with through his early career; but the later one was published in Berlin, where Nabokov was residing at the time. I think there's more cerebral play in the earlier version, and that it's intrinsic to the novel (not to mention explicit), tightening it up as Bely did somewhat akin to, say, Sterne editing Tristram Shandy down to a more manageable length; but there doesn't seem to be an English translation that would permit such an assessment. M&M complain that Cournos made even more cuts, while the rap against M&M is overliteral and unliterary, or something like that. Dunno about McDuff, but Elsworth gets it: I know some of the wordplay had to be left behind, but the spirit of the thing is preserved. And in that spirit, that is, of cerebral play:
In Vladimir Nabokov and The Art of Play, Thomas Karshan has added something to the critical mix by considering play as the unifying theme in his work (I take issue only with the definite article, an indefinite one more appropriate). Karshan himself could have been a bit more playful by bending the rules of the academic monograph (such as "I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true"), but the tracing of play (both rule-based and free: the Russian and German words carry broader connotation) through Kant, Schiller & Nietzsche to more direct influences on Nabokov (Voloshin, Bely, Aikhenvald) is well played. The applicability of the concept to early novels like King Queen Knave and The Luzhin Defense is evident, but suffers some distortion in consideration of later work (not that it isn't operative, and despite which there's food for thought where it isn't). However, the chapter on "Pale Fire and the Genre of the Literary Game" stands out, tracing a different provenance from Erasmus to Pope and Swift and beyond, and providing other fresh insights.
Also, more Nabocommentary, via the listserv, Cycnos | Volume 24 n°1 Vladimir Nabokov, Annotating vs Interpreting Nabokov

Short takes on other highlights:
Michal Ajvaz, The Golden Age (Andrew Oakland) [Dalkey]: Rrosélavian
Wieslaw Mysliwski, Stone Upon Stone (Bill Johnston) [Archipelago]: deftly fit together without mortar
Bernard Share, Inish [Dalkey]: the tale's in the telling, and it's telling what can be made out of an advert placed by an import-export expat
Eric Chevillard, Palafox (Wyatt Mason) [Archipelago]: endeavouring to haruspicate surrealism's exquisite corpse
Arno Schmidt, The Stony Heart / B/Moondocks (John E. Woods) [Dalkey]: the first, collective scholarduggery; the second the best of his I've read yet, and I've read (with pleasure) all of Woods' Dalkey offerings now, and the best yet to come, his rendering of Zettel's Traum (translating Poe the central conceit) to be published within a year
Elias Khoury, Gate of the Sun (Humphrey Davies) [Archipelago]: Compounded persevering Palestinean crises of identity, resisting erasure; intertwined stories, families, destinies. Ranks with the best of Roa Bastos, Donoso, Andric, Selimovic
Yasushi Inoue, Tun-huang (Jean Oda Moy) [nyrb]: filling in lost time, hoarded against the hordes ... falls off a bit towards the end, otherwise a well-imagined and well-researched reconstruction, tautly told with subtle overtones (also apt after the Rexroth renderings of Sung poetry)
Fumiko Enchi, The Waiting Years (John Bester) [Kodansha Int'l]: (Onna zaka, the women's slope, separate temple path): Meiji matron thanklessly holding family together; at the same level as Masks (Onna men, which I picked up at the Milwaukee airport of all places), once again exceeding Tanizaki, approaching Kawabata, her models. Enchi deserves to be better known; latest book acquired is A Tale of False Fortunes (Roger K. Thomas)

Waxing poetic, waning prosaic

2011-06-29T01:47:00.003-04:00

Half the year gone by, not much to show for it in these parts, though I've kept up with bookchat, which has put more poets on my radar than anything else, making for a larger proportion of my reading. (Obligatory linklift: What we talk about when we talk about poetry when there's poetry about and we're not about to get in to a bout about what poetry's about.)

The biggest undertaking was Ezra Pound's Cantos, a group reading of which petered out after the first 30 (so too the Cantos themselves; I expected the Pisan Cantos to be the high point but they were but a relative maximum). I picked up the Companion by Carroll Terrell (of Terrellton) after 30 so as not to be lost in the weeds, and weeds not wildflowers they are, but it covers the grounds well. It was a bit odd to read Pound railing against high finance at a time when that sport is again current ... still I don't think politics makes for good poetry (of course Plato had it t'other way round); nonetheless, it's part of the warp & woof (mad dog!). Given his insistence on the importance of 'right names' it's more than a bit odd that he so often muddles them (not just Chinese transliterations, nor even corrupting Western names, but pure misidentifications), not to mention his ideosyncretic take on Chinese (among other things); and clearly he didn't know when to say enough. That said, it doesn't take away from the achievement of the initial cantos or the technical innovations throughout (well, middle excluded), and also led me to Browning's Sordello, and prompted me into The Analects of Confucius*, and, serendipitously, Kenneth Rexroth's 100 Poems from the Chinese, a less literal than liberal take, the Sung sometimes mediated through French renderings, but strictly speaking that wasn't his aim ... for my part, a relief from Pound's agenda and sounding an ironic note on poet-polity: "Chu Hsi (1130-1200) is the great philosopher and historian, founder of Sung Neo-Confucianism. That is, he gave the ancient code of the scholar gentry a new religious and philosophical content, owing much to Ch'an Buddhism (Zen) and Taoism—the sort of etherialization undergone by a doctrine when it no longer corresponds to reality at all. However, he gave Confucianism another 700 years of life. As might be expected, his poetry is formal—'neo-classical.'". Similarly ironic: Pound's insistence in being acknowledged as unacknowledged legislator.
*oops, speaking of irony, left this note out: VI 13: "The Master said to Tzu-hsia, 'Be a gentleman ju, not a petty ju." with note "The original meaning of the word is uncertain, but it probably referred to men for whom the qualities of the scholar were more important than those of the warrior. In subsequent ages, ju came to be the name given to the Confucianists."
Odds & ends:
Jack Ross covers Cantos LXXII-LXXIII w/ englishing of latter;
JEHSmith on Pisan: I disagree with his conclusion; Pound recantless, even Terrell lapses in suggesting (through another cite on CVII 69) that dropping the last word from exceptis viris religioses et Judaesis was exculpative, when every other ref is supposed to confirmatively imply any missing bits;
and Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes, beyond intrinsic interest, provided clear counterpoint.

Other poetry-related reading was more rewarding: Haffenden's Empson bio, Mendelson's The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927-1939, Geoffrey Hill's Selected Poems (wow!) ... Muldoon, Heaney ... and stuff queued up for the second half includes selected Hall and Lorca, early Ashbery and complete Merrill. Prose, that's another story, a good one, but for another post.

Reversification

2011-04-17T16:52:00.000-04:00

A few years back, I summarized the state of the authorship debate within Pale Fire; some of Carolyn Kunin's insights have since been consolidated by DeRewel & Roth [pdf] in the 2009 Nabokov Online Journal, though I continue to stand behind my own take on it, and the contention that emphasis on internal authorship has eclipsed more important and interesting questions.

That's not to say it isn't an important or interesting question, or that its answer doesn't have consequences, such as recasting L213-4: "A syllogism: other men die; but I / Am not another; therefore I'll not die", if Kinbote is Shade's post-stroke other (ergo, a broken minor premise). Fortunately, at least insofar as Botkin is a third-party candidate, prior art can shed some light. In Pale Fire, Professor Pnin makes a cameo appearance, and Hurricane Lolita is mentioned. But I'll go back to a device from a still earlier book, also involving the loss of a child: his first American novel, Bend Sinister. Nabokov advised readers to "caress the details"; I'm going to rub them the wrong way.

First, a speculative take on Hamlet (Nabokov often embedded his best lit-crit in his fiction), in protagonist Adam Krug's colloquy with academic colleague Ember, in Chapter 7: "... Krug suggests tampering with Hamlet's name too. Take 'Telemachos', he says, which means 'fighting from afar'—which again was Hamlet's idea of warfare. Prune it, remove the unnecessary letters, all of them secondary additions, and you get the ancient 'Telmah'. Now read it backwards. Thus does a fanciful pen elope with a lewd idea and Hamlet in reverse gear becomes the son of Ulysses slaying his mother's lovers."

Backing up to Chapter 3, Ember again: "At first I was struck by the unpardonable thought that he was delivering himself of a monstrous joke like the time he read backwards from end to beginning that lecture on space to find out whether his students would react in any manner. They did not ..."

A bit further on, or back, we have Krug stopped for a pass at a bridge by illiterate soldiers in Chapter 2: "'Let me read you what this little paper is meant to convey,' said Krug, stretching out a helpful hand. / 'Read on while I hold it,' said the thin one, holding it upside down. / 'Inversion,' said Krug, 'does not trouble me, but I need my glasses.'" Having to return for a signature, the pass is marked with the fat soldier's name, which turns out to be Gurk. Krug backwards, as Nabokov notes in his introduction: "The Russian circumference, krug, turns into a Teutonic cucumber, gurk, with an additional allusion to Krug's reversing his journey across the bridge." As with many of his mischievous hints, he doesn't quite spell it out: Throw in adam backwards into GURK: maG / dURaK: in Russian, the first word carries the same meaning as the English mage (magician, person of superior learning and wisdom), the second, durak, means fool. As the maxim goes, Many are the fools who believe they have attained wisdom, but few are the sages who know they have achieved folly.

Returning to Pale Fire, we have obvious reversible names in the half-brothers Odon and Nodo, and Jakob Gradus reflects mirror-maker Sudarg of Bokay. Botkin seems to stand behind Kinbote, but who stands behind Botkin? The device used in Bend Sinister, suitably configured, provides an answer. It's figurated in C803, on misprints: "There exists to my knowledge one absolutely extraordinary, unbelievably elegant case, where not only two, but three words were involved. The story itself is trivial enough (and probably apocryphal). A newspaper's account of a Russian tsar's coronation had, instead of korona (crown), the misprint vorona (crow), and when next day this was apologetically 'corrected', it got misprinted a second time as korova (cow). The artistic correlation between the crown-crow-cow series and the Russian korona-vorona-korova series is something that would have, I am sure, enraptured my poet."

Kinbote becomes Botkin by eliminating a letter and reversing syllables. Botkin, in turn, when reversed and a letter dropped, becomes nikto, Russian for 'nobody'. In other words, there is no man behind the man behind the curtain. Nabokov redacted a playful hint in his introduction to Speak, Memory * when he revised the envoi, but Boyd recovered the original draft as supporting the Shadean theory in the biography (VNAY 445):
"As John Shade says somewhere:
Nobody will heed my index, I suppose,
But through it a gentle wind ex Ponto blows."
... 'ex ponto' being Latin for 'from the bridge', putting us back with Krug and Gurk. (Or with Ovid's letters, posted from exile, post-Metamorphoses.) Ember may be marginally invoked in the commentary: "After line 174 there is a false start in the draft: I like my name: Shade, Ombre, almost 'man' / In Spanish . . ." And, returning to the final line of the poem, I'll point out that "empty barrow" might Anglosaxonically connote a cenotaph, a tomb within which there is no body.

As far as internal authorship goes, does Nabokov write himself into his novels, or out of them? Bend Sinister ends with one of the most marked authorial intrusions of all time, when the narrator bestows upon Krug the blessing of "a sudden moonburst of madness"; such madness may set alight the wondrous strange pale fireworks, with further reference to Hamlet, putting a twist in "when he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin." But Nabokov's last, unfinished novel concerns a writer's self-effacement. And in another instance of Nabokov citing nobody, responding to a question about the pronunciation of his name, Nabokov says, "Every author whose name is fairly often mentioned in periodicals develops a bird-watcher's or caterpillar-picker's knack when scanning an article. But in my case I always get caught by the word 'nobody' when capitalized at the beginning of a sentence."

* Another item from the introduction to Speak, Memory, on the chess problem included there: "My most amusing invention, however, is a 'White-retracts-move' problem which I dedicated to E.A. Znosko-Borovski, who published it, in the nineteen-thirties (1934?), in the émigré daily Poslednie Novosti, Paris." Once again, moving backwards to move forward. And, as it happens, with an anagrammatic solution: White retracts PxN=R and plays PxR=N mate.

Ontology recapitulates philology

2011-03-11T01:59:00.002-05:00

Once upon a time, there was a word, but there was no one to speak of, and so the word was all by itself, and so the word said itself.
All the same, it's the word that was spoken of at the time, so it's said.
Everything was said by the word; and it goes without saying that what wasn't said was utterly silent.
In a word, it was all that could be said, when all's said and done, as the saying goes.
And it had all been a blank page, but the word emerged from inky darkness into the light. And it was all there in black and white, but it should be understood, it wasn't understood.
And the word wanted to be heard, to be understood, so it sent for an envoy, and it was given to the envoy to spread the word.
All the same, the word was not for the envoy; the envoy was sent to bear word.
Let it also be understood that the envoy was not the word; the envoy was sent, and through the envoy was word sent.
That was how the word came to light.
So it was that the word got out; but it was not known what to make of it.
The word came into its own, but it was not heard.
But those of us that heard were given to understand that solemn word had been given, even as we'd heard.
Word that was not given lightly, and not to be borne lightly, we were given to understand.
And the word embodied meaning, and we dwelt on its meaning, in all its nuance.
The envoy came forward, saying, that's the word of which I spoke, word must have preceded me; for the word comes first.
And of its meaning are we apprised, in all its nuance.
For letters may come by envoy, but meaning comes embodied by the word.

PS: A shout-out to goofy for putting words together at the source.

What's in a 'nym?

2011-03-06T22:18:00.001-05:00

Attn Conservation Notice: nominal self-indulgence, vainly attempting to explain myself.

nnyhav: six characters in search of a rationale: My moniker was not of my own making. It was assigned to me as a login ID by my then employer, and when I registered to use the New York Times website 15 years back, it was picked up automagically, so when I joined their Books Forum chat, the handle stuck. It became set in stone after discussion there on Brian Boyd's book, Nabokov's Pale Fire, caught his eye, from which he extracted (and cited, by name and nick, with permission) comments for a follow-up article, "Azure Afterimages", in a millenial turn in Nabokov Studies #6. So having been 'outed' in print, and later on-line (on the Nabokov listserv with reference to this here blog), I dropped any pretense of pseudoanonymity (not that I thought it could be indefinitely maintained). I'd meanwhile backronymmed nnyhav into "no New Yorker has a view", playing upon both the widely-held non-opinionation of the locals and the reservation of upper floors for out-of-towners. It's also in the middle of Sunnyhaven, and if you transpose the first letter to the end, in the middle of Copenhagen. Making ornaments / of accidents and possibilities ...

Life Everlasting—based on a misprint!: Even in Usenet's pre-Sempitember days I knew the persistence of memory would make me accountable for my words, and their distortion for lack of context, long after any relevance had passed, tempering my temper even in seemingly ephemeral chat-rooms, knowing that prospective employers might take umbrage. My internets handle seems sufficiently unattractively random to garner competition (never unavailable as domain name), but over the past year my blog-title has strangely been appropriated for trash-sites pushing technical analysis for foreign exchange trading (chartists sure ain't what they used to be—it's a jargon-crazy enterprise, "stochastics" having nothing to do with randomness); kindafunny in that I once plied that trade myself, publishing on behalf of a FCM in Chicago 20+ years back (ntm the prevalence of lit in translation hereabouts). But~~tle~~ the most persistent misattribution is to my given name, by way of typo (once amongst many mentions), in an entry sure to be red-flagged (not redacted) by any competent HR information retriever (until it got buried beneath all the social network references). (My father suffered the converse: at the pinnacle of his career, his foresighted analysis of railroad reconfiguration put his name in headlines on the front page of the Wall Street Journal—misspelled.)

Perhaps this goes some way towards explaining my interest in proper names, and in what Nabokov made of them, as well as of improprieties. On the other hand, I've never really been very good with names ...

Lives of the Poet

2011-02-22T01:25:00.002-05:00

Attention conservation notice: Pale Fire again. Hey, it's my favorite book.

Once in a while you can get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right. This past weekend, I came to realize just how intrinsic Samuel Johnson is to Pale Fire. Not just by virtue of the Hodge epigraph, or of Kinbote striving to be Shade's Boswell. Johnson presumably would have wanted to be remembered primarily for his dictionary and for Rasselas, but being taken as a founder of modern literary criticism (via The Lives of the Poets as well as essaying Shakespeare) probably didn't even enter into his consideration, and his popular image was set for all time by Boswell as a witty conversationalist above all. All these aspects blinded me to the fact that Johnson was also a poet, translating Pope into Latin and producing his own Juvenalia (imitating the third and tenth satires), and should by all rights have been included in my consideration of poet-critics in Pale Fire.

Jeffrey Meyers (biographer of Conrad and others) compiled a NewCrit inventory of Johnson connections, concluding that "Pale Fire reveals how profoundly Nabokov identified with the character of Samuel Johnson." I got there by a different route: Thomas Karshan's TLS article on Naiman's perversion and Maar's marred cryptallization sparked discussion on the Nabokov listserv about VN's hostility to Freud. I agree with Jansy Mello that it's largely symbolic, and related to the literary criticism it spawned; in the realm of artistic production and assessment the differences are deep-rooted (and VN's best 'frenemy' Edmund Wilson is implicated by The Wound and the Bow). Thus primed, Colin Burrow's 17Feb LRB coverage of a new edition of The Lives of the Poets, "Sudden Elevations of Mind", felled the scales from my eyes:
Johnson’s very robust form of humanity goes along with a distinctive view of moral psychology, which is a vital element in the Lives. [...] That moral psychology (itself not entirely unpriggish, since it goes along with a deep hostility to aristocratic leisure and to self-indulgences of all sorts) underpins many of the ethical judgments in the Lives, and indeed runs through the detail of its phrasing. Pope was ‘fretful, and easily displeased, and allowed himself to be capriciously resentful’. That phrase ‘allowed himself’ is absolute Johnson: Pope’s failure to correct his own inclination to be fretful turns his natural disposition into a moral failing. In a similar way Swift, towards whom Johnson is generally hostile, condemned himself to eventual madness by his refusal to participate in society: ‘His asperity continually increasing, condemned him to solitude; and his resentment of solitude sharpened his asperity.’ The sentence is so damning because it makes no reference to Swift’s own agency. He failed to prevent himself from becoming an isolated curmudgeon because he allowed his passions to drive his behaviour into a loop of decline, and that way madness lay: ‘His ideas, therefore, being neither renovated by discourse, nor increased by reading, wore gradually away, and left his mind vacant to the vexations of the hour, till at last his anger was heightened into madness.’ Even this judgment, severe though it may be, is not simply cruel or inhumane: Johnson saw in Swift’s mental decline a parallel to his own battles with ‘vile melancholy’, which he sought to alleviate by the therapy of activity. Swift’s final illness was a mortal and moral hell which has its roots in voluntary weakness, and was a fate which Johnson could imagine as his own.
Aside from the relevance of Pope and Swift to Pale Fire, what struck me was the depth of Nabokov's involvement with Johnson, and how morality and psychology were intertwined (or non-disassociated) in their aesthetic viewpoints, and how that was both a weakness and a strength. And how all this assists in interpretation.

Brian Boyd in Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years contends:
In their literary principles, they could not be further apart. Johnson opts for common sense, for reason, for the amplest generalizations he can make about "general"—that is, human—"nature." Nabokov extols the surprise of personal perception, the play of individual fancy, the irreducible detail that the general view can overlook but never explain. But both have a proud independence of mind and an unquenchable vigor of expression. Both refuse to be daunted by the genius of their subjects, and demand the best of them, according to their own high standards: Johnson chastises Shakespeare for a Nabokovian pun, Nabokov reproves Pushkin for a Johnsonian dictum.
But these are matters of technique, not of underlying principle. Criticism, and what motivates it, matters, a lot. So, too, literature: perhaps this is the basis (or lack of it) for VN's aversion to Dostoevsky. Which is not to say that technique doesn't count. Nor that Nabokov didn't have his blind spots.

So with this in mind, I began to consider how Kinbote's relation to Shade in Pale Fire might mirror that of Rasselas to the poet Imlac. (I know a fair bit of the lit-crit on Nabokov, but little of the extended academic scholarship.) Little did I imagine that Thomas Karshan, the TLS-SAist, would be the one who'd gotten there ahead of me, in the just-published (in the UK) Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play (coming in April to the US). Courtesy of googlebooks:
Nabokov had thought of calling Pale Fire 'The Happy Atheist' (SL 212*). He may have derived the idea of examining the response of an Optimist to his daughter's death from Johnson's Rasselas (1759), in which a stoic philosopher's much-vaunted 'rational fortitude' collapses when this very tragedy befalls him. In Pale Fire, Nabokov, like Erasmus in Praise of Folly, More in Utopia, and Johnson in Rasselas, is testing stoicism, and Shade's secret alcoholism suggests that his victory over unhappiness may be confined to art. If Shade has invented Kinbote it might be as a repository for the unhappiness which he cannot admit into the felicity of his poem.
* Selected Letters: to Jason Epstein, 24 Mar 57, opens: Dear Jason, My main creature, an ex-king, is engaged throughout PALE FIRE in a certain quest. This quest, or research (which at one point, alas, involves some very sophisticated spiritualism), is completely divorced from any so-called faith or religion, gods, God, Heaven, Folklore, etc. At first I thought of entitling my novel THE HAPPY ATHEIST, but the book is much too poetical and romantic for that (its thrill and poetry I cannot reveal to you in a short and matter-of-fact summary). My creature's quest is centered in the problem of heretofore and hereafter, and it is I may say beautifully solved.
(Yo, OUP! I'd gladly accept a review copy!)

But another relevant bit, perhaps one of the better known from Rasselas, takes on new significance in light of Brian Boyd's examination of Pale Fire as a story involving some very sophisticated spiritualism; as Imlac puts it:
"That the dead are seen no more ... I will not undertake to maintain, against the concurrent and unvaried testimony of all ages and all nations. There is no people, rude or learned, among whom apparitions of the dead are not related and believed. This opinion, which perhaps prevails as far as human nature is diffused, could become universal only by its truth; those that never heard of one another would not have agreed in a tale which nothing but experience can make credible. That it is doubted by single cavillers can very little weaken the general evidence; and some who deny it with their tongues confess it by their fears."
This in no way shifts the balance between Boyd's and Kunin's alternate interpretations of who tells the tale, as the Swift decline, and Imlac's signature observation that "[h]uman life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed", could be cited in support of the latter. (And Imlac's caution, "Be not too hasty to trust or admire the teachers of morality. They discourse like angels, but they live like men", tempers reception of Johnson's and Nabokov's critical judgments.)

Ah, had I only paid heed to Jansy (much of this post being drawn from my correspondence with her over the weekend) when I last ventured into questions of psychoanalytic lit-crit, I might well have arrived here sooner. But, as Nabokov put it in Speak, Memory: "The pleasant experience of the roundabout route (strange landscapes, gongs, tigers, exotic customs, the thrice-repeated circuit of a newly married couple around the sacred fire of an earthern brazier) would amply reward him for the misery of the deceit, and after that, his arrival at the simple key would provide him with a synthesis of poignant artistic delight." The funny thing is, that roundabout route sounds a lot like Rasselas' plot-line. And now The Lives of the Poets is on the list of works to be acquired for my bookshelf of good intentions, now of more than historical interest.

PS: Back for a moment to Meyers' inventory: one trick he missed was Goldsmith (nominally entwined with Wordsworth in Pale Fire), whose epitaph Johnson penned: from the Latin: "Oliver Goldsmith: A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian, who left scarcely any style of writing untouched, and touched nothing that he did not adorn. Of all the passions, whether smiles were to move or tears, a powerful yet gentle master. In genius, vivid, versatile, sublime. In style, clear, elevated, elegant." Largely apt for Nabokov too, I think. But seek out Samuel Johnson's epitaph on-line, and you arrive at a very different sylvan shade, alias "Lord Flame"; nowadays, comments are moderated.

Economy of means

2011-01-30T00:16:00.000-05:00

Try foretelling time well spent
No telling in these trying times
To tell the truth you tell it slant
That time does not repeat but rhymes

Past performance does not guarantee future results. But ignoring the past guarantees future underperformance, while distorting history results in futures disfigured. If journalism is a first draft of history, financial-economic journalism is its first overdraft, managing both ignorance and distortion at once. But readers demand explanations, narratives that make sense of "market reaction" (a perennial complaint), whether to real news or to the release of economic statistics. Such statistics are a necessary shorthand, for all their shortcomings (and revisions) a corrective to anecdotal speculation, but frequently become a basis for wilder economic extrapolations, economical with nuance and with fact alike. So I'm pet-peevishly returning to the yield curve and the shape of things to come, but first reprising some commentary over at FT's Long Room (a semi-private area of the FT Alphaville blog):

from early December:
First time as tragedy, second as farce
April 2010
1) Greece teeters on brink of default
2) SEC goes after financial misdealings in Goldman Sachs / hedge funds
3) Oil spill impacts offshore drilling
November 2010
1) Ireland totters on brink of default
2) FBI goes after financial misdealings in expert networks / hedge funds
3) Document spill impacts offshore dealing
to which I'll add: relief at results of Portugal's latest bond auction are reminiscent of Greece's a year ago ...

from September (back when double-dipping was all the rage):
The Mild Depression

What's in a name? Calling the latest contraction "The Great Recession" manages to both overstate and understate the case, and sets in place false expectations for the shape of recovery. I propose "The Mild Depression" as more appropriate to the circumstances.

The difference between recession and depression evolved through common usage. The term "recession" gained currency to differentiate from The Great Depression (itself a term one-termer Hoover popularized; in the last episode of similar magnitude to today, one deserving of the moniker "The Great Recession", Alfred Kahn's proposal for "banana" never quite gained traction). "Depression" has come to mean a GDP contraction on a massive scale, at the expense of useful qualitative and other quantitative distinctions, for example deflationary vs inflationary impact, employment levels, or duration of effects.

David Rosenberg's corrective assessment of our current economic malaise underscores how this episode differs from prior post-war experience, but is misleading in its implicit comparison to the inter-war one: as historical analogues go, the past decade or so more usefully viewed (at least from a financial economics standpoint) as a centennial historical re-enactment, the last 3 years (and the consequent ongoing rejiggering of the regulatory regime) corresponding to the 1907 Bankers' Panic (and to the establishment of the Federal Reserve System, trust companies being the shadow-bankers of the time). But ramifications were more local, as the US was not yet a leading player on the world stage. It's not merely a matter of getting the right metaphor, it's getting the metaphor right; pace Rogoff and Reinhart, not just this time, but every time, it's different.

But relative to what to measure the differences? Just as recent experience defies the prevailing economic frameworks, the historical analogues fail to account for substantive structural changes. The most severe past global contractions predate the consolidation of fiat currencies, multinational corporations (especially in finance), and the service economy. The lead political actors seem to understand that 'beggar thy neighbor' tactics ultimately boomerang, and that a lovely little world war is no longer a viable exit strategy; historically speaking, the degree of coordination among governments has been remarkable.

One place to look for guidance is in how recent recoveries have deviated from expectations. The inelasticity of the US jobless rate in the last two mild recessions does not augur well. The ultimate profitability[?] of Resolution Trust/Funding Corp., the government's excursion into cleaning up the S&L crisis, hits a brighter note (cf TARP), as does the fact that commercial real estate hasn't cratered. Still, the artificial floor that has been installed beneath the residential housing market indicates that it will be a long time before that becomes an engine of recovery in the US, meanwhile skewing CPI lower (in my book, statistics come after lies and damned lies, but before demographics), while consumer demand seems likewise on a lower growth path, and so with business investment, and so on.

Taking a more global perspective, the burgeoning of sovereign balance sheets is most important in a relative sense: it's not the absolute level so much as how much that level exceeds peers (pot, kettle, minstrel show). One silver lining is that the crisis in developed countries has served to better integrate into the global economy those emerging markets whose balance sheets had improved since the Asian contagion. The banks' balance sheets now have Basel III as benchmark, the long phase-in mitigated by more proximate market discipline. In the US it's the household balance sheet that weighs most heavily against potential growth (and not on average, given the rising Gini coefficient).

Economic theory, much maligned in the course of events, still seeks an elusive equilibrium, now to incorporate financial intermediaries as players rather than just facilitators. I suppose this is rational behavior, at least by their lights, but I note that economist jokes have lately overtaken lawyers in popularity. The economy's itself in a transitional state (when isn't it?), the myriad interventions clouding where it will find what will be called a new equilibrium, regardless of what fundamentalist IS-LMists may say. Statistically, the lesson to be drawn from recent events is to only listen to economists whose name begins with the letter 'R': Roubini, Rajan, Rogoff, Reinhart, Roach ... Rosenberg?

Yogi Berra once said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Much of the current commentary seems not to have much of a grasp of the past, much less the present, distorted by focus on a preferred prospective state of affairs, making it much tougher to get right. But then Yogi also said "The future ain't what it used to be."

So, as I was saying ... I've been bemused by continuing economic commentary and forecasts relying upon the history of the 2yr-10yr spread in U.S.Gov't notes. In normal times this may be a fair characterization of the shape of the yield curve, but these are far from normal times and the curve is warped by ZIRP and quantitative easing. (And the last "inversion" in 2-10s was of negligible magnitude relative to its supposed effect, but I've been over that before.) This isn't to say that there aren't signals to be discerned from the curve: one positive sign is that the area of maximum slope has migrated back below the 5-year mark. More widely, the hold of the bipolar "risk-on / risk-off" trade on the markets has weakened, as have correlations between asset classes (good: differentiation may cause sectoral pain but is return to systemic health) and co-ordination between governments (not so good, although not necessarily dire).

So how are my predictions holding up? Pretty well: for the 7-yr note recommendation, with recent yield curve resteepening, change over the past 18 months in the 5-yr yield have been largest (-0.7%, or -1.4% with curve roll-down), while unannualized total return (including coupons & roll-down) has been 10% for 7- & 10-yr, vs 8% for 5- and 30-yr; compared to 6 months ago, the 7-yr held its overall return while everything longer lost value and everything shorter eked out tiny gains. As for the benchmark bond swap spread, I was low by 5 basis points on level but otherwise on-target: I said -10 to 0bp for 2-3 months, then 0-5bp; we had -5 to 5bp for 2 months, and, except for a month-long excursion into the low teens post-election, 5-10bp since.

But where do we go from here? I don't know, I'm not going there ... I'd say your guess is as good as mine, but it probably isn't. I leave regular econoblogging to those who think they know better. Oh, if only they did ... and by now you'd think they would.

Closing the books

2010-12-26T13:28:00.001-05:00

... or the year-end accounting: 2010 I will be glad to have put behind me. Not that the year was without its felicities, but these were set against a ground of ongoing adjustment to a surplus of defelicity. But enough of that; no open book, I only broach personal matters here to lend context to holding forth on my varied interests. Suffice it to say that circumstance has not been conducive to more enthusiastic pursuit of these interests, and less so to blogging about them. This is but a transient state of affairs, just longer now than I'd expected, and blogging being a peculiar form of persistent ephemera, I'm willing and able to endure some dormancy.

Meanwhile, filling in on especially noteworthy reading this past quarter:
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: a reread (sort of), Richard Zenith's version, including an olla podrida of loosely associated pre-Soares writings.
Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra (Margaret Sayers Peden): Juan Goytisolo's backcover blurb gets it exactly right, one of the great monuments of the Spanish-language novel; a bit of early Melville & Poe pastiche in Part II fully exonerated by later use made of them, but the future bracketing is less well executed (not the opening but the closing parenthesis). Though this is more ambitious, still I think Donoso surpassed it with Obscene Bird, albeit on a narrower canvas.
Shusaku Endo, The Samurai (Van C. Gessel): And the missionary. Caught in history's closing door.
Henry James, The Ambassadors: Not sure how I let this one get by me for so long. A bit much of the wonderful and magnificent, floating and pulling up, but remarkable in its proportion; I can see why HJ thought it his masterstroke. Brought to mind by Cynthia Ozick's latest, Foreign Bodies (still to be read), as well as by recent reading of Wharton's The House of Mirth, and Howells' Indian Summer; Updike describes the difference: James' expatriates are seeking and losing their souls abroad; Howells' are on holiday. Somewhat relatedly, currently in the midst of Aidan Higgins' Balcony of Europe, an excursion through an expatting zoo.
Honorable mention: Michal Ajvaz, The Other City: dingbatty lyrical surreal gnomic nocturnal quest; Dalkey followed up with The Golden Age and so shall I.

Also, more throwaway lines binned into prior catchalling down the scroll.

Where does the time go? to a place when nothing happens

2010-09-26T21:37:00.002-04:00

Not quite yet another obligatory post.

Between and betwixt other readings I've been revisiting The Book of Disquiet (Richard Zenith's over-complete rather than Margaret Jull Costa's over-selective translation), which Fernando Pessoa attributes to his foremost semi-heteronym, Bernardo Soares, "because his personality, although not my own, doesn't differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it". In fact, so too his name, in which Pessoa's initials are augmented with a couple of extra strokes (F-B, P-R) and clipped a bit in the middle (n-r), and then the surname swapped front to back (Ressoa, Soares); the intermediate step is 3rd person singular present indicative (or 2nd person imperative) of the Portuguese ressoar, meaning resonate (the 2nd person future subjunctive [not to mention infinitivo pessoal] ressoares includes both but that'd be pushing it ...)

I was primed for this observation by Alberto Savinio, who plays a similar name-game in Childhood of Nivasio Dolcemare. Other noteworthy translations: Ilf & Petrov's The Golden Calf, Donoso's The Garden Next Door (cf Waggish), Roa Bastos' Son of Man, and Romain Gary (as Émile Ajar), The Life Before Us (previously Momo, filmed as Madame Rosa): for me, required reading after Hocus Bogus (see prior post), but brilliant by its own lights (and translating it must have been arduous fun for Ralph Manheim), sustaining the young narrator's voice in all its malaproposity hard enough but rendering its development harder still, all from a bottom-of-le-banlieue perspective making [non]sense of a time out of joint. And somebody at NDP was having a bit of fun: among other chronomalies, midway through the novel Momo marvels at film running backwards at a dubbing studio (another hint of someone behind Ajar? Queneau suspected a hoax but not Gary) ... the backcover summary of the book (Prix Goncourt, 1975) concludes: "A movie based on the book, Madame Rosa, starring Simone Signoret [appearing on the frontcover], was released in 1968."

fifth bloggiversary

2010-07-29T17:05:00.007-04:00

Yes, another fiversary (though not work-related). I've not marked the prior millstones as I've ground through them, and I'll admit that the unevenly monthly posting of the past year has yielded up thin gruel lately. Not that the lack of clear direction is anything new; Stochastic Bookmark was inblogurated with writing samples pulled from the drawer, moved on to mostly litcritical ruminations before settling into a reading diary, which course was abandoned a couple of years ago to try a different tack, but the wind didn't hold; I've since indulged a broader range of interests, including professional (vs confessional self-indulgence), with gallimaufrian result. I'll not mark this occasion with a medley of greatest hits, only take the opportunity to update the table of contents (which bumped the first post into the second).

I will however revisit a post from a year ago, on yield curve dynamics (capsule summary: there's potential a few years out for a rare configuration, a inverted humped yield curve, as occurred in Germany in spring '94, but regardless there's relative value in the belly of the curve). Below I'll track how my recommendation of the 7-yr Treasury note is doing so far, but first I'll remark on some recent interesting developments:

Reading the economy from the curve: The Cleveland Fed released a research note suggesting the curve signals slow growth but no double-dip (cf reactions from PragCap, Felix Salmon, Greg Ip). The old saw was that an inverted yield curve has predicted 9 of the last 5 recessions. The simplistic economic reading using two points to proxy the curve is deceptive: The last inversion was minimal and equivocal, hardly indicating the severity of the damage to come, and I pointed out last year that the duration of the episode during which the curve was essentially flat, in unstable equilibrium, stored up energy like a spring (though I've yet to see an economic model that recognizes it). I also said that one of the curve features bugging me was: "The current yield curve, while 'normal' in shape, is abnormal not only in being so low (though Japan's has long been lower [a dead cat silhouette?]), but also in that its inflection point occurs farther out (2-3 yrs)." Since then, the same, only moreso (as with the Fed's "extended period" of low rates, ntm managing the curve with Treasury purchases). Japan's curve signalled its lost decade plus, but that occurred while the rest of the world wasn't losing any time. Turning Japanese? I don't think so, pace St Louis Fed prez's latest jawboning (pdf summary, paper), but ... after factoring out safety and liquidity etc, the US curve indicates that there's a lot of drag for some years (but no decade) to come. Long-term alarmist, if you will.

Benchmark bond swap spread goes negative: Again. This is more puzzling; my partial explanation at FTAlphaville the first time around (LIBOR/OIS misbehavior, convergence of 10- and 30-yr spreads) has since reversed, and now the 10-yr spread has breached zero again, following the 30-yr spread down, with little evident correlation to other market indicators. Negative swap spreads are nearly as anathematic as negative interest rates (why should inter-bank credit be better than the government's?), and while technical factors (e.g., structured exotica hedging) mitigate concern over the persistence of 30-yr spread negativity, that it should crop up against the most liquid security in the world is more troubling. I provisionally expect (without recourse to more recondite data, based on how the 30-yr spread behaved when it crossed zero) this episode to persist for about 2-3 months in negative single digits before normalizing to low positive single digits. But there's a lot that can operate at variance with this expectation.

Update 30.07: FTαville is onto this, striving to relate it to convexity trading, which in the past drove repo through zero (and elsewhere to asset swap demand for burgeoning corporate issuance), and noting repo misbehavior now as well. The parenthetical explanation seems to be the best try, but insufficient in and of itself. Interesting times ...

Back to prior prediction: The evolution of the curve over the past year is consistent with (but does not prove nor make more likely) a humped inversion. The belly of the curve (5-, 7-yr maturities) was cheapened by expectations of reversion to a normal shape, for which the slope is greatest across shorter maturities; instead, this maximal slope has drifted farther out the curve, benefitting the belly by both lower yields and roll-down (migration of fixed-date maturity to lower tenor). I chose the 7-yr, "that step-child among the on-the-runs", as the best value on the curve due both to these benefits and the lesser detriments of curve normalization, with the kicker that humped inversion would pay off halfway to its maturity. So, one year on, how's it doing?

Maturity (yrs)______ 1 __ 2 __ 3 __ 5 __ 7 ___ 10 __ 30 Yield 29.7.09 _____ 0.49 1.12 1.66 2.63 3.30 _ 3.72 4.56 Yield 29.7.10 _____ 0.30 0.61 0.95 1.75 2.43 _ 3.03 4.07 Change (bp) ________ -19. -51. -71. -88. -87 _ -69 _ -49 Yld w/1 yr roll ________ 0.30 0.61 1.35 2.09 _ 2.83 4.05 Change (bp) _____________ -82 -105 -128 -121 _ -89 _ -51 Price apprec (over par)_ 0.82 2.08 4.97 6.79 _ 7.03 8.67 Apprec incl cpn ___ 0.49 1.94 3.74 7.60 10.09 10.75 13.23 $Duration (start)__ 1.00 1.97 2.91 4.66 6.20 _ 8.29 16.26 Riskadj ret(/$Dur)_ 0.49 0.98 1.28 1.63 1.63 _ 1.30 0.81 notes: yields from FRB H15, roll lin interp, pricing for par as of 29.7.09

So, pretty much as advertised (though the risk adjustment by interest rate sensitivity is an outer bound, as readjustment over the course of the year would favor shorter maturities). The 7-yr may still be attractive, today's auction notwithstanding, but some of the juice has been squeezed out of it.

Sorry, bloggiversaries get me all wonky ...

Notable July reading:
Yves Bonnefoy, The Curved Planks: Nobel-worthy poetry
Adam Foulds, The Quickening Maze: redolent of Penelope Fitzgerald, high praise in my book

Mo' odds & sods

2010-06-27T20:20:00.001-04:00

georgic

cultivating solitary arts
I alone reaped the mow
and would as soon disown what I'd sown
losing patience with words
mightier the ploughshare than the pen
though both are double-edged
the better to overturn raw ground
and cut a truer line
so the final cut's a single swath
nothing left now but to
gather meagre gleanings from the sward

_________________________________

Lest it be thought that this fallow field might revert to Nature, more gleanings from the fictional woods ...

Much of my reading time of late has been spent in stats (thx again Cosma; Fan & Yao a worthy successor to Box & Jenkins as time-series text), but I've fit in some remarkable literary stuff as well. While the latest Aira and Bolaño available in English weren't up to the usual high standard (though Antwerp may be Bolaño's Eleuthéria), many Nobelaureates also underdelivered, but not Yasunari Kawabata's The Old Capitol (translator J Martin Holman's second pass, '05), but then Kawabata never disappoints; the surprise was Fumiko Enchi's Masks, (Juliet Winters Carpenter) exceeding Tanizaki and approaching Kawabata. Other outliers:
Shiva Naipaul, North of South: An African Journey: '70s poco travelogue, Orwell comparison justified.
José Donoso, The Obscene Bird of Night (Hardie St Martin & Leonard Mades): a monstrous unrelenting shifty labyrinthine pile (unjustly eclipsed by the Boom's headliners).
Romain Gary as Émile Ajar, Hocus Bogus: I love love love a good literary hoax and this one has greatness written all over it. David Bellos' translation is true to the spirit (cannot be to the letter, but the freedom's constrained), and his intro sets it up well; Barbara Wright's translation of Romain Gary's "The Life and Death of Émile Ajar", dishing the posthumous dirt, is included afterwords. (These two translators are responsible for the bulk of what put Perec and Queneau among my top 10 20c authors; the latter approved Wright's renderings for again being true to the spirit.)

(looking forward to Melville House's release of Mahendra Singh's rendering of "The Hunting of the Snark", can't wait to see how it turns out despite wishing it would never end ...)

throwaway lines

2010-04-03T23:48:00.002-04:00

lazily gathering bits'n'pieces dropped elsewhere

Some folks got a way with words. I get away with 'em.

The unexamined life isn't worth a second glance.

They say the best things in life are free, but they kill you on the accessories.

When Christopher Columbus did the egg trick, did he get a standing ovation?

In the land of the kings, the one-eyed jack is wild.

I've still got a lot to learn, but all didactic fiction shows is how not to do it.

There are only two kinds of dichotomies: True or False.

Time is the universal solvent.

Misentropic variations: Everything is a waste of time, anything further would be a waste of space, pointing this out is a waste of energy.

From Borges' The Garden of Forking Paths: En una adivinanza cuyo tema es el ajedrez ¿cuál es la única palabra prohibida? "In a riddle whose answer is 'chess', what is the only forbidden word?" Is this not a riddle? A riddle whose only answer is forbidden?

François duc de La Rochefoucauld: Les finesses et les trahisons ne viennent que de manque d'habileté.
Napoléon Bonaparte: N'attribuez jamais à la malveillance ce qui s'explique très bien par l'incompétence. / Ne jamais attribuer à la méchanceté cela qui peut en juste proportion être expliqué par l'incompétence.
The latter is most oft referred to as Hanlon's Razor (for Robert Hanlon or Heinlein): Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence, whereas the former Englishes without re-attribution to Cunning and treachery are the offspring of incapacity. Circular? go figurate.

I was walking with the Ethicist across the footbridge over the tracks leading to the switching yard when he stopped and said, "Say you were down at that switch there, and a train was coming in to the yard, fast, and that there were a bunch of children playing on the siding that your switch shunted the train on to, but if you threw the switch the other way, it would go on another siding where a workman was engrossed in his task, and you couldn't signal the train to stop in time or get the kids' or workman's attention. What would you do?" So I threw his fat ass over the railing into the path of an oncoming train.
_______________________

Recent reading worthy of note: two more BTBA-listers, José Manuel Prieto's Rex & Gail Hareven's The Confessions of Noa Weber, the latter the winner, deservedly; & Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey, a tighter FSG repackaging, which The New Yorker's Daniel Mendelsohn judges too clever by half, which is too thick by a third.
(Less worthy of note gets dropped in the fictional woodpile.)

Making up for lost time

2010-02-04T14:14:00.001-05:00

Mark Thwaite of RSB recently (and bravely) put up a post about being hit close to home which hit uncomfortably close to home. Being affected, or afflicted, by somewhat similar circumstances, I too lost for a time the attention necessary to sustained reading. In my case, the underlying loss occasioned sorrow more than grief (that is, without so much in the way of attendant anger, much less madness), but nonetheless altered my life in ways both mundane and profound. Though felt keenly, my travail is a faint reflection of his: unlike Mark, who speaks of the revelatory impact of Hamlet while in the midst of his own loss, mine was presaged by a message in the aether which prepared me for its impact and helped to sort it. I'm through the worst of it, I think, but like Mark (without his eloquence) won't elaborate further. I will respond to his reader response to Hamlet, or more precisely to the conclusions he draws, not to invalidate or contest them so much as to (I hope) sympathetically argufy them.

Hamlet is a full-blown portraiture upon which much has been projected, as with Hamlet the play, as with its author, himself oft mistaken for a fiction. But of all his characters, not to mention predecessors, Hamlet is the most self-regarding. He's become a by-word for madness real and feigned, and for doubt and delay (I'll fess up to a bit o' the latter, but not the former, nor even feigned sanity). Madness runs like a toxin through the play, which opens and closes with poisonings (to borrow from Empson's "Missing Dates": Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. / The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.); but it is a madness of distinct character from that of say MacBeth or Lear. It is self-questioning, and steps outside itself to ask, not as a ghost in the machine but as an aura encompassing its larger context. One consequence is turning the device of mise-en-abyme inside out, foisting the play around the within the play, bounded in a nutshell, out into the gallery. Opening up these boundaries of the self does not dissolve the contents or compromise the coherence. It recasts selfhood as relational and contingent rather than absolute, perverse internal logic following a pattern established by external circumstance and event, opening up the play between them. But much of this is a modern imposition, a shift in emphasis conditioned by cultural evolution that, whatever the play's genius, could not have been foreseen. The sensibility was always there, its significance was not. It's a matter of perspective, and I suspect that Horatio's was more privileged than it's now considered:
And let me speak to the yet unknowing world
How these things came about: so shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall'n on th' inventors' heads: all this
Can I truly deliver.
The crowning touch on Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is to bring Horatio on at the last minute to deliver these final, fading lines. While the textual history suggests that in its time, Hamlet was a palpable hit, it then faded along with the rest of the works; Shakespeare wasn't restored to the canon until a century after the Restoration (and his identity not questioned until a century after that). In these, our times, following the death of the author and the resurrection, Hamlet speaks to us more strangely than was originally envisioned, with an authority invested over time.

While I've been putting these thoughts and words together, I've been stuck in The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin, but the log-jam has otherwise been broken (so too the blog-jam). After emerging from Within a Budding Grove, I put Proust aside for the longlist for the Best Translated Book Award (I'd read Bolaño's The Skating Rink [CR, 3%] and Aira's Ghosts CR, 3%] last year):
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Memories of the Future [CR, 3%]
Cao Naiqian, There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night [CR]
Juan Filloy, Op Oloop [CR]
Hugo Claus, Wonder [CR, 3%]
Mati Unt, Brecht at Night [CR]
Robert Walser, The Tanners [3%]
For me, the best of the above were Juan Filloy's protoGombrowiczic ramble and Cao Naiqian's fine-hewn coarseness. Favorite Krzhizhanovsky story was of course "The Bookmark".

Other reading:
Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies: strong collection, people out of place
James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room: not so tender is the night
Roberto Bolaño, Monsieur Pain: mesmeric revelations diffracted through intermediary influence [CR,3%]
A.S. Byatt, Possession: slightly overdone, like its subject matter

Gamechanger

2010-01-25T23:47:00.003-05:00

First among world champions Garry Kasparov reviews a book on computer chess and artificial intelligence as a pretext to explain it all in NYRB. It is as cogent a non-technical essay as any I've seen on what it means not only for chess, but for computing and beyond. Which is not to say that it's not quibblable, but that's not my aim here; instead, a few points on which to expand or expound:

Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism and the demands of the market. Brute-force programs play the best chess, so why bother with anything else? Why waste time and money experimenting with new and innovative ideas when we already know what works? Such thinking should horrify anyone worthy of the name of scientist, but it seems, tragically, to be the norm. Our best minds have gone into financial engineering instead of real engineering, with catastrophic results for both sectors.
Well, I'll quibble a tad here: Financial engineering (FE) has not deprived real engineering of real expertise; computer engineering has probably been more of a brain-drain on traditional disciplines. But what comprises financial engineering is largely the same kind of brute-force computation that chess programming relies upon. Unlike chess, finance is not a game of total information (efficient market theory doesn't go that far), and representations of the underlying processes and parameters are critical to the veracity of the outcome (whether for pricing or risk assessment: one common weakness of implementation was that the latter overrelied on the former, since pricing had to be more precise, on the "why waste time and money" principle). Model deficiencies were masked by the enrichment afforded by the Moore's Law expansion of computational power, whose better-faster-cheaper trifecta cached out other strategies (I'll forgo the martingale subreference here) before it broke the bank with Monte Carlo. (NB: Moore's Law is just as empirical [and to some degree as self-fulfilling] as many posited economic laws.) But the root deficiency was not in the models, but in how they were used within the banking establishment; what Kasparov says earlier about computer-assisted chess holds institutionally: Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.

Perhaps chess is the wrong game for the times. Poker is now everywhere, as amateurs dream of winning millions and being on television for playing a card game whose complexities can be detailed on a single piece of paper. But while chess is a 100 percent information game—both players are aware of all the data all the time—and therefore directly susceptible to computing power, poker has hidden cards and variable stakes, creating critical roles for chance, bluffing, and risk management.
Hidden behind this metaphor is the old saw about bipolar nuclear strategy (Soviet chess players, American poker players). (Hidden behind that is CIA misassessment of Soviet capabilites.) But, ex ante, I'll raise the point that it's still the wrong game: In pre-FE days, option modelers were chess-players, options traders were bridge-players ... and so's Warren Buffett, but then so's Bear Stearns' XCEO Cayne ... and of course there's Citi's XCEO Prince's penchant for Musical Chairs ... anyway, bridge mixes imperfect information into both competition and co-operation, not to mention its contractual aspects. But there is no right game, and that's why we keep playing; and, let's face it, looking for the optimal research algorithm is a mug's game, despite which it's one of the best ways to get ahead. (Game for the times? Yikes! I brought Mornington Nomic to the attention of David Chess ten years ago! Perhaps MCMC isn't Markov Chain Monte Carlo but Mornington Crescent Musical Chairs ...)

OK, more quibbling than I intended. But Read The Whole Thing, as it is written ... (also, I recommend Jonathan Schaeffer's book, One Jump Ahead, not mentioned in the article)

throwaway lines:
untitled
Kafka once met Einstein
they discussed the problem of our laws
unfortunately no transcript exists

related posts:
On chess: Calculus of Variations
Sample fiction: Inside Job

I listeth where I goeth, cometh if thou canst and hearest the sound thereof

2010-01-18T23:31:00.002-05:00

Ordinarily I pay little attention to the short- or longlists of literary awards (or, more generally, best-of compilations), other in that they usually assure some minimal standard of quality, even then often subordinated to marketing imperatives (as much the awards themselves as the candidates), as is much general interest book reviewing. Commercial publishing no longer serves literary tastes so well, preferring a lighter seasoning on genrefication, and writers have followed suit. While the decline in publishing may be incidental, it has exacerbated the trend. This has prompted me to look farther afield for challenging reading, particularly to translations, which, long neglected by the big houses, have afforded non-profits such as Dalkey Archive, Archipelago and Open Letter an opening and a way forward. All of which are well represented in the 2010 Best Translated Book Award [BTBA] longlist, which I take more stock in than any majors' shortlist.

Literary translation occupies difficult territory, an academic step-child, an original voice mediated by another. This 'defect' is in fact a virtue for those of us lacking deep fluency (comparable to first language) in the source language: Nuances altered into the target language are nonetheless not lost, resonances or harmonies emerge consistent with the change in matrix (but it's the cultural not the linguistic matrix that's determinantive). I've likened translation to musical transcription, with English playing the part of pianoforte, but this over-emphasizes arrangement at the expense of performance, a necessary interpretive element that goes beyond the score. Translations have provided vitalizing cross-cultural infusions and feedback: Baudelaire's Poe, or Borges' rendering of Faulkner's The Wild Palms triggering The Boom (Garcia Marquez in turn preferring the Englishing of his writings). As literature itself is self-aware, reflexive (pomo only ostensibly mo'so), this interaction between languages and cultures holds some critical interest ... and for my part, as a reader, the defamiliarization is a way of making it new; that, and that of late they'd been making it newer in the southern new world and the eastern old one.

I attended last year's inaugural BTBA ceremony at Melville House Books (a new indy pub for imports as well as domestic brews), and plan to be at the extended ceremonies hosted this year by Idlewild Books, with a panel discussion accompanying the winnowing to a shortlist on February 16th, and the ultimate winner announced in the same venue March tenthatively. (The last event I attended there was Jacques Roubaud's reading, whose book didn't quite make the cut but should've; I wasn't able to make it the following week for the last BTBA winner.) Idlewild is discounting all the longlist titles, but I'm not; I already have a third of the list in hand and a fifth under my belt, and haven't yet been disappointed. Chad Post is elucidating each candidate in turn in the run-up, and may well add to my fractions. Sure, this is about selling books, but I'm already sold on the concept.
add 19.1: Literary or no, Idlewild's buyer speaks to this (via Conversational Reading).

Rounding out the year ...

2009-12-29T23:30:00.000-05:00

Although I no longer have something to say about every bit'o'lit read, I would be remiss were I not to say something about stand-outs among recent reading, not that I have a lot to say, these things speak for themselves, and that's saying something ...

As I mentioned on the Nab listserv, I heartily recommend George Economou's Ananios of Kleitor; my six-word synopsic is classicist palefirean excursion flauting scholyrical sapphistication , but I'll let Tim Whitmarsh do most of the talking, since he put me on to it:
What it actually is, however, is harder to define: perhaps equal parts academic parody, postmodern romance and prose poem, a kind of ancient-world equivalent of Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Some sequences are uproariously funny, but others are provocative, moving or horrifying. It draws to the surface the absurdity, myopia and arrogance of academic prose and the awful conjunctures of history and scholarship; but it is also an affectionate and humane tribute to the power of poetry to lend new meanings to new readers’ lives across the ages. A wonderful book.
This being the sort of thing I like, a lot, I did, in fact, even more. (Not more than or as much as Pale Fire, but still ... available in US PoD through B&N.)

I was also wowed by Mircea Eliade's The Old Man and the Bureaucrats (Mary Park Stevenson), which lives up to its backcover blurb: "a satire of the Romanian Communist police state [that] has been called A Thousand and One Nights as if written by Kafka." Well, not quite, unless Borges served as an intermediary; it manages to be discursive within a more confined space.

More recently, Andreï Makine's Dreams of my Russian Summers (Geoffrey Strachan) provided the impetus to resume reading Proust (chronologically situated between Lermontov and Nabokov [who englished him], as Makine observes he himself is alphabetically), which had been nipped in the budding grove ...

passage time

2009-12-24T20:36:00.000-05:00

Attention conservation notice: long-now-clockwatching at ten past

S00N the calendar turns on another decade, one that prefers to remain nameless, no consensus on what it ought to be called, not for lack of trying (early on, on Usenet, I suggested the Annies, in recognition of a certain blank-eyed little orphan and of those New Year's glasses we're well rid of; in retrospect, Oh-ohs captures the accidents that happened to be waiting, while Dubblows suggests itself to those of a more partisan persuasion, and Dreadnoughts to the belligerent; I expect the coming decade will be dubbed the Tweens). Now, I'm not one to be particularly observant of calendar conventions, unless it's to calculate bond yields (I even wrote code to generate OECD holidays, back in the day), but this time round it needs some squaring with how the years unfolded, as what I took for constants became variable.

In the workaday world, I've noted my millenial turn from computer programming to risk consultancy, not so much a reinvention as a retriangulation (maths, finance, and technology being my golden triangle, I merely moved the last to the short side). Being a strict interdisciplinarian, I don't define myself by the rôle assumed, nor in terms of or enumeration of faculties. As I once put it, I'm good with words and numbers; there's safety in numbers—but a facility with words has also held me in good stead, both in annotating my own work and in scriptdoctoring others', adding another dimension (a golden tetrahedron?). But the lure (or allure) of writing for its own sake is mitigated by the scant livelihood it affords to all but a few of the pros (and fewer in verse), its value taken as subsidiary to other endeavors. In finance, I have worked with and written for quants, programmers, traders, researchers and risk managers, and had a go at each (through circumstance, not conscious pursuit), but found my comparative advantage (and autonomy) was at the nexus of these different rôles. (Farther back along these lines, earlier careering here.)

Nonetheless, the itch to write persists, and the blog a place to put my scratchings. This has been the decade of the weblog, a malleable medium with extensive cross-referencing to absorb an oversupply of writing. While I got my own in rather late, I've been following along from the beginning. In all its diversity, it will persist, unlike the chatroom/listserv paradigms whose day has passed, fun though it was while it lasted, or the new-new forms of sociomedia and instatextin', fun I've avoided for the most part (nor for me the bandwidening A/V accretions; the word is paramount). Chat and blog helped develop my literary interests, prompting deep-delving into translations of Latin American and Eastern European authors among others; most of my writing here has been in the service of my reading. Still, the scribbling often takes unforeseen directions, even within a single post (this one, for instance). So, too, life: I find myself on the threshold of a new order, novel arrangements of unfamiliar character, so please excuse the paucity of postings as I pause to get my bearings.

Meanwhile, 'tis that season once again:
Wishing All A Meretricious & A Preposterous New Year ...

The Original of Laura: reprise

2009-11-18T18:57:00.001-05:00

The run-up to the release of The Original of Laura, not so much a novel in fragments as fragments toward a novel, raised expectations beyond anything that it could fulfill, and the reviewers aren't pleased (reminiscent of Helen Vendler's reception of Alice Quinn's effort, “Betraying Elizabeth Bishop: The Art of Losing”). The state of the manuscript requires extra- rather than interpolation, a willingness to perpetrate an intentional fallacy to perpetuate the legacy.

Based on the then sketchy reports, I had speculated on Laura's origination:
I would propose as a primary source: Poe's "The Oval Portrait", a short short that takes the relation of Art to Life to an extreme (and which, as a discourse upon a discourse, welcomes extrapolation [or is it involution?] to the story itself, as well as to critical appreciation). TOOL would be an elaboration of, a doubling of, an argufying of and an answering of TOP's theme.
I'd taken the hint from Lara's Transatlantica précis (Its central female character seems to be Flora, the wife of the narrator and, most likely, the ‘original’ of Laura, who is the eponymous heroine of a novel titled My Laura. This novel is sent to the narrator and main protagonist of The Original of Laura by a painter, a rejected admirer of his wife, Flora, of whom “he did an exquisite oil a few years ago.” In My Laura, the mistress is less lucky: she is destroyed by the “I” of the book whilst “in the act of portraying her”—‘literally’, as a writer. Apparently “the portrait is a faithful one,” its features being “absolutely true to the original.” cf p121; prior post for embedding context), and would seem to be borne out by other supporting detail, such as the valet in "Legs" (pp 255-261) and, from the initial chapter, by one of Flora's fawners: Only by identifying her with an unwritten, half-written, rewritten difficult book could one hope to render at last what contemporary descriptions of intercourse so seldom convey [...] Readers are directed to that book—on a very high shelf, in a very bad light—but already existing, as magic exists, and death, and as shall exist, from now on, [...] A copy of Glist's "Glandscape" (receding ovals) adorned the wall.. The second chapter provides some elaboration, in Flora's grandfather's landscape painting being consigned to oblivion, her father's auto-photography of his obliteration; her mother's "art was not strong enough to survive the loss of good looks ...". And her husband's self-effacing technique is the central conceit of the novel-in-ovo. That said, I had expected more in the way of the play of the light ...

But the aspect that caught my attention has deeper implication. There is as usual ample intertextuality to prior art (Hubert H. Hubert being the most obvious case), but not in the hyparodic spirit of Look at the Harlequins!; the text that exists does fulfill one promise, providing a window into Nabokov's creative process (reflected in Philip Wild's annihilative strategies), from a personal standpoint; the book most drawn upon is (once again) Speak, Memory. The opening to chapter 5 thereof describes a different sort of creative destruction:
I have often noticed that after I have bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in an artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it. Although it lingered on in my mind, its personal warmth, its retrospective appeal had gone and, presently, it became more closely identified with my novel than with my former self, where it had seemed to be so safe from the intrusion of the artist. Houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in the mute films of yore, and the portrait of my old French governess, whom I once lent to a boy in one of my books, is fading fast, now that it is engulfed in the description of a childhood entirely unrelated to my own. The man in me revolts against the fictionist, and here is my desperate attempt to save what is left of poor Mademoiselle.
The novel within the novel, "My Laura" transfers this process to depiction of a character (based on the character Flora, who remains inviolate in the novel proper), and her husband in turn is unwritten out of existence from the inside. The writing on the wall (or in the wallpaper, another leitmotif, cf Pnin) is that which closes SM's chapter 3, in elliptical self-portraiture:
I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. Its reflection fills the oval mirror above the leathern couch where my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book. A sense of security, of well-being, of warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

cloture

2009-10-17T15:14:00.004-04:00

the decision has been taken
it will only be revisited
to recast past incident
in the light most favourable
to its consummate prescription
henceforth taken as a given
remembering that it is not
just prophesy that self-fulfills

hiatus extended

2009-09-15T12:41:00.002-04:00

Blogging will be held in abeyance while I attend to more fundamental and pressing matters off-line.

polyfiversaries

2009-08-15T00:20:00.001-04:00

While many more momentous anniversaries are being observed, this month marks some personal-professional milestones:
30 years ago: Back in my college days, started programming in APL, on a pre-PC IBM desktop, with 64K RAM, peripheral floppy drive, & a switch up front to choose between APL and something called 'BASIC', never used the latter, though I did become adept on the firm's Wang word processor, and they later got the IBM-PC equipped with STSC APL; it wasn't all cutting-edge technology back then, though, as my first task was to drive-and-deliver a '35 Dodge pick-up (top speed 45mph) to my new boss in Washington DC, which he had found in Oblong, IL (looks just like it sounds);
25 years ago: Began making models & apps for Merrill Lynch's Debt Strategy Group, as a consultant (later an employee), finding out that my self-taught APL was wizardly, and now I got to do it on a mainframe (IBM 370, VM/CMS) while teaching myself, then others, financial analytics;
20 years ago: Moved back to New York to stay, courtesy of Morgan Stanley's Fixed Income Research;
10 years ago: Became a financial market risk consultant at UBS, 'programmer' dropped from job description.
None of this was a matter of planning or foresight, more of contingency and serendipity.

Non-professionally, lit-blogging will resume once lit-reading does.

Interesting times, timing interest

2009-07-28T18:06:00.000-04:00

Attention conservation notice: A swerve into career history, plus wonky financial (and economic) speculations.

This being a hobby-blog, mostly on literature, I've only obliquely touched upon professional concerns (which are considered somewhat sensitive in the banking biz), but being sidelined for over a year now, I guess it qualifies as a hobby for now. Per my prior post, I've been upskilling on my own, which served me well once before, ten years ago. But expertise that I acquired well prior to that may be relevant to the shape of things to come, particularly the shape of the yield curve (beyond battered).

As a model-maker for market-makers before "financial engineering" was codified, I did pioneering work on the term structure of interest rates, e.g. in '86 on the application of principal component analysis (though the meteorologist I teamed with called them empirical orthogonal functions), or in '93 on the application of tension splines, for on-the-run Treasuries (in the latter case, replacing my funky very-high-degree polynomial method based on holding forward rate acceleration constant between knots, and paired with more conventional splining to price off-the-runs real-time; the former case represents my only brush with publication, a piece in a special advertising supplement in the June '87 Scientific American called "The Science of Making Money"). While yield curve dynamics are no longer my principal interest (sorry), under the circumstances I can't help but be drawn to the topic. But this being a low graphics blog, I'll paint word-pictures instead. (When college composition required a description of a physical object, I essayed a tesseract. You've been warned.)

Basics: The yield curve plots the annualized internal rate of return for recently issued (on-the-run) government securities (as if all the coupons returned or were reinvested at the same rate) against their term to maturity. To begin with, the three widely accepted configurations are "normal" (yields monotonically increasing with term to maturity), "inverted" (decreasing likewise), and "humped" (increasing to a maximum, then declining). This last generally has an inflection point after a hump (itself often around 2 years out), as rates level off for longer maturities; the normal yield curve may or may not have an inflection point early on, usually within one year to maturity. The current yield curve, while "normal" in shape, is abnormal not only in being so low (though Japan's has long been lower), but also in that its inflection point occurs farther out (2-3 yrs). The idealized flat yield curve is not considered a stable configuration (others can explain stuff like the market price of [interest rate] risk), but an unstable equilibrium, a transition state between the others. So, why did an essentially flat curve persist through '06 to the beginning of the credit crunch in Aug'07?

The shape of the curve is often taken as a harbinger for more than just future rates: for the economic forces that drive them, and for forecasting economic conditions (see Baum's May commentary). For example, an inverted curve is supposed to signal impending recession. (Contrarywise, even for signalling future rates, the curve retained a normal shape through most of the Great Moderation.) This is not something that is much under the control or influence of government intervention. The Fed traditionally sets only the shortest term rate, and the Treasury determines how much it needs to issue at what maturities; these actions, and market anticipations thereof, filter through the term structure. Current conditions being what they are, there's been fiddling with bits of the off-the-run curve even in the midst of massive new issuance, ostensibly to prevent localized distortions from affecting the whole market, but managing the curve itself to some extent as well.

Back to that flat curve preceding the financial crisis: There was a lot of ambiguity about whether it represented a true inversion; by one oversimplified measure, the 2-10yr spread oscillated between positive and negative. But viewed as a flat curve (which was resisted since it didn't fit the paradigms), the persistence was itself an indicator of something big in the works (like a monkey-wrench): The longer that a dynamic system spends in an unstable state, the more likely it is that the departure from it will be profound. And so it was ...

Principal component analysis derives modes of movement, daily changes in yields across the curve[1], that correspond to long-time practitioners' understanding. The primary mode is a parallel shift, in which all yields move up or down the same amount across all maturities (though a tad more in the middle ranges), and explains the bulk of yield variation; the second is slope change, steepening or flattening (again more pronounced in the center of the curve); the third is a bowing (or humping) of the curve (though the related trade is called a butterfly); the rest is noise.

The combination of these modes of movement in proper proportion give rise to all of the yield curve shapes described above. Plus one more: just as a normal curve can be inverted, so too can a humped curve, but an inverted humped curve was not thought to occur in nature, until it did in Germany in early '94. (NB: I'm working from memory here as I no longer have data access to be more precise.) Yields reached a minimum about 3 yrs out before increasing again. This was the result of a confluence of two historic events, the work-out from the reunification of Germany that preceded it, and the absorption of the Deutschesmark into the Euro that followed. This is not the sort of state of affairs that seems likely to recur, except that the U.S. faces the prospect first of exiting its extraordinary monetary stimulus, and second, of its reserve currency status being supplanted by something like Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) of which it would be the largest component. So, perhaps four years down the road, the U.S. bond market could experience the same inverted humped curve, but with an impact on derivative markets well beyond the previous German episode.

So, what does this add up to now? Well, one more attraction to Thursday's Treasury auction of 7-year notes, that step-child among the on-the-runs ...

[1] It would be too obtuse to link it up there, but for a daily pulse on the bond market, Across the Curve is unmatched.

Other readings:

Larry Wasserman, All of Statistics & All of Nonparametric Statistics: another recommend gleaned from Cosma Shalizi (his weblog also where I picked up the attention conservation locution); among other virtues, reconciles statistical and machine-learning perspectives.

Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: political history of the 60s, before I came of age.

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way: I thought that this would be a departure from financial topics and here I find it's a long segue about a stockbroker's son ...

On deck: Quantitative Finance and Risk Management: A Physicist's Approach, by Jan Dash, a fellow Merrillumnus whom I once had the pleasure of working with, and, who knows, may once again.

hiatus not quietus

2009-06-25T11:35:00.001-04:00

It's about time I reported in, prompted by the immanent snarkaeologist Mahendra Singh (whose characterization of me as occluded is rather high-flown, as I have not yet lost contact with the ground; and a tip of the copper-sieved-bateau without my capsize? but I quibble). But while he butchers Carrollian maths, I've been synchronistically having a go at a number of more improbable maths (degaussed randomness, order statistics, entropy optimization — bring in da noise, bring in da functional analysis! — also, delving more deeply into Cosma Shalizi's generously provided guidance, which I've been following for over a decade, sup[thx]) intent upon financial application (recent readings in this area: Bruner/Carr's The Panic of 1907 [speaking of the synchronistical, my parallel line of enquiry just preceded its release and the bicentennial historical reenactment], Donald MacKenzie's An Engine Not a Camera [zoom!], and Mandelbrot/Hudson's The (Mis)behavior of Markets, in which the new ingredient is Mr. Market's Bergsonian time — but hey, timing is the secret to both comedy and finance, though volatility changes meaning — anyway, all well worth the time invested), complemented by philosophical meanderings (Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Keefe & Smith's Vagueness: A Reader). Navigating this parenthetical thicket left little time for novels (and less for the internets), but family vacation last month afforded a break (in reading and merit order: van Gulik's The Phantom of the Temple [do I detect a touch of Roussel?], Yourcenar's Alexis [precociously steeped in melancholy], Aira's Ghosts [an episode in the afterlife of an architectural site], and Abish's How German Is It [primed by the short story "The English Garden" from In the Future Perfect]); another break from the maths and philosophy, Roubaud's The Loop, turned out to be a convolution of both with memory, excellent in its own right and prompting me to finally embark on À la recherche du temps perdu — and to ponder larger matters, like cosmology's missing antimatter (404 [And here time forked.]*) — what if the first broken symmetry was Time, at the instant of the Big Bang? and antimatter preferred the arrow pointing the other way? apparently consistent with Loop Quantum Gravity, and could have driven anomolies of inflation — but don't look back, something may be receding from you ...

add: 3QD reminds that past performance is functionally related to future returns.

*... The screen / In its blank broth evolved a lifelike blur, / And music welled.

Quoth nnyhaven Jill Lepore

2009-04-21T18:55:00.003-04:00

This week's New Yorker includes a bicentennial consideration of Edgar A. Poe which pulls together many strands but leaves a few loose ends. As it happens, the opening conceit, along with the confluence over at The Book Bench of decoding Poe and Shakespeare authorship pegs what I was up to last year in "To Assume a Pleasing Shape" (also here in different format):
"[The Philosophy of Composition] is as much a contrivance as the poem itself. Here is a beautiful poem; it does everything a poem should do, is everything a poem should be. And here is a clever essay about the writing of a beautiful poem. Top that."
I tried (but constrained by remaining factual at least in detail).

But Ms. Lepore misses a trick or two:
"If Dupin sounds uncannily familiar, that’s because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, like every other author of detective fiction, not to mention the creators of a thousand TV crime shows, is incalculably in Poe’s debt. [...] All detective stories and police procedurals begin with the intellectually imperious C. Auguste Dupin: methodical, eccentric, calculating—and insulting. We, mere readers, are so many Watsons, Hastingses, and Goodwins. Poe is the only Holmes." Or, earlier on, You love Poe or you don’t, but, either way, Poe doesn’t love you. A writer more condescending to more adoring readers would be hard to find."
Not so, as I've indicated in my reading of "The Purloined Letter": Poe drops clues for the careful reader. Also, buried in comments hereabouts, I've noted many other strands of influence: Nabokov (perhaps even forthcoming?), Borges, Pynchon; OuLiPo, nouveau roman, and surrealism via Roussel via Verne; WBYeats (whose poems similarly exceeded technical requirements, though one of these days I'll have to dig up a parody starting "Hear the whisp'ring of the belles/Southern belles!"); even Eastern Europe & Russia (most markedly Kafka & Dusty, but Bulgakov has a similar tone -- how much Poe how much Gogol how much ETAHoffman I dunno).

Another lost opportunity, in a word, is 'detective'. MobyLives notes that "Poe himself seemed to realize he’d created a genre, too, and would write two more stories featuring Dupin — The Mystery of Marie Roget, and The Purloined Letter. One thing he can’t take credit for, though, is invention of the word 'detective.' There was no such word at the time he wrote the story. Its first appearance seems to have been around 1850 — two years after Poe’s death."
Back to Ms. Lepore:
"In February [1842], Poe wrote an unfavorable review of Dickens’s 'Barnaby Rudge,' a novel about a village idiot and his talking raven that had been published, serially, in The New-Yorker. The next month, Poe met Dickens, who was on his American tour (during which Dickens coined the phrase 'the almighty dollar')."
It happens that the OED's first cite of the noun 'detective' is in Dickens' Household Words (1850), and the first literary usage is in Bleak House (1852). And, the opening words of "The Philosophy of Composition"? 'CHARLES DICKENS, in a note now lying before me, alluding to an examination I once made of the mechanism of 'Barnaby Rudge,' says- "By the way, are you aware that Godwin wrote his 'Caleb Williams' backwards? He first involved his hero in a web of difficulties, forming the second volume, and then, for the first, cast about him for some mode of accounting for what had been done.'"
(addendum 22.4 prompted by MS raising the perennial question, and working backwards: Dickens' writing desk and reupholstered pet raven Grip share the Rare Books room of the Philly Free Library with the only copy of the poem in Poe's hand and a cheesy augmented bust of Pallas. Draw your own conclusions.)

For all that, the New Yorker piece is well worth the time, and occasioned the connecting of several bits I've put together on this here blog.

PS recent reading: Attila Bartis' Tranquility and Walter Abish's In the Future Perfect, the opening story of which ("The English Garden") presages How German Is It ...

diversionary tactics

2009-04-10T13:22:00.000-04:00

Andrei Codrescu has performed a signal service in providing The Posthuman Dada Guide: Lenin & Tzara Play Chess (for those in NYC, events next week here), which, arbitrarily alphabetized, pulls together strands of artistic, literary and political history into a cogent gallimaufry of dada: The PhD Guide could in itself be core reading for a collage course, prompting me to pull from the shelf the MoMA Dada catalogue (despite his disdain), Tom Stoppard's Travesties (a curious frame for some excellent set pieces) and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Lenin in Zurich (last stop before Finland Station, in a sealed car detached from The Red Wheel), before hurrying to complete Thomas Nashe's Lenten Stuff in season (this last, in similar spirit, being in praise of the red herring). In appreciation, I will cavil at the missed opportunities, foremost being in not exploiting the fact that the two sports most revered in dada, chess and boxing, have merged in chessboxing; also, the omission of Sophie Taeuber in discussion of puppets (or, for that matter, of the Communist conception of their usefulness) or other mannequinistic manifestations; and of the grandmasterly virtual mechanization of chess. I'll give him a pass on sliding over the online presence of Julia Butterfly, and on space limitations preventing further explication of the language crystal, but my bemusement at the extra b Codrescu inserts in kibitz, (obscuring separate etymologies with kibbutz; in chess, an annoying onlooker giving unsolicited and often misleading advice, which often turns out to be correct, thus the chess proverb The kibitzer sees all: I've long listed my occupation, here and elsewhere, as itinerant kibitzer), was tempered when off to the OED I went, to find that the word derives from Yiddish (which I knew) from German (as I would have guessed) kiebitzen, 'to flutter over card-players', in turn from kiebitz, 'lapwing', which Graves elucidated in The White Goddess:
The Greeks called the lapwing polyplagtos, 'luring on deceitfully', and had a proverbial phrase 'more beseechful than a lapwing' which they used for artful beggars. In Wales as a boy I learned to respect the lapwing for the wonderful way in which she camouflages and conceals her eggs in an open field from any casual passer-by. At first I was fooled every time by her agonized peewit, peewit, screamed from a contrary direction to the one in which her eggs lay, and sometimes when she realized I was a nest-robber, she would flap about along the ground, pretending to have a broken wing and inviting capture. But as soon as I had found one nest I could find many. The lapwing's poetic meaning is 'Disguise the Secret' and it is her extraordinary discretion which gives her claim to sanctity. According to the Koran she was the repository of King Solomon's secrets and the most intelligent of the flock of prophetic birds that attended him.
There, I'm glad that's out in the open ... (more serendipity, the very next word in OED is kiblah, the site one faces to address the Deity, the first non-Mohammedean cite being in Stonehenge ...)

In response to Scientific American's Laughing Matters, I'll reprise my older (pre-blogging) commentary:
They say laughter is the best medicine. Now science has proved that laughing is good exercise! You know what I have to say to that? HA! That’s right, HA! I’ll bet those scientists think they’re pretty funny. I can just see them, snickering in their white labcoats: “Hey, doc! How about a sports club called ‘The Laughing Fit’?” You can believe them if you want to, but I was born a skeptic, and I’ll die a skeptic. If I die.

memory playing tricks

2009-04-04T17:30:00.002-04:00

Thursday evening, as part of the program for Oulipo in NY, Jacques Roubaud gave a reading from the translation of The Loop, branch 2 of 6 of his 20-year memoiric [re]construction with interpolations and bifurcations, under the constraints of pre-dawn composition, truthfulness of the moment, and non-revision. Here he stuck to the main story, with two excerpts (the second the last, §50; the opening, §1, is excerpted at The Brooklyn Rail, with interpolation), before commenting on the depredations of age (command of both memory and English, in the latter case not knowing where the stress falls) and taking questions from the shop-packing audience. I asked how Memory and History play off against one another from the perspective of the Present, to which he responded that he had left behind such Theoretical Concerns in abandoning the Project (first described in the first branch, Destruction) for more particular, personal recounting. He also commented upon how the first branch had been received, readers seeking to console him for it well afterwards, how the choice of Destruction for an ENS examination was subverted by a bomb scare, and the more particular reader response when what he had recalled was at variance with the facts of the matter: To get a better sense, his translator, Jeff Fort, had travelled to the childhood home described in The Loop, only to find that he'd gotten the wrong house (and that the right one had been altered beyond recognition). Roubaud remains modest about his accomplishments, not just in his novels, but also in mathematics, poetry, and scholarship ("I just read things"), but reserves his intention in putting his prose forward. (My short take on the first branch here, the casebook thereon since moved here.)

Idlewild Books, the venue for this reading, offers about 50-50 travel guides and associated literature (current and classic); I took the opportunity to pick up both The Loop (kindly signed at my request) and Best-Translated-Bookwinner Tranquility by Attila Bartis, who will be reading there next week (I don't know that I'll be able to make it; I did not attend Wednesday's New School Oulipo panel discussion, but fortunately Andrew Hultkrans did; oh, and cf AGNI). Serendipitously, my reading for the train ride to the city was Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller. (Other March reading: Robert Graves' The White Goddess and Collected Poems ['61] [cf WLF], Robert Coover's Pricksongs & Descants, and Raymond Queneau's Eyeseas [Les Zioux] [trans Hurezanu & Kessler], selected poetry '21-'43.)

reading behind the lines

2009-03-04T00:47:00.002-05:00

It seems like everybody loves a backstory. This week's New Yorker has Updike on Cheever (and over at the NYTimes blogs Cavett on both on Cavett) and DTMax on DFWallace; the latter, in the entanglement of life and style, reminds of Clive James on F.Scott Fitzgerald in Cultural Amnesia, which prompted me to read The Crack-Up, Edmund Wilson's compilation of FSF's essays, notebook fragments, and letters from the descent (a history in which the first act was farce, the second tragedy); Clive concludes, "... there is a principle that can't be taught in creative writing class and is hard enough to teach in the regular English faculty, but it's worth a try: his disaster robbed us of more books as wonderful as The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night, but we wouldn't have those if he hadn't been like that. Fitzgerald's prose style can be called ravishing because it brings anguish with its enchantment. He always wrote that way, even when, by his own later standards, he could as yet hardly write at all. He could still write that way when death was at his shoulder. He wrote that way because he was that way: the style was the man." Nonetheless, I found The Crack-Up but a footnote on the man, placing him more among his peers than among his words. Not that there aren't gems among the essays and fragments ("A girl who could send tear-stained telegrams" will be updated by e-mail). Another thought: will The Pale King be DFW's The Last Tycoon?

Another writer's early self-chronicle, Heinrich Heine's Travel Pictures (trans Peter Wortsman) was wonderfully wicked, traversing the Harz Mountains, the North Sea and Lucca only incidentally for more incisive observations. Heine was my first exposure to lyric poetry (courtesy of Untermeyer's translation in Heritage Press, as part of my extracurricular primary education) so it was surprising to me that the lyric note could be so well maintained against high irony.

Which leads me to poetry I'd almost forgotten was on the shelf, Virginia Hamilton Adair's Ants on the Melon: A Collection of Poems; Alice Quinn had put her on the radar, but it took a reminder from Oliver Sacks in TED Q&A to reopen my eyes:

There was a fine poet called Virginia Adair.
She published a lot as a young woman
But then became a teacher of English.

But then she lost her vision
And started hallucinating in her 80s
And this started up her poetic voice again.

And she published her first book of poems
When she was 83. So she was able to use
Her Charles Bonnet hallucinations
Very creatively—

Quite a lot of her poems are about
The amazing cascade of images
Which would rush through her mind.

Quite a lot of her poems aren't, and her poetic voice was never stilled, it was just that publication was by the by. The selection reflects a life long pondered and wondered at, the writing technically sure, simple and direct, a sense of which can be bracketed by an early and a late poem, the latter the last of the book (in the section "Make Light of Darkness"), both of which appeared in the NYTimes, though in separate articles:

Railway Tempo

Now vanish, nameless village, tossed
Into the oblivion of our wake.

Swiftly, the high road that we crossed
And blotted out, the lake, the thickets,
And the wide meadow, for our sake
—We being arbiters of time
Whose end is punched on one-way tickets—
These idle images must recede
Beyond our sphere of plush and grime.

For we, the here and now, command
Collapse to follow our fierce speed,
And only the final town to stand.

Take My Hand, Anna K.

My mother wept in church, Episcopalian;
Over her far-off town the sun shone bright.
Her New York City child, I felt an alien.
Coming to a crossing the train cried in the night.

My only home is in the poems I write
Who now am exiled by my failing sight.
Words vanish like a flock of birds in flight.
Coming to a crossing the train cries in the night.

Here end my tracks of passion, reason, rhyme
Before the terminal rush and roar of light,
All go together under the wheels of Time.
Coming to a crossing the train cries in the night.

It is in the writing that the writer's life resides, but it's the backstory that seems to bring visitors in train.

Herding chats: assorted notes from all over

2009-02-20T09:52:00.002-05:00

Reading is a solitary social activity. But that doesn't mean I don't get out a bit.

Maybe it's an ex-programmer glitch on my part, but I always have an Obi-Wan problem with the year N award for the best being for year N-1. Anyway, as I reported at WLF, last night the inaugural Best Translated Book Winners were announced at Melville House's bookstore in DUMBO. Chad Post opened the proceedings at 8PM, introducing Francisco Goldman, who, after prefactory remarks on the art of translation, announced the winners, first in poetry then in prose (I mean the winners not the presentation). Many worthy books to have to choose among, with Desnos, Castellanos Moya and Bolaño's 2666 among those honorably mentioned (see finalists in poetry and prose; the latter also lists the panelists, one of whom I'd the good fortune to know from Gotham Book days; of the panelists, only Scott Esposito was unable to attend). Attendence was large, the attendees largely in the biz in some aspect, but not unwelcoming to amateurs like myself; it was good to put faces to names, and to celebrate the attention that translations are receiving across a broad spectrum of interest. Nonetheless, thinking global it's imperative to act local: book-providers need more individual support as grants are curtailed by straitened finances (cf next graf). I also procured a copy of one of the finalists, Raymond Queneau's EyeSeas, as well as Heinrich Heine's Travel Pictures (as previously noted) and Gilbert Adair's The Death of the Author ... and thanks to ubuweb downloaded Helen R. Lane's translation of Claude Simon's Properties of Several Geometric and Non-Geometric Figures.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a different sort of wordsmith confab at the Paley Center in Midtown, co-hosted by the Financial Times' blog ftalphaville, on translating dire numbers into words, with an audience predominantly of journalists, bloggers, and relational publicists; it happened that I was alone among the attendees in having previously worked with both of the guest presenters (same department, different times), Rob Passarella (who used to blog but now tweets) and Rick Bookstaber, both of whom had well-informed takes in their respective areas of expertise (in Rick's case more financial than blogging risk, but his was more a descrial of the factoid culture than of the medium).

Back to literary matter(s): I dropped a note to the Nabokov listserv on Clancy Martin's LRB diary entry; I'd like to see Senderovich & Shvarts extend their cross-sectional approach [pdf] on shop-windows as commercial balagan in Nabokov's writings.

Recent reading starts with musical offerings:
Manuel Puig, Heartbreak Tango (Suzanne Jill Levine) Who leads the dance, and with whom? Made up of many monologues, interior to epistolatory to forensic, with the music and the movies in the background.
Dumitru Tsepenaug, Vain Art of the Fugue (Patrick Camiller): Incidental variations on a theme, not unlike but not at all like Queneau's Exercises in Style, like a fish needs a bicycle, narration by path integral:
"As you can see, madam, words are getting staler and staler—you can't do much with them at all." The lady smiled with embarrassment. "And the reason is that idiots have used them like so many wheelbarrows, you know what I mean? They've loaded them up with all kinds of idiotic confessions, with all these ideas, each more stupid than the last—and if not stupid, then certainly destructive—in short, with what people call messages.
cf The Believer, complete's-review, TQC; an interview.
Walter Abish, Minds Meet: Unexpectedly this fit in with the Tsepenaug I just read. Taken individually the stories are sort of not quite Don Barthelme, but combination raises the collection, perhaps, including epigraph, as 13 ways of looking at a blank sheet of paper. cf on Abish, revisited, 5 yrs ago at the NYer; the current issue has Menand revisiting Barthelme, alas reg $ubs only, but there is audio for everyone.
Virginia Woolf, Orlando: I didn't think she had it in him. OK, too glib, but it struck me as too flash, oversumptuous, less profound (esp in style and subtlety) than her other writings of this period. Letting out all the stops let something else out, but then approaches to gender issues were constrained by the times, had to be fantastic, and in turn everything is overdone (she knows she's overdoing and lets you know she does), authorial intrusions included, even what is left unsaid is unsaid loudly (tho often to great comedic effect). For all that, behind Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and The Waves.

Odds & ends

2009-02-03T12:34:00.001-05:00

Scott confirms that I tuned in to the right wavelength in the previous post.

Speaking of ephemeral archives, it appears that the NYTimes BookForum has permanently rendered its service temporarily unavailable, even read-only, even barring linkfixes per alumni chatroom. Having been on Usenet's rec.arts.books pre-Sempitember and still being able to follow threads from wayback then, I just don't get it, or should I say they don't. (But with BookWorld being folded into the WashPost, the NYT Book Review is just about the only one left stand-alone.) Meanwhile, NYTBF alumnae, those I know of who have moved on to actively blogging, in traditional reverse chronological order:
Fragmentary Evidence: Oakland ramblings
Snarke: Pugetopulent poetics
Spinozablue: Art & Lit from all over
Jabel: stratified LAer atop the cape and upstate
Diario del hablante lirico: Chilean imagings
Rodney Welch: critical view (books, music, film) from Columbia SC

Moving on, my local used bookmonger is closing his doors for good (and for ill); I've relieved him of 40+ titles at half off this past month (including those asterisked below). So, on to January reader's report, shamelessly lifted from my WLF posts:
Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone linked to longish commentary at WLF in post before last.
Kenneth Rexroth, Love and the Turning Year: One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese, personal interpretations, split evenly between the Six Dynasties and T'ang and Sung, with brief biographical notes on the 60 poets represented. But beyond the usual problems of translation, typography can never adequately reflect calligraphy.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night* was just as good as expected, the intricate psychological observations pared down to the most elegant expression, even though the supporting structure fell apart as the main character did.
Joseph Roth, The Emperor's Tomb (John Hoare) disappointed, despite a similar acuteness, perhaps because it was confined to one character's viewpoint.
Claude Simon, The Georgics (Beryl & John Fletcher) A high degree of difficulty, interleaving or should I say interweaving stories, the didactic point being that history teaches us that we can learn nothing from history (the point being made nonchronologically). The minor cavil is that the homage to Orwell (yes that's as ironic as the title's allusion to Virgil) is not really integral to the tapestry (but it's not superfluous, nor tacked on). I haven't yet been disappointed by Simon, having first stumbled on The Trolley (aka The Tramway) a copula years ago and The Flanders Road last year; now I'm on the look-out for Acacia. cf Reading Claude Simon.
Cristina Peri Rossi, The Ship of Fools (Psiche Hughes) re-engendering the world, strong in concept and excellent in parts but uneven; YMMV.
Tim Krabbé, The Rider (Sam Garrett) should be read in one sitting; see complete's-review.
Victor Pelevin, The Helmet of Horror (Andrew Bromfield) a chatroom should not mean, but be. (complete's-review)
Kurt Tucholsky, Castle Gripsholm (Michael Hofmann) too Thin-Mannish
Nikolai Leskov, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk* (Robert Chandler) just too thin (Hesperus annoys at full price, even half off and half again is still a bit much for a short story)
Carlos Fuentes, The Old Gringo (Margaret Sayers Peden) flawed execution, overdone.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey* not heavy going, but first class fare
Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt* ibid
Shiva Naipaul, An Unfinished Journey* more transporting (now I really must move on to Heinrich Heine's Travel Pictures)
Shusaku Endo, Deep River* (Van C. Gessel), syncretic sermonizing, overlitanized, partially redeemed by plot and character sketch but demonstrating Endo's worst tendencies.
Knut Hamsun, Hunger* (Robert Bly), manic depression's a frustrating mess; I.B. Singer's intro too high in register, it's not Dostoevsky but Gogol who's relevant, very interesting but short of timelessness.
A.S. Byatt, The Matisse Stories*, three shorts, the middle half overtelegraphed though well-executed, the bracketing ones excellent.

Throwaway Anchor

2009-01-22T00:28:00.002-05:00

Scott McLemee wins the prize for deepest allusion in an article title for "Here Comes the Flood" (on the deluge of scholarly monographs and the reductio ad absurdum proposed by Hal Draper), and not because of Lindsay Waters (who I've cited before myself, in what is apparently [per Google] itself the most cited bit on this blog). The subreference to one track of Robert Fripp's Exposure expands to take on the relevance of the whole of the second side of that LP.

It opens with the title track, which, as noted by Elephant-Talk on Exposure, "contains the – by now famous – quote from [J.G.] Bennett »It is impossible to achieve the aim without suffering.« In an interview with Ron Gaskin Fripp explains: »[...] the point is, much suffering is unnecessary. Greed, for example. All the suffering involved with greed. It's wholly unnecessary. I'm greedy. If I could give up being greedy, I would have a lot more energy to suffer in a ... in a more appropriate way.« The quote on the album stems from lectures around the idea of »Conscious Labour and Intentional Suffering«".

This is followed by Häaden Two (JGB again opens and closes: »If you know you have an unpleasant nature, and dislike people, this is no obstacle to work.«) and dialogue only on the original '79 version (again per Elephant-Talk [my edits]):
"Eno: »It was an incredible little piece – very, very impressed by it.«
Bennett (& sbd. else): »Ahh, ... (garble [... that's extraordinary]) how wonderful.«
Eno: »It just has none of the qualities of your work that I find interesting. Abandon it.«
Bennett: »More good advice could hardly be packed into one sentence than [there] is there.«
Unknown woman's voice: »Both those things were[n't] true, that's definitely true.«
Deadly laughter and »Oh dear. Oh dear«"

This is followed in turn (after the instrumental Urban Landscape) by I may not have enough of me but I've had enough of you (»That is the way it is because it is that way«), and finally by Here Comes the Flood bracketed by Water Music I & II.

How well this all dovetails with Scott's essay I'll let sink in on its own.

The Bookshelf of Good Intentions

2008-12-23T16:04:00.001-05:00

David Lodge is best known for the parlor game Humiliation (in Changing Places), wherein English faculty players score highest for admissions of not having read the most essential literary works. But this is a sport for pros, or those who profess to be, and I'm unabashed by my (lack of) standing, which is the sole confessional aspect to all this; I've never aspired to be scholar, critic, or reviewer; and writer, while more a game for amateurs, was but a faint calling, subordinate to being a reader, as one of the ways of playing along. As such, it is not a competition with other readers, nor with the author, apart from a problematic sense that Nabokov described (as I've elaborated on).

So why take inventory of what I have yet to read? In part to place a marker for what I set out to do, which I'm looking forward to looking back upon, not nearly as much as I anticipate the pleasure of the reading itself. In part to encourage myself (don't need any one else's, thx) and not Look on thine works, ye mighty, and despair! In part to excuse in advance the paucity of postings (but there are other ~~excuses~~ reasons for that) and to provide fodder for one (what better to write about at length but long works long deferred?). Nothing to do with making up excuses; it's more the case that stochastic processes aren't just be about traversing the space by rolling the dice, but may involve calculating waiting times for determined moves. Also not a New Year's resolution, rather an ongoing one, not to be achieved in a mere year's time, nor pre-empting the rest of the literature stacked on the shelf (though not quite so heavily) or its continuing accretion, or for that matter other heavy reading in philosophy, maths, etc. So here's a score or so, tallied up:

Works in progress, which have permitted being taken piecemeal, between other reading:
Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone: Halfway through the middle volume; C-R rates this most high, but so too with Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, which I found to be among the causes (and so, in nonprogress, though someday ...), and in this case is a milder overstatement. I'm hoping that the final volumes, compiled by Gao E, do not fall off in quality. 9.1.09 Done: comments here.
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: Through Groups A, B1, D of the A.C. Cawley edition. I'd previously managed not to encounter any of it despite its being standard secondary school fare.

Works demanding more complete attention, and soon:
Vladimir Nabokov, Eugene Onegin: I've been through the first volume, Pushkin's poem, but not in tandem with the annotations, which are the point (and pointed). Spurred on by the recently released Verses and Versions, and not merely in the spirit of completeness; it's not to learn Russian, but to learn Pushkin, and Nabokov, and poetry, and translation, and language, and method. Also, to be read in parallel, Charles Johnston's translation, which claims to take VN's take into account.
Robert Graves, The White Goddess: Still unread, despite many prods (thx johnr). A personal universalist mythology of greater interest to me than that of Freud/Jung/Lacan/et ilk.
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: The latest addition weighing heavily on the shelf, though not the latest edition, as the title rendering makes clear.

Others, more patiently waiting their turn:
Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra
Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales
James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover: The longest resident on the shelf (except possibly for Finnegans Wake), joined recently by Collected Poems
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur
E.T.A. Hoffman, The Best Tales of Hoffman
W.H. Auden, The English Auden
Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound
Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet
Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed: A long engagement ...
I.A. Goncharov, Oblomov: Somehow putting this off indefinitely seems to be in keeping with the spirit of things.

Rereads (all first read 20 years ago and more):
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita without bits missing
Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Homer, Iliad & Odyssey Fagles' translation

Not yet procured but intended to be on the shelf:
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji

Best of the season to all!

A Change of Seasons

2008-12-01T13:59:00.004-05:00

Winter finally arrived here a couple of weeks ago, two months after it hit the economy, credit markets frozen, ok technically not winter but a prolonged fall (but now NBER says it's official), financial storms of an intensity exceeding even the direst forecasts. So there's been a chill on my posting as well, as I've been occupied by reading the harvests of sown wind, the excesses of the Great Moderation (for which the internets surfeit, the best filtration & blogroll being Yves Smith's; but, sadly, RIP, Tanta [add: I would be remiss not to mark the passing of Kiyoshi Ito, coformalizer of stochastic calculus]), though not occupationally for the moment.

Autumnal outings included Trio Solisti performing their last CD plus something even better from their next, Piazzolla's The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, wittily transcribed to pianotrio; the fall meeting of the Lewis Carroll Society, whereat I got to meet the illustrious illustrator and snarkaeologist; and Martin Ramirez's exhibit 2.

What else? A compendium of reading since July (translator in parens):

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
B.S.Johnson, The Unfortunates
Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun (Donald Keene)
L.P.Hartley, The Go-Between
Günter Grass, The Tin Drum (Ralph Manheim)
Francis Carco, Streetcorners (Gilbert Alter-Gilbert)
Camilo José Cela, The Family of Pascual Duarte (Anthony Kerrigan)
Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
Amos Oz, A Perfect Peace (Hillel Halkin)
Graham Greene, The Quiet American
Tove Jansson, The Summer Book (Thomas Teal)
G.V.Desani, all about H.Hatterr
Paul Verhaeghen, Omega Minor (Paul Verhaeghen)
Alan Bennett, Untold Tales
Juan Goytisolo, Makbara (Helen Lane)
Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa
Arno Schmidt, Collected Stories (John E. Woods)
Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup (Ralph McCarthy)
Venedikt Erofeev: Moscow To The End Of The Line (H. William Tjalsma)
Yury Dombrovsky, The Keeper of Antiquities (Michael Glenny)
Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian (Grace Frick)
Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus & Harmony (Tim Parks)
André Breton, Nadja (Richard Howard)
Camilo José Cela, The Hive (J.M.Cohen)
Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human (Donald Keene)
Elie Wiesel, Night (Marion Wiesel)
Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number (Toby Talbot)
Seamus Heaney, Electric Light
Flann O'Brien, An Béal Bocht/The Poor Mouth (Patrick Power)
Ignácio de Loyola Brandão: Zero (Ellen Watson)
Horacio Castellanos Moya, Senselessness (Katherine Silver)
Ariel Dorfman, Konfidenz
Shusaku Endo, The Sea and Poison (Michael Gallagher)
Christina Peri Rossi, The Museum of Useless Efforts (Tobias Hecht)
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
J.F. Powers, Morte D'Urban
David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America
Roberto Bolano, 2666 (Natasha Wimmer) [1]
Nathan Englander, The Ministry of Special Cases
Ariel Dorfman, Widows (Stephen Kessler)

1/2way thru Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone (David Hawkes)
on deck: Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian Poetry selected and translated by Vladimir Nabokov, ed Brian Boyd & Stanislav Shvabrin

[1] best of 2008 publication: I'll reprise the 4 seasons based on the fictional author's pennamesake: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, but there's one picture worth a thousand pages:

Tractatus Rationali-Exspectationem

2008-09-25T23:11:00.003-04:00

1. The economy is all that is the case.

1.1 The economy is the totality of prices, not of values.
1.11 The economy is determined by the prices, and by their being all the prices.
1.12 For the totality of prices determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case.
1.13 Prices in the markets are the economy.

1.2 The economy divides into prices.
1.21 Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same.

2. What is the case—pricing—is the execution of transactions.

2.01 A transaction (an exchange of values) is a combination of values.
2.011 It is essential to values that they should be possible constituents of transactions.
2.012 In markets nothing is accidental: if a value can be monetized in a transaction, the possibility of the transaction must be written into the value itself.
2.0121 It would seem to be a sort of accident, if it turned out that an asset would fit a value that could already exist entirely on its own. If values can be monetized in transactions, this possibility must be in them from the beginning. (Nothing in the province of markets can be merely possible. Markets deal with every possibility and the average of all possibilities are its prices.) Just as we are quite unable to imagine equity values outside profitability or debt values outside timely payment, so too there is no value that we can imagine excluded from the possibility of combining with others. If I can imagine values combined in transactions, I cannot imagine them excluded from the possibility of such combinations.
2.0122 Values are independent in so far as they can be monetized in all possible assets, but this form of independence is a form of connection with transactions, a form of dependence. (It is impossible for a trade to appear simultaneously in two different roles: by themselves, and in propositions.)
2.0123 If I know a value I also know all its possible monetizations in transactions. (Every one of these possibilities must be part of the nature of the value.) A new possibility cannot be discovered later.
2.01231 If I am to know a value, though I need not know its external properties, I must know all its internal properties.
2.0124 If all values are given, then at the same time all possible transactions are also given.
2.013 Each value is, as it were, in a space of possible transactions. This space I can imagine empty, but I cannot imagine the value without the space.
2.0131 An equity value must be situated in nonnegative space. (A book-value is an accounting-place.) An entry in the balance sheet, thought it need not be dollars, must have some currency: it is, so to speak, surrounded by currency-space. Notes must have some maturity, present values of the claims of loans some degree of interest, and so on.
2.014 Values contain the possibility of all assets.
2.0141 The possibility of its being monetized in transactions is the form of a value.
2.02 Values are simple.
2.0201 Every statement about derivatives can be resolved into a statement about their constituents and into the propositions that describe the derivatives completely.
2.021 Values make up the substance of the economy. That is why they cannot be composite.
2.0211 If the economy had no substance, then whether a proposition had sense would depend on whether another proposition was true.
2.0212 In that case we could not provide any estimation of the economy (valid or defective).
2.022 It is obvious that a risk-free economy, however different it may be from the real one, must have something—a form—in common with it.
2.023 Values are just what constitute this unalterable form.
2.0231 The substance of the economy can only determine a form, and not any material properties. For it is only by means of propositions that material properties are represented—only by the configuration of values that they are produced.
2.0232 In a manner of speaking, values are currency-less.
2.0233 If two values have the same market form, the only distinction between them, apart from their external properties, is that they are different.
2.02331 Either a value has properties that nothing else has, in which case we can immediately use a description to distinguish it from the others and refer to it; or, on the other hand, there are several values that have the whole set of their properties in common, in which case it is quite impossible to indicate one of them. For it there is nothing to distinguish a value, I cannot distinguish it, since otherwise it would be distinguished after all.
2.024 The substance is what subsists independently of what is the case.
2.025 It is form and content.
2.0251 Equity, debt, currency (being denominated) are forms of values.
2.026 There must be values, if the economy is to have unalterable form.
2.027 Values, the unalterable, and the subsistent are one and the same.
2.0271 Values are what is unalterable and subsistent; their configuration is what is changing and unstable.
2.0272 The configuration of values produces transactions.
2.03 In a transaction values fit into one another like the links of a chain.
2.031 In a transaction values stand in a determinate relation to one another.
2.032 The determinate way in which values are connected in a transaction is the structure of the transaction.
2.033 Form is the possibility of structure.
2.034 The structure of a price consists of the structures of transactions.
2.04 The totality of executed transactions is the economy.
2.05 The totality of executed transactions also determines which transactions are not executed.
2.06 The execution and non-execution of transactions is reality. (We call the execution of transactions a realized P&L, and their non-execution an unrealized P&L.)
2.061 Transactions are independent of one another.
2.062 From the execution or non-execution of one transaction it is impossible to infer the execution or non-execution of another.
2.063 The sum-total of reality is the economy.

2.1 We quote prices to ourselves.
2.11 A quote presents an asset in market space, the execution and non-execution of transactions.
2.12 A quote is a model of reality.
2.13 In a quote values have the elements of the quote corresponding to them.
2.131 In a quote the elements of the quote are the representatives of values.
2.14 What constitutes a quote is that its elements are related to one another in a determinate way.
2.141 A quote is a price.
2.15 The price that the elements of a quote are related to one another in a determinate way represents that values are related to one another in the same way. Let us call this connection of its elements the structure of the quote, and let us call the possibility of this structure the indicative form of the quote.
2.151 Indicative form is the possibility that values are related to one another in the same way as the elements of the quote.
2.1511 That is how a quote is attached to reality; it reaches right out to it.
2.1512 It is laid against reality like a measure.
2.15121 Only the end-points of the bid-ask spread actually touch the value that is to be measured.
2.1514 So a quote, conceived in this way, also includes the indicative relationship, which makes it into a quote.
2.1515 These correlations are, as it were, the feelers of the quote's elements, with which the quote touches reality.
2.16 If a price is to be a quote, it must have something in common with what it depicts.
2.161 There must be something identical in a quote and what it depicts, to enable the one to be a quote of the other at all.
2.17 What a quote must have in common with reality, in order to be able to depict it—at-market or off-market—in the way that it does, is its indicative form.
2.171 A quote can depict any reality whose form it has. An equity quote can depict anything profitable, a currency one anything denominated, etc.
2.172 A quote cannot, however, depict its indicative form: it displays it.
2.173 A quote represents its subject from a position outside it. (Its standpoint is its representational form.) That is why a quote represents its subject at-market or off-market.
2.174 A quote cannot, however, place itself outside its representational form.
2.18 What any quote, of whatever form, must have in common with reality, in order to be able to depict it—at-market or off-market—in any way at all, is market form, i.e. the form of reality.
2.181 A quote whose indicative form is market form is called a market quote.
2.182 Every quote is at the same time a market one. (On the other hand, not every quote is, for example, a equity one.)
2.19 Market quotes can depict the economy.

2.2 A quote has market quotation form in common with what it depicts.
2.201 A quote depicts reality by representing a possibility of execution and non-execution of transactions.
2.202 A quote contains the possibility of the asset that it represents.
2.203 A quote agrees with reality or fails to agree; it is at-market or off-market, valid or defective.
2.22 What a quote represents it represents independently of its validity or defectiveness, by means of its indicative form.
2.221 What a quote represents is its sense.
2.222 The agreement or disagreement or its sense with reality constitutes its validity or defectiveness.
2.223 In order to tell whether a quote is valid or defective we must compare it with reality.
2.224 It is impossible to tell from the quote alone whether it is valid or defective.
2.225 There are no quotes that are valid a priori.

I could continue, but it would involve the arcana of CAPM theory, financial modeling and back-office / accounting mechanics, and I’m boring us already. Sometimes even whereof one may speak, thereof it is best that one remain silent.

Waxwing philosophical: a hermeneutic interpretation of Pale Fire

2008-09-20T16:02:00.003-04:00

Pale Fire, my favorite book, my Lit 202, its literary allusion thick as thieves; lit-critical flypaper, in which no commentator has the last word (we are all Kinbote now). By topsy-turvy coincidence it sparked blogcommentary on philosophical ruminations (the most relevant here, TheValve: Uncruel Beauty?), and a blogpost series (not intended as such to start with, just turned out that way) 3 years ago, in which I explored some of its many aspects, on Nabokov generally (1, 2) and Pale Fire specifically (3, 4, 5, 6, 7), culminating in "The Antinomy of Criticism", aligning Aunt Maud and Prof Botkin with Maud Bodkin. But now it's time to up the ante, beyond lit-critical interpretation, and to bring it full circle. Today we have the naming of parts.

We begin with Brian Boyd, in Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years:

It is Shade who points out that Kinbote is "the author of a remarkable book on surnames”—a hint if there ever was one. According to Nabokov's dictionary, Webster's Second, a kinbote is a bote or compensation "given by a homicide to the kin of his victim." Jack Grey, the man who kills Shade, certainly does not give Kinbote to Sybil, nor would she want him. The only way the name make the sense that Nabokov indicates it ought to have is if Shade, in compensation for the shock of fictively killing himself off, presents Sybil with the maddening but supremely colorful Kinbote, whose attacks on Sybil, if reflected through one more mirror so that we can read them the right way around, are of course a tribute to her staunch loyalty. And "Botkin" is just as apt. Webster's Second records one meaning of bodkin—or as Kinbote insists, "botkin”—as "a person closely wedged between two other persons," like Kinbote trying to thrust himself between John and Sybil Shade. Its main meaning, of course, is a stiletto, and in this sense it evokes Hamlet's "When he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin" and the suicide that will remove the figmentary interloper between the two Shades as soon as he has finished his commentary and index.

In the service of identifying Kinbote with Botkin, and Shade as sole author of Pale Fire (a judgment subsequently revised), Boyd is echoing Kinbote's technique of argumentation as seen in a digression in the commentary to line 71 [C71]:

[of Shade's parents] ...a bird had been named for him: Bombycilla Shadei (this should be "shadei," of course). The poet's mother, nee Caroline Lukin, assisted him in his work and drew the admirable figures of his Birds of Mexico, which I remember having seen in my friend's house. What the obituarist does not know is that Lukin comes from Luke, as also do Locock and Luxon and Lukashevich. It represents one of the many instances when the amorphous-looking but live and personal hereditary patronymic grows, sometimes in fantastic shapes, around the common pebble of a Christian name. The Lukins are an old Essex family. Other names derive from professions such as Rymer, Scrivener, Limner (one who illuminates parchments), Botkin (one who makes bottekins, fancy footwear) and thousands of others. My tutor, a Scotsman, used to call any old tumble-down buildings a "hurley-house." But enough of this.

Professor Hurley, English department head at Wordsmith, who opened C71, is a rival commentator enlisted by Sybil Shade, one of two that she proposes to assist in the editing of the poem "Pale Fire"; per the Foreword:

Instead of answering a month-old letter from my cave in Cedarn, listing some of my most desperate queries, such as the real name of "Jim Coates," etc., she suddenly shot me a wire, requesting me to accept Prof. H. (!) and Prof. C. (!!) as co-editors of her husband's poem. How deeply this surprised and pained me! Naturally, it precluded collaboration with my friend's misguided widow.

I propose that Profs. H. & C. correspond to Hermogenes and Cratylus in Plato's dialogue of the latter name. Need I mention that the point of this dialogue is the making of names, and that Pale Fire is set at Wordsmith University? The above are sidebars to the crux, C894, the rock upon which theories of ultimate authorship and of the novel's "reality" founder, seeming to cede Kinbote's objective existence among witnesses—and if skepticism about Kinbote's reportage is to reject this evidence, where doe it end? But aside from this, its function within the matrix of the novel has been a tough nut to crack; Cratylus sheds light upon much of what's going on here.

C894 recounts the episode in which a German lecturer visiting Wordsmith from Oxford remarks upon Kinbote's likeness to King Charles, the deposed monarch of Zembla, Kinbote's denials leading to consideration of etymologies of resemblances and names, and is the first indication of Botkin, another prospective double. The whole episode, largely reported dialogue, mirrors Socrates' arguments:

Soc. [...] I should say rather that the image, if expressing in every point the entire reality, would no longer be an image. Let us suppose the existence of two objects: one of them shall be Cratylus, and the other the image of Cratylus; and we will suppose, further, that some God makes not only a representation such as a painter would make of your outward form and colour, but also creates an inward organization like yours, having the same warmth and softness; and into this infuses motion, and soul, and mind, such as you have, in a word copies all your qualities, and places them by you in another form; would you say that this was Cratylus and the image of Cratylus, or that there were two Cratyluses?
Crat. I should say that there were two Cratyluses.
Soc. Then you see, my friend, that we must find some other principle of truth in images, and also in names; and not insist that an image is no longer an image when something is added or subtracted. Do you not perceive that images are very far from having qualities which are the exact counterpart of the realities which they represent?
Crat. Yes, I see.
Soc. But then how ridiculous would be the effect of names on things, if they were exactly the same with them! For they would be the doubles of them, and no one would be able to determine which were the names and which were the realities.

Beyond this, though, we have larger implications regarding the source for the name of the poem itself, Shakespeare's Timon of Athens: "The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction / Robs the vast sea; The moon's an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun ..." (gender-mangled in Zemblan translation; cf the introduction of images in Cratylus: Soc. First look at the matter thus : you may attribute the likeness of the man to the man, and of the woman to the woman ; and so on? ... And conversely you may attribute the likeness of the man to the woman, and of the woman to the man?). But thievery is not the sole point to be taken from this:

Soc. I should imagine that the name Hermes has to do with speech, and signifies that he is the interpreter (ermeneus), or messenger, or thief, or liar, or bargainer; all that sort of thing has a great deal to do with language; as I was telling you the word eirein is expressive of the use of speech, and there is an often-recurring Homeric word emesato, which means “he contrived”—out of these two words, eirein and mesasthai, the legislator formed the name of the God who invented language and speech; and we may imagine him dictating to us the use of this name: “O my friends,” says he to us, “seeing that he is the contriver of tales or speeches, you may rightly call him Eirhemes.” And this has been improved by us, as we think, into Hermes. Iris also appears to have been called from the verb “to tell” (eirein), because she was a messenger.

Note that this also expands and folds in the part played by Iris Acht (King Alfin's flame) in the proceedings. But the list of Hermes' referents—interpreter, messenger, thief, liar, bargainer, contriver—all have resonance within Pale Fire.

To return to Boyd's quote above, a hint if there ever was one:
Shade [addressing the German visitor]: "Professor Kinbote is the author of a remarkable book on surnames. I believe [to me] there exists an English translation?"
"Oxford, 1956," I replied.
The excerpts from Cratylus above are taken from the translation of Benjamin Jowett, in Dialogues of Plato, Oxford 1953; the only contemporaneous reference I've found (but not seen) is Richard Robinson (of Oxford), ‘A Criticism of Plato’s Cratylus’, The Philosophical Review LXV:3, July 1956. (For an overview of the dialogue, see Stanford's Encyclopedia.)

Cratylus is an ur-text of hermeneutics (Aristotle refers to it, though as being suspect, and not in On Interpretation). Kinbote seems to cast himself as Plato to Shade's Socrates (in the latter case there may be a physical resemblance). It leads me to wonder to what extent Nabokov was addressing the evolution of hermeneutics; for example, in his writings of this period St. Augustine seems a pervasive influence in other ways, but also had something to say about rules of interpretation in On Christian Doctrine. Does our visiting German lecturer stand in for Herder-Schleiermacher-Heidigger-Gadamer?

The Purloined Letter: a note on what's missing

2008-09-06T15:39:00.001-04:00

I was enjoying the luxury of meditation, in profound silence; intently and exclusively occupied with mentally discussing certain topics which had formed matter for conversation at an earlier period of the evening; I had been sitting in the dark, and now arose for the purpose of lighting a lamp, but sat down again, without doing so, requiring reflection to better purpose in the dark. That the difficulty now, I hope, is very simple indeed, and I can manage it sufficiently well; but I thought the details of it odd. Simple and odd, and not exactly that, either. The very simplicity of the thing which puts at fault such an idea. And what, after all, is the matter on hand?

The above is extracted from the opening to "The Purloined Letter", steganographically (i.e. by process of elimination, preserving word order); I had thought to devise a full first-person narrative in this manner but found that task too difficult, so it will serve instead to introduce consideration of an aspect of this short story (my favorite) which I have not seen remarked upon.

There's a hole in the story, but not the one that the critical commentary I've seen addresses (taken in by the nullity that is the contents of the letter). Instead, I mean a hole in the logic, something said which is contradicted by something left unsaid. Dupin's reasoning seems perfect, but one extrapolation appears to be unwarranted, at odds with everything that led up to it:

" [...] But I had an object apart from these considerations. You know my political prepossessions. In this matter, I act as a partisan of the lady concerned. For eighteen months the Minister has had her in his power. She has now him in hers; since, being unaware that the letter is not in his possession, he will proceed with his exactions as if it was. Thus will he inevitably commit himself, at once, to his political destruction. His downfall, too, will not be more precipitate than awkward. [...]"

Contexting this (renowned verbifier Alexander Haig's abusage), the letter came into the Minister's possession in full view of the lady concerned, and his knowledge of her knowledge of this conferred its power. But the repossession of the letter, unbeknownst to the Minister, is not accompanied with the information that the Minister remains in the dark about its loss:

"In that case," replied Dupin, opening a drawer, and producing a check-book, "you may as well fill me up a check for the amount mentioned. When you have signed it, I will hand you the letter."

I was astounded. The Prefect appeared absolutely thunderstricken. For some minutes he remained speechless and motionless, less, looking incredulously at my friend with open mouth, and eyes that seemed starting from their sockets; then, apparently in some measure, he seized a pen, and after several pauses and vacant stares, finally filled up and signed a check for fifty thousand francs, and handed it across the table to Dupin. The latter examined it carefully and deposited it in his pocket-book; then, unlocking an escritoire, took thence a letter and gave it to the Prefect. This functionary grasped it in a perfect agony of joy, opened it with a trembling hand, cast a rapid glance at its contents, and then, scrambling and struggling to the door, rushed at length unceremoniously from the room and from the house, without having uttered a syllable since Dupin had requested him to fill up the check.

When he had gone, my friend entered into some explanations.

So the Prefect departs without any notion that the Minister still believes himself in possession of the letter; the Prefect, and by extension that exalted personage for whom he is agent, does not know that the Minister does not know. The question is, who will first discover this state of affairs? Every indication would seem to favor the Minister in this regard: his powers of discernment already having been demonstrated in the original theft, supported by the digression on games (an identification of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent. [...] And the identification [...] of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent, depends, if I understand you aright upon the accuracy with which the opponent's intellect is admeasured. [NB: I particularly like the interpolation of "if I understand you aright"]) and the following adumbration of the false duality between poet and mathematician (with another nice touch: Bryant, in his very learned 'Mythology,' mentions an analogous source of error, when he says that 'although the Pagan fables are not believed, yet we forget ourselves continually, and make inferences from them as existing realities.'). The repossession of the letter will change the behavior of both the Prefect and of the exalted lady in response to and even prior to any attempted continued usage of the Minister's supposed but now non-existent power. The Prefect's diligence in tracking the Minister will relent; any subsequent audience with the lady will evince changed circumstances by her newly-found confidence in dealings with the Minister. So Dupin's supposition that the Minister "will proceed with his exactions" is flawed, and so too the consequent "political destruction ... not ... more precipitate than awkward." While this course of events is indeed possible, it presupposes an unlikely blind spot in the Minister's dealings, and suggests a blind spot in Dupin's. But I do not think that this is a point that Poe overlooked in his composition of this tale, but rather something hidden in plain view for the astute reader (who, me?) to discover.

Experimental Fiction

2008-08-04T13:58:00.002-04:00

My short short "Lab Report" is up at LabLit, "dedicated to real laboratory culture and to the portrayal and perceptions of that culture – science, scientists and labs – in fiction, the media and across popular culture." As I mentioned last summer, I once traced my work-life through the dictionary entries for 'volatility', starting with dispersion through media, my first 'real' job being in Pharma R&D, as a lab-tech, in "Dissolution Testing", on downers (no, really; yeah, a capsule summary).

Box Review

2008-07-26T16:01:00.001-04:00

B.S.Johnson, The Unfortunates

I do not ordinarily essay book reviews here, but I'll make an exception for this; a journalistic approach is wholly appropriate to what the backmatter describes: "A sportswriter, sent to a Midlands town on a weekly assignment, finds himself confronted by ghosts from the past when he disembarks at the railway station. Memories of one of his best, most trusted friends, a tragically young victim of cancer, begin to flood through his mind as he attempts to go about the routine business of reporting a soccer match." Literary License supplies a summary of the whole package, the unconventional 'book in a box', with chapters presented unbound, to be read in random order between the first and the last. This being Stochastic Bookmark, how could I not review it?

But I'll go further than that. Just as B.S. breaks the back of the book (as if the requirement that books must be orderly is binding), I'll break the rules of book-reviewing in telling you how to read it.

The Unfortunates should be read in one sitting, but not in one chair, or even room. This can be accomplished by interspersing the reading with mundane household tasks (laundry, dishwashing), snacks, and other interruptions of ideally less than a quarter hour. Children may also be found useful in this regard. And smoke 'em if you got 'em, particularly if you have a room set aside for the purpose. (And should you occupy a studio apartment, just stroll among other reading venues.) But nothing that otherwise engages the intellect, not even newspapers or magazines, in fact especially not those, nor the internets.

Why? Pretty much for the same reason that B.S. wanted the chapter order indeterminate. It is not a gimmick, though that's what brings wider attention; nor is it an authorial abdication (but thanks Scott for prompting me to, um, order my thoughts). It is not that the story itself is without order, it is that there are many such orders, none of which are privileged. The process of recalling things is being reproduced, memories not determined by a narrative line but by a network of associations. It's evident that some segments fit into a chronological order, but even then there are even many such timelines (extending even to architecture). All these alternative orderings would be eclipsed by any canonical sequencing, and readers would derive meaning from supposed structure where there is only contingency. Even remembering how these memories re-emerged is a piecemeal process. B.S. requires of himself an absolute fidelity in recording this, and also makes demands upon the reader, to respect the interleavings, no, interweavings of these various threads, the interdependencies that he has embedded, to remember what has gone before. While rich enough to give play to many strands, the text is short enough to hold, yes, in memory, until complete (a more difficult task for its author).

What shall I say of these many strands? Nothing; that would be giving the game away. But friendship entails a lot.

(the above was written while between lawn and garden)

Irony

2008-07-13T12:08:00.002-04:00

Rumormongers have hypocritically insinuated that I make use of cheap irony. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I employ only the finest quality of irony, procured at great expense, its like not to be had discounted. In fact, I do not entrust supply to outside provisioners, but participate at every stage of manufacture, from the selection of raw material (unalloyed, never scrap) through its refinement—forged under sublime pressure, even tempered, under controlled heat, by a process of my own invention. Despite all due precaution, irony can become corrupted, so the results of all this effort may well never see the light of day. Only the most resilient irony, without discernable imperfection, is suitable to any proper craft.

Nor do I use it sparingly. To be effective, irony must be thickly applied, preferably in many layers, and meticulously worked in to its foundation so as to become integral to the final product. Those who speak of corrosive irony are really attesting to deficiencies of material or workmanship. It's often forgotten that the first function of irony is literally to protect the underlying matter. This has been obscured by the success of irony as a decorative element.

The importance of presentation must not be denied. Raw irony is unattractive—dull and base, it sends the wrong message. This should not be confused with the pure, simple affect achieved by the so-called Socratic method, made to seem rudimentary through its miminal, flat finish. Irony can also be polished to a high gloss, though usually augmented by a thin adherent coating to maintain its surface integrity.

For more ornate treatments, the devil is in the details: to assume a pleasing shape, the substance must be respected, even as it is moulded, but irony is no less versatile for all that. Whether chiseled to a fine edge or otherwise carved, or etched with acid, it readily accepts a variety of designs. But the key to superior irony is texture. Smooth, stippled, sawtoothed, or scored, it is essential to compensate for the inconstant densities of the material, lest the result leave a motley or clouded appearance. Superficial asperity can be enhanced with a dry wash, or light varnish—heavier treatments tend to mask the desired impression.

The display setting should be chosen to show the finished product to its best advantage. Shifts in perspective and lighting angles can produce dramatic effects in the denouement. Understatement may have its virtues, but flirts with the possibility that finer aspects of the irony will be overshadowed. Hidden irony may elicit a shock of recognition, but this is transient, and better saved for those times that occasion truly demands.

Whatever the current fashion may be, mock irony is to be assiduously avoided as a breach of taste. Its defects become apparent even under cursory examination, to say nothing of the sceptical eye of the connoisseur. It deceives no one.

I trust that this demonstrates my approach to irony is not to be gainsaid. I take irony very seriously indeed. And when I say that, I mean it.

x-post facto: now reappearing at Spinozablue

de pêche mode

2008-07-08T09:14:00.006-04:00

When Keats came upon him, Chapman was subjecting the piece of fruit in his hand to intense scrutiny.

"What is the difficulty?" he asked.

Chapman replied, "This seems ripe and luscious enough, and the blush is just right, but I expected the fuzz to cover it evenly. Here, along the cleft, there doesn't seem to be any. I have my doubts about partaking of any fruit which exhibits a tonsure."

"You're committing a synecdoche," Keats remarked, "in taking the part for the hole."

Chapman glared at him.

"Come now," Keats rejoined, "it's only a vigorous peach."

(and for dessert ... an update 9.7: Boston Review's Roger Boylan's Flann O'Brien [via Literary Saloon]: shorter version: "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / when a new planet swims into his ken")

Family Business

2008-07-04T20:00:00.001-04:00

So, you think I'd resort to retailing startling revelations of a personal nature? Not part of my upbringing. Instead, I'll plug the gap between what this blog was and will be with an interludic infomercial about one of my favorite places, which not unrelatedly is in keeping with accommodating family business.

I mentioned Michigan as waystation in comments to my prior post; as such, it splits in two parts, not unlike the state. But one of them, Mackinac Island, nestles between the peninsulas, and between Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. It is an exceptional place, off the beaten track (but then so am I, and hey, you're reading this), though it wasn't always: in colonial times, it was a fur trading center (where John Jacob Astor later got his start) and fort (contested in the War of 1812), later, a Gilded Age retreat for Chicago and Detroit fortunes; much of this history has been preserved. But the mode of preservation I appreciate most is the state park (originally national, 2nd one, after Yellowstone), which takes up 3 of the nearly 4 square miles of the island. No motorized (non-emergency) vehicles are permitted on the island, ringed by the nation's only "Motorless State Highway"; it's horses (a different sort of carriage trade) or bicycles if you're not walking. Or rambling, for which the park is ideal, naturally diverse, with well-maintained trails (bridle and bike paths too), not for serious trekkers. My favorite route [map, pdf] is up the hill to the East Bluff cottages, away from town to Robinson's Folly, then along the bluff past Arch Rock, cutting over to Sugar Loaf and up to Point Lookout, then back towards town via Fort Holmes (also excellent for stargazing), ending up at Anne's Tablet (commemorating Constance Fenimore Woolson, whose bestseller Anne was set on Mackinac), with the best view of the town and the straits outside Fort Mackinac. Only a tiny proportion of visitors to the island penetrate even this far.

My own history on Mackinac goes back to the 70's, when my father's hobby of amateur restoration, with limited means and less limited sweat equity (I have brothers), was satiated by rearranging a house on the island from condemnation to commendation. In the 80's it became one of the first bed & breakfasts on the many-hotelled island, and these days my brother's family runs it: check it out: next to Ste Anne's (no relation to above) Church, "a short but welcome 3 blocks from the bustling 1800's downtown", period furnishings (some say my sentence structure could use that; but I ramble), friendly attention, and economical (the brother's other gig is teaching AP Economics). Reservations: (906) 847-6244.

Reset

2008-06-28T16:59:00.002-04:00

It's time I took a different tack.

I've been doing this thang nearly 3 years, 2½ as a reading journal, but that's served its purpose, the time has come to swerve its purpose. Not that its concerns, nor mine, have become any less literary, just that this is no longer the way to address them, at least as a rule. It often feels as though I only scratch the surface; now it no longer itches as much.

For convenience, I've supplanted the first post (moved that into the second) with a table of contents, indicative, by month not by (approximately weekly) post. Typically low-tech of me, but 'twill serve. As to the new direction (which doesn't preclude gestures in the old one), that should become evident in subsequent weeks (or months), if you get my drift ...

Making amends (10.9): If you must know what I've been reading, I've outsourced the listing to WorldLitForum: Recently Finished Books (just type nnyhav in the UserName field); similarly with what presently in future will have been read in Recent Purchases (these protosurreal tenses sure are complicated, as it were, what it is, shall be, without end).

Banality of Evil

2008-06-21T23:23:00.002-04:00

Hermann Broch, The Guiltless (trans Ralph Manheim): A heavyhanded indictment tracking the cancerous rise of the Nazis to the cellular level. Not without force, but a slight disappointment after The Sleepwalkers, as Broch here ties together previously published stories on the pre-war Zeitgeist, but binds them too tightly to let them breathe, too concerned with its overarching purpose: apoliticism as complicity: "... it is precisely from such a state of mind and soul that Naziism derived its energies. For political indifference is ethical indifference, hence closely related to ethical perversity. In short, most of the politically guiltless bear a considerable amount of ethical guilt. One of the purposes of this book has been to show this and to show the profound reasons for it." FAIL. Both in principle, given the uncertainties inherent in political and ethical action [and worse, the levelling with the truly complicit, and those with the pretense of certainty, and those mistaking or unforeseeing consequences], and as art. The grain of truth (they came for X, but I was not X) is contaminated by the ergot of transcendental surety. Funny, that's more or less what he says about the German character.

Georgi Gospodinov, And Other Stories (trans Alexis Levitin & Magdalena Levy): Short shorts with a long range, more hits than near-misses (yes I wrote that before seeing concurrant prior link) both in conceit and execution, e.g. Peonies and Forget-Me-Nots & Blind Vaysha, Gaustine & A Second Story (too telegraphic). And First Steps inspired me to twitterfic ... and, as with the above, the material is subject to re-use in his other writings, oddly given the second epigraph: "Nobody can enter twice into one and the same story."—Gaustine (Hey, Gospodinov's short stories are a rent in the fabric under this post's rubric, but what can you do.)

Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project: With each book, Hemon keeps raising expectations, then exceeding them. (Reviews range from very good to wow! but it's only fair to also link the local papers implicated in the book.) This time, a tightly woven dual-track historical emigrant narrative, better than the Bradbury in my best-of-'05. Sharing surnames across a century might seem clunky stitchwork, but it holds, as do the almost subliminal connections drawn between the narratives, and the times. Not to give short shrift to the local delicacy (pace da Trib), where Hemon's strengths as a stylist can distract from the structural finery. And these are but means for a compelling story, make that two, of how much is lost, how easily, how much there is to lose, how hard it must be held. Best-of-'08.

Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica: Feral children foist upon a feral grown-up world. The Henry Darger cover almost put me off; pace Mr.Waggish, this is a wholly different kind of strangeness, not that of an outsider aesthetic, but faux-naïveté, more fabular, a not-quite-coming-of-age disguised as an amoral children's tale in its diction, occasionally belied by an aside, a citation, a learned allusion. Often compared, favorably, to Golding's Lord of the Flies (which I don't miss missing myself); the plotting and flow are superb yet subversive (just imagine Amis fils' tween fiction).

filling forms in or out

2008-06-14T18:18:00.000-04:00

Epistemological uncertainty: As is remains indeterminate, should ought lead elsewhere? (Counterclaim: If ought isn't the new is, it should be.)

Halldór Laxness, The Happy Warriors (trans Katherine John): Jane Smiley, in her preface to The Fish Can Sing, says "In 1952, he published one of my favorite novels, Gerpla, translated as The Happy Warriors, a mock Icelandic saga that explores (and sends up) violent militarism as a way of life." (She also wrote the intro to Vintage's collection of the Sagas.) There's more to it than that: in the next paragraph, she explores greatness tinged with irony and dark humor, both in the sagas and as refracted in Laxness' writings, which riff off this heritage. In this case, he hews closely to the form even while undermining it. One protagonist is profoundly stupid, but leads the other, a skald (a laywright, rather more than poet, less than bard), by the nose when it's not in the grasp of women; both struggle in the clutches of a destiny that they delude themselves to be grandiose. The commentary goes beyond the sagas, wide-ranging not only in terms of geography and first turn-of-the-millenium history, but also of religion and its ironies—our heroes choose to serve the upstart king who later became patron saint of Norway (of whom Snorri Sturluson wrote the saga, which I haven't yet read). The Happy Warriors can be read as the final saga, and though it works even without that referent, it is enriched and deepened by it. I hope Vintage takes Smiley's hint and brings it back into print (not everybody has an Icelandic next-door neighbor, after all).

Raymond Queneau, Elementary Morality (trans Philip Terry): His last book (1975), now available in English translation by a fellow poet who himself follows the form that Queneau established here: "First comes 3 series of 3+1 pairs, each pair consisting of a noun and an adjective (or participle), freely including repetitions, rhymes, alliterations, and echoes; next, a kind of interlude of 7 lines, each line 1 to 5 syllables long; last, a conclusion of 3+1 pairs of words (noun and adjective (or participle), more or less recapitulating several of the 24 words of the first part" (per The Oulipo Compendium, which I finished meantime, will only remark that Oupeinpo (plastic arts) section is weak, otherwise a must-have especially post-'pataphysics). The form, also known as the quennet (though Queneau dubbed it lipolepse), falls outside Oulipo's remit of mathematical determination, but it encourages a multidimensional reading. Bellos, in his introduction, comments that "Queneau was a mathematician as well as a poet", echoing Dupin's appraisal in The Purloined Letter (nonlipogrammatic despite the title; the Chamfort quote, Il y a à parier que toute idée publique, toute convention reçue, est une sottise, car elle a convenu au plus grand nombre, also provides the epigraph for Flaubert's Dictionary ... but I digress). That's just Part I; the remainder comprises prose poems hovering between aphorism and fable, with Part III inspired in part by Queneau's marginal notes to I Ching 50 years previously. Bellos remarks on the Eastern influence even unto a prospective basis for the lipolepse in the Chinese liu-shi as practiced by Li Po.

Six words

2008-06-08T16:17:00.002-04:00

Descending order of merit, and reading:

Patrick White, Riders in the Chariot: Misfits versus philistines. Guess the winner.
Álvaro Mutis, The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll (trans Edith Grossman): Tangled Up in Blue in print.
Dubravka Ugrešić, The Ministry of Pain (trans Michael Henry Heim): Exile from superseded to undersea depatriation.
Thomas Bernhard, The Loser (trans Jack Dawson): Not quite as good as Gould.
Tatyana Tolstaya, On the Golden Porch (trans Antonina W. Bouis): Expecting more, protagonists disappointed. Me too.

19.6 updated Mutis link to Updike's NYer review, via SPLALit

27.6 appending three more:
Marguerite Yourcenar, Coup de Grâce (Grace Frick): Modern romantic tragedy, end of nobility.
César Aira, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (Chris Andrews): Humboldt's physiognomy naturally rearranged, gone awry.
Ryū Murakami, Almost Transparent Blue (Nancy Andrew): Burroughs does Japan, or vice versa.

Displaced Persons

2008-05-21T17:48:00.002-04:00

Not being entirely foreign to displacement myself lately, albeit merely through a minor transposition of keys, that such a theme should be ubiquitous in recent reading was unsurprising. Best first:

Imre Kertész, Liquidation (trans Tim Wilkinson): Mr. Waggish [spoilert] gets at the gist; I'd add that comparison to Ozick's The Messiah of Stockholm seems apposite (though my timing in reading this, just after the fate of Nabokov's unfinished novel was resolved, was purely coincidental).

Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz (trans Alfred Mac Adam): The deathbed being the point of departure, Cruz takes leave of his senses (or vice versa) while recollection of his life (Fuentes, el memorioso?) encapsulates the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath, not to mention other displacements, well, just one: it's modernism/stream-of-consciousness adapted to new ground. While I don't know quite how I missed this during the Boom, waiting for retranslation proved rewarding.

Anita Desai, Baumgartner's Bombay: The epigraph is the opening of T.S.Eliot's East Coker, the whole of which resonates through the novel (the closing could serve above as well). Baumgartner, a German Jew settled in Bombay, abides his time as the life he has pursued and the death pursuing him from Berlin to Calcutta catch up with him. I found it well executed but structurally conventional (though in curious contrast to her trajectory); YMMV. It's the first I've read of hers, and won't be the last.

Bruce Schechter, My Brain is Open: The Mathematical Journeys of Paul Erdös: Biography of the itinerant mathematician and Hungarian refugee, retailing many anecdotes and light (and sloppy) math along the way; essentially another magazine treatment (JAPaulos thereon). The topic just can't miss, but Erdös deserves a better biographer.
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Elsewhere, snark-hunter extraordinaire Mahendra Singh has made available his work in progress for your exagmination. Wonderfully befitting as it is, the blog adds the frisson of his running commentary, which I hope he'll append as backmatter when the time for publication rolls around (promise binding?) ...

Extreme translation

2008-05-05T14:30:00.002-04:00

Increasing the degree of difficulty: three canonical authors that resist translation, each in his own way:

Witold Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk (trans Carolyn French and Nina Karsov): Betwixt the Poles of Form and Chaos, Spurred like Buridan's Ass, running on Empty ... an extended riff on gawęda, a storytelling form of the early provincial gentry that itself riffs extensively, but which in time gave rise to the national epic, Pan Tadeusz; Fatherland here takes the place of the father in Bruno Schulz for this prodigal son. This makes for challenges to English rendering that the translators tackle à la Pevear and Volokhonsky, but into a 17c style (the OED [?!] their primary reference book)—not to everyone's satisfaction—Stanislaw Baranczak's introduction is essential to setting context, and my having essayed other Gombrowicz helped to mitigate the inevitable untowardness of this approach (or any other). A romp, exitentially. No extract can be prised from the midst of this feast, so I offer only the opening course:

I feel a need to relate here for Family, kin and friends of mine the beginning of these my adventures, now ten years old, in the Argentinian capital. Not that I ask anyone to have these old Noodles of mine, this Turnip (haply even raw), for in the Pewter bowl Thin, Wretched they are and what is more, likewise Shaming, in the oil of my Sins, my Shames, these Groats of mine, heavy, Dark with this black kasha of mine—oh, better not to heave it to the Mouth save for eternal Curse, for my humiliation, on the perennial track of my Life and up that hard, wearisome Mountain of mine.

Arno Schmidt, Collected Novellas (trans John E. Woods): [dalkeyarchive links still broke] Here the difficulty is in how well wordplay travels. Woods respects the text, punctually and contra, of the late Schmidt, belatedly—preserving the obscure, the arcane: how many translations send you to the dictionary of your native tongue? These have something of the flavor of John Hawkes, from the German post-war perspective, whether set there and then or in more distant peripheries of classical or apocalyptic times. Not quite up to Nobodaddy's Children (down the scroll), but that's praise by faint cavil—my only plaint is the lack of apparatus to identify allusions to prior German literature. I'll let Woods select an extract, gone fission, from "Lake Scenery with Pocohontas":

And so alone in the boat : meeting the wavelets head-on; often slapping and thumping below the bow (and Pocohontas always in my eye, my playful one; I managed once to sail right over her; the great flailing girl.) / Think. Don't be content with belief : go further. Once more through the circles of knowledge, friends ! And foes. Don't interpret : learn and describe. Don't futurize : be. And die without ambitions : you were. At best full of curiousity. Eternity is not ours (despite Lessing !) : but this summer lake, this slough of haze, gaily checked shadows, the wasp sting on your forearm, the printed yellow-plum sack. And there, the long diving maidenbelly. / Another tender snap, and a lacewing vanished within : fish ! : bream, dace, shiner, chub, bleak, sucker, rudd, roach, chevin, loach, tench, gudgeon, ide : D' you speak English ?

Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations (trans Barbara Johnson): A different problem, in recasting the finely braided threads of a close-mesh net into foreign waters, unavoidably fraying and entangling the style. Divigation it may be, but salmagundi it's not: one thing leads (how? inexorably) to another, and Dr. Johnson captures the convolutions (though no doubt importing some as well), the warp and weft, and the interstices (but isn't it all?) ... relating theater and music to verse (from "Solemnity"; a lone glint from this many-faceted expository):

The record of a real Poem, as here, seems to me to be that—arising from conditions that authorize its visible unfolding and its interpretation—it first lends itself, and then little by little, ingenuously if need be, it only replaces all for lack of all. I imagine that the cause of going out together and assembling, in view of festivals inscribed in the human program, will not be the theater, limited or incapable of responding all by itself to subtle instincts, nor music, which in any case is too fleeting not to disappoint the crowd: but founding in oneself something vague and brutal that these two isolate—an Ode, dramatized or cut up knowingly; these heroic scenes making an ode in several voices.

Addendum 7.5: CONTEXT offers notes on translation in Reading Culture.

Many Distant Cites

2008-04-20T00:29:00.003-04:00

A long sundry on many matters, reading matter first, highly migratory (but I've been flying so far under the radar I'm showing up on sonar—hey maybe I can ascribe the decreasing frequency of posts to that), best of which were Selimović and Naipaul:

Krishna Dutta & Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (about to be reissued with a new preface by Anita Desai): Having read Gora, I wanted to find out more about Tagore: this is the book (thx Indranil!). His life resists summary, his talents (and accomplishments, though some efforts came to little) many, but his influence remains diffuse. This biography seeks to go beyond the arts & letters, though with a fair sample of poetry in translation; some things just don't translate. Among his many associations outside India, the most surprising to me was that with Victoria Ocampo (as she was becoming central to Argentine arts & letters), and with romantic overtones at that.

William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain: Great men encounter great continent, latter prevails til the end of this bildungsroman: A corrective to then ('25) prevalent historical narratives, spanning from Erik the Red to Lincoln. WCW's prefactory comment: In these studies I have sought to re-name the things seen, now lost in chaos of borrowed titles, many of them inappropriate, under which the true character lies hid. In letters, in journals, reports of happenings I have recognized new contours suggested by old words so that new names were constituted. Thus, where I have found noteworthy stuff, bits of writing have been copied into the book for the taste of it. Everywhere I have tried to separate out of the original records some flavor of an actual peculiarity the character denoting shape which the unique force has given. Now it will be the configuration of a man like Washington, and now a report of the witchcraft trials verbatim, a story of a battle at sea—for the odd note there is in it, a letter by Franklin to prospective emigrants; it has been my wish to draw from every source one thing, the strange phosphorus of the life, nameless under an old misappellation. The most extended piece, an appreciation of Poe, I found the most interesting, perhaps for what it says of Williams.

Lydie Salvayre, The Power of Flies (trans Jane Kuntz): Disappointing. A one-sided conversation engaging Pascal's Pensées; but the execution does not live up to the conceit (unlike, say, Queneau). Not up to what else of hers I've read, but YMMV: cf compleat-revue, 1/4ly conversation (and Dalkey's internal linkage broken [as are redirects from centerforbookculture.org], there's also Motte reading Salvayre).

Meša Selimović, Death and the Dervish (trans Bogdan Radić & Stephen M. Dickey): While thinking highly of Andrić, I think this book puts Drina in the shade. (C-R also puts it among the best.) Set in 18thC Ottoman Bosnia (in a town much like Sarajevo), it bridges the chiasmus of the ambivalence of betrayal. An iconic excerpt can say it much better than I:

Once he showed me the cripple Jemail, who was pulled by his children from place to place in a cart and who would hobble into his tailor's shop on two canes, dragging his lame, withered legs. When he was seated he astonished everyone wih his beauty and strength, his masculine face, the warmth of his smile, his wide shoulders, strong arms, and wrestler's build. But as soon as he stood up all of his beauty dissapeared, and he would hobble toward his cart, a cripple whom it was impossible to watch without pity. It was he who had crippled himself. While drunk, he had stabbed himself in the thighs with a sharp knife until he severed all of the tendons and muscles; and even now, when he drank he would drive the knife into the withered stumps of his legs, not allowing anyone to approach him. No one could restrain him, either; his arms were still incredibly strong. "Jemail is the true image of Bosnia," Hassan said. "Strength on mutilated legs. His own executioner. Abundance with no direction or meaning."
"So what are we then? Lunatics? Wretches?"
"The most complicated people on the face of the earth. Not on anyone else has history played the kind of joke it's played on us. Until yesterday we were what we want to forget today. But we haven't become anything else. We've stopped halfway on the path, dumbfounded. We have nowhere to go any more. We've been torn away from our roots, but haven't become part of anything else. Like a tributary whose course has been diverted from its river by a flood, and no longer has a mouth or a current; it's too small to be a lake, too large to be absorbed by the earth. With a vague sense of shame because of our origins, and guilt becaus of our apostasy, we don't want to look back, and have nowhere to look ahead of us. Therefore we try to hold back time, afraid of any outcome at all. We are despised both by our kinsmen and by newcomers, and we defend ourselves with pride and hatred. We wanted to save ourselves, but we're so completely lost we don't even know who we are anymore. And the tragedy is that we've come to love our stagnant tributary, and don't want to leave it. But everything has a price, even this love of ours. Is it a coincidence that we're so overly softhearted and overly cruel, so sentimental and hard-hearted, joyful and melancholy, always ready to surprise others and even ourselves? Is it a coincidence that we hide behind love, the only certainty in this indefiniteness? Are we letting life pass by us for no reason, are we destroying ourselves for no reason, differently than Jemail, but just as certainly? Why are we doing it? Because we're not indifferent. And if we're not indifferent, that means we're honest. And if we're honest, let's hear it for our madness!
Hear, hear!

Sir V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival: Titled after Chirico (actually Apollonaire enigmatically arrived at the titles), how could I resist? Actually I did for too long, having been lukewarm about Mr. Biswas, but a nudge (thx Rick!) helped resolve any doubts, though that's not what it's about, it's more of a walkabout, a memoirish novel (Sebald seems to derive from this). (That Patrick French's biography of Naipaul is just out added impetus, not that I have any interest, not that he cares. Hey, it is what it is. [Tractatus 1.]) What it is is retropoco, a reversion. Empathy with those one hardly knows. Displacements. Remembering, writing, living. (Strangely, publication of EofA roughly coincided with An Unfinished Journey by his younger brother Shiva, published posthumously [nyrb credits to VS]. Strangely, the finale of EofA deals with their sister's passing.) Much has been written about all this, I won't add any more, except to recommend highly.

Gyula Krúdy, Sunflower (trans John Bátki): Exuberant melancholia (it's a Hungarian thing, you wouldn't understand, so says John Lukacs in the intro, a profile piece pulled from the New Yorker, prone to exaggeration of importance, I think, but it's a Hungarian thing ...). Character sketching along strong lines and serial imagistic epigrammatic metaphor (e.g. daughters of the bourgeoisie ... listening to the music of distant accordians, their hearts overflowing like a stone trough whose water drips from a little-used faucet) carry the story.

Nagai Kafu, During the Rains & Flowers in the Shade (trans Lane Dunlop): The seamy side of the second 20thC Tokyo, between the earthquake and the war. After Selimović and Naipaul, the best of the bunch. From the translator's preface:
Edward Seidensticker, in his authoritative Kafu the Scribbler (1965), cires a comment by Tanizaki as the most perceptive yet made. I quote from his translation:
"The old-fashioned is fairly conspicuous in Kafu's recent During the Rains. Indeed in its style and the shifting of its scenes, it might be called the oldest of his novels yet. There are chance meetings scattered all through the book, which are used to further the plot, in a manner common enough in plays and novels of another era. The oldest of this form stands in subtle contrast to the modern colors of the material."
And Donald Keene, in his monumental study of modern Japanese fiction Dawn to the West, has this to say:
"During the Rains ... ranks as one of Kafu's finest achievements ... The exceptional praise [...] won from discriminating critics was occasioned chiefly by the novelistic interest. The detached analysis of a group of people makes the story read like a work of French Naturalism, though a few passages [...] evoke the beauty of place and season in the typical Kafu manner."
Flowers in the Shade might almost be called a continuation ...

These last two I've used to interspersed Arno Schmidt novellas. Along with other odds'n'sods (selected Mallarmé, Thom Nash[e]). What newly awaits on the shelf (trans in parens):
Venedikt Erofeev, Moscow to the End of the Line (H William Tjalsma)
Dubravka Ugresic, The Ministry of Pain (Michael Henry Heim)
Imre Kertész, Liquidation (Tim Wilkinson)
Joseph Roth, The Emperor's Tomb (John Hoare)
Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz (Alfred Mac Adam)
Anita Desai, Baumgartner's Bombay
Witold Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk (Carolyn French & Nina Karsov)
Stephane Mallarmé, Divagations (Barbara Johnson)
Arno Schmidt, Collected Novellas and Collected Stories (John E. Woods)

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Elsewhere, a World Lit bookchat has been set up by a Glaswegian litblogger (discussion threads seeded with prior postings, serves as index thereto)—I enjoy the forum form, the back-and-forth without it being somebody's territory, but it needs many voices to succeed. I hope this will achieve critical mass, since literature in translation is a strong interest of mine, and I'm already mining the site for new reading. (A translator from Estonian has piqued my interest in Toomas Vint's A Never-Ending Landscape. But I'll have to wait.) Meanwhile, I'll pull over some thoughts on translation that haven't yet sparked discussion over there (over here isn't much for discussion, it's just the way it is, but I'll save ya da click):

The Art of Translation

Translation is widely considered to be an inferior art: its product is subordinate to the original, in a way reminiscent of the ancient philosophical distinction between the written and the spoken word. Exact replication is an unachievable goal, as refraction into a different linguistic and cultural matrix distorts the nuances and allusions upon which literary character depends. Faithful reproduction is perforce an interpretation, trying to capture what's essential in the original (a matter of opinion) and to elaborate upon it in a changed context while preserving what of the original context can be transferred: translation is a derivative, highly constrained craft.

And the translator is the most self-effacing of craftsmen. The translator (unlike the critic or scholar) tries to be a version of the author, a stand-in drawing attention away from himself. Commercial and academic rewards are scant. Still, many authors (particularly poets: odd, or perhaps not, in that poetry is the most difficult to translate) devote time and effort to translating the work of others.

And so the reading of translations is similarly looked upon as debased. Not that the acquisition of non-native language is seen as much better: it remains blind to unacknowledged natural linguistic resources and to a cultural framework investing much of the meaning. For many of us, translation is as much a window on this framework as on the work itself.

An analogy I find apt is to musical transcription. It is rare for the adapter to be more recognized (though it happens: ~~Rimsky-Korsakov~~ Ravel is more commonly identified with "Pictures at an Exhibition" than Mussorgsky). I think of English as the pianoforte of languages, adaptable to a broad range of orchestration. But just try to render, say, Indian melody and harmony with it. Anyway, in the same way that appreciating music is at some basic level about anticipating the notes that are to follow, I view literary reading as being in large part an exercise in reconstructing meaning in expression. Translation makes this more problematic. But also more interesting.

Half of all Statistics are Bayesian

2008-03-30T18:33:00.002-04:00

Abstract: A metadata analysis was performed on the reliability of statistics, using Google Search. The methodology employed was a biased sampling using the first one hundred occurrences of the phrase "of all statistics are"; given the documented link precedence utilized by Google, this was taken as representative of the approximately 71,300 primary instances of the phrase. Of these, 95 (95%) included a percentage figure and an assessment (the remainder only contained the phrase in links, excepting the first such, from the UN Office of the Under-Secretary-General: "First of all, statistics are generally recognized as one of the cornerstones of national and international policies.")

The assessment was, in the vast majority of cases (75%), "made up". Equivalent categorizations (fabricated, invented, ...) accounted for another 10% of the observations, while half the remainder were "worthless", the other half similarly equivalent (useless, wrong ...). Most estimations of the proportion of statistics that fell into these categories were to 2-3 significant digits, though a high degree of precision was implied in a handful of cases. Fractional representation was not employed (in the full sample, "half" appears only once).

The observed proportion to which these assessments applied varied from a minimum of 36% to a maximum of 99.9%, with a mean of 70% and a standard deviation of 21% (with the usual caveats regarding employing Gaussian measures to bounded ranges). The overall empirical distribution displayed a strong mode at approximately 42.7% ("made up on the spot") to 43% ("worthless"), and curiously no observations at all between 48% and 61%; a minor second mode was evident at 98%. The subsample comprising "made up" statistics dominated these results (mean 71% stnd dev 21%), though with a propensity for those "made up on the spot" to cluster at the lower end of the distribution.

Given the uniformity of the assessments above, it was determined that no further statistics need be derived to confirm the validity of this analysis.

Hello I must be going

2008-03-23T01:15:00.000-04:00

My reading over the past fortnight was confined to books that had been remaindered to my custody by bookculture, one of which had been put on my most wanted list by another book going under the same alias, The Lost Steps: I'd pled nolo contendere on Carpentier's sentence rendering here back in December, but having submitted to its appeal, I will reopen the case with my initial reactions from a LatAmLit bookchat that took it up (though that discussion stutter-stepped into incoherence [despite good individual commentaries] as the participants couldn't get on to the same page):
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Disorientation: Narrative shifts from stage to backstage include displacements in time. Story moves forward as subject goes backwards (and movement westward is another etymology for disorienting): this is an anti-modernist tract in modernist drag. The critic turned upon himself, the mask depicting a mask slipping to reveal a mask. The narrator's misdirections are difficult to resolve, unreliability not necessarily of motive. There's a lot to say about time, music, creativity, and how each is reflected in the unfolding of the narrative itself, but it can wait ... Aside from the malleability of time, this strikes me as apart from magic realism (2x13 ways of looking at MR), perhaps because the perspective is from outside, unattained. The opposition to Surrealism is real enough though, and taking on the fashions and fascisms of the time is no surprise, but Nietzsche and especially Ludwig van get a bum rap (maybe it's that Ludovico thang)—I said anti-modernist already, but it's also anti-decadent, with a sort of Rousseauic flavor. Perhaps it's the anti-Heart-of-Darkness. The Lost Steps strikes me as quite distinct from The Kingdom of this World (the phrase occurs twice, once midway through and once near the end) primarily due to the protagonist's viewpoint. Ti Noël directly experiences what our current narrator merely mediates, the veneer of civilization running so deep in him, holding him back from what he thinks he wants. There's also an insane jealousy about him. These combined to make me wonder to what extent TLS is a specific critique upon Rousseau (ed: cf Reveries of a Solitary Walker).
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The anti-surreal indictment, which identified a prime suspect, was prepared by Timothy Brennan's introduction to Harriet de Onis' translation:

Perhaps none of Carpentier's fiction [...] was a more decisive repudiation of the pretenses of surrealism, which had occupied him and his international circle of Parisian friends between 1928 and 1939.
The title itself is an allusion to André Breton's volume of essays, Les pas perdus (1924), which means, significantly, both "the lost steps" and "the not lost." As if to make the most of the latter meaning, Carpentier set out to stress that Breton's book had been the sort of evasion that an intellectual from the colonies might best overcome. Breton had written contemptuously of the "ridiculous condition of existence here below" and counseled that we all remain unattached "in a state of perfect disponibilité (availability)." We understand Carpentier when we grasp how much he hated those words, smacking as they do of a bourgeois European effeteness. Throughout the 1950s Carpentier sought to make good on his years of self-training in the study of the Americas—a training prompted by his own simmering resentments over the previous two decades as he watched politics and magic coalesce in the creative minds of the European avant-garde. Since at least the late 1930s he had been trying to make the point that without knowing it, the avant-garde was only whoring after a surrealism found fully formed in the Cuban babalaos and the village shamans of the Latin American continent.

I don't dispute the verdict about what became of surrealism in the thirties and beyond, but the evidence from Breton's original brief now having been examined, I see Carpentier retracing the steps that Breton took away from Dada, steps that had to be taken even if later taken back. Les pas perdus (trans Mark Polizzotti, University of Nebraska Press) is a seminal document of protoSurrealism, with all its promise intact; it prefigures the narrator's journey, and the narration, that Carpentier relates in his version. I take as a point of departure more prefactory commentary, supplied here by Mary Ann Caws and supplemented by the translator:

It is against any settling at all that the essays of The Lost Steps are assembled, the idea of wandering and meandering already expressing the state of expectation that characterizes Surrealism at its best. This work is the perfect prefiguration of the waiting state, even as it is the perfect prefiguration of a transition. The essay most nearly approximating Breton's open state of mind announces a general departure: "Leave Everything"—a phrase appropriate for train stations like Gare de Lyon, where, to use the memorable image that Breton will later offer, the train is always shaking with convulsive beauty, always just about to leave. [MAC]
Actually the title—Les pas perdus in the original—evokes not so much loss (although this, too, is present) as aimlessness, it inevitably recalls for its French audience the locution salle des pas perdus, the waiting room of a train station, where expectant travelers errantly pace. Like many of Breton's titles, this one acts as a billboard: the following writings, individually and as a whole, form above all a record of imminent departure. [MP]

Or perhaps immanent.

But enough of hearsay. Witness the conclusion of "Leaving Everything":

Leave everything.
Leave Dada.
Leave your wife, leave your mistress.
Leave your hopes and fears.
Drop your kids in the middle of nowhere.
Leave the substance for the shadow.
Leave behind, if need be, your comfortable life and promising future.
Take to the highways.

Breton also provides ample testimony implicating his co-conspirators. But it's time to move on to the parole hearing ("Words without Wrinkles"):

We are beginning to distrust words; we were suddenly noticing that they had to be treated other than as the little auxiliaries for which they had always been taken. Some thought that they had become worn down from having served so much; others, that by their essence they could legitimately aspire to a condition other than the one they had—in short, we had to free them. The "alchemy of the verb" had been superseded by a veritable chemistry that first and foremost had puts its energies into disengaging the properties of these words; of these properties, only one—meaning—was specified by the dictionary. It was a matter (1) of considerinh the word in itself and (2) of examining as closely as possible the reactions words could have to each other. Only at this price could we hope to restore language's true destination, which for some (myself included) promised to take knowledge a giant leap forward, and exalt life by as much. We thereby lay ourselves open to the usual persecutions in a domain where good (good usage) consists mainly in remembering the etymologies of words, in other words, their deadest weight, and in making the sentence conform to a mediocre and utilitarian syntax, where everything is in agreement with paltry human conservatism and with a loathing of the infinite that never wastes an opportunity to show its face. Naturally such an enterprise, which is part of the poetic impulse, does not demand so much clear will from each of those who take part in it; one does not always have to formulate a need in order to satisfy it. And my intent here is only to develop an image.

It was by assigning color to vowels that for the first time, consciously and in full knowledge of the consequences, someone turned the word away from its duty to signify. That day it emerged into concrete existence, such as no one had ever suspected it might have. There is no point in debating the exactness of the phenomenon of colored audition, on which I will be sure not to rely. The important thing is that the alarm has been sounded and that from now on it seems imprudent to speculate about the innocence of words. We now know that, all in all, they have a sonority that is sometimes quite complex; moreover, they have tempted painter's brushes, and very soon we will be studying their architectural side. This is a small, intractable world over which we can float only the most insufficient surveillance balloons and in which, even so, we occasionally spot some flagrant violations. In fact, the expression of an idea depends as much on a word's aspect as on its meaning. There are words that work against the idea they are claiming to express. Indeed, even the meaning of words is not always pure, and we are nowhere near determining to what degree the figurative sense progressively acts on the literal sense, each variation in the latter supposedly entailing a variation in the former.
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Modulo the rest of the remaindered reading:

Alberto Savinio, The Lives of the God (trans James Brook & Susan Etlinger, Atlas): Doomed to be an echo of the other brother, Chirico, though their paths diverged. These Surrealist writings probably don't do him justice; curiously, like Carpentier, he had his stint as music critic as well. (more, and better)

Joseph Roth, The Legend of the Holy Drinker (trans Michael Hofmann, Granta): Last words—one for the road.

The Original of Laura

2008-03-07T16:33:00.000-05:00

The fate of Nabokov's last, unfinished novel has been a hot issue of late (yes well it's obligatory, all this to burn or not to burn folderol), sparked (OK I'll stop) by Ron Rosenbaum on Slate. My interest in The Original of Laura is in better understanding the methods of construction of a master craftsman, as one aspect of my larger interest in literature is in how things are made, and how this is integral to the final product (which then becomes foundational material for future construction, both for writers and readers; cf prior post); I have little interest in manufactured controversy. But in the particular case of Nabokov, a coincidence of interests have made the ephemera more attractive, as I've even built additions (well, lean-tos) on other incomplete work (the metaphor of the chess problem has some force as regards publishing draft material; the intended solution has to work [be sound] and be properly framed, put into context, made interesting). Rosenbaum's latest installment includes second-hand reports on what TOOL's all about (as well as a more interesting colloquium on its fate); these deserve more extensive quotation than he afforded {his extracts curliqued}:

"Brushing through 'veiled values and translucent undertones': Nabokov’s pictorial approach to women", Lara Delage-Toriel, Transatlantica 2006-1 (Apr 6 2006)

In his last unfinished, and supposedly testamentary, novel, The Original of Laura, this type of vertiginous mise en abyme becomes a ruling narrative principle. Like a Möbius strip or an Escher print, the manuscript’s involuted plot expands upon the ambivalence of the sign inscribed within its very title. The referential indetermination of “original” and “Laura” is indeed refracted by a complex matrioshka-type of narrative in which pictorial and literary representations appear to mirror each other and thus unhinge the classical foundations of mimesis. {Its central female character seems to be Flora, the wife of the narrator and, most likely, the ‘original’ of Laura, who is the eponymous heroine of a novel titled My Laura. This novel is sent to the narrator and main protagonist of The Original of Laura by a painter, a rejected admirer of his wife, Flora, of whom “he did an exquisite oil a few years ago.” In My Laura, the mistress is less lucky: she is destroyed by the “I” of the book whilst “in the act of portraying her”—‘literally’, as a writer. Apparently “the portrait is a faithful one,” its features being “absolutely true to the original.” Our desire to peer through the frame—like the unfortunate protagonist of Nabokov’s short story ‘La Veneziana’—is thwarted by the elusive nature of this ‘original’: does it refer to the mistress of the “I,” the Laura of My Laura, or to the probable mistress of this novel’s author, the Flora of The Original of Laura? The manuscript’s playful juxtapositions obviously incite the reader to fuse both ‘originals’ into a single original, a gesture which Nabokov graphically performs in ‘chapter’ 5, by contriving an amusing hybrid, ‘Flaura’. On close observation of the manuscript, one notices that the name contains in fact two capital letters, ‘F’ and ‘L’, as though Nabokov had been loath to give precedence to either name and had instead opted for some typographical monster, a bicephalous cipher of sorts.}

Nabokov’s dove-tailing conundrums become even more artfully significant when we consider the fact that portraits of courtisanes called Flora or Laura are well-known masterpieces by such Renaissance artists as Titian and Giorgione and already constitute variations on the theme of Petrarch’s Laura.

The watermarked presence of these artists beneath the surface of his text is another feat in Nabokov’s chiaroscuro deftness of touch. The adjectives “veiled” and “translucent” which Nabokov selected to define chiaroscuro in Pnin suggest nuances that may be either conspicuous or concealed, depending on the way they catch the light or the angle from which they are perceived. But the visibility of these nuances is equally tributary of the degree of saturation with which the artist endows them; he can shade them in to reveal a veiled value, or shade them off to convey a muted glimmer-effect, a “translucent undertone.” When I first referred to chiaroscuro, I explained that it was a device contrived by Leonardo da Vinci to create an illusion of volume on a flat surface. Chiaroscuro is thus intimately linked to the deceptive quality of art. When addressing fledgling artists in his treatise on painting, Leonardo also singles out indirection as a paramount virtue: “Light too conspicuously cut off by shadows is exceedingly disapproved by painters […]; do not make your figures appear illuminated by the sun, but contrive a certain amount of mist or of transparent cloud to be placed between the object and the sun.” It is particularly significant that Leonardo should mention a “transparent cloud,” as though the old master’s phrase were foreshadowing Nabokov’s own terms. It induces the same type of shimmer-effect, designating, like the “veiled”/ “translucent” couple, a screening device that may at once conceal and reveal.

In this respect, the convoluted structure of The Original of Laura, with its web of metatextual allusions and its iridescent play on “original,” could be considered an elaborate bow to the subtle art of the Renaissance. The manuscript depicts various portraits of a deceitful woman, each of them faithful, each of them mere images, offered to the viewer’s appreciation. If you look at Giorgione’s Laura or Titian’s Flora, you will notice that what is offered to the viewer is just as ambiguous: the woman seems to ignore the spectator, averting her gaze as though lost in her own thoughts. At the same time, the carefully calculated baring of her breast is a clear acknowledgment of the spectator’s presence. Quite obviously the true appeal of these portraits springs less from the features of the woman than from the way these are presented. We are seduced, etymologically led astray, because unsettled by the power of her enigmatic stance, which is neither entirely modest, nor entirely immodest. Although Nabokov’s manuscript remains rather sketchy, its embryonic plot does also reveal the same qualities vis-à-vis the reader; it is up to him to decipher the myriad signs generated by its specular structure. The disconcerting seductiveness of its deceitful mistress is paradigmatic of Nabokov’s preoccupations with representability, authenticity and faithfulness. What Nabokov’s pictorial representation of women lays bare is the fact that the seduction of art lies in its very deceptiveness, its tantalizing oscillation between “le vrai et le vraisemblable,” to quote the title of one of Nabokov’s essays. Because it functions, like the female figure, as a “double-talk mirror,” mimesis cannot be taken at face value only.

"Vladimir Nabokov, his masterpiece and the burning question", Stefanie Marsh, London Times, Feb 14 2008

Other people have seen the text. Only a handful, but, with a little digging, it becomes apparent that this most delicate of literary quandaries is not quite as veiled in secrecy as it once was. Zoran Kuzmanovich, the editor of the Journal of Nabokov Studies, was in that Cornell lecture room on the day Dmitri surprised his audience with an impromptu reading of Laura. “To me the passage or passages he read sounded very much like the passages of Nabokov’s densest, erotically charged prose,” he told me.

“I wrote in my notes that Laura may well be a woman and a book and that its chocolate mousse prose was not entirely safe from sounding like a parody of Lolita.”

Is Laura any good? {Talk to enough Nabokov scholars and the outline of a plot emerges: Philip Wild, an enormously corpulent scholar, is married to a slender, flighty and wildly promiscuous woman called Flora. Flora initially appealed to Wild because of another woman that he’d been in love with, Aurora Lee. Death and what lies beyond it, a theme which fascinated Nabokov from a very young age, are central. The book opens at a party and there follow four continuous scenes, after which the novel becomes more fragmented. It is not clear how old Wild is, but he is preoccupied with his own death and sets about obliterating himself from the toes upwards through meditation. A sort of deliberate self-inflicted self-erasure.}

Is Laura in a fit state for publication? Nabokov wrote most of his novels including Lolita and Pale Fire nonlinearly on index cards, which he would shuffle as part of his editing process. As Laura was unfinished and Nabokov often wrote the middle section of his stories last, it is questionable whether, published in her current state, Laura would have resembled the book that its author had intended to write. These are fragments – 50 cards compared with the 2,000 cards it took Nabokov to commit Ada or Ardor to paper.

“It seems revealing that the novel itself seems to be about work that seems to be unfinished,” says Boyd. “How finished it would have been if completed, I don’t know. There would have been deliberate lacunae.”

Rosenbaum found these accounts of what's TOOL's about somewhat at odds. But I find them consonant with what, given these sketchy reports, I would propose as a primary source: Poe's "The Oval Portrait", a short short that takes the relation of Art to Life to an extreme (and which, as a discourse upon a discourse, welcomes extrapolation [or is it involution?] to the story itself, as well as to critical appreciation). TOOL would be an elaboration of, a doubling of, an argufying of and an answering of TOP's theme. This conjecture also puts Delage-Toriel's in a new, somewhat different light. Beyond which, as Vera is dedicatee and first-row audience for Vladimir's fictions, it may indeed have been the capstone of the oeuvre that he piled up over his long career (rather than continuing the falling off that Transparent Things and Look at the Harlequins! are taken to be).

So perhaps all this talk of putting TOOL to the torch has illuminated some dark corner of Nabokovia. And perhaps its publication will bring a deeper appreciation, not in and of itself, but of prior work, all unnoticed before. Per TOP:

Long--long I read--and devoutly, devotedly I gazed. Rapidly and gloriously the hours flew by, and the deep midnight came. The position of the candelabrum displeased me, and outreaching my hand with difficulty, rather than disturb my slumbering valet, I placed it so as to throw its rays more fully upon the book.
But the action produced an effect altogether unanticipated.

there and here

2008-03-04T20:35:00.001-05:00

I've been accorded the privilege of helping to pre-inaugurate Spinozablue, An Eclectic Journal of the Arts, with an essay (perhaps a cautionary exercise), "To Assume a Pleasing Shape". I promise not to expound on how I came to write it; my numerical analysis training (custom-Taylored) leads me to eschew terms beyond the second derivative anyway. But it's flattering to be asked to take an early lead; more content to follow in coming days.

Reading: After Saramago's Gospel came just-reissued Halldór Laxness, The Fish Can Sing (trans Magnus^2son; thx JAbel for the heads-up!) and J.G.Farrell, The Singapore Grip. Now it's A Bad Man's turn (that would be Stanley Elkin). Each of the voices is familiar (trans included), each mixes light irony with dark humor; these examples may not be the best each has to offer, but it's better than what most others can.

mo' uses of literature

2008-02-22T21:55:00.001-05:00

An unwelcome intrusion upon our premises has come to its inexorable conclusion, due to an overbearing taste for literary matter.

In addition to an overflow of reading material, the cellar had harbored a number of crickets; these began to diminish as autumn ended, which we put down to seasonal effects, until a couple of weeks ago, when I went downstairs to find the dustcovers and bindings of many books in shreds. It was then clear that, the supply of crickets exhausted, our heretofore undetected house mouse had turned to literary nourishment. Disdaining paperbacks, he had sampled a number of works, finding some not so much to his taste (Steven Pinker, John Allen Paulos, Teachout's The Skeptic, Doug Adams, Kharms, Saramago, Eco, Grushin, and some old Latin & German primers), and others worthy of deeper attention (books on the Civil War and Lorenzo the Magnificent, Robbe-Grillet/Magritte's The Fair Captive, Urban's The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes) -- but his tastes were betrayed by those tomes he absolutely devoured, cover to cover:
Faulkner, Light In August
Koestler, Darkness at Noon (a penchant for Everyman's evident here so far)
Martin Gardner, The Night is Large
Burgess, Earthly Powers
Nabokov, King, Queen, Knave
Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan
Christine Stansell, American Moderns
Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James
Sholom Aleichem, Tevye's Daughter
Over all, not one for translations. His library privileges have now been revoked, along with residency.

Meanwhile, books that have been keeping me occupied:
Robert Walser, The Assistant (trans SBernofsky) not to my tastes
Gabriel Josipovici, Goldberg: Variations yum! I must find more of GJ
Claude Simon, The Flanders Road (trans RHoward) ... and more of CS (via RH).
Currently in Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans GPontiero), going slowly, moreso than ordinary, as it seems to be a rereading from many years ago, though it being an oft-told tale, I could be mistaken.

Exploits & Opinions

2008-02-10T21:05:00.001-05:00

Today marks the 110th anniversary of the seizure of the 27 equivalent books of Dr. Faustroll, and so I seized upon Exact Change's rendering of Jarry's neo-scientific novel, ~~even though~~sorry, no longer available at the Pataphysics Research Lab. In short:

Doctor Faustroll is dunned for back rent by the bailiff Panmuphle, who inventories and seizes his library of "twenty-seven equivalent books." (BOOK ONE)
The elements of pataphysics are briefly set down and illustrated by an experiment in relativity and surface tension. (BOOK TWO)
Doctor Faustroll escapes the law in a skiff or sieve which travels on both land and water. He is accompanied by the baboon, Bosse-de-Nage, as navigator, and by Panmuphle, tamed by drink and chained to his seat, as oarsman and narrator until the next to last book. Their peregrinations carry them to fourteen lands or islands, whose topography and inhabitants are so described as to convey Jarry's comments on fourteen friends (or enemies) in the world of the arts - among them, Aubrey Beardsley, Léon Bloy, Gauguin, Gustave Kahn, Mallarmé, Henri de Régnier, and Marcel Schwob. (BOOK THREE)
After further navigations, discussions, and a great banquet, Faustroll discourses on death and starts a holocaust in which Bosse-de-Nage perishes - provisionally. His monosyllabic and all-sufficing language ("Ha ha") is carefully analyzed. (BOOK FOUR)
After a coprological aside on the "legless cripple" who represents Pierre Loti, Faustroll puts Henri Rousseau in charge of a "painting machine" to "embellish" the academic canvases hanging in the Luxembourg Museum. (BOOK FIVE)
While Faustroll has an erotic adventure, the painting machine under the Lucretian name of Clinamen executes thirteen paintings, each described in a short prose poem. (BOOK SIX)
Faustroll dies by drowning after sinking the skiff to avoid collision, and his body, like a tight scroll unfurled by the water, reveals the future in its spirals. (BOOK SEVEN)
The final book, entitled "Ethernity," resumes the treatise on pataphysics begun in BOOK TWO. Two telepathic letters from Faustroll to Lord Kelvin regarding the latter's experiments in measurement, matter, and light, are followed by a crowning pataphysical discourse on the "surface" and nature of God. In accurate geometrical theorems He is demonstrated to be "the tangential point between zero and infinity." (BOOK EIGHT)

'Pataphysics is teh Science ...

(... also leading to rediscovering Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, via influence ...)

Recto

2008-02-09T20:24:00.000-05:00

The imposed storylines of authorita~~rian~~tive versions:

Dezső Kosztolányi, Anna Édes (trans George Szirtes): Reactionary bourgeois narcissism, in which only the murderer is innocent (even the author is implicated in the end). [review]

Roberto Bolaño, Nazi Literature in the Americas (trans Chris Andrews): Postulating a full-fledged movement, borrowing detail from literary actualities. As Amulet is embedded in The Savage Detectives (or, the former an elaboration of a section of the latter), so Distant Star is in Nazi Literature in the Americas. A bibliography of invented works includes Poe's "Philosophy of Furniture", from which interior description is directly lifted. [review; excerpts: The Mendiluce Clan, The Many Masks of Max Mirebalais, The Fabulous Schiaffino Boys, and in the same neighborhood but not in the book, "Álvaro Rousselot's Journey"]

Imre Kertész, Detective Story (trans Tim Wilkinson): A tables-turned fable, special police investigation. [review]

Hermann Broch, The Spell (trans H.F.Broch de Rothermann): A stranger comes to town, as once did an Austrian watercolorist-housepainter. Written thrice, the version published 25 years after Broch's death followed the first (1940) with elaboration from the first rewrite only in the purple patch of the narrator's first love. [summareview]

Ricardo Piglia, The Absent City (trans Sergio Waisman): Story machine escapes between the interstices of state machinations. [brieview]

Day Today

2008-01-27T18:20:00.000-05:00

Good reading throughout the week, by authors who I'd read at most once previously:

16-20Jan: What is the What by Dave Eggers. I suspect that what is invented are only the more plausible bits, to keep structure intact. That Valentino Achak Deng was kept intact is the more remarkable.
21Jan: Today I read Today I Wrote Nothing, by Daniil Kharms (ed/trans Matvel Yankelevich), prompted by RW. The closest thing to Soviet surrealism, though with a Gombrowiczian inflection; where some narratives parodize, he parodies narrative. I regret lacking the background in Russian verse to appreciate the poetic invention properly.
22Jan: Of Illustrious Men, by Jean Rouaud (trans Barbara Wright), continuation of the lyrical melancholy of Fields of Glory.
23-24Jan: Written Lives, by Javier Marías (trans Margaret Jull Costa), brief, askew looks at well-known authors, which he was prompted to compile following thumbnail bios of extremely obscure authors in his anthology Unique Tales, which still awaits translation, as do I.
25Jan: Bloodchild, by Octavia Butler, prompted by SEK (dipping my toes in before taking on Xenogenesis).

Update

2008-01-14T21:30:00.000-05:00

When I first picked up The Arcades Project, my first act was to perform the Sortes Benjaminae, and I lighted upon [M19,2]: "The sandwich-man is the last incarnation of the flâneur." Walking past Macy's on the way to the train tonight, I saw someone wearing a placard, but on only one side, but it was advertising a sandwich. I guess they're serving open-faced now.

Readings:
David Leavitt, The Indian Clerk: Impure mathematics: queering GHHardy (works with Gaye, not with Thayer) imposing his ideals upon Ramanujan amidst Cambridge, Apostles, WW I. Put on to by TEV.
Donald Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective: Too language-dependent, I think.
Stanley Elkin, Van Gogh's Room at Arles: Novella's his proper length, but of the three here, only the title cut stands out.
Robert Pinget, Monsieur Levert (trans Richard Howard): Beckett does Faulkner, prodigally.
Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader: We are much amused.
Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art: Imposing his ideals upon Minny Temple and Constance Fenimore Woolson, that is; more of a triography, except that there was another woman.

Currently in the midst of Michel Butor, Passing Time (trans Jean Stewart, serviceable, but doesn't l'emploi du temps = the timetable?), a bitemporal narrative, twinned mystery entwined in an enigma wrapped in a map, as it presents itself to a foreign clerk. 15.1 23:31 Time forks more often as it goes on. Typeface, Borgis [var of Borges?] Baskerville-Antiqua, appropriately.

Happy Solstice ...

2007-12-22T21:10:00.000-05:00

... for those who celebrate (and no this won't be the shortest post); otherwise, here's Wishing You a Meretricious and a Preposterous New Year ... I'm bookending December a tad early to avoid the holiday rush.

First, pendant to my addendum to the prior post, Julien Gracq (hail & farewell; what follows, the last of the surrealists upon the first), from Reading Writing, "Literature and Painting":

Duplication in art. Giorgio De Chirico exhibits in a Belgian gallery. On the first page of the catalog, a full-length portrait of the artist; in the grand uniform of the Academician, heavy, ungainly, his face devoid of thought, muttonlike and obtuse, beneath white, woolly hair, hands crossed over a jutting paunch, he brings to mind both an unskilled laborer disguised in the Academy's green costume and Ingres' Bertin. The same heavy build of bourgeois prosperity, the same grin of satisfaction, sly and sated. He is eighty-eight years old. After being submerged in academicism for fifty years, he is now remaking the paintings he painted at thirty without modification–simply recombining their elements, like an Erector set: streets with arcades, pink towers, empty squares, equestrian statues casting shadows, factory smokestacks, locomotives in remote landscapes–"unsettling muses" with heads of light bulbs, mannequins, bobbins, T-squares, artichokes. And these paintings that are so many impostures, these paintings that are tricked-out and soulless–which one might imagine being resigned to responding solely to market demand, gracelessly and after a long sulk–are not easily distinguished from those he painted half a century ago. The same edge of yellow sky at the horizon, below a heavy green firmament, the same magnet of the arcades, the same low walls masking a procession of railroad cars against the light. All of which, in advance and from the start, almost erased for me what surrealist painting at its best might have subsequently offered.

Ostensibly and conscientiously–through a rare combination of precocious indifference, cynicism, and longetivity–he was one of the first artists allowed to become his own forger. The big, white, wily tomcat that caught so many mice, the bulky manipulator of painting, peering slyly from the threshold of his catalog at the visitors of the galleries, presents an enigma, a slightly irksome one.

Well, yes and no. The execution of the late paintings seems not quite as fine, the composition a bit less compelling. (Gracq settles on the titles as betraying more of a fall-off.) But the overall effect is irksome–how so little can matter so much, rendering the self-pastiche so evident. But it hardly puts me off the early efforts, much less surreality ...

Other readings this month, offered without comment (but with linkage for the worthier efforts):
Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps, trans Harriet de Onis
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans Pevear & Volokhonsky
Witold Gombrowicz, Polish Memories, trans Bill Johnston (unlinked but not deserving remaindering)
Raymond Queneau, Letters, Numbers, Forms, trans Jordan Stump
Jean Rouaud, Fields of Glory, trans Ralph Manheim

What common denominator, beyond translation? All antimodern, in some sense ... for the last, I picked up Of Illustrious Men on spec a while ago, but saw that it should wait for its predecessor. A trip to Milwaukee's best used book store sufficed, also yielding up elusive old nouveau romans (Claude Simon, The Flanders Road; Michel Butor, Passing Time; Robert Pinget, Monsieur Levert) and others (Hermann Broch, The Spell; Octavia Butler, Blood Child; Stanley Elkin, Van Gogh's Room at Arles; Dezső Kosztolányi, Anna Édes, this last on spec, vote of confidence in translator George Szirtes); it took 2 hours just to winnow the fiction stacks. Like what NYC's Strand used to be, but no longer is (more miles of books, but the pavement is uniform, flat).

So, as I'd said, I'm looking to take this thang in a new direction next year, sorry about being a bit becalmed in the meantime. It's been a busy, eventful year (centennial historical re-enactment of the Panic of '07; hail and farewell Abby, poodle extraordinaire; betterhalf's best job evah, lucky her, luckier her employer), so I've read less than in prior years, oh well, never enough time anyway. In the meantime, while I don't maintain a blogroll, I'd like to reciprocate to those who list me on theirs, all of whom have more of interest to say (and no doubt more readers, but I'll overlook the superfluousity of backlisting them from this backwater in order to say thanks to them, and checkitout to the rest):
Group Efforts: The Valve, Long Sunday;
Solo Solons: Pseudopodium (loglist), Waggish, Notional Slurry (random blogroll: how fitting), Snark Hunt;
Book Reviewers: Scott McLemee, Rodney Welch.
(and then JGoodwin via delicious; sorry if I missed anyone.)

British subjects

2007-12-02T10:00:00.000-05:00

Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, struck me as a bit thin in places, or its author a bit thick. There are interesting but seldom argufying bits in the essays (most often book reviews) bracketed by sections on Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses. Introducing the collection, Rushdie concedes that after the fact, "I find 'Outside the Whale' a little unfair to George Orwell and to Henry Miller, too." Which is to say, a completely wrong-headed attack on any quietist impulse, proposing instead making "the very devil of a racket" and denying any whale, prior to being swallowed by one of his own devising, the book he asks to be considered in context as "not a piece of blubber, but the whole wretched whale." (Not that this dilutes support for him against fatwa: such principles do not require saints or heroes as object.) Similarly, his complaints with V.S.Naipaul serve to bring certain parallels to mind, including the unequallible early success. Suffice it to say that the short form does not play to Rushdie's strengths.

J.G.Farrell, Troubles: Everything starts out amusingly enough, but ends badly. Said of the twins, this applies to everything in this story save the story-telling, which centers on Major Brendan Archer's return to a decaying English inn in County Wexford, Ireland, after the war marking the British Empire's zenith, not yet acknowledged as such, as the Irish assert independence. Nearly everyone is half-mad, and becoming moreso, the formidable troupe of elderly ladies hanging on perhaps most comprehensively representing Britain, though other facets are not lacking for representation. It is a lack that is the Major's comitragic flaw, a humorlessness despite natural empathy, and an inability to take leave of what is better left behind; and he is the best of what Britain has to offer here. Even the inn, the Majestic, has something character-like about it, its own heart of darkness an overgrowing Palm Court contributing to its entropical degradation. The narration itself blends British understatement with Irish absurdist irony into inseparability for all the mutual incomprehension (though seen only one-sidedly -- a technique perfected in Krishnapur [cf]). Now The Singapore Grip awaits.

Update 3.12: Kudos^2! In comments M. Snghark brings to my wandering attention a nearby exhibition (just north of Saint 'Patacathedral) of De Chirico's late works, mostly late 60s/early 70s, including a baker's half dozen bronzes (archaeologists included), revisiting earlier themes by popular demand; there are also a half dozen paintings from the 50's, in particular an earlier and stronger revisitation: Arrival at Another Place ('51) relies more heavily on Enigma of a Day than on the curator's identification with Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (only the van has moved from the latter, the surround, sans statuary, is from the former, and the figures in the background have moved forward; but I quibble). Giorgio De Chirico is not just my favorite surrealist artist (as are Duchamp and Magritte) but also my favorite surrealist writer, not for his memoirs (cf ¶4) but for Hebdomeros, also title of a self-sketch there, which is a nom de chirico paying homage to Apollonaire ('hebdomad' being a division of 7 days important to the cult of Apollo), though now joined by Aragon -- Exact Change link leads to both, and to Roussel as well. Exactly one week ago I was gazing upon MoMA's selection, one of which serves as monitory background. To think I would have passed this by if not for the commentatory intervention ... thx^3!

kthxgiving

2007-11-22T16:52:00.000-05:00

Donald Barthelme's Flying to America: 45 more stories (well, 44 1/3) collects 30 that had appeared in Come Back, Dr. Caligari | Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts | Amateurs | Great Days | Overnight to Many Distant Cities | Sadness, (nearly) a dozen that hadn't, and (almost, maybe) 3 previously unpublished. So much of it was familiar (in its defamiliarizing way), but it's good to have it all in hand once again (my having passed along the aforementioned way back when). It's as hit-or-miss as always, more of the former than anyone has a right to, though, given the range. I recognized more than I'd expected to; it also led to recognizing a similarity with other stand-alone material (which fits in better with Ray's argument, so there, &thx). But I think the defamiliarization helped to revitalize the form. Speaking of which ...

My interest in Borges prompted me to pick up William Faulkner's Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem] upon learning that it was his transmutation that introduced WF to the Latin American writers who would turn themselves into the Magical Realists, and in turn succeed so well in English translation. (I haven't read much WF outside of Yoknawhatevah, which casts a long shadow.) The dual story has a curious publication history, having been split in the late 40s by Malcolm Cowley (with WF's complaining complicity) and briefly in 50s France, though quickly corrected there, with translator Coindreau defending in essay in Les temps moderne: "To say that 'Old Man' gains by being printed and read independently of 'Wild Palms' is to pretend that a fugue would be more beautiful if the answer and the countersubject were detached from the subject." (Restoration took much longer in the US.) That the stories can function independently makes the interaction that much more remarkable, and it's not just a matter of parallel ravelling (f'rinstance, the narrative temporal reversal of roles between the doctor/landlord and the deputy warden). But an added frisson, given Borges as conduit to GGM et al, was afforded by the brief interlude with a Cajan character whose only word in English is 'boom'.

Borges likewise prompted Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, all the more as a segue from Walter Benjamin, from whom he was encouraged to embark on this summa, to whom he dedicates it. All of it held my interest (and I feel a rereading of Eco's Foucault's Pendulum coming on), but the Zohar chapters had that added philological aspect that beyond the pseudepigraphia aligns with getting to the crux of the creation of Constantine's Donation and of Ossian's verse. For a treatise on gnostical leanings, it's particularly apt that the Aramaic windowdressing on Hebrew writing should provide a key to unitary authorship:

This motley display of different styles is equally evident in the use of pronouns and particles and in the employment of forms and endings of nouns. In some cases, the forms used are those of the Targum Jerushalmi. Frequently, the various forms appear quite indiscriminately in the same sentence. As a result, every page of the Zohar displays a rainbow picture of linguistic eclecticism, the constituent elements of which, however, remain constant throughout. The syntax is extremely simple, almost monotonous, and wherever there are differences between Hebrew and Aramaic, the construction is distinctly Hebrew. Syntactical peculiarities of medieval Hebrew recur in Aramaic disguise.

As in the case of every artificial language, a characteristic note is introduced by misunderstandings and grammatical misconstructions. Thus the author in many cases confuses the verb-stems of Kal with those of Pael and Aphel, and vice versa. He employs entirely wrong forms of Ethpael, and gives a transitive meaning to verbs in Ethpael. He mixes up finite verb-forms, chiefly in the many cases where the endings of the participle are tacked on the perfect; and his use of prepositions and conjunctions is often quite preposterous.

All the more apt in that, while written for publication in English (based upon lectures in same in New York), Scholem composed in German, with George Lichtheim translating. In any case, I've noticed that this is the longest string of untranslated reading I've done in a long while; continuing now with Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands (and dipping into Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with Blake on deck).

Addendum 23.11: I could not let pass without mention that one section of the Zohar is Sava, "The Old Man"; per Scholem a coupla pages on:

"Which is the serpent that flies in the air and walks alone, and meanwhile an ant resting between its teeth has the enjoyment, beginning in community and ending in isolation? Which is the eagle whose nest is in the tree that does not exist? Which are his young which grow up, but not among the creatures, which were created in the place where they were not created? What are those which, when they ascend, descend, and when they descend, ascend, two which are one, and one which is three? Who is the beautiful girl on whom nobody has set his eyes, whose body is concealed and revealed, who goes out in the morning and hides in the day, who puts on the ornaments that are not there?"--Thus the "Old Man" begins his great discourse. The mystifying purpose is plain. It is also apparent in the not infrequent sentences containing some brief impressive-sounding obiter dictum which is not only in most cases entirely obscure but which in many instances cannot even be properly construed grammatically. It is sometimes difficult to avoid the impression that the author was acting on the good old principle of epater le bourgeios. However that may be, his capacity for declamatory, pathetical and sonorous prose was without doubt highly developed, and it is undeniable that he was a sovereign master on the instrument which he himself had fashioned.

I know some people who feel that way about Faulkner.

mo' mentum

2007-11-03T13:38:00.000-04:00

Reading of late:

The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse Wyndham Lewis & Charles Lee, ed.: Sometimes the flame of inspiration throws up clinkers. The aporrhoea ranges from Abraham Cowley to Tennyson, with the best bits served up as hors d'ouerve and postprandial. While this serves to remind that even the best weren't always at their best, it's the forgotten, those left behind by shifting tastes (and those tastes themselves), that I found more of interest; overall, though, I prefer parody (e.g. eds. Dwight MacDonald, William Zaranka) as a means of teasing out such foibles.

V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas: One of those loose tight 19c-style thangs that I have such trouble getting through; in this case the book kinda like the ramshackle house, reading it kinda like being Mr. Biswas. The only other thing I'd read of his was A Bend in the River, long ago ... The Enigma of Arrival tempts, as anything borrowing from de Chirico (Apollinaire suggested the title) would for me (and "a sunlit sea journey ending in a dangerous classical city" brings to mind Broch's The Death of Virgil), but even though Servius' writing smiles, and the family portraiture excels, his style's just not my cuppa, so I may pass on ... anyway, glad perhaps somebody's satisfied now.

M. John Harrison, Nova Swing: A follow-up to Light, more quantum noir, won the award Light should have, doubling up on its lateness, this time generational. Nova Swing, while good, feels like the middle weak link to a trilogy (I can hope), not quite realizing its ambition. Vico Serotonin is tourguide for this pubcrawl among no-hopers nonetheless hopeful (opener). PS: I must mention the Rarebit-Fiend in conjunction.

I'm hoping my jadedness doesn't carry over into reading Donald Barthelme's Flying to America: 45 more stories (ed Kim Herzinger), just out, just in. (Of prior posthumous Herzinger compilations, I found The Teachings of Don B. to be essential, not so Not-Knowing.)

Lincage

2007-10-21T20:27:00.000-04:00

appended 27.10 19:00

Re Toussenel: "Fourier . . . claims to 'join together and enframe, within a single plan, the societary mechanics of the passions with the other known harmonies of the universe,' and for that, he adds, 'we need only have recourse to the amusing lessons to be drawn from the most fascinating objects among the animals and plants.'" Armand and Maublanc, Fourier (Paris 1937), vol. 1, p. 227; citing Fourier, Traité de l'association domestique-agricole (Paris and London, 1822), vol. 1, pp.24-25, and Théorie du l'unité universelle (1834), p. 31. -- Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, [W13.1] (trans Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 1999 and 2002), pp. 641-642.

(NB, e.p.: Barthes extends [W11.2] from Sade and Fourier to Loyola.)

On second thought, I would be remiss in not including translator notes, and in not citing [W13a,6]:
"A series is a regular classification of a genus, species, or group of beings or of objects, arranged symmetrically with respect to one or several of their properties, and on both sides proceeding from a center or pivot, according to an ascending progression on one side, descending on the other, like two flanks of an army . . . There are 'open' series, in which the world (!) of subdivisions is not determined, and 'measured' series, which comprehend, at various levels, 3, 12, 32, 134, 404 subdivisions." Armand and Maublanc, Fourier (Paris 1937), vol. 1, p. 127.

_____________________________

"The nature which develops in human history—the genesis of human society—is man's real nature; hence, since it develops through industry, even though in an estranged form, is true anthropological nature." Karl Marx, Der historische Materialismus: Die Frühschriften, ed. Landshut and Mayer (Liepzig), vol. 1, p. 304 ("Nationalökonomic und Philosophie"). [X1a,3]

On the bungled reception of technology: "The illusions in this sphere are reflected quite clearly in the terminology that is used in it, and in which a mode of thinking, proud of its . . . freedom from myth, discloses the direct opposite of these features. To think that we conquer or control nature is a very childish supposition, since . . . all notions of . . . conquest and subjugation have a proper meaning only if an opposing will has been broken. . . . Natural events, as such, are not subject to the alternatives of freedom and coercion. . . . Although . . . this seems to be just a matter of terminology, it does lead astray those who think superficially in the direction of anthropomorphic misinterpretations, and it does show that the mythological mode of thought is also at home within the natural-scientific worldview." Georg Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes (Liepzig, 1900), pp. 520-521. It is the great distinction of Fourier that he wanted to open the way to a very different conception of technology. [X7a,1]

Wrapping Up

2007-10-13T14:24:00.000-04:00

Stefan Themerson, The Mystery of the Sardine: A 'pataphysical excursus (upon its epigraph: Axioms are mortal, politics is mortal, poetry is mortal,—good manners are immortal.) along similar lines though differently directed than Tom Harris -- little to add to what I said about that, except that it rounds out recent reading nicely, being comparable to Gombrowicz as well. Though it is unsettling that, like Butor, it opens with the color of eyes (just as moles reappeared from Montano's Malady in Akutagawa's "Cogwheels"). I've exhausted Dalkey's reissuance of Themerson, but so much more remains out-of-print ...

But on to other stuff. I've been doing this thang as a reading diary (occasionally interspersed with other comment) for a couple of years now, primarily for my own benefit, as a discipline to think about what I've read, and to tease out bits that don't fall under the rubric of review, criticism, or scholarship, none of which capture what I'm after. It's time for me to take a different tack, though I'm not yet sure in what direction; besides, the reading awaiting on the shelf includes much longer works, so posting would be more infrequent anyway. Even while the obligatory enforcement of habit has sometimes led me to surprise myself, I'd rather pack it in than phone it in. I hope that this has been useful in bringing to attention writing more deserving of it. As to what follows, you'll know when I do.

How we go on

2007-10-07T16:26:00.000-04:00

(appended 8.10 below)

From writer's writers on to writing about the writing life.

Michel Butor, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ape (trans Dominic Di Bernardi): (I think I'm so educated and I'm so civilized ...) The backmatter summarizes this well; what I can add to it is the mirroring of the narrator's adolescence (and confusion between reality and fantasy) with that of modernity (actual timeset) and civilization (recourse to medieval myth). Much is left as an exercise for the reader, as the strands don't pull together too strongly; autobiographical reference becomes more prevalent in later writings, and for Butor, "writing is a way to be several people at the same time". Or perhaps at different times.

Enrique Vila-Matas, Montano's Malady (trans Jonathan Dunne): Praised for its literariness and erudition, but it didn't click for me even on its own terms. The title-cut (of 5 sections) works best, but even then is heavyhanded; the following section, "Dictionary of a Timid Love for Life", is a synthesis more artificial than that of Bartleby & Co.; the denouement, "The Spirit's Salvation", only recovers somewhat in its opposition of German writers cited previously to a German writers' conference. Literarian illness is a chronic complaint, here it shades into hypochondria (and Butor did better with vampires).

Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Mandarins (trans Charles De Wolf): While the earlier stories collected here establish his chops, I found the later ones more compelling. The writings are a multifaceted mirror of a multifaceted writer looking in on himself (a selfcontained Rashomon Effect, evident in "The Life of a Fool" [a hint of rengu here as well]) and his vocation ("O'er a Withered Moor" brings R.E. to bear on the death of the author), and descent into a depressive inevitability (especially "Cogwheels", the last story, published posthumously). This also got coverage, and deserved attention), as part of this summer's Reading the World.

and on ...

Cesar Aira, How I Became a Nun (trans Chris Andrews): Through the Looking Glass Darkly: Little did I think this would be the icing on the cake, a novella that begins and ends in strawberry ice cream. Not so much writing about becoming a writer as such, but as with the first two above, textual manifestation, it trumps Butor (from a six-year-old rather than adolescent perspective), and renders Vila-Matas' disappearance in the text unbecoming. Fundrous!

Say no more

2007-09-25T12:39:00.000-04:00

So I punted commentary on Gombrowicz and Bacacay, which is up there with Ferdydurke, superior to Pornografia & Cosmos where the conceit falls short of extension to novella length. (a recent oeuvreview)

So I continued without pause to fill an important lacuna (not a much-needed gap) in my reading with late Beckett: Nohow On (Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho). A radical reduction, the mover now unmoved, but a progression nonetheless as even more is pared away. These texts have the uncanny property of reading you as you read them. The eye tears. The page tears. I had the most difficulty with the central term of the progression, where most seem to find the last hardest, but Worstward Ho seems to me more straightforward, working towards a climax encapsulating all:

Worse less. By no stretch more. Worse for want of better less. Less best. No. Naught best. Best worse. No. Not best worse. Naught not best worse. Less best worse. No. Least. Least best worse. Least never to be naught. Never to naught be brought. Never by naught be nulled. Unnullable least. Say that best worse. With leastening words say least best worse. For want of worser worst. Unlessenable least best worse.

Everything that follows this is the unsaying of all that preceded it, ending with the missaid unsaid.

It also led me to ponder how Sam might have rewritten something completely different: Evening. She's a goer. No. What I mean? Say no more. Nudge. Nudge. Does she go? Bet she does. Follow me. That's good. A nod good as a wink to a blind bat. Very good. Wicked. Say no more. Wicket? A sport? Bet she does. Likes games. Knew she would. Been around. No. What I mean? Asked knowingly. Snaps. Could be taken on holiday. Still. Insinuating? No. No. Yes. Been around. Done it. Slept. No. No more.

Paragonzo

2007-09-23T16:07:00.000-04:00

Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant (trans Simon Watson Taylor) (Exact Change '94): A 1926 anti-novel meant to provoke his fellow surrealists as much as the critics. I picked it up on spec a couple weeks ago, and brought off the shelf when I happened upon reference to it in Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project (which I've been reading between novels), not knowing how fundamentally it served as the impetus that sent Benjamin down the path towards creating that monument, or rather recreating the monument that appears on the summit in §XIII of Buttes-Chaumont. Much has been made of this (and much more behind jstor or other appurtenances), but his own words perhaps capture it best:

"If I insist on this mechanism of contradiction in the biography of a writer ..., it is because his train of thought cannot bypass certain facts which have a logic different from that of his thought by itself. It is because there is no idea he adheres to that truly holds up ... in the face of certain very simple, elemental facts: that workers are staring down the barrels of cannons aimed at them by the police, that war is threatening, and that fascism is already enthroned ... It behooves a man, for the sake of his dignity, to submit his ideas to these facts, and not to bend these facts, by some conjuring trick, to his ideas, however ingenious." Aragon, "D'Alfred de Vigny à Avdeenko," Commune, 2 (April 20, 1935), pp. 808-809. But it is entirely possible that, in contradicting my past, I will establish a continuity with that of another, which he in turn, as communist, will contradict. In this case, with the past of Louis Aragon, who in this same essay disavows his Paysan de Paris: "And, like most of my friends, I was partial to the failures, to what is monstrous and cannot survive, cannot succeed ... I was like them: I preferred error to its opposite' (p. 807). (N3a,4 trans Eiland & McLaughlin)

But if it is a failure, it succeeds brilliantly, and through "... error which demands that a person contemplate it for its own sake before rewarding him with the evidence about fugitive reality that it alone can give. Surely it must be realized that the face of error and the face of truth cannot fail to have identical features? Error is certainty's constant companion. And anything said about truth may equally well be said about error: the delusion will be no greater. Without the idea of evidence, error would not exist. Without evidence no one would even pause to think about error." (p7, "Preface to a Modern Mythology"). And so he gives evidence; not for him automatic writing, nor the exquisite corpse: "The inner meaning [le fonds] of a surrealist text is of the greatest importance, since it is that inner meaning that gives the text a precious revelatory quality. If you write dreary idiocies following a surrealist method they will remain dreary idiocies. Without possible excuse." (Traité du style, 1928)

Per that textual exhumer and architect, Benjamin, in a letter to Adorno: "I could never read more than two or three pages in bed at night before my heart started to beat so strongly that I had to lay the book aside" ("... excitable boy, they all said / and he dug up her grave and built a cage with her bones ...") (speaking of cages, how it is that it was the Jardin des Plantes that housed both Rilke's panther and Nabokov's ape ["As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage." — afterword to Lolita]) (I'll be visiting an old friend at the Botanical Garden here next week myself) — where was I? Benjamin differentiates his project in convolute N, "On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress":

Delimitation of the tendency of this project with respect to Aragon: whereas Aragon persists within the realm of dream, here the concern is to find the constellation of awakening. While in Aragon there remains an impressionistic element, namely the "mythology" (and this impressionism must be held responsible for the many vague philosophemes in his book), here it is a question of the dissolution of "mythology" into the space of history. That, of course, can happen only through the awakening of a not-yet-conscious knowledge of what has been. (N1,9)

For all this, Benjamin's skeletal construction is built on generalities, the abstractions of others taken as particularity, as elemental fact, which can lapse grandly into error: "'The truth will not escape us,' reads one of Keller's epigrams. He thus formulates the concept of truth with which these presentations take issue." (N3a,1) Rolf Tiedemann's note: "This sentence could not be found among Keller's epigrams." But there is a more comprehensive error, a conflation of infrastructure with superstructure, non-recognition that interpretation is contained within interpenetration:

Obviously, there can be no true sense of the unconscious, if we limit ourselves to the general conception of this faculty. At least, one could not have more than an abstract knowledge, or rather, a logical intuition, of it. But if we consider that the conscious can derive its elements from no other source than the unconscious, then we are obliged to agree that the conscious is contained within the unconscious. It is thus a preliminary sense by the conscious of the unconscious, a sense (of direction) which starts off figuratively but extends itself logically* [*A sort of sentimental backward march.], and which in this way occupies the whole mind, that we may justifiably name the sense of the unconscious. Bearing in mind the definition I gave of myth, it will be seen that this sense is in every respect identical with the mythical sense, that it is indeed the mythical sense. And its description explains to us its power and its effects. (p125, "A Feeling for Nature in the Buttes-Chaumont")

Yet it was Benjamin whom Adorno criticized for Jungianism. But I am presenting this as if there were some dialectic operating between Aragon and Benjamin, when in fact even within the confines of Benjamin's dialectical treatment of historical materialism, there is hidden agreement:

Scientific progress — like historical progress — is in each instance merely the first step, never the second, third, or n + 1 — supposing that these latter ever belonged not just to the workshop of science but to its corpus. That, however, is not in fact the case; for every stage in the dialectical process (like every stage in the process of history itself), conditioned as it always is by every stage preceding, brings into play a fundamentally new tendency, which necessitates a fundamentally new treatment. The dialectical method is thus distinguished by the fact that, in leading to new objects, it develops new methods, just as form in art is distinguished by the fact that it develops new forms in delineating new contents. It is only from without that a work of art has one and only one form, that a dialectical treatise has one and only one method. (N10.1)

Compare with Aragon's prefactory conclusion, his defining myth, to see whether the face of truth and the face of error share the same features:

I no longer wish to refrain from the errors of my fingers, the errors of my eyes. I know now that these errors are not just booby traps but curious paths leading towards a destination that they alone can reveal to me. There are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses. Admirable gardens of absurd beliefs, forebodings, obsessions and frenzies. Unknown, ever-changing gods take shape there. I shall contemplate these leaden faces, these hemp-seeds of the imagination. How beautiful you are in your sand-castles, you columns of smoke! New myths spring up beneath every step we take. Legend begins where man has lived, where he lives. All that I intend to think about from now on is these despised transformations. Each day the modern sense of existence becomes subtly altered. A mythology ravels and unravels. It is a knowledge, a science of life open only to those who have no training in it. It is a living science which begets itself and makes away with itself. I am already twenty-six years old, am I still privileged to take part in the miracle? How long shall I retain this sense of the marvellous suffusing everyday existence? I see it fade away in every man who advances into his own life as though along an always smoother road, who advances into the world's habits with an increasing ease, who rids himself progressively of the taste and texture of the unwonted, the unthought of. To my great despair, this is what I shall never know.

Aragon is very particular in his explication of detail in "The Passage de l'Opéra", less so in "A Feeling for Nature ..." but still well-grounded underneath his 'vague philosophemes'; these are framed by "Preface to a Modern Mythology" and "The Peasant's Dream", dissolving into a series of maxims. Paris Peasant, which does not depend on Benjamin's use of it for its value (though perhaps for its readership), remains unacknowledged as anti-novel, only mentioned as proto-anti-novel at best, another measure of its success.

In my own case, the bookshop is the arcade.

Witold Gombrowicz, Bacacay (trans Bill Johnston): Answering the question of what one could possibly read after that. What can I say?

Two books and a library journal

2007-09-16T20:59:00.000-04:00

Two excellent novels, perhaps not appreciated (by me or by most, who's to say?) for the right reasons:

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart: Now more highly regarded for its subject than its form, which seems less remarkable, but which then posed a particular problem, as the novel was an exogenous, assimilative Western structure. (To what extent does this reflect return from exile to find one's land banished?) But, per Achebe, on writing in English: "... in the logic of colonization and decolonization it is actually a very powerful weapon in the fight to regain what was yours. English was the language of colonization itself. It is not simply something you use because you have it anyway; it is something which you can actively claim to use as an effective weapon, as a counterargument to colonization." (from subscription-only Atlantic; cf 1994 & 2007 interviews). The cultural argument hangs on religion as wedge and fulcrum; 50 years on, the African bishops are a dominant conservative force in the Church. Go figure.

Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker: Continuing/bringing up to date my reading on Haiti (Carpentier, Green — her preface to the former put her on my list), here with a diaspora disfigured by what is inescapable, memory and identity, unusual in that the exiles constitute both oppressed and oppressor; unusual too in that the strongly interconnected short stories fully work stand-alone as well. (I was glad to have interposed both Kiš & Pekić: the latter's "The Time of Miracles/of Dying" corresponding to if not with Danticat's "The Book of the Dead/of Miracles" — Vodou is sublimated throughout.) Haiti (not just the land) bears a multitude of scars, some within. (Interview.)

On to other matter: I attended the Thursday night NBCC panel at HousingWorks' UsedBookCafe in Soho (helping alleviate homelessness and HIV) on literary magazines disappearing into the aether at libraries; another attendee describes the proceedings (via EdRants) so I don't have to; I'll merely note that much of the discussion about aesthetics and other differences between print and screen and other shortsightedness is long established territory, and amend with a couple further questions from the audience:
Q: To the librarians on the panel: How many lit mags do your libraries subscribe to in print? A: NYPL, 800-1,000; Manhattan CC/CUNY, 5.
My Q: Can Print-on-Demand technology, perhaps non-profit driven, help? A: POD carries a number of other problems, beyond the current state of the technology, such as associated rights etc ...
While this issue is auxilary to the broader NBCC campaign, it is to my mind more important: Much of what appears may be as ephemeral as newspaper, but a much larger proportion (however small, not negligible) lasts. As it is with authors, there are always more small presses than can economically serve readers. Costs are shared across many institutions which are being squeezed, libraries not least among them. But the technological solution for reducing costs does not work as well as it may for scientific or scholarly work (where abstracts provide the browser the gist). It was also a pleasure to put a face to the writings of Scott McLemee, who added this site to his blogroll on the occasion of my dismissive comment there (along the lines that newspapers are market-, not issue-driven) on the broader campaign.

Nouvelles en trois lignes

2007-09-09T16:19:00.000-04:00

In 1906, tall, skinny anarchist Félix Fénéon took France's measure, an eyebrow raised, brought up short when it came up short.

I began a comedy

2007-09-08T21:53:00.000-04:00

John Crowley, Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land: An imagining of Byron reimagining himself in novel form, exploring variations on established formats by both Byron & Crowley (as both are wont to do). "The Evening Land", annotated by his daughter Ada Lovelace, comes to light through rediscovered papers, comprising a parallel armature, an e-pistolary story which, though refracting Byronic attributes into modernity, functions primarily as didactic apparatus. The compulsion to explain belies a lack of confidence in the art or in the audience, which, for the former at least, is unjustified; similar purpose could have been better served by bracketing by modern introduction (here at the end) and afterword, and further development of Ada's notes. But the core, ventrisoliloquizing Byron, makes up for all that. (Post title from epigraph, from Byron's journal: "I began a comedy, and burnt it because the scene ran into reality—a novel, for the same reason. In rhyme, I can keep more away from facts; but the thought always runs through, through . . . yes, yes, through." And I was amused by Harold Bloom's blurb, given his appearance in the armature, and nearby, by Crowley's anagrammatic agent Roony J. Welch, rather close by the by to that of a Columbia [sometimes even District of] bookreviewer of my cyberacquaintance.)

Daniel Dennett exceeds his competence ...

2007-09-03T16:16:00.000-04:00

... in a Technology Review piece on chess & AI, performing a reductio ad absurdam on his own argument, which belies a cluelessness at several levels, not least in provocateurship. As with much polemic, it is seeded with some reasonable observations but is distorted by tendentiousness and weakness of argument buttressed by spleenful rhetoric. It would deserve a thorough fisking, were it to rise to that level; but the interesting questions that could be raised and investigated, such as What is cognition? what is thought? what is intelligence? what is consciousness? and how do they depend upon one another? are not attributes displayed by Dennett here, much less broached. So I'll do so only in part. I don't have any brief against Dennett or his views generally; I just think that he here gives more comfort to the other side of the question. While he somewhat justifiably claims that critics have moved the goalposts, he then proceeds to do so himself, more radically, complaining all the while, and in the process scoring an own goal.

"Chess requires brilliant thinking, supposedly the one feat that would be--forever--beyond the reach of any computer. But for a decade, human beings have had to live with the fact that one of our species' most celebrated intellectual summits--the title of world chess champion--has to be shared with a machine, Deep Blue, which beat Garry Kasparov in a highly publicized match in 1997."
Error of fact: The title of world chess champion was never at stake in an exhibition match. And the premise that chess requires brilliant thinking rather than massive computation would be just what Deep Blue's accomplishment refutes. (Oh, but we're in the popular imagination. So massive computation is brilliant thinking.)

"The best computer chess is well nigh indistinguishable from the best human chess, except for one thing: computers don't know when to accept a draw."
Um, no. The best computer chess makes moves inexplicible to a human, moves which may well be objectively best but which come from no formulation of a strategic plan. The best human chess paradoxically often arises from recovery from earlier less-than-best moves (e.g., deceiving the opponent along a false trail). The bit about not knowing when to accept a draw is specious, since it is a matter of convenience in play versus humans.

"When Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997, many commentators were tempted to insist that its brute-force search methods were entirely unlike the exploratory processes that Kasparov used when he conjured up his chess moves. But that is simply not so. Kasparov's brain is made of organic materials and has an architecture notably unlike that of Deep Blue, but it is still, so far as we know, a massively parallel search engine that has an outstanding array of heuristic pruning techniques that keep it from wasting time on unlikely branches."
Seizing upon the entirely unlike, this commentator is tempted to insist that the process is exactly the same, except for the differences? This is pruning an argument rather close to topiary. What matters is not whether the heuristic is explicit or implicit, what matters is whether the heuristic is imposed or self-generated.

"The fact is that the search space for chess is too big for even Deep Blue to explore exhaustively in real time, so like Kasparov, it prunes its search trees by taking calculated risks, and like Kasparov, it often gets these risks precalculated. Both the man and the computer presumably do massive amounts of "brute force" computation on their very different architectures. After all, what do neurons know about chess? Any work they do must use brute force of one sort or another."
The fact is that computers exhaust a large fraction of the search space locally, while the human chessplayer's subconscious calculation is highly inexact (though refined by pattern recognition honed by experience) and of course the conscious calculation only traverses a sliver of the search space, and even that not fully. There is a difference (and interplay) between filtration and selection. But define "brute force" broadly enough, and everything is merely a matter of computation -- welcome back to the clockwork universe.

"It may seem that I am begging the question by describing the work done by Kasparov's brain in this way, but the work has to be done somehow, and no way of getting it done other than this computational approach has ever been articulated. It won't do to say that Kasparov uses "insight" or "intuition," since that just means that Kasparov himself has no understanding of how the good results come to him. So since nobody knows how Kasparov's brain does it--least of all Kasparov himself--there is not yet any evidence at all that Kasparov's means are so very unlike the means exploited by Deep Blue."
Yes, begging the question. No, there is abundant evidence that Kasparov's and Deep Blue's means differ substantively, even though we can specify little of the former. Drawing analogies between mental and computational processes can help elucidate the former, but the ability to draw analogies is one distinguishing characteristic of intelligence, however defined. Add a meaningless pawn to a chess position, and the human recognizes the similarity while the computer relaunches a full analysis. (Add a meaningful pawn and the human may well be misled.)

But Dennett proves incapable of analogizing, relying instead on the brute force of rhetoric. The whole silicon/protein dichotomy is a red herring: The difference between emergent behaviors of designed algorithms versus adaptive systems is what's in play. (Should some cellular automata be considered more intelligent because they give rise to more complex behavior? Or simpler?) The latter may or may not reduce into a some algorithmic architecture, and might usefully be modelled by such. But there is no evidence that they must be algorithmic, much less designed.

(Older speculations around this topic, in fact and fiction.)

Addendum: On second thought, I'll save you a click on the first link:
Early attempts to replicate human modes of analysis were (and still are) an abject failure. The way forward was to make the best use of what computers do best, iteration and computation. (And a third component, memory, as applied to opening play and checking endgames against known results.) Iteration involved building a tree of all possible moves from a given position, defining a search space, but the combinatorial explosion in potential moves limits how far out this can go. The computational aspect is in evaluating the resulting positions in terms of balance (not just material, but control of space and other tactical and positional factors) and stability (to determine whether to evaluate positions further down the tree; for a simple instance, if there are checks available to either side). Optimizing the interaction between iteration and computation is what lends strength to the result; it also governs strategies for human play against computers, in which long-term strategic considerations, beyond the horizon that such iterated computation can detect, become the tactic.
To which I'll add: Consider chess problems of the "mate in n moves" variety. Computers have outperformed humans in solving these for decades; computers exhaust the search space as a first resort, humans as a last resort. Is this then the same process?

For Thine is the Boredom

2007-09-02T21:44:00.000-04:00

Helen Gardner, The Art of T.S.Eliot: A study investigating the musicality of "The Four Quartets", extended into a consideration of all Eliot's poesy, which lacks the tautness and sharp insight of the original study. I read this with half an eye to Pale Fire, in which reference to both "The Waste Land" and "The Four Quartets" plays its part (cf prior posts on poet/critics and poetic criticism); the fact that the gardener has a key role in PF made it seem more than likely this was no coincidence; but as it turns out, it was (even though Maud Bodkin gets a footnote). Where Gardner begins to go off the rails is when she takes on Eliot's career, and approach to faith, in the light of comments he made on Matthew Arnold in "The Use of Poetry", in particular:
...We mean all sorts of things, I know, by Beauty. But the essential advantage for the poet is not, to have a beautiful world with which to deal; it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory. The vision of the horror and the glory was denied to Arnold, but he knew something of the boredom.
Gardner hones in on "the boredom, and the horror, and the glory" as the trajectory of Eliot's development. But she misses the consonance with "the kingdom, and the power, and the glory", and so the significance with respect to both Arnold and Eliot. On the other hand it did lead me to Donald Justice's take in memory of the unknown poet ... but as a "landmark study" this is just a historical landmark.

Better that it had never been written

2007-09-01T16:43:00.000-04:00

Borislav Pekić, The Time of Miracles (trans Lovett F. Edwards): Lest the header mislead, this is an excellent book; Pekić seems something of a Serbian Saramago (whose Gospel According to Jesus Christ I have yet to read, but it's on the list). Pekić's foreword opens with a passage from Ecclesiastes, then recapitulates the Old Testament up through Isaiah's prophecy, concluding
And behold, the Scripture was fulfilled.
He came during the reign of Octavian Augustus.
This is the true story about him, his teaching and his disciples, his miracles and his passion. This is the true tale of how his new kingdom above all kingdoms was born. [...]
The story asks (sorry, interrogates) for whom were the miracles performed? the prophecies fulfilled? and against whom? and the sacrifices? in whose service?

The book is split into two parts, "The Time of Miracles" and "The Time of Dying", each part limited omniscient narratives (of miracles, of deaths) bracketed by first-person accounts (or testaments): "Simon, son of Jona, by the Lord's will Peter, apostle and servant of Our Lord Jesus Christ" opens, and "Hamri Elcanaan, servant and friend" of Lazurus closes the first part, while Judas' bookkeeping, the longest chapter of the novel, begins the second part, which ends with the account told from the cross (the only chapter in which the idea exceeds the execution). Judas' insistence that the prophecies be carried out to the letter is the driving force behind the story; thus, the title to this post, so it is written.

So, too, an afterword. According to Angela Richter, in Serbian Studies 15.1 (Pekić issue [spoilert]), in a '91 interview, asked whether in retrospect he would configure Christ differently than in '65, he answered:
Certainly I would. Nowadays, I wouldn't write this book. I wouldn't commit such a sin, not because of my religious beliefs but because of a human being's point of view, because even back then I believed in God—the only problem I had was with the holy nature of Christ. If I would have chosen for my literary effort to get straight with the communist Messianism, with every ideological Messianism, or any other historical paradigm, then I would have expressed my truth using Aesop's language, which, at that time, was the only language I had access to. I made the worst choice possible. For a long time I wanted to distance myself from the book. However, I recognised that such acts are worthless. What's done is done. You cannot delete something that has become part of the Book of Life.

(Excerpts from Parts I and II, courtesy of his widow, Ljiljana Pekić.)

Quick takes

2007-08-26T00:26:00.000-04:00

Gilbert Sorrentino, The Moon in its Flight: "I have attempted to tell this story many times over the past years, the past decades, for that matter. I've not been able to bring it off. I've never been able to invent—inhabit, perhaps—the proper narrational attitude. I begin to invent plausible situations that soon falsify everything, or unlikely situations that, just as soon, parody everything." So begins "In Loveland", but it applies to much of this short story collection: See Derik Badman & Dan Green for elaboration, with which (or whom, whatevar) I largely but not fully concur, in part because it's interesting to see how (if not why) the particular storyline fails to gel (if it had, perhaps into a novel? anyway, of these, the last is best), but on the whole this book feels the least of what I've read of his (which is a lot, but not all, and not his poetry at all). For the rest, "A Beehive Arranged on Humane Principles" and a couple of shorter pieces feel Barthelmean rather than Sorrentinose.

RSB has a couple RCF pieces on him, by Andrews and Creeley (cf Creeley's afterword to Splendide-Hôtel); also, a '94 interview with Laurence.

Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World (trans Harriet de Onis): "Magical realism" begins here (as lo real maravilloso in Carpentier's original preface to this novella), and here is much sparer and so more powerful than it later became (in Boom works such as The Explosion in the Cathedral—b'dum-pssh—). The life of the protagonist, Ti Noël, spans the Haitian slave rebellion against whites, then blacks, ending with mulattoes in the synthascendent, while religion shades from Catholic to Vodou — written while the former waged holy war on the latter. This is less to the point than the animism bracketing the story.

Graham Greene, The Comedians: I'd put off reading this until had a better sense of Haitian history, for which the preceding sufficed. Planned as an "entertainment", it became much more, a book that had an effect, and yet the cycle continues. More timely if less timeless than Carpentier. I suppose who the comedians are depends upon the stage set for them.

Danilo Kiš, The Encyclopedia of the Dead (trans Michael Henry Heim): I usually don't come back so quickly to an author, but Kiš is exceptional. The stand-out stories are those influenced by Borges: The title cut combines Aleph and Library, while "The Book of Kings and Fools", whose subject may have inspired Tlön, suppresses some details while others are imaginatively conjectured. Most of the stories derive from prior art or incident, but others (e.g., "The Story of the Master and the Disciple") seem to converge upon it. Kiš provides a postscript commenting on each story in turn (he notes the LDS genealogy project wrt "Encyclopedia", after the fact; I seem to recall Borges noting it in a similar context, don't know where). So rather than excerpting any of the stories, I'll include the last words of this testament:

"The reference to the 'arch-materialist Diderot' derives doubtless from the following letter, which I discovered thanks to Madame Elisabeth de Fontenay: 'People who have loved each other in life and ask to be buried side by side are not perhaps so mad as is generally supposed. Perhaps their ashes press together, commingle, and unite . . . What do I know? Perhaps they have not lost all feeling, all memory of their original state; perhaps a remnant of warmth and life continues to smolder in them. O Sophie, if I might still hope to touch you, feel you, unite with you, merge with you when we are no more, if there is a law of affinity between our elements, if we were destined to form a single being, if in the train of centuries I were meant to become one with you, if the molecules of your moldering lover had the power to stir and move about and go in search of your molecules dispersed in nature! Leave me this wild fancy; it is so dear to me, it would ensure me an eternity in you and with you . . .'"

Optical Allusion

2007-08-18T13:15:00.000-04:00

Claude Simon, Triptych (trans Helen R. Lane): A compendium of film techniques, especially editing, structurally carrying a three-reeler of three interspliced narratives, in time as well as settings: rural, urban-industrial, Mediterranean resort (plus a circus act), from an "I am a movie camera" perspective. Simon doesn't miss a trick – the first two settings include projection (in a barn, a theatre) and the third, a movie set – and it's all done with wit (e.g., film rabbiting in its sprockets). But for me, it's more construction than novel, its subject matter all a matter of perspective on what ultimately falls flat, and all that cross-cutting goes against the grain; cinema buffs may find it interesting, but then by and large they'd rather wait for the movie (subtitled not dubbed). Speaking of projection, an academic take on blind spots and afterimages; more worth reading are an over- and interview.

I can name that tune in no notes

2007-08-12T12:17:00.000-04:00

It's a bit scary when you can guess what's coming next on the radio from crowd noise ... I never owned any of Frampton's tunes, but just knew that "Do you feel like we do" was about to be borne.

(Sorry about the prior post not being as crisp as I would have liked, something there I failed to articulate, it'll have to do.)

In the beginning I left messages in the aether

2007-08-11T22:18:00.000-04:00

David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress: Markson recently released The Last Novel, fourth book in a trilogy of which the seed was contained in this novel, which bears more palpable fruit. (Not that I've read them, but from the descriptions I've encountered I'd rather be working my way through Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project, which, in fact, I am, between novels.) As I recall, when this first came out my interest was subdued by a co-programmer who was (is) a philosophy ex-post-doc (ergo propter?) (but as I think of it, perhaps ex-ante) (which is not to say Kantian) (I'm just not sure about his thesis) (if there was one) (but this was after that). But these are philosophical investigations of another order, or disorder: The narrator is not unreliable but her perception, memory, cognition are impaired. Prior episodes of madness have completely alienated her from human (even animal) contact, except through art and music (not reading), in which her interests lie not in the works but in the underlying artists (the only painting described in detail is by an unsigned and unknown artist), making for a sort of second-order engagement which is overlaid upon many of Wittgenstein's words (as material for Markson's bricolage) and overlaps his conceptions. It's a nice conceit, well executed in a brilliant comic confusion, though the conclusion doesn't satisfy, though I can't think of a better way to wrap it up. Beyond the coherence of the narrator in her in- or decoherence, there is the second-hand apprehension of literature via popular culture, context without content (even Pynchon's liner notes are online these days), pointed observation on Culture as well as on problems of depiction and language, which overrides the cheap thrills of recognition of allusions beyond the narrator's ken, a sort of brain candy that I suspect is more prevalent in Markson's later work; I'm now more interested in what preceded this. To turn to the author's story rather than his works, his role in rehabilitating Lowry (via thesis) and in refloating an unrecognized Gaddis inclines me more favorably towards his own efforts.

Other linkage:
Tabbi's reading of and interview with Markson
Badman's overview
TEV, likewise
A more recent interview

My top ten, and what of them I haven't read

2007-08-07T23:26:00.000-04:00

The 10 20c authors (alluded to in prior post) I've chosen below are those I've been compelled to read just about everything that I could get my hands on; not necessarily the best of what the 20th century has to offer (though I think there's substantial overlap). But I haven't read all that each has offered, anyway (and only of that in English translation, as applicable) -- what follows is what's been left out so far:

Nabokov: Top spot in my book. Yes, I've even read the plays (indifferent though they are) and the translations (Igor, Lermontov) (not to mention copious secondary material), with only one monumental work left: Eugene Onegin was to have been a summer project, but other reading interceded. Actually, I once breezed through the Text (V.1), but a proper reading with the Commentary (V.2) awaits.

Borges: Alastair Ried's translations of unselected poetry, the out-of-print collaborations (excepting The Chronicles of Bustos-Domecq), the interviews.

These two stand apart, not only through their own writings, but also in extending my reading through both critical essay and literary allusion.

The 3IE:
Joyce: Finnegans Wake still intimidates from the shelf.
Beckett: Nohow On, Happy Days, and the miscellany.
O'Brien: The Poor Mouth, for fear it suffers in translation.

Pynchon: maybe the occasional NYRB essay, is all.

Eco: Of the fiction, none unread. Of the rest, of what's in print and aside from children's books: Kant and the Platypus, History of Beauty, Thomas Aquinas, Joyce, and I've only really browsed A Theory of Semiotics & Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language.

OuLiPo:
Queneau: Exercises in Style (a self-imposed constraint).
Perec: on nupraisal, nomissions.

Kafka: Amerika, though it's been a very long time since I've read the longer works.

Were I to add a poet to the above, it would be Pessoa (without omission in translation); a playwright, Stoppard (a few missed, most notably the latest); a critic, Bakhtin (not Volosinov/Medvedev, if that counts) ... and if he doesn't qualify as philosopher, then Wittgenstein (Remarks on Mathematics, lest it mess with my dayjob ... more anon). But among the 'greats' (those on just about every top ten list, except here, since it's my accounting of tastes, and I don't deny the greatness of e.g. Woolf or Faulkner), it's only Proust I haven't cracked (yet).

Precursors

2007-08-04T22:00:00.000-04:00

Much virtual ink has been metaphorically spilt over what should properly be considered the predecessor to the blog, whether as medium or as genre. In the latter case, that these are pieces for publication argues against diarists or occasional essayists, and for journalists of regular 'occasional' pieces casting their lines for larger audiences (than, for examples, 'zines). Two exemplars follow:

Flann O'Brien, At War: Among my top 10 20c authors, Eire is overrepresented by the Three Irish Exiles (3IE), Joyce, Beckett, and O'Brien. The latter, a case of internal exile, from himself as well, not least in name (Brian O'Nolan wrote these pieces for the Irish Times under the byline Myles na gCopaleen) but in displacement -- the mask slips only to reveal another. Here he is simultaneously Keats and Chapman:

See, I'm at the window now. I pull aside a corner of the blind and peer out. Dismal rain. A sodden fugure us making his way through the murk. He is approaching the house, he is going to call. Who can it be? I can scarcely make out his face but there is something familiar about his stride. The clothes too I have seen before. Now I see him! I know who it is. It is myself! I rush down and open the door just as the ring comes. Immediately I am confronted with the question.

'What were you doing at the window?'

'I was just looking out for myself,' I nimbly reply.

This is the third collection from Cruiskeen Lawn, of earlier pieces not quite as scintillating as the others (more excerpts). But even then he knew whereby a tale hangs off an execrable pun (e.g., As for drink, they tell me it can give you a red nose, a complaint that can be passed on to your children. Damn nosa, how red it is!* / *damnosa hereditas, a blighted legacy, but explaining the joke puts the humor out of its misery).

O'Brien's style (especially the cathecismic) has been pastiched by a number of bloggers, but without the feel for pacing and the superb absurd placing of the throwaway bit of erudition; I've indulged in it in bookchat myself, but like much else it was the most fun the first time. (The link may be self-indulgent, but. Best. Bookchat. Evah.)

Clarice Lispector, The Foreign Legion (trans G Pontiero): Short stories plus crônicas, the latter having that blog-journal feel. Lispector's stories vary (at least in translation) but her descriptions of that which words cannot capture about childhood ("The Misfortunes of Sofia", "The Message") are unmatched, though she's better known for her works on the worse off; both are well represented in the crônicas, as is the writing process and critical commentary. That these pieces, or fragments, come from her 'bottom-drawer' doesn't mean they're just shelf-liner. Here, she seems to anticipate Eno's ambient music more than reflecting Cage's 4'33" (though No.2 seems relevant as an Oblique Strategy):

In Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, I woke up in the middle of the night, as peaceful as if I were awakening from a peaceful bout of insomnia. And I heard an ethereal music which I had heard once before. It was extremely sweet and without any melody, yet it consisted of sounds that could be orchestrated into melody. It was undulating and uninterrupted. The sounds emerged like fifteen thousand stars. I felt certain that I was capturing the most primitive vibrations of air, as if silence were speaking. Silence was speaking. It had a low and constant pitch without any edginess, and it was criss-crossed with horizontal, oblique sounds. Thousands of resonances which had the same pitch and the same intensity, the same relaxed pace, a night of bliss.

It resembled a trailing veil of sound, with variations largely of shadow and light, sometimes of density (such as when the veil fluttered and folded over). The music was incredibly beautiful, and impossible to describe because there are no words to denote silence. The composer's presence was not felt; only angels in countless groups, impersonal as angels, anonymous as angels. When silence manifests itself, there is no warning; silence simply manifests itself in silence. As if you were to ask: what is the number 1357217? And this number were to come forward and reveal itself as 1357217. Silence can achieve the maximum: by becoming evident. And so my hotel room was inundated with the choral song of silence which became evident. And I was blessed in this manner. But I have no desire to renew the experience.

The rest is silence.

Rough Stretch

2007-08-02T19:42:00.000-04:00

One of these days, one of these days isn't going to be one of those days.

AGora

2007-07-29T21:29:00.000-04:00

Rabindranath Tagore, Gora (trans Sujit Mukheejee): There is much to say (and I've no doubt much has been said, though perhaps not in English letters) about the various social aspects to this novel: colonialism/nationalism, religion/traditionalism, caste (an -ism not quite racial), feminism, all interacting towards a fundamental understanding of the hierarchical obligations of individual, family, community and society. It also served me as introduction to the Bengali Renaissance through its foremost proponent (a family franchise), so far-sighted in liberal reform as to invite neglect, so much has it become unremarkable, preassumed, part of a general atmosphere, and at the same time overshadowed in world history by western social reform movements (which deferred consideration of its imperial subjects until much later). (Despite Meenakski Mukherjee's introductory remarks to the contrary, this aspect of the novel is predictably polemic, in its small-l liberal way. But the Sahitya Akademi edition provides excellent ancillary material for those, like me, unfamiliar with the milieu.) There is a particular brilliance in having Gora's birth at the time of the Sepoy Rebellion invoke another dominion of British Empire (J.G.Farrell led me here; now it rebounds). But the larger brilliance is in constructing a dialectic within the frame of the coming-of-age of the two protagonists, Gora and Binoy, and their romances with members of a Brahmo Samaj family. (Unusually for the time, the intercession of the distaff characters [and not just the objects of attraction] is decisive.) This is a delicate balance, sustained through the first half of Gora, but compromised thereafter by the exigencies of plot and purpose, leading to a tailing-off (not unlike e.g. V2 of Musil's The Man without Qualities, though plot wasn't a consideration) as the supporting cast retreats into unidimensionality, and to deus-ex-machinations. But I quibble: There is a deep irony that Gora should be the only major character to go beyond the environs of the urban educated class, and again in Binoy's high degree of sensitivity to polite constraint -- if anything, the novel's development follows that of Binoy most closely, but the denouement might be said to expose Gora as it does pasteboard (a self-conscious comment upon the novel?). But as the story does with its protagonists, Gora engages both the head and heart of the reader, and in approximately that order.

Addendum 31.7: A reader closer to this than I points out that the underpinnings of the story combine elements of both Vedic and Greek mythology -- in reflecting the Brahmo Samaj syncresis, it strongly mitigates my quibbling above (as do biographical aspects beyond my ken). As I learn more, I better appreciate the scale and scope of Rabindranath Tagore's (and his family's) accomplishments, and the influence, however muted, that persists.

An Open Letter to Myself

2007-07-22T20:13:00.000-04:00

Dear me,

Some reading material bears close introspection:

John Williams' Stoner: A man of the land (both poor) finds his calling, and refuge, at University in English Literature. The hook is Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, setting the tone, as Stoner, a self-assessed indifferent student, scholar, and teacher, despite obstacles met with a detachment born of and shielding a love of his subject, still contributes marginally to the literature by bringing that love into another love, brief as Indian summer, an instructor with whom his affair intertwines her thesis. Dickstein's recent NYT re-review calls it 'the perfect novel' (no, but very very good -- the style and structure is spare but loaded, the erudition worn lightly has depth, and it is surely a page-turner), and points to (but doesn't link) Irving Howe's New Republic and C.P.Snow's Financial Times pieces (404), Dan Wakefield's profile/interview, and Steve Almond's appreciation. Williams' own assessment of his protagonist, from another late interview, is included in the nyrb intro:
"I think he's a real hero. A lot of people who have read the novel think that Stoner had such a sad and bad life. I think he had a very good life. He had a better life than most people do, certainly. He was doing what he wanted to do, he had some feeling for what he was doing, he had some sense of the importance of the job he was doing. He was a witness to values that are important ... The important thing in the novel to me is Stoner's sense of a job. Teaching to him is a job -- a job in the good and honorable sense of the word. His job gave him a particular kind of identity and made him what he was ... It's the love of the thing that's essential. And if you love something, you're going to understand it. And if you understand it, you're going to learn a lot. The lack of that love defines a bad teacher ... You never know all the results of what you do. I think it all boils down to what I was trying to get at in Stoner. You've got to keep the faith. The important thing is to keep the tradition going, because the tradition is civilization."
This points towards a didactic aspect, but with a curious omission: For all that Stoner is defined as a teacher, none of his students merits more than passing mention. In the only extended classroom scene, only the aforementioned instructor (soon to be lover, auditing the seminar) and the interloping protégé of another professor (soon to be department chair, with whom Stoner will be at odds) are more than walk-ons. An experiment in pedagogy succeeds primarily in relieving an undue burden imposed by the department chair. It isn't that Stoner isn't diligent about his responsibilities to his students, just that these are subordinated to the institutional ramifications. This says something about both the institution of the University and the institution of the Hero. And, at another remove, that of the Novel.

But I've said enough about all that, especially since you've read it too. Sometimes your correspondent just needs to get these things out in the open (note those 'things' in the above quote). Coming a generation after Williams, I find myself at variance with him on many points -- things have changed. I have long resisted identifying vocation as defining self, perhaps because I have had no calling as such. Instead, I was fortunate to find a venue in which my analytical abilities (cf the précis bridging the chapbook and reading journal this became) were found useful, even valuable, and have made my own minor, incremental contributions to the profession I landed in. I bring the same kind of skills to my haphazard study of literature, a field in which no apologetics is necessary, pace Ray (repressing giggle); whether these are appropriately deployed is beyond me ("When all you've got is a jackhammer, everything looks like a street"). To my way of looking at things, writing remains an amateur profession (so too my reading); Nabokov was consummate in this regard (aside: from the latest NYRB: "... partake of the spirit not so much of the chess player, who naturally focuses on plausible lines of play, as of the chess problemist, who relishes positions that wouldn't normally arise. He shares with the problemist both the love of ingenuity for its own sake and a penchant for outlandish configurations." No, not him. Louis MacNeice, per Brad Leithauser [not online]). Literature is no less important a part of my life than the dayjob (though not as day-to-day, though over a goodly stretch it wasn't every day); blogging about it is subsidiary (wholly pwned). That it can also be a living, well, for a lucky few -- talent and motivation aren't sufficient, and what persists may never have made the author a dime -- but the institution makes for many middlemen, where the insufficient isn't even necessary, while some of the better middlemen operated outside its ambit (e.g., Wilson, Mencken). The institution certainly eases access to the literature, but, as Williams says at the end of the Wakefield piece, "You know, novels are `useless,' really, we don't have to have them, like food or shelter, but we make them anyway, and making those `useless' things, that's what separates us from the animals." It also provided the platform from which Williams (and co-NBA'73 winner John Barth, whose interpretations helped put me on to this mind-altering substance) could operate. To me, the NBCC campaign would have been better directed towards an institutional problem all along (and btw it's not just the publishers; these guys blog).

Enough for now. Don't be a stranger.

Very truly yours,

Yours truly

PS Also read Thomas Bernhard's The Voice Imitator (trans K.J.Northcott; excerpts): The review[s] a bit harsh relative to the scope, though it doesn't measure up to Merwin or Manganelli for example. One wonders whether the translator has written anything himself. (Probably does interpretations.)

Untied Nations

2007-07-15T00:54:00.000-04:00

Danilo Kis, Hourglass (trans Ralph Manheim): A novel bookended between prologue and table of contents, a club sandwich interleaving travel scenes, notes of a madman, criminal investigation and a witness interrogated. The form owes something to Pinget, the title (perhaps more) to Bruno Schulz, but dissociation, disintegration, and magnification of petty slights in the midst of the grossest indignity of the modern age are Kis' own. Noah is given prominence, Shoah remains distant except in more particular emanations, as in a Jan '42 massacre:
The brain of Dr. Freud, the surgeon. A chunk of frozen, gelatinous pulp, perfectly intact, looking like a lamb's brain served whole (at the Danubius Restaurant in Vienna, 1930). The snow, trampled all about by heavy soldier's boots, seemed only slightly melted around the brain, whose convolutions, comparable to those of a walnut, and network of fine capillaries were clearly visible. The brain lay in the snow at the corner of Miletic Street and Greek School Street, and I Heard someone say to whom, that is, to whose skull, it had belonged. So this was the brain of Dr. Freud, the surgeon: a small snowy island between paths trampled into the snow, an intelligence torn from its cranial husk as a mollusc is torn from its emerald shell, a trembling, throbbing mass, lying in the snow as in a refrigerator. But (seeing as how I knew whom it belonged to) it was nothing like the brain an idiot in a glass container; it was the brain of a genius, preserved and protected in nature's incubator, so that inside (the incubator), freed from its corporeal shackles, a dark pearl might develop, the pearl of thought at last materialized, crystallized. from Notes of a Madman
No excerpt stands alone, and the sensibility is often closer to that of Victor Klemperer's diary, but this is all the more remarkable in its construction, per interview (cf. Hemon on Kis): the end is truly cumulative, everything leading to it necessarily and sufficiently.

Andrei Platonov, The Foundation Pit (trans Mirra Ginsburg): High expectations foundered as this really didn't get off the ground for me. There's a sharp divide between the lyrical and satirical in Platonov, and however brave (no, foolhardy) the latter, however clever its construction from the then regnant (google wants to know if I meant pregnant) slogans (with which I have only a passing familiarity; A Cheng's The Chess Master, while similarly infused with particulars of the Cultural Revolution, does not depend so heavily upon them) and from characters drawn from Russian literary history (but alas only as types), however clever the synecdoche represented by the provincial project, it remains pasteboard, flat however well articulated. Not to say it doesn't have its moments, and its scope exceeds its slender length, but in the end it just doesn't work, for me anyway.

My own private Zembla

2007-07-07T20:17:00.000-04:00

My reading follows an odd course. Not by accident is this thing called "Stochastic Bookmark": my explorations of literature are not determined by any extant map, rather by what I happen upon by chance, and the notes I compile along the way are just what strike me as significant, though the observations may not be so valid statistically. So that these notes may serve others, I ~~tread~~ plod a narrow path between review and criticism, on the one hand giving some assessment while avoiding spoilers for those who haven't read the work in question, and on the other indicating some aspect that is not evident on the surface but which adds to an my appreciation of the text. Part of the task I set myself involves drawing connections to what else I've read, however tenuous, as was the case in my prior post; but sometimes these seem to imply a multifaceted network which, like a spiderweb, is both fragile and sturdy, deriving strength from a design invisible from a fly's-eye view. Still, I'm surprised by the unexpected segue, as occurred with my latest reading:

W.F.Hermans, Beyond Sleep (trans Ina Rilke): The C-R review provides the overview, but this shares a couple of points of reference with Ah Cheng's The Chess Master; one being chess of course, not just as an aside within the novel about prospects (in this case, of science) or lack thereof: "Everything will have been calculated by then. Winning at chess will be a question of memory." There is also the author's note regarding his revisions, a dozen years and 14 printings on:
"There are two sides to everything, and more than two to novels. Not for nothing is the story of Jesus told four times over in the Bible.
Writing a novel can in some respects be compared to playing chess. The difference is that writing is not a competition, A bad move on the part of one player is an advantage to the other. A weak passage in a novel is no use to anyone.
If a chess player thinks of a better move thirteen years after a particular game, it is too late."
Hermans might have profited from Nabokov's comparison to the chess problem, and the last bit disregards how chess theory moves forward with improvements upon prior practice, where a new, previously unanticipated move (a "theoretical novelty") is introduced to resuscitate abandoned lines of play. But this is all by the by.

The other shared orientation is explicit in The Chess Master, as one of only two citations of Western writing as the basis for story-telling within the story, Jack London's "Love of Life". While implicit within Beyond Sleep, it shares too much in common to be discounted (which I will not elaborate, per the constraints I mention above; I will assent to note, unrelatedly, the parallel to mountain climbing -- because it's there). Not that this suggests that these novels have much to do with each other, for, after all, a few pages before the first quote I pulled:

"One of the reasons why the range of subjects dealt with in novels is so limited is that authors want everybody to be able to follow exactly what is going on. Technical terms put readers off. Entire classes of trades and professions never make it into novels simply because it would be impossible to describe the reality without the use of technical jargon. Such occupations as do occur -- policeman, doctor, cowboy, sailor, spy -- are no more than caricatures in response to the delusional expectations of the intended lay readership."

Of course, I'm sure you'll understand if I decide to amend or re-edit this later on; as always, I reserve the right to recall the witness.

Merely very, very good

2007-07-04T18:16:00.000-04:00

Life is too short for major minor poets, as it is for chess. (The latter, per Byron, Henry James [only one of him], in "Our Boys", a play holding the record for longest run in London for a long stretch.) A bit of a stretch here, I'll admit, for a double-headed post:

Poetry in short
Karl Shapiro, Selected Poems ('68 edition): A career that took many turnings; his best work, in the 40s and 50s, propelled him to the inner circle of the elite American poets, but the wheel turned again, neglecting him until recently (see Joseph Epstein on the occasion of LoA inclusion). He was able to satirize even his own standing (in "The Bourgeois Poet", for instance), but I found he took poetry itself as his subject too often. At his best, though, well worth remembering, as the following will attest:

Ballet Mécanique

The hand involves the wheel that weaves the hand
Without the kiss of kind; the digits flick,
The cranks obedient to no command
Raise on their iron shoulders the dead weight
For which no forges cheer. Nothing is late,
Nothing behind, excited, or too quick.
The arm involves the treadle and the wheel
Winds wakeless motion on a tireless reel.

The kiss of kind remembers wood and wool
To no cold purpose, anciently, afar;
The wheel forgets the hand that palpitates
The danceless power, and the power waits
Coiled in the tension tower for the pull
That freezes the burnt hand upon the bar.

The proximate referent is Fernand Léger (flick) and George Antheil (soundtrack, for percussion, 3 airplane props and 16 synchronized player-pianos [paging Wm.Gaddis]), unreconciled until quite recently. The apposite comment by fellow Baltimorean Pellicano on his conducting debut: "The difficulty is not getting lost [in the score], but being perfect in the hand."

Chess
Ah Cheng, The Chess Master (trans WJF Jenner): While Stefan Zweig's Schachnovelle remains the acme of gamewriting, this is a worthy contender (along with Kawabata's The Master of Go), and is of particular interest in merging modernity with tradition in both theme and composition (more thereon, not cited in a skewed intro). The Chinese form of the game, xiangqi (more), is probably played by more people than any other chess variant, including the Western version, but remains relatively unknown outside China; within this story it serves to transmit tradition, albeit in a debased form, across the Cultural Revolution, and to preserve Tao -- the author clearly gets the development of prodigy through early tactical wizardry to mature appreciation, which includes the proper appreciation for the modest place of chess in life. As per one of the taglines, how may melancholy be dispelled, save through chess?