2020: Louise Glück: "Firstborn" (1968); "A Village Life" (2009)

On "Firstborn"

It is a
Puzzle,
Reading poetry -
A brainteaser book with no answers upside-down at page bottom.

And I am a cretin:
There is something illiberal in my education.
Yet I find the experience irksome at first,
Gradually embittering,
Of reading poems.

The Puzzle's Clues:

1 Across: fragmentary allusion to lived reality (the feel of a shoe, or weft of wallpaper)
    (Shards of a New-England-grounded life, plus some trip to Italy)
    These are easier for the poet to encode than the reader to decipher
3 Down: men are reprehensible shits
    A recurring and probably justified observation
5 Across: An indistinguishability between pregnancies and miscarriages
    (These leap well off the page, aspark)
6 Down: a regular contrast of the tranquil with the quietly appalling
    The poet's best trait
8 Across: but am I understanding any of what I am reading?
    (Not quite, not really, despite checking each page multiple times)
11 Down: ...can anybody make sense of this one?

***

Passing on from that first of Louise Glück's chapbook-length books - "Firstborn", published when she was 24, and apparently semi-slightly-disavowed it later - I thought I should give the other end of her career a shot. So I poked too at "A Village Life", the last of the 11 books collected in her Poems 1962-2012.

(Incidentally, if I follow the implications aright, some of Glück's work from "Firstborn" would run back to when she was 18. She'd've been ~65 when "A Village Life" came out.)

The comparison between the two books is actually surprising. Next to her freshman effort, "A Village Life" reads like a straight-text essay. It's at pains to show up with identifiable themes and concrete cash-value. What it is so concretely relating, is the shape of a life at sunset. There is a recurring motif of the burning of autumn leaves around this small town. We're examining a point of life in this book when the years of action are behind us, and reflection predominates. There are no conclusions much to be seen, just a steely and almost sacredly-calm mode of observation. Not too much recollection of times past, either, just an unsentimentally incidental amount. Mostly we have... a still-life of a life's stillness. (Look, the book's gone and made me all poetical too.)

"A Village Life" is elegant, and austere, and maybe a little frightening.

(9/8/2021)

2019: Olga Tokarczuk: "Flights"

There’s the question of what a novel is. Not that that’s worth splitting hairs about. But you could say this isn’t one - that it's literature, just not a novel. Flights imparts a vision of the world - “Here is a way of viewing what it’s about, this thing we’re in.” Which certainly counts as literature. But not quite a story as such.

What we have is a dossier, a 400-page sheaf of reflections and anecdotes and serialized novelish hunks, on the theme of transit. A fantasia on travel. If it weren’t a good book you might think it’s a cynical promotional gimmick to get paperbacks into airport bookstores. But it is a good book, very - so extra points to Tokarczuk for accomplishing literature and a slick marketing plan in one stroke.

The fragments of fantasia come in small bits: a few grafs of dry observation, or intellectual satire, like the pop-up lectures she describes in airport lounges on the emerging discipline of Travel Psychology. The audiences for these lectures can't be bothered to stop and listen....

In this clip, Tokarczuk (Polish) attacks me personally (American). But it's an amusing attack, tantalizingly thoughtful. [ie, multilinguality is more than just "being cultured", and instead is a cognitive grounding for an expanded self.]

dot-dot-dot.

And there are the longer hunks of fantasia fragment. The man whose wife and small child vanish during a mere minute out of sight, on a roadside pee-break en route home from vacation. A woman traveling to see an old flame on his deathbed across the world, learning they have no real connection at all anymore. An anatomical artist obsessed with platicizing human remains*... whose story segues into the history of a 17th-century predecessor, a naturalist in Spinoza’s Netherlands whose collected human oddities were lost at sea on their way to the Tsar. A fading octogenarian classicist earning his supper with cruise-ship lectures on ancient Greece. What these story fragments are pointing toward is a cosmic irony of people working, through motion and transit, to shore up something enduring and persistent across time. With the expected results.

(A homeless madwoman speaks what may be the book’s most succinct self-summary: “So go, sway, walk, run, take flight, because the second you forget and stand still, his hands will seize you and turn you into just a puppet.” [ie, “he who rules the world… who reigns over all that is still and frozen, everything that’s passive and inert.”])


Since the book is all about travel, the top theme I unconsciously expected was wanderlust, a kerouakian passion for road adventure. There’s some of the obverse of that - castigation of people who stay put - but the book's excitement level is pretty subdued. There is a (should I call it Slavic?) patience, or 1000-mile-stare indifference.

Flights is like... looking into the well-fledged, well-edited travel notebook jots of 100 educated European holidaymakers. People whose reflections evince a quietly philosophizing bent - bending toward mortality. On our varied paths, we are all traveling to the same place.



*Errata: I noticed that the plasticizer examines a cat who’d been done up by a colleague. As some kind of joke, the embalmed cat is rigged to play Queen’s song “I Want to Live Forever”. Well. Queen has no such song. The song is, “Who Wants to Live Forever?”, a song which does not yearn toward immortality, but reckons with mortality, which is pretty much the opposite thing. Ok, whatever, right? But Tokarczuk’s error is an interesting irony inside an irony (inside an irony).

(12/11/2019)

2018 (awarded 2019): Peter Handke: "Kaspar and Other Plays"

Well, I fucking hated this.

The best I can say about Peter Handke’s play Kaspar is to thank god I didn’t get stuck seeing it performed live. True, one of Handke’s objectives is to attack his audience, which can be a wonderful aim, and I’m often willing to put my money where my mouth is and get punished by an artwork. Still, I feel Handke’s success in assaulting the audience is accidental. That is, rather than challenging our psychological foundations, he is merely annoying us with bullshit.

To synopsize, a guy (Kaspar Hauser) shambles onstage. There’s a lot of scripted instruction about how he should take a long time getting snarled in the curtain on the way in. Kaspar then dithers, and mumbles nonsense, and has trifling stage business: all of it crafted I guess to goose us up with the expectation that he’ll eventually do something. The stage directions themselves are broadcast over the theater’s PA along with auxiliary bits of babble, while nothing in particular continues to develop onstage during the next 30 or 45 minutes. Then, in a turn that would at least briefly be amusing, Hauser's joined by as many as five dithering dopplegangers: half a dozen Kaspars in all, banging off of each other, knocking about the stage, murmuring repetitively, killing time.

There is something suggested throughout all of this about language. And there is something here about self-construction ex nihilo. I stand unconvinced of any profundity in either of those themes. Herzog got more insight into the opening credits of Every Man For Himself and God Against All than are going to be found in this whole production. Nope. Fuck all of this, and fuck Peter Handke. We human beings have lives, after all, damnit, and they warrant being spent on something more dignified than this play.

That is at least how I feel about the man Peter Handke and his work before reflecting on his later career as a Serbian-genocide denialist.

But we are not done. Kaspar was one of the plays in this volume, but are two more. Another is Offending the Audience. You can see already that this is in the same line as Kaspar. But the title makes too much of itself, since again, the highest attainment here falls short of offense and more around the level of boredom /irritation.

To be charitable, I'm sure in the context of the time (1966), Handke’s self-conscious theatrical “provocations” may have seemed challenging, or fresh, or original? As against achingly tiresome. I mean, "Offending the Audience" consists in a clutch of blokes standing onstage for 20 minutes literally declaiming shit like, “You are an audience. You all put on nice clothes and came here tonight. Now you are sitting in seats, in rows, and are expecting something to happen. Us saying this, is something which is happening. Time is passing, and we are all here right now, and this time will never be reclaimed or repeated.” But it's far more verbose, filling page after page after page after page.

Somehow I’m put in mind of Mike Myers’ SNL sketch of a German program called “Sprockets”? That, crossed with the Baader-Meinhof faction.

Self-Accusation. This play was the best of the three in the volume, though clearly that is not saying anything at all. But this time around, within Handke’s Wittgensteinian language-game blather, there crops up a tantalizing hint now and then of almost human detail. For instance, in the middle of many pages of automatic, deductively-driven mechanistic language, there’s a phrase about “lying down with R during her period”. And, “I failed to turn in leaflets dropped by enemy airplanes.” I am so starved for anything interesting by these idiotic plays of Handke’s that these glimmers of potential biography actually sparked my interest.

Also: absent in "Self-Accusation" is the constant presumption we were clobbered over the head with in "Offending the Audience" that - dudes!, your minds are soooo blown by my transgressive play, man! I Mean, "Offending the Audience" contained actual lines like, “Your expectations are being foiled. Your anxiety is increasing.” Etc., etc. (which I guess may have qualified as offensive, after all? I did not like being repeatedly told what I think. Least so when it was nothing close to what I was actually thinking.)

In sum, this offering of three pieces of shit by Peter Handke seems grounded in the belief that it is virtuosic to work without content: to deduce some simulation of theater out of the empty set. Yet this is, uh, just wrong. The result's tedious, and is (in a wearied, not-getting-too-worked-up-about-it kind of way) contemptible.


Post-scriptum: I hated Wings of Desire. I mean HATED HATED HATED that movie. “Leaving the theater in a shaking rage for having my time so wasted” kind of hated. (Handke did the screenplay). My feelings about the movie were even - disorienting, since Wings is such a universally-beloved film.... So I guess my sensibilities and instincts diverge somewhat from Handke's, and I will not be going on to read his Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (more famous/representative than Kaspar), nor Repetition (though it seems with a title like that, Handke would be playing to his strengths). Nor will I read his book-length apologia for systemic rape and genocide (A Journey to the Rivers).

(12/10/2019)

2017: Kazuo Ishiguro: "Never Let Me Go"

Preambulations on The Unconsoled and Remains of the Day

I was a tremendous fan of Remains of the Day when the movie came out (1993). This led me to the book a couple years after. In both incarnations, Remains sticks with me as a shattering indictment of the concept of employment. As far as I’m concerned, “setting the table for Lord Darlington’s peace summits” should join English-language idiom alongside, “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”.

Remains of the Day details an assiduous care taken in professional work, interlocked with a single-minded short-sightedness in same. We've got a man here shouldering his way through a lifetime’s toil - not out of enslavement, but because he takes true pride in the toil - and in that long self-abnegation, the only transcendent result is that he’s fulfilled somebody else’s doomed, useless agenda. (To be employed, after all, means exactly that you’re being used.) Mr. Stevens throws his life away rather than throw his all into Miss Kenton as he was damned well meant to.

In any event, I was pretty taken by the restrained passion quilted into Remains of the Day. So a couple years later I picked up Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled. This signaled some rare praise from me, reading Ishiguro again, ‘cause I am generally too worried about all the things I haven’t read to go back to any well twice. If I’ve read something by somebody, “I have that base covered”, I tend to figure. But I'd heard that Ishiguro’s other work was much weirder than RotD. And this was May 1998, so I was drinking a good bit, and shacking myself away in a very lonely downtown-San-Francisco SRO. The rootless, never-going-anywhere nightmare logic of The Unconsoled suited me too well.

In it, a musician shows up in a town which is never too well-described… for a performance which is never too well-explained... and a series of nested digressions keeps unfolding - all of them pretty ambiguous in their import too - through all of which, we’re not sure why the musician is being hustled into fulfilling pointless requirements set by his hosts, nor where any of this headache is heading. Like in a dream, none of it is ever questioned. There's an assuredness that - though nothing makes sense, everything obviously makes sense.

Also like a dream, I remember nothing specific about the book all this time later, except that it helped make me feel very bad, and very anxious, in a moment of life when I was super well-disposed to feeling bad and anxious. Does that sound like a recommendation? No? Well it is one, and Unconsoled is a worthy literary grandchild to Kafka.


Never Let Me Go

The two books I’d read by Ishiguro were such a contrast in style and level of literalism that hell, if I'm reading something by every Nobel Prize winner, it seemed like a compelling chance to go get a third data point from him.

Never Let Me Go falls somewhere smack in the middle of that concrete/fantasy spectrum. I walked into this book with no knowledge of the story, and only gradually felt out the fact that we were in a very fictional, rather dreamy environment. We’re hearing that there are people known as Carers, of whom the speaker, Kathy, is one. Not unlike Ottoman Janissaries, Kathy was raised under segregated life-training, thrown in with a school’s worth of other orphan children: a place called Halisham. An adult now, she's living what seems to be a relatively free and normal English life, and we're given a gradually-managed trickle of details about this strange upbringing. (But is it so strange in boarding-school England? I couldn't always tell.)

It turns out (spoiler) the children of Halisham, who will eventually be Carers and ultimately Donors, are genetic clones cultivated for organ donation. Ishiguro lets us know this in such slow, piecemeal development that there is hardly a time when this comes across as shocking. Our focus is entirely on what relations were like among the kids, within the social world they created for themselves while growing up.

Take an example. Kathy's frenemy Ruth boasts to her peers about receiving a pocketbook from the teacher - Kathy learns it was not from the teacher, lets Ruth know she knows (this is all so trivial...). Well, Kathy makes a point of stepping around this embarrassing intel in front of the other kids - helping conceal Ruth's lie - to prove to Ruth that she is worthy of friendship. Neither Kathy nor Ruth exchanges a word explicitly about any of this. Which is - I mean, all of it is so small, it doesn't even count as worth describing in a book. But here's the thing: for kids radically isolated in an orphanage / academy / internment camp, minutiae like these are the only raw materials for building a private culture. The reason this book is brilliant is that we see the workings of brains building that culture, and building sense-of-place, from incredibly scant materials.

(Hierarchy and clique in absence of normal social class - or any other basis of difference.)

Ishiguro’s strength is in constructing an imaginary environment - not directly by explaining it to us, but by using unspoken assumptions, and implicit familiarity with human mental life. From these wisps he gathers together a sense of place that we grow into understanding as sensible and normal, while it is absolutely neither. So he is able to get in a critique of our routine mental lives as humans... and a critique of how we construct "normal"... without having to say a word about any of it directly. That is brilliant.

(4/15/2020)

2016: Bob Dylan: "Chronicles I", "Man Gave Names to All the Animals"

Well I was never a Bob Dylan fan. So rather than trying to read through his lyrics and report, "These don't make much sense to me, said the joker to the thief", it seemed sensible to take him at his most literary. Hence two books: his first, but only, volume of memoir, and a children's book he evidently had some degree of responsibility for.

Or at least I listened to the audiobook of Chronicles I. Which is abridged(!) and read by Sean Penn, if these things are handicaps, or matter.

Ho-kay, Dylan describes himself, surprisingly, unsurprisingly, as a legitimate youthful human, growing up curious and excited about a certain line of art (folk music and stories). But then to his apparent surprise he's suddenly overcresting his own sources of inspiration as somebody else’s idea of the Voice of a Generation or the Soul of Revolution or something. It does seem like a weird arc to find one's self living through.

Interestingly - I am a snob, mind - when Bob speaks of something in passing that I prejudicially think may be out of his intellectual range (because I am a snob and a dick), I find that what he has to say hits about right. I mean, he may discuss... Dostoyevsky in a way that is succinct and overweeningly folksy. But when I put his words up against my scorn-meter, I have to concede his take as accurate and apt.

So I admit it. He seems like a very intelligent and self-aware man. One who does deliberately put on weird masks sometimes.

Speaking of which, as far as that strange relationship with his fame goes. He talks about doing, "...unexpected things like pouring a bottle of whiskey on my head and walking into a department store and acting pie-eyed, knowing that everyone would be talking amongst themselves when I left. I was hoping that the news would spread. What mattered to me most was getting breathing room for my family. The whole spectral world could go to hell."

So that is interesting. Some of his wobbly persona, the saying-shit-that-makes-no-sense, at least comes from a concerted effort to fuck with people, rather than from being fundamentally out of touch. I feel I can respect that. I feel (however) like I don't understand how it would win privacy for his family.

This is an introspective career memoir... him relating what he remembers feeling about his work, what he was thinking about creatively at the time. There is weirdly little detail about the mechanics of the business, or the technical side of making music. Even family is mentioned only as a passing contradistinction from his core mental career of creativity. I mean sure, he does say, “I was thinking about my family at the time, not taken in by this other stuff.” So he claims family was a priority, and I'm not saying it wasn't, but it sure isn't in the book. I mean he mentions getting married and having three kids, but we never hear so much as their names.

Following my theme (seemed amusing to me, at least) of encountering Dylan without listening to his music, I tried three of the movies about him.

• Rolling Thunder Revue
• Masked & Anonymous
• I’m Not There

The first one is by Scorsese. There is something I wanted to say about it, and damnit, I forget what. Must I rewatch the thing? The second, Larry Charles was involved, and what I wanted to do was simply share this link. I can't remember if I got all the way through the third movie. (I have a minor crush on Cate Blanchett and don't want to see her pretend to be Bob Dylan. Is that churlish? It's churlish. Well I did watch her do it.)

Wait, I forgot to discuss the kids' book. It's just the lyrics to one of his songs, with pictures.

(12/10/2020)

2014: Patrick Modiano: "So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood"

This is a later book for Modiano, came out right around the time he won the award. It regards a writer of quasi-memoir, and is thus a bit "meta" / hall-of-mirrors. The writer is contacted by someone who’s picked up a notebook he had lost, though he hadn't even known he'd lost it. In meeting the person to get back the book, the returner asks about a specific name written down there, since the returner had been leafing through….

As of this writing, I read this book better than three years ago and find  myself a little embarrassed for recollections of it. As I poke around, reading some reviews of the book and checking it out of the library in an electronic copy for a skim, I find that this very problem I’m having about the book - the fade of memory, the struggle to reassemble past experience from clues - is what the book is about. So that’s a daub of synchronicity.  So I’ll call my non-description of the book nuancedly self-referential, and call it a day.

I liked it, hey. Time permitting in life, I'd like to read something from Modiano again.

(4/4/2020)

2010: Mario Vargas Llosa: "Conversation in the Cathedral"

A sprawling book and not an easy one for me to get through. A sweep of 1950s Peruvian history under the Odira dictatorship, this comes through as a precious, kaleidoscopic look at the history and politics I know are going on in my hemisphere, but which I can never see for all the glare of the US.

It's a hell of a mess of a book, too. More characters than you can keep up with forgetting. So I started keeping this tally - my great skeleton-key contribution - because I promise that with this list as a cheat sheet, the book would be an order of magnitude easier to read:

A character list from Vargas Llosa's "Conversation in the Cathedral"
Santiago Zavalita	Our protagonist: AKA, Superbrain, Skinny (family nicknames)
Ambrosio	Our main interlocutor, who worked for the protagonist's family a couple decades before
Amalia	Santiago's family maid, later at Hortensia's, beset & eventually wedded by Ambrosio
Santiago's family
Don Fermin Zavalita	Santiago's father, a connected right-wing oligarchic type
Senora Zoila	Santiago's mother
Sparky	Elder brother of Santiago. Not sure what his real name is. Later, marries Cary.
Tete	Santiago's sister
Popeye / Freckle-Face	Hangs around the family house, interested in Tete
Ana / Anita	Nurse caring for Santiago, goes on to marry him
Trifulcio, AKA Trinidad	Fathers a miscarried child by Amalia - gets in trouble with the law, is disappeared
Don Hilario Morales	Ambrosio's cheating business partner, first recommended as uncle of Ludovico's
At the University
Aida	Santiago's revolutionary crush at the university
Jacobo	Santiago's revolutionary friend at univ., & rival for Aida
Cahuide	Org name of the socialists. Or their newspaper?
Saldivar	Communist revolutionaries
Ochoa	Communist revolutionaries
Huaman	Communist revolutionaries
Hector	Communist revolutionaries
Washington	Communist revolutionaries
Matias	Communist revolutionaries
At the Newspaper
Carlitos	Alcoholic newspaperman who works/speaks with Santiago
Clodomiro	Uncle to Santiago, gets him a newspaper job after S. is busted for being a socialist
Norwin	Writer at the paper, friend of Santiago
Arispe	The editor (AKA Mr. Vallejo? or is that someone else?)
Becerrita	Crime reporter, hired Santiago initially
Perquito	Photographer
Dario	Assisting reporter
Caruso Tallio	Bullied (by admin.) newspaperman who fires Carlitos from job, way-back-when
Prostitutes
Senora Carlotta Hortensia	Amalia's new employer, mistress to Don Cayo Bermudez
Queta	Lesbian girlfriend of Carlotta
Gertrudis Lama	Friend of Amalia
Simula	Coworker of Amalia
Ivonne	A French madam who hooks up Bermudez with women, like Queta
Robertito	Bouncer at Ivonne's nightclub
Political Operatives
Odria	Right-wing head of state in Peru
Bustamante	Former APRA (left-wing) leader of Peru, overthrown by Odria
Arequipans	The center-left party out of power
The Vulture	Wealthy provincial loan shark, long passed on
Don Cayo Bermudez	The Vulture's son, runs away with the milk woman's daughter but becomes Odira junta head of security
Tumula	The milk woman, whose daughter marries Bermudez back home in the country
Colonel Espina AKA the Uplander	Recruits Bermudez to the government, later falls from favor
Senator Landa	Administration loyalist, joins coup
Major Paredes	Adjutant to Cayo (and, much later, succeeds him)
Col. Idiaquez	Administration loyalist
Lozano	Fascist organizer / lieutenant
Tomasa	Odria administration loyalists
Don Emilio Arevalo	Odria administration loyalists
Mr. Zavala	Odria administration loyalists
Dr. Ferro	Odria administration loyalists
Dr. Alcibiades	Odria administration loyalists
Ludovico	Thug, works with Ambrosio for Bermudez
Hipolito	with Ludovico, a factotum
Dr. Lama	Administration loyalist, minister for foreign relations
Dr. Lozano Arbalez	Administration loyalist (with Molina)
Pereda	Peasant organizer being leaned-on by Ludovico & Ambrosio
Gimpy Meleqias	An incompetent informant
Fleafoot Heredia	Informant?
Don Remigio Saldivar	Fixers in the provinces helping the administration (I think)
Dep. Azpilcueta	Fixers in the provinces helping the administration (I think)
Gen. Alvarado	Coalition friendly, ousts Don Cayo Bermudez
Ferro	A conspirator with the coalition against Odria

Some reviews and references I found useful:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-elder-statesman-of-latin-american-literature-and-a-writer-of-our-moment.html

http://www.eveningallafternoon.com/2011/03/conversation-in-the-cathedral.html

https://www.enotes.com/topics/conversation-cathedral/characters

(6/1/2019)