Conversational Reading

Friday Column: Literary Science

I suppose that Jonathan Gottschall's article in th Boston Globe, arguing for literary studies to embrace scientific methods, was meant to be provocative and exciting. Most of his ideas, though, seemed more yawn-worthy than anything.

Take this, for instance, about the so-called beauty myth:

Scholars tend to take this evidence as proof that Western culture is unusually sexist. But is this really the case? In a study to be published in the next issue of the journal Human Nature, my colleagues and I addressed this question by collecting and analyzing descriptions of physical attractiveness in thousands of folktales from all around the globe. What we found was that female characters in folktales were about six times more likely than their male counterparts to be described with a reference to their attractiveness. That six-to-one ratio held up in Western literature and also across scores of traditional societies. So literary scholars have been absolutely right about the intense stress on women's beauty in Western literature, but quite wrong to conclude that this beauty myth says something unique about Western culture.

I don't think many theorists worth reading would be surprised to find that non-Western cultures also discriminate against women based on physical beauty. What Gottschall appears to misunderstand is that the Western beauty-myth isn't so simple as something that can be summed up in a few lines and tested. Rather, it's based on taking a very generalized idea--male discrimination--and tracing out the ways in which this broad theme is made idiosyncratic and distinct by the Western world and its art.

To me, the problem with Gottschall's take on the beauty myth gets at exactly what's wrong with with taking a "scientific" approach to art. Science is very good for forming and testing generalizations, but art is all about finding the unique and individual in the world. Scientific methods can tell us how things work in general, but I don't think its meathod brings us toward the most interesting territory art can cover.

Take Gottschall's test to confirm that the author isn't dead:

Is this one of those squishy, unfalsifiable literary claims? No, it is also testable. Hijacking methods from psychology, Joseph Carroll, John Johnson, Dan Kruger, and I surveyed the emotional and analytic responses of 500 literary scholars and avid readers to characters from scores of 19th-century British novels. We wanted to determine how different their reading experiences truly were. Did reactions to characters vary profoundly from reader to reader? As we write in "Graphing Jane Austen," a book undergoing peer review, there were variations in what our readers thought and felt about literary characters, but it was expertly contained by the authors within narrow ranges. Our conclusion: rumors of the author's demise have been greatly exaggerated.

I'm highly suspicious of a test that can distill a concept like the death of the author into a simple, testable maxim; i.e. "that authors have no power over their readers." But moreover, I don't think anyone would be surprised to know that most readers encounter a text more or less as an author intended. This isn't what the death of the author is about.

It's not about how an "average" reader enounters a text; it's about larger idea that readings that deviate significantly from the norm are valid and maybe even better--perhaps far better--than those that the author "intended." It's about the fact that intelligent people can still disagree over fundamental aspects of a work like "The Turn of the Screw"--and that perhaps both readings are valid at the same time, even though we may have proof as to how Henry James "wanted" the story to be read. How could you prove or disprove an idea such as that? You can argue it back and forth, but a scientific test won't tell you whether or not any of this is "correct."

More than it's futility, though, Gottschall's idea reminds me of nothing more than the fact that this has all been done before, and far more interestingly. Northrop Frye tried to create a scientific underpinning for literature--not by submitting a bunch of pseudo-literary maxims to scientific tests but by creating a theory of modes that, if it failed to place all of literary studies on a scientific basis, still created a very worthwhile structure for encountering and understanding the whole of Western literature. Similarly, Roland Barthes and the structuralists may have failed (inevitably . . .) at turning literature into science, but they did create another very useful framework for encountering a text. These, to me, are the worthwhile attempts to place art on a scientific footing. They are the products of singular genuises carving out a path somewhere between the two disciplines. They are not a simple transference of the scientific method to literature.

It's a truism that scientific discoveries are inevitable, but artistic ones aren't. That is to say, if Newton hadn't discovered the universal theory of gravitation, someone else would have, but if Shakespeare didn't write "King Lear," no one would have. Similarly, the "scientific" theories of thinkers like Frye and Barthes are irreproducable, and that's precisely what makes them valuable to us. Science, for all it can do, can't do what they did, and to my mind that's precisely why science can't ever co-opt the study of art. Gottschall writes:

Studies like these showcase the promise of applying a scientific approach: Relatively simple experiments can upend decades' worth of untethered theoretical speculation, exposing flawed assumptions and focusing scholars' attention on fresh and productive questions.

as if literary studies wasn't already doing this; as if literary scholars hadn't been debating things like the death of the author far more interestingly for decades.

But in the end, what seems most troubling about Gottschall's ideas is the "out with the old, in with the new" feeling one gets from his scientific triumphantalism.

But if ideas like "the beauty myth" or "the death of the author" arise from loose theorizing and defunct models of human psychology, how have they managed to thrive for decades in the world's top literature departments? The answer lies partly in our standards of evidence: Instead of forcing professors to rigorously test their big ideas, as scientific methods do, literary methods encourage us merely to collect and highlight evidence that seems to confirm them. The result of this laxity, as Berkeley's Frederick Crews points out, is that "our bogus experiments succeed every time." And since it is so hard to be wrong in literary studies, it is equally hard to be right. So books and papers pile up but, more often than not, genuine advances in knowledge do not. To fix this problem, literary scholars need to develop more rigorous ways of testing their ideas, demand a higher standard of proof from their colleagues, and be willing to discard the theories that fail.

Reading something like this, one begins to wonder if Gottschall has any historic perspective whatsoever. Art, philosophy, literary studies . . . they aren't about being "right," about testing "big ideas." Why then, if that were the case we'd all long ago quit talking about the ravings of some Greek who was convinced we all lived in a cave.

In the end, I suppose one must look on Gottschall as a sort of ally gone astray: after all, he has a worthy goal in mind, the rejuventation of moribund literary studies. But he seems to be fundamentally misinformed of how best to do this. Imitating the sciences, trying to make art studies a sort of "science-lite" won't serve art any better than becoming Republican-lite served the Democrats:

If we literary scholars can summon the courage and humility to do so, the potential benefits will reverberate far beyond our field. We can generate more reliable and durable knowledge about art and culture. We can reawaken a long-dormant spirit of intellectual adventure. We can help spur a process whereby not just literature, but the larger field of the humanities recover some of the intellectual momentum and "market share" they have lost to the sciences. And we can rejoin the oldest, and still the premier, quest of all the disciplines: to better understand human nature and its place in the universe.

As always, the key to making art respected (for those who take on this curious goal) is to show why art is valuable as art. People who are of Gottschall's mindset aren't the kind of help art needs.

More Mann to Come (?)

I'm somewhat surprised to see that people seem to have responded rather favorably to my somewhat casually strewn thoughts on Doctor Faustus. They were even partly responsible for a very intelligent post from James Higgs over here, in which he addresses at least one conern I had about the novel:

The novel is conceived as 'a biography' of Leverkuehn written by his rather sycophantic friend, Serenus Zeitblom. As such it can examine matters that no essayist would touch. Mann's novels are, to my mind, flawed masterworks, a continuing battle to find a style capable of discussing ideas in a way that only a novelist can. One can't take a novel, strip it of its fiction and turn it into an essay without losing something essential. Any novel worth the name is an atomic unit, very probably flawed, but nonetheless indivisible.

Faustus is clearly the kind of book that requires a lot of time; that is, not only to read it through once, but to go back to it and stick with it for a while to really work out your ideas on it.

Since people seem to be interested, I'd like to do just that right here in the upcoming weeks. To say the least, these are going to be rather busy weeks for me, but to my mind if I'm ever going to revisit this book it would be right now--right after I finished reading it and an still familiar with everything my first reading has brought to mind.

LINKS

* Other folks begin hauling in those 2666 ARCs

* And some are still waiting (well actually, not any more)

* And we all may be waiting a long, long time for Garcia Marquez's purported new novel. Marcelo has some evidence that there may be no novel after all.

* I'm with the Literary Saloon. Shameless as it may be, if the so-called best of the Booker gets people reading The Siege of Krishnapur, then it can't be all bad

* The Economist profiles artist Philip Guston, perhaps well-known as the man who joined up with that other, literary Philip to pillory Richard Nixon

* The University of Chicago Press has published a previously untranslated work from the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize. There's also audio of a reading from the work.

* Middlebrow mediocrity is the least of it. I just got through wading through the list of authors scheduled to appear at BEA, and the clear majority of the books these people had written simply sounded hilariously bad. It made me long for those earnest, mediocre writers that are blessed with even a tiny bit of good sense.

* Chad points me to the Estonian Literary Magazine

* Winning the Nobel is hard

* Columbia University Press points you to an interview with The Song of Everlasting Sorrow's translator

* This is ambitious. It'd be cool if an American publisher, or a group of them, tried to do this.

* I pray for a future where I don't have to read Janet Maslin talking about James Frey "hitting one out of the park"

*  And while I'm down here on my knees, I might as will ask for a future where I don't have to listen to Cokie Roberts talking about American history

Trilling's Novel

Over at TNR, Cynthia Ozick considers Lionel Trilling's unfinished novel, soon to be published by Columbia University Press and discussed on this blog here:

The breadth of Trilling's renown can hardly be understood today. He was a professor of literature at a major university who was at the same time a "figure" (a term he honored) in the culture at large. And what was he really? An essayist; and it is tempting to say, given the expository clamor of the moment--its short views and skimpy topicality--merely an essayist. Yet no present-day magazine writer or blogger or reviewer or critic can aspire to what Trilling as essayist encompassed: his aim was nothing less than to define, and refine, civilization. He meant not only to comment or discriminate or analyze or judge, but to "stand for something." And at his death in 1975 at the age of seventy, what he finally stood for was a scrupulously perceptive and sinuously nuanced interpretation of the moral life as expressed in the literature of the West. If the idea of sage could be applied to any American essayist after Emerson, that is what he had become. A more modulated perspective would settle for Trilling as the most discerning, the most reasoned, and certainly the most celebrated, critic of his time.

138 Copies

I think the answer is to find different ways of measuring literary success.

138 copies. A few weeks ago, when I received my first royalty check of $27.08, I received the news: 138 copies. My first book of poems, Blind Date with Cavafy, sold a total of 138 copies.

My question: was that good or bad?

To me, it sounded like a lot. I had been lucky enough to win the Third Annual Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Book Prize, judged by Denise Duhamel, which resulted in the publication of my book. Marsh Hawk Press’ editors, particularly Sandy McIntosh, the late Rochelle Ratner, and the brilliant cover designer Claudia Carlson, were nothing but kind to me. I had no choice but to ask myself: did I fail them by not selling more than 138 copies in over a year?

Experiments

Authors aren't the only ones who can experiment:

     Approximately two-thirds of trade publishing respondents said they believe experimentation is crucial to the future success of the industry, while more than 75% of educational and professional publishers believed innovation is critical to the future. Just over 81% of trade publishers said experiments have led to changes in their normal work practices, while 87% of nontrade publishers reported changes.

The most common experiments involve the Web, either through new marketing techniques or redesigns of corporate sites. Nearly 69% of trade publishers said experiments had resulted in new products, while 77% of nontrade publishers said they had created new products. The source of innovation comes from a number of places, ranging from top management to “literally anybody” at the company, the survey found.

Doctor Faustus

I've been slowly making my way through Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. Despite recently reading proust, Grass, and Kenzaburo Oe, I can pretty easily say that this is the most challenging read I've embarked on in a long time. I've found myself retreating to the safe harbor of Bakhtin just to take on something a little less bracing.

Other than a too-early read of Death in Venice, this is the first Mann I've read, and I'm wondering if all of his books are this intellectual. By that I mean that here Mann is pretty explicitly working out ideas regarding art and culture (obviously, most pointedly as they relate to classical music) and how they parallel the "renewal" of German society brough on by the Nazis.

I think Mann can get away with this because of the form of Doctor Faustus; that is, the book is a biography of a classical composer penned by his friend (an academic), so it makes sense that this book is going to give character and plot short shrift and be more caught up in the ideas at play, and giving us a surprisingly-often rarified discussion of them.

It's a kind of strange novel to read. You can't help but marvel at the level of ideas being brought to the table and how Mann integrates them into the wider plot of Germany in the modern period, but I'm not entirely sure if I feel okay with Mann creating this mock-biography framework to work out his ideas novelistically. I suppose the continuity of the narrator is what holds this book together as a novel (as opposed to just a bunch of ideas strapped onto a fictive body)--that is to say, Mann nails the narrative voice right from the beginning, and he hasn't lost it yet.

Reading Faustus does make me wonder about some of Mann's other big books--whether they're more fundamentally constructed as stories with people, or if the ideas there also predominate to the same degree as in Faustus.

LINKS

* Garbiel Garcia Marquez has renounced his decision to quit writing and has reportedly finished a new novel

* Paul Verhaeghen has won the Independent foreign fiction prize for his novel, Omega Minor, published in the U.S. by the Dalkey Archive Press

* And he's giving the prize money to the ACLU 

* Have a look at Marcelo's blog for a quick introduction to Macedonio Fernandez, aka Borges's mentor. We'll be publishing an essay on him in the summer issue of The Quarterly Conversation, and Open Letter Press will be pubbing one of his novels, likely in 2009.

* For those who were less than surprised by who showed up on the NBCC "Good Reads" list they've now posted a "Fiction Also Rans" list that, to my eyes, is substantially more interesting

* A review of The Blue Fox, written by one of Bjork's collaborators:

Sjón’s poetic training tells. Most of the pages hold less than a paragraph, the observations are sparse and disconnected, and whilst perhaps it’s an obvious trick to leave so much blank space in a story dominated by snow, the effect of short chapters is a slowing of pace, not a Dan Brown-esque increase. Each word in its scarcity is loaded high with importance, so that your mode of reading changes and like the pastor tracking the fox, you pay close attention to every mark on the page.

* They're making a movie of Martin Amis's London Fields

* Wow. The Penguin wiki-novel bombed. Never woulda guessed . . .

* The Village Voice has a review of that recent theatrical production of The Sound and the Fury that doesn't subtract a single line from the book:

As in earlier ERS adventures, one's never sure whether the company means to act out the story, stylize it, take its elements apart, or even, conceivably, burlesque it. What the company thinks of Faulkner, what experience of his novel it wishes to convey, remain mysteries buried in the soft wax of its faintly campy, noncommittal style. Especially in an era that views black history very differently from educated Southerners of Faulkner's generation, the event carries a tinge of spoofing the Southern Gothic clichés that the novelist's less intense, less reflective successors exploited to exhaustion. What reverberated in my head as I came away wasn't anything ERS had done, but the classic line from Ronny Graham's merciless 1952 parody of Truman Capote: "Just then the old house gave another lurch as the termites finished the west wing."

* Harold Bloom continues to detract from his own reputation

* A documentary on the life of Mike Tyson will premiere at the Cannes Film Festoval

* Michel Houellebecq's mother has something to say

The Guardian on . . . The Dunciad

Rather impressive to see The Guardian offering a feature essay on Pope's Dunciad. What's the chance that Tanenhaus and Co will offer an appreciative essay on a challenging 200-year-old work by an American master?

Alexander Pope's longest and most elaborate poem, The Dunciad, has a good claim to be the greatest unread poem in the language. Glitteringly witty, the jewelled machinery of Pope's verse is as enjoyable now as it ever was, yet the work into which he put the most invention and the most gusto is little known outside seminar rooms. Perhaps it is because the poem is so full of obscure names - the 18th-century hacks and literary dunces whom it mocks; or because the verse is encrusted with Pope's own prefaces and notes and appendices - an apparatus of mock-learning that mimics the pretensions of would-be scholars and critics. The Dunciad has become forbidding when it is truly a thing of delight and dark brilliance.

BEA

For the five or so of you who a) want to meet me, and b) are headed to BEA this year, send me an email and let's figure out a time and place to get together. Or, if you prefer our meeting to be a little more spontaneous, just look for the bewildered-looking gentleman wandering around who approximately matches the photo to the right.

This is going to be my first BEA, so treat me nice.

What We're Missing

Words Without Borders has an interesting follow-up to that recent Guardian story that asked prominent Arab writers to tell us what Arabic book they'd most like to see translated to English.

Among the several interesting responses that caught my eye were Sabry Hafez’s list of younger fiction writers (about whom I will devote a subsequent post), and NYU Professor Hala Halim’s comment that publishers and translators need to start thinking about translating critical and intellectual work from the region. I have been a fan of this idea for a long time, but reading Professor Halim’s statement from here in Cairo got me considering what exactly English language readers might be missing by having to consume a culture only through a few novels, stories, and books of poetry, without any exposure to the role and nature of the thinker in contemporary Arab culture.

An evening forum featuring one of Egypt’s most prominent intellectuals, Nasr Hamid Abû Zayd, the Ibn Rushd Chair and Professor of Humanism and Islam at Universiteit voor Humanistiek in Utrecht, the Netherlands, held May 3 at the American University in Cairo, gave me a piece of my answer . . .

Future of the Book

Some interesting stuff in this speech, including some ever-elusive details about what's really going on in POD land:

Amazon is now attempting to use its leverage as the world's biggest online retailer to claw back some of that POD business from Ingram for their BookSurge operation. But the initial strength of BookSurge, that they worked with printers around the world who were already in place, spawned its weakness. Reports from publishers I have spoken to say BookSurge's quality and flexibility don't compare to Lightning's. And apparently their printing charges are higher. But since Amazon sells so many of the books that are printed on demand, their threats to make those books less available if they are printed outside of BookSurge carry tremendous weight.

      

But neither BookSurge nor a much-expanded Lightning are the last word in decentralized print-on-demand. The next step has been taken by On Demand Books, and their Espresso machine. The Espresso prints and binds one book at a time -- one-color and paperback only, although with a full-color cover -- and is intended for in-store use. There are only a handful of them in place, but they offer the entrepreneurial bookstore some very intriguing opportunities to expand their business. We have encountered a very entrepreneurial bookseller at the University of Alberta in Canada who has made one work profitably in his store within months.

      

Last month, Espresso announced a deal with Ingram by which the Lightning repository of files will be made available for delivery on Espresso. That suddenly makes the Espresso proposition a lot more likely to succeed. Espresso is worth exploring in any place where English-language books are in demand, that is remote from the sources of English books, and where prices for those books are high. In other words, the Danish book trade should look into it.

Friday Column: Manuel Puig and the Performance of Ourselves

It has been said repeatedly, and I think correctly, that in this heavily ironized, mediated era we are each method actors performing ourselves. That is, TV, movies, and other mass media surrounds us with role models for any conceivable identity we may want to inhabit, and our well-developed consumer economy offers us everything we need to wear and own to be the person we think we are. From an early age we are sent off on a search to find ourselves—because, after all, postmodern society makes each of us feel the center of the world—and on this lifelong quest we are provided us with all the equipment (both mental and material) that we will need to define our self and then perform it into being.

If this view of things is correct, if it is true that we are all method actors whose greatest role is being our self, then there can be no doubt as to the contemporary author we must read: Manuel Puig. Heavily influenced by the theories of Freud and Lacan, Puig writes as though each of his characters are actors in a movie. His books are all about people who construct their identities by playing roles, and via his plots he deconstructs the ways in which people discover who they are and then learn to act it out.

Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Puig's clear masterpiece, is the book that most obviously reveals his preoccupation with how everyone is himself or herself an actor. It starts, after all, with the narration of a movie.

Two prisoners, one a homosexual window dresser and the other a young revolutionary, share a jail cell in early 1970s Argentina. To keep entertained during the long hours of their imprisonment, the window dresser, Molina, tells movies to Valentin, the revolutionary.

Already Puig has given us a lot to think about: here we have two people what have taken on atypical, ill-defined identities—if anyone needs roles to play, people such as Molina and Vanentin would be them. Furthermore, these two are talking about movies, a medium in which people pretend to be people who they aren't; and, in fact, they are discussing the movie not as seen on the screen but as filtered through Molina's mind.

All this, implicit in the first few pages, is quite a lot to unravel, but the wonderful, dizzying thing about Puig is the way he takes a perfectly intelligent conceit and then he keeps layering it up with levels and levels of meaning.

Take, for instance, the movie Molina is telling to Valentin. It is a fantasy/horror story about a woman who may or may not turn into a ravenous puma when a man kisses her on the lips. As Molina tells the movie to Valentin, the men begin to speculate as to why a woman would concoct such a tale; Valentin thinks it's something she invented because she's frigid, the product of a repressed upbringing that has frightened her about sex. After so many years of internalizing this fear, argues Valentin, she's talked herself into acting the part of a person who believes she'll turn into a puma if she's kissed.

So then the very substance of the movie adds a layer to Puig's conceit—and then another gets added in the form of Molina himself. Genetically a male, he's a fem gay man who prefers to act the part of a woman, especially as regards to romantic relationships. Quite literally, Molina can be seen as an actor: a man acting the part of a woman to the best of his understanding of what a woman is.

That's another layer now, but there's still another, most obvious one: the format of the book itself. Kiss of the Spiderwoman is mostly narrated in unattributed, un-stylized dialog (Puig's prose is littered with "mmm"s and ellipses). By foregrounding speech, Puig very simply emphasizes the fact that one of the principal ways we present ourselves to the outside world is in fact a very considered, very performed one. Speech, after all, is something we're continually constructing, and it changes based on the location we're in, the person to whom we're speaking, the mood we're in at the moment, etc.

And yet, though Puig is clearly taken with the idea that our personalities are performances based on who we think we are—that we're all really actors—the paradox that drives this nuanced, brilliant inquiry is that we're never quite sure exactly how to act out the personality we want to exhibit. Say you want to act the part of a cool person; well, what exactly does a cool person do? How should you act this out? It's a hard question to answer because concepts like "cool" are so overdefined, so ponderous with aggregated meaning and conflicting definitions, that it's hard to know exactly where to start performing them. Watch how quickly Valentin is stymied when Molina asks him what should be a very simple question: What makes a man?

—Well . . . Why don't you tell me what it means to you, being a man? . . .

—Mmm . . . his not taking any crap . . . from anyone, not even the powers that be . . . But no, it's more than that. Not taking any crap is one thing, but not the most important. What really makes a man is a lot more, it has to do with not humiliating someone else with an order, or a tip. Even more, it's . . . not letting the person next to you feel degraded, feel bad.

—That sounds like a saint.

—No, it's not as impossible as you think.

—I still don't get you . . . explain a little more.

—I don't know, I don't quite know myself, right this minute. You've caught me off guard. I can't seem to find the right words. . . .

This paradox is so intriguing because though Valentin can't tell Molina precisely what the measure of a man is, he's generally quite confident that he's acting like a man.

Most of the time, at least. The crises of Molina's and Valentin's lives tend to occur when each is uncertain about how to perform his identity. Thus, for instance, when Valentin falls ill and Molina tries to take care of him, Valentin suddenly flies into a rage (a rage which is acutely felt despite the fact that Puig limits himself to conveying it through about 20 words spread out over a few lines of dialog) because he's feeling a conflict between how he wants to act, i.e. to let Molina care for him, and how he thinks he needs to act, i.e. the stoic revolutionary.

Though Valentin is certainly a well-felt, fully realized character, Molina's thoughts and personal crises tend to be richer, perhaps partly because Puig himself was a gay man, but more likely because Molina's mind entertains more ambiguity than Valentin's and thus opens itself to us more and wrestles with issues a little more poignantly. The difference becomes most clear when Puig momentarily steps out of the dialog to enter into his characters' stream of consciousness (another favorite device of Puig's). Valentin's stream is abrasively jumpy, enough to prevent him from following a difficult thought to completion, and the way in which his mind constructs the narrative distances himself from his feelings and always leaves the truth of the matter in doubt:

—a fellow with a plan on his mind, a fellow who accepts his mother's invitation to visit her in the city, a fellow who lies to his mother assuring her of his opposition to the guerilla movement, a fellow who dines by candlelight alone with his mother . . .

Contrast this with the rawness, the directness of Molina's thoughts, as here when he's stung by some well-intentioned but nonetheless hurtful remarks Valentin makes about a movie Molina likes:

seen from behind, looking elegant, but from behind of course no way to tell if the faces are beautiful or not, and no one realizing that these two are the protagonists of the story that's just been told, and mom was crazy about it, and me too, and luckily I didn't tell this son of a bitch [i.e., Valentin], and I'm certainly not going to tell him another word about anything I like, so he can't laugh anymore about how soft I am, we'll see if ever he weakens or not, but I won't tell him any more of the films I like the most, tey're just for me, in my mind's eye, so no filthy words can touch them, this son of a bitch and his pissass of a revolution

What exactly is Kiss of the Spiderwoman inquiring into? The ways in which we construct our identities, for one thing, but also how exactly gender is created and the ways in which men and women interact according to its dictates. (The latter is, if anything, even more of a preoccupation with Puig than the ways we perform ourselves into our personalities.)

The two are clearly related. It's often far easier to say what something isn't than what it is, and accordingly, in Puig's books characters are able to define themselves as men and women most distinctly when interacting with people of the opposite gender. Spiderwoman, like all of Puig's books, can well be seen as people's investigations into otherness, that is, people figuring out how to define themselves through extended conversation and interaction with other people who quite obviously aren't them. Thus you can find odd pairings throughout Puig's works: fem gay and red-blooded straight; old man and young man (Eternal Curse on the Reader of these Pages); Don Juan wannabe and earnest provincial; seductress and good daughter (the latter two groupings in Heartbreak Tango). Because of their differences, conflict between these characters becomes inevitable, and yet, though at root this conflict is based in the inner turmoil people feel when they strain to understand themselves, Puig always makes these conflicts the natural outgrowths of perfectly normal situations.

Friday Classical Music: Beethoven's 3rd Symphony, the "Eroica"

Here ya go--the first movement of the symphony that got the Romantic age of music started.

LINKS

* The Village Voice discusses art of the African diaspora:

Africa, however, is a different matter. Its art continues to remain resistant to assimilation, and if Okwui Enwezor and Robert Storr's extended, impassioned debate in recent issues of Artforum is any indication, the question of how to even begin representing African artists is still subject to serious dispute. Into this confusion intelligently steps "Flow," assembled by the Studio Museum in Harlem's associate curator, Christine Y. Kim. The exhibition presents the work of 20 artists under the age of 40 who were either born in Africa or whose parents emigrated. Only a few of the artists in the show currently live in Africa full-time. Yet whatever their present location (most reside in the United States or Europe), each is immersed in a diasporic African artistic tradition whose contribution to world culture has been immeasurable.

* It's nice to see Critical Mass posting Scott McLemee's picks for the "Good Reads." Unsurprisingly, these sound a lot more interesting than the books that made the list.

* Open Letters Monthly has a modest proposal for Dmitri Nabokov (which sounds much better than pretending to get permission from Vladimir's ghost):

But wait, Dmitri Vladimirovich – before you dash our hopes for Laura by publishing her, consider a proposal that would both adhere to the letter of your father’s request, and give his readers a taste of the last moments of his creativity. My solution, I believe, allows for both, throwing in a bit of healthy rebellion to boot. I say . . .

* There's a new issue of CONTEXT available, which, as usual, looks to be full of good stuff

* A good time-killer. You type in an author's name and it maps who readers of said author are likely to have read.

* The Believer has announced its shortlist for The 2007 Believer Book Awards. We've review three of the titles: Remainder by Tom McCarthy, The Power of Flies by Lydie Salvayre, and The Meat and Spirit Plan by Selah Saterstrom.

* The head of Random House is stepping down after the publisher's failure to meet profit expectations

* Rain Taxi runs down three books centering around the Mayan prophecy that the current world will end (giving birth to a new one) in 2012

* Chad and Garth both have wonderful things to say about PEN's tribute to Robert Walser. We've reviewed Walser's latest novel to be translated, The Assistant. And, if your interest in Walser runs this deep, you can read our essay on Enrique Vila-Matas, who holds Walser as a key influence.

* Daniil Kharms, who received a good deal of attention in U.S. book reviews not too long ago, is discussed in the LRB

* The shortlist for the so-called African Booker has been released

* The Village Voice reviews Christopher Barzak's new book. If you're unfamiliar with the name, see The Mumpsimus's tribute to the author.

* Carpe diem poems

* A fine meme:

pick a work of literature or philosophy (or poetry, if you can make it work) and a sentence from that work that, if the sentence had been excluded from the work, would have made the greatest difference in the work's interpretation/reception/history in the following years. 

Knowing the Original Language

From Martin Riker's Notes Regarding the Editing of Translated Literature:

An editor need not be an expert in the original language because the editor’s primary concern must always be toward the quality of the work in English, that it creates for an English-language reader an experience approximate to the experience the book’s original readers had. An editor needs to know English, and needs to know how to edit. There are far more people who have competence in a foreign language than there are people who know how to edit a book well, yet when it comes to making a book the best book it can be, skill in editing—in other words, skill with the English language—is by far the more important attribute. The editor first and foremost must be a reader of English, and a person for whom the translation must read, in English, like an original work—which in many senses it is.

The Eagle Has Landed

Though I still stand by the sentiments expressed in this essay, my English-language copy of 2666 just arrived and I'm, err, pretty freakin excited.

Missing Children

The New Republic reviews a novel.

The abductees are still the focus of news stories and Amber Alerts. But--as a mother will learn in Charles Bock's magnificent first novel -- the majority of missing children are runaways. In Beautiful Children, they include Ponyboy, who left home after the death of his little brother and makes a living as a bike messenger delivering pornographic videotapes; the vampirishly skinny Lestat, who hitchhiked across the country to visit Anne Rice's house and never returned home; and a pregnant teenager known as "Danger-Prone Daphney," who brags that her own picture was once on a milk carton. She collected them as souvenirs, but since she had nowhere to keep them, the milk quickly spoiled, and eventually she lost the empty cartons as well.

Why do children disappear? This is one of the preoccupations of Bock's novel, which centers around the disappearance of Newell Ewing, age twelve, late one summer night in the desert outside Las Vegas. . . .

When Books Go Wrong

The Guardian, with a tragic story of bibliomania:

The books and documents took over the house. The family - two wives, three daughters of the first marriage - knew their place: second best to the books and to boxes, some of which stood for several years waiting to be unpacked. They were pressed into service, unpacking, sorting, and stacking shelves. The walls of the once-fine house were stained and peeling; there was never money to pay for repairs. Regular visitors - for Sir Thomas, for all his faults, was unfailingly generous to serious scholars - noted mournfully as they escaped down the almost impassable track towards Broadway that the state of Middle Hill House was even more grievous now than the last time they'd seen it, with every room filled with heaps of paper, manuscripts, books, charters, lying on the floor or piled up against walls, on tables, chairs and beds.

His daughters took the earliest chances they could to get married and move away. That led to one of the bitterest of the baronet's many feuds. . . .

Too bad his daughters weren't more Borgesian . . .

Sunk Costs

I guess it's plight of the translation day here today.

Translation-funding was repeatedly discussed. Krüger noted that in Germany being a translator is a respected profession (and one off which one can live), while in the US publishers seemed to consider translation costs as simply sunk costs, not even caring much about finding the best person for the job. Freihow mentioned that one reason even a tiny country (4.5 million Norwegian speakers !) could sustain university departments in obscurer languages is that students know that they can fall back on literary translation from those languages, which will always be in (at least limited) demand.

The Europeans remained baffled by the lack of translation-subsidies in America (they just can't get over the fact that it's politically unthinkable for public money to be used that way). More troublingly, Krüger believes that, as the conglomerates take over much of publishing, the Europeans, too, are inevitably moving towards a university-press system, where certain types of books can (only) get published on the public dime -- showing little understanding of the American university press system where there is now also a great deal of pressure to balance the balance-sheets. (As we mentioned recently, there even seems to be a strong trend towards books that get published by 'normal' publishers elsewhere (the UK, Canada) only getting published by a university press in the US.)

Dominating Figures

Via the Literary Saloon, I read:

Several of the authors have spent a considerable amount of time in New York and Lago, who has been here the longest (some two decades), began by noting that despite a strong Spanish presence in the US there still is a shocking lack of knowledge and awareness of Spanish-language literature here. Reviewers and readers, he complained, expect a certain pattern from Spanish and Latin American fiction -- but expectations of a particular style or kind of fiction seem to be an issue in Spain and Latin America, too. Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez noted that for decades Colombian authors found it almost impossible to get around the overwhelming figure of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. No country, he suggested, has had such a dominant literary figure, and the effect was in many respects stifling, as readers came to expect everything to follow in that same magical realism-mode.

It's interesting to speculate why Latin American literature has been dominated by a few major figures while literature of other regions has avoided this. I don't really have a good reason why.

Though I do think that, whatever the reason, this dominance has transferred over to U.S. readers of Latin American fiction. Actually, if you look back you'll find that a lot of the major Latin American writers beyond Garcia Marquez or Borges were at one point translated into English, but then quickly went out of print.

I'm hoping this changes, as there seems to be a lot of genuine interest right now for "discovering" new Latin American writers. Of course, a pessimist might predict that in 5 - 10 years all these new translations will have gone out of print.

But a fact such as this one tends to lead me toward pessimism:

Lago complained bitterly about how American publishers go about publishing (and considering) translations, noting that the fact that no one in the major houses seems to be able to read these works in the original is a major hurdle and problem.

We're not talking about Nahuatl here. This is Spanish. If true, it's astonishing that no one in the major houses can read a novel in Spanish.

LINKS

* 50 years after The Birthday Party first opened, The Guardian re-examine Pinter's first play and discusses how he overcame overwhelmingly negative reviews to continue his career as a writer

* The 12 stupidest questions:

It started with Eco talking about the list of the “twelve stupidest questions” he’d been asked while on tour and his “twelve stupid answers.” For example, to the question “Why did you name your book The Name of the Rose?” he’d respond “Because Pinocchio was copyrighted.”

* Soft Skull's fall catalog is available for viewing on the Internet

* I haven't heard Andrew Sean Greer's name in a while, but he's got a new novel and John Updike reviews it in The New Yorker

* I'm not sure that I 100% agree with this. I see The Complete Review's point that the NYTBR should finds ways of including better books and toss aside some of the trash it does review. But I think that if a review section aspires to be a "paper of record" (or a "gatekeeper") then there's some argument for reviewing books with buzz, simply because a paper of record needs to be on the record about major books. Of course, that leaves us to define exactly what "major" is (I wouldn't say all the books discussed in the post are "major"), and it also leaves open the question of the best way to deal with a major book that's not really very good (a full-page review? something shorter? space in a roundup?).

* The Chicago Press blog has a roundup of coverage on one of its books, coving one of America's most influential avant-garde jazz collectives

* The Guardian has got the lineup for the Hay-on-Wye festival of books

* Another nation cuts its public funding to literature

* The Literary Saloon provides more coverage of the PEN Festival. Start here.

* Sherman Alexie is interviewed at The Guardian

* The Quarterly Conversation contributor John Lingan reviews Chabon's new book

* Re-translation

* "The most successful writer in China today isn’t Gao Xingjian, the winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize, or even Jiang Rong, the author of the best-selling novel “Wolf Totem,” just released in the United States. It’s 24-year-old Guo Jingming, a pop idol whose cross-dressing, image-obsessed persona has made him a sensation in a country where the Communist dictatorship advocates prudery and heterosexuality."

* Book-swapping websites

* Another publisher is planning to bring good literature back into print

*

PEN World Voices Festival

Garth over at The Millions is reporting on it:

Among my favorite discoveries last night were the South African writer Rian Malan - whose lovely reading voice has affinities with Ondaatje's - the Mexican poet Coral Bracho - and especially the Hungarian Peter Esterhazy. In what I believe is a new twist, writers read in their first language, with a translation projected onto a screen behind them. I applaud this, in theory; in a festival that prides itself on a global outlook, it seems questionable to force readers into English. That said, the projectionist's manic-depressive speeding-up and slowing-down of the scrolling text added a rather surreal dimension to the evening.

Mucho Bolaño

Among other offerings in a strong, new edition of HermanoCerdo, you can read two essays dealing with Roberto Bolaño.

One is by me and deals with my take on the Bolaño phenomenon in the U.S. Thankfully, the Hermanos have translated it into Spanish for me, but they've also retained the English version for those who prefer that language.

The other, in Spanish only, deals with a (oh my lord) theatrical adaptation of 2666, although, wisely, they didn't attempt to bring all of it to the stage.

Spring 2008 "Good Reads"

Critical Mass has posted the NBCC's list of spring 2008 "Good Reads." (I didn't participate in the vote since I've only read one book published in 2008, and I didn't like it that much.)

I was hoping this list would be a little more interesting than the first Good Reads list, published a few months back, but it isn't really. None of the 10 fiction titles presented here (7 tied for 4th place) was published by anything resembling a small or indie press, and most of the books are titles that should be obvious to anyone with any familiarity with contemporary literature.

I don't see how the NBCC helps anything by publishing a list of recommendations that pretty much recommends the authors everyone is already reading. This kind of sounds like a rubber stamp to me. Perhaps before we put together the next Good Reads list we can find a way to ensure that the recommendations include a few books that readers are likely to have not heard of.

Friday Catalogs: Open Letter and Mark Batty Publisher

Open Letter, the press started up by Chad Post at the University of Rochester upon his departure from the Dalkey Archive, is on the verge of publishing its first round of books. Here's two of the first six that struck me:

The Pets (Bragi Olafsson, trans Janice Balfour, October) strikes me for two reasons: the first is that it's translated from Icelandic, and that just seems appealing to me, probably because Iceland has always seemed like an interesting place, but also because I can't remember the last time I've seen an Icelandic translation; the second reason this book strikes me is because it seems to be narrated by a person hiding under a bed. That the author appears to be a fan of Paul Auster (he translated City of Glass into Icelandic) would also be a good sign.

Vilnius Poker (Ricardas Gavelis, trans Elizabeth Novickas, January 2009) sounds like it's either going to be a really great read or a really bad one. It's narrated by an extremely paranoid office worker in Soviet-ruled Vilnius, and it's, apparently, 500 pages of him working out his paranoid theories; so it could either be really enjoyable, in a Kafkaesque sort of way, or really painful.

Mark Batty Publisher is the one that published Garth Risk Hallberg's Hopscotch-inspired novel; in my opinion, it's a book that, in addition to being innovatively written, is also very nicely designed as an object, as it looks good and integrates numerous photos into the substance of the text.

I mention Garth's book because after looking at MBP's slightly-outdated-but-still-worth-mentioning Fall 2007 catalog, it's clear that Garth's is a good example of the kind of stuff this publisher produces.

Imposters (Jim Knoblauch, Shawna Kenney), which is illustrated in the catalog with a photo of a Storm Trooper in a suburban home playing a video game, seems like an interesting photo book. It's a sort of documentation of Southern Californians who attempt to earn their living by dressing up as various well-known Hollywood-movie figures and skimming a few bucks off of tourists to the area.

I had no idea that stickers were such an essential part of graffiti culture as to inspire a magazine solely devoted to them. PEEL: The Art of the Sticker (Dave Combs, Holly Combs), documents the development of the magazine (also called PEEL) and the sticker's place in street art.

I'm not quite sure it's my thing, but Face Food (DETACH) documents the "art" of crafting Japanese children's bento box lunches into appealing things, like Pikachu. At any rate, this gives you an idea of the diversity of stuff Mark Batty publishes.

Though it's not a new book, While You're Reading (Gerard Unger) sounds like an interesting enough read. It's all about what actually happens within a person's eyes and brain while they read. Intriguingly, the book goes into things like type design to explain what they do to facilitate this process.

Gatekeepers

In a debate on blogging, Sven Birkerts says:

"There's no place to stand from which to assess it," Birkerts said. What we lack in the world of blogs, he argued, is a council of gatekeepers who will impose hierarchies and coherent voices upon the chaos.

This sort of literary gatekeeping is exactly what happens at entities like the New York and London Reviews of Books and the New York Times Book Review, and Birkerts lamented their hypothetical destruction in the wake of plummeting print advertising revenues and emoticon-using, short-attention-spanned youngsters.

But I wonder: if the NYRB died tomorrow, what would really be lost?

A couple thoughts: first, I find it hard to see how a publication that reviews a handful of fiction books per month (and usually only those from the most famous of the famous) stands as a gatekeeper. Perhaps in bygone days the New York Review was a gatekeeper of sorts, but it has abdicated that role.

As for the NYTBR, I'd say that this is where its ethnocentrism is really showing. Based solely on the number of books it manages to cover, you can make a case for the NYTBR as a gatekeep of books published in the U.S. But the problem with that is that increasingly literature is seen as a worldwide endeavor, and with the NYTBR shunning fiction from outside the U.S. as much as it does, I don't see it as a gatekeeper.

Again, in bygone times you could get by a lot easier ignoring fiction from around the world, but now it really makes no sense to call yourself a gatekeeper if you're ignoring works from outside the U.S.

As for blogs, I don't know why Birkerts keeps wanting them to do something they're obviously not interested in doing. Even the now-defunct LBC, the closest thing to a Birkertesque "gatekeeper" that I've seen come from litblogs, made it pretty clear that it didn't see itself as a gatekeeper and didn't want that role.

Frida--Back in the U.S.

The NYRB reports on the latest Frida Kahlo show in the U.S.:

Frida Kahlo was an ironic and devilish person, and so she might be intrigued by the thought that, for this writer, at least, her finest single work is in an outward respect her least typical. Kahlo is known, of course, for her many unsparing self-portraits, images where she can confront us with tears on her cheeks or exhibit herself as a bedridden patient or victim. They present a woman who, facing us as well with her distinctive and unforgettable dark, unbroken, single eyebrow and clear suggestion of a mustache, and often wearing clothes or accompanied by details that are redolent of her native Mexico, exudes a smoldering fury—an expressionist tension that, until recent decades, was rarely encountered in the work of women artists.

The Suicide of Dorothy Hale, however, a painting dated 1939 which shows exactly that, a woman killing herself, has a New York City setting and has as its protagonist a formally and elegantly dressed woman who is not remotely like any other figure in the painter's work. . . .

LINKS

* This is what The Sound and the Fury looks like on stage. Read more about the adaption, which doesn't cut a single line from the novel.

* The long odyssey of Christopher Hitchens

* Iceland will be the guest of honor at Frankfurt . . . in 2011. They really plan these things in advance.

* The Columbia University Press blog on Korean poet Kim Sowôl

* We're goin to Mars, Argentina!

* And speaking of all the strange things for the U.S. to bring out to Argentina, I've just discovered that Tom Wolfe will be appearing at the MALBA in Buenos Aires. That's great.

* The Complete Review reviews With Borges, which I discussed a few weeks ago

* The New Yorker posits that teaching English in China is a matter of framing it as a path to self-fulfillment and a way to beat the imperialist aggressors

* Garth has a pretty good take on Ursula K. Le Guin's recent, odd essay on the state of reading in the U.S.:

Is there a crisis in reading? Impossible to say, when "our own people," the arbiters of literary culture, decline one of its most valuable functions: self-criticism. To be fair to the editors quoted above, their enthusiasm on behalf of their respective projects is evidence of a laudable commitment to the culture of the book; as Lorin Stein puts it, "This is a business I believe in passionately." And if we are to blame someone for changing the subject from the state of reading to the state of publishing, it should be Le Guin herself.

* Those with an interest in Michel Houellebecq's mother issues will enjoy this article

* Looks like PBR isn't quite as working class as it likes to think:

         Since the early 1970s, sales of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer had plummeted steadily. Then, in 2002, the beer became the beverage of choice in hipster haunts everywhere. Sales rose 5.4% that year, followed by a 9.4% increase in supermarket sales in the first quarter of 2003. Marketwatchers initially scratched their heads at this sudden and inexplicable uptick. The beer hadn't been actively advertised in years, but that's precisely what worked in its favor. With ads from the competition (typical T&A showcases, burping frogs, and the ubiquitous catchphrase "Wassup?") as foils, PBR was automatically imbued with an anti-corporate aura that couldn't be bought.

Except that it was.

As it turns out, a savvy marketer had decided to forgo mainstream advertising, instead targeting his pitch at those bastions of corporate culture, bike messengers. And that's just one of the many tales of corporate marketing firms plundering the underground Anne Elizabeth Moore tells in Unmarketable. . . .

* Critical Mass gives you a write-up of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books

* Wood v. Franzen

* And lastly, please don't say it: Getter better

Herzog v. Morris

The Believer:

WERNER HERZOG: Walking out of one of your films, I always had the feeling—the sense that I’ve seen a movie, that I’ve seen something equivalent to a feature film. That’s very much the feeling of the feature film Vernon, Florida or even the film with McNamara—The Fog of War. Even there I have the feeling I’ve seen a feature, a narrative feature film with an inventive narrative structure and with a sort of ambience created that you only normally create in a feature film, in an inventive, fictionalized film.

The new film that I saw, Standard Operating Procedure, feels as if you had completely invented characters, and yet they are not. We know the photos, and we know the events and we know the dramas behind it. And yet I always walk out feeling that I have seen a feature film, a fiction film.

ERROL MORRIS: Yeah. The intention is to put the audience in some kind of odd reality. . . .