June 2011
54 posts
“Sometimes when I read new fiction, I feel that the writers of it, myself included, have a somewhat dysfunctional relationship with our own culture. I don’t mean we disapprove of it, I mean we have absorbed so much habitual disapproval of it that we are no longer able to see it, and therefore are unable to disapprove of it properly. How can you disapprove (or approve) of something you no longer see? If your palette of possible modes of representation has been habitually narrowed and restricted (to the edgy, the snarky, the hip, etc.), if that palette has been shorn of, say, the spiritual, the ineffable, the earnest, the mysterious — of awe, wonder, humility, the truly unanswerable questions — then there isn’t much hope of any real newness there.
Are the very real pleasures of being an American in 2011 underrepresented in our fiction? Are the very real terrors of living in other, less functional cultures adequately taken into account when we critique our own? If America is sick, what is the exact nature of the illness?” —
Are the very real pleasures of being an American in 2011 underrepresented in our fiction? Are the very real terrors of living in other, less functional cultures adequately taken into account when we critique our own? If America is sick, what is the exact nature of the illness?” —
George Saunders, in conversation with Patrick Dacey. Excerpted in this months Harper’s. It’s a good question. (via winesburgohio)
[Warning: this is a Tragos rant you are about to read.]
Sometimes what depresses me about the notion of American fiction is the phrase “American fiction”. Why is the phrase “American fiction” a little depressing, like sitting on a mustard colored couch listening to Donovan?
It shouldn’t be. Hearing “uh-meh-ri-kan fik-shun” should make me say “oh yeah…exciting stuff”; but it never does.
Take the words, “the novel,” or “essays,” or “lyric poems,” or “graphic novel,” or what have you; they give me a little charge. This could be because I drank too much Capri Sun and Tang as a young child. But it might also have something to do with inclusiveness.
The word “fiction” says with a nasally accent that you better, Mr. or Ms., limn some essence of American-ness. You better “capture” (always “capturing”) the “experience” of this thing we call America.
But a “poem”? O.K. Now you’re hanging out not only with Whitman, but also with the Canadian Anne Carson; not only with Marianne Moore, but also with Rimbaud, Leopardi, Qian Qi, Sappho, Neruda, Juana Inés de la Cruz, Baudelaire, Petrarca, Pushkin, and why not: Homer.
A “novel”? It doesn’t need to be “great” or “American” (even if it is both those things), because it’s also grabbing a beer with Austen, Petronius, Stendhal, Vargas Llosa, Achebe, Xueqin, Murakami, Tolstoy, Bolaño, Calvino…whoever shows up for a pint that night.
I was born and raised in San Diego. No matter what I do, think or write, my world and perspective are “American”. I don’t need to try to “engage my culture,” or worry about representing the pleasures or terrors of the American scene. These are ways of thinking I can’t help, for better or worse.
For example. Right now I live in Turkey. I could put the pen to paper right now with the sole intention of writing an epic poem about life in Ankara. It would be an American epic poem. For better or worse. (Fear not: I have no intention of writing an epic poem about life in Ankara.)
Does this limit me, this inevitable ineluctable Americanosity? Yes, to some extent. But also no. Because that’s what reading is for. When Orhan Pamuk writes about Istanbul, that’s my chance, as a reader, to understand the health, sickness, wonder and terror of his Turkish universe. More importantly, it’s my chance to read another novel. A novel that’s in conversation with Balzac, Proust and Faulkner, and with all the worlds and visions rolled into Pamuk’s living and writing mind.
To me, this isn’t at all about a forced cosmopolitanism, about the number of visas and stamps you’ve collected in your passport. It’s about telling “fiction” to go screw itself. Who needs one more night drinking fancy cocktails with a nasally, anxiety-ridden killjoy anyhow?
(P.S.: For anyone who thinks my opposition to the phrase “American fiction” is a little crazy, note that when I was in sixth grade, I made a list of 78 words I strongly believed should be removed from the English language. “Muffin” and “pumpernickel” were among those words.)
“The generic can be more intense than the concrete. We do not lack illustrative examples. Since I was a boy summering in the north of province, I was fascinated by the surrounding prairies and by the men downing maté in the kitchen; but my happiness was fierce when I found out that those plains were “pampas”, and those guys “gauchos”. The same with the imaginative souls who fall in love. The generic (the repeated name, the type, the fatherland, the adorable destiny invested in it) reigns supreme over individual traits. And these individual traits are tolerated by virtue of the generic itself.”
—
[Jorge Luis Borges: Historia de la eternidad. Emecé Editores, 1953, my translation]
I have always felt guilty for sometimes preferring the abstract and general to the concrete and specific. If I were a better person I’d only write Anglo-Saxon monosyllables that mark out not just rocks and lizards, but panetellerite and plumed basilisks. And specifically the ones under your feet (not directly in the latter case, I hope).
But the dirty truth is that I fall headlong for classifications, schemas, generalizations, brands and rankings. For a while I thought this was a moral failing, but now I more comfortably attribute it to having spent too much of my childhood baking in the sun.
The thought, then, that all the “details” endure by grace of the generic? That, my friends, is a consolation and a half.
That there is a Book somewhere tolerating (stomaching!) the presence of this tawny, dampstained, pencil-scratched, black-cased, dust-jacketless library edition of History of Eternity splayed on my blond-wood desk would surely please our man Borges, wherever he might be in his labyrinth in the sky.
[Original:]
Lo genérico puede ser más intenso que lo concreto. Casos ilustrativos no faltan. De chico, veraneando en el norte de la provincia, la llanura redonda y los hombres que mateaban en la cocina me interesaron, pero mi felicidad fue terrible cuando supe que ese redondel era “pampa”, y esos varones, “gauchos”. Igual, el imaginativo que se enamora. Lo genérico (el repetido nombre, el tipo, la patria, el destino adorable que le atribuye) prima sobre los rasgos individuales, que se toleran en gracia de lo anterior.
Dante in Love →
ft.com
The Financial Times reviews the English critic, columnist, and reviewer A.N. Wilson’s just-published book, Dante in Love.
An excerpt from the review, by the Dante translator Robin Kirkpatrick.
“The virtue of Dante in Love is that it readjusts certain misapprehensions and also remedies a culturally disastrous commonplace. Evil, one is told with tedious frequency, is more interesting than goodness – so read Dante’s Inferno, but not a page beyond! Yet, as anyone following the Inferno to its end will see, evil is itself finally tedious, mechanical and banal. Goodness, by contrast, is the true source of variety and surprise.”
You know what though? If anything it’s that purgatorial bridge between mechanical evil and unpredictable goodness that’s really meant to charm.
“All colors and blends of Americans have somewhat the same tendencies. it’s a breed - selected out by accident. And so we’re overbrave and overfearful — we’re kind and cruel as children. We’re overfriendly and at the same time frightened of strangers. We boast and are impressed. We’re oversentimental and realistic. We are mundane and materialistic — and do you know of any other nation that acts for ideals? We eat too much. We have no taste, no sense of proportion. We throw our energy about like waste. In the old lands they say of us that we go from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture. Can it be that our critics have not the key or the language of our culture?”
—
Lee in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (via goyago)
Steinbeck on understanding America
Author Jason Goodwin on Turkish food
Lapham's Quarterly
LQ editor Aidan Flax-Clark talks with novelist Jason Goodwin about Turkish food, the delights of eating in the Ottoman empire, and his series of historical mystery novels, with their main character, the eunuch investigator Yashim, solving crimes and cooking his way through nineteenth-century Istanbul.
Read Goodwin’s essay on Turkish food, “The Imperial Kitchen,” in our Summer 2011 issue, “Food.”
On Turkish food and mysteries.
“the Kuuk Thaayorre who live in northern Australia. It’s a tribe that does not have words for relative directions. They don’t say ‘left’ or ‘right’ or ‘up’ or ‘down’ or ‘back’. They use only the cardinal directions i.e. north, south, east and west. So instead of saying: ‘Hand me that cup of water by your left hand,’ they’ll say: ‘Hand me that cup of water by your southwest hand.’ Or: ‘You have an ant on your northeast leg.’ So how are they able to do this? The answer is that they have to remain constantly orientated. And it turns out that if you spin them around, put them in a cave, or try all sorts of things to discombobulate them, they can still unfailingly point in the right direction. So here is one example where you really do see that the fact their language has this property requires their cognition to build around that in a different way.”
—
Through the Language Glass | The Browser
It turns out that Whorf was wrong, but Chomskey wasn’t exactly right: to some extent our language does in fact make us see the world a bit differently.
P.S.: I am a south paw who bats east handed.
Hear Bill Murray Read Poems by Billy Collins and Cole Porter →
nymag.com
As always, I try to appeal to that magical sweet spot between Fans of Stripes, and Fans of Contemporary American poetry.
superfluidity: Academic publishing is decadent and depraved →
superfluidity.tumblr.com
Have any of you ever lost precious sleep wondering about the metaphorical uses of sickles, the agricultural uses of jawbones, or the strange lexical association in many cultures between words for sickle and jaw? (Don’t lie Raynor.) Well, butcher all those imaginary sheep, store the meat in the…
Hot of the press: an article by Superfluidity! Congratulations to Tumblr’s official Classics scholar.
(I offer Superfluidity apologies in advance, if I end up taking the article to the beach.)
“If that’s holiday as in “utterly removed from any sense of immediate surroundings”, my most memorable holiday reading is Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which I started in the cab on the way to Vancouver airport, headed for a first trip to Berlin where I was doing something, I wasn’t sure what, with Samuel Delany and Wim Wenders at the Kunsthalle. I am uncertain as to the year, likely it was 1991, before the publication of All the Pretty Horses. I had recently read McCarthy’s astonishing The Orchard Keeper, and on the urging of the friend who had recommended that, I began Blood Meridian. I remember nothing else, door to door, between my home in Vancouver and the hotel room in which I finished the book in Berlin. I awoke from it as from some terribly potent dream, and found myself, quite unexpectedly, in a strange city. Being Berlin, and particularly then, it was a very strange city. A few nights later, over in the east, I continued to experience intense overlays of Blood Meridian. Indeed, I think those overlays helped me better comprehend what I was seeing, and not to panic. The Judge, I knew, would understand all of this”
—
William Gibson on his most memorable holiday read (via walkwhilereading)
I remember reading Blood Meridian for the first time in San Francisco. It was as if I were a child taken on a camping trip to the desert, but left there on my own to wander among the cacti and snakes. I wondered if I’d ever be found.
After a few hours, I tried to escape by way of sleep, but the Judge, the Kid, the grotesquerie of McCarthy’s West, they all slithered into my dreams.
Which way to the egress, was the question. The answer, after desperate reflection, was obvious all along. P.G. Wodehouse.
For the next three nights, I read Blood Meridian until near midnight. Set the damn thing down. Then burned the 12am oil with Jeeves, Bertie, Agatha, Gussie, and Tuppie.
An invaluable lesson, and a prime reason I’ll never respect Hollywood until they start giving more Best Picture Oscars to comedies.
“Chekhov wrote in a letter to Suvorin: “Remember that writers whom we call great or just good and who make us drunk, have one common, very important feature: they are going somewhere and calling you with them, and you feel not with your mind, but your whole being, that they have a goal, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father.”
—William Boyd, “A Chekhov Lexicon,” The Guardian, July 3, 2004. (via msodradek)
