Civilization

'But that's the aim of civilization: to make everything an enjoyment.'
'Well, if that's its aim, I'd rather be wild.'

[Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Trans. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky]

Crash Course

THE PRIDE OF GARBAGE When the owner of the house picked up the bag of garbage and headed out to the street to throw it in the dumpster, the bag was overwhelmed with the fear that she would be put side by side with her companions. But when the man placed her on top of all the others, she became intoxicated with her greatness and looked down at them with disdain.

by Osama Alomar, translated from Arabic by C. J. Collins with Lydia Davis

With Mint Tea On a Sunday Night; Weightless

What She Knew

People did not know what she knew, that she was not really a woman but a man, often a fat man, but more often, probably, an old man. The fact that she was an old man made it hard for her to be a young woman. It was hard for her to talk to a young man, for instance, though the young man was clearly interested in her. She had to ask herself, Why is this young man flirting with this old man?

—Lydia Davis

"Obsessed, boring, grief-stricken."

"That's another of the problems when one suffers a misfortune: the effects on the victim far outlast the patience of those prepared to listen and accompany her, unconditional support never lasts long once it has become tinged with monotony. And so, sooner or later, the grieving person is left alone when she has still not finished grieving or when she's no longer allowed to talk about what remains her only world, because other people find that world of grief unbearable, repellent. She understands that for them sadness has a social expiry date, that no one is capable of contemplating another's sorrow, that such a spectacle is tolerable only for a brief period, for as long as the shock and pain last and there is still some role for those who are there watching, who then feel necessary, salvatory, useful. But on discovering that nothing changes and that the affected person neither progresses nor emerges from her grief, they feel humiliated and superfluous, they find it almost offensive and stand aside: 'Aren't I enough for you? Why can't you climb out of that pit with me by your side? Why are you still grieving when time has passed and I've been here all the whole to console and distract you? If you can't climb out, then sink or disappear.' And the grieving person does just that, she retreats, removes herself, hides. Perhaps Luisa clung to me that afternoon because with me she could be what she still was, with no need for subterfuge: the inconsolable widow, to use the usual phrase. Obsessed, boring, grief-stricken."

- from The Infatuations by Javier Marías,
translated by Margaret Jull Costa

Paper Bound Solace

(Photo mine.)

 

book·worm/ˈbo͝okˌwərm/

Noun:

A person devoted to reading. The larva of a wood-boring beetle that feeds on the paper and glue in books. A person devoted to reading who begins, in both physical and virtual worlds, to resemble a wood-boring beetle that feeds on the paper and glue, margins and type, quote and blurb, jacket and spine, colour and smell, shape and size, heft and height of books.

Lit Wit

"Listen: I don't have anything against autobiographies, 

so long as the people writing them have penises that are at least a foot long when erect."

- Roberto Bolaño

Judging Books

I've just peeled tentatively open a slim, soft, signed copy of a novel called The Solitude of Prime Numbers by an apparently very handsome gentleman named Paolo Giordano. It was sent to me by a trusted friend and reader, and I am already committed to it over the several sad others sitting on my shelf because it has perhaps the loveliest epigraph and dedication I've ever read:

Her old aunt's elaborately trimmed dress was a perfect fit for Sylvie's slender figure, and she asked me to lace it up for her. "The sleeves are plain; how ridiculous!" she said.

- Gérard de Nerval, Sylvie, 1853

*

To Eleonora,
because in silence
I promised it to you

*

Letter

Dear F,

I find myself surrounded by the imaginative debris of my most recent read, a slim but monumental novella by the always astounding Alan Bennett called The Uncommon Reader. The most pertinent thing to say about it for the purposes of this letter, although too mechanical a remark to really befit the work, is that it is everything I have ever wished to know or say about reading, writing, and English Royalty, squeezed through a much more sensitive, seasoned brain, and poured across one hundred or so pages. The following, for instance, plucked a resonant string:

"The truth was Sir Claude had no notion of what the queen should write or whether she should write at all, and he had only suggested writing in order to get her off reading and because in his experience writing seldom got done. It was a cul de sac. He had been writing his memoirs for twenty years and hadn't even written fifty pages."

I wonder if this isn't the hidden, terrifying reason I aspire to a life of writing. Because it is, somehow, the suburbia of ambition, recognizably noble yet too safe to really be significant. A cul de sac career. Comfortable, finite, foreseeable. A place where there is no more journey left to journey.

The book is making me romantic and a little ridiculous, dulling my cynicism and softening me toward everything. One has even begun to wish one were a queen, just so one could get away with referring to oneself as "one". In all seriousness, though, apropos of this writing business: I do feel something brewing inside me and by jove it isn't tea.

Can't decide if I want to move onto to Jane Austen or D.H. Lawrence next. No doubt the sex will be a determining factor. Write soon. It's lonely these days. Skeletal trees and literary Brits are my only company.

Love,

L

NY4

What looks like a fourteen year old boy comes in wearing a grey coat and a beautiful butter yellow tie, and buys a small cup of coffee. A strange desire to watch the superbowl surfaces. The same banker winks at me twice, pre- and post-latte. Infidelity need not be chronologically concurrent with a relationship. Optimism is easier when one doesn't have to explain one's anxieties in full; a momentary frown needn't provoke an emotional third degree. Baseball players are the best looking American sportsmen, or perhaps I'm just a sexual racist. Didn't expect Paul Harding's page 24 punch to the gut. Still haven't written that goddamn letter. Do even french people know how to say "Sartre"?

Stoneking and Sal Paradise

...evaluating the hardness of the steel halls and the softness of the woman who is not there.

Better-er

Reading is always more important than writing.
- Roberto Bolaño

Bolaño knows better.

"Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite,but the desire to read and to fuck are infinite;
it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace."

- Roberto Bolaño.

(Responding to Stéphane Mallarmé: “The flesh is sad—and I’ve read every book.”)

Amulet sucked me in and spit me back out again.
And now I am asking myself: Where shall I go from here? Everywhere, I suppose.
Somebody told me this evening that I am better equipped for the world than it is for me.

Where?

"I'm interested in what Ondaatje calls the "international mongrels of the world," or what Rushdie calls the "international bastards," all those people with no place and yet every place inside them. The best line I ever heard along these lines was from John Berger. I met him in Paris. We were both a little over-served, shall we say, wine and vodka, and I asked him where he was from. He looked at me strangely, as we are friends and we'd been corresponding a long time, and he said, "England, of course." And I said in the most ridiculous way, "I know, I know, I know, but where are you from from?" He smiled that big smile of his, those eyes of his. He waited a long time and then he said that he was "a citizen—no, no, not a citizen—a patriot of elsewhere."

- Colum McCann, in a conversation with Nathan Englander published with Let The Great World Spin, which I just finished today and found intermittently fascinating and illuminating, but didn't wholly love. This bit intrigued me, though. It's not the puzzle piece so much as it is a tentative outline of the gap that needs to be filled, but it's something.

Eugene Capstone #2: The wrong kind of lit.

You know you're a geek when the smart-arse salsa vendor who flirts with you at the farmer's market gets a napkin with the name of a novel, rather than your number, on it.

Not sexy. Even despite the fruitsicle, hot jalapeno relish, and one more game of Guess Her Nationality. Sexier, perhaps, was the look of bemusement I exchanged with his small female coworker who had no doubt witnessed the putting of the same moves on other vegetable-shopping Eugene chicks several times today.