early Italo Calvino collection

review of Calvino's Last Comes the Raven.

This passage is irksome. 

Since then, he has acquired the veneer of cultish allure that I associate with authors—David Foster Wallace, John Kennedy Toole, J. D. Salinger—who are frequently name-checked on Reddit. He is clever and protean, and his metafiction has a galaxy-brain swagger.

There seems something off about shoehorning a European writer in conversation with a wealth of world literature into American disaffected white young males.  

The reviewer gives the game away when referencing Elena Ferrante. That's the other Italian writer she truly knows & obviously prefers. No need to waste that precious Yale degree on reading Buzzati, Levi, or de Maria. 

Great job, New Yorker.  

binge of indie rock label books continues

I remembered to read the last chapter of the Merge Records book this morning, Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, the Indie Label That Got Big and Stayed Small. Arcade Fire wasn't a band that commanded my attention. The postscript that Touch & Go downsized in 2009 made me wince. I felt bad for Corey Rusk & his laid off workers. I'm not comfortable with laying that at the feet of Merge Records, although Mac & Laura admit that they should've been more communicative with old friends. 

The Butthole Surfers seeing Touch & Go sprang to mind. That hurt too. Listening to And Introducing cover Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life clouded by memories fondly of the Butthole Surfers. That was a shitty move. I wasn't a Fugazi person back then because they always seemed too dour. MacKaye's perspective made me come around. 

When Touch and Go: The Complete Hardcore Punk Zine '79–'83 comes back into print, i need to snag it. It was published 2010. Copies are going for upwards of $80 now. 

I started Baumgarten's Love Rock Revolution this morning. Reading these indie rock books has been a healing salve for my long binge on reading the machinations of the CIA.  

Valeria Luiselli Discusses Migrant Children and Other Lost Souls

Valeria Luiselli Discusses Migrant Children and Other Lost Souls. I liked The Story of My Teeth and Sidewalks immensely, but never got around to picking up Tell Me How It Ends. Lost Children Archive seems extremely timely.

the Kindle

The Kindle device was leaving me nonplussed. I like reading books because they are books. It gives me a very different feeling from reading chunks of text online. I completely ignored Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road when it came out in serial, as i couldn't be bothered to read it online, knowing that it would be better enjoyed when it would be collected in a book.

Bookninja suggests something very obvious that i ignored completely. Reference books. Yeah, that would be useful. I already carry one bird book around with m all of the time (National Geographic, because it has paintings, not photos, and the range maps are on the same page as the pictures.) It would be kinda cool to carry books around for insects, reptiles, flowers, ect. or just cram it full of Wikipedia entires. However, the Kindle does not look much more robust than a laptop. And 30 hours of battery life? Why bother?

Yeah, i'm unconvinced. It looks like an utterly useless device.

Ed Champion has ten arguments against it.

The Lost Books of The Odyssey

Stumbled across an interesting review of a book called <span style="font-style:italic;">The Lost Books of The Odyssey: A Novel by Zachary Mason on Starcherone Books that looks pretty good. It's not out until March of 2008 though. There is more on it on the Stacherone blog. And the author is no workshop hack:

Zachary Mason is a computer scientist specializing in artificial intelligence. He got his B.S. at Harvey Mudd and his Ph.D. at Brandeis. He works for a Silicon Valley start-up. In recent months he has had short stories accepted by Pleiades and The Journal of Literary Imagination. This is his first novel. He is currently working on another novel about the mythology and culture of AI's

It's lazy on my part, but i'm thinking of Kadare's The File on H if written by an unholy hybrid of Richard Powers and Enrique Vila-Matas.

Alexander Theroux interview

I cracked open that copy of Darconville's Cat last month, but keep skipping back to other books.

Theroux has a new book, Laura Warholic: or The Sexual Intellectual, his first novel in twenty years, and it being put out by.... Fantagraphics? Interesting.

There's an interview over on Los Angeles City Beat. This bit tickled me:

Like his description of Eyestones, Theroux is possessed of an “assemblagist’s imagination” and an “encyclopedic knowledge of many unlikely subjects.” “Every writer writes the book he wants to read is a truism I would subscribe to,” he explains. Theroux’s books, for example, pullulate with lists. “I love lists, the taxonomy of a subject gathered in. The headline for the review of Darconville’s Cat in the New York Times Book Review was ‘Awash with Lists.’ It was a grudging review written by a peevish little cucurbit who spitefully and arbitrarily chose to blame me for a literary device – lists – that other writers of the encyclopedic novel, Francois Rabelais, Miguel de Cervantes, Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, to name but a few, were not only praised for but revered in the department of invention.”

Curcurbit? That's going in my vocabulary as soon as i can use it correctly. I suspect that he's calling the reviewer a pumpkinhead.

Lists have made me uncomfortable ever since Nick Honrnby. With this reminder, i now have an excuse.

What an arrogant bastard he is... i like him. It'll be interesting to see Bill's reaction.

The Blind Owl

Not quite finished with The Blind Owl yet, but i am a little puzzled. Pamuk says that he has read it in a few interviews with the Persian press, but barely mentions the book otherwise... or at least, that's how it appears to in the English language. He praises the book. It's not as if he dismisses it in any way. However, in reading The Blind Owl, i recognized passages that are echoed in Pamuk's work... the obsessive, hallucinatory mania that creeps in, especially The White Castle... it feels drawn straight from the scorning alienation of the wildly unhinged, but wonderfully poetic narrator of The Blind Owl.

Anyway, i gotta go finish it. Setting back up the Wordpress blog tonight is beginning to feel too much like work.

Magdalena Tulli

I've never heard of her previously, but just ordered Dreams and Stones based on this piece about her book Flaw. The reviewer compares Magdalena Tulli's work to Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Bruno Schulz, which has to be some kind of trifecta.

Archipelago Books puts out some beautiful looking books. Regardless over my freakout of the word hymenoptera, the translation of Gombrowicz's Bacacay flowed very well for me. I actually trust Bill Johnston's interpretation.

What's with the Polish kick for me anyway? Don't forget about Poland, man.

going blind

There was a little revelation at the end of this great post on the story "Borges & I" for me, as it had not occurred to me either.

The last line of “Borges and I” famously ends with the sentence, “I do not know which of us has written this page.”

It hadn’t occurred to me before but by the time that Borges composed that line he had already gone blind. So, in the physical sense of writing, he actually did not write that line. It was written by someone else, the person listening to him.

Yeah.... i really, really don't want to go blind. Just because the blog is/was Orbis Quintus doesn't necessarily mean that Borges is my favorite writer (as i probably do not have one,) but since i may or may not have early onset glaucoma (as no one else in my family has had this,) i'm feeling a bond to him stronger than before.

translation and intent

Bill responds to my fixation on the use of the word hymenoptera in Gombrowicz's "The Events on the Banbury":

The whole hymenoptera issue would have completely evaded my attention if you had not mentioned it. Yet another example of things I don't know anything about. The larger question on whether or not editors, translators, or writers do most of the fucking up is an interesting one. For myself, if I like an author, I ususally blame the translator (unless of course I like the translator, in which case I blame the
editor...). If I don't care, I assume the author is at fault. This particular case is an interesting one...

Say Gombrowicz DID get the name wrong. The translator is of course obliged to translate the text in front of him. An editor gets it and catches the error (unlikely as that is). Does he change it? Is he obligated? Is he allowed? Suppose Gombrowicz made the "error" on purpose. Suppose it was designed to be a way to lead the attentive and intelligent reader astray. Suppose it is just nonsense. How can
you tell (especially in this case where an author is dead)? As an editor, what do you do?

That original post was excerpted from an email, as is Bill's reply.

Bacacay and hymenoptera

Part of the reason why i'm having trouble finishing a book now is because i'm stuck on finishing Witold Gombrowicz's Bacacay. It's not an inaccessible book. Kat picked it up on the drive back from Austin, reading the first story quickly, and has been intrigued ever since. (She's waiting for me to finish before she dives into it, although i'm urging her to try other authors first.) There are some great stories, and even better ideas in there, but i keep finding them overlong, and become impatient with his lack of immediacy. Obviously, i have no problem with long books, but i don't like like short stories to be overly ornate. Bacacay is a good read, but i doubt whether i'll engage him in a full novel.

It seems that the translator is doesn't know his entomology. A scorpion is not a member of hymenoptera. It's done in the story "The Events on the Banbury.” Hymenoptera is the order for ants, wasps, and bees.... all insects. A scorpion is an archanid, more closely related to spiders. They actually belong to a different subphylum altogether, Chelicerata, while insects are in Hexapoda..... distant cousins evolutionarily. Eh, it's just taxonomy, right?

But why is hymenoptera used? Probably it's because both wasps and scorpions sting. Why is this important to me? Because it makes me suspect that the translator is possibly being purple or lazy. It makes me doubt everything that Gombrowicz has written. Did Gombrowicz, the narrator or the translator use the word hymenoptera? What other words am i missing the significance of or interpreting too much into?

Please remember that i'm a college dropout who majored in biology, and am no expert in either literature or entomology. This obsession over one word is petty and obsessive. Nonetheless, that one word choice has me in a doubting frenzy now.

(Shit. Was it actually the word hymenoteran that was used? The book's not handy to reference at the moment.)

Tycho Brahe's Path to God

I'm so behind in my reading that it's obscene. Even if i plot out years ahead what i'm to read, i'm lost. Another confession.... i have not read everything by Kafka.

So do i need to line up the new edition of Max Brod's Tycho Brahe's Path to God that just came out this month from Northwestern Press, or is this just being too ambitious?

Montano's Malady is dwelling on Kafka's diaries, which only exist because Max Brod ignored Kafka's posthumous instructions to burn them. Which is more important? Or at least, what is more immediate reading? Brod the editor or Brod the writer?

Montano's Malady as a reader's guide, part 1

In picking Montano's Malady back up, i've found it more necessary than usual to have an open notebook at hand while i'm reading. I'm too ignorant to catch most of the references, and have to look them up online when i take breaks.

One of the unfamiliar authors mentioned is Alan Pauls, who wrote something called The Borges Factor. I suspected the author and the work were fictional, but they are not. It turns out that he's an Argentine writer and has had his fourth novel translated to English this year, The Past. I've read three reviews so far, one in the Independent, one in the Guardian, and one in the Sunday Herald. Although the essay on Sick Art woven into the narrative seems intriguing, the actual plot of the novel doesn't attract me.

Pamuk lecture in Portland, OR

Just read the notes on the Pamuk lecture in Portland, Oregon by James Tata.

The fact that he's distanced himself from the American Congress statement on the nearly century old Armenian genocide, saying that it's an internal matter is only slightly disappointing. Turkey is under enormous strain right not. Turkish troops entering northern Iraq, into Kurdish controlled regions, are going to cause even more strain between American and Turkish relations. As much as i loathe to say it, i'm not sure that making this an issue at this moment in history in Congress of all the times it has been and will be possible is all that wise. Bush might actually be right.

(I can be convinced otherwise though.)

As an American, my favorite Pamuk book is The Black Book, not Snow, and oddly, i believe that prefer the Guneli Gup translation to the Maureen Freely one.

Want to know a dirty little secret of mine? Of Pamuk's greatest novelists, Tolstoy, Mann, Dostoevsky, and Proust, i have read only Dostoevsky, and of him, only Notes from Underground and The Idiot. I barely remember either one, as those were in my chemical years.

Exploradores del abismo

Conversational Reading has news on a review on the latest from Vila-Matas... in Spanish. It's somewhat beyond my reading comprehension unfortunately, but one day... one day... i won't have to sit around whining about why Spanish language literature is not readily available in English translation.

I stalled out on Montano's Malady weeks back. It's almost as good as Bartleby & Co.

10.14.07 book haul

Yesterday, i hit a couple of bookstores in the French Quarter. It wasn't a deep trawl, just a hit and run. Someone must have dumped all of his Ismail Kadare, as i found three (one of which i already had, two of which i've already ready.) Only Doruntine was a "new" book.

The other notable find was Alexander Theroux's Darconville's Cat. Bill has been urging me to read it for a couple of years now. Accidentally, i wound up with some kind of a fake first edition. According to Bill, the real first edition has a single page that is filled with a dot matrix checkerboard, but the smaller run has a single black page. The one bought yesterday has the single black page.

The Insufferable Gaucho

Fiction by Roberto Bolano in the New Yorker. Nope, not had a chance to read it yet.

In Austin, i finally picked up my copy of The Savage Detectives. (It's one of those books that i've been holding out for a first edition.) About halfway through.

I neglected to mention that Bill and i picked up some books at Cottonwood Books in Baton Rouge last Saturday. I bought Richard Powers' Gold Bug Variations and Peter Ackroyd's First Light.

Bill bought what was labeled as a first edition Borges, Brodie's Report, but definitely was not.

the purchases were of no real consequence, although i'm pleasantly surprised by that Ackroyd. Really, i just wanted an excuse to slap an embedded Google Map into a post.


View Larger Map

Google Book Search has a way to go

I lost my password for Library Thing months ago. Recently i went insane on Facebook trying to put together my library on some app they stuck on there, before it began to bore me to tears with how damned slow it was to load. Now there is a My Libary feature on Google Book Search.

That edition of The Master & Margarita that i just mentioned? It ain't on there. I checked the ISBN. It's a relatively common book. Their database cannot be terribly vast yet, can it?

So much for wasting a few hours trying to save some work for the government clerks assigned to track my every movement.

When they do get this together though, it looks like it might be fairly useful, in that some of my searches on certain books will go far more smoothly.

translating Bulgakov

Damn it to hell... i finally read The Master & Margarita earlier this year. Although it had been recommended to me dozens of times, it was usually recommended by kids who played Vampire: The Masquerade who fancied themselves as libertine iconoclasts. They also had good things to say about Anton LaVey's Satanic Bible and wore pewter pentacles around their necks. I cannot count how many cats that i've met named Behemoth. There was no fucking way that I was going to read Bulgakov.

Another debate has erupted over which is the superior translation of the book, and this time, i actually give damn. Unfortunately, the translation that i've read is the Burgin & O'Connor translation, which suited me just fine as i now love the book, but i ain't got a horse in this race.

Despite the number of books that i read that are in translation, the only non-epic poem ones that i recall intentionally reading in different translations are Don Quixote and The Arabian Nights oddly. And the Bible. Ach.

via 3%.