Absence

A failed disposable camera picture of my desk in Boston in ‘08. Two photographs tacked to the wall are visible: An artists’ photograph printed in Harper’s of a controlled fire set in an empty model home in Britain to train firemen, & a newspaper picture of the Iraqi minister of the Interior blindfolded & tied to a chair in his office after he was arrested for corruption.

I got up earlier this afternoon, still at the same café, to order another coffee & I put out my cigarette while I straightened. While I walked away what was left of it was still smoking in the ashtray, a kind of signal or trace. It reminded me, when I sat down again, of those effective & precise signifiers of absence (that is, of former presence) that crop up most often in crime fiction — the detectives are just seconds too late, & there’s still a thin coil of smoke coming up from the ashtray.

I suppose, overused, these verge on cliché — the flapping curtains in the open window, the still-warm, slight imprint in the empty bed — but the physicality of the best of them is moving. I read a Chilean poet once, I can’t remember who, it was a friend’s bookshelf in Ronda, & I still remember a turn of phrase — someone had come home to find that a person close to them had been taken by the special police, had been disappeared. An empty saucepan or a teakettle sat on a hot stove, smoking, ‘dry as a bone,’ the water all boiled away.

I can’t think of other similar moments in fiction, but perhaps you can.

People disappear sometimes in Basque Country, too (not in the same way as in Chile! — I want to add, because parallels are cheap), & the stories you’re told about it are typically difficult to make a single clear sense of. A friend works in a pueblo east of here, way up in the mountains, & five people were detained a few weeks ago in 3 a.m. raids with — from her high schoolers’ perspective, at least — no explanation. They were spirited away in the night & nobody knows what’s happened to them. This, at least, was what she was telling me, what her kids had been talking about in class in their mixture of Basque & Spanish. The same thing happened last fall — there were massive demonstrations in Bilbao. My friend brought it up at a party, to a Spanish woman, who listened with a particular kind of expression on her face & then said, politely but firmly, “There must have been a good reason.”

Which is to say, Don’t trust your kids to give you an accurate sense of what’s going on out of their own feelings of persecution.

This morning while I was taking my coffee at the bar in the Mercado de la Ribera,  I read in El Correo about the cache of explosives recently seized in Portugal; ETA, it seems, has been making noises about car bombs, attacks on airports. Most of their leadership is in jail — if you look at the wanted posters you see a bunch of rural kids from the pueblos. An ongoing season of crackdowns & detainments that started this fall, probably not all justified, probably not all unjustified.  I’m in over my head. I didn’t mean to start writing about this again. I’m just trying to give a sense of what’s left, what’s hanging in the air.

Pillow talk

Yesterday on the bus, I came upon a wonderful passage in Corazón tan blanco (wonderful, at least, when I read it in Spanish) that displays Marías’ penchant for the sinuous & piled sentence, for narrative catalogues, for listing, & also reminded me — to the point of being almost, it seemed, a direct reply (the last sentence in particular) — of a passage from Georges Perec which I’ll affix below everything else:

Estar junto a alguien consiste en buena medida en pensar en voz alta, esto es, en pensarlo todo dos veces en lugar de una, una con el pensamiento y otra con el relato, el matrimonio es una institución narrativa.

[...]

Por amor o por lo que es su esencia — contar, informar, anunciar, comentar, opinar, distraer, escuchar y reír, y proyectar en vano — se traciona a los demás, a los amigos, a los padres, a los hermanos, a los consaguíneos y a los no consaguíneos, a los antiguos amores y a las convicciones, a las antiguas amantes, al propio pasado y a la propia infancia, a la propia lengua que deja de hablarse y sin duda a la propia patria, a lo que en toda persona hay de secreto, o quizá es de pasado. Para halagar a quien se ama se denigra el resto de lo existente, se neiga y execra todo para contentar y reasegurar a uno solo que puede marcharse, la fuerza del territorio que delimta la almohada es tanta que excluye de su seno cuanto no está en ella, y es un territorio que por su propia naturaleza no permite que nada esté en ella excepto los cónyuges, o los amantes, que en cierto sentido se quedan solos y por eso se hablan y nada callan, involuntariamente. La almohada es redondeada y blanda y a menudo blanca, y al cabo del tiempo lo redondeado y blanco acaba sustituyendo al mundo, y a su débil rueda.

— Corazón tan blanco, Javier Marías p. 184-85

I’ll try now to give you a translation, with apologies — I’m piecing it together myself, lacking an easier way.

Being together with someone consists to great extent in thinking out loud — that’s it — in thinking everything over twice instead of once, first as a thought and later as a story — marriage is a narrative institution.

[...]

Out of love or that which is its essence — to recount, to inform, to announce, to comment, to opine, to entertain, to listen & to laugh, & to make futile plans — we betray all else, our friends, our parents, our siblings, those we’re related to & those with whom we have no relation, our old loves & our convictions, our former lovers, our own past & our own childhood, our own tongue that ceases to be spoken & without a doubt our own homeland, that which in every person is secret, or perhaps long past. To flatter who we love we denigrate the rest of existence, we negate and detest everything else in order to reassure & make content the only one who can leave; the force of the territory marked out by the pillow is such that it leaves our hearts when we’re not upon it; it’s a terroritory that by its own nature does not permit anything on it except lovers or spouses, who feel in a certain way that they are alone and so speak and are never quiet, involuntarily. The pillow is soft & rounded, usually white, and over time its roundness & whiteness replaces the world & its weak orbit.

Anyone with the English translation on hand is invited to correct my errors or offer other version of sentences. Actually, reading this earlier, I’d forgotten almohada meant pillow & thought it meant bedspread, which would make placing Perec side by side even more apropos — but what I like about this isn’t just the quality of the observation, but the way that a relationship becomes analogous to fiction itself (el matrimonio es una institución narrativa), not just a narrative that is created but also a form of betrayal (we could equally write that the author in certain ways betrays everything else when he weds himself to the blank page, a territory delimited & someone private, made to be enjoyed by one other person at a time, so that the act of reading what someone else has written — love letters are proof of this — is a kind of union or relationship, a being alone with someone else). Perec, in a metaphor he extends but doesn’t quite close:

We generally utilize the page in the larger of its two dimensions. The same goes for the bed. The bed (or, if you prefer, the page) is a rectangular space, longer than it is wide, in which, or on which, we normally lie longways. ‘Italian’ beds are only to be found in fairy tales (Tom Thumb & his brothers, or the seven daughters of the Ogre, for example) or in altogether abnormal & usually serious circumstances (mass exodus, aftermath of a bombing raid, etc.). Even when we utilize the bed the more usual way around, it’s almost always a sign of catastrophe if several people have to sleep in it. The bed is an instrument conceived for the nocturnal repose of one or two persons, but no more.

— Species of Space & Other Pieces, Georges Perec, trans. John Sturrock

And finally, because writing this has reminded me of it & because I’m quilting this together out of pieces of this & that anyway, here’s a poem by Tennessee Williams:

Life Story

After you’ve been to bed together for the first time,
without the advantage or disadvantage of any prior acquaintance,
the other party very often says to you,
Tell me about yourself, I want to know all about you,
what’s your story? And you think maybe they really and truly do

sincerely want to know your life story, and so you light up
a cigarette and begin to tell it to them, the two of you
lying together in completely relaxed positions
like a pair of rag dolls a bored child dropped on a bed.

You tell them your story, or as much of your story
as time or a fair degree of prudence allows, and they say,
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, until the oh
is just an audible breath, and then of course

there’s some interruption. Slow room service comes up
with a bowl of melting ice cubes, or one of you rises to pee
and gaze at himself with mild astonishment in the bathroom mirror.
And then, the first thing you know, before you’ve had time
to pick up where you left off with your enthralling life story,
they’re telling you their life story, exactly as they’d intended to all
along,

and you’re saying, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, the vowel at last becoming
no more than an audible sigh,
as the elevator, halfway down the corridor and a turn to the left,
draws one last, long, deep breath of exhaustion
and stops breathing forever. Then?

Well, one of you falls asleep
and the other one does likewise with a lighted cigarette in his mouth,
and that’s how people burn to death in hotel rooms.

Tasting what you read

— Contemporáneos, Alicia Martín (2002). Via cloudy1985.

I happily subscribe (yes, like a magazine) to the notion that translation is inevitably partial & in some sense insufficient, a remaking — and if you can read the language that the original’s printed in, why lapse back to your native tongue? — but I also confess that from time to time, reading Spanish fiction, I’ve thought guiltily that I’d be picking up on more things if I were reading the English version. Wanting to go back to translation feels lazy, like giving up — or maybe like surrendering your membership card, having to read in English like everyone else, people who haven’t even tried to learn how! — but it’s true that in Spanish there’s a frustrating opacity, a flat effect that I don’t feel with English. I don’t have as good a sense of the flavor of the words, I can’t taste them, even though can follow the action.

But on the bus the other day I thought to myself that it wasn’t such a surprising feeling, either. Read literary fiction & you see the writer working within or against the language (I’m glossing DeLillo, I just realized — ‘matching with the language’). You have to have a sense of how sentences look when they’re readymade, the coloring of certain words, what the clichés are, or the equivocal signalings that signify an unreliable narrator or the rhetorical flourishes adopted by pedants or what barbed overformality looks like — and in English you’ve absorbed all of these distinctions & weights & flavors from thousands upon thousands books read or alluded to. It’s easy for me to forget just how little I’ve read in Spanish. More than a half-dozen books? Certainly not more than a dozen. A dozen — stack them up and they make a sad little pile set against those thousands upon thousands of English books, the blue Hardy Boys boxed set that was the first book you ever read on your own, big doorstop Michener wheezings, those bent & thumbed Lord of the Rings paperbacks, the time in high school you didn’t like My Ántonia . . . To say nothing of the books I’d say now I love (but with those there’s always a little bit of posturing).

That’s one of the enormous disadvantages of learning Spanish like I did, by bullshitting to people over beers & teaching teenagers & watching daytime television & reading the newspaper sometimes. In this language I’m talkative but not literate. Maybe this gets compounded by the tendency, if we like to think of ourselves as well-read, to cut our teeth on, I don’t know, Cortázar or Borges (or Marías) instead of the boundless & fecund soil of run-of-the-mill fiction they sprouted from. Imagine (in belated honor of his birthday), James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man being the very first book you tried to read in English.

All of which is a long way of saying that Corazón tan blanco has been teaching me a lot of new words, in part because of the narrator’s analytic formality — saying ambos, which I’d never heard before, instead of los dos (both), calling marriage el contrato — and, mostly, in a series of sequencies mired in the past, in looking at photographs of the dead, that seem to be summoning up a more elaborated & colorful language than what was being used previously, more descriptive, using words whose mystery is perhaps unjustifiably enhanced by my unfamiliarity with them.

I don’t know if you find, as I do, that sometimes you plow through foreign language fiction & depend on context to pick up on words & that other times you find yourself looking up practically every word, suddenly sucked in to wanting to know exactly what’s being said, wanting to make sure that you’re really, really understanding what’s happening — and I don’t know whether this has to do, actually, with part of the book itself that we’re reading or whether it depends on us, on our mood, on how lost we’re willing to feel.

I’m reading with a paperback U of Chicago dictionary published the year I was born, & some words it just doesn’t have. I’ve managed to find definitions for the following after writing them down here, but with no internet at home these were mysteries to me for a week: difuminarse (softening, losing clarity, blurring); picaflor (hummingbird, known also as colibrí, pájaro-mosca, or chupamirto, but in this case, a womanizer); atezado (tanned, browned by the sun); irguiendo (raising the head, straightening the back); paulatina (gradual).

Picaflor was particularly frustrating because the narrator’s father repeats it — “yes, I said picaflor” — and the narrator later reflects that his father had been choosing his words carefully. That entire chapter, the two of them talking on the night of his wedding, is actually really well done propulsive tension even in the midst of circular digression, a momentum, a motion building up to a final word: Cuando tengas secretos o si ya los tienes, no se los cuentes. — Y, ya con la sonrisa devuelta al rostro, añadió: — Suerte.

Other examples, from my notes (I don’t know how interesting this is to anyone but me): Nudo is a knot, join, union, bond, or tie — in a play it’s the turning point. Pulcro (neat, trim), carlajada (peal of laughter), atolondrarse (to confuse, muddle, perplex — here, reflexive, it means to mingle, like in a crowd), jactado (bragged, boasted), apaciguada (appeased), silbido (a whistle or hiss).

My latest attempt to describe how Corazón tan blanco is working on me: Marías’ fiction as pearl-making. The fictional world, at first a tableau illuminated, as if by a camera flash, by a shocking & specific moment of violence, is added to & added to, filed in, elaborated, becomes more and more complex & self standing, a living thing in fits & starts, not secrets kept from us & then revealed, exactly, but entire histories that we don’t notice we’re not being told because each digression is so complete, so exhaustive. Or maybe not a single pearl, but stringing a necklace?

Practice

“…Many writers feel that the Reconquista in Spain in particular paved the way for expansion in the Americas by supplying tested institutions, practices, and techniques for conquest, control, and settlement. Cortes sometimes described Aztec temples as ’mosques.’ Much of the same has been said of British conquest and settlement in Ireland from the late sixteenth century. Some scholars feel that one can exaggerate the extent to which Ireland was a ’blueprint for America.’ But one cannot deny that the settlement of Ireland produced a particularly tough and re-settlement-prone subculture: the Scots-Irish. These people had by far the highest rates of overseas migration in the British Isles in the 18th century. The same is true of the Andalusians of Spain and the Cossacks of Russia. These groups were the shock troops of European far-settlement, and they had been produced by earlier, closer, settlements.”

— Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, James Belich, p42.

What I wouldn’t give to have known about this book a year & a half ago, so I could have looked at its bibliography before going to Andalucía. There are two or three Jaéns in South America for this very reason. Have I mentioned that I miss English-language libraries?

Via zunguzungu, whose archives I’ve been rifling through in my spare time. The Tanzanian material especially elicits, first, a shock of simple, self-centered recognition: You see someone has had a similar thought and rejoice that the private fastness of your mind has been mirrored outside of yourself, affirmed. (The pleasures & difficulties of teaching 7 & 8 yr. olds, or kids who may have already been given up on; or the mild affront of going to a different foreign country after you’ve just gotten used to living one where you know the language & get around . . . ) The second thing you notice is that he writes with uncommon humility coupled with insight — hey, you say, maybe I could stand to be more like that! This kind of close reading of the yearly output of a stranger writing in an intimate setting feels a little stalkerish, but then it’s kind of nice for me, at least, to see how someone else dealt with the broadly similar problem of chronicling via blog time spent in an unfamiliar culture. — Anyway, that was a couple years ago, & he’s writing about his dissertation & strings of stuff about cultural artifacts (The Wire! The Office!). You don’t need me to tell you to read him — I don’t have a readership, after all — but I wanted to do more than a bare sourcing & dragged myself into a whole expository paragraph, so here we are.

San Blas

Today is the feast day of San Blas (English: Blaise), patron of the throat. Here (by here I mean “in Bizkaia,” as one of the teachers at my school was quick to tell me: “Just in Bizkaia — not in Gipuzkoa”) you wear something — I didn’t quite catch what, a medallion or a ribbon, I’ll tell you when I find out —  around the neck for a certain number of days in his honor, and groups old men, in the Basque way, wear checked kerchiefs & berets & roam the old town singing in the streets. The church dedicated to him is in Arenal, across the river, and on my way here to write this there was a crowd spilling out the door of the church and into a line that stretched down the side of the street.

For San Blas they also sell a kind of flat, unleavened pastry made with oil, anise & a sugar glaze that someone brought to school a few days ago, and also a kind of small, hard donut (buñelo) out of what I think is the same dough.

(Gipuzkoa, incidentally, is the neighboring province, capital San Sebastian, which is a cosmopolitan seaside town & retreat for the wealthy — French menus, world-famous chefs, exquisite pintxos, a beach. There is a provincial rivalry.)

Compare & contrast

“Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it’s the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I’ve always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word for word, as I work through a sentence.”

— Don Delillo, Mao II (p. 48)

&

“As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become … “

— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (ch. 1)

Market day

I love the Mercado de La Ribera (Signs in Basque say: Merkatua).  They have creamy, unsalted butter wrapped in paper from Burgos; thick, fragrant stalks of leeks (puerros, a word I learned last week); apples, avocados, cherries, oranges at the fruitstands; fresh eggs piled in wire baskets; forty different kinds of cheese & homemade arroz con leche in little containers; five different kinds of mushrooms (setas are the wild ones harvested from the hillsides, campiñones are the white button kind); heads of garlic & dried red peppers hanging in bunches; buckets of dried beans, spices, peppers . . . And this is just on the third floor, to say nothing of the fishmongers on the ground floor or the butchers on the second.

The market looks a little like a big yellow train station. It has skylights & colored glass windows & mosaic tiles on the outside. Two-thirds of it is rubble, right now, because it’s being massively renovated, but the last third is still open. I go twice a week, Mondays & Thursdays in the morning.

Last week I found out that one of the fruitstands sells reusable milk bottles for 0,40€ & has a machine with farm-fresh milk that you fill up for a 1€ per litre. This in particular is a revelation, because Spanish milk is always sold in cardboard boxes, quadruple-pasturized and irradiated (“UHT”) & stored at room temperature in stacks on the floor like bricks, & it tastes like chalk.

As if this wasn’t enough to keep me happy, the market features the best idea ever: a bar on the top floor, right underneath one of the skylights, so that you can have breakfast when you come in the morning (café cortado & a croissant) or a caña & a tortilla while you’re finishing up.

But really, the reason to do my shopping here in addition to all of this, and in addition to the prices (I walk away from the fruitstand, my arms sagging, having let go of 2,50€; I try six different cheeses & pay less than a euro apiece), is that in a market you do something you don’t do in a supermarket, which is talk to people. The women at the fruitstands tell you which fruits are good: Not that one. That one isn’t for today. You want this one. You find yourself in the position of having to know the names for things. After a little while you’re recognized, both because you’re one of the few foreigners (my castellano is getting more noticeably accented because I’m trying to get rid of my andaluz; people ask me where I’m from) and because you’re young, and a man, and I don’t really see many other muchachos shopping at market. I almost said, because not a lot of Spanish boys my age cook, but I think that’s truer in Andalucía, where I knew tons of young adults who lived exclusively off of their mothers’ food, frozen in tupperware, than here in País Vasco, which has a food culture (so many chefs come from San Sebastían).

Still and all, it’s a delight just to talk to people, to feel like you’re part of a city, to see a smile of recognition, to have someone tell you when you’ve forgotten to withdraw enough cash that you can pay her the next time you come in, to return to your kitchen with fresh, real things, to chop vegetables, in place of going to the crowded aisles of the Carrefour Express ten minutes’ walk away in  Zabálburu to feel lonely & listen to the piped-in American pop.

(I found a butcher, too, a German family-run place in Ensánche that makes its own currywurst & sausage & stocks this spicy imported brown mustard you squeeze from a tube that you can’t get anywhere else, also shockingly cheap; the owner is exceedingly pleasant & trilingual in Spanish, English & German.)

Now the only thing I buy in a store are staples, rainy-day food — canned tomatoes, vermouth, flour, pasta, sliced bread. I meant to wait on writing this until I had pictures, but I’m still looking for a place to develop my first roll of film.

Seriousness

So I’m still thinking about Dave Hickey’s response to the question, “Do you think humor’s a very important element of art?”:

DH: It would be if anybody could take a joke! Alec Waugh proposes “seriousness” as a form of infectious stupidity. I agree.

I.
On my new humorlessness, or:
How reading too much Borges doesn’t make you
into Borges, it makes you into Pierre Menard.

Somewhere along the line — I’m no longer sure when or how — I think I came to lose my sense of humor — or rather, my ability to write funny. This is what I used to do, how I used to define myself as a writer (I’m talking like, 13 years old). I wrote jokes, I made people laugh, this gave me a sense of purpose. I felt like I had an audience. I always wrote for someone else. I’ve always defined myself, like Didion or DeLillo, by how I could work through a sentence. And somewhere along the line, I stopped being  funny. Maybe this had to do with me feeling like I was ‘growing up’ — I think there’s probably a linear correlation you could draw between the humor sieving out of my work & me self-defining as an artist with the A capitalized. I don’t know. These days, when I write — let’s say, in a blog comment — I suddenly feel like I’m overdressed, wearing a too-tight rounded collar, earnest & boring, talking somebody’s ear off at a friend of a friends’ cocktail party, sweaty-palmed & too eager to make an impression. Picture those Spanish scholastics assembling elaborate systems of inquiry to determine the composition of the Throne of God or the ranks of the angels. All of the actual professors I know are funnier & more self-effacing than me, so the problem can’t be academic knowledge as such — it’s not as though, properly, you come to read Serious fiction and Borges causes you to Put Away Childish Things.

Probably part of this is that when I write I overdetermine my prose (“…a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish….”) — I’m not good at committing myself to mistakes, or wandering lines of inquiry. I don’t tend to go on & on; I underwrite instead. Most of rewriting for me is prying open my placid sentences & trying to inject some life into them, & most of what I write on my blog is first-draft stuff anyway, & so I sound more serious & self-important than I mean to.

II.
On being funny, or:
How to satirize a world that
bombs the moon for water.

Me aside, though, the rest of this is all tied up with the question of satire in a postmodern world, or the degree of engagement, or the extent to which you allow yourself to be earnest about something. I’m kind of thinking about typing this quotation out from an interview with Rebecca Solnit & taping it above my desk at home:

The challenge is how can you not be the moralizing, grandstanding beast of the baby boomers but not render yourself totally ineffectual and—the word that comes to mind is miniature. How can you write about the obscure things that give you pleasure with a style flexible enough to come round to look at more urgent matters? Humor matters here, and self-awareness, and the language of persuasion and inclusion rather than hectoring and sermonizing. You don’t have to be a preacher to talk about what matters, and you don’t have to drop the pleasures of style. If you can be passionate about, say, Russian dictionary entries from the early nineteenth century, can you work your way up to the reconstruction of New Orleans? And can you retain some of the elegance and some of the pleasure when you look at big, pressing topics?

What bedevils me, I’m tying to say, is the question of how one goes about making this stuff, where stuff is some value of work — fiction, performance, gallery art whatever — that engages with the world in a meaningful way & doesn’t dodge out. To set out to do something like that is maybe the wrong way to go about it (that is, you don’t sit down to write an Important Novel) — but somewhere along the line, maybe while you’re revising, you have to acknowledge a certain amount of ambition or earnestness, and this acknowledgment is inherently ridiculous. It is kind of silly, in either a despairing existential way — all’s dust — or a hardheaded, pragmatic way — how many people read literary fiction? — or in a purely formal way — here you are, sitting in a room & inventing people who talk to each other & worrying about whether they’re speaking correctly, and it all reminds me a little of that Vonnegut line about reviewers expressing rage & loathing for a novel being preposterous, “like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.”

The worrying thing for me is how to make it, which is sometimes superseded or confused by the usual preoccupation of, say, a literary review, which is usually more along the lines of, how do we judge this? Having critical training is nice, I guess, if you’re going to make something, but it’s not necessarily helpful while you’re working on draft no. 1.

How do you make this stuff? How funny can you be in these Times? — and I think by that I don’t mean, in these Serious, Serious times where we are presented by Serious issues, but rather in a climate where the thing to do is to be distantly ironic about everything —  because who knows what will happen next?

I mean, I did my high school senior thesis on satire, which I think is what started me getting earnest in the first place, because while satire may be funny, it’s funny in an earnest kind of way, it takes itself seriously enough to aim itself like a weapon, and how, for instance, do you satirize a world that bombs the moon for water? (this is scrawled in my notebook).

This is the problem, because even though Seriousness is probably a form of infectious stupidity, sure, ok (& look at the infectiousness of the Seriousness that’s driven us braying into all sorts of hysterics & barbarities, where not demonstrating the appropriate level of Seriousness disqualifies you from the debate) — but Funny can be an easy way out too.

Now that I think about it, that’s more or less the preoccupation of this essay by Chris Bachelder, which once you get past the table counting the number of exclamation points in Upton Sinclair’s OIL! is actually about the difficulty of satire & the ridiculousness of being earnest & the way you go about trying to negotiate a middle path, the difference being that it’s by someone who kept trying to be a comic writer, whereas I’m rearranging myself from the other end.

I’ll let Bachelder define the crux for me:

I guess one of the things I’m arguing here is that in wanting to engage the world but in reacting against the sincere, naïve, programmatic Novel of Exclamation Points, today’s satirists in fact often end up writing Novels of Wry Gags that are just as superficial, tendentious, and programmatic as a Sinclair novel. We’re no doubt funnier than the muckrakers. We’re more laid-back and resigned to global capitalism. For exclamation points substitute winks. We’re less politically astute and more comically and culturally astute. Despite a 180-degree tonal shift (and with notable exceptions), we really haven’t moved the political novel forward. The beginning of The Jungle is really good (remember? It’s the wedding party—a truly jubilant scene despite the fact (or perhaps because) the participants cannot afford it). The end of The Jungle (the socialist pamphlet part) is almost unreadably bad. It can certainly make you want to flee. But the danger is fleeing from one dead end to another dead end. Doctorow again, speaking of the politically sentimental writers of his childhood: “When it’s all toted up, it may turn out that we’ve written as badly in our time as they did in theirs.”

So. The problem is how to be ambivalent while holding convictions, or how to be earnest without being humorless, or how to be funny without being trite. And I’m writing this, I suppose, out of the feeling that — probably out of a Napoleon complex of short-statured blog readership — I’ve written here in an imperious, over-detached tone at odds with my actual cultural standing, & not done a good job of being inclusive, humorous & self-aware while I grandstand. I don’t think I got around to explaining this, but yes, I know keeping a blog that purports to really like analog things is kind of ridiculous, given, you know, that it’s a blog.

Tomorrow I’ll be back to writing about Basque, which I don’t speak, & local politics, which are hard to understand, & I hope you’re as interested as I am to try to make sense of it all, even though I acknowledge I’m not the best person to be doing the sense-making.

Matter of time

The Matter of Time (Richard Serra), now at the
Guggenheim in Bilbao, scanned from a postcard a visiting
friend bought for me in the giftshop.

_

The Guggenheim is the first thing I thought of when I thought of Bilbao. Before I knew anything else about the city, I had a vague mental image of a silver, billowing, sail-like building, blurred green hills behind, something near water. This is particularly ironic because the Guggenheim is, really, still a new building. Nonetheless, as a single piece of architecture it’s done more to reshape the city than anything since the steel industry. They’re building another Guggenheim out in the countryside somewhere now, in some valley that I saw once through a car window. Also, I hear, in Dubai. Art too can be franchised.

For a building that’s changed so much about Bilbao’s public image, it’s oddly demure from street level. It doesn’t loom over the city; it’s not even central. Sometimes you catch glimpses of it down a side street. It’s best viewed, and most dramatic, from the river, which has been transformed from a shipping & steel center into a long postindustrial parkway.

At any rate. I’ve seen Serra’s Matter of Time twice since coming here; it’s probably the best reason to visit the Guggenheim (overpriced compared to the Museo de Bellas Artes, which has a bigger collection & is free on Wednesdays). Photographs of it are kind of beside the point, since it’s about reshaping how you perceive space as you move through it, & with that in mind, & lacking better words, I’ll just reprint here what I wrote in my notebook while sitting in the center of one of those loops of steel:

Richard Serra’s labyrinth — a nautilus, high rust-colored walls, sloped steel, narrowing & widening. An endless feeling, walking through, something about the angles producing a self-renewing feeling of anticipation, of expectation — almost there . . . . A constant sense of being about to arrive, that something decisive is approaching. Deceptively simple.

Being inside the pieces warps your sense of space. You loose yourself. The walls bulge and recede in equal measure. You are made to feel endlessness, momentum, sudden absence of light. Sounds become distant. Someone whistles, a thousand miles away. Far-off footfalls.

The snake [center] is darker than the others, gradients of light near the lip. Stamp your food and the echoes are inhuman. The walls ring like gongs. One spiral feels like it is collapsing, the walls changing color, and you lean to avoid the fall. Appropriate particularly for a city like Bilbao, which has been forging steel since the 6th c.

A week or so later, Serra came up — one of those moments where what you read all seems to be interrelated — in a Believer interview with Dave Hickey. (About all of these Believer references: I don’t have internet at home. One day, I opened every free online article in the Believer in a tabbed browser so that I’d have something in English to read at night before I go to bed. This is the result.)

DH: Alec Waugh proposes “seriousness” as a form of infectious stupidity. I agree. Actually, Bruce Nauman is pretty funny. Everybody pretends that he’s not, but clown torture is pretty funny! You know? And, uh, I think Peter Saul is funny, he’s very witty, and I think Ellsworth Kelly is not funny but he’s witty, and Ed Ruscha is extremely funny and extremely witty, you know?

SH: I love Serra but he’s not funny.

DH: No, well, but Richard’s smart. And he’s an artist. He can’t talk without drawing. He’s the real fucking thing. Not nice.

SH: Not nice. No, he doesn’t seem so nice. [Laughs]

DH: But Richard’s really fun to go look at art with, because he will look at anything, and he likes to look at art, and when you see him you don’t sit around. He says, “Let’s go look at art,” so that’s what he does. He’s kinda corny because he’s not hip at all. He doesn’t know anybody. He doesn’t know who got AIDS, he doesn’t know who got fired. But he’s a real artist to me anyway.

More photographs — the dumbest way to experience Serra ever — on my tumblr. Tomorrow, I want to take this quotation & think about what seriousness as an infectious form of stupidity might mean.

Constraint, ii

For those of you who were interested the last time I wrote about Javier Marías’ reading at New Haven & the constraint (at least that’s what I called it) that he employs, here’s another account of the same event by Andrew Seal at Blogophia Literaria:

Finally, he [Marías] offered an interesting account of how he writes. After a page is finished—I don’t believe he said “perfected,” but he could have, not because he was less than humble, but because that would be an appropriate verb for his writing—he will not add new material or subtract anything from it to restructure the shape of the narrative. He says he will make continuity corrections (switching a Thursday to a Tuesday), but he doesn’t change what he has written if doing so might make things more convenient for the novel at a later stage; if Marías didn’t think of it the first time, he has to write his way around it at the point in the narrative when it becomes necessary to do so. If it might help, for instance, that a character knew something 20 pages earlier than when Marías thought about it, all the worse for the character—and for Marías—he described this method as “suicidal!” He sticks to this principle, he says, because he wants to parallel the conditions of knowledge in real life. Not knowing something when you’re twenty has actual consequences, no matter how much you might wish you had known that thing now that you’re thirty.

I’d wished before I could have been there to ask Marías in more detail, but a stereoscopic report of the answers he gave is the next best thing. It’s fascinating to see two people give such different accounts of the same thing — I know I’m reinventing the Rashomon wheel here, but still.

Seal doesn’t mention the typewriter, which honestly was the first thing that caught my eye in Crowley’s version, but his account is a nice answer to my nagging skepticism over what had before sounded to me a little like a Kerouackian scroll, writing without revision. I wrote before that the essential unit of Marías prose was the long, baroque, redoubled sentence; later I emended that to the paragraph; but now, knowing that he ‘perfects’ or ‘finishes’ a page & then moves on, it’s easier to read the long paragraphs as ‘pages,’ & the effect of the way he writes that I keep trying to describe is the same, a kind of working-out or working-through of a thing, turning it around & around in hand & reconsidering it & then setting it down & moving on to the next. And I still think the typewriter is an especially good vehicle for this kind of writing, the way the sentences are set down immovably & you have to work out what you want to say before diving into them.

All of this, at any rate, reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend a few days ago that turned to the idea of writing in darkness. A couple of lines from a letter Diderot wrote always come to my mind —

“This is the first time I have ever written in the dark . .. not knowing whether I am indeed forming letters. Wherever there will be nothing, read that I love you.”

— Diderot, letter to Sophie Volland, June 10, 1759

— but also got me thinking about Nicholson Baker, who told the Wall Street Journal that he writes essentially the same way that his protagonist writes in A Box of Matches, at 4 a.m. on an old laptop with the background black & the letters dark blue, the screen lowered so that it’s grazing the tops of his knuckles, staring into a fire; darkness writing. For The Anthologist, though, he’d recorded a few hundred hours of tape narrating as the titular poetry anthologist & then transcribed it, to try to get the voice right.

Method of composition leaves its mark on writing — whether we write it out in longhand, whether we assemble on notecards, whether we dictate or record our own voices or type out & refuse to change pages once they’ve been perfected. I remember reading once, years ago, Walker Evans’ introduction to an edition of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men that talked about James Agee’s ‘night writing’ . . . ah. Here it is, from google books:

Night was his time. In Alabama he worked I don’t know how late. Some parts of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men read as though they were written on the spot at night. Later, in a small house in Frenchtown, New Jersey, the work, I think, was largely night-written. Literally the result shows this; some sections read best at night, far in the night. The first passage of A Country Letter (p. 34) is particularly night-permeated.

— “Forward,” p. vi

You could make method a kind of performance art, define in advance a method of composition for each novel, suited or at odds with the project, to capturing the voice or produce something different from what you’d written before. Dictate one novel via telephone, assemble the other out of napkins, type the third on Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter, bought at auction, write the fourth with nothing but a quill pen, the fifth into your second language & then retranslated. I don’t know if constraints of writing method are the same as constraints as in Georges Perec — but aren’t the rituals of our national writers, reported on wide-eyed by journalists in the Wall Street Journal, already performative?

(Speaking of that article, headlined — really? — “How to Write a Great Novel,” here’s Margaret Atwood treating the question with the appropriate level of seriousness:

“Put your left hand on the table. Put your right hand in the air. If you stay that way long enough, you’ll get a plot,” Margaret Atwood says when asked where her ideas come from. When questioned about whether she’s ever used that approach, she adds, “No. I don’t have to.”)