Ephemeral Firmament

The Surprising Beauties of the Time Reading Program

One of the high points of my yearly calendar arrived last weekend: the fall Friends of the Seattle Public Library book sale, held in a giant warehouse of a building on Sand Point Way. It's the kind of thing that, at this point in my book-crammed life, could be so painful I ought to just avoid it: a roomful of cheap books for the taking, when I have no more room for books in my house (and more books than I will ever have time to read). But I've found a way to make it work: my friend Grant has opened Under the Volcano, an English-language used bookstore in Mexico City (the only one in Mexico City). Grant needs books, and I need (almost medically) a way to buy books without keeping them. For the last couple of years, I've elbowed my way through the aisles there alongside all the hired guns with their bar-code reading phone apps (and some fellow readers), and it's been unambiguously delicious.

I think I came away with a pretty good selection for him this year--and just a handful for myself!--but the most interesting find for me was a certain edition of paperback I'd never seen before that kept coming up. They were books I was interested in already, but the covers drew my eye too: I'd never seen them before, and I was struck by their style. They were sturdy, lovely, and had the surprising name on the spine of "Time, Inc." Here are the ones I took home (with apologies for the lousy photo):

Nice! What you can't tell from the photo is that the plastic-coated covers are very stiff, the art extends around to the back, where there's no text at all, and the inside front and back covers are in a solid, muted matte color, different for each book, that's quite lovely itself. According to the title pages, the books are "Time Reading Program Special Editions," but there's no further explanation of what that is. Some have custom introductions (The Day of the Locust's is by Budd Schulberg (!); The Lost Weekend's is by Dr. Selden R. Bacon, the director of the Rutgers Center for Alcohol Studies), and they each have an "Editor's Preface" signed, in the anonymously authoritative way Time enjoyed, by "The Editors of Time."

What was the Time Reading Program? Wikipedia, of course, has an answer: the books were reprints, chosen by Time's book reviewer Max Gissen, that were sent monthly to subscribers (of the program, not the magazine) between 1962 and 1966. And I'm not the only one who thought they were pretty: apparently they won lots of design awards. (Each book credits its cover artist: Jerome Miller for The Lost Weekend, Bill Berry (pre-R.E.M.?) for The Day of the Locust, and Leo and Dianne Dillon for Reveille in Washington. I've already shipped The Treasure of the Sierra Madre to Grant, so I can't tell you that one.) The wiki has a list of books in the series, but it's spotty--only two of these four are on it. The Neglected Books site (a blog after my own heart) has a more extensive list, but it's not complete either. They say there were almost 100 books published, but list only 52 (and again, only two of mine). But Leggman's Time-Life Library: A Compendium of Time-Life Books Information (oh, Internet, how I love and am awed by thee), while not claiming to be exhaustive, lists 109 by my finger count (including all four above), which I'll take to be authoritative for now.

If I were a collector (I'm not, I'm not, I'm really trying not to be!), I have to say this would be a pretty appealing place to start: a fascinating-looking collection, a strong but varied design sense from a specific historical moment, and long-lasting construction. The better-known books on the list are smartly chosen enough (Muriel Spark and Richard Hughes in the house!) that they make me curious about the lesser-known ones, which may have been well-known then but are certainly neglected now. And equally appealing: based on the prices of the four above on Amazon, they appear to be available dirt cheap. You might be able to collect the whole shebang (postage included!) for about the same price as a first edition of 84, Charing Cross Road, which, yes, I just recently looked up and found was too rich for me...

Albert Murray, 1916-2013

At another time in my life, the news that Albert Murray had passed on yesterday at the age of 97 would have caused me to clear my decks for the afternoon and probably well into the night for the bittersweet task of writing an obituary for one of my heroes for Omnivoracious. In this space, with my number of readers and my number of recent posts both approaching the x-axis, I don't feel so ceremonial a need, but still...

I've said before that I'm not much of a completist as a reader, and that's the case even with a hero (a word he liked to use himself) such as Murray. Of his dozen or so books, I've actually only read his great manifesto, The Omni-Americans, his as-told-to (auto)biography of Count Basie, and Trading Twelves, the too-short collection of his correspondence with his friend Ralph Ellison. Stomping the Blues, South to a Very Old Place, and others are waiting for me on the shelf. But from those few, and from what I've read about him, I have an idea of him I've held to, as a feisty and stylish battler, a patiently self-made intellectual, a passionate friend of other artists, and an idea man whose interest in integration was founded in his unapologetic, joyful confidence that African American culture was as creative and complex (one of his and Ellison's favorite words) as any American culture, if not more so: that it was American culture. (By the way, I love everything about the cover of the Da Capo reissue of The Omni-Americans--I love so many of their reissues!--except the subtitle, "Black Experience and American Culture," which doesn't match the feistier and far more evocative original, which at least still appears on the title page inside the book: "Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy.")

And as I learned more about him I found especially appealing the path of his late-blooming career, in which he rejoined the Air Force in his mid-30s, just before his pal Ellison suddenly became a literary star with Invisible Man, and spent a decade or two revving up in anonymity to write his first book. But then, as Ellison got bogged down in living up to the accolades of his great (and only finished) novel, Murray hit his stride with The Omni-Americans and South to a Very Old Place. Though he remained relatively unknown, he was writing--often about ideas he and Ellison shared--while Ralph wasn't, and for a long time it soured their friendship, at least from Ellison's side.

The New York Times has a lengthy (and probably long-composed--the man was 97!) obituary, but the place to go to read--or in my case this evening, re-read--about Murray, aside from his own books, is Henry Louis Gates's wonderful profile from 1996, which the New Yorker has appropriately made available to nonsubscribers as well today. (By the way, the Times features my favorite photo of Murray, the one to the right with Ellison, taken by Fred W. McDarrah. I just adore the look of pleasure and admiration on Murray's face.)

And, if you have it handy, I'd also recommend looking into Trading Twelves, a spirited record of a decade of his friendship with Ellison--the only period in their lives when they weren't both living in New York, and therefore the only time when they wrote each other regularly. Part of the fascination is seeing ideas and experiences shared equally between these two men, as one becomes famous and the other bides his time, a situation made most evident in the mid-50s when they were living on opposite sides of the Mediterranean: Ellison on a fellowship at the exclusive American Academy in Rome, and Murray in Morocco as an officer in the Air Force. Here's an longish excerpt from a letter of Murray's from November 2, 1955, that gives a flavor of some of the voices and subjects they exchanged, as he responded first to a funny story of Ellison's about running into the drummer Jo Jones and then to his qualified admiration of a favorite book of mine, Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian:

Dear Ralph,

Good to hear from you, man. Good to hear you in there riffing like that. But then you're bound to be riffing if you're cutting dots for that goddamned Jonathan Jones. He's every bit as crazy as that goddamned Sonny-assed Greer, the main difference being that he drinks only cokes and claims to be a narcotics agent. You got to hit em and git, blowing over that Birmingham-KC tempo, Jim. Remember what he told that fay drummer that time. This poor square cat was clunking and plunking up there on 52nd and one night he looked out there's old Jo sitting there not even looking. Whereupon this cat falls to and commences to fair-thee-well all but cook supper on them skins as only a grayboy feels he's got to do. Sweated himself into a double krupa trying to make old Jo take notice, then at the end of the set he came over and asked if he dug him. "You're distorting me, man," old Jo lectured him right then and there, his teeth set into that razor-edged footlights not-smile, his eyes crowfooted, his nose narrow, his voice nasal, "This way, man, this way. Lighten up, lighten up and loosen up. Watch your elbows, man. Watch your shoulders. What you mad about? It's music, man, music, music. From here man, here, here, here. It's heart and soul, pardner. Man, you're distorting the hell out of me." Man, that cat didn't use nothing but brushes the rest of the night....

By the way, speaking of reading, I did "Hadrian's Memoirs" last spring. Found it completely absorbing. Also picked up some of Robert Graves' Roman stuff.

But speaking of books, man, I've bought SEVENTY since I've been here. Regular editions, condition good to excellent. GI library salvage sale. TEN CENTS EACH!! Stuff like this: Ten volumes of that Rivers of America series, Six volumes of the American Folkways series (Deep Delta Country, Palmetto Country, High Border Country, etc), Van Tilburg Clark's City of Trembling Leaves, Track of the Cat; Mencken's Supplement One; Buckmaster's Let My People Go; Perry Miller's Jonathan Edwards; Robber Barons; The Big Con; The Great Rehearsal; Reveille in Washington; Douglas Moore's From Madrigal to Modern Music; Gods, Graves and Scholars; Michener's Voice of Asia, Return to Paradise; Capa's Slightly out of Focus; Vincent Sheean; etc, etc.... Good thing old Uncle Sugar is hauling this stuff around for me for free.

We've now taken a small villa and have just about gotten settled into the new routine. Mique of course never missed a beat, school nor otherwise. And Moque you know just lays in there strumming like old Freddie Green does in that Basie rhythm section. Me, I'm zeroed in and zunking. We were in a hotel for five weeks, but now we're out in one of the quartiers.

Mique (his daughter, Michelle, who later danced with Alvin Ailey) and Moque (his wife, Mozelle, who must be well into her nineties herself now) both survive him.

P.S. And then I woke up this morning to the news that we lost another hero, Elmore Leonard. Rather than clearing another day's decks, I'll point you to my appreciation of the great Dutch that I already linked to near the top of this post.

On Old Encyclopedias

For the sake of breaking the ice on this river, and so that I might have them at close hand myself, here are a few of W.G. Sebald's "writing tips," as recorded by two of his students in his last fiction class at East Anglia in 2001, three days after which he died in his car crash (although not from his car crash). (And, I'll always remember with grave regret, from the same fall when he came to Elliott Bay to read from Austerlitz and I, who never think I'm too sick to miss anything, was so wiped out by a 24-hour bug I couldn't make it.)

The "tips" cover a variety of subjects, and some of the others are note-worthy too ("Fiction should have a ghostlike presence in it somewhere, something omniscient. It makes it a different reality."), but when they get to this section, suddenly it feels like true Sebald territory:

On Reading and Intertextuality 

• Read books that have nothing to do with literature.
• Get off the main thoroughfares; you’ll see nothing there. For example, Kant’s Critique is a yawn but his incidental writings are fascinating.
• There has to be a libidinous delight in finding things and stuffing them in your pockets.
• You must get the servants to work for you. You mustn’t do all the work yourself. That is, you should ask other people for information, and steal ruthlessly from what they provide.
• None of the things you make up will be as hair-raising as the things people tell you.
• I can only encourage you to steal as much as you can. No one will ever notice. You should keep a notebook of tidbits, but don’t write down the attributions, and then after a couple of years you can come back to the notebook and treat the stuff as your own without guilt.
• Don’t be afraid to bring in strange, eloquent quotations and graft them into your story. It enriches the prose. Quotations are like yeast or some ingredient one adds.
• Look in older encyclopaedias. They have a different eye. They attempt to be complete and structured but in fact are completely random collected things that are supposed to represent our world.
• It’s very good that you write through another text, a foil, so that you write out of it and make your work a palimpsest. You don’t have to declare it or tell where it’s from.
• A tight structural form opens possibilities. Take a pattern, an established model or sub-genre, and write to it. In writing, limitation gives freedom.
• If you look carefully you can find problems in all writers. And that should give you great hope. And the better you get at identifying these problems, the better you will be at avoiding them.

 

Goodbye, Village Voice Bookshop

In a side note to the otherwise upbeat NYT piece this week on how French bookstores are thriving under government subsidies and a law limiting the discounting of books, I was sad to see the offhand mention that the Village Voice bookshop, one of the great English-language shops in the city, will close this summer, the implication being that the easier availability of discounted English books left the store more vulnerable to Amazon's underpricing. Sad but I guess not surprised, since when we made it one of our high-priority stops when we finally got to visit Paris a couple of years ago, the owner herself, Odile Hellier, made the same complaint. (I didn't confess that I worked for Amazon at the time.)

My wife had made me the excellent and self-sacrificing gift of certificates at both of the city's famous English bookshops, the aggressively venerable Shakespeare and Co. and the more urbane Village Voice, and I took full advantage. I came away with a stack of books (Rupert Thompson? Jean-Claude Izzo?) but the only one I can remember for certain is Memoirs of Hadrian, about which I have waxed plenty in the past. And I took a few photos (see above), including some UK editions of American novels that I had to steel myself not to add my collection (the Lethem especially!).

About the economics of bookselling in France, I'm not sure what to say. I'm sure in some galactic sense I owe an apology to Mme. Hellier for working for the clampdown. Discounting has an obvious (or at least apparent) democratic effect, by making books more affordable, but the downstream economics are more complicated than that, and probably too complicated for me to parse. Certainly ruling out discounts allows small booksellers to compete on a more level playing field, and the effects in Paris are obvious: the place was riotous with small little shops of all kinds and specialties. It was thrilling enough to see when I couldn't read most of the books on offer, and I can just imagine what it would be like if I could. (Of course the French cult of the book long predates Jack Lang's 1981 law, so I'm not sure how much can be credited to the discount issue itself.) I also imagine that doing away with discounts would lower list prices significantly: one reason, I assume, hardcovers cost $30 is that the massive discount under which most of them will be sold is already factored in. And I expect that removing discounts would push the business more toward paperbacks rather than more expensive hardcovers, as, from my untutored glances, the French business seems to be aligned.

No doubt there are futher effects, both positive and negative, that I haven't conceived of--I'd be curious to hear from anyone with more direct experience of book buying and selling France and Germany (which I think has a similar law). The idea that we'd institute such price controls in the U.S. is so preposterous that it makes the thought experiment no more than that, but I'm glad some other countries are able to resist the monoculture enough to keep other models alive.

Where Is the There There? More Non-Luddite Grouching About Ebooks

I'm happy today to point to my first contribution over at The Millions, a bookish site I've been enjoying and admiring for years: "Confessions of a Reluctant Fetishist: Keep Books Adulterated." It's a reply of sorts to a post in praise of ebooks Tim Parks wrote for the NYRB blog over a month ago--I liked the case he made for them, which I thought hadn't been made (to my eyes) very often before, but I also thought it helped me understand some reasons I still prefer printed books. I started writing it to post here, but thought it could stand a few more readers than I can usually drum up, so I'm glad Mr. Magee over there was willing to post it.

After finishing it I had a further thought, a related one though I'm not sure it would fit into the essay. As I say there, one problem with ebooks is that they don't have a spatial structure to put your idea of the book into (and no, that percentage gauge at the bottom doesn't count). It makes it nearly impossible to move back and forth quickly in a book (unless you know an exact word to search for) the way you can do so easily in a printed book (and which I realize now I do all the time when reading, especially nonfiction or anything I'm trying to reread or write about).

Now, I do at least as much reading online as I do in printed books, and I don't feel that same unmoored feeling reading online that I do with an ebook. In part I think that's because web pages have more visual structure than ebook pages: either scrolling or paging through a long web article gives you a physical sensation that nearly approximates a printed book or magazine. But online reading has a further advantage that most physical books don't have: it has a place you can point to and share. (I know--big insight into the benefits of social media!) A blog post or an online essay (or a photo of a cat) may not exist in your hands, but, perhaps even better, it exists in a consistent place for anyone else online. A URL is, importantly, an address.

But an ebook doesn't exist in the same way: it doesn't have an address you can share. In other words, it doesn't have the spatial benefits of a printed book, and it doesn't have the social benefits (which are themselves based on occupying a particular place in the virtual network) of an online piece. This came across to me most clearly when I read a Kindle Single recently, Ann Patchett's "The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life." I liked it quite a bit (I eat that sort of stuff up), and usually with something like that I'd want do something with it after I read it: poke back around in it, write about it, share it here. But I've found it hard to do. If I want to go back and look through it again, I have to work within the linear straightjacket of my Kindle to find the parts I'm looking for, without the visual memory cues of static pages to help. And if I wanted to share it with people, well, there's nothing to point to--well, except for this excerpt on Byliner.

I understand the value of not making her ebook available to share with everyone. I love that Patchett's making a buck from a lot of people downloading this cheap minibook--I hope she can use it to help support her new bookstore--and I'm happy to pay my share. But the result, when I want to work with this book and not just dispose of it after I've read it, is that it feels like it hardly exists. I can't settle down into it and wander around the way I like to with a book I've read and want to think more about, and I can't point other people to it. I imagine Tim Parks might suggest that it should live abstractly in my mind at this point, but my mind, apparently, needs a network outside itself to thrive as a reader and a rereader.

The Mad and Extraordinary Bob Tashman

I perked up when reading Claire Messud's tribute to Bob Silvers on the Paris Review Daily last week (I was already pretty perky, since Claire Messud writing about Bob Silvers is fairly high on my list of best possible blog posts, somewhere alongside Mark Ibold on Lebanon bologna--both of which probably tell you more about me than you need to know), when she mentioned starting work in the ad department at the New York Review of Books in the summer of 1988, because that same summer, perhaps my favorite of my forty-five so far, I worked down the hall at 250 W. 57th St. on The Reader's Catalog, an NYRB spinoff that might have been big if it wasn't for, well, the Internet.

I came down to the NYRB offices to make copies and just soak up the general heaped-up, anachronistic braininess (they still used typewriters, while we used floppy discs!), though I wish I had been unintimidated enough to soak up more. Like Messud that year, I never met Silvers (I didn't even hear his "sonorous and elegant voice"), though unlike her I did meet his co-editor, the great Barbara Epstein, in a short conversation I vividly remember flubbing. But the detail in her account that made me perk up further was the parenthetical but affectionate mention of the one editor at the Review I did get to know a little:

(I had, on the other hand, many mad and wonderful conversations with the late Bob Tashman, who roved the office with apparently much time on his hands and who, although balding, had an impressive corona of hair emerging from his shirt collar. His long-worked-upon American Decameron, alas, we will never now see.)

Bob Tashman made a wonderfully similar impression on me at the same time (right down to the hair coming out of the collar). He was friends with my boss at the Catalog, and he did have enough time on his hands, and enough friendly generosity, to have a few somewhat mad conversations with a clueless, goofball undergraduate like me. His voice, as I recall it in my ear now, had a sort of impish snarl to it, and though he was funny pretty much all the time, I remember a couple of his lines in particular. One, involving George Bush Sr. also choosing Lloyd Bentsen as his running mate, would probably not survive the retelling but was very funny at the time. The other was a sly imitation of the founder of the Catalog, Jason Epstein, describing a homemade mayonnaise.

He wasn't like anyone I'd ever met, and I think I idly felt that a window had opened up on an adulthood in which you could be serious and smart and still have a great, subversive time. "Idly" is the operative word there: I didn't really do anything to seek that world out--I was, typically, content just to observe and enjoy--but I remembered him well enough in the decades that followed, and was curious enough about what he was doing (and who he really was in the first place, since of course I didn't ask!) to Google his name from time to time once that became possible. Surprisingly little came up, until a couple of years ago I came across the last search result you want to find: notice of his death at 53 from pancreatic cancer.

Messud's is the first mention of him I've come across by chance, and it thrilled me to hear that someone remembered him as I did. I hadn't just made him up! And of course it made me wonder: what was this "American Decameron"? A grand, mad plan he liked to talk about, or something he was actually working on? Part of what always made me curious about him was the mystery of these brainy, literary people who publish so little under their own names. I know there are scores of them scattered around New York at magazines and publishing houses--I've met a few since--but I'm always amazed they can go through their lives so immersed in shepherding words and ideas into print with, apparently, so little drive to publish them under their own byline. (It's a modest stance that I imagine is becoming as anachronistic as the NYRB's typewriters.)

I searched, of course, on "bob tashman american decameron" and found nothing more, but did come across what as far as I can tell is nearly the only other real mention of him out there,* but one that confirms his mad charisma. It's an aside again, in a post on an entirely different subject, this time by a colleague from his later stint at Granta, where Bob apparently moved after the NYRB:

In those days, the magazine had something of a surplus of testosterone, mostly in the formidable shape of the bearded Buford and the extraordinary Bob Tashman, (now sadly departed) an inspired, and slightly crazed import from the New York Review of Books. Tensions around deadline time ran high, particularly among would-be alpha males in the spring, and release was sought in curious ways. Often our editorial meetings were preceded by impromptu push-up challenges or ferocious arm wrestling bouts. After these sessions, with the blood pumping, Bob and Bill would bond over a raucous a capella duet of the Sam the Sham hit. It reminded them, I guessed, of happier days in collegiate America, when men were men, and they weren’t surrounded by uptight Brits, reading proofs.

I feel a little sad we never got down to arm-wrestling or howling "Wooly Bully" in the Fisk Building, but maybe Buford was the necessary catalyst to push Bob into manly hysteria.

With stories like these out there, I'm sure he is well-remembered by many, and I post this in part so there will be one more entry when people search "Bob Tashman," and perhaps in the hope of hearing from someone who knew Bob better than I did, and who would know more about who he was. I'm curious to know more.

* I've since found a few pieces under the "Robert Tashman" byline: two of them defenses of cultural productions others have found indefensible: Altman's Pret-a-Porter and, amazingly, O.J. Simpson's I Want to Tell You, and the other an appreciation of Salman Rushdie's little BFI book on The Wizard of Oz, which includes, oddly enough, a knock against Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories--odd, since based on other Web evidence, Bob was the editor of that book. It takes a bit of a leap to hear his spoken voice in the more formal and even a little stiff style of those written pieces--they are not overtly madcap--but his contrarian learnedness is clear.

Yesterday in My Twitter Feed: Don Cornelius and Denis Johnson

Yesterday morning my Twitter feed, and perhaps yours too, was full of two things: links to old Soul Train clips, in honor of the passing of Don Cornelius, and to samples of the Denis Johnson archives newly available at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, courtesy of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Among the Cornelius clips was this one, which makes a nice footnote to my celebration of The Man Who Fell to Earth last week. It's Bowie, promoting "Golden Years" while, apparently, high as a kite. He's giggly and off-rhythm and seems adolescent, especially compared to the grave, composed alien he played in the movie--not to mention to the supreme mellowness of the late Mr. Cornelius, who insists on calling him "Boowie," like the Maryland suburb. It's so strange to see that charismatic man shrinking into himself and missing the beat of the moment (and not really handling the excellent question: "When did you start wanting to do soul music? I mean you're doing it!").

(I'll be quite honest: Bowie's uninspired lipsynching pales in comparison--at least in terms of commitment--to the back-to-back duets of "Ziggy" and "Life on Mars" I shared with Martian Bracelets at Seattle's Best Karaoke last week.)

And from the Denis Johnson material posted today I could link to almost anything--notes for Train Dreams, or scribbles on coasters for Tree of Smoke, or on a paper plate for The Name of the World--but this was the one that got under my skin: little slips of paper described by the archives as "motivational notes."

It's heartening to know that Denis Johnson needs to buck himself up too, and these are exactly the sort of messages I'd hope and expect he'd write to himself (though not the colors or the fonts!?!). And the second message should not be surprising at all, given the title and cover image of this poetry collection of Johnson's. "If I'm Some Kind of James Hampton" would make an excellent album title, or just a message on my own wall. So be it.

A Forking Path in Bolano's "Labyrinth" Leads to J.-J. Goux (and Fleetwood Mac)

The work of the late Roberto Bolano, endlessly exhumed, can seem a bit of a labyrinth, sprouting fresh narrative paths--some followed obsessively and some abandoned almost at the outset--at every turn, but his story published in the New Yorker this month, called "Labyrinth," feels like a guide, if not to reading his fiction then at least to how he constructed it.

He begins with a photo (the one on the left above). Of course, this being Bolano, it's of a group of writers, a subject about which he felt as strongly (and ambivalently) as Fitzgerald did about the wealthy. It's a real photo, of real French writers, some of them--Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers, for instance, the couple at the center--even well known to a small American subculture (academic theorist circles, circa 1988), and from it Bolano spins a speculative tale that both minutely analyzes the photograph ("Kristeva's skin--perhaps it's a trick of the light--has a metallic, bronzelike quality, while Carla Devade's is silky and yielding") and playfully imagines the lives behind it ("Any moment now, J.-J. Goux might start to cry. The voice that warned him of the Devil's presence is still ringing, though faintly, in his ears.").* The mechanics of Bolano's style--the ease with which he unfurls story after story from the tiniest of details and shifts from the pettiness of literary aspiration to the horrors of politics and murder and from boredom to desire to melancholy beauty--are visible here as in a cutaway diagram. It's as if Bolano had received a workshop assignment to write a story in the style of Bolano.

In this mix of fact and fiction, meanwhile, he quickly establishes one figure in the photo as, for his purposes, purely fictional: the man second from the left, labeled "J.-J. Goux" in the caption: "About J.-J. Goux I know nothing. He's probably called Jean-Jacques, but in this story, for the sake of convenience, I'll continue to use his initials." He imagines him as a gloomy, lonely figure, eating sandwiches in front of the TV, waiting for Sollers to pick up the phone, and missing out on the sexual ronde of his set. I can't vouch for his gloominess, but I do know that in fact, J.-J. stands for Jean-Joseph. About halfway through my reading of "Labyrinth" I realized "J.-J. Goux" rang a bell with me, and that I had a book of his on my shelves: Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud.

This is the point at which I would love to dig up some quote or anecdote from Goux that makes a telling or evocative resonance with Bolano, but his book seems impenetrable to such connections. Impenetrable to me at least: what amazes me now is that not only did I read the book, but I underlined passages all the way to the end, wrote comments in the margins (which I never do!), and even still have note cards summarizing each chapter stuck in the book. (What all those notes actually tell me is not that I really understood the book, but that I was struggling to do so.) I read it I think while preparing for my grad school exams, back when I was fascinated by the possible connections between money and language, those two abstracting media of human exchange, and felt responsible for understanding the theoretical literature connecting them. (I'm still fascinated by that subject, but, thank god, I no longer feel responsible for the theory--or at least I'd be more likely to look to Lawrence Weschler or Lewis Hyde than French poststructuralists to help me think about it.) Some of my often skeptical marginal comments imply that I did actually follow Goux's arguments for a fleeting moment, but looking back through the book it's hard to imagine I did, even enough to dismiss it.

It would be easy to pull a quote out of context here to make a joke about its stereotypical impenetrability, but instead here's the one that I marked that actually makes the most sense to me now. Its point is not an earth-shattering one but at least according to the only Amazon review of the book (a 5-star review posted just a few weeks ago--Goux lives!--that actually summarizes the book pretty clearly) it's central to his argument that the end of the gold standard accompanied the beginnings of postmodernism (alert Ron Paul!):

The system of monetary circulation has shown an increasingly obvious tendency toward inconvertibility, toward a complex type of balancing that floats, no longer anchored by a fixed standard. Shortly after Saussure had declared that linguistic values--in contrast to economic values based on a standard--had no foundation in nature, shortly after Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian had abandoned the search for direct empirical reference in order to espouse pure painting, the economic system dispensed with the gold standard, with the evident result of generalized floating.

And Goux himself? According to the evidence of the web, he's now a professor emeritus at Rice, where I got the photo on the right above, on which of course I would have loved to have read Bolano's further speculations. But when Symbolic Economies was published in English in 1990 he was a professor at Brown, which opens up a forking path in the literary labyrinth not back to Bolano but to The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides's roman a clef of Brown's swoon for French semiotics in the early '80s, around the time that Goux most likely decamped from Paris for the eager embrace of the American university.

And here after all is the beautiful echo I'm always looking for and that the world, like Bolano, so often provides: just as I was typing the previous sentence a bearded young man, who might on another day be reading Julia Kristeva or The Savage Detectives, walked into my cafe carrying a pen, a notebook, and, yes, The Marriage Plot. 

*I can't look at the photograph myself without thinking of Fleetwood Mac, mostly because the woman fourth from the right, "M.-Th. Reveille," makes me think of Christine McVie every time I see her. Obviously in that scenario Sollers and Kristeva, the central couple, are Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, although the parallels start to break down after that point. Is Pierre Guyotat, the Peter Boyle-looking fella third from the right whom Bolano unaccountably calls "the handsomest man in the group," Mick Fleetwood (tall and bald) or John McVie (because he seems to be with Reveille)? And can we fill out the rest of the crowd with '70s SoCal rockers? Let's say Marc Devade, on the right, is Phil Spector and "C. Devade," the lovely young woman to his left, is Rita Coolidge (Rita Coolidge!). Jacques Henric, on the left, is a toughie: Chris Hillman? And our Jean-Joseph Goux, a little nerdy and earnest? How about Graham Nash?

Fortnightly Firmament #10: The Millions' Year in Reading

After eight or so years of choosing my favorite books of the year at some point in mid-October, for professional reasons, I might seem a little overdue for such a list for 2011. But I'm enjoying the luxury, for a change, of waiting to sum up a year of reading until after the year is actually over, so I'll post my top 10 for 2011 just after the new year, as Firmament #11.

In the meantime, instead of summing up my own year's reading, I'll sum up someone else's, or rather a whole lot of someone elses'. My favorite year-end book feature (and I do like year-end features) has become The Millions's Year in Reading series, which has become an online institution in recent years. Their approach, which they seem to have pioneered in the States but which is much more common in the UK, is not to come up with some consensus ranking of the "best" books published during the year (which I think is still a worthy exercise!), but to ask a number of good or at least famous readers (mostly writers) to write about favorite or memorable books from their own year of reading, whether they were published this year or not.

As much as I've always enjoyed the series, the posts come in at such a rapid pace that at some point in the season I always end up lagging behind, never to catch up. But this year, even though the number of contributors has passed 65 (I think they must be coming to an end soon), I took it as my responsibility to read them all, so that you don't have to, and highlight a few of my favorites.

What criteria did I use? Two main ones: was the post interesting to read in its own right? And did it make me want to read the book or books they recommended? Some of the entries below were stronger in one element or the other, some in both. None this year quite reached the idiosyncratic heights of Sam Anderson's "Year in Marginalia" from 2010, but these ten were both good reading and, more importantly, will lead I hope to more good reading.

(By the way, two sociological notes from reading all sixty-plus entries: a) the Millions staffers have a lot of new babies this year; and b) musicians--sorry!--just aren't very good writers.)

1. Benjamin Hale on The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon: The closest to a genre-busting entry this year, and certainly the most attention-grabbing, which begins as an examination of post-debut-novel ennui (by the author of The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore) and ends as a heated plea for Fanon's fiery manifesto: "Frantz Fanon was not punching the clock. He was not writing a book because he was a writer and writers write books. He was writing with dire passion, with an intensity of hate that only true love can birth." (Docked one point for an ill-judged Joyce Carol Oates sideswipe--my impression is that Oates writes so much out of passionate mania, not joyless mechanism--but granted an extra one for a gratuitous but I'm guessing justified knock on T.C. Boyle for phoning one in.)
2. Ward Farnsworth on Jorge Luis Borges and John Jay Chapman: Farnsworth's celebration of Borges's lesser-known but still thrillingly encyclopedic nonfiction made me want to open up the copy of the book that I've had on my shelf since it came out, but what I really appreciated was his recommendation of Chapman, who sounds like just the sort of neglected but fascinating writer I love to discover: "Chapman was one of the finest American essayists of the early 20th century, and a very singular character; after starting an unjustified fight as a young man, he punished himself by putting his hand into a fire until the skin burned off, forcing its amputation. Fortunately he did his writing with the other hand, and was prolific with it. He wrote with learning, passion, moral energy, and rhetorical skill about all sorts of topics, most related to American political and cultural history." Also, Farnsworth's own unfashionably declarative style makes me want to check out his manual, Classical English Rhetoric.
3. Stephen Dodson on Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman: Grossman's once-lost World War II epic has long seemed like a must-read, but never has it seemed more concretely so to me than in Dodson's compact and convincing account: "His huge novel has nothing in common with the modernist works that stand beside it on the shelf of twentieth-century Russian masterpieces, Bely's Petersburg and Olesha's Envy and Nabokov's The Gift; there are no magical interludes or language games or hidden messages, just a well-told tale of an extended family caught up in circumstances beyond their, or anyone’s, control."
4. Daniel Orozco on The Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones: No doubt I bring something to this post, since Dan is an old friend and reading his words is always enhanced by hearing his sly, deadpan delivery, but in recommending Jones's stories he manages to skillfully squeeze in a moving reader's story of his own, of how what he once disliked about the stories is now what makes him love them: "What I remember about not liking Jones had something to do with the hopped up, motor-mouth narration of the few stories I’d read. Well, The Pugilist at Rest is an entire collection of hopped up, motor-mouth narrations, and the effect of reading all eleven stories was very emotional for me. There is an urgency and a need in this aggregate voice that feels palpably human, and vulnerable."
5. Belinda McKeon on Love's Work by Gillian Rose: Here the extra element I bring is the added faith I have in NYRB Classics, the publisher of her recommended book (and of book #3 here), which makes whatever she says in praise of it twice as convincing. But she does a fine job of it herself, making me want to go back to a book that, as it happens, I was paging through in the store the other day. How about the stylish first sentence here: "She gives comfort a kicking, and shows morbidity up for the easy moping that it is; complex, jarring and vivid, this is no trip into grief-lit. It also contains one of the most perfect descriptions I’ve encountered of a child’s discovery of the written word: 'Reading was never just reading: it became the repository of my inner self-relation: the discovery, simultaneous with the suddenly sculpted and composed words, of distance from and deviousness towards myself as well as others.'"
6. Philip Levine on Piano Lessons by Anna Goldsworthy: A short and unflashy post whose effectiveness can nevertheless be measured by the fact that I just bought this book to give to my cousin, a young violinist: "I have never read a better depiction of a great mentor and of how true learning takes place. Every teacher of anything should read this book. Twice."
7. Michael Schaub on The Great Frustration by Seth Fried: A convincing argument that Fried, who I didn't know of, is a very funny writer, although the two (very funny) quotes Schaub gives as examples both come from Fried's blog, not this collection of stories: "Like Anton Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, and George Saunders, Fried is a master at the absurdities, small and large, that make up the human condition. He’s a deeply funny, deeply generous author, and on the basis of The Great Frustration, I’m ready to pay him the biggest compliment I could ever give an author: there’s never been a writer exactly like him before."
8. Geoff Dyer on All God's Children by Fox Butterfield: Extra authority points here, certainly, because it's Geoff Dyer making the recommendation. The short piece doesn't show off any of Dyer's more pyrotechnical critical moves, but instead makes a straightforward case for a book that's just old enough that few would think to pick it up unless someone like Dyer told them to: "The narrative of this investigative genealogy is valuable in itself (even if there are moments when Butterfield seems in danger of being swayed by his own rhetoric) but it’s the close-up story of Willie and his father that makes the book so compelling: the constant, cliffhanging hope of the possibility of redemption matched by the attendant fear of something ever more dreadful about to be unleashed."
9. Ellis Avery on The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald: I shouldn't need much excuse to read more Fitzgerald but I have to confess that, after liking The Blue Flower and The Bookshop quite a bit, I had moved on to other writers (as I often do), so I'm glad to have a good case made for one of the others I haven't read yet, although the part of her review that most makes me want to read it is a bit of a spoiler, so I won't quote it here.
10. Parul Seghal on The Journals of John Cheever: Here Seghal loses points, through no fault of her own, because I don't need anyone to tell me how good the Journals are. But she says why better than I've been able to say it to myself, so I'm glad to be reminded: "It’s a disheveling, debauching book. Even a dangerous book: it invites you to contemplate — even embrace — your corruption."

 

James Wood Being James Wood; Anthony Lane Being Somebody Else (or, Finally, Himself)

I'm still excited every time I see James Wood has a review in The New Yorker; I've mostly given up reading Anthony Lane's. Wood, though he has his hobbyhorses and blind spots, is still an excellent stylist, a good reader, and a talented grenade-roller, and, for better or worse, since he's become The Critic Who Matters, his reviews are events and so reading them is a bit like watching the Oscars. Lane, though, has worn me out. I remember being smitten by him, back around the time he called the title of Showgirls "not so much a noun as an imperative," but over the years he's become my bete noir of the back of the NYer book, with his straining for non sequitur one-liners a measure of his boredom with the material he's been given to evaluate. He hasn't convinced me to see a movie since Speed.

But this week, Wood bored me a little with his predictability, while Lane surprised me. I smiled when I saw Wood was reviewing Pulphead, a book I'm in the middle of and am loving nearly as much as I expected. It's a collection of magazine essays, normally considered one of the lowest forms of literary life, but it's been fun to see the consensus build around it to match my own judgment that John Jeremiah Sullivan is one of the writers most worth reading right now. And Wood likes it too, and admires many of the things about it that I do: Sullivan's ability to hit many registers, his eye for odd and telling detail, and his generous willingness to open himself to his subjects.

But what Wood likes best are, well, the things he always seems to like best about the things he likes. He spends much of the piece making the case for the "novelistic" sensibility of these essays like these, and no regular Wood reader will be surprised that this is founded in Sullivan's use of free indirect style, which I too think is one of the great achievements of civilization, but it sometimes feels like that's all Wood is ever looking for in a book. And what of the content of the essays draws Wood's attention most strongly? The moments of when Sullivan, a lapsed Christian like Wood, is sensitive both to the power of belief and of its demise. Hmm: belief in the hands of former believers, and the ironic power of fiction: why those are the subjects of Wood's own first two collections of essays! It's hardly a bad review, and one I agreed with on many points, but it just felt like Sullivan's weird and wonderful book had been put through the Wood machine, and what you were left with at the end wasn't Sullivan but Wood, or if I was Anthony Lane, straining to end a review with a bit of wordplay, a pile of Wood chips.

Meanwhile, while reading Lane's "Year in Movies" entry in their "Year in Review" blog series I had to keep checking the byline to see if this really was Anthony Lane. Not a zingy, forced gag line to be found! (There are a few gags--"The backlash against 'The Artist' is, presumably, well under way, but I remain among the many who prefer to lash it forward"--but they are well in harness, not driving the whole thing.) Not a hint of boredom, just passionate enthusiasm. And what begins as a pretty standard year's-best wrapup turns into a subtle and open-ended reminder of how strongly what we remember from a year of viewing is influenced by the conditions under which we were watching:

Most accounts of films, moreover, proceed as if the work had been viewed in a vacuum, and pay dangerously little heed to the hours and backdrops of that viewing, which can act as permanent markers on the work concerned; this year, I happened to watch “Midnight in Paris” at midday, in Paris, and, like it or not, those circumstances are fated to stick to the movie like glitter; to encounter it with a French audience did not lessen one’s enjoyment, yet it was, I must admit, rather like coming across an immaculately decorated but artificial Christmas tree in the middle of a real pine forest.

And best of all, I came away with a handful of movies to see: some confirming raves I've already heard (Of Gods and Men, Rise of the Planet of the Apes), some bringing me new names for my list (Pina, Before the Revolution). I hope I like them as much as I liked Speed.

Lane just feels looser and well, happier in this format. Maybe he should stop reviewing movies and start blogging about them.