It looks like Elliott Bay Books is in financial trouble. The Seattle Times is reporting they many need to move or close. This is a great bookstore and it would be a shame if it went out of business, if for no other reason than the number of author readings it hosts just could not be duplicated anywhere else. Hopefully, they can weather the storm and maybe move somewhere else.
Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice is one of those films which is both an obvious product of the time it was made and a criticism of those times. It is a difficult feat to be both and despite its humor and cutting critiques of the 60’s it can’t hep to fall prey to some of those same excesses and dated elements.
What makes the film a smart critique is the juxtaposition of the free-love-do-what-ever-feels-good ethic against real life. Culp and Wood’s characters attempt to live the life of complete openness, taking from a group therapy session, the idea that complete honesty always works. Yet they quickly learn that completeness isn’t everything and that emotion and the history of one’s life leads to reactions that no matter how open and honest, perhaps are best left unsaid. Moreover, when one takes that ethic outside to the wider world, it is easy to find that those ideas are yet just another way of being.
When Bob and Carol try to have the open relationship, most of it is a matter of convincing themselves that what they are doing is right. And when they take those ideas to Ted and Alice they find that not everyone is capable of an open relationship. It is those realities that make the film still interesting, not only taking to task some of the excesses of the 60’s but showing just how hard it is to live by those ideals.
For Ted and Alice the idea is not one they can truly even contemplate. Even when they get drunk enough to contemplate it, they can’t. Ted who was at first titillated by Bob’s extra marital affairs, is the shiest of all when it comes to getting in bed with everyone. Ultimately, they all realize the idea of sleep together is not what they are, but what they think they want to be now that society has become so permissive. It is that final criticism of trying to become something you are not, something that the kids are doing even though you are middle age, that makes the film still relevant today.
At times, though, the film is pure 60s. Some of the camera angles for sure, but most telling is the end of the film when the four of them leave the hotel in Las Vegas after failing to sleep together and in the street they walk around in a big circle staring at themselves and strangers up close. The behavior, first shown in the EST-like retreat Bob and Carol had attended, is supposed to be away of truly getting to understand another person’s soul. The use of the scene suggests the film makers do believe in some of what they have shown. Unfortunately, it is such a dated and over the top way of highlighting the good in expressing one’s self that it makes the ending laughable.
Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice is a fun jab at the 60’s even though it believes a little too strongly in some of what it criticizes.
El Pais has an article that notes that Spain has 3500 literary prizes, 10 for every day of the year. I have always thought there were a lot of prizes floating around Spain. Every time I watch El Publico Lee it seems the invited author has won some prize, often from one of the provinces. It would be as if each state had its own literary prize (and some do). Of course, there are the publishers who have their own prizes. There are some uses, but I’m not sure it signifies much about quality.
“The quantity of prizes in Spain is something that surprises foreigners, especially those from Peru where there are only three,” says Fernando Iwasaki. In his opinion, the awards serve three purposes: sustain a vocation, to establish a career, or to directly retire someone before their time.”
“La cantidad de “>premios que hay en España es algo que sorprende a cualquier extranjero, sobre todo si viene del Perú, donde sólo hay tres”, dice el escritor limeño. En su opinión, los galardones sirven para tres cosas: sostener una vocación, consagrar una trayectoria o “directamente, prejubilarte”.
Bright Star is a quiet film, which is fitting the early 19th century, before music and industrial noise became ever present. Why should a love scene between Keats and Brwane swell with what was not possible? The silence, too, is befitting the romantic contemplation, a quiet amongst nature. With the panoramic beauty, the flowers blooming in the the meadows, the winds amongst the reeds as the only sounds, Bright Star is a Romantic film that not only quotes Keats, but wants to be Keats, or at least his representation, a poem. And in this sense the film succeeds, though the contemplation and lack of music can be as jarring as if the music were playing at twice the usual volume: absence can be as powerful as presence.
Bright Star is also a romance between Keats and Fanny Brawne and the film navigates the early 19th century’s formality and class structures with the same contemplation that places a flower as the object of affection, but one that is inquiry and strangely requires a distance to fully enjoy it. The scenes between the two characters build as the romance grows and the distance of affection dissipates, but between those moments of affection the stiffness in manners reappears.
The effect, then, is a film that is at once Romantic, celebrating the power in nature to animate the spirit, and yet lives in a world of distances both in terms of the characters, and those of an audience used to the sounds of modern films. It is those distances that make the film feel slow. What is really in play, though, is not plot or charter development, of which there is ample, but the closest attempt to make a bio-pic not only tell the story, but reflect the essence of the are those characters represent. Bright Star clearly reaches that level and it doesn’t really matter what the verisimilitude of the film is, which is a refreshing thing since so often bio-pics are little more than a TV movie of the week.
El Pais is reporting that newly released documents show that between 1967 and 1985, Garcia Marquez was spied on by the Mexican Secret Service. Of note is the interest that the Mexican’s had in Garcia Marquez’s relations with Mitterand and leftwing groups. Possibly more inflamatory is the claim that he was helping the movement of arms between Cuba and leftwing groups in Latin America.
Acording to the information obatined by the news paper [El Universal], the spies for the Mexican Government assured that the writer was “involved in the trafic of arms between Cuba to Columbia and was helping the communist struggle in Latin America.
Según las informaciones obtenidas por el periódico, los espías del gobierno mexicano aseguraban que el escritor estaba “involucrado en el tráfico de armas que salía de Cuba a Colombia y que apoyaba la lucha comunista en América Latina”.
I just finished writing a review of Season of Ash
Michael Chabon was at Elliot Bay Book Company on Friday for those occasional superstar appearances at the bookstore, where it is standing room only and the fans spill out into the cafe which is normally separated fro the reading area. I would imagine most of the crowd has read one or all of his books. I, naturally, haven’t ready any because I never get around to reading American authors (something I hope to remedy soon). In the great tradition of salesmanship, I went to be sold on his writing. Right now he is touring his new book Manhood for Amateurs and he read a couple peaces about the joys and disappointments of comic book loving geekdom. While parts were entertaining, I can’t say I’m going to rush out to read the book, because the points he ultimately raise about the joy of the geek life and sharing it with your children were not particularly compelling—nice, but not compelling.
The questions he took, though, led to a great quote and underscores the truth that sometimes what an author writes isn’t as interesting as what they talk about. I am still curious to read one of his novels. Perhaps in a few more months.
In talking about how the comic book and genre geeks create new ideas by taking what an author has created and extending it in new ways he said,
The Talmud is fan fiction of the Torah. The New Testament is fan fiction on the Old Testament.
Bookworm had an excellent discussion about American Fiction and culture recently. Ostensively, the show was about Clancy Martin’s new book, How to Sell, but the interview was more wide ranging, yet incisive and to the point (not something that Silverblatt always achieves). It was particularly insightful when positing that the ethical and intellectual works in fiction are more concerned with shock than anything else. The focus has led to the use of the serial killer as an over used literary device.
Well worth the listen.
KCRW’s Bookworm has an excellent interview with Uribe and Cristina Rivera-Garza about their new book Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction (Dalkey Archive). It is an interesting conversation about the state of Mexican fiction, especially for post Boom authors. One of the good things about the book is that it is bilingual, a rarity in fiction. It is definitely a book worth reading and an interview worth listening to.
The Baader Meinhof Complex as the name implies is as much about the psychology of the Baader Meinhof Group as it is about the events. Not knowing much about the time it is hard to say how accurate the film is to the events. It does portray the unrest in West Germany of the late 60’s and early 70’s well and which is reflected in some of Fassbinder’s films, especially in The Lost Honor of Katarina Blum. The more interesting take of the film, though, is not the historic, but the motivations of the group. What was it that drove them and how did it manifest itself if their actions?
The film makers make clear that they see the group as well intentioned ideologues who could not control what they were: free loving anarchists from the 1960’s. The anarchism in their personal lives leads to mistakes in their actions. They are undisciplined terrorists and while they can plan out bank robberies well, they can’t plan out the next steps. And when they are arrested those who follow cannot plan any better. It doesn’t mean they are the Three Stooges of terrorism, because they managed hijackings and the German Embassy raid in Stockholm. It means they had no plan after the action. What happens when you reach your tactical objective?
The Badder Meinhof was good at achieving the tactical, but not the strategic and eventually the movement died out. However, it was not because the police were particularly cleaver. They caught group members, but were not able to stop new members from starting following after the group. Badder Meinhof dissipated as the times dissipated, as the politics that drove the original members changed.
It was also the seeming patience of the police that stopped the gang. The film makers show a scene where the head of the terrorism squad says, we must understand their motivations. It doesn’t make those motivations right, but it is the only way to defeat them. When he says it those in the meeting with him are resistant and it is an obvious criticism on the American War on Terror, which has posited a with us or against us mentality that has seemed to block analysis the movie posits. Yet the film also makes it clear that the German legal system was not able to handle the group adequately, since its processes were based on the idea that the accused will want to fight their charges. Instead the group makes fun of the case and spends time in their prison cell planning escapes.
Ultimately the questions The Baader Meinhof Complex grapple with is how do you stop terrorists? And how do you do it without destroying your society or creating more terrorists. The movie has no answers, but the skilled acting and film making make this and excellent film.
Troy Jollimore’s recent review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new book Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, had one of those brilliant one liners that can some describe a whole class of fiction well. He writes, “Characters in contemporary fiction often suffer from Multiple Epiphany Disorder.” It is a line that sums up so much of contemporary short stories. The problem I have with the epiphanies is people seldom have them and when they do they seldom follow them. Moreover, it makes the fiction read like your 7th grade report about the field trip so that story really seems to have ended this way: I learned that… It is refreshing to see a writer avoid such nonsense. I think part of the problem is young writers are taught to have epiphanies. I remember I was. Someday, maybe, that vogue will disappear, but for now we at least have Ishiuro’s stories.
Hanan Al-Shaykh finally has a new work available. It has been sometime since Only in London came out and I was quite excited to hear about the new book. The Barnes and Noble review is mixed, but I will be reading it none the less. The book is part biography and part novel and does sound interesting, especially in view of her complete works in English. As with many foreign language writers she isn’t mentioned too often, but with 6 or 7 books in English now she is one of the best translated Arabic writers.a
The novel’s only significant weakness is its sluggish pace. Inevitably, the poetry-filled yearning characterizing Kamila and Muhammad’s years apart begins to grate after a while. And al-Shaykh’s decision to chronicle Kamila’s countless attacks of jealousy and insecurity proves exasperating, repeatedly miring the story in protracted nothingness. Equally unoriginal is Kamila’s realization that married life with Muhammad is not all bliss, what with children and domestic chores multiplying almost unabated.
Of course, there are exceptions. Occasionally, al-Shaykh will inject a surprisingly powerful element into descriptions of her mother’s long days and quotidian duties, as when she depicts Kamila’s disturbing (and successful) attempts to miscarry, a ghastly homegrown solution to unwanted pregnancy. And after Kamila is widowed, al-Shaykh poignantly has her express her newfound anxiety: “During our marriage, my endless pregnancies and exhaustion had left me isolated from friends and relatives. I’d seen the world through his eyes. After his death, it was as if I started out all over again.”
What really matters, however, is al-Shaykh’s major twofold achievement with The Locust and the Bird. To begin with, she has written a stirring but never hagiographic account of a woman — her mother — who defies almost every major societal and religious stricture governing women’s behavior in her time. Yet al-Shaykh also manages the remarkable feat of unpretentiously capturing a character’s philosophical relationship with art. A close reading of The Locust and the Bird reveals that — perhaps counterintuitively — young Kamila does not in fact live vicariously through film; she pointedly refrains from transmuting her hunger for the real yet elusive man she loves into a complacent satisfaction with the honeyed images of romance flitting before her eyes. Indeed, far from allowing films to become her life, Kamila emerges from the theater spiritually refreshed but further impelled to achieve her dream. And that, aside from being a profound notion al-Shaykh deftly encapsulates in literary form, is probably both the wisest and healthiest approach to art.
It has been years since I’ve gotten around to reading something in public. Usually, readings are either poetry centric, which makes sense since it is a short format and you can get a lot of people cycling through the stage and you don’t have to concentrate too long on any one thing. Or the reading feels like some sort of comedy fest. Again, poetry lends it self to this. Even if you write 3000 word, 5 minutes translates to a fourth of a story. If I had fifteen minutes…well you do the math.
I did decide after reading for five minutes, getting a few laughs were they were expected, that the real role of these readings is not to air out your latest piece, which I’m not so sure really matters without feedback (this is Seattle so there’s none of that), but to practice acting out the readings. Back before TV and perhaps a little too much seriousness, even great authors like Dickens would give dramatic readings of their works. Too few do that now. But if you are not writing a novel of ideas, why not. At least it will be entertaining. We will see how that works out in practice next month.
Tirana MemoriaScott at the Quarterly Conversation has written an excellent article about Horacio Castellanos Moya and the new political novel. It is a good introduction to his work and is worth a read in part because it charts not only an interesting history of the development of the political novel, but of Latin American political novels. The nexus of his argument is here
As with Senselessness, the shape of She-Devil’s political conspiracy never becomes very distinct. Trapped within the narrator’s paranoid consciousness we can only guess at its actual dimensions, and any objective reality of an actual conspiracy is never confirmed. Part of this is simply the fragmented distribution of political power in a modern society—the fact that even a president can’t have full information on everything being done by a government. This fragmentation of power is something that Moya elegantly fuses with the development of his plot and his character as he marches his protagonists down each alley one at a time, closing certain threads of investigation even as new ones are introduced.
Yet the more significant part of this is due to the protagonist’s mind, which changes subtly but powerfully throughout both of these novels. What Senselessness and The She-Devil in the Mirror are doing is bringing the unreliable first-person novel to a modern Latin American context. What for Ford Madox Ford was primarily a story of infidelity in inter-war England, and for Kobo Abe was about existentialist malaise in mid-century Japan, and for Walker Percy was about the alienation of the individual in a radically mediated society, and for Kazuo Ishiguro was a story of classism in contemporary England, becomes for Moya a story of the great political subconsciousness that seethes through life in 21st-century Latin America. Each of these writers shares an interest in portraying the space between objective reality and human subjectivity. Fundamentally, they are interested in what happens as the human mind attempts to piece together a reality, though it lacks the necessary information to do so. As the diversity of these writers’ output shows, the dramatization of this gap is a very malleable tool: an individual’s quest for objective truth can interrogate realities about the cultures that range from a bottom-rung operative in a Latin American state on the verge of failure to a wealthy, privileged gentleman in a European nation at the height of empire. What is most characteristic about these novels is that vital facts about the culture each is set in are bound up at the deepest levels with the narrators’ own gradual realization that there is no such a thing as an objective reality. The process of self-discovery is contingent on comprehending one’s cultural context.
I would also add that having read Tirana Memoria I know that he doesn’t always approach reality in such dark terms, even when he is writing about a coup. He is also willing to inject humor and play games with the perception of reality only in the most oblique terms. Tirana Memoria uses one of the most straightforward sounding narrators, who scarcely hints at the deep rejections of a verifiable truth. If the book is ever translated into English, perhaps we will have a more complete picture of his work.
The Italian film Il Divo is one of those films where not knowing the history behind the story makes it difficult to understand what is going on. The need for background knowledge makes an already cryptic movie even more cryptic and though not impossible to understand it leaves one, despite the informative title cards interspersed through out the story, puzzled at best.
Il Divo is the story of Giulio Andreotti who was the Italian Prime Minister several times between the 70’s and the early 90’s and whose links to corruption and organized crime lead to his mafia trial in 1992, where he was found not guilty. The film covers all of those things, but in atemporal snipits so that it is hard to know what happened when and why. Il Divo is not a movie that tries to explain what he did, but suggest what he did. It is a movie that looks on the events from the outside, as might a reporter. Events, then, if unknown, stay unknown. For the outsider to Italian history the collection of characters who meet, but don’t seem to incriminate themselves leaves one uncertain as to the point of showing the characters. While the technique of showing what is only known make reportorial sense, that when it comes with so few explanations, the film looses some of its impact. Which is not to say the film is bad, just that without the backgrounding one is bound to be confused.
Toni Servillo who plays Andreotti is one of the bright spots of the movie, even for one who knows nothing about Italy. He walks like a nerdy Nosferatu, shoulders hunched, taking small gliding steps, backing out of rooms and turning on his heals to change direction. Apparently this is an accurate portrayal of Andreotti and it is fascinating to watch him inhabit the character. The way he speaks, too, is strange: not a dominator, but strategizer.
What one comes away with after watching the film is a complete amazement that Italy functions at all. There is scene after scene of corrupt meetings, politicians giving away things to voters, and, of course, assignations. You don’t have to know Andreotti to know something is wrong with all of that.
Il Divo is a mixed movie, one that doesn’t require a specialist’s knowledge to enjoy, but it sure will help.
Letras Libres‘ August issue included three stories that influenced some of Borges’ most famous stories in Fictiones. The stories are a fascinating look into Borges process of thought and creation and worth a look for any fan of Borges. While the stories are available on-line in Spanish, they are not on-line in English. However, two are more or less easily available in reprints, while a search for the third on the web will easily bring up a result. The three stories by Borges are the Library of Babel, Perrie Mendard Author of the Quijote, and the Shape of the Sword.
Of the three, the precursor to the Library of Babelis the most interesting. Written by Kurd Lasswitz, the Universal Libraryis a mathematical exploration of a library that contains every possible book, those with errors, those that we know, and the billions of others that do not exist now. What sets the story apart from Borges is the idea that there is some sort of true volume by each author, whereas Borges focuses more on the metaphysical complications of a library that has every possible book. Both stories authors posit intriguing ideas on the shape of ideas, but for Lasswitz the library he envisions is a mathematical monster, one that would be so large that laying the books end to end would take two light years to get from one end to the other. Even though Lasswitz sees it as finite, in practice it is an infinite library. For Borges the intrigue is more in what happens if the library already existed, how would knowledge exist. He goes one step beyond Lasswitz, one step beyond the reader’s history with true volumes, and reflects on more than the mathematical possibilities, but the ontological possibilities.
The precursor to Perrie Mendard Author of the Quijote has the most Bogesian changes. Corputby Tupper Greenwald is the story of a professor who so loves King Leer that when he finally takes the time to write his own play, what he creates is an exact copy. Greenwald’s protagonist is more of a lost man who has so imbibed a work he is unable to differentiate himself from the work. The story is psychological more than literary and it suggests that the professor has become senile. Borges, on the other hand, places the focus of the story less in the copying of the Quijote, and focuses on the interpretation, the way a work is understood through time. When the narrator of Perrie Mendard Author of the Quijote describes the book he changes the terms of interpretation so that what in Cervantes’ day was considered a medieval way of writing, in Perrie Mendardbecomes a briliant exposition of criticism. Even though they are the same text, the interpretations have changed. Corput, while interesting, is no where near as interesting as Perrie Mendard Author of the Quijote.
The final story, Shape of the Sword, I won’t cover here but is based on W Somerset Maugham‘s the Man with the Scar.
As in reading Boccaccio’s Filocolo before reading Chaucer’s the Franklin’s Tale, or reading Plutarch before reading Shakespeare, reading the sources of Borges will not diminish the quality of invention in his stories, but will magnify them.
A new Words Without Borders has been published, focusing on international journalism:
This month we present eyewitness accounts from around the world. In the spirit of the great Ryszard Kapuściński, our contributors record far more than just the facts, blending genres and filing dispatches from both political and literary frontlines. From the killing fields of Cambodia to the swarming streets of Tehran, on the ground and in the trenches, the writers here chronicle the news of the world with artful urgency. See how Nanni Balestrini, Karl-Markus Gauss, Gébé, Elham Gheytanchi, Peter Fröberg Idling, Wojciech Jagielski, Erwin Koch, François Vallejo, and Abdourahman Waberi deliver news that stays news
60Watts, a relatively new Spanish language literary journal, has published an as yet unpublished short story by Roberto Bolaño, El contorno del ojo (The Contour of the Eye). The story was presented at a literary contest in Valencia in the 80’s so Bolaño could earn some money. Perhaps it is good. I haven’t had time to read it, not translate anything from it.
You can read the story at 60Watts and read a short article in La Vanguardia, all in Spanish.
By The Firelight 