It has been a while since I’ve heard anything from Daboberto Gilb. I can remember liking his collection of short stories The Magic of Blood, but not his novel the Last Know Residence of Mickey Acuna. It is amazing how one bad book can completely turn you off to other books by a writer. He has a new story in the New Yorker. It is OK, very LA of a certain time, especially all his Dodger references. However, I wasn’t wowed by it, but it did have a certain charm. His style was a bit tedious, but at least, it didn’t have an epiphany for an ending.
Month: May 2010
Spanish Author Javier Cercas at the PEN World Voices Festival
Javier Cercas was interviewed by Amanda Vaill at the PEN World Voices Festival. He is an important author in Spain and has a few books in English. The conversation will give you a flavor for his interests which lean towards the historical and political. His books though question narrative truth and sound interesting. In the interview and another I’ve seen on Spanish TV, he seems a little prickly at times.
Manga Legend Yoshihiro Tatsumi Interviewed by Adrian Tomine
Graphic novelist Adrian Tomine interviewed Manga legend Yoshihiro Tatsumi at the PEN World Voices festival. Tatsumi wrote some of the first serious Manga, in other words, Manga that isn’t about superheros and samurais, but real people and events. Several of his books are available in English and I reviewed Good-bye a couple years ago.
It is Short Story Month
I didn’t know there was such a thing, but maybe I should get out more. The dedicated and excellent Emerging Writers Network has a few notes on it and is a site to watch if you want to celebrate it.
The question is if there is a poetry month, a short story month, and one would hope one day a novel month, what do we do with the rest of the year? Perhaps an essay month, play month, autobiography month, and if I could think up more genres we could fill up a whole year.
Mexican Novelest Daniel Sada Reads a Short Story (in Spanish)
The Mexican novelist Daniel Sada read a short story, The Ominous Phenomenon, at the PEN World Voices festival recently. It is a good chance to hear a great writer who has yet to have much translated into English. It is only in Spanish, though.
Egyptian Writer Nawal El Saadawi in Conversation at Pen World Voices
The Pen World Voices festival has an hour long conversation with Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadwi. She talks about how started writing and her views on the individual and writer as a political actors, among other things.
Nawal El Saadawi
Google to Sell Digital Books
Tech Flash is reporting that Google is going to sell digital books. Putting aside the issues with Google’s book scanning initiative which has many problems, this is a good thing. To have some more outlets and break Amazon’s initial stranglehold on distribution and forced low prices is a good thing. Obviously, we’ll see how it works out. The WSJ notes that there is some candy for the small independent store which sounds promising.
Google says its new service—called Google Editions—will allow users to buy digital copies of books they discover through its book-search service. It will also allow book retailers—even independent shops—to sell Google Editions on their own sites, taking the bulk of the revenue. Google has yet to release details about pricing and which publishers are expected to participate.
My May Reading at the Hugo House
I read at the Hugo House Monday night (5/3/2010). It is an untitled piece as yet, but it is more or less done, except for the nervous, pre-read corrections. It was a bit of a departure in that it was designed to be funny, a piece of comedy. It was the first time I’ve read something like that, but I got plenty of laughs were I wanted them. It took the crowd a paragraph to get into it, but after that it went well. I even had to wait several times for the laughter to stop, ten seconds in one case, before I could continue reading. It is good to know that what you thought was going to work does.
Also on the bill was Dave Gardner reading an excerpt from his memoir of growing up in Guadalajara as a teen in the 50’s. It was interesting and if you want to read it or the whole book you can at his blog.
There were a couple of short stories that were good and one writer brought a friend and they acted out the dialog of her story. One woman, a Polish immigrant, read a piece about loosing her job and getting financial counseling so she could begin to save money again. She told us she was going to read it to some bankers later in the week. Then there was piece about overcoming addiction and coming out as a transgendered woman. Those last two were quite a departure from the usual poetry and fiction. The best line of the night goes to the woman with the piece where she becomes a god: I don’t plan to do any work, that is what my pantheon is for.
May Issues of Words Without Borders & Open Letters Monthly Up
The May issues of Words Without Borders and Open Letters Monthly are up.
Words Without Borders theme is teens and includes some fiction by the Mexican author Eve Gil and the Catalan Andres Barba. (Update: I have been informed he writes in Spainsh, and a simple internet search will prove that, so I wonder why Words Without Borders said Catalan?)
No One Knows About Persian Cats – A Review
No One Knows About Persian Cats is a delightful film about musicians in Iran just trying to play music they like, mostly rock, and a totalitarian state that refuses to let them. The film is ostensibly about two indie-rock musicians who are trying to put together a concert for their friends and family, and also get fake passports so they can flee the country to play a show in London. They travel around Tehran trying to put together a band and talking with different musicians in Tehran’s underground music scene. Accompanying them is a promoter who is the ultimate wheeler-dealer with a fast tongue that makes his living bootlegging alcohol, selling pirated and forbidden CDs and DVDs, and otherwise brining his black market sensibilities to the music world. The quest allows the film makers to show the great lengths the musicians have to go to play. Every time they go to a new space it is down a warren of staircases to a forgotten basement that will muffle the music and keep the police away. One metal band even plays at a dairy farm amongst the cows and hay bales. Despite these great lengths it is a world of fear and every musician has been jailed at least once for playing music. All the musicians, except for the rapper, play music that is completely apolitical and in a few cases lacks words, yet the government will not allow almost any form of rock to be played. It is the tension between the musicians simple desire and the politics is one of the primary things that makes the movie compelling.
The other thing that makes the movie so interesting is the music. Sure it is all infuenced by American and European rock and hip-hop, but that is part of the fun. And all of it is very good. There are 2 blues rock bands, one with a female singer with an great voice; 2 metal like bands that are full on hard-core with double bass drums and chorused guitars; a couple jazz jam bands; an indie-rock band; a folk singer; and a hip-hop group. All of these get a couple of minutes to play a song and while they play the film becomes a kind of rock video showing montages of Tehran and its street life. The best performance is from the rap group which performs a great song that indicts the state for the disparities in wealth in Tehran while the montage show scenes of people living on the streets. The raping style and the music are aggressive and underscore the seriousness of their critique. The female fronted blues band was also very good, but what made it even more compelling is everyone in the band was filmed out of focus, mostly likely for their own protection. It was a haunting song set to night scenes of Tehran.
The film might have a bit of the Andy Hardy series of films where Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland put on a musical in a barn, if it weren’t for the political consequences of what they are doing. It is in the political tension and the liveliness of the music that the film is at its best a is a fascinating look at Iran. Definitely worth watching, especially if you like music.
My Review of White Masks by Elias Khoury Is Up at the Quarterly Conversation
My review, A Cacophony of Stories: White Masks by Elias Khoury, is available at the Quarterly Conversation.
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Sheppard Lee Written by Himself – by Robert Montgomery Bird – A Review of an American Satire
Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself
Robert Montgomery Bird
New York Review of Books, 425 pg
Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself is a forgotten American classic from the early part of the nation’s history, one that revels in poking fun at the contradictory tendencies in the young democracy. Bird’s vision of its inhabitants isn’t so much caustic, but a distaste for the pretentious idlers who only want to be aristocrats. His writing, though, is not dull and full of scolding, rather in the tradition of satire he makes fun of his characters, who, despite their striving, never quite achieve what they long for. His take on antebellum society (with one exception) is filled with humorous touches that both make fun of and describe the country.
Shepard Lee is the lay about heir to a large farm in New Jersey whose only ambition in life is to do nothing because nothing interests him. Since nothing interests him he knows nothing about money and is slowly swindled out of his land, trusting in people too much mostly because it is the easiest thing to do. Finding that living well and not working only leads to poverty he becomes desperate as his income (his land holdings) dwindles and he begins to dream of finding pirate’s treasure. He descends into superstition as his black servant explains how if one dreams about Captain Kid’s treasure three times in a row, one can find the treasure at midnight. Complaining all along about the indignity of digging for the treasure at the middle of the night, he sets out to find the treasure, and, of course, only experiences mishap after mishap. He is a useless shovel man and only manages to injure himself in the process, something Bird draws quite comically.
It is at this moment he accidentally kills himself and the book takes its strange and fantastical shape. Looking at his dead body Lee wonders what to do next when he sees a dead hunter near by. He is a rich man and Shepard Lee wishes he could be like that man and as he does so he suddenly finds his spirit sucked into the man’s body, reanimating it and partially taking over his life.
The ability to go from dead body to dead body is the defining feature of the book and animates the satire. Bird constructs the reanimation so that when Shepard Lee enters the body of the dead person he only partially controls it, the rest comes from the formerly dead person, who magically returns to life and resumes his life as before. Letting the dead person live his life lets Shepard Lee both comment on the strangeness of the life and see how that person lived his life. While Bird doesn’t stick to the device completely and Lee seems to be in control at times, the device is clever and lends itself well to the satire.
Once Lee takes over the body of the hunter he finds he is a rich man, which thrills him to no end. Quickly he realizes, though, that being rich isn’t everything. The man has painful gout and has a combative wife. Lee spends little time in the man’s body, which is fortunate, because the satire in this section of the book isn’t particularly interesting, especially the relationship with the wife. How many henpeck husband jokes can one take, really? However, it does introduce us to Sheppard Lee’s first of many disappointments as he learns that lives are seldom as they appear.
He next reanimates a young dandy and Lee is excited to live the life of a young, handsome man. If Lee wasn’t so rash with his choices, though, he might have thought twice before entering the body of someone who has just commuted suicide. But Lee doesn’t think about those things and when he returns home he finds himself surrounded by creditors. He tries to convince them he is going to get married soon and will be able to pay them all off, and for the remainder of the dandy section his only goal is to get married to a wealthy woman. The dandy is one of the better pieces of the book and in it you see the conflicting impulses of the young country. On the one hand you have the dandy, a man who is too good to work and yet has no money and spends all his time trying to figure out ways to marry into wealth. It is quite reminiscent of Vanity Fair, especially the chapter How to Live on Nothing a Year. On the other hand the dandy’s uncle is a country bumpkin and a rich man, but who at the first opportunity to enter society is willing to spend his fortune on clothing, houses, and carriages all because that is what one has to do. Bird takes great pleasure in showing all these people, the dandy with his hustler like mentality, and the new rich with their over whelming desire to buy respectability, as either selfish or gullible, the dark side of the wide open society of the United States.
In another funny section, Bird gives us the Quaker philanthropist, which he uses in the broader term of do-gooder. The philanthropist is a man who always believes there is good in man. The bad are just victims of society and need a second chance. The philanthropist, of course, takes it on himself to provide these second chances to everyone. His only interest in life is in helping people and he drives great pleasure from this, something the Sheppard Lee, after a series of miserable hosts, takes delight in. However, the philanthropist is not much of a realist and everyone he tries to help either turns against him or cheats him. In one chapter he summarizes his failures:
I. Beaten by a drunkard whom I had taken out of prison, and bailed to keep the peace.
II. Mulcted out of $100 surety-money, because my gentleman broke the peace by beating me.
V. Rolled in the mud by the boys of my own charity-school, who I had exhorted not to daub the passers-by.
XI. Whitewashed and libeled on my own back by the stone-cutters, for buying wrought marble out of the prison.
The philanthropist always wants to help, but his help is either an unwanted intrusion in other people’s affairs, or is rejected by ungrateful people who want something better than the paltry sums he hands out. Shepard Lee realizes that it doesn’t pay to help anyone and the satisfaction the philanthropist gets when he helps people is just a selfish desire to feel good. It is a funny and probably the best section of the book. Bird’s take on selfish hucksterism of city life leaves few people unscathed.
The philanthropist is then captured by fugitive slave catchers and taken to Virginia. He is a wanted man because he has helped too many slaves escape. Just as he is about to be lynched by a mob in Virginia Lee sees a slave fall from a tree and die. At that moment he reanimates the slave’s body. The depiction of slavery Bird gives is something along the lines of my old Virginia home, where the master is a happy and generous man, and the salves are well fed and contented. Trouble only comes when the slaves find an abolitionist pamphlet in some goods they are unloading and begin to learn they are captives. Worse, Lee reads what the paper says and makes them even more dissatisfied. The salves then plan a revolt and in the process kill members of the master’s family.
The slavery potion is the worst part of the book and obviously the most dated section. Bird is almost an apologist for slavery here, essentially saying that the slaves are happy and contented as long as they don’t know anything about their servitude. In certain contexts the notion that knowledge is disturbing might be interesting, but here it elevates slavery to some exalted type of paternalism, a better form of philanthropy that is best left as it is. Throughout the book Bird doesn’t hesitate to show people as greedy, selfish, misguided, and yet the only people who are not that way are the masters and the slaves. At best it is a weakness of the story, but I think it reflects a way of thinking that is racist. The plantation was not the garden of Eden and to paint is as one even in satire is ugly. Had the satire actually shown the dark side of slavery, in much the same way that he takes on stock trading, for example, then the slavery section might be interesting. As it is, it is a legacy from a darker time in the young United States.
Sheppard Lee Written by Himself is a book that takes great pleasure in making fun Americans as they strive to remake themselves and often find they are making hypocritical and self defeating decisions. For those who wish to make money or enter high society, Bird places even more scorn, holding, instead, the life of the gentleman farmer, as Sheppard Lee eventually learns, in high esteem. It is a conservative position, a throw back to Jeffersonian in the age of Jackson. Part of the fun of the book is to see just how rambunctious the schemes to get rich are, and it presents an America, at this distance, that is rough and wild and even though some people strive to make themselves respectable, it is impossible to escape that striving character. It obviously has problems when questions of race and slavery come up, but otherwise it is a highly readable and funny satire about the early United States.
Interview with Etgar Keret at Words Without Borders
Words Without Borders has an interesting interview with the short story writer Etgar Keret about his process and what he thinks of creative writing programs and craft. I am a big fan of his stories and he has been one my most interesting finds in the world of short stories over the last year or two along with Amanda Michalopoulou and Hipólito Navarro. Because his works deviate from the more American tradition of epiphany and craft, I find his work quite refreshing. His take on craft, something I was taught in my earliest creative writing classes and still seems to haunt me like some tedious specter, was interesting.
DH: Do you think there is an essential difference between what people think a good story is in contemporary American literature and in other parts of the world? I mean, do you see a difference between what is considered a good story here and, say, in Israel?
EK: I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but what I can say about the US is that there are many readers and creative writing professors who are into the tradition of the “well written story,” which is something I completely dislike because it focuses on the craft machine. I tell my students that they should focus on writing “the badly written” good story. There is something paralyzing if you are thinking all the time about the form; it can stop you from focusing on the true passion and emotion. Here I can see that some people could characterize my stories as “shaggy dog stories” because they say, “OK, this is about a guy who went to a bar, etc., but this is not literature” because I don’t write the typical New Yorker story. I think this is very American because it goes with the Protestant work ethic: when you read a story you should see that someone worked very hard on it. But when I write something I want to hide my effort. I want people to feel that I am speaking to them. If it took me two months to write it I want it to look as if I didn’t make any effort. This is something that clashes with the American tradition. If you compare Bob Dylan singing a song with someone from American Idol, the latter sings better, he has a better voice. But the guy from American Idol is thinking about “singing well,” while Bob Dylan is thinking about the song. So the American kind of “well written” story is about creating an American Idol kind of story.
His discussion about rhythm and sound in translation was very interesting, too. In poetry you expect to loose elements like that, especially if the poetry use formal structures. Prose isn’t necessarily thought of in those terms, although I love writers who can pay attention to the musicality of prose.
DH: I believe in that, and it makes sense, given the fact that your stories are not premeditated, but they start based on sound or rhythm. Now, you are a writer that in this country we read in translation, so there is problem with that.
EK: The problem is that English is 30/% longer than Hebrew. In Hebrew you can really construct very short sentences. In know this because I work with two very, very creative translators. And many times I don’t want them to be loyal to the text, but to the meter. For example, I have a story that begins with a series of compliments about a guy; but when my translator translated the story, it didn’t work because she wanted to translate the word, but the rhythm didn’t work. So, I told her, “Forget about the word! It should be ta-ta-ta.”
By The Firelight 