A Different Stripe

Old Weird America 101

Envy those University of Minnesota students who have the opportunity to take a class titled "The Old Weird America" from the man who coined a term that has come to define everything from aesthetic categories in music and art to that feeling you get when driving past burnt-out barns along the highway.

That's right, next fall, Greil Marcus will be teaching "Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature: The Old, Weird America":

"This course examines commonplace, authorless songs as elemental, founding documents of American identity. These songs can be heard as a form of speech that, with a deep foundation, is always in a flux; especially in the work of Bob Dylan across the last fifty years. Reading includes novels (Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days; and Lee Smith's The Devil's Dream, criticism (Constance Rourke's classic American Humor ), Bob Dylan's autobiography Chronicles, as well as music and film excerpts."

Pet Shop Boys and Post-Office Girls

Today brings an endorsement from an unexpected place: the disco floor. Neil Tennant's latest post on The Pet Shop Boys site reads:

Just finished reading this beautiful, fast-moving, tragic novel, The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig. It was written in the early 30s but has only just been published in English. I think it will haunt me for a long while. Highly recommended (as are many other works by this under-rated writer).

And he even links to The Nation review of the book.

Now if we could only find out if, in the lyrics to West End Girls, the band is actually referring to the Edmund Wilson history of 19th and 20th century radical revolutions, when they sing:

In every country, in every nation
From Lake Geneva To the Finland Station.

or is it just a colloquialism? As a Time article of 1939 explains,

The phrase "to the Finland Station" has a symbolic meaning, implies something like a rendezvous with destiny.

We should also mention that Tess Lewis at The Wall Street Journal also reviewed The Post-Office Girl this past weekend.

NYRB on Facebook

The NYRB Facebook page is here. Come say hello, or send in a picture of you or anyone reading a New York Review Book. There might just be something in it for you.

World domination, one translation at a time

The site Well-Mannered Frivolity points us to Unesco's magnificently named Index Translationum, which attempts to catalog all books in translation everywhere (or at least among its hundred-odd member states), a Borghesian task.

Our own Georges Simenon comes in at #16 on the list of most translated writers, with 1,959 translated books to his name. He's right after Isaac Asimov and just before Pope John Paul II. The index is worth looking at, and the Translationum database could proove be a very useful resource, indeed.

As Ms. Well-Mannered Frivolity comments, "Authors who write prolifically have a distinct advantage here," which explains why Barbara Cartland outranks the New Testament.

The photograph above shows M. Simenon (for once without his pipe) adding another volume to his "all-Simenon" bookshelf.

The Booker of Bookers

2009 will  be the 40th anniversary of the Booker Prize (the first awardee was P.H. Newby's Something to Answer For). To drum up interest in the award, and because the only thing better that a best-of list is a best-of-the-best list, there will be a "Best of the Booker" prize given to one of the 41 former winners. As the Man Booker site notes, this isn't the first time such a prize has been distributed, in 1993 Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children was deemed the best by a panel of judges.

Democracy has swept the world, and what worked 1993 surely won't work for the Web 2.0 generation, so this time, the panel of experts is selecting only the six finalists for the "Best of the Booker" prize. The public will be making the final choice.

ABE.com is holding its very own, early poll. So if you'd like to vote for NYRB's lone Booker winner, head over to its Booker page, and put your support behind J.G. Farrell's Siege of Krishnapur.

One Shot World Tour

Thanks to Betsy Bird, we learnt that the One Shot World Tour was stopping in Canada today. So here we are to say a few words about Stephen Leacock, and to try to convince you that, even though he looked like this,

(photo by 4BlueEyes)

his writing remains fresh and hilarious.

Stephen Leacock is famous in Canada, a sort of Canadian Mark Twain. There's a Leacock Museum, a Leacock Medal for Humour, a Leacock website at the National Museum of Canada, etc. He was so well known that his niece was able to sell a book of memories about him. What is it about Canada that breeds wit, even in a trained economist such as Leacock? There's no point in trying to figure it all out, instead let's just read what Leacock had to say about his writing (including the book we publish—with an introduction by Daniel Handler—Nonsense Novels) in a preface to one of his most successful books, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town:

I have written two books, one called Literary Lapses and the other Nonsense Novels. Each of these is published by John Lane (London and New York), and either of them can be obtained, absurd though it sounds, for the mere sum of three shillings and sixpence. Any reader of this preface, for example, ridiculous though it appears, could walk into a bookstore and buy both of these books for seven shillings. Yet these works are of so humorous a character that for many years it was found impossible to
print them. The compositors fell back from their task suffocated with laughter and gasping for air. Nothing but the intervention of the linotype machine—or rather, of the kind of men who operate it—made it possible to print these books. Even now people have to be very careful in circulating them, and the books should never be put into
the hands of persons not in robust health.

Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these humorous nothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable to perform the serious labours of the economist. My own experience is exactly the other way. The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in
writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far between. Personally, I would sooner
have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Nonsense Novels, true to its title, is a collection of silly stories, each one sending up a different literary genre. On our website (or here), you can download a pdf of the rags-to-riches story "A Hero in Homespun," which we describe as "a heartwarming tale of a country lad with big dreams who moves to New York City and ends up burning it to the ground." Even better is Leacock's satire of the passionate heroine of the Russian novel, "Sorrows of a Super Soul" Here is the heroine's first encounter with her future love:

How beautiful he looked! Not tall like Alexis Alexovitch, ah, no! but so short and wide and round—shaped like the beautiful cabbage that died last week. He wore a velvet jacket and he carried a camp stool and an easel on his back, and in his face was a curved pipe with a long stem, and his face was not red and rough like the face of Alexis, but mild and beautiful and with a smile that played on it like moonlight over putty.

Do I love him? I cannot tell. Not yet. Love is a gentle plant. You cannot force its growth.

As he passed I leaned from the window and threw a rosebud at him. But he did not see it.

Then I threw a cake of soap and a toothbrush at him. But I missed him, and he passed on.

Daniel Handler's introduction to the book—really more of a nonsense novel of his own—is also available for download. And it should also be mentioned that the artist who pays homage to Leacock on the cover of the book is another famous Canadian, Bruce McCall.

Afloat vs. Afloat

A guide to telling apart two books with the same title.

Guy de Maupassant on Afloat:

This diary has no interesting story to tell, no tales of derringdo.Last spring I went on a short cruise along the Mediterranean coast and every day, in my spare time, I jotted down things I’d seen and thought. In fact what I saw was water, sun, cloud, and rocks and that’s all. I had only simple thoughts, the kind you have when you’re being carried drowsily along on the cradle of the waves.

Jennifer McCartney in coversation about Afloat:

Q: Does it aggravate you when people ask you how someone as young as you are can create a novel with so much emotional depth and complexity, or do you look upon it as a compliment?

A: I think some people are confused not so much by the emotional depth, but with the concept of how someone so young can have anything to write about in terms of life experience, and that’s fine. I’ve been lucky enough to have lived in six American states, in Scotland and England, and held over twenty-five jobs. That emotional depth comes from having a lot of different experiences, but that’s not a necessity for writing, really. A lot of Canadian and U.K. writers publish in their twenties . . . I’d like to think Afloat stands alone as a novel, regardless of my age. Most readers won’t know it was written when I was twenty-four.

A Lost Round-up

If you missed the cameo appearance of The Invention of Morel on Lost last week, there'll be another chance to the episode tonight.

Elsewhere, the internet is abuzz with discussion about the book:
"Fugitives? Island? Anomalies? I see a pattern here!"
Wondering what else shows up on the character Ben's bookshelf?
"[The plot] sounds a bit familiar, no?"
Ever read a book just because it's appeared on Lost?
An entry on the "Lostpedia" that could use some fleshing out.
The Mother Jones blog is discussing Lost? Isn't there an election to cover?
A reader suggests a story by Bioy Casare's friend and collaborator Borges that might prove fascinating to Lost viewers: "'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,' which is about a decades-old conspiracy to make an imaginary world 'real.'"

and so on...

In researching all of this, I uncovered another NYRB–Lost connection. A while ago, we mentioned that Frigyes Karinthy, whose memoir of surgery, A Journey Round My Skull, we'll soon be publishing, is frequently credited with the now-ubiquitous (and recently disproven?) proposition that all people are connected to each other by only six degrees. Now I see that Karinthy is mentioned in the Season 2 Bonus disk for Lost. On the disk, writer-producer Carlton Cruse, in voice-over, asks:

"Have you ever sat next to someone at a bar and felt that your paths have crossed before? Has the thought ever crossed your mind that the stranger behind you at the store would become a significant part of your life? In 1929, a Hungarian writer (Frigyes Karinthy) put forth the idea that anyone of us could name any one person among the earth's billions of inhabitants and through, at most 5 acquaintances, connect that person back to themselves. He called it 'The Theory of Centrality.'"

Hmmm. Who knows what other connections lurk in the pages of the Lostpedia?

 

Lost? Turn to The Invention of Morel

Our resident Lost insider, Chad Post, tipped us off a while ago to the presence of one of our books, The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares in the Lost episode that airs on February 21 ("Eggtown," episode 4, season 4). In fact, Chad's been talking about the similarities between Morel and Lost for some time (conspiracy theory anyone?). Today he sends something even more thrilling, a preview of the episode in which a character (Sawyer) is reading the book, and appears loath to be torn away from it. Is it because it reveals the secrets of the island?

Read a summary of The Invention of Morel  and find some links to related pages on an earlier post.

Big at the AWP, David Jones

One of he most heartening things about staffing the NYRB table in the nosebleed stands of the AWP was the popularity of books that have been, to put it kindly, something less than popular.

Most notably, several people came over to us expressly to get a hold of David Jones's highly-allusive modernist prose-poem memoir of World War I, In Parenthesis.

Jones enlisted in the army at the age of 19

From W.S. Merwin's introduction:

As a “war book” In Parenthesis is incomparable. In his account of those months of stupefying discomfort, fatigue, and constant fear in the half-flooded winter trenches, and then of the mounting terror and chaos of the July assault on Mametz Wood, David Jones made intimate and inimitable use of sensual details of every kind, from sounds, sights, smells, and the racketing and shriek of shrapnel set against the constant roar of artillery, to snatches of songs overheard or remembered, reflections on pools of mud, the odors of winter fields of beets blown up by explosives, the way individual soldiers carried themselves at moments of stress or while waiting. All of these become part of the “nowness” that Jones said was indispensable to the visual arts. The resulting powerful and intense evocation, however, occurs in what seems like a vast echo chamber where the reverberations resound from the remote antiquity of military activities, and of the language and mythology of Britain, from Shakespeare’s Histories, in English, and from the poems, conflicts, and divinities of the more venerable traditions of Wales and the Welsh, and from the legacy, civil, political, and military, of the Roman occupation of the island, some remnant of which Arthur himself had fought to preserve.

Merwin mentions Jones's beliefs about the visual arts because Jones was as much an artist as he was a poet. He drew from an early age and studied under Walter Sickert. But perhaps the most important influence in life as an artist was fellow Catholic-covert Eric Gill. In the 1920s Jones lived with the Gill family, illustrating books and experimenting with different print making styles. He was even engaged to one of Gill's daughters for a time.

The illustration on the cover of In Parenthesis is a detail of a drawing of Jones's that belongs in the collection of the Tate Britain. He was also involved with the design and typesetting of the interior of In Parenthesis, of which the NYRB edition is a facsimile.

Languagehat on David Jones
Modernism's David Jones pages