In one of the most bizarre casting decisions in recent memory, actress Jennifer Garner is, according to the Hollywood insider website deadline.com, to play Miss Marple in the forthcoming Disney reworking of the much-loved TV series based on Agatha Christie’s novels.
Meditating on her future, philosopher Gillian Rose considered the model of Miss Marple. We hope Ms. Garner is listening:
I aspire to Miss Marple's persona: to be exactly as I am, decrepit nature, yet supernature in one, equally alert on the damp ground and in the turbulent air. Perhaps I don't have to wait for old age for that invisible trespass and pedestrian tread, insensible of mortality and desperately mortal.
Barbara Comyns (author of The Vet's Daughter) is the inaugural author published by Dorothy, a brand-new press "dedicated to works of fiction or near fiction or about fiction, mostly by women." Brian Evenson writes about reading this remarkable novelist at The Rumpus:
Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead was the first book I read by British novelist Barbara Comyns. I knew nothing about Comyns at the time: I picked up the novel exclusively because of the title, which struck me as promising and intriguing.
In fact, the book turned out to be a great deal more than that: it was downright astonishing. Beginning mid-flood, with ducks swimming through Grandma Willoweed’s drawing room windows “quacking their approval,” Comyns’ narrator quickly moves on to “[a] passing pig squealing, its short legs madly beating the water and tearing at its throat, which was red and bleeding,” and then the sun comes “out bright and strong and everywhere became silver.” That last fact is a good thing if you side with one of the book’s several astonished children, but bad if you’re Old Ives the handyman, superstitiously convinced that the sun will draw the moisture back into the sky. Inside the house, maids pin up their skirts and try to make breakfast while wading red-legged through the water, laughing and screeching. Meanwhile, the bodies of drowned peacocks eddy round the garden, the hens in one shed commit suicide by falling from their perches into the water, and the hens in the other shed fatalistically sit “on their eggs in a black broody dream until they were covered in water. They squarked a little; but that was all. For a few moments just their red combs were visible above the water, and then they disappeared.”
All of that happens in the first two paragraphs of the book. [continue reading]
See what else Dorothy is publishing Read about The Vet's Daughter at Bookslut Listen to the John Wesley Harding album named after Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead
Last week, the Déja Vu blog of Lapham's Quarterly ("Bringing an historical perspective to today's news") made a connection between a new study showing that the mind needs periods of rest in order to process and retain all the information we shove into it throughout the day and Robert Burton's own lament about the overwhelming number of books published in "our Frankfurt Marts, our domestic Marts" (of the early 17th century). There is too much information for one brain to absorb, and it seems that we've been feeling that way for a long while.
Meanwhile, Harry Ayres, writing in the Financial Times (for a no-comment comment on the unlikelihood of the FT praising Masanobu Fukuoka, see Anna Lappé's twitter feed) finds a way into The One-Straw Revolution, and it's not through organic food:
I was struck by one sentence in particular. Somewhere in the middle of
this charming, eccentric book, one of the founding texts of natural,
non-interventionist farming, Fukuoka asserts that “the one-acre farmer
of long ago spent January, February and March hunting rabbits in the
hills”. Later on, he says that while cleaning his village shrine he
found dozens of haikus, composed by local people, on hanging plaques;
but “there is no time in modern agriculture for a farmer to write a poem
or compose a song”.
Farmers, once upon a time, had leisure time! They wrote poetry, at least they did in Japan. And that leisure was characterized, not by catching up on RSS feeds or figuring out how to apply for farm subsidies, but by wholesome pursuits that allowed for a fair amount of wool-gathering. Ayres's column brings out the features that make The One-Straw Revolution an inspiration to so many: its holistic (sometimes didactic) approach to creating the good life.
(This all puts us in mind of the way, whenever we spoke on the phone to Larry Korn, who co-translated and edited The One-Straw Revolution, and who has made a career out of Fukuoka's methods of gardening, we had to slow down our New York patter, breathe deep, and listen to his calm—and calming—voice. Thank you Larry-sensei!)
The whole of The Summer Book takes place in what we would consider downtime and involves a little girl finding ways to amuse herself. David Nice, a music critic, has published our favorite recent appreciation of the book. It might be our favorite because he quotes some great, funny, passages, it might be because he truly praises the translation, or it might be because he writes the following:
Somehow I imagined it would be a bit of a soft option, gentle whimsy after the bright and black of Linn Ullmann's A Blessed Child,
another masterpiece based on the author's childhood and times.... I was wrong.
And by extension, you are wrong too, if you fear that The Summer Book is sentimental.
Here, for slow viewing, and with a soundtrack of crashing waves and birdsong, is footage of the island where Tove Jansson and her partner spent their summers:
Yuri Olesha's Envy, the funniest novel you'll ever read about the quest for the perfect means of mass producing sausage, has as its dramatic center a soccer match between the USSR and Germany. In the passage below, Volodya is the shlub of a narrator's rival, and Goetske is the flamboyant star of the opposing team. The playing styles of the two men are contrasted, each, perhaps, reflecting the spirit of his home country.
Volodya would catch the ball in midflight, when it seemed mathematically impossible. The entire audience, the entire living slope of the stands seemed to get steeper; each spectator was halfway to his feet, impelled by a terrible, impatient desire to see, at last, the most interesting thing—the scoring of a goal. The referees were sticking whistles into their lips as they walked, ready to whistle for a goal...Volodya wasn’t catching the ball, he was ripping it from its line of flight, like someone who has violated the laws of physics and was hit by the stunning action of thwarted forces. He would fly up with the ball, spinning around, literally screwing himself up on it. He would grab the ball with his entire body—knees, belly, and chin—throwing his weight at the speed of the ball, the way someone throws a rag down to put out a flame. The usurped speed of the ball would throw Volodya two meters to the side, and he would fall like a firecracker. The opposing forwards would run at him, but ultimately the ball would end up high above the fray. Volodya stayed inside the goal. He couldn’t just stand there, though. He walked the line of the goal from post to post, trying to tamp down the surge of energy from his battle with the ball. Everything was roaring inside him. He swung his arms, shook himself, kicked up a clump of earth with his toe. Elegant before the start of the game, he now consisted of rags, a black body, and the leather of his huge, fingerless gloves. The breaks didn’t last long. Once again the Germans’ attack would roll toward Moscow’s goal. Volodya passionately desired victory for his team and worried about each of his players. He thought that only he knew how you should play against Goetske, what his weak points were, how to defend against his attacks. He was also interested in what opinion the famous German was forming about the Soviet game. When he himself clapped and shouted “hurray” to each of his backs, he felt like shouting to Goetske then: “Look how we’re playing! Do you think we’re playing well?” As a soccer player, Volodya was Goetske’s exact opposite. Volodya was a professional athlete; the other was a professional player. What was important to Volodya was the overall progress of the game, the overall victory, the outcome; Goetske was anxious merely to demonstrate his art. He was an old hand who was not there to support the team’s honor; he treasured only his own success; he was not a permanent member of any sports organization because he had compromised himself by moving from club to club for money. He was barred from participating in play-off matches. He was invited only for friendly games, exhibition games, and trips to other countries. He combined art and luck. His presence made a team dangerous. He despised the other players—both his side and his opponents. He knew he could kick a goal against any team. The rest didn’t matter to him. He was a hack.
Louise Bourgeois, detail of Untitled (Legs and Bones), 1993; courtesy Gallerie Karsten Greve, Cologne; photograph by Beth Phillips
Louise Bourgeois: 1911–2010
"We sit in Louise's web, a wonderfully tatty parlor, watching the
paint peel, waiting nervously. There is a round coffee table with a
dozen bottles of liquor on it. Esrafily pours and says: 'Louder! Like
we're having a party. If she thinks she's missing a party, she'll come
down.'' Cloud taunts us: ''Man, she's gonna lay waste. I call this place
the smack-down shack, 'cause it ends in tears, man.'
"Then she appears, and it's hard to imagine this small, opalescent
woman in a pink tunic, black slip over black leggings and tiny black
Nikes smacking anybody down."
From "Always on Sunday," a profile of the artist and her circle that appeared in The New York Times in 2002
"My Life in Pictures": Bourgeois comments on photographs of herself from age 2 to 85, also in the Times.
And for Barbara Comyns admirers, we hear that her novel Our Spoons Came from Woolworths will soon be republished in America (it's available in the UK from Virago). More details to come.
Just before Halloween, the New York Institute for the Humanities sponsored a panel discussion about Vasily Grossman and Curzio Malaparte, two writers who worked as war correspondents on opposite sides of the Eastern Front during WWII. When it was Chris Hedges turn to speak, it became clear that he believed the most significant
divide between the two writers to be not geographical or narrowly political, but primarily moral. The panelists were too polite to duke out the merits of realistic writing versus the fantastic mode or the value of giving voice to war's victims (Grossman) rather than focusing on those in power (Malaparte) right then and there. Too bad, we would have liked to hear panelist and Malaparte translator Walter Murch come to Malaparte's defense.
Last month, the radio program On The Media gave Hedges an opportunity to discuss war writing, Grossman's bravery and what he terms Malaparte's "war pornography" in more depth. It takes a minute, but an audio player should load right on this very page.
By the way, it's worth listening to this entire episode of On The Media, which took "The Future of the Book Industry" as its theme.
In getting together our edition of Tibor Déry's (that's Déry Tibor to you Magyarphiles) novel Niki we came across some poems of his, published in the short-lived Dokumentum, a journal he helped edit. After dropping some not-so-subtle hints to poet and translator George Szirtes (who has written the introduction to Niki) that it would be wonderful to read the poetry in English, he graciously had a go at translating one or two. We should mention that the poems would not have been found had they not been digitized by the New York Public Library.
MY GOLDFISH
born into sunlight they swam around her silent one spring night they entered my heart
the well of resurrection! their golden ferries glittered through my breast look at them dancing! years march on monotonous in the garden greenhouse here and there a face leans towards me and sheds its tears
feed my goldfish the wind moans outside day’s leaden back casts its shadow across us days pass who will unearth time’s infinite gifts from my body?
in the dust of the street… there sprawl the lost nights gilded wooden statues of beggars march along the boulevard everywhere darkness the stars above them: the purple-scaled highway of my fish
Getting together a reprint of J.F. Powers's novel Wheat That Springeth Green, we were struck by the beauty of its epigraph (which appears in the form of sheet music, taken fromThe Oxford Book of Carols). Digging a bit, it becomes clear that the carol is in fact an Easter song. Even so, it can be appreciated even by a non-believer on this vernal equinox.
Now the Green Blade Riseth
Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain,
Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain;
love lives again, that with the dead has been:
love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.
In the grave they laid him, love whom men had slain,
thinking that never he would wake again,
laid in the earth like grain that sleeps unseen:
love is come again like wheat the springeth green.
Forth he came at Easter, like the risen grain,
he that for three days in the grave had lain,
quick from the dead my risen Lord is seen:
love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.
When our hearts are wintry, grieving in pain,
thy touch can call us back to life again,
fields of hearts that dead and bare have been:
love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.
Who:One of the most ancient of goddesses, Hecate survived Zeus's banishment of the rest of her tribe from Olympus and was granted part dominion over the earth, sea, and heavens. As such, she bestowed material blessings those who pleased her. In time, however, she became associated with the underworld, witchcraft, and sorcery. "She is, in short, a convenient symbol of a dark-age notion of 'the feminine'—a figure, in various guises, of mystery, beauty, and fertility, but at heart, a succubus. She attracts, she seduces, she consumes."—Louis Menand, from the introduction toMemoirs of Hecate County Where: Edmund Wilson's enchanted suburb, Hecate County, is ruled over by housewives who get up to mischief during by day, but welcome their husbands home in the evening, highball in hand. Resonance: Hecate represents the Roman trivia, or "three ways." Her three-headed likeness was placed at Roman crossroads. She is the embodiment of choice. The hero of "The Princess with the Golden Hair" is involved with three women. He is afraid that "a spell" has been cast over him. Her 1940s avatar: "I found her this time in a velvet gown, sumptuous and wine-purple...She was wearing gold-embroidered sandals of the high-heeled kind then in vogue that left the instep attractively unprotected; and she had parted her hair in the middle and plaited it in two gorgeous braids that were wound around her head like a diadem. She was sitting in a carved high-backed chair." Proof that she retains some traces of power: "The Princess with the Golden Hair" was banned in New York State on the grounds of obscenity. No less great literary authority than Lionel Trilling testified in its defense, to no avail. The case went to the Supreme Court, which upheld the lower court's ban.
The Times Online tips us off to the Philip Pullman–curated table at Waterstone's booksellers in the UK. NYRB Classics and Children's Collection publishes four out of the forty books selected—however only two of the editions selected by the bookseller are NYRB editions. The four picked are The Magic Pudding (Philip Pullman wrote the introduction to the NYRB edition of this staple of Australian kidlit—which is also a favorite of Peter Carey), The Anatomy of Melancholy (don't be fooled by the slimness appearance of the book on Waterstone's site!), The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and The Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard (published by Canongate as The Complete Brigadier Gerard Stories. Michael Chabon recommended the book as part of NPR's You Must Read This series)
Beginning the 4th of September, the Waterstone's page will include handwritten reviews of each of the selected books.
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