A Different Stripe

The two Harriet Daimlers (includes mild, cartoon nudity)

All day, the blogger at Bella's Bookshelves has been tweeting about her pleasure in reading After Claude by Iris Owens. Which got us thinking that the book's heroine, Harriet Daimler, with her take-no-prisoners strategy and her viper-tongue, might make a good role model this winter. Let's not take this miserable season lying down, let's rally our wits and bitch at it until it relents. We're all Harriet Daimlers now.

[read Gerald Howard on Owens's "sublime snarkfest" at Bookforum]

Here Maxine, an old friend, tries to offer Harriet some advice:

“Well,” she demanded, “what’s happening between you and Claude? Isn’t he planning to marry you and take you back to Paris with him?”
    If there’s one thing on this earth that irritates me, it’s when a dumpy, frigid, former nymphomaniac assumes that my tongue is hanging out, thirsting for marital bliss. It goes without saying that though ideally suited and ecstatically happy, Jerry and Maxine had flown directly from their wedding ceremony to group therapy, paying top prices for the privilege of insulting each other in front of an audience.
    “I’ll make you a promise, Maxine, and then let’s adjourn this summit conference. I promise you that the day I decide to marry anyone I hate as much as you hate Jerry, one: you’ll be the first to know, and two: I’ll seek professional help.”
    Did Maxine get the message and leave me in peace? Not a chance. She sat there radiant with superior knowledge. “My dear, that is precisely your sickness. You think everybody hates their life. You’re wrong. I don’t hate Jerry. I love him. My heart may not palpitate when he walks into the room, but I’m happy with him. I appreciate his devotion and goodness. I love our child, our home.”
    “Excuse me very much, but if it’s love, sweet love, that makes you parade the streets like a crazed drag queen, if it’s happiness that drives you to come sniffing around here like a starved alley cat, give me hate and misery.”

Of course, Harriet Daimler was also the name under which Iris Owens wrote pornographic novels for the legendary Olympia Press. So maybe we should be looking to this young lady, who graced the cover of a reprint of Owens's notorious rape-fantasy novel, Darling (if not to the contents of the book). She radiates joy of the kind hard to find in bleak midwinter.

Time and again: Burton, Fukuoka, and taking a break

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:

Stefan Zweig makes Wonkette

Woodcut by Elke Rehder, 1 of 6 inspired by Zweig's Schachnovelle (or Chess Story)

We feel it's safe to say that this is the Austrian writer's first appearance in Wonkette—and perhaps the snarkiest Zweig-related piece written to date. How did it happen?

The Financial Times publishes a brief review of The Post-Office Girl March 2nd:
"...a fascinating depiction of the effects of history on individual lives."

On the 3rd, Op-Ed columnist Richard Cohen writes a piece in The Washington Post, picking up on the above mentioned line from the FT, but more or less missing the point that the earlier reviewer was speaking about the characters in the novel, rather than of their creator. Well never mind :
"Zweig fled Austria in 1934 and made his way to England and then to America and finally, for some reason, to Brazil. He was as safe there as he had been in America, but his world — once so comfy and secure — was gone. He became a castaway, a Viennese writer deposited roughly on a Brazilian beach. History had come roaring out of Germany and flattened everything."

Finally, under the heading "Nostalgia Porn" Wonkette summarizes the Cohen column thusly:
"Also: Richard Cohen read a review of a book that sounded interesting. The book was written by a European Jew named Stefan Zweig who fled the Nazis and ended up 'for some reason' in Brazil and killed himself in despair, like a man. What’s the book about? Who knows! But the review was great."

And here we have a diagram of the media ecology of 2009. Thanks to Damion Searls for bringing this to our attention.

Menand on Trilling, Sorokin on the queue, Charles Taylor on us

The September 29th issue of The New Yorker includes a profile of Lionel Trilling by Louis Menand that is a much-expanded version of the introduction he wrote for our edition of The Liberal Imagination.

Words Without Borders reprints Vladimir Sorokin's witty and nostalgic afterword to his novel The Queue. Is there a word for poignant remembrances of the Soviet Union as nice as the one coined for East German nostalgia, ostalgie?

Charles Taylor wrote a love letter to NYRB Classics in the LA Times last week. Ok, he also mentions some other publishers too, like Europa Editions, Hard Case Crime, and Persephone who've recognized the failure of the marketplace to give real readers what they're looking for. If you don't have time to read the full piece, we suggest scanning its section headers: "Part of this Little Club," "Faulting Modern Fiction," "Threat to Establishment"—they don't exactly capture the article, but they're amusing.

The LA Times piece quotes Peter Miller of Freebird Books in Brooklyn, NY, remarking that "he displays the NYRB series near his register because 'you feel as if you're part of this little club that NYRB has curated for you.'"—which reminds us that we never linked to a roundup of Miller's NYRB favorites, complete with a photograph of Freebird's Classics shelf. And—would you look at that!—it turns out that John Wyndham's Chrysalids is the store's November book club pick. Thanks Freebirds!

Remember Angus Wilson?

Terry Teachout does and has some very nice things to say about Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and other books in the series in a recent "Contentions" column on the Commentary web site. He makes Wilson's novel sound like a natural companion to Lionel Trilling's non-fiction Liberal Imagination.

"Of special interest is the cold eye that Angus Wilson casts on humanism in all its mid-century varieties. Neither conservative nor (so far as I know) religious, Wilson was nonetheless acutely aware of the inadequacies of the secular creed to which most of his fellow liberals adhered, and skewered them with the sharpest of sticks."

The title of the novel, by the way, comes from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass  :

"All this was lost on Alice, who was still looking intently along the road, shading her eyes with one hand. 'I see somebody now!' she exclaimed at last. 'But he's coming very slowly—and what curious attitudes he goes into!' (For the Messenger kept skipping up and down, and wriggling like an eel, as he came along, with his great hands spread out like fans on each side.)"

Which is why that curious messenger illustrates our edition of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes.

 

Boldtype

If you're one of the three people who hasn't come here from the review of The Invention of Morel in Boldtype, then there's a chance you didn't know that there was a review of The Invention of Morel in Boldtype. It was written by Scott Esposito of Conversational Reading and The Quarterly Conversation. Needless to say it behooves you to subscribe to Boldtype, Conversational Reading, and The Quarterly Conversation.

First, the bad news

Finally got a chance to watch the Lost season finale, in which Manservant and Maidservant was set to appear. Maybe it does. After all, the scene appeared as described in the page of script sent to us by the Lost script coordinator—in which Kate hastily grabs her gun out of a box, and in that box is a book. But alas, the book literally flies by as she tosses it aside to get to the gun. Oh well, it gave us a good reason to revel in Ivy Compton-Burnett.

Why don't we have another look at Sawyer immersed in The Invention of Morel—and what the heck, Rory Gilmore reading Monsieur Proust on the beach.

     

Freeman. Dyson.

Radiolab's bioengineering episode (So Called) Life mentioned New York Review of Books contributor and "frog prince of physics" Freeman Dyson numerous times . . . and in a stern voice reminiscent of action movie trailers, or perhaps, a headlining heavy metal band (if you download the epsiode, fast forward to 33:45). Such intonations seem entirely appropriate for the author of The Scientist as Rebel.

Update: Here is the sound clip . . . Download freeman_dyson.mp3

Update the II: Here is a remix of the sound clip Download freeman_dyson_remix.mp3 . . .

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.