September 2011 Wind-up

Since I wrote about 90% of all posts from my former workplace (former, yes, indeed. But don't worry, they didn't fire me for blogging related reasons) there hasn't been much posting in the last couple months on my behalf. So I decided, like, today, that I at least give you little list-like impressions of what is, or rather was, going on in my literary, filmic, musical or otherwise musings once a month. This is less inspired than just kicked-off by Nick Hornby's monthly column "Stuff I've Been Reading" for The Believer, which I've been reading this month. Actually I just read it a couple minutes ago. Since I hadn't known at the beginning of the month that I would start such an endeavor at it's very end, I have to guess some of the stuff that made apparances this September of 2011 but failed to inscribe itself deeply into my memory. And since, quoting Bill Pullman in "Lost Highway", 'I like to remember things in my own way, not necessarily in the way they happened', don't blame me if any of the following, or preceding, for that matter, information is incorrect or fails to register with whatever fascist-mode of truth your brain is operating on. So, here it goes:

Stuff that I bought:

• Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds, BluRay
• Marcel Proust, Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit, 13 Bd.
• Sigmund Freud, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse & Psychologie des Unbewußten
• Ernest Hemingway, Tod am Nachmittag
• Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
• J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
• The Believer, September 2011 issue
• The Believer Book of Writers Talking To Writers (Revised & Expanded)
• A ticket for the upcoming BUSH concert in Cologne on Nov, 8th 2011

Stuff that I read and watched and listened to:

• Bush, The Sea of Memories
• Daily Bread; Well, You're not invited
• The Decemberists, Calamity Song
• Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds
• Lars Von Trier, The Element of Crime
• Lars Von Trier, Epidemic
• Lars Von Trier, Europa
• Lars Von Trier, Breaking The Waves
• Lars Von Trier, The Idiots
• Lars Von Trier, Dogville
• Lars Von Trier, Manderlay
• Jorgen Leth, The Perfect Human
• Lars Von Trier, The Five Obstructions
• Lars Von Trier, The Boss of it All
• Thomas Vinterberg, Dear Wendy
• Seth Gordon, Horrible Bosses
• John Michael McDonagh, The Guard
• Californication, Season 4
• some U.S. Open
• Bernhard Schlink, Der Vorleser
• Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close
• The Believer, September 2011 issue (unfinished yet, it's a bathroom read)
• The Believer Book of Writers Talking To Writers (same as above)
• David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction (in ASFTINDA)
• Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (not finished yet)

Well, what can I say? I was preparing for Lars Von Trier's Melancholia by watching all, almost, the stuff that I hadn't watched before and by rewatching all the stuff that I had watched before. And although Dancer In The Dark and Antichrist and Riget are not on that list, I pretty much got it all covered. I have to say that I was really surprised of the variety of his work. Especially his early Europa-trilogy is quite distinct from his later works in visual as well as in narrative style. All of them, The Element Of Crime, Epidemic, Europa, and Dogville at the very forefront, distinguish him as a master storyteller. And apart from the gut-wrenching border-crossings of the human soul starting with Breaking The Waves, he can just as easily pull off an extremely funny comedy like The Boss Of It All. Alright, yes. The last 15 or so years have been a constant tumbling down the rabbit hole of depression and we will have to see if Melancholia will be the end of that or just another apex in his CV. But even in this condition he is an extremely gifted filmmaker. I'm looking forward to everything he gets on the big screen.

Proust: I do not know when or if I will ever have the time to read him but this complete German edition of his À la recherche du temps perdu smiled at me from an 'each book 1€' flea market box. I got the whole bunch for 9€! Also, since I once owned the complete Freud Studienausgabe and sold it on eBay several years ago and now it costs like 100€ up and I'm trying to get my hands back at those books, I got volumes I and III for a euro each at the flea-market. The Hemingway I bought for my brother since he loved The Old Man And The Sea and The Sun Also Rises so much, but doesn't read English so well, hence the German edition. Death In The Afternoon was the only Hemingway I could find there and since there was the very last bullfight in Barcelona this week I thought it would be a nice gift. I mailed the book to him and he didn't respond whatsoever to this niceness of mine. Hm...


Today I bought the Salinger and Lolita. And this is probably the very first time in my life that I bought something for myself of which I have a perfectly good copy at home already. The Catcher In The Rye, that is. Actually there had already been two copies on the bookshelf, the other one belongs to my girlfriend. But I just couldn't resist the wonderful book jacket. It looks so graceful and dignified. I had to buy it. And then I had to think of that Mel Gibson flick, Conspiracy Theory, in which he owns a couple dozen copies of this very novel but can't give a reason why. Or at least I didn't get to know the reason, I never watched the movie, but know just that one scene. Weird, isn't it?


And I stumbled upon The Believer magazine, which is a part of McSweeney's, which, respectively, is owned and published by Dave Eggers, sort of, because of an interview with Don DeLillo and Bret Easton Ellis, so naturally I had to get ahold of a copy. There is also an interview with Jason Schwartzman in it. But this darn Ellis DeLillo interview is ONE YEAR OLD!!! It took place in Paris in October 2010 when both of them promoted their latest novels, Imperial Bedrooms and Point Omega, respectively. And since I'm an avid reader of DeLillo and Ellis interviews, there was about nothing new in it, because they told all that stuff to dozens of other interviewers already. That sucked. The Believer Book of Writer's Talking To Writers arrived a couple days later and at least I do not know so much of the contents of those interviews beforehand, because, frankly, I know just about half a dozen of the (three and a half dozen) writers featured in it. And that is a good thing. I like interviews with writers and those are quite interesting. They nevertheless never reach the quality or length of those featured in The Paris Review.


And the really big thing after Lars Von Trier: I, as you already know, started reading Gravity's Rainbow. I'm about 130 pages deep now and don't really have any words that I would want to W.A.S.T.E. upon this. Therefore I will end this post with the video for The Decemberists's Calamity Song. And I have to make that clear: It is the video, not the song that I like and appreciate for obvious reasons.

Donna Tartt takes her time

Her debut novel The Secret History, published in 1992, is said to have taken her about 9 years to write. Her second novel, The Little Friend, came out in 2002. A third novel is said to be underway, publishing date seemingly somewhen in 2012. Between her novels, appearances are scarce. She has published less than a handful of short-stories in her career. The last thing published was an afterword to Charles Portis's True Grit, which she also narrated in the audio book version (both the novel and the afterword).

The Secret History was my first real literary love. (Wait, this is not true. The Catcher in the Rye preceded it and was a perennial companion through the early stages of my adolescence. I once gave it to a girlfriend hoping she would get a better, if not crystal-clear, understanding of the person that I was. I was 20 back then. It didn't make any sense to her. It was a long time before I read another novel.)
The Secret History falls well into the patterns that Salinger laid out for me. I discovered not only the beauty of written language but also what a perfectly crafted narrative could do. The novel still haunts me and only had to tie its #1 position when I discovered House of Leaves (both eventually lost it to Infinite Jest) a couple years ago. It was, after Catcher in the Rye, the first book that I would frequently draw from the bookshelf and start reading random passages out loud from. Sometimes I kept reading on for hours and way into the night before realizing that darkness had fallen around me. Its prologue is probably the piece of literature that I've read most often in my life. It still chills me to the bones. It starts:

"The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation."

And the situation is this: Richard and his new closely-knit circle of friends - eccentric and very reclusive classics majors at a prestigious New England Liberal Arts college; Richard always remains detached and an outsider to their minds, emotions, and actions - murder one of their own, Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran. Book I of The Secret History leads us from Richard's arrival at Hampden college and his integration into the group to their murder of Bunny. Book II is a painstaking examination of the psychological aftermath that the five of them have to deal with after the killing of their friend.

"I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell,"

closes the prologue and makes clear to everyone (who has skipped the book's motto's by Nietzsche and Plato) that this is also and foremost a story about storytelling itself. And for those who also skip prologues, Richard opens the first chapter:

"Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs."

And it is precisely this morbid longing for the picturesque that suffuses Richard's narration throughout the novel. A moi. L'histoire d'une de mes folies.

It was not until Tartt's second novel, The Little Friend, arrived on the scene and gathered some bad reviews - praising once more the brilliance of The Secret History - that I finally picked up her debut. And now, about nine years later, last week, I read The Little Friend. The reason I hadn't read it before was my conviction that it couldn't possibly surpass The Secret History in any way and why spoil my idolatry of Donna Tartt's writing, as some of the bitter reviewers did? But I see now clearly that she achieved pretty much what she set out for:

"After The Secret History I wanted to write a different kind of book on every single level [...] I wanted to take on a completely different set of technical problems. The Secret History was all from the point of view of Richard, a single camera, but the new book is symphonic, like War And Peace. That's widely thought to be the most difficult form."

I haven't read War and Peace, but I can see that The Little Friend is symphonic, and also a brilliant - and totally different from The Secret History - book. It starts out with a prologue in which we are told that nine year old Robin Cleve Dufresnes was murdered:

"He was hanging by the neck from a piece of rope, slung over a low branch of the black-tupelo that stood near the overgrown privet hedge between Charlotte's house and Mrs. Fountain's; and he was dead. The toes of his limp tennis shoes dangled six inches above the grass. The cat, Weenie, was sprawled barrel-legged on his stomach atop a branch, batting, with a deft, feinting paw, at Robin's copper-red hair, which ruffled and glinted in the breeze and which was the only thing about him that was the right color any more."

 As we are told,

"the Cleves loved to recount among themselves even the minor events of their family history - repeating word for word, with stylized narrative and rhetorical interruptions, entire death-bed scenes, or marriage proposals that had occured a hundred years before - the events of this terrible Mother's Day were never discussed [though]. They were not discussed even in covert groups of two, brought together by a long car trip or by insomnia in a late-night kitchen; and this was unusual, because these family discussions were how the Cleves made sense of the world."

And thus it comes that 12 years later, when the story sets in and no murderer has been found, twelve year old Harriet, Robin's sister, sets out to make her own sense of the murder against a wall of silence from her family. And here you can see, again right from the first page, that this novel is also about storytelling. And the story that it tells is not so much about the death of Robin or who the murderer is, but about a whole town, Alexandria in Mississippi, in the late 1970's, and the people that live - and die - in it. And it is about that one long, hot, idle Southern summer that changes everything. And because it's a long, hot summer for a twelve year old, the narration is also, well, not long and hot, but exuberant, invasive and spreading out like the kudzu - the vine that ate the South - that overgrows, and connects, so many places, and, metaphorically, people, in the novel. If you think plot, there are many loose ends. If you think characters, they are as three-dimensional as they get, even the two-dimensional ones.

Until her third novel arrives, I will pass the time listening to Tartt's great Southern voice, narrating The Secret History and The Little Friend herself, and, considering her True Grit essay I think I will start with her interpretation of Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn. I liked the book, the Coen movie not so much, but I'm pretty sure I will love Donna Tartt reading it out loud to me.

World of Leaves

Enjoying literature is not an easy thing to do. At least not if you try to lead a normal life, that is, whatever that is. Because there is so much of it around. Nothing but letters in endless combinations. Sometimes I wonder if I would go mad or start a philosophical or armed war in Borges's Library of Babel, engage in bare-knuckle-fights, bludgeon the skulls and smash the brains of fellow searchers with uncreased spines of books that have never been opened. Would I take a pencil with me and scribble in the margins, multiplying the already infinite number of possible texts further or would I stab my own eyes and pierce my tongue and throat with it to free myself from the curse of written and spoken language? I would have to pierce my eardrum as well as my own brains, too, writing my last unreadable message with lines of dripping blood.

Having just finished Cosmopolis, I am confronted with choices that I can hardly grasp. Every step from now can lead me in the wrong direction. What should I read next? Should I go back to DeLillo's beginnings and read him in chronological order or rather go directly to Underworld? What about Pynchon? Gravity's Rainbow or start with V.? What about the still not finished Barthelme and Barth? Robert Coover's Universal Baseball Association, because DFW mentioned it in some interview? And DFW himself. Besides Infinite Jest and The Pale King and some of his journalism, I haven't read anything else. What about rereading Infinite Jest? And Don Quixote, the new 70,- € German translation is still waiting for me, as well as Bolano's 2666 and Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Paul Auster after The New York Trilogy, another round of House of Leaves, Catcher in The Rye or turn to Franny & Zooey and Salinger's other writings? Donna Tartt's The Little Friend is waiting on my bookshelf for the last 6 years or so. Maybe 8. I was a totally different being back then (well, not so radically different as I wished I would be.) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay or some more Vonnegut or Safran Foer's Tree of Codes, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, what about Proust and Nabokov and every single Sherlock Holmes story? William Gibson, James Ellroy, William Gaddis, Zadie Smith and Flannery O'Connor. Toni Morrison. I could go on for days, literally, and weeks, losing much of the precious time I would otherwise spend reading some of that (or other) novels. One thing at least seems to be pretty clear to me: After finishing Franzen's self-indulging The Discomfort Zone, he will be off my reading list for a long, long time.