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.

This is why I despise German literature

I finally overcame my physiological and mental (spiritual as well?) impediment of not being able to grab a piece of German literature - say, a novel -, open it with my bare hands and read it from beginning to end, or just a couple sentences in the middle or whatever. This was due to a confluence of coincidences that recommended Irmgard Keun's 'Das kunstseidene Mädchen' aka 'The Artificial Silk Girl". And when I eventually stumbled upon it in one of the Foukisens bookshelves, I read the first two pages and was very intrigued. And indeed, it was not a total waste of time. It was funny and sad enough to go on reading it all to the end. But surely not the literary epiphany I hoped for. At least it broke the spell.

Then I picked up another book that I thought might be interesting and which I bought a couple of years back when the movie came out and Kate Winslet got away with one of her two Golden Globes that year. And now read this:

"Was sind die Zeiten der Krankheit in Kindheit und Jugend doch für verwunschene Zeiten!" or this

"Schließlich hatte ich alles zusammen, Hannas Adresse in einem Gefängnis in der Nähe der Stadt, in der ihr der Prozeß gemacht und sie verurteilt worden war, ein Kassettengerät und die Kassetten, von Tschechow über Schnitzler zu Homer numeriert. Und schließlich schickte ich das Paket mit dem Kassettengerät und den Kassetten auch ab." or this

"Die Sehnsucht nach Hanna wurde so stark, daß sie weh tat." or this

"Das Gesicht war eigentümlich alterslos. So sehen Gesichter aus, die geliftet worden sind. Aber vielleicht war es auch unter dem frühen Leid erstarrt - ich versuchte vergebens, mich an ihr Gesicht während des Prozesses zu erinnern." or this

"Als ich selbst zu schreiben begann, las ich ihr auch das vor. Ich wartete, bis ich mein handschriftliches Manuskript diktiert, das maschinenschriftliche überarbeitet und das Gefühl hatte, jetzt sei es fertig. Beim Vorlesen merkte ich, ob das Gefühl stimmte. Wenn nicht, konnte ich alles noch mal überarbeiten und eine neue Aufnahme über die alte spielen. Aber ich machte das nicht gerne. Ich wollte mit dem Vorlesen abschließen. Hanna wurde die Instanz, für die ich noch mal alle meine Kräfte, alle meine Kreativität, alle meine kritische Phantasie bündelte. Danach konnte ich das Manuskript an den Verlag schicken.
Ich habe auf den Kassetten keine persönlichen Bemerkungen gemacht, nicht nach Hanna gefragt, nicht von mir berichtet. Ich las den Titel vor, den Namen des Autors und den Text. Wenn der Text zu Ende war, wartete ich einen Moment, klappte das Buch zu und drückte die Stop-Taste."

And I now push the stop-button as well, because if I wouldn't, I would have to retype the whole novel (short of about 5 (!) sentences that contain at least an interesting metaphor) as an example of really bad writing. If you haven't gathered yet, I am talking about Bernhard Schlink's 'Der Vorleser' aka 'The Reader'. And it doesn't help that he actually comes from my hometown. And it also doesn't help that this is 'literature' that is taught in German schools. By the way: the movie is also pretty shitty. An aside: I just saw this novel was one of Oprah's picks as well and consequently hit the New York Times bestseller list pretty hard. And although I want to personally apologize to all the people of the U.S. of A. for this wretched piece of German Export I can hardly be held responsible for Oprah.

What he does - Schlink, that is - is taking the Holocaust and employing it to his sentences - this is the genocide of language. Every single word or metaphor is flat and dead. Stale, as if exposed to poisonous gas for too long. It is at the far other end of writerly expression as Anthony Burgess once wrote:

'And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax, and glitter with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning.'

There is no atmopheric dust in Schlink. This is not literature at all. And I want to see it's worth in terms of dealing with the Holocaust but all I can think of is why is he writing so very poorly? This novel is a prime example of what can happen if you only tell and never show - and of course, if you also have no writing skills whatsoever. It has about the same literary quality as Charlotte Roche's novels. The only good thing about it is that you can learn a lot from so many bad choices of another writer. It should not be used to talk about the Holocaust, it should be used in creative writing classes. But then again, German schools don't offer creative writing classes. And this seems to be an essential part of the whole problem.

Just to give you an anchoring point: I started Foer's 'Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close' today to prepare for and distance myself from this week's 9/11 10th anniversary mass-media-coverage-overkill. And this is a real page-turner and it makes me remember how much I loved every single sentence in Everything Is Illuminated and that I do not see any German writer ever achieving what Safran Foer did in that novel. Do they not dare writing like this about the Holocaust or are they just not apt to do it?

Here is the thing: This one sentence of 'Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close' has more literary value than there is in the whole of Schlink's 'Der Vorleser'. It belongs to a man who gradually lost his speech, but not his words, which is why he starts to write down everything he otherwise would have said:

'and instead of singing in the shower I would write out the lyrics of my favorite songs, the ink would turn the water blue or red or green, and the music would run down my legs.'

last week's literary downpour...

...among other, non-literary, gifts. Besides The Pale King not necessarily in reading order.