Cross Cultural Blogging Tuesday, Apr 22 2008

Partly because this is an abandoned library in Russia, I will be quoting a passage from Derek Walcott’s Omeros about a Polish waitress (and it’s a book set in so many countries via poetic imagination, but mostly set in the Carribean), I am reading the Dominican Republic’s transplant Junot Diaz, France’s darling Proust, and I just finished an entertaining book about a second generation Korean immigrant. The fact that I actually finished a book is surprising…and at least my house doesn’t look like the picture to the left…

Here is that passage I promised before I start talking about other things…

“Acres of synonymous lights, black battery cells

and terminals coiling with traffic, winked out. Sunrise

reddened the steel lake. Downstairs, in the hotel’s

Canadian-fall window, a young Polish waitress with eyes

wet as the new coal and a pageboy haircut was pouring him

coffee, the maples in the glass as yellow as orange juice.

Her porcelain wrist tilted, filling his gaze to the brim.

He hoped adoration unnerved her; the sensible shoes

skirting the bare tables, her hand aligning the service

with finical clicks. As if it had tapped her twice

on the back for her papers, she turned with that nervous

smile of the recent immigrant that borders on tears.

A Polish Sunday enclosed it. A Baroque square, its age

patrolled by young soldiers, the flag of their sagging regime

once bright as her lipstick, the consonants of a language

crunched by their boot soles. In it was the scream

of a kettle leaving a freightyard, then the soft farms

with horses and willows nodding past a train window,

the queues in the drizzle. Then the forms

where her name ran over the margin, then a passport photo

where her scared face waited when she opened its door.

She was part of that pitiless fiction so common now

that it carried her wintry beauty into Canada,

it lined her eyelashes with the snow’s blue shadow,

it made her slant cheekbones flash like the cutlery

in the hope of a newer life. At the cashier’s machine

she stood like a birch at the altar, and, very quietly,

snow draped its bridal lace over the raven’s-wing sheen.

Her name melted in mine like flakes on a river

or a black pond in which the wind shakes packets of milk.

When she stood with the cheque, I tried reading the glow

of brass letters on her blouse. Her skin, shaded in silk,

smelt fresh as a country winter before the first snow.

Snow brightening the linen, the pepper, salt domes, the gables

of the napkin, silencing Warsaw, feathering quiet Cracow;

then the raven’s wing flew again between the white tables.

There are days when, however simple the future, we do not go

towards it but leave part of life in a lobby whose elevators

divide and enclose us, brightening digits that show

exactly where we are headed, while a young Polish waitress

is emptying an ashtray, and we are drawn to a window

whose strings, if we pull them, widen an emptiness.

We yank the iron-grey drapes, and the screeching pulleys

reveal in the silence not fall in Toronto

but a city whose language was seized by its police,

that other servitude Nina Something was born into,

where under gun-barrel chimneys the smoke holds its voice

till it rises with hers. Zagajewski. Herbert. Milosz.”

If you got through that and are interested, the book is called Omeros and it is a 300 page lyric poem loosely based on The Odyssey… bringing in echos of James Joyce, Africa, slavery, love, the Carribean, etc. I read it for class, so I read it quickly…but may one day go back and read it slowly and more carefully. It is the last book I had to read for my comp lit degree so in that way it is special.

I started Junot Diaz’s “Drown” on the bus this morning, but cannot read on the bus… I like it so far.

I also find it completely hilarious that the janitor lady is vacuuming the floor while people are watching movies here in the media department and asking them to get up so she can vacuum under their feet. I am giggling to myself.

All for now.

Leave a Response »

 

There’s too many ostriches! Friday, Apr 11 2008

I found this picture on my new favorite blog that will be listed on the left, called www.maudnewton.com/blog. It’s very interesting literary talk and things. I have finished reading Possession by A. S. Byatt and I’m glad I’m done because I couldn’t help but thinking it would end up like I thought it would and so it did. The mystery letters were recovered and alls well that ends well. Except not a whole lot of things end well and such should be represented by literature. Which is why I must be attracted to things not Victorian. I am continuing on with Auto da Fe, content to have it slow going and savoring. The whole book is like a chess game and the readers are the pawns. And so with a chess game, thus the reader can take it slow.

For school, I am reading Omeros, by Derek Walcott and it’s also slow going but pretty interesting and I’ll be glad to finish the last book I will ever have to read for my undergraduate degree. I will be set free. Today I would like to start The Master and the Margarita, all things considered and go on from there. I have not been reading on the same rate as I was last year and I’m not sure why. With Andrew gone to New Jersey I should have more alone time to sit with a book, be that good or bad. I will also probably cook a lot. Becky is home this week thanks to large amounts of narcotics, not hers, of course and for that I am glad. What a rogue world!

I am know shamelessly bogarting recommendations from other blogs for my own enjoyment and reference. And after that almost horrific bout of Victorian romance and bad poetry, I need a little concrete postmodern and sanity–and I want to be sure to say that it’s not that I didn’t like the book Possession or that I won’t read the author again, but goodness: I need a new genre and quick!

“In the meantime here are five novels of ideas (3 classic and 2 that seem destined to become canonical), each revolutionary or anti-revolutionary in a way that describes their respective ages as well as anything else. They deserve to be read, or read again, on different terms: in light of their relationship to the novel itself.

1. Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann. When Tony Buddenbrooks, a beautiful, divorced, woman of dwindling prospects dismisses a wealthy suitor because, “Er sagt mich stadt mir” (He says who <.em>instead of whom), and it’s not the beginning of a morality tale then you know you’re in a world of the sublime. In this case it’s the fluid, intellectually sophisticated, milieu of the early 20th-century haute bourgeoisie (Bildungsburghertum), with the shadow of aristocracy on one hand, and the tenuous nature of their own position on the other.

Mann, of course, was the last European master who could act with the underlying assumption that the intellectual, political and material wants of the society he was born into shared more than physical space — that his project and the values of his culture were one — without drawing suspicion of naïveté or worse.

He continued to believe this until he was living in exile. Claiming until the last that the betrayal of the rest of the society by its political custodians was an aberration. Historians might make other claims, however, as the arcs of the 20th century played out at different paces in the European capitals, the case can still be made for Mann as the last of the great realists, trusting unmediated literary representation and inquiry to make deep sense of the world. Never mind that it was already a modernist one.

2. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Ellison might be the single most important American writer of the last hundred years. Where others traded on well-established schools of thought he combined the protean modernist sensibility of Toomer with the formal perfection of the European novel to create an Erfahrungsroman for the 20th century. He is the fork in the road of American literature, one path leading to the well-behaved world of mannerism and craftsmanship, and the other diving down the rabbit hole into the gleeful madman lands of Reed and, only slightly less directly, Pynchon. Besides having a share to the claim Great American Novel, this book does even more than invent the jazz novel. This is funk before funk had a name.

3. The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. This is the epitome of a book whose failures show as much its triumphs. Durrell lays bear his ambition with the claim: “Modern literature offers us no Unities, so I have turned to science and am trying to complete [a novel] whose form is based on relativity. Three sides of space and one of time. … I have tried to turn the novel through both subjective and objective modes…” Post-modernism avant la letter. And that’s just the hand he reveals. Among a great many other things this is a project that also happens to be Cosmopolitan, devious (Sadian, Lawrencian, that is to say before the pill) and sexy as hell.

If his worldly gaze strikes the contemporary reader as chauvinistic, or as sharing a border of Empire with Kipling, well nothing can transcend its age entirely. Here is a writer whose meridional creativity grasps with a beautiful ease of intelligence the relationship between the fleeting and the permanent in a single sentence. Between the body, language and the fragile invisible they may sometimes express, or summon into being.

4. By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews. Latin American artists tend to look further afield for inspiration and models than their northern counterparts. Certainly they tend to be more Europe-facing. So much so it might be argued that between the anxieties of whiteness and so-called Magic Realism the following generation had a hard time taking shape. It turns out, in the best of cases, it’s because they were out wrasslin’ with the biggest problems they could find.

For Roberto Bolaño the essential, atlas-like question is the nature of creation and the genesis of evil itself, both its personal and historical manifestations on a global scale. As might be imagined ambition like that needs a language of its own, and Bolaño creates a startling poetry to carry his meaning over.

If Bolaño is one of the great artists of his generation (and his core achievement seems to me on a level with Achebe — Sui generis), he has found in Chris Andrews the ideal translator. Where other interpreters seem to miss a beat, Andrews displays an intensity and lightness that get to the poetic and metaphysical reaches without losing, or attempting to sweep away, the spaces and silences of what cannot be translated.

5. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Post-modernism taken seriously has become the province of the grand old men, playing out the bittersweet end of what was the game of their times. It is not equal to the codes or experiences of our moment. While Coetzee — viewed with mutual suspicion by most black African writers, who suffer a different double-blind — tries to balance the equation while describing magnificently and, in the end quite revealingly, the noble and tortured last wall of the old school, several writers have already scrambled over to the other side. Among the many conceivable solutions none is quite so sly as the one offered by Kazuo Isiguruo (who shares many concerns with Coetzee, but feints to the zeitgeist as often as the canon). His deceptively simple sentences contain whole other worlds, vast unspoken epistemologies, beneath their surface. Among other things Never Let Me Go is a haunting disquisition on whether love or art can explain our world, or save us from inhuman fates.

The most frequent complaint against this book is: Why don’t they make a run for it? Opening onto the larger: Why don’t we all?”

http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/

This is where these particular recommendations come from and I think that it’s a new treasure trove of things to read! I really need more things to read. Update: I gave up on Against the Day for now. Maybe forever. We’ll see how the rest of the year pans out. I still have not received the 5th Proust and I’m not sure if I ever will. Hopefully, NYC has a copy of it floating around it’s hallowed library halls.

Leave a Response »