I saw this in last week’s issue of TimeOut Chicago and thought of you:

TimeOut Chicago and Bleak House Books announce a short story contest open to all writers living in the Chicago area. Bleak House — a Madison, Wisconsin-based purveyor of fine literature — is looking for stories with a Chicago and Midwest flavor, to be included in a short story collection, The Future Is Bleak. Finalists will be honored by TimeOut Chicago with a party and a reading in the city.

Somehow we know the future is bleak even before we see the damn stories! But don’t let that influence you in any way. The deadline is September 21. You can get more info by writing to shortstory@timeoutchicago.com.

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Said the Great Cham, “Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.” Here’s some of the latter:

* Adam Langer’s latest column at the Book Standard presents the “Seven Deadly Reviews” to which innocent new works of fiction are subject, ranging from the “backhanded compliment” to the “bone-headed comparison.” Langer’s new book, The Washington Story, comes out on August 18.

* We have two perspectives (host and hosted) on the inaugural event in the Bookslut Reading Series. Jessa shares her unfounded anxieties; Jason Pettus, his impressions and animal urges. The next event looks terrific.

* James Marcus likes Richard Stern’s Stitch, recently reissued by Northwestern University Press.

* Max of The Millions ferrets out the details on Richard Ford’s upcoming novel.

* Every man has a libretto inside of him. At least Bernstein and Foer do. Or did.

* I’m sure some discriminating soul out there enjoyed the little homage to Dan Green I appended to my recent post on Hemingway. As for the rest of you: you’re a great disappointment to your mother and me.

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Didn’t attend the Gapers Block Authors’ Roundtable last night? Missed Sunday’s literary evening at the Chopin Theater? Eric Sinclair reports on the former and Satya Cacananda on the latter. And here are some pics from the Gapers do.

So far, nothing from Pete on the Northwestern Writers’ Conference. Pete, you’re holding out on us.

Incidentally, it did not escape my attention that the new Chicago Lit section of the Sun-Times promises “lively reports about literary happenings in and around the city.” We’ll hold you to that, Henry.

ADDITION 7/28: Pete delivers.

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Quite a few literary events happening in the old town this weekend:

* Northwestern University is holding its Summer Writers’ Conference, featuring such names as Aleksandar Hemon, Calvin Forbes, Elizabeth Crane, Joe Meno, and many others. Pete is attending, and will no doubt tell us all about it. Today through Sunday.

* At the Hothouse, Mary Anne Mohanraj has a launch party for her book, Bodies in Motion, which has already gotten some nice reviews. Cara Jepsen has a good profile of Mohanraj in the Reader this week. Saturday.

* Myopic Bookstore’s Poetry Series has an especially good program, featuring Suzanne Hancock, Jessica Smucker Falcon, and Christina Pugh. It’s the Reader’s Critic’s Choice. Sunday.

* Finally, there’s The Keystone: A Literary Extravaganza, which I mentioned a couple days back before it acquired its current moniker. Suketu Mehta (Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found), literary agent Sterling Lord, and others. Sunday.

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Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramago is not someone who appears in North America very often, so I was surprised to see that he recently spoke at the Ottawa International Writers Festival in Ottawa, Canada, on June 12. Isabella Kratynski has posted some lovely notes from the reading on her blog, Magnificent Books.

Saramago takes the stage. Standing ovation. He looks genuinely humbled.

He speaks (in French) for maybe 10 minutes: For all our advanced studies — discussion, analysis, exposition — he says what is missing from universities today, what is missing from the study of literature is communication, between the reader and writer. Saramago speaks also of “la reception” — by which I understand a kind of opening up of the reader to receive and welcome, and engage in, the literature at hand.

Saramago has received thousands of letters from readers around the world. He wonders why — they are not seriously intended to engage with the author, they are a one-way communication. But he understands that in the letter-writing the reader engages with his own self, and perhaps this is what literature is meant to do after all.

Saramago reads the opening pages of Blindness in Portuguese. It’s beautiful.

Check out the rest — it’s in three parts. Further searching revealed some photos from the event, now taken down but still available from Google cache.

By the way, the attractive woman you see in the picture at the top of the page is Graham Greene’s niece.

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Hemingway’s birthday is today, don’t you know. Journalist and television personality John Callaway is giving the annual Birthday Lecture tonight at 7:30 at the Hemingway Museum in Oak Park.

I first encountered Hemingway when I was a freshman in high school. One afternoon after school, while in detention for not wearing my mandatory “dink” — that bastard Costigan stole it out of my locker — I spotted A Moveable Feast on the library bookshelf and was immediately absorbed in the literary world of 1920s Paris.

I often think of that famous picture of Hemingway from the same period, standing in front of Shakespeare & Co. with a gigantic bandage on his head, looking like a wounded war vet. In fact — and forgive me if you know this — the injury occurred in peacetime, 1928. One night in his apartment in the rue Férou, Hemingway got up to use the bathoom. On completing his mission, he grabbed a rope he thought would flush the toilet and gave it a firm yank — bringing a skylight crashing down on his head. The rope was for opening the window.

(How could you forget how to flush the toilet in your own bathroom? A mystery for some future scholar to unravel.)

I tried to reread the book a couple of years ago but it was too awful to finish. A lot of his other stuff drives me nuts too. My dislike (which does not extend to the short stories) is purely on aesthetic grounds and has nothing to do with his personality. You’d have a pretty poor library if you left out all the bastards. In fact, even as we speak, that bastard Costigan is probably in some Brooklyn apartment working on his first novel. I’m sure it’ll be great, the bastard.

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From Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (1901), translated by John E. Woods:

Until now Gerda’s violin playing had been just another charming adjunct to her unique character …  But he was forced to watch as her passion for music — which he had always found rather odd — took possession of the child at such an early age. In some sense it had been part of Hanno from the very start, and Thomas regarded music as a hostile force that had come between him and his child — after all, he had hoped to make a genuine Buddenbrook of him, a strong and practical man with a powerful drive to master and take control of the world outside him …  He did not let them see the anguish he felt as he watched the apparent estrangement grow between him and his son, and he would have recoiled at even the appearance of currying the son’s favor.  He had little leisure during the day to spend with the boy but sometimes at meals he would banter with him amiably, with just a hint of sternness.  ”Well, my lad,” he said, patting him a few times on the back of his head as he sat down beside him at the dining table, across from his wife, “how are things going? What have you been up to?  Studying?  Oh, and playing the piano?  That’s fine.  But not too much, or you won’t have energy for anything else, and you’ll be set back come Easter.”  Not a muscle in his face betrayed his anxiety as he waited to see how Hanno would react to this greeting, how he would respond; he betrayed nothing of the painful wrenching inside him when the boy simply glanced his way wth shy, golden-brown, blue-shadowed eyes that avoided looking directly at him, and then bent down mutely over his plate.

It would have been monstrous to express alarm at the boy’s childish awkwardness.  But as they sat there together waiting for the plates to be changed for the next course, it was his duty to show some concern about the boy, to test him a little on facts, to rouse his sense for practical things.  What was the population of the town?  Which streets led up from the Trave into town? What were the names of the firm’s warehouses? Speak up, now, loud and clear!  But Hanno was silent. Not because he wanted to defy his father, or hurt him. Under normal circumstances, the population, the streets, even the warehouses were matters of complete indifference to him, but the moment they were raised to the status of questions on a test, they filled him with reluctant despair.  He could be in a perfectly fine mood, even be enjoying a little chat with his father — but as soon as the conversation took on the least hint of a little oral exam, his mood sank to zero and below and all his powers of resistance collapsed.  His eyes lost their sparkle, his mouth took on a despondent pout, and all he could feel was a great pang of regret that Papa had been so careless, because he surely had to know that these tests always turned out badly and spoiled the meal for himself and everyone else.  He gazed down at his plate, his eyes swimming with tears. Ida nudged him and whispered the names of the streets and warehouses.  But that was pointless, absolutely pointless.  She didn’t understand. He knew the names well enough, or at least most of them, and it would have been so easy to oblige Papa and answer his questions, at least in part — if only he could, if only it weren’t for this overwhelming sadness. 

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Spent a very pleasurable hour in Ann Arbor last week in the Special Collections Room at the Hatcher Graduate Library at the University of Michigan, looking at a first edition of B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo.

Come to think of it, this was my first visit to this room since 1985, when I was in grad school and took a course in the “literature of exploration.” Back then, I stopped by Special Collections to look at their 1914 copy of the South Polar Times.

I sought out the 1964 Angelo because I recently made a disappointing discovery in the 1987 New Directions edition: no freakin’ hole.

Many people know only two things about Johnson: 1) that he published a novel consisting of unbound chapters in a box, to be read in any order the reader wished (The Unfortunates), and 2) that he published a book with a hole cut through some of the pages so that the reader could see forward to a future event (Albert Angelo). Unfortunately, the cost of publishing such eccentric products is prohibitive, so we see editions without holes (or any mention of holes), and even (at least in one instance) bound editions of formerly unbound pages.

Johnson’s biographer Jonathan Coe refers to Albert Angelo’s famous feature as “a rectangular hole cut through two of the recto pages (pages 147 and 149) so that the reader can see through to a future event on page 151.” Later in the biography he writes:

For those readers who like me have always been slightly puzzled by the “future event” (which then turns out not to have been a future event) revealed by the holes cut through the pages of Albert Angelo, here at least is a partial explanation. It seems to be intended as a cryptic reference to Johnson’s identification with [Christopher] Marlowe (who was killed at the age of 29 in a tavern brawl) and belief in his own imminent death.

Maybe Coe, with his own cryptic talk about the “future event which turns out not to be a future event,” didn’t want to spoil the surprise. But I have no such scruples, and so following is my description of what the hole reveals, what it is intended to suggest, and why Coe gets so twisted around in talking about it.

In the book, Albert Angelo is a substitute teacher working in a tough school in a poor neighborhood in North London. Despite the book’s humor there is an atmosphere of menace appropriate to the setting, and by the time you get to page 147 you are wondering where the mutual antagonism between teacher and students will lead.

The hole occurs at the bottom of page 147, continues through 149 and 151, and reveals three lines from page 153 (not 151):

struggled to take back the knife, and inflicted on him a
mortal wound above his right eye (the blade penetrating
to a depth of two inches) from which he died instantly.

When we get to page 153 we see that this is actually a description of the death of Christopher Marlowe. But viewed through the hole from back on 147, it appears to reveal Albert’s future fate.

Now I’m going to spoil the rest of the book for you. Pages 154-163 are among the book’s funniest, presenting Albert’s students’ written descriptions of their teacher (”he walks like a firy elephant,” “very nice and fat he is,” etc.). Suddenly, on page 164 the author interrupts: “OH, FUCK ALL THIS LYING.”

Pages 167 through 176 present the author’s ruminations on the art of fiction (”telling stories is telling lies and I want to tell the truth”) and translation of events of the novel into the events of his own life (”I’ve had no girl called Jenny, whereas [her name] was Muriel”).

In the end, the author concludes that “even I (even I!) would not leave such a mess,” and in the last two pages of the book he returns to the story of his fictional hero. Albert meets some of his students on the street one night. They throw him in the canal and he drowns. The End.

Thanks to the great B. S. Johnson website for the cover image of Albert Angelo. See Flickr’s B. S. Johnson tag for pictures of a copy of a recent edition of The Unfortunates. And, of course, read Coe’s fantastic bio, Like A Fiery Elephant, which set me off on my current exploration of Johnson’s books.

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Dan Wickett from the Emerging Writers Forum (now with extra bloggy goodness) has published another panel discussion with reading-series directors, which reminds me that last month’s panel included Chicago’s Kerri Sonnenberg, director (with Jesse Seldess) of the Discrete Reading and Performance Series. I learned a few things from reading Sonnenberg’s comments. For example, that the Discrete Series started only in March 2003. That some readings in Chicago are financially supported by an anonymous private donor via Poets & Writers. And that local poetry readers sometimes drive to Milwaukee to buy their books:

Most of the writers we feature are publishing in the vibrant network of small presses from all parts of the US (and internationally). Journals like Aufgabe, Factorial, Traverse, 26, Bird Dog, Parakeet, Antennae, Skanky Possum, nocturne, Magazine Cypress and presses such as Litmus, Etherdome, Omnidawn, Gong, Tougher Disguises, Flood Editions, Burning Deck, Salt, Green Integer, Roof are critical centers of activity for contemporary poetry working out of the postmodern tradition. Of course the big chain bookstores stock next to none of these publications and few independent bookstores (of which there are already a diminishing number) in Chicago have the inclination or ability to order these publications for their shelves. I (and others in Chicago) typically drive to Milwaukee, to the great Woodland Pattern Book Center, or order through SPD (Small Press Distribution) to get our hands on books and journals publishing writers like those featured in the Discrete Series. All of this is to say that I don’t have any gauge for determining to what extent a reading influences the local sales of their books, except in the immediately visible case of what books are sold at the reading itself.