GRJ initiates will know that Swiss-German novelist and short-story writer Robert Walser is a kind of patron saint for this blog. (See past posts here.) For several months, I’ve been contemplating good ways I might mark the 50th anniversary of his death, which occurred on a snowy Christmas Day in 1956. I thought perhaps the good folks over at the Goethe Institute Chicago, those tireless advocates of German-language lit, would be doing something in his honor. After all, Walser-related readings, lectures, and exhibitions are happening in 18 European cities, and the local Goethe chapters are sometimes involved. Alas, they can’t do everything, I suppose. And they aren’t.

One small, fairly practical thing I considered was to compile a list of the many Walser-inspired works of art that have been created, which include stories, paintings, poetry, plays, films, chamber music, operas, and other forms. (Walser was – is – a great favorite among artists of all kinds.) I may still do that. More interesting and also more preposterous was my idea to organize some kind Flickr-based tribute, in which people would post their creative variations on those uncanny, melancholy, morbid final photographs. That, I will not be doing. But don’t let me stop you.

Anyhow, here’s where I ended up: between now and Christmas, I and another Walser admirer who shall reveal himself shortly are going to cooperate, tag-team style, in a translation-of-slash-commentary-on Carl Seelig’s brief and charming memoir, Wanderungen mit Robert Walser. You’ve heard of NaNoWriMo; this is more like NaTraMo. Actually, more like NaTryMo. This thing is a little quixotic to say the least. My only instruction in German has come through regular attendence at Cassell’s New Compact German-English University. Our source text is the 1977 Suhrkamp edition, fetched by these two hands from the Harold Washington branch of the Chicago Public Library.

Seelig’s book consists of 47 short chapters. Each chapter recounts one of Seelig’s visits with Walser over a twenty-year period from June 1936 to December 1956. My rendering of the first half of the first chapter is here.

Share on Facebook

Jonathan Lethem, in conversation with Mark Sarvas, reminds us of the late, great, truly forgotten novelist and screenwriter Don Carpenter.  I offer some links in the comment thread, but here’s something I particularly liked:  Carpenter reviewing Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America in the San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle on 15 October 1967:

Poor old Brautigan. In an age when any idiot with a typewriter and a dictionary can make a fortune writing muck, he has to try to be honest, and report life the way he sees it. And life the way Brautigan sees it is comforting, funny and delightful only to people who haven’t yet invested too heavily in what used to be called greed and hypocrisy. (Those words certainly have a quaint ring to them don’t they?) And not only that, Brautigan seems not to appeal to people who have chosen sides. It doesn’t matter what the issue is, Brautigan is on neither side of it. But it would be pointless to feel sorry for Brautigan. He continues to write, without a trace of bitterness or irony, and continues to find American life fascinating. He also continues to find publishers who are interested not in making money but in producing good books, such as Donald M. Allen of the Four Seasons Foundation and James Koller of Coyote Books. And, for that matter, Brautigan himself is a publisher, and has recently brought out his own volume of his poetry. To give you an idea of the kind of person he is (and why the big people in New York are afraid of him), he raised the money for his book of poems all by himself, got the paper and press, printed it, and then gave the entire issue away. I’m not kidding. The book is called All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, and right in the front it says, “This book is printed in an edition of 1500 copies by the Communications Company. None of the copies are for sale, they are all free.” You can go up to the City Lights Book Store right now and take a copy off the shelves without paying for it. You can take two copies and give one to a friend. You can take the whole stack, if you’re a hog, and throw them in the garbage can. Free means free. Do you see what I’m getting at? Brautigan is a loser. Trout Fishing in America is a loser book. Most of the people who will buy it are probably losers. (I should mention that the first time I met Brautigan we got into a poker game with some people and everybody in the game lost.)

By the way, what a phenomenal resource for Brautigan fans is this Brautigan Bibliography and Archive web site.

Share on Facebook

Must be in a house-cleaning sort of mood.  Updated my list of writers’ homes today with a few I’ve visited since 2004.

Share on Facebook

A word from Charles Shields, whose recent bio of Harper Lee I greatly enjoyed:

This past June, I published Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee. Now I’m beginning work on the first authorized biography— the first biography at all, actually— of Kurt Vonnegut. I’d like to hear from any of your readers about their experiences with Vonnegut, either personally or with his novels. Thanks!

Charles J. Shields
Cjs1994@earthlink.net
(434) 985-9063

Share on Facebook

Great portrait of writer Yuriy Tarnawsky during his recent visit to Chicago, from arimneste’s Flickr library.

Share on Facebook

Thanks to a recent visit, I’ve spruced up my 2002 post that lists works in the Art Institute having a literary theme or connection. 

It occurs to me once again how useful it would be for museums to list, on their websites, the works they have on display, organized by gallery.  Yes, I know it would be a long list, and yes, I know it will change.  But if radio stations can post their playlists, why not museums?  Support me on this.  Maybe I should start a petition.  What more obvious way to help fulfill your educational mission, in the age of the Internet, then to give your visitors the opportunity to continue their learning once they leave the premises.

Share on Facebook

Over the weekend the Literary Saloon had a couple of interrelated items of interest.  Via the first item I learned that Harper Collins, in partnership with China’s People’s Literature Publishing House, plans to publish new translations of three classic works of Chinese fiction, including GRJ fave Lao She’s Rickshaw Boy.  (This is mentioned in an article on Chinese translation by Karen Ma in the International Herald Tribune.) 

Rickshaw Boy, with a translator-supplied happy ending, was a bestseller in the U.S. in 1945, as this Wikipedia article notes.  Later and presumably more accurate English versions have appeared, but I’ve never read it. I have read many of his stories, and I’m currently reading his novel Mr. Ma and Son, which tells the tale of a Chinese father and son who resettle in London in the 1920s, just as the author did.  Although this edition reads like it was OCR’d and never cleaned up — typos on almost every page, people “foisting” themselves up instead of “hoisting,” dogs “trouncing” into the room instead of “jouncing,” etc. — there’s a decent translation peeking out between the printer’s errors.  It’s especially enjoyable to read after reading Patrick Hamilton’s Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, which takes place in the same era and the same Oxford Street neighborhoods.  (Speaking of TTSUTS, when do you suppose we’re getting the book here in the U.S.?  When are we getting the series?  What the hell’s going on?)

Annnnyhow, there are English translations of classic Chinese lit out there today.  Two sources are Cheng & Tsui and the previously noted English Books of China.  In addition to Lao She, I like Lu Xun among the classics, and Gao Xingjian among the contemporaries.

The second Saloon item concerned Princeton University Press’s two-volume abridged version of Franco Moretti’s five-volume compilation of essays on the form and history of the novel, published in Italian as Il romanzo.  I’ve waded through the 2,000-odd pages of the abridged version — with very little joy, I might add.  The strengths (for me at least) are the essays on individual works.  Two I liked in particular were Frederic Jameson’s essay on Polish novelist Boleslaw Prus’s The Doll (”A Businessman in Love”), and Edoarda Masi’s essay on Lu Xun’s Ah Q, both in Volume 2.  Chinese literature in fact gets a welcome amount of attention, with a good essay on the history of the novel in China in Volume 1. 

The aim of Moretti’s collection is to recontextualize the novel as an international form rather than a Western invention.  You’ll get no argument from me on that score, but I couldn’t help but notice the absence of many landmarks of Western fiction.  I found a far more concise statement on the novel as part of our “universal civilization” when I toured Lao She’s house in Beijing last spring: among the few books on display was the author’s copy of Hesketh Pearson’s biography of Dickens.

Share on Facebook

You’re not going to believe this, but you know that Reading First program?  Well, it’s crooked.  Who’da thunk it?

I guess I missed this earlier piece.

Anyhow, this morning’s article reminded me that a book on the same subject of reading instruction, Let’s Kill Dick and Jane, by the Chicago Reader’s Harold Henderson, got a glowing notice from Paul Beston in the Wall Street Journal last week:

Blouke Carus and his wife, Marianne, Americans with strong German roots and a familiarity with the exacting standards of the German gymnasium, read Flesch’s book and formed Open Court in 1962. Together with a small band of dedicated educational theorists and consultants, they created innovative materials with the goal of educating the American masses as rigorously as the elites of Europe. Providing both a history of this remarkable company and a withering portrait of the education culture, Mr. Henderson’s book is more compelling than any lay reader could reasonably expect.

In connection with reading instruction, those of us with a more literary turn-of-mind might think of this passage from Chapter 4 of Nabokov’s Speak Memory:

I learned to read English before I learned to read Russian.  My first English friends were four simple souls in my grammar — Ben, Dan, Sam and Ned.  There used to be a great deal of fuss about their identities and whereabouts — “Who is Ben?”  “He is Dan,” “Sam is in bed,” and so on.  Although it all remained rather stiff and patchy (the compiler was handicapped by having to employ — for the initial lessons at least — words of not more than three letters), my imagination somehow managed to obtain the necessary data.  Wan-faced, big-limbed, silent nitwits, proud in the possession of certain tools (”Ben has an axe”), they now drift with a slow-motioned slouch across the remotest backdrop of memory; and, akin to the mad alphabet of the optician’s chart, the grammar-book’s lettering looms again before me.

Speaking of the creator of Pnin, did you read Nab biographer Brian Boyd’s article on literary criticism and biology in the autumn issue of  The American Scholar?  A little dippy, I thought.  But the whole issue is of unusual interest, with stories by Steven Millhauser and Dennis McFarland, a memoir by Mary Gordon, an interesting piece on Lincoln’s writing style, and a whole lot of other stuff.  The Scholar — I used to like this pub, but I haven’t read it regularly since the Epstein era, and not at all since Fadiman left.  What’s the deal with no website?

And Boyd’s essay, just to continue the strange digressions in this post, reminded me of this line from Eric Jacob’s bio of Kingsley Amis:

Most people reading English [at Oxford], Amis wrote in his Memoirs, treated literature “as a pure commodity, a matter for evasion and fraud, confidence trickery to filch a degree.”

Share on Facebook

Jennifer Howard’s piece in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education offers some good news about our favorite publisher:

In an 11th-hour reversal, Dalkey Archive Press has canceled its plans to relocate to the University of Rochester early next year. The press and the university “have mutually agreed to dissolve the contract under which Dalkey Press would have moved to the university in January 2007,” the university announced in a news release on Monday.

* * *

“We will stay in Central Illinois and do what we have been doing: publish,” Mr. O’Brien wrote in his e-mail message. “None of this will affect our publishing schedule, fortunately. The press has always managed its resources in a very conservative way and therefore this does not constitute a crisis for us.”

According to the article, this isn’t all good news:  the move was cancelled when a major grant fell through.  In a world run as I would wish it, a press as important as Dalkey would never want for money.  But I’m glad they’re staying in Illinois. 

(A tip of the kapelusz to Tato for this link.)

Share on Facebook

Even when I’m not blogging — which is, increasingly, always — I’m still erecting that rickety fabric.  Here’s what I’ve been thinking about lately, from Bate’s Johnson:

Three books of which he never tired, said Mrs. Thrale, were Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Don Quixote. “Alas,” he would say, “how few books there are of which anyone can possibly arrive at the last page” and “Was there ever anything written by mere man” that one could wish longer than these three books?  He would have gone on reading them, he would never exhaust them, because here — as in no other works — his identification was almost complete.  These three wanderers — one a castaway, one a pilgrim, and one on an impossible quest — were prototypes of what he felt to be his own life.

(God I love search inside this book.)

Elsewhere I read that Johnson had all three books on his nightstand.  Or did I make that up?

Share on Facebook