Nice piece by Morris Dickstein about John Williams’s Stoner in the NYT yesterday. Always fun to read Dickstein. I liked this phrase he quotes from the novel:

In literature he senses a depth of human understanding beyond his power to express, an epiphany of knowing something through words that could not be put in words.

I haven’t read Stoner, but Dickstein’s description reminded me a bit of Alan Seager. The early 60s really were the 50s, as strange Nan Talese says in the Ian McEwan documentary I also also happened to catch this weekend. I’m struck by the sincerity with which guys like Williams and Seager tried to reconcile a life devoted to literature with the the gray-flannel values of 1950s America. Is that kind of thing still done, do you think?

The documentary reminded me: I still hate McEwan’s stuff. Why do I hate so much contemporary fiction? Then I happened to pick up Lewis Robinson’s stories for the first time this weekend and I realized, no, I don’t hate everything.

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Here’s something I’ve thought about off and on ever since reading it six months ago. From “Translator’s Note,” by Mabel Lee, in Gao Xing Jian, Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather:

While still in Beijing Gao wrote a brief postscript for his seventeen-story collection, Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather, in which he warns readers that his fiction does not set out to tell a story. There is no plot, as found in most fiction, and anything of interest to be found in it is inherent in the language itself. More explicit is his proposal that the linguistic art of fiction is “the actualization of language and not the imitation of reality in writing,” and that its power to fascinate lies in the fact that, even while employing language, is able to evoke authentic feelings in the reader.

My first reaction was: of course language can evoke feelings. What’s so remarkable about that? And then I thought, maybe it’s something that we so take for granted that we don’t realize how amazing it is.

Perhaps the relation between language and emotion is like that between music and emotion: what Levi-Strauss called “the supreme mystery of the science of man.”

(Lots of other stuff in this little paragraph is worthy of note, but it’ll have to be some other time ….)

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From Hair of the Dogma: A Further Selection from “Cruiskeen Lawn,” by Flann O’Brien:

The Dublin man’s attitude to his wife and his pint are identical.

Summarise the situation thus:

He accepts both wife and pint as inevitable; he does not like or dislike either; under no circumstances will he take any notice whatever of either unless something extraordinary happens (e.g., if either is knocked over in his presence). Both are ordained companions, alternative, interchangeable, similar, cognate even in contour. They are complementary.

The Dublin Man’s technique is quite the same, whether he is entering his bedchamber or a public house. He comes in and stands near the counter. He is, of course, quite guiltless of the gaffe of ordering a pint. And let no simple reader imagine he makes his needs known by gesture. He does absolutely nothing at all that can be related to drinking. He may fill his pipe or possibly scan a newspaper. But when a soft, moist thud is heard, he carefully places eightpence on the counter; he knows there is a pint there. He does not, of course, see this pint. There must be, however, some mysterious method of cognition, some apparatus of invisible pint antennae, to explain this phenomenon. Who has the mind and the pen to convey to the stranger this grand and portentous spectacle—the Dublin man ignoring his pint!

And what is he at now? An old and dirty document is produced from an inner pocket and minutely perused. It is replaced. Very carefully the face of the clock is read. The pipe is taken apart and prodded with wire.

Hey presto!

We have taken our eyes off them for one second and lo, both are gone! The Dublin Man and his pint have vanished.

The tumbler stands, a veritable monument, with delicate traceries of foam slowly sinking to the bottom.

Trace, explain, unmask this Man? It can’t be done, I tell you.

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The Summer issue of The Quarterly Conversation is now online, including my review of the first-ever English translation of Robert Walser’s 1907 novel, The Assistant. My debut in (digital) print. News flash: I liked the book.

Also today, from near and far, some cheerful encomiums for my online efforts. Thanks, guys.

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