Deep Inside…

Jung’s Red Book is coming out next week.  It’s already being buzzed about in academea, but how do you get the kids to get excited?  Well you get cool guys like Charlie Kaufman and David Byrne ( & many more) to talk about it and vlog it.  They’re not out yet, but look for them.

About the book though; it’s one of a kind.  It’s Jung’s personal account of his trip into the Inferno.  For sixteen years, durring a ‘mid-life crisis’, he spent his free time tearing down the wall between his concious and subconsious mind.

In it, Jung travels the land of the dead, falls in love with a woman he later realizes is his sister, gets squeezed by a giant serpent and, in one terrifying moment, eats the liver of a little child. (“I swallow with desperate efforts — it is impossible — once again and once again — I almost faint — it is done.”) At one point, even the devil criticizes Jung as hateful.  NYT

Of course there’s much more to it than dragons and a morbid liverwurst.  This is a record of the subconcious of a man that formed a good deal of the contemporary ideas about the subconcious.  The book’s translator, Sonu Shamdasani, who wrestled with the book for ten years called it “the nuclear reactor for all [Jung's] works.”

The log of  his journies has taken a twisted path itself.  The New York Times has done a great job putting that story to pixels, and you can find it here.  It’s all very exciting, but for now, I don’t have $115.

Banned Books Week

Whether you knew it or not, we are in the midst of Banned Book Week where we, um, celebrate banned literature. So, might I humbly suggest that you pick up one of these and give it a go. I don’t consider reading Harry Potter an act of participation. I would, however, commend anyone who chooses to give Gossip Girl a whirl. In all seriousness, I think you would enjoy this one quite a bit. Let me know what book you chose if you so decide to partake in this silly week.

Smoking Dope With Pynchon

So I’m reading Pynchon’s new novel – which includes lots of pot – and stumbled upon this. It appears to be fairly legit actually. It is one man’s account of meeting Pynchon in the 60’s (a decade “Tom” is obsessed with, as you might know) and smoking a fat joint. It’s really not that interesting unless you are one of those people who adores the very silly shenanigans surrounding Pynchon’s anonymity. Read if you are are one of those folk…

Dope With Big T.P.

Poverty

“Zoshchenko’s technique is that of the skaz, the oral tale. The tale is supposed to have a moral, instructional point, to illustrate something; that is the excuse for telling and listening. But the point gets lost on the way: the story teller is caught up in the story itself or simply succombs to the delight of having an audience. It is himself he expresses, and not the moral. Either he loses it completely or arrives at a conclusion as unexpected for him as it is for the audience, or he tacks it on by force majeure, exposing either his own clay feet or the insubstantiality of all conclusions, or both.”

-Sidney Monas

This story isn’t the best example of that, or close to Zoshchenko’s best,  although it is an enjoyable little thing. I chose it mainly becuase it is much easier to transcribe 3 pages of text than it is 40. That and Shiv asked for more stories

Poverty (Zoshchenko, early 1900’s)

Nowadays, brothers, what is the most fashionable word there is, eh?

Nowadays, the most fashionable word that can be is, of course, electrification.

I won’t argue that it isn’t a matter of immense importance to light up Soviet Russia with electricity. Nevertheless, even this matter has its shady side. I am not saying, comrades, that it costs a lot. It costs nothing more expensive than money. That’s not what I’m talking about.

This is what I mean.

An open invitation

I have been running a few blogs (with many posts from me when I was in high school, if you are into that) and felt as if i would share them with all you chaps. One is on film and the other is on books. On either side of the coin you get my immediate, brief and entirely uneducated/spasmodic thoughts on the dvd I just ejected or the book I have just begrudgingly closed. All entries take ten minutes or less, so don’t judge me (or my grammar).

Synesthesialgia

Apnoea

Principles that make for a good story

1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature

2. Total Objectivity

3. Truthful descriptions of persons and objects

4. Extreme brevity

5. Audacity and originality: flee the stereotype

6. Compassion

Dutifully transcribed by yours truly from the Pevear/Volokhonsky…

The Huntsman (Chekhov 1885)

A sultry and stifling day. Not a cloud in the sky…The sun-scorched grass looks bleak, hopeless: there may be rain, but it will never be green again…The forest stands silent, motionless, as if its treetops were looking off somewhere or waiting for something.

A tall, narrow-shouldered man of about forty, in a red shirt, patched gentleman’s trousers, and big boots, lazily saunters along the edge of the clearing. He saunters down the road. To his right are green trees, to his left, all the way to the horizon, stretches a golden sea of ripe rye…His face is red and sweaty. A white cap with a straight jockey’s visor, apparently the gift of some generous squire, sits dashingly on his handsome blond head. Over his shoulder hangs a game back with crumpled black grouse in it. The man is carrying a cocked double-barreled shotgun and squinting his eyes at his old, skinny dog, who runs ahead, sniffing about in the bushes. It is quiet, not a sound anywhere…Everything alive is hiding from the heat.

Soviet literature

I’ve recently adopted Soviet literature. It makes for quite the pet. Soviet authors are absolutely hilarious, true to their culture’s literary past and, in general, fucking awesome. Sometimes their stories are just as interesting as the books they wrote (which often saw publication decades after they were written or were smuggled into foreign countries before their manuscripts were destroyed by “The Right Place”). I thought that this gem of a website was too comprehensive not to share, although I doubt anyone’s enthusiasm about this kind of stuff can meet the fever pitch mine has.

sovlit.com

Petersburg, Andrei Bely – 1916

Petersburg is an astonishing composition that blends much of what many love about 19th century Russian Lit with a daunting symbolist aesthetic that practically swallows its strands of plot into a prenatal existence. Sure, there is a narrative – a bomb, politics, parricide – but the crux of Petersburg is the dazzling imagery and false signifiers that Bely relentlessly cascades from every page.

The novel is nearly as concerned with shapes as it is with humans. Cubes, pyramids and, yes, even parallelepipeds are given the same (and on occasions more) notice than the men and women who stroll about them. The result is a dizzying and at times hallucinatory painting of a city and  a world where symbolic sensation does not correspond to the stimulus.  Everything is caught in an integument of shapes and sensations with nowhere to expand. Nowhere is this captured better than in the case of Alexandr Ivanovich.

His ephemeral descent into delirium is perhaps the most perfectly realized account of madness I have read in any Russian novel (and if we’re talking madness here, Russian authors hold the throne imo). I would try to describe the end of chapter six, but my words would be impotent. I will simply sum it up with the word “enfranshish” and remark that it involves a giant bronze horse come to life and a host of other things that make for some breathtaking reading along the lines of Gogol although, and its hard for me to say, likely better.

There is plenty more to talk about here – language, narration, bodily deatchment, repetition – but I would simply like to say that this is a book worth reading. Well worth reading. It’s astonishing.

Nobody Move

I guess when you win the National Book award you can afford to write a breezy 200 page noir novel for the likes of Playboy. Serialized, released in four sections and, finally, here in novel form, this is precisely what the doctor ordered for Kevin after his bout with 2666. The mere fact that this book exists seems strange at first, although you quickly gather that Johnson is not straying terribly far from the grimy, distinctly American, characters and roots that have always served as the foundation of his fiction.

Point in case, Jimmy Luntz – the protragonist if you will – “never felt so comfortable or so at home as when lying on his back and listening to the far-off music of the referee’s ten count.” Every noir needs a Femme Fatale and Nobody Move is no exception. Except, in this case, you get a woman who is terribly down on her luck and whose idea of respite is mixing vodka with lemonade and watching boxing films in the afternoon while her life unravels outside the theater.

In minor ways, this is like a jazzed up and poppy version of Johnson’s first (and excellent) novel Angels. The dramatic weight, however, has been lifted. Instead, we are left with something that would feel more at home on black and white celluloid. It is replete with cigarettes, booze, magnums and dialog that nooone would come up with off the top of their head.  Read with one’s mind on a good time, Nobody Move fulfills exactly what it promises. It made me think of Safe House, actually. The whole time I was reading it I was itching to adapt it and hand it off to one of you folks who deal with cameras. Any takers? John? Thomas? How do copywrite laws work, anyway?

2666

Inconclusive and sprawling, 2666 embarks upon a search for the unsearchable – delighted to confront and accept the void. Along the way, Bolano leads you along a path that is as inconclusive as it is real and real to the point where it seems fantastic. During part one, I couldn’t stop thinking of Bouvard and Pecuchet (Flaubert’s unfinished novel which is mentioned in passing on page 227) as three well to do Europeans search, sometimes comically, for an obscure German author and engage in a Jules et Jim-esque love triangle.

Part 4, about the killings of dozens of young women, offers a stark contrast to the flighty world of word. In the section about the killings in Santa Teresa, Bolano’s repetitively relentless  prose (etched with penknife) carves a bloody tunnel with no end in sight. His documentary-esque account of the rapes and murders is certainly not spineless, although, in another sense, it has no stable anatomy. It lives and breaths the carnage it documents, refusing to look past the barest of details (delivered in sparce and simplistic language). When it ends (or dies), you feel as if the narrator is as beguiled and leery of the bleak repetition as you are.

The part about Archimboldi, while certainly not bringing things anywhere close to safe ensemble, offers a minor reconciliation between the reader and the narrator. Some bridges are drawn over the converging rivers of plot the novel offers and, instead of attaining comfortable satisfaction, the reader is left thirsty in the midst of an abyss. This is a good thing. 2666 is a two way train between one’s brain and a dark defiant place.

A passage I liked (and dutifully transcribed) after the…