Mostly a links blog with occasional commentary on the linked articles (since 2010 mostly my book reviews) and infrequent personal updates.
I am a 64 year old married writer. See my website for my current writing projects and to download my ebooks; my about me page has links to my various web 2.0 venues.
I can't watch or listen to the Republican convention. Of all the occupations that make up an economy and society, of all the ways one can make a difference in the world, the only one that matters to Republicans and whom they wish to represent is "business owner," and the solipsism of Republican entrepreneurs and the politicians who are their mouthpieces is truly nauseating. Of course not all American entrepreneurs are narcissists; some are Democrats and independents.
Today Dalkey Archive Press is publishing English translations of three books by Yugoslav writer Danilo Kiš who was first introduced to English language readers in the 1970s when Philip Roth included Mr. Kiš’ book of linked short stories A Tomb for Boris Davidovich in the series of books Roth edited, Writers from the Other Europe. The three books published today are Kiš’ first two novellas, The Attic and Psalm 44, written in 1960 when Kiš was 25, and The Lute and the Scars, a posthumous collection of the last short stories he wrote between1980 and1986, the year he was diagnosed with the lung cancer that took his life in 1989. My reviews of the three books appear on New York Journal of Books.
Mr. Kiš was born in 1935 in northeast Serbia, a region that was home to a mixture of nationalities and languages, to a Jewish-Hungarian father and an Eastern-Orthodox Christian mother (as an adult he identified as Jewish). The family spent World War Two in Hungary where his father was conscripted into that country’s labor brigades (Jews were not allowed to serve in the regular Hungarian military) and in 1944 was deported to and murdered in Auschwitz. Young Danilo and his mother repatriated to her native Montenegro in 1947 where he excelled in school leading to his university studies in Belgrade in the mid-1950s. The scope of my NYJB reviews does not leave room to quote excerpts of his work, but there are no such constraints here.
(To be continued)
(Continued from my previous article)
In my New York Journal of Books review I describeThe Attic as “a highly inventive, imaginative, and partly autobiographical account of bohemian life in Belgrade and the Adriatic Coast in the 1950s,” and I recommend it “to readers who enjoy foreign literature in translation and the bildungsroman or coming of age subgenre, as well as to fans of Mr. Kiš’ writing who want to experience his earliest work.” In his debut book Danilo Kiš employs a variety of literary styles including a lyricism he largely abandoned in his mature work. The book begins,
"I listened to invisible trains weeping in the night and to crackly leaves latching onto the hard, frozen earth with their fingernails.
"Everywhere packs of ravenous, scraggly dogs came out to meet us. They appeared out of dark doorways and squeezed through narrow openings in the fences. They would accompany us mutely in large packs. But from time to time they would raise their somber, sad eyes to look at us. They had some sort of strange respect for our noiseless steps, for our embraces."
Mr. Kiš’ alter-ego protagonist is nicknamed Orpheus and his girlfriend is Eurydice. He addresses her in her absence:
"It rains so often here that the moonlight is splashing.
"Eurydice, put your arms around me!
"You aren’t always the same, either, you who appear in the likeness of Eurydice, from out of the words, shadow, and veil. On the outskirts of the city your voice spreads luxuriantly, peacefully across the windows, like dusk, blue. In the moonlight it starts to resonate—like a harp, like…
"But in the attic, toward evening, when your breasts are bare, your voice becomes a caress, a miracle, a violet blossom."
According to the book’s translator, John K. Cox, The Attic has more humor than any of Mr. Kiš’ subsequent works. For example, when Orpheus and his roommate Igor whose nickname is Billy Wiseass open a tavern Orpheus writes a menu and wine list with satirical names for the dishes and vintages.
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When Danilo Kiš was writing The Attic he took a three to four week break to write Psalm 44 and submit it to a local Jewish writing contest. Mr. Kiš would go on to write other books about the Shoah, but Psalm 44 is the only one set in Auschwitz. In my New York Journal of Books review I write, “In Psalm 44 Mr. Kiš’ postmodern prose embellishes a framework of heroic yet ethically complex characters and a simple plot.” In my review I praise the book for its moral gravity and those ethically complex characters and fault it for its historical inaccuracies.
Most of the action of Psalm 44 takes place in the women’s barracks where our heroine Marija, who has secretly given birth to a baby boy, is trying unsuccessfully to get some sleep in the hours before an escape attempt. At age 18 she is already a veteran prisoner and wonders why she is still alive when so many of her fellow prisoners have perished.
"…The first was Erzika Ignac. The one…picked right at the beginning, as a human guinea pig. Then Nameless, who played in the orchestra;--but the mechanical hand that would light a red light to warn of rebellion and go into action to sever contact before any misfortune could occur, or at least before the great shock of a dose of high-voltage current arrived, that hand had now compressed the column of women with one powerful sweep and covered it up with a clean white shroud of the type placed on the catafalques of heroes or virgins; Marija was the only one, the only one for a long time now, who stood next to that catafalque like a soldier who by some miracle had remained alive after the explosion of a bomb that fell into the trench where his unit was fighting, and who now stands bare-headed next to the mass grave, with flowers in hand, reading from the marble the names of those who had been his comrades-in-arms and with whom he shared his cigarettes and exchanged in moments of weakness family photographs and memories, and who now in anguish thinks back to all those friends at rest under the marble obelisk, transformed into golden letters, and he wonders how this could be, by dint of what miracle had he missed being part of the formation at that final roll call, for his place was there, in that line, right alongside the first in the row, who was A, and the one behind, who was C, and whose names were now impressed in the marble of the monument.
"That’s how she felt now in front of the obelisk of memories: standing with a bouquet of flowers and amazed, hardly believing her eyes."
In Mr. Kiš’ mature work he mostly avoided convoluted run-on sentences such as these. His readers will find in Psalm 44 an early stylistic experiment he abandoned in his later work.
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In the six stories and one short essay that compriseThe Lute and the Scars we find a more confident and assured voice than in Danilo Kiš’ first two novellas two decades earlier. In my New York Journal of Books review I recommend the book “to Mr. Kiš’ admirers as well as to all readers of Eastern European literature in translation and of short form fiction.”
The first story in the collection, “The Stateless One,” is about a writer. Here is number 4 out of the story’s 26 numbered paragraphs; note the detailed descriptions:
"He captured in haste a few observations, a fewBilder: a newspaper vendor slurping her soup from a plate, next to her nostril a wound the size of a coin, a raw open wound; a female midget attempting to climb onto a train; a waiter totting up a bill with his pencil between his little finger and index finger because the rest of his fingers are missing; and a pimply porter with a boil on his neck. And so on."
In my NYJB review I praise Mr. Kiš’ conversational tone in “Juric Golec.” In this excerpt the title character’s wife has recently died and he and the narrator have returned to Mr. Golec’s Paris apartment after dining in a restaurant.
“For the last twenty years we didn’t live under the same roof. In that length of time I slept with a lot of women; I assume she took lovers as well. How many? I don’t know. But there was nonetheless something that bound us together. Something elemental. Whatever it is that unites a man and a woman forever.”
The telephone rang, and he chatted with someone else in German, quietly. Either German or Yiddish. Then he returned to his seat opposite me. “A month before she got sick, we went for a stroll on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. It was a clear day, like this one. At one point she stopped and took my hand. ‘I would like to live a hundred years,’ she said. ‘With you.’ And we kissed. On the lips.”
Juric Golec drank a swallow. “A splendid bottom line for an old Jewish couple,” he concluded. After thirty-three years of shared life.”
For a more in depth discussion of this book read my review on New York Journal of Books.
This examiner.com article includes links to my New York Journal of Books reviews of the two novels.
Most people will have multiple jobs and two or three distinct careers in the course of a lifetime. While those careers can be rewarding and fulfilling the transitional periods at the outset or in between careers can be emotionally difficult. Two novels published this month describe such transitional periods at different stages of life.
New York Journal of Books
In Joe Meno's Office Girl the characters are fine-arts majors in their early to mid-twenties transitioning from college to establishing themselves as working artists. In this interim period they find themselves taking dull, dead-end jobs to make ends meet.
In my New York Journal of Books review of the novel I compare it to Lena Dunham's HBO seriesGirls in that the characters are legally adults but are still growing up, and how their poor choices exacerbate their already modest and insecure circumstances. One of the characters has a role model in his Jewish step-father.
The story is illustrated with line drawings by Cody Hudson and photographs (including one of a topless woman wearing a gas mask) by Todd Baxter. There is an excerpt from Office Girl in The Nervous Breakdown.
Gray Adams,Barbara Browning's male protagonist inI'm Trying to Reach You is a middle-aged dancer turned academic (mirroring the author's career path) who is a post-doctoral fellow at the same university and the same department where in real life Ms. Browning is a professor.
Post-doctoral fellowships are by definition transitional periods between graduate school and a college teaching career. Mr. Adams has few responsibilities, little money, is in a long distance relationship with an overseas partner, is applying to tenure track teaching positions for the following year, and is obsessed by the consecutive deaths in a period of months of great performing artists and by a series of home made YouTube videos featuring dance performances by Ms. Browning.
In my New York Journal of Books review I recommend the novel "to anyone . . . who wants to experience a multimedia novel blurring genres and means of communication as well as the boundary between the author and her fictional narrative.” Ms. Browning discusses I'm Trying to Reach You in an interview on her publisher's blog.
My review first appeared on the now defunct examiner.comIn the years following World War II academic psychologists grappled with the phenomenon of apparently normal people following orders to act inhumanely to other people and indeed to participate in mass-murder. In 1947 California Psychologist Theodore W. Orno devised a personality test to measure what he termed the authoritarian personality. His work has since been refined to what is known as Right-wing authoritarianism and the number of criteria reduced to three traits:
Indiewire
1. Authoritarian submission — a high degree of submissiveness to the authorities who are perceived to be established and legitimate in the society in which one lives.
2. Authoritarian aggression — a general aggressiveness directed against deviants, outgroups, and other people that are perceived to be targets according to established authorities.
3. Conventionalism — a high degree of adherence to the traditions and social norms that are perceived to be endorsed by society and its established authorities, and a belief that others in one's society should also be required to adhere to these norms.
In 2004, a man named David Stewart was arrested in Panama City, FL, in connection with a series of prank calls to fast food restaurants around the country, in which he had allegedly impersonated a police officer and convinced managers to detain and strip search female employees that he accused of theft. Yesterday at The Broadway Screening Room I attended an advance screening of the movie Compliance which is based on one of those prank calls. The movie will open in theaters on August 17, 2012.
Had I not already been familiar with the psychological research on authoritarian behavior I would have found it hard to believe that the manager of the Ohio ChickWich restaurant (ably portrayed by Ann Dowd) and some of her employees could be so gullible, so utterly lacking in critical thinking skills. Why did they believe the caller was who he claimed to be? It seems that anyone who has watched television police dramas could find holes in his story. And yet in 70 cases across the country fast food restaurant managers followed the prank caller's instructions to the letter.
I found the film disturbing and thought provoking, but at 90 minutes (even though it condensed a three and a half hour conversation) I thought it was too long. If it were re-edited Compliance would make a fine one hour TV drama; I'm not convinced it needed to be a feature length film. The cinematography captures what running a fast food restaurant is like.
There is a perhaps unavoidably creepy aspect not only to what the prank caller (played byPat Healy), who identifies himself as "Officer Daniels," is doing but in the way the viewer is turned into his voyeuristic accomplice. This is exacerbated by the fact that Dreama Walker, whose acting performance as the accused employee is very good, has breasts that are so identical in shape and size as to appear unnatural and indeed look surgically enhanced. If viewers are expected to empathize with this character rather than ogle her why did directorCraig Zobel chose an actress for the role whose breasts resemble those of a porn star?
I'm glad I saw Compliance, but I'm also glad I didn't pay to see it. I'm sure the film will work as well on a smaller screen (and many of today's flat-screen TVs are not that small) and advise readers to wait for it to appear on IFC, the Sundance Channel, or on premium cable.
Do the coolest brands really deserve their alleged socially responsible reputations? In her new book,Ethical Chic, award winning journalist, author, (friend, fellow shul member,) and Brooklynite Fran Hawthorne investigates six such companies to find out the answer to that and other questions, including:
--Do Starbucks baristas really talk to their customers? (And why did the company cheat the coffee farmers of Ethiopia?)
--Is Trader Joe’s really organic?
--Did Apple know about the conditions at its iPod factory in China?
--Why did Tom’s of Maine sell out to Colgate?
--How does Timberland explain killing all those cows?
--Should we hate American Apparel for its sleaze or applaud it for supporting immigrant rights?
To promote her new book Ms. Hawthorne will be giving two readings this month in Brooklyn:
Wednesday June 20, 2012 at 7:00 PM at Community Bookstore, 143 Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, and
Ms. Hawthorne has been a writer or editor at Fortune, BusinessWeek, Institutional Investor,and other publications. She is the author of three books on health care and investing, including Inside the FDA and Pension Dumping.
This article first appeared on the now defunct examiner.com
