Painted this afternoon. Got Va to her x-ray in the morning. Didn’t take too long. Then I went to Rosen for my annual. New Medical center up on the hillside looking out to Stinson. Larry Spencer is trying to stop Lowe’s from building and ruining the view but frankly today I looked out and thought wow the valley is so magnificent and Stinson so big that a little commercial strip down there is not going to ruin things all that much. Am I a little frog being slowly cooked in the pot? Yep, in lots and lots of ways.
So excited by and pleased by Bolaño’s book. Seven-eights through. Can’t decide to use it in Extreme or not. Could break the class into three groups—one would read it the way I am, front to back; second group would read it according to strict chronological time; third group would read it by characters. So cool. Would it work all three ways? Think so. Trumps Cortazar doubly so.
MONDAY Oct 29
Friday evening we went with Pat and Ted to the AVA gallery re-opening in Lebanon. DeRosas and Coykendahls there & tons of other people. Pat was all excited to find that there is a “real scene” there & joined up as a member. Made me consider doing so and entering some of their painting competitions, or jury shows. If they will take digital, which they most likely will not but I can submit over and over again and try until they do. So what and all that. Then we had dinner at the Irish pub, Salt Hill. Our dish–stuffed acorn squash—was terrible but we had a good time anyway. Good to be out in totally different contexts.
These Monday notes show me how little time I take any more to write any thing let alone to write either poetry or tales or a great novel like Bolaño’s, of whom I am now, of course, totally and absolutely jealous and envious after having finished last week his big novel Savage Detectives. And now I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next, what book to read, what duty to perform day in and day out and I’m cast once more upon the open seas, the winds howling and the barque tossing. I did start this morning Melville’s “Paradise of Bachelors” and who knows for what reason. For some reason that work and its companion piece, “The Tartarus of Maids,” has been on my mind over the past few weeks and months. They pop in there every so often and I wonder what it would be like to read them again. I read them my junior year in college, in that course on Melville and Robert Lowell at Univ Md, College Park. I was fascinated by them, by all of Melville, but he was so vast one could hardly take him in as an undergraduate, something I probably still fail to realize after so many years of teaching about my own students. So I did begin to read this slim little piece of Melville’s after having finished his huge tome of a poem, if we should call it that, Clarel, the long long trudge of a work in verse he wrote to occupy himself in the years after his fame had burnt out and he was forgotten and dry and living out his years. “Living out one’s years” becomes a phrase with which one begins to wonder about death. Do I have anything more to do or accomplish? When will it come and how? Am I starting to think about it way too early or already too late? Why even think about it? Whatever happened to seizing the zen, staying in the moment as the only worthwhile thing? Anyway, Bolaño’s book is a delight that is too long, by some measures, and then too not long enough, so we welcome news that his last really huge novel is being translated and will appear in a few years. A massive work called 2666. Year of the apocalyptic beast in there for sure, and what all else we don’t yet know but just having read this one novel you can tell that he’s the sort of writer who had been writing one huge work and snipping off pieces of it every now and then for publication. His own life lightly and heavily re-worked into fiction of a new-old sort. Savage has that feel to it–the experience of it feels both new and old and dated somehow. I guess because it deals with, is rooted in, the characters all coming of age in the 70s, so there is an historical dimension to it. And yet the ways of telling the tale feel new in the sense that no one has quite brought off a whole novel by doing purported “interviews” with the characters. A technique very familiar now to us, both in print and mostly in media. But not a technique used so much in the 70s, and really less “interview” than “oral history,” or fake oral history. The voices just appear to us, readers, on the next pages and we are left to surmise that someone, who?, has gathered these collected interviews over a period of twenty years. We can figure out who the collector is, it is the fellow who started the book and ends it with two segments of his diary from 1975/76. But that sort of information is not what really interests us too much. Once we get going we can see how Bolaño is playing with everything, quietly and brilliantly. With the recent history of Latin American fiction, so his guys are not “magic realists,” heaven forbid, they are revolutionaries and “visceral realists.” They have a lost figurehead-mentor, they allude to and refer to hundreds of other Latin American writers, mostly Mexican perhaps but others too. Plus Bolaño plays with all the giants–Borges, Cervantes, Garcia Marquez, Cortázar. I think he especially jokes with and trumps Cortázar’s great novel, Hopscotch, which I just read last summer for the first time in my life. Hopscotch is famously capable of being read in two different sequences, front to back as usual but also in an alternative sequence, the numbers of the chapters given in that other order. Then within that there are some game-playing, getting lost tricks. One chapter for example, is it 55? I have to double check—has two story lines interleaved—every other line—so one line of text continues story A and the next line of text continues story B—may have been at the time a typesetters nightmare? and for the reader it gives delightful pause and “choice.” I think Savage Detectives could be read according to three or more sequences: 1) front to back, how I just read it; 2) by date of “interview” and journal entry, i.e. the calendar; 3) then too by Voice—one could look through and collect the voices and read their interviews together before moving on to another character’s collection of interviews; & 4) could you not also read the book by geographical location? each “recorded interview” takes place in a specific location, street name, city, country, so one could re-organize the book by geography and read it by that principle of spatial order. Now, can any young and coming writer trump Bolaño on this? YouTube auteurs and writers of the next generations, the challenge has been thrown down. Just how “deconstructed” can a book become before we will no longer let it be shelved next to the old novels or even next to a collection of poems?
Some reviewers have already said Bolaño is a poet/novelist, not just that he wanted most to be a poet but that his narrative gift is hearing people’s voices and capturing the poetic nuances in the voice, the musicality of language, the feeling of thought shifting fluidly like wind through flowers more than through rational structures and sequences, the “speculative” poetry one critic put it of the doomed search for certain knowledge about the fates of the main characters, about knowing just what they did and what they failed to accomplish. Then the book has at least two, maybe more, endings—and the one “big” one takes place in Africa—feeling like it is straight out of recent movies set in Africa where Europeans and Americans — 1st worlders — try to find how to fix all the mistakes the nasty old imperial colonialists made — and also feeling like a deep and profound poetic bow of homage by Bolaño to that great African poet-adventurer–Rimbaud. Every poet must somehow be in envy of Rimbaud—-wise enough to stop writing while he was really young, at the top of his game and go off to Africa to sell guns. It can’t get any better than that so far as mytho-poetic poesis, can it? Byron fought for Greece’s liberation from Turkey. Rimbaud ran guns—no bother with who might be liberating whom. And the trajectory is what every writers hungers for—Words-Guns. Talk or Kill. Live free or die as our NH license plate puts it. Poets would save the world and re-invent new ones in case they fail and blow us all up with bad poems and better bombs. Why haven’t commentators noted how the suicide bombers of the past ten years everywhere are young idealist poets, aching for art that will bring about the philosphy-kingdom? poorly mentored by lousy poets and lousy philosphers, how our best anti-terrorist tactics and strategies would be to broadcast more deeply and widely our poets? In fact that is what Hollywood has been about the past five years—-only their poetry is not as up to the mark as we all need either. How hard it is to find, foster, greatness of vision. DNA keeps throwing about sperm and egg as massively as it can, but the combinations seem to defy statistics and history seems to thwart fecundity.
Saying Savages is a novel about poets is very misleading. It is, but the poetry is not at issue. We never read any poems by the main characters and then only one poem by a mysterious character and that has about it all of the demands of the joke and by the end of the ultimate joke, so it is a poem yes but not really a poem no. It is a novel about interesting people, people like you and me. Maybe about some greater but only by poetic extrapolation. Both main characters are two sides of the author, two alter egos. We somehow sense that before anyone does bio research and confirms that.
Am I as crazy about Bolaño as I was about Sebald when I first read him five or six years ago? Maybe. Not sure yet. I bought some others of his books. But not feeling as desperate to read every word as I was with Sebald. Something very different about the sensibilities, the ways of wandering, constructing the work. Bolaño is more of a gamesman than Sebald, both less serious and more self-consciously set on making a checkmate move. Both are about loss of various sorts. Sebald has world war two hanging over the backdrop of his books. Bolaño has the distant and near revolutions in Latin America as the backdrop of his, and there is a felt difference. Bolaño has more of a sense of humor, but then Sebald is German. And Sebald has a sense of humor that is less easily discerned but perhaps more cosmically comedic—-the sadness so thick it loops back over itself into a sort of divine perspicuity. I have been waiting some forty years to be able to use that word with a little bit of confidence in a sentence. This matter of whether one is wholly taken with a writer that you set aside everything else and read everything in print you can get your hands on—-Rick Moody wrote about how Sebald had that effect on him just as it did on me. Apparently lots of people felt that about Sebald—-including even Saul Bellow. A year after Sebald was killed in an auto accident there was a memorial celebration at the Goethe Institute in Boston and I went down for it. Bellow was there, my old prof from Chicago, looking very much older and more frail. I had taken only one course with him, on Joyce’s Ulysses and I was moved that he should have like Sebald enough to be there for this event. Sebald’s translator was there too. Rather than try to say hello to Bellow I wrote a short note on a card and passed it to him as I left. “UC Spring ’68 course on Joyce, thanks, Bob Garlitz.” There was a press of people around him but I waited to see him read the note and catch his eye and acknowledge his smile with my own. We were both glad I’m sure that we were now in agreement about enjoying Sebald’s work and mourning deeply his loss. Anyway in his essay in a recent issue of that strange magazine The Believer Moody talks about how with his first reading of Sebald he succumbed to textual compulsion and set off to read every word. Since reading his essay—a fine attempt to map the amazing structure of Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, I’ve thought how this experience of entrancement was termed by a writer of an earlier generation, another grad professor, Wayne Booth, simply as falling in love with a writer. Or developing a deep and lasting friendship. Booth has a whole long section on this in one of his big books of criticism, The Company We Keep. He laments that the notion has gone out of style. How much he would lament further had he seen how it has now become termed something like “textural compulsion” by someone—I assume—is a little bit younger than I—Rick Moody. Thus the march of the age, the ages. From bookish friendship through deconstruction and the sattelite -isms that attended it over the last thirty years to textual compulsion. Reading as s bit of a disorder, a newish syndrome of maladjustment, hyper-textuality. But it does help to suggest how the novel will keep going. The Japanese already have, some website reported last week, a new kind of novel that get published first on your cell phone—arrives as text message. Later, after weeks of text messaging, you can eventually pick it up in completed paper form. Will other sorts of novels follow suit? Will we read literature just to “stay connected” to human voices, no matter what the plot, if any, no matter whether fiction or fact or infinitely shaded degrees of blended material, no matter how it begins or how it ends. Spanish novelist Javier Marías says in an interview (Paris Review I think) that the endings of novels are not that important. The end of Savage Detectives is pretty good. And even, after nearly six hundred pages, a visual ending and not verbal. Neat, you say, brilliant & funny. A simple joke rounding off all the jokiness of the whole book. Sad too but perfectly counterbalanced, squared even, with the comedy, or by the comedy.
