A must-read.

What foreigners might read to better understand the “American character.”

An author gives up on writing criticism: “I know intimately that the worst novels ever written took more fearlessness, will and soul than the best book reviews ever written.”

To buy the time work on a play or another book, Richard Price is working on a screenplay for Lush Life.

Raymond Carver biographer Carol Sklenicka: “It boggles the mind how someone who is said to be gentle can hit his wife over the head with a wine bottle and sever her artery.” I have a review of Sklenicka’s book in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Is To Kill a Mockingbird keeping Southern writers from addressing race?

Colum McCann’s win at the National Book Awards somewhat redeems Ireland’s failure to qualify for the World Cup.

Rick Moody starts tweeting a story tomorrow at @BlackClockmag.

A visit to the graves of Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. And the guy who played Coach on Cheers.

The publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s The Original of Laura is an opportunity to dump on living authors: “Richard Powers drones on in high, wooden prose about love, Philip Roth engages in bottomless carnal rumination, Foerian pornographers of tragedy eagerly show us their wares—and Nabokov’s fragments … reveal how hollow so much serious (a synonym, these days, for self-serious) contemporary literature is.”

The publication of The Original of Laura is an opportunity for Roger Ebert to write about the film version of Lolita for Playboy. [NSFW]

The publication of The Original of Laura is an opportunity to come up with some new covers for Nabokov’s backlist.

Jonathan Yardley likes Ben Yagoda’s book on memoirs, though he’s not much for the recent spate of memoirs themselves.

Jonathan Lethem on the Kindle: “I like old, crapped-out books. For me, it’s an unapologetic fetish, and my house is loaded with them and I’ll always be in love with these things. I worked in used bookstores for a long time. But again, in the cause of not being the cranky old man, even though I can feel all kinds of intense sensory resistance to this thing I choose not to believe it’s the enemy. I’m just going to decide that the world has enough room for this innocuous little guy, too. Why not?”

Scordati ogni esperienza che provoca sussulti.
E qualsiasi cosa abbia a che fare con la musica da camera.
Musei in piovosi pomeriggi domenicali, eccetera.
I vecchi maestri. Tutta quella roba.
Scordati le ragazze. Cerca di scordartele.
Le ragazze. E tutta quella roba là.

Raymond Carver

(A presto un post su di lui)

Hace pocos meses apareció traducida al español una antología de los mejores cuentos del gran narrador estadounidense Tobias Wolff, amigo del más popular entre nosotros Raymond Carver, y cuyos recuerdos de infancia y adolescencia fueron llevados al cine por Michael Caton-Jones en Vida de este chico (This boy´s life, 1993), con Leonardo Di Caprio. El relato que prestaba su título a la selección, Aquí empieza nuestra historia, formaba parte originalmente del libro De regreso al mundo (Back in the world, 1985), y ya destacaba entre el magnífico conjunto.

        Wolff nos propone en su cuento un juego literario, una historia en la que caben muchas otras, desde la que nos presenta el narrador hasta las que imagina el personaje principal, pasando por las que otros cuentan y que se mezclan y se transforman en las de sus propias vidas. Como si de muñecas rusas se tratase, tras una historia siempre puede aparecer otra, y otra más, porque los personajes de Aquí empieza nuestra historia son además creadores de ficciones, lo cual nos hace pensar a los lectores cuánto tenemos de ambas cosas y dónde comienza realmente nuestra historia.

        “Sabía que en alguna parte, allí fuera, un barco se dirigía a puerto a pesar del solemne aviso, y mientras caminaba Charlie se imaginaba arrodillado en la proa, con un farol en la mano, atento a la luz que brillaba justo ante él. Cualquier distracción desvanecida. Demasiado vigilante para tener miedo. La lengua humedeciendo los labios, los ojos muy abiertos, listo para avisar en esta niebla cambiante, que en cualquier momento podía revelar cualquier cosa.”

             Publicado por Alfaguara.

For whatever reason, this poem strikes me as particularly poignant for today, for thanksgiving, and so I’ll leave you with it today, and thank you for everything, those who have been part and parcel of my life up to now.

Late Fragment
by Raymond Carver

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Click here to read!

Stephen King reviews a biography on Raymond Carver:

Raymond Carver, surely the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the 20th century, makes an early appearance in Carol Sklenicka’s exhaustive and sometimes exhausting biography as a 3- or 4-year-old on a leash. “Well, of course I had to keep him on a leash,” his mother, Ella Carver, said much later — and seemingly without irony.

Mrs. Carver might have had the right idea. Like the perplexed lower-middle-class juicers who populate his stories, Carver never seemed to know where he was or why he was there.

Unless your a fan of Carver, and I am, the above passage doesn’t promise much in the way of a writer’s biography but I’m more interested in Carver’s story of redemption. A hopeless alcoholic for much of his career, he finally found victory over the bottle and began a new life with a new wife and was happy for a while before his tragic diagnosis of cancer. Make no mistake, Carver is no hero here; he treats his first wife shabbily and the executors of his estate sound like they’ve continued to do so. But there are some good things to be found in his life story and those things are more important than any of his stories.

(King also reviews the new collection of Carver stories, which he likes, but I’ve already blogged here about the book and I still believe it’s too early to issue this volume.)

Here’s something I came across while browsing through my updates, a very good article by Stephen King.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/books/review/King-t.html?_r=1&nl=books&emc=booksupdateema1

Enjoy

PhilosopherPoet

Raymond Carver’s Life and Stories

By Stephen King

Illustration by Ruth Gwily, based on a photograph by Bob Adelman/Corbis

Raymond Carver, surely the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the 20th century, makes an early appearance in Carol Sklenicka’s exhaustive and sometimes exhausting biography as a 3- or 4-year-old on a leash. “Well, of course I had to keep him on a leash,” his mother, Ella Carver, said much later — and seemingly without irony.

Mrs. Carver might have had the right idea. Like the perplexed lower-middle-class juicers who populate his stories, Carver never seemed to know where he was or why he was there. I was constantly reminded of a passage in Peter Straub’s “Ghost Story”: “The man just drove, distracted by this endless soap opera of America’s bottom dogs.”

Born in Oregon in 1938, Carver soon moved with his family to Yakima, Wash. In 1956, the Car­vers relocated to Chester, Calif. A year later, Carver and a couple of friends were carousing in Mexico. After that the moves accelerated: Paradise, Calif.; Chico, Calif.; Iowa City, Sacramento, Palo Alto, Tel Aviv, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Cupertino, Humboldt County . . . and that takes us up only to 1977, the year Carver took his last drink.

Through most of those early years of restless travel, he dragged his two children and his long-suffering wife, Maryann, the mostly unsung heroine of Sklenicka’s tale, behind him like tin cans tied to the bumper of a jalopy that no car dealer in his right mind would take in trade. It’s no wonder that his friends nicknamed him Running Dog. Or that when his mother took him into downtown Yakima, she kept him on a leash.

As brilliant and talented as he was, Ray Carver was also the destructive, ­everything-in-the-pot kind of drinker who hits bottom, then starts burrowing deeper. Longtime A.A.’s know that drunks like Carver are master practitioners of the geographical cure, refusing to recognize that if you put an out-of-control boozer on a plane in California, an out-of-control boozer is going to get off in Chicago. Or Iowa. Or Mexico.

And until mid-1977, Raymond Carver was out of control. While teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he and John Cheever became drinking buddies. “He and I did nothing but drink,” Carver said of the fall semester of 1973. “I don’t think either of us ever took the covers off our typewriters.” Because Cheever had no car, Carver provided transportation on their twice-weekly booze runs. They liked to arrive at the liquor store just as the clerk was unlocking for the day. Cheever noted in his journal that Carver was “a very kind man.” He was also an irresponsible boozehound who habitually ran out on the check in restaurants, even though he must have known it was the waitress who had to pay the bill for such dine-and-dash customers. His wife, after all, often waited tables to support him.

It was Maryann Burk Carver who won the bread in those early years while Ray drank, fished, went to school and began writing the stories that a generation of critics and teachers would miscategorize as “minimalism” or “dirty realism.” Writing talent often runs on its own clean circuit (as the Library of America’s “Raymond Carver: Collected Stories” attests), but writers whose works shine with insight and mystery are often prosaic monsters at home.

Maryann Burk met the love of her life — or her nemesis; Carver appears to have been both — in 1955, while working the counter of a Spudnut Shop in Union Gap, Wash. She was 14. When she and Carver married in 1957, she was two months shy of her 17th birthday and pregnant. Before turning 18, she discovered she was pregnant again. For the next quarter-century she supported Ray as a cocktail waitress, a restaurant hostess, an encyclopedia saleswoman and a teacher. Early in the marriage she packed fruit for two weeks in order to buy him his first typewriter.

She was beautiful; he was hulking, possessive and sometimes violent. In Car­ver’s view, his own infidelities did not excuse hers. After Maryann indulged in “a tipsy flirtation” at a dinner party in 1975 — by which time Carver’s alcoholism had reached the full-blown stage — he hit her upside the head with a wine bottle, severing an artery near her ear and almost killing her. “He needed ‘an illusion of freedom,’ ” Sklenicka writes, “but could not bear the thought of her with another man.” It is one of the few points in her admirable biography where Sklenicka shows real sympathy for the woman who supported Carver and seems to have never stopped loving him.

Although Sklenicka exhibits something like awe for Carver the writer, and clearly understands the warping influence alcohol had on his life, she is almost nonjudgmental when it comes to Carver the nasty drunk and ungrateful (not to mention sometimes dangerous) husband. She quotes the novelist Diane Smith (“Letters From Yellowstone”) as saying, “That was a bad generation of men,” and pretty much leaves it at that. When she quotes Maryann calling herself a “literary Cinderella, living in exile for the good of Car­ver’s career,” the first Mrs. Carver comes across as just another whining ex-wife rather than as the stalwart she undoubtedly was. Ray and Maryann were married for 25 years, and it was during those years that Carver wrote the bulk of his work. His time with the poet Tess Gallagher, the only other significant woman in his life, was less than half that.

Nevertheless, it was Gallagher who reaped the personal benefits of Carver’s sobriety (he took his last drink a year before they fell in love) and the financial ones as well. During the divorce proceedings, Maryann’s lawyer said — this both haunts me and to some degree taints my enjoyment of Carver’s stories — that without a decent court settlement, Maryann Burk Carver’s post-divorce life would be “like a bag of doorknobs that wouldn’t open any doors.”

Maryann’s response was, “Ray says he’ll send money every month, and I believe him.” Carver carried through on that promise, although not without a good deal of grousing. But when he died in 1988, the woman who had provided his financial foundation discovered that she had been cut out of sharing the continuing financial rewards of Carver’s popular short-story collections. Carver’s savings alone totaled almost $215,000 at the time of his death; Maryann got about $10,000. Carver’s mother got even less: at age 78, she was living in public housing in Sacramento and eking out a living as a “grandmother aide” in an elementary school. Sklenicka doesn’t call this shabby treatment, but I am happy to do it for her.

It’s as a chronicle of Carver’s growth as a writer that Sklenicka’s book is invaluable, particularly after his career path crossed that of the editor Gordon Lish, the self-styled “Captain Fiction.” Any readers who doubt Lish’s baleful influence on the stories in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” are apt to think differently after reading Sklenicka’s eye-opening account of this difficult and ultimately poisonous relationship. Those still not convinced can read the corresponding stories in “Beginners,” now available in the sublimely portable and long-overdue “Raymond Carver: Collected Stories.”

In 1972, Lish changed the title of Car­ver’s second Esquire story — which he edited heavily — from “Are These Actual Miles?” (interesting and mysterious) to “What Is It?” (boring). When Carver, wild to be published in a major slick, decided to accept the changes, Maryann accused him “of being a whore, of selling out to the establishment.” John Gardner had once told Carver that line-editing was not negotiable. Carver may have accepted that — most writers willing to submit to the editing process do — but Lish’s changes were wide and deep. Car­ver argued that “a major magazine publication was worth the compromise.” Lish, who tried unsuccessfully to edit Leonard Gardner (who would go on to write “Fat City”) with a similarly heavy hand, got his way with Carver. It was a harbinger.

Was Gordon Lish a good editor? Undoubtedly. Curtis Johnson, a textbook editor who introduced Lish to Carver, claims that Lish had “infallible taste in fiction.” But, as Maryann feared, he was — in Ray Carver’s case, at least — much better at discovery than development. And with Carver, he got what he wanted. Perhaps he sensed an essential weakness at Carver’s core (“people-pleasing” is what recovering alcoholics call it). Perhaps it was the strangely elitist view he seems to have held of Carver’s writing, branding the characters “grossly inept” and speaking of “their blatant illiteracies, of which Carver himself was unaware.” This did not stop him from taking credit for Car­ver’s success; Lish is said to have bragged that Car­ver was “his creature,” and what appears on the back jacket of “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?”(1976), Car­ver’s first book of stories, is not Raymond Car­ver’s photograph but Gordon Lish’s name.

Sklenicka’s account of the changes in Carver’s third book of stories, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (1981), is meticulous and heartbreaking. There were, she says, three versions: A, B and C. Version A was the manuscript Car­ver submitted. It was titled “So Much Water So Close to Home.” B was the manuscript Lish initially sent back. He changed the name of the story “Beginners” to “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” and that became the new title of the book. Although Carver was disturbed by this, he nonetheless signed a binding (and unagented) contract in 1980. Soon after, Version C — the version most readers know — arrived on Carver’s desk. The differences between B and C “astounded” him. “He had urged Lish to take a pencil to the stories,” Skle­nicka writes. “He had not expected . . . a meat cleaver.” Unsure of himself, Carver was only three years into sobriety after two decades of heavy drinking; his correspondence with Lish over the wholesale changes to his work alternated between groveling (“you are a wonder, a genius”) and outright begging for a return to Version B. It did no good. According to Tess Gallagher, Lish refused by telephone to restore the earlier version, and if Carver understood nothing else, he understood that Lish held the “power of publication access.”

This Hobson’s choice is the beating heart of “Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life.” Any writer might wonder what he’d do in such a case. Certainly I did; in 1973, when my first novel was accepted for publication, I was in similar straits: young, endlessly drunk, trying to support a wife and two children, writing at night, hoping for a break. The break came, but until reading Sklenicka’s book, I thought it was the $2,500 advance Doubleday paid for “Carrie.” Now I realize it may have been not winding up with Gordon Lish as my editor.

One needs only to scan the stories in “Beginners” and the ones in “What We Talk About” to see the most obvious change: the prose in “Beginners” consists of dense blocks of narration broken up by bursts of dialogue; in “What We Talk About,” there is so much white space that some of the stories (“After the Denim,” for instance) look almost like chapters in a James Patterson novel. In many cases, the man who didn’t allow editors to change his own work gutted Carver’s, and on this subject Sklenicka voices an indignation she is either unwilling or unable to muster on Maryann’s behalf, calling Lish’s editing of Carver “a usurpation.” He imposed his own style on Carver’s stories, and the so-called minimalism with which Carver is credited was actually Lish’s deal. “Gordon . . . came to think that he knew everything,” Curtis Johnson says. “It became pernicious.”

Sklenicka analyzes many of the ­changes, but the wise reader will turn to the “Collected Stories” and see them for him- or herself. Two of the most dismaying examples are “If It Please You” (“After the Denim” in “What We Talk About”) and “A Small, Good Thing” (“The Bath” in “What We Talk About”).

In “If It Please You,” James and Edith Packer, a getting-on-in-years couple, arrive at the local bingo hall to discover their regular places have been taken by a young hippie couple. Worse, James observes the young man cheating (although he doesn’t win; his girlfriend does). During the course of the evening, Edith whispers to her husband that she’s “spotting.” Later, back at home, she tells him the bleeding is serious, and she’ll have to go to the doctor the following day. In bed, James struggles to pray (a survival skill both James and his creator acquired in daily A.A. meetings), first hesitantly, then “beginning to mutter words aloud and to pray in earnest. . . . He prayed for Edith, that she would be all right.” The prayers don’t bring relief until he adds the hippie couple to his meditations, casting aside his former bitter feelings. The story ends on a note of hard-won hope: “ ‘If it please you,’ he said in the new prayers for all of them, the living and the dead.” In the Lish-edited version, there are no prayers and hence no epiphany — only a worried and resentful husband who wants to tell the irritating hippies what happens “after the denim,” after the games. It’s a total rewrite, and it’s a cheat.

The contrast between “The Bath” (Lish-edited) and “A Small, Good Thing” (Ray Carver unplugged) is even less palatable. On her son’s birthday, Scotty’s mother orders a birthday cake that will never be eaten. The boy is struck by a car on his way home from school and winds up in a coma. In both stories, the baker makes dunning calls to the mother and her husband while their son lies near death in the hospital. Lish’s baker is a sinister figure, symbolic of death’s inevitability. We last hear from him on the phone, still wanting to be paid. In Carver’s version, the couple — who are actually characters instead of shadows — go to see the baker, who apologizes for his unintended cruelty when he understands the situation. He gives the bereaved parents coffee and hot rolls. The three of them take this communion together and talk until morning. “Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this,” the baker says. This version has a satisfying symmetry that the stripped-down Lish version lacks, but it has something more important: it has heart.

“Lish was able . . . to make a snowman out of a snowdrift” is what Sklenicka says about his version of Carver’s stories, but that’s not much of a metaphor. She does better when talking about Lish’s changes to a passage in “They’re Not Your Husband” (in “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?”), pointing out that the Lish version is “meaner, coarser and somewhat diminishing to both characters.” Carver himself says it best. When the narrator of “The Fling” finally faces up to the fact that he has no love or comfort to give his father, he says of himself, “I was all smooth surface with nothing inside except emptiness.” Ultimately, that’s what is wrong with the Ray Carver stories as Lish presented them to the world, and what makes both the Sklenicka biography and the “Collected Stories” such a welcome and necessary corrective.

Stephen King’s latest novel is “Under the Dome.”

In case your Monday passing slowly, and you need something to help pass the time:

• Kim Stanley Robinson explains why dystopia is easy.
• James White offers insights into the films of Terry Gilliam.
• Ben Schott’s readers had fun with drunks.
• Stephen King on Raymond Carver.
• David Jolly brings us a morbid moment from France.
• WNYC’s Studio 360 brings us Darwin in verse, Denis Dutton on The Art Instinct, murder and drama among chimpanzees, and original fiction from Lydia Millet (read by Martha Plimpton).

And as I’m having a hard time coming up with anything else, how about a Totoro bus?

Pocos imaginarían que el “amo del suspenso”, como se le conoce a Stephen King, pudiera ensayar acerca de la obra de uno de los escritores norteamericanos de culto más importante del siglo pasado. Aquí, y para disgusto de algunos eruditos que no toleran la literatura ni a los escritores Best Seller, dejo el fragmento de un artículo publicado hace algunos días en el New York Times Book Review donde King da su punto de vista sobre la vida y obra Carver.

Raymond Carver’s Life and Stories

Raymond Carver, surely the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the 20th century, makes an early appearance in Carol Sklenicka’s exhaustive and sometimes exhausting biography as a 3- or 4-year-old on a leash. “Well, of course I had to keep him on a leash,” his mother, Ella Carver, said much later — and seemingly without irony.

Born in Oregon in 1938, Carver soon moved with his family to Yakima, Wash. In 1956, the Car­vers relocated to Chester, Calif. A year later, Carver and a couple of friends were carousing in Mexico. After that the moves accelerated: Paradise, Calif.; Chico, Calif.; Iowa City, Sacramento, Palo Alto, Tel Aviv, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Cupertino, Humboldt County . . . and that takes us up only to 1977, the year Carver took his last drink.

Through most of those early years of restless travel, he dragged his two children and his long-suffering wife, Maryann, the mostly unsung heroine of Sklenicka’s tale, behind him like tin cans tied to the bumper of a jalopy that no car dealer in his right mind would take in trade. It’s no wonder that his friends nicknamed him Running Dog. Or that when his mother took him into downtown Yakima, she kept him on a leash.

As brilliant and talented as he was, Ray Carver was also the destructive, ­everything-in-the-pot kind of drinker who hits bottom, then starts burrowing deeper. Longtime A.A.’s know that drunks like Carver are master practitioners of the geographical cure, refusing to recognize that if you put an out-of-control boozer on a plane in California, an out-of-control boozer is going to get off in Chicago. Or Iowa. Or Mexico.

(…) leer más aquí.

Maud Newton

It was after discussing Margaret with my mother that I stopped trying to talk about my experiences. Instead, I became obsessed with the notion that I would, eventually, write them down.

Pre-teen novels were my frame of reference. I envisaged a story in the downbeat, questioning vein of “Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret” or “My Darling, My Hamburger.” But unlike those books, mine would be true, and, because I could not see beyond the sphere of my own unhappiness, it would be called, “And You Think Your Family is Crazy.” I shudder to think of it now.

I guess it’s not surprising, in the Oprah era, that so many other people had the same idea. Nowadays bookstores are overrun with narratives that could be sold under exactly the title that so appealed to my adolescent self. It’s hard to dispute writer Ben Yagoda’s assertion that the memoir has become the “central form” of this cultural moment. Whether it has, as he also contends, supplanted fiction remains to be seen.

But I hope he’s wrong.

Mavis Gallant

Why do novelists write essays? Most publishers would rather have a novel. Bookshops don’t know where to put them. It’s a rare reader who seeks them out with any sense of urgency. Still, in recent months Jonathan Safran Foer, Margaret Drabble, Chinua Achebe and Michael Chabon, among others, have published essays, and so this month will I. And though I think I know why I wrote mine, I wonder why they wrote theirs, and whether we all mean the same thing by the word “essay”, and what an essay is, exactly, these days.

Reif Larson talks about writing and the unfinished work of Nabokov is discussed.

Javier Marias

“Linked Volume” is a regular post of a hodge-podge of intriguing links on the Internet. Think of it as a breath of fresh air. A break from all music all-the-time. You’ll find links to good articles, maybe a slick piece of artwork, a cool new blog, mixed in with the tunes. A music blog can’t help but touch on other cultural interests. A curious nature is often the best way to create and find good music. Enjoy. Please feel free to e-mail me with suggestions for links. – David D. Robbins Jr.

• BOOK BIO: Famous horror author Stephen King writes a review for the New York Times Sunday Book Review about a new Raymond Carver (pictured above) biography. I’m reading it right now. This book would be a nice present to buy in tandem with the Library of America Carver collection.
• SCIENCE RIFF: Yawwwwwwwwwn. Why do we do it? Apparently, yawning is a sign of our deep humanity writes Steve Jones, genetics professor at University College London.
• FREE TUNES: Needing some good, loud music to get your day off to a good start? How about four free live tracks of Cymbals Eat Guitars at Daytrotter.com? Oh yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. Better than orange juice baby!
• ESSAY: Author Zadie Smith writes about the art of the essay.
• VIDEO: Cool amateur video entitled “Trees, They Move” set to the band Mum’s song “K/Half Noise.” Very stylish. A must watch.
• MOVIES: For the guys, an interview with Eva Mendes, including what she thinks of acting in Werner Herzog’s new movie, “Bad Lieutenant.”
• OF NOTE: The current New York Times Review of Books (not to be confused with the NYT Book Review) features a piece by critic Harold Bloom about 60’s comic creator R. Crumb’s latest work. (No link.)
• POLITICS: Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh writes about Pakistan and nukes for The New Yorker.

.

Miedo de ver una patrulla policial detenerse frente a la casa.
Miedo de quedarme dormido durante la noche.
Miedo de no poder dormir.
Miedo de que el pasado regrese.
Miedo de que el presente tome vuelo.
Miedo del teléfono que suena en el silencio de la noche muerta.
Miedo a las tormentas eléctricas.
Miedo de la mujer de servicio que tiene una cicatriz en la mejilla.
Miedo a los perros aunque me digan que no muerden.
¡Miedo a la ansiedad!
Miedo a tener que identificar el cuerpo de un amigo muerto.
Miedo de quedarme sin dinero.
Miedo de tener mucho, aunque sea difícil de creer.
Miedo a los perfiles psicológicos.
Miedo a llegar tarde y de llegar antes que cualquiera.
Miedo a ver la escritura de mis hijos en la cubierta de un sobre.
Miedo a verlos morir antes que yo, y me sienta culpable.
Miedo a tener que vivir con mi madre durante su vejez, y la mía.
Miedo a la confusión.
Miedo a que este día termine con una nota triste.
Miedo a despertarme y ver que te has ido.
Miedo a no amar y miedo a no amar demasiado.
Miedo a que lo que ame sea letal para aquellos que amo.
Miedo a la muerte.
Miedo a vivir demasiado tiempo.
Miedo a la muerte.

Ya dije eso.

.

.

Fear

.

Fear of seeing a police car pull into the drive.
Fear of falling asleep at night.
Fear of not falling asleep.
Fear of the past rising up.
Fear of the present taking flight.
Fear of the telephone that rings in the dead of night.
Fear of electrical storms.
Fear of the cleaning woman who has a spot on her cheek!
Fear of dogs I’ve been told won’t bite.
Fear of anxiety!
Fear of having to identify the body of a dead friend.
Fear of running out of money.
Fear of having too much, though people will not believe this.
Fear of psychological profiles.
Fear of being late and fear of arriving before anyone else.
Fear of my children’s handwriting on envelopes.
Fear they’ll die before I do, and I’ll feel guilty.
Fear of having to live with my mother in her old age, and mine.
Fear of confusion.
Fear this day will end on an unhappy note.
Fear of waking up to find you gone.
Fear of not loving and fear of not loving enough.
Fear that what I love will prove lethal to those I love.
Fear of death.
Fear of living too long.
Fear of death.

I’ve said that.

.
.
Raymond Carver
Miedo
Traducción de Rigoberto Rodríguez

Ho cominciato a leggere Vuoi star zitta, per favore? tre notti fa, imponendomi non più di tre-quattro racconti per volta. In questo modo spero di riuscire a farmelo durare una settimana circa. E’ dura però, le storie sono troppo belle e amare insieme, troppo ben scritte, troppo rappresentative, emblematiche.

Si tratta dell’ultimo libro di Raymond Carver uscito presso Einaudi, anche se in realtà esso uscì nel 1976 e fu la sua raccolta d’esordio. Ulteriori informazioni sono qui.

Chi già ama Carver deve senz’altro procurarselo; chi non ha mai letto Carver approfitti di questa bella edizione per conoscerlo: dubito ne resterà deluso.

Ah, che bello poter leggere mentre fuori fa freddo e perdersi completamente in quell’Ovest americano pieno di gioie e tristezze effimere.

Seguirà una recensione, perbacco!

]]> http://rosebudbookreviews.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/one-of-the-best-bios-ive-read/ Sat, 14 Nov 2009 19:14:49 +0000 John http://rosebudbookreviews.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/one-of-the-best-bios-ive-read/

Raymond Carver, A Writer’s Life by Carol Sklenicka, Scribner, $35, 578 pages, ISBN 978-0-7432-6245-3

Let me depart from my usual reviews and share a poem with you instead. My only justification is that I want to convey the experience of this wonderful biography rather than talk about it second hand (and I think Carver would understand).

• Gawker asks journalists to just quit it already with their show-offy Raymond Carver-inspired What We Talk About When We Talk About X headlines. The New York Times was the worst offender (and Gawker was next).

• Good news for fans of creepy/cute pen drawings: a “lost” Edward Gorey-illustrated book is back in print. Anything with the word “Deflowered” in the title has stocking stuffer written all over it.  

• Random House Canada hooks up with a boozy new bed partner – Stoneleigh wine bottles will get neck tags recommending book club titles. Very crafty. How do you say no to a nice merlot telling you to stay home and read books? 

• The Guardian’s Stuart Jeffries has a major hate-on for Waterstones and Waterstone returns the favour. I need a Brit to fully explain the stormy relationship between book people and the chain. I can’t peek at TheBookseller.com without getting hit with some serious anti-Waterstones vitriol in the comments. 

• How well do you remember your Judy Blume? A quiz for anyone who ever wanted to write “I GOT IT!!!” on the back of a postcard.

di cletus

Settimana scorsa, per lavoro, ero a Milano. E’ una città che mi piace, e con la quale ho avuto uno di quei flirt a distanza. Ogni volta che ci torno mi sembra sempre più viva, pulsante. A Milano, fino a fine dicembre, c’è un’antologica su Edward Hopper. Non sono riuscito a vederla. Mi riprometto di farlo a Roma, dove è prevista per febbraio 2010. Ho portato con me questo libro, leggendolo nei tragitti in metro.

Cosa ha fatto Aldo Nove ? Semplicemente si è inventato un incontro, fra il pittore e Raymond Carver. Toh, sono due artisti che amo moltissimo, e che a dispetto dell’operazione di Nove, hanno davvero, a pensarci bene, molto in comune. Perchè non giocarci intorno ? Nove l’ha fatto, e ha prodotto questo volumetto nel quale interpone cenni biografici di entrambi, a dialoghi immaginari avvenuti fra i due. Il prodotto è gradevole, sia detto, agile la scrittura e non priva di passaggi che commuovono (come quando entrambi ricordano, seduti al bancone di un bar di una sperduta stazione di servizio, magari proprio quella di Gas, celebre quadro di Hopper), ma c’è qualcosa che non mi ha convinto del tutto.

Il discorso è : va bene, al momento di aprire il libro già le note di copertina (“un incontro immaginario fra Edward Hopper e Raymond Carver”) inducono l’avveduto lettore a sospendere la sua incredulità, come dire “oh, sia chiaro, sto fantasticando eh ?!” ma proprio per questo, forse, il risultato mi è parso deludente. Se affabulazione ha da essere che lo sia fino in fondo. Se decido che quello è il terreno sul quale sviluppare la narrazione, non dico di ricorrere ai neon o agli effetti speciali, ma almeno, proprio inseguendo questo registro, poteva il buon Nove spingersi oltre e affrescare si, ripescando dalla lirica della luce di Hopper, quel senso di “attuale”, come una polaroid ritoccata a pastello, cui Carver (con o senza l’apporto di Lish) ci ha abituato, innescando continue connessioni, queste si molto reali al di là dell’espediente narrativo che ne forza la contemporaneità.

Ecco allora, che finito il testo, forte resta il sospetto che intorno alla personalità e alla complessità di questi due americani, la scelta di farne un testo “provocatorio” si perda, risultando troppo didattica e ingenerando il sospetto che i quattordici euro, per un volumetto di 78 pagine, per carità, ben rilegate, sia sostanzialmente un’appendice molto paracula al battage pubblicitario provocato dalla mostra.

I attended the Southern Historical Association’s annual meeting this weekend, and Jacobpedia had to take a back seat.  I have a couple of posts in the hopper, though, and I should have them up in the next day or two.  For the time being, here are some links:

• Is Philip Roth too prolific?  John Davidson says yes.  On a related note, Allison Block writes that Roth “seems more creepy than inspired” in his latest work.  In a much more positive piece than the previous two, the Guardian imagines American literature post-Roth.
• Joe Posnanski does his usual thing on four newly eligible candidates for the Baseball Hall of Fame.
• Adrian Chen calls for a moratorium on headlines inspired by Raymond Carver’s short story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.  The highlight among the Carver mimicking headlines is  “What We Talk About When We Talk About Pampers.” (H/T mathitak)
• Revolutionary War General Casimir Pulaski has become an honorary U.S. citizen.  I like the sentiment, but it is a little weird to make someone an honorary citizen of a country that didn’t exist (Declaration of Independence notwithstanding) when the person died.
• And, this is my new favorite photograph blog.  Sorry, Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century.

Issa’s Untidy Hut has long been one of my favourite blogs, serving up some of the finest ‘little’ poems from the Lilliput Review, poetic explorations into the lives and art of poets and of course Issa’s Sunday Service. The Sunday Service features a song which bridges the gap between rock and literature in some fashion… it may be a reference, it may be the artist themselves or it may be that the words demand closer attention. However it happens, we all know music and literature are not as far removed as some would like to think.  And now, Issa’s Sunday Service has put the call out for submissions of your favourite LitRock Songs and to make it even sweeter, if yours is selected, you receive the two current issues of The Lilliput Review.

Now as you know, I am a huge believer in Ezra Pound’s famous words:

poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music

so here’s a few of my LitRock recommendations for you to dip into…

And please, drop your suggestions to me as a comment, I am always up for some listening and don’t forget to email them to the Lilliput Review for consideration (be sure to check out the first 27 tracks before emailing).

Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken? – Lloyd Cole & the Commotions

When it comes to Lloyd Cole, there are a number of tracks I could have selected – Rattlesnakes for it’s Simone de Beuvior reference; Perfect Skin for its lyric, Louise is the girl with the perfect skin/ she says turn on the light, otherwise it can’t be seen/ she’s got cheekbones like geometry and eyes like sin/ and she’s sexually enlightened by cosmopolitan; Weird On Me for using a line from Raymond Carver – but I have gone for the lesser known Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken? Originally recorded as part of the Rattlesnakes sessions, I chose this song for it’s wonderful Norman Mailer reference and all round lyricism. And with Lloyd playing Brisbane’s Powerhouse tonight, his words have been circling my brain. Be sure to watch the clip above…

Here’s a snapshot of the lyrics:

Pumped up full of vitamins
On account of all the seriousness
You say you’re so happy now
you can hardly stand
Lean over on the bookcase
If you really want to get straight
Read Norman Mailer
Or get a new tailor

Are you ready to be heartbroken?

(read the complete lyrics here)

It’s Hard to be a Saint in the City – Bruce Springsteen & The E-Street Band

Let’s face it, any song from Springsteen’s first few albums could be included and then there are the tracks from Nebraska & his much overlooked album The Ghost of Tom Joad. The man has penned some of the greatest lyrics of his era. And before I go further into the lyrics of Saint in the City, if you don’t get goosebumps watching this live clip of a young, hungry E-Street Band, tearing up The Hammersmith Odeon on their first tour of Britain, then you need to check your pulse. The way Bruce conducts the whole band here is intense and the guitar duel between he and Little Stevie is white hot. But back to why I chose It’s Hard to be  Saint in the City. Well, it’s purely on the lyric. Springsteen’s early work had that wild, sprawling, carnival feel… all shifting perspectives, haunted visions, streetwise toughness & heady romanticism. Saint is a classic and for mine makes the list every time.

Check out these lyrics:

And the sages of the subway sit just like the living dead
As the tracks clack out the rhythm their eyes fixed straight ahead
They ride the line of balance and hold on by just a thread
But it’s too hot in these tunnels you can get hit up by the heat
You get up to get out at your next stop but they push you back down in your seat
Your heart starts beatin’ faster as you struggle to your feet
Then you’re outa that hole and back up on the street

And them South Side sisters sure look pretty
The cripple on the corner cries out “Nickels for your pity”
And them downtown boys sure talk gritty
It’s so hard to be a saint in the city

(read the complete lyrics here)

Swan Lake – The Church

Steve Kilbey, like Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, Bob Dylan et al. is a poet in his own right. Having released three books – Earthed, Nineveh/The Ephemeron & Fruit Machine – plus the broadsheet, Eden alongside more than 20 albums with The Church (not to mention the myriad other side and solo projects), Kilbey has more than proved his literary credentials. 1992’s Priest=Aura album was a turning point in my own personal history. The albums dense textures and sublime lyricism turned me inside out and set me off in search of poetry. I could have chosen any one of the songs from this album but for now, I will settle with the fragile beauty of Swan Lake.

One night your shoulders will ache
But next day when you wake
You’ll sprout wild wings, and fly high
Just like in Swan Lake

(complete lyrics here)

And for everyone in Australia, don’t forget the band is touring nationally throughout November. Full tour dates are listed on the band’s website.

February – Not Everywhere

Such days, when trees run downwind,
their arms stretched before them.

Such days, when the sun’s in a drawer
and the drawer is locked.

When the meadow is dead, is a carpet
thin and shabby, with no pattern

and at bus stops people retract into collars
their faces like fists.

- And when, in a firelit room, a mother looks
at her four seasons, her little boy,

in the centre of everything, with still pools
of shadows and a fire throwing flowers.

Norman MacCaig

*

Gigha

That firewood pale with salt and burning green
Outfloats its men who waved with a sound of drowning
Their saltcut hands over mazes of this rough bay.

W.S. Graham

*

.

Éramos cinco a la mesa de juego
sin contar al croupier
y su ayudante. El hombre
de junto a mí tenía los dados
en la mano.
Se sopló los dedos, dijo:
¡Vamos, pequeños! Y se inclinó
sobre la mesa para tirar.
En ese momento, una sangre roja brotó
de su nariz, salpicando
el verde paño de fieltro. Soltó
los dados. Se echó hacia atrás pasmado.
Y luego aterrorizado cuando la sangre
corrió por su camisa abajo. ¡Dios mío!
¿qué me está pasando?
gritó. Se agarró a mi brazo.
Oí funcionar los motores de la Muerte.
Pero en aquella época yo era joven,
y estaba borracho, y quería jugar.
No tenía por qué escuchar.
Así que me largué. No me volví ni siquiera,
ni encontré esto dentro de mi cabeza, hasta hoy.

.

Raymond Carver

Sangre