Summer Reading Club: The Master and Margarita

Who wants to read Mikhail Bulgakov’s legendary satire The Master and Margarita? Once again, the Summer Reading Club (we always already have matching satin jackets) is taking on a tome or two. Read the Burgin-O’Connor translation along on this schedule:

Sunday, June 14th, chs. I-IV, pp. 1-45
Sunday the 21th, V-XVI, pp.45-153
Sunday the 28th, big push, XVII-XXVI, pp.154-280
then the last fifty pages, either for Sunday the 5th of July or maybe we get ‘er done before the 4th of July, a natural piece of punctuation for the summer

Open thread below.

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My wife dislikes … Kind of implies there’s more … Specifically more to do … Needing to guess what’s that … About.

I have been reading Juan Goytisolo’s Don Juliàn. He looks ferocious. The book is. It’s hard not to think this … Open, I guess. Open to the front, closed to the back. I don’t know. Just guessing. Writing words. I’ll need to get back at it. Find the thread. Use the needle. Knit a sock.

Gass brought me to Goytisolo. After Don Quixote it is the first book in Spanish I want to finish. It’s a break from Finnegans Wake as well. Halfway through it, it kind of lost me (after the Russian revolution if I recall well). I’ll get back to it. I consider it a …

altivo, gerifalte Poeta, ayùdame : a luz màs cierta, sùbeme : la patria no es la tierra, el hombre no es el àrbol : ayùdame a vivir sin suelo y sin raìces : móvil, móvil : sin otro alimento y sustancia que tu rica palabra : palabra sin historia, orden verbal autónomo, engañoso delirio : poema

Juan Goytisolo, Don Juliàn, p. 118

This bloody keyboard doesn’t even let me put the accents in the right direction! Never mind. Let us stay a bit positive in this world which is fixed to its past and therefore closed to its future.

Friday Afternoon Confessional: Finnegan’s Slumber

If there’s an -ist that applies to me it’s pensivist. Maybe I should go cold turkey on thinking. I confess that the strategy of doing it moderately doesn’t feel like the winning strategy. And what is a strategy if it is not winning. Isn’t it all about winning? It is. It is. It is. Therefore I am. Whether I like it or not. Nobody asked me. Except myself. Precisely nobody, that is.

I’m reading Finnegans Wake. I confess to ambivalence about it. It’s great but makes me feel little. What is the point?, is that the point? It is a snake; it is; it is; it is. But I was bitten long before. Now I’m just rattled. Ha. The beauty of it is: it is self-contained. I read it without trying to understand.

But let me think about the eternal recurrence of the eternal recurrence. I hate it but confess to loving those who seem to love it, or, at least, who love those who love those who seem to love it. The thing is that those who seem to love it are those who break the cycle and, methinks, Finnegans Wake breaks the cycle.

Thus –>

Sunday Stories: Full Gass on Being Open

I’m jealous. So jealous I’m too ashamed to write out all my a’s. Who needs a’s anyway when you’re feeling a straight b? Flat, no capitals. Jealous of Gass, jealous of not letting the bile get out. I self-labeled myself the eternal cultural optimist and one must live up to one’s label nowadays or find no place in society’s shelves; shelf or be shelved, although that sounds better than it means. Such is the story of my life that I have self-censored what probably is my only real aptitude in it: a mild inclination to sarcasm, well-founded in an all-out hatred for ‘the way things are’. I am a self-made man in being the bottle for my own bile – only releasing some of its steam at moments of social stress such as dinner parties or occasions where I’m forced to listen (to dumb people, I wanted to add but one only ever listens to dumb people because only dumb people have a tendency to speak on public occasions).

So, as a matter of self-preservation, I need to find a way to reconcile both bile and optimism, so as to avoid bliss-less eternity too. Here goes the argument. Its form is to neutralize -1 and +1 to leave just N.

Tuesday Hatred of prizes (& the prices thereof)

I hate that Thomas Pynchon did not win the Nobel Prize. It’s not so much that I particularly care who gets it. But Pynchon not getting it means that my scarcely read dialogue with his masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow published here will remain just that: scarcely read. Nobody will discover my insights, nor the post-perfectionist style which I perfected precisely to  be able to write them in, and be able to forward such discovery pointing out to the forwardees how I started this intriguing series of literary collage in tempore non suspecto (i.e. before any wide publication of Mr. Pynchon being hot as far as being a possible recipient of this most elusive of prizes).

Instead, they gave it to a Swede. Go figure. From looking at the possible candidates and recent winners, I would guess that the price to pay for winning the Nobel prize of literature is that one has to be prepared to live far longer than is healthy for the spirit. Maybe one should write a book about writers who have outlived their writing but are in a fierce competition to look as if they are about to die for as long as possible a time. On the one hand, you don’t get the prize if the committee does not feel like you might not be around the next year to get it. On the other hand, there are at least ten people who might get it and who all look like they might not be around next year. Outliving those who are about to die therefore seems to be the key capacity to get the prize.

[The same cannot be said for other prizes such as those of Peace and Economics but, as we all know: it’s more immediately apparent whether a certain action or research has advanced peace or the field of economics than it is whether a book or a poem has lasting value. The former is a matter of one to a couple of years whereas the latter normally would take a couple of centuries at least. One can only hope for the Nobel prize committee that the average life expectancy of writers goes up to 200 years or so soon.]

The essence of my today’s hatred is a counter-factual. This means my hatred is of a purely academic nature. In fact, I hope Mr. Pynchon never gets the Nobel prize for if he never were to get it my dream will remain unchallenged meaning that I can die happily in the belief that it might have come true if only …

The upside of this is that I need to feel under no compulsion to live any longer than I really want to.

Take that, Tomas Gösta Tranströmer!

Mercifully

“…yet there is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to have the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever. May we trust that this blessed ship is bound for some better shore, some undrowned Lemuria, risen and redeemed, where the American fate, mercifully, failed to transpire…” (Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice)

On Reading Infinite Jest

I read a quote once that said the only way you’re going to be able to read Proust is if you want to be reading Proust. I think the same can be said for Infinite Jest. You don’t read it because you want to see “what happens,” but because you enjoy the book’s voice and texture and the weird world it’s creating.

I’ve dipped in and read some of the Infinite Summer posts when I’ve checked on the schedule, and this seems to be the difference between those who enjoy it and those who don’t: the latter want some kind of payoff, either plotwise (in which case they’re terminally disappointed) or, since the plot-based satisfaction so obviously isn’t going to happen, morality-wise (the whole “read it because it will make you a better person” line). The morality aspect seems like a stretch to me, but it might serve a valuable purpose of motivating someone to keep reading until they learn to enjoy the type of novel Infinite Jest is.

And if they don’t? Well, maybe it’s just not their thing. I don’t have any particular stake in whether big thick postmodern novels are people’s thing or not — for me, the value of Infinite Summer is that it’s exposing people to that kind of thing so that they can make an informed decision on whether it’s their kind of thing (even if the conscious goal of the project is more ambitious and therefore dubious than the humble goal of figuring out a way to get people to try something because maybe they’ll like it).

Small press success story

Via IMDB, I stumbled across the following fun fact: Shane Jones’s Light Boxes, published by Publishing Genius, recently had its movie rights purchased by Spike Jonze. This is a huge deal for Publishing Genius, which my friend Adam Robinson founded a few years ago, and will hopefully give PG and small presses more generally closer to the amount of credibility they deserve.

Idea for a new book series

The series would cover notoriously confusing or strange topics and be called the “Seriously, WTF?” series. Titles might include David Lynch: Seriously, WTF? or Quantum Physics: Seriously, WTF?

These books would represent an advance over the “For Dummies” and “Idiot’s Guide” series insofar as they recognize that the obstacle to understanding lies in the object being examined rather than in the reader.

Seed ‘Em If You Got ‘Em

This had to be one of the most tedious torrents ever to create.  A friend of mine completed the download today, and near as he can tell they are all fully functional and complete.

For those without Demonoid access … pity.