July 2009

July 1, 2009    Godot in New Hampshire

we saw Waiting for Godot last night---don't see much live theater but this was superb.  Over in Lebanon NH, Hanover area so they have the money to hire real first-rate actors.  Happy to report that it really works well after fifty years and on stage.  had only seen parts probably of the old bert lahr version on film.  

I probably just can't read plays very well---but on stage in with these terrific actors it was just superb.  So happy to see that it really holds up, stands up, is as great as its reputation.  Very funny in a steady 

deep belly sort of quiet chuckling mode and then out loud every so often.  Bleak too but/and about as bleak as reaching 65 is pretty much.  For about two hours afterwards we felt that every move we

made was another extension of the play itself.  Good effect.  I know it is also now on broadway and I am positive I enjoyed this performance much more than I would have the one in NY because Celebrity

would interfere with your pleasure in the script and performances.  You are always saying to yourself that is John Goodman playing Pozzo & isn't he great & there is the famous Nathan Lane etc etc.  It

has always been so I suppose in theater---all the greats of the history of theater----and yet our sense of media celebrityhood feels even more distracting and vapid.  Anyway, I enjoyed these actors tremendously and second again your paen of a few weeks ago to these professionals who stay with their careers and survive somehow in a world that is not at all supportive of theater these days.  

July 12, 2009    A Mirage of Salvation  (last page)

Comments on Montano’s Malady----by Enrique Vila-Matas

earlier

If you are reading this,, you are suffering from the illness which the book I am urging upon you is the only cure.  Ok, the only palliative.  Well, then, one of the best of currently available ameliorations.  

We are all, dear reader, sufferers of what Enrique Vila-Matas has name Montano's Malady.  Literature-sickness.  

The book is maddening and delightful, as it should be, I guess, since it purports so much about such important things as literature, art, sickness, death and time.  All the usuals.  And Vila-Matas takes the risk and manages to pull off a magnificent collaging of it all---perhaps a sort of Napoleon pastry of a book---multi-layered thin sheaves interlayered with creamy fillings that are too rich, sugary and overwhelming to be believed.

He gets "everyone" into his labyrinthine pantheon--Cervantes, Sterne, Kafka, Perec, Magris, Musil, Proust, Sebald, Cheever, Walser, Shakespeare, Mann, and Neruda.  What about Nabokov?  Probably, but my head seems to be too dizzy to be sure.  

Pastiche, collage, homage, imitation, invention, allusion, quotation---encyclopedic, repetitive, irritating, fascinating, intriguing, attempting too much, being way too derivative, yet full of its own welter of surprise, original interpretation,  admirable mastery.  Vila-Matas wants to blur and blend all the writing forms---diary, essay, novel, autobiography, dictionary, criticism, poetry, interview, and lecture.  

He divides the book into five chapters---the well-made five act play.  He gives himself a wife, Rosa, a best friend-monster enemy, Tongoy, a pseudonym, and a few pet locations---Valparaiso, 

---later --- from an email---

so that was my first burst of enthusiasm----later my opinion turned---

just finished a spanish novel Montano's Malady by a barcelonan writer--Vila-Matas.  I had really like an earlier one by him Bartleby & Co in which he lines up the lives of lots of writers who announced to the world that they were ceasing to write---Melville's Bartleby, the clerk who says to all 

queries----"I would prefer not to. "  

This malady of Montano's is literature-sickness---perfect for people who read and write too much, or at all--- The book starts well--wittily enough---and then gets further into trying to merge and blend all  forms of writing---diary, journal, novel, essay, travel essay, etc etc---which I think I will like--- but after half way through the whole thing turned sour for me and the narrator just becomes a sort of fussy worrying pain in the ass.  He name drops and imitates "everyone" he can think of---all the writers famous for great journals etc etc --- but then it all becomes too much and too tedious finally.  He doesn't really have enough to say or discover on his own with all of this trickery.  He tries too hard---you can see him performing for the cafe writerly society in Barcelona and south america.  Borges and all that.  He might have had an interesting book had he left out.  All of that Altermodern stuff.  Just a plain old narrative-diary-travel-novel with meditations on books read along the way.

But now I've swung too far in the other direction, haven't I?  I marked and underlined lots of places in the book---lots of fascinating and interesting things said and observed.   

July 14, 2009    Thomas Bernhard--Exhilaration and Elation

Tim Parks' lines on Bernhard I want to get down and post on the blog---

In reading Bernhard, as in reading Eliot and Joyce, we immediately perceive the impasse to which their protagonists are led.  We do not really begin to grasp the true nature of his achievement, however, until we see in his protagonists an ironic version of their author, whose successful encounter with his mediators is an inverted mirror image of their failure.  The typically modernist contrast between the bleakness of the world that Bernhard depicts and the elation that we experience in reading his novels has been well expressed by the English novelist Tim Parks:  “The world described is ugly, the reflections leave no space for optimism, but the mechanism invented for delivering the bad news is never less than exhiliarating.”  He then adds, in a tribute that cannot be improved:  “The antithetical energies unleased in these books lay down a pulse in the reader’s mind, and their prose is as near to unforgettable as any prose I know.”  

Parks---”The Genius of Bad News,” (review of Gitta Honneger’s book) New York Review of Books, January 11, 2007, 46-49 “

            quoted in Thomas Cousineau’s Three-Part Inventions, Newark, University of Delaware, 2008: 169-170.

July 18, 2009    Yes, for sure, readin Vilas-Matas for yourself

Vilas-Matas creates more fun for bookishly inclined readers than anyone else I can think of of late, so discount heavily my earlier slightly grumpy comments about this book and give it a good read.  It has lots of wonderful touches and turns, it stays in your memory with things you keep talking back to it about, and it keeps you pondering what living with, through and in books is all about anyway.  Even what I dismissed as Vila-Matas's tediousness is perhaps the next morning's headline or discovery.