‘In these seemingly anti-literary times, authors tend to do all they can to support literature; Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas is the first I’ve seen to treat it like a disease. That’s not to say, however, that he isn’t supporting the literary in his own way. Rather, it’s just that Vila-Matas’s way of pushing the medium forward is by contemplating whether or not we’re going though a period of literary parasitism because mostly everything Western literature has to utter has been said. If Vila-Matas’s discourse suggests that we might benefit by pushing the current edifice right off a cliff, then consider it tough love.
‘Befitting an author who entertains the notion that contemporary literature amounts to scribbling in the margins of the great works, Vila-Matas seems to be pioneering a strange new genre: the literary essay as novel. The first two of his books to appear in English, Bartleby & Co. and Montano’s Malady, are fine examples. Both translated by Jonathan Dunne and recently published in paperback by New Directions, these books, as any well-written essay might be, are positively saturated with quotes, references, glosses, and other signs of deep research; what’s more, the obvious scrupulousness (even exhaustiveness) with which Vila-Matas has looked into his subject matter seems more appropriate to a critical work than a novel. At a time when more and more novels are including lists of sources and footnotes, Vila-Matas’s books stand out both for their rigor and for making their sources an integral part of the text.
‘In Bartleby & Co. and Montano’s Malady Vila-Matas is grappling with the act of literary creation, and in the process he obsessively stares up at the works of his predecessors. The most important aspect of these two novels is how they are very consciously written from under the shadow of literature; these are books that are not only aware of the debts they owe to great authors—Kafka, Musil, Beckett, Gide, and Robert Walser among them—but that seem to be written desperately, as if the great works make their own existence virtually impossible. Each is trying to understand where the words come from—an author’s life? her imagination? dictated by the divine?—and each is based on the fear that after 2,000 years there may not be that much left to say.
‘Appropriately, the tone taken by the barely named first-person narrators of each novel rests somewhere between droll and depressed, treading a fine line between sarcasm and grief. Usually it’s impossible to tell on which side the narrator stands. When, for instance, the narrator of Montano’s Malady delivers a lecture in which he spontaneously chooses to discuss an affair he suspects is going on between his wife and his best friend (both present), it’s uncertain whether we should laugh along at the elaborate joke or worry that a) it’s true, or b) it isn’t, but this delusional man believes it. It’s similarly difficult to know how to interpret it when the narrator of Bartleby & Co., who is working on a book that consists only of footnotes about writers who didn’t write, informs us that a letter he sent requesting help from the author Robert Derain was never answered, so he has written his own reply and added it in as footnote 20.
‘Though the narrator’s lives revolve around books, they view literature with much ambivalence. Yes, they both read with an austere, at times awe-struck respect, and they clearly wouldn’t trade their reading for anything so transitory as material success or happiness, yet they are all too aware that such a deep love of books is also a burden. Literature is quite baldly linked to a Svevo-esque conception of sickness, and one gets the sense that the narrators have paid a sizable amount for their lifelong intimacy with the written word. They have paid it in terms of obsession, loneliness, and alienation, and perhaps they are living with the dreadful suspicion that they would be better off without books.
‘The narrator of Bartleby & Co. hasn’t written a thing in 25 years. That was when he published his first novel, but his father, angrily believing that the son cribbed from his parents’ troubled marriage, dictated an inscription dedicated to his mother. That was enough to spark 25 years of silence. Now he has decided to write again by penning footnotes to a book not yet written. Is the narrator writing a “real” book? Has Vila-Matas? This is one of the questions that this quietly beguiling novel swirls around.
‘One of the noticeable things about a Vila-Matas novel is how quickly symbols grow obese and references dizzyingly stack up. Watch how fast debris collects around the question “What is writing and where is it?” found on page 3. Two paragraphs down, the narrator tells us of his intention to explore this question what writing is by, ironically, writing an anti-book. On page 4 he links literary anti-creation to transcription by referencing Walser, who couldn’t write because he worked as a copyist. In the next paragraph, this is linked to Melville’s famous “scrivener” Bartleby (thus tying into the title), and then scarcely three sentences later Vila-Matas quotes the critic Roberto Calasso who equates Bartleby and Walser as copyists who “transcribe texts that pass through them like a transparent sheet.” From here the next paragraph tells the story of the narrator’s exit from writing (and the beginning of his life as a copyist) when his father made him transcribe the dedication. The author then discusses Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo, who told everyone that his books were transcribed from stories told him by “Uncle Celerino.” And finally we travel on to the implication that authors are merely the vessels for inspiration, or rather, copyists for the divine. We are on page 7.
‘With all the links and references that there are to keep track of, a novel with as much self-referentiality as Bartleby might easily become suffocating, but Vila-Matas avoids this by making each footnote its own absorbing preserve. It’s quite easy to get caught up in each note as an object in and of itself, and this way each is buffered from the others. You may choose to dive into the rabbit hole of referentiality, but to enjoy this book you certainly don’t have to.
‘Another thing that keeps Bartleby & Co. from gaining oppressive weight is the lightness with which Vila-Matas presents the material. Many of the footnotes read as beautifully crafted, 1,000-word flash stories, and they’re usually shortened or juxtaposed versions of longer pieces. In these, Vila-Matas knows how to give just enough information to make a story meaningful without deflating it—in his artful condescension he often makes something new out of his source material. A wonderful side-benefit of this is that he makes you want to read all the books that he writes about, even (or especially) the nonexistent ones.
‘To see his method in action, take footnote 32, which is essentially a summary of a review written by Borges. Vila-Matas first presents the title of the review, “Enrique Banchs Celebrates Twenty-Five Years of Marriage to Silence,” letting us puzzle over that as he fills in some important background info. After quoting Borges’s definition of poetry at us (“the vehement and solitary practice of combining words that startle whoever hears them”), Vila-Matas is finally ready to return to the title, letting Borges explain that it refers to Enrique Banchs, an extraordinary poet who hasn’t written for 25 years. Then Vila-Matas quotes Borges at length, giving us both a taste of the poet and the critic’s evaluation of him, and finally leaves with this quotation as a conclusion: “His own dexterity may cause him to spurn literature as a game that is too easy.” Vila-Matas has done little more than crib from and reframe the review, yet this has made all the difference—Borges’s review is now Vila-Matas’s story of a poet who quit because the “practice of combining words” was too easy.
‘Virtually all the footnotes in Bartleby and Co. are equally successful postmodern manipulations of literary source material, and in the end this may be what separates this book from a literary essay. Essentially there are no characters worth mentioning in Bartleby and Co., there are no scenes to be set, and there is no real plot—rather than evolve forward in terms of drama, this book evolves forward as an essay might, by increasing elaboration of a central idea. The book is so devoid of the kinds of things typically found in fiction that it all but provokes us to wonder why it is fiction. Beyond a preference for mystery (as opposed to explanation), the only other reason I can imagine for writing this as fiction is the narrator’s tone, which would a require a brave, perhaps depressed author were it to be used in a work of nonfiction. It’s not hard to see why Vila-Matas would want to be distanced from this narrator who is a lonesome, friendless person, a civil servant who occasionally makes deprecating references to the hump on his back and is eventually fired for cutting out on his job to write. At one point he writes about a headache he has just had: “Having recovered from it, I think about my past pain and tell myself that it is a very pleasant sensation when the ache goes away, since then one re-experiences the day when, for the first time, we felt alive, we were conscious of being human, born to die, but at that instant alive.”
‘Being human then is to ache productively. So is to write: “Elizondo proposes that the pain [of a headache] transforms our mind into a theatre and suggests that what seems a catastrophe is in fact a dance . . . a mystery that can only be solved with the help of the dictionary of sensations.” In a similar way the narrator evokes literature as a burden that he could never be separate from and that at times offers him transcendent moments, “a dance out of which new constructions of sensibility may already be arising.”
‘Viewing literature as a monumental headache might be the best answer for a book that asks why writers give up writing, and perhaps Vila-Matas would have had a difficult time making such a point without the help of a narrator. Nonetheless, all the research and creativity that has been brought to bear in making this book probably could have gone into a fine, book-length essay investigating the writers of No. I do believe, however, that even if Vila-Matas himself had written an essay in place of this fiction, he could scarcely have written something more well-built and delightful than this carefully enigmatic work.’ — Scott Esposito
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Further
Enrique Vila-Matas Website
Enrique Vila-Matas @ New Directions
EV-M interviewed @ BOMB
‘Enrique Vila-Matas: A Spanish Literary Phenomenon’
Enrique Vila-Matas @ La Femelle du Requin
‘The Triumphant Humiliation of Enrique Vila-Matas’
‘ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS TAKES A WALK’
‘Things Fall Apart: A Spanish master’s quizzical unravellings.’
‘Welcome to Literature’s Duchamp Moment’
‘Géographies du vertige dans l’oeuvre d’Enrique Vila-Matas’
‘A fictional history unfolds with Borges-like literary machinations’
‘Enrique Vila-Matas’s citadel of the self’
‘Irishness is for other people’
‘ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS: THE LAST WRITER’
‘What He Says about “the Cat”: Enrique Vila-Matas on Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain”’
Buy ‘Bartleby & Co.’
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Extras
Enrique Vila-Matas and Paul Auster in Conversation
Enrique Vila-Matas re: Proust
Enrique Vila-Matas vous présente son ouvrage “Marienbad électrique, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster”
Vila-Matas sobre Robert Walser
Vila-Matas parla de Bolaño
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Interview
In your novels you frequently include real writers as characters. How did you land on this idea?
I read a novel by Peter Handke called Short Letter, Long Farewell [1972] and the protagonist was a young man who visits [film director] John Ford at the end of the story. John Ford gives him some advice and talks to him about the past. When I read this novel 30 years ago, I realized you could include real-life people like Hemingway and Kafka, who could at the same time be fictional characters in a book.
In the past you have collaborated with French artist Sophie Calle, another expert in mixing reality and invention. Do you think contemporary art is fulfilling a need that much modern literature no longer does?
I wouldn’t know how to answer that. However it has been very important for me to open up to contemporary art. In Kassel during [the contemporary art exhibition] Documenta, I saw some things that I did not understand and that got me really interested. Because if I don’t understand something, there’s a door that opens. I like this idea of the spectator creating the work they are seeing.
You’ve said that when you started out as a novelist you didn’t read novels but poetry. How did that affect your writing?
I think it was good for me to have only read poetry, because only writers who are connected with poetry can write good novels. I myself decided to quit writing poetry because I didn’t think I was able to compose a perfect poem. I believe the novel is the literary genre that readers find the most accessible, so I’ve done my best to adapt to what publishers require. However, I believe I’ve never written a conventional novel. The closest I’ve come is Dublinesque [2010].
As a journalist in the 1960s you made up interviews. What was going on?
I did what I did because I needed it. The first interview I had to translate [from English into Spanish] was with Marlon Brando. I was 18 and had just joined a newspaper. If I’d confessed to my boss that I couldn’t speak English, I would have been fired.
The next interview I made up was with Nureyev, because the night before I was supposed to interview him I bumped into him at a bar where we had an argument. If I’d have gone to his hotel the next day to interview him, he would have recognized me.
The third was with Anthony Burgess. I didn’t have the time to carry out the interview and to type it and to send it to the Vanguardia newspaper and have it published the next day. That is why I decided to have my own interview already done before.
The fourth one was with Patricia Highsmith. As always in her interviews, she said nothing of interest. So I decided just to make the whole thing up. It was like being a murderer. Once you’ve killed for the first time, it’s easy to kill again. However, let me just say that in this particular case I did it without being aware that what I was doing was that wrong.
When the interview with Marlon Brando was published I was the only one who knew that I had made it up. But I overheard a conversation in a cafe where a Catalan writer I knew told someone else: “Did you read those idiotic things that Marlon Brando said in the newspaper?” I actually got offended. I had to shut up, but I was offended because I believed that was my text which was being criticized, my creation.
Why did you stop?
I stopped but not because I felt sorry about it. I just started to write fiction instead. In France they believe that was the origin of my literary vocation, but I don’t think that’s the case.
You’ve written about Odradeks, the word coined by Kafka for strange, spool-like creatures with mysterious powers. Do you have one of your own?
A friend gave me a real one done with little threads. It’s at home on the floor in my hallway. The lady who comes to clean my apartment is from Bolivia and when I told her about this object that I like to have conversations with she smiled as though she was thrilled by the idea. Then she said: “At last, something normal in this house.”
Do you think art requires certain compromises with reality?
Which reality? If you mean the conventional “consumerist reality” that rules the book market and has become the preferred milieu for fiction, this doesn’t interest me at all. What really interests me much more than reality is truth. I believe that fiction is the only thing that brings me closer to the truth that reality obscures. There remains to be written a great book, a book that would be the missing chapter in the development of the epic. This chapter would include all of those—from Cervantes through Kafka and Musil—who struggle with a colossal strength against all forms of fakery and pretense. Their struggle has always had an obvious touch of paradox, since those who so struggled were writers that were up to their ears in fiction. They searched for truth through fiction. And out of this stylistic tension have emerged marvelous semblances of the truth, as well as the best pages of modern literature.
This sentiment is very similar to something you’ve written — “where there is a mirage there is life” — and it reminds me of something I heard you say in an interview: that for the modernists the quest is rectilinear, in contrast to that of Ulysses, whose quest was a circle. In your books, what inspires this search?
In a movie by Wim Wenders, Nicholas Ray says “you can’t go home again.” Sometimes I think about this phrase, and in order to calm down I imagine myself as a Chinese who came home. “I’m just a Chinese who returned home,” wrote Kafka in a letter. Sometimes I wish I were this Chinese, but only sometimes. Because the truth is that what I write frequently brings me to a descent, a fall, a journey within, an excursion to the end of the night, the complete opposite of a return to Ithaca. In short, I long to journey endlessly, always in search of something new. Always alert.
Your books are very different from Hemingway’s, and your influences—Borges, Kafka, Musil, for instance—didn’t write like Hemingway either. Why did you originally set out to emulate him when you went to Paris, and what do you think of him now?
I continue to admire him as a storyteller and as a great sculptor of language. But the truth is that Hemingway isn’t among my favorite writers. Be that as it may, I read A Moveable Feast at fifteen years of age in what was then a very provincial Barcelona, and it instilled in me a grandiose desire to go to Paris and live the “life of a writer,” just like Hemingway. Some four years later I in fact succeeded in living this writer’s life in the garret that I rented from Marguerite Duras. And now, if Hemingway (as he affirmed in A Moveable Feast) could say that in Paris he was “poor and very happy,” I, on the contrary, can only say that at the end of my experience I was poor and very unhappy. Still, after much time and the writing of Never Any End to Paris my unhappiness has become a true moveable feast—in this case of my memory and my imagination.
What role has anxiety played in the creation of your works?
When it grows dark we always need someone. This thought, the product of anxiety, only comes to me in the evenings, just when I’m about to end my writerly explorations. By contrast, the day is completely different. As I write I control my anxiety and anguish thanks to the invaluable aid of irony and humor. But every night I am subdued by an anxiety that knows no irony, and I must wait until the next day to rediscover the blend of anguish and humor that characterizes my writing and that generates my style. “The style of happiness,” as some critics have called it.
To finish up, given that your books frequently deal with other writers, I’d like to ask you about your friendship with Roberto Bolaño, who, as you know, has become a very popular writer in the United States. Did the friendship leave traces in your literature?
Meeting Bolaño in 1996 meant that I no longer felt alone as a writer. In that Spain, which was trapped in a provincialism and an antiquated realism, finding myself with someone who from the very first moment felt like a literary brother helped me to feel free and not consider myself as strange as some of my colleagues would have me believe. Or maybe it was the opposite: I was stranger still. We laughed together very much. We wrote letters to imbeciles and we talked of a beauty that was short-lived and whose end would be disastrous.
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Book
Enrique Vila-Matas Bartleby & Co.
New Directions
‘In Bartleby & Co., an enormously enjoyable novel, Enrique Vila-Matas tackles the theme of silence in literature: the writers and non-writers who, like the scrivener Bartleby of the Herman Melville story, in answer to any question or demand, replies: “I would prefer not to.” Addressing such “artists of refusal” as Robert Walser, Robert Musil, Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Duchamp, Herman Melville, and J. D. Salinger, Bartleby & Co. could be described as a meditation: a walking tour through the annals of literature. Written as a series of footnotes (a non-work itself), Bartleby embarks on such questions as why do we write, why do we exist? The answer lies in the novel itself: told from the point of view of a hermetic hunchback who has no luck with women, and is himself unable to write, Bartleby is utterly engaging, a work of profound and philosophical beauty.’ — New Directions
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Excerpt
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p.s. Hey. ** scunnard, My complete pleasure, sir. Everyone, This past weekend’s Soft Territories showcase had/has a fraternal twin showcase that you should check out to get the biggest picture. Find it here. ** Adem Berbic, Well, hey there, Adem. Ah, it’s set. Hold on. Everyone, Adem Berbic and his compatriot Alex Abrahams and others have launched an exciting new publishing house called Porters, and their first two titles are born. Go read about them and possibly order them by heading over here. Congrats, bud. Cool that you made it to Thomas’s et. al’s reading. He was just over here visiting us Parisian transplants as you may know. I’m good, Z’s good. Just basically non-stop film stuff as usual. Mm, the Chicago screening is on the 17th and we’ll likely go there a day or two earlier, so I don’t know … we might be here at the very, very beginning of your visit possibly. I hope so. Hugs back. ** Steeqhen, Hey. From every single thing I’ve heard of Taylor Swift she seems like the absolute epitome of mediocrity to me. She makes Elton John seem like the Velvet Underground. But I’m all for getting pleasure where you need to. Glad Jared’s post spoke to you. No, I have yet to play ‘Stray’. It’s coming though. I’ve never played any Steam games. I try to avoid playing on my laptop because I’m too wedded to it otherwise. Luck with the bookshop job hunt. I think the Paris stores are just reopening now. ** Dominik, Hi!!! The park was Efteling in the Netherlands, my favorite park. It was really great. Have you been to Prater yet? Our temperature is sinking by the day. I hope yours is reaching friend status too. Most of the upcoming screenings are in the US, but it looks like there’ll be one in Europe and maybe one in Paris too. We’re waiting for the verdicts. Uninterested twink = god? Love pirouetting everywhere he goes, G. ** Misanthrope, Sounds like a solid birthday. Nice. Holy moly, amazing about your mom! Wow, what a giant relief. Wow. On the other hand, David sounds like he’s in serious, latter stage junkie mode. Let’s hope he secretly realises that. Life here is its usual self, which is fine. But a bunch of film-related traveling is coming up before too long. ** jay, Cool. Kier’s great. He/they did the cover of ‘I Wished’ as you may know among many other large accomplishments. The Kristof novel trilogy is a masterpiece, says I, and definitely in my top five novels of all time, so, yes, I think you should read all three if you like ‘The Notebook’. My favorite is the second one, ‘The Proof’. My weekend passed without a hitch. Yours? ** Mari, Very happy you liked the post, and I’m sure Jared is too. So did you make progress with the color work knitting? Socks for me?! I have this stupid allergy to clothing and dyes so I have to wear organic clothes, which is very boring, but I have these very thin organic socks that you can slide regular socks over easily without turning your feet into lumps unsuitable for shoes, so, long story short, if you ever make me socks, I can even wear them! Thank you. I hope your weekend was everything a weekend can be at its happiest. ** Hugo, Well, happy if I nudged into theme park visiting. Ghost rides aren’t scary at all. Even the cheesiest horror movie is a hundred times scarier. They’re just outsider art with a gloomy pretence. I don’t know MR X Toon, but I’ll look for his stuff. August is not a rich time for exhibitions, but I can recommend Ramelzee @ Palais de Tokyo, Alain Guiraudie @ Fondation Cartier, and Rick Owens @ Palais Galliera. ** Nicholas., Hi. I think I’m kind of blank when it comes to those things, yes, I suppose so. You make me want to go to Paris’s only Chipotle, and maybe I will. ** Steve, Interesting: that documentary. Well, yeah, seems like the least they can do is mail those things to you. It’s a fucking bank, they can afford it. ** _Black_Acrylic, Wow, that’s quite a gig your brother has there. It sounds big. I saw the American Apparel doc, yeah, wow. I knew some people who worked there at the big building in downtown LA, and let’s just say, yes, spot on. ** Darby 🍝, Whatever’s on that plate, if it’s a plate, looks good. Yes, I did enjoy it. ‘That’s harakiri’, gotcha, I’ll go there. And do the youtube ‘Messes’ experience too. Thank you! Yes, come to Europe. And don’t leave France off your agenda, or at least not Paris. Well, of course we should meet in person. Absolutely! That would be a joy! That link didn’t take me to the keychain, but I’ll find it. Haha, yes, I would say Trent Reznor is plenty awkward, and never more so than when Gary Numan is imitating him. Good pasta, one hopes? ** Roma, Very happy you liked the post and the stuff. ‘The Cat Lady’ … that’s a game? My next game is ‘Stray’ about a stray cat, so they seem like they would be a handy couple. ** HaRpEr //, It’s the same with Nathalie Sarraute. When people even know who she is, it’s always because of her memoir ‘Childhood’, which is extremely not her best work. Oh, David Trinidad! Excellent. Yes, he totally singular. So happy you like his work. He’s a very long term friend and colleague of mine since youth as you probably know. Good, staying productive is the key, or it always is for me. If I’m working and into it, the rest feels like it will fall into place even when it’s actually falling apart, haha. ** Okay. Today I spotlight an excellent novel by Enrique Vila-Matas that I’m guessing a bunch of you don’t already know? See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 
Hi!!
I’ve never read anything by Enrique Vila-Matas. Thank you so much for this!
Ah, Efteling – of course! I’m not surprised it didn’t disappoint – it looks mind-blowing! And yes, I’ve visited Prater! I went before opening hours because I was curious to see how eerie it would be with its creepy retro design when empty (quite) and then watched as it came alive around me. There’s one ride I didn’t try but would like to at some point – a newish-looking 3D clown dark ride.
I can’t complain; our temperature here is very friendly now as well.
I can’t wait to learn more about the upcoming screenings! Are you going to attend them all?
Uninterested twink = god, definitely.
How sweet of love! Love not finding anything at his local grocery store because it’s been rearranged, Od.
Hey Dennis. It’s been a long absence between extended birthday celebrations, brief travels and then an odd sickness that completely took me out, but I figured this was the best spot for me to come back in, given my love for Bartleby. The longer my absence, the more I tried to stitch together my notes and responses until the whole thing fell apart under the weight of its own contrivance and I figured that doing a response to the post alone was probably a better way to ease back in. As with many of the posts, I’ve never heard of this and am adding it to my list. Your recommendations usually make it past the noting down stage, and of particular recent enjoyment are Schluter and Elorriaga. Speaking of books titled after others, I recently saw a poetry collection floating around titled, ‘Destroy Dennis Cooper’ and thought you might want to know. There’s no information out about it that I can find but it seems to be vaguely complimentary. Wanted to go to the Chicago screening but it’s on a day that makes it harder to attend. Hoping to catch a screening before the year is out, or at least to catch it online somewhere.
Hey Dennis! Wow, this book looks so, so good. I’m going to check if it’s available near me before reading that extract, just to avoid spoiling myself.
I did know Kier did the I Wished cover, it’s really great. I love all your covers, but that one’s especially cool. Your Japanese covers are also really, really cool, but I have no idea how much of your input those had. He/they has an amazing tumblr blog I follow too, that’s half retro bondage/hosiery pornography and half great 3-part movie frames.
Phew, about The Notebook. I was totally transfixed by the perspective/total neutrality of the first book, so it’s a relief to hear the other books are good too. Your recommendations are always amazing, most of my to-read list is from your “all-time favourites” list. Anyway, good day to you. Adios!
Hi Dennis, thanks again for being part of Soft Territories! It was really positive and great to readwhat everyone had to say. Very much could not have happened without your support (duh). Oh Bartleby! I remember writing a bit about it in my book… something about the I’d prefer not to-ness in relation to art and undoing? Anyway thanks again and thanks for the Delere shoutout as well.
Pretty sure that Bartleby has been featured here on the blog previously, maybe in the distant past? I know I’ve been wanting to read this book for the longest time.
I love Enrique Vila-Matas. I read the above novel, and I had to get and read the others. I have a special section on my bookshelf for his titles. Just a superb and fun read.
Ah, cool to get to meet an unfamiliar (to me) Spanish author before my move out there. Only a week & a half to go. Can’t wait.
The stuff in the intro about the burnout of western lit is interesting, but in my view the way to counter that is to look outside the western (& written) confines. The way the Dadaists & surrealists looked to “the primitive” & came out rejuvenated. The stuff Péret & Tzara wrote after encountering non-western poetry was quite a quantum leap for them. And the visual artists too—Picasso’s “African period” is some of his best work. And I know, everything always comes back around to ethnopoetics with me. Guilty.
On the subject of Spain, I had an idea for a potentially interesting day for your blog. Taking Lorca’s definition of the duende as a starting point, I’d give various international examples of works that strike me as rife with duende—poems, songs, visuals. Call it something like “Duende Correspondences”. Would something like that be of interest?
Did you end up watching those suicidal Seine bathers? (great band name, those last three words…)
Eep, I was wary that might be the case. Well, I’ll keep my eyes peeled and drop you a comment or an email closer to the time. I heard maybe there’s gonna be a big protest on the 10th so perhaps the Eurostar will get firebombed or something anyway. But fingers crossed.
The above really makes me wanna grab a copy of Bartleby & Co — I’ve been in more of a readerly, writerly, existerly mood in the last week than I have for a while. Long may it last.
Hugs for the shoutout, and for nothing in particular as well.
Hello!
I found what he said about novels being “the literary genre that readers find the most accessible” really interesting. I have found poetry to be difficult for me to read, much less understand, but reading that has really motivated to try again. I remember spending a lot of time in school learning about poems, but it never clicked me for me.
Unfortunately didn’t get to knit much at all this weekend (ￗ﹏ￗ ) I was driving all over the place. I did get to explore a little of the Bay Area though (and got more yarn). I find driving with loud music to be extremely mediative, even when experiencing small bursts of road rage. I assume you don’t drive in France? Do you miss California freeways?
Wow that must make shopping a bit of pain! But worry not as they are so many yarns out there I think I could find a perfect one, no foot condoms needed! Are you allergic to wool too?
Wishing you happy start to the week, Dennis! ᕙ(⇀‸↼‶)ᕗ
*Poof* Ah hum interesting I think that “Blank Space” I call it the white hot room now a days as its past like a mind palace and more a furnace of creation and death and rebirth that might be personal haha anyways I think you’ll get that too. So I basically had this idea when I was a kid randomly one night that I was just gonna Collapse every version well the best versions of myself into one and I think its worked for sure(we see where that’s gotten me haha). Back to that blank feeling or well hum human design says its actually like we take from the personalties of those present or people we like and its added to the amalgam that makes us whole. So its past mirroring and a type of well adaptation and synthesis clearly an empathic talent let’s say. So I literally believe with well access to A white hot room and that sort of empathic channel open all the time for better or worse makes for a pretty solid combination to be able to wing it in life especially if you like me are also a möbius coil of selves and really hot idk what I’m so worried about all the time! anyways hum what’s your blank like? Im actually well I oscillate between high thinking and then applied action + intention and now more rest periods I run so hot it’s easy to burn out lol. Hum what am I getting at Cooperation boy probably! Omg that’s so funny Paris has one chipotle I make all my chipotle at home and its made me so skinny Im afraid to eat outside food not candy tho ill be right back so ttylxox im kinda sick either from smoking or walking around alot everyday all summer lol time to rest!
Haha even with my blinding nostalgia for her country pop and my love of folklore/evermore, I also have to agree that whatever this album sounds like, it will be mid and nothing artistically interesting, but i will certainly end up enjoying at least 3 or so of the tracks enough to feel embarrassed by my end-of-year album statistics! And I am happy to hear that you also find Elton John egregiously bleh; I was once stuck on a 3 hour bus from Dublin to Cork at 1-4am, with no phone power and stuck with the bus driver’s Elton John playlist on loop…
I went to a pub quiz with my friends tonight, we came 4th, but were 1st for about 2 rounds, and lost by 5 points… I forgot how good I am with trivia but was so antsy that I ended up fucking up 2 or 3 questions. Still, there’s next week!
I used to be the same with Steam, but since obtaining a PC for extremely cheap 2 years ago, I’ve become such a PC snob! I tend to only get Nintendo exclusives on the Switch, which is very seldom due to their tightness on resale copies and their lack of good sales compared to Steam or other consoles. I’ve modded my 3ds so basically anything from 3ds/DS/GB(A)/SNES I play there, and anything from consoles up to the 6th(? ps2/xbox/wii) generation of gaming I play on PC emulators. I do have an issue though with playing games on my laptop; specifically clicker or idle games. Cookie clicker, the likes. There’s 2 that are my go to: NGU Idle (which i have about 300 hours in) and Leaf Blower Revolution (with a crazy 700 hours). I finally opened up LBR after a year or two of avoiding it, and it’s totally overwhelmed my brain with how many tasks and things to do and work on, and how much idling and farming you need to do… It’s perhaps the bane of my existence and has stifled so much of my willpower and time that could be committed to creating.
Such a stressful day! The bank insisted that I had to come up and look over my parents’ possessions in person, but they also told me I could no longer stay at their house and needed to get a hotel. After a lot of conversation, they seemed to understand that apart from the books, almost everything there belonged to my parents. (Following college graduation, I never spent more than a month at a time at their house.) They agreed to ship the books – I’ll give them the address tomorrow. But the prospect of a 24-hour trip to my hometown where I would have to stay at a hotel was very daunting.
Pigeons really enjoy sitting on my fire escape, but they can’t comprehend that the glass window is solid! It’s odd to see them repeatedly bump their heads on it, trying to get through the window.
Ooh, this book looks right up my alley, and I love all of the writers cited. I’m fascinated by the idea of silence in literature, and of course by Blanchot’s writings about it (he even discusses ‘Bartleby’) and how the act of writing is a form of echoing that which cannot cease speaking, and to echo it is to silence it, because I guess to silence everything is to attempt to make sense of it or something. Or even just making sense of why you wanted to write it in the first place. I have Blanchot quotes written down in a notebook and there’s sometimes a split second where I feel that I entirely understand them, but then I start to think he meant something else. Though I guess that might be insignificant when a lot of his philosophy is about forgetting haha.
Yeah, I’m sort of getting better about trying to silence a lot of the external factors that make me a wreck and just basking in the good moments. I’m going to be meeting new people and doing new things and it’s easy for me to forget that there’s fun to be had. Summer is strange. Post Christmas and summer are when I get the most reflective, and the rest of the year I eschew that. But I think Fall is coming soon and I can’t wait. Me and you are both big Halloween enthusiasts so there’s never been a year when I haven’t been virtually inspecting the ground for signs of the first fallen leaves anyway. But summer is so claustrophobic and fall coming feels like being able to breathe freely for the first time in forever. You normally head back to L.A. in October right? Planning on checking out any haunts?
I picked a good day to check back in on the site. Just bought my tickets to the Chicago RT show!
hey man,
Great day on an author I’ve been aware of but not read yet, hopefully this will be the push I need. I could really do with something energising to read.
I’m assuming at some point Room Temperature will be available to stream/buy? Was there any plans for a London showing? I’ve not been very good at keeping up with anything for a while but I think I’m clawing my way back.
Anyway, I hope you’re well and secretly writing a new novel…
tomk
I saw Weapons this week and I liked it. It really does not have most of the stuff that bothers me in contemporary horror films. It’s fun to see with an audience and hear their reactions. It’s like some of the better Stephen King things, where it is a whole town of shifting perspectives reacting to an odd event.
The movie theater I go to plays surprise horror films on Mondays. Tonight’s was a New Zealand film called Grafted which I was surprised to like so much. It’s about a medical student who knows the secret to seamless skin grafting and uses it to steal the face and identity of people she kills. There is a lot of stuff that’s usually annoying where characters will just state themes out loud but it works. The tone is very soap opera melodrama and the scifi element is very pulpy, like 1950s level of unscientific nonsense, but it doesn’t lean into being very silly and arch and camp like other stuff with those elements would. The gore effects are quite good.
Yet another new-for-me literary figure from this blog. What caught my eye most was his casual statement that he didn’t understand some contemporary art. It’s rare for literary figures to say of their own volition that they don’t understand something that they consider important.
How are you holding up in the heat? Also very hot here but there is AC.
I’m busy with the new literary magazine + line of poetry readings. We’re managing to grow without ego clashes getting in the way. I hope that continues. I’m going to read a translation I did of Paul Cunningham into Hebrew later this week. It’s a safe bet this is the first translation of his work into Hebrew.
Trying again, looks like a technical problem.
Yet another new-for-me literary figure from this blog. What caught my eye most was his casual statement that he didn’t understand some contemporary art. It’s rare for literary figures to say of their own volition that they don’t understand something that they consider important.
How are you holding up in the heat? Also very hot here but there is AC.
I’m busy with the new literary magazine + line of poetry readings. We’re managing to grow without ego clashes getting in the way. I hope that continues. I’m going to read a translation I did of Paul Cunningham into Hebrew later this week. It’s a safe bet this is the first translation of his work into Hebrew.