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Sunday, January 10th, 2010
I went over to Woody's house last night and watched The Passion of Joan of Arc, which I've seen a couple of times and loved for its visual beauty; I think I may be getting past the gawking and starting to be able to appreciate the tragic beauty of Joan's story. In particular I was noticing something in common between watching this movie and reading The Gospel According to Jesus Christ -- how my understanding of the story is shaped by knowing the lead character will suffer martyrdom. It probably goes without saying (though I don't know if I would have made the connection myself before yesterday) that Joan is a Christ-like figure -- in her story as in Jesus' there is a sense of fatality, that he will go to his death on the cross and she to hers on the pyre because God has set in motion the course of events and it is not subject to change.
Something that had held me off from reading The Gospel According to Jesus Christ was the subliminal fear that it would be mocking Jesus -- I am not a religious man and indeed have been known to appreciate lampoons of religion and of Christianity, but the idea of a life story of Jesus which mocked him was rubbing me the wrong way. I am glad to find my worries were totally misplaced.
posted evening of January 10th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, January 7th, 2010
 Adam Bertocci has written -- on a lark, in order to get some attention for his more serious projects -- a script for The Big Lebowski as Shakespeare might have written it. And what a job he has done! The Knave abideth. Two Gentlemen of Lebowski.
 Update: As of January 9th (quick work!), Michele Schlossberg and Frank Cwiklik have announced that they will be producing Two Gentlemen of Lebowski at the East Village's Kraine Theater (upstairs from KGB Bar) in March, with Mr. Cwiklik directing.
posted evening of January 7th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, January third, 2010
I'm impressed again by Saramago's eye for the details of the story as he looks at Joseph and Mary's predicament -- they are in Bethlehem, 100 km from Joseph's shop and source of livelihood, they need to find a way to feed themselves for the 33 days Mary must remain in confinement following the circumcision of her son. My unresearched understanding of the Nativity sort of has the Magi showing up with their gifts immediately the night Jesus is born (and I am wondering whether the visit of the Magi will figure in Saramago's retelling*) -- I should go look at some source material and see how close this is to the accepted story. Joseph's taking work building the Temple has me thinking of Balthazar working on the Convent. Two passages from this section that I think illustrate the broad range of tone Saramago brings to this story. First a belly laugh:
On the eigth day Joseph took his firstborn to the synagogue to be circumcised. Using a knife made of flint, with admirable skill the priest cut the wailing child's foreskin, and the fate of that foreskin is in itself worthy of a novel, from the moment it was cut, a loop of pale skin with scarcely any bleeding, to its glorious sanctification during the papacy of Paschal I, who reigned in the ninth century of Christianity. Anyone wishing to see that foreskin today need only visit the parish church of Calcata near Viterbo in Italy, where it is preserved in a reliquary for the spiritual benefit of the faithful and the  amusement of curious atheists.
and only a few pages later, Joseph is walking back from the construction site where he has found employment; he passes by Rachel's Tomb, and we get deeply reverent, mournful introspection:
Without so much as a word or a glance, one body separates itself from another, as indifferent as the fruit that drops from a tree. Then an even sadder thought came to him, namely, that children die because their fathers beget them and their mothers bring them into this world, and he took pity on his own son, who was condemned to die although innocent. As he stood, filled with confusion and anguish, before the tomb of Jacob's beloved wife, carpenter Joseph's shoulders drooped and his head sank, and his entire body broke out in a cold sweat, and now there was no one passing on the road to whom he could turn for help. For the first time in his life he doubted whether the world had any meaning, and he said in a loud voice, like one who has lost all hope, This is where I will die.
 * No, it does not.
posted afternoon of January third, 2010: Respond
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Saramago's telling of the trek Joseph and Mary must make from Nazareth down to Bethlehem in the ninth month of Mary's pregnancy, is utterly gripping and fascinating. I had never thought much about this aspect of the Christmas story; Google Maps gives the distance they had to travel as either 155 km (taking the westward route) or 166 km (taking the eastward route) -- perhaps 2000 years ago, on donkey and foot rather than in a car, it would have been shorter to go due south, not sure what the geography is like there. This is a long way to be forced to travel in service of paying taxes to an occupying power! The four canonical gospels do not spend much time on it, I wonder if there is another biblical source for this. I'm moderately surprised to find this book (so far, at any rate) not strongly hostile to religion; prayer in particular is being treated as a vital source of comfort to the impoverished Nazarenes. There is a lot of hostility towards the villagers' patriarchal misogyny apparent, and this misogyny is encoded in much of the prayer; but it isn't seeming to me like this translates directly to an anti-religion stance. A little bit of beauty from the third night of the trek, as the travellers take refuge in a caravansary in Ramah:
That night there was no conversation, no prayers or stories around the fire, as if the proximity of Jerusalem demanded respectful silence, each man searching his heart and asking, Who is this person who resembles me yet whom I fail to recognize. This is not what they actually said, for people do not start talking to themselves like that, nor was this even in their conscious thoughts, but there can be no doubt that as we sit staring into the flames of a camp fire, our silence can be expressed only with words like these, which say everything. From where he sat, Joseph could see Mary in profile against the light of the fire. Its reddish reflection softly lit one side of her face, tracing her features in chiaroscuro, and he began to realize, with surprise, that Mary was an attractive woman, if one could say this of a person with such a childlike expression. Of course her body was swollen now, yet he could see the agile, graceful figure she would soon regain once their child was born. Without warning, as if his flesh was rebelling after all these months of enforced chastity, a wave of desire surged through his blood and left him dizzy.
posted morning of January third, 2010: Respond
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Adam Shatz has published "Wanting to Be Something Else", a review of Museum of Innocence, in the new London Review of Books -- this is the best, most thoroughly developed writing about Pamuk I can remember reading since McGaha. Shatz traces themes of alienation and longing in Pamuk's writing from The White Castle through The Black Book, My Name is Red, and Snow up to the current book, examining what drives his books, where they succeed and where they fall short. This piece is required reading for anyone interested in understanding Pamuk's fiction.
posted morning of January third, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, January second, 2010
The old men lead their sins to pasture,
this is their only job.
They release them during the daytime, and pass the day forgetting,
and in the evening go out to rope them
to sleep with them, warming up.-- from "The Old Indians"
 For a few days I have been reading some poetry from the collection Poets of Nicaragua: a bilingual anthology 1918 - 1979; today I think I found a poet I really dig. Every poem I have read by JoaquÃn Pasos contains images that transfix me with their concreteness and clarity and originality -- "The old men lead their sins to pasture"! "Let us seek out a corner in the air,/ that we might lie down"! 14 of Pasos' poems are online at los-poetas.com, including his magnum opus, "Song of the war of things".
posted evening of January second, 2010: Respond
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Mary put out her hands to receive the earthenware bowl, which, through some extraordinary optical illusion, perhaps due to the light of the sky, was transformed into a vessel of the purest gold.
I started reading Saramago's Gospel According to Jesus Christ last night, the book which precipitated his self-imposed exile from Portugal. Taken aback by the grandeur of the heresy he lays out and by the subtle beauty with which he commits it. His voice describing Galilee and its denizens, and Mary and Joseph, has a familiar ring to it -- this book is very clearly written by the author of Balthazar and Blimunda.By happy coincidence I was at the Brooklyn Museum today and got a chance to look at their collection of James Tissot's watercolors of The Life of Christ -- beautiful, meticulously researched and composed. Tissot is of course coming from a very different place than Saramago. But the commitment to a naturalistic rendering of Christ's life had me thinking of Saramago's work as I looked through this exhibition. A few reading notes: The opening of the novel is a detailed description of a painting of the Passion, it had me wondering whether Saramago is describing a particular existing painting or a fictitious composite work. In the third chapter, when Joseph tells his tale to the council of elders, they send a delegation composed of Zacchæus, Dothan, and Abiathar ("names recorded here to forestall any suspicion of historical inaccuracy in the minds of those who have acquired their version of the story from other sources" -- ha!) to question Mary about her vision; I wonder where Saramago is getting this bit from. The three names are Biblical but I'm not finding any connection to the story of Jesus' conception.
posted evening of January second, 2010: 1 response
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Thursday, December 31st, 2009
The first ten years beginning with the numeral "2" have gone by us! Tomorrow will open the first- ever Anno Domini with the initial digits "201".* I hope this year has treated you well and that the coming one will only be better. Happy New Year, Onwards, Excelsior!
 * (This is carefully phrased in an attempt to be accurate but is in fact wrong.)
posted evening of December 31st, 2009: Respond
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And, well: here are the books I want to read in 2010. Many of these are left over from 2009's list... The deal is the same as before, I'll be adding to this list as the year goes along; if you have any suggestions for me, please leave them in the comments. (Actually the list is now books I plan to be reading in 2011. For the books that were on this list that I read in 2010 and removed from the list, see A Year of Reading.) The List
Novels and stories
- The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov
- City of God by Paolo Lins
- The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk, in Güneli Gün's translation.
- 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
- Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
- The Promised Land by Karel Shoeman
- Die Blendung by Elias Canetti
- The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
- Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa
- Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace
- The Fat Man and Infinity by António Lobo Antunes
- A Wild Ride Through the Night by Walter Moers
- The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar
- Shining at the Bottom of the Sea by Stephen Marche
- The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
- Dusklands by J.M. Coetzee
- Letter from an Unknown Woman by Stefan Zweig
- Casi un Objeto by José Saramago
- Sobre heroes y tumbas by Ernesto Sábato
- Temple of the Iconoclasts by J.R. Wilcock
- El desierto by Carlos Franz
- Where Once Was Paradise by Carlos Franz
- The Art of Resurrection by Hernán Rivera Letelier
- Santa MarÃa de las flores negras by HRL
- How it is by Beckett
- The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale
Non-fiction
Poetry
- Paradise Lost by Milton (or, well, probably not actually.)
- Works and Days by Hesiod
- Theogony by Hesiod
- MartÃn Fierro by José Hernández
- Altazor by Vicente Huidobro
- Spring and All by William Carlos Williams
posted evening of December 31st, 2009: 8 responses
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Well: the theme this year has been the Spanish language, the literature of Iberia and of Latin America. I started out the year reading Borges oral and (the beginning of) Cien años de soledad, and translating the Spanish translation of Saramago's blog, and thinking it's kind of funny that my interest in Spanish should have ultimately been piqued by a Portuguese author. Over the year I've gotten much more comfortable with the language and am just finding it a whole lot of fun to be reading and understanding a language which is not English. Maybe it's connected that I've gotten a whole lot more interested in poetry this year than I ever have been in the past, principally in Spanish-language poetry; at the beginning of the year I was reading Pablo Neruda and GarcÃa Lorca, then I picked up Romantic Dogs, also I spent some time on Ferlinghetti; and just recently I've been spending time with some Spanish and South American poets whom I have not been writing about yet. Not quite sure what it is, but somehow the distance between me and the text imposed by the foreign language seems to make it easier to appreciate the sound of the poetry and to look for the imagery being communicated. This is also the year Sylvia lost interest in having me read her bedtime stories -- early in the year we read The Subtle Knife and The Hobbit (which led to me reading Lord of the Rings on my own and reliving my juvenile frustration with it); after that she was done with the bedtime story ritual. Growing up! My favorite books this year: Elizabeth Costello, Balthazar and Blimunda and The History of the Siege of Lisbon (which together gave me an entirely new picture of Saramago and which have me waiting on pins and needles for The Elephant's Journey), Museum of Innocence, and late entrant The Savage Detectives, which is making me want to read more Bolaño soon.
posted evening of December 31st, 2009: Respond
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