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Saturday, August 7th, 2010
Today, I finished reading Super Sad True Love Story. Today, Michael Woods reviews Super Sad True Love Story for the Times Book Review (inspiring Molly Fischer to wish for "someone to love me as the Times loves Gary Shteyngart"). It's a good, insightful review of a good, insightful book. (I wish the review did a little less summarizing of the story-line though.) When I opened the book and read the first pages, I was thinking this was going to be a magnificent book. It started feeling overly scripted, a little plodding, somewhere in the first third of the book... but by the last hundred or so utterly gripping pages, it had won me back completely. I find the Times' love for Shteyngart well directed.
posted morning of August 7th, 2010: Respond
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Wednesday, August 4th, 2010
 Today was a good day in California.
posted evening of August 4th, 2010: Respond
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 | So we all think we don't want genre, we want to be anti-genre or perhaps hybrid, but since these are genres too, let us think about what it means to really go genreless. To go genreless in our contemporary publishing environment is to make a work without a ‘document map', without a diagram, without a blueprint. Without a sales category. A work such as this has no overview or topography. It can't be nicely summarized. It cannot be publicized, because it lacks ‘publicity'. In place of publicity it has secrecy, distortion, obscurity, waste. It is a waste product. | |
Así pensamos todos que no queramos gnero, queremos ser contra-género, tal vez híbrido. Pero como esas también son géneros, consideramos qué significa él, actualmente sin género. Ser sin género en la industría editorial contemporanea es escribir una obra sin «mapa de documento» o programa, sin diagrama. Sin categoría de venta. Tal texto no tiene ningún descripción topográfica. Y no se puede buen reducir. No se publica porque la «publicidad» lo falta. En lugar de publicidad tiene silencio, deformación, oscuridad, desperdicio. Es basura. |
Looking at Christopher Higgs' post today at bright stupid confetti led me along to this essay, "Problems after genre" by Jovelle McSweeney, and somehow hit on the idea of rendering it in Spanish. I wonder if this will improve my ability to speak and compose in Spanish. The first effort sounds a little strained, not such a natural tone. More of the essay below the fold.
El problema genérico
por Jovelle McSweeney
Así pensamos todos que no queramos género, queremos ser contra-género, tal vez híbrido. Pero como esas también son géneros, consideramos qué significa, actualmente sin género. Ser sin género en la industría editorial contemporanea es escribir una obra sin «mapa de documento» o programa, sin diagrama. Sin categoría de venta. Tal texto no tiene ningún descripción topográfica. Y no se puede buen reducir. No se publica porque la «publicidad» lo falta. En lugar de publicidad tiene silencio, deformación, oscuridad, desperdicio. Es basura.
Ser sin género no tiene por supuesto ningún lugar acerca de la editorial tradicional, convencional; y es también afuera de la rúbrica formalista que gobierna la publicación de la más prosa «vanguardista.» Esquematicia es lo que da «rigor» lógica al escrito vanguardista. Sin género es sin rigor, claro. Salvo el rigor mortis. Muchos de los sinónimos con los cuales la vanguardia se llama arreglanselas con coger el movimiento sobre la basura, limitado a los intersticios confusos de la mente. Aún la hibridación trae con si un sabor muy ordenado, un sabor exonorando del corporate-scientismo verde y izquierdo.
Todo quieren un género, aunque uno novelo, sobre todo uno novelo. Género parece un equipo; puedes batear para tú género.
Ser desfallecendo, siendo sin forma y sin género -- comer la placenta, mierda en las cejas obtener... ahora te metes de verdad en líos. Para obtener un número ISBN, la editorial debe a ti un género marcar. La falta de género significa que tus obras no se venden. Para tener lugar en los catálogos y indicias debes parecido algún género realizar. Uno sin género no entra nunca en el registro. Para pedir una estación en la conferencia AWP, debes marcar a cuál género pertenece la lectura. Sin género no puedes hablar. Solicitud de trabajo requiere una prueba de algún competencia genérica. La falta de género expone incompetencia.
Pero ¿qué es la escritura sin género? ¿Qué puede ser? Se ve el más fácil un montón de escritura tenienda género, género tan excesivo, tan plural que es sencillamente desordenado y incoherente. Es decir, «it's whack, like crack», como nos asegura Whitney Houston. Y (como ella también afirma) si era adicta, ¿dónde estan los recibos? No cuadrandose las cuentas, faltan los recibos. Ahora se hace uno un tipo adicto. Solipsismo y retardación reemplazan la forma ortodoxa. Vergüenza, deterioración, decadencia. Y sin embargo ese problema diagnosticar requiere usar palabras de finanza: tal cuentas son desequilibradas. No pueden explicarse. No se ganan compensación; o peor, no tienen ninguna compensación propia. Pierden tiempo, pierden el tiempo del público.
Si una obra era infestada por género hasta que no tiene género, tal vez no puede mantenerse. Puede suicidarse muchas veces, pero cada vez despierta y descubre que aún existe -- lo cual le da asco, y tambíen a todos otros.
↻...done
posted evening of August 4th, 2010: 1 response
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Tuesday, August third, 2010
I happened on a new web-comic today, new for me and only a few months past its inception: it is Jonathan Rosenberg's Scenes From a Multiverse. Rosenberg also draws Goats, funny but currently on hiatus. (Thanks for the link, dad!) Multiverse is updating every day Monday-Friday and has an interactive feature where readers can vote on which parallell universe to revisit next week -- currently the "Sciencemastering Lair" universe appears to be the most popular, veering as Rosenberg warns, "dangerously close to a storyline."
posted evening of August third, 2010: 1 response
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Reading Super Sad True Love Story is a bit like going to the sauna -- the steamy immediacy of Lenny's diary entries alternating with the icy removal of Eunice's GlobalTeens account. I had been thinking the diary entries were not believable as diary entries and the GlobalTeens not believable as chat/e-mail messages; but halfway through I'm re-thinking this. I realized today that I don't have any clear idea what the method for entering text into one's äppärät is; the verbosity and the correct spelling of the GlobalTeens messages becomes much more believable when I take into account that Eunice and her friends are not using keyboards, that some kind of word recognition is happening inside the computer. I'm curious now about what it might be -- I'm pretty sure they are not composing the messages by speaking to their äppäräts.
posted morning of August third, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, August first, 2010
Lönnrot: Hello, Zunz --
Zunz: Inspector Lönnrot?
L: Yeah -- I hope you don't mind me calling at this hour, but ah... I was just wondering if you managed to turn up anything on the ninth attribute of God yet.
Z: The ninth attribute of God?... Well yes, it's the immediate knowledge of everything that will exist, exists or has existed. ...Is everything all right, inspector?
I was interested to find out the other day that Death and the Compass had been adapted into a movie a few years ago, and that the movie is watchable online. It is adapted by Alex Cox, who directed Repo Man, and the (amazing) soundtrack is by Pray for Rain, a band which has apparently been around since the eighties.Cox directs this piece masterfully -- I am in awe of his adaptation, which took off in a direction I was not expecting at all, but which had me believing by the end of the movie that Scharlach was speaking words Borges had written -- Cox' screenplay has drunk of the same well Borges was going to when he wrote this. The radical deviations from Borges' storyline only serve to make it a better movie, truer to the original. You can watch the movie online at dailymotion.com; I recommend it highly.
 An interview with Cox about how he picked this story.
posted evening of August first, 2010: 7 responses
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We dropped Sylvia off today for her first vacation away from home -- she's spending the next two weeks at Journey's End Farm Camp in Sterling, PA. Here she is with her bunkhouse counselor Michaela, in the sunflower patch just outside her door... (Click the image for more camp photos.)
posted afternoon of August first, 2010: Respond
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In today's New York Times, Orhan Pamuk describes the view of Istanbul that he sees through his office window -- the Blue Mosque and behind it the opening of the Bosporus. "To the popular question inquisitive guests and visiting journalists ask — 'Doesn’t this wonderful view distract you?' — my answer is no. But I know some part of me is always busy with some part of the landscape, following the movements of the seagulls, trees and shadows, spotting boats and checking to see that the world is always there..." Illustration by Matteo Pericoli.
posted morning of August first, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, July 31st, 2010
I'm eating up Super Sad True Love Story.... A couple of reactions to it, but first a brief passage that I think illustrates what a great rush reading this book is. (i.e. if you don't like this, don't bother with the book, and vice versa.)
My äppärät pinged.
CrisisNet: DOLLAR LOSES OVER 3% IN LONDON TRADING TO FINISH AT HISTORIC LOW OF 1€ = $8.64 IN ADVANCE OF CHINESE CENTRAL BANKER ARRIVAL U.S.; LIBOR RATE FALLS 57 BASIS POINTS; DOLLAR LOWER BY 2.3% AGAINST YUAN AT 1¥* = $4.90
I really needed to figure out what this LIBOR thing was and why it was falling by fifty-seven basis points. But, honestly, how little I cared about all these difficult economic details! How desperately I wanted to forsake these facts, to open a smelly book or to go down on a pretty young girl instead. Why couldn't I have been born to a better world?
I can honestly see how I could go either way about this -- it could seem self-indulgent and silly; but instead I'm feeling for Lenny, caring about his histrionic soliloquies. Rayyan Al-Shawaf at The Millions complains that Shteyngart's broad satire produces one-dimensional, artificial characters -- but to be honest that's sort of what I'm expecting from Shteyngart based on Absurdistan and The Russian Debutante's Handbook -- it's a feature, not a bug.
Possibly of interest in this connection, I'm seeing some points of connection between this book and A Visit From the Goon Squad -- a hugely different book, and one comparatively much more concerned with drawing characters than with biting social satire. It's possible I'm making this up -- but there seems to be a common theme between the two of them. In both books authentic communication is dying, its place being taken over by superficial, thoughtlessly immediate texting.
* (No explanation at this point in the text, why ¥ is being used as a symbol for Yuan instead of å…ƒ. Perhaps just sloppy copy-editing...)
posted evening of July 31st, 2010: Respond
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I went to Brooklyn yesterday evening to hear Gary Shteyngart reading from Super Sad True Love Story (about which more later -- it looks from the first pages and from the portion he read like it is going to be a magnificent book) at Greenlight Books,  which turns out to be a lovely independent book shop in Fort Greene... I got there early enough to take the train to Grand Army Plaza and walk through Prospect Heights, and by serendipity discovered a second bookshop that I'm adding to my list of destinations, which is Unnameable Books. The reading was packed -- easily 75 people were there, filling up the seating area, spilling onto the floor and into the aisles of the shop. One of the most fun readings I can remember. I met up with Dave and Greg, and went out for dinner with them afterwards. Got my book inscribed. (And by a funny coincidence, I bought an inscribed book at Unnameable Books, a little booklet of poetry by José Pubén -- it is signed "with brotherly amity" to Adela Muñoz.)
posted morning of July 31st, 2010: 1 response
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