How I Wrote Certain of My Books

How is Swann's Way coming?... And the Brothers K?... are you reading the Pevear and Volokhonsky trans? He seems to catch a lot of shit, but it's hard for me to say if the criticism is warranted. It probably is, but I liked their Notes from Underground. Sandra did not care for the translation of "The Lady with the Little Dog." As you (Steve) recall, we rewrote it for her class. I read over my rendition the other day and was disappointed. I was trying to draw out some kind of unfelt drama and make it... felt. It was not a success. At any rate, this is one of my interview questions. Please be patient, the full interview is coming soon. I am reading FOUCAULT: A Very Short Introduction. I love this series. Sorry. Sorry. Next I will tackle SCHIZOPHRENIA: A Very Short Introduction. Then, FREE WILL... but, first: 'What is an Author?' More soon. My boss just called. - abbi

Sanatoriums

What ever happened to sanatoriums?

Have they been replaced by rehab clinics and spas?

I would like to know if there are still places for the simply infirm, of moderate income. In Arizona, maybe. Cheap labor and a dry climate would make such a place possible there. Nationalized health care could recall the word 'sanatorium' into common use. The times being what they are, people might even use slang to refer to them. "I've been feeling burned out so I spent a long weekend at the sana'." The first 'a' would be softened in abbreviation, as in 'saw'. Owing to the similar contexts, friends might be confused, especially if the cell phone reception was spotty. "You spent a weekend in a sauna? What?" People from the North Atlantic region of the US would make it sound like 'santa'. Imagining it, I hear half-Dominican young women intoning the word. "Didjew hear about that new Santa in Worcester (read: Woostah)?"The New York Times Magazine would devote a full issue to the best and brightest among them. Zoloft, the modern man's Ether, may have made the need for such places redundant. But their usefulness, at least in literature, extends beyond the calmative, the curative. Doesn't Vronsky return from the sanatorium he was sent to after his horseracing accident more heroic than before? Or was the opposite the case? Is it only after his return that the affair with Anna K. turns sour and perverse? Was it used as a thematic turning point in the story?

Brandon's post about the Russians got me thinking about sanatoriums. They're a kind of part-time Elysium in these books, and Chekhov writes some about them too, if I'm remembering correctly. In which case, I'd like to read a history of Slavic literature tracking the motifs: extraction to a sanatorium, export to a gulag.

I can't think of an analogue in Latin American literature, where most of my own attention is focused, except in AIDS literature. In this, though, the effect is ironic. It is strange, thinking it over now, that there is not a tradition of sanatorium visiting in Latin American literature and culture. The politics alone, with its tendency toward decadence, neglect and repression, would make sanatoriums useful, at least to the educated class, doctors, lawyers and so on, both as a means of recovery for the individual, and for silencing, on the part of the state.

the LA scene: part 1

It's about time to write something from LA.

Last night Mary and I went to our first reading. It was at Beyond Baroque, a literary arts center and chapbook archive in what was once Town Hall in Venice. We walked there. On the way we stopped at a little J-boutique looking for shoes for me and all we found were the "latest style" from Japan, this from the proprietor who said we were very welcome even though they'd closed an hour before. Les Figues, a local press, was featured. Most of the stuff was utter nonsense and/or gobbledegook. I don't know enough about poetry to tell which. Fortunately, the person we were there to see was kickass, and read her poems in French and English. Except for the fact that most of the people seemed to be in a good mood, it was like any other reading I've ever been to. It ended and we went home, where we opened the laptop to watch our "stories".

Here I begin the true subject of this post: Entourage, a show that may be fun or funny if you don't live here, but which is just the stupidest show I have ever seen because I am here. Because I've been looking to get into a fight for a while, I want to announce an open challenge to ANYONE WHO LIKES ENTOURAGE. I challenge you to defend this poorly-orchestrated cliche orgy as a form of entertainment. I challenge you to prove it better than watching chimps knife fight. Anyone.

That aside aside, there do seem to be things going on. In Chinatown, for instance, Eileen Myles was recorded this evening in a basement down an alley off a boulevard. The place is called Betalevel, and they record readings and interviews with writers. We missed this one. But it did get me to Google "Eileen Myles" and I got her website where in addition to the usual writer stuff I found a link to her "blog," some kind of monster gross thing "curated by Infiniti". It looks to be some kind of lifestyle blog for intellectual types: how to be bored in hotel rooms when you've run out of cigarettes, and so on. Interestingly, you can't navigate back to the eileenmyles.com from the totally punk blog sponsored by MSN. I had to reload her page, ended up on her "bio" page and found out that her new book of poems describes "the transmigration of souls from the east coast to the west". If she means that literally, I wonder whatever became of my body--but she couldn't mean that literally because a few lines down she calls herself a "virtuoso."

What's the story with this poet?

Other news: Just finished Ryan's book of poems, "when i come here" from Plan B. It was great to see in print so many of the poems I'd heard, especially "boy" which turned out to be shaped like a kite turning left.

Currently reading the Overture to "Swann's Way" in the C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation. Let's see how far I get.

scooters, vacation, fall

1. Currently reading…
David Hume's Treatise on Human Nature. No, not really. I'm actually reading nothing but magazines right now. The first "Reading" in this month's Harper's is good, and the one about the contractor working in Afghanistan. Also, there's a Bolaño poem…

I'd like to be reading a novel.

2. Favorite Line(s):

An aristocrat was riding down the street in his carriage. He ran over my father.
·
After the ceremony I walked back to the city. I was trying to think of the reason my father had died. Then I remembered: he was run over by a carriage.

- VIEWS OF MY FATHER WEEPING, Donald Barthelme

"The roads are empty and I am driving fast. I think of my father, imagine him long ago at night casually parting my mother's legs with the mechanical indifference of someone opening a cupboard. And I say to myself: I will leave every cold man, every man for whom music is some private physics and love some unsteppable dance. I will try to make them regret. To make them sad. I am driving back to my tiny kitchen table and I will write this: forgiveness lives alone and far off down the road, but bitterness and art are close, gossipy neighbors, sharing the same clothesline, hanging out their things, getting their laundry confused.

'That's how much it costs, Miss,' says the attendant at the gas station where I stop, looking rather numbly at the price on the pump.

'Oh,' I say and fumble for my wallet. The oil cans stacked against an old truck tire are wordless and collusive. But the triangular plastic flags strung at one end of the island flutter and ripple in the wind, flapping to get my attention, my compassion, like things that seem to want to sing but can't, things that almost tear themselves in trying to fly, like rainbow-colored birds, hung by string and their own feet."

-What is Seized, Lorrie Moore

3. You should read Sandra's book. It's good. I personally felt very depressed throughout, but I'm easily depressed. Which is not say the book is sentimental—it is not. I should quote something again I think:

1.1 Three postcards arrived the following week:
1.2 Dear Mom, Got here without dying. This is just to let you know I decided to use my middle name from now on cause I suddenly realized, Eddie = Oedipus, which just freaks me out. Like, I can't believe I was so lucky to get away, now I see what's really happening. Anyway, this is the last time I'm writing, so if you want to think I'm dead, it's not my problem. –JACK
1.3 Chrysa, Here is London which SUCKS. They all look like fucking walruses, I totally get that Beatles song. So I've got this Finnish chick now, Martina, she's like seventeen. She's like, she left her hometown because 'the people were not sincere,' so basically dumb chick. But that's why I'm not writing after this cause I can only write when I'm lonely, sorry. Tell Mom I'm trying to be cool but I can't deal with her right now.—JACK
1.4 Chrysa, Getting the fuck out of Europe to Africa, I can't take it here. It's like everything's neutered with so-called 'civilization.' Like Martina ran off with some other Finnish asshole named Casper (honest to shit real name) cause he sleeps with both men and women because he's comfortable with his masculinity or some shit, which I don't have to leave California to hear this shit. Like friendly ghost jokes or what. So I'll write from Egypt if I don't suddenly have a fit and die. – JACK
1.5 That was the last we heard.

THE ONLY GOOD THING ANYONE HAS EVER DONE, Sandra Newman

-- Abbi Dion