1904

Moving Pictures

George Snyder — Wed, 23 May 2012 14:10:24 GMT

RINEKE DIJKSTRA (Dutch, b. 1959)
A Retrospective.
Exhibition catalogue, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2012

I've never been much for video room installations at exhibitions. I'm afraid I've always thought they were either intended for weary parents with small children in strollers, or for ladies of a certain age seeking out a quiet place to while away the afternoon, or if noise is part of the experience, then designed for young people who don't yet care about going deaf.

But the Rineke Dijkstra retrospective I recently saw at SFMOMA was quite different, perhaps because I was feeling adventurous or curious or both. Initially I was drawn in by the large scale photo portraits, but then I couldn't leave. This is an extraordinary exhibition, closing in San Francisco this weekend but traveling to the Guggenheim in New York (June 29 - October 3, 2012), and if you have any choice or say in the matter I urge you to see it. Dijkstra is a photographer of young people (mostly) which is hardly a narrow focus, but what makes her work so compellling is how she manages to find the moment(s) when the self-consciousness of youth gives way to un-self-consciousness - that glorious, sometimes heartbreaking but freeing moment when the intense awareness of youth is surrendered, either by accident or by concentration or by some profound and life-changing/interrupting/transforming experience. One of my favorite works was a series of studies of teens dancing to techno music - Dijkstra set up a studio in a couple clubs in Liverpool and invited dancers to be filmed individually. They know they're being filmed of course, and where the camera is, but there comes a moment when the music takes over (When love takes over is the refrain of one number) and the dancer merges into the beat, into the dance, the music, the movement of the body, and for a moment or two the camera and the awareness of being seen, the consciousness of being observed is forgotten. Magical.

Another piece you must must see is "I See A Woman Crying (Weeping Woman)" (Tate, 2009). This work (still image here) is a multiple screen film study of a group of school children looking at Picasso's Weeping Woman while they muse aloud about the painting's subject, what might have been going on with her, what she was feeling, what had happened to her. The result is mesmerizing. At first the responses are as you would expect from kids: tentative, halting, self-conscious, seeking out what the teacher/authority might want or be looking for, but then the viewers viewing their subject - (the portrait is not seen - the children are our subject, the camera's subject, a group portrait) - forget they are being filmed and lose themselves in speculation, allow themselves to drift and flow with the projection of their own feelings and ideas and experiences, playing off the contributions of their classmates like a jazz riff, reworking a remark from someone else, adding to it. "No one likes her," says one child. "Someone she cared about has died," says another. "She's come from the funeral." "Maybe it was her mum or her da."

"People don't understand her, she has no friends," says another child.

Amazing. Moving.

Picasso's Weeping Woman dates from 1937. His Blue Period was 1901 - 1904.

Confusion

George Snyder — Fri, 18 May 2012 14:14:48 GMT

Lily anxiously posing on sidewalk stencil art, Melrose Ave., waiting for a treat.

Last night we went to see a movie about a group of old English actors who go to India to be in a Bollywood movie and although no one really sings or dances what happens is they discover that the boy from the slums who became a millionaire has grown up and gotten a girlfriend who works in an Indian call-center, Maggie Smith is no longer a dowager duchess and has a new hip, and Judi Dench has evidently retired from being James Bond's M; it was all a little confusing but pretty.

J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904 - 1967) was if you remember the one in charge of Los Alamos when they found the atomic bomb, which is important to keep in mind (or not) given the flurry of news in the non-mainstream media about the downside of what will happen if the Fukushima Number 4 reactor fails. It's pretty dire. Oddly enough (or not), it's only the alternative press that's writing about the possible consequences not to mention the challenges of evacuating 40 million people and the deadly radiation headed toward the US west coast and yes possibly this is one of those endless k-hole (no, I'm not explaining) loops of information (mis-information) that keeps feeding back on itself. Or not, because if the story proves correct it might just mean the extinction of life on earth, so maybe it's just as well the big news outlets are avoiding the subject, it makes everything else seem slightly less pressing.

"Should I move?" I asked the friend who sent me the link about the death cloud headed my way.

"There's not a lot of air on the other planets," was his reply.

Which is probably another reason not to get too worked up. News is after all the driving force behind capitalism. If a news story won't get you to buy something, duct tape or a gas mask at least, or promise to help you lose weight, look younger, live longer, or make you buy a ticket, get a prescription, get it up and keep it that way just in case, in any time and any place, then what good is it?

It's like, what if Rupert Murdoch was a cracked container of spent fuel rods, right? Then you'd really need to worry.

Compulsion

George Snyder — Wed, 16 May 2012 14:13:04 GMT

THOMAS DISCH
Under Compulsion
London: Panther Books, 1970, reprinted 1978
Collection of the author

Science fiction can be political, right? My copy of Under Compulsion, Disch's collection of 17 short stories which first appeared in 1968 arrived yesterday; it smells deliciously of paper pulp mildew and shoebox and sock drawer and the faintest whiff of motor oil. Heaven.

Science fiction published between 1904 and 1933 has been called Radium-Age SF by Josh Glenn, because it falls between the Curies winning the Nobel Prize for their discovery of radium in '03 and Marie Curie's death (from radiation-induced leukaemia) in '34. Whether you want to argue over the specific choice of dates or not, there was definitely a period of transition between the 19th century SF romances of writers like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne and the explosion of SF writing in the years leading up to the second world war.

Disch is, of course, outside the time frame but that's not the point, the point is I'm in the mood to see everything political (or not political enough as the case may be) and it's a little like Neo being unplugged from the Matrix, once it happens you can't see things the same way again. A shift in perspective changes everything. It will be a compulsion or it won't last, I'm not sure which.

And by the way, did anyone else notice the heavy dose of Lovecraft in Joss's Cabin in the Woods? Lovecraft would be Radium-Age SF for sure.

I Am Waiting

George Snyder — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:01:44 GMT

Interior
City Lights Bookstore
261 Columbus Ave., San Francisco
Co-founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin in 1953

When I think of Ferlinghetti (b. 1919) I think of Pablo Neruda (1904 - 1973) or Louis Zukofsky (1904 - 1978).
Of course I also think of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and Howl.
I think of Coney Island of the Mind. I think of I Am Waiting.

I went up to San Francisco to see The Cult of Beauty show at the Legion of Honor, but while I was there I did other things too. I went to City LIghts.

I had forgotten about the poets who influenced me so profoundly as a teenager. I'd forgotten how political they were, how political I had been then, for a kid that is. At least until Kent State when we realized the establishment was going to shoot us.  Then the draft ended, I didn't have to flee to Canada, the war ended, life went on. Then the epidemic and we were political again, but everyone was dying.

Lately I've been thinking about the arts and politics. Someone said that theater was the last of the arts to have been political. I think of Angels in America, okay, yes. I'm probably just woefully out of touch, but I can't think of anyone I've read lately except for Roberto Bolano who is especially political. I mean in poetry or fiction.

But as I say I am out of touch. I am waiting to see what the next generation does. I took heart when I heard about the Syrian teenagers who go out at night to tag buildings with anti-government messages.  They're being shot at and they're being killed but they do it anyway. When was the last time I saw grafitti here with a politcal message? I can't remember.

I wonder if it will happen. I'm waiting to see.

What Matters

George Snyder — Sat, 12 May 2012 15:11:04 GMT

CHRIS HEDGES
Death of the Liberal Class
Nation Books, 2010

One of the reasons 1904 is so important is that there were still anarchists.  They hadn't all been discredited, diminished, dismissed, denigrated and done away with. No one likes a madman with a bomb, of course, but when all real challenge to the system is eliminated, when the liberal class ceases to defend the worker, reign in corporate greed and seek real reform for the good of all people, then you got yourself a problem.

"The liberal era, which flourished in the later part of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, was characterized by the growth of mass movements and social reforms that addressed working conditions in factories, the organizing of labor unions, women's rights, universal education, housing for the poor, public health campaigns, and socialism. This liberal era effectively ended with World War I. The war, which shattered liberal optimism about the inevitability of human progress, also consolidated state and corporate control over economic, political, cultural, and social affairs..." (Hedges, p. 7)

The way you kill a liberal is with war.  It's hard to justify treating people fairly or equitably during wartime because everyone needs to make sacrifices, right? Plus, war is not only important and righteous and about defending freedom, war is also profitable and who can argue against that? Very hard to do, as liberals and intellectuals who tried to argue against the Bush wars found out. You can even torture people in the name of freedom. You can target your own citizens. You can do anything.

What you can also do is co-opt the liberal class.  The corporate elite finances intellectuals, the universities, the arts and sciences at the same time it undermines their influence by letting them in on the perks of power. You pay them to stand in front of a blackboard, epitome of the smart tweedy bearded academic, and praise the oil company they work for. You crank out propaganda masquerading as news and you embrace the gleefully gayest of gay entertainment at the same time.  You tell one side of the corporation they have nothing whatsoever to do with the other side, of course, so everyone can sleep at night. It's a delicate balance, even if it's not very fair or even true. It's a love-hate kind of relationship.  It's Fox.

Style

George Snyder — Mon, 07 May 2012 13:54:23 GMT

Fabulous shoes
HANS J. WEGNER
Valet or Bachelor's Chair
Johannes Hansen, designed 1953
37.5" x 20" x 21"
Hammer price US$5500
LAMA Modern Art & Design Auction
May 6, 2012

Le Corbusier started studying architecture in 1904; his tapestry Bogota, from the edition of 6 (Aubusson, 1950), (est. US$40 - 60,000) sold for $105,000 (hammer, not including buyer's premium) yesterday at the LAMA auction in Van Nuys. A pair of Barcelona chairsby Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (Knoll, 1929) produced after 1972, in cream Mocha leather went for US$3500; van der Rohe was working as a draftsman in 1904.

Style is so important. Taste, on the other hand, can be hard to figure. The sale yesterday probably told us nothing about the latest trends in taste, but there was plenty of style and it was great fun. I was outbid before I even got started on the Ed Kienholz, acquired by the lady behind me in Le Corbusier glasses for US$3750 (hammer, not including premium).

"Well done," I observed.
"I collect him," she replied, and squinted at my catalogue. "What'd I pay?"

An intriguing small Joe Brainard mixed media assemblage (est. $3-5000) went unsold, but a Jeff Koons balloon dog (edition of 2300) made mid-estimate at $7000; there was no interest in a wonderful Hockney watercolor portrait of a young man (est. $40 - 60,000) but the Lichtenstein thunderbolt felt banner (1966) fetched $70,000 (hammer).

"We're not living in a School-of-Paris world, you know, and the things we really see in America are like this. It's McDonald's, it's not Corbusier." Roy Lichtenstein, quoted in the LAMA catalogue.

The very comfy French Art Deco style lounge suite in tan leather where I was sitting fetched $4500; the lady sitting next to me had fabulous shoes.

Green and Greene

George Snyder — Fri, 04 May 2012 14:34:28 GMT

MISS READ (Dora Jessie Saint MBE)
Gossip From Thrush Green
Illustrated by J.S. Goodall
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982
First American ed. hardback, w/ dust jacket
A firm tight copy so I wasn't about to break the spine to get the shot.
Collection of the author

You shouldn't expect a great deal from Miss Read's novels of buccolic English life, but I assure you they're perfectly fine for escape into a world where a lovely afternoon tea is a given, one knows all one's neighbors, and dramas of the sort I adore - fire raging through an old house for instance - are muted and uncomplicated affairs: yes, the rectory may be gutted and beyond repair but there's no loss of human or domesticated animal life.

Just the sort of book to snuggle in with on a day when the real world seems too demanding and close. Very far away, a far cry that is, from the moral ambiguity and post war angst of a writer like Graham Greene (1904 - 1991), but I needed a 1904 reference and I like the contrast, don't you? In fact, the writer Miss Read is more often compared to is Barbara Pym (1913 - 1980). I suspect if Mr Greene and the creator of the fictional worlds of Fairacre and Thrush Green were invited to tea, they'd have very little to say to one another, although I'm sure Miss Read would manage to be polite. Distant but polite. Mr Greene, on the other hand, being not only Catholic but bi-polar, would be a far less predictable guest. It could end up being a tense affair.

When she started writing in the 50s Miss Read set her stories in a world familiar to readers of the works of lady novelists in the 20s and 30s; whether that way of life still existed by the time Miss Read came on the scene might be open to debate, but by the time Gossip From Thrush Green appeared in 1981, I'm pretty sure if you were seeking a realistic or authentic depiction of English country life you'd need to look elsewhere.

I believe, however, that realism can be over-rated. Not that I don't struggle constantly with moral issues and agonize over matters of faith and duty, you understand, but sometimes I just want to slip away to a world where a church spire rises above charming Cotsold roofs in a blue sky, and the Right Reverend Charles Henstock prepares his sermon oblivious to impending but non-life-threatening disaster, and Molly Curdle balances precariously on a stool to hang out freshly washed curtains, and Miss Watson at the school is on the verge of making a decision.

Dora Jessie Saint (April 17, 1913 - April 7, 2012)

Getting Free

George Snyder — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 15:40:53 GMT

THOMAS M. DISCH
On Wings of Song
New York: St. Martin's, 1978
Collection of the Author

If you're as self-obsessed as I am, then the idea of getting free of the bondage of self is an appealing one; so too is the idea of flying. In Thomas Disch's novel On Wings of Song, the two combine. Singing releases the soul / spirit / consciousness and you leave the body. Some people never return. Everyone wants to learn to fly. It's fantastic and in the novel's future fundamentalist America, in most states it's a crime.

On Wings of Song made an extraordinary impression on me when it came out in '78. The hero of the story is Daniel who goes to prison at the age of 14 for possession of copies of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, gets free, falls in love, moves to New York, joins a gym, trains to be a Bel Canto singer, becomes a male escort - it felt like the story of my life. Or at least a version I wouldn't mind having. What I knew about Bel Canto was limited to Puccini (Madama Butterfly premiered in 1904) and tenors like Caruso or Joseph Schmidt (1904 - 1942) but the book was funny, touching, shocking, and full of familiar landmarks. I was hooked. I still think it's one of the great forgotten sci-fi novels of all time. Later I found out that Tom and his lover lived around the corner from us, but I didn't know that until I was already long gone from New York.

I corresponded for a little while with Tom Disch (1940 - 2008) at the end of his life. Fighting eviction from his rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan, grieving the death of his long-time companion Charles Naylor, struggling with financial difficulties, depression, resentments against various publishers and agents, he was angry, frustrated, defiant, needy. Was I really a fan? he asked. I was? Then why didn't I come and take care of him? He must have figured I wouldn't. He shot himself on the 4th of July.

“The song does not end,” Disch wrote in the closing pages of “On Wings of Song:”

and though he had written that song before he’d learned to fly himself, it was true. The moment one leaves one’s body by the power of song, the lips fall silent, but the song goes on, and so long as one flies the song continues. He hoped, if he were to leave his body tonight, they would remember that. The song does not end.

See Elizabeth Hand's excellent piece on Remembering Thomas M. Disch in Salon.

Translation: Death Sentences

George Snyder — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:03:31 GMT

KAWAMATA CHIAKI
Death Sentences
Translated by Thomas LaMarre and Kazuko Y. Behrens
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

I can only really think in one language. I may have dabbled in a few others but the truth is that in my mind I am pretty much stuck with my native tongue. It's a limitation I'm not especially proud of. Whenever I read a book in translation I can't help wondering what it would be like not to be constrained and confined by the language I know; I try to imagine how different the experience of the text I'm reading would have to be in the original. I don't know about you but I happen to believe you can be trapped by the way you think as much as by your physical body, if not more so, and I've often dreamed of what it would be like to break free of both.

Death Sentences is the story of a text that does just that - sets the reader free that is, quite literally, from the bonds of body and mind. Even better, it works in translation. In the same fashion that the conceit of the video tape works in the movie The Ring, in Death Sentences the agent of change and transformation is a surrealist poem written by a mysterious young man, half French, half Vietnamese, named Who May (hu mei) who meets André Breton and bequeathes his addictive revolutionary poetry to the famous French writer and poet and founder of Surrealism.

Death Sentences is a novel that is worthy of multiple readings, which I promise you is not something I can say of most novels, but it is that rich and that layered in meaning. Plus, once I found out there were French Surrealists involved, I was hooked. Pierre Mabille (1904-1952), the well known writer and editorial director of the famous art review Minotaure, makes a brief appearance and as you can imagine, there was no stopping me after that. Few things delight me more than real people in fiction, because then you start questioning how much is fiction after all, and a shiver of delight ensues. Is Death Sentences another version of Who May's poetry? Are you reading a version of the text the novel is telling you about? You have to wonder. The experience is addictive.

The conceit of drug addiction, in fact, plays an important part in the novel, in my humble opinion. For the drug addict at any rate, the desire for release from the physical - whether to flee pain or pursue pleasure - is pretty much an outward focused journey. It's about looking for something external, something outside the body we can find and consume that will change us and free the soul, so to speak. In Death Sentences, it's a poem that leads to an altered state of consciousness. Like so many drugs, of course, it also has some unpleasant side effects, chief among them being that it kills you. So the sentences of the poem are a death sentence (condamnation à mort), and it is a tribute to the translators that with all the layers of language and meaning intrinsic to the text, they are able to translate so many of the puns and doubles entendres and plays of words into this English version.

Death Sentences is the sort of book that makes you wish you knew more about everything. Most of the drugs I ever did just made me want more of them. Which is not nearly as interesting or rewarding.

Inventing Reality

George Snyder — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:57:17 GMT

Photo Shoot, Burbank, April 23, 2012

A photo shoot can be very intense. You become so conscious of things you normally pay no attention to. The quality of the light, where the sun would be if there weren't any clouds in the way, the fall of shadows, the thickness of the air, the color of skin.

Photographers like George Hurrell (1904 - 1992) and Cecil Beaton (1904 - 1980) knew there was nothing really representational about photography. That what the camera does in the right hands is pure invention. Or a particular sort of photography, let's say. The kind that takes the raw material of this world to create another one entirely. Like yesterday when we took a beautiful girl and a beautiful boy with interesting lives and stories of their own and gave them entirely new ones, in a place that became another place, in a time that became another time. "You're seventeen and just got back from a cruise on your father's yacht," I tell the girl. "You're French and whispering in her ear and you are nothing but trouble," I tell the boy.

It was overcast in Burbank, but when the photographer was done, it was Bel Air on a sunny day, with water the blue color of a Tiffany box. Those of us standing around innocently eating Red Vines and drinking Diet Cokes disappeared along with the 80s rock music playing and the dogs in the next yard barking and instead there was only Veuve Cliquot and Chanel and possibly danger and a secret being shared.

How this transformation happens is always a mystery to me. Everything becomes thick and heavy from all the concentration, all the focusing on details you never normally notice; there's a sense of the familiar turning strange, of desire mixed with uncertainty like in a dream. Even the air is intense from the act of creating. It's not a picture being made but a world. Afterward, looking at what the camera has captured, in all the subtle shifts and variations you see another narrative emerge, another reality invented. This is not the girl and this is not the boy who came to a photo shoot in Burbank on a cloudy Monday afternoon. This is a place of boundless blue sky and possibility and this is a handsome young man who is nothing but trouble and you wonder what he's whispering in her ear. And she is a very beautiful young girl of enviable confidence and unlimited privilege who knows you're watching and looks up just for a moment as if to say, you wish you were me.

Translation II

George Snyder — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 14:37:16 GMT

CHRISTOPHER DRESSER (1834 - 1904)
British Museum, London, Display (Detail)
Photograph Credit: Willliam Godwin

The text in the image reads: "Colour lithograph plate from Dresser's Study in Design 1874-78 described as a 'frieze ornament or dado-rail. The style is particularly that of the Author.'"

Friends are so helpful finding 1904 references and I am indebted to William for sending me this image from a visit to the British Museum because Christopher Dresser is certainly not to be forgotten, being the greatest of Victorian designers, especially his metalwork which was influenced by his trip to Japan in 1876-7.

A timely contribution too, because the translation of Japanese style into English silver reminds me that I am deep into reading another friend's work, a translation of a Japanese novel which I can't wait to share with you except I need to finish it first and am torn between hurrying or savoring. But soon, I promise! In the meantime Jerome wants to know how "et fit pleuvoir sur moi l'averse étincelante et céleste de son sourire" is illustrated in the Proust manga (see below).

What do you think? Since the manga was originally produced in Japanese, Proust had first to be translated from French into Japanese and then back into French again. Makes your head spin doesn't it.

The Moncrieff translation of this jolie phrase into English is "[the Duchess] showered upon me the sparkling and celestial torrent of her smile." I'm not sure 'torrent' is quite right because it feels rather harsh for a celestial flow; I would be tempted to go with something about a heavenly golden shower which as you know would risk having rather the wrong connotation, not to mention requiring a drain in the floor, and how would you draw that?

Talk about what gets lost in translation. Or found.

Translation

George Snyder — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:50:19 GMT

MARCEL PROUST
À la recherche du temps perdu
Paris: Soleil Manga, 2011

This lovely Proust en BD (en bandes dessinées, literal translation: comic strip) arrived the other day from a dear friend in Paris. "Look upon this as an aide-memoire," he wrote, "for the greatest French story ever told. And bear in mind that you've got to give serious thought to the graphic novelization of your own oeuvre. It can't fall into the wrong hands."

He also included copies of the latest issue of Agenda Q and Qweek (les bons plans au bon moment) and other treasures - "think of these as aides-memoires for a life we once lived. Modern French boys will not be denied their pleasures. What would Marcel make of it all?"

What indeed. In 1904 Marcel was still working on his translations of Ruskin, but he wrote that after that he was going to work on a translation of his "own poor soul." And in 1909 he commenced writing the great work which would occupy him for the rest of his life.

As it turns out I have actually given considerable thought to the question of a suitable artist to translate my books into manga / BD / comics; regrettably many of my favorites are dead, but I'm open to suggestions. I've also spent plenty of time imagining the movie version, which is such fun. In the meantime I've been deeply engaged in casting models for the photo shoot for the cover of Book Three, Into Deeper Water. The call sheet arrived this morning. We nearly landed a location in Malibu but as it turns out we're going with a pool in the Valley which is just perfect for our needs. And we've found both a Pam and a Didier, I think. It wasn't easy. I can't tell you how difficult it is translating the people who live in your head into real flesh and blood versions. How many photographs of beautiful boys and girls you have to go through, how many disappointments when this one or that one isn't available or ends up having funny looking ears. What a challenge it is finding just the right real life versions who are free on a Monday afternoon for a photo shoot in a swimming pool which (Note to Self) we should probably make sure is heated. And find the right hair and makeup. And make sure the pool doesn't have a hedge around it that blocks all the sun after 11 am. And get time off from the day job. And hope and pray everyone shows up on time, and they're all in good moods.

At least we can count on nice weather.

Control

George Snyder — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:22:05 GMT

PAUL CADMUS (1904 - 1999)
Le Ruban Dénoué: Hommage à Reynaldo Hahn, 1963
Columbus Museum of Art
To embiggen and learn more go Here

I have a friend you could set a watch by. Arrives on the dot, never misses an appointment, has you in all his mobile devices, carries healthy snacks. And I have another friend who's completely unpredictable, who likes to keep it fluid and flexible, which means you can't pin him down and you never know whether he'll cancel at the last minute.

God help you if you delay the first guy, and don't even think about showing up late. Whereas my other friend will mock you for being a fussy old maid, for wanting to make him commit to a day, a movie, a restaurant, a departure or arrival time. "Forget it," he'll say; "you're obviously in a hurry." Or, "Never mind, it sounds like you don't really want to do anything."

It's about control, of course. Managing the fear. Keep everything orderly and neat and stay on schedule and you'll feel safe. Or conversely, don't commit, keep it loose, don't tie yourself down to some future time when you might feel differently.

When I'm with my prompt and orderly friend I think, who are you kidding? Your Day Planner won't protect you from the chaos waiting outside that door.

And when I'm trying to make plans with my other friend I find myself thinking, dude, your laid-back attitude is nothing but a front to cover your rage and your fear, so how dare you make fun of me for wanting to bring a little order and thoughtfulness to the party.

In short, I love them but sometimes I could kill them both.

Plot and Process

George Snyder — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 13:59:59 GMT

RONALD FIRBANK. Five Novels.
New York: New Directions, 1981.
Introduction by Osbert Sitwell
Cover photograph of the Countess Castiglione by Pierre-Louise Pierson, 1863/66
courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Collection of the author

When I despair of story-telling, I turn to Ronald Firbank (1886 - 1926), who valued style over everything else.
From his first story, The Fairies Wood (1904) or his first play, The Mauve Tower (1904) you can tell that plot is a secondary if not altogether inconsequential consideration. Which is such a relief sometimes.

I adore plot, don't get me wrong (although some of you will do just that anyway), but up until nearly Easter Pam was on a collision course with a story-line that just wasn't going where it needed to, not to mention Sam being utterly lost and Didier contributing nothing useful, which wasn't that unusual but still didn't feel quite right. As I may have mentioned, however, I resisted the impulse to pitch it all and leave town. Sois prudent, I told myself, and then as the paranoia seeped in, "On nous surveille," I reminded my characters.

Then I went and did something else entirely, the shopping perhaps, or I may have ironed and folded some sheets, I don't recall, but in any case some important but soothing activity. And yesterday morning, the story sorted itself out again. I told Bianca and Lily at dinner.

"You're having fun again," Bianca observed. "I can tell." And she was right.

After dinner we went to the launch of BLOOM at Blu Dot on Melrose. Tout le monde was there. Such fun. We introduced Lily to a taxidermied raccoon who seemed a perfect dear but wasn't her type. There were tiny yellow frosted cupcakes. When we left the sky was an exquisitely vivid and wildly swirling pink, the way it is sometimes after the rain.

Process

George Snyder — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 15:24:46 GMT

Easter Sunday is probably not a good day to continue a discussion of Vedanta (see previous) but I have discovered it is an excellent occasion for macarons from 'lette, and thank goodness it was a short photoshoot this morning because they're all gone now.

"Have you read Catcher lately?" my lunch companion this past Good Friday asked, seeing my copy of Franny and Zooey on the table. I confessed I had not recently done so. "You must," he urged me. "I don't know why, but no one understands what it's really about, the critics seem to have missed the point, and yet you only need to read the first two pages to know."

I replied that Franny and Zooey was practically a guide book to the spiritual life, at least in terms of an understanding of the ancient Vedic scriptures, introduced along with yoga to the west by Swami Vivekananda, whose teachings so profoundly influenced J.D. Salinger among other devotees, but my lunch date was not to be distracted. "Grief," he announced. "Catcher is the story of grief."

Needless to say I went to my local book shop soon thereafter which is to say yesterday to pick up a copy, and since the errand involved going past 'lette and because we all need to make the most of an outing to save on gas, what with a gallon now at $4.99 and rising, I realized I should pick up some macarons while I was out, even though I'd walked.  Not exactly Easter eggs but close!

Salinger struggled between literary ambition and a spiritual life; ultimately he found them incompatible and gave up the one for the other. Christopher Isherwood (1904 - 1986) had something of a comparable conflict although you might characterize his as one between the world of the flesh and the world of spirit, but then again, his guru said he could keep his relationship with the teenager Don Bachardy and still be a member of the Vedanta community. So as they say, it was a little more complicated than that, as these things usually are.

In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that everything is more complicated. The problem all the writers I teach and work with, my lunch companion explained, is that they keep developing more and more secondary characters when they should be focused on the main character instead. They go off on tangents. "They all forget their main character!" he exclaimed.

Guilty as charged, I say to myself, looking at the mess I'm currently working on, and the urge to throw in the towel becomes a powerful, almost irresistible temptation. Pitch it all out the window, I say; give it up, surrender, rip up that draft and admit defeat, and then shave your head, put on an orange robe, give away all your earthly possessions and renounce the world.  The joy of creation can turn to despair in a heart beat you see; grief at the arrival of that old familiar failure seeps in, wells up, overwhelms. The world seems a dark and terrible place, and the only solution retreat.

Then you drag yourself out of bed, walk across the pages scattered across the floor, make more coffee and have another macaron.

Part of the process, as you probably know.

Influence

George Snyder — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 15:08:19 GMT

My desk is a mess and I don't care.

I read somewhere the other day in the comments on Gawker about how some people don't like Salinger anymore. Which is odd, I think, when you consider how much his voice has influenced the voice of young writers today.  At least a particular kind of cocky yet earnest, smart yet sentimental (sentimental sounding) writer, erudite but unafraid of the colloquial, wise but willing to play it on the down low, the unaffected verging on affected for being unaffected. The writers and commenters on Gawker, for instance. Funny but modest, savvy but mostly kind hearted, smart but self-effacing,or posing at self-effacing at any rate. Like Salinger.

Odd but hardly surprising, I suppose, since all you have to do to kill a writer is to make one of his books required reading in school. I regret to say I was one of those teachers (a brief career, mind you; I had a conscience) who tried to teach Catcher in the Rye, and I'm not proud of it. One generation's passion is the next generation's punishment. Maybe not odd but sad.

In any case, you know how I feel about influence in general, and the convergence of everything at every moment as we stumble forward in time, caught like Scoobie Doo in the haunted house cobwebs of connections, references, allusions, an unconscious stream of consciousness that makes Ulysses (which all takes place on one day, remember, June 16, 1904) seem superficial.

Nice then, when someone draws your attention to the links, the connections between you and the rest of the world, the ideas, say, that you had that someone had before you, someone you liked, loved, cherished, respected, revered even.  A. L. Bardach does just that recently in the Wall Street Journal, pulling together Salinger, James (both William and Henry), Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard - all my favorites and then some, Leo Tolstoy and Sarah Bernhardt too.

As you know, I call my Venn Diagram 1904 but you could like Bardach see another pattern, another web of intersections and call it Swami Vivekananda.

To Be Continued.

George Snyder — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:52:26 GMT

DAVID WINGROVE
Chung Kuo. The Middle Kingdom
New York: Delacorte Press, 1990
Collection of the author

A friend who came to my reading stopped at The Coffee Bean on the Sunset Strip beforehand. "My dear, I saw three million dollars parked at the curb," he observed. "Literally and I do not exaggerate. Not one but two Ferraris, a Lamborghini Murcielago, at least one Bentley, several Rolls, more than a couple new Jags and more Porsches driving by than you could shake a stick at. One forgets if one doesn't get out how well a few people are doing."

But according to the ever subtle HuffPo Headlines ("CHINA TAKES OVER, AMERICA NO LONGER IN CHARGE") it's not about the 1% elite at all anymore. It's about China now. It's China's turn to be in charge. For instance, did you know they're investing in all the mainstream media companies, although they seem not to have heard that newspapers and magazines are going out of business left and right. Apparently, however, they aren't completely naive, as another friend tells me; they know full well another Tiananmen Square is coming, and so they intend to be prepared. Having cock-blocked the Internet, (oh yes, you'll be lucky if you can access your Twitter and Facebook accounts while you're there) they fully intend to have a hand in the way the traditional press covers incidents of unrest.

You don't want to repeat the past. You will recall that in 1904 the radical Shanghai newspaper The Alarm Bell had to be shut down under German pressure, and US Immigration held Sun Yat-sen in a San Francisco detention center. Meanwhile the Kwangsi revolt of the secret Heaven and Earth Society had been in full swing since 1902. In June of 1904 the Kwangsi rebels took Liucheng; in July the Imperial Court ordered the governors of south China to suppress the Kwangsi revolt after the rebels take Ishan, where Imperial troops would end up defeating them in August.

Always trouble somewhere, of course. Right here in River City and over there too, never mind what you're driving. The question is, who's going to end up being in charge? A co-worker asked me to bring him my copy of Wingrove's futuristic novel Chung Kuo, which is all about a future when China rules earth and several other planets as well. It's the first in a series. Long but awfully compelling if you enjoy a good dystopian romp, and who doesn't?

The reading went very well by the way, thank you. Film footage follows when I'm more recovered. Meanwhile, I say we look at the bigger picture, and worry. It's not about the gays getting married or Planned Parenthood, my darlings. What's coming next, that is. What's coming next is going to be big. Really big.

To Be in the Lights

George Snyder — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 14:46:46 GMT

Window of Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Blvd. West Hollywood, CA 90069

From Cecil Beaton: Memoirs of the 40s, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972, page 232:

"We walked to the Twenty-One restaurant and were thrown into a rowdy melée of people. Greta was very gay and taking everything in her stride. The great tall impresario of the place said: 'I'll give you a nice quiet corner in the shade.' To which G. replied: 'No, we've come here to be in the lights and in the center of everything!' I was quite as amazed as the tall impresario."

Cecil Beaton (1904 - 1980) did rather enjoy being fussed over. His companion Greta Garbo, however, wasn't known for wanting to be in the lights, and the truth is, I'm not so sure I'm so fond of it myself. But tomorrow night I will be, briefly, and I hope you can be there too.

I stopped by last night just to make sure the sign in the window was right (it is: Thursday, March 29th at 7 pm), and to leave a few event cards at the front desk because you know how people love a free takeaway and having a shirtless boy on the front side of it can't hurt. The very distinguished men and ladies milling about for the writer event last night were enjoying wine and canapés; the nice tall impresario in charge said I could serve wine at my event, but I quickly persuaded him it would be ill-advised considering the crowd I'm expecting. First of all, I warned, I would never be able to have enough, and secondly I'd never be able to afford the clean-up afterward. Most of my friends and guests will be very well behaved, I assured him, but you didn't want to press your luck.

'Is it a very dirty book?" a stranger cornered me and asked the other day. "Full of sex?"

"Full of the threat of sex," I explained, which I hoped sounded enticing.

"Lots of drugs?"

"Lots about the aftermath," I replied. "Lots about the side-effects," I added ominously.

Being ironic is fraught with danger, as you know. Being in the lights and in the center of everything can be exhausting too.

Anarchy

George Snyder — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 14:52:41 GMT

JAMES ROBERT BAKER (1946 - 1997)
writing under the pseudonym
JAMES DILLINGER
Adrenaline
New York: Signet / New American Library, 1985
First printing
Collection of the author

Those who knew Baker say his favorite word was 'anarchy.' His books are speed-freak cautionary tales of a world falling apart and out of control, with characters trapped in impossible situations that can only end badly, and maybe because I'm streaming the first four seasons of Breaking Bad I've been drawn back to Baker's novels of obsession, drugs and sex, brutality and love on the run.

Or maybe I'm going to do a book tour of the shelves of 1904 one book at a time. I started out this morning thinking I'd have something to say about Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson's The International Anarchy, 1904 - 1914 (1926), but then I wondered whether it always pays to be so obvious. As you know, Dickinson was an historian and pacifist and fellow at Cambridge and great friend of the Bloomsbury Group. E.M. Forster was his literary executor and biographer, although Forster in typical fashion refrained from making any mention of his subject's foot fetish or unrequited love for young men.

Adrenaline opens with:

It was hot. The sun pounded down through the smog and the ash from the brush fires, saturating Los Angeles with an eerie metallic orange light. It made everything look fake, as if all the streets and cars and buildings were part of a massive set for a movie about nuclear apocalypse.

It's not Albuquerque, New Mexico, the setting for Breaking Bad, but it's close. Then we meet the protagonist, Nick, who sounds like a 70s porn star:

Sweat matted Nick's short black hair and dripped from his sunburnt nose and thick black mustache. It glistened on his hairy chest and trickled down his hard stomach, soaking into his filthy button-fly Levi's.

He's drinking a luke-warm coke and smoking a Marlboro Red and you can't help wondering if G. Lowes Dickinson, writing in the 1920s, had any idea what sort of anarchist would appear on the scene in years to come. And I can't help wondering if any of the young men Dickinson yearned for looked anywhere near as hot as Nick.

Wars I Have Seen

George Snyder — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:23:08 GMT

GERTRUDE STEIN
Wars I Have Seen
New York: Random House, 1945
First American Edition
Collection of the Author

"I do not know whether to put in the things I do not remember as well as the things I do remember." So Gertrude Stein begins her "first-hand report," as the (tattered) dust jacket says, "of four years of Nazi rule in France and the joy of liberation in 1944."

I hope you will go see the marvelous exhibition The Steins Collect at the Met which includes a video tour of the paintings that hung at 27, rue de Fleurus from 1904 to 1934. You can watch the paintings as they were added to the collection and rehung and rearranged. Paintings probably talk to each other at night the way books do; it's important to move them around so they can make new friends.

Collecting books has its own challenges and rewards, of course. I acquired my copy of Wars I Have Seen in New York in the 70s. In the early 80s my boyfriend took it with him to Fire Island to have something to read by the pool at the house in the Pines, the house he shared for the summer with his friends from the gym and the Saint (I didn't go because they were his friends, his share in the house, it was that kind of relationship). There's still the faintest scent of coconut suntan lotion to the pages. It wasn't until later (mercifully too late to fight about it) that I discovered he'd torn and taped the dust jacket back together. That summer would end up seeming so brief and fragile and distant; when his friends and my friends started dying it began to feel like living in France the way Gertrude and Alice did during the war, during the Occupation, hiding more or less in plain sight of the Nazis, trying to get by and going about your job and focusing on the practical, and then hearing about the death of someone else you loved, someone else sick, another memorial service, and wondering how long it would last, when it would end.

Of course the Nazi analogy is so overused and abused these days. Back then there were people who swore they didn't know what was going on, they didn't know anyone who was sick or anyone who'd died, they had no idea. That's what I remember at least, and it was such a useful lesson to learn, such a valuable insight into life, that there are the things people say they have seen and know and remember and the things they don't remember or don't know or didn't see which were happening at the very same time. I put my copy of Wars I Have Seen in a yard sale once when I was really broke, after I moved out here from New York to get away and start over; it didn't sell. So I still have it. I just recently bought another copy of Dancer from the Dance. The ante-bellum novel, the fin de siecle story of life Before the War. When it came out we said you had to read it and then give it away right afterward or you'd have bad luck. If only we'd known. Now I keep Dancer next to Wars so Gertrude and Andrew Holleran can chat at night about the things they remember and don't remember, and the wars they have seen.