Gonzalo Barr

Who hasn’t had a bad day when hours after you first sat at your desk to write, you have only a few words to show for your efforts?  Tolstoy, whose short stories are as long as most contemporary novels and whose novels make contemporary novels seem as short as haiku, wrote this in his diary on February 6, 1859 –

All the time been working on my novel [”Family Happiness”] and made good progress, though not on paper.  Changed everything… Very satisfied with what is in my head.

Image:  “Leo Tolstoy” by Nikolay Gay, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; Source: Afterword by David Magarshack, Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories

Earlier this week, The Times highlighted ten “literary suicides,” or suicides by persons who wrote works, though not necessarily literature. The first case was that of the Greek philosopher, Empedocles, who jumped into Mt. Etna.  Heinrich von Kleist and Ernest Hemingway died from self-inflicted gunshot wounds.  Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath gassed themselves.  The most gruesome suicide still belongs to the brilliant novelist, Yukio Mishima, who committed a botched version of hara-kiri.  There are five more cases cited in the article.

We know that dentists in the US have the highest incidence of suicide among health professionals, even higher than psychiatrists, but I wonder how writers compare with the population at large.

Photo:  Grave of Heinrich von Kleist, Berlin-Wannsee, 2009, Jochen Hansen, Wikipedia; Source:  “Ten Extraordinary Literary Suicides,” The Times (Jan. 25, 2008), extracted from Gary Lachman, The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides: Dead Letters

Previously, I posted a quote by John Fowles in which he said that the reason he collected books — to read them — would make a book collector spit. Paging through my notebooks last week, I found this passage about book collectors [translation to English mine] –

I bibliofili, come si sa, sono dei veri feticisti, e non leggono i libri che collezionano. Amano soltanto posserderli. E strano: meno si legge, piu ci si interessa a libri che nessuno puo aver letto. Come se ormai il valore letterario fosse riposto altrove, nell’unicita, nel gusto di poter sfogliare qualcosa che stava in un cassetto o in cassaforte.

* * *

Bibliophiles, as one knows, are real fetishists and do not read the books they collect.  They only love possessing them.  Strange:  the less they read, the more they are interested in books that no one could have read.  It is almost as if the literary value were elsewhere, in the uniqueness, in the pleasure of being able to leaf through something that was in a drawer or safe.

Roberto Cotroneo, “Siamo tutti guardoni?”

Cotroneo states, as a truism, the conclusion that book collectors do not read the books they collect, that book-collecting is a fetish, where possession is the only aim. Perhaps this is true. Walk into any antiquarian book store and you will find that the price of the books on sale have nothing to do with the value of what is between the covers. It is all about the condition of the dust jacket and the pages, whether the author is a celebrity, and of course, the demand for the book as an object. Stated differently, the price of the book is directly related to the number of people willing to pay an extraordinary amount of money just to say that they own it.

Photo: Rick MacWilliam, Edmonton Journal, canada.com; Source: Roberto Cotroneo, “Siamo tutti guardoni?,” L’espresso (July 13, 1999)

LITERARY LEAP: GONZALO BARR LEAVES THE LAW FOR A CAREER AS A WRITER

Posted on Mon, Jan. 28, 2008

BY ANA VECIANA-SUAREZ

PETER ANDREW BOSCH / MIAMI HERALD STAFF
Gonzalo Barr.

On the first day of his new life, Gonzalo Barr awoke at 2:30 a.m. and finished reading Don DeLillo’s Underworld. The 827-page novel, which spans decades and offers acute observations about race, pop culture and consumerism, dazzles many readers but defeats others. Barr found it an invigorating read, and when he closed the book that December morning, the lawyer and former medical-school student knew a few things:

He had done the right thing by resigning from his lucrative Miami law practice. He would finish the novel he had begun writing between clients and cases. He would devote the rest of his life to writing.

”It’s scary to quit your job, but at the risk of sounding pompous I think I did it at the perfect time,” Barr says. “I have absolutely no second thoughts.”

When Barr quit the law in December, he was only months away from clocking the Big Five-Oh, and ”how many more productive years do I have, really?” he had asked himself.

His decision was eased by changes in his practice that would have meant more travel and less writing time. ”I wanted to pull the plug in 2008. So it was just a matter of doing it earlier,” he says.

Barr does not have an agent or a publisher for his novel, and Leejay Kline, his mentor and creative-writing teacher, calls the move ”pretty ballsy.” But what Barr does have is an impressive debut to his credit. His first book, the critically acclaimed short-story collection The Last Flight of Jose Luis Balboa (Houghton Mifflin, $12 in paper), won the coveted Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize in 2005, garnering attention and admiration from several established writers.

It is a quintessential Miami book, ripe with quirky characters, keen observations of only-in-South Florida situations and a deep compassion for the strange and the flawed. The opening story, for instance, is about two balseros and what happens when one lends the other his wife’s car. Another story, the three-page The Sleepless Nights of Humberto Castaño, is about an overprotective father.

`ENGAGING, FUNNY’

Francine Prose, the Bakeless Prize judge, wrote that the stories were ” . . . engaging, funny, highly enjoyable. . . .” The Times Literary Supplement opined: ”a brilliant short story collection.” The Los Angeles Times: “ . . . [T]he stories sparkle with daily ritual, along with the bonus (beyond pleasure) of a spirit-cleansing kindness.”

By phone, Prose, a prolific novelist and essayist, says she was touched by the way Barr showed sympathy for his characters. “I liked the liveliness and the spirit. I really admired the energy.”

Julia Alvarez, author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies and other novels, remembers reading some of Barr’s stories in workshops at Bread Loaf in Vermont. ”He was probably my oldest student there, so his stories had a sense of gravity and experience the others didn’t have,” Alvarez says. “Gonzalo was very committed and very serious about his work.”

For Barr, this unexpected, warm literary welcome, which included a multicity book tour, confirmed his secret dream.

”I remember realizing that the one thing I really wanted to do more than anything else in the world was to write,” he recalls. “But I wasn’t really sure how to go about it or how I could even support myself.”

Barr’s new novel expands on one of the stories from The Last Flight. The Natural History of Love recounts, in part, the lovesickness of a young character with whom Barr shares few traits except that both attended private schools in Miami.

Those who know Barr and his work have no doubt that he will succeed, despite the risk and the odds against launching a writing career at his age.

TAKING MIAMI’S PULSE

John Dufresne, author of several novels including the upcoming Requiem, Mass., met Barr at a Friday-night writing group the Florida International University professor hosts. Some of the stories from The Last Flight were first discussed there, and Barr ”always worked very diligently and improved them greatly,” Dufresne says. “He’s really got a finger on the pulse of Miami.”

Kline, who taught Barr in a continuing-education class at the Florida Center for the Literary Arts at Miami Dade College, agrees. ”Gonzalo has an incredible work ethic,” Kline says. ‘A lot of people say `I have an idea for a book,’ but they don’t really pursue it because they’re not willing to put in the time and effort. Gonzalo is.”

What’s more, adds Kline, Barr’s goal is not to become a No. 1 New York Times bestseller. ”What’s on his mind is writing literary fiction. Good fiction,” Kline says. “That’s all he wants.”

Born in Miami to a Peruvian father and Dominican mother, Barr grew up mostly in Little Havana, watching the influx of Cubans change his home town. Most colleagues and acquaintances assume he’s from the island, too.

”I cannot deny that the Cuban culture, the way Cubans speak even, has had an indelible impact on me,” he says. And upon his fiction.

STARTED AT AGE 5

Barr wrote his first story, about a king who was getting married and looking for a bed, when he was 5. His love for writing deepened during his years at Immaculata-LaSalle High School and Belen Prep. English teachers encouraged him, including a nun who gave him Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. He eventually published two stories in the campus literary magazine.

Yet, he knew his family did not regard writing as a worthy profession. After college at Columbia in New York, he headed off to medical school, intending to become a psychiatrist. But during a rotation through psychiatry, ”I had this conversion,” he says. “I no longer believed in Freud.”

Barr transferred to the University of Florida’s law school. After graduation, he worked as a solo practitioner, then joined a small firm and, later, another, where he specialized in personal-injury law. He made a good living.

”Yet, all the while I felt I was not being true to myself,” Barr recalls. ‘I kept asking myself, `What am I supposed to be really doing?’ I was looking for meaning in my life.”

In 2000, he enrolled in Kline’s class. He had been writing sporadically — ”lots of words going nowhere” — but he promised himself that in five years he would publish a book. He wrote a couple of hours before work almost every day and attended several writers’ conferences, including Bread Loaf, where he read about the Bakeless Prize. To finish his manuscript for submission, he ended up pulling all-nighters.

When he learned he had won, that his manuscript would be published as a Houghton Mifflin Mariner paperback original, “I closed my office door and did a little dance. I couldn’t believe it.”

The prize, he adds, gave him a sense of validation.

Still, ”I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he says. “I’m still trying to figure things out. But I realize the decision was really a no-brainer. On my death bed, I didn’t want to regret not having written what I wanted to write.”

Source: The Miami Herald

This morning, we awoke to find our city shrouded in fog.  Fog is an unusual sight here, something akin to seeing an eclipse.  Here are some pictures I took early this morning:

At the Coconut Grove marina –

On I-395 toward South Beach –

On Watson Island, facing west, toward Downtown –

“The Republic” is what I call Miami.  It is where I was born, where I grew up, and where I live.  It is an affectionate term that I use to underline the fact that Miami is a unique place, unlike any other in the world, beautiful too.

Photos:  Gonzalo Barr

Le monde reports that Aube Elléouët, daughter of surrealist, André Breton, found an envelope containing 26 drawings that Francis Picabia (1879-1953) made for Breton’s magazine, Littérature.  The drawings had remained hidden in the envelope since 1920.  Now she is selling all 26 drawings to a museum that is willing to purchase the entire group and not separate them.  The proceeds from the sale, minus the exhibition costs, will go to Nouvelles Recherches biomédicales - Vaincre le cancer, a cancer research center.  Galerie 1900-2000 in Paris is exhibiting the drawings.

First, major kudos to Ms. Elléouët for what no doubt will be a generous gift to the cancer research center.

Second, what a find!  Picabia has enjoyed a reassessment lately as an artist who revolted against Dadaism and became the precursor to much of contemporary art.

Now, let’s play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (in a modified form) with the protagonists of this story, shall we?

Breton’s daughter, Aube Elléouët, discovered the envelope containing Picabia’s drawings and placed them for sale with Galerie 1900-2000, owned by David Fleiss and his father Marcel Fleiss. The elder Fleiss opened the gallery in 1972, encouraged by Man Ray, with an exhibition of 40 rayograms by the artist.  Man Ray was born in the US, but moved to Paris in 1921, where he met Marcel Duchamp, who introduced Ray to Dadaism.  Duchamp had met Picabia ten years earlier, at the 1911 Salon d’Automne, and was also instrumental in drawing that artist into the fold of Dadaism.  By 1919, Picabia was living in Paris.  That same year, Breton, with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault, founded Littérature, for which Picabia made 26 drawings that remained in an envelope for over 86 years, until Breton’s daughter found them.

Simple, non?

You can buy the catalog for 15 euros from the gallery bookstore.

Photo: Francis Picabia in his studio, George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, Wikipedia; Sources:  Harry Bellet, “Picabia en 26 dessins rares,” Le monde (Jan. 18, 2008), picabia.com, manraytrust.com, galerie1900-2000.com, articles on Francia Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, Wikipedia

“Art as a weapon?” he said to me, the word “weapon” rich with contempt and itself a weapon. “Art as taking the right stand on everything? Art as the advocate of good things? Who taught you all this? Who taught you art is slogans? Who taught you art is in the service of ‘the people‘? Art is in the service of art — otherwise there is no art worthy of anyone’s attention. What is the motive for writing serious literature, Mr. Zuckerman? To disarm the enemies of price control? The motive for writing serious literature is to write serious literature. You want to rebel against society? I’ll tell you how to do it — write well.

Leo Glucksman to Nathan Zuckerman in Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist (1998).

Image: Geli Korzhev, Museum of Russian Art, minnesota.publicradio.org

The Yomiuri Shimbun of Japan reports that about 1,000 authors paid Singpoosha Publishing Co., a Tokyo-based vanity press, approximately one billion Japanese yen (about USD 9,440,731), but the works remain unpublished. Six million copies of books written by another 15,000 authors had not been distributed and were in storage.

Last July, three persons and one corporation sued the publisher for breach of contract. The publisher applied for “court-protected rehabilitation” but was rejected. It now plans to file for “voluntary bankruptcy.” The publisher’s liabilities are estimated at two billion Japanese yen.

The publisher has offered to sell the warehoused copies to the authors at 40 percent of the cover price. Singpoosha president, Yoshiyuki Matsuzaki, issued a public apology and was quoted as saying that, “Self-publishing is an absolute necessity for humankind… I hope support will be given to writers who hold onto their dreams.”

Photo: Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri (1962); Sources:  yomiuri.co.jp, hdrjapan.com

In the 1980s, Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, and Tama Janowitz were celebrated for having captured the spirit of the times in their books — McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, Ellis’s Less Than Zero, and Janowitz’s Slaves of New York. The first two were novels. The last was a collection of short stories. All were (can we use this word?) dazzling.

McInerney placed the reader in the middle of the action with the first word — you — when he began his novel with the unusual second person point-of-view –

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then again, it might not. A small voice inside you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is a result of too much of that already. The night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where two A.M. changes to six A.M. You know the moment has come and gone, but you are not yet willing to concede that you have crossed the line beyond which all is gratuitous damage and the palsy of unraveled nerve endings.

The language is more than real.

Painters have been doing that for centuries. The folds in the satin dress of “A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal” by Vermeer come to mind.

A more recent variety exists in works described as hyperrealist. The artist works off a photograph, usually spontaneous or at least appearing to be that, and produces a painting or drawing that yields much more than the photograph, even the original moment.

Juan Francisco Casas works in paints, like other artists, but a few days ago, he was featured in El país for hyperrealist drawings that he made using a ballpoint pen. Casas took photographs of people, then drew from the prints.  From a photograph taken of a group of drawings on exhibit, each sheet appears to measure 40 inches by 60 inches, if not more. This is just an estimate. I could not find the actual dimensions. And the show, “Bare(ly) there,” is being held at the Fernando Pradilla gallery in Madrid from January 10 to February 2, which is too far for me to make the trip.

Even in reproduction and reduced to a few hundred pixels squared, the drawings still have (to use a mundane and unimaginative phrase) more life than life itself. Or are they more real than reality, even dazzling?

Images: Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), “A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal,” National Gallery, London; Juan Francisco Casas (1976- ), “Sarajevosurpriseattack nº3,” Fernando Pradilla Gallery, Madrid, elpais.com; Source:  Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City (1984), at 1

The Burlington Free Press reports that the police have a few leads and expect to start making arrests next week. Sometime between December 28 and 29, vandals trashed the cabin where poet Robert Frost spent his summers on Bread Loaf mountain in Vermont. The owner of the cottage, Middlebury College, estimate the damages at $10,000.

UPDATE: Police cited 28 persons with unlawful trespass and other charges. They are due to appear in court next month. The Burlington Free Press reported today, January 18, 2008, that most everyone was between the ages of 17 and 22 and residents of nearby Middlebury or Ripton.  An estimated thirty to fifty persons attended the birthday/New Years party at the Frost cottage.