Author of “The Last Flight of José Luis Balboa”
{ Monthly Archives }
El nuevo Herald reports today that a painting by Mexican Rufino Tamayo sold for USD 7.2 million, breaking the record for the auction of Latin American art. Tamayo completed the painting, Trovador, in 1949. It was auctioned at Christie’s, in New York, last night. The previous record had been held by the sale of Frida Kahlo’s painting, Raíces, in May 2006.
Sources: “Rufino Tamayo el más cotizado,” El nuevo Herald (May 30, 2008), christies.com
Previously, I quoted Don DeLillo on writing being like pure mathematics. He said –
That’s how you write novels actually. You suddenly hit upon something and you realize this is the path you were meant to take. You’d be a fool if you didn’t follow it. Perhaps it’s like solving a difficult question in pure mathematics. There must be a moment when the solution is so simple and evident that you wonder why you hadn’t come upon it before. When you do come upon it, you know it in the deepest part of your being. It carries its own logic.
Now, I read about Chilean writer, Pablo Simonetti. He graduated with a degree in civil engineering and worked as an engineer in a private firm for seven years before turning to writing full-time at the age of 35. He is the author of Vidas vulnerables (1999, Vulnerable Lives), Madre que estás en los cielos (2004, Mother Who Art in Heaven), and La razón de los amantes (2007, The Why of Lovers). El nuevo Herald, in Miami, quoted him as saying that literature “has a lot to do” with mathematics, as both disciplines “construct a world through axioms” (la literatura ”tiene mucho que ver” con las matemáticas, ya que ambas disciplinas “construyen un mundo a través de axiomas.”)
What is it about writing and mathematics? Where is the common ground between the two disciplines? Perhaps Simonetti is correct. Perhaps DeLillo is. I think the root goes deeper than process. It is the search for order, a making sense of what is essentially a chaotic universe. Literature gives one the sense of completion that life often denies us.
Sources: Don DeLillo quote in John Wilde, “The Day John Kennedy Died,” Melody Maker (Nov. 19, 1988), at 52-53, the article in El nuevo Herald is no longer available, but the quote can be found at “Simonetti relaciona las letras con matemáticas,” lostiempos.com (Apr. 4, 2008)(accessed Mar. 19, 2010), Pablo Simonetti website
This year the Booker prize, the most prestigious literary award in the UK and Commonwealth countries, celebrates forty years since its inception on April 22, 1969. (Some argue that the Booker is the most prestigious literary award in the English-speaking world on account of the fact that the judges’ decision is final. That is not the case with the Pulitzer. The judges there recommend the winner and finalists, but the trustees of Columbia University, with the president of the university at the head, who select the winner. The university president has overturned the decision of the Pulitzer judges at least once in history. The authors of the Booker website waste no time with silly arguments and proclaim ex cathedra that the Booker is the “most important literary prize in the English-speaking world,” even though citizens of the US are not eligible. Only US citizens are eligible for the Pulitzer. It’s nice to see that hyperbole is alive and well in the UK. Or is it just a bout of Le mal de Barnum?)
To celebrate the 40th anniversary, the Booker will award a Booker of Bookers or, as they call it, The Best of the Booker, in addition to the yearly prize. Earlier this month, the judges announced their shortlist — Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995), Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988), JM Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist (1974), and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). In 1993, Rushdie’s novel was also judged to have been the ‘Booker of Bookers,’ the best novel to have won the Booker Prize for Fiction in the then-25-year history of the award.
The judges for the 40-year Booker’s Booker shortlist were the biographer, novelist and critic Victoria Glendinning, (Chair); writer and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup, and Professor of English at University College, London John Mullan. The finalist will be chosen by the public, who are voting via SMS text messaging even as you read this. The voting is open until noon July 8 UK time. The winner will be announced July 10, 2008.
Can a TV show be far behind, with authors performing and the viewers voting for the winner? Does anyone know if Rushdie can sing?
Image: poster for Barnum & Bailey’s circus, wikipedia; Source: Man Booker Prizes website
The Times reports that three Goya drawings were recently “rediscovered” when a Swiss family took them to Christie’s for appraisal. The drawings were last seen as part of a collection of unrelated drawings, the earliest of which dated back to 1796. In 1877, the group of drawings sold for between 6 and 140 francs. One of the three “rediscovered” drawings was not among those sold then. The Swiss family currently in possession of the drawings cannot recall how they got them.
The highest a Goya drawing has sold for is GBP 1.3 million (USD 2,568,482). The three “rediscovered” Goyas will be auctioned by Christie’s London in July and are expected to sell for more than GBP 2 million (USD 3,952,062) each.
Image: Francisco Goya, El aguacil Lampiños cosido dentro de un caballo muerto (1812-1820), from the article in The Times; Source: Dalya Alberge, “Buyers Drawn to Goya Sketches Rediscovered After 130 Years,” The Times (May 27, 2008)
Assume you read one book each day for the next 83 years. You would finish sometime in 2091. You would have also read your way through 30,000 books.
That’s the number of books in Alberto Manguel’s library, which he houses in a rebuilt barn next to a 15th-century presbytery in France. He accumulated his books over six decades, beginning in his childhood in Buenos Aires, where he was born in 1948, and in Tel Aviv, where his father was Argentine ambassador to Israel. –
One of my earliest memories — I must have been 2 or 3 at the time — is of a shelf full of books on the wall above my cot, from which my nurse would choose a bedtime story. This was my first library; when I learned to read by myself a year or so later, the shelf, transferred to safe ground level, became my private domain. I remember arranging and rearranging my books according to secret rules that I invented for myself: all the Golden Books series had to be grouped together, the fat collections of fairy tales were not allowed to touch the minuscule Beatrix Potters, stuffed animals were not permitted to sit on the same shelf as the books. I told myself that if these rules were upset, terrible things would happen. Superstition and the art of libraries are tightly entwined.
After living in many places, packing up his books each time he moved, after finding the right place to display them all, he describes his present and last library in the reconstructed barn –
The library as it now stands, between long walls whose stones carry in some places the signature of their 15th-century masons, houses the remnants of all those previous libraries, including, from my earliest one, the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers in two volumes, printed in somber Gothic script, and a scribbled-over copy of “The Tailor of Gloucester.” There are few books that a serious bibliophile would find worthy: an illuminated Bible from a 13-century German scriptorium (a gift from the novelist Yehuda Elberg), half a dozen contemporary artist’s books, a few first editions and signed copies. But I have neither the funds nor the knowledge to become a professional collector, and in my library, shiny young Penguins sit happily alongside severe-looking leather-bound patriarchs.
“I knew that once the books found their place,” Manguel writes, “I would find mine.”
The rest of Maguel’s essay is here.
Sources: Alberto Manguel, “A 30,000-Volume Window on the World,” New York Times (May 15, 2008), tabularasa blog, article on Alberto Manguel, Wikipedia
Ever since Nietzsche announced the death of God, other people have been proclaiming the end of something to gain purchase on their fifteen minutes of fame. No one in the US seriously debates the vitality of the novel anymore. We await the next book by our favorite author the way others used to stand in line Saturday evening to get a jump on the Sunday paper. In Europe, things are not as clear.
Spanish novelist, Fernando Royuela, last week in El país wrote a scathing attack on those who declare the novel dead. He singles out Eduardo Mendoza who, in the early 1990s, made news doing just that. More recently, when Mendoza was asked in an interview if it wasn’t a bit “paradoxical” of him to claim the novel dead when he continued to publish them (he has published no fewer than seven novels since 1990), he backpedaled. “I do not say that the novel has died, but neither do I deny it.” (No digo que la novela haya muerto, pero tampoco lo excluyo.) There you have it: John Barth meets Bill Clinton.
The death of the novel is one of those stupid ideas that will not go away, like the notion that coffee is ”bad” for you. José Ortega y Gasset was the first to announce it in 1925, Walter Benjamin in 1930. Gore Vidal and Tom Wolfe followed suit in the fifties and sixties. The high point was probably 1967, when The Atlantic published an essay by John Barth entitled, “The Literature of Exhaustion.” Barth published a retraction or, if you prefer his word, a “clarification” entitled, “The Literature of Replenishment” in 1979, but never mind. Today, both essays are historical curios, mementos from a time when academics also proclaimed the death of the nation state and the beginning of another ice age. Shelve it all next to your phrenology head.
I’m not sure what provoked Royuela to write this essay in 2008. Maybe some Europeans really do think the novel is dead, exhibit number one being the lack in so many continental novels of anything resembling a plot. Royuela reminds us what it is about the novel that makes it universal and resilient. In that sense, debate or no debate, his words matter [translation to English mine] –
Que si la novela está muerta o está viva, que si la novela debe ser ficción o no ficción, que si la novela o es fragmentada o no será, son diatribas estériles de necesidad. Cada cual airea su paja mental y cuenta la guerra según le conviene. Esto es al fin y al cabo muy humano (salvo en el caso de los creacionistas, que como es sabido defienden el origen divino de sus novelas) pero harta igual.
La novela es un género flexible, tolerante y magnánimo en el que todo cabe salvo el aburrimiento. Intentar acotarla o encauzarla carece de sentido histórico y sólo evidencia papanatismo intelectual o crematístico afán de notoriedad.
La novela carece de reglas. La novela es por excelencia el último bastión de la libertad creativa del individuo. La novela es el territorio de la fantasía, el trasunto imposible de la realidad, el big bang del pensamiento libre y el instrumento con el que el mundo se reinventa una y otra vez. Pura catarsis, puro caos, pura pasión. …
Quienes no tienen una historia que contar, quienes carecen de visión del mundo o son incapaces de desarrollar un lenguaje propio gustan de exhibir su indigencia predicando por los medios el fin de la novela, su mutación genética o su retirada menstrual. …
Me fastidian los doctrinarios de la primera persona del singular, los certificadores de defunción del texto clásico, y cuantos pretenden ser modernos echando ketchup en el coño de Madame Bovary.
* * *
Whether the novel is dead or alive, whether the novel should be fiction or non-fiction, whether it is fragmented or it will not be, are diatribes lacking need. Each one airs his own brain spew and retells the battle the way he finds convenient. After all, this is very human (except in the case of Creationists who, as we know, defend the divine origin of their novels) but it is tiresome just the same.
The novel is a flexible genre. It is tolerant and magnanimous. It will accomodate everything except boredom. To try to delimit it or narrow it down makes no historical sense and shows intellectual gullibility or a financially-motivated pursuit of notoriety.
The novel has no rules. The novel is, par excellence, the last bastion of individual creative liberty. The novel is the territory of fantasy. It is the impossibly faithful representation of reality, the Big Bang of free thought and the instrument with which the world reinvents itself once and again. Pure catharsis, pure chaos, pure pasion. …
Those who have no story to tell, who lack a vision of the world or are incapable of developing their own language like to show off their indigence predicting through media the end of the novel, its genetic mutation, or its menopause. …
I’m sick of doctrinaires of the first person singular, of those who would certify the death of the classic text, and who pretend to be hip by tossing ketchup on Madame Bovary’s cunt.
Once I recovered my breath, that last line reminded me of the disdain for the past that occupied so much intellectual space in the twentieth century, of the failed attempts to deracinate ourselves. Novelty is the essence of history. (Notice how the word “novel” lies comfortably within the word “novelty.” Clever, no?) But all creation, even when it is artistic, is no more than the cobbling together of something old to make something new. That idea doesn’t sound so retrograde anymore. It is unlikely to raise any eyebrows or protests. And that is promising. It is good to keep it in mind, even as we continue to pay for the damage done by all that clowning around in the name of modernity.
Meanwhile, I’m going back to working on my novel. Characters get jealous. They don’t like it when I ignore them for too long. They have their stories to tell and they are eager to get it all on paper.
But before I do, I’ll make myself a double espresso. Haven’t you heard? Coffee’s good for you.
Sources: Fernando Royuela, “Soluciones habitacionales para indigentes literarios,” El país (May 17, 2008), articles on phrenology, the death of the novel and John Barth, Wikipedia, “El cansancio de la novela,” Página oficial de Eduardo Mendoza, an interview of Eduardo Mendoza comprised of fragments from nine interviews, as listed on the web page where the composite interview appears.
This has nothing to do with books or literature or even writing.
Read the chart above. George Crane, PhD, MD, wrote the chart to help marriage counselors. And what better way to salve a broken marriage than by pinning all the blame on the wife?
If your circa-1939 wife wore red nail polish, she got one demerit. If she put her cold feet on you to warm them at night, she got another demerit. Back seat driver? That got her a demerit too.
Before you get the idea that Crane was some kind of Nazi, he was generously forgiving of other kinds of behavior — if your wife flirted with other men, she got off easy with only five demerits.
On the plus side — If she dressed for breakfast, she got a merit point. If she personally put the children to bed, she got another merit point. And if she could carry on an interesting conversation, yet one more merit point.
Wait a second — one point? One measly merit point for having something interesting to say? Shouldn’t that be worth a lot more? Maybe interesting conversationalists were common back in 1939, an age before television started to erode the national IQ and a good many marriages.
At the end, you were supposed to add all the points, merits and demerits. If your wife got 76 points or more, she was diagnosed as being “Very Superior” and all the blame for the marriage faltering shifted to you. (Serves you right for going to this quack.) But if she got 24 points or less, she failed. The chart is silent on what happened then.
Image: George W. Crane, PhD, MD, “Wife’s Chart” (1939), The Telegraph; Source: Matthew Moore, “Mark your wives: The 1930s marriage test,” The Telegraph (May 14, 2008).
This Tuesday, a nude by Lucien Freud became the most expensive work of contemporary art by a living artist ever auctioned. Barely 24 hours later, another record was broken when Triptych, by Francis Bacon, was auctioned for USD 86 million.
The Times has more here.
Some people have been looking under the sofa cushions and finding quite a bit of loose change to spend, don’t you think?
Source: The Times
If you think the world has become noisier, that background music has grown into foreground music, and every space of consciousness is being invaded by advertisements and cultural detritus, this note from “NB” in the Times Literary Supplement reminds us how it may have started. (Note the date: it was almost one hundred years ago.)
André Gide, while visiting Andorra in 1910, wrote in his journal –
This abominable inn! While I’m writing this, a phonograph is barking music in the sitting room, where we are going to eat soon.
André Gide [translation into English by James Kirkup]
Source: “NB” in the Times Literary Supplement (May 9, 2008)(quoting James Kirkup, An Island in the Sky (2004))
“What if…?” It is the beginning of story writing. “What if the young, happy couple next door were really…” You imagine alternatives and play them out. Most of the time they don’t work for any number of reasons. But when they do, you have the beginning of something.
Below is not a story, it is a video by Adam Buxton. And the question he asked himself was what if there were no news one day? No news at all. There would be nothing for the talkingheads to read, nothing to say. What would the dead air sound like?
The result is uncomfortable and peaceful at the same time. It might make you think of a story too.