THE COUNTERFEITERS - NAZI PERIOD REVISITED

Just when it feels like an event of the tragic scope and aftermath of the Holocaust has been as thoroughly mined creatively as one could imagine -- off hand at least 20 films and 30 more novels that heavily reference this milestone of 20th century disaster come to mind -- another film emerges that portrays this dilemma from a new angle. The Counterfeiters eerie strength and power relies not simply for its stark portrayal of holocaust atrocities - but it's unswerving honesty in getting inside the individual personalities, ambitions, and alienations of the protagonist -- a professional counterfeiter, an heir to the alienated Camus' Meersault of the Stranger, a 20th century man lost in meaningless and slowly imbibing death on the installment plan. Surrounding him in the camp which are desperately counterfeiting British and ultimately American currencies are an idealistic Marxist who abhors any attempt they are making to assist the SS even if it is saving their lives and allowing them somewhat less subhuman living conditions, and a doctor who'se well intentioned humanism is belied by his ultimate commitment to savign his own skin. The film also has an eerie resonance with the US current financial crisis where the dollar has never been so low -- suggesting the eternity of the rise and fall of commodities/currencies/empires as the slow, ineluctable wheels of history grind on. This is a film not to be missed.

Whatever Happened to Thomas Mann?

I was just waxing nostalgic about college -- and the intensity of high modernism. Thomas Mann figured largely in the list. The exquisitely complex double narrative structure of Dr. Faustus. The brilliance of Hegelian thinking realizing itself in the panoramic vista of the Magic Mountain and the oneiric journey back into Hans Castorp's primal scene mind with a baby being torn into pieces - so deftly symbolizing his fate as a member of the German Volk destined to become cannon fodder in World War I, and more deeply Mann's deft encapsulation of the philosophical dilemma of the end of the 19th century -- Could we any longer entertain the beautiful humanism of Rousseau in an era that was destined (he certainly scores high on prescience) so many total horrors? Was Nietzsche indeed the cutting force who would shape twentieth century politics with his anticipation of the blond beasts and their relentless brutal smashing down of high culture, interpersonal differentiation, and the collapse of potential utopias?

Sadly, a friend of mine who has taught twentieth century literature for over 30 years at the college level -- despaired that Mann has largely been dropped from the canon of "important" writers -- such as Kafka, Proust, and Joyce. Even Woolf has taken over a greater cultural relevance.

What in the world is going on here? Who can forget Death in Venice?

THE ENDLESSNESS OF ANNA KARENINA

It's often been said that the power of great art/literature/psychoanalysis lies in the compulsion it stimulates in the reader/viewer/analysand to feel the greedy necessity of re-reading the work in order to fully understand it. The act of a good read can become a fascinating form of a repetition compulsion -- charged with the satisfaction of going through the story AGAIN combined with the new excitement of saying there's a level of understanding lurking here that can only be grasped the second (or third) time around.

One of my favorite college teachers had the funny notion of a year long course in the novel that would have one semester of reading the great 19th century classics -- Anna Karenina, Moby Dick, The Red and the Black -- and then re-reading them the following semester. His idea was that the first time around the reader is so engrossed in the story with primary identifications with the characters that you don't notice the structure, you don't notice the subtle messages lurking in the background, he described his urgency to get to know Anna and how irritated he was with the Kitty/Levin plot -- and it was only as he matured that he realized this created the brilliance/balance of the novel.

In the new translation of Anna Karenina Tolstoy himself is referenced in the foreword regarding his own need to "find" Anna -- for a few years he wrestled with the idea of a story of a "bad" woman -- outside the social norms, someone who would be punished for transgressing। It was only when he came to fall in love with her -- and found himself unable to think of an ending good enough for her -- that he began to reconsider her suicide along the lines of a courageous woman -- a split off part of his own personality -- torn between the hunger for stability and the desire for unconventionality। Those four years were time well spent। After four readings Anna Karenina continues to capture, delight, reverberate with the deepest themes of existence rendered without an ounce of pretension. It made me wonder: is there contemporary literature today that rises to this level of ambition?

ALICE MUNRO: Immigrant Song

Alice Munro's work eluded me until her newest work, The View From Castle Rock. It's a trusim that great writers teach you how to read their work, they insist on it, you must succumb to their particular prose and once conquered, you're conquered. Her work at times is arguably flawed -- particularly in this fascinating collection of stories drawn from letters, chronicles, and evidence of her family dating back to their migration from the darkest forms of Calvinism in Scotland in the eighteenth century, chronicling their struggles across the Atlantic into the present. The tales are at times brutal, at times poignant, uncompromising and unsentimental in their grittiness of the stark harshness of the life that was left and the new stark reality of eking out an existence in a world where the streets are not paved with gold.

But Munro's genius is in the subtletly and denseness with which she excavates precisely the nature of inner experience, juxtaposed against conditions of deprivation. Consider a passage like: Only from the inside of the faith is it possible to get any idea of the prize as well as the struggle, the addictive pursuit of pure righteousness, the intoxication of a flash of God's favor. OR: The child is turning somersaults in her belly. Her face is hot as a coal and her legs throb and the swollen flesh in between them... is a colding sack of pain. Her mother would have known which leaves to mash to make a soothing poultice. At the thought of her mother such misery overcomes her that she wants to kick somebody.

This book is writing on the grand scale. As Munro pulls into her fifties as opposed to the apocalyptic vision of Cormac McCarthy, she crafts a world of mythic intensity, built of blood and stone and labor, the chronicles of her forebears, a world in which birth and death complete and eternal cycle that offers the faintest glimpse of a gritty neorealist's version of resurrection against all odds.

ERICA JONG: A love affair

As an adolescent Fear of Flying took me over. I couldn't believe there was writing this honest, that people who lived in rambling duplexes with gold leaf ceilings could have major mood swings, that women married to psychoanalysts got depressed and would ride their husbands cocks at night far above the velvety darkness of Central Park in a frenzy of rage, going back to their analysts to talk, to confess, and to get ready to break the rules. Much criticism has been levied against Erica over the years, -- that her novels degenerated into laundry lists and instructions for her nannies, that her sense of her life collapsed the value of her art, that her novels failed to maintain a certain quality of art. I met Erica a few years ago at an event for writers held at Marymount College. It still provoked that adolescent thrill of meeting a celebrity, the author behind the pages that launched over 15 million copies sold and changed lives throughout the world because she had the courage to tell the truth. And she was just as I expected: Sincere, to the point, no nonsense. I was in the middle of a major crisis with my first publisher and didn't feel this was the time or place to go into it. That year I'd met E L Doctorow and a host of other writers who were polite but definitely rushed who scrawled their autographs and bustled off into the effluvium of their own fame. But Erica went slowly. There was a deep look into my eyes, frightened and wearied that my novel would never be published, or if it were, would be hacked into a work of art I wouldn't recognized by an editor who didn't seem to like or get it and rarely returned my calls. She just firmly looked me in the eye, asked me my name, chatted in a down to earth manner, and signed: For David, Without Fear!

Francine du Plessix Gray and the 1970s

Francine du Plessix Gray shocked everyone (or so people tell me) in the mid 1970s with her astonishing talent. Her debut novel Lovers and Tyrants came out of nowhere and had the indisputable thrill of a Proustian recollection fueled by hallucinogens, third wave feminism, and a ferocious intelligence which du Plessix Gray never let dominate her chronicle, but elegantly wove philosophy and history through the at times hilarious and heartbreaking story of a woman struggling deep within the engine of middle age to understand her life. The novel while not entering the pantheon of mega bestsellers like "Fear of Flying" did play a pivotal role in the literary world and many women writer's of the next generation found much to emulate in du Plessix Gray's ability to write with a self-revealing candor that maintained a consistent level of art. Unlike Jong, the literary arrow consistently aimed high and struck the mark, combining a degree of self-disclosure that was all the more powerful in taking on themes of marriage, madness, sexuality, masochism, and existential imprisonment with an acuity of perception that was both hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure. Ah Francine, keep writing, let's see more of it. Her recent autobiography, THEM, which deservedly won the National Book Award for Creative Nonfiction showcased her talents, but somehow lacked the same fire. Let's keep our fingers crossed that she can and will do it again!

JEAN RHYS: THE ENDLESS VOYAGE

Much has been written about how impending death releases an artist's greatest inner capacities in one final flood that pulls the entire tapestry of their life together.

I can think of few writers for whom this is more true than Jean Rhys. She began in her twenties and attracted acclaimin a narrow but significant literary circle with her natural sense of form and determination to write from the point of view of the underclassed, the disadvantaged with a natural sense of form. Some championed her as the grittier social realism that lay beneath the upper crust world of Virginia Woolf. Voyage in the Dark immediately intrigued Ford Maddox Ford's for its utter lack of sentimentality. This is my favorite Rhys novel, showcasing her uncanny ability to capture the inner derangement of Anna Morgan, a poor chorus girl sent away from her native land, who withers in the bitter cold of England. The novel ends with a startling evocation of the inner mentation of a psychotic episode while the protagnoist undergoes a back room abortion.

Subsequently Rhys' career did not take her into the limelight. She was marginalized, she wrote "about women", she was thin compared with the male writers of the period, she lacked the sheer brilliance of Proust or the innovations of Joyce. She was merely a "good writer" in a time of ground breaking genius.

Personally wrestled with alcoholism, difficult marriages, and the struggle to find a balance between her creativity and her demons as she slipped further into obscurity. Then towards the end of her life, confronting her mortality, she produced "THe Wide Sargasso Sea" -- which not only re-launched her career but brought her to a different level of literary acclaim.

Finally Rhys was serious fiction. Finally, by inhabiting the tormented mind of the mad woman locked in Jane Eyre's symbolic attack and giving her flesh and blood, Rhys had arguably entered the pantheon of the elite few who had pushed their writing beyond the form of entertainment into a powerful art form that began to use a shocking change of perspective -- the ability to tell what seems a narrative which is by definition forbidden - the story of someone insane -- with impressive lucidity, and above all a compassion which drives powerfully to wrestle with what sanity is and how language can press at the outer reaches of consciousness. My suspicion is that as time moves us further into the 20th century the interest in her work will continue to grow and for good reason. Her writing continues to chill, to fascinate, and to remind us all of the power of words to both haunt as well as redeem.

Is Cormac McCarthy THAT GOOD?

Cormac McCarthy lurks in the place of American letters like a ghost from a disappearing age when writing MATTERED and writing had its own mythos of excessive drinking, womanizing, and a machismo that went through the roof. I'm reminded of Erica Jong's observations on being an undergraduate at Barnard at how so many of the poets that came through -- Untermeyer, Ted Hughes (of Sylvia Plath notoriety), and the like all told them that as women they were wasting their time writing poetry -- the real themes of blood and guts belonged to men. Never mind that already Grace Paley, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, to name a few had already begun to establish a significant readership and a new way of writing that was far from the feminine form of traditional romance.

If as Philip Roth once commented: to be a great writer means risking telling something shameful, to be more perverse rather than neurotic, McCarthy does succeed in precisely this way. His novels don't stop short of the full truth -- be it violence, cannibalism, incest, and the two themes he defines as central to the nature of life in America -- violence and death. He never pretends to be redemptive, and he rarely strikes a false note.

My problem with his much lauded work (how complex that the NY Times mega-review of American classics places his "Blood Meridian" third, beneath Toni Morrisson's "Beloved") is the pervasive sense that comes through the writing that McCarthy insists on being seen as a "big writer" in the way that Faulkner and Hemingway were huge. In insisting on this icon status it detracts from the actual power of his work. In my view James Dickey succeeded to be both more subtle and more profound about the same issues in Deliverance, without his ever present fingerprint hovering over the novel, clamoring for immortality. Beyond violence and death lies craft, humility and the importance of writing for its own sake. If McCarthy could discover this subtlety he could truly be one of the great voices of our time.

WILLIAM FAULKNER AND THE POWER OF SPACE

It's been a well known aphorism in writing that fiction tends to emerge out of the environment in which it's written. Could magical realism a la Garcia Marquez have happened anywhere but in Colombia? Could the stiff, emotionally repressed, but psychologically probing work of Anita Brookner have come from any other city but London? Perhaps, but nowhere is the case clearer than in Faulkner that place is everything. The slow, languid pace of the backwater of Mississippi, spanish Moss, ruined plantations, the ineluctable smell of the vanquished permeate every page of his work. I recently read As I Lay Dying for the tenth time, and it held up. If place is all, this is as good as it gets.

MILAN KUNDERA: THE BODY Phttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifOLITIC

Milan Kundera was that rare thing -- a breakthrough author who'd survived a totalitarian government who managed to create the best kind of subversive art -- a blend of eros, psychoanalysis and politics -- that fused the high modernism which pulled in the philosophy of the Nietzsche's doctrine of the internal return, the pathos of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, and a knack for plots that took daring risks with twists of time and character and managed to generate genuine dramatic intensity while continuing to pulse with a jungle of ideas and philosophies. The Unbearable Lightness of Being was his arguable masterpiece, and in its rise to best sellerdom spawned the trappings of literary celebrity, film adaptation, and a stardom which Kundera wisely eschewed, remaining closer to the bone. The only question is, where has he gone? What is he doing? And what in the world is coming next?

HEMINGWAY AND THE DREAD OF THE FEMININE

When I was a teenager my sisters would come back from their catholic high school with the standard literary fare intended to prepare them for college -- Hemingway and Fitzgerald figured heavily in their mix, as did John Knowles, Steinbeck, and those other writers in a realist vein that precede the later discoveries of Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Mann and the perverse twists of high modernism. Because they were at a strict school for girls where wearing socks at the inappropriate length could result in detention (this was the 70s!!) , almost all of the excerpts from Hemingway's novels that dealt frankly with sexuality were literally torn or blacked out of the book. It made it so intriguing (what was behind all that dark ink the nuns had so assiduously applied over the years?) that I went out and got a copy of A Farewell to Arms.

I was struck by how little Hemingway knew women, how plastic they were in his work, and how much more mysterious they were with the power of omission rather than with his depictions of them. It's easy to rant against an over-rated icon, but it's also curious to me that somehow Hemingway endures, that he's still a mainstay in so many different kinds of curriculum, that beginning writers are still advised a la John Gardner to read all the Faulkner you can and then read all the Hemingway you can to get the Faulkner out of your system. Personally I'd rather keep Hemingway high on a shelf, like an occasional shot of Jack Daniels. There's a kick to it, but it's in the service of avoiding the dread of something he can't write about. If Lytton Strachey once felt distubed by the "lack of copulation" in Virginia Woolf's work, I think there's a greater problem with the pretense of copulation in Hemingway. Perhaps the nuns and all of that ink were right, even if for all the wrong reasons?

MARY GAITSKILL AND PERVERSE SENSIBILITY

Mary Gaitskill isn't kidding around. Freud's famous maxim -- the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego -- has rarely been taken to such a successful extreme by any writer of contemporary fiction. Her willingness to expose, confront, and engage the body in her swirling narrative of memory, perversion, desire, death and triumph brings in all the big themes of literature without sentimentality, and with an unfaltering quest to seek out the good, the bad, and the ugly of sexuality and our culture in a way that makes the likes of Philip Roth and John Updike seem absolutely inhibited. Again to consider Freud: The pervert does what the neurotic envies: Gaitskill's writing is pervese where Roth and Updike by comparison are neurotic. She takes it a step further while avoiding the trap of an adolescent cultivating shock value for its own sake. Gaitskill belongs to the realm of Goya, Pasolini, and Diane Arbus in her fearless willingness to delve into the taboo without judgment. She exposes excrement, sadomasochism, desperation, disease, and excavates the delicate pulsating sublime pulsating within it all.

ANNE MICHAELS WHERE ARE YOU

There is no positive addiction like being seduced by a book. And it seems to me that a decade is a crucial time in the lifespan of a book -- has it become merely a product, is it ready to be discarded -- or after ten years does it retain a certain kind of magic, that demands to be read and then read again, each time unfolding different nuances of meaning. I think aside from some of the negative reactions to the novel -- the lack of a successful ending, the lack of differentiation of some of the characters -- the immensity of its ambition to wed philosophy and poetry, its constant level of observation which is woven into the fabric of the drama remains a triumph. I keep finding sections that bear not only re-reading but which make me want to go back into philosophy and really plumb the depths of Hegel and Husserl. For those of you who want to go to the distance with serious writing that aims high but also shoots for life outside of the coterie audience of academia, Fugitive Pieces is a must and Michaels' poetry, largely unknown outside of her native Canada, holds the mark with the best of Adrienne Rich and Robert Lowell. If ever a book shows the value of ten years worth of writing, this one does.

MICHAEL ONDAATJE AND INFINITE SPIRITUAL POSSIBILITY

Michael Ondaatje haunts me. The lyrical intensity of his prose finds the right level, the delicate balance between earth and ether. His novels are big in the best sense of literary ambition -- the psychological intensity of Shakespeare pitted against the power of the sentence that aspires and frequently achieves the level of intensity of Joyce or Woolf. So curious to see what his next novel will deliver.

I was excited for him, given his years of laboring in relative obscurity, that The English Patient was made into a major release and won so many awards. I thought the screenplay simplified his relationship to politics, making it seemingly palatable for the Count to sell the maps to the Nazis, whereas the book seemed to be so much broader in it search for a global equanimity. Well, that's Hollywood for ya...

JEANETTE WINTERSON REVISTED

It's been twenty years since Jeanette Winterson stunned the literary world with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. I recently finished The Passion and found it curiously flat. It was as if the story had driven the engine of the experience so completely, that in the words of Virginia Woolf "the text failed to vibrate." I find this question so intriguing: what creates a Picasso or a James Joyce who push the edges of anartform incessantly, constantly expanding the envelope, right up until their deaths. And what creates an artist who makes a stunning debut but devolves from that point of origin into a product? All ideas on this welcomed.

SLOANE'S ARTWORK INSPIRES EVENT

Check out where I went this weekend. These pictures by Janice Sloane, a long time legendary underground guerilla girl of the East Village really got me thinking.

Do these pictures invite a sense of sensuality versus despair, or both?

What lies beneath the shock value? I was haunted by the fact that the stretched skin belonged to Sloane's dying lover, and constitutes an elegy of his disappearing flesh which she is nursing to the grave?

When art is great it seems to me the crucial thing is that it becomes more than entertainment, but rises to the realm of fetish, ritual, redemption, disclosure, the nightmare and orgasm caught down on the page in the flashbulb of a second.

With that in mind I restlessly emailed Carole Maso, who remains one of my favorite writers well over thirteen years after I first read her to New York to show a group of psychoanalysts a series of avant films and how they spark the translational mappings of the dream screen into narrative text.

More details will follow as the event unfolds. Check back soon.

WRITING AND THE TRUTHhttp://www.bloghttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifger.com/img/gl.link.gif

Just got back from seeing a magnificent retrospective of Annie Leibowitz' photography -- and was so struck by the power of story implied in her portraiture. The heartbreak and pathos of Johnny Cash and his family. Wow did Roseann look depressed. The pleasant maternal chaos of Patti Smith and her family juxtaposed with the demonic figure of Matthew Barney captured as if he were a satyr. The show seemed to reach a peak intensity with the portraits of Clinton and his family taken at the height of his power, and then the Bush administration shortly after how the Iraq war began.

The Bush photograph is a masterpiece in the vein of Goya's portrait of the syphillitic and decaying royal family he worked for but detested. Bush flashes an arrogant shit-eating grin that says "I can do anything and git away with it long as I sound Texan and shoot ducks on my ranch." Rumsfeld looks sneaky and tragic, as if he knows his days are numbered. Cheney looks like the devil incarnate with a defiant raised eyebrow. Condoleeza Rice has her fists clenched over her crotch, her eyes are dark violent stones burning in her head glaring at Leibowitz with hatred. Her face says: "We know how you are. A liberal. A lesbian. A subervise. We know and we are not afraid of you and your camera."

I came home and began thinkin of power and fiction. Annie Leibowitz is definitely getting down the disturbance of our time. The show is magnificent. I'm so curious to see what writers of our period will rise up to take on this current epoch and expose it, in the way Burroughs blew away the 50s, Barthes and Coover defined the 60s, Pynchon and his descendants rocked the 80s, and Chuck Palahniuk introduced a shock wave into the commercialism of the 90s.

Let's stay tuned!

THOMAS PYNCHON REVISITED

THOMAS PYNCHON REVISITED? Writing and culture always reflect back the world from which it emerges. Back in the derangement of 1973 a world filled with urnest -- the Watergate scandal, the American political system falling apart, the beginning of the end of Viet Nam, we had two odd cultural phenomenon. The Exorcist - a film where a pubescent girl played by the then-adorable Linda Blair screamed obscenities and defied the growing techno-secular world to enter her bedroom and chase the demons out screaming.

The picture on the upper right is the link incidentally to a fabulous Pynchon website with tons of interesting information about this enigmatic genius.

The other major phenomenon was the mind boggling convoluted story of rocket 00003 and a test replete with power equations mad matings of extraterrestrials and a strange phenomenon called the white visitations blowing the
second half of the century away and leaving the ramshackle butch realism of Hemingway in the dust forever.

But here we are in 2006, in an age where despite the fact that more than 800 million Americans are in reading groups, Thomas Pynchon has put out a new novel which is actually accessible. I'm not sure whether to applaud him for trying to really reach an audience outside of the ivory tower, or whether this is a moment of despair, of giving up that rare form of high art in the service of pandering to the masses....?

WRITING AND EROTICA

As I get ready to move across the country with the carnk up of a tour -- details will come out later, I've been struck by the tremendous diligence and efforts that the publishing world -- particularly the smaller independents have to make. So many of the larger publishing houses having formed have a conglomerate have almost total takeover not just of Barnes and Nobles and Borders (yes they do buy a token amount of alternative fiction but even when it sells out they're loath to buy more because they're already committed to the next big unloading from a mega-organization like Random House-Knopf-Viking so they just don't have the room to do something based on sales and vision. "Third spacing" has proven to be an interesting possibility and as I anticipate the tour promoting The Dolphin Smiles I've been encouraged by how many alternative stores, particularly those that promote and sell erotica, those tools that expand our sexual selves -- have been really open not just to stocking the novel but also to having events/readings/a real sense of celebration. Similarly, the cyber community has been an extremely receptive place where so much has happened. Clearly despite a major regression in our political system we're a reading nation -- books are as important as they've ever been. So many people are not only reading but joining groups in which to do it. THe question is how can we use the power of our democracy to break out of the consumer frenzy and let writing and other art forms find their audience on their own terms? Let's keep talking about this!

LITERATURE AND GHETTOIZATION

I was talking today with one of the managers of a large chain store which is stocking my novel. I should be grateful and in many ways I am. This place, despite being a conglomerate, has won a lot of my admiration with its complete uber-efficiency and its willingness to take chances with my book which is in some ways is a bit more experimental than the garden-variety bestseller. What I was struck by is their insistence that the book appear exclusively in the gay and lesbian section. Yes, OK, marketing has its realities and we know that the gay and lesbian community is a major force in book purchasing. But realistically, I think one of the problems our culture faces as market forces rise up and dominate things, is that writing is valuable because of its innate value. And its ability to have universal appeal. Literary minds and styles as diverse as Proust, Wiilliam Burroughs , Virginia Woolf and Carole Maso are on the map not because they're gay per se, but because they're great writers who continouously probe, provoke, incite, and force us to reconsider our worlds. I'm curious to see where the next few years will lead us in this direction as more and more of queer culture sets the standard for what's hip, what's in vogue, and what defines the avant garde. Best to everybody, David