Jeff Remarks: June 2009

Note to the publisher.

Would Norton consider completely making my day by reissuing the Highsmith boxed set with paper-over-board editions (like that nice Beckett Centenary that Grove did a few years back?) and stop it with the ridiculous dust jackets?

No, probably not.

I will, finally, respond to this. . .

but not, my friends, where anyone who asked me will read it.

Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.

In no particular order:

1. The Valley of Fear by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
2. The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley
3. My World and Welcome to It by James Thurber
4. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
5. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
6. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
7. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
8. Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
9. How It Is by Samuel Beckett
10. Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman
11. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
12. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
13. The Castle by Franz Kafka
14. Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl
15. The Portable Dorothy Parker

Note: I will not pretend for one second that I enjoy Pale Fire. Instead, that book taught me that there is a limit to my enjoyment of books and of their appeal to me. A depressing day that was immediately brightened by the realization that Samuel Beckett was there for people like me and that the world was full of less opaque and convoluted perverts than Nabokov for me to latch onto. Jakov Lind, for one, a man who would make number sixteen on this list with ease.

Book Review: Everyday Spooks by Karel Michal

I reviewed, with only occasional incoherence, Everyday Spooks for The Review of Contemporary Fiction.

From COUNTING MY STEPS by Jakov Lind

"The world is a maze of bookshops and libraries, editorial offices and universities, studios and stages, stuffed with literature and culture like a rhinoceros with formaldehyde. There is so much good intention in the world, so much belief in reason, friendship, and peace, so much moral outcry, so much printed agony and sheer horror, the best I can do is lock myself in my own mirror of events and see if there is anything left to chew."

and a bit later,

"The attic of my nineteenth-century soul is stuffed with weird obsessions. Future, past, hope, justice, Socialism to name but a few. The things in my attic were once Everything. And Everything has its place, a few places in fact."

And I am only mildly disappointed to say, but the majority of Lind's first autobiography isn't experimental nonsense or absurd perversion. It is autobiography, straight-forward and observant.

Title for a prospective novel: Formaldehyde Park

From Strangers in the Land by Eric J. Sundquist

Writing in 1961, Daniel Bell, the secular child of observant immigrants, described himself as one "who has not faith, but memory," who was "born in galut [exile]," and accepts. . ."the double burden and double pleasure of my self-consciousness, the outward life of the American and the inward secret of the Jew. I walk with this sign as a frontlet between my eyes, and it is as visible to some secret others as their sign is to me."

From Why I am so wise by Friedrich Nietzsche

"Like every man who has never been able to meet his equal, and to whom the notion of "retaliation" is just as incomprehensible as the notion of "equal rights," I have forbidden myself all measures of security or protection and also, naturally, of defense and "justification" in all cases where I have encountered foolishness, whether trifling or very great. My form of retaliation is this: as soon as possible I follow up my encounter with stupidity with a piece of cleverness; by this means perhaps one may still overtake it. To use an image: I swallow a pot of jam in order to get rid of a sour taste. . . . just let anybody give me offense-I shall "retaliate," he may be assured of That. . ."

Very Entertaining

Klaus Mann, the critic Marcel ReichRanicki has said, was triply afflicted: he was gay, he was addicted to drugs, and he was the son of Thomas Mann. With the exception of himself – but at least he could rely on himself in this regard – no one seemed to take Klaus entirely seriously. The best joke about Klaus Mann – deep and strange, as Brecht’s jokes tend to be – is by Brecht: “The whole world knows Klaus Mann, the son of Thomas Mann. By the way, who is Thomas Mann?”. Others are less funny, merely punny: W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman (who were his in-laws, I suppose), hearing there was a Klaus Mann autobiography on the way – he published the first one at the age of twenty-five – proposed such titles for it as “The Invisible Mann” and “Subordinate Klaus”.

--from TLS