And while you comply with this alien style, while you fit
your own prose into it, you may also, positively, react against it, in your
hours off, your away hours: it was while I was translating, with such pleasure,
Proust’s very long and ingenuity-taxing sentences that I began, in contrary
motion, to write the very shortest stories I could compose, sometimes consisting
only of the title and a single line.
Lydia Davis, “Twenty-One Pleasures of Translating (and a
Silver Lining),” Essays Two
We
had a couple of days in Picton visiting father-in-law and his wife over the
weekend (driving straight there without stopping, driving straight home without
stopping) for some holiday enjoyments, one of the rare few we’d planned that we
hadn’t cancelled or postponed. Our young ladies played in the yard, went
tobogganing and did their own gingerbread house crafts, among other activities.
As part of the trip, I took a mound of books for potential reading, focusing on
things that I wasn’t going through with the express purpose of working a review
or other types of commentary, despite whatever random notes I might be sketching
out. It would be good, I thought, to just sit and read. Christine, on her part,
attended to her knitting.
The
first volume I brought along was Lydia Davis’ latest,
Essays Two (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2021). I’m a huge admirer of the work of Lydia Davis, having
gone through
Can’t and Won’t (2014) [
see my note on such here],
Essays One (2019) and
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (2009), among
others, much of which has sparked numerous different threads and direction in
my own writing over the years. Just as
Essays One focused on her pieces
on writing and writers,
Essays Two collects her various essays, lectures
and talks on the process of translation, something that features heavily in her
creative work. It is fascinating to hear her experiences attempting to explore
languages she has either only a passing knowledge of, or simply no knowledge
whatsoever, navigating an endless sequence of paths attempting to read, understand
and translate a language, such as Norwegian, into English, deliberately without
utilizing a language dictionary. She probably doesn’t know of Hugh Thomas’
ongoing project of translating poems into English from languages he doesn’t know,
including Norwegian (
I should certainly mention this chapbook, for example). She had
me thinking in a number of directions, including, through attempting to
translate a relative’s two hundred year old English prose memoir into a
contemporary narrative poem, about the notion of the line break. It reminded me
of Dennis Cooley’s classic essay on the line break, collected in
The Vernacular Muse (Turnstone Press, 1987), an essay, and a collection, I can’t recommend
highly enough. Through this piece, as well as with others, it is interesting to
hear Davis speak of her uncertainty with language and form, attempting to feel
her way through a puzzle to the other end, without any sense of what the final
form might look like. As she offers as part of her explorations of the line
break:
Or I could take Ashbery’s answer as, really, the best an
only answer, and here is how it might work: you would simply have to keep
attempting your own line breaks, trusting your instincts and then listening again
to what you had done, examining your line breaks, reexamining them. You would
also, when you wer not writing your own poems, study the line breaks of other
poets, especially poets you unquestionably admired. You would then return to
examine your own, and in that way inculate in yourself a feel for line breaks,
until you could confidently, without worrying, break the line “wherever it felt
right.”
I
took a lot of notes (including some thoughts in prose of my own, including
scratchings toward a potential essay or two, and some possible fiction), but couldn’t
bring myself to shape up those notes into a review, as though simply wishing to
retain the experience of reading and absorbing the material. I suspect I’ll do
the same here, despite Davis being one of my favourite prose writers. Sometimes
it’s a matter of allowing the experience of reading to prompt my own writing
and thinking, not wishing to be distracted or sidetracked through composing a
review. I’ve had a similar experience earlier this year when attempting a
review of Gail Scott’s Permanent Revolution: Essays (Book*hug, 2021). There
are certain books that render themselves slippery when it comes to commentary,
prompting me to, instead, simply prefer to lose myself in the reading and
thinking. It is entirely for this reason, as well, that I never did do proper
write-ups for Joshua Beckman’s paired 2018 Wave Books essay titles, despite the
wealth of notes I made when working through those collections.
The
first thing I always read in a new issue of
The Paris Review is the
interviews. Really, a good interview can be revelatory, allowing a
point-of-entry for a writer with whom I’d little to no prior knowledge. Even if
I never get around to reading that particular writer, there are elements that
one can always pick to add to one’s own thinking around process, and how writing
and books are potentially made. My mother-in-law gifted me a subscription last
year for Christmas (I hope she renews), so I’ve been able to see a regular run
of issues for a while now, all without leaving the house. I had begun to pick
up the occasional issue prior to this, which I think had been noticed by either
Christine or her mother during one of our cottage-jaunts, so perhaps that where
the thought originated. I’d pick up one every year or so, depending on who was
being interviewed within. The interview with
Doris Lessing was deeply satisfying,
for example, and I enjoyed the interview with
Robert Haas far more than I’d
expected, especially at his admission that even he considers that his wife,
Brenda Hillman, is a more interesting poet than he is (which is actually where
my own preference sits, also: sorry, Bob).
The current issue of
The Paris
Review is #238 (Winter 2021), and includes interviews with
American fiction writer Gary Indiana and
American non-fiction writer Annette Gordon-Reed. I’d
heard of the first, but not the second at all. It is impossible, after all, to even
hear the name Gary Indiana without being reminded of
a very young Ronnie Howard singing the song named for the geography, as part of
The Music Man (1962).
It was fascinating reading through Indiana’s process of novel-building, and the
particular political and cultural era he wrote through the midst of, the 1970s
of Los Angeles, and the beginnings of the AIDS crisis. I’m aware of some of the
writers and writings from this period, particularly the New Narrative writers,
but I get the sense that Indiana was working a more mainstream direction in his
fiction, which is how I hadn’t encountered it as of yet.
The
real revelation was the interview with Annette Gordon-Reed. Apparently she was the
researcher and writer who verified the long-held rumour that American President
Thomas Jefferson had fathered children with a woman he owned. As the
introduction to the interview begins:
Annette Gordon-Reed will
always be most famous for having confirmed, beyond a reasonable doubt, the
centuries-old rumors about Thomas Jefferson having had multiple children with a
mixed-race woman named Sally Hemings, whom he owned. In 1997, armed with only
the analog tools of traditional historiography, she made a resounding case for
the relationship in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. The book touched off a fierce debate followed a year later by
the DNA testing of male descendants in Jefferson’s family, the results of which
proved her theories.
It
seems stunning to me, at least from this perspective of geographic and cultural
distance, that this part of Jefferson’s history had only been proven so
recently, as I’d long presumed it was simply known, and widely-so. It speaks,
yet again, to the importance of history as being a moving target, and one that requires
ongoing updates, as new information is revealed, or even better understood.
Gordon-Reed, herself, sounds absolutely fascinating, as someone deeply engaged and
curious, seeking out answers to questions that had either been deliberately
buried, or ones that other historians simply hadn’t thought to pose. She sounds,
in all honestly, utterly brilliant.
Other
than that, I haven’t dipped into much of the issue, although I was intrigued by
the poem “Strange as the Rules / of Grammar,” by Terrance Hayes, a poem that
ends:
The scar is so old others
must tell you
how it was made
It
doesn’t count as reading, but a week or two back, I spent a few nights watching
that new Beatles documentary, the eight hours of watching them noodle around to
create the
Let It Be album, culminating in that 1969 rooftop performance—their
first public performance in three years, and their final public performance as
well. I saw some on social media complaining about the documentary, not able to
get through that first hour, citing the level of complaining and bickering
(which is fair; that first hour or two has some rough spots in it). But I found
it utterly fascinating in the same way I used to enjoy
Inside the Actors’
Studio: conversations on and around process, building and creation, which
is why I even bring it up in the context of this assemblage of reading notes. How
does anything get made? Even for the Beatles, which were, at that moment, the
biggest band in the world, sitting through uncomfortable stretches and bickering
and nonsense and the pressure of deadlines. Christine had no interest in the series
at all (she also ignored
the George Harrison doc, which I had to watch after
she’d gone to bed, also, as well as
a Brian Eno doc I caught last year). She offered
that part of the appeal for such a documentary is having to be actually invested
in these particular musicians and their music, which is fair enough. I suppose
she was just never into the Beatles, whereas I spent much of my teen years
attentive to same, including and up to 1987, celebrated in certain media as the
“second summer of love,” pushing the 20
th anniversary of
Sgt. Pepper’s,
and other elements of the 1960s. I think I watched
Yellow Submarine 25-plus
times during that period. My ex-wife even had her 1960s-era Beatles 45s, left
over from elder brothers. And every Sunday morning, an hour long radio program I
caught that featured music by the Beatles. So I suppose I was the right audience
for this thing. The documentary was fascinating in the way songs emerged, and
the back-and-forth between the band, both individually and as a group,
attempting to shape and hammer whatever came into their heads into workable
songs, some of which were abandoned, and others reshaped into long-familiar
classics.
It
is odd, to me at least, the slight backlash the documentary has prompted,
articles suggesting “Its not their fault we thought them the greatest rock band
in the world.” An article in The Washington Post was titled “The Beatles are overrated. That’s our fault, not theirs.” One has to think of context,
certainly. Weren’t they the perfect storm of talent, industry, timing, everything?
Brian Epstein wouldn’t let them tour the US until a Number One single on American
charts, whereas The Animals just went over (where are they now?), or the
sheer onslaught of songs writ and sold by Paul/John, which I’m sure allowed
them enough financial comfort to hang about and write their own material
without requiring side-gigs. I mean, context is everything, isn’t it? It seems
silly as a response, and a complete misunderstanding of who they were within
that particular period, and what they were actually accomplishing. “We don’t like
them now because culture has progressed further”? It has been fifty years,
after all. I mean, really.
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