“I fear non-existence. When life goes on and one doesn’t experience anything anymore, one is no longer there.”

—Marcel Reich-Raniki, German literary critic

And on a completely unrelated note:

”I became obsessed with the terrifying thought that these texts would expose me completely to the public at large as I really was, namely a trickster and a deceiver and nothing more, a philosopher who knew nothing about the history of philosophy or about Marx.”

–Louis Althusser, author of Pour Marx (In support of Marx)

John Lopez over at No Treason took up the latest blogspam trend (wasn’t it just a year ago we were calling these “memes”?), this time about books. Despite following the chain about five links back, I couldn’t find any authoritative source of this thing, but there seems at least to be a consistent format. Of course, it also seems like the etiquette is to wait to get tagged by somebody else before engaging, but, since readership around here has dwindled pretty significantly around (through nobody’s fault but my own), I figure I might be waiting a while. Plus, it sounds like fun, so here goes:

• Number of books I own: It’s weird: in most respects I’m one of the laziest, most disorganized people I know (of course, it’s easier to justify this by saying I “work better under pressure”), but I’m actually fairly meticulous about books; they’re generally alphabetized on my shelves (although as I say that I’m looking directly at an unsorted stack which includes Rothbard’s Man, Economy and State, Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Paz’s El laberinto de la soledad) and I actually try to keep lists of what I own and what I’ve read in the last year (which is especially weird because, so far as I can tell, these are the only lists I have ever kept; I don’t even make up a list when I go grocery shopping). Anyway, the point is, by doing a simple line count on the list of books I own and subtracting the overcount for those that take up multiple lines, I (tentatively) conclude that I have 462 books in my one-bedroom apartment (not including various English-to-X dictionaries, my Calvin and Hobbes collection, etc. and also not including the two dozen or so books saved to my hard drive), for which I am rapidly running out of shelf space. Of course, there’s also a stack of books still in my parents’ house that aren’t included in that count, but those don’t number more than 30 or 40, so I think I can safely assume I own about 500 books.
• Last book I bought: Just this afternoon, I swung by Barnes & Noble to pick up HST’s Fear and Loathing in America: The Gonzo Papers, Vol. II, which should be fun. That having been said, I have to admit I’d actually read Lopez’s post before buying this particular book, so if I’d responded sooner, the answer would have been the French-English dictionary I picked up this morning at the university bookstore, whereas at the time Lopez actually posted, the answer would have been a tie between Valle-Inclán’s Tirano Banderas and Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, two of my all-time favorite books that, for whatever reason, I’d never actually bought until last week.
  
  Like Lopez, tossing out a book is, apparently, entirely anathema to my aesthetic makeup; I can’t remember a single book I’ve ever thrown away. I remember being quite traumatized when, sometime in high school, my mother threw out (or maybe she gave them to the local library) some kids’ books (think the terrible later Hardy Boys books, Jack B. Quick books, etc.); not that I was ever going to read the damn things again, but it just seemed so wrong to get rid of any book, even these admittedly pretty badly written examples. I do occasionally give books away, but there’d better be a damn good reason.
• Last book I read: The System of the World, the third volume of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, for the second time. For whatever reason, every six months or so I need a Stephenson fix, and this was the time. Fortunately, it only took one volume to satisfy that need this time around; usually it’s much worse. For example, last fall, around the time System was coming out, the Stephenson craving kicked in especially strong, and I actually ended up re-reading every book he’d ever written, along with System, in the span of about two weeks. Which, when you consider that such an endeavor requires reading about 5500 pages, is either very impressive or extremely disturbing (I just calculated that 5500 pages / 14 days = 392 pages/day, which seems absurd, but maybe not impossible, given that (a) I devoured the 1000 page System this week in two days and (b) I wasn’t working or taking classes at the time).
• Five books that mean a lot to me: Christ, I hate these list-making questions (see, my book-related indexing [but not by preference] is a pretty bizarre aberration from my usual behavior). I can never think of just five because there are so many that come to mind. However, I also hate people that just totally ignore the upper limit on such lists, so I’m just going to put down the first five that come to mind, even though it means I’m guaranteed to do one of those theatrical head-slaps tomorrow when I realize that I actually really should have included X. Furthermore, I especially hate the whole “mean a lot to me” thing, because it’s so ambiguous; I mean, I’ve probably read/heard Goodnight Moon more than any other book on Earth, and it obviously meant a great deal to me as a little kid, since I demanded it every night for years as my bedtime story, but including it on such a list seems sort of counter-productive, since I was, after all, about four at the time. On the other hand, that many repetitions at such an impressionable age probably means it’s had a deeper psychological impact on me than any other book (I’m not sure exactly what that impact is, but I’m sure it’s so ingrained as to be entirely subconscious at this point), so excluding it would seem disingenuous as well. So, that being said, I’m just going to put down my five favorite books (within the bounds of my earlier qualifier): Don Quijote, by Cervantes, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Solzhenitsyn, Ulysses, by Joyce, The Death of Artemio Cruz, by Fuentes, and Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, by Wittgenstein (the weird thing about this last selection is that I actually agree much more with the later Wittgenstein of Philosophical Grammar and Philosophical Investigations, but the Tractatus is a much more beautiful work).

Hmm…that ended up being much longer (and probably more boring) than I had originally intended (although, come to think of it, that probably characterizes at least 75% of what I write around here, so it should come as no surprise). Anyway, like I said, it seems that part of the game is to “tag” some other people one wants to see engage in this little exercise, so I hereby officially tag Petya, the guys at Market Theocracy, Billy J, and Neil (assuming they’re even reading this in the first place).

From this article, about the Russian satirist Vladimir Voinovich, the entirety of which I recommend the reading for the other little tidbits of his wit that are included, I can’t resist posting a little excerpt, since my brother was elsewhere talking about the mixture of the sacred and profane. In this case it’s more like the learned, the poetic and the profane in sublime satire, which to me recalls nothing so much as Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s Nephew), by Diderot, which I also greatly recommend, with its erudite jokes about in stolchim regit (not sure about the Latin, since I don’t have the text with me) and an arrogant ecclesiastical prelate sitting come un maestoso cazzo fra due coglioni. Anyway, here it is:

“Naturally, in these little sheds (the younger generations perhaps cannot even picture this) on both the M side and the W side the wooden floor was embellished with a dozen or so large holes in a long row and soft heaps deposited haphazardly around them….

The visitors squatted in a row, like sheaves of wheat standing in the field, and I recall with particular sympathy the old men suffering from arthritic joints, constipation and hemorrhoids, who strained until they turned blue, wheezing and moaning and groaning as if they were in a nativity home.

[The narrator’s friend] used to say that if it was up to him to decide what monument to erect to our Soviet era, he would not have commemorated Stalin or Lenin or anyone else, but the Unknown Soviet Man squatting like an eagle on the peak of a tall mountain (Mount Communism) deposited by himself.”

p.s. The title of the post is the title of an old Vladimir Vissotsky song about mountaineering, which is also about communism in a subtle way.

addendum 7/12: now that I actually have a copy of Le neveu de Rameau in front of me, I can provide the passages from Diderot in full (translations mine):

“On s’enrichit à chaque instant. Un jour de moins à vivre, ou un écu de plus; c’est tout un. Le point important est d’aller aisément, librement, agréablement, copieusement tous les soirs à la garde-robe. O stercus pretiosum. Voilà le grand résultat de la vie dans tous les états” (“One enriches oneself constantly. One day less to live, or a dollar more; it’s all the same. The important thing is to go easily, freely and copiously to the bathroom. Oh precious manure! That’s the major result of life in all its forms”).

“Comment, l’abbé, lui dis-je, vous présidez? violà qui est fort bien pour aujourd’hui; mais demain, vous descendrez, s’il vous plaît, d’une assiette; après-demain, d’une autre assiette; et ainsi d’assiette en assiette, soit à droite, soit à gauche, jusqu’à ce que de la place que j’ai occupée une fois avant vous, Fréron une fois après moi, Dorat une fois après Fréron, Palissot une fois après Dorat, vous deveniez stationnaire, à côté de moi, pauvre plat bougre comme vous, qui siedo sempre come un maestoso cazzo fra duoi coglioni” (“‘How now, priest,’ I say to him, ‘are you presiding? That’s all well and good for today; but tomorrow you will descend a seat; the day after tomorrow, another seat; and so on from seat to seat, whether to the right or the left, until you come to the seat that I once occupied before you, and Fréron before me, Dorat before Fréron, Palissot before Dorat, and you will finally stop beside me, poor little bugger that you are, sitting like a majestic penis between two testicles'”).

While reading about various Catholic saints on Wikipedia today (don’t ask), I skimmed through the entry on San Juan de la Cruz, the Spanish mystic and poet. I couldn’t help but be amused by the analysis offered therein of San Juan’s famous poem “La Noche Oscura”:

Dark Night of the Soul narrates the journey of the soul from her bodily jail to her union with God. It happens during the night, which represents the hardships and difficulties she meets in detachment from the world and reaching the light of the union with the Creator. There are several steps in this night, which are related in successive stanzas.

Not that this is necessarily wrong (it’s certainly the orthodox interpretation and the one San Juan de la Cruz himself gave to justify himself to the Inquisition), but it’s definitely the interpretation of someone who’s only read “La Noche Oscura” in stilted translation and not someone who has read one of the most erotic poems ever written in the Spanish language (which is no mean feat; after all, this is the language about which Heinlein once said “the Spanish language is so beautiful that much of its poetry sounds best if the listener does not understand the meaning”). As always, I’m reminded of one of the favorite sayings of the late, great Bill Bonds:

Reading poetry in translation is like having sex through plate glass: you can more or less see what’s going on, but you won’t feel anything.

I have a friend, who is Jewish and currently spending his year abroad at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who last year gave me his belief that James Joyce was the most successful of the literary modernists because he was the only one who found an authentic cultural identity for the artist and, by extension, modern man in society, an identity which, paradoxically, consisted of its deracination from cultural moorings. In other words, while Yeats, for example, was fruitlessly trying to revive an authentic mythology, a spiritual grounding, Joyce’s evocation of the mythic is more inherently and self-consciously ironic, aware of the naivete of believing in such a project, and casting the absence of the mythic and the secure in the world today into even harsher relief. Regardless of the truth of this idea (I think Kafka far surpassed them all and actually succeeded in seamlessly fusing the primeval and the ultra-modern), the reason I mention this, and the reason my friend’s religion is pertinent, is because this sort of notion of a culture grounded in deracination is even more obviously characteristic of Judaism, and that may in fact have been the inspiration for his idea, consciously or not. I recently read an autobiographical work by Georges Perec entitled W ou le souvenir d’enfance (W or the memory of childhood), which is very much in this vein. Perec was a small child in France during WWII and lost both his parents to it, one in battle and the other in the Holocaust, and his evocation of the time is extremely elliptical, composed, as he says, “d’absenses, d’oublis, de doutes, d’hypothèses, d’anecdotes maigres” (“of absences, of forgetfulness, of doubts, of hypotheses, of thin anecdotes”), and the whole text is interspered, between every chapter, by an account of an Olympic dystopia, a society devoted entirely to sports competition which slowly crescendoes into pure concentration-camp horror and is intended, in my opinion, to show how at that time one’s personal past was being continually interrupted and superimposed by the catastrophes of the war, of history. The main themes are clear: silence, brokenness, the impossibility of any sort of recovery of the past. It’s very finely done but my objection, as to much Holocaust art and literary modernism, is the barrenness of this sort of spiritual orphanage. This is not to deny the importance of the horrors of the past but simply to suggest that, in the case of both Joyce and Perec, there is something, if not disingenuous, then at least deliberately hopeless about the whole project. It seems to me that the irrevocable annhilation of the past is one of the premises of their work, and that in the end it becomes the exaltation of a dead end. In the linguistic minuteness and general incomprehensibility of both, esp. Finnegans Wake, this is almost literally true, as if the language has gone to the limit (and beyond) of expressiveness in this direction, and this is the end.

Which brings me to the thrust of things. Philip Roth has just published some correspondence with Saul Bellow in the New Yorker in which Bellow describes mainly the genesis of The Adventures of Augie March, his first major success. He was living in Paris when the inspiration came to him; I find many parallels between his situation and my own, and not only on that account. He felt, as I often do here, “that Europe was defying me to do something about it” and was consequently terribly depressed. And then, ah! inspiration, “I discovered that I could write whatever I wished…I did not have to kill myself in the service of art.” It seems that this disburdening is not purely personal, but also has larger cultural overtones, for, as he says, “That “Augie Marchâ€? happened in dismal postwar Europe (knowledge of the Holocaust was slowly coming to us back then) is evidence of an independent move of the mind, a decision not to surrender to horror. I discovered that I no longer wanted to be put upon by art seriousness.” This moment of inspiration at the end of a downcast sojourn in Paris seems to symbolically indicate, then, a break with an exhausted and morbid European culture, a discovery of an artistic vitality native to America and the English language. And there you have it: Bellow had discovered a new free language and mode of expression which was also implicitly an assertion of freedom, a step forward and away from the onerous legacy that extinguishes everything in Perec and so many others’ writings and thoughts. It would no doubt be a great over-simplification to say that Europe has followed the cultural path of Perec and America of Bellow, but it is comforting to find a soul from my culture that, in contrast to much of Europe’s (and possibly America’s) cultural élite, understands that Adorno’s belief that poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric is a “surrender to horror” and, more importantly, actually discovered a vital form of expression that could resist it, and resist it sensibly and animatedly, not tragically and despairingly. And this has made him practically the founder of post-war American literature.