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Gushing about what I've learned on my deep dive on the Letter to the Romans to my brother as though it were fandom, and he's okay with it.
#I don't know if I'm pleased with myself or not - I set a goal to reread all the Pauline epistles this year and I was getting along fine but#then Romans came along and demanded I spend more time on it and I've chewed on it with commentaries and cross referencing and#prayer for months now and not moving on to the rest because I just want to keep understanding Romans better#(although it's got me reading lots of the literary and prophetic literature as well as the Pentateuch as references to them keep on arising#I highly doubt I will hit my original goal but hopefully this is good#less of a Goodreads challenge approach to it and more of letting it move in and live in my house for a good half year?#recovering reader#faith#sacred#coreander's old books
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On Alan Moore’s SUPREME
It is an understatement to say we live in interesting times. These are chaotic times, and I hope we survive long enough to learn from them. I do not know how they will be remembered. I only know that I do not believe that hindsight is 20/20. Rather, nostalgia has distorting effects that render eras in caricature. I know this because while people often look at things and say “hey, remember the nineties?” with this quasi-ironic tone meant to pigeonhole things according to a handful of superficial traits, I actually feel like I do remember the nineties, and they were not that, but they were very far from where we are now.
I recently tracked down collections of Alan Moore’s run on Supreme via my local library. Supreme was a character created by Rob Liefeld at Image. Liefeld and Image are both prime examples of what people think of when they think of “1990s comics,” though their influence continues to this day, maybe stronger now than it ever was then. The backlash against this stuff that followed, which involved a great deal of nostalgia, that you see in things like Mark Waid and Alex Ross’ Kingdom Come, or Kurt Busiek’s Astro City, is, I would argue, way more definitive of the era, in that there was maybe a “square” or defensive reactionary tone that seems more out of step with the modern moment, maybe because they essentially “lost.” Moore’s Supreme is about comic book reboots, and comic book history. It’s pretty nostalgic, but it’s also one of the more optimistic Alan Moore comics: The reaction against the superficial Image work also included a rejection of the “grim and gritty” aspects of Moore’s eighties work.
These Supreme collections are out of print, which is weird. While new stories continue to be told set in this universe Rob Liefeld created, but I think it’s pretty widely acknowledged that Moore’s comics were the best things to come out of there, the stuff where the ideas make the most sense, where there’s material that can be expanded upon. I know Brandon Graham took material from Moore’s work for his Prophet run. The recent Warren Ellis/Tula Lotay Supreme: Blue Rose derives from concepts in Moore’s run. It’s vastly tonally different, aiming for some sort of slow-paced Solaris vibe of mystery, which Moore’s run explains in such a way that it feels like Ellis’ run would have less of a reason to exist were his source text widely available.
I read Moore’s first issue at the time of its release, and was not that into it. When I think of the comics I was into at the time, I understand why: Thinking of Mark Waid/Humberto Ramos series Impulse, or Christopher Priest and Mark Bright’s Quantum And Woody, the emotional connection I had with those books as a reader is basically impossible to imagine anyone having with Supreme. I don’t think Moore was interested in doing that: I think he was trying to crack “nineties comics” and was seeing a bunch of dumb garbage it was very easy to think mixing in some pastiches would improve.
Also, the character is basically just Superman, and while in some ways Supreme is “better” than, say, Scott McCloud’s Superman Adventures, in that a good deal of work and thought is being put into creating these riffs on the Superman concept, Rick Burchett’s art, drawing Bruce Timm designs, is more appealing than what Joe Bennett comes up with, though, so it’s kind of a wash. Chris Sprouse comes on board later, and when he’s drawing the book, it’s great. The book moves from being “kind of a slog even though it’s clever” to “actually pretty fun.” After working together on Supreme, Moore and Sprouse would launch Tom Strong together. That’s another comic I stopped reading early on because I wasn’t getting that much pleasure out of it. Both Supreme and Tom Strong have flashback sequences drawn by other artists (in Supreme, they’re usually handled by Rick Veitch) that are also meant to be reference some other genre or historical moment, fleshing out backstory but also demonstrating Moore’s cleverness, which is two-fold: it’s both the cleverness of a plotter, telling stories pithily, and the cleverness of a student of comics showing how much he knows, via jokey parody. This becomes tedious when baked into the structure of every issue of a comic, but it’s also how Supreme gets to have Rick Veitch pages, which are welcome when the stuff set in modern times is drawn by people whose work isn’t fun to look at. Still, it’s a superhero comic where the core of most issues is not a fight but an extended vaguely comedic riff.
Another person to continue on to Tom Strong is letterer Todd Klein, who does a great job here, enough so that, when late in the run there are issues he didn’t letter, they’re demonstrably worse and harder to read. Tom Strong does have a different colorist than Supreme though, and in some ways there are weaknesses even in Sprouse’s issues that can be laid on the coloring: It’s “nineties” in a true way, in that it’s tied to the computer coloring that was then state of the art. I am pretty sure I read the later issues of Tom Strong in collections a roommate owned, but I remember none of them. Most likely I will forget these issues of Supreme. The most impressive thing about Moore’s run is the long-term plotting, that the payoff to a year’s worth of stories is set up very early, and points that would pay off later are seeded throughout.
Still, in the mind of a kid, a year is a very long time. A developing brain pursues a lot of interests. There are very few comics I read every issue of for a year: To do that would cut into my ability to take chances on comics like, say, Alan Moore’s first issue of Supreme, when I’d never read any of the previous ones. Another reason I didn’t follow the title as a kid is this: By the time you get to the point where you have a preference for good superhero comics over bad ones, you’re also interested in non-superhero comics. The best stuff in the series are later Chris Sprouse drawn stories that work effectively as superhero comics, where multiple villains fight multiple heroes, and jokes are made steadily. This all follows up on groundwork laid earlier in the run.
These collections are not published by Image, but rather a book company called Checker I am pretty sure is no longer in business. The books at my library were not in great condition, and they’re not very well-designed. There’s an Alex Ross image on the front, and Rob Liefeld on the back, alongside text that gives bios of Moore and Liefeld but says nothing about the Supreme comics the books contain. The interiors use Alex Ross drawings between issues, to cover for the original cover art being largely abysmal. I’m pretty sure Liefeld could reprint them at Image, although “this comic is drawn by a ton of different people, and quality varies” is not an appealing sales pitch. There were also other flashback stories, drawn by the likes of Melinda Gebbie and Kevin O’Neill, that ran in the original comics but aren’t in these collections, which I would hope a future reprint would restore. Around this time, Moore also did a run on Youngblood with Steve Skroce that was never collected, fondly remembered by some but also compromised by the fact that the last few pages currently extant, were drawn by a considerably worse artist.
What’s fun about these Supreme comics is that, for all the nostalgia for the past they contain, they’re still dense with ideas. It’s clear that what Moore appreciates about the old Superman comics he’s explicitly homaging is the imagination therein. He’s riffing, but extrapolating as well, these aren’t pure analogs. There are these science fiction or mythic elements all pressed together. I’m not saying there’s much that originates with Moore here, but in his bricolage things feel new, it’ll get your neurons firing. This is truly wild: the concept of the Supremacy, where all the alternate Supremes hang out, and its corresponding Daxia, where all the alternate reality versions of his nemesis hang out, both built in limbo, is surprisingly similar to plot points on the show Rick And Morty.
There are comics that are better than Moore’s Supreme, many more of them available now than there were twenty years ago. I read them, I write about them, and much of my championing of them stems from a preoccupation with storytelling. But there is a different kind of substance to these stories. It’s not “substance” in the sense of meaning, or emotional content. The substance is the sort of idea-space you swim in while reading fantasy or science fiction. I like to think that if you’re reading this you consider yourself a smart person, and that manifests itself as a certain snobbery in certain ways. Maybe you don’t read that sort of stuff as much as you did when you were a kid. As an adult, I’ve got other hang-ups. It is maybe a form of solipsism, though it stems from empathy, or a desire for it, obsessed over my own ability to relate to others. This is the stuff that makes up the content of “literary fiction” whereas I think of being a kid and trying to be imaginative or imagine possibilities beyond reality as essentially a spiritual quest. Reading this collection I could sense I wasn’t engaging it enough, even if only a portion of the pages were drawn well enough to make me want to engage it.
Moore is a spiritual person, obviously. You can listen to him talk about his work and artmaking and time and life and death and find a great deal of comfort. So much of his work is deeply reassuring and helpful, even though much of it is dark and more pessimistic than his Supreme run, and it’s often done through these genre pretexts. His work is much richer than what’s propped up by current trends, and it’s all informed by this grand history of literature, where what follows in Moore’s wake is frequently hollow because it doesn’t have this grounding in possibility and potential, but is instead premised on the observable. I’m making fun of Warren Ellis here, his obsession with science magazines and the idea of Moore’s run of Supreme as an observable phenomena after Moore made it exist.
It’s easy to view the way you engage this type of work as escapism, and there is truth to that, I think, when you’re an adult reader. I do think that when you’re younger, engaging with this stuff is more of a building a toolkit of ideas to engage with existence in a way that will stave off existential woe one encounters as they age. I frequently have this feeling that I am more tired than I used to be. My head is now subject to this feeling which is for all intents and purposes stupidity that maybe stems from trauma of having bad things happen to me (I have repeatedly been the victim of violent crime) and anxiety over things still to come. (Whether it be more crime or fascism or whatever, the complete collapse of the social fabric.)
There’s a feeling of being enervated I want to chase and have no idea how to, but it was genuinely present in my past. I know I can’t find it in nostalgia, in binge-reading old comics. That is 100% a trap and I know that the feeling I want is actually dependent on the absence of nostalgia, of being awake to there being possibilities in the future I can barely foresee. Moore’s run of Supreme taps into this energy, and he doesn’t think of it in a nostalgic way, the way he viewed 1963. He was engaging the moment, and finding the energy and collaborators that would propel him into the America’s Best Comics line, the sort of “better things” that might exist for a person in the near future that it is in the moment impossible to foresee. In all likelihood, the ability to manifest these things comes from a receptivity to potential that these comics evince.
Last week I turned 34, then the next day I found out my editor at The Comics Journal, Tim Hodler, was leaving it. I’m aware I need to leave Baltimore, get a new job, embark on a career path, enter into a new relationship, change everything about my life; all of these things both for their own sake but also to hopefully get the gears turning in my brain so I can write fiction again and feel that I am doing something.
When I read these book collections I was sort of wishing that like 2/3 of the pages were redrawn so that a book could exist which would have a reason to be read. Now I’m writing about it so I can remember I read it, and trying to explain why I’m doing so inevitably becomes about dissatisfaction with what is potentially giving way to something better, but I’m as overwhelmed by the facts of my own existence as Chris Sprouse would be at the fact that all the pages I would want him to redraw were already drawn by other people. Moore’s Supreme run can be reduced to these things that are essentially truisms: It’s “a moment in time,” “a transitional work.” This is true for so many things, but it is better to be these than the other thing that so much amounts to, a dead end.
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Biblical Paraphrase and Hummus: Conversation with Dror Burstein on “Muck”
DECEMBER 8, 2018
MUCK, THE LATEST novel by Israeli writer Dror Burstein to appear in English translation — in this case, a dexterous, canny one by the poet Gabriel Levin — is not easily described. Among the residents of its battered world are an elderly book critic known to thrash young writers bloody, talking dogs, child-peddlers, blind falafel prodigies, security guards watching over imperial plunder at the silent edge of empire, a secret police operative posing as an angel in cheap plastic wings, and an elegant classical pianist who was kidnapped in central Europe and brought against his will to his home country, where he rules as king from his childhood bedroom. Also, history’s largest bowl of hummus. That’s a lot to think about well before the fact that the book is a close rewriting of several key passages from the Hebrew Bible.
Actually, so much of the book is derived from biblical narrative that when I reached out to Burstein by email recently, he told me, “I think the genre of Muck is not exactly a novel, but what is called Rewritten Bible or Biblical Paraphrase.” The novel retells the story of the biblical prophet Jeremiah, against the backdrop of the political developments described in Jeremiah, Lamentations, and II Kings — which, if you know your Bible (or think about the word “jeremiad”), does not bode well for our protagonist, his king, or his city.
Jeremiah is in many ways a fitting choice. He is probably the most historically knowable character in the Jewish Bible, a strong contender for having written not only the book that bears his name, but also Deuteronomy, the Torah’s final installment, which describes itself as having been “found” in Jerusalem’s temple. Jeremiah’s an anguished character, who endures his civilization’s precipitous decline under a corrupt and ineffectual government. He tells his neighbors they’re arousing their god’s wrath, which goes unheeded, and he sees his city burned as a consequence. And like Burstein, he’s a scholar, trained in the interpretation of law, making his name as a poet.
I reached out to the author, who lives in Tel Aviv, by email. The below conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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IAN DREIBLATT: At its core, Muck is very much a retelling of the events leading up to the Babylonian exile, as they’re narrated in the Bible. Where did that idea come from?
DROR BURSTEIN: I wish I knew. All I can say is that I have been long interested in Jeremiah, as a person more than as a prophet. I think I was intrigued by him because I sensed his personality as one that actually existed, one I could have understood had he lived today. I cannot say the same for, say, Moses or Abraham. At some point I had an idea to import Jeremiah into the present and see what happens to him. Can he speak in the context of modern Hebrew? Will anyone listen? But also, what does he do for a living? Who are his parents? What does he eat? Bringing a prophet into the contemporary world is a nice idea, but answering all of these questions, and many more, is the stuff of the actual work of writing.
Despite its biblical narrative, Muck is shot through with concerns you’ve examined in your other books — family and lineage, astronomy and geology, the minds and rights of animals. These come up in Kin and Netanya — your two earlier novels in English — and I imagine in Pictures of Meat, which I can’t read until it gets translated. What are your most consistent interests?
I think I have a consistent interest in reality. Which consists more or less of matter and energy of all sorts: outer space, human and nonhuman creatures (viruses and bacteria included), vegetation (mushrooms included).
As for your first point, it’s true. I guess I keep painting the same picture, only the frame changes. I feel like a flame which catches a different candle every once and a while — some thick, some thin, some white, some red, et cetera. The drainage periods are of a flame that cannot find a candle to catch.
You’re hardly just repeating yourself — though in Muck you are, in a very direct sense, repeating aspects of a biblical narrative. Maybe it’s history that’s repeating itself?
To a certain extent, there are geopolitical similarities between Israel and ancient Judea. Nevertheless, for me, this is the least interesting part of writing, as it seems almost obvious. There’s no way around it if your hero is Jeremiah. Although the novel is local in many senses, it is also about every human culture with corruption, aggressiveness, greed, and fear, and every person who speaks against that, with almost no one caring to listen.
But nothing can repeat itself in the exact sense. Or perhaps only music can do it. Philip Glass’s fifth piano étude is an important piece of the soundtrack to Muck. This music, above all, repeats itself.
You’ve got me listening. Certainly it’s unhopeful music, fit for a dismal fate. But while Muck is in a sense a repetition, it’s not stylistically repetitive the way the étude is.
Repetitive prose has its charm. I used to like reading books like that, Thomas Bernhard especially. Today I’m not so sure about it. If I find myself writing in this manner, I stop.
It doesn’t take a prophet to foresee trouble for the Judea of your novel, a blundering and compromised state, too invested in its increasingly antiquated future to perceive the urgencies of its beleaguered present. I have the feeling you’re “contending with the past” here — is that a fair description?
I think of the relationship between our present world and the ancient one more in terms of a continuous metamorphosis. I mean, I don’t think most people learn from their ancient fore-parents, their history. I’m not sure there’s much “contending” with the past here. As far as our leaders are concerned, they are driven by certain basic urges and needs, which haven’t changed so much.
I really like your Jeremiah — he’s a sweet kid when we meet him, and he greets his fate admirably. To flesh out a vision of Jeremiah is to animate a person’s suffering, on some level. That seems difficult!
That’s life; suffering is part of the deal. The First Noble Truth. For Jeremiah, the “on some level” is a bit of an understatement. You touch something very interesting. If one doesn’t wish to write kitsch — or, to put it differently, if one strives toward reality — depictions of suffering are inevitable. Your question helps me understand why I feel somewhat alienated toward this book. I wish I could live and write in a place in which prophets are not needed. Another planet, I guess.
Speaking of suffering, the sudden death of Jeremiah’s younger sister is an important part of his backstory — even on a family level, his life is marked by tragedy. That’s not something mentioned in the biblical narrative; where did that come from?
I realized long ago that for me, there’s always some continuity between one book and the next. As I said, I keep painting the same picture. So, the sister is a continuation of a character from a novel I published four years before Muck. There’s always some unfinished business in a book, and I try to make up for what one book missed in the next one. Or perhaps I just need some fuel from my reserves to ignite a new drive.
The earlier book is Sun’s Sister, right? Are you done with the character now?
Yes, she’s died twice now. That’s more than enough.
Jeremiah’s family is complicated. One of my favorite scenes in the book is the short one in which his mother pulls out a secret idol she keeps of a female divinity and quietly venerates it. How do you see her faith?
Israelites have always worshiped many gods — otherwise, there wouldn’t be such a need for so many prophets. Jeremiah’s mother is just an ordinary woman in this respect. I don’t think her son would be outraged had he known about her small statuette. It’s almost like keeping a painting on your wall today and paying daily attention to it. The damage in Muck is done not by people who believe in other gods, but by people who believe too much in their own egos.
But wait: the biblical Jeremiah does decry Israelite devotion to “the Queen of Heaven,” and other apparently popular pagan divinities. He has kind of a hang-up about it!
You are perfectly right. I got carried away with my own rendering of Jeremiah. Of course, he would have gone berserk had he known of his mother’s outrageous idolatry. I understand now that she keeps her idol in a can mainly because of her son. That’s the risk in adopting an existing character. You tend to make them similar to yourself to some extent.
Another fascinating character is the literary critic Broch. He’s a sort of protean villain; his role shifts across the book, but he’s never good news. How do you understand his role in the story?
He doesn’t have a specific biblical analogue. You might say he represents the public, the world that won’t listen, but in a more active way. He doesn’t just refuse to listen, he actively tries to eliminate some voices. In a more practical sense, maybe he’s a manifestation of my own inner voice, trying to convince me to stay out of this absurd travail of prose writing.
As a poet, Jeremiah courts his favor somewhat. Your send-up of poetry scenedom is pretty spot-on. You certainly don’t seem too sanguine about the writing and publishing landscape you’re depicting.
There are some magnificent writers here, not to mention rest of the world. But generally speaking, literature as an industry needs rethinking. I don’t really want to get into this, but I can say that I don’t set foot in any of the big bookstores in Israel — spaces from which almost everything I adore about literature is absent. I have a fantasy of opening my own bookshop, in which every single book sold will be my own private and specific recommendation. I think it’s awful, selling books you detest or don’t care about. It’s really unethical. And this is the “natural” way of doing business in the book trade. I wouldn’t sell you a poisonous sandwich, would I?
I hope not! I once heard you say at the World Voices Festival, “We all know poetry is the only thing worth writing.”
Well, novels are necessary: you can’t express everything with poetry. Historical events, for example, are unfit for a haiku or even a whole book of haiku. But that’s a necessity, not an ideal form of writing.
Do we have a distorted view of you in the United States, because you’re primarily a poet, and what we’re reading here are the novels? Do you prefer writing one or the other?
I think that my best writing period was while teaching for a semester in Worcester, Massachusetts, in fall 2013. Removed from the outside reality of Israel, I’d thought I was going to finish Muck there. It turned out I didn’t even touch it. Instead, I took a lot of trips around New England, returning especially often to Walden Pond. It all ended up in a book of poetry that was published in the same year as the original Hebrew edition of Muck. I had to write the novel, but it didn’t give me much pleasure. I wanted to write those poems at Walden or Cape Cod. I’d rather have Thoreau as a friend than Jeremiah, and I’d prefer living in Concord to Jerusalem. But I guess I’m more useful here.
You’ve said that “the genre of Muck is not exactly a novel, but what is called Rewritten Bible or Biblical Paraphrase.” What’s the difference?
The concept of retelling a biblical narrative was borrowed from ancient books that do just that, like the Book of Jubilees from the second century BCE. What’s special about this genre is that it frees you from having to be the sole inventor of the whole plot. It gives you a clear frame in advance, then lets you find your own way. You know the ending, more or less, from the start, or at least you think you know where you’re headed. After writing a few novels in which I had to invent everything myself, rewriting another text came as quite a relief!
If there was some relief in not having to invent a whole plot, you surely paid for it with the high stakes created by your subject matter, right?
The stakes are always high in novel-writing. This was still slightly easier than building the whole thing from scratch.
Read anything great lately, besides 2,200-year-old biblical retellings?
Oh yes, a lot. I’ve just finished Roland Barthes’s The Preparation of the Novel, translated into English by Kate Briggs. A must-read for anyone in the profession of prose writing. I was amazed and delighted to see Barthes extensively discuss Japanese haiku as a preliminary to novel-writing. Another great book is The Forest Unseen by David George Haskell, a biological meditation focused on one square meter of forest floor in Tennessee. Meticulously observed and very beautifully written. I wish I had the time to translate it into Hebrew.
The English translation of Muck is wonderful — nimble and resonant, managing a kind of code-switching that I imagine is more present in the original. Do biblical Hebrew and modern Hebrew bump up against each other in the book?
Yes. Gabriel Levin did great work. Actually, he suggested translating it into English in the first place. In the original, there is a continuous mixture of biblical and modern Hebrew, sometimes in the same sentence. The biblical phrases are not marked, and I invented some pseudo-biblical verses here and there too. I tried using biblical quotations that I thought would be intelligible to a present-day reader. It couldn’t have been easy to reproduce this idea, two layers of language merging into one textual flow.
Could we talk for a second about … hummus? Hummus plays an important role in this book — not only because it sets the stage for one of the most jaw-dropping events in the story, but because characters are often seen eating it. Not to put too fine a point on things, hummus has a reputation for both connecting and dividing the cultures of the Middle East. In Muck, it seems almost to be a kind of counter-muck — an exalted, nourishing goop. I confess, I have no question.
You’ve got a fine short essay on the symbolism of chickpeas here. I’m serious. Hummus is my favorite dish and has been for almost 40 years now. I reckon I’ve consumed tons of it. The scene in the book that features a “World’s Largest Hummus Bowl” competition, which might sound absurd, was taken from an actual ad I saw at a (hummus) restaurant in Abu Gosh, near Jerusalem. I mean, such a competition actually took place, some years ago. There is an official Guinness record for this. What’s more, after Israel had set the world record, the Lebanese overshadowed the Israeli achievement, weighing in at a mere four tons, with their own 11.5-ton bowl. You can read this all here. I’m not making it up.
What’s the best hummus you’ve ever had? Desert island hummus?
There was a place in Jaffa owned by Mr. Mustafa Kalboni. Unfortunately, he passed away, and his son, Sultan, embraced a religious life and hasn’t continued the business. I can testify that he was capable, culinarily speaking.
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Ian Dreiblatt is a poet, translator, and musician who lives in Brooklyn. His chapbook how to hide by showing in the age of being alone with the universe is recently out from above/ground press, and he is among the translators of Pavel Arsenev’s Reported Speech, out now from Cicada Press.
Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/biblical-paraphrase-and-hummus-conversation-with-dror-burstein-on-muck/
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This tribute first appeared in the Romanian cultural weekly Observator Cultural, no. 925 (June 7, 2018). It is translated from the Romanian by Philip Ó Ceallaigh.
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MY WIFE CELLA and I last saw Philip Roth on Friday, May 18, when we visited him in the Cardiac Ward of New York Presbyterian Hospital. He was very weak and pale; his voice was almost inaudible. We exchanged a few words, looked at each other for a long time, shook hands, and smiled at each other. Back home, I wrote him a message recalling our long friendship and stressed my conviction that even though he was weak and suffering he could bounce back, as I had often seen him do, and that this time he would be equal to the struggle.
Unfortunately I was wrong. As Canetti warned, death is the invincible enemy of man. Philip passed away on the evening of May 22 at the age of 85. The toll that numerous operations had taken on his body was too much even for his extraordinary tenacity and discipline. I remember his exalted shouts one summer, at the swimming pool at his home in Connecticut: “I’m going to live forever! Norman, I’m immortal!”
However, his biographer states that when they signed their contract in 2012, Philip said: “Okay, I’ll help you for about a year, then I’m getting out of here.” He knew what was coming.
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If I were to choose one among the many qualities and contradictions that set him apart from his contemporaries, I’d go for his obstinate rejection of banality, of the commonplace, of awareness dulled by the quotidian, where complacency, tribal loyalty, pious or prudent complicity, and collective blindness give birth to monsters. “I had to squeeze the nice Jewish boy out of me drop by drop,” he once wrote. I remember him phoning me from someplace where he was holidaying in the period when he’d give me manuscripts of his work-in-progress and then capture my observations of a tape-recorder. “What are you doing?” I asked him. “It reminds me of the Romanian Securitate…” He replied, “I’m getting old. What can I do? My memory lets me down.”
But it didn’t. Not really. He had a sharp memory, particularly where it came to writing, reading, and literature.
The dilemma he wanted to debate was itself literary, in the manuscript of his masterpiece, Sabbath’s Theater. “The lover asks her partner to swear an oath of fidelity: to never sleep with any woman except her again! How can you reply to such an absurdity? Such impertinence…” We wrestled back and forth with the demand made by the lover, who was, by the way, herself quite libertine. After a while, the author got to the heart of the paradox. “I’ve got it! He asks her to sleep with her darling husband! That’s the condition. He’ll be faithful, if she starts sleeping with her husband. They both know this is no longer possible…”
Nothing should impede the free exercise of the imagination, creative freedom, and the fundamental personal freedom that defies and overcomes the archenemies of creativity. Roth enjoyed the great success of Portnoy’s Complaint, but it also brought a lot of hostility. The novel was considered objectionable on many grounds, but the main accusations against it were that the author was a misogynist and a self-hating Jew and complicit with the most rabid anti-Semitism. His Jewish accusers, besides the non-Jewish anti-Semites, included not only well-known rabbis but also learned as well as literary figures, such as his friend Alfred Kazin. Gershom Scholem, the venerable commentator on the sacred texts of the Kabbalah, made the claim that the novel was even more hate-filled than The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that sinister, poisonous forgery made by the Tsarist secret police.
If even learned Jews of today forget the Biblical prophets, who are so much a part of the tragic destiny of the Jews by virtue of their searing criticism of human imperfection and the moral weakness of sinners, who are many and everywhere, why should the swelling anti-Semitic mob come as any surprise to us?
Those who got to know Philip, as I was lucky enough to, are well aware how many of his friends were Jews, that he adored his Jewish parents, and that he was always eager to learn something new about the recent and not-so-recent story of that suffering people, of their vulnerability and energy, their sensitivity and stoicism, their tales and humor.
Literature has a premise and potentialities that differ from those of historiography or journalism. It looks at the human tragicomedy using introspection, fantasy, burlesque, and ambiguity, and is anything but a vendor of cheap entertainment or scholarly escapism. We can, for that reason, apply to anti-Semitism the words of a non-Jewish writer, Mark Twain, whom Roth admired, “Jews are just merely human beings,” and that’s bad enough.
Concerning the supposed misogyny in Roth’s books, I witnessed a scene at Bard College. He was the first guest in my “Contemporary Masters” series, followed by Bellow, Saramago, Kundera, Kadare, Cynthia Ozick, Edna O’Brien, Tisma, Tabucchi, Magris, Pamuk, Vargas Llosa, Muñoz Molina, and Tahar Ben Jelloun … I would put a selection of the author’s work on the course, meet with students to review it, and then, the following day, discuss it with the author and the class. I arranged to talk with Philip by phone after my Monday class in order to be prepared for the Tuesday meeting. Everything went perfectly on Monday, even up to the awkward Sabbath’s Theater, where the students agreed that both the male and female protagonists of the novel were equally flawed, vital, passionate, and powerful.
Surprisingly, in the case of I Married a Communist, Philip was not convinced as I was that all was well. He requested that we meet earlier than usual. He appeared with a bulging briefcase containing a massive volume by Rabelais and another relating the Sinyavsky-Daniel Trial, in which the two Soviet dissidents were convicted. The event, an “open class” for the entire college, began peacefully, but during the debate several female students accused the author of creating simplistic, vulgar caricatures of women. The same old male chauvinism! All the female characters were cardboard cut-outs, lacking in life and complexity!
Philip listened quietly and did not interrupt the speech, then took out the Rabelais book, and read a sardonic fragment about human nature, then the dialogue between Daniel and the Soviet prosecutor. The prosecutor notes that although the dissident has disguised his intentions, it was obvious to any attentive reader, and still more to an official censor, that the mental hospital in his work of fiction was a crude metaphor for the Soviet people and the communist regime. “Certainly not! How can you claim that? It’s just a hospital, they’re patients, sick people,” the accused replies. “We know, we’re not as stupid as you think, we’ve read books too, we’re not illiterate!” At this point, Daniel took from his pocket a booklet on which was printed the Statute of the Soviet Writers’ Union. “I’ve got the writers’ constitution here, I’m a member of the Union, and there’s no article that demands that the Soviet writer has to describe only perfect people, immaculate citizens.”
Philip’s intervention didn’t convince the rebels; it provoked them. “What are you saying? Are you comparing us to Soviet censors, to tyranny? Just for expressing objections in a literature class? This is a free country, we are told, a democracy.”
As we were gathering up our papers and books, getting ready to go, a beautiful girl we didn’t know in the front row stood up and approached the lectern. “I’m from Prague, I heard about this class and came along with my American literature professor.” A man in a suit and tie stood up and smiled at us. The girl turned to face her American fellow-students. “And you … you understand nothing! Nothing! Nothing about the emotional and sexual bonds between a man and a woman, nothing about flirtation, shyness, intensity. Nothing about literature — about the code of literature!”
The American girls were dumbstruck, cowed by the wild “Eastern European,” until one of them stood up: “So, you’re from Prague? If that’s how you do things back there in Prague, then good for you, I’m sure it goes down well there. But this is our country!”
If we’re going to discuss misogyny, it would be well to recall Philip’s many female friends, both young and old, who adored him and were with him to the end. In fact, his relationship with the actress Claire Bloom wasn’t transient either. I was around when they belatedly officialized their union by getting married, and when they divorced, and when Claire Bloom’s caustic memoir appeared. The bitter accusations made after the break-up were unjust and wounded Philip deeply. He withdrew to Connecticut like a hermit and didn’t want to see anyone for a time, but he phoned us regularly. Recently I’ve heard that Claire painted an affectionate and admiring portrait of her ex-husband on British TV, saying that the egoism of two artists who were married but both obsessed with their own creativity is easy to understand, that their love was full and memorable, and that the deceased will be remembered as a great modern writer.
Philip Roth does indeed occupy a major place in American and world literature, as many critics have noted, now and in years past. We only need to look at the judgment of a towering spiritual authority such as Cynthia Ozick on the enduring value of The Ghost Writer, The Anatomy Lesson, American Pastoral, Everyman, The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America. The same narrative flair, humor, originality, and acuity are found even in the so-called minor works of this tireless literary craftsman.
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Though Roth enjoyed major international acknowledgment, he never won the Nobel Prize. Prizes are given by people and, like people, they are imperfect. Even were the Nobel to be awarded by computer, it would still be imperfect, as there can be no impersonal equation for such a fluid and vast and diverse spiritual territory. And I can’t even say it was a bad thing not to win it! He thereby enters such select company as those other neglected writers — Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Borges …
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A 30-year friendship between writers (a profession of vanity, Camus calls it somewhere), is not very common. But he took care of it in the afterlife too, having written last year to Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, asking to be allocated a grave at Bard, near my own, so he wouldn’t be bored, as he put it, in the endless “beyond.”
This is why he rests at Bard and awaits me there. It is not, as some press reports claimed, that he wanted a Jewish cemetery. The cemetery at Bard is not Jewish, it is non-denominational and even atheists are buried there, and the funeral that took place on Monday, May 28, was non-religious, in accordance with his instructions. Those that he had selected to speak were not to talk about him, but would each read fragments from his books.
I read from The Dying Animal, the book he dedicated to me in 2001.
But to return to happier beginnings.
Knowing he’d published a collection of East European prose, Writers from the Other Europe, I wrote to him in 1987, from Berlin, where I was living on a DAAD (German Ministry of Cultural Exchanges) grant, following my trials and tribulations in communist Romania. I proposed to him an English translation of an anthology of young writers published at Albatros Publishing House, so that Romania too — the only Eastern European country absent from his anthology — might find its place in the world … He replied promptly, without mentioning my suggestion, asking who I was, what I wrote, what I was doing in Germany. And so, our relationship began.
When my grant ended, I wrote to tell him I didn’t know where I was headed, only that, for the moment, there was no going back. I didn’t want to take any final decision, preferring to await in the West the long-dreamed-of passing of our “most beloved son of the people,” as the national press used to call the dictator. My attempts to obtain another grant in Germany or France failed. He wrote to tell me to look him up if I happened to decide on America. When I got to Washington, he invited me to New York, to Essex House, where he was temporarily living. I suggested we put it off for a while, because I didn’t speak English and was about to start a course in the language for new arrivals. “It doesn’t matter, we’ve got hands, we’ve got eyes, we’ll understand each other.” He wanted me to bring him something translated into English, but all I had was a too-short story called “Proust’s Tea,” published in a magazine in London. “Bring whatever you have.”
I crept into the big hotel, Cella accompanying me. The room was spacious. Our host was sitting on the sofa, feet on the table, smiling encouragingly. I went up to him and handed him the few pages. Silence. “Proust? Proust, you say? I’ve tried to read this writer 20 times and I’ve never got past page 15…” I froze. In Romania I had learned that if you didn’t like Proust, you were outside literature. What was left for me to say to the great American? Nothing. I couldn’t utter a word.
Then another salvo: “Céline, not Proust! Céline is my Proust!” That floored me … I knew Céline was a great writer and an anti-Semite. I’d read him with interest, but I was speechless. I smiled weakly, and sat down on the sofa next to Cella, preparing myself for the next blow. But the conversation became more cordial, allowing for the inevitable language problem. At the end, he wrote some names and addresses and telephone numbers on a sheet of paper. Robert Silver, Rose Marie Morse, Mary McCarthy. “They’re my friends, they speak French, you’ll be able to talk to each other.” Stumbling out of Essex House, I told Cella I’d never call him again. “Enough, I’m done!”
But that first meeting was soon put behind us. The American maestro began to call me weekly, asking how I was doing, if my English was coming along. “Have you anything translated into another language?” I had two books in German. He gave me the address of Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, who, I understood, was a German speaker. I sent him my books and received an extraordinarily laudatory reply, comparing me to the contemporary German writers I most admired … Then I met Mary McCarthy, who taught at Bard. And she recommended me to Botstein also.
My friend and future German editor at Hanser, Michael Krüger, put me in touch with New Directions Publishing House, which he thought would be the best fit for me. There I met with its director, the cutting and charming Griselda Ohannessian, and her young secretary, Barbara Epler, who would eventually, as Griselda’s successor, publish my complicated novel Captives. I got along perfectly with both my collaborators and was ready to sign a contract when a two-book offer came in from Grove Press.
And so started what the Romanian nationalist press back home called the “the international Jewish conspiracy” of my arrival on the world literary stage (the MacArthur Prize, Guggenheim Foundation Prize, and so on).
When, in 1997, after 11 years of exile in the United States, I accepted Botstein’s invitation to accompany him to Bucharest, where he was conducting two concerts at the Ateneu, Philip supported me. Saul Bellow, who was more knowledgeable about Romania, didn’t think I should go back (“You have enough trouble here as it is, you don’t need the old Romanian problems too”). Philip encouraged me, but made me promise to call him daily from Bucharest (!!!) and to go immediately to Sofia (?), and to fly back to New York if I sensed anything wrong … For me it was like returning as a posthumous tourist. I was on edge, but nobody was aggressive. Cluj and Suceava were enjoyable, apart from the state of my nerves, which made me lose my notebook on the return flight.
My friendship with Philip deepened with time. Each of us marked the life events of the other, and we always celebrated New Year’s Eve together, in our home. At the end of the public celebrations of my 75th birthday at the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, Philip shouted: “I want something like that too! But not just two days, five!” Once he took me to Newark, where he was born, to see his childhood home and his old high school, the streets, the entire environment. He still felt close to the city. He had a relationship with the local library, and a street was to be named in his honor. As well as attending each other’s literary events, Philip and I visited each other in the hospital as time went on. In more recent years we had had a grim competition for having the greater number of coronary stents: I was winning for a while, but Philip finally took the lead, with 13 stents …
Our friendship endured all kinds of differences between us, perhaps well expressed at the start in the contrasting preferences for Proust and Céline, but the connection was still strong, affectionate, and lasting.
Let’s remember that generous compensation which exile rewarded me with.
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In November 2012, Philip announced that he had stopped writing. Clearly, he was tired. Writing, as well as being a profession of vanity, is one that demands great devotion and concentration, and it takes its toll over time. I always teased him by saying that his withdrawal was in fact the subject of another book that he was writing in secret … It wasn’t so. His health was finally failing. At 85, it’s too late to hope for some miracle of rejuvenation.
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In Exit Ghost, published in 2007, Nathan Zuckerman, the author’s alter ego, asks: “Who among your contemporaries will be the last to die? Who among your contemporaries is least likely to die? Who among your contemporaries will not only elude death but write with wit, precision, and modesty of his amused bafflement at successfully pulling off eternal life?”
This avalanche of rhetorical questions might indeed be posed by the passing of Philip Roth himself.
In The Ghost Writer, Philip’s captivating short novel that preceeded Exit Ghost by many years, Anne Frank survives and reaches America, and is in love with her college professor. A stunning anticipation of these epic queries, addressing the mumbled questions of old age to a void without voice or memory.
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Philip Roth, the great writer, an acute observer of human existence, with all its cruel and burlesque conflicts and contradictions, has left us to face without him our explosive present and uncertain future. His forceful intelligence, his lucid and interrogative conscience, his unshaken devotion to the written page will not be forgotten; all the libraries of our tormented world will remind us of him in our fight for truth and beauty, for ardor and authenticity. Literature — America’s and the world’s — lost one of the most brilliant writers of modernity, an incomparable creative force. In the planetary crisis of our time, with so many aggressions against our spiritual environment, we will more than ever miss his intensity, his code of work and honesty, his humor and humanness.
Cella and I, we are overwhelmed by sadness and loneliness. He was for 30 years our American brother, always nearby, caring, energetic, vital, and helpful, a unique interlocutor, irreplaceable. Our exile became deeper, darker. But we’ll be buried near each other. Let’s hope that this way we’ll be less lost in the endless desert of the afterlife.
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Norman Manea was born in Bukovina (Romania) in 1936. His works include the novels The Lair and The Black Envelope and the memoir The Hooligan’s Return.
The post Nearby and Together: Norman Manea on His Friend Philip Roth appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.
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Saying Goodbye to Books
I hate getting rid of books because they are like time capsules for me. I generally remember the who, what, where, when and why of ownership. But space is finite, and I must allow some of my beloveds to move on. Here is where I shall remember them.
Another Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn The author did a reading for my grad program ... Actually, he did a masterclass on poetry workshop. I ended up buying this book and getting him to sign it. # of Years Unread: Probably 5
John Keats: Selected Letters by John Keats It was the beginning of my creative reset in Europe. I was at Keats’ House surrounding by Keats’s things, and I was promised his letters were scintillating. They not. I’ve never been so bored, and I tried. I really tried. RIP John Keats. #of Years Unread: 3
Poetic Reflections by The Watts Prophets (Otis O’Solomon, Richard Dedeaux, Anthony Hamilton) Watts Tower is an architectural landmark in Los Angeles. But I found this book while browsing a local bookstore in South Pasadena while waiting to pick up lunch in between strategy sessions. Usually, I love a good poetry find, but I just never got around to this one. # of Years Unread: ?????
Found Poetry Review Vol 6 I probably got this at an AWP.
Variations on the Body by Michel Serres I found this at a local book fair with my favorite AH. I think I also got some titles from Les Figues Press here. Anyway, this book of translated philosophy particularly caught my eye because I was deep into my own project ToE at the time. I always planned to read it for inspiration, but I never did. And because ToE moved onward anyway, I believe this book’s time has passed.
Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion I believe I got this book in college. I was an English major, and it was my job to continually expand my understanding of literature by reading. I probably chose this book because Didion was a famous modern female writer, but I don’t remember being really drawn into the story. I always assumed I’d reread it (because rereading can do that). But of all the things I could reread, I just don’t get excited about this book. So farewell!
Continental Drift by Russell Banks When Barnes and Noble was in its heyday, I found this book here. This was also a college book, and I specifically wanted to read more literature set outside of the US or Europe—although this book is set in America, so I paid attention to the back cover well. Since then, I’ve read lots of other books that fit that criteria, and that’s why it’s time to set this one adrift. # of Years Unread: 20?
The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker I actually can’t remember when I got this, but I know why I bought it. The premise is that the entire 130 page story occurs between two floors—the main character steps on an escalator to get between them. I think I attempted this book several times. ZzzzzzZzz
Perdido Street Station by China Miéville I’ve read many great things about Miéville, and I still would like to read one of his books. My first attempt was with this one, and I made it about halfway through. I just was very much not in a scifi or fantasy stage. Although what I remember most about this book is how it accompanied me to Boston while I was decided on grad programs. I remember trying to read through the chapters at night.
The Golden Age of Myth & Legend by Thomas Bullfinch I think this is one of the seminal collections of Greek mythology. My aunt gave it to me while I was in my European creative reset. She got it to practice her English, but it was too hard so she passed it on. I thought it would be a good refresh of Greek mythology, especially because I used to know ALL OF IT. But it just didn’t capture my attention. There were other worlds to conquer.
Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys I have no idea what this book is about. But I got it while living in Japan during our book club trade (probably at that restaurant in the arcade that had that little patio). I loved reading classics at the time, and I felt like I needed to read more modern women writers. But it just never happened.
Dances for Flute and Thunder: Poems from the Ancient Greek translated by Brooks Haxton From my local used bookstore that officially really closed down (T_T), I picked up this poetry title. I used to get all my high school reading from here, so I always liked to stop in an purchased something. The poetry didn’t really snag me, so away it goes.
Microscripts by Robert Walser I believe I read an article about this Swiss writer and his enigmatic hand-written papers. A whole story was deciphered on the back of a business card. When I found the book, most likely in Silverlake, I had to get it—it was a beautiful poetry book with pictures and an interesting format. I don’t think I was able to get through a few pages; it just seemed like random thoughts to me. Roland Barthes’s collected musings on mourning were more intriguing.
Enchanted Forest: an inky quest & coloring book by Johanna Basford Adult coloring books are one of those ideas where I get to say, “I thought of it first.” Obviously, if I had done something about it, then I would be RICH! RICH! But I didn’t, and so instead I got this one as a Christmas gift. I’ve colored one page. It’s time to send it on to someone who needs it! # of Years Unread: 4? Box Girl: My Part-time Job as an Art Installation by Lilibet Snellings This was actually really fun! Especially because I know the author and the publisher and the process in how it all came together. I’m excited to send this on to someone else. # of Years Unread: 4-ish The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu Also a book acquired in Japan and most likely from a book club gathering. I always assumed I’d read it, but instead I toted all 1000+ pages across an ocean and through several moves.
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson In college, I read a poem by Denis Johnson called “Sway” and it remains one of my favorites. So at an AWP, when I saw them giving away free hardcover copies of his new book, which was also a National Book Award winner, I thought: Gimme. It’s still beautiful, and it remains virginal in that it’s never been read by anyone. Hopefully someone else will try.
Jesus’ Son: Stories by Denis Johnson Our grad program gave free copies to all students, and I could not stand any of the stories.
A Typographic Workbooks: a primer to history, techniques, and artisty by Kate Clair and Cynthia Busic-Snyder I love typography and everything about it, but this remains one of the dullest books I’ve ever read. AND THE TYPOGRAPHY IS GRATING! Purchased for a class and never dumped because all the information was technically accurate.
Strange Pilgrims: Stories by Gabriel García Márquez I love GGM a. lot. LOT. This book also hails from the book club in Japan. Widely traveled just never read.
Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism edited by Robyn R. Warhol & Diane Price Herndl Gifted by an uncle, but being given up because I have so many anthologies and only so much space. Although I am keeping the other anthology of women poets.
Zone: Selected Poems by Guillaume Apollinaire I want to read more French poets, but I just keep having bad luck with translations. In this one, I felt like the translator worried to much about maintaining rhyme instead of imbuing meaning. And it just got repetitive and dull fast. I keep trying though. Oh yes! This was bought in New York in the East Village or in a feminist/queer bookshop called Bluestockings or trendy little hipster-ish joint in the West Village called Three Lives & Co. (after a Gertrude Stein book!)
And last but not least, design books bought for design classes for design programs that are no longer sold on discs:
Dreamweaver CS4 Adobe Illustrator CS4 Adobe Indesign CS5 - bought for me by my mentor when I first started working for her!
“Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.” ― George Eliot
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