Michael Hofmann (again)

This book (Where Have You Been?) is really brilliant. There are a few essays, about people I've never or barely or never heard of, like Robert Walser. With any other critic I wouldn't bother, not knowing the writer. But Hofmann, it's still a delight. Like this phrase: "...the rough, oxygenated outdoorsiness and the sheepish punctilio...".

And this admission, to begin the essay: "It's not that writing about Walser can't be done, it can be done endlessly and beautifully, but it seems unlikely to accomplish anything much. He offers so much scope for true statement, insight, and original expression. You write your piece, make your comparisons, press your claims, and at the end of it all you look up and see Walser, looking not much like your likeness of him, only slightly battered for having been the object of your attentions."

It's criticism as real literature. My copy is from the library, but I keep thinking I need a copy to keep, if only it weren't so depressing to buy books one might never reread. Now there's one advantage of ebooks; they don't sit on shelves making you anxious.

More--

"He was short-tempered and high-maintenance...".

"In Zurich, I saw a street named after him, where he couldn't possibly have afforded to live...".

Transhumance

People keep asking me--as the time for departure approaches--what I'll do in Paris. And the answer, I realize, is pretty much what I do here, except that it'll be in Paris: work, walk, shop, gym...  the food will be better. I'm eager for cheese and real apples, not the plastic kind that could have grown in a mall.

See friends.

I've got tickets for Peter Brook's 'Battlefield' at the Bouffes du Nord, which, with Ariane Mnouchkine's Theatre du Soleil, is a theatre everyone should go to at least once. "Battlefield is based on the "Mahabaharata," which Brook already turned into a play, years ago--something that ran over 3 days and nights, if I recall, at the Festival d'Avignon one summer. It's on from September 15 to October 17th, directed by Peter Brook. It's going on tour, I think I saw--maybe on the website. 

Warning! Promotional!

Just received my ten translator's copies of Yves Bonnefoy: The Anchor's Long Chain, first published in France in 2008. The translation is published by Seagull Books, with a blood-red burning sky cover (Frederic Church) that seems to fit this summer of forest fires and smoke-filled air in the West, and charred black endpapers. It is handsome.

I gave a copy to a friend the other evening and then reread it myself, through his eyes. What I felt--in addition to my relief that the translation held up--was the moving limpidity of Bonnefoy's lines and their vision of the human condition--if you'll allow me the expression--which is probingly dark. 

I want to mention the British journal PN Review, which has been an enthusiastic supporter of many individual poems in translation, including, most recently, the title poem, which retells a tale Seamus Heaney also recounts in his Squarings sequence ("Lightenings viii"). 

Background Music: Crickets

Growing up in Vancouver, B.C., I don't remember the chirp of crickets at night in summer, though I guess I would have known Jiminy Cricket, aka il grillo parlante. My first real encounter with crickets was as "grillons" in southern France. Living in Marseille and the Vaucluse, as we did for seven years, we heard them sing all summer long and occasionally we'd find one inside in winter, and feel lucky (roped in by Dickens and Disney and other local lore): a cricket on the hearth. 

Each night before I go to bed, here in the Bay Area, I hear the crickets, interrupted now and then by a plane flying over, the train whistling at the level passages at 30-minute intervals, a late bicycle whooshing past, a jogger, and I conjure up a long line of people in condos and cabins and caves in the August dark listening to crickets chirping.

                                                                  On a piece of  bark

                                                             drifting down the river

                                                                   a cricket, singing.

                                                                                                          (Issa)

Café living

I'm becoming a sitter in cafés. Campus has a number, with various personalities, subgroups and degrees of quality of espresso. Some are parts of chains. Most have pleasant outdoor places to sit in shade or sun. The Business School has wine in addition to excellent espresso, and a fancy monumental sculpture of chewed bronze, like a giant lump of spit-out chewing gum, smooth though, curves you'd like to stroke and all. My favourite is (naturally) the one in front of the main library, which is grubbier than the Business School (naturally) and full of humanities types, also grubbier. Eucalyptus trees, also a sculpture, the Red Loop, more playful, with an on-again off-again fountain. I take out my book, I read, I listen to conversations, I make up stories about the people around, I stare into space. Today I'm meeting a friend for lunch in a café I've never been to, over towards computer science territory: it's called Bytes.

Michael Hofmann, "Where Have You Been?"

The library has a high-ceilinged, clerestory-windowed reading room, big, thick, heavy oak tables, squeaky leather chairs, good lighting that manages to look gentleman's libraryish, a historic water clock and lots of computer plugs. It also has the LRB, the NYRB, the TLS and some French book reviews. It's where new books get shelved: just-catalogued, hardback, shiny-plastic-covered, no coffee stains, no grease marks, no blood, and you can be the first reader stamped on whatchmacallit in the back (big deal. I don't like to think of the number of books I have checked out over the years for which I am the first reader ever, and they still message me to return it 3--or is it 4?--weeks later, as if people were lined up to read it).

Anyway. That's where I found Michael Hofmann's essay collection a month ago and pounced. I binge-read the poetry section (Bishop, Lowell, Seidel etc) and the rest--most of which I'd probably read elsewhere over the years--and now I'm even reading the parts about people I'm unfamiliar with, mostly German. Yesterday I read a Paris Review Interview with Hofmann, how he felt a little embarrassed about his first poetry collection: lightweight alongside papa's novels. And this morning in the shower, having read Hofmann's essay on Antonioni twice yesterday, I was thinking: maybe Hofmann has invented some new manic-critic form, akin to Bernhardt's rants or Sebald's depressive meanderings or even Kundera's tamer fiction-as-essay style. Where Have You Been is, after all, honourably thick (unlike the slender, reductive distillations of a volume of poetry), Hofmann has a powerful (putting it mildly) presence in it, it is jam-packed with his taste and culture and vocab and sentences, it's sort of magic-realismy over-the-top, kid-on-christmas joyful (he's left out the hatchet jobs), bright-coloured torn tissue paper and ribbon tossed around--what would it take to tip all this towards the realm of capital-L enduring Literature? Who else writes like this? A new nonfiction form? Whitmanian capaciousness? Perec exploding out of the Oulipo straitjacket?

I had a twinge of an epiphany, reading the Antonioni piece, when Hofmann describes the film The Passenger's shape as "just something of a certain length. A piece of string. Scenes are knots along it. It is easy to imagine other ones, different ones. . .Finding fault with them doesn't seem to be the point. They aren't load bearing. Other cafés, other roads, other dialogues. It doesn't matter. [...] It is waiting, while nothing and everything, happens."

Paris and so forth

American poems are more associational and biographical than British poems, I read somewhere online yesterday...oh, an essay from Jacket (date?) about Seamus Heaney that harked back to Alvarez's 1980 NYRBooks review of Field Day.

This morning some twinge sends me off to read a bit of Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupés (1887) where I find an evocation of an April evening in Paris, "les feuillages d'ombres": the foliage of shadows. Here's the passage, roughly translated:

"...a bright evening with the sun setting, the monotonous noises, the white houses, the foliage of shadows; the evening softer, and a joy in being someone, of going about; the streets and the crowds, and in the air, very far off, stretched out, the sky; Paris all around sings, and in the mist of perceived forms, . .  " and so forth. Les Lauriers is thought to be the first novel to use stream of consciousness. . . .

Anyway, what stopped me, for one, was the neatly twisted "foliage of shadows," which reminded me of walking under a thickly-leafed chestnut tree that was hanging over someone's house wall on my way home one evening in the Paris suburbs, back when we lived in the Paris suburbs. It was dark (in Dujardin it is not dark, it a spring evening sunset--what time of day would that be?), it was mild--there was a street lamp and walking under the chestnut tree, though the thick shadows it cast on the sidewalk (not forgetting the probable dog shit on that sidewalk), was like walking through some substance--and then out the other side into less dense air.

The funny thing about Paris is that it is a twilight city: I mean, it's a place you want to be between seasons (in "la demi-saison", in fashion terms), not in the glare of summer, not in winter. 

Apollinaire

A recent review from the TLS has been picked up by the Wall Street Journal. 

Les obus miaulent has more of Apollinaire's poetry from the first World War: poem-letters written to a friend (both the friend and Apollinaire died during the war), delightful and moving in themselves, but also drafts for the war poems that appeared in Calligrammes (1918), many of which are also in Apollinaire, The Little Auto (CB Editions, 2012).