Labor Day Weekend: the National Book Festival; A Most Wanted Man

From last year’s festival

Philip Seymour Hoffman (1967-2014) (see review below)

Dear friends and readers,

I carry on going places and to events that when Jim was alive I never thought about: this past Saturday with a few friends to the National Book Festival in DC. It’s in its 14th year (!), and until recently was held out on the Mall in tents. A couple of people I talked too lamented the change of venue to the massive cement and steel and glass labyrinth double-building Convention Center. The audience and speakers were probably more comfortable physically; on the other hand, you were rooked for food and drink, and could not escape the omnipresent sense of corporate power.

I learned very different audiences show up for this festival. I made the mistake of trying a couple of lectures by people in vast rooms labeled Contemporary Life and History and Biography. Though the first had legitimate political figures (John Lewis in one) and serious books too, they seemed to attract people looking for sheer celebrity authors: TV personalities who have written a book; the appallingly incoherent great-grand-daughter of Krushchev who delivered quite a diatribe on Putin, though her book is supposedly not about him. There are areas dedicated to children’s books, picture books, young adult fiction — the experiences on offer are a reflection of contemporary American publishing. I regret to say I missed Jules Feiffer: he was listed under “picture books” and talked late in the day. There is a problem that “stars” or events thought to be particularly popular are done early in the day (to bring people in) as well as late in the evening (to keep them there). Trying to find and eat lunch with my friends, I missed out on Claire Messud, a rare good woman writer at this fair. I didn’t have the stamina to stay for three sessions on Books into Films: I console myself with the thought that from talk I heard these were going to be hugely crowded.

If I go again next year I will be sure to plan my day better so as to reach authors I want to hear and avoid what’s demoralizing, “hands-on activities” for children, and (much worse) book signings, which were vast tedious lines I had to get round to get to “book sales,” only to discover the only books there were the latest books by the authors talking (in piles), mostly expensive editions. No wonder, I thought to myself, Jim never suggested we should go to this. All the lectures I heard or chanced by were at a minimum interesting in revealing the ways in which different lesser authors in front of different popular audiences tailor what they say lest they offend someone important to their career in this particular world; refuse to answer questions that might provoke genuine dissension or open discomfort; and the ways in which famous and much-respected be-prized authors are surrounded by adulation and how they cope with it.

There were also events and talks more than worth while: moving, exhilarating, informative, with touching moments too:

E.L. Doctorow

I heard E.L. Doctorow speak: I’ve read only Loon Lake and Jim read Ragtime, but I remember the first. I read it the week we spent at Mount Desert Island where I heard the loons on Maine lakes. And we saw the musical of Ragtime; Jim said he liked the book. Something about Doctow’s tone allowed me to feel inspired without being talked down to or feel anything phony or complacent was intermixed. He was lucky: grew up in the Bronx with a faher who owned a music store in Manhattan to which world famous musicians came; his grandfather was a printer and intellectual. His family were all readers; his teachers approved of and encouraged his work: he said how important the teacher’s attitude to a student is. He took good classes in Journalism (he once got an F for lying; he made a plausible report up), went to Kenyon College. His editorial career was useful in teaching his objectivity. He said of his writing, “a key word was desperation.” He often starts with an image or phrase or music or language that he finds evocative. He writes to find out why he had that feeling. For his book on Sherman’s march he researched, but often he is impelled by contemporary experience: his Book of Daniel because he was so appalled by the Rosenberg execution. Ragtime came from asking himself after he moved to New Rochelle what New Rochelle looked like in 1902 filled with upper class white people all dressed up. Loon Lake: he saw a sign in the Adirondacks which made him think about how the wealthy of this earth make wilderness hospitable to themselves, create private railway cars to get to the exclusive (and excluding) places. In Andrew’s Brain he asked himself how does the brain become the mind. He much enjoyed working with others on the musical adaptation of Ragtime; he delivered notes longer than his book; the musical’s ending is softer, the insouciance of the book’s characters is lost; singing makes it much harder to distance characters; yet he felt the musical did the book enough justice. As to the art of his books he feels something is working for him when he transgresses rules, seems to break conventions. He suggested novels are a highly conservative form because you must obey conventions necessary to tell a story.

Natasha Wimmer on translating Bolano

Paul Auster and Natasha Wimmer talked of poetry and translation in a joint session. Auster has published many books of poetry, of translation from the French, and his work has been translated into 40 languages. Wimmer is a professional translation from Russian and Spanish; the books she was hawking were Roberto Bolaño’s “2666” and “The Savage Detectives” and she has translated Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa’s “The Language of Passion,” “The Way to Paradise” and “Letters to a Young Novelist.” Both have been awarded prestigious prizes. So we heard how hard it is to translate something, how much time it takes, how often translators make a pittance and the centrality of translation to most people’s reading experience, how deviously language works. How insular is the US where 3% of books published are translations while in Germany 50% are. Why it is that a work must be re-translated every 30 years as the translations become obsolete while the original text is not expected to “keep up.” Auster says he began to translate in order to understand poems in French better; he did translate for money at one time and made a dismal amount. Auster spent five years in France, speaking, reading, breathing the language and this changed his relationship to English ever after. I learned a professor, poet and translator Jim and I once knew had died: Allen Mandelbaum (Auster’s uncle by marriage at one point). Wimmer said ideally you must know your author’s life, other works, have lived in his or her country, and know your own language well. You have to connect. I found interesting Auster’s talk about how Becket moved from Irish English to French and back again to create his texts. Wimmer did not discuss the meaning or themes of her texts, only language choices — how you must try to enact strangeness while under pressure to make a text immediately accessible to modern readers.

Alice Ostriker read from two recent books of poetry: The Book of Seventy and The Old Woman, the Tulip and the Dog. While I liked a couple of the poems she read (e.g., “Insomnia”), I felt she was presented too cheerful a face for her presumed matter. During the question period a woman got up who said she was recently widowed (she was under the hammer of terrible loss) and said all day she seemed to hear of experience only from the angle of the young. Could Ostriker recommend any books whose outlook was that of an older woman, any books to help someone coping with devastating loss. Ostriker would not answer, said she could not think of a book. Later (today) she came onto Wompo asking for titles about mourning. I posted that the woman was equally wanting literature from older people about their experience, and this beautiful poem came in with its context from Kathleen Flenniken: Dorothy Trogdon, Tall Woman Looking, a review, with a poem:

Strange How You Stay

Strange how you may stay in one place—
Say a house facing a stand of alders—
and yet are carried forward,

stay in one place but not in that time,
not in the years that meant so much to you,
that were your happiest years,

how you are helplessly carried onward.

It has come hard to me, this knowledge,
I have had to practice to do it—

to swallow silently the losses while I hold close
what the heart has claimed.

Now the trees have entered their winter silence.
In the garden, one foolhardy yellow rose
Is blooming still.

I passed by one intelligent bearded youngish guy on the second floor in front of (stranded, stuck, it was his job), before a many-boothed exhibit about research at the Library of Congress — of course they were there as chief sponsors. He saw the absurdity of some of this circus. You do research by reading. He seemed to smile at me in recognition because I was sceptically amused at the antics of video.

Richard Rodriguez around the time of his Hunger of Memory

Last I heard an exhilarating talk from Richard Rodriguez which showed me why I used to love his essay segments on PBS reports when it was run by McNeil and Lehrer. He told of his time running a bookstore in Eliot Bay and his feeling that today people have stopped reading in the way they once did, that they read in a different spirit. A good book needs a good reader he said. I did love how he made fun of the idea that we read for role models. When I first came onto the Net, I thought this a silly idea too: when I taught and students would talk this way, I’d suggest to them they were not imitating the characters in the books. I’ve been so inundated by this idea, gotten so used to the notion I almost parrot it myself.  I talk about bonding and identifying, or being alienated by characters at any rate. He told of his boyhood and friendship with girls and women. He does not think of himself as a gay but a morose writer. He called himself an essayist (now a bad word to utter), and how an essay is a process of thinking, which shows us how to respond to experiences. Hre said a true teacher teaches a vocation not job training. We no longer live in the places we physically live in, and he spoke of the growing loneliness of lives lived without roots in socially dysfunctional environments. There is a revolution going on where women are assaulted with impunity, being deprived of rights over their biology while gays are being given the right to marry. What shall we make of this? He asserted that people love one another or want and need love, so we need to write about the madness we see about us, not pretend homeless people are not there. Use our loneliness to create purpose and links to one another. Important icons and places: the mountain top, the vast deserts, caves. He produced funny satiric vignettes of celebrities on TV and among literati today (poor Maggie Smith as a witch uttering ugly thoughts — probably from Downton Abbey that one). He ended on how we need to understand religion urgently to understand the changed violent landscapes of our earth. How the US oligarchy has destabilized and destroyed society after society around the globe (I add it’s been done within the US now too). I have ordered his Hunger of Memory.

I came home somewhat weary knowing that Jim would not be here. But Yvette was and so my two cats; she and I ordered Chinese food and ate and talked together and played with the cats. She has spent her weekend watching the US open championships. I had letters from good friends, watched some of the Jane Austen Book Club (and blogged away on it). From Friday to this evening on and off I reread Trollope’s powerful An Eye for an Eye and Shirley Jackson’s genius gothic masterpiece, The Haunting of Hill House (for coming teaching). Caroline was here on Sunday to help us buy and put together a new vacuum cleaner. I threw out my now feeble canister vacuum cleaner (bought in 1984). We watched the very clever John Oliver together. His humor goes beyond satire of what obviously is to explain subtleties of corruption on media (“native” newscasts versus advertisements which pretend to be newscasts) and complexities of fleecing: a single vulture corporation holding a whole country, Argentina and its people to a stranglehold by having bought very cheaply a debt and demanding full payment of the literal sum owed.

Today I saw a powerful film, A Most Wanted Man featuring as Gunter Bachman the brilliant Seymour Hoffman based on yet another of LeCarre’s important ironic political tales. It was sad to watch Seymour Hoffman knowing this man who could convey such a depth of feeling and thought is now dead — and at such a young age. As his character is a kind of victim, so in real life Hoffman was (of the drug and doctor trade). Unless you realize the the ironic spirit in which the whole story is told (the villains are the American CIA woman, the thug German & NATO establishment and their scary police), you will be very puzzled by the ending. (In comparison Breaking Bad has a child-like morality, schmaltz.) In this one we see the spies deluded exploited, the decent people they were trying to help crushed as so many terrorists without so much as a hearing, or clear evidence. The woman from the Anonyma movie (Nina Hoss) is Irma, the woman Gunter wishes he could get himself to have a relationship with and who loves him: so she’s Hoffman’s comforting silent support and sidekick. Most powerful were its director’s images: the anonymous city, the use of harsh color with only occasional forays into a suddenly lovely park (where did this come from?), the filthy impoverished slums and tiny flats versus luxurious apartments: the cold exploitative injustice of the moneyed structures imposed on our fugitive lives is pictured.

One of LeCarre’s earliest books, a success d’estime (not violent or a spy story) is Trollopian: A Small Town in Germany, whose central character’s dilemma is very like the Warden’s and his solution too: walk away, don’t be coopted. Hoffman does not walk away at the end; we are to feel he plays on because to give up is to cede all to barbarism. A Most Wanted Man did need more time to develop the interesting relationships between some of the characters (an 8 part mini-series anyone?) so it was hard to see how Gunter and his world is a grandson of George Smiley and his but they are, and in this film more deeply embittered. The mole’s conscience, a young man, Jamal is persuaded to tell the truth about his father’s charities on the promise it will not hurt his father, and when telling ends in destroying the father (leaving him subject to torture, cruel imprisonment, deportation of he family), we have suggested where suicide missions come from (“the making of a so-called terrorist”); but in the justified anger at what the powerful western oligarchies are now getting away with, this scarce gets a look in now. So don’t miss this film. I know I should read the book.

While at the National Book Festival I talked to a few people. One widow who told me 7 years later it is still a “lousy cruel” life. Another woman living alone, seeking companionship for the nonce. She will be at the OLLI at AU this fall. Older women speak to older women. I was invited to go to a political get-together in a neighbor’s house two blocks over but could not get myself to go: I didn’t know what to wear and didn’t dress up in time. I’ve been obsessing over this failure ever since.

So I get through the hours with successive bits of the old enjoyments and then I’m back to my condition of frustration (I cannot do without him what I could with him) and bereft loneness and frustration again. I hate how time goes by, each turn of the season because it means he is dead that much longer, that much more somehow lost to all existence, how dare the world move on this way? not care? No one realizes time becomes timeless for the widow. A Wanted Man was about the ruined lives of the destroyed, the lives of those putting a brake on it, not on those left with their future subtracted. Killed young by the cancer epidemic, mistreated. I miss his affection, his warmth, his love for me. He missed out on 20 years of fulfilled life.

I didn’t use to pay attention to holidays when Jim was alive. I didn’t think about them. They didn’t matter. I wish I could return to that state of mind now but how without his presence to bathe my reality in perpetual real care. I miss his kind eyes looking at me.

Sylvia