September 2015

The Asian Woman

By Adrian Nathan West.

In Philadelphia, on New Year’s Day, it is customary for working class men, who have received money to this end from the city government, to dress themselves in women’s clothes or as harlequins and march or ride floats down Broad Street while making noises that are reciprocated by the throngs of people on the sidewalk. It is therefore necessary, if you want a bit of peace and quiet, to go to places you do not usually frequent; and this is what I did on the first day of 2009, walking fifteen or so blocks from my apartment to a Starbucks on Ninth and South streets, thinking there to read a book I had bought myself for Christmas, La mauvaise conscience, by Vladimir Jankélévitch, in the Spanish translation, and to make notes on that book for an anthology of ideas on ethical philosophy that I had been compiling at home to no foreseeable purpose, and also to think back over the course of the preceding year with its many disappointments. I ordered a hot chocolate at the register and took a place at the counter beside an Asian woman in her forties who was wearing a burgundy down coat with a fur-lined hood and a pair of what seemed to me very fashionable boots, with squared toes and a zipper running up their back side. I laid my books, journals, and pens before me.

Wilhelm Meister & Me

By Barry Sheils.

When I returned to Ireland that summer after my travels around Europe with Michael, I took a train by myself to a small town in Leitrim called Carrick-on-Shannon. This was as far north as the train went, the Ulster Transport Authority having in their wisdom many years before closed the majority of the cross-border lines. I had nearly a whole day to kill until my mother’s nursing shift ended and she could drive to collect me, a journey from Omagh that would take her over an hour. The weather was fair so I managed well enough, snoozing in the park where a circus was setting up, watching passers-by.

I assumed Carrick was a typical small town, though I hadn’t made the connection to the town mentioned in so many of John McGahern’s stories: it turns out that Carrick was not just any provincial backwater, it was paradigmatically provincial, refined by literature to represent everything suffocating and ennobling about living in a particular place. An apt location, in other words, for me to remain vaguely European, sublimely detached from my surroundings, and lie the length of that day in imaginative solidarity with my fellow travellers, the bare-chested itinerants who were just then erecting the scaffold for the big top. I didn’t know it at the time but I was playing the part of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, at the end of his travels, artistic and existential experiments behind him, inducted into the secret society of those who know what experience is. I was basking in the feeling of aesthetic bliss adjoined to economic privilege; and this, despite the fact that I didn’t have a penny to my name.

The Novel Without Qualities

An Interview with Luis Chitarroni by Andrew Gallix.

Luis Chitarroni is a prominent Argentine critic, editor, and novelist, whose staggering erudition is only matched by his warmth, humour, and kindness. Over several months—as I edited the following interview—he patiently responded to all my queries. Here is an extract from a message he sent me yesterday, which gives a good idea of the number of references he can cram, quite naturally, into a short paragraph:

The Distant Star is an allusion, almost a reference, to Roberto Bolaño’s title (Estrella distante). The man from Madrid is Javier Marías (an autor [sic] who declared ‘War’ to Jorge Herralde, his previous editor and publisher). The final sentence pretends to enhance Giordano Bruno’s observation on explosions and shakespeare title’s play [sic].

In the end, I cut some passages that remained too obscure to me. There are other instances when I chose to leave in some rather cryptic sentences, due to their hypnotic rhythm or sheer beauty. After all, as Roland Barthes declared, ‘For writing to be manifest in its truth (and not in its instrumentality) it must be illegible.’ Tidying up Chitarroni’s answers felt, at times, like translating from English into English, which is slightly disquieting, but also ironic. Indeed, Susana Medina—a London-based Spanish novelist—had kindly translated my convoluted questions into her mother tongue, as I wanted Chitarroni to be able to express himself as freely as possible. When the answers came in, however, they were in English. So the questions were in Spanish, the answers in English, and the interview is the gap between the two. Whenever Chitarroni opens his mouth or puts pen to paper, it is the entire history of Western literature that seems to speak, and yet the voice is always unmistakably his. Whatever the language.

The Irish literary journal’s irresistible rise

 

From a longer piece on Ireland’s new “little magazines”, the Irish Times, 23 September 2015:

A new monthly salon series hosted by the writer Selina Guinness as part of her dlr residency will focus on the subject of literary journals. Taking place in the dlr LexIcon Studio in Dún Laoghaire, the first event runs on October 7th and features readers Mark O’Connell and Sally Rooney, and editor Brendan Barrington.

In the literary world, news breaks first through the “little magazine”, according to Guinness, who hopes to profile those working behind the scenes at Irish journals. “Editors are usually backstage workers, deeply appreciated by authors but unknown to readers,” she says. “I wanted to explore their tastes and choices, discover their current enthusiasms, and afford a stage to the contributors whose work excites them.”

Symptoms of the Subterranean

By Suzanne Walsh.

I’m sick again, and so my world shrinks to the boundaries of the house, sometimes to the bedroom walls or the soft edges of the bed. The living room feels remote, but when I’m a little stronger it become safe territory again. The outside world is still too brash, too bright, in its distance. Better to be laying grey and quiet on a couch instead, supine and still, awaiting the possibility of restoration. Out there, like some stronger strand of the same species, the healthy attend events, shop, talk, drive, walk. I look down at them, from my remote exiled state, like a vulture that longs to feast on their vitality.