The not paying for things was intoxicating.
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(Philip Roth, American Pastoral).
I wrote about kleptomania in literature, from Daniel Defoe to Jennifer Egan, for The New Inquiry.
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On a related note: Why does she sounds German?
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Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — the indie recut.
Anyone? Anyone?
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In Japanese, tsundoku means, “the act of buying books and not reading them, leaving them to pile up.”
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“Occasionally, an American or two spoiled the tasteful palette with vacation colors. They shot into the town square like clowns fired from a cannon, mugging their snack-smeared faces at some imagined camera and releasing high-strung moods as if by megaphones: I have arrived in your historic city, and I am the happiest person you will ever know! Let me rub my joy on you!”
(Ben Marcus, “The Dark Arts.” Polaroid by Bastian Kalou.)
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Excited to see “No Joy” at Glasslands tonight. Their music doesn’t grab you by the shirt collar and shake you, like some others. But it has more of a pile-on effect: cool and slick songs, a raspy vibe that feels so effortless in recent Montreal bands. Anyway, this is “Lunar Phobia.” And this is me signing off, and going back to work with my sad desk lunch.
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Lost in translation
On what it means when translators introduce words they think should be in the original text, but aren’t:
In Lawrence’s Women in Love Ursula reflects that she’s not even tempted to get married. Her sister Gudrun agrees and carries on, “Isn’t it an amazing thing … how strong the temptation is, not to!” Lawrence comments: “They both laughed, looking at each other. In their hearts they were frightened.” A recent Italian edition of the book offers something that, translated back into English, would give, “They both burst out laughing, looking at each other. But deep in their hearts they were afraid.”
Experimenting over the years I’ve realized that if I ask a class of students to translate this into Italian approximately half will introduce that “but.” It appears to be received wisdom that one doesn’t laugh if one is afraid; hence when Lawrence puts the two things together, translators feel a “but” is required to acknowledge the unusualness of this state of affairs. Lawrence on the other hand suggests that nothing is more common than laughing and being afraid; one laughs because afraid, in order to deny fear.
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“A Lot of Sorrow” — The National at MoMA PS1
After four hours and fifty-five minutes, Matt Berninger, the lead vocalist of The National, decided to have some fun. “Sorrow found me when I was young / Sorrow waited, Sorrow won,” he raced through the first two lines of the lyrics like a record out of whack, then paused and smiled.
If his voice sounded slightly hoarse, it was hard to blame him. The National was taking part in a grueling experiment: the band members were to sing their song “Sorrow,” a brooding, almost-monotonous, three-minute number, over and over again, for six hours, as part of a duration-based performance piece by Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, titled “A Lot of Sorrow.”
As the band wrapped up the song and then rekindled again—all in all, they would play “Sorrow” a hundred and five times, according to Pitchfork—the audience erupted in thunderous applause, as if hearing it for the very first time. Berninger’s voice, a dark, beautiful baritone that feels just as enveloping in sold-out arenas as it does in bed with the shades drawn, created a kind of winsome claustrophobia. About eight renditions in, and the words started to lose any meaning for me. The syllables began to wear off, like the colors of a favorite t-shirt. Instead, all I heard was the strum of the guitars—a melodious hum that worked up to a soft crescendo. Then the words resurfaced, new and familiar all at once.
“I don’t want to get over you,” Berninger sang, for the umpteenth time. Almost six hours in, “Sorrow” felt like an incantation.
Photo shows the set list.
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My review of James Lasdun’s “Give Me Everything You Have”
How does one write about obsessive love? Well, if “Lolita,” “The Kreutzer Sonata” and “Wuthering Heights” are to be any kind of guide, then the answer is: Magnificently. But what if our focus is not on the Humbert Humberts, the Pozdnyshevs, the Heathcliffs of our world? What if our narrator is not the one obsessed but is rather the object of obsession? And what if the nightmarish events that he describes – not without a sense of foreboding – are real? Add to that the peculiarities that define the age of the Internet (Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, she became a cyberbully), and the result is the fascinating new book “Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked,” by James Lasdun.
Lasdun, an accomplished British poet and novelist living in New York, first met a woman he calls Nasreen in the fall of 2003. He was teaching a fiction workshop at a place he refers to as Morgan College, and Nasreen, a quiet and reticent student who sat at the back of the room, quickly turned out to be the star of his class. Born in Iran to a family that had fled to the United States after the 1979 revolution, Nasreen based the ambitious chapters of her novel-in-progress in Tehran, during the last days of the Shah. Not only was Lasdun impressed with her work, but when he subsequently praised her in class, he was taken by her coolheaded response: “This too, this unflustered reaction of hers, seemed to me the mark of a real writer.”
For two years after that course ended, Lasdun didn’t hear from Nasreen. Then one day she emailed to inform him that she had finished her manuscript, and asked if he would he read it. (MFA teachers: Beware of ex-students bearing galleys!) He replied amicably, politely declined her request, citing lack of time, but felt strongly enough about her talent that he put her in touch with his own agent. This triggered a series of friendly exchanges between them – “That she was younger than me, a woman, and Iranian were all things that gave the prospect of this friendship a certain appealing novelty,” he writes – whose nature at first struck Lasdun as harmless, though the correspondence soon became increasingly flirtatious on her end. When Lasdun then tried to make it clear that his intentions were not romantic – dropping hints about his happy marriage and mentioning an upcoming trip with his kids – Nasreen’s reaction should have perhaps alarmed him more than it did: She replied by accusing Lasdun of having had an affair with another former student. Later she rescinded her charge, and Lasdun seems to have had no qualms about letting this odd fabulation go. … [Read more]
