“In order to write about the tenderness of love, take bus no. 7 from Lubyansky Square to Nogin Square. The appalling jolting will serve to throw into relief for you, better than anything else, the charm of a life transformed.”
- Mayakovsky, How are verses made? (1926)
Paul Collins (of whom I am an enormous fan) reports on his blog that English as She is Spoke is now available from Google Books. Collins put out a new edition in 2004 , so is this good or bad news for him?
In 1855, when Jose da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino wrote an English phrasebook for Portuguese students, they faced just one problem: they didn’t know any English. Even worse, they didn’t own an English-to-Portuguese dictionary. What they did have, though, was a Portuguese-to-French dictionary, and a French-to-English dictionary. The linguistic train wreck that ensued is a classic of unintentional humor, now revived in the first newly selected edition in a century. Armed with Fonseca and Carolino’s guide, a Portuguese traveler can insult a barber (”What news tell me? All hairs dresser are newsmonger”), complain about the orchestra (”It is a noise which to cleve the head”), go hunting (”let aim it! let make fire him”), and consult a handy selection of truly mystifying “Idiotisms and Proverbs.”
Last night I bought a copy of The Collected Works of Jane Bowles.
From today’s Guardian:
“The borough [Brooklyn] can boast Walt Whitman, Arthur Miller and Truman Capote, who was particularly fond of visiting the waterfront underneath Brooklyn Bridge. WH Auden, Carson McCullers, Paul and Jane Bowles and Richard Wright at one time lived in the same house.”
Yesterday I saw the Neo Rauch exhibit at the Met. It was amazing. It will be at the museum until 10/14 and you can see some of it online. The paintings reminded me of the covers of The Hardy Boys books. Afterwards we saw Claudia from The Magnetic Fields at St. Mark’s.
Monday 9/24
- 4PM: Naomi Klein at CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave at 34th St.
- 7PM: Charles Bernstein and Rachel Blau DuPlessis at 113 W 60th St at Columbus Ave.
Thursday 9/27
- 7PM: A.M. Homes at National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South
Friday 9/28
- 6:30PM: Paul Collier: The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It at The Cooper Union, 7 East 7th Street at Third Avenue
Saturday 9/29
- 10AM- 6PM: Housing Works Open Air Book Fair on Crosby St. (between Broadway and Lafayette) at Prince Street. “Tens of thousands of books, records and CDs marked down to a dollar!”
This was my week:
Tuesday: Deb Olin Unferth and Paul La Farge
Wednesday: Lydia Davis
Thursday: Diane Williams (not reading, just signing and chatting)
Notes:
- Christine Schutt and Bill Hayward were at the Williams event, too.
- Lydia Davis read from a new project where dreams are juxtaposed with strange things that happened in real life. They are funny and Lydia Davis-like. She also read my favorite story from Varieties of Disturbance:
The HandBeyond the hand holding this book that I’m reading, I see another hand lying idle and slightly out of focus-my extra hand.
There are so many readings in New York. I spend a lot of time online looking for readings and might start listing them here, so that we don’t all have to spend a lot of time online looking for readings. I am enthusiastic about it.
“I have lots of phone numbers of my friends, but I don’t really have friends come over to my house because I don’t trust a lot of people. Why should they come to my house? I could talk to them in the street and I could hang around with them in the park and school, and I could still show them how I play the piano in school. I mean, if they want free private lessons, then maybe they should come to my house. Or if I want to date hot chicks, maybe they should also come to my house.
I don’t have a girlfriend. I’m single. I look for a girlfriend every day. Recently, I’ve been getting plenty of hot chicks. Kissing and hugging them, but not dating them yet. A lot of girls like me because I’m original and enthusiastic and also because I like to play the piano.
When I came into the school, I didn’t have so many friends. Last year, I was looking at how a guy was talking to a hot chick, and I asked him: “Could you introduce me to her? What’s this girl’s name and could you tell her that Boris said hi?” I didn’t speak directly to girls because I was too shy, but now I understand that this was a major mistake, because girls never like shy guys.
There was one girl who loved me, but she rejected me because I was being stupid with her. I cheated on her. I forgot her name. It was a disaster.
I love the piano because it relieves my stress. When I practice the piano, I forget about the hot chicks, that they were being mean to me. It expresses my emotions. When I’m angry, I play a prelude by Rachmaninoff — Opus 23, No. 5.”
[NYT]
Patrick said Lydia Davis had been married to Paul Auster. I didn’t believe him.
But look!
“Of late, Auster has had some crises of his own to deal with. In 1998, Daniel, his son by his former wife, poet Lydia Davis, pleaded guilty in a New York court to stealing $3,000 from a dead drug dealer called Andre ‘Angel’ Melendez. In the court case, it turned out that Daniel had actually been present in the room when Melendez was killed by a well- known Manhattan party promoter, Michael Alig, who is currently serving a 20-year sentence.
Then 20, Daniel was not implicated in the killing, but received five years’ probation for the stealing charge. It is a subject on which, unsurprisingly, Paul Auster has remained steadfastly silent. I had been forewarned by his press officer that it was not up for discussion, that he had threatened to abruptly curtail a previous interview in which it was broached.”
Update: 9/19, 7PM Lydia Davis at Housing Works
JOB: Is that still the working principle–to write about what you want to say no to?
DW: The underlying principle is the same in the sense of wanting to get to what would be personally dangerous material, but in order to succeed over and over again I’ve had to learn how to trick myself into it–some of the time, going backwards toward it to keep myself intrigued. And there are many times in the fiction when I believe I’m writing about someone else, but thinking, oh my God, what if that were me? It’s assuming a dangerous or perplexing stance whether or not I think it’s from my own experience.
And here’s one of her stories:
“That’s a little too heterosexual for my taste.”
“And for our part, let’s stop being so surprised when we discover that our public figures have their own complex sex lives, and start being more suspicious when they self-righteously denounce the sex lives of others.”