The 30th Day

One of the anomalies of the writing life that could stand more attention is the time difference between (a) events in what I call (rightly or wrongly) 'real life' and (b) their translation into prose.

For example, the events in my own life that come to mind as likely source material for my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me occurred for the most part in the 1980s or even earlier. A relationship begun and ended; career changes, culminating in brushes with stockbrokerage; frequent trips to Paris; work as a translator, and as a services coordinator in a marginally '12-step' environment; 'family drama'--these scattered bits of source material came and went in my 'real life' more than 20 years before they resurfaced, transformed, in Kiss.

The time difference isn't always to be measured in decades. The processing, the transformations, may work themselves out in a few years or months. And there are other kinds of writing--blogging, for example, or reportage--where the time difference may seem to disappear altogether.

Still, I'm continually aware of the absence from my writing--or, at the very least, the underrepresentedness--of so much that is characteristic of my 'real life' today. To cite only two examples: a beatific relationship of over 20 years' standing, and over three years' study and practice of qigong and related arts.

Qigong is on my mind today because this post completes my experiment of 30 consecutive days of blogging. As I wrote on the first day, I undertook the experiment on the advice of my sifu, Anthony Korahais, and at the same time resolved to practice qigong every morning. For now, I'll say of my own experience only that it's been very positive in both areas, and a definite success. And I'll refer you to Sifu Anthony's own post from yesterday, which explains the 'The 30-Day Trial' in detail and which may give you some ideas for your own real life in the month ahead.

Banned Books Week, 24 September - 1 October 2011

Banned Books Week has been observed annually in the United States since 1982. It's sponsored by the American Library Association and nine other groups. For more information on the goals and importance of the week in the US, see this ALA page. For an international perspective on issues of censorship, see this AI page. And for a site focussing entirely on Banned Books Week, including videos, click here. YouTube even has a dedicated channel for Banned Books Week.

It seems likely to me that most readers of this blog sympathize with the goals of Banned Books Week--raising awareness about issues of censorship, advocating for intellectual freedom. It's good to err, though, on the side of greater vigilance, and to look for creative ways to help extend to others, wherever they live, the freedoms that some of us already enjoy. (One condition for these readerly freedoms, obviously, is literacy itself. Consider visiting the website of First Book [for the US and Canada] or the UNESCO literacy portal.)

One frequent suggestion from the organizers of Banned Books Week: celebrate your freedom to read by reading a banned or challenged book. To get some ideas, see the ALA's lists of banned and challenged classics and most frequently challenged authors of the 21st century. Or link directly to some historically banned/challenged classics that you can download for free: books like Fanny Hill, Huckleberry Finn, The Awakening, The Jungle and Ulysses.

I hope you'll share here your experiences with banned and challenged books and your ideas for improving access for others to all books. And I'll return to the topic of (specific) banned and challenged books throughout the months ahead.

Kindle: If You've Been Waiting, the Wait Is Over

This morning Amazon has announced a dramatically extended line of Kindles. Now you can have the features you want, leave out what you want to leave out, and pay an unbeatable price.

In retrospect it seems to me that we've all been paying too much attention to speculation about this rumor or that, this model or that. What we've all known all along is that getting the price of a new Kindle down into the double digits for the US market would mean an historic tipping point for the ebook revolution. It happened this morning.

These new Kindles start at $79. True, with that price the buyer agrees to receive onscreen notifications of 'special offers'... and to do without a (physical) keyboard. But there are other options as low as $99. And... oh, yes... that tablet we've all been waiting for, which will set us back all of $199.

The news is good. Start learning more at Amazon.com. Or at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.de--making sure to go to the £89 or €99 model's product page for a complete comparison of all the Kindles available.

Free eBooks: A Few Links

Nowadays ebook retailers offer (typically) thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of free books, usually as an incentive to attract customers who will, presumably, spend money on reading devices, 'paid' books and other merchandise. I'm going to assume that regular customers know how to find the free ebooks at their retailers' websites (e.g., by using each site's bestseller lists and search engines).

I want to make sure that you also have access to a few websites that offer free ebooks in multiple formats. (Note, however, that not all books are available in all formats.) Books are typically in the public domain (more about this later), and all are offered 'DRM-free', i.e., do not contain additional code to prevent file-sharing. (Among other things, this means that you can use software like Calibre to convert files to different formats.)

First, what I'll call 'the Gutenberg family': the Project Gutenberg sites for the US, Canada and Australia. Think of the US site as your free download site of first resort, and the two others as complementary sites that focus on filling in gaps left by the US site. (The US site offers only books that are in the public domain [i.e., no longer under copyright] in the US. The duration of copyright is different in different countries. In general, the laws of the country in which you are located determine what it is legal for you to download.)

Each Gutenberg site includes information on ebook formats (generally EPUB for reading devices other than Kindle), the mechanics of downloading, and the conditions under which it is legal for you to download ebooks from the site.

There is also at least one French-language site with an admirable breadth of offerings: Ebooks Libres et Gratuits. Most users will need to go to the search engine  for the site, which can be found here. (Note that files labelled 'Mobipocket' can be read on a Kindle.) All materials are in French; they may or may not be in the public domain in your country.

Let me add one final link--a site where I frequently find things that are available for free nowhere else: Munsey's. Munsey's is where you'll find more free pulp fiction and more free Henry James--and quite a bit in between--than anywhere else on the Web. The database may not have the sleekest interface you've ever seen, but there's a lot to love at this site.

One tip, applicable to all these sites: if you're going to be reading your free ebooks on a tablet, it may be easiest for you to browse these sites and download your books using the same tablet you're going to read on. This saves you one subsequent file transfer (e.g., laptop to tablet).

Also, some ebooks, conspicuous classics, are just elusive. You may want to use your usual Web search engine... always including, of course, a term like 'EPUB', 'Kindle' or 'ebook' with the title.

Finally, you may want to investigate ebook lending (friend to friend, as offered for Kindle and nook users), and borrowing from public libraries (long available via nook and recently announced for Kindle users in the US as well).

As always, I encourage you to use the comments function below. Be sure to mention your own favorite sites....

A Few Lines on the Name of a Cat: Alcestis

I'll come clean with you. I decided to blog today about my choice of 'Alcestis' as the name for one of the cats in my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me because I knew that I could never make any real headway with future posts about Euripides and Plato (two  of 'the 26') and the Plato quotation about love, self-sacrifice and gender that is the final epigraph in Kiss--could never get anything said in any of these three future posts if I didn't devote a few paragraphs to Alcestis first.

Alcestis, in A Kiss Before You Leave Me, is the name of Kathleen Kincaid's cat. Kathleen communes with her Alcestis in the first chapter, where we learn in passing that Alcestis may have kittens on the way. Later in the novel, one of those kittens will save Jack Emery's bacon on Miranda Kincaid's birthday. Miranda will adopt her and soon name her Sido (for Colette's mother), and the kitten, then adult cat, deaf from birth, is seldom far from Miranda's side from that day onward.

But what about the mother cat? What about Alcestis?

She seems to be there just to give birth to the future Sido and send her packing. As Kathleen suggests in that first chapter, a mother cat has it easier than a human mother: once Alcestis has given birth to her kittens and nursed and loved and taught them for a few weeks, she gets to say goodbye to them forever. (Unlike Kathleen, Alcestis will never have to serve as a mother-in-law.)

But what's in that name?

Although the character of Alcestis goes back to Greek legend, the earliest account of her story that survives intact is in Euripides' play Alcestis (first produced in 438 BC), which is also his earliest surviving work. By the time of the Renaissance, Alcestis had become a widely-used reference for pure, selfless love. But the 'classic' Alcestis is the one we find in Euripides.

Alcestis is a Greek princess, the wife and queen of King Admetus. The preordained moment arrives when Admetus must die unless he finds a surrogate to die in his place. Only Alcestis is willing to sacrifice herself. She is remembered for that sacrifice--to which Admetus agrees--although the story is more complicated: Admetus' friend Heracles arrives shortly after Alcestis' death (about which Heracles is not informed), and for reasons of 'hospitality' Admetus proceeds to break, one after the other, the vows he's made to Alcestis on her deathbed. Heracles produces a 'new' woman, veiled, whose hand Admetus takes--only to discover that she is Alcestis, whom Heracles has won back from Death. After three further days of silence, she is fully restored, purified.

The play is, at least potentially, and especially for present-day readers, thorny and controversial.

My own reading of the play has always begun, inevitably, with the speech in which Admetus denounces his father's refusal to die for him. It is a simultaneously powerful and alienating speech that must suggest to some modern readers the question of Admetus' own tacit refusal to die for Alcestis--a possibility he never invokes but which is clearly there: he would need only to decline to make her his surrogate. He would die; she would live.

This is not to say that Alcestis would welcome such a sacrifice on his part, nor that there is no possible justification (for reasons of family or state) for his failure to make it. (Commentators, even if they ignore the issues of self-sacrifice, always explore the cultural justifications for Admetus' apparent breaches of faith after Alcestis' death.) Indeed, I hold no brief here for any one approach, and I do not claim to hold the key to Euripides' intentions. I ask only that you hear in the name Alcestis not merely the Renaissance ideal but also the multiple possibilities that are there for readers of today.

I propose between A Kiss Before You Leave Me and Euripides' Alcestis no simple analogies or parallels (and thus no easy keys to anyone's intentions). The cat Alcestis is of course not called upon to sacrifice herself, temporarily or permanently, for love or anything else. She was named, however, by her highly literate human (an editor, a fancier of crossword puzzles), who knows--and has yet to learn--a great deal about self-sacrifice in the name of love.

'Hiroshima mon amour' (1959)

For several months now I've wanted to say something here about the 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour (directed by Alain Resnais from a screenplay by Marguerite Duras). And that mirrors, to some extent, a problem faced by the creators of the film: the desire to speak about something that cannot be addressed directly.

Coming on the heels of her novel Moderato Cantabile (1958), Hiroshima mon amour again revealed Duras to be a powerfully innovative writer with more surprises up her sleeve than her earliest work had suggested. It was Resnais's first full-length film, and--together with Truffaut's 400 Blows (which, like Hiroshima, was first seen at Cannes in 1959) and Resnais's next film, Last Year at Marienbad--is associated with the emergence of the New Wave of French cinema.

But talking about how Hiroshima mon amour is or isn't a New Wave film, feels as wrong as comparable discussions of whether Moderato Cantabile is or isn't an example of le Nouveau roman. And the same thing could be said about efforts to situate Hiroshima in the respective careers of Resnais and Duras.

It's a film that both have spoken of as being born out of an inability to bring the usual tools of understanding, language and art to bear on the violent disruptions of the Second World War. Instead of making a documentary (or near-documentary) on the bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945 and its aftermath, they decided to film a love story set in the Hiroshima of 1957.

A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) is finishing work on a 'film about peace' in Hiroshima. The day before she is to return to France, she meets and becomes involved with a Japanese architect (Okada Eiji). When she tells him of everything she's seen in Hiroshima (museum, hospital, people...), he insists: 'You have seen nothing in Hiroshima--nothing.' The problem isn't the difference of nationalities: it's the enormity, the utter incomprehensibility of Hiroshima--and perhaps of war itself--as a phenomenon. The viewer sees, among other things, approximately what the French actress has seen: the Hiroshima of documentaries and tourism. But these images will be joined by others as the film continues....

Although they're both married, the architect asks the actress to stay on with him in Hiroshima. She softens her eventual refusal by telling him her own story of loss in wartime France, a story not even her husband knows. More terrible even than her girlhood loss and subsequent humiliation, however, is her acquired knowledge that the loss of love is not fatal: that we live on and in time forget. This does not mean that we forget the intolerable as a first step to building a new life: the erosion of memory is rather an extension of the ravages of war.

For me, it was time to see the film again, and to return to Duras's published screenplay. Perhaps you'll join me.

The Followed

Today's post has one and only one purpose: to introduce a concept. And a (blog) label. A concept and a label that didn't exist an hour ago.

Here's how it all began to take form. My intention, formed while sipping the first latte of the day, was to blog today about Marguerite Duras in general and (her screenplay for) Alain Resnais's 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour in particular. Duras, as regular readers of this blog may remember, is one of the writers I refer to collectively as 'the 26': a list of favorite writers that came together for me one day--in one moment, in fact--in 2009.

The 26 are for me an idiosyncratic mini-canon of authors for whom I have enormous esteem. I also have surprisingly clear and relatively unvarying feelings about who 'belongs' and who doesn't. There might be clerical (and other) errors, and changes that come with new experiences (I simply forgot to include Faulkner in the list, and in early 2009 I hadn't read Jo Nesbø yet) but there was at least no indecisiveness on my part: Balzac, a definite yes; Flaubert, no.

I'm very aware, however, that most of the 26 are what we used to call 'dead white European males'. (The only exceptions are Jane Austen, Duras, Thich Nhat Hanh and Ruth Rendell.) DWEMs tend to be included 'automatically' when we start formulating canons, and then the newly-formulated or -recognized canon (at least for some of us) brings up the whole DWEM issue in turn. Today I want to stress the 'D' term: 'dead'. Only two of the original 26 are alive: Thich Nhat Hanh (born 1926) and Ruth Rendell (born 1930). I'm very conscious of a sense that we have a different relationship to writers who are in some broad sense our contemporaries. And what has brought this home to me is not some sense of remoteness from authors of earlier eras but rather a sense that I needed to disclose or explain something about my closeness to Duras.

Marguerite Duras, who was born in 1914, died in 1996. For the last 20 years or so of her life, I followed her.

If I explain what I mean by that, it sounds like a watered-down paraphrase: 'I eagerly awaited each new publication, bought it at the earliest opportunity and read it immediately.' In reality, there was more passion in it. Note that I felt that the fact that I followed her was something that I had to disclose....

I had started reading Duras at some point in the early 1970s, reading with enthusiasm and admiration, reading books from her backlist--the Hiroshima screenplay, Moderato Cantabile, Lol. V Stein, L'amante anglaise--and towards the end of that time, something clicked for me and I had to read... well, of course, everything of hers I'd missed, but, even more passionately, every new volume as it appeared, starting, as I remember, with the screenplay Le camion.

I'm sure it had something to do with the fact that Duras in the 1970s was still perceived as at least marginally avant-garde. The great popular success of The Lover (1984) was still to come; there were even in France virtually no rack-sized paperback editions of her work. She wasn't a classic then.

And the fact that I followed her then, and for so many years thereafter, sets her apart from most of the rest of the 26. Let's risk overstating the obvious: for almost 20 years I 'went where she went'; I never lost sight of her. I didn't literally stalk her; we never met; indeed, I probably continue to have far less interest in the details of her private life (which have filled many books, both her own and others') than do the majority of her readers.

Still, when I came up with 'the Followed' as a term to designate collectively the writers whom I have read or still read in this way, I heard in that term a hint of Vince Kincaid's following of his ex-wife Miranda (in yesterday's excerpt from A Kiss Before You Leave Me) more clearly than the sense in which we speak of followers on Twitter. I want to underscore in 'the Followed' an association with the love you never quite outgrow, and such a love totally out of the context of regularization by corporations (e.g., Twitter) or groups (e.g., the totality of the 'fanbase' of a particular writer).

What writers have you 'followed' in this sense? How did it turn out?

Just a Taste of 'A Kiss...'

[WARNING: Today's post contains some material of an adult nature. Please be so advised before you read. I would also appreciate your feedback on how to deal with such material in the future.]

Just because it's Friday: a short excerpt from the end of Book One of A Kiss Before You Leave Me, which is entitled 'Seeing Someone':

It’s hours later. Two cars have made their way from Mitzi’s to Miranda’s, the street winding so elaborately as they approached their destination that the driver of the second car might have plowed into the rear end of the first if he hadn’t known exactly where it would stop. Instead, he’s parked two hundred yards short of the first car. His vision, of course, is perfect, but his view is obstructed by the stand of trees that wraps around three sides of the duplex just ahead. He sees the man in full profile, lounging in the driver’s seat; the woman’s profile appears and disappears by turns. 

At least they don’t appear to be touching. 

And they aren’t going in. 

Yet. 

There’s no way the solitary watcher can hear the conversation in the first car. But he doesn’t need to. It’s bad enough to watch and wait. 

[....] 

The man in the other car sees them go inside, and he feels his terrible solitude, as if for the first time. He tells himself there’s nothing more to see. He’s right, and he’s wrong.... 

Back at his own house, once hers, once theirs, alone, in what was once her favorite chair, he reaches for the phone, snatches up the receiver, punches buttons without having to think or look, listens, waits, breathless, as the call clicks through and the ringing starts, whirring in his ear, one, two, Vince counting, three, four, giving her ten, ten to pick up he decides, she’s there, she’s there, seven, she’s not fucking him yet, eight, not yet, nine, no, ten, she’s fucking him, and he slams the receiver down, seeing nothing in his darkened living room, seeing everything as it happens a dozen streets away, hearing the intake of her breath, tasting mouths, smelling perfume and cologne, Vince’s own breath returning now, fast, urgent, as if to hold it back might mean missing one detail, hungry now, panting, watching, in his way, watching her hands stroke the new man and the man’s stroke her, watching them fumble with wool and silk, push the fabric aside—feeling, tasting, smelling flesh itself—panting now, all three—a part of Vince recoils but he cannot look away, he stares, through the blackness, the streets, the walls that separate them, that close him in and out but cannot save the three of them from this: he sees.

From Jeanette Winterson, 'The PowerBook': Epigraph 7.1 - Ambiguity

Today I come to the one epigraph in A Kiss Before You Leave Me that I find it most difficult to talk about directly--because of my reluctance to divulge certain things about the final section of the novel, which it introduces. Partly as a result of this difficulty, I'll end up saying more about the general problem of ambiguity than about exactly what happens in that final section.

The epigraph comes from The PowerBook, a novel by Jeannette Winterson (born 1959) first published in the year 2000. Winterson has been a novelist (and essayist) to read and follow since three of her earliest novels: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, The Passion and Sexing the Cherry (author page at Amazon.co.uk, author page at Amazon.com). Her work (most often compared to that of Virginia Woolf, especially the Woolf of Orlando) arouses strong passions and in my experience never fails to fire the reader's imagination. I recommend her website and the rest of her work as the ideal introduction.

As with other epigraphs in Kiss, the very act of quotation gives Winterson's original sentence a change of context. First, the sentence:

There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet.

The context, in The PowerBook, is a description of love as a force larger and more powerful than individual subjectivity, psychology, can account for. For better or worse, its context in A Kiss Before You Leave Me (and in the rest of this post) is subjective, as a result of the proximity of both (a) a particular epigraph from Plato (which we'll talk about another day) and (b) the final chapter of Kiss.

It's a sentence that, even taken in isolation, provokes strong feelings, depending in part on (a) the reader's experiences of (and approach to) love and (b) the reader's interpretation of the sentence. From time to time I've tweeted each of the epigraphs to Kiss at least once, but this is the only one that ever triggered a strong negative response.

At first glance, the sentence (there on the screen, say, of your ebook reader, at the beginning of the last section of Kiss) does not appear to be ambiguous. There are clearly possible nuances of interpretation (just try to paraphrase it: how rational or how 'Romantic' do you want to make it?; do you want to highlight or tone down the allusion to Christ-like/Christian martyrdom?; etc.)--but it appears to say something like the following: to love another person (or group, or creature, or thing) is to be vulnerable to suffering terribly, like a martyr.

I want to suggest to you, however, that the sentence ('There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet'), in its new context, is ambiguous. And that's the relatively good news: that the sentence can be 'taken' in two ways, a bit like C. Allan Gilbert's 1892 drawing 'All Is Vanity', reproduced here, or a Necker cube (see, in addition to the article in Wikipedia, the presentation here). The bad news is that I'm barred from spelling out the ambiguity of the sentence. It's something that has to fall into place for the reader.

It's not difficult. It doesn't rest on a syntactic ambiguity. It's not richly satisfying, especially for readers who don't yet know A Kiss Before You Leave Me. But seeing the ambiguity (which I can't spell out) and knowing just one thing about ambiguity (which I can)--can put you well on the way to knowing what to make of the end of the novel.

All you have to know about ambiguity--this sort of ambiguity in art or fiction--is that your task, as a viewer or reader, is not to resolve the ambiguity. Not to find some hidden sense (to be sought out) behind some manifest one (to be discarded). It's not an either-or but a both-and... to be embraced and experienced... and understood on its own terms.

Don't take my word for it. Look again at the drawing 'All Is Vanity': we aren't fully seeing it until we see it both ways. Or work through the whole theory of the Necker cube and the lengths to which viewers go to reduce ambiguity: the price they pay. Or read Shoshana Felman's extraordinary study of ambiguity in The Turn of the Screw (here, or included here).

All this may give you a clearer sense of how you deal with ambiguity, and what your options are....

Tony Bennett: The Man of the Hour

Unless you've just emerged from weeks of Internet and television deprivation (I'll try not to fantasize about that too long), you know that Tony Bennett, who recently celebrated his 85th birthday, just released a second 'album' of duets, on which he sings with Lady Gaga, Aretha Franklin and almost every other partner you could wish for. Gay Talese depicted the Bennett-Gaga lovefest recording session for 'The Lady Is a Tramp' in six memorable pages in the issue of The New Yorker dated 19 September, but the first 'single' from Duets II is Bennett's collaboration with Amy Winehouse on 'Body and Soul' not long before her death. (Sales of the single benefit the Amy Winehouse Foundation.) I'm still getting to know the new album, but I'd cite those three duets (with Gaga, Franklin and Winehouse) and a fourth, Bennett and Norah Jones singing 'Speak Low', as being among the best of a very good batch.

You can of course download Duets II from iTunes, Amazon or wherever else you download music. But (in part because of parallel issues involving relative prices of ebooks and printed books) I'm providing a link only to the Amazon.com page for the CD, where it's currently $3.00 cheaper than the download.

Tony Bennett was one of my earliest favorites (along with Dinah Washington and Peggy Lee) and has remained with me through all the changes in media (45s, LPs, CDs, MP3s) and (other people's) styles. Not long ago, one CD of vintage Bennett material survived many months of almost daily play in the changer in the car, and I'd like to single out this particular line-up of songs to recommend today. It is in fact no longer available as a CD, but as an MP3 album it's going strong. It's what survives (along with some 'CD extras') of Bennett's 1965 LP If I Ruled the World--Songs for the Jet Set. It's very much the pop Bennett (as distinguished from the jazz, well represented in the compilation bearing that title), and I recommend it in its totality, even though you'd have to go to another album of the same era (or a greatest-hits compilation) for two indispensable pop cuts ('The Good Life', 'I Wanna Be Around...').

And, if you'd like even more, take a look at Bruce Ricker's 2007 tribute while it's available on Netflix instant play.

John Dickson Carr on Kindle and iBooks

John Dickson Carr (1906-1977), among the crime novelists I grew up reading, is the best of the best. US-born but with close ties to the UK, Carr is one of the stars of the Golden Age of crime fiction.

He was the grand master of the 'locked room' mystery (his The Hollow Man [1935] defines the entire sub-genre), author of some 80 books of surprisingly uniform quality, cerebral even when he made the reader laugh (his most-used pseudonym was wrongly suspected of belonging to P. G. Wodehouse), a master of both 'contemporary' and historical mystery fiction. (Incidentally, the first chapter of his first 'historical', The Bride of Newgate, measures up very well to the best of Dumas, and all of Carr's 'Victorian melodramas' are good, too.) Carr even experimented (on rare occasions, but successfully) with such unexpected themes as time travel and witchcraft. His place in my personal list of 26 favorite authors is very secure.

And now you can read him in ebook format. Thanks to the Langtail Press, six of Carr's classic novels are now available--all 'contemporaries', most featuring one or the other of his star detectives, Dr. Gideon Fell (He Who Whispers, The Problem of the Green Capsule) or Sir Henry Merrivale (The Plague Court Murders, And So to Murder, She Died a Lady), with one spectacular non-series novel, The Burning Court, thrown into the mix. (I've provided links to Kindle editions, but all six are also available on iBooks, and Carr is 'priced to sell' in both formats.)

And just in case you're not a fan of locked-room puzzles... neither am I: I just like John Dickson Carr.

Give him a try.

From Beryl Bainbridge, 'According to Queeney': Epigraph 2.1 - The Artist, the Model - Striking a Pose

Beryl Bainbridge's novel about Samuel Johnson, According to Queeney, is the source of a second epigraph in A Kiss Before You Leave Me. (For the first, and more general remarks about Bainbridge, According to Queeney, and the real-life characters who appear in it, see here.) By the time I came to this passage in my first reading of Queeney I was so much in the habit of smiling indulgently or ironically over what Bainbridge's Johnson did and said (that's the explanation most charitable to me, at least), that I misread it. That's what I believe today, at any rate. I'll explain.

Johnson is of course best known to readers of our time as the subject of James Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791), considered by many the greatest biography ever written in English. It's a 'classic', part of our or 'our' cultural heritage, one of the 'great books'.

When Boswell is first mentioned in Bainbridge's novel, the future great book is but a gleam in its young author's eye. And Johnson, in this scene, shows little faith in Boswell's ability to capture Johnson's likeness in words:

"[Boswell's account of our conversation] will not be accurate, for man's compulsion is to replicate himself. Think of painting--one has only to examine a portrait to see in the sitter a resemblance to the artist."

Ten years ago, I smiled ironically (and wrongly, I believe) at the skepticism Johnson (Bainbridge's character) expresses about Boswell's accuracy as a verbal portraitist; today, I think, I can better entertain a 'straight' reading of the passage. I used to set more store by Boswell; today I'm more conscious of the tension between Boswell's Johnson and Hester Thrale's--i.e., between the classic, 'great books', canonical version of Johnson on one hand, and Johnson as captured by the other chronicler, who was at one time categorized by some simply as his 'mistress' but whose own writings about him and her era form an alternative account increasingly appreciated in our own time.

What first recommended these lines to me as an epigraph, though, was their introduction of the notion of involuntary self-portraiture, the muddying of distinctions between artist and model, portraitist and 'sitter'. When we first see Miranda posing for Jack, their conversation takes off from his sense that her place is to be nude, his to be clothed; hers to pose, his to depict. While he sketches (and lectures) her, she gives free reign to her imagination... inadvertently planting the seeds for one of his first 'sensations': some fifty pages later, we find him--them--at work on a diptych entitled 'His and Hers', in which artist and model appear to switch roles: in the second panel, he is portrayed as her model, nudity and all. Their differences, their dissymmetry, are by no means dissolved or even suspended: the less expected of the two panels is still an elaborate joke or stunt, and his exhibitionism cannot be cast as a simple corrective. Of course, his career and their relationship are still in the early stages.

But what about the claim made by Bainbridge's Johnson, that the portraitist transforms the sitter, in the sense that portraiture is always to some extent self-portraiture? There may well be some truth to this. Perhaps the (male, let's say) portraitist skews the portrait in his own direction--whereas the (female, let's say) model guides the development of the artist in a less predefined way. This is, at least, one possibility.

From Shakespeare, 'The Tempest' and 'Measure for Measure': Epigraphs 4.1 and 6.3

Of all the epigraphs in my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me, the two from Shakespeare seem to me to require the least explanation. They are lines that a number of Shakespeare editions I've consulted do not annotate, and I suspect that my own intent in incorporating them into the novel will not surprise readers already familiar with Kiss. Let's talk about them for just a moment.

The first is part of an exchange in The Tempest (V, 1) between the wizard Prospero and his daughter Miranda:

MIRANDA: How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in it!
PROSPERO: 'Tis new to thee!

Miranda has spent twelve of her fifteen years on the island, and the only humans she can remember seeing before now are her own father and his deformed slave Caliban. It's little wonder that the royal party her father has brought to the island--especially Ferdinand, who Prospero intends will marry her--should dazzle Miranda; nor that her father should have a different perspective, since the party includes two conspirators who deposed him. (Prospero is the rightful Duke of Naples.)

These lines from The Tempest, transported to the beginning of the fourth section of A Kiss Before You Leave Me, stand as an invitation to the reader to examine my Miranda's situation at this point in the novel. She's suddenly a celebrity, of sorts, the model and very public companion of an artist who is... perhaps the flavor of the month, perhaps more. She is, of course, dazzled; even he's dazzled by his success. What she seems not to see, however, is that she forms part of an apparatus that may be elevating him at her expense; moreover, the reader has reasons to question the artist's commitment to her.

The second epigraph from Shakespeare is a line from Measure for Measure (II, 4). Angelo (the strict judge who rules Vienna in the absence of the Duke) has told Isabella, a novice nun who has begged him to spare her brother Claudio's life, that he will do so only in exchange for her virginity. So well established is his reputation for rectitude, he suggests to her, that no one would believe her if she made his offer public.

ANGELO: ...Say what you can, my false o'erweighs your true.

One of the ironies of the situation is that the offense for which Angelo has condemned Claudio to death is fornication (Claudio slept with his betrothed wife before the banns had been read a sufficient number of times to give full legal force to their marriage); what Angelo seeks with Isabella is far graver.

The sense of Angelo's line is simple: even if you accuse me truthfully, it is my denial, a lie, that everyone will believe.

The context in the penultimate section of A Kiss Before You Leave Me is quite different. I used the epigraph to focus the reader's attention on one character's claim that might be paraphrased as follows: 'What I told you may technically be a lie, as you see it; but for me, at a deeper level, it is profoundly true.' My intent was dual: to suggest some sort of analogy between the character's ploys and Angelo's, and to ask the reader to weigh the possible truth of that character's claim as paraphrased here.

I apologize for my inability to discuss this more openly; those who've already read A Kiss Before You Leave Me to the end will understand.

Note one thing, though, about both of these epigraphs: they are not intended to pronounce judgement on characters or situations in the novel; rather, they offer different possible perspectives. Think of these lines of dialogue, and all the other epigraphs, as being themselves in dialogue with the novel that quotes them. That, at least, is the approach that works best for me.

Booker Season: Time for Julian Barnes?

Since even before Julian Barnes's latest book, the novella The Sense of an Ending, appeared in the UK last month, it's been making news, and now it's been so widely touted to win this year's Booker Prize (to be announced 18 October) that Alfred A. Knopf has advanced its US publication to 5 October, presumably to cash in on the transatlantic buzz about the book. Weeks ago it was already the most-mentioned current book in my Twitter timeline, and I don't expect that to change any time soon. Today's blogpost is just to make sure you've heard about it.

First, a word about the Booker Prize, a word addressed especially to those US readers for whom the Booker is not a constant reference point. The main prize, awarded annually since 1969, goes to a longer work of fiction written in English by a citizen of a Commonwealth country or Ireland or Zimbabwe. Some commentators in the US tend to downplay the Booker (full name, since 2002: The Man Booker Prize) because works by US citizens are excluded from consideration. (The group that established the prize in the 1960s felt that there were enough comparable prizes for which US authors received primary or exclusive consideration. There's now also a Man Booker International Prize, given for the body of a novelist's work, for which Americans are eligible; Philip Roth is the most recent winner.) Most readers internationally, however, would describe the main Booker as the greatest formal distinction that a novel written in English can receive. Past winners have included V. S. Naipaul's In a Free State, John Berger's G., Iris Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (which has twice won the 'Booker of Bookers', a prize for the novel voted the best to date of all winners of the main prize) and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace. In the UK both the press and the public follow each stage in the selection process with an avidity unequalled in the run-up to and awarding of any comparable prize in the US.

Julian Barnes (born 1946) has been on the Booker shortlist three times in the past but has never won. All of his work is inventive and highly readable, starting with his first novel, Metroland (1980), but the book that put him on the literary map was Flaubert's Parrot (1984), a free-wheeling novelistic account of events in the life of Gustave Flaubert, told from the perspective of a fictitious amateur scholar. In the 1980s he also wrote Duffy and three other crime novels under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh, and for four years in the early 1990s he wrote the 'Letter from London' in The New Yorker.  He's published three volumes of short stories, and The Sense of an Ending is his eleventh book-length work of fiction. In recent years, Barnes has continued to confront what in a dustier author would be called themes of human shortcomings, but his perspective seems to have turned from wry to somber. He continues to dedicate his books to his wife, the high-profile literary agent Pat Kavanagh, who died in 2008.

I've called The Sense of an Ending a novella, for want of a better word (it's about 150 pages in length, and it's best read in one or two sittings), although the cover of the US dust jacket calls it 'a novel'. The story contains some surprises, big enough so that readers are best off if they read no plot summaries beforehand, but modest enough so that some may be misled and expect bigger surprises than are in fact forthcoming. I think it's best just to say that it's told in the first person, from the perspective of a man a bit past middle age who is still sorting through the events of a lifetime in which he may not always have behaved nobly, events about which he still has something to learn. I would recommend that you read it not for its surprises but for its insights, its sensibility, its characterizations. In addition, if you're like me, The Sense of an Ending may lead you to examine your own life a bit differently. That's not what I was looking for in 1980, but in 2011 I'll take it.

Digital Shakespeare: Ebooks and More

I've suggested that, if you have to choose between reading a Shakespeare play and seeing it on stage, you choose to see it. (And I've spoken of Shakespeare films and videos as special categories unto themselves, neither the best nor the worst--but no substitutes for live performance.)

In fact, though, you don't have to choose: most of us have read Hamlet, seen it in live performance and watched every sort of cinematic/video version.

And, depending on where you live and travel, reading may be the only option you have for certain plays at certain moments.

So we return to the familiar territory of books in general and ebooks in particular. What sort of digital editions of Shakespeare are available?

The good news, as far as it goes, is that there are many free (or very inexpensive) 'complete works of Shakespeare' available as ebooks or in comparable digital formats. The bad news about them is that they tend to resemble the one-volume print editions of the 'complete' Shakespeare that were available before the advent of well-edited and -annotated editions like the Riverside, the Pelican and the RSC: most 'complete Shakespeare' ebooks are under- or unedited; lines are often unnumbered; and formatting is rudimentary at best.

The one free digital 'complete' Shakespeare that I suggest you consider, if you're an iPad user, is the Shakespeare app from Readdle. (There's also a Pro version priced at $9.99 with an integrated glossary; users complain however that the current Pro version is prone to crash.) It includes the texts of 41 plays (compare with the 37 in the editions most of us grew up with) plus poems and a concordance, the formatting is the best currently available at the 'price'--but the lines are unnumbered, and there are no annotations and no access to the glossary of the paid Pro edition.

And what about ebooks of individual plays?

In my experience, the free (or very inexpensive, priced at 99 cents, say, in the US) individual ebooks have the same shortcomings as most of the 'complete works' ebooks: no frills, questionable formatting.

And as of this writing, the ebooks that correspond to the rack-sized annotated editions most readers use for individual plays (in the US, Signet and Pelican, for example) have yet to catch up in formatting with the print versions on which they are based. Many such ebooks are so poorly formatted as to be almost unusable.

The only ebook series I can recommend to US readers is the one edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Individual RSC editions (usually of single plays) are offered in the Modern Library Classics series at prices currently ranging from US $2.99 to $7.99. (See one US example here, or go here for an overview of the series. Palgrave Macmillan, which publishes the RSC Shakespeare in the UK, is expected to make individual ebook editions available there in the future.) The superiority of these editions is most obvious on tablets or tablet-like readers, but editorial annotations are properly linked for use on all the ebook readers I've tested. (I do assume that you're using a reader that permits landscape, or horizontal, orientation, or the equivalent.) Other editorial features and extras are also first-rate.

Remember, of course, that the availability and quality of ebooks are constantly changing. With Shakespeare, though, it's usually a good idea to sample before you invest in an ebook--and remember that some formatting problems will not be visible in a sample that stops short of the principal text of the play.

These three posts about Shakespeare obviously don't even scratch the surface. (For an intelligent choice of the links missing here and references to secondary literature in print form, see RSC editor Jonathan Bate's recommendations here.) I haven't even talked about the reasons for which some people find Shakespeare unapproachably difficult--or just boring. Nor have I addressed any of the mysteries or controversies surrounding him--or the sheer diversity of his output. It seems to me particularly appropriate in the case of Shakespeare not to predefine what's waiting for you in his plays and poems. It's better for his frequently heralded 'universality' not to become one more dusty 'topic'--but to stand instead as an invitation, an open door.

Film and DVD: More about Shakespeare

Yesterday I urged you to see a good stage production of a Shakespeare play rather than read the same play.

But it's the second decade of the 21st century, and most of us are a few clicks or steps away from access to almost any one of the plays on video--not to mention the occasional Shakespeare offering on the big screen. For most of us, video and cinema are the easiest ways to experience Shakespeare, the paths of least resistance.

I'm referring here both to (a) films shot on conventional sound stages and/or on location (e.g., Kenneth Branagh's Henry V) and (b) video recordings that attempt to capture specific stage productions (e.g., 'Richard Burton's Hamlet'). The first type looks like any other feature film and has a budget to match; the second usually makes no attempt to conceal its ties to the stage. It's not always possible to classify a given Shakespeare video in one category or the other. In what follows, I'll speak about them together in very general terms.

So: how do film and DVDs stand up as a way of experiencing Shakespeare's plays?

My quick answer: video Shakespeare uses a different medium (from Shakespeare on stage), neither as deficient as its detractors would have it nor as successful as its strongest advocates maintain. The same is true for specific films and video productions of Shakespeare.

In retrospect, it feels as if I had spent too much of my life listening patiently to those who decried the supposed absurdity of Mel Gibson as Hamlet (1990) or who sang the praises of Kenneth Branagh's Henry V on film (1989). I saw them both when they first appeared, didn't mind seeing them, felt good about their potential to connect new audience members to Shakespeare--but they aren't among the interpretations of Shakespeare that remain vivid for me. (They aren't even the films of Mel Gibson or Kenneth Branagh that remain most vivid for me.) And I would say the same thing about most of the other full cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare I've seen.

The magical Shakespearean moments that I'll remember all my life are all from my direct experience of stage productions, like Trevor Nunn's direction of The Merchant of Venice at the National Theatre, or Gregory Doran's of Macbeth for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Young Vic, both seen in London in the year 2000, to mention only two. I'd love to see the DVDs of each of these (they exist, but I've never seen them), but I have no expectation that they would capture the power of live performance, however well they were done. I believe there may be things to be learned from such DVDs (as there are from fully cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare). I would never want to be deprived of all experience of the 1976 staging (by Trevor Nunn again) of Macbeth for the RSC (with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench)… and I know it only through a version recorded for television broadcast in 1978. Let's be grateful for such video recordings… and continue to pursue the experience of live performances on stage.

Next: some thoughts on Shakespeare in ebooks, and a few links.

Let's Talk about Shakespeare

I've been remiss about keeping my promise of almost a year ago to blog individually about the authors I call collectively 'the 26'--the first 26 favorites who came to mind when I was doing a '25 Things about Me' riff on Facebook in 2009. Among other things, I wanted to make recommendations of how readers (by which I mean especially ebook readers) could approach the 26.

Let's take the bull by the horns today by talking for a few minutes about Shakespeare--surely, it would seem, the most daunting of the 26, and until recently one particularly ill served by ebook technology.

Shakespeare was of course a playwright. So were, to some extent, at least 11 others of the 26: Büchner, Euripides and Schiller (it was their plays I was thinking about when I included each of these three); Chekhov (a special case: better known to the general public as a playwright but to fiction writers most important as an author of short stories); Diderot, Dumas, Marguerite Duras, Henry James, Sade and Wodehouse (six authors best remembered for work in other genres but who wrote between them some 85 full-length plays); and the unclassifiable Heinrich von Kleist (a) who could not be contained by any genre, (b) all of whose works I was thinking of collectively when I named him and (c) most of whose eight plays still 'hold the stage' in German-speaking countries 200 years after his death.

The first thing to be said about Shakespeare's plays could be said about those of most of the other 11 as well:

If you have to choose between seeing a good stage production of a  Shakespearean play and reading the play, see the stage production.

Shakespeare's plays, like most plays that are ever produced, were written to be performed, not read.

One of the hallmarks of a good stage production of Shakespeare is that every line of the text will make sense, will be understandable: the text will be opened up, not sloughed over, plowed through, mugged past. The audience will be lifted up, not condescended to.

The ease with which you can find good (and great) productions of Shakespeare may have something to do with where you live and where you travel. But there are surprisingly good (and a few surprisingly bad) productions almost everywhere. My own preference as a theatre-goer is for productions that people attend out of sheer love of the experience and not, say, to be seen attending a high-cultural event. (Why pass up falling in love, just to stay in love with some version of yourself?) I can tell you from personal experience that there are great productions of Shakespeare to be found in high-school auditoriums and municipal stages. And the presence of 'name' actors in the cast neither guarantees nor rules out that a production will be a good one.

So, good Shakespeare is not always easy to find. What this suggests to me is that we should reward it (with our patronage) when we find it, and that we be ready to take chances in the hope of stumbling upon great experiences. In most cases, the local theatre company doing A Midsummer Night's Dream is taking a bigger chance in staging it than we are in attending....

I've already gone on longer than I intended to in this first 'segment' on Shakespeare. When we return to him, I'll try to say something (very general) about Shakespeare on film (and on DVD, which is not exactly the same thing) before tackling Shakespeare editions available as ebooks. (There's hope on both fronts.)

Before I sign off, though, let me express my indebtedness to Jim Carpenter, which on the subject of Shakespeare in performance is even more obvious than usual. There's the conventional qualifier: if you benefit from what I say here, give him the credit; if not, I'm the one to blame.

My '25 Things': A Document from 2009

If you really want to feel old, consider just for a moment that this post will be seen by some people too young (at least in years online) to remember the '25 Things about Me' fad of over two years ago on Facebook.

I sat down a few minutes ago to write a blogpost about Shakespeare, found myself referring back to my '25 Things...' (dated 4 February 2009, like this New York Times article about the general phenomenon) and quickly decided to post the old 'note', unedited, as what I would now have to call an archival document:

1. My dream breakfast consists of one fried egg, one slice of dark bread (preferably a thick end-crust) toasted, a slice of Swiss cheese--washed down with a couple of sips of quite strong espresso. I just had precisely that breakfast to give myself the strength to make this list.
2. The classical musician most abundantly represented in my CD (and now iTunes) collection is the violinist Jascha Heifetz. My nick- and screen name 'Jascha' refers to him, or to this passion of mine, as well as to the fact that 'Jascha' is the closest thing to a Russian diminutive of 'James'.
3. There have been years in my life in which I 'lived for' opera. My favourite opera composer is Verdi, but my favourite opera is Berg's Lulu (either version). Opera singers of today do not thrill me like those of a generation or two back--but I admit that there may well be great (and thrilling) singers I've never heard.
4. The popular singers I liked best when I was ten years old were Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee and Dinah Washington. I've added a few more names to the list since then, but I never outgrew those three.
5. I didn't start learning German until I was eighteen, but when I was in my twenties I spoke it so convincingly that on two different occasions German women who knew me quite well (but didn't know my nationality--a long story, in each case) lost all patience with me when I finally told them that I was not German but American. (It was as if I were trying to tell them that I was a duck.) I never tell this story, because how it reflects on me depends in part on how you feel about German men. Think about it. Or perhaps it's better if you don't.
6. Shortly thereafter I had a French period, the limits of which are less easy to define. I spent only one semester at an institution where French was spoken (in Geneva) but for something like ten years French played at least as important a role as English in my reading, writing, speaking, thinking and relationships. (Even when I was reading in other languages, it was authors who had been passionately embraced by the French:  Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud....) Nevertheless I have what you would call an English failing of joking broadly, not always gracefully but usually affectionately, about other nationalities. I always say that every French film, for example, is the French-est film that was ever made, that every French person is quintessentially French, and so forth. It may not be true, but there's something to it. At the same time, that's not much to bring away from a whole decade of your life, is it?
7. If I let myself go, all twenty-five of these 'things' might be about reading. So I'm trying to keep it to one (more) 'thing', a list of favourite authors, and I'll try to keep it to twenty-five: Austen, Balzac, Büchner, John Dickson Carr, Chekhov, Conrad, Dickens, Diderot, Dostoevsky, Dumas, Marguerite Duras, Euripides, Freud, Henry James, Kafka, Kleist, Marx, Thich Nhat Hanh, Nietzsche, Plato, Ruth Rendell, Sade, Schiller, Shakespeare, Simenon, Wodehouse. (That's one too many, but there's no one here I can part with.)
8. One more 'thing': a readerly passion I can't remember ever discussing with anyone is for what used to be called the Viking Portables (typically containing at least one novel, a half-dozen short stories, a selection of letters and essays). The series dates back to World War II, and my own addiction, to The Portable Faulkner, which I bought in hardback almost fifty years ago. The Portable D.H. Lawrence got me through many cold nights during one of my Korean winters, and, when I read in James Jones's Some Came Running that the protagonist had made it through WW II with the help of five Portables (Faulkner, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe), that set me on a quest for the last three, which had been out of print for many years. I can't imagine parting with any of them. Now the series is being repackaged as part of Penguin Classics, and of course for Kindle. It's all good.
9. I'm a curious sort of writer, in that as of age 61 I've published only a few articles and a few translations (although one of the latter was a curious commercial success, Dictionary of Symbolism). I'm now revising a novel originally conceived in the 1990s, and I have some concern that, because my partner is a painter and the novel involves some shenanigans at the edges of 'the art world', that the book could be taken as a reflection on him or on other artists whom we've come to know. In truth, when the book was first drafted, Jimmy had yet to find himself as a painter. The novel even contains a hint that it is in truth 'not about how things happen in the art world' but is instead, 'perhaps, about letting go'--another theme of Jimmy's, but one to which he found his way years after that hint was drafted.
10. If my mother were still alive, she would be 100 this month. She suffered from Alzheimer's, but in her very last years (she died twelve years ago) she recovered a sweetness that I remembered from my childhood. The most surprising thing about her (the most unusual difference between her and me) was that she had no patience for fiction, whether in print or on the screen.
11. If my father were still alive, he would be 105 this spring. (He died almost six years ago.) He was an organic chemist (first a petroleum chemist, then a blood chemist; he had an inability to retire that I apparently did not inherit), but he read more widely in more different areas, including all eras of European and U.S. literature, than anyone else I've ever known. Like my mother (who studied and taught mathematics), he was brilliant. He originally wanted to become a doctor but couldn't afford to study medicine. I think of him as a man of enormous generosity.
12. When I was in my twenties, I felt most (eerily?) at home stepping off a train in any randomly chosen German city and walking from the station into town. By my forties that random German city had been replaced by London: I had always been happy in London, but it's been clear for a long time now that if I had to choose somewhere other than Gainesville to live, and could select anywhere in the world, it would be London. It's clear enough to make you believe in 'past lives'.
13. The adult outside my family whom I most admired while I was growing up was a physician, Dr Sam Hartman, the father of friends in my year of school. We lived in Beaumont, Texas, and you will not be surprised to read that he was the only person I knew who subscribed to the New York Review of Books, who had read all of Orwell's books from the 1930s, all of Lawrence Durrell, all of Henry Miller--you get the idea. He (and my father) still embody for me 'enlightenment' in every sense of the word. I don't think that he or anyone else is his family knew what a gift they were to the rest of us.
14. I have a rarely indulged fondness for little things. For example, if Jimmy and I had all the money in the world, I would still do the laundry myself, at home, but I'd use detergent from the little boxes they sell in machines in laundromats, one or two boxes for every load. That's the only thing I can think of that great wealth would definitely change about my life. (Jimmy may have a longer list.)
15. Jimmy and I are not completely without differences, though. He would be quite happy spending the rest of his life listening to stereophonic sound, whereas I have an admittedly unnatural fondness for mono. (Listening to Toscanini recordings in particular triggers a memory of 'listening to music on the kitchen radio' when I was very young. And the right recordings from the Busch Quartet or early-to-middle Heifetz do things to me I can't explain.) This (stereo v. mono) may seem like a minor difference, but it's the biggest one I can come up with. I'm not sure that there's anyone else who knows us well enough to know how very much we are alike.
16. One last musical 'thing' and then I'll move on: the kind of music I enjoy most, in performance, is chamber music, hands down. The most powerful such performance I ever heard was of Bartók's String Quartet No. 6 by the Guarneri Quartet in Washington about ten years ago.
17. Marlowe (the most vocal of our stuffed animals) wants me to make it clear once and for all that he is named for the playwright Christopher Marlowe, not Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, not Conrad's narrator Marlow, not Marlo Thomas. Marlowe should know: his name is 'self-selected'. As the quintessential black sheep, he, through his deportment (riding ceiling fans, reading boys' adventure novels under the covers with a flashlight after lights-out--well, it would take another list of at least 25 'things'), made it clear that he should bear the name of the original 'bad boy'--alleged sexual outlaw, counterfeiter, heretic and spy. It doesn't hurt that the original Marlowe was a rival of Shakespeare's, and our stuffed dog was already named Willy (after the Bard); our Marlowe, on behalf of sheep everywhere, has 'issues' with all dogs (he doesn't like to take orders) and bristles whenever there is a reference on TV to 'Afghan President Hamid Karzai' or Slumdog Millionaire.
18. When we were planning our move from Maryland to Florida in 2003, Marlowe told Willy (who, being a dog with serious eyebrows, looks quite worried all the time anyway) that he (W.) was to stay behind at the old house and live in what Marlowe described as 'a household of cats'. Not till moving day did Marlowe tell Willy that M. had interceded on W.'s behalf and persuaded us to take him along after all. (This story captures the essence of both animals and their interaction.)
19. You might say that I have a weakness for dogs. Our habit of naming stuffed animals for authors (Marlowe, Shakespeare, Dickens) goes back to my having had springer spaniels in the 1980s named for Marguerite Duras (Maggie) and Michel Foucault (Fookie). They were not stuffed, except after mealtime. I still miss them. They made it clear to me, if any reminder was necessary, how very dog-like I am.... When I was about five and had been away with my mother visiting my grandparents in Wisconsin, I returned to find that my beloved cocker spaniel puppy Brownie was no longer in residence. My father told me he had traded Brownie for a 45 rpm record player for me. (It was not until I was in the fourth decade of my life that it occurred to me that he had simply found someone who was willing to adopt Brownie, then had gone out and paid cash for the record player.) My first 45 was 'Come on-a My House, My House-a Come On', which may explain a lot, but not to poor Brownie. At least it was Rosemary Clooney, however unhappy she was about singing that particular song. All four of us made some compromises. I hope Brownie had a good life. Obviously, I still miss him.
20. I do better with cats than, say, Willy does, but I take them on a case-by-case basis.
21. Not all of our stuffed animals have literary names. Bosco, who hibernates, and his niece and ward Ovaltine, who has no choice but to hibernate alongside him, are named for chocolate beverages. Other animals are named for saints/holidays (Valentine, Patrick), ballet dancers (Rudi), flavours (Cookies, Cream) and dental hygiene products (the fraternal twins Toothpaste and Flosswell).
22. My least favourite means of communication is the telephone. It can be useful, I admit, but I try to keep it in its place.
23. I used to run. I ran for almost thirty years, starting in my late twenties, distances up to 20 km (approximately a half-marathon). I thought I would run forever, but my running 'career' was cut short by back problems, which led to physical therapy and a string of referrals (physical therapy, massage therapy, chiropractic, acupuncture, neurology) culminating in a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease last spring. I've told the story elsewhere of how in the course of several months acupuncture, chiropractic, and chi kung and chi kung therapy turned my symptoms around, to the point where my neurologist proposed reducing my medication and even said that if he had been seeing me for the first time that day I would not have qualified for a diagnosis of Parkinson's. Now Jimmy and I take chi kung and related classes six times a week, and I have acupuncture three times a month. We are growing more and more 'Eastern' in our approach to life, and this is helping us to embrace it as never before. Our debt to everyone at the Gainesville Wellness Center, and to Cosmos Chi Kung, is incalculable.
24. When I first met Jimmy, almost eighteen years ago, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. Today he makes me happier still.
25. The French expression for 'don't go on and on forever' is, literally translated, 'don't tell your life's story'. Guess I didn't get the memo.

From Hanif Kureishi, 'Gabriel's Gift': Epigraphs 1.2 and 5.2 - Art, Imagination and Absence

Hanif Kureishi (born 1954) won international fame (and an Oscar nomination) as the author of the screenplay for the Stephen Frears film My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), in which Londoners variously marginalized (by ethnicity, class, sexual orientation...) meet, clash, love and, for the most part, find mutual understanding--in Margaret Thatcher's England. I find the film as fresh and powerful (and funny) today as I did over 25 years ago.

Before Laundrette, Kureishi was already playwright-in-residence at the Royal Court Theatre, and his subsequent career has defied those who would pigeon-hole him as any one thing: novelist, short story writer, essayist, screenplay author or playwright. I drew two epigraphs for my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me from his fourth novel, Gabriel's Gift (2001; UK Kindle edition here, US paperback edition here). Like Laundrette and Kureishi's first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, Gift is a coming-of-age story set against a backdrop of familial wrangling. Like Buddha, it features prominently a Bowie-like rock icon--in this fourth novel the father's former bandmate, who presents the 15-year-old Gabriel with a sketch that the boy, a budding artist, copies perfectly as the first step in a demonstration of the power of art to mend what's broken.

Accordingly, the two epigraphs we're talking about today resonate more optimistically in Gabriel's Gift itself than when they appear in the context (out of context) of A Kiss Before You Leave Me.

Epigraph 5.2: 'Art is what you do when other people leave the room' (from Gift, chapter 1). In Gabriel's Gift, this is the boy's recollection of a sentence heard on television the night before, now turned into a comforting accompaniment for the solitary creative process of an artist in the making. True, there have been traumatic departures from his household: his twin brother who died as a toddler, and his father, whom his mother has sent packing. But the emphasis in the sentence is on the rightness, the appropriateness of solitary artistic work, and in Kureishi's novel the power of art is, as we've said, fundamentally restorative.... In A Kiss Before You Leave Me, this epigraph introduces the section entitled 'Solo Show', which begins with an inventory of paintings done by Jack Emery in preparation for his first one-man show, but is also about departures affecting or involving him, dissolutions of ties, in both the past and the present, and, to some extent, about the reasons for those dissolutions: rightly or wrongly, art may seem to at least one character in A Kiss Before You Leave Me like what you can finally do when you've left the others behind.

Epigraph 1.2: '"What does an imagination do but see what isn't there?"' (from Gift, chapter 3). In Gabriel's Gift, rock icon Lester Jones is speaking to Gabriel, polymorphic icon to fledgeling artist, affirming the boy in his creative identity and reassuring him of the powerful value of his differentness. (It's a rare 'creative' who receives this message at the age of 15, but it's never too late to read this scene, in its entirety.) Where the question is inserted in A Kiss Before You Leave Me, however--as an epigraph to the first section, 'Seeing Someone'--the reader knows nothing of the 'art' plot and can associate the quotation only with the tortured power and play of the voyeuristic imagination as seen in the culmination of that section. (See the second half of my Sartre post of three days ago, and the earlier discussion of the lyrics of 'A Kiss to Build a Dream On'.)

Absence, separation and negativity come to the fore at these moments in A Kiss Before You Leave Me. They may well not be the dominant notes in the novel as a whole--but at these moments in particular the novel feels very different from Gabriel's Gift, which most readers would call Kureishi's sunniest work to date. It's all in the context.

Language and Silence: September 11: A Public and Personal Anniversary

I'm probably not the only one this morning who'll be reaching for a little Wittgenstein. It sounds better to my ear in the original German: 'Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen' (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Abschnitt/Proposition 7: 'What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence').

If I hadn't vowed to blog every day this month, I would probably have passed over the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks in silence. And the same is true, in consequence, for another anniversary that coincides with it: 11 September 2010 was the true date of first publication of A Kiss Before You Leave Me, making this a curiously personal-and-public day for me and a day of conflicting emotions, and conflicting inclinations to speak and to remain silent--not least because both the novel and this blog have represented to me heightened instances of 'breaking silence'.

But I don't want to go on embroidering on multiple meanings, exploiting accidental convergences, and such. I don't want to exploit anything or anyone. This is a day, simply, for me to say that the United States has been very good to me, and that you, all of you, have been very good to me. And that, whatever our passion for anniversaries, we are, also, 'all about' tomorrows.

I honor all of you. I wish all of you strength and tenderness. And I will see you tomorrow.

Finding Constance Garnett

I logged several decades as a book-lover before I expanded my horizon to include ebooks close to four years ago. And all book-lovers (with or without an e- up front) spend a certain amount of time in quest of specific books. Ebibliophile may be a neologism the world can live without, but we exist, we are real, and we have our passions. We go to lengths that we do not always disclose, just to be able to download the elusive title in readable form. Some day I may do a more general (very much in the sense of 'general confession') detailing of my quests for individual ebooks. Today, let's talk about just one that's finally available in the U.S. and Canada.

When I was growing up, there was one canonical English translator for 19th-century Russian fiction: Constance Garnett (1861-1946).

True, from the 1950s onward there emerged in Penguin Classics a number of contemporary translators with significant readerships: Rosemary Edmonds, David Magarshack, David McDuff, Ronald Wilks. I've relied on them more than on any other contemporary translators. I'd like to salute them here but leave them out of today's discussion.

Constance Garnett saw almost 40 years of Queen Victoria's reign, then lived on past the end of World War II. But when her detractors refer to her as a 'Victorian' they are not thinking primarily of the fact that her life overlapped with that of many of her authors. As a translator, she sometimes downplayed sexual content, especially in the case of Anna Karenina. Still, for multiple generations of English-speaking readers hers was, and for many still is, the voice of Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov: a beautiful, compelling and (especially in her day) a surprisingly immediate voice. (If it wouldn't open a can of worms, I'd say that her translations were almost comparable in stature to the King James Version of the Bible.) Perhaps the power of her English owes something to the master novelists of the era into which she was born: Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot, Hardy, Henry James, Conrad....

In recent decades, she's been found wanting by some (but not all) critics who have compared her translations with those of the new kids on the block, the prolific team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. In addition to all their other strengths as translators, Pevear and Volokhonsky have the advantage that she is a native speaker of Russian and he of American English. They are arguably the world's most famous and most decorated living literary translators into English. Their translations are current, precise and authoritative. Some are even bestsellers; their Anna Karenina was a selection of Oprah's Book Club.

My passions in this area, however, remain permanently focussed on Garnett. (Perhaps I'm just one of those birds who mate for life.) And my greatest ebibliophilic quest has been for Garnett's 1904 translation of Leo Tolstoy's masterpiece War and Peace.

Largely because Gutenberg.org chose to digitize the (later) Maude translation, there has been until now no digital access to Garnett's. (Some databases indicate the contrary, but they mistake the Maude for the Garnett.) I've campaigned online for a Garnett War and Peace ebook for years--and suddenly it's here before us. It's so new that even Google as of this writing is unaware of it. (That will change quickly: Google tracks this blog admirably.)

Surprisingly enough, the new ebook is a Barnes & Noble Classics edition (published in print in 2006; with an introduction by Joseph Frank and extensive notes by Lena Lencek) available as of this writing only at the U.S. and Canadian iBooks stores. (This, too, will change, I predict: even if there is no Kindle edition [other books in the series have so far been offered only in EPUB format--the format for most ebook readers except the Kindle], I expect it to crop up as an offering on Barnes & Noble's nook soon. When that happens, I'll post a link.) [UPDATE: nook and Kindle editions of the Garnett translation are now available, as of 9 December 2012, but the price for this Modern Library ebook is more than three times that of the iBooks edition and in what I call the 'gouge zone'; as a rule, I don't provide links to such editions on this blog.]

Here are the iBooks links: for the U.S. and for Canada. Not an iBooks user yet? Well, whenever you're ready, iBooks--and Garnett--will be there. For me, at least, the wait has been worth it.

From Sartre's 'Kean': Epigraph 1.3 - Seeing Someone, or Not

As a follow-up to yesterday's post about The Collector, let's talk some more about the amorous observer's inability to see.

Jean-Paul Sartre's Kean (a very free adaptation, first staged in 1953, of an 1836 play by Dumas père) is best known as a bravura star vehicle for actors as different as Anthony Hopkins and Jean-Paul Belmondo. It turns the great Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean (1789-1833) into a specimen of existentialist bad faith: even 'actor', 'man', 'lover' are for Sartre's Kean just so many roles in his repertoire. As the play continues, he will be called upon to step aside and yield Elena, the woman he loves (or 'loves'), to the advances of the Prince of Wales--in exchange for money to pay off his creditors. In an earlier scene (II, 2, 1), however, he explains why he must use his time before she joins him in his dressing room, to think about Elena:

'It's only when I'm alone that I can meditate on the charm of the woman I love.... When she's with me, I won't have a moment to see her: I'll be too busy watching her.'

Watching her, noting her responses, trying to catch her out, stealing glances at her, spying on her--but not for a moment seeing her....

The first section of my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me (the section introduced by the epigraph from Kean) is entitled 'Seeing Someone'. It extends from the first gleam in a matchmaker's eye (roughly speaking) to the culmination of the first date of the pair she's brought together. The reader's attention by this time is not on the matchmaker at all, and not primarily on the new pair (Miranda and Jack), but on an observer who's secretly followed them back to Miranda's place, lingered outside in the dark--watching, spying and all the rest--and who sees, or believes he can see, even in the darkness, through walls, then from blocks away. The section ends:

A part of [him] recoils, but he cannot look away, he stares, through the blackness, the streets, the walls that separate them, that close him in and out but cannot save the three of them from this: he sees.

Or not. The watcher in the shadows can imagine well enough what the other two are doing--can't 'avert his gaze', can't stop imagining, can't not 'know', can't escape that knowledge--but these are all negations relating to a figure who is herself absent. His view of the 'real' Miranda may be even more compromised than Kean's of the 'present' Elena....

From John Fowles, 'The Collector': Epigraph 6.1 - In the Name of Miranda

One of the shortest epigraphs in A Kiss Before You Leave Me may appear at first quite innocent: '...Her name as beautiful as herself, Miranda.' That innocence doesn't last for long, but here I'll pretend to preserve it a bit longer by talking first about my secondary reason for using the quotation and only after that, and cryptically, about my primary reason.

Miranda is of course the name of the apparent protagonist of A Kiss Before You Leave Me, whose beauty animates the so-called 'Miranda paintings' for which she poses. In using the epigraph from John Fowles, I wanted the reader to think, if only for a moment, about the name Miranda (as well as the recurrent subject of 'my' Miranda's beauty).

Miranda is such a popular name today that we may forget that it seems to have been invented by Shakespeare. (He used it, of course, for Prospero's daughter in The Tempest, the source of another epigraph [4.1].) The form 'Miranda' is a Latin gerundive--'a 'verbal adjective' formed from the present participle of a verb, always passive in force; e.g., agenda (neuter plural), literally, '[things that are] to be done'; 'referendum'; 'propaganda'; 'Amanda', '[she who deserves] to be loved'. The meaning of the name Miranda is sometimes given simply as '[she who is] to be admired', but the verb mirari means not only 'admire' but also 'look at', 'marvel at'. I propose that we gloss 'Miranda' as 'she who is to be gazed upon in amazement'. Miranda Kincaid is admirable in every way... and beautiful, yes, astonishingly, wondrously so--but not necessarily to be emulated--especially in her moments of 'passivity'.

Miranda's beauty is a huge topic. Among other things, when other characters find her appealing, her beauty is often all they can see, or at least all they can name. We wonder at times how deeply others understand her, especially those who are attracted to her. Moreover, as the novel goes on, her beauty becomes a commodity of sorts, subjected to commercial exploitation. Some readers may discover a recurring theme of the connection between (a) certain loves' failures to see deeply or to understand and (b) the monetization of beauty or of love itself.

But my primary reason for including the epigraph from John Fowles's 1963 novel The Collector was to remind readers already familiar with it that Miranda is the name of the young woman in that novel. I don't want to say much here about the plot of The Collector, because that might imply a closer parallel between situations in the two books than is actually there. But the least I can say is that my brief reference to Fowles's novel suggests that what presents itself as a passionate love of beauty, a love or 'love' that understands itself as collecting, preserving and protecting the exquisitely beautiful, can also be the enemy of what it admires.