Tuesday One: Hyperealism

Mircea Cărtărescu: Solenoid (Deep Vellum Press 2024) translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter

Georgi Gospodinov: The Physics of Sorrow (Liveright) translated by from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel

Aristotle: Poetics a new translation from Greek (somewhat) by Anthony Kenny

Aristotle needs to be retranslated every year because the years change him. He is, like Plato and Sappho, a model.: our writerly ambition can’t reach any farther: to be retranslated every year! I’m aristoteling with admiration.

The two Eastern Europeans noted above Aristotle, though not quite up there, are nonetheless taking literature back to magic and forward to another high mission. They are reconnecting the novel to where Borges, Queneau, Eco, Dali, De Andrade and Marquez left it burning. It was an unattended fire almost extinguished by the streams of piss from memoirists. There is no blame here: the victims couldn't hold it any longer, their bladders burst into language. The language of memoirs is the frayed prose of therapy, which can clothe real victims, but also fakes. Every human is a traumatized victim for every reason imaginable, but memoir peddlers victimize readers, and worst of all, they bore children. Unfortunately, trauma-ramas sell and mint new writers who pass on the counterfeit currency of mindless language to the unsuspecting. The therapy memoir is the new pornography posing as the enemy of the old pornography, now online. There will always be consumers. Cărtărescu and Gospodin, are among the fifty descendants of Sheherezade, Ovid, Dante, the Bhagvad Gita, Cervantes, Rabelais and Lautreamont. They burst into the crowd of pissing memoirists with the sturm und drang of their imaginations. These writers, holding on to the raft of poetry, are the survivors of cataclysms, and because they are survivors they are also memoirists. In other words, they activate  the awareness of trauma in the language of hyper-attention. They rarely piss on themselves, but when they do they are sure to keep pristine the crease in their jeans. There is no cure, there is no cure for love.

New Reads from the kudzu of my canon:

The Manhattan Project by David Kishik (Stanford, 2015)

I have reread this brilliant book several times. The conceit, hidden under that unfortunate title, is that Walter Benjamin did not commit suicide in 1940, but reached New York after fleeing Europe. In New York, under another name, he launched an investigation of his new city from the New York Public Library, a decades’ long project mirroring The Arcades Project, Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century (1927). New York, the capital of the twentieth century elicited his profound insights through the medium of David Kishik. In Kishik Benjamin found a clear channel for his extraordinary thinking. This book is a masterwork.