If you know anything about me, you know that I read a lot of books, something around 160 per year. This month, to date, I have not read anything. I just didn’t feel good enough.
To make matters worse, my apartment will be inspected by the City of Los Angeles a week from today. Not only did I not read anything, but Martine and I have been preparing to donate upward of a thousand books by January 29.
It breaks my heart to donate books that I had spent big bucks collecting, including Folio Society, Library of America, and other premium hardbound editions.
I only hope that the people who get these books appreciate their quality. In the end, it’s probably best that I don’t think too much about this. It would be even more grim if I were given a warning by the city to gut my personal library.
I’ve said on many occasions, usually around this time of year, that only a fool celebrates the passing of time. Every January 1, take a picture of yourself in your bathroom mirror and note the thinning and graying of your hair, the mottling of your skin, and the network of spidery lines demarcating the zones of your face. Oh, well, it’s all a natural process.
On a more positive note, let’s see what the youthful Charles Dickens wrote about New Years Day in his first book, Sketches by Boz:
Next to Christmas-day, the most pleasant annual epoch in existence is the advent of the New Year. There are a lachrymose set of people who usher in the New Year with watching and fasting, as if they were bound to attend as chief mourners at the obsequies of the old one. Now, we cannot but think it a great deal more complimentary, both to the old year that has rolled away, and to the New Year that is just beginning to dawn upon us, to see the old fellow out, and the new one in, with gaiety and glee.
There must have been some few occurrences in the past year to which we can look back, with a smile of cheerful recollection, if not with a feeling of heartfelt thankfulness. And we are bound by every rule of justice and equity to give the New Year credit for being a good one, until he proves himself unworthy the confidence we repose in him.
This is our view of the matter; and entertaining it, notwithstanding our respect for the old year, one of the few remaining moments of whose existence passes away with every word we write, here we are, seated by our fireside on this last night of the old year, one thousand eight hundred and thirty-six, penning this article with as jovial a face as if nothing extraordinary had happened, or was about to happen, to disturb our good humour.
Hackney-coaches and carriages keep rattling up the street and down the street in rapid succession, conveying, doubtless, smartly-dressed coachfuls to crowded parties; loud and repeated double knocks at the house with green blinds, opposite, announce to the whole neighbourhood that there’s one large party in the street at all events; and we saw through the window, and through the fog too, till it grew so thick that we rung for candles, and drew our curtains, pastry-cooks’ men with green boxes on their heads, and rout-furniture-warehouse-carts, with cane seats and French lamps, hurrying to the numerous houses where an annual festival is held in honour of the occasion.
We can fancy one of these parties, we think, as well as if we were duly dress-coated and pumped, and had just been announced at the drawing-room door.
The Jewish-Ukrainian-Brazilian Clarice Lispector (1920-1977)
If Clarice Lispector were alive today, she would be celebrating her 104th birthday. The strikingly beautiful author with the high cheekbones and wild Scythian eyes was one of the greatest women writers of the 20th century, joining such titans as Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, Ursula LeGuin, Patricia Highsmith, and Wislawa Szymborska.
In my e-mail today was a message from New Directions Publishing, which publishes some twenty titles by Lispector in English translation. It contained a link to a video entitled “Dias de Clarice em Washington.” It is 29 minutes long in Brazilian Portuguese with English subtitles.
During the 1950s, Clarice was married to a Brazilian diplomat named Maury Gurgel Valente who was posted to the embassy in Washington. From her house in Bethesda, Maryland, she took part in diplomatic social functions and raised a family, as well as writing a number of books and short stories … until it all became too much for her, and she filed for divorce, after which she returned to Brazil.
I urge you to see this video and see what a great writer must do when she is pulled between her marriage and her art:
It’s a culinary tradition in Slavic countries such as Russia and Ukraine: When you drink vodka, you eat zakuski, which literally means “something to bite after.” It sounds like a delicious culinary tradition. Except for one thing: I’ve never had vodka.
After reading Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov’s Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv (2012), I just might get myself a bottle. Throughout the novel, the characters are dealing with a strange anomaly. The inland city of Lviv has strange incidents of seagulls, starfish, a stench of seaweed, and salt water crabs appearing in various places throughout the city.
Several residents band together to try to identify the problem, which they do after the consumption of a whole lot of vodka and zakuski. Their Lviv is a magical city in which the hand of the late Jimi Hendrix is buried in a local cemetery, having been supplied by the KGB with the help of Lithuanian operatives. Why? Apparently to study the speed of the spreading of rumors in Soviet society.
This is the fifth work of fiction by Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov that I have read. They are all of them sweet and gentle—especially as they come from a land that is now mired in a brutal invasion by Russian forces. I cannot help but think that Kurkov’s whimsy can be as deadly to Putin’s aims as any weapons in his arsenal. Anyhow, let’s hope so. I have a lot more of Kurkov that I want to read; and I hope he continues to live a long and productive life.
He will never win any humanitarian awards, or, for that matter, any awards, but Louis-Ferdinand Céline is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, an anti-Semite, a Nazi sympathizer, and probably a very decent human being otherwise. Born Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches in Courbevoix, France in 1894, Céline became a wounded war hero at Ypres in 1914
After the war, he became a physician and toured Africa and the Americas working for the League of Nations. In 1932, he published his greatest and most approachable novel, Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit). Unfortunately, in the early 1940s, he published several anti-Semitic books urging closer ties to Hitler’s Germany.
After the Allied invasion of France, Céline fled to Germany after having been identified by the Resistance and the British as a collaborationist. It was the beginning of a long and confused period escaping Allied bombing attacks and the Russian Army that was brilliantly described in his trilogy about being a guest of the Nazis as they were being pounded to pieces:
Castle to Castle (D’un château l’autre) 1957
North (Nord) 1960
Rigadoon (Rigadon) 1961
Years after reading the first two volumes, I have just finished reading Rigadoon and loving it. Céline and his wife are constantly being shuttled on trains from one bombed-out city to another. At one point, he escorts a group of eighteen severely retarded children from Hannover to Hamburg and manages to transfer them to a special Swedish Red Cross train taking them to safety. Unfortunately, the same train took Céline to Copenhagen, where he served a year in prison for his collaboration with the Nazis.
He died in 1961. Although his novels were a powerful influence on other novelists, Céline was never treated with the honor that his literary and medical work deserved. He spent his last years being a doctor treating poor patients in the slums of Paris.
So fair and foul a career I have not seen. I love Céline’s novels even as I detest his racial and political views. Life can be strange.
I am currently reading William S. Burroughs’s The Ticket That Exploded, and what a ride it is! As Anthony Burgess wrote, “Burroughs seems to revel in a new medium … a medium totally fantastic, spaceless, timeless, in which the normal sentence is fractured, the cosmic tries to push its way through the bawdry, and the author shakes the reader as a dog shakes a rat.” Here is a little sample for your delectation:
In this organization, Mr Lee, we do not encourage togetherness, esprit de corps. We do not give our agents the impression of belonging. As you know most existing organizations stress such primitive reactions as unquestioning obedience. Their agents become addicted to orders. You will receive orders of course and in some cases you will be well-advised not to carry out the orders you receive. On the other hand your failure to obey certain orders could expose you to dangers of which you can have at this point in your training no conception. There are worse things than death Mr Lee for example to live under the conditions your enemies will endeavor to impose. And the members of all existing organizations are at some point your enemy. You will learn to know where this point is if you survive. You will receive your instructions in many ways. From books, street signs, films, in some cases from agents who purport to be and may actually be members of the organization. There is no certainty. Those who need certainty are of no interest to this department. This is in point of fact a non-organization the aim of which is to immunize our agents against fear despair and death. We intend to break the birth-death cycle. As you know inoculation is the weapon of choice against virus and inoculation can only be effected through exposure … exposure to the pleasures offered under enemy conditions: a computerized Garden of Delights: exposure to the pain posed as an alternative … you remember the ovens I think … exposure to despair: ‘The end is the beginning born knowing’ the unforgivable sin of despair. You attempted to be God that is to intervene and failed utterly … Exposure to death: sad shrinking face … he had come a long way for something not exchanged born for something knowing not exchanged. He died during the night.
In this case, obscuridad is translated not as obscurity, but darkness. I toyed with the idea of calling this post “Noir Mexicana,” but I didn’t want to mix the two languages. I hope you get the general idea.
Fernanda Melchor is a very dark writer indeed. I have in the last few months read all three of her novels that have been translated into English:
This Isn’t Miami (Aqui no es Miami)
Hurricane Season (Temporada de huracanes)
Paradais
All three novels are about wasted lives in the vicinity of the author’s home state of Veracruz. Although short in length, all three are crammed with violence, superstition, and fear. In the background—or sometimes in the foreground—there are the drug cartels, with scenes such as Milton in Paradais being commanded to shoot and kill a pathetic old taxi driver who is begging for his life.
Reading Melchor is like reading Louis-Ferdinand Céline or the Jim Thompson of The Killer Inside Me. One is reminded that, in Mexico, it is easier to see the skull beneath the skin.
For over a decade, I have tackled one or two works of horror literature during the month of October. In the past, most of these were collections of horror stories in the excellent collections put out by Dover Publications, but I am coming to the end of these; so I am branching out a bit.
This month, I have read two collections: Amelia B. Edwards¹s The Phantom Coach and Other Stories and Thomas Ligotti’s Noctuary. Ms Edwards (1831-1892) was not only an excellent teller of tales, but also a world traveler, journalist, and—to add a touch of the weird—an early Egyptologist of some note. I have downloaded her book A Thousand Miles Up the Nile from Amazon Kindle to read sometime next year.
Thomas Ligotti, on the other hand, is a contemporary, born in 1953. I had previously read two of his collections—Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe: His Lives and Works—and found them satisfyingly eldritch in every way. The same could be said of Noctuary, which I loved. In fact yesterday’s post on this blog site was a short short story entitled “One May Be Dreaming” from Noctuary in its entirety. Click on the link to check it out.
For Halloween, I’ve decided to excerpt as short short story in its entirety from Thomas Ligotti’s excellent collection entitled Noctuary.
One May Be Dreaming
Beyond the windows a dense fog spreads across the graveyard, and a few lights beam within hazy depths, glowing like old lamps on an empty street. Night is softly beginning.
Within the window are narrow bars, both vertical and horizontal, which divide it into several smaller windows. The intersections of these bars form crosses. Not far beyond the windowpanes, there are other crosses jutting out of the earth-hugging fog in the graveyard. To all appearances, it is a burial ground in the clouds that I contemplate through the window.
Upon the window ledge is an old pipe that seems to have been mine in another life. The pipe’s dark bowl must have brightened to a reddish-gold as I smoked and gazed beyond the window at the graveyard. When the tobacco had burned to the bottom, perhaps I gently knocked the pipe against the inside wall of the fireplace, showering the logs and stones with warm ashes. The fireplace is framed within the wall perpendicular to the window. Across the room are a large desk and a high-backed chair. The lamp positioned in the far right corner of the desk serves as illumination for the entire room, a modest supplement to those pale beacons beyond the window. Some old books, pens, and writing paper are spread across the top of the desk. In the dim depths of the room, against the fourth wall, is a towering clock that ticks quietly.
Those, then, are the main features of the room in which I find myself: window, fireplace, desk, and clock. There is no door.
I never dreamed that dying in one’s sleep would encompass dreaming itself. I often dreamed of this room and now, near the point of death, have become its prisoner. And here my bloodless form is held while my other body somewhere lies still and without hope. There can be no doubt that my present state is without reality. If nothing else, I know what it is like to dream. And although a universe of strange sensation is inspired by those lights beyond the window, by the fog and the graveyard, they are no more real than I am. I know there is nothing beyond those lights and that the obscured ground outside could never sustain my steps. Should I venture there I would fall straight into an absolute darkness, rather than approaching it by the degrees of my dying dreams.
For other dreams came before this one—dreams in which I saw lights more brilliant, a fog even more dense, and gravestones with names I could almost read from the distance of this room. But everything is dimming, dissolving, and growing dark. The next dream will be darker still, everything a little more confused, my thoughts … wandering. And objects that are now part of the scene may soon be missinfg: perhaps even my pipe—if it was ever mine—will be gone forever.
But for the moment I am safe in my dream, this dream. Beyond the window a dense fog spreads across the graveyard, and a few lights beam within hazy depths, glowing like old lamps along an empty street. Night is softly beginning.
The following short short story is from a collection of Antonio Tabucchi’s short stories entitled Message from the Shadows. The author, an Italian who lives in Portugal, is known for his diverse points of view, In this story, we see humanity from the perspective of a whale.
Postscript: A Whale’s View of Man
Always so feverish, and with those long limbs waving about. Not rounded at all, so they don’t have the majesty of complete, rounded shapes sufficient unto themselves, but little moving heads where all their strange life seems to be concentrated. They arrive sliding across the sea, but not swimming, as if they were birds almost, and they bring death with frailty and graceful ferocity. They’re silent for long periods, but then shout at each other with unexpected fury, a tangle of sounds that hardly vary and don’t have the perfection of our basic cries: the call, the love cry, the death lament. And how pitiful their lovemaking must be: and bristly, brusque almost, immediate, without a soft covering of fat, made easy by their threadlike shape, which excludes the heroic difficulties of union and the magnificent and tender efforts to achieve it.
They don’t like water, they’re afraid of it, and it’s hard to understand why they bother with it. Like us, they travel in herds, but they don’t bring their females, one imagines they must be elsewhere, but always invisible.
Sometimes they sing, but only for themselves, and their song isn’t a call to others, but a sort of longing lament. They soon get tired and when evening falls they lie down on the little islands that take them about and perhaps fall asleep or watch the moon. They slide silently by and you realize they are sad.
Tarnmoor 
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