Five writers’ photos.

Joanna Walsh, Clarice Lispector. (Source: New Directions.)

It’s not faces themselves that mean so much, it’s the repetition of their representations. Seeing Lispector on the street, Heti at a reading, would be nothing if these weren’t instances of the faces on a million book covers. What am I adding in reproducing these representations? Drawing is always some kind of attempt at possession – to possess or to be possessed – and I’m never sure which.

Joanna Walsh draws photos of Marguerite Duras, Clarice Lispector, Joan Didion, Miranda July, and Sheila Heti. [via New Directions]

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There’s this about Joan Didion.

I had trouble graduating from Berkeley, not because of this inability to deal with ideas — I was majoring in English, and I could locate the house-and-garden imagery in The Portrait of a Lady as well as the next person, ‘imagery’ being by definition the kind of specific that got my attention — but simply because I had neglected to take a course in Milton. I did this. For reasons which now sound baroque I needed a degree by the end of that summer, and the English department finally agreed, if I would come down from Sacramento every Friday and talk about the cosmology of Paradise Lost, to certify me proficient in Milton. I did this. Some Fridays I took the Greyhound bus, other Fridays I caught the Southern Pacific’s City of San Francisco on the last leg of its transcontinental trip. I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in Paradise Lost, the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote 10,000 words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco’s dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits into a grayed and obscurely sinister light. In short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus. During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn’t think. All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.

Which was a writer.

By which I mean not a ‘good’ writer or a ‘bad’ writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?

[via brain pickings]

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Meeting Joan Didion.

When I finished Blue Nights, I exhaled deeply knowing things were now different. I’d started it the day before, a copy I’d happened upon, and while I knew there was other writing of hers I’d yet to read to be sure of it, I nevertheless knew I’d tasted something true. The sense of a new era overwhelmed me. Loss, memory, loss, memory. That was my mantra at the time, and Didion sang it back to me more clearly and more devastatingly than I’d known it could be sung. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

More over at the Paris Review. [via The Paris Review]

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Omnivore: Incoming!

Omnivore is a regular report on some of the things that I’ve been enjoying during the week (or thereabouts).

Except this week, it’s not. This week I’m going to tell you about books I’ve just placed an order for. Here’s what’s incoming in no particular order:

• The Collected Poems: 1956-1998, Zbigniew Herbert, Echo Press
• Gasoline, Quim Monzó, Open Letter
• The Restored Finnegans Wake, James Joyce, Penguin (Preorder)
• Antwerp, Roberto Bolaño, New Directions (Preorder)
• The Walk, Robert Walser, New Directions (Preorder)
• Dublinesque, Enrique Vila-Matas, New Directions (Preorder)
• The Passion According to G. H., Clarice Lispector, New Directions (Preorder)
• The No Variations, Luis Chitarroni, Dalkey Archive Press (Preorder)
• Replacement, Tor Ulven, Dalkey Archive Press (Preorder)
• Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth, Salvador Espriu, Dalkey Archive Press (Preorder)
• Blue Nights, Joan Didion, Fourth Estate Ltd (Preorder)
• The Planets, Sergio Chejfec, Open Letter (Preorder)

And a much belated birthday present for someone else.

Incredibly small sample size break-down:

2 out of 12 of the books are in English to begin with (though some may disagree about Finnegans Wake); the rest are Polish (1), Catalan (2), Spanish (4), German (1), Portuguese (1), Norwegian (1), assuming I didn’t make a mistake.

My favourite publisher appears to be New Directions (4), although I do have two Open Letter books (2) in mind that I just couldn’t preorder yet; Dalkey is in second place (3) because they released an excellent, excellent catalogue a week or so ago.

The most expensive book here is The Restored Finnegans Wake, but it looks very pretty and I figured that if it was going to join my library, now is probably as good a time as any with this fancy new edition; there’s a tie for the cheapest book, and they are Antwerp and The Walk, I think because they are both short books belonging to the same series.

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Omnivore: Wishlist.

Instead of telling you what I have read or watched or listened to this week, I’m going to talk quickly about what 2012 in literature holds in store for me in terms of new releases.

I was just doing up my wishlist on the website that I use and here are some forthcoming new releases that I will be looking to acquire in 2012 (in no particular order):

• Sátántangó, László Krasznahorkai
• The Land at the End of the World, António Lobo Antunes
• Almost Never, Daniel Sada
• Varamo, César Aira
• Dublinesque, Enrique Vila-Matas
• Zona, Geoff Dyer
• Monsieur Pain, Roberto Bolaño
• Antwerp, Roberto Bolaño
• Blue Nights, Joan Didion
• Dead Man Upright, Derek Raymond
• The Planets, Sergio Chejfec
• My First Suicide, Jerzy Pilch

Most of these are just new translations of much older works (Dyer, Didion, and Derek Raymond being the exceptions). Some of them were released in the past couple of years in expensive hardcover editions that were too much for this poor student to afford, so these paperback releases are greeted with much welcome. And one of these (Derek Raymond) is simply a re-release with a nice cover, as far as I can tell. Which suits me just fine.

The one I’m probably looking forward to the most is Dublinesque, since Vila-Matas is probably my favourite living writer. (But as they say, here comes a new challenger, and Krasznahorkai is fast climbing the ranks.)

2012 looks like a brilliant year in literature. For me anyway.

“I never got to that point, even at the very end.”

I had begun to lose patience with the conventions of writing. Descriptions went first; in both fiction and nonfiction, I just got impatient with those long paragraphs of description. By which I do not mean—obviously—the single detail that gives you the scene. I’m talking about description as a substitute for thinking. I think you can see me losing my patience as early as Democracy. That was why that book was so hard to write.

Read Joan Didion’s Paris Review interview in the link. [via The Paris Review]

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Blue Nights reviewed.

Maud Newton reviews Joan Didion’s Blue Nights.Excerpt:

In Blue Nights Didion brings a compelling and paradoxical blend of skepticism, acceptance, and astringent detachment to bear on these trends in psychology — and how they both reflect and shape our own self-images. As in most of her personal writing, she’s highly attuned to these kinds of recursive absurdities, and I would guess she’s also more than a little bit amused by them. But, like the very funny Flannery O’Connor, she depicts the ridiculous with a poker-face. And, as in O’Connor, the comic element of human existence is always the obverse of something much darker.

Hit the link for more.

[via Barnes and Noble Review]

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