Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual (Godine edition) is the Spring Big Read selection over at Scott Esposito's Conversational Reading. The reading is currently well underway and excellent discussion is sure to follow.The first is The Knight’s Tour. The idea of this is that there are specific routes by which the chess figure known as a Knight can touch every square on a chessboard. Perec envisioned his apartment as something like a chessboard, making it a 10 x 10 grid (36 squares larger than a chessboard’s 8 x 8). In Life, the narrative voice is akin to the Knight in that it moves from square to square via the leap that only a chess Knight can make (i.e. two steps forward, one to the right; or two steps left, one forward). Note that the apartments in Perec’s building are not each only 1 square in size . . . many of them are built by combining adjacent units into one large unit, which Perec notes in their descriptions. Each of the 99 chapters in Life corresponds to one of the squares, meaning that for some characters we are in their apartments more than once (albeit in different rooms of the apartment). And yes, the math majors among us have already noticed that 10 x 10 = 100, not 99. We’ll talk about that missing 100th chapter later.
Knowing this, and watching the clues that Perec leaves (usually at the beginning of each chapter) you can, if you want, reconstruct a diagram of the apartment as we go along. (There’s also a completed diagram at the end of the book, but I heavily recommend you don’t look at it early.) In fact, doing so as we read is probably tantamount to accepting Perec’s implicit challenge to “put together” his puzzle, as Bartlebooth does with jigsaw puzzles in the book. This would make sense, as one of the themes that Perec elaborates throughout Life is that of a puzzle as a medium of communication between the puzzle designer and the puzzle doer.
The one other thing I’ll mention right now is that Perec famously placed quotes from favorite authors directly into the text of Life without any sort of indication whatsoever. Undoubtedly some of these quotes will be recognizable to you, and it is a thrilling moment to see, for instance, Borges suddenly emerge from the text as though popping out of a pool of water. Probably, though, many of these quotes will go completely unnoticed, a further testament to Perec’s skill as a writer."
Are any of our Godine blog readers participating in the Spring Big Read? If so, please comment and let us know what you think of Life A User's Manual.
A big thank you goes to Pat Leuchtman for featuring a review of Godine's Oh Garden of Fresh Possibilities!: Notes from a Gloucester Garden by Kim Smith on her country garden blog, Commonweeder, last week:"Fresh Possibilities are just what I am looking for at this time of the year, so it is no surprise that I have been spending happy evenings with Kim Smith’s beautiful book that includes so many of her own delicate paintings of flowers, birds and butterflies.
Kim Smith gardens, and paints, in Gloucester. Over the years her garden has grown, as has her concern about conservation and her delight in the roads to literature and art that her garden has opened to her. Oh Garden of Fresh Possibilities: Notes from a Gloucester Garden (David R. Godine Publisher $35) combines all these aspects of her life in the garden in the most beautiful way.
With its delicate paintings of individual flowers, and butterflies, the book does not look like a how-to book, yet it includes plant lists to attract butterflies, of fragrant flowers and plants through the seasons, seasonal blooms and useful annuals. I can hardly decide which I enjoy more, the charming prose of chapters titled The Narrative of the Garden, Flowers of the Air and The Memorable Garden, the exquisite paintings, or the poetry that ranges from our own Emily Dickinson and Dorothy Parker to Li Bai (701–762 CE), a famous Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty. I enjoy knowing that Kim has found the same delight in the connections to history and the arts that I find in the garden."
The full review can be found here.
James Sullivan, a Boston Globe correspondent, visited Barry Moser at home in North Hatfield, MA for a fantastic feature that ran on Sunday, March 20th:“God will not examine our medals and diplomas, but our scars.’’
Scars, wrinkles, furrowed brows, and other imperfections are the stuff of life for Moser, the renowned printmaker and illustrator who has worked on more than 300 books in his prolific career. His latest, “One Hundred Portraits’’ (Godine), is a collection of engravings of writers from Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath, with detours into music (Sibelius, Bukka White the bluesman) and personal subjects, such as his late parents and his beloved Rottweiler, Rosie.
On March 26 the Brandywine River Museum in Pennsylvania opens an exhibition of Moser’s work: engravings, watercolors, and limited-edition books. Given the museum’s emphasis on American illustration, it’s a feather in an already well-plumed cap. In 1983 Moser won a National Book Award for his work on “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,’’ and he published his own spectacular illustrated version of the King James Bible two decades later.
Not bad for a man who has come to believe he grew up dyslexic. “I’m really interested in the irony of that,’’ says Moser, 70, a bespectacled, head-shaved Tennessee native with a tangy drawl and the sculpted white beard of a 19th-century judge. “I think I largely overcame it by setting type — upside-down and backwards.’’
Read the rest of the article here.
Moser is the author of several Godine books, including his latest, One Hundred Portraits: Artists, Architects, Writers, Composers and Friends, which was published in 2010.
“It was a proverbial dark and stormy night on March 10th, 2011, when David R. Godine gave a talk to The Baltimore Bibliophiles about the history of his publishing business. Rain had been pounding down since the night before, causing road-closings and traffic jams. Nonetheless, the crowd was large and lively – serious book collectors and aficionados who all seemed to know David, either personally or professionally. The evening began with a sort of free-for-all book sale of Godine titles displayed on a large table near the bar. Drinks, cash, and books changed hands in the crowd, with David at the center, calling out, “Make me an offer – I’m not taking any of these books home!”
The seated dinner, old-world university club style, featured crab cakes – a local specialty. Finally, David got up to speak. For the many of you who have heard David give similar talks, you can imagine the scene – slide after slide of his exquisite books accompanied by a narrative chock full of details of his career from the very early days at Leonard Baskin’s Gehenna Press in Northampton through several current titles still in production. The crowd seemed familiar with names like Harold McGrath, Lance Hidy, Michael McCurdy, Fritz Kredel, Gillian Tyler, and seemed to take technical terms – such as Vandercook, Monotype Bembo, Antigone Greek, Bulmer, Centaur, Amalfi, Fabriano, and a colophon in the shape of a lobster pot – in stride. Anecdotes kept everyone chuckling . . . a recipe for brewing beer in a bathtub printed in a children’s book . . . David’s thirteen-year-old sister helping to hand-color illustrations . . . William Steig allowing Godine to print Rotten Island because he agreed to use DayGlo inks.
Susan Fillion and David
It got late. The talk was over, the tables had been cleared, a small gaggle of people followed David down to the parking lot. As I drove away, I could see him in my rear-view mirror, standing on a flat spot between enormous puddles, still chatting. He seemed to have sold every last book."
SUSAN FILLION is the author of Godine’s forthcoming book Miss Etta and Dr. Claribel: Bringing Matisse to America, due out April 2011.
Ok, just one more . . .
Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Allopathy appears in the Third.
We just featured Wesley McNair on the blog last Friday but we had to share this good news as well. McNair was just appointed Maine's new poet laureate on March 11th.Wesley McNair doesn’t need a formal title to remind him that it’s important to bring poetry to the people.
But McNair, appointed by the governor to the position of Maine poet laureate Friday at a ceremony at the Franco-American Heritage Center in Lewiston, plans to wear the title with honor and keep doing what he’s always done.
“I’ve bringing poetry to the people from the start,” said McNair, 69, who lives in Mercer. “My goal is to continue making poets in Maine more visible to their communities and to their regions.”
McNair’s appointment came at the beginning of the Maine State Poetry Out Loud finals. Poetry Out Loud is a national competition for high school students, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. Lauren LePage, daughter of Gov. Paul LePage and a member of his administrative team, introduced McNair. There is some irony there, because McNair spoke out for Maine poets when the governor opted to leave poetry off his inauguration program in January, interrupting a Maine tradition.
McNair said he viewed his appointment as a positive sign. “I look forward to this level of support continuing as I carry the banner for the literary arts up ahead. It’s an opportunity,” he said.
McNair has received many awards and grants, and has read his poems at the Library of Congress. His latest book is Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems.
The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is an interesting little book. In 1968, a French computer company issued a challenge to artists: create art using a computer. Computers in the ‘60s were giant, loud machines that used punch cards, for reasons that remain nebulous to anyone younger than 40, to drive their operations. They were not very sophisticated.
The specific challenge was to create something based on a flow-chart entitled “The art and craft of approaching your head of department to submit a request for a raise.” And because computers figure things out by taking each scenario to its conclusion, the flow-chart often brings the user back to square one.
A year previous to this challenge being issued, writer Georges Perec had joined a group of writers and mathematicians called Oulipo, short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature. Their mission was to create literature using constrained writing, imposing rules such as disallowing the use of a specific letter. (Perec’s 1969 novel La disparition (A Void) uses this technique. It is completely devoid of the letter “e.”) It would appear that this assignment was tailor-made for Perec to tackle.
It’s important to understand the backstory to this piece of literature because without that, Asking Your Boss for A Raise seems slight. It is experimental fiction in a pure form—an exercise in seeing if one could write a story based on a flow-chart. Of course, this is the sort of thing one sees all the time now in experimental fiction, but Perec wrote this over 40 years ago. Luckily, this first English translation of Perec’s story has a lengthy introduction by David Bellos, the translator, telling the story of this story in depth.
. . .
Being based on a flow-chart, the book itself is recursive. Written in second-person singular, “you” have decided to ask your boss for a raise, and “you” end up being confronted with a variety of scenarios with numerous outcomes. Is your boss in? Are his daughters ill? What was on the menu in the cafeteria? It reads a bit like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, only the reader is not making the choices. Perec emulates the flow of computer processing by making the story one long sentence, which also imitates the rhythm of someone navigating around an office, or “circumperambulating” as Perec writes. Perec also adds drama, tension, and humor throughout the office escapade.
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Sound interesting? Then you need to check out Verso's online game for the book here.
Godine is proud to publish several works by Perec, including Life A User's Manual, Thoughts of Sorts, A Void (mentioned above), and W, or the Memory of Childhood.
and, let’s be honest, if your steak isn’t from a Midwest grass-fed Angus heifer, you might as well save yourself the calories.
Eddie Chuculate is an American fiction writer whose stories typically feature Native American characters and culture. David R. Godine, Publisher had the privilege of publishing his debut book, Cheyenne Madonna, last year under its imprint Black Sparrow Books. This short story collection follows Jordan Coolwater, a Cheyenne Indian, throughout his life, first as a boy dealing with his family’s prejudices and alcoholism through his adult life struggling in the art industry and his marriage. These narratives depict what it means to be a Native American, from 1826 to the present-day, with gritty realism. Below, Eddie shares with us about his writing life, racism, and which NBA team will end the season on top.
A post from Chelsey, an intern at Godine:
The Goat-Faced Girl, a children's book we recently released, has already quickly become a Godine favorite.
forthcoming paperback edition of Sugar on Snow. This lovely picture book will be available starting in early March. In the story, a father, his two sons, and one dog rise (very early) to the occasion and set off at dawn to the sugar bush to begin the maple sugaring process. We see the entire family involved – Mom preparing the meals, Dad steering the big John Deere tractor through the fields, and the two sons, Seth and Ethan, learning how to steer, collecting the buckets, and replacing them on the spouts and, of course, the loyal hound Chloe (probably the only dog so named on any farm in New England) trotting along for the ride.
Today we're featuring a blog entry from our wonderful intern Melanie:
"Coleman is best known for her 'warrior voice.' [But her] voice too can weep elegiac, summoning memories of childhood's neighborhoods – her South L.A.'s wild-frond palms, the smog-smear of pre-ecology consciousness. Her voice hits notes as desperate as Billie Holiday's tours of sorrow's more desolate stretches. But it can also land a wily punch line as solid as that of a stand-up comic."Wanda Coleman’s poems, “Noise (3),” “Ashes Scattered at Sea,” and “The Mingus Effect,” appear in our Winter 2010-11 issue, edited by Terrance Hayes. Here is an excerpt from “The Mingus Effect”:
the java fires the lava flowing in my brain
hot wet sex-rider screaming stains
black cold heart bleeds lightning and rain
Coleman talks about the impact other poets and art have on her and shares a bit of the back story for each of her three poems:
Often my acts of creation are acts of “re-creation,” as I struggle to encapsulate an experience, feeling, observation (rehumanizing the dehumanized), or attempt to distill the moment. Occasionally, I reach for and touch the soul of another, entering their realm, bringing them into mine. Poets of power (Jeffers, Plath, Lorca, Antonius) draw me into them and hold me in their joyous spells. When I come out of the trance, I am better for having read and for having been embraced. In “Noise (3)” I continue my aesthetic—sometimes humorous—polemic on urban life below the poverty line where one (i/me/myself/we) must constantly struggle to maintain focus against a ceaseless onslaught of disturbances. “Ashes . . . ” reveals that part of my psyche which yearns to reconnect with my deceased oldest son. “The Mingus Effect” exemplifies my classroom assertion that art feeds art, and serves as a reminder that writing may be fun. Inspiration may be the descriptive word used to sum up the process, but it seems inadequate, given where I’m coming from—so I’ll let my poems continue speaking for themselves.
Black Sparrow Books, an imprint of Godine, is proud to publish multiple titles by Coleman including Jazz and Twelve O'Clock Tales, The Riot Inside Me, and Bathwater Wine.
In 1987 Paul Auster reviewed Life: A User’s Manual (see post for Monday, January 31, 2011), including in his review the following comment: “Those who have read a great deal will no doubt recognize passages that quote directly or indirectly from other writers – Kafka, Agatha Christie, Melville, Freud, Rabelais, Nabokov, Jules Verne and a host of others – but failure to recognize them should not be considered a handicap.” But is there a quote-recognition handicap in today’s technologically savvy and search-engine powered society? Adam Kirsch of the Wall Street Journal discussed his views on this subject last month in the article “Literary Allusion in the Age of Google.”
One of my favorite stories from World War II concerns the great British travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, who in 1944 led the daring mission to kidnap the commander of the German forces occupying Crete. The general, Karl Heinrich Kreipe, was held captive in a mountain cave, where one morning the sunrise brought into view the snow-covered peak of Mount Ida.
Gen. Kreipe, who had studied the classics, began to recite a famous Latin ode by Horace, which opens with the image of a mountain that "stands white with deep snow"—whereupon Mr. Fermor, who also knew it by heart, joined in and finished the poem. The men's eyes met, and a long silence ensued. "It was very strange," Mr. Fermor recalled. "As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist."
Mr. Fermor's story, from his memoir "A Time of Gifts," is like a fable about the paradoxical power of allusion. Speech and writing are supposed to be most powerful when most sincere. To quote is to use someone else's words, which ought to make that kind of immediacy impossible. Yet when two people—a captor and a prisoner, or a couple of friends or (most often) a writer and a reader—can share an allusion, it creates a remarkable intimacy. If you can recognize a writer's borrowing, it is because the two of you know something that other people don't.
In this sense, literary allusion is exclusive, even aristocratic—which is why it's hard for anyone writing in 21st-century America to pull it off. Even if you stick to English, it is almost impossible to be confident that your audience knows the same books you do. It doesn't matter whether you slip in "April is the cruelest month," or "To be or not to be," or even "The Lord is my shepherd"—there's a good chance that at least some readers won't know what you're quoting, or that you're quoting at all.
What this means is that, in our fragmented literary culture, allusion is a high-risk, high-reward rhetorical strategy. The more recondite your allusion, the more gratifying it will be to those who recognize it, and the more alienating it will be to those who don't. To risk an unidentified quotation, you have to have a pretty good sense of your audience: Psalms would be safe enough in a sermon, "The Waste Land" in a literary essay or college lecture, Horace just about nowhere.
In the last decade or so, however, a major new factor has changed this calculus. That is the rise of Google, which levels the playing field for all readers. Now any quotation in any language, no matter how obscure, can be identified in a fraction of a second. When T.S. Eliot dropped outlandish Sanskrit and French and Latin allusions into "The Waste Land," he had to include notes to the poem, to help readers track them down. Today, no poet could outwit any reader who has an Internet connection.
As a result, allusion has become more democratic and more generous. If you quote an obscure book today, you're not shutting the reader out but extending an invitation for him to track it down and make it his own. Here, as in so many areas of life and literature, the Internet abolishes secrets and hierarchies, offering universal access to "the best that has been thought and said in the world."
Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Galeanthropy appears in the Second.
Thank you to Yuri Artibise for his wonderful review of Godine's Genius of Common Sense: Jane Jacobs and the Story of the Death & Life of Great American Cities on the Jane's Walk Phoenix site:Big mistake!
Genius of Common Sense is a must read for anybody interested in the life and work of Jane Jacobs. While indeed meant for young adults, the clear and concise writing provides a great introduction to the queen of urbanism. It’s a quick and easy—but nonetheless compelling—read.
The book takes you on a journey from Jane’s earliest days in Scranton, through her early days in New York to her battles with Robert Moses and the publication of Death and Life, and ultimately to her move to Toronto. It also talks about the people and instances that influenced her and her thinking. It is packed with details often overlooked in more academic texts, including her unruliness in grade school and her fascination with manhole covers.
The book includes excellent illustrations by the authors and rarely seen photographs of Jane and her family. It concludes with excellent appendices, including a bibliography, a chronology of Jane’s live and detailed chapter notes.
Genius of Common Sense was written to bring alive the life of Jane Jacobs for any teenager wondering how s/he can make a difference in the world. It surpasses this goal and will inspire people of all ages to get involved in their community."
Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Piaffer appears in the Third.
