Strong Opinions

I am about three-quarters of the way through Nabokov’s Strong Opinions. Sometimes he comes off like an insufferable prig, like the literary egghead brother of Comic Book Guy on "The Simpsons," but the best thing about these interviews is he doesn’t hold back. He rips a new asshole on various literary giants:

Hemingway and Conrad: “writers of books for boys”

“I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir-shop style, bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist clichés.”

Finnegan’s Wake: “A formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room.”

Dreiser, Tagore, Gorky: “formidable mediocrities”

Dr. Zhivago: “melodramatic and vilely written”

Faulkner: “corncobby chronicles”

Death in Venice: “Asinine” – and, in another interview, the embodiment of poshlost.

N. gets asked a lot to judge what he thinks is good writing. Of the Americans, he admires Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson’s poetry. He also likes Borges and Robbe-Grillet, although he denounces the latter’s claim that there is no psychology in his novels as “preposterous. Those manifestos, those dodoes, die with the dadas.”

Of contemporary American writers, he says he like Salinger and Updike, but claims not to have heard of Pynchon, with whom he is compared. As a boy he liked H.G. Wells, Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

This made me think of S.’s theory that “words are magic” after she read Isaac Babel:

“My feelings toward James are rather complicated. I really dislike him intensely but now and then the figure in the phrase, the turn of the epithet, the screw of an absurd adverb, cause me a kind of electric tingle, as if some current of his was also passing my own blood.”

Greatest masterpieces of 20th century prose, in this order: Joyce’s Ulysses; Kafka’s Transformation; Biely’s Petersburg and the first half of Proust’s fairy tale In Search of Lost Time.

He doesn’t think much about novels that attempt to take on the Big Social Issues; novels with a lot of dialogue; moralists, didacticists: “There can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art.”

Some of the questions reflect the social tenor of their day. He gets asked repeatedly about psychoanalysis and Freud (“Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. I really do not care.”). Here’s another:

VN’s opinions: on the modern world, contemporary politics; on drug addicts who might consider Lolita “square”?

“Young dunces who turn to drugs cannot read Lolita, or any of my books; some in fact cannot read at all. Let me also observe that the term ‘square’ already dates as a slang word, for nothing dates quicker than radical youth, nor is there anything more Philistine, more bourgeois, more ovine than this business of drug duncery.”

Naturally, he gets asked over and over about his writing process, which involves index cards, no typing, and writing out of sequence. I like his description of hitting the sweet spot/phlow while writing, which I’ve always found to be like the fugue state of playing a musical instrument when you stop reading the notes and something like memory, but not exactly, takes over:

“The greatest happiness I experience in composing is when I feel I cannot understand, or rather catch myself not understanding (without the presupposition of an already existing creation) how or why that image or structural move or exact formulation of phrase has just come to me…”

E.M. Forster speaks of his major characters sometimes taking over and dictating the course of his novels. Has this ever been a problem for you, or are you in complete command?

“My knowledge of Mr. Forster’s works is limited to one novel which I dislike; and anyway it was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting of out hand; it is as old as quills, although of course one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are galley slaves.”

Elsewhere he answers this question thusly:

“I have never experienced this. What a preposterous experience! Writers who have had it must be very minor or insane.”

Here, Nabokov presages the emoton:

How would you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?
“I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile – some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.”

Finally:

Do you believe in God?

“To be quite candid – and what I am about to say now is something I never said before, and I hope it provokes a salutary little chill – I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.”

Huh?

Black Friday

A writer, Annie Choi, wrote a hilarious piece called, “Dear Architects, I Am Sick of Your Shit,” in which she calls out some of the more annoying attributes of architects, i.e., how they always talk about how little sleep they’ve gotten, in furious service of their projects.

Writers, too, of course, have their annoying attributes, primary of which is complaining about how little writing is getting done due to procrastination, lack of fortitude, inspiration, and so forth. The amount of energy spent complaining about how no writing is getting written could fill volumes of dreck that no one could possibly want to read.

Kafka to Max Brod:

“Writing sustains me, but is it not more accurate to say that it sustains this kind of life? By this I don’t mean, of course, that my life is better when I don’t write. Rather, it is much worse then and wholly unbearable and has to end in madness. But that, granted, only follows from the postulate that I am a writer, which actually is true, even when I am not writing, and a non-writing writer is a monster inviting madness. But what about being a writer itself? Writing is a sweet and wonderful reward, but for what? In the night it became clear to me, as clear as a child’s lesson book, that it is the reward for serving the devil.”

A temporary worker at a Wal-Mart in Long Island was trampled to death around 5 a.m. this morning when the doors opened and two thousand shoppers stormed in.

Had lunch with S. in the Upper West Side. We talk about my newish cat. I tease her about the fact that she has “Cats for Dummies: The Purr-Fect Campanion for Cat Lovers” on her bookshelf. She says she is afraid if she got a cat, she would forget about finding a boyfriend.

On the way home, I stop by the outdoor holiday market at Union Square to replace the scarf I got for my ma last Christmas because she had lost it recently and requested a replacement. When I called her earlier that day, she had just discovered a new TV set in her bedroom, a gift from my sister and brother-in-law.

Then I walk across the street to the Strand to look at books. There is a display of David Markson books, which I have off and on thought about getting because I am interested in all writing that is essentially composed of singular lines, strung together and packaged as “novels.” That kind of shit gives me hope. But after reading about a two dozen lines, I feel that I get what he is doing and don’t need to buy it, at least not for $13.

Then I go upstairs and spend a lot of time looking a photography book called “The Places We Live” by Jonas Bendiksen, a Magnum photographer who documented the households of several families who live in slums in Mumbai, Caracas, Nairobi, and Jakarta. I maintain my belief that photojournalism is the sexiest job on the planet, not the least of which because it doesn’t require words.

I have always been uncommonly voyeuristic about people’s domestic spaces. I remember once in junior high, when I had even less social skills than I do now, I mortified a friend when I went to her house for the first time and began opening her kitchen cabinets out of curiosity. Christ, what a savage I was.

One of the interesting things about the households Bendiksen visits is the presence of television sets even in the most rudimentary conditions – presumably even in places where electricity is off the grid.

I didn’t buy that book but I did buy for $5 a book I have never seen of Nabokov’s called “Strong Opinions,” (McGraw-Hill, 1973) a collection of some of his interviews and critical writings.

In the foreword, Nabokov writes: “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.”

This is by way of explaining why he only conducts interviews through writing, never verbally.

The book opens with an interview he does at the St. Regis Hotel in New York with four journalists upon the premiere of the film Lolita.

The first question he is asked is:

Interviewers do not find you a particularly stimulating person. Why is that so?

Later that evening, procrastinating some more, I caught this story on cnn.com:

Deputies: Woman, 84, Covered Self With 50 Cats To Keep Warm

"About 50 cats, 20 ducks and 15 turkeys were taken from a New Smyrna Beach home, and a woman was arrested after her 84-year-old mother told authorities that she kept warm by covering herself with the animals, according to Volusia County sheriff's deputies.

"Mary Bosket, 54, was arrested on a charge of neglect to the elderly after her mother was found on Thanksgiving Day at the Glencoe Road home, which was in deplorable conditions and did not have a working heater, deputies said."

The news: atrocities through peepholes.

There was also a story, dateline Nairobi, reporting that three British guards were pulled out of the ocean after failing to prevent the latest in a string of Somali pirate attacks, this one involving a chemical tanker.

According to CNN, pirates have attacked almost 100 vessels off the coast of Somalia coast this year:

“A pirate leader claimed attacks on shipping would continue as long as life in Somalia remained desperate.

"’The pirates are living between life and death," said the pirate leader, identified by only one name, Boyah. "Who can stop them? Americans and British all put together cannot do anything.’"

I try hypnosis to get some writing done. A monkey leads me by the hand into a subterranean restaurant past the fish tanks and says, All the ideas are here.

I look around and see everything is written on strips of pink butcher paper in Chinese, which I can’t read.

November Notes

The Collective

We will form a Collective, drawing upon our individual talents, which, taken together, will make us no more commercially viable, yet imminently available for the day that someone throws an event that should require the services of two singer-songwriters, a hurdy-gurdy repairman, a vegan Nuevo Latin chef of small dishes, a poet, and a eye, ear, nose and throat specialist no longer licensed to practice in the United States and its territories.

Ramen

M: Ramen is to New York what burritos are to California.

Minca for the pork, Setagaya for the noodles, Sapporo for the mid-town hustle, Rai Rai Ken for hole-in-the-wall ambiance and the handsome fellow behind the counter.



Central Casting

See that man at the bar: he played a pederast on a police drama. He also played a serial killer-slash-rapist in an R-rated thriller starring a well-known actress, the one with the lips. He is, as you say, right out of Central Casting. Something in the pallor of his skin – a tightness around his temples and the peculiar shine of his forehead – fulfills our expectation of what a social deviant should resemble.

I knew a woman who went on a few dates with him. She couldn’t get over it; he made her uneasy, like white bible covers.

Central Casting, Part 2

Me: The wise-cracking best friend

You: The explosives expert

Me: The stoic vamp lover of the Russian drug lord

You: The seen-it-all barkeep

Me: A robot with feelings

You: The sexually ambiguous master of ceremonies

Me: Neo-Shanghai is About to Explode!

You: The neighborhood fink in his autumnal years



Movie Rental

Down to the Bone – the careless, incremental ways ordinary people guide you to your own self-destruction.

The Human Predicament

When she was younger, she wore dark lipstick to appear older. When she became older, she shaved a few years off her age. When she made barely anything, she bought one expertly tailored silk dress, used, and wore it for important occasions. When she began making real money, she would sometimes buy expensive baubles to make her fatigue worth it. Whereas once she was embarrassed by her family’s loud Cantonese, she now grasps at its aphoristic wisdom. There were men she slept with but could barely speak to. There were men who she could speak to but couldn’t imagine sleeping with. She was attracted by that borough because the immigrants made the local restaurants cheaper and more interesting, but the other borough had more trees and better coffee. When she was in the prime of her health, she subsisted on arugula and almonds. Now that she is dying, wasting away, really, she eats like a teenage boy.


Sighing

An animal is never more human than when it sighs.

Or is it that humans are never more bestial than when we sigh?

Anorexics and Bulimics

B: What would you guess is the number one health-related reason New York subways get stopped?

L: People who think they are having heart attacks.

B: No, it’s not that.

L: People who shit themselves.

B: Naw, I wish. The number one reason is fainting women. Because they’re not eating enough.

There are two types of people: anorexics or bulimics. Whatever it takes for you to get things done.

Me, I’m a bulimic. I have to sink both arms and submerge my entire face in the depraved, empty-calorie, mind-numbing blubber of excess before I am able to emerge, as purposeful as the slice of a knife blade. But it’s the anorexics that I admire, their grueling discipline that counters no weakness.

S: Does it have to be anorexics and bulimics? That seems so depressing. What about constipation and flow?



Line Breaks at the Diner

S. is upset because Z. has proclaimed that Sebald is a greater poet than most poets. Although she agrees that the problem with American poets is they might as well be writing prose, what with their lazy line breaks. I don’t know about Sebald, but release my usual crank renunciation of poetry as an art form.

After we leave the diner, I go home and read a poem by Bernard Radfar, translated from the Persian Azerbaijani Jewish Neo-Aramaic:

we didn’t know
that we
weren’t together

we went into it
and later
what was broken
became days

and me
with night
riding me

Which of These $chemes Will $ee Us Thru the Economic Crisis

Braille fortune cookies
Fortune Cookie Mt.
Fortunes cookies written by a sociopath
Neighborhoodie fortune cookies
Tarot fortune cookie set
Flotation device fortune cookies
Casual encounters fortune cookies
Fortune cookie Transformers
Fortune cookies written by a computer
Fortune cookie writing $$ contest
Fortune cookie logic
Fortune cookie divorce
Fortune cookie bean bag chair
Crooked fortune cookie smile
Fortune cookie lobbyists
Fortune cookie phony
Authentic Japanese fortune cookies
Fortune cookie hats
Fortune cookie neophyte/rookie
The Teen Choice fortune cookie winner
Ranch-flavored fortune cookies
Kitten Blend Fortune Cookies
Mock vegetarian fortune cookies
Eau de Fortune Cookie
Fortune cookie ruins, B.C.
Misfortune cookies
Fortune cookie-heads
Fortune cookie burlesque
Fortune cookelese triangle
Fortune cookie change purse
Frozen fortune cookie pops
Fortune Cookie Country Critters
A fortune cookie-motivated incident
Fortune cookie condom wrappers
Fortune cookie mini-bites
Fortune Cookie Monster
Vintage Fortune Cookie
Fortune cookie cell phone ring
Ask Fortune Cookie
Fortune cookie cereal
Fortune cookie burritos
Lottery numbers/date of yr death fortune cookies
The Fortune Cookie Killer
Fortune cookie charm bracelet
Fortune cookie sacred chants
Do-it-at-home fortune cookie kit
Deep-fried fortune cookies with oysters
Fortune cookies for yr Sworn Enemies
Fortune cookie check cashing
Fortune cookie roulette
Fortune cookie riots
The Fortune Cookie Diet

Discography

Listening to Thelonious Monk transports me to Dave’s house in El Cerrito, Berkeley? when we were in college, sky blue carpet and two enormous cans of hominy holding up his speakers. There is a picture of Hugh in a cowboy hat vacuuming in that house; it must have been when they were moving out because there isn’t furniture, just a quarter acre of that blue carpet. A few years ago I googled Hugh and discovered he is the resident rabbi at a Jewish high school in the Bay Area. Once we smoked a joint and he cut my hair – a terrible job, slanted like a flight of stairs. The great thing about that room I lived in at the time was you could open a backdoor and sweep the hair – anything -- right out. I remember in Iowa sitting on Rick’s back porch as he swung his arm back and threw a chicken leg bone he’d been gnawing on right into the creek that bordered that row of houses. He didn’t even have to stand up. My twin bed in that room fit right in an alcove under a tiny sink. I could pour a glass of water by leaning over. A homeless man named Berkeley Bob, a cantankerous mumbler with a yellow beard and a tweed sports coat, slept right outside my window. You never know what your memories will be like until you have them.

Being a tourist in Atlanta, GA

Asian Hair Stories: A Director's Notes

In my early 20s I was a gaffer on the set of a pornographic video shoot in Los Angeles. I remember the room in the house where we set up was a sea of beige: beige carpet, beige couch, beige art on the wall. One of the men had worked with the actress, a blonde, before. They chatted over coffee while the other man stood to the side, manipulating his Sidekick. I was young, I didn’t know anything. When the director figured he had enough footage of one position, he would call ‘Cut’ and the actors would disengage and wait to be told which position to assume next.

In one scene the woman was giving one of the men a blow job. He arched his back slightly and placed his hand on her bobbing head, at which point the wig she had been wearing shifted back, exposing a fragment of dark hair just above her ear. The actors did not stop – it’s likely none of them realized what had happened. I thought the director would stop the shoot, but he did not. The scene continued with the wig shifting back and forth in place.

To this day I don’t know if the director did not stop the scene because he figured the movie was a low-budget affair that didn’t afford him the time and logistics to reshoot the entire scene. Perhaps it was simple laziness. Or, it could be he allowed the camera to roll because he realized the scene became more -- not less -- charged at the instant the sliver of her natural hair emerged, a layer more bare than the naked bodies thrusting in the frame.

The Five Poisons

Viper
Two sisters, a white snake and a blue snake, assumed womanly forms to experience what it was to be human. White Snake fell in love with a scholar-poet, who was mesmerized by her willowy curves and the smoothness of her brow.

The first time they were intimate, he joked about the coldness of her skin. She drew her head back sharply and unleashed a fury of curses. He was shocked by her outburst, but soon made her forget her anger with entreaties and kisses.

Over time, the scholar grew curious that his lover disappeared each night, claiming that she needed to care for her ailing sister at home.

One night he followed her through the winding streets to the rural outskirts of their village. When they reached the lip of the river, she descended into a cave hidden beneath a covering of reeds. He waited, then followed her path through the dark canals, until he found himself in a narrow room where he found, to his horror, two enormous snakes, one blue and one white.

Blue Snake saw him first, and hissed, See what you’ve done! Now that he knows our secret, he must be destroyed. She sunk her teeth into his neck and swallowed him whole.

For two weeks, White Snake curled up next to Blue Snake to caress the discernable form of her lover.

Scorpion
When he was indignant, he would straighten his back; his ass would lift slightly, like that of a scorpion preparing for a death match.

Centipede
Watching the furious tank-tread progress of a centipede fills me with dread. It is loathsome to think that such extraordinary rotary mechanics are driven toward the pursuit of an infinitesimal morsel of lettuce.

Toad
The father and son were both unattractive. But while the younger one, with his sleepy, bulbous eyes and wide lips, could be said to resemble a frog, his father looked more like a toad. Even so, the son was possessed of a glorious and tenderhearted personality that hit you with the force of sunshine at brunch.

The son’s girlfriend, who needed to move to her feet to count the number of assholes she’d dated, loved this about him, and was willing to overlook his less appealing attributes. But she feared that, as he aged, the son would grow to more and more resemble his father, whose toad-like features she found repulsive.

She thought: The frog leaps from lily pad to lily pad, but the toad sits, turd-like and oblivious, in the mud. The frog glistens like a dew drop, but the skin of the toad is thwarted with warts, barnacles from a lifetime of dissolution.

She prayed that she would not wake up one day and find herself in the arms of a toad.

Spider
Little one, we called you Spider, sewed toads on your pillowcase, embroidered scorpions on the pockets of your silk coat, carved snakes into your headboard to protect you from the pernicious things of this world.

Now you’ve grown into a man with a heart that could set tires on fire. When they come rooting for things in your past to explain your demonic impulses, tell them that our amulets and symbols lost their potency in this foreign country, that they were little more than the whimsical decorations of a once powerful empire.