Celebrating William Blake, the Nativity, and the Imagination

The Nativity by Wm. Blake

On the Morning of Christ's Nativity
by Wm Blake

I'm commemorating the Nativity with having, on Christmas Eve, finished reading Peter Ackroyd's "thick" biography of William Blake.  What extraordinary work, such intense labor, and I'm not just referring to William Blake, mind you, I'm talking about Ackroyd's bio.  Blake's world, inside and out, was to say the least as sublime as it was penurious.  His visions are repeatedly heartbreaking, fearsome, and although his petulance and at times manic distrust of his friends colors some of his personality throughout, he is still for me, as he has been since I first read him at Queens College many years ago, a standard bearer, one of the horsemen of my own interior apocalypse.  Here is some Blake--


"You ought to know that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men.  That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care."

Portrait of Wm Blake by
Thomas Phillips

"I know that This World Is a World of IMAGINATION & Vision.  I see Everything I paint In This World, but Everybody does not see alike.  To the Eyes of Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun, and a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes.  The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way."


"But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself.  To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination."




Angel of the Revelation
by Wm Blake

 

 

Blake talked about the notion of "States."  Ackroyd writes

 "His first mention of 'State' comes in the penultimate 'Night' or chapter of the poem in which he declares that it is necessary to know 'The Difference between States and Individuals of those States.'  These states may be of desire, or rage, or longing; they may also be of the material selfhood itself, and the Individual passes through them while retaining an essential spiritual identity.  You can be 'in drink' for a while, but that does not mean you are a 'drunkard.'  ...it was a way of considering the passage of the soul through the world without dwelling upon sin and guilt but rather upon forgiveness and redemption."

 

The Ancient of Days
by Wm Blake

 "Thought chang'd the infinite to a serpent;
 that which pitieth:
To a devouring flame;
 and man fled from its face and hid
In forests of night...
Then the serpent temple form'd, image of infinite
Shut up in finite revolutions,
and man became an Angel;
Heaven a mighty circle turning;
God a tyrant crown'd."



When the Morning Stars
Sang Together by Wm Blake



"The other evening...taking a walk, I came to a meadow and, at the farther corner of it, I saw a fold of lambs.  Coming nearer, the ground blushed with flowers; and the wattled cote and its woolly tenants were of an exquisite pastoral beauty.  But I looked again, and it proved to be no living flock, but beautiful sculpture." [Blake]

 

 

Nebuchadnezzar by Wm Blake
This is one of my favorite prints by Blake.
It's an accurate representation of myself in the morning;
it's why I need coffee, first thing.

 

 

 

"What is the price of Experience do men buy it for a song

Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No it is bought with the price

Of all that a man hath in his house his wife his children

Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy

And in the witherd field where the farmer plows for bread in vain."

 

[from Vala or The Death and Judgement of the Eternal Man: A Dream of Nine Nights by William Blake]

 

 

 

 

"The imagination is a great disturber of theories..." John Cowper Powys Page entry #8

a selection from Obstinate Cymric by John Cowper Powys

"...the sensations of walking for the sake of the pleasure it gives us is a very different thing from noting the impressions left upon us by what we catch sight of on our way to work.  ...The imagination is a great disturber of theories and we must qualify all our conclusions where poetry is concerned by reminding ourselves that there come moments of inspiration when experience or lack of experience matter little.
 
     "Life at such moments is grasped in planetary perspective and with a peculiar kind of emphasis hard to define, an emphasis neither moral nor cynical, neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but so intimately concerned with the unchanging pathos of terrestrial fate that of necessity it appeals to the hand-worker equally with the brain-worker.

     "That is the mysterious emphasis for which the human race has no name but which all men born of women needs must feel."

Huw Menai, 1886-1961

Powys is writing about his admiration for the poetry of Huw Menai, a Welsh coal-miner who wrote poetry which spoke      "...indignantly and wonderfully of all those workers in mine and factory whose reserved, long-seasoned, experienced, and far-sighted revolutionary insight finds it as hard to conceal its contempt for mass-hypnosis and mob-frenzy as for the Machiavellian tricks of the privileged:
     'Once in his cups, he howled aloud
     His true opinion of the crowd.'"


[and from On Seeing Leaves Falling on the Clean-Way--]

"Our hearts are still inexorably weak
For all our conquests of the earth...and late
Tasting our impotence we sadly seek
Some larger scapegoat for the larger Fate;

For we who have the grace to be ashamed
Of our mean actions feel that life would meet
Our prayers half-way if only the nameless named
Had tithe of our pity for the blind and maimed
And the dumb lowlier things about our feet."

"Huw Menai's thoughts [writes Powys] resemble wind-whipt waves breaking one after another on a rocky shore, each particular wave following so hard on the one before it that we might almost say that its choice between breaking into foam and rolling foamlessly forward into the rock pools was conditioned, decided, and predestined by a revolt from, or an imitation of, the choice made by its predecessor.  ...A reader can never be quite certain whether it will be a pagan "Tarot card" or one from the other pack that will turn up next."

(The Simple Vision: Poems by Huw Menai, 1945)

  [The above selections are from Chapter 8: The Simple Vision, Obstinate Cymric, by John Cowper Powys, London: Village Press, 1974.  Chapter 8 ("The Simple Vision") was first published in  1946.]

Page 214: "Revenant found a bottle of homemade farigoule on the table. ...a bulwark of a wine, yet [he] drank it like it was champagne."

From page  214 of the book:

Between the wine and the delicious food prepared by Gerard's, my whole body became a receptacle for the noise, the conversation, the perfume and the after-shave, the rustle of bodily movements, and the living organism that the party had evolved into.   ...I was looking out for Revenant's best interests and if I could steer someone to him or away from him it could be done by my roving antennae.

  I was, however, unaware of how much he was drinking and that he'd been drinking before he arrived.  Once he'd greeted everyone, Revenant found a bottle of homemade farigoule on the table.  Farigoule is a bulwark of a wine, made with thyme leaves.  It was too strong for a social occasion, yet Revenant drank it like it was champagne.

Thyme, a central ingredient to Farigoule

  ...In another corner, Owen stood by the hors d'oeuvres table with Mr. Benoit and Mr. Cans.  They were listening to Mr. Perrein pontificate on recent actions in the Chamber of Deputies; this time in English, so that Mr. Cans was lost.  Owen turned and reached for a pitcher of water.  I stuck my hand out to stop him.
    "Remember Lot's wife?" I asked.
    "Yeah," he said.
    "Well, she drank that water," I said, and handed him a bottle of unopened mineral water.
    "Barbaric country," he said, unscrewing the top.

the chamber of deputies

  
  

There's my father. My father is that man. I used to know him. [Reading Richard Ford's new book, Canada.] or [You gotta love Richard Ford, part II]

Excerpts from Ford, Richard.  Canada, New York: Harper Collins, 2012.

   "...and since so much was about to change because of him, I've thought possibly that a long-suppressed potential in him had suddenly worked itself into visibility on his face.  He was becoming who and what he was always supposed to be.  He'd simply had to wear down through the other layers to who he really was.  I've seen this phenomenon in the faces of other men--homeless men, men sprawled on the pavement in front of bars or in public parks or bus depots, or lined up outside the doors of missions, waiting to get in out of a long winter.  In their faces--plenty of them were handsome, but ruined--I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.  It's a theory of destiny and character I don't like or want to believe in.  But it's there in me like a hard understory.  I don't, in fact, ever see such a ruined man without saying silently to myself: There's my father.  My father is that man.  I used to know him." [pp 75-76]

 

A view of Great Falls, MT

 

 

"I'm willing to say now that guilt has less to do with it than you might think.  Rather, the intolerable problem is of everything suddenly being so confused: the clear path back to the past being cluttered and unfollowable; how the person once felt being now completely changed from how he feels today.  And time itself: how the hours of the day and night advance so oddly--first fast, then hardly passing at all.  Then the future becoming as confused and impenetrable as the past itself.  What a person becomes in such a situation is paralyzed--caught in one long, sustained, intolerable present.
"Who wouldn't want to stop that--if he could?  Make the present give way to almost any future at all. Who wouldn't admit everything just to gain release from the terrible present?  I would.  Only a saint wouldn't."
[p.120]



 



A view of Great Falls, MT

Orhan Pamuk says #8: The thing that binds us together is that we have both lowered our expectations of life.

"...Ipek laughed as if Ka had just told a very good joke, but before long her face turned deep red.  During the long silence that followed, he looked into Ipek's eyes and realized that she saw right through him.  So you couldn't even take the time to get to know me, her eyes told him.  You couldn't even spend a few minutes flirting with me.

Don't try to pretend you came here because you always loved me and couldn't get me out of your mind. You came here because you found out I was divorced and remembered how beautiful I was and thought I might be easier to approach now that I was stranded in Kars.

By now Ka was so ashamed of his wish for happiness, and so determined to punish himself for his insolence, that he imagined Ipek uttering the cruelest truth of all: The thing that binds us together is that we have both lowered our expectations of life."

[from Pamuk, Orhan. Snow, New York:  Vintage International, 2004, p. 38.]

Page 352: "Nothing to worry about," Shanzenbach commanded. "Did I tell you I've bought on consignment ten cases of Bellett wine? Château de Crémat."

[From page 352 of the book]

"Nothing to worry about," Shanzenbach commanded. "Did I tell you I've bought on consignment ten cases of Bellett wine? Château de Crémat." He put his arm through Félix's as they walked toward the wreck. "It goes splendidly with your wife's monkfish soup I've heard so much about. It'll remind you of damp rocks. I'll have Covarelli bring a case by your house tomorrow."

"round and herby" says Elizabeth Gabay, with delicate
notes of lilac, peach, & rose

Félix knew from the looks on the faces of those three old men that a change, outside of regulation and good reason, had come over them. He decided to let it pass with the reassurance Shanzenbach gave him, and because of the close affinity he felt toward Owen and Georges. If he asked for a breathalizer test on any of them, they would've failed and then the atmosphere would've degenerated into one of embarrassment.

 

 

Baron G is a flinty, dry white of considerable complexity
made entirely from the Rolle grape.

This time I sat in the driver's seat. Revenant was next to me, and Ebert, Shanzenbach, and Owen sat in the back. I looked anxiously at the priest.
    "You don't know how to drive stick, do you?" he asked.
    I shook my head.
    "Where's that cop?" Revenant said, twisting around to the rear. "Hah! He's pulled up in back of us; the curious pain in the ass."
 

[Oenology note: the Bellett (or Bellet) vineyards were originally cultivated by the ancient Phoenician Greeks around 500 BCE.  The wine from Chateau Cremat is "the very best" (says Robert Parker), of "extremely high quality."  The whites can be made from a wide variety of grapes but the most popular variety is Rolle.  Rolle is a grape that is native to the area around Nice and is used in the production of these white wines. It's similar to Chardonnay. According to my hyperlinked references, "Bellet wines were highly appreciated by Louis XIV, and also by Thomas Jefferson."]

 

 



She tried to keep her father behind her until she could meet the commitments of her face. (from Grace Paley's "Faith In the Afternoon")

Grace Paley

I'm reading two collections of short stories by Grace Paley, who's been around the scene for a while, I know, but I never went down her street.  All I can say is, I love her.  Here are some snippets from Enormous Changes At the Last Minute:

He had had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber's snake, could work its way through the ear down the throat, halfway to my heart.  He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment. [ from "Wants"]

I know you Kitty.  You're one of that crowd.  You're the kind thinks the world is round.  Not like my sister, he said.  Not Anna Marie.  She knows the real shape.  She lived, Anna Marie.  What did she have, when she was a kid, what'd my father give her, a little factory to begin with, embroidery, junk, but she's shrewd and crooked and she understands.  My two brothers are crooked.  Crooked, crooked, crooked.  They have crooked wives.  The only one is not crooked, the one who is straight and dumb like you Kitty, he said, dragging her to him for a minute's kiss, is her husband, Anna Marie's.  He was always dumb and straight, but they have got him now, all knotted up, you wouldn't unravel him if you started in August. [ from "Come On, Ye Sons of Art"]

There is a family nearly everybody knows.  The children of this family are named Bobo, Bibi, Doody, Dodo, Neddy, Yoyo, Butch, Put Put, and Beep.  Some are girls and some are boys.  The girls are mean babysitters for mothers.  The boys plan to join the army.  They are very narrow-minded.  They never have an idea.  But they like to be right.  They never listen to anyone else's ideas. [from "Gloomy Tune"]

I have to tease a little to grapple any sort of a reply out of her.  But mostly it doesn't work. It is something like I am a crazy construction worker in conversation with fresh cement.  Can there be more in the world like her?  Don't answer.  Time will pass in spite of her slow wits. [from "Distance"]

Paley, Grace.  Enormous Changes At the Last Minute, New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1999.

Page 248: We were in the Middle Ages, drinking wine from the salty marshes of the Camargue...in the company of two atheists and a collection of sculpted granite saints.

From page 248 of the book--

I laughed and ate more of the cheese and some of the sausages from Arles.


Sausages in Arles market

Shanzenbach moved us along, carrying a couple bottles of Listel wine made in the Camargue, on the Mediterranean shore, and steered us into a 14th-century church.   



Interior, Church of St. Trophime, Arles

There we were afforded absolute silence and near refrigerator coolness in the midst of a town full of parties and singing and dancing.   We sat in the back. Shanzenbach opened the wine, dispensing it in tiny paper cups stolen from Mr. Fourbiere of Arles. We were in the Middle Ages, drinking wine from the salty marshes of the Camargue, celebrating a Papal ritual in support of the Great Schism, in the company of two atheists and a collection of sculpted granite saints.



the salty marshes of the Camargue

The Great Schism of 1378–1417.  Rival popes had seats in Rome and in Avignon.
The election of Pope Martin V during the Council of Constance 1414–17 put an end to it.

 

 

Photo Credits:
1. Sausages in open air market, courtesy of Dimitrios Dalagiorgos.
2. Listel wine, courtesy of Vranken-Pommery Monopole, Berlin.
3. St Trophime, courtesy of Wikipedia.
4. The Camargue, courtesy of Alamy/PCL, Manchester Guardian.

 

 

Orhan Pamuk Says #7 "You can't start out again in life, that's a carriage ride you only take once."

Sitting in the carriage with the book in my hand... I felt a strange contentment and peace of mind, an easy feeling inside me, whose reason I understood only much later, as I thought and thought about it, ...I decided that the pleasure came from that book I was holding, from looking at the cover and remembering how Nigan, Turkan, and Sukran, one after the other, had read to me from it that day:  an Englishman lived for years alone on a desert island because his ship had sunk, no, not entirely alone, actually he had a servant....  I knew it wasn't this thought that filled me with peace, I knew it was something else.

I had before my eyes the road and the memory of this day, which was so lovely to contemplate.  But the thing that pleased me above all was the feeling that once back home, because of the book in my hand, I might be able to relive those delightfully confusing moments now past.

I would always tell myself so many years later: You can't start out again in life, that's a carriage ride you only take once, but with a book in your hand, no matter how confusing and perplexing it might be, once you've finished it, you can always go back to the beginning; if you like, you can read it through again, in order to figure out what you couldn't understand before, in order to understand life, isn't that so?



From Orhan Pamuk's second novel, Silent House, originally published in 1983 and just this year translated from the Turkish by Robert Finn.

You got to love Richard Ford. I just finished his book The Lay of the Land and highly recommend it, and the trilogy, of which it is the 3rd part. He punches you in the gullet all the time.

 (You got to love Richard Ford. I just finished his book and highly recommend the trilogy, of which it is the 3rd part. [1-The Sportswriter; 2-Independence Day] He punches you in the gullet all the time. The following are excerpts from The Lay  of the Land, this first one is from toward the end of the book.  It is November 2000, after the Gore vs. Bush presidential election.)



"When I'm turned loose from this current challenge, I am going to sit down and write another letter to the President, which will be a response to his yearly Thanksgiving proclamation--generally full of platitudes and horseshit, and no better than poems written for ceremonial occasions by the Poet Laureate.  This will be the first such letter I've actually sent, and though I know he will not have long to read it and gets letters from lots of people who feel they need to get their views aired, still, by some chance, he might read it and pass along its basic points to his successor, whoever that is (though of course I know--we all do). 

 It will not be a letter about the need for more gun control or the need for supporting the family unit so fourteen-year-olds don't steal cars, own machine pistols and shoot people, or about ending pregnancies, or the need to shore up our borders and tighten immigration laws, or the institution of English as a national language (which I support), but will simply say that I am a citizen of New Jersey, in middle age, with wives and children to my credit, a non-drug user, a non-jogger, without cell-phone service or called ID, a vertically integrated non-Christian who has sponsored the hopes and contexts and dreams of others with no with for credit or personal gain or transcendence, a citizen with a niche, who has his own context, who does not fear permanence and is not in despair, who is in fact a realtor and a pilgrim as much as any.
      


...I'll write that these demographics confer on me not one shred of wisdom but still a strong personal sense of having both less to lose and curiously more at stake.  I will say to the President that it's one thing for me to give up the Forever Concept and take on myself the responsibilities of the Next Level--that life can't be escaped and must be faced entire.  But it's quite another thing for him to do, or his successor.  For them, in fact, it is very unwise and even dangerous.  Indeed, it seems to me that these very positions, positions of public trust they've worked hard to get, require that insofar as they have our interests at heart, they must graduate to the Next Level but never give up the Forever Concept.  ...there is an important difference worth considering between the life span of an individual and the life span of a whole republic."



[p. 466.]

Richard Ford

"Chances are, with the year I've had, I was headed there anyway....When I asked what it was I had to do before I was sixty, maybe it's just to accept my whole life and my whole self in it--to have that chance before it's too late: to try again to achieve what athletes achieve when their minds are clear, their parts in concert, when they're "feeling it," when the ball's as big as the moon and they hit it a mile because that's all they can do. When nothing else is left. The Next Level."

"More tears are falling.  I could laugh through them if I didn't have a potentially self-erasing pain in my chest.  What is it I'm supposed to accept?  That I'm an asshole?  (I confess.)  That I have no heart?  (I don't confess.)  But what would be the hardest thing to say and mean it?  What would be the hardest for others? 

"...and of course, the answer's plain, unless we're actors or bad-check artists or spies, when it's still probably plain but more tolerable: that your life is founded on a lie, and you know what the lie is and won't admit it, maybe can't.  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

"...deep in my heart space a breaking is.  And as in our private moments of sexual longing, when the touch we want is far away, a groan comes out of me.  'Oh-uhhh.'  The sour tidal whoosh the dead man exhales.  'Oh-uhhh.  Oh-uhhh. '  so long have I not accepted, by practicing the quaintness of acceptance by....'Oh-uhhh.  Oh-uhhh.'  Breath-loss clenches my belly into a rope knot, clenching, clenching in.  'Oh, oh, ohhhhhpp.'  Yes, yes and yes. No more no's.  No more no's.  No more no's."

"As I said, acceptance is goddamned scary. I feel its very fearsomeness here in my bed, in my empty house with the storm past and Thanksgiving waiting with the dawn in the east. Be careful what you accept, is my warning--to me. I will if I can."

[All excerpts above from Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land]



Orhan Pamuk Says #6 Can't you sleep? Isn't it too soon to confess the truth? You are not allowed to think about what you did today or what you're going to do tomorrow.

 

 "You've just gone to bed. You're in familiar surroundings, nestling inside sheets and blankets that are steeped in your own smells and memories; your head has found that pocket of softness in the middle of your pillow; you're lying on your side, and as you curl your legs up against your stomach, your forehead tilts forward, and the cold side of the pillow cools your face: soon, very soon, you'll fall asleep and, in the darkness that engulfs you, you'll forget everything--everything.




Photo courtesy of Amanda Ruggeri

 

    

      "You'll forget the...unfinished work...those who've blamed you, those who will blame you, your financial troubles, the rush of time, your loneliness, your shame, your defeats, your wretchedness, your pain, and the catastrophes--in just a few minutes you'll forget them all.

 

     "...Waiting with  you in the darkness, or the half-light, are all those ordinary and oh-so-familiar wardrobes, chests of drawers, radiators, tables, trays, chairs, tightly shut curtains, discarded clothes, and cigarette packs--the matches are in the pocket of that jacket, and next to it is your handbag and your watch--all waiting, waiting.  ...You are ready.

     "You are ready.

     "But still you can't sleep."

 

 

     "If my memory, my powers of imagination, and my bedraggled dreams do not cave in from exhaustion in the course of my long travels, I'll keep on drifting through that gray land between wakefulness and sleep until my eyes light on a place I know...whatever it is, I'll go inside, and after opening every door and searching every room as if the house itself were the lost recesses of my own memory, I'll go into the last room, blow out the candle, stretch out on the bed, and, surrounded by strange and alien objects, fall asleep."

 

 

[Text excerpted from Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book. New York: Vintage International Books, 2006, pp.246-250]

[Photo credits: (1) Siena at Night, Amanda Ruggeri; (2) Orhan Pamuk, Innocence of Objects.]

 



"A great writer reveals himself in his ideas of good and evil as much as in anything." He was the "Master of human smiles and human moan, Passions that ask for bread and find a stone, Hopes hungered into madness..." (John Powys on Thomas Hardy) --John Cowper Powys Championship Page #8

(Having been a fan of Thomas Hardy's novels during and after college, I was doubly delighted when I read this particular chapter, sometime during the 1980s, of Powys' wonderful book Enjoyment of Literature.)

John Cowper Powys

John Cowper Powys on Thomas Hardy...

 

Thomas Hardy in his garden

      "...in the midst of those who aim at creating a glow of sensuous well-being in their readers and of those who aim at distrubring their readers with frightfulness and disgust, the figure of Thomas Hardy stands out clear and distinct as one whose purpose was to capture the simple truth; and to present it, whatever the effect on his readers might be, with the patient taciturnity of the monotones of nature as they refuse to change one note of their grey neutrality under the prayers and imprecations of our troubled race."   

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

   

  "A great writer reveals himself in his ideas of good and evil as much as in anything; ...Hardy's good men are...a mixture of simplicity and sagacity, and they seldom, if ever, surprise us by explosions of morbid nerves or of imaginative weakness.  ....Loyalty, fidelity, simplicity, sagacity, disinterestedness, are the marks of a "good" Hardy character.  And it is the same with Hardy's good women.  Tess is certainly "a good woman," if ever there was one; and what a comfort to feel how the moral sense of the age has advanced since such a "wounded name" as Tess's needed the bosom of a great and daring genius to house it!"



     "What makes Hardy--with Shakespeare--the greatest of our pessimists is that his pessimism isn't a matter of personal nerves or personal misfortune but a matter of indignant sympathy with a suffering world..., the kind of suffering on which he concentrates, is not, though the physical enters also, the misery of hardship and destitution, so much as the emotional tragedies of the heart."

views of Thomas Hardy country in England

[Text from above excerpted from Powys, John Cowper.  Enjoyment of Literature, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1938, pp. 435-450.]

A very good review from Derosaworld.typepad.com on General Mouse

 

A Good Short Story and A Great Short Story: The Professor vs General Mouse

Our college literature professors teach us that a good short story has a strong descriptive narrative about one event or moment in time. There are plenty of Hemingway short stories that can prove that theory.
But occasionally a writer can break that mold and you get Dorothy Parker’s The Big Blonde which seems to capture a novel-sized life in a few pages.
I read two short stories last week that also go for the ‘Hail Mary’ pass in terms of story arc. Roberto Bolano has a story in Harper’s Magazine this month The Ruin of Amalfitano (log-in required) which manages to track the downfall of a writing professor (Amalfitano) once he has met a young writing student named Padillo, as they share a demolition derby ride through life.
The other story is General Mouse, a tour de force written by Mark Zipoli. This story sets out to cover the life of a man who we meet bemoaning the super-sized dietary habits of Americans as he works keeping a Los Angeles Farmers' Market clean of garbage and trash.
The story unravels General Mouse’s amazing personal history overlaid with remembrances of things past from our shared history of Vietnam.
Bolano’s story is the ‘good’ story here, and is as wild as we would except from the author of The Savage Detectives. The highs, lows, sex and drugs of a Bolano story are on display as the trajectory of the professor's life changes after meeting the student who changes everything. It is a richly drawn character study that captures the fallout as the men's passions collide and mix to create a toxic nectar of which both men drink.
It is the scope of the story that is impressive. The reverberations of the friendship of these two men’s lives require Bolano to write of the aftermath of the final parting of Amalfitano and Padillo on the other minor characters in the story. We too, as readers are left changed after sharing the experience of their lives, and we are left wanting to know more.
The ‘great’ story here, is General Mouse, a story different in every way possible from Bolano’s except for the impact and the scope of what it attempts to achieve, a man's life story.
Mr. Zipoli manages to create a complete biography of a very complex, secretive and important person in the short story form, and we are lacking nothing at the end. We have experienced an epic novel.
General Mouse, whose real name is Anh Dung Tran, a 70 year old worker at the Los Angeles Farmers’ Market, empties the overflow of trash and garbage throughout the day passing judgment on the customers as he slips in and out of memories from his past; memories intertwined with the history of his home country.
...Nobody knew that he’d read history in Hanoi and studied at the Sorbonne; that he’d taken courses at Moscow University and learned Russian, English, French, and Chinese; that he read maps and had built bridges and swing traps, and dug tunnels; and launched spiked tree trunks into the air against the French and the Americans.

Nobody knew that he’d helped to make a French regiment disappear without a trace in the forests of Cao Bang province. The French colonialists, they never put their backs into it, he thought; we were just savages to those heirs of Voltaire and Danton...

All the revolutionary promises, betrayals and failures experienced by the East vs West satellite nations of the Cold War are played out in the mind, minefields and on the back of Anh Dung Tran.

The writing is truly mesmerizing as we are swept through a biographical, psychological and historical journey of General Mouse.

Tran's present and past, haunt the Farmers’ Market. This is truly a great American short Story.

Mark Zipoli is the author the novel The Long Habit of Living as well as other short stories. Please look him up, he may not be as easy to find as the ghost of Roberto Bolano, but his work is rich in texture and nuance of character. Mr. Zipoli is an author who lets you into the minds of his characters and what they share with the reader is worth volumes.

Review courtesy of http://derosaworld.typepad.com

 

Orhan Pamuk says #5 "The museums I visited in my childhood were joyless places infused with the atmosphere of a government office."

"The museums I visited in my childhood were joyless places infused with the atmosphere of a government office."

[So says Orhan Pamuk in the latest issue of Newsweek Magazine]

"Nevertheless, we still knew exactly what we were supposed to feel: respect for that thing known as “national history”; fear of the power of the state; and a humility that overshadowed our own individualities."

[Check out the full article at Newsweek Magazine here.

All photographs are courtesy of and copyrighted by Newsweek Magazine.]