by
Joshua Cohen
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Such a pattern played out in Mahler’s milieu of Germanic Jews. Mahler, like Kafka, like Marx a generation before, was born into the bourgeoisie, then became an artistic “Bohemian,” if only to redeem himself from guilt, before he was expected to be reabsorbed by the bourgeoisie, in a classical resolution, as if the key of home and hearth were a sunny C major. Except it wasn’t, and the basses surged beneath on a soured tone. Kafka left his parents’ house in Prague for a young Polish-born, ex-Hasidic girlfriend and Berlin; Marx abroad in Paris abandoned verse and metaphysics, entering politics to effect not art but change. Revolution is just that, an inability to be reintegrated, and, unlike his life, Mahler’s music cannot be reintegrated. Forsaking the sonata’s inevitable resolution, his compositions can lead only to discord, in a progressive development with no recapitulation save death. The ultimate modern depressive, Mahler fell in love with his death as the final finale, and this love, a one-man version of Wagner’s Liebestod, is what elicits our empathy today. The soundtrack of this death, because so much about Mahler’s life is cinematic, has become the soundtrack to all death, even to the death of music, and the fact that Mahler’s symphonies lack a certain program or biography for whatever degenerescence has been scored allows us to impute sufferings of our own, to become, in them, acting conductors of our personal mortalities.
Innumerable poems, stories, and shoddy ad campaigns have fantasized that the river running through Prague, the Vltava—the Moldau in German—is a river of beer. On one bank is the city’s administrative center; on the other, the nation’s—the Castle, apostrophized by another son, Franz Kafka. Prague is a city of churches where no one goes to church, a city of synagogues without Jews. Literary Prague—aping the literary life of the empire’s imperial cities, Budapest and Vienna—once enjoyed more of a café culture, conducted not in Czech but in German. Kafka and his future executor, Max Brod, along with Oskar Baum and Franz Werfel, were ersatz Viennese who aspired to the capital’s caffeination, taking their beans with a dash of cream. Not for them the Slavic demimonde, the twilit taverns strewn with sawdust, their rusty tanks and taps—the Eastern accents of this Western metropolis were too gauche for the authors of The Metamorphosis and The Song of Bernadette.
i just like the way this passage is written is all
Socialist Realist fiction was too obviously occupied with schematic surface: A man is discharged from the Red Army a hero and returns to reorganize his hometown around a hyperprogressive cement factory (the novel Cement by Fyodor Gladkov). It was all exterior, a series of events or plot points demonstrating fate, synonymous in these books with political calling. By contrast, the corpora of censored or banned writers were usually more interested by the inner life—the mind, the one space from which no citizen can be exiled. Show a veteran working productively in a plant and you have created propaganda, but tell the thoughts of this man, tell us what he feels when he boozes at night and beats his children and wife, and you have an artwork—a dangerous artwork.
Since Sebald’s death in 2001 his influence has only grown, especially outside of Germany—rather, especially in countries that fought Germany, and remained fascinated by its madness. To be sure, it’s Sebald’s techniques that are thriving—his pondering of a set of facts in situ, as a means of interpreting himself—while his preoccupation with the Holocaust has been transposed to more-current crises. It helps, on a first reading of Sebald, to have already read your Benjamin, and Adorno, Wittgenstein, and Freud. But it doesn’t help, on a first reading of Sebald’s heirs—say Geoff Dyer, Teju Cole, and Ben Lerner—to have already read your Sebald. Their books come off as too weak to shoulder the comparison, as the writer-narrators—who share traits if not also names with their authors—practice backpacker-flânerie through the major capitals in the style not of exile but of tourism or study-abroad. Certainly Dyer’s Jeff (in Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi), Cole’s Julius (in Open City), and Lerner’s Adam (in Leaving the Atocha Station) and Ben (in 10:04) are still doing the most serious work of trying to patch a creative self out of the strangers they meet and the artworks they experience, and the way they go about it is often intelligent (Lerner), compassionate (Cole), and droll (Dyer). Still, all of those books of self-alienation through travel are suffused with the shaming suspicion that a ticket home will always be available—even if that’s only because everywhere in the world can feel like “home,” or much of it has been homogenized to resemble it, at least. But globalization isn’t the novelist’s fault, or not completely.
lol
CALL IT THE NEWSPAPER PROBLEM: About a decade ago I wrote an essay on contemporary poetry for a newspaper that will remain nameless and had the occasion to quote a line by “Eliot.” The editor sent back many changes, the most minor but telling of which was that the quotation was now attributed to “the English poet T. S. Eliot.” Vaguely piqued, I asked what the editor was trying to clarify: Was he afraid readers wouldn’t realize the quotation came from a poem? Or was he afraid readers might confuse the Eliot who wrote it with, say, George Eliot, the pseudonymous author of Middlemarch? Anyway, I noted that the “English” qualifier was misleading: Though T. S. Eliot had taken British citizenship, he’d been born in America. The editor, then, sent on another suggestion: “the American-born English poet T. S. Eliot.” I, having lost all the patience I had as a twenty-something-year-old, replied by modifying that tag to: “the American-born, British-citizen English-language poet, essayist, dramatist, teacher, publisher, and bank teller Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965),” after which the editor finally got the point and canceled the assignment.
lmao
Quba isn’t a one-horse town. It’s a half-horse town. The rear half. Smelly (from car emissions, outlying factories, sewage), hideous. Besides apples, Quba’s also known for its carpets—known for its carpets whose woven wool must inevitably soak up all the smells—and while the few formal stores display their wares flayed in windows, the bazaars roll them up and tie them and lean them against walls like they’re about to be executed by firing squad: carpets like multicolored, arboreally patterned bodies—carpets for use as multicolored, arboreally patterned bodybags.
lol
LET ME REPHRASE.
I know what I want to say, but I don’t know the words in which to say it. And this, I want to say, is the problem—a theological problem.
Let me rephrase.
As a writer, I go about my dull daily life with a book in my head. And, despite that dull daily life, let’s call my head a type of heaven.
Up in the heaven of my head, this book is perfect. It’s complete. It’s complete and finished. From the first word to the last, though I don’t know what those words might be, though I might not even know anything about it: not the characters, the situations, the settings. All I know, all I have to know, is that it’s brilliant, this book of mine, and that it’s above me, like a star floating high, and that without even the slightest effort on my part, it’s shining brightly Up There—I know it’s shining even during daylight.
Because the book that descends is not the same book that was hovering so peacefully in the empyrean. The book that descends is never that same book. It’s rather like a parody or satire of that book, but it’s not funny. Or it’s not funny to you.
The book that you now have in front of you, worded onto the page, or onscreen, is just a beaten ugly incarnation of its original perfect being, and it’s your fault. You have only yourself to blame. Because you couldn’t control yourself. Because you just couldn’t have left it twinkling in the ether. You had to call it down, you were so afraid, so jealous, that someone else might possess it. But now it’s yours, it’s all yours, a justly perverse reward for your needy greed and hubris. Now, instead of perfection, you possess a monster.
My daily routine, now that I’m finally over the jet lag: wake up at 6:00 A.M., write for four hours, get to Hummus Beit Lechem just when it opens. Order a hummus with egg, which is served with pita, pickled veg, and half a raw onion. Eat while reading Haaretz. Buy cigarettes and smoke my way back to writing by noon. I can choose between two routes; rather, between two sides of Herzl Street, neither of which gives any shade from the sun. One side has a store that sells birdcages. The other side has a store that sells birds. Both are run by Ethiopians and both are called “Song of Sheba.”
I quit by 7:00 P.M., and head out again for a shwarma or a falafel or a sabich, then wind down the day at a bar, reading the books I bought at Ha’Nasich Ha’Katan and Robinson, and drinking beer and arak until I’m sleepy (by 11:00 P.M.). The books, in Hebrew: Dolly City (Dolly City) by Orly Castel-Bloom, Hitganvut Yechidim (Infiltration) by Yehoshua Kenaz, and last but not least, Ha’Yored Lemala (The Acrophile) by Yoram Kaniuk, a great writer who was once very generous and kind to me, and whom I can’t avoid, or can’t avoid missing, not just because Tel Aviv was very much “his city,” but also because it’s been two summers now since he died.
kind of love this
IF YOU’RE A WRITER, YOU translate yourself. There’s an idea in your head, or an image, and it must find its way to words. There has always been a tension, a tension or an opposition, between writing that seeks to record life as experience, in the private language of experience, and writing that seeks to refine or winnow life into final statements, into fixities, with more-public vocabulary, syntax, grammar. On one hand, think of William Faulkner, who sends personal and so imperfect memories stumbling stuporously across Yoknapatawpha. Then, on the other hand, think of the safer, saner Saul Bellow, who tells us intellectually what Chicago means, clearly, even conclusively. This push/pull between inhabiting the self and experience, and making the self and experience intelligible to others, is especially pronounced among writers who write in second languages, and, to a lesser degree, among writers who write about a culture that is not the culture they are writing for or toward. Someone like Bellow, born to immigrants, born to Yiddish, beginning to write in post-WWII America under the sign of bestsellerdom, must have felt compelled to explain more, to explain his intentions, in a fancy Hyde Park version of the way my own relatives, when they spoke English, often spoke. very. slowly. and repeated themselves and repeatedly YELLED! to make themselves understood.