The Rumpus.net » Michael Berger

Perec On Asking For A Raise

Michael Berger — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 20:45:56 +0000

Everyday life is surprisingly full of hair-raising adventures. Sometimes you don’t realize it until you’re in the thick of it.

Waiting for the grocery store manager to confirm that you are not in fact the same guy who stole the roast chicken three days prior.

Finding yourself in your boss’s office, waiting for him to angrily adjust the nodules on his new Executive office chair while you are assailed by a bizarre coughing fit.

And you say to yourself: wow, this is absurd and vaguely like a scene from a novel. You pile enough of these singular details together and you have a comic epic.

Georges Perec was one of those writers who made high (and very playful) art out of the intricacies of day-to-day life. His Life: A User’s Manual is one of the great books of the last century. Today I discovered that this month Verso published an English translation of his 1968 novel, The Art Of Asking Your Boss For A Raise.

To honor it, please follow this flow chart on how to actually ask that question.

The Joys Of Freelancin’

Michael Berger — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 22:00:48 +0000

“The great thing about freelance, of course, is the numerous freedoms it embraces, chief among them being the freedom to work in your underwear. This seems to be the one that everyone knows. I was talking on the phone to an uncle of mine who’s in a nursing home, and when I told him I was working freelance, he said, ‘Oh, the underwear people!’”

Essays like this are the reason I put pants on sometimes.

It’s funny too, isn’t it, how “pants” and specifically “wearing pants” is a cultural marker for maturity, autonomy and not being a total, scum-sucking parasite? The moment I’m caught without pants on I’m compromised in countless ways; it becomes open season on what remains standing of my integrity. Unless I’m not wearing pants for ribald reasons. (Which could conceivably expose me to a different kind of devastating humiliation.)

Also: I have severe freelance envy.

Introducing Belgium’s Master Fantasist

Michael Berger — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 20:45:03 +0000

Just like last week, Belgium, for reasons obtuse and inexplicable is on my mind.

I discovered at 50 Watts a guest post by Edward Gauvin about a Belgian writer named Thomas Owen that English-only readers are not going to encounter anytime soon. As a fan of pseudonyms, alter-egos and Pessoa’s heteronyms, I loved this autobiographical description of Owen:

“The story goes like this: there once was a lawyer named Gérald Bertot, who worked all his life in the management of the same flour-milling factory. He held a doctorate in criminology, and a side career in art criticism under the pseudonym Stéphane Rey.

Spared service in World War II, he turned to writing mysteries for money, with the encouragement of Stanislas-André Steeman, a celebrated craftsman of Belgian noir. In Tonight at Eight (1941), he introduced the police commissioner Thomas Owen–a character whose name he liked so much he later took it as his own when he embarked on what he has called his true calling, his career as a fantasist.”

The only book by Owen translated into English can be purchased to the tune of 300 some dollars on the internet. Which, if I had the money, might be worth it.

Introducing Anna Kavan

Michael Berger — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 23:30:42 +0000

There’s an indispensable book called About Writing by Samuel R. Delany. In the first essay he cobbles together an eclectic list of authors that, ideally, the aspiring writer should read. Because Delany has read everything, you can bet his tastes are wide and varied.

And it’s thanks to that book that I discovered Anna Kavan.

Born Helen Ferguson, she began writing while living in Burma in the 1920′s but then after her second marriage collapsed, she had a nervous breakdown and changed her name to Anna Kavan, a character in one of her novels. Thereafter her books took a decidedly surreal turn.

In fact, downright weird and hypnotic and deranged, at least based on the two I just recently read: Ice and Sleep Has His House.

Besides being the author of nearly a dozen bizarre and influential novels and story collections, Kavan was also a lifelong heroin addict, car enthusiast, world traveler, painter and breeder of bulldogs. Her life seemed to be one long fever dream that seeped, by way of her fictional persona, into her unclassifiable books.

Ice has been cited as an influence on everyone from J.G. Ballard to Doris Lessing to Elizabeth Wurtzel.

What’s it about? Well, in an unnamed country an unnamed man is driving around trying to find his true love, a frail albino woman who is perpetually haunted by demons. But the man’s quest is hampered by ice and snow and floods and ruins; in fact, it is verily the end of the world by ice that is deterring him time and again. And also other suitors, including an evil, ice-blue-eyed man named the Warden who is something of a warlord and a sadist.

The unnamed narrator is also obsessed with capturing the strange music of the lemurs. But this music, while it delights him, is a true torment for his albino love. The story flows in meandering, non-linear, dreamlike fashion and it casts a spell on the reader who goes for that kind of intelligent, fractured weirdness.

So on that note, go explore the weird world of Anna Kavan.

Tandem Reading: J.G. Ballard and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder

Michael Berger — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 00:30:39 +0000

Remainder by Tom McCarthy can only lazily be compared to Kafka or Murakami, Ionesco or Calvino. Really, there is an English dryness about it that is more like Graham Greene having a surrealist fit. Or Iris Murdoch as edited by Raymond Carver.

But the most apt comparison might be to J.G. Ballard.

Both Ballard and McCarthy map the maze of post-industrial civilization and isolate moments of transcendence, no matter how irrational such transcendence appears. For Ballard, absurdity begins in the casual, harsh contrasts that the average citizen confronts in his day to day life: a car wreck beneath a billboard advertising dishwasher detergent or a freeway overpass crawling with monkeys and parrots. Burnished landmarks of civilization can, in the wink of an eye, become ruins overrun by society’s castaways.

For McCarthy, a similar absurdity exists in the mind’s propensity to be blinded to matter, to the sheer superfluousness of it. And also to be, as he demonstrates so poetically, blinded by it. The sheer quantity of things makes any distinction between reason and madness perfectly arbitrary. Both authors pose a fundamental question: to paraphrase Krishnamurti, is it irrational to be unadapted to a profoundly irrational society? (“Profoundly sick” was Krishnamurti’s phrase.)

Based on some very fine praise given to it by Zadie Smith, I read Remainder two months ago and can’t stop thinking about it. Even dreaming about it.

Maybe because it’s a book about three things that I especially obsess over: matter, memory and happiness. And how these three “things” manage to exist in a minefield of negation and conflict which, in fact, is life itself. (I’ve never before encountered a book that renders concrete what is fundamentally abstract about our human experience.)

We all obsess about happiness but I do it in ways that I know are whimsical and impractical, just like the novel’s “protagonist.” My self-awareness tells me that my ideas of happiness fly in the face of the order of things. To persevere in my rebellion I have to be monomaniacal. Or make compromises and sacrifices.

Either way I’m constantly negotiating significance on a chaotic, overcrowded landscape littered with what is mostly insignificant.

The way of the former, the monomaniac is the harder path. It is easier to make drastic cuts to your vision than to go with it whole-hog and no holds barred. In this sense, money and resources helps, as well as similarly-obsessed conspirators. Remainder details a well-funded experiment in sustained monomania that any artist would envy.

Remainder is also about the way the mind, operating at a feverish level of awareness, sees in vertiginous detail all the pixels of reality for what they are: pixels, points, dots. No rhyme, no reason. You can connect them any way you choose and they’ll always be ones left over, or burnt out, or inoperable.

But this is also, paradoxically, the way of freedom: the freedom to create meaning out of fragments and work assiduously to make meanings cohere. Thus you have an object and a mission and, in this dance of invented purpose, an onus to find happiness. Viktor Frankl said as much in his masterpiece, Man’s Search For Meaning.

It’s a game that can have exhilarating or dire consequences depending on how you react to it. More often than not, connections will not be made, matter and time and energy will be wasted.

Remainder is an ode to nonchalance in the service of finely-wrought philosophical fiction. It builds like a joke, escalates into a densely-layered fable, and then blossoms into hysterical nightmare. But despite the mayhem it doesn’t lose its composure. Everything makes sense in Remainder, even what is often preposterous. You won’t think the same way again about deep fried liver or Starbucks or windshield wiper fluid or cats on a roof. If you want a physical text that authoritatively invades your subconscious and rewires your most precious preconceptions read Remainder right now.

I would recommend reading it in tandem with J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, an arguably darker, more obsessed dispatch from the far side of post-industrial madness. Or even Ballard’s The Unlimited Dream Company or Crash would be fine accompaniments. With Ballard you are always in the terrain of the infrastructure overcome by its Id; mankind’s attempt to impose order on matter results in an excess that nobody ever suspected.

(Throw in a little Beckett or Lydia Davis afterward and you’ll have a metaphysical soul-wound more gaping than James Woods’ chest in Videodrome.)

The H.D. Book: A Clarion Call for all Artists and Writers

Michael Berger — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 18:00:27 +0000

In school I took a class on female poets and was instantly taken with the poetry of H.D., especially her later work Trilogy, a savage and mythic poem about rediscovering meaning in the ruins of war. One of the founding Imagists, H.D. was Ezra Pound’s muse, D.H. Lawrence’s “platonic lover” and friend and one-time patient of Sigmund Freud.

Her eventful life was mirrored in a poetry that was at once impressionistic, mythic, occult and sensual.

Her poetry spoke to me by its spare form, built on concrete impressions of natural and mythic landscapes, all of it imbued with spiritual concerns. A lapsed Catholic, I have never given up on the idea of some originary spring where all this interestingness wells up from — and that can be dipped into freely given the right conditions. And H.D. spoke to me by marrying the mundane with the transcendent in a way that hinted she knew the way to the source. Whatever that source might be named.

But then I forgot about her for some time, as happens with writers we love.

And then, at the beginning of this year, at The Green Arcade bookstore I remembered her again because another poet I admire, Robert Duncan had apparently written a big book about H.D. which was also a big book about everything. The “final” version of all Duncan’s working notes and chapters was published posthumously in early January and entitled The H.D. Book, a meticulously-edited, painstakingly-assembled text that is one of the “great ‘lost’ texts in the history of American poetry.”

The H.D. Book, at nearly seven hundred pages, began as an homage to one of Duncan’s favorite poets and evolved through the years into an associative, hermetic, and far-reaching atlas of all things poetic. An atlas masquerading as a manifesto. A poetics as a call to arms. An anatomy of the collective artistic psyche of the mid-twentieth century.

Over this weekend I plan on starting it with the same zeal that I began 2666 or The Brothers Karamazov.

The publication of Duncan’s magnum opus has produced ripples of excitement in worlds beyond poetry. For example, Jed Perl, the art critic at The New Republic had this to say:

“Published a half-century after it was written, The H.D. Book reads like a clarion call. At a time such as ours, when artists are either embattled or co-opted, either locked away in some ivory tower of their own invention or overtaken by market forces and political forces, Duncan argues for the most strenuous artistic ambitions as a dynamic democratic possibility.”

Perl’s entire appreciation is worth reading.

As is Erik Davis’ review of The H.D. Book at Bookforum.

Cendrars, The Extraordinary Daydreamer

Michael Berger — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 23:00:31 +0000

Long before David Shields excoriated the strict boundaries between journalism and fiction, espousing, in its place, a loose and open-ended hybrid that is more in keeping with “reality”, a Swiss-born Frenchman with one arm, a Gauloises cigarette forever dangling from his grizzled lips and a swaggering nonchalance befitting only a soldier and a drifter, penned a series of “autobiographies” that blended history, memoir, fiction, poetry, gossip, news clippings and every kind of slipshod arcana into one boisterous melange.

Born Frédéric Sauser, he became the writer known as Blaise Cendrars (a made-up name that can be given to mean “to strike the fire of art”). This name came to him when he was starving in New York on Easter, where he came to write a poem (“Easter In New York”) that is considered to be at the origins of modernist poetics.

Written in the 194o’s, his series of memoir-novels Sky, The Astonished Man, Planus and Lice are unlike anything else you’ll ever read.

Within the rhapsodical pages of this quartet you learn the implausible “facts” of his life: He started as a brilliant delinquent runaway, fleeing to Russia to make his first millions as a jewel merchant. Afterwards he found himself in China working in a boiler room and then fled from there on the Trans-Siberian. Then it was a succession of wars and schemes and voyages to Brazil and collaborations with artists and filmmakers and fellow poets.

At some point he bargained to purchase a giant anteater. At another, he’s living with Gypsies. Later, he predicts the atomic bomb.

For years the English translations of his memoir-novels were out of print and, having little French at my disposal, I hunted high and low to find them. The Astonished Man was the hardest to find, which is funny because only the other day, three copies of it arrived at my bookstore marked down to the inconceivable price of $5.98!

But the best way to get quickly acquainted with Cendrars — the solitary man, the adventurer, bon vivant, writer, soldier and Renaissance man — is to read The Paris Review interview with him, in which he admits that he is not “an extraordinary worker” but an “extraordinary daydreamer.”

He also offers this priceless advice to young people:

“One counsel: when you see an open door, newspaper, radio studio, cinema, bank, anything—don’t enter. By the time you’re thirty you’ll be nuts because you left your laugh at the door. That’s my experience.

Poetry is in the street. It goes arm in arm with laughter. They take each other along for a drink, at the source, in the neighborhood bistros, where the laugh of the people is so flavorsome and the language that flows from their lips so beautiful.”

Long Live Hobos

Michael Berger — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 20:45:40 +0000

In Santa Cruz, I had occasion to meet some hobos. Real or fake hobos: it was hard to make the distinction in a town so enshrined to the misfit ideal.

There was a train bridge near the roller-coaster that you could walk across if you were brave enough. (Yeah, it was the same train bridge that Keifer and his vampire crew jumped from in The Lost Boys.) That bridge was also where the Union Pacific slowed down just enough for your typical Santa Cruz scum-punk-hobo to leap into an open box car and haul off to an unincorporated sugarbeet-scented town up north.

It seems harder and harder these days to live on the margins of society without being downright destitute or immediately imprisoned.

So as a fan of Boxcar Bertha, William T. Vollmann, and the hobo visions of Grace Krilanovich and David Means, I say to you that hobos are not only NOT dead but they still reconvene every year as they have for over a hundred years.

Yes folks: a hobo convention. (Via: Bookforum)

Adapting Blood Meridian?

Michael Berger — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 20:30:41 +0000

I just found out that James Franco is set to direct the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian which is the most violent novel I’ve ever read.

So I pose the obvious questions: how will he pull it off? Who will play The Judge? What will the rating boards think? Just how many scalpings can an audience endure?

Blood Meridian was the first McCarthy book I read — it was assigned in a college course — and by the end of it I was pretty much numb to anything, be them flirtatious glances or front page atrocities. We planned to read it in tandem with a screening of Clint Eastwood’s western High Plains Drifter but, at the last minute, the teacher couldn’t screen it because of the not very ambiguous rape scene in the movie that was presided over by the midget mayor.

Still it was fine for us to read three hundred pages of scalpings and rapings and hangings and beatings and various other American-style barbarisms.

I wish Franco the best of luck but sometimes I wonder if certain books aren’t just film-proof. (Although Passolini did manage to adapt Marquis de Sade’s One Hundred Twenty Days of Sodom and turn it into an allegory about fascism — or so I’ve heard yet concern for my sanity has stalled from seeing it.)

My Year In Books

Michael Berger — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 08:00:49 +0000

As The Millions keeps rolling out their amazing Year In Reading series, I’d thought I’d offer my own attempt at doing justice to the books in my life, and not just the ones I read this year but the ones that keep piling up on my desk, on my floor, in my bed with the furor of a contagion, not to mention the ones I peddle during daylight hours at the bookstore I work at.

My Year In Books 2010 began with a book I never finished: Women And Men by Joseph McElroy, a 1300 page exercise in consciousness overload. Which is to say the book is “about” the molecules of thought that go careening through the wandering minds of several characters in New York City in the 1970′s. I made it halfway through and while I agreed that his sentences were indeed some of the most original I’d ever read I realized at the same time that I was missing out on other books. (And nowhere else will you encounter a forty-page interior monologue performed by a woman while she is masturbating.)

Richard Hughes’ A High Wind In Jamaica was the first great book I read in 2010. Written in 1929, this macabre, oddly-hilarious novel is about what happens when five perfectly heartless children are taken captive by bumbling pirates and what this says (and doesn’t say) about the arbitrariness of civilization. The first part of the book, depicting the ravages inflicted by a tropical storm on a colonial manse in Jamaica is some of the most deranged and beautiful scene-setting I’ve ever read. But then the book just gets better, weirder and lovelier.

I read three novels by Samuel R. Delany this year: Neveryona, The Mad Man, and Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand.

Written in the early 80′s, Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand imagines a galactic civilization of over 5,000 occupied worlds where, in order to perform space travel in anything like a diplomatic fashion, it is necessary to plug into a database called General Information to learn about different cultures and customs. Sound familiar?

On a different note, The Mad Man is the most graphically explicit six hundred pages of man-on-man loving I’ve ever encountered — while also being a mystery, a romance and a philosophical thriller. The book is liberating in ways few others are; it dares to imagine what love can be like when all boundaries of tact, hygiene, class and moral certitude have been breached. Neveryona is, among other things, about a 9 year old girl-adventurer who learns about the origins of civilization from an escaped slave.

The best non-fiction book I read this year was The Way Of The World by Nicolas Bouvier, a travelogue illustrated with pen and ink drawings and published by NYRB Classics. In 1953, the twenty-four-year old Bouvier and his pal Thierry set out from Geneva to the Khyber Pass in their rattling little Fiat without any money or plans. And so began, improbably enough nearly a year’s worth of working and traveling in countries that few Westerners had been in, like the former Yugoslavia, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and finally Pakistan.

Bouvier’s impressions are the most touching when he talks about the kind, gregarious and wise people he meets along the way, especially in the Muslim countries where he spent most of his time. There are unbelievable scenes of magic and tenderness on every page. Nothing I’ve ever read has so desperately seeded the desire to travel — and especially to places I know close to nothing about.

I read lots of books about love this year: The End Of The Affair by Graham Greene, Farewell My Lovely by Raymond Chandler, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Robinson’s novel is gorgeous but I can’t recommend reading it in the heart of winter, in a cold, loveless room, beset upon by tooth aches and asthma, codeine and hot toddies your only friends. I exaggerate! (But not by much.)

But the best book I read about love was Eros: The Bittersweet by Anne Carson. Nobody will make you wish you had studied ancient Greek more than Carson. You will also never think about ice in quite the same way again. Or apples. Or puns.

It was also a year of “dipping” into books but not necessarily finishing them: Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas, The Ticking Is The Bomb by Nick Flynn, The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Role Models by John Waters, poetry by Rilke, H.D., Hart Crane. Which means it was also the year I started reading poetry again. Which made me realize that the reason I read anything at all is for the lines, which is to say: the language.

A Sport And A Pastime by James Salter was scarring. And yes the sex, as people have pointed out was painted maturely and exquisitely. And devastatingly. The narrative trick of observing the central love affair by a distant third party was fascinating. It made the whole thing read like someone else’s dream that you could easily pass off as your own. (Just such a dream as the one he dissects in blistering detail had been heavy on my mind at the time.)

I might have mentioned before how much I loved The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich. It gave me an idea for a novel, a sort of Neo-Victorian erotic werewolf noir. . . .

As for books that came out this year: The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell is incredible, if only for the deft and nimble way he mixes suspense, action, romance and lyricism into highly unconventional historical fiction. (It’s refreshing to see real adventure in fiction instead of just tedious autopsies of suburban/middle class life.)

Finally, the very best novel I read this year is sadly out-of-print: On Wings Of Song by Thomas M. Disch. Published the year of my birth (1979), this is Swiftian-Orwellian science fiction at its most searing and lyrical. It’s the future: Iowa is a police state where the farmers are the aristocracy. If you can sing passionately enough, it is possible to leave your body and fly. (Sounds cheesy? Well, it’s not. Really. I promise.)

But it’s illegal to fly! (At least in the farm belt.)

So our hero, after a year of eating Big Macs in a prison camp, must escape back East with his bride. But while she succeeds in the transport of song, he fails to fly and must maintain her living corpse for fifteen years by becoming a concubine for a castrated opera singer, dyeing his skin black and living out his dream as a pop-minstrel hero in a broken-down metropolis! (America has never seemed so much like itself than in this book.)

Ultimately, patriotism saves the day, love is vanquished and the world is restored to its fundamental blandness.

On that hopeful note, I must end this over-long ramble. And wish you a wonderful New Year!

The Rumpus.net » Michael Berger

Perec On Asking For A Raise

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Tandem Reading: J.G. Ballard and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder

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