Attention Span 2010 – Tim Conley

Javier Marías, trans. Margaret Jull Costa | Your Face Tomorrow, Volume Three: Poison, Shadow and Farewell | New Directions | 2009

If you’ve read the first two, you’ve read the third; if you’ve not read any, what are you thinking?

Tom McCarthy | Remainder | Alma | 2006

Francis Carco, trans. Gilbert Alter-Gilbert | Streetcorners: Prose Poems of the Demi-Monde | Green Integer | 2004

Irregular moments of flânerie, economically and sharply framed. “It seemed to me as if a new sensibility had penetrated me.”

Lara Glenum | Maximum Gaga | Action | 2009

You know that party you went to, thinking you knew someone there, but it turned out you didn’t know anyone at all and you couldn’t believe what people were saying and wearing? And you were a little scared, sometimes more than a little, and long afterwards you look back on that party as perhaps one of the best parties you ever went to. This book is that party.

Vanessa Place | La Medusa | FC2 | 2008

Normally my interest dampens at the scent of a rewriting of Ulysses, and Place’s novel fits the bill, though with a very American apocalyptic sensibility and conclusion. But it’s the bubbling springs of language that make this book special: this novel is alive in a way that so many are not.

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, trans. Joanne Turnbull | Memories of the Future | NYRB Classics | 2009

Svetlana Boym | The Future of Nostalgia | Basic | 2002

A rich investigation of cultural displacement, a redefining of “nostalgia.” Those Moscow girls make me sing and shout.

Richard Overy | The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars | Allen Lane | 2009

Although deserving of a quibble or two, this history of British anti-war sentiment and activism offers a nice counterpoint to the usual Churchillian bluster.

More Tim Conley here. His Attention Span for 2009, 2008. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Peter Quartermain

Victor Coleman | Icon Tact: Poems 1984-2001 | Book Thug | 2006

Sardonic and sometimes savagely funny, other times just plain pissed-off; now and again tender, or screwball. Coleman, who reads widely, should be better known and warrants wide readership—and if the last three words make me sound like Elmer Fudd, well, Coleman would enjoy that.

George Deem | Let George Do It | Post-Apollo | 2009

Paintings and drawings; prose and verse. George Deem, who died in 2008, was a language artist, as well as a painter. As Ulla Dydo says in her introduction, this book “is not about painting, it is about writing.” A modest treasure. I’ve turned to it more than once, since I got it a few months back.

Lorne Dufour | Jacob’s Prayer | Caitlin | 2009

Simple prose is hard to write, and even harder to sustain. Dufour does it brilliantly, evoking the hardships of life in a British Columbia aboriginal village where he was schoolteacher, and the people who saved his life during and after a freak storm on hallowe’en in 1975. Sheer unpretentious good writing; generous, warm, loving—and political as Dickens.

George Economou | Ananios of Kleitor: Poems & Fragments and Their Reception from Antiquity to the Present | Shearsman | 2009

A wonderful romp through the petty, predatory and even campy squabbles and pedantry of certain scholars of Ancient Greek texts, at the same time funny and informative. Economou has a terrific parodic ear for the grave tones of scholarship, and an equally terrific poetic ear for the real delights of ancient Greek lyric. A tour de force.

Susan Holbrook and Thomas Dilworth, ed. | The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: Composition as Conversation | Oxford | 2010

Long needed, superbly edited, indispensible.

Kevin Killian and David Brazil, ed. | The Kenning Anthology of Poet’s Theatre1945-1985 | 2010

Generous (so many plays! so many really good ones!). Eye-opening. Inspiring. Useful. A great read. Let’s hope for a follow-up volume.

Ammiel Alcalay, general editor | Lost And Found: The CUNY Poetics Documentary Initiative Series I | CUNY | 2009

Five issues, each with a different editor, issued in seven fascicles: selected correspondence of Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn; selected correspondence of Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara; Muriel Rukeyser on Darwin; selections from Philip Whalen’s Journals; Robert Creeley and Daphne Marlatt at the Vancouver Poetry Conference 1963. Series II, promised for Fall 2010, will include Muriel Rukeyser, Jack Spicer, and others. Need I say more?

Gérard de Nerval, trans. Richard Sieburth | The Salt Smugglers: History of the Abbé de Bucquoy | Archipelago | 2009

Nerval’s cheeky and indeed risky Tristram-Shandyish response to the crazy law in the Second French Republic (July 1850) which through exorbitant stamp-tax made impossible the publication of fiction in newspapers. Nerval’s quest, serialized in Le National, for the memoir of the man who actually escaped from the Bastille, which he once glimpsed on a bookstall but did not buy, has its occasional longueurs, but the whole thing is a nicely comic demolition of easy distinctions between fact and fiction. Not previously published in English, in excellent translation, with valuable introduction and relevant annotations.

Jacques Roubaud, trans. Jeff Fort | The Loop | Dalkey Archive | 2009

The second installment of The Great Fire of London, Roubaud’s highly resourceful and deeply moving Oulipean struggle with memory and loss; to read this is to skirt terrible despair, yet strangely enough to come out of it refreshed, strengthened.

José Saramago, trans. Margaret Jull Costa | Death With Interruptions | Houghton Mifflin | 2009

“The following day no one died” opens this story in which Death takes a vacation. Saramago’s gift here is a clear-sighted logic which exposes and ridicules (with hilarious ingenuity) the profound and absurd ineptitude of all expediency. The novel turns out to be a passionate defence and celebration of love and compassion—but to say that is to sound clichetic. If there is a cliché in the book, then it’s a fresh one.

More Peter Quartermain here. His Attention Span for 2008, 2006. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Meredith Quartermain

Thomas Bernhard, trans. Richard and Clara Winston | Gargoyles | Vintage | 2006

A poem/novel that takes it all in: man & nature; man & industry; man & art—generations of the human animal.

Thomas Bernhard, trans. Ewald Osers | Old Masters: a Comedy | Quartet | 1989

This droll piece consists of the narrator’s thoughts as he stands in a particular room in a gallery waiting for his friend, a distinguished music critic, who on a daily basis, likes to come to this room to contemplate the image of a white-bearded old man (like himself it would seem). The museum attendant is the only other character.

Lisa Roberston | R’s Boat | California | 2010

Rousseau’s boat has extended itself, with Robertson’s customary wit and inventiveness, which inevitably turns comfortable subjectivity on its head.

Robert Walser, trans. Susan Bernovsky | The Tanners | New Directions | 2009

An early, autobiographical novel, but then all of his work is autobiographical. Life’s journeys torqued by a deeply feeling and crazily, stubbornly, beautifully resistant mind.

Robert Walser, trans. Susan Bernovsky | Microscripts | New Directions | 2010

At last the microscripted manuscripts (lengthy stories drafted entirely on one side of a post card) are available in English. Even crazier, more deeply feeling, more stubbornly beautifully resistant. We also learn much from the accompanying introduction, such as that Walser wrote out his novels non-stop, without correction, in a matter of six weeks, simply for the pleasure of fine handwriting.

Javier Marías, trans. Margaret Jull Costa | All Souls | HarperCollins | 1992

Set in Oxford and concerning the sojourn of a Marías-like Spanish professor, the tale spins around translation, both linguistic and cultural. His send-up of dining at high table is side-splitting.

Javier Marías, trans. Esther Allen | The Dark Back of Time | New Directions | 2001

In this novel Marías amuses himself by examining the relation between “real” characters and the ones in his novel All Souls. Very witty, post-modern foldings and refoldings.

Javier Marías, trans. Esther Allen | Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico | New Directions Pearl | 2010

Impersonation takes on a whole new meaning in this Elvis encounter.

Javier Marías, trans. Margaret Jull Costa | Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear | New Directions | 2005

Obviously I’m hooked on Marías. This one examines othering—when do we see the other as evil—when do we cross that line?

Kate Eichorn & Heather Milne, eds. | Prismatic Publics | Coach House | 2009

Featuring interviews and work by Nicole Brossard, Margaret Christakos, Susan Holbrook, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Karen Mac Cormack, Daphne Marlatt, Erín Moure, M. NourbeSe Philip, Sina Queyras, Lisa Robertson, Gail Scott, Nathalie Stephens, Catriona Strang, Rita Wong, Rachel Zolf. In other words, a ground-breaking collection in Canadian letters.

Sina Queryas | Expressway | Coach House | 2009

I read Queryas for her panache, her in-your-faceness, her tightly woven structures.

More Meredith Quartermain here. Quartermain’s Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004. Back to directory.