Meanders: Zarko Radakovic, Julije Knifer, Storytelling

3:23 a.m. For sleepless hours the title line from Richard Thompson's "From Galway to Graceland" has been flickering in my mind, catching like a torn toenail on the loose fabric of family worries and job worries and restless turning and a recurring need to pee. I pull out Zarko's description of his trip from Germany through Zagreb to Pristina on the occasion of Slobodan Milosevic's catastrophic speech at the field of blackbirds, Kosovo polje, read his careful cadences, follow his restless mind, enter his world just as he finds an old friend:

. . . we walked listlessly down Amruš street, whose meandering course took us unfailingly to the house number thirteen.

At Julije Knifer’s, the atmosphere was “cozy.” The dog gnawed at one of my shoes. Nada was coating eggplants with bread crumbs. Ana was unaffected and sweet. Knifer, as always in similar situations, held his joined hands at the nape of his neck. Those were moments of pure feeling, of clear looks and inner peace. Even the voice of Slobodan Miloševic on television was slightly more restrained.

Zarko once took me to visit Knifer in his apartment in Paris. Paintings of meanders everywhere. And in the night I ease my mind into slow meanders, let the ticking clock move me along the currents of black paint on white, of simple form.

ads without products reads peter handke

In spending the morning folding shirts, rolling up socks, cutting my nails, bathing and showering, sipping tea from time to time on the balcony, I succeeded for the first time in conceiving of such activity as a possible way of life (for a while)

Must admit that reading Handke’s is interfering with my getting back to blogging. It feels now that the blog should be something like this, but on the other hand, what an impossible act of solipsism that would be.

My friend Michael Roloff pointed out this blog, being written by a professor of literature in London. He has discovered, or is rediscovering, Peter Handke's aphoristic works, including "The Weight of the World." The first quote above is from Handke, the second from the blogger.

The blogger relates such passages to Joyce's epiphanies, which makes good sense to me.

And finally, the whole set of thoughts leads to questions about a writer's notebook and his or her writing. Teaching a class called WANDERLUST, thinking about travelers who write, I find my mind swinging back and forth between notebook and text, between note and sentence, between observation and explanation.

[HERE a link to the blog]

Solstice Sunset vs the End of January

Dragan Aleksic's novel "Chiaroscuro" and My Home Town

I have just read Dragan Aleksic's novel "Chiaroscuro" in English translation (originally published in Belgrade). In an earlier post, I quoted a piece of a poem of his printed in a book of German translations of Serbian writers, edited by my friend Zarko Radakovic.

Here the image on the cover of the novel:

And here the passage, near the end of the novel, that has my mind reeling:

Maybe it told him: ‘There, your town is dead, you’ve heard the music, and now you can leave peacefully, with calm in your heart. Everything has died, the bitterness has run dry, and you have nothing to do with it any more, you can go, go.’

The music did not stop, the record played again and again; the invisible orchestras were wondered along the streets and hooted their sorrowful tones towards the sky.

Suddenly Emil Farnik felt a need to void his bowels. He smiled a sour smile and thought that maybe it was another message from his destiny. He turned and walked two or three steps, thinking that perhaps he would not need to do it. But he had to: the urge was getting stronger and stronger.

He thought: ‘Why don’t I vomit, since I am sick of everything, since that is why I came here?’

He pulled his trousers down and his underpants; he turned his back to the streets, churches, houses, trees to everything that was down there. He turned his back to his twenty nine years.

While squatting and waiting to be relieved, Emil Farnik felt tears in his eyes.

‘I shit on you, my home town,’ he said aloud and tearfully.

The music stopped.

On Friday, I presented a short paper at the UVU conference honoring Martin Luther King. It was a series of memories about my own home town, Farmington, New Mexico, a town that played a large role in shaping who I am. Unfortunately, I pointed out in my paper, part of who I am is a racist.

Let me quote a piece of my history, a part that makes me, like the character in Aleksic's novel, need to (not want to) shit, tearfully, on my home town, and thus on myself:

15 October 1998, Provo

A couple of days ago, a Wyoming student named Matthew Shepard was beaten and left to die in Laramie. One of the killers was raised as a Mormon. Shepard was gay.

Laramie has always reminded me of Farmington.

21 October 1998, Provo

Laramie residents deny that their town is a homophobic place. We live and let live here, they keep saying, a western mantra that rings true until you bring homosexuals into the equation.

Or Indians.

In 1974, thousands of Navajo marchers packed Farmington streets after high-school boys tortured and killed three Navajo men. I ask Mom about that tense summer.

I didn’t understand it, she says. We had never had any trouble with the Indians before.

Aside from the nervous night I spent on the Reservation guarding the Cactus Drilling Company equipment, I have little memory of what happened.

Like the other good citizens of Farmington, you simply went to work? No impulse to march with the Navajos? No desire to end the violence and discrimination?

None whatsoever. Not much curiosity beyond a quick read of the newspaper.

19 November 1998, Provo

I’ve been trying to cut through my culturally induced amnesia. Rodney Barker’s book about the murders and civil unrest, The Broken Circle, has been enlightening. Most surprising has been a 1975 Civil Rights Commission assessment of the events called “The Farmington Report.”

Early in report, the authors quote Philip Reno’s essay in The Nation, August 31, 1974 to the effect that “various services have bound Indians and border towns together in the same ‘relentless reciprocity’ that Jean Paul Sartre saw binding colonized to colonizer in Africa.”

Sartre and Farmington in the same essay!

Reno argues that “now the old reciprocity, which was based on inequality and dependency, is breaking down and a new reciprocity, based on more equal rights and power, must be established.”

He’s right about the need, naïve about the future.

22 November 1998, Provo

Marlo Webb was Mayor of Farmington in 1974, just a few months in office when the marches began. Mayor Webb did what he could to manage the situation. He held meetings with the protestors. He tried to explain that the three boys didn’t represent the rest of Farmington’s Anglo population. Their families had moved in from elsewhere and didn’t have a history with Navajos. The boys were unfortunate aberrations. Their abbreviated sentences to juvenal reform school were not evidence of racism, but products of technicalities of the law.

Mayor Webb could not understand why the Navajos were so riled up. To understand, he would have had to oppose the society he represented, the culture that had made him. That made me.

When “The Farmington Report” finally appeared, concluding that investigators had found ample evidence of racism, discrimination, and brutality against Navajos, Mayor Webb’s frustration was manifest:

This is a typical example of how the ever-growing cancer of bureaucracy is dominating and directing our country and the lives of its citizens. . . . This commission would appear to want to drag each of us down to the level of the lowest common denominator and obviously is advancing the cause of socialism in this country. They advocate that government fill all of the needs of the individual rather than achievement through individual effort. This would be impossible to finance and completely contrary to the American way of life, and the greatness achieved through the free enterprise system and self-achievement of the individual.

Sterling Black, chairman of the Advisory Committee, responded with frustrations of his own:

There appears to be little awareness on the part of the general population or elected public officials of the complex social and economic problems. . . . Navajos are aware of the indignities and injustices, and want something done to better the situation. . . . [Unfortunately, they hear only that] there are no problems existing, people in this town get along very well with each other, there are no indignities, there are no injustices, and there is nothing to be done to remedy these complaints.

Winter Light, Starting with the Solstice Sunset

And ending with a sunset a week later, already creeping north.

Life is Tenuous

Several weeks premature, I was, nine days later, still only 5 lb 1/2 oz, as my young mother's careful accounting showed. Then there was a jump of 1 1/2 oz, and by the 31st I was approaching 6 pounds.

I just found this scrap of almost translucent paper, folded and faded, proof of the tenuousness of early life, and proof that however complicated life grows, including relationships with parents and children, there's a physical, historical family base that undergirds and/or undermines it all.

Sixty years later, I'm trying to stay under 200 pounds, happy with each oz that slips away, still relying on family, still struggling with family, still grateful for family.

Serbo-Croat Novelist Dies

Milorad Pavic, Unorthodox Novelist, Dies at 80

By MARGALIT FOX

Published: December 19, 2009

Milorad Pavic, an internationally prominent Serbian writer whose novels upended the traditional relationship between reader and text, taking the form of dictionaries, crossword puzzles and much else, died on Nov. 30 in Belgrade. He was 80.

Ivo Eterovic/Alfred A. Knopf

Milorad Pavic

Mr. Pavic’s narratives do away with the forced-march, page-after-page strategy to which most readers are accustomed. They are profuse with self-reference, unreliable narration, authorial asides and “Rashomon”-like shifts in point of view. Stories nest within stories like the pieces of a Russian doll.

.................

It's surprising, and always a bit odd, where the years take you. A sabbatical year to work on a book about Freemasonry and the German Novel led me to the German university town of Tübingen, where I met Zarko Radakovic, who became a novelist and translator. The friendship blossomed into joint projects and finally into a couple of books. I have even taught interdisciplinary classes on the crisis in the former Yugoslavia, drawing on things I learned from Zarko and experienced during our travels.

Zarko's work is not adequately described as "postmodern," but it shares some of the traits of recent philosophical movements, including a distrust of straightforward narrative. And now I read that Zarko's fellow countryman Milorad Pavic has died, a novelist who also experimented with literary form.

Just this summer, accompanying Lyn to her family gathering in Breckenridge, Colorado, I found a used-book store and bought a copy of Pavic's "Dictionary of the Khazars: A lexicon novel." I already had a copy of the novel, translated by Christina Pribicevic-Zoric, but it was the "male" version of the novel. This one was the female version.

A couple of months after buying the book, I wrote to Ms. Pribicevic-Zoric and asked if she would translate Zarko's half of our book "Vampires / A Reasonable Dictionary." She declined, but suggested Alice Copple-Tosic, who has now translated the "Vampires" half of our book into English.

And now Milorad Pavic has died. And I've got a manuscript full of diversions, feints, questions, and a basic anti-narrativity for which I'm dying to find a publisher. We'll die ourselves, soon enough. Our words, our sentences, our collaborations ought to find a more permanent place between book covers.

Zarko's opening, along with mine:

SUMMARY

One summer at the end of the 20^th century, a man in his forties accompanied by a ten-year younger female traveling companion spends a short vacation in the south of a neighboring country. They sleep in a different place every night. They walk through the landscape, wander through city streets, leisurely sit in the gardens of empty houses. They have long meals in half-empty restaurants… One night in a hotel on the seashore, after a late television broadcast of the film Fog, the man calls a friend in his homeland. During the brief conversation, he finds out that seven years after their divorce, his ex-wife has been put into a mental institution…During the night the man talks to his mother on the phone and finds out that another friend has tried to commit suicide and is currently “in a serious state,” “lying” “in a hospital”…On the way home the man runs over a cat and then loses control of the car. When it happens he is listening to Bill Frisell on the radio…Once he gets home the man experiences numerous changes… He “hooks up” with a much younger woman who tries to bite his neck during sex, after which he turns rough…He attends the meetings of a “secret organization”…He does not sleep at night…Walking through town he breaks the window of an apartment where the light is turned on… He decides to change his place of residence... One night he goes to the movies and sees Vampires. It strikes him that this is one of the most important events in his life, which is already quite shaken up. That same evening he makes an important acquaintance; there are exciting adventures; long hours of talking, arguing and fistfights…Absorbed in images from daydreams… Battling with insects… Attacking a gas station … Nocturnal noises in the hotel… Orgies…Pallor… Bleeding gums…The man calls his mother and tells her he is going back to his hometown… After a raid in a restaurant in the center of town, he injects himself with a medicinal serum… He spends some time in a village where ­­­­a pig is slaughtered at a celebration, he comes up against considerable changes… He meets enemies… He meets friends… Long conversations… A battle for details.

................ and mine:

Let this story begin, perhaps, in 1998 in Belgrade among the well-kept ruins of the Kalemegdan fortress that overlooks the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers. A barrel-chested man walks along a path with his two little girls. They lag behind. He shouts at them. They catch up. They turn aside to play among wildflowers. He threatens them. The girls join him momentarily, then disappear among the tall flowers. He roars a command. They return. The youngest girl begins to cry. The older girl takes her hand. The big man steps off the path and rips a bunch of wildflowers from the high grass. He hands them to the crying girl. She stops crying. He shouts again. They walk away, all three of them, holding mismatched hands.

Or let the story begin just after the turn of the century with the younger brother of my friend Christian Gellinek’s grandfather. Otto Gellinek was an Austrian officer, Christian says, a ladies man -- he died of syphilis – and a fencing instructor who liked to show off by walking on his hands. In 1907, disguised as a painter, Gellinek traveled in Bosnia-Herzegovina to sketch fortifications and make notes for a possible war. In 1908, despite Gellinek’s report arguing against a formal annexation, the Austrians invaded the country. Catholic Croats welcomed the invaders, but Muslims and Orthodox Serbs opposed them bitterly. The battle lasted three months and cost the Austrian Army 5,198 casualties. More importantly, it aroused virulent anti-Austrian sentiment among Serbs, manifest most pointedly in the person of the 19-year-old nationalist who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo to set off the First World War.

Translating Peter Handke’s A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia from German into English, I called my old friend and long-time collaborator Žarko Radaković to ask about the phrase: “Do we need a new Gavrilo Princip?”

What kind of principle is this? I asked. Is it a term from business management?

Gavrilo Princip? Žarko laughed. He was the young assassin.

It’s not easy to begin a new story about the old land of the southern Slavs (Yugo = south). After all, what do I know? A foreigner in the country for a few days. A self-styled translator with no command of this language. A potential verbal assassin.

. . . in Shefko’s translation the old man’s words seemed suspicious, smelled of politics and seditious intent. . . . Shefko, who was obviously putting the worst possible construction on the old man’s exalted phrases and who loved to stick his nose into everything and carry tales even when there was nothing in them, and was ever ready to give or to confirm an evil report. (Ivo Andrić, The Bridge Over the Drina)

Caveat lector.

..............

someone ought to want to read this book; and if that's true, someone ought to publish it.