With the new year fast approaching, I now have a pretty good excuse to annihilate my liver tonight. In fact, I’ve gathered all the materials for a night of beer barrels and a painful beginning to 2007, with a twelve-pack of Heineken, two liter bottles of schnapps—cinnamon and root beer, respectively—and a bottle of wine that will likely go untouched by my buddies and I. And I’ll keep Ernest Hemingway’s wise words in mind: “Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That’ll teach you to keep your mouth shut.”

As per usual, we have something bookish to talk about: the Guardian and the Melbourne Age are looking forward to 2007, with both of them mentioning forthcoming titles by Norman Mailer, Michael Ondaatje, Ian McEwan, and Khaled Hosseini. (Out of those four authors, I’m only interested in Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest.) But Justin Cartwright’s The Song Before It Is Sung, about a 1944 attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler, sounds interesting, despite its awful title. Michael Chabon gets marks for having one of the strangest plots I’ve heard about in a while: The Yiddish Policeman’s Union “proposes a world in which Alaska rather than Israel becomes the Jewish homeland in the 1940s.” There are also a few comebacks to look forward to: Toni Morrison returns with Mercy and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Children of Hurin will finally be published. And on a bittersweet note, Philip Roth will publish his final Nathan Zuckerman novel, Exit Ghost, in October, which is, fittingly, “a wintry end to what looks to be a particularly fertile year for fiction.”

I’ll never understand spiritualism or parapsychology, but I thought this article, about a trip to the Brontë parsonage, was an interesting read, with its spooky, Gothic atmosphere and the sad history behind the house and its inhabitants.

Inside the parsonage, silent aside from our whispers and the chiming of the Reverend Brontë’s grandfather clock, it occurs to me that simply being allowed to wander here, without the usual crowds, is an entry into the unknown. We start in the dining room, to the left of the hall, where Charlotte gathered with her sisters in order to talk and write in the evenings, and where she worked, alone, in the wake of their deaths. Emily died of tuberculosis in December 1848, three months after Branwell; the same disease was also to claim Anne the following May. Charlotte, suffering terribly, wrote in a letter on Christmas Day, just after Emily’s death, “Emily is nowhere here now—her wasted mortal remains are taken out of the house; we have laid her cherished head under the church-aisle beside my mother’s, my two sisters’, dead long ago, and my poor, hapless brother’s … So I will not ask why Emily was torn from us … rooted up in the prime of her own days, in the promise of her powers … like a tree in full bearing—struck at the root …”

[...]

Upstairs, we visit the servants’ room (“Very cozy,” says Coral), and then go into Charlotte’s bedroom, where she slept in her mother’s deathbed, and where she was also to die. Suddenly, Coral’s eyes fill with tears. “There’s an enormous amount of grief in this room,” she says.

“I’m really surprised at how intensely you can feel the unhappiness in here,” adds Henri. “I didn’t expect this—I expected to sense all the tourists that have passed through this room, but instead you get this feeling of someone hanging on to her sanity by the skin of her teeth. And yet she was able to go on writing—she was so stalwart.” These are, as Henri herself admits, the kind of observations that anyone might make—it doesn’t take a spiritual medium to know that Charlotte Brontë was hit hard by bereavement—but, nevertheless, there is something about these unusual circumstances that allows one to look at the Brontës’ clothes and jewelry preserved in this room, and see them as if for the first time; the property not of fictional heroines, but of sisters who laughed and cried real tears.

Esquire’s feature on Norman Mailer is infuriatingly, mind-numbingly dull—now I remember why I stopped reading Esquire—but I found a few choice bits here and there, mostly pertaining to his newest novel The Castle in the Forest.

What it means, in the short term, is that he has a novel coming out. This might not sound like a big deal, given his productivity—he’s put his name to forty-five books, fiction and nonfiction—until you start to think of the other writers who went to war and who started writing novels when Mailer was publishing his first, the hugely successful The Naked and the Dead. I was going to say they’re either dead or silent, but really, now that William Styron is gone, they’re just dead—except for maybe Vonnegut. And here comes Mailer, not just writing a novel but writing something large and ambitious … no, writing something large and ambitious about Hitler … no, writing something large and ambitious about Hitler, narrated by the Devil.

[...]

You can look at just about any of his books and you will find him going on about a lot of the same things—masturbation, cancer, orgasm, psychopathology, and the ongoing struggle between the Devil and God—and The Castle in the Forest brings those ideas to a kind of logical conclusion. And the logical conclusion is Hitler. The Castle in the Forest is not just about Hitler; it’s about Hitler’s family and the forces that shaped Hitler into an artist of annihilation. But here’s the thing: in Mailer’s book about Hitler, the forces that shape Hitler are almost entirely Mailer’s obsessions. Mailer’s Hitler is a product of Mailer’s obsessions. Basically, the argument that Mailer makes is that Hitler is bad because he was created that way—because he is, as Mailer told me, “the second-most-quintessential birth in all of Christendom” and “the Devil’s answer to Jesus.”

I’m already yawning because Tom Junod somehow manages to make Norman Mailer look like the most boring author in the world, but how the hell is Adolf Hitler a “logical conclusion” to many of Mailer’s themes? Cancer, orgasm, and masturbation logically lead to Hitler? I don’t know whether to laugh at this guy or pin the blame on the magazine’s seemingly nonexistent editors. One thing’s sure: I can’t help but wonder what kind of creepy shit is hiding in Junod’s porn collection.

I looked and looked, but it’s been a slow day for bookish links. Then came a half-assed attempt at something resembling an essay, but I realized I was more pissed-off than inspired. I haven’t even felt like reading these last few days; I dip into Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice at a rate of about ten pages a day—twenty if I’m lucky. My conclusion: the holidays are emphatically not conducive to reading or blogging. Take a look downstairs; I’m still choking on holiday cheer. And that really fucks with my reading habits, which, in turn, makes me cranky. It’s like denying a smoker cigarettes for a week.

But Plato always gives me something to ruminate over. The Republic is nice, though I don’t entirely agree with it. And while I’ve always thought that the Apology would be a pretty good basis for a courtroom drama, my favorite dialogue is the Symposium. Really, you won’t find better relationship advice anywhere else.

A base man is that common lover who loves the body rather than the soul; for he is not lasting since he loves a thing not lasting. For as soon as the flower of the body fades, which is what he loved, “He takes to the wing and away he flies,” and violates any number of vows and promises; but the lover of good character remains faithful throughout life, since he has been fused with a lasting thing.

Well, now you know why he’s just not that into you.

Time Out New York reports that it’s the small presses keeping translated literature alive.

If you’re the sort of person who keeps track, you’ll know that big American book companies still think that publishing literature in translation can be a worthwhile enterprise. HarperCollins recently dropped a reported cool million-plus on the English rights for Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), the American-born Jonathan Littell’s French doorstop told from the point of view of a loyal SS officer. Knopf puts out worthy novels by Japan’s Haruki Murakami, French provocateur Michel Houellebecq and Holocaust victim Irène Némirovsky. Last fall, FSG released one of the best translations of the year, Grégoire Bouillier’s The Mystery Guest, and next April it will publish the first English edition of The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, a Chilean-born novelist whose stateside reputation has been on the rise, thanks to New Directions press.

There’s more, but people who really keep track argue that America’s literature-in-translation output remains dismally low. In 2002, the National Endowment for the Arts determined that a mere three percent of books published in the U.S. were translated from another language.

[...]

But even if the above presses are reaching an audience, the question remains: how many readers, who may already have piles of important but unread books on their nightstands, are looking to add to their to-do lists? FSG editor Lorin Stein suggests that a little can go a long way. He has worked on books by Americans (Lydia Davis, Sam Lipsyte) and international authors (Bouillier and Bolaño), and for him, it’s reading, not translation, that publishers should focus on. “This vague idea that reading things in translation is like eating your vegetables—it’s good for you—is terrible,” he says. “It makes much more sense to talk about individual writers you love than to say, ‘You should go out and buy books by Chileans or Germans.’”

Part of the “problem,” as it were, with translations is that they don’t age well. It seems that every generation is given new translations of works by literary giants like Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alexandre Dumas, and Dante. Then, of course, there’s the question of the translator’s aesthetic and interpretation—the substance of a translated work may be present, but translations live or die based on how the work is presented. But I wonder how much consideration translators give to the author’s original intent, as well as to the literary and cultural conventions of the era during which a book was written.

Despite receiving two interesting books for Christmas—John Darnton’s The Darwin Conspiracy and Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father—yesterday turned out to be rather depressing: I didn’t call my mom to wish her a merry Christmas. I hadn’t planned on being at my friend’s parents’ house past five or six, so when I finally crawled through the front door at ten at night, I was already wracked with guilt. Mom’s pretty understanding—she lives on the east coast, putting her two hours ahead of me—but that doesn’t really make me feel any better.

The books I received are small consolation and though I’m pretty close to my friend’s family, I was a bit surprised that they picked books that pertain to my interests. I’ve always had a certain fascination with Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species—I imagine my friend mentioned how much I talk to him about the theory of evolution—so The Darwin Conspiracy was a welcome surprise. And considering Barack Obama’s possible (certain?) presidential candidacy, his memoir is definitely something I should take advantage of, if only because (I hope) it’ll give me more insight into one of the country’s most popular politicians. It’s not every day—or any day, for that matter—that we’re offered a memoir that was written ten years before the author considered running for Senate and the presidency.

Palace of St. Nicholas
In the Moon
Christmas Morning

My Dear Susy Clemens:

I have received and read all the letters which you and your little sister have written me by the hand of your mother and your nurses; I have also read those which you little people have written me with your own hands—for although you did not use any characters that are in grown peoples’ alphabet, you used the characters that all children in all lands on earth and in the twinkling stars use; and as all my subjects in the moon are children and use no character but that, you will easily understand that I can read your and your baby sister’s jagged and fantastic marks without any trouble at all. But I had trouble with those letters which you dictated through your mother and the nurses, for I am a foreigner and cannot read English writing well. You will find that I made no mistakes about the things which you and the baby ordered in your own letters—I went down your chimney at midnight when you were asleep and delivered them all myself—and kissed both of you, too, because you are good children, well-trained, nice mannered, and about the most obedient little people I ever saw. But in the letter which you dictated there were some words which I could not make out for certain, and one or two small orders which I could not fill because we ran out of stock. Our last lot of kitchen furniture for dolls has just gone to a very poor little child in the North Star away up, in the cold country above the Big Dipper. Your mama can show you that star and you will say: “Little Snow Flake” (for that is the child’s name), “I’m glad you got that furniture, for you need it more than I.” That is, you must write that, with your own hand, and Snow Flake will write you an answer. If you only spoke it she wouldn’t hear you. Make your letter light and thin, for the distance is great and the postage very heavy.

There was a word or two in your mama’s letter which I couldn’t be certain of. I took it to be “a trunk full of doll’s clothes.” Is that it? I will call at your kitchen door about nine o’clock this morning to inquire. But I must not see anybody and I must not speak to anybody but you. When the kitchen doorbell rings, George must be blindfolded and sent to open the door. Then he must go back to the dining room or the china closet and take the cook with him. You must tell George he must walk on tiptoe and not speak—otherwise he will die someday. Then you must go up to the nursery and stand on a chair or the nurse’s bed and put your ear to the speaking tube that leads down to the kitchen and when I whistle through it you must speak in the tube and say, “Welcome, Santa Claus!” Then I will ask whether it was a trunk you ordered or not. If you say it was, I shall ask you what color you want the trunk to be. Your mama will help you to name a nice color and then you must tell me every single thing in detail which you want the trunk to contain. Then when I say, “Good-by and a merry Christmas to my little Susy Clemens,” you must say, “Good-by, good old Santa Claus, I thank you very much and please tell that little Snow Flake I will look at her star tonight and she must look down here—I will be right in the west bay window; and every fine night I will look at her star and say, ‘I know somebody up there and like her, too.’” Then you must go down into the library and make George close all the doors that open into the main hall, and everybody must keep still for a little while. I will go to the moon and get those things and in a few minutes I will come down the chimney that belongs to the fireplace that is in the hall—if it is a trunk you want—because I couldn’t get such a thing as a trunk down the nursery chimney, you know.

People may talk if they want, until they hear my footsteps in the hall. Then you tell them to keep quiet a little while till I go back up the chimney. Maybe you will not hear my footsteps at all—so you may go now and then and peep through the dining-room doors, and by and by you will see that thing which you want, right under the piano in the drawing room—for I shall put it there. If I should leave any snow in the hall, you must tell George to sweep it into the fireplace, for I haven’t time to do such things. George must not use a broom, but a rag—else he will die someday. You must watch George and not let him run into danger. If my boot should leave a stain on the marble, George must not holystone it away. Leave it there always in memory of my visit; and whenever you look at it or show it to anybody you must let it remind you to be a good little girl. Whenever you are naughty and somebody points to that mark which your good old Santa Claus’s boot made on the marble, what will you say, little sweetheart?

Good-by for a few minutes, till I come down to the world and ring the kitchen doorbell.

Your loving Santa Claus
Whom people sometimes call “The Man in the Moon”

—Mark Twain

“Is it possible for you to be any more of an asshole?”

I’ve never really believed that there’s such thing as a rhetorical question, but this one, posed to me by a friend while we were browsing at our local Barnes & Noble, had me stumped. Should I answer it truthfully—Why, yes, there’s always room for more Jell-O—and risk the wrath of a woman insulted, or should I hang my head in mock shame and thank the bookstore gods that no one was within earshot of her question?

I opted for a third alternative: “I’m telling you, that’s a shitty book.”

“Don’t fucking cuss at me.”

I sighed and marvelled over the fact that, despite our platonic friendship, this was veering into the kind of dark wood that even Dante would stayed away from. Beatrice may have been his ultimate goal, but I’ve long suspected that she never really existed, or if she had, he fantasized about her from afar, never really understanding that goddesses have to stay firmly rooted in reality. Even Hera was a jealous bitch that few men would have taken the trouble to seduce. But was Jennifer more Scarlett O’Hara than Beatrice or Hera?

“I think it’ll be a good book.”

Now we come to heart of the argument: my inner book snob. She was cradling a paperback copy of Raymond Khoury’s The Last Templar in her hands, reading the endless blurbs comparing the book to that other occult blockbuster. My pleas in favor of Umberto Eco went ignored or, at best, were met with quizzical stares and dismissive grimaces. And then the final nail: I’d made some unamusing witticism to the effect that ignoring my opinion on the book was tantamount to heresy.

“All right. Your choice.” Did I really care? I suppose I did, if only because I wanted to steer her away from the worst book I read this year. I hid behind a sip of my over-priced cappucino and briefly wondered if I wanted to continue pissing on Khoury’s book, then decided I wasn’t in the mood to argue.

She swatted me gently with the novel. I flinched. “So I’m not as well-read as you are. Go easy on me. It’s only a book.” Her face brightened and I pictured a dimly-flashing lightbulb hovering over her head. “You could write a blog about this. Call it—I don’t know. You figure it out.” She sang a few bars of the Gorillaz’ “Feel Good Inc.” and dangled the car keys in front of my face. “Since you’re such a spoilsport, you get to drive.” She began walking away, her eyes fixed on the book in her hands.

I followed her and, giving in to temptation, whispered that single word that has both fascinated and frustrated millions of men the world over: “Women.”

(Cross-posted at A Curious Singularity.)

Perhaps more than any other author, Franz Kafka embraces absurdity and uses it to reveal facets of society that most people take for granted. He’s an author with a very dry sense of humor, someone who takes comedy so seriously that any pretension of humor can be lost in the translation. The Trial was so absurd, so ridiculous in a “that-could-never-happen” kind of way, but Kafka’s voice is so unsympathetic that it’s difficult not to become infuriated at the inevitability of Josef K.’s trial. Reading Kafka is like watching a toddler chase after a ball at a busy intersection: one feels a sense of a danger, a notion that everything is going to turn out in the worst possible way, but characters seem helpless to change anything and readers can’t help but look on in stomach-churning silence.

In a society where individuality is seen as a virtue, where everyone has his or her own place in the world, Kafka’s reality can be hard to accept. The author’s characters are often imbued with a sense of self-worth, with lofty ideals and misunderstood views that are ultimately lost in the ever-changing flow of society. To be sure, Kafka seems to recognize that everyone matters, but his cynical take on such things—that people are more easily forgotten than remembered—seems more in line with the way the world operates. Artists can be found in every corner of the world, but Kafka seems less interested in art than in the question of why people should care in the first place.

It’s a difficult question, and one that even Kafka isn’t inclined to answer. In “A Hunger Artist,” we’re offered a dry, disinterested account of an insignificant form of “art”: that of fasting. It’s a foolish premise—how is starving oneself considered art?—but this is coming from an author who wrote a novella about a man who turns into an insect overnight. Kafka delights in exaggeration and “A Hunger Artist” is no different: the unnamed artist in the story, who spends weeks in a cage, like an animal, is convinced that he can fast longer than forty days—and perhaps he can—but the real question is, How far would you go for the sake of your art? As far as death? Like The Trial, the ending of “A Hunger Artist” is a foregone conclusion, but Kafka, like most fatalist writers, insists on showing readers that fate is inescapable.

But one of the most interesting aspects of the story is its observations about society. The hunger artist, though he thinks very highly of his “art,” is really nothing more than a novelty. People aren’t interested in his art so much as seeing if he’ll defy their expectations. And like most people, they’re almost disappointed when he succeeds in his self-imposed challenge. Interest wanes and the hunger artist is quickly forgotten. Like the rock star who’s overstayed his welcome, the hunger artist lowers his standards—in this case, by joining a circus, where he’s about as interesting and relevant as the bearded lady—in a bid to continue fasting in front of an audience. But the tragedy is of the hunger artist’s own making: he maintains silence throughout the story, never giving his audience a reason to care about his art.

Next time you read a Charles Dickens novel, you may want to keep a neurological reference book handy.

In The Pickwick Papers, Dickens writes about Joe, a young man known for his love of food, generous build, and uncanny ability to fall asleep anywhere. In 1956, 120 years after The Pickwick Papers began serialization, Dr. C. S. Burwell and his colleagues published a medical case report titled “Extreme Obesity Associated With Alveolar Hypoventilation: A Pickwickian Syndrome.” After quoting Dickens’s description of Joe, the authors go on to describe their patient, a fifty-one-year-old business executive who stood five-foot-five and weighed more than 260 pounds.The patient was suffering from “obesity, fatigue, and somnolence.” After several years, he had an experience that “indicated the severity of his disability.” During a weekly poker game, the patient “was dealt a hand of three aces and two kings. … Because he had dropped off to sleep he failed to take advantage of this opportunity. …” This was the first medical case report of what is now called sleep apnea, a disorder, usually linked to obesity, in which, during sleep, excess tissue blocks the trachea, or breathing tube, causing multiple awakenings and chronic sleep deprivation.

This was only the first of many medical diagnoses teased from the pages of Dickens’s work. Another character, Mr. Krook, an eccentric shop owner in Bleak House, is described in the following way: “He’ll never read. He can make all the letters separately and he knows most of them separately when he sees them … but he can’t put them together” to make words. This is thought to be the first recorded example of a case of dyslexia—a difficulty that wasn’t recognized as a neurological disorder until nearly fifty years later.

And then, of course, there’s Ebenezer Scrooge, that insufferable miser whose symptoms include hallucinations, tremors, fever, and an “expressionless, rigid, nearly immobile” countenance. Was it a stroke? Alzheimer’s, perhaps? Probably neither: the diagnosis, according to Dr. Chance Alger, a board-certified neurologist, is Lewy body dementia, a disorder that lies somewhere between Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

[T]he hallmark of Lewy body disease is the real clincher in this diagnosis: vivid and detailed hallucinations featuring friends and relatives are common. And like Scrooge’s visions, these phantasms are distressing, often terrifying. Finally, in Lewy body dementia, hallucinations occur early in the disease, frequently before the cognitive deficits are apparent. I went back and re-read the book with Chance’s diagnosis in mind. It fit. It’s clear that once again Dickens has identified a disease, in this case a full century and a half before medicine did. What then of Scrooge’s miraculous transformation from stingy, miserable wretch to the embodiment of giving and generosity? No disease can account for that. Perhaps that is the true miracle of the story and, maybe, the real meaning of Christmas.