1Q66 and All That

Charles Baxter reviews Murakami's 1Q84 (NYRB):

the locale also includes two moons, miniature angels or demons (it is hard to tell which they are) referred to as “Little People,” ghosts knocking on the door demanding payment, insemination-by-proxy, and air chrysalises: cocoons created by the Little People in which pod-like human replicas, referred to as dohta, are hatched. 1Q84 is a marathon novel. (Murakami himself is a marathon runner and has said that “most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day.”)

But the Little People are "absolutely mystifying. It is as if the Seven Dwarfs had gradually made their presence known and their powers understood in a novel by James T. Farrell." I'm not sure I want to read this novel. (I've read very little Murakami, but have a vaguely favorable impression of what I've read -- read 2.2 novels in succession in 2009, then forgot my copy of Norwegian Wood between the sheets in a hotel room in Vannes, and never returned to his work.)

In other news, the Lethem-Wood plot has thickened, with James Wood responding to comments at the Millions -- I recommend Ctrl-F -- disconcertingly, Wood refers to himself in the third person and then seems surprised when other commenters refer to him as "'James Wood'". (Back-story: Lethem recently wrote a content-free whinge at the LARB (naturally) about a supposedly dishonest/elitist review by Wood ca. 2003; this got more coverage than it deserved because everyone likes to bait Wood.) I haven't read the comments, there are too many of them, but I am indebted to the (as-of-now) very last one, by "Edmond Caldwell," for a phrase -- revanchist domestication -- that accurately if uncharitably describes my approach to the more experimental stuff I like.

(Re post title see here.)

"All middle, like a tortoise"

Ivan Bunin recollects a conversation with Chekhov [from the forthcoming Memories of Chekhov, excerpted in the NYRB]:

“Do you write? Do you write a lot?” he asked me one day.


I told him, “Actually, I don’t write all that much.”

“That’s a pity,” he told me in a rather gloomy, sad voice which was not typical of him. “You should not have idle hands, you should always be working. All your life.”

And then, without any discernible connection, he added, “It seems to me that when you write a short story, you have to cut off both the beginning and the end. We writers do most of our lying in those spaces. You must write shorter, to make it as short as possible.” 

According to Peter Young's book Tortoise, this truncating habit of Chekhov's is where Galsworthy's line about C's stories comes from: that his stories are "all middle, like a tortoise." I'm not sure I follow the connection between Chekhov's two remarks either -- except that the more you write the more you can afford to throw away -- but this struck me as an unexpected parallel between the "Protestant work ethic" and that of someone like Flaubert. Truth-to-life is a less dandyish criterion than truth-to-language but the idea is the same at some level. (I don't read Russian but I have heard that Chekhov's prose is "workmanlike.") I guess the gloom is poignant in its way: if one is a perfectionist about one's work and is condemned, as Chekhov was, to a youth of hackwork:

Chekhov had to pay for his own education, which he managed by—among other jobs—private tutoring, catching and selling goldfinches, and selling short sketches to the newspapers. ...[ca. 1880] he wrote daily short, humorous sketches and vignettes of contemporary Russian life.

Cf. also Pope: "the last and greatest art, the art to blot." (I twice typed in "blot" as "blog" ...) And: "To write well, lastingly well, immortally well, must not one leave father and mother and cleave unto the Muse? It is such a task as scarce leaves a man time to be a good neighbor, an useful friend, nay to plant a tree, much less to save his soul."

NB: 1. the Tortoise book seems appealing but unreasonably pricey. 2. Had you heard of Ivan Bunin? Apparently he won the Nobel Prize.

"Drinking, Namby-pamby, Aeolus, Droll..."

The names of the Seven Dwarfs translated out of English by Disney and back into English by Google:

 

It is surprising how many of these are correct; for instance, one hardly expects a machine to translate anything as "dopey." The algorithm is probably trained re the dwarfs. Some of the odd ones are false friends (Tudor, Trotter, etc.) -- see e.g. here for the foreign-lang. versions. Then there are the expected, vaguely charming, mistakes (listed above, also "God Bless You").

(Admin note. In addition to the Brazilian blog dump that ended up losing me a few subscribers, Blogger has lately been very unreliable with embedded images.)