[ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 6/18/2025]
I need to get books read. The unit manager sicced his bully boy onto our unit. Allegedly, most prominently, because we have been ranking between 4 and 6 in inspections for most of this year. He also mentioned the disappearing shower nozzles and the guys (all sex offenders) driven out of their rooms (except for counts and sleeping). That one of the counselors was removed - allegedly for introducing contraband - got a mention that was more an announcement, but never was any explicit connection made with the increased inspections (I did that). After all, the meal rotation inspections have no apparent rationality, or we would not be second this week. The inspection that put us into second place occurred before the enhanced inspections. One more reason for calling this place Franz Kafka land. Also, the unit manager's promise to do something about the black mold and the dripping water pipes remain unfulfilled. These inspections have as much to do with meal rotation standing as I have any longer with polite society.
But I got three pillows to hide. I have two extra blankets. I got the Norton's Anthology of English Literature and volume one of Shelby Foote's Civil War history, on which I perch my CPAP machine. I put them into the locker, along with pillows and one of my blankets. I must get room, and that means the books must go. Which, for me, means reading them, not discarding them
And I had a rather bad bout of depression. Joel C. read over "Mike Devlin's Homecoming". He spotted one problem I had seen - it is not quite as much a standalone storey as I think they all ought to be. He also pointed out a flaw I did not see. I wanted Devlin to be a hope for others. This hope was to be an illusion. I see this installment's overt theme to be illusions. Devlin has his illusions: his independence from nostalgia, that he can go back to his pre-prison life, that he has time to accomplish his goals, that his son will appreciate the father's absence, and all he needs for success is will power. The other main characters have their illusions about Devlin. The problem Joel saw was I had not given the reader enough reason to believe in their hopes/illusions. That I already killed Mike Devlin influenced me. From that flaw, I think I found another with pacing. I put a lot into this. I also had a problem with obsessional behavior.
Depression started creeping in with my questioning if I have any talent for writing. I know I am doing something. Then I ponder just how good is my judgment now. I will myself to patience, for feedback from outside of this place. I tell myself it takes me four drafts to get over my laziness of mind. This was the third draft.
It did not help T2 that last evening hung up the telephone rather than take my call. More about that later.
I will make Devlin think of his life as empty as mine has been. It may be another illusion. He will continue. I came up with this phrase: To not be a Captain Ahab without a Pequod.
Draft four awaits typing paper. Actually going to work on draft 3.5 longhand. We have been out of copying/typing paper for about a week now. The guys running the gambling here went wild, copying their betting slips. This does give me time to read.
I finished Best European Fiction 2010 (edited by Aleksander Hemon; Dalkey Archive Press, 2010) last night. I feel pummeled by the experience. Yet it made me want to get back to writing by telling me how far I had gotten off the path when I turned down TJ's offer to let me write. Yet, I cannot put my finger what exactly moved me.
Peter Terrin's "The Murderer" and Georgi Gospdinov's "And All Turned Moon" and Victor Pelevin's "Friedmann Space" taught me the use of fantasy as a satirical device. Not all fantasy wields a sword. Doesn't mean it can't cut, though.
(Forgot Peter Krištúfek's "The Prompter".)
Then come the stories I think of as fantasy without the satire. The story is a character in David Albahari's "The Basilica in Lyon." The Faust story makes an appearance in Julian Rio's "Revelation on the Boulevard of Crimes" and the Messiah in George Konrad's "Jeremiah's Terrible Tale". What I will call magic realism appears in Valter Hugo Mae's "dona malva and senhor jose ferreiro" (ghosts) and Orna Ni Choileain's "Camino" (a seer) without stilting the storytelling. Not that I have found any use, but in a story already written. Yet, it gives me ideas.
If Matthias Ospelt can create an interesting story about Lichtenstein, why cannot I do the same for Indiana? I found myself drawn to those from small countries: Albania (Ornela Vorpsi), Bosnia (Igor Štiks), Croatia (Neven Usumovic), Estonia (Elo Viiding), Iceland (Steinar Brage), Latvia (Inga Abele), Lithuania (Giedra Radvilavičiūtė), Slovenia (Andre Blatnik), and Switzerland (Peter Stamm). From the biographies, I suspect we share a feeling of being from the boondocks.
I suggest reading the biographies and writer statements in a book like this. Here I got ideas, here I got inspiration, and here is where I saw how far I got away from my dreams of writing. TJ and my oldest sister condemned me at different times of being against dreams. I recall being deflated, taken aback by both accusations. I never meant to be so critical, such a realist. No one has asked me what dreams I had or might have. Maybe I dreamt too largely. Maybe I never expected, never wanted, to live so long. I was far too superficial because I thought I had no time. But I do not remember anyone telling me they really wanted me to stick around. Not you, TJ. Not you T2. Nobody came back to get me. I had to get sent to prison before my dreams about writing could bear any fruit.
I need to write honestly about what I know. The Europeans got this idea through my head. Then I must write well. This was also beaten into my head. I may not pull off a story like Jon Fosse's "Waves or Stone", but I can try. I thank all of them who I forgot to mention.
I move onto Michael Z. Lewin's Out of Season (William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1984) Thirty years old, it came out that year of Phyllis and Michele Moon and an angry TJ; of leaving Muncie and starting law school; of hopes remaining. I recognize the Indianapolis of this novel - even if I had no idea of gay bars in Indianapolis. That would LAH telling me of them. I wonder if Lewin still lives. Is he in print? This is not the first of his books I have read. I liked the fellow. I will have to make my mind up about how I like him. I go on towards a less crowded locker.
sch
[6/18/2025: Not having access to the internet while in Fort Dix FCI, I have spent a long amount of time adding links, but also the following. Let us call this a bibliography. I found out things about the writers I mentioned above that made me admire them even more. Until today, I did not recall that I had Jon Fosse, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature since 2010. The items I link to below leave me even more impressed with the writers I read 11 years ago. I also go answers about Michael Z. Lewin. sch]
Reviews of the anthology:
The Pleasures of Diversity: Best European Fiction 2010 (Cerise Press)
...Literature is at least as diverse as coagulated-milk-based food products; and Best European Fiction 2010 includes thirty-five writers from thirty countries (Belgium, Spain, Ireland and the UK have multiple inclusions to cover differing language groups or distinctive regional cultures), many of whom were unknown, at least to this reader, and discovering them is one of the real pleasures of this anthology. Some countries are missing. There is no entry from Germany, none from Greece or Sweden, nothing from Turkey. Eastern Europe is well represented, as are the Baltic States and the Balkans; Russia is included (although Belarus and Ukraine are not); and some of the most innovative stories come from areas which the anglophone world tends to associate with political and/or economic instability. That imaginative fiction is also being written there comes as a revelation: Ornela Vorpsi’s wonderful “The Country Where No One Ever Dies” depicts an Albania never imagined and probably not soon to be forgotten.
Best European Fiction 2010 edited by Aleksandar Hemon (PopMatters)
Something a little different:
First Sentences or Paragraphs #5: Best European Fiction 2010 Edition (HTMLGIANT)
[series note: This post is the fifth of five, in a week-long series examining first sentences or paragraphs. It’s not my intention to be prescriptive about what kinds of first sentences writers ought to be writing. Instead, I hope to simply take a look at five sets of first sentences for the purpose of thinking about how they introduce the reader to the story or novel to which they belong.... 5. first sentences from Best European Fiction 2010.]
About some of the writers:
An interview with Igor Štiks (Asymptote)
We are seeing the rise of right-wing parties in Europe latching on to anti-immigration sentiments. France, which recently banned the burqa, is a clear example. Premised on the protection of indigenous rights, this political rhetoric promotes the notion that 'native rights' must come first. It is, in other words, nationalism par excellence. Do you think that the concept of 'national literature' can only add to this air of xenophobia, or is there still some good to it?
The nineteenth-century idea that literature could be neatly compartmentalised into 'national' literatures was always a problematic one but increasingly so in a world of intensive migration. However, old habits die hard, and the old institutions – academia, literary circles, university departments, cultural ministries and such – suffer from inertia. This is why we are now privy to fruitless debates about 'French' and 'francophone' literature, 'British' and 'commonwealth' literature, local and 'immigrant' literature, which to me is a waste of time but something that won't disappear so easily. The idea that literature preserves the cultural or spiritual essence of a nation is still an attractive one. My new homeland Scotland is a good example. Edinburgh has the biggest monument ever erected for a writer, namely the Scott Monument for Walter Scott. And we thought that only Eastern Europeans still believe in writers as 'fathers of the nation'! Literature is indeed always written in particular places and in a particular language but it is also cosmopolitan in its essence – one of the beautiful paradoxes of human creativity.
Elo Viiding – a Poet who Plays on Social Nerves (Estonian Literary Magazine)
The lightness of being serious. Short stories by Giedra Radvilavičiūtė (LRT)
The question of the worth of literature crops up more than once in the stories, and Radvilavičiūtė’s takes are suffused with a casual, playful cynicism. “I really do think great literature has died,” she confesses at the outset of the volume’s concluding story. And yet she shows little interest in trying to heroically resurrect the art form, rather preferring to pick at the corpse with her flurry of scattered, sarcastic observations. It is this necessity to try and the simultaneous, keenly felt impossibility of saying anything meaningful that characterises the work’s tone. Life can feel so full of meaning and yet, grasping for words to describe it, every utterance turns into a sad joke. It is “impossible to write about objectively, because love gets in the way,” as the narrator says of a friend.
An Interview with Andrej Blatnik from The Dominion Review
DR: You write a lot of short short stories which seem to approach the level of the prose poem. Is your approach to the short short story different than it is to a longer work?
AB: Ja, it is definitely different. In longer works you try to have an atmosphere closer to real life. There is more space for dialogue, which lends itself well to humor, for example. But in my short short stories there is much more concentration_or trying to explore a concentrated moment of time, like the moment when a secretary says to you on the phone "hold on." These moments have their own atmospheres, and those atmospheres are what I try to create.
Interview with Peter Stamm (The White Review). I suggest anyone wanting to be a serious writer, who wants to read a writer with ambitions, read this interview. Its format does not allow for quotations, which would probably be inadequate.
Jon Fosse – Podcast (NobelPrize.org)
Interview with David Albahari* (Mozaika)
Q: It is very interesting that you, as a writer who is deeply concerned with the inability to communicate, keep writing. Leeches, published in 2005, is your ninth novel. You have also published ten collections of stories and two collections of essays. It is a fascinating phenomenon; could you talk about it?
A: The answer is simple—I believe in writing, but I don’t believe in the possibility of accomplishing any perfect [literary] work by writing. Therefore every time I try again. You can find a similar poetics—or at least traces of that poetics—in Beckett’s or Faulkner’s [works]. Furthermore, writing is a completely personal act for me. In other words, I write to reach some answers that I consider relevant for me. When a story is already written, then it can also be published, but a reader most probably won’t recognize what urged me to write that story. In the end, a reader won’t read a story that I wrote, but he’ll read a story he wants to read. That is another ambiguity we need to think about when we talk about language and communication; to be precise, a writer and a reader seemingly read the same story, but each puts the story in the context of his own self, which means that, naturally, a reader can’t read what I wrote. I already know in advance that what I try to say reaches the reader in the form in which he wants to hear it. Not even I can read my story twice in the same way. Literature is like a river, and one can’t step twice into the same river, as a philosopher once said.
Nationalism and Contemporary American Literature: An Interview with Aleksandar Hemon (The Common) has much of interest, but the following seem to be important for what they say about American literature. The first is a call for American writers to take a good look at our country; the second is a call for Americans to take into account a wider range of writers.
ND: In a recent article, you suggest the rise of Trump may rescue American literature, if “a good writer never lets a catastrophe go to waste.” This is what you do in your work, which always deals with both American and Bosnian politics and history. But to me, it seems as if that’s easier to do in retrospect. When one is directly affected by the catastrophe, the shock may make it almost impossible for the writer to confront the “unimaginable realities.” So the writer uses her work to resort to alternative realities. What is your “prescription” for writers in such conditions?
AH: [Laughs.] Well I don’t write prescriptions. A prescription is some sort of an ideological demand that I would not put upon others, and would not want anyone to force upon me. But at times of historical, societal ruptures (and I think we’re in the middle of one, because Trump is already destroying something and it’s just started and we’re paying a terrible price), the destruction is already ongoing, and that is the destruction of reality that many people have taken to be self-evident and solid and stable. So all you have to do as a writer is to address it and then interpret it creatively. This is the current fate of the realistic concept of literature where your work as a writer or your book is diagnosing society.
Because this country has been stable in some ways and for a certain class of people, and now it’s falling apart, some of the novels written five years ago, in many ways, are no longer applicable. They’re either complicit in creating an image of society where the problems are simplified, or the conflicts are simplified or reduced to the exclusive experience of a certain group of people. It’s a widely generated fiction of the American Manifest Destiny, and decency in America, that guarantees consumerism and the pursuit of happiness and all of that. Or they just seem like novels of the last century. It’s all just shit now. It has to be questioned from the beginning. So to me, to own the destruction, the rupture, is to accept the fact that this country is not what we thought it was, whoever we may be.
In other words, Trump is an absolute and total failure in American society, including its literature and culture and art, and politics, and democracy, and everything! And he’s been only two weeks in office so far, so the literature has to address this to some extent, otherwise it’s complicit and propaganda. And I expect it to happen. Because what else are we going to do?
***
ND: I want to go back to what you said about the writer’s responsibility. I think a similar sense of responsibility could or should be expected from translators. When it comes to translation, and politics of translation, the paradoxes of life and political realities are standard expectations from literatures of the so-called war-torn regions. Once it was the Balkans, now the Middle East, and the list goes on. This is how the popular American readership (and society in general) focuses on the problems of the “other” and deliberately forgets how miserably its own literature is divorced from politics, or how lacking its literature may be; this is especially a phenomenon in American translation. This is all happening when, as you suggest, there is no novel that discusses the inequities of the post 9/11 era. The farthest fiction on this subject went was to discuss “how difficult it was to shoot innocent people in the head.” Do you think the narrow focus of American translation plays a role in the gradual decadence of American literature?
AH: It’s improved a little perhaps, but not much. As a reaction to 9/11 and post-9/11 American nationalism, there are certain parts of the publishing industry that renewed interest in “other parts of the world.” But literature, any literature that is supposed totranslate “other” works is by necessity provincial. It does not communicate with other literatures, with other aesthetics, and ethics for that matter. The American publishing industry suffers from something that I like to call metropolitan provincialism; that is, the belief only in things that are “of value.” In other words, all that needs to be known is already known or will be soon known.
I remember when Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize, his work had never come out in New York. (I think the only translation at the time was from Yale University.) People were essentially claiming, well if he was any good, I would have known about him. And this is bizarre to me. I think that’s what has damaged American literature, has been damaging it for decades. At the same time there are people, and not just writers, publishers and critics too, who are fighting against that. There is substantial Spanish-language publishing activity in this country. Spanish language literature, rural literature in Spanish, especially from Latin America, has had a major impact on North American literature. It’s not so visible in the elite circles of New York necessarily. But in certain parts of the world, and in this country where people speak Spanish in cities, they have a major role. For instance, Junot Diaz cannot be fully understood outside of this context.
Lewin still lives, but I cannot tell how many of his books are in print.
sch 6/18/25]
[I think that I cannot add anything more to this far too long of a post, and this turns up in my LitHub newsletter for today: The Annotated Nightstand: What Catherine Lacey is Reading Now and Next: Featuring Jen Calleja, Tezer Özlü, Georgi Gospodinov and More
Georgi Gospodinov, trans. Angela Rodel, Time Shelter
Listed in the New Yorker’s “Best Books of 2022,” they write, “In this antic fantasy of European politics, narrated by a fictionalized version of the author, an enigmatic friend of his designs ‘a clinic of the past,’ which soothes Alzheimer’s patients with environments from a time they can still remember. As the treatment gains prominence, feverish nostalgia grips the continent… [Gospodinov] cunningly drawing attention to the violence that the past wreaks on the present” Time Shelter won the Booker in 2023.
I guess I forgot he won the Booker: Georgi Gospodinov: Winner of the International Booker Prize 2023 (The Booker Prizes) (which includes a podcast interview. sch 6/20/25.]
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