william e. young, “shark! shark!”

Posted on Thursday 24 March 2011 by dbv

Captain William E. Young
(as told to Horace S. Mazet, F.R.G.S.
Shark! Shark! The Thirty-Year Odyssey of a Pioneer Shark Hunter
(Gotham House, 1934)

I acquired this book somewhat mistakenly: there was a Paul Collins piece somewhere about strange books, and there was a mention of the first edition of this book, bound in sharkskin. I ordered a copy online, thinking such a book would be an interesting thing to have; but the copy that arrived turned out to the be second edition, which is a rather undistinguished hardcover. Still, it is a book about shark-hunting; books like this aren’t really written any more. It’s not especially well written: Horace S. Mazet is attentive to the problems involved in describing sharks, as he seems to have soldiered in the shark-writing business for years, but the narrative is not all that might be hoped for, despite the occasionally gripping content. Most of the attraction of this book comes from the character of Captain Young, who comes across as a decidedly unphilosophical Ahab, interested only in killing sharks, who explains his life in a matter-of-fact way. There is a formative experience in William Young’s youth, but it’s not especially revelatory: he ditches his Boy Cadets drill to go fishing with the old fishermen; one of them invites him to go fishing, and the boy sees his first shark. After that, of course, he wants to kill as many sharks as he can; he leaves California for Hawaii, where he proceeds to do just this.

Young’s story is unrelentingly bloody. He starts killing sharks before there’s any commercial reason to do so; he is interested in finding commercial uses for sharks not to get rich, but that he might continue killing them. Perhaps the sport of this is taken for granted; maybe this hasn’t aged well. At times, he seems to want to wipe sharks off the face of the earth as a problem for fishermen; he is continually having to explain to people that sharks eat people, which the people of the 1920s and 1930s seem loathe to believe. It’s confusing, and Captain Young comes off as a maniac, which might be what makes this book compelling. From time to time there are digressions like this one, when Captain Young is harvesting sharks in North Carolina for a New York sharkskin concern in 1921 or 1922:

Another fisherman, who evidently had more than one fish in his frying pan, approached me one evening with a most curious proposition. He beat about the bush for so long that finally I asked him in desperation what under the sun he was driving at.
“Waal, it’s this way,” he said. “You’re bringing in lots of sharks every day from out to sea. Now why” – here he dropped his voice to a whisper – “why not try a little bootlegging in the shark bellies? No one ever bothers you, and no one will ever suspect.”
It was an ingenious idea, and I suppose it would have been possible to stow away a good many bottles of liquor inside each shark. At the time, however, my mind was entirely concentrated on catching sharks. (p. 127)

Captain Young is cheerfully insane and guileless, which makes him good company, despite his murderous tendencies. Almost certainly he should not have killed all of those sharks, but it’s too late for regrets now. A few pages later, he is visited at his shark processing plant by a “diffident visitor” who shows him a fossil shark’s tooth, and tells him about the Age of Fishes when sharks ruled the earth. Then the visitor gives Captain Young the fossil tooth and wanders out; Captain Young has no idea who the man was, nor does he ever turn up again. Such things happen when you’re a shark hunter. Later, Haile Selassie turns up: he wants to go lion hunting, but Captain Young has sharks in Somali that he has to deal with, so that doesn’t happen. Felix von Luckner, who provides a forward that was surely scrawled on a cocktail napkin on his yacht, makes an appearance near the end of the book, with the suggestion that fishing for sharks might be made more sporting if bungee cords were used as lines. I’d not known of Count von Luckner; his Wikipedia entry points out his ability to tear up telephone books with his bare hands, among other exploits.

This is a book that has its longueurs; but the end of this book has the advantage of taking the reader completely unaware. Thirty pages before the end of the book, Captain Young is still talking about his foiled plans to start an aquarium in Cuba where sharks could be kept; this aquarium would also feature a café “allowing visitors to select a fish and see it captured by a fisherman for their meal”. Then there’s an excursus about the question of whether it’s possible for a diver with a knife to kill a shark (possible, yes, but dangerous). Then some men from Harvard show up to make a film about him and sharks, to be titled Tigers of the Sea. Then a paragraph about how old men like to tell stories, and the book’s suddenly over. There are thirty more pages of an Appendix, which explains via diagram how to go about skinning a shark, among other things; but the book is over.

jacques sternberg, “future without future”

Posted on Friday 18 March 2011 by dbv

Jacques Sternberg
Future Without Future
(trans. Frank Zero)
(Seabury, 1974)

The Museum of the Moving Image has been having an Alain Resnais retrospective, where I finally saw Je t’aime, je t’aime; the program notes for that film pointed out that it had been written by Jacques Sternberg, “the French Philip K. Dick.” I didn’t remember ever having heard of Sternberg; this book, a 1974 translation of 1971’s Futurs sans avenir seems to be one of two by him available in English (the other being 1967’s Sexualis ’95). Future Without Future appeared as part of Seabury’s Continuum series of foreign science fiction; also listed in the series are works by Stanisław Lem, the Strugatsky brothers, and Stefan Wul, all of whom, like Sternberg, seem to have had their books turned into arty movies. An English Wikipedia page gives some background on Sternberg’s life and work in entertaining prose:

Sternberg, a very apt helmsman, owned a diminutive 12 Ft dinghy (Zef class, excellent for day cruising but slow and utterly unfit for racing) and often undertook arduous coastal treks, even in comparatively bad weather. An anarchist at heart, he rejected organized regatta and racing – Not unlike Bernard Moitessier, the famous ocean vagabond – and wrote a biting satire of yachtsmen, sponsors and yacht clubs, in his erotic-nautical novel Le navigateur published at the peak of Eric Tabarly’s success. Dinghy sailing means living a very close relationship with the sea and it is one of the keys to understand the important place of the sea in Sternberg’s work, specially in what may arguably be his best novel Sophie, la mer et la nuit.

This is not helpful for this book, which contains only passing mention of the sea. The French Wikipedia is a bit more helpful; there we learn that:

Avec 1 089 textes répertoriés à ce jour, J. Sternberg peut se targuer d’être le nouvelliste le plus prolifique du xxe siècle !

Perhaps he will go on being one of the most prolific novelists of the twentieth century; however, he did die in 2006. One learns there that he was part of the Panique group with Fernando Arrabal, Roland Topor, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Olivier O. Olivier; a fair number of his works still seem to be in print in France despite his general disappearance in English.

Future Without Future collects a novella (“Fin de Siècle”) and four stories. The novella presents a man’s diary for 1999: he lives in a dystopian Paris clogged with cars and soot run by an all-powerful state. Everything is regulated; there are fines and impositions for any misstep (he is sentenced to play tennis two hours a day for a few months), even down to private life (he has a state-mandated mistress and child; the state gives out adultery cards). He spends his day counting punctuation at a state publisher; his job is futile, as all jobs are futile, but there is no escape. Love turns up, predictably enough; but as the story progresses, it becomes clear that the government’s manipulations of time (declaring the Sunday will be skipped) are not in name only, as might be expected, but real; the government’s mismanagement of time causes the universe to collapse.

The stories show Sternberg to be preoccupied with the world of the bureaucrat: the drudgery of work is very real in these stories. In “Vacation,” a man is forced to go on vacation (which also happens in “Fin de Siècle”); he takes a jaunt by rocketship to the boring world of his childhood, but on his return he is informed that their rocket will need to be parked in orbit for the next year; no worry, because his work will be sent to him. “Very Sincerely Yours” starts out as a report of an absurdist joke (a bored functionary decides to write letters about his own anomie to the people he is supposed to be corresponding with on official business) which turns into a weird fantasia (his correspondent turns out to be an alien living in a parallel world; the alien infects the world with a virus that will eventually cause humanity to shrink to the height of twenty-eight inches, the height of the alien race, so that they might be more easily conquered in a few hundred years). It’s presented in epistolary form; as it begins it might be the response of a latter-day Bartleby so utterly alienated by capitalism that he has no real name (he signs with the name “JR, Director,” though his boss, of course, can’t be bothered with anything as quotidian as answering letters).

Bartlebys take over the world in “Future Without Future,” the last story in the book: in that, the societal revolutions are telescoped forward to a world where the young (“the Fatigued Generation”) refuse to do anything, which stops the Vietnam War and brings about a peaceable planet. Sternberg puts himself in the vanguard of their cultural revolution:

But it is literature, still, which evinces the most spectacular reversals. For two or three years now, the books of Sagan, Druon, Kessel, Troyat, Dutourd, Mallet-Joris, Daninos, or any of the best sellers of the 70’s have not sold a single copy. On the other hand, a vast public of indolent and disgusted readers have flocked to the work of heartsick professionals such as Céline, Beckett, Michaux, Sternberg, Bierce, Kafka, Cavanna, Benchly, and above all Cioran, whose Précis of Decomposition sold five hundred copies between 1949 and 1975, but enjoyed sales of ten million in 1980, and has established itself as the new Bible of modern times. By the same token, no publisher has managed to market a book on management or marketing, those moth-eaten themes of 1970, or any book of poetry, history, politics, sociology, or metaphysics. Those thought-provoking bugbears have finally bored, disgusted, and fatigued the public which still reads. That is to say, the new generation alone. (pp. 193–4)

To Sternberg’s list of familiars, one might add Anna Kavan, whose tone is sometimes very close to this book; I suspect that the argument could probably be made by one more familiar than I that Sternberg presages Houellebecq. Sternberg is not, on the evidence of this book, the French Philip K. Dick: there is no secret meaning to be found in his world, only drudgery, entertainingly presented.

little soul

Posted on Friday 18 March 2011 by dbv

Little soul little stray
little drifter
now where will you stay
all pale and all alone
after the way
you used to make fun of things

(Hadrian, trans. W. S. Merwin)

march 1–march 15

Posted on Wednesday 16 March 2011 by dbv

Books

Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves & Michael Grant

Films

The Jazz Singer, dir. Alan Crosland
Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam), dir. Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker & Alain Resnais
I Want to Go Home, dir. Alain Resnais
Je t’aime, je t’aime, dir. Alain Resnais
Le chant du Styrène, dir. Alain Resnais
The Naked City, dir. Jules Dassin
Night and the City, dir. Jules Dassin
Mon oncle d’Amérique, dir. Alain Resnais
Mélo, dir. Alain Resnais
La Glace à trois faces, dir. Jean Epstein
The Kids Are All Right, dir. Lisa Cholodenko
Brainscan, dir. John Flynn
Little Odessa, dir. James Gray
Querelle, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Liebe – kälter als der Tod (Love Is Colder Than Death), dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Exhibits

“Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand,” Met
“Our Future Is In The Air: Photographs from the 1910s,” Met
“Pierre Huyghe: The Host and the Cloud,” Marian Goodman
“Tibor de Nagy Gallery Painters & Poets: Celebrating 60 Years,” Tibor de Nagy
“David Hammons,” L & M Arts
“Stanley Casselman: Evolution-Water,” Chashama Donnell Windows
“Hong Seon Jang: Zip City,” Chashama Donnell Windows
“Liliana Dirks-Goodman: Color Series #3,” Chashama Donnell Windows
“Jose Landoni: The Great Wave,” Chashama Donnell Windows

noted

Posted on Wednesday 9 March 2011 by dbv

A stage reading of Raymond Roussel’s The Dust of Suns (in the translation of Harry Mathews, under the direction of John Beer) is happening in March at the Charnel House in Chicago.
I have a piece in the Review of Contemporary Fiction‘s upcoming “Failure” issue. There’s going to be a reading at PS1 on April 2.
Probably the best piece in that issue, Sam Frank’s “The Document” is up at Triple Canopy; new Sergio de la Pava & Joshua Cohen to appear soon in the current issue.

suetonius, “the twelve caesars”

Posted on Monday 7 March 2011 by dbv

Suetonius
The Twelve Caesars
(trans. Robert Graves, revised Michael Grant)
(Penguin Classics, 1979)

This book I have something of a history with: in a particularly uncomfortable moment during the year I worked in Rome, I was once called in as a witness to ask someone being fired over a disagreement about the contents of this book, Italian, English, and Latin editions of Suetonius being brandished as proof. Which bit of imperial misbehavior was being argued about I don’t remember anymore – spectators being boiled alive by Caligula in the Circus Maximus, maybe. I picked it up again with the idea that the life of Septimius Severus was described here; it’s not, of course, but I always feel guilty about putting off the classics, and this seemed easily digestible and full of entertaining trivia, in the manner of Petronius or Procopius. My classical history seems to be weighted in that direction; this (along with, of course, my lack of Greek and Latin) is why I’m not a classicist.

Suetonius is pleasant, not least because of what he takes to be his work in writing this book. Most of the long chapters – Galba, Otho, and Vitellius weren’t in power long enough to make much of an impression – are effectively divided in half: the first half presents the notable deeds of the emperor before and after coming to power, while in the second half, Suetonius explains what the emperor was really like. While Suetonius has a grudging respect for at least Julius Caesar and Augustus, and he seems to outright like the short-lived Titus, none of the emperors is exempt from criticism. The lives of the first two emperors are told with quotations from original documents; those don’t generally appear in the later histories, ostensibly because Suetonius was kicked out of the archives. One wonders who this book was intended for; it seems hard to imagine such a scabrous book functioning as a widely-read history. The accuracy is hard to gage; at the very least, there’s a huge amount of second- and third-hand information; at least some is outright imagined. One ends up with something like Voragine’s Golden Legend, mostly nonsensical as history, but entertaining nonetheless.

It’s hard not to enjoy the details, like the inadvertantly Joycean bit where Caligula calls his “great-grandmother Livia a ‘Ulysses in petticoats'” (p. 164). Most of the Caesars planned on staking out a month in the calendar; Claudius decided that he would improve the alphabet:

Claudius also added three new letters of his own invention to the Latin alphabet maintaining that they were most necessary. He had written a book on the subject before his accession, and afterwards met with no obstacle in getting the letters officially adopted. They may still be found in a number of books, in the Official Gazette, and in inscriptions on public buildings. (p. 210)

Claudius’s letters didn’t take; but they have, in fact, been added to Unicode: they are Ⅎ, Ↄ, and Ⱶ, and whoever added them to Unicode seems to have ahistorically created minuscule versions of them as well. Wikipedia’s story that Claudius was led to add new letters because of his mother’s taunting isn’t in Suetonius; however, Antonia does refer to her son as “a monster: a man whom Nature had not finished but had merely begun.” The young Claudius comes off as rather endearing, almost a young Prince Hal: his “reputation for stupidity was further enhanced by stories of his drunkenness and love of gambling.” He has questionable friends:

Some jokes exercised their wit by putting slippers on his hands as he lay snoring, and then gave him a sudden blow of a whip or cane to wake him, so that he rubbed his face with them. (p. 190)

What’s strange about this book as a whole might be how modern so much of it seems – the struggles for power and succession aren’t immensely different from anything that might be happening today – and yet how unthinkable so much of what’s described as daily life – even aside from the exaggerated excesses – seems to be. A paragraph from early in the story of Vespasian might illustrate this:

In Greece, Vespasian dreamed that he and his family would begin to prosper from the moment when Nero lost a tooth; and on the following day, while he was in the imperial quarters, a dentist entered and showed him one of Nero’s teeth which he had just extracted. (p. 282)

This is not a particularly odd moment in the narrative; indeed, this comes in the midst of a long sequence of auspicious signs that Vespasian noticed prior to becoming emperor. Sequences like this occur again and again in this book. How can we make sense of this? The rationalist approach would say that dreams don’t foretell the future, and that this is an ex post facto dramatization of what happened: Vespasian wanted to be emperor, Vespasian was handed a tooth, Vespasian explains that he dreamt he would be emperor when Nero lost a tooth. Presumably Vespasian is in Greece with Nero, though this is unclear to me. In a more horrific version in the previous paragraph, a stray dog brings a human hand to Vespasian while he’s eating breakfast; this is also a good sign because a hand is an emblem of power. Suetonius doesn’t seems to doubt these signs: he reports them as fact. Vespasian did become emperor, after all. But one feels unimaginably far from a world in which a dog bringing in a hand is regarded as a good thing.

The amount of casual violence is also staggering. Even apart from imperial excess, there’s the sense of life being astonishingly cheap. Regiments of the army are repeatedly decimated; minor crimes are given capital punishment; countless numbers of gladiators and prisoners die in arenas. The family trees of the Claudians and Flavians contain more unnatural deaths than not. Roman life expectancy wasn’t pretty, of course. But it’s almost impossible to imagine what it would have been like to live in a world where death was so inescapable; maybe arbitrary whims of gods make more sense.

the name “galba”

Posted on Saturday 5 March 2011 by dbv

“Why the surname ‘Galba’ was first assumed by a Sulpicius, and where it originated, must remain moot points. One suggestion is that after a tediously protracted siege of some Spanish town the Sulpicius in question set fire to it, using toches smeared with resin (galbanum). Another is that he resred to galbeum, a kind of poultice, during a long illness. Others are that he was very fat, the Gallic word for which is galba; or that, on the contrary, he was very slender – like the galba, a creature which breeds in oak trees.”

(Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, “Galba” 3, p. 248 in the Robert Graves/Michael Grant translation.)

corrections

Posted on Thursday 3 March 2011 by dbv

Correction: March 3, 2011
An art review on Friday about an exhibition of work by Ree Morton at the Alexander and Bonin gallery in Chelsea referred incorrectly to the exhibition. It is the first solo show of her work at a New York gallery in 10 years, not the first in New York in that time. (There was one at the Drawing Center in 2009.)

Correction: September 29, 2009
An art review on Sept. 18 about “Ree Morton: At the Still Point of the Turning World,” at the Drawing Center in SoHo, misstated the history of exhibitions of Morton’s drawings. Other exhibitions have highlighted her work; this one is not the first.

better days for the arts