Yay og suk

Den her bog udkommer, lyksaligt nok:



men først i november, melankolsk nok!

Men hey! også fedt forjættende med det ONE, så bliver det jo nødt til at være planlgt mindst 1 TWO!

iLydia

Mest misundelig jeg har været på ihændehavelsen af en smartphone:

Fyren, jeg den anden morgen ca. 8:33 stod skulder ved skulder med i stopfyldt S-tog og som saligt opslugt læste i Lydia Davis' Collected Stories (jeg nåede lige at genkende forsiden (men ikke den lidt længere historie han et et meget ordknapt skærmbillede ad gangen læste)) -

- fandt lige et TLS-interview med Lydia, hvor hun svarer på 20 spørgsmål, her er 3 af dem:

"What will your field look like twenty-five years from now? 
This is another difficult one. How does one predict anything in the future, especially now, when things change so fast? The temptation is always to take present trends and project them forward, though that can be completely wrong. If I were to do that, I’d say – there will be more and more self-publishing, less and less concern for correctness of grammar, usage, accurate meanings of words, a more casual approach altogether to the task of editing. More spontaneous creation of personal narrative, and more blurring of the lines between fact and fiction, or reality and fiction. I’m thinking also, for some reason, of 3-D holograms, and imagining the creation of holographic fictional situations in which we walk into something that mingles our reality and our daydreams. Here, I’m trying hard to project something I can barely imagine. On the other hand, the traditional novel, for instance, has continued to thrive, even in print form, despite all the changes going on around it. Traditional printed books may simply continue to find an enthusiastic readership.

 (...)

Let’s play Humiliation (see David Lodge’s Changing Places): What’s the most famous book you haven’t read?/play you haven’t seen?/album you haven’t listened to?/film you haven’t watched?
Are you asking about all of these categories? Well, I won’t admit publicly to the very most embarrassing of the famous books I haven’t read, but I will admit to Don Quixote. But I have on my bookshelf at least three translations of it, as well as the whole immense thing in Spanish, so clearly I’m working up to reading it. (It has a lot of competition.) I’ll attempt the other genres. Play: a lot of Shakespeare, though I’ve probably read them all. And Ibsen’s Peer Gynt – though now I’m discovering that, far from being famous, Ibsen isn’t someone that literate younger people have even heard of. Album: I’ve never listened to more than individual songs by Bob Dylan. Film? Probably Tarkovsky, but most of the famous films one simply sooner or later ends up seeing.

Do you have any hidden talents?
This is another tough one – I simply sit here thinking of all the things I don’t do very well. I ski, but not very well; play the piano, but not very well; for a while played the violin in a string quartet, though we, in the quartet, were the only ones who enjoyed hearing what we played; once earned $40 playing the violin in The Messiah. I cook, but only occasionally with any flair. I’m a patient gardener, and the plants don’t usually die. I can darn a sock, if I have to. I once made a dress that I could actually wear. The first time I fired a rifle, I shot the bottle off the wall."

Den sensationelle FØRSTE sjove skriveøvelse

fra Comedy-værkstedet, der er at svare, som om man selv, med navns nævnelse, er en beboer, på denne opslagstavletekst, der nemlig er en ORIGINAL Line Knutzon-tekst skrevet for år tilbage til dette skriveøvelse-formål - og den ANDEN skriveøvelse var så at svare på en af svarene til den tekst, og så kunne vi være blevet ved, men det gjorde vi ikke, og det skulle vi måske have gjort, nej, vi skulle ej, tredje skriveøvelse blev zen-brutalt OULIPO-sabotagen S + 7, og det skulle det også være:

"Til alle beboere(også i nr. 12)(ikke 19)

I forbindelse med vedtagelse af en ny kloak (vedtaget på generalforsamling 5-5 hos Lars)(Vagn var der ikke) er det nødvendigt at nedpille cykelskuret så håndværkerne kan komme til. Man bedes derfor parkere/stille sine cykler ud på hhv. Glentevej, Rødmosevej, Mejsevej og ikke mindst langs hækken op til Foldmans alle - numrene 2 til 22 (dog ikke ved nummer 12 . da kørestolsbruger J.H. Iversen
 skal kunne forcerer området). Der blev ved general forsamlingen (d.5-5 hos Lars)(Vagn var der ikke) diskuteret om hvorvidt det blokerer brandvejen at folk parkerer, særligt den ene scooter .men også de to barnevogne og den store cykelvogn som tilhører Marianne. Der var bred enighed om at det tiltrækker pyromaner og man bør venligst fjerne genstandene fra port området i tilfælde af en sådan pyroman brand. Kloakken ventes færdig august og den af bestyrelsen nedsatte "cykelskurs gruppe" (bestående af Richter, Ole og Karin) er i gang med at søge oplysninger om oplysninger om et nyt cykelskur. Jeg, det bedste gør som jeg kan, for at fremskynde processen.

Robert Olsen, gårdlavsformand"

- Jeg fandt 1 (måske!?) fiktiv henvendelse og 1 faktisk til inspiration - og fik også tre relevante otutakes fra Jens Blendstrups - OGSÅ SENSATION (men jeg har fået lov at låne jer en hele OUTTAKE-FØLJETON på Blogdahl)! - kommende roman Slagterenker og bagerkoner:


Jens Blendstrup:

(jobansøgninger outtakes, måske er den med kirkekontoret med…)

  

Til Præstø Kirkekontor

Kære Præstø Kirkekontor. Jeg er en ældre elektriker der søger med lys og lygte efter et arbejde. Jeg ved godt I ikke arbejder meget med strøm. Men jeg husker med gru min egen moders død, da hun lå lig de parade i det mørke kapel. Skulle der på nogen måde være brug for min ekspertise i forbindelse med dette, vil jeg uden skelnen til den alvorlige situation, kunne opsætte lys hvorved den afdøde, kan fremstå, om ikke levende, så dog behageligere at beskue. Jeg sender denne ansøgning upåagtet at i ikke søger nogen til denne stilling, men i skal vide jeg har tænkt på det lige siden jeg så min moder ligge der. Nuvel hvad er min forbindelse til jeres ”hvilested.” Mit navn er Usse Karlshøj. Og hvis i kigger i jeres ”analer” vil i finde slægtens aner flere generationer tilbage. Jeg ejer derfor stor veneration for jeres sted. Faktisk er mit liv for intet at regne uden min opvækst i og omkring jeres dejlige kirkegaard. Min fader haver mange gode venner der ligge der. Om mig selv kan jeg sige: Jeg er i stand til at arbejde for mig selv. Ligesom min evt. Belysning af jeres ”døde” ikke vil fremstå vulgær, men taktfuld.

Med venlig hilsen.

Jørgen Usse Karlshøj.

Kære Korsør Tæpper

Jeg er en midaldrende mand der i livet har lavet ganske mange ting. De sidste 20 år har jeg været elektriker hos et større dansk elfirma. Når jeg ansøger jer, er det fordi jeg gennem årene har købt mangt et tæppe hos jer. At jeg i disse år ikke har været der i nær samme grad, skyldes tidernes ”krav” om blotlagt træ. Eller rent ud sagt: trægulve. Det er imidlertid kommet mig for øre, jeg har set det selv, at i ikke er særligt gode til at skilte med jeres tæppers kvalitet. Hvorfor ikke gøre dette bedre? Jeg foreslår en helhedsløsning! Lamper i gulv og loft. Evt med drejeskinne, hvorved kunder der kigger ind – kan drages til at kigge med lyset ind på jeres mange skatte. Jeg lover jer fuld tilfredshed eller ingenting. Da jeg stadig er på dagpenge! Slå til nu! Eller fortryd

Mvh. Jørgen Usse Karlshøj

……(klip ud og gem)

kære Jørgen Usse

Tusind tak for din henvendelse. Men jeg er en gammel kone, som ikke har brug for lys i min butik. Jeg har netop valgt at afstå til anden side, da min datter ikke vil føre forretningen videre. Men du kan altid henvende dig til ALDI danmark, da det er dem der har købt min butik for at rive denne ned. Mvh. Gurli. Korsør Tæpper.

  

Hallo Bardo Beton

Jeg ser I søger en chauffør til jeres afdeling i Slagelse. Jeg er ikke chauffør, men kan hurtigt blive det. Jeg har været privat bilist i mange år. Og har kørt mange ture i jeres område og ved hvor der mangler mørtel! Hold nu op hvor folk de sløser med deres murværk! Natarbejde intet problem. Da jeg har hund der sover om natten. Hvorfor ikke satse på en voksen medarbejder i stedet for alle de unge mænd med ”Beton i røven”

Ja undskyld hvis jeg lyder lidt fræk. Men jeg er vant til at flytte tunge havefliser, og ved hvad det vil sige!

Ring eller skriv til Jørgen Usse ”bardo” Karlshøj. For mer. Information.

Readymade i opdatering af Harald Voetmann:







- fra Lydia Davis' Can't and Won't

LETTER TO THE FROZEN PEAS MANUFACTURER


Dear Frozen Peas Manufacturer

  We are writing to you because we feel that the peas illustrated on your package of frozen peas are a most uattractice color. We are referring to the 16 oz. plastic package that shows three or four pods, one of them split open, with peas rolling out near them. The peas are a dull yellow green, more the color of pea soup than fresh peas and nothing like the actual color of your peas, which are a nice bright dark green. The depicted peas are, moreover, about three times the size of the actual peas inside the package, which, together with their dull color, makes them even less appealing - they appear to be past their maturity and mealy in texture. Additionally, the color of your illustrated peas contrasts poorly with the color of the lettering and other decorations on your package, which is an almost harsh neon green. We have compared your depiction of peas to that of other frozen peas packages and yours is by far the least appealing. Most food manufacturers depict food on their packaging that is more attractive than the food inside and therefore deceptive. You are doing the opposite: you are falsely representing your peas as less attractive than they actually are. We enjoy your peas and do not want your business to suffer. Please reconsider your art.


  Yours sincerely

3 nye Lydia-historier til dig som fredags-talismaner

Notes During Long Phone Conversation with Mother

for summer – she needs

pretty dress – cotton

cotton nottoc

coontt

tcoont

toonct

tocnot tocont

tocton

contot

On the Train

We are united, he and I, though strangers, against the two women in front of us talking so steadily and audibly across the aisle to each other. Bad manners.

Later in the journey I look over at him (across the aisle) and he is picking his nose. As for me, I am dripping tomato from my sandwich on to my newspaper. Bad habits.

I would not report this if I were the one picking my nose.

I look again and he is still at it.

As for the women, they are now sitting together side by side and quietly reading, clean and tidy, one a magazine, one a book. Blameless.

 - og total Voodoo-besværgelse, anti-os!:

A Story Told to Me by a Friend

A friend of mine told me a sad story the other day about a neighbour of hers. He had begun a correspondence with a stranger through an online dating service. The friend lived hundreds of miles away, in North Carolina. The two men exchanged messages and then photos and were soon having long conversations, at first in writing and then by phone. They found that they had many interests in common, were emotionally and intellectually compatible, were comfortable with each other and were physically attracted to each other, as far as they could tell on the Internet. Their professional interests, too, were close, my friend’s neighbour being an accountant and his new friend down South an assistant professor of economics at a small college. After some months, they seemed to be well and truly in love, and my friend’s neighbour was convinced that ‘this was it’, as he put it. When some vacation time came up, he arranged to fly down south for a few days and meet his Internet love.

During the day of travel, he called his friend two or three times and they talked. Then he was surprised to receive no answer. Nor was his friend at the airport to meet him. After waiting there and calling several more times, my friend’s neighbour left the airport and went to the address his friend had given him. No one answered when he knocked and rang. Every possibility went through his mind.

Here, some parts of the story are missing, but my friend told me that what her neighbour learned was that, on that very day, even as he was on his way south, his Internet friend had died of a heart attack while on the phone with his doctor; my friend’s neighbour, having learned this either from the man’s neighbour or from the police, had made his way to the local morgue; he had been allowed to view his Internet friend; and so it was here, face to face with a dead man, that he first laid eyes on the one who, he had been convinced, was to have been his companion for life.

 - fra bidrag til netfanzinet fivedials.com, hvor 2 yderligere nyheder kan læses

Lydia lærer/læser norsk fra scratch (dansk og dansk litteratur er MISUNDELIG!)

fra enquete om Books Of The Year i New Statesman, november 2014:

Lydia Davis:
One of the most interesting books for me this past year has been the latest “novel” by the much-laurelled Norwegian Dag Solstad. Since the book, known familiarly over there as “the Telemark novel” (its full title is long), does not exist in English, I have been struggling, happily, to make what I can of it in Norwegian (it’s published by Forlaget Oktober). A most peculiar form of fiction, consisting as it does almost purely of fact and dense with detailed genealogies of Solstad’s ancestors, it is animated, nevertheless, by strangely compelling incidents of centuries-old conflict and joy and by the author’s impassioned investigative spirit and wry commentary

Romanens titel: Det uoppløselige episke element i telemark 1591-1896

fra interview med Lydia Davis i norske Morgenbladet, oversat (tilbage) til engelsk på sitet lithub-com, april 2015 (tak for link til Lea L):

“No, I never use dictionaries. Then there would have been no challenge. No intellectual challenge at all!”
Lydia Davis has just shown me her handwritten notes in the margins of a novel called “unreadable” and “as dull as the phone book” by critics in the country in which it was published.
In Davis’s meticulous handwriting, systematic descriptions of vocabulary, style, and grammar spill over the pages of the novel and onto a stack of papers. The makeshift booklet, made up of sheets of paper folded in half, densely annotated on both sides, constitute a grammar not only of the novel itself, but of the language in which it was written, a grammar constructed entirely by Davis herself.
The 2013 winner of the Man Booker International Prize, who is widely respected for her translations from French, already speaks German and Spanish, has taught herself Dutch and some Portuguese and admits to having “looked into a few other languages,” although, she adds, “I wouldn’t say I speak them.”
After visiting a literary festival in Norway in 2013, Davis embarked upon her most ambitious linguistic project to date. She decided to learn Norwegian, a language previously unknown to her, from this novel, and this novel only.
“I can’t pronounce the title, so I just call it ‘the Telemark novel’,” Davis admits.

“Do exactly what you want, that’s my idea. Some will love it and some will hate it, and that’s alright.”

(...)
“I did not want to stop reading Norwegian,” Davis wrote about the experiment in The Times Literary Supplement: “I had become attached to my daily immersion in the tales, some quite dramatic, all curiously entrancing.” The result was a heartfelt passion for the book itself.



“You may ask questions in Norwegian—if they are simple,” Davis wrote in an email before the interview.
When she greets me at the train station of her hometown, Hudson, two hours north of New York City, Davis is happy to explain how the project grew out of her idea of what it means to be an international writer:
“It all started with a resolution. After my books started coming out in various countries, I made a decision: Any language or culture that translates my work, I want to repay by translating something from that language into English, no matter how small. It might end up being just one poem or one story, but I would always translate something in return.”
(...)
“Were those first words in the novel—‘Read slowly, word by word, if you wish to understand what I am saying.’—in themselves an encouragement?”
“At that point I didn’t even worry about what it meant, I was more concerned with decoding words than interpreting content. But at least I can say I really followed the author’s instructions!”
“How do you start making sense of such a complex material?”
“Some passages are richer than others. Look at this, for example, when I found this I felt I had found a goldmine…” She examines the pages, pointing to a paragraph. “Look, these words clearly form pairs, they function as opposites,” she says. “’Jung’—is that how you pronounce this?”
“Young”?
“Yes, ‘young’ and ‘old’, I knew that was what ‘ung’ and ‘gammel’ meant. I could tell what followed was a whole list of opposites of the same order. So I could easily figure out the other words: ‘rich’ and ‘poor,’ ‘sickness’ and ‘health’. You see how you are suddenly able to unlock so many words, just by studying the pattern? Take the words beginning with ‘Hv.’ I guessed they were used in questions: ‘hva’ meaning ‘what’, ‘hvorfor’ meaning ‘why’. But it took me a long time to figure out ‘hvis’ was ‘if.’ I had to start by assuming it was a word of the same class and then test all the different possibilities. The h is always silent, right?
“Correct. So when you find a pattern, do you check with other sources to see if you’re right?”
“No, no, never! Then it wouldn’t be the same. I want to figure it out myself. I think of learning a language as a riddle. Learning it this way is like being an egyptologist, deciphering hieroglyphs. It is that process, finding the key that opens up a world of meaning that was previously hidden, which is the motivation for me. To learn grammar in the traditional textbook way would just be too boring.

Lydia Davis i den faste enquete By The Book i New York Times, april 2015:

What books are currently on your night stand?

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle: Book 2” is on top of the pile at the moment. You’d think, from where the bookmark is, that I’m near the end, but the book is so fat that that’s an illusion — I still have 100 pages to go. Another that I’m reading, this one in Norwegian, is by one of Norway’s pre-eminent fiction writers, Dag Solstad. It’s called “Armand V.,” and it’s entirely in the form of footnotes to a novel that does not exist but that we begin to imagine as we read this one. (...)

What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?

A Mickey Mouse comic book in Norwegian — I bought it to help me with the language. Ditto a couple of children’s books in Norwegian. Many different editions of the children’s classic “Bob, Son of Battle,” by Alfred Ollivant — I was collecting them. A book I’m actually enjoying a lot called “Studies in Lowland Scots,” by James Colville (published in 1909). A lovely little thick volume in Dutch showing different traditional costumes. Some old books by Lenin inherited from my father that haven’t yet found a good home.

 

- jeg bestiller straks den Telemark-roman på Audiatur, men kommer jo til at læse den alt for nemt (hvis den så bare var på nynorsk)

Aflyste køer

Googlede som en gal efter ny Lydia Davis-tekst, som kunne have være blevet læst op i aftes, men uden held - fandt i stedet to ubrugte omslag til Can't and Won't ved LD's faste omslagsdesigner Charlotte Strick, begge med køer på:





Stricks kommentar:
Ariana (kotegneren LB) and I went through several rounds of cows. At first they all felt too disengaged and then "not gestural and painterly enough." Lydia hoped they would be "slightly threatening" while also "curious." We changed to a 3/4-view and facial expressions that made it clear these cows weren’t willing to move from their positions on the page, but it started to feel to everyone like the whole cow idea was too cute and Lydia’s work is not cute. She had warned me by email that she "might simply feel in the end that any image of a cow over-determines the way the book is approached..." Clearly it was time to move on.
These early sketches look so fussy to me now, though Ariana’s painting style is simple and sophisticated and the color would be just as limited in the final jacket design. That "final" design was actually one of my very first ideas, scribbled in a notepad, but instead of working it out I’d been seduced by Davis’s bovine neighbors and lost my way. Often you need to build a jacket design till it’s dense with ideas – then find the time, will and clarity to strip, strip, strip away. Lydia’s writing is that stripped down too, and to get a design right for her work I need to remind myself of this.
At first I was sorry to see these cows amble off my jacket design, but when I looked back at my computer screen, I saw that what was left was a blank space and these words:

...because, they said, I was lazy. What they meant by lazy was that I used too many contractions: for instance, I would not write out in full words cannot and will not, but instead contracted them to can’t and won’t.

I had to laugh -- it turns out I’d been pretty stubborn too! Davis’s sentences hadn’t needed embellishment; they’d just needed me to stop thinking beyond their simple statement... and for me to find an equally straightforward way to set them on a page.
Finally, I choose to deboss all these words to give them another layer of strength. Like the cows, this book (and its jacket) now quietly stands its ground, daring you to look away.

- det endelige rent bogstavelige, koløse omslag

Lydia og vandflasken og dig

(du måtte desværre/heldigvis ikke tage billeder i komediekælderen, men)

her er Lydia Davis i boghandlen ved siden af hendes gode ven, vandflasken, knipset af dig i aftes, hun har fået en mikrofon i øjet og bruger ikke nodestativet; hun oplæser en ny story, som er en hemmelighed for alle os, der ikke var med i boghandlen, sikkert printet ud af på hendes egen printer - det er så fint at forestille sig Lydia Davis' printer, printende ny tekst ud, og den har du IKKE set eller knipset

Mr. Lydia B. Davis - Professor ? Davis

De to perfektest frydefulde tekster, jeg foreløbigt har oplevet i 2014 (værker af Blendstrup, Gjessing/Løppenthin/Caspar, Højrup, Sternberg, Hesselholdt, Hagen, Laugesen, Voetmann, Juul, MONDRUP (mangler 50 sider, men det ligner Gennembrud) tilhører ANDRE kategorier af fremragendehed), er

Helle Helles roman Hvis det er

og Lydia Davis' oplæsning af sin text in progress "Goodbye Louise, or Who I Am" på Louisiana Literature, som Louisiana netop har være så ekstremt rare at lægge op på video - strengt obligatorisk link HER

 

En tekst af Russel Edson, Lydia Davis' kortprosalæremester

Let Us Consider

By Russell Edson
 

Let us consider the farmer who makes his straw hat his
sweetheart; or the old woman who makes a floor lamp her son;
or the young woman who has set herself the task of scraping
her shadow off a wall....

    Let us consider the old woman who wore smoked cows’
tongues for shoes and walked a meadow gathering cow chips
in her apron; or a mirror grown dark with age that was given
to a blind man who spent his nights looking into it, which
saddened his mother, that her son should be so lost in
vanity....

    Let us consider the man who fried roses for his dinner,
whose kitchen smelled like a burning rose garden; or the man
who disguised himself as a moth and ate his overcoat, and for
dessert served himself a chilled fedora....

Russell Edson, "Let Us Consider" from The Rooster's Wife.

I går var Lydiadag og hun havde malet sine negle sorte

og hvor var det godt at se og høre hende live, jeg blev helt fanoboysitrende, vi havde ventet i en time midt i caféområdet med andre hattedamer uden hatte og kom derfor til at sidde perfekt på anden række, så vi kunne føle os med-scannet, når hun lod sine store øjne vandre under interview og oplæsning, og heldigvis bad interviewer Christian Lund hende læse rigtig meget op, og læse perfekt udvalgte stories og frem for alt (det meste af, desværre ikke hele) "The Language of Things in the House", så vi omsider kunne høre den korrekte, omhyggeligt musikalske UDTALE af tingene i husets sprog:

A pot in the sink with water running in: "A profund respect"

A spoon stirring a mug of tea: "Iraqi, -raqi, -raqi"

The wasking machine in agitation cycle: "Pocketbook, pocketbook."

Ikke fordi hun ikke med stort og fint overskud svarede klogt og vittigt på spørgsmål - Lund mente at vide, at hun blev inspireret af tale med naboer, det vidste hun nu ikke rigtigt, men der er jo teksten om "Cows", og køerne er vel en slags naboer, og dem talte hun i hvert fald med; hun blev inspireret til sin frie kortprosa-form af den ikke særlig kendte kendte amerikanske prose poet Russel Edson (som døde i april i år), og han var god at lære af, fordi han modsat superheltene Beckett og Kafka også skrev svage tekster - men fordi teksterne er sagen selvfølgelig, og det helt vilde sensationelle var, at hun til allersidst, da vi troede seancen var færdig og havde voldklappet accordingly, læste en lang, liste-tekst in progress op, der hed "Goodbye Louise" og bestod af alt det, hun (og hendes bøger) fejlagtigt/sært var blevet kaldt og præsenteret og udpeget som, og som startede med ca. to sider med forvrængninger af hendes navn (og køn), inkl. Louise - jeg havde fået øje på den første sides smalle navneliste (uden at vide, at det var det, den var, jeg har ikke lasersyn, desværre) allerede. da hun kom ind og satte sig, og stærkt håbet, det var en ny tekst, hvilket det var, og hvilken (og alle damerne med og uden usynlige hatte og damekøn var helt vilde med både den og ting-sproget og sorg-grammatikken, og jeg kunne ikke lade være med at tænke, jamen, hvorfor læser I så ikke nogen af de danske forfattere, der skriver lige så formalistisk påhitsomt og præcist og rørende , fx sidder Christian Yde Frostholm lige derovre, han har skrevet en Paris-bog, og I elsker jo Paris, der er så temmelig Lydiask, læs fx ham!)!

Intet slår idoler, der ikke skuffer!

Bortset fra det er i dag Lydiadag

klokken 18, Koncertsalen, Louisiana!

Wrong Thank-You in Theater

At the back of the auditorium, as the theater fills for the event, I stand up from my seat to let a woman get past me to her seat in the row.
  "Thanks," she says.
  "Mmm-hmm!" I say in aknowledgement.
  But I have misunderstood. She was not thanking me, she was thanking the usher, who is standing a few feet behind me. 
 "No, I meant her," she says, without looking at me.
  She just wanted to make that clear. 

De hemmelige benspænd 1 & 2

Min samvittighed (og du) byder mig at afsløre 2 anmeldelsers skjulte benspænd, nu den sidste af dem omsider er kommet i avisen.

Det er fordi, da Anna Libak fik nyt job og havde 4 uger tilbage som redaktør af Weekendavisen Bøger, gav jeg hende 4 ønsker, 1 pr. uge.

1. ønske var en anmeldelse kun i hovedsætninger. Det blev så tilfældigvis - men jeg ville nok ikke have udsat en bog, jeg decideret ikke brød om, for eksperimentet (uden at afsløre det) - anmeldelsen af Katrine Marie Guldagers digtsamling Et sted i verden - jeg snød så meget jeg kunne uden at snyde, masser af indskud, men ingen deciderede xtrasætninger, indskudte, bi- eller relativ-, mellem punktummer. Her begyndelsen:

Jeg kan ikke anmelde Katrine Marie Guldagers nye digtsamling retfærdigt. Jeg er for sentimentalt glad for hendes to seneste, 13 og 19 år gamle digtsamlinger, Styrt, 1995, og Ankomst, Husumgade, 2001, og deres turbulente og rasende firkanter. Digtene i den nye bog, ligner digte, højremargen-flossede en halv til tre kvart side lange, og ligner digtene i debutbogen Dagene skifter hænder,1994, og ligner måske mest - og lyder nu da også som - digtene i Søren Ulrik Thomsens bestseller Rystet spejl.

   I min anmeldelse i sin tid af debutbogen kunne jeg godt hører ekkoer af både Thomsen og især Henrik Nordbrandt. Styrt imidlertid lød, rundt og rundt i vaskemaskinens dødsdrom, som ingen andre end Guldager. Aldrig har jeg følt så generations-broderlig en forbindelse til en bog. Aldrig har jeg været så jaloux på en bog. Den bog burde jeg have skrevet!

  Seks år senere globaliserede og politiserede Guldager sit fart og tempo i Ankomst, Husumgade. Så tudsegammel er den såkaldt ”nye” politiske/etiske digtning. Derpå stod den på prosa atter prosa, noveller og romaner og romanserie, med stadig mindre turbo og stadig mere alviden. Efter sin Kritikerpris-belønnede første novellesamling, København, 2004, udtalte digteren til denne avis:

2. ønske var endnu hårdere og smertfuldere en anmeldelse uden adjektiver (undtagen krimi-anmeldelses-adjektivet spændende), og smart nok havde jeg lige fået fingre i koncept-coole Lydia Davis' Can't and Won't, som ikke burde have noget imod at stå for skud (den bog var jeg så også endnu meget gladere for), og det blev til rigtig mange og tunge substantiveringer selvfølgelig. Begyndelsen medsamt trompet/underrubrik/rubrik:

LYDIA-NETIK Lydia Davis formår at gøre køernes koreografi og vaskemaskinens messen dødspændende

Nekrologers topfart

Lydia Davis: Can’t and Won’t. 289 sider, 190 kr. i Politikens Boghal. Hamish Hamilton

Selvfølgelig er min yndlingstekst i mester-kortprosaisten Lydia Davis’ samling Can’t and Won’t (kan ikke og vil ikke) den, der på dansk ville hedde ”Tingene i husets sprog”, og som begynder sådan her (jeg oversætter halvt, det kan ikke oversættes helt, undtagen måske af James Joyce, der ikke er til rådighed):
  ”Vaskemaskinen centrifugerende: ”Pakistani, Pakistani.”/ Vaskemaskinen agiteret (langsomt): ”Firfighter, firefighter, firefighter, firefighter.”// Tallerkener raslende i opvaskemaskinen: ”Neglected”
  Og sådan fortsætter det gennem ikke færre end seks sider, med stumper af et hus-tings-sprogs-essay i kursiv; dette er de tre slut-notationer:
  ”Fugl: ”Marguerite!”/ Fugl: ”Hey, Frederika!”/ Suppeskål på disken: ”Fabrizio!”.

  Omhuen og præcisionen, med hvilken tingenes sprog er fremlyttet, både imponerer og fryder og foruroliger.

  Som oftest går Davis stik modsat til værks imidlertid, aflytter vaskemaskine- og fuglelydene, der midt inde i sprogets orden signalerer absurditet og følsomhed, paradoksalitet og sammenbrud.
- og så vidt jeg kan overskue, har ingen læsere bidt mærke i, at der var noget lusket på færde i de 2 tekster - bortset fra at en enkelt på FB roste Guldberg-anmeldelsens ekstraordinære koncentration og mårettethed - tilfredsstillende og skuffende nok!

3. ønske var en anmeldelse af en Melodi Grand Prix-bog af Jørgen de Mylius.

4. ønske nåede aldrig at blive formuleret, og jeg vurderer, at det nu er uhjælpeligt for sent.



- en fotograf forsøger at spænde ben for en anden Lars 

Norman Mailer som short short storyteller

Meget Lydiaske (OG Normanske) disse to helt korte korttekster, der tilsammen udgør afsnittet "Microbes", i paperbacken The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer, som jeg snuppede i går i Gentoftes Biblioteks frilufts-bogbørs (jeg stikker dubletter af Thøger Jensen, Schnack, Barnett Newman tilbage lige om lidt):

IT

We were going thorugh the barbed-wire when a machine gun started. I kept walking until I saw my head lying on the ground.
  "My God, I'm dead," my head said.
  And my body fell over.

THE SHORTEST NOVEL OF THEM ALL

At first she thought she could kill him in three days.
  She did nearly. His heart proved nearly unequal to her compliments.
  Then she thought it would take three weeks. But he survived.
  So she revised her tables and calculated three months.
  After three years, he was still alive. So they got married.
  No they've been married for thirty years. People speak warmly of them. They are known as the best marriage in town.
  It's just that their children keep dying.

De gamle mænd i byen, fx Hellerup

Seneste offentliggjorte tekst af Lydia Davis er "Old Men Around Town" i New Statesman", der begynder sådan her - dr er også gamle mænd i Hellerup, mildt sagt:

In our town there was an old man who would come out of his house and take his daily walk along the sides of the streets in the town. There were not many sidewalks, so he shared the street with the cars, but in the backstreets the cars went by slowly. He was a tall, thin old man with a slight stoop – the father of the doctor in our town. He held his cane in one hand and a cloth bag in the other, for the mail, and he walked briskly but with such small steps that he did not advance very fast.

He seems to be gone now. The warm weather has returned, but he does not appear on the streets. In the cold weather there are no old men on the streets. Now that the warm weather has come, a few old men have appeared, but we see them only in the centre of the town, walking a short distance along a sidewalk to enter a shop or standing at a street crossing. One of them is fleshy and bearded, in shorts and suspenders, dark socks and sturdy shoes. Another is bone thin and totters, swaying to one side, resting a hand against whatever bit of wall is nearby, or leaning far back to open a shop door.

Another old man, before the doctor’s father, used to walk past our house. He had good balance and a longer step. He wore a tam-o’-shanter at an angle on his handsome head. His white beard was short and curly. He had lived in the town all his life, unlike the doctor’s father, and he would stop to tell us where the sidewalks used to be and who had died a violent death, in which house. We no longer see him these days.

Another old man, once a week, would stand dressed in a suit and overcoat by his gate, in polished formal shoes. He was out early, waiting to be picked up by his son.

We see these old men on the streets of our town, and we see others in a nursing home, where they have been left by their families. The nursing home is itself like a little town, with its own chapel, barbershop, gift shop, and community meeting room like a town hall. There are the offices of the administrators, and there is the hallway like Main Street. There you may meet the others in the town and stop to talk with them. Some of the residents, though, spend the whole day going up and down the hall. They have given up stopping to chat, if they ever did, and as they pass you, they stare hard at you, almost with hostility, or else look straight ahead with vacant eyes.

Det er stadig rigtigt at Lydia Davis kommer til Danmark i august

JA!

og det er faktisk sandt, at hendes danske forlag Vandkunsten spørger WA om vi er interesseret i at interviewe hende

INTERESSERET I AT INTERVIEWE HENDE ?

Dette er Weekendavisens officielle svar, suverænt udformet af mig i form af en af teksterne i Vandkunstns Davis-bind nr. 2, Den trettnde kvinde (med tekster fra (eller det faktisk bare hele) Almost no Memory, 1997), oversat af Karen Margrethe Adserballe:

Et vrededsudbrud nær vejen, en afvisning af at tale på stien, en stilhed i fyrreskovene, en stilhed over den gamle jernbanebro, et forsøg på at være venlig i vandet, en afvisning af at stoppe skænderiet på def flade sten, et vredessskrig på den stejle jordbred, en gråd i krattet.

Med andre ord: JA!

Jeg ved hvem der skal interviewe Helle på Lousiana

det skal

LYDIA DAVIS

for det har jeg vist mærkeligt nok ikke råbt op om her, det er ret præcist lige så stort som en ny Helle-roman, for hun er ret præcis lige så stor en prosahelt FOR MIG, men jo bare amerikaner, og derfor er vi uforkælet med hendes daglige nærvær - for et par år siden var hun faktisk planlagt til at optræde på Bogforum, men nåede af dårlige grunde, jeg ikke kan huske, men som sikkert havde med ikke-Louisianaske småpenge hos Vandkunsten, hendes danske forlag, og ikke-Louisianaske lavambitioner hos Bogforum at gøre, aldrig frem, men nu sker det faktisk og omsider:

LYDIA DAVIS KOMMER TIL DANMARK

(MED ELLER UDEN KAT)



og så skal

PIA JUUL

der bliver aktuel med ONKELBOGEN, interviewe Lydia Davis (med eller uden kat), synes jeg,

og så skal

PETER HØJRUP

stadig aktuel med Island, som jeg lige har hørt Klaus Rothstein halv-disse på Deadline (vs. Mai Misfeldts rene ros), fordi han opfatter Bogforum-sporet som fad satire, det er fed satire er det, men det er da først og fremmest høj, panisk komik, basta! interviewe Pia Juul,

og så skal

DAVID LETTERMAN

interviewe Peter Højrup, ja!

Den patroniserende cartoonsammenligning er bullshit

I et par anmeldelser af Lydia Davis' Can't and Won't er nogle af de kortere og vittigere og "lettere" tekster blevet sammenlignet med New Yorker-cartoonisten Roz Chast, og det er helt klart ikke ment som en ros, men som en markering af deres - i forhold til rigtig litteratur - kokette alt-for-lethed, Men det er noget snobbet fis (og snobbet fis er en slem omgang fis). Vi burde i langt højere grad sammenligne gode forfattere med gode cartoonister og bladtegnere og tegnserieskabere - for at illuminere og ROSE begge praksisser bedre: Jens Blendstrup med Robert Crumb, Kristian Bang Foss med Carl Barks, Henrik Nordbrandt med Per Marquard Otzen (der netop er blevet tildelt Statens Kunstfonds livsvarige legat, samtidig med Morten Søndergaard, tillykke til dem begge!) - og gid nogen engang ville sammenligne mig med Andrè Franquin! 

- en Lydiask Chast-tegning



- hov der kom Franquin, som en blækkat! Sådan skal en anmeldelse skrives!

Inspirationsprofeti

En novelle i Pia Juuls novellesamling nr, 2, Dengang med hunden, 2004, hedder "Plejeplan for Lydia".

LYDIA!

Dengang havde hun, formoder jeg, endnu ikke læst Lydia Davis.

Men det skulle hun komme til.

Lydiask sætning fra den novelle:

Tante Kamma står klarere for mig end min hverdag, sådan er det nu.

Vi havde stadig vores iskælder

Jeg fik ikke anmeldt Can't and Won't til WA Bøger i morgen, fordi jeg mandag fik en tung hasteopgave: Anmelderen, der skulle anmelde Joen Billes tykke "familekrønike" Villa Ibsen, var pludselig sprunget fra. Skulende og skumlende arbejdede jeg mig gennem bog og anmeldelse, mens jeg hele tiden stjal mig til at læse i Lydia. Hvilket til gengæld betød, at jeg igen og igen kom til at læse Bille med et Davis'sk teksttyvagtigt blik; den her klasse(u)bevidste bid - fra sent i bogen; huset er Ibsen-Bjørnson-klanens villa i de italienske bjerge - er slet ikke til at stå for (lige ovenover står sætningen: "På den måde blev Tante Lillebils stilling flydende"):

Der var stadig ikke centralvarme. Hele huset blev varmet op med brænde. Vi havde stadig vores iskælder. Og vi havde stadig tjenestefolk til at hjælpe os om sommeren. Ignaz og og Valeria var der fast hele året. Om sommeren fik vi en stuepige og en hjælpepige. Hver fjortende dag kom så bønderkoner og vaskede på gammeldags manér i vaskekælderen. Og bønderne kom ind med mellemrum og slog de fleste plæner med le. Vi var den eneste villa på egnen, som stadig var i stand til at få hjælp. Underholdningsværdien var ikke ringe for tjenestefolk på Villa Ibsen. De fulgte nøje med i alt, hvad der foregik.

(og for en gangs skyld kan jeg linke til en WA-anmeldelse: vær så god!)

Jeg blev færdig for en times tid siden, bladrer lidt tilbage

The Old Vacuum Cleaner Keeps Dying on Her

The old vacuum cleaner keeps dying on her
over and over
until at last the cleaning woman
scares it by yelling:
"Motherfucker!"