the red and the green

Behind that ugly outward face lay van Gogh’s resolute schedule of artistic self-education – he would reason out each procedure in a letter as he executed it, giving 19th-century art theory a test report. But behind that, the correspondence pivoted on a deeper contradiction. Artists – pre-eminently Millet, the great programmatic painter of 19th-century peasantry, the compassionate visionary who ‘reopened our thoughts to see the inhabitant of nature’ – were founts of self-will, imbued with genius: if that art theory had Realist trappings, its core was wholly Romantic. Having studiously admired that role from without, he had now taken it to heart. But the same picture-trade education also told him that what mattered was the market-worthy product, not the producer. In that light, how could he hold his head up, at once unemployable and unsaleable, a puppet on a remittance? What did this inner authorial voice amount to, first whispered into his ear by his brother?I am trying to analyse why the second and third sections of this six-volume set contain some of the most uncomfortable reading I can remember undergoing. ‘If it’s at all possible send me another 10 francs, say. A week’s work depends on it.’ ‘I promised to pay my landlord 5 guilders … I hope you’ll send me what I so greatly want.’ ‘In a few days, you understand, I’ll be absolutely broke’. That juncture was one that nearly all the letters, however long, eventually came round to. Was it – so both writer and reader must have wondered – what all the verbalising eventually boiled down to? Was the driven man of vision no more than a beggar with an act? And therefore, since the mirage of commercial viability – ‘It won’t be long before you no longer have to send me anything’ – never seemed to draw any closer, Vincent flailed.

Julian Bell in the LRB on the new translation of Van Gogh's letters.

so glad you came

Behind a glass wall there was that bank of recording equipment you see in pictures. In the main room, where we were, there were some mikes, a set of drums, a fridge and a sofa. I said that I was only 14 and he laughed. No, I wasn’t, he told me. I was, I said. He pushed me on to the sofa and I repeated that I was 14, and – I was pleading now, knowing I was in trouble – I was a virgin. I was at any rate young enough to think that telling him that would give him pause. No, I wasn’t, I was not 14 and I was certainly no virgin, he laughed, as he pushed up my skirt. I have no idea whether he believed what he was saying or not.

Jenny Diski on Polanski at the LRB

arf

Wondering if Boulez has ever been to a dog show, I leave early in the morning with Eloise sound asleep on the back seat and a bag of pricey dog food in the trunk.

John Adams

• Try not to panic if you can’t recognize that noise coming from the stage as something you wrote. The players, even those who’ve seriously practiced their parts, are nonetheless holding on for dear life. From their vantage point inside the churning machine they very likely have no idea at all what you mean nor how what they are playing is supposed to fit into the grand plan. They have only their individual parts, which are strange and incomplete road maps full of rests, occasional notes and then more rests. Even the very best of them will miscount on a first encounter.

also John Adams

some exercise of power

Ana Maria Pacheco's Some Exercise of Power will be in a show at the Mascalls Gallery in Paddock Wood, Kent from Nov 2 to Nov 19. (Paddock Wood is apparently somewhere in the neighbourhood of Tunbridge Wells.)

arga warga revisited

Courtesy Janet Reid, MOMA's Warhol Not Wanted letter on the Rejectionist.

V TH

Tony Harrison on sculpture:

There is a monument to Heine in a park outside the Frankfurt Opera which is used by heroin addicts. Heine's hair was covered in blood sprayed from the veins of junkies when their injections went wrong. Another Heine was in Corfu in the palace of Sissi, Empress of Austria, who adored the poet. At her assassination the palace was bought by the German kaiser, and his first act was to get rid of what he called that "syphilitic Jew".

the subversive scribe

On Words Without Borders, María Constanza Guzmán interviews Suzanne Jill Levine, whose The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction has recently been published by Dalkey Archive.

MCG: North American translators are subject to what Lawrence Venuti has called the "canon of fluency," i.e., to certain standards and norms of English writing. How do you negotiate market demands, translation demands, and publishing demands, in the English in which you render your works, how do you deal with questions of readability and smoothness? What would or wouldn’t you compromise?

SJL: That is a complex matter. With all my books, including the biography Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman, and in general with any book that anybody writes, there is someone who mediates between you and the reader, and that’s the editor. Depending on the editor’s culture and the culture of the publishing house itself many things can happen. I have worked with publishers accustomed to dealing with experimental fiction, but nonetheless sometimes they had questions or they wanted to use a solution for something that seemed to me like a conventional compromise. It was a back and forth. And you accept some compromises and not others, but you definitely want to get the book out there. One of the most interesting experiences I had in that regard was when I worked with Simon and Schuster, a big commercial house. I was doing the last novel of Puig’s. My editor at that time said to me, "there is a problem because we don’t know who is talking." I explained that this was part of the style, but she said "Well, can’t we put names?" I said: "Definitely not," and there was a huge battle, but I won. Because part of the point is that in the novel Puig is using film script format but without the names. It is very important how he plays with that, and it is up to the reader to find out who the speakers are. In a way you are what you speak. So that was the story, and I thought it was rather interesting; it was quite invasive of the editor; I had never encountered that before. Then again, the book wasn’t exactly a runaway bestseller either. I think that sometimes I’ve really taken control of the text and sometimes the editor might have been right.

(Much, much more in this extremely interesting interview, the rest here)