Valleyesque is the third Fernando Flores book I’ve read. He was born in 1981 in Reynosa, Mexico, and now lives in Austin. I loved his first collection of stories, Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas, which combined what is for me an exotic setting—the Rio Grande Valley—and an exotic subject—small time struggling punk rock bands—in a group of unlikely, extertainiung stories that verge on the fantastic. He takes a major turn into the fantastic in Tears of the Trufflepig, a kind of absurdist science fiction story set again in the Valley. He returns to the Valley in Valleyesque, but pushes even further into the surreal and fantastic. If he has a theory behind his writing, it is expressed in the story “Nostradamus Baby”—the main character is a struggling writer who scrapes by as a ghost-writer. The character says, “I feel I can reveal more by writing stories in the tradition of hard-core, maybe weird literature, rooted in something old and unknown, and infusing it with my life and where I come from, as unintentionally as possible.” While down-to-earth naturalistic stories of the Rio Grande Valley might be very authentic, Flores turns the Valley into a kind of weirdly poetic place.
I found W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz to be a difficult book to read. It was one long paragraph, with no obvious place to stop and set it aside. Jacques Austerlitz was shipped from Czechoslovakia to England in 1939 as part of the Kindertransport, a program that brought thousands of refugee children, mostly Jewish, to Britain. Austerlitz is placed in the care of a rural Welsh family and grows up knowing almost nothing about his origins. He grows up to be an architectural historian, obsessed with structures from the industrial age. Especially old train stations. (His name, in addition to being a famous battle in the Napoleonic wars, is also a major Parisian railroad station.) One day while poking around in an ancient London train station, he finds himself in a chamber he had been lead to as a child refugee and is flooded with memories. This leads him down a path of attempting to rediscover his past, which take up most of the book. He discovers his family came from Prague, he discovers a woman who knew his mother and him when he was a small child, and discovers that he can speak Czech when he begins talking to her. His research takes him to the Theresienstadt Ghetto, where the Jews of Progue ended up before being murdered. This book is told to us by an acquaintance of Austerlitz, so there are repeated versions of the following construction: “I don’t remember what I replied, said Austerlitz, bit I do recall. . .”Whenever Austerlitz says something in his own story, it is always followed by “said Austerlitz” to remind us that this story is not being told to us by Austerlitz, but told to a third person. Why Sebald would use this construction is hard to say, except to remind us that history is always someone telling someone else a story, over and over, before it gets told to us. Austerlitz’s mother, Agata Austerlitz, has her story told to him by Vera, the old woman he meets in Prague, then to the narrator of the book and then to us.
Junky by William S. Burroughs is a classic novel of addiction, written in a pulpy, hard-boiled style. The protagonist starts out in New York City, ends up at Lexington for the “cure”, goes to New Orleans, down to Mexico City and by the end he is planning to go to Colombia to try yage. The life of a junkie, as depicted here, seems seedy and not very fun. There has long been a fear that drug literature would encourage people to try drugs, but Junky does very little to make it attractive. In fact, Burroughs goes out of his way to make sure you don’t get the idea that this is “fun”. “Junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness.” A lot of the book deals with that sickness an addict get when he can’t score some heroin.
Joshua Reynolds was a great English painter in the 18th century. He was the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, and presented 15 lectures to them that are called “Discourses” A lot of his lectures are an attempt on his part to elevate painting into the realm of a liberal art, like poetry. This makes sense given England’s fairly paltry record in visual art. Reynolds is constantly discussing great Italian, French and Flemish painters because no painters in England can really compare to them. A lot of what Reynolds discusses are ways for English artists to be better artists in a general, well-rounded sense. He writes in Discourse VII, “that a painter stands in need of more knowledge than is to be picked off his pallet, or collected by looking on his model, whether it be in life or in picture. He can never be a great artist, who is grossly illiterate.” Weirdly enough, Reynolds seems to hold poetry in higher esteem than he does painting. His account of his recently deceased colleague Thomas Gainsborough in Discourse XIV goes deep into understanding that painter’s weaknesses and strengths. He describes some of Gainsborough’s “scratches and marks” as having “a kind of magick” in the way they add up to a whole image. He repeatedly describes great painting as a combination of mimesis and poetry. In a letter to Samuel Johnson’s magazine, The Idler, Reynolds wrote, “If the excellency of a Painter consisted only in this kind of imitation, Painting must lose its rank, and be no longer considered as a liberal art, and sister to Poetry.” His ideal is Michelangelo, whom he describes as the “exalted Founder and Father of Modern Art, of which he is not only the inventor, but which, by the divine energy of his own mind, he carried at once to its highest point of possible perfection.” This suggest that art has all been downhill since Michelangelo: “That the Art has been in a gradual state of decline, from the age of Michel Angelo to the present, must be acknowledged.”
Anatoly Kuznetsov was 13 when the Nazi army conquered Kiev. It was a miracle that he survived. He kept a journal and remembered everything he saw and heard. Later, with the help of his mother, he reconstructed the events and then wrote it as a first-person account, Babi Yar. Babi Yar is a ravine in the city of Kiev that was used for dumping bodies after the Nazis conquered Kiev in 1941. The worst atrocity (of many) was the murder of over 33,000 Jews on September 29 and 30 in 1941. But the ravine remained a killing field for the rest of the time the Nazis held Kiev.
Why the author’s name is in parentheses, I have no idea. He wrote the book in the 1950s and submitted to a Soviet publishing house. The editor returned it and said it could only be published if he removed all the “anti-Soviet” parts. In a way, this editor is a hero—he could have just rejected it. But he recognized how important Babi Yar would be. A bowdlerized version was published in the USSR in 1966. After the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia, Kuznetsov defected to the UK with photographs of each page of the manuscript of Babi Yar.
Because the publishing history is part of the story of the book, for this edition, Kuznetsov runs the text in three different formats. Plain text is what was originally published in the USSR. Bold text is what was censored, added back in. And finally, text in brackets is text he added after his defection.
This is a terrifying book that must be read, especially as Kiev’s fate is uncertain again.
In the 80s and 90s, Kathy Acker was kind of an icon of alternative culture. I think I became aware of her from reading interviews with Alan Moore, who was apparently a fan. In 1991, I went out to dinner with Paul Mavrides and some others—he was in town (Seattle) for the Misfit Lit exhibit, of which I was one of the curators. Probably Larry Reid was there with us. Kathy Acker came up. Mavrides mentioned that people were always spreading rumors about her love life—that he had heard a rumor that he was one of her lovers, in fact. This is the last time I remember even thinking about Kathy Acker until 2020, when my old friend Larry Reid published a book about Acker’s sojourn in Seattle called, creatively enough, Kathy Acker in Seattle. Then a few months ago, I read a review of a new biography of the writer called Eat Your Mind. The review was extremely positive and I can’t say why, but I bought the book on impulse. Mainly I was interested in Acker’s artistic circle and how social relationships can build an artistic movement. This is a subject I am very interested in, and McBride’s book delivers this aspect in spades (which is true of just about any good artistic biography). Because I knew that Reid and Mavrides had met her, I was interested to see if they had any walk-on appearances in this biography. As I read it, I was attuned to McBride mentioning any people I knew—how many degrees of separation were there between me and Acker—really between me and the 80s and 90s art scene which she inhabited. For instance, Acker meets Carolee Schneeman in the late 1960s. In 1988, the College Art Association had its annual meeting in Houston, and we art students were recruited to help out. One of the speakers was Carolee Schneeman and whe had a slide show that included a photo of her famous Interior Scroll performance, in which the unrolls a scroll that was in her vagina. Naturally I was titillated by this, and later that day I was riding an elevator with my friends I mentioned this artist puling a scroll out of her hoo-hah and a voice in the back piped up. “That was me.” That’s how I met Carolee Schneeman for the first and only time. Later the biography mentions her friendship with David and Eleanor Antin, through whom she meets artist Martha Rosler and her son. The son is never named here, but he is Josh Nuefeld, who will grow up to be a pretty good cartoonist, and who I will encounter several times in the 2000s. On big fan of Acker’s was comics writer Neil Gaiman, whom I got to meet years later when I edited a benefit book for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund written by Gaiman. It was three essays by Gaiman illustrated by various comic book artists. I met Gaiman at a signing for it. Eat Your Mind describes an extremely uncomfortable sexual encounter between Gaiman and Acker, in which she asked him to “whip her pussy”.
“It was profoundly unsexual,” he recalled. “I did it and ran away.”
Artists We’ve Known is the accompanying book from an exhibit dealing with the personal collection of the Menil Museum’s first director, Walter Hopps, and his wife, Caroline Huber. Walter Hopps was a teenage art fanatic from Los Angeles who got to be friends with pioneering collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg and artist/dealer William Copley (aka CPLY). In 1957, he and artist Ed Keinholz opened Ferus Gallery, which would be the first gallery to show many important California artists and even Andy Warhol. He later became the director of the Pasadena Art Museum. It was Hopps acting as the director who was responsible for putting on the first Duchamp retrospective. I wrote a bit about this exhibit when Eve Babitz died.
He worked for the Corcoran museum in Washington, and then from 1979 to 1989, as director of the Menil Museum. And he was far from an ivory tower director—he was dee4ply involved in the Houston art scene—particularly because his wife Catoline Huber who ran Houston’s most important alternative art space, Diverse Works, from 1982 to 1993. She was by necessity attuned to what was going on in the local art community.
I mention this history because the exhibit has the kind of work you would expect when the collector has been on the front row for the major art movements of the past 70-odd years. Lots of greats from his California days—work by George Herms, Wallace Berman, Jay DeFeo. Joe Goode, Bruce Connor, Sonia Gechtoff, Keinholz, Edward Ruscha, etc., The collection also has some of that early dada and surreal objects that appealed to Hopps right at the beginning of his art journey—Duchamp, Joseph Cornell and Kurt Schwitters, and a huge selection of works by Houston artists, including James Bettison, Mark Flood, Virgil Grotfeldt, Wes Hicks, and Terrell James. When I think about it, until I saw this exhibit, I had never seen works by Bettison, Grotfeldt, or Hicks is an institutional setting.
Each artist gets their own page in the catalog, which consist mostly of potted biographies and anecdotes about how they crossed paths with Hopps and/or Huber. A few of these are written by the artist themselves. Mel Chin tells a story of how after he had an NEA grant denied him by John Frohnmeyer (appointed to the NEA job by George Bush in 1989). Frohnmeyer was really on the hot seat with grants, and this piece, Revival Field, a piece of environmental remediation disguised as art, was thought to be a step too far. But when Hopps found out, he made some calls and within a couple of days was in Washington DC with an important patron, museum director and Chin to lobby Frohnmeyer. Chin could have used his space to talk about what a great curator and tastemaker Hopps was—instead, he chose to depict Hopps being a great friend facilitating the creation of a major work of art.
Paul Fussell was a literary scholar whose experience as a 2nd lieutenant in World War II drew him to the memoirs and poems of British junior officers in World War I, including Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, and Siegfried Sassoon. He eventually wrote The Great War and Modern Memory out of thinking about war writing from World War I—specifically that which came from British infantry-men who fought and died in huge number in the filthy trenches of France. So excluded, mostly, are writings by Americans who fought (they showed up late in the war and weren’t killed in quite as dramatic numbers as the British, French and Germans), the French and Germans (who also responded to the war with literature), the rear-echelon types, the pilots and sailors—it tightly focused. But he uses these memoirs, novels, personal letters, poems by this particular group of soldiers as a way to think about how literature responded to the brutal, bloody elimination of millions of young men.
Orhan Pamuk is probably best-known as the only Turkish winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. I just read Snow, a novel Pawuk wrote in 1999-2000. Part of the reason for me to read a translation of a Turkish novel is to fill in the vast gaps in my knowledge of Turkey. Until now, I had never read a novel set in Turkey. Pawuk is well-aware that he is providing cheap package tours for Western cultural tourists such as myself. The novel is set in the city of Kars, a city in the Northeast corner of Turkey. Compared to Istanbul, Kars is relatively poor and backward. Towards the end of Snow, a character named Fazil is talking to Orhan Pamuk (who is both the author and a character in the book) and says that people will read his book about Kars “if only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. But if you put in what I’ve just said, at least your readers will keep a little room for doubts in their minds.” Wow. Just reading these lines, after having exactly that reaction to a long, deeply involved novel that moves one to love and sympathize with its characters and associate them with the entirety of the Turkish nation, makes me feel seen.
The basic action is that in the city of Kars, girls attending state schools are being required to take off their headscarves or not get an education. Some of the girls, faced with this dilemma, commit suicide. Ka is a former exile and blocked poet who has recently returned to Turkey from Germany. He gets an assignment from a left-wing publication to go to Kars and report on the suicide epidemic. He accepts the assignment because he wants to see a woman he used to know there, Ipek. In the beginning of the book, Ipek and Ka are having a conversation in a bakery when the head of the school that has been requiring girls to remove their scarves is assassinated. He was murdered on the orders of an underground Islamist terrorist named Blue. Ipek and her sister Kadife both have a romantic past with Blue. When Ka arrives in Kars, the city is completely cut off from the rest of the country by a massive snow storm. In addition to Ka, there is a theatrical company in town. The leader of the company, Sunay Zaim, working with the security services, tries to execute a coup in the city after putting on a play about the suicides. Soldiers kill numerous boys from the local religious high school during a performance of Sunay’s anti-head scarf play. Ka meets Blue in secret, and is interrogated by the local police. Eventually, Blue is killed by security forces, Ka and Ipek’s romance comes an abrupt end. The politics of Snow is complex, and for Pamuk, must have been very present in his day-to-day life. It occurs to me that Pamuk’s Nobel Prize gives him a little armor against political oppression, unlike writer Ahmet Altan, who was imprisoned after the failed coup in Turkey of 2016 and not released until 2021. But what Pawuk does is make sure Ka knows (and Pawuk knows, as a character in the book) that they are a kind of elite whose lifestyle and personal philosophy are utterly unlike the people about whom they write. Ka’s arguments with Blue are an especially powerful part of the book; it reminded me very much of Nathan Zuckerman’s tense conversation with Jewish extremist Mordecai Lippman in Philip Roths’s The Counterlife. The confusing encounters between educated “Western” characters and religious fanatics is something growing more and more common. Go to any school board meeting in Houston’s suburbs.
[Please consider supporting this publication by becoming a patron, and you can also support it by patronizing our online store. And one more way to support this work is to buy books through The Great God Pan is Dead’s bookstore. ]