Sunday, December 29, 2019

U.R. BOWIE PUBLISHES TEN BOOKS IN FIVE YEARS (2014-2019)



                       FIVE YEARS, TEN BOOKS OF CREATIVE LITERARY FICTION









Note to the Reader

A few brief words about my books. Yes, Sama Seeker is the tenth published work of fiction (over a period of five years: 2014-2019), and as I poise here on the edge of the octogenarian age, I marvel that I got that many books written. And in print. But, then again, I retired from my professorial duties at Miami University twenty years ago, and I’ve had nothing to do but write fiction since then; therefore, my output should not be surprising.

Among my published works are three romans durs, big complicated literary novels: The Tale of the Bastard Feverfew, Hard Mother, and now Sama Seeker in the Time of the End Times. They’re all worth the effort for any reader interested in delving into quality literary fiction. The Russian theme is prominent in two of these three, as well as in (1) Disambiguations—three novellas all set in Russia; (2) Gogol’s Head—a quirky and effervescent hybrid work, featuring the biography and the fictional style of the great Nikolai Gogol; and (3) Googlegogol—a collection of short stories, each one having a direct connection to one or another Russian writer.

I have also published two other collections of short stories, these with no particular Russian connection. The most recent, Such Is the Scent of Our Sweet Opalescence, republishes, in part, stories from the earlier Anyway, Anyways. In the second collection I was interested primarily in an audiobook, so I brought together in one volume stories that best lend themselves to oral performance. You can now listen to my own unique performance of these works of art, in my voice, for who better than the author knows the rhythms and sounds of his own sentences? Listen and laugh, because these readings are funny.

U.R. Bowie
Gainesville, Florida





















Monday, December 23, 2019

Chekhov’s «Пари» (“The Bet”), A Weak Story in Amidst Some Gems







Chekhov’s «Пари» (“The Bet”), first published in the newspaper New Times (Jan. 1, 1889), under the title «Сказка» (“A Fairy Tale”).

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While studying to be a doctor in Moscow, Anton Chekhov had the additional burden of supporting his whole impoverished family—father, mother, and many siblings. He managed to do this by publishing little anecdotal pieces in the popular press. These slice-of-life fictions have no pretentions to being of literary value. They were written for unsophisticated readers, to make money. But they did give him the writing practice that enabled him to later develop into a great writer.

Around 1883 or 1884 it began dawning on Chekhov that he was capable of writing genuine literary fiction, and from that point on some of the real gems of short stories began appearing. But the transition was not immediate, and he still went on writing some of the earlier-style anecdotal pieces. The story titled “The Bet” is one of these.

Aesthetically speaking, the story is not very good. It has the feel of something just dashed off, not long considered, not well written. For example, the original bet is supposed to involve whether the young man can tolerate fifteen years of imprisonment, but by the time the rules are laid down on the next page the idea of solitary confinement is added. I doubt Chekhov was aware of this in 1888, but modern psychology has determined that solitary confinement is one of the absolute worst punishments inflicted on an inmate. Anyone who is put through even a few years of total isolation from the world will go insane.

I’m surprised that Chekhov saw fit to include this flawed story in his collected works. At the time he was editing it for the collected works he decided to cut the whole third (last) chapter. The story in its final form now ends with the voluntary prisoner’s losing the bet on purpose and thereby rejecting the money he could have won.

Whether read with the third chapter included or not, the story is still weak. The third (cut) chapter describes another gathering of the banker’s friends, and once again they are mulling over philosophical issues. They argue about the value of total asceticism, and then one rich man (they all are rich this time) argues that he has never met a man who would turn down a large sum of money. The banker (main character) disagrees and they make a bet, three million this time, that such a man can, or cannot be found.

Of course the banker already knows there is such a man; he still has the note left by the prisoner—declaring his renunciation of the money he had earned through fifteen years of solitary confinement—so he figures on showing the others this note and winning the bet. But then comes a kind of deus ex machina: the original prisoner shows up, asking for money! It seems he has reevaluated his former ideas and now wishes he had won the bet and taken the money. In a word, a whole lot more silliness, but, then again, the whole story is silly.

But during the same time period that Chekhov wrote “The Bet” (1888-1889), he was also publishing some of his best long stories: “The Name-Day Party,” “A Dreary Story,” “The Duel,” and one of the shortest but absolutely unparalleled: “Gusev.”




Saturday, December 14, 2019

Book Review Article, EDNA O'BRIEN, "NIGHT"



Book Review Article

IN HONOR OF THE 89TH BIRTHDAY OF EDNA O’BRIEN, DECEMBER 15, 2019

Edna O’Brien, Night, Penguin, 1974 (originally published in London by Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1972), 122 pp.

THE CULTURE OF THE ABDOMEN

In her memoir, Country Girl, Edna O’Brien mentions a favorite book of her bilious husband, who was obsessed with poisons in the atmosphere and in food: The Culture of the Abdomen, by F.A. Hornibrook. Here is the sample passage she quotes: “One cannot live over a cesspit in good health. How much more difficult to remain well if we carry our cesspit about inside us . . . . Food is taken several times daily, often too frequently and too freely and of unsuitable quality; but, as a rule, one occasion only is permitted for the ejection of its waste materials. And remember that all the time this lagging tenant of the bowel is retained the conditions favoring evil are at work; heat, moisture, nitrogenous refuse, darkness and micro-organisms. The slow poison factory is in full swing, and its output is turned into the highways and byways of the body.”

In the same memoir, speaking of her therapist, the lover of LSD and psychoanalyst, R.D. Laing, O’Brien writes, “I owed him a debt; he had sent me packing with an opened scream, and that scream would become the pith of the novel I would write. It was called Night, the story of Mary Hooligan, in nocturnal lather, her mind raveled and excoriating, with all semblance of niceness gone. It was the dividing line in my life, between one kind of writing and another.”

Night is a good title for a book featuring a febrile narrator in the throes of insomnia, her palaver-thoughts over the course of one sleepless night. But given the nature of Mary Hooligan’s Rabelaisian “nocturnal lather,” an equally good title would be The Culture of the Abdomen. Like her model, Molly Bloom of Ulysses, Mary thinks thoughts that run low: they wallow in sexuality, in the grossly abdominal and scatological.

Dictionary definition (Webster’s New International, Second Edition, Unabridged): “hooligan [after an Irish family named Hooligan, in Southwark, London] a loafer or ruffian, like the hoodlum or larrikin.” One thinks of hooligans, largely, as males, but Edna O’Brien specializes in female characters, and she has chosen to write about a female hooligan. One of her epigraphs to the novel reads as follows: “The original Hooligans were a spirited Irish family whose proceedings enlivened the drab monotony of life in Southwark towards the end of the nineteenth century.” … E. Weekley

The narrator and only main character of this short palaver novel, Mary Hooligan, is about forty, a native of the fictional town of Coose, West Ireland. Don’t know if “coose” is an Irish slang word, but it’s worth noting that the Urban Dictionary defines coose as an extremely obscene reference to a woman: “bitch, cunt.” Like Oblomov of Russian literary fame, Mary is in bed for a goodly part of the novel. Unlike Oblomov, whose temperament is phlegmatic, Mary languishes in the choleric/melancholic.

GUTS AND QUIMS, SCATOLOGY

The stream-of-consciousness narration over the course of one night describes “half a lifetime,” and quite a bawdy half it has been. The denizens of back-home County Clare were set back on their heels by O’Brien’s first novel, The Country Girls, with its frank depictions of female sexuality, but if any of these inveterate Irish Catholics had the temerity to approach the hot potato that is Night, you can imagine them slamming the potato shut and running with a shriek for their rosary beads.

Here is the narrator on the redemptive joy of a wallow in excrement: “Ah, to sink into it at last, to say yea instead of nay to the lambative stink and smear of it all.” Faced with the word “lambative,” my big Webster’s Second International throws up its pages in surrender, but the Internet offers these definitions: “(adjective, archaic) taken by licking with the tongue; (noun, archaic) a medicine taken by licking with the tongue; a lincture.” So, unlike that finger-licking world of Col. Sanders and KFC, the world of Mary Hooligan is “shit-licking good.”

Except that far from all of the excrement that comes into contact with her lips tastes good. Not in dear old Connemara, not in London, where she lives now, and not in her travels on the European continent. More on that later.

The book is rife with excrement, shat out by people and by animals, such as cows. According to Mikhail Bakhtin—see his wonderful book, Rabelais and His World, originally published in Russian as «Творчество Франсуа Рабле и народная культура средневековья и Ренессанса» [The Creative Works of Francois Rabelais and the Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance]—the expulsion of feces is one way we communicate most directly with the world at large, find pagan communion with earth and God. Another way is alimentation. We take the world, through food, into our insides and commune with it, make it part of our own being. Mary, as well as most of the other people she encounters, likes eating: “the thing I hanker after is custard, great soft glaubs of it in the mouth, not too sweet, but certainly with a dash of vanilla,” let it caress your tongue, then slide smoothly down your gullet, ahhh . . . check out the uvula, “then the juices easing their way down and the epiglottis dropping away nicely at the base of the tonsil.” The carnal primordial religion of flesh, gut and earth.



Another old pagan tried-and-true manner of making contact with Ultimate Reality is sexual intercourse. Mary takes an interest in men, all sorts of men, “A motley crew, all shades, dimensions, breeds, ilks, national characteristics, inflammatingness, and penetratingness. Some randy, many conventional, one decrepit. An old man . . . I could smell death and extreme unction off him.” O’Brien was forty when she wrote these lines. One wonders how she would view them at present, as she navigates old age, walking around behind some shambling pusher of a wheeled walker, who reeks of decrepitude and the viaticum. 

Throughout the course of the narrative Mary indulges in twosomes and threesomes, and her sexual adventures are often tinged with comedy. She invites, for example, a “junior window cleaner” into her home and boudoir, but then is repulsed by his idiotic blather and the look of one dark fingernail: “I went right off him. The old quim went quite dead, dry as his piece of brown chamois.” Wheh. Dry quims. At this point in the book the reader yearns for, say, the description of an Elvis Presley concert in 1954, replete with shrieking mouths and dripping quims.

You wonder if Mary has ever come in contact with the Sheela-na-gigs, sculptural images on British, Irish and French Christian churches that date to the eleventh and twelfth centuries. They depict leering female creatures, holding their huge quims open for the delectation of the world at large. See Anthony Weir and James Jerman, Images of Lust: Sexual Carvings on Medieval Churches (London, 1986). Ireland apparently has the largest number of surviving sheela carvings. Mary would take delight in the sheelas, for, whether she knows it or not, Mary Hooligan is an acolyte of the Earth Mother.

The observation about how the window cleaner has turned her off sexually leads to Mary’s notion that there ought to be “quim diviners,” like water-witch dowsers, blokes with forked sticks, walking the woodlands in search of fresh wet pussy. Here’s the passage: “I had a brainwave that there ought to be such a thing as a quim diviner, just as in the Barony of Coose there were water diviners. Right mohawks they were, nearly always afflicted, blind or maimed, always pockmarked, marauding around the fields with rods and wands, giving false hopes, true hopes, no hopes at all. Ferocious appetites. Loved victuals, ate heartily, then ate the scraps, the giblets, the gristles and the adipises. Bad for their stomachums. Sucked upon the bones . . .” More gross alimentation here, more sucking of God’s world into your guts and soul, making it part of you. Adipises? I’m guessing this has something to do with adipose fat (body fat).

“I used, for perversity’s sake, to slide my hand in under the dark swamp of a hen’s bottom, while the eggs were being hatched.” Mary Hooligan, who revels in the deep dark swamps of human nature, does a lot of things, it seems, for perversity’s sake. O the dank sticky emissions of our all-too-carnal life. After a disastrous copulation, which leaves her unsatisfied but with threads of sperm hanging out of her, “in loops, suspended,” she muses as follows: “I thought I would go home and masturbate, that was what I would do, but it was early, it was so early, so bright. The sales were on and there was fifty per cent off everything.” Comedy. Yes, Night is, among other things, a comic novel. And like all great comic novels it has a foundation cemented with deep sadness and grief.

A little girl experiences her first menstruation, and later that day she comes for the first time spontaneously, on a city bus: “she had to accompany her mother to a big store, to meet ladies for lunch, where she got cramps, then diarrhea, had to decline the lunch, was teary, but going home in the bus, with the street lights already on, she saw a man in overalls, who looked at her, right into her, and she had a sexual experience, the jellying, a womb wave, her very first, the first big dip.” So much for the innocence of childhood.

At one point Mary muses that she should have found a way to nourish the many spurtings that she has inspired in randy males. “Lately, I’m thinking that if I’d kept some of these emissions instead of squandering them so, that if I’d put them in a little jar or a test tube. I could have done a bit of experimentation, dabbled in the mysteries of botany. No knowing what might have emerged, a plant, gestation, a half-thing, a creature, nearly with animation, on the borders between animal and plant, no feet, moving by means of its cilia, always moving in the daylight, in the dusk, in the dark, with something of the phosphorescence of the glow worm or the ocean, a little wandering infusoria. I could have given it names, mused over names, the way expectant parents do, consulted a book. I forsook all that, the domestic bliss, spurned it.” The “domestic bliss” of having your very own creature, your sort of offspring made of sheer spermatozoon! Comedy.

Bawdiness upon bawdiness. Luckily for Edna O’Brien, she got this book into print after Joyce’s Ulysses had done all the down and dirty work of pushing obscenity in literature past the dour censors of the world, and after Nabokov’s Lolita had finished off what Ulysses began. But just imagine this kind of writing, emerging from the pen of a girl who once attended school in a convent, who grew up in a good Irish Catholic family with “prayers specially addressed to the stigmata of Saint Francis, that he may crucify the flesh from its vices” (from Country Girl). 

As for the Irish Catholics of Connemara, I’m guessing that even today they gag on the stark animality of human nature, as presented by Edna O’Brien through the intermediation of Mary the hooligan, who, unbeknownst to her, propagates the ancient gut religion of the pagan Earth Mother, a religion endemic in the scrotums, quims, wombs and souls of the Irish—long, long before upstart Christian Catholicism moved in and tried, unsuccessfully, to elbow it out.

LONELINESS

“I am getting used to my own company,” writes Mary at one point, but the narrative suggests that this is a character long accustomed to her own company. She once had a husband, who is long gone, unlamented. She has a grown son, who is off traveling the world. She speaks of several acquaintances, with whom she has lived occasionally, fought with, bickered. Now she is alone in the dark of night.
On New Year’s Eve she goes out to a pub alone. As usual, she makes contact with fellow indulgers in carnality, but the overwhelming loneliness of the main character lays a pall of sadness over the book. The setting encompasses only one night. All of the action takes place in the thoughts of the main character. Mary is living alone, housesitting for a couple we know only as Jonathan and Tig, two characters who never come totally into focus. The direness of her situation becomes clear at the end of the narrative, when we realize they are about to return, and she will have nowhere to go.

WORDS, WORDS, WORDS

Other than her communion with the dank netherworld of the lower bodily regions, Mary has little to comfort her but words. In her autobiography Edna O’Brien stresses “writing and reading, those two intensities that have buttressed my whole life.” Mary Hooligan, it appears, is not much of a reader, nor is she a writer, but her author lends the character her own intense wallow in the joys of the English/Irish language. “Coose palaver arses me,” says Mary at one point, and I’m not sure exactly what that means, but there is no doubt that the palaver of her native Coose is at the heart of the book’s style.

Never have I read such a short book with so many unfamiliar words. Mary, we are informed, has been once to New York, where she has encountered incomprehensible locutions (“buggy, whatever buggy is”). She notes that Americans make do with a few repetitive phrases: among them are “Kiss my ass,” “Ohboyohboy,” and “Nope.” But an American reader (me, I’m one) in Mary Hooligan’s world runs into passages like this: (1) “They were intending to mitch,” this in reference to some schoolchildren Mary has befriended. Mitch: to play truant from school; (2) “the Count, who was stotious and overwrought by the various emotions.” Stotious: Irish slang for tipsy; (3) “in the full spall and frenzy of their capitulation,” describing a man and woman who perform sex acts while Mary watches; I Googled spall, no go; looked it up in various dictionaries, spall, “a chip, fragment, or flake, from a piece of stone or ore” (that won’t work). Could it be a misprint for spell? Not likely. Finally found, in my big trusty Webster’s Second International, that spall can be a variant of sprawl; (4) joxer; well, umm, in short, I never did figure out exactly what a joxer is. Coose palaver arses me too.

At one point Mary’s Finnish lover is described as follows: “Liked it all ways, somersaults, a maiden’s closed purse, the old podicum sursum, the romp, the wrangling brandlebuttock.” Huh? You take note of this concatenation of sexualities and think to yourself, Here I am on the cusp of old age, and just imagine all the things I’ve missed! But if you look up these expressions you get, largely, nowhere. The compendium of positions, omitting only the missionary position, appears to be all fabrication, a joke on the part of Mary, and her creator.

“The sea was in a right old tether, disgorging waves of such gorgeous brightness, only to be swallowed up and annihilated in troughs of black or indigo. The carousel, on the other hand, was utterly still, the white china horses with golden manes and tilted forelegs, riderless and pearled in dew.” There’s a passage written by a professional writer with high literary skills. It is in fact written by Edna O’Brien in her autobiography, but it could well be written by Mary Hooligan, for the author has lent her love of locutions and their combinations to the character. Unbeknownst to her ownself, Mary Hooligan is a writer.

In many other ways Mary, of course, resembles her creator. Take this passage describing children at play: “one summer Sunday a girl with ringlets lured me in for an ‘op,’ short for operation. It was quite dark, and we were hidden by the low-lying branches as we took off our knickers, then pulled up the stalks of the wild iris that grew in a swamp and stuffed the wet smeared roots into one another, begging for mercy. Our cries flowed together and were muffled by the drones of bees and wasps that swarmed in and out as we swore eternal secrecy. Then afterward, when we came into the daylight, her eyes were a queer, shiny black, the light making yellow slashes in her pupils, and she said she would ‘tell’ unless I gave her my most prized possession, which was a georgette handkerchief with a pink powder puff stitched into it. And so I did.”

Mary Hooligan could well have written the above description, but it was Edna O’Brien who wrote it, in Country Girl. Of course, writers always give their characters pieces of themselves. In the Country Girl memoir O’Brien describes a visit back to the homeland from her London life, where her irate father calls her, “You little shite.” Mary Hooligan ventures back to dear old Coose, to visit her aging father, and sees in him “the wild umbrage prevalent in all the men that I had loved, unloved, betrayed.” Upon parting, he says to her, “You shite you.”

GOOD LITERARY FICTION

How do you recognize good literary writing? Easy. The best creation inspires creation. The best stuff always has you writing down passages, then feeling them get embellished as they writhe in your mind. I recently went back to Toni Morrison, a writer I have never appreciated. I read one hundred pages of her novel, Paradise, and found myself writing down exactly nothing. It’s really quite simple: good writing reeks with good sentences. In reading Mary’s narrative I found myself copying down passages and embellishing constantly. One example, a description of the way dogs sometimes bark in a hesitant manner, not yet sure they should bark in earnest, with the italicized passage straight out of Night:

“I could hear the dogs starting up, not exactly barking, but in a rehearsal for barking, the way a singer does at a party while somebody else is taking the tasseled runner off the piano, doing scales, do re me fah arf, one meagre tenor arf, then a soft bass arf, then the whole insincere canine choir joins in, we’re not really yapping yet, folks, we’re not yet into the genuine thing, the arffest is, as for now, just a rehearsal, you know, like tentative? arf, arf, arf…”




Friday, December 6, 2019

Марина Цветаева, Translation of Poem by Marina Tsvetaeva, "Уж сколько их упало в эту бездну," "So many have been swallowed up and perished"





Марина Цветаева
Marina Tsvetaeva
(1892-1941)

Уж сколько их упало в эту бездну,
Разверзтую вдали!
Настанет день, когда и я исчезну
С поверхности земли.
Застынет все, что пело и боролось,
Сияло и рвалось.
И зелень глаз моих, и нежный голос,
И золото волос.
И будет жизнь с ее насущным хлебом,
С забывчивостью дня.
И будет все — как будто бы под небом
И не было меня!
Изменчивой, как дети, в каждой мине,
И так недолго злой,
Любившей час, когда дрова в камине
Становятся золой.
Виолончель, и кавалькады в чаще,
И колокол в селе…
— Меня, такой живой и настоящей
На ласковой земле!
К вам всем — что мне, ни в чем не знавшей меры,
Чужие и свои?!-
Я обращаюсь с требованьем веры
И с просьбой о любви.
И день и ночь, и письменно и устно:
За правду да и нет,
За то, что мне так часто — слишком грустно
И только двадцать лет,
За то, что мне прямая неизбежность —
Прощение обид,
За всю мою безудержную нежность
И слишком гордый вид,
За быстроту стремительных событий,
За правду, за игру…
— Послушайте!- Еще меня любите
За то, что я умру.
Dec. 8, 1913
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Literal Translation

How many have fallen into that abyss,
Gaping in the distance!
The day will come when I as well will disappear
From the surface of the earth.

It all will congeal, everything that sang, that struggled,
That shone, strained, burst,
Both the green of my eyes, and the soft voice,
And the gold of my hair.

And life will still be, with its daily bread,
With the forgetfulness of each day.
And everything will still be—as if beneath the skies
I had never even existed!

I, with as-fickle-as-a-child expression on my face,
And I who could not be angry for long,
Who so loved the moment when the log
In the fireplace turned to ash.

The violincello, the cavalcades in the thicket,
And the bell in the village . . .
But not me, so alive, so genuine,
On this tender earth!

I turn to you all—for after all, I’ve never had
A sense of measure—who is my intimate, who is a stranger?
To all I demand I be believed,
And to all I plead for love,

Both day and night, in written word and orally,
[Love me] for the sake of truth, a simple yes or no,
[Love me] because so frequently I’m all too sad,
And I’m only twenty years old.

Because you can’t avoid the inevitable:
Forgiving me for insults,
For all of my unbridled tenderness
And the too proud look on my face,

For the rapidity of impetuous events,
For the truth, and for play . . .
Listen! Love me as well
For the fact that I will die.

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Literary Translation/Adaptation by U.R. Bowie

So many have been swallowed up and perished,
Dissolving in that distant gaping chasm.
My time as well, this life that I have cherished
Will soon recede in one last gasping spasm.

Coagulate will all, will into stillness freeze,
Everything that sang and struggled, shone:
The green of my eyes, the voice with its muted unease,
And the hair streaming gold in the breeze as it’s blown. 

And life will go on, all that give-us-our-daily-bread,
With the wallow of diurnal in oblivion/forget,
And all will be the same, all pages still misread,
As if I’d never whirled my way through being’s grim roulette.

My me will be gone, the innocent look on my face,
The me who never ever held a grudge!
That me who loved to watch a hearth log dissipate,
And turn to tender ashes, smoulder-smudge.

Who saw the cavalcades of riders through the forest,
Heard cellos play, the toll of bells in village church,
That me not be? Who throbbed with life’s exultant chorus,
Who safe in earth’s fond grasp did snugly perch.

To all of you appeal I, to intimates and strangers—
For, after all, I’ve always lacked a simple sense of measure—
I say to all, “Believe me, please,” we’re all too prone to dangers,  
Please send to me some love as well, through fair or stormy weather.

You’ll do that, won’t you? Day and night, in written word
Or spoken. Send artless yeses, guileless nos, and sympathy aplenty,
For fact is little me’s so sad, a woeful dickeybird,
And one more thing you need to know: today I’m only twenty!

Send love, forgiveness, won’t you please? Send kindly dispensations,
From sinful ways, insults, offenses, calumnies, disgrace,
For my unbridled tenderness, for my perverse cunctations,
For all the pride and arrogance that’s plastered on my face,

For my impetuosity, effrontery nonplussed,
For truths I’ve told and games I play, for candor I defy . . .
Listen here now! That’s it! Love me you must
For one simple reason: because some day I’ll die.








Poem declaimed by Masha Matveychuk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FA2DJdwcuwg