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Selections from Graveyard of Bitter Oranges: The Dead of Carinthia

Art credit Anthony Cudahy.

This week, we will be running a series of excerpts from Josef Winkler’s Graveyard of Bitter Oranges. Inspired by the author’s stay in Italy after leaving his native Carinthia, the novel was first published in 1990 by Suhrkamp Verlag and its English translation will be published by Contra Mundum Press in 2015.

As a child, I often heard it said that the inhabitants of the village of my birth who had died away from Carinthia had been repatriated and their bodies committed to the soil of their birth. Siegfried Naschenweng, who died in an automobile accident on Golan Heights, was brought first to Vienna in an airplane, and from there repatriated to Kamering in a hearse from the funeral home in Feistritz. One of my mother’s brothers, who fell in the war in Yugoslavia, was repatriated to Feistritz by train. My uncle picked up his mortal remains with a hay cart drawn by two horses and brought them to Kamering, where they lay exposed one more day in his parents’ farmhouse. Apart from all the deceased enumerated and described in this book, the arms, legs, and skulls nailed to the tall stakes that Wilhelm Müller, author of the text to Franz Schubert’s Winterreise, saw in passing from his carriage, while a young priest made the sign of the cross over every piece of the cadaver, are also repatriated to the graveyard of bitter oranges and coated with the ashes from the statue of Saint Florian, patron saint of fire, that the landholders of Kamering burned when the saint allowed the village, which had been built in the form of a cross at the end of the century before, to be reduced to ashes by two children playing with fire, so that it had to be rebuilt, once more in the form of a cross. The corpses of the then five-year-old children who were forced to live with a skull in their chambers in a Trappist monastery, to dine for years on nothing but bread and potatoes that they themselves planted, who were forced to wear a horse’s bit whenever they spoke a word without permission and had to sleep in coffins when they accidentally slept late in the mornings, once again open their eyes in grave number 24 of the graveyard of bitter oranges. To the graveyard of bitter oranges I repatriate as well the two gay boys, twenty-five-year-old Giorgio and fifteen-year-old Antonio, whose countrymen from Giarre, their hometown in Sicily, drove them to their demise, and who convinced a twelve-year-old boy to shoot them to death together—Don’t be afraid of the police, you’re still a minor—in exchange for a gold watch. Lined up side by side in the graveyard of bitter oranges are the corpses of those children of Naples who, during a festival in honor of the Virgin, were hung a whole day from a rope draped around the tall statues of the saints and swung in the air from side to side with cardboard wings attached to their backs. For hours they hung dead from the ropes, with angels’ wings on their back, before their small corpses were taken down. I repatriate to the graveyard of bitter oranges the seventeen-year-old boy who dared to break the cross of the Lord of Nazareth and whose stomach the faithful flayed around the navel, wedging a crucifix in his rent flesh. The boy with the flayed navel remained alive, and was chased in circles around the cross until his entrails wrapped around its base. Water dripped from the fine mesh of the nets that were used to fish out the hundreds of corpses of the children of nuns from the pond of a convent in Rome. The children’s bodies, knotted with the green tendrils of aquatic plants and coated in mud, were washed by the nuns, who chanted canticles, then repatriated to the graveyard of bitter oranges. The palm fronds that covered the body of a nun who was run down in the street lie in a pit in the graveyard of bitter oranges, beside a pink sports newspaper, blood-splattered and discolored, that likewise hid from the eyes of onlookers the bleeding head of a young motorcyclist who lay mortally wounded on the roadside. To the graveyard of bitter oranges I repatriate, in a bishop’s white gloves, embroidered with a golden cross, the finger bones of a saint, with one nail chipped off, though well-preserved and still sharp, which every year, in recollection of the painful circumcision of the child Jesus, has been set in the lunula of a monstrance and kept for twenty-four hours in the tabernacle, since one of the popes determined it may well have detached the prepuce from the tiny member of the child Jesus. The lizard with the forked tail—which immediately recalled to the priest who delivered the extreme unction the two fingers of a bishop’s hand extended in blessing—scurries back into the mouth of the gypsy girl Monica Petrovič, brought to the graveyard of bitter oranges after being murdered by a sixteen-year-old Roman boy, and it stays there, in its death throes, in grave number 20, nestled between her slowly rotting lungs. A Sicilian boy, who had learned in catechism that there was only one God and that one must pray only to him, saw, to his consternation, an unbelievable number of crosses in a church, on each of them the man from Nazareth was nailed, and he threw those that rested on the bye-altars to the ground and stomped on them, shouting There is only one God! There is only one God! until a nun appeared in the church of that nearly abandoned village—one of a handful of half-deaf church marms who worked there—then seized the peasant boy, dragged him away from the broken crosses, and strangled him to death with her rosary. I exhume the mortal remains of that boy, perished in a state of sin and buried outside the village’s cemetery walls without a priest to escort him, and I repatriate them to the graveyard of bitter oranges. The dead of the graveyard of bitter oranges are also sprinkled with the dust of the dead bodies of two cardinals who were dried out in ovens and ground up by the order of the pope, then placed in sacks resembling saddlebags and carried about by mules whenever his Holiness would travel with his retinue, to be exhibited as a warning to the other prelates. Not even a grain of dust remains of the boy with the cardboard wings who hanged himself from the branch of an olive tree with the image of the decapitated John the Baptist over his breast when the approaching lava would no longer grant respite to the pictures of the saints leaned up against the trees. A half-hour after he had taken his life, the lava reached the olive tree and set his corpse alight… The rosary beads that hang from a crucifix and are made of the vertebrae of one of the innumerable skeletons of the children of nuns found in the pond of a Roman convent lie in grave number 42 of the graveyard of bitter oranges, over the breast of the repatriated body of Pino Lo Scrudato, who was killed by his father with a hatchet in Sicily because, instead of tending to the cows on his farm, where there was neither electricity nor running water, he connected a television to the tractor battery to watch a soccer match. The cadaver of a bishop, with crumbs of holy wafers at the edges of his pallid lips, lies in the graveyard of bitter oranges over the mortal remains of the mentally ill sixteen-year-old boy in Sicily who was supposed, by the intercession of San Filippo, the patron saint of the insane, to have the devil driven from his body, and who used a communion candle to wedge holy wafers impressed with the image of San Filippo into his anus, thus mixing in his intestines the body of Christ with his own feces. The next night, wracked with fear and guilt, he awoke covered in sweat, entered the kitchen, sliced off his genitals with a butcher knife, and began to devour them while his blood drained from his body. Over the trampled corn in the concrete granary, where two children born in Carinthia and repatriated to the graveyard of bitter oranges were choked to death by the gases from the freshly harvested corn, they laid two cross-shaped bouquets of flowers with white ribbons that read: With love! and Your mother and your father, and when they rotted, they were mixed with the fodder and eaten by the cows, bulls, milk calves, and oxen, all in a jumble, fir needles, flowers, and paper ribbons… The suicides of my home village of Kamering, Hanspeter and his father, Jakob and Robert and Robert’s brother, and all the others from my village who died from brain tumors or cancer, from desperation and solitude, those whom the Catholic church drove toward death, the children and adults whose lives were ended by reckless drivers, by drunks and lead-footed truckers on the highways of the Drava valley, the children dead prematurely and those who were miscarried in my home village, the boy who drowned in a lake, the epileptic bricklayer’s apprentice who fell from a scaffold, the boy who was crushed by an overturned tractor, all are repatriated to the graveyard of bitter oranges. And yet, though I have walked from cemetery to cemetery and have read countless gravestones, paged through archives and spoken with the brothers and sisters in the convents and monasteries—and despite that I refuse to give up my search—I have never found the body of that young man who murdered a fifteen-year-old boy and was granted freedom by order of the pope and brought to a sacristy to be invested with blue silken garments. With a wreath of olive branches on his head, holding a lit candle in his hand, he sat before the altar in a church and recited a prayer of penitence… I will once again have to eat cemetery dirt if, one night, the ink ceases to flow through the black quills of the fir trees. I will brave the onslaught of the storm, nail the lightning bolts to the cathedral wall, and liberate the hanged bodies from their ropes, because in September of 1989, as I was completing a clean draft of this novel, Robert’s second brother brought his life to an end as well. Now the three Ladinig brothers hang from their ropes, one in Kamering, beside Jakob, in the parish house barn, the other in Arnoldstein, from a fir branch, and the third—whom I repatriate to the graveyard of bitter oranges as well—hanged himself in Villach, from a bridge spanning the Drava river. The eyelids will open against my nipples when I beat the drum with the leg bones of the swan. I know someone who had a harvest crown tied to his coffin, another who asked that they hang a gilded pyx from his coffin lid, in each case with bloodied calves’ halters, it goes without saying! If only, upon my death, the bereaved would throw a bishop’s cassock over my coffin, like a horse blanket over a mare’s warm and shimmering flanks! When not a lone word, not even a death rattle, emerges from my lips, I will strip my skin from my body, embalm it, and blow up my mortal sheath like a balloon, so that my skin may float above me. Before the words run through me like coffin screws, I can only hope that a spider nests in my heart, laying eggs, so that the abscess grows larger and larger, until it explodes and the creatures to whom I will have given warmth and shelter will crawl down my breast, cross over my navel, and reach my pubic hair, where they may settle for a day or two. With glue and the covers of my favorite books, I will fashion the lid to my coffin and lay it over the tub where I once crouched down—but when was that?—while the water drained over my pale bony shoulders and the turpentine soap impressed with the deer’s head slipped down my belly.

Josef Winkler (b. 1953, Austria) is the author of fourteen books and winner of numerous literary honors, among them the 2008 Büchner Prize. His major themes are suicide, homosexuality, and the corrosive influence of Catholicism and Nazism in Austrian country life. His novels When the Time Comes and Natura Morta are currently available from Contra Mundum Press, who will also be publishing Graveyard of Bitter Oranges in 2015.

Adrian West is a writer and literary translator whose works has appeared in numerous publications including 3:AM, McSweeney’s, and the Review of Contemporary Fiction. His book-length translations include the novels of Josef Winkler as well as the long poem cycle Alma Venus by Catalan poet Pere Gimferrer.

Anthony Cudahy is an artist living and working in Brooklyn. He is currently an artist-in-residence at Artha in the Brooklyn Navy Yards.

Friedhof der bitteren Orangen. Copyright (c) Josef Winkler, 1990. English translation copyright (c) Adrian West, 2012. Translations published by permission of Contra Mundum Press.

 

Our New Year’s Resolution: Travel More

Mallet compound locomotive of the St. Louis and San Francisco Railway (Frisco) via Wikimedia Commons.

We know: it’s hard to leave home. Your showerhead gets great water pressure; the guy at your bodega saves you the last copy of the Post; the coffee people remember your name. Why skip town? Indeed, we’re so irredeemably tethered to Manhattan that we haven’t bothered to have a foreign office in forty years. And we’re The Paris Review.

But it’s a new year, time to cast off our parochialism and see the world. Riches may lie in store. Legend tells, for instance, of a land called San Francisco, where paupers pan for gold, used bookstores line the streets, and the buses run on electricity. What is the state of letters in this paradise? Which fashions are in vogue among its citizenry? How’s the ceviche? We can’t say. But we know who can: McSweeney’s, a San Francisco institution since 1998.

This January only, you can get a dual subscription to The Paris Review and McSweeney’s for just $75—20 percent less than two individual subscriptions. In other words, you’ll have the comforts of home and a year of bicoastal exploration for less than it would cost us to get from Penn Station to Philadelphia, if that were something we were inclined to do.

Get transcontinental with McSweeney’s and the Review.

 

Truth in Advertising

As the Northeast is battered by “Winter Storm Hercules”—a nor’easter all but destined to enter Wikipedia’s list of notable nor’easters—one public library has provided succor, sort of. In Hopkinton, Massachusetts, a redditor came across this sign; to its great credit, it suggests neither burning books, nor reading erotica aloud, nor any other heat-generating gimmickry. Rather, it stands as a stark, charmingly blunt reminder that though literature may warm the soul, it will never warm the body.

Curl up with a good book today, but don’t try to be a hero: curl up with a blanket, too.

 

Art and Literature Are Teeming with Monsters, and Other News

Art credit Hieronymus Bosch.

Behold, art and literature’s greatest monsters! Plenty of welcome departures from the norm here—Frankenstein and Dracula didn’t make the list. Neither did Chuck Palahniuk.
In a synergistic turn worthy of the greatest CEOs, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch has caused a spike in attendance at the Frick, where its namesake painting resides. (There’s a tote bag now, too.)
An intrepid sociologist gets at the roots of uptalk—the irritating tendency to inflect every sentence as if it were a question—by watching Jeopardy!
Disparaging nondisparagement agreements: Byliner canned editor Will Blythe, and he’s not going quietly. Or rather, he is going quietly, but he would prefer to reserve the right not to.

 

The End of the Internet: An Interview with Matthew Thurber

I met cartoonist and musician Matthew Thurber six-odd years ago somewhere in Prospect Park (a séance? a picnic?), and then saw him play alto saxophone in his Muzak-jazz-punk trio Soiled Mattress and the Springs at the New York Art Book Fair. We kept running into one another in odd places; or, since New York City is now lacking in odd places, at places where subculture obsessives go to convince themselves there’s still oddness in the world. Soiled Mattress broke up in 2008, but Thurber’s “Anti-Matter Cabaret” act Ambergris has continued, and sometimes he plays with artist Brian Belott as Court Stenographer and Young Sherlock Holmes. In 2011, after years of publishing minicomics, zines, and books on tape, Thurber collected his serial 1-800-Mice in graphic-novel form. It’s about a messenger mouse named Groomfiend, a peace punk named Peace Punk, and a cast of thousands. More recently, Thurber wrote a culture diary for this blog, and started Tomato House gallery with his girlfriend, Rebecca Bird, in Ocean Hill, Brooklyn.

Thurber’s new graphic novel, Infomaniacs, is about the singularity and the end of the Internet; it’s also the final book from the great comics publisher PictureBox, which serialized parts of Infomaniacs online starting in 2010. The book’s heroine is Amy Shit, a punk rapper who sometimes lives off the grid—in a subway tunnel, even. Her brother’s a neo–Ned Ludd who goes around smashing iPhones. Meanwhile, Ralph is an Internet addict who escapes from reality rehab, then embeds in an immortality cult run by a libertarian oligarch who wants to eat the brain of the last man who’s never seen the Internet. A horse and a bat, both intelligence agents for the ATF (Anthropomorphic Task Force), wonder what the singularity will look like—a 1950s computer, a crystal, a cell phone, a tree branch?

Thurber’s video trailer offers a sense of the comic’s raucous hugger-mugger and subterranean surrealism, but doesn’t touch on its Underground Man againstness. For that, perhaps this quote, from an early, uncollected strip: “All bundled up and no place to go … The man who hates the Internet is a man who hates the world.”

Thurber and I met in the office I share with a puppet theater, near the Barclays Center. Giant heads hung from the walls. I don’t have Wi-Fi and don’t know anyone’s password.

When did you quit Facebook?

The beginning of 2013. It was my New Year’s resolution. I was an addict, checking it twenty, thirty times a day.

And you were off Twitter for a while, right? You half-quit.

I deleted my account and then I couldn’t stay away. I don’t think I lasted more than two weeks, but I still get to the point where I’m completely furious at the way people are packaging their identities, and then I’ll make some kind of horrible statement like, I can’t, this is shit, this is …

A lot of people are able to use social media more casually than I can and feel less conflicted about it. You go to an art-marketing class, and they tell you that you have to constantly remind people of your existence. Even if you’re not directly telling them to buy your thing, you should be promoting yourself ambiently. This is a picture of my studio, or This is something I’m reading, or This is somebody I bumped into at a party. It’s interesting when you see literary celebrities doing that, like Salman Rushdie or Margaret Atwood or Joyce Carol Oates. They’re constantly on Twitter, and it makes me wonder if they’re actually really lonely or bored.

The few first drawings in Infomaniacs are more primitive. I can almost imagine your having drawn them with a stylus on a 1993 Apple Newton.

Those are unedited sketchbook pages where I was trying to launch the story. I didn’t do any scripting at the beginning. I just started developing a plot around characters I’d intuited. I knew about their attitudes and how they looked, but I didn’t know who they were. I was working from subconscious images and then trying to construct a plot or story line around them. At first the strips were gags about technology—the name Infomaniacs was there, but the characters weren’t. Starting off with nothing is a tactic I’ve used before just to get going—start with a title and write backward, trying to fill in the space between the clauses.

Infomaniacs is meant to be like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, a caper—big, messy, overbudget.

The epic-comedy genre. 1-800-Mice was a soap opera, where I was cutting between all these little stories. And when I saw Mad, Mad World and Around the World in 80 Days, it made sense to go in that direction, because it’s all soap-opera story lines directed at a MacGuffin. Everybody’s going after some prize.

There’s another quality to your storytelling, though, a kind of unending proliferation of narrative. It makes me think of role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons.

I did pre-Internet role-playing games from age seven or eight through high school. I used to make my mom play D&D with me, and I was the dungeon master. There are preset stories you can follow, but there’s also the more improvisational school of D&D where you make things up and it’s a shared fantasy with your friends. We would come up with great plots, like a man with anthrax running after you trying to pee on you, or you find a truck in the middle of the dungeon. That’s when it gets really surreal. As the DM, you’re trying to be like Scheherazade, keeping everybody interested. You never want the game to end.

I wonder if college or high school students—kids who are born into the Internet—can relate to Infomaniacs. I’m teaching college kids now and they’re constantly online, dependent on technology, and if they’re drawing they always want to use images from the Internet as references. I had thought of them as my audience—

Or were you imagining them as your characters and thinking about how they might use the Internet?

The Ralph character is definitely just a confused college student, somebody I’ve seen in one of my classes. Infomaniacs is not a kids’ book, but in my mind the ideal audience is a confused teen or confused college student—a college student who’s angry at everything and doesn’t know why. Or maybe this is a kids’ comic. It’s pretty PG. There might be some swear words. Well, a character’s name is Amy Shit.

The comic reads like a fever dream of tech anxieties. Did you read up on singularity literature, or just make it up based on what had come to you ambiently?

I had to make it up or respond to a made-up version of what the tech utopians were thinking. There was a New Yorker article about Peter Thiel—that was my main research. He’s driving around and going to the Methuselah Foundation to meet with the life-extension researchers he’s funding. It’s like post–Ayn Rand, this is the next step you can take. Now that you’re the master of the universe, now you can behave like an immortal. And Thiel gave Facebook a huge angel investment when they were starting out. But what an incredible character. He was my idea of an Ayn Rand character come to life. He’s like a Bond villain in his nascency.

Then I started actually reading Atlas Shrugged, and I thought, This is a great science-fiction novel. For the first fifty pages, it felt like a neat Philip K. Dick story. And then I got bogged down and stopped.

I like not-knowing in general. And if I’d waited until I’d read all of Ayn Rand and all of the singularity literature, I wouldn’t have been able to work fast enough to get this comic done. I felt an urgency to get it out before it became completely irrelevant. YouTube has been around for a decade. The Snowden stuff happened when this book was coming out. But I felt like it would be funny if I didn’t know what those things were. Writing a book responding to the singularity but not really knowing what it was. It was just a rumor. Ineptitude can be funny, too.

What about the singularity made you feel like you wanted to reply to it? Because it feels like the endpoint of technology?

The escalation of culture and technology to a certain messianic goal. Is there a point to all this time-wasting activity, or is all this confusion that we feel with technology and all of the metaphysical torture from social media—is it all going to be okay in the future when the singularity happens? We’ll just have evolved?

The idea that people might be poor now, but in the future the technology that’s making them poor will make them rich.

Yeah, which is a MacGuffin. Everyone’s in pursuit of this thing, and it’s a mirage. We’re all just going to be competitive on these platforms forever.

In Infomaniacs, the singularity is a thing, but it’s also a person. It’s a character.

That’s what I mean about making it up. Because I don’t know what the singularity really is. I understand that it involves the hybridization of humans and technology, or A.I. Or actually, no, I don’t know what it is. A robot? Like the movie D.A.R.Y.L.? Or any movie where there’s a robot who has feelings?

As far as I understand it, there are a few different versions. One is Ray Kurzweil’s—predictably exponential technological growth, and that means we’ll all become hybrids. And then there’s the idea that there’s a point beyond which we can’t really know anything, it’s unimaginable, like traveling into a black hole, totally unknowable to our tiny human minds.

And maybe it already happened? Do people think it already happened?

There are some people who would say, Oh, obviously we’re self-improving intelligences and we have been for a long time, so we’re already on that road. Most singularitarians don’t think it has already happened. They think it’s going to happen around 2045.

I have the cranky old misanthropic personality of every stupid cartoonist or artist, which is that everything is getting worse and people are disempowered and can’t draw, can’t write, can’t think. They’re dependent on technology, so then it’s less a religious awakening than a Matrix-y dark future. My definition of utopia is technology-free, probably more like the Garden of Eden than like having infinite knowledge.

Maybe constant communication has its benefits. People become sophisticated pretty quickly, they figure out what’s a good aesthetic to have, and they get feedback more rapidly. On the other hand, while it’s not necessarily great to be on your own and trying to figure stuff out for yourself, sometimes it means you make something that’s super weird and amazing, even if it’s totally flawed.

Real freaks can’t help it. Sometimes you’ll meet somebody, and you’re like, This person is undersocialized, but they’re incredibly smart, and they’re talking enthusiastically and they’re not afraid to be talking about it. I don’t want people to have their freakishness crushed by constant socialization, which creates conformity. Even on Twitter there’s stuff you can’t say or you wouldn’t say, and that sucks, but you would say it if you were Mike Diana or Dame Darcy making a comic book.

Dril is the one character from weird Twitter I like reading. He’s not a consistent character. Sometimes he’s a middle-aged divorced guy who’s kind of gross. He has sexual hang-ups about jeans, and he likes smoking cigars, and there’s something that’s a little bit wrong there that’s verging on scary, which is good.

That sounds like the kind of thing I want to read on Twitter—a completely fictionalized, fully rendered character. When it gets too personal it’s like, This is me but also it’s not me. It’s too confusing. Personally, I find it difficult to write anything sincere on Twitter. And it’s why I quit Facebook. Because it’s broadcasting to the public, and I find it vulgar to share personal things about my life in a commercialized, monitored space. The NSA is spying on you, and so are your friends, your business acquaintances, and your mom. We’re behaving more like spies every day. I think this conditions us for a corporate, if not fascist, future in which free and nonconformist behavior is really difficult.

I should read Brian Chippendale’s Twitter more—is that safe?

It’s a fire hose of really good jokes. I don’t know how he does it. I’m trying to think of who my favorite Twitter person is. It’s like that quote that remarks are not literature.

Who said that?

I don’t know.

I’ll google it.

We can google it.

Are you working on another comics project right now?

Did I tell you about the handwriting-analysis thing? I wrote a bunch of one-page or one-paragraph samples and put out a call. I mailed people a typewritten sample of prose—it’s all fragmentary. Maybe some of it goes together to make different stories. So they rewrite it and mail it back, and then I’m going to develop a system of analysis to understand who they are through their handwriting samples. That’s the next project, to make a book out of that, or maybe just a long booklet, but I’ve got 160 samples so it might be a really long zine.

It’s a way to type and keep communicating with people in a non-Internet way. The handwriting-analysis project was really motivated by the desire to receive letters, so even if I had to write them and people had to rewrite them, it was still stuff in my mailbox. For when the Internet goes away—it’s my insurance.

 

Selections from Graveyard of Bitter Oranges: The Bloody Boar

Art credit Anthony Cudahy.

This week, we will be running a series of excerpts from Josef Winkler’s Graveyard of Bitter Oranges. Inspired by the author’s stay in Italy after leaving his native Carinthia, the novel was first published in 1990 by Suhrkamp Verlag and its English translation will be published by Contra Mundum Press in 2015.

The first night after we had moved into a sublet room in Rome, I dreamed of a girl who had a swatch of blood resembling a Hitler moustache on her upper lip. As she approached me, and I kicked my legs at her frantically, blood ran from down over her mouth and chin. I sprang awake, and tried to awaken Andrea, but I seemed to be paralyzed, and it was only minutes later that I could once more move around the bed. I said nothing, and waited more than an hour for sleep to return. After that dream followed a second. Bishops and cardinals in their vestments were dying in a hail of bullets; though they stayed dead in their seats, I could not distinguish a single wound on their bodies. I approached a cardinal and looked long at his body. Then I was jarred awake once more by the clangorous bell of the Convent in the Via Tolmino, which tolls every quarter of an hour and which had only allowed me, my first few nights there, to sleep in fifteen-minute increments.

You no longer show any sign of life? But I write about death, my friend!

I like to be among the dead, they do me no harm, and they are people, too.

It’s good that it’s only February and the tree in front of my window has not yet gone green again and is still not covered in leaves, because this way, at least, I can look down at the street from my bedroom in Rome, particularly when I grow bored, and wait to watch a traffic accident take place. Naturally, I would like to be the first to run to the victims’ aid.

On the street I saw a man in reading glasses perusing a copy of L’Unità that was fixed to a wall. The man held two mirrors, which he used to project the light from the streetlamp onto the newspaper.

An oil lamp in my hand, I strode over a crosswalk that separated the tombs of Hubert Fichte and Jean Genet.

The skeletal crackling of a dove overrun by a hearse was drowned out completely by the clamor of the street.

For various tenths of a second, in the glimmering glass window of a shop in Rome that sold religious kitsch, the chasubles of archbishops and cardinals, pyxes and statues of saints, the reflection of two policemen rolling slowly down the street was imposed over a life-sized statue of Jesus holding a banner of the resurrection, wrapped in clear plastic film.

In Trastavere, my knees began to quake when I glanced into a hairdresser’s shop and saw a man in a wheelchair seated at a mirror having himself shaved. The barbiere, with a gesture, led me to understand that he was at my disposal as well, and that I too could sit down in the wheelchair, if only I would carelessly cross the street.

In the film version of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, which starred Marcello Mastroianni, when the judge asked the murderer Meursault to repent, he took a silver crucifix from his file drawer and waved it before Meursault’s nose. And this man, do you know who he is? cried the judge in a trembling voice. I felt as though he’d held the cross before my own eyes in the cinema. As if to defend myself, I turned toward my seat back and pressed my face into my hands.

On September 19th, when the blood of Saint Januarius, the patron saint of Naples, is said to liquefy, Neapolitan children cover their mouths with reproductions of Saint Januarius, and later tear the stickers off, and they cling so staunchly to the children’s lips that blood begins to run and little slivers of skin remain stuck to the reverse side of the images.

When, in Lido di Ostia, I had to reach into my pocket for the fifth time today, I flung my loose change at the feet of the beggar in the doorway of the cathedral, so that she would have to bend down as a punishment.

Will I never again see that boy who knelt down in a field on the outskirts of Rome, blinding the black ants with a mirror?

A group of disabled veterans in uniform marched in goosestep—to the extent that their handicaps would permit—between the tombstones of a Jewish cemetery.

Large crosses shimmered in the darkness over the breasts of the nuns when lit up by the headlights of passing cars.

I lit two candles after reading, in the diary of Friedrich Hebbel, the story of the death of his young son.

In front of a butcher’s shop in the Rue Saint-Denis in Paris, I saw an enormous boar, dead but not yet portioned into pieces, its bloody maul tied shut with a plastic bag. Only when I had asked the saleswoman for the fourth time what the entire boar would cost, having not the slightest interest in the price per kilo, did she weigh it and give me an answer. With the bloody boar on my back, I walked along the Seine to Pere Lachaise and buried the animal beside Oscar Wilde’s dreadful grave marker. I woke with my heart pounding and touched the nape of my neck, which the boar’s black bristles had irritated.

Was there really cemetery dirt in every one of my mother’s flowerpots? The scent of the those snowdrop stems, plucked, on a child’s hands!

The children in the mental hospital, cinched to the iron bars of their beds, cannot even turn from side to side when they take fright, hearing the last bellows of the animals in the slaughterhouse next door.

I was terribly ashamed, one rainy night in Rome, when a Walt Disney film showing on television allayed my fear of death and, with a beer in my stomach, I was able to sleep peacefully.

Instead of fingers, I saw ten crabs on my hands rotating a black-trimmed funeral notice. In vain I tried to make out the name of the deceased.

I swam across the Dneiper in the vestments of the Pope, my head between my teeth.

A beggar, with an interminably ringing bell on his wrist and a large placard of the Virgin Mary hung over his chest, walks around amid the people in the Piazza Rotunda, holding out a silver-plated bowl.

If it had to be, I would rather my life be saved by an animal than a human being, because I would owe my life to that person till the end of my days, even were he to say: don’t thank me, it’s nothing! Purely from a sense of guilt for having to thank a human being for my survival, I would bring my life to an end.

I immediately drew back my hand from the broad iron slit of the mailbox, after the letter had tipped and fallen silently into the red metal receptacle of the mailbox in Rome, because I feared that my hand, and not only the letter, could fall inside.

Who was the bald young man in women’s dress who plunged from the tree to the ground dead, and whose face was covered in brown packing paper? A boy approached the body, took the packing paper from his face, folded it, and placed it in his shoe like an insole.

Josef Winkler (b. 1953, Austria) is the author of fourteen books and winner of numerous literary honors, among them the 2008 Büchner Prize. His major themes are suicide, homosexuality, and the corrosive influence of Catholicism and Nazism in Austrian country life. His novels When the Time Comes and Natura Morta are currently available from Contra Mundum Press, who will also be publishing Graveyard of Bitter Oranges in 2015.

Adrian West is a writer and literary translator whose works has appeared in numerous publications including 3:AM, McSweeney’s, and the Review of Contemporary Fiction. His book-length translations include the novels of Josef Winkler as well as the long poem cycle Alma Venus by Catalan poet Pere Gimferrer.

Anthony Cudahy is an artist living and working in Brooklyn. He is currently an artist-in-residence at Artha in the Brooklyn Navy Yards.

Friedhof der bitteren Orangen. Copyright (c) Josef Winkler, 1990. English translation copyright (c) Adrian West, 2012. Translations published by permission of Contra Mundum Press.

 

Our New Year’s Resolution: Stop Watching So Much Fucking TV

Two thousand thirteen was the year that introduced binge-watching to the lexicon. In a new poll by Netflix, 61 percent of respondents conceded to having binged on one show or another, meaning they’d watched upwards of three episodes a single sitting. The message, dear reader, is clear: we’re gorging ourselves on serialized dramas and slick on-demand entertainment. It’s time to step away from the fucking television.

This should be the year we all read more. And because our resolve can sometimes waver, we’ve enlisted our friends at McSweeney’s in a call to action.

Until the end of January, you can subscribe to The Paris Review and McSweeney’s for only $75—that’s 20 percent less than the price of individual subscriptions. Your 2014 will be so stuffed with the best in fiction, poetry, interviews, and essays that you’ll forget where you put the remote, forever.

 

New Year’s with Burroughs, Surprisingly Tame

Firecrackers and whistles sounded the advent of the New Year of 1965 in St. Louis. Stripteasers ran from the bars in Gaslight Square to dance in the street when midnight came. Burroughs, who had watched television alone that night, was asleep in his room at the Chase Park Plaza Hotel, St. Louis’s most elegant.

—William S. Burroughs, the Art of Fiction No. 36

 

Happy Birthday, Isaac Asimov (Maybe), and Other News

Happy birthday, Isaac Asimov! Maybe. Probably.
Newbery winner Kate DiCamillo has been named Ambassador of Young People’s Literature, a position which has been around since 2008.
Sure you can find plenty of lists of best of 2013, but what books were unfinishable? (Well, for Laura Miller?)
Ruth Rendell: “Reading is becoming a kind of specialist activity and that strikes terror into the heart of people who love reading.”

 

Darcy and Elizabeth Go to Summer Camp

In honor of the new year, we are bringing you some of your favorite posts from the past twelve months. Happy holidays!

This summer, in honor of the Pride and Prejudice bicentennial, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill held its first annual Jane Austen Summer Program, described informally as the “Jane Austen summer camp” and inspired in part by the Dickens Project at UC Santa Cruz. Our correspondent kept an illicit diary of his experiences, excerpted below.

Thursday, June 27

4:35 P.M. I have been hoodwinked into wearing many hats at this conference, some of them literal. E-mails from the braintrust inform me that I am to play Mr. Darcy at the Meryton Assembly on Saturday night, to which end I must shave my beard and attend two sessions of Regency dance instruction, all while perfecting my scowl. During convocation, I scan the order of the dance: “Braes of Dornoch”; the “Physical Snob”; “Mr. Beveridge’s Maggot.” The more boisterous sounding the dance, the more I fear for my newly fitted tights and breeches on generous loan from the Playmakers Repertory.

Professor James Thompson of UNC is our first plenary speaker. Thompson explains the etiology of the program, suggests that next year’s gathering will likely focus on Sense and Sensibility, and floats the idea of one day holding a summer conference about “Austen and the Brontës.” From the collective intake of breath, he may as well have been talking of 2Pac and Biggie. Thompson also expresses gentle alarm over suspected "crypto-Trollopians" in audience, a joke that lands with shocking force among this mix of academics, various regional representatives of JASNA, garden-variety superfans, Ladies of a Certain Age Wearing Sun Visors, archaic dance enthusiasts, and one very precocious eleven-year-old who takes notes at each of the plenaries. I give thanks that Thompson is a friend and banish anxiety over the tights.

Thompson’s talk is very good, positing Austen as a foundational figure in sociology based on her anatomization of “first impressions”—the original title of Pride and Prejudice. Nora Ephron (“the twentieth-century master of first impressions”) receives mention alongside Durkheim, Kimmel, and Erving Goffman. Is Lydia, in P&P, an embodiment of Durkheim’s anomie? The audience seems to buy it. The word civility, Thompson “reminds” us, appears seventy-nine times in P&P. When Thompson stumbles briefly, excusing his “afternoon ephasia,” audience members are more than happy to supply character names alto voce: “Miss Bates!” “In Emma!”

Democratic conferences invite mutiny.

9:30 P.M. The inaugural Austen HQ is Hyde Hall, home to UNC’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities and an appropriately elegant building for such a mannerly subject. Hyde Hall houses the four principal conference venues: Rosings (the Fellows Room), Longbourne (the Imaginarium), Netherfield (the grand seminar room), and, most important, Pemberley (the University Room). Dinner is excellent, though during the digestive interval, gentlemen do not stay in the dining room for port and politics. Nancy Armstrong’s provocative but highly technical lecture, about epistolary networks and the domestic novel, prompts seditious murmurs among the crowd, who were promised a happy balance between the edifying and the accessible. The restless unfold their fans as they complain quietly. Armstrong leaves the building with no sign of a struggle. And so, as Pepys would say, to bed.

Friday, June 28

11:15 A.M. Following little sleep and generous helpings of fruit, I chair the panel on “Jane Austen and Romance,” with excellent papers from Sarah Frantz, Kumaraini Silva, and Emma Calabrese. (At the current rate, Colin Firth will set a record for most appearances in Microsoft PowerPoint before the weekend is up.) My task is to introduce each panelist and then drag her from the lectern as gently as possible once her time is up. Professor Inger Brody has provided me with three large laminated signs: “FIVE MINUTES”; “TIME TO STOP”; and my favorite, “YOU’VE DELIGHTED US LONG ENOUGH,” a quotation from that uncomfortable scene in which Mr. Bennet must separate his bespectacled, strident-singing daughter Mary from the piano forte.

For all the genial wit, these signs prove less useful than, say, a shepherd’s crook, which would have been more direct.

One of the panelists begins to quote the first line of P&P, and by “acknowledged” the full audience has joined in. One hundred-plus adult humans intoning this sentence is wonderful and creepy in equal measure; think the Nicene Creed, delivered by ebullient zombies.

2:15 P.M. Among various other “oh, by the way” duties, I have been asked to adapt portions of the Juvenilia into a one-act, and to oversee the production with a very talented colleague, Adam McCune. (Adam works in the nineteenth century, a character defect I generously overlook.) We’re performing at 7 P.M. and have just finished our first rehearsal with the full cast. The script is bonkers, a mashup of Love & Freindship [sic] and The Beautifull Cassandra [also sic] with various one-liners added for zest; adapting an epistolary comic novel for the stage necessarily involves metatextual fuckery, and I’m banking on the world’s easiest audience for Austen jokes. Our players are uniformly delightful. Our fourteen-year-old Jane (in fact a highly accomplished twenty-seven-year-old colleague) sports pigtails and simply owns the stage. Professor Brodey’s fifteen-year-old daughter exudes an enviable stage presence. Joe F., our policeman, delivers my Dogberry-style prologue like Terry Jones of the Pythons, while coconuts prove a useful prop during our various hackney-coach and phaeton scenes. For a first full-cast dress rehearsal, people are on point.

4:20 P.M. Mercury broke 100 today, yet no fainting or swooning among the Austenites. Nove I’ve got all these smelling salts and no one to revive.

5:45 P.M. First session of dance instruction complete. Got the moves down but am newly concerned about the tights situation.

8:45 P.M. SCENE: Two writing tables bookend the room. A divan rests center-stage (if possible, fainting couch). The divan should be large enough that at least two adults can faint on it comfortably at one time.

Note to self: for cheap ego boost, appear in amazing blue waistcoat before a room of Austenites and affect an English accent. The play is a smash, everyone overacting in the proper melodramatic register, the tiniest jokes landing like a Richard Pryor show. It seems clear that certain younger males in the audience are now in love with every woman in the cast. A film of the performance, for good or ill, will soon appear on YouTube, where it can rub shoulders with The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, The Real Housewives of Jane Austen, and The Jane Austen Fight Club—among many other instances of multimedia fan fic. After the Q&A, I unbutton my waistcoat and taste oxygen for the first time in forty-five minutes. A contingent of the Women in Sun Visors approaches me to ask questions, offer thanks, and compare my stage presence to (a) Hugh Grant and (b) David Niven.

My academic career has peaked early.

Saturday, June 29

11:15 A.M. Prof. Brodey chairs the plenary panel on “Austen & Film,” where, alongside Suzanne Pucci and Ellen Moody, I appear as “guest film critic.” The discussion is boisterous, fun, and hopelessly unfocused. Ellen likes my notion that the modern director must take on the role of Austenian narrator—i.e., the camera shoulders a great deal of the editorial burden—but seems to prefer simple voiceover. None of the films agrees to play on the projector, another argument in favor of the novels. In aftermath, I drop a tweet in honor of Jennifer Ehle, forever the Elizabeth Bennet. Ehle, a North Carolina native, responds with great class: “Thank you, I am endlessly grateful I had the chance to pretend to be her.”

We are now enjoying “elevenses,” a delightful spread that includes various scones, several buckets’ worth of clotted cream, coffee cake, teas and juices, and the occasional piece of fresh fruit. One’s impulse is to apply a straw to the clotted cream and never look back.

2:45 P.M. More dance instruction in the ballroom across the street. Jack Maus, a charmingly dry instructor from the NC Assembly Dancers, leads us through “Mr. Beveridge’s Maggot,” the “Physical Snob” (perhaps my favorite), and the “Duke of Kent’s Waltz,” which Maus describes as “not a waltz at all because you’re not allowed to touch!” The younger generation (I include the graduate students here) seem more comfortable on the twirly, kaleidoscopic dances; the stationary foot-maneuvers required to “set” in most dances prove far more befuddling.

Meanwhile, diehard attendees appear already to know their moves. I am a total poseur. 

4:10 P.M. The silent auction has begun and will finish at the ball tonight. “The winner will be announced after the harpist has finished playing,” Brodey says, as though this is a normal thing to say.

7 P.M. Meryton Assembly begins. Tights-wearing status: very much so.

The “Netherfield trio”—Bingley, his sister Caroline, and I—are instructed to enter fifteen minutes late and fifteen miles aloof, in direct imitation of the rendition in Joe Wright’s 2005 film. As we appear, the music dies and the muttering begins. I remove my top hat and appraise the company with as much disdain as I can muster in my current high spirits. Caroline Bingley, looking ravishing, leads the following dance with me, one of the twirly variety that always makes me happy.

A professor’s youngest daughter, tiny and dressed in lovely Regency white with a pink sash, asks whether she can dance with Mr. Darcy. I take a knee and explain that my second dance is spoken for, and would she do me the honor of saving the third for me? She agrees and keeps me to my word, and we round the hall doing spins like a pair of pros, despite the height differential.

A very convincing Lizzie Bennet presents herself, and, having already broken character by being civil to a child, I see no objection to repairing to the viewing gallery for idle gossip and decorous flirtation. Whist had been on the evening’s docket, but dancing has monopolized the collective attention, and bowl after bowl of Shrub, a vinuous punch concocted in the classic style by Gary Crunkleton, a local bar owner and “mixology historian.” I abstain, but Lizzie informs me the concoction is divine. So is Lizzie, and most all the women in the room. It becomes curiously clear, in this moment, how very easy it might be to find oneself smitten on such a night, two-hundred-some years ago.

Sunday, June 30

10:00 A.M. Four hours’ sleep last night. No A.M. swimming to revive spirits; must settle for pull-ups, crumpets, and coffee.

1:10 P.M. Douglas Murray offers an excellent breakout session on “The Male and Female Gaze in Pride & Prejudice,” though a really excellent Gosling/“hey girl” PowerPoint moment doesn’t provoke a single audible laugh. The formal leave-taking, held in Pemberley, is warm and wistful. Thompson and Brodey both speak, and there is a strong sense among attendees that returning home—geographically and temporally—will be difficult.

This sentiment is both very silly and very sweet and speaks well for the program, which seeks to occupy a middle spot between literary criticism of the high academy and the untheorized enthusiasm of civilian superfans. As such, it’s not only an important gesture of outreach on the part of scholars (that chilly, insular bunch) but also an act of extended sociability very much in line with Goffman’s Austenian notion of meaningful “conversation” as the social glue—“the bridge that people build to one another, allowing them to meet for a moment of talk in a communion of reciprocally sustained involvement.” Literary academics are not traditionally known for building bridges, or for fraternizing with the great unwashed. But if we’ve read our Austen, we know that Caroline Bingley is not an object for emulation.

Her brother Charles is a far better model, opening his doors to anyone who delights in a ball.

Ted Scheinman is a doctoral candidate and culture reporter based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His essays, reporting, and criticism have appeared in Slate, the Oxford American, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Village Voice, and elsewhere. Follow him on twitter at @Ted_Scheinman.