Book-rific Scrumptiousness

I've talked about this collection before. But it's beautiful enough to mention again, this time with a proper picture.

Where are we here? In the bedroom. Who needs a nightstand for books, when you can sneak in a whole shelf?

We got this particular collection at auction, after fighting a fairly heated bidding war with a fairly hard-bitten antiques dealer. I knew she wouldn't treasure them like I would (and likely only saw them in terms of their resale value), so I kept at it. From my seat, I saw the Zola, the Dostoevsky, the Pepys and Harte.

After a quick volley of bids, she finally conceded, and I carried the many boxes home.

This is just one collection. There are a few others in the living room--one is a fantastic little collection of blue-bound Harvard Classics--but I'll provide a glimpse of them another day.......

A Foreigner Among Foreigners

In 1998, I lived in Munich, huddled within the textured white walls of a tiny efficiency apartment charitably doled out to university students by the city’s Studentenwerk. There, my small room perched several stories above a first floor inhabited, on one side, by an Italian restaurant and, on the other, a police station, whose cars blared their panic-inducing two-tone sirens by night and by day. Down the street, the BMW plant began cutting sheet metal at 7 a.m., even on Saturdays.

From my apartment, I could see the architectural magnificence of the Olydorf, the 1972 Olympic Village, where some people took great pride in their apartments. Their stepped terraces, decorated with flowerboxes and spilling over with vining plants looked beautiful from my large square window. I felt bad for the reciprocal view offered by my sad gray-green building, which was casually shedding small bits of stucco onto the sidewalk below and occasionally onto Moosacherstrasse, which thrummed with the regular movement of cars like blood through arteries.

On Sunday mornings, when I usually suffered from a hangover that robbed me of my peripheral vision, I would force myself to get out and roam the streets, which I did even at night. I had no fears there. Almost no one bothered me. And I say almost because, once, a man did. But that's another story, for another time.

I had an admirer in those days, a dark haired man who worked in the restaurant kitchen, a man who seemed to know my schedule. He would stand outside smoking a cigarette and staring at the cinderblock walls surrounding the dumpsters. He always turned as I left through the glass door, my shoe heels clicking against the broken asphalt. “Ciao, Bella! ” he’d shout loudly at me before tossing his cigarette away and going back inside to--I assumed, based on the rubber gloves in his back pocket--wash dishes.
I usually rode the subway from the Olympia Zentrum stop, where drunks stood by the Imbisse near the heavily populated bicycle lock-up and drank Apfelkorn or the horrible, enamel-dissolving Obstler from tiny bottles they lined up like soldiers on the high, chairless tables. I nodded to the few World War II veterans I had come to recognize, one of whom told me he was kept as a POW by the British. I doubted some of his story because he was forever incandescent with alcohol, pinkish eyes tearing, nose leaking, mucous running like a frightened woman towards his upper lip. If someone had ever struck a match near him, I feared he would explode in one giant conflagration. So, I moved quickly past him, having faltered near him once and having been forced, thanks to my lack of a hard heart, to listen to his story. Not that it was uninteresting, just slightly incoherent, even accusatory. He thought I was British and was quietly giving me the business about his suffering and privations.

Munich's Theatinerkirche, a sight that makes me
teary-eyed. I never thought it would take me so long
to get back.

Often, I traveled to the wide and regal Odeonsplatz, which was the city’s hub. I emerged from the dark earth somewhat recovered and near the base of the towering, ochre-colored Theatinerkirche, with its giant Baroque dome and twin clock towers. Feldherrnhalle stood before me, a massive neoclassical memorial to fallen military leaders and behind it, the shadowy Dodger’s Alley, once travelled by those who wished not to salute another Putsch-related memorial plaque Hitler riveted to the side of the monument that faced the Hofgarten.

And then, the delicious walk to Marienplatz: past the modest Residenztheater and the opulent state opera, whose interior walls were either mirrored with beveled glass or painted an icy blue and accented with silvered acanthus leaf moldings. Beyond this, the shops: furriers; tobacconists, whose scents wafted onto the street with each movement of their shop doors; music stores in whose windows sheet music fanned and gorgeous violins suspended over burgundy velvet. There were ‘antiquariats,’ where I looked for prints and carefully flipped through gently yellowing first editions of Mann’s Buddenbrooks under the disdainful gaze of the storekeeper, who knew I was an impecunious student, but understood by my accent that I was a foreigner with at least one of the currencies then enjoying a high rate of exchange. Still, I often tried to hide my foreignness, and the longer I lived there, the better I became at it, until no one knew I was not one of them--a Bavarian who spoke the same broad vowels and deep-formed consonants authentically.

This was how I spent my days when I was not at the museum, where I catalogued the Wittelsbacher collection, harvested lavender from the roof garden by climbing through the window above my desk, translating correspondence into first halting, then lilting English. I, a foreigner among foreigners, with a disparity soon entirely undetectable.

This was originally written, in slightly different form, for Dan Waber's hypertext project, "That Reminds Me". Soon, there will be more....

My Review of Helene Aylon's show at Forward Magazine's Blog

I'm excited to report that one of my reviews of Helène Aylon's show The Liberation of G-d and The Unmentionable, currently on view at The Warhol Museum, is now live at The Jewish Daily Forward's blog, The Arty Semite. You can read the whole review here. In the meantime, an excerpt:


Helène Aylon, The Digital
Liberation of G-D, 2004
(Photo Credit)

 "The highlighting also reveals scornful attitudes towards the feminine. For example, Leviticus 15: 19-30 broaches the subject of female menstruation. Within these 11 lines, the word “unclean” appears 15 times. The repetition, when pointed out, is startling and calls to mind an earlier cataloging of unhygienic animals."

Pittsburgh City Paper (CP) will also run my review of the same show. However, this second review approaches the subject from a different angle, in order to offer other insights and ideas than those already presented. This should appear in next week's issue of CP. So, more to come on this next Thursday.

Other writing project are in the works, including a review for Sculpture Magazine. Details on these to come....

What's New in my Zoo

I know, I know...it's been almost a week since I've posted. But I've been working on a variety of projects, about which I'm pretty excited. Let's work backwards in time, shall we? Let's, indeed.

Yesterday, I finished a proposal for City Sages: Pittsburgh. All in the preliminary stages, mind you, but I put together a list of significant historical and contemporary writers, who have helped to define or are currently working to shape Pittsburgh's literary identity. It will be part of a series, published by Baltimore's City Lit Project, an organization headed by Gregg Wilhelm. Jen Michalski edited the first volume, devoted to Baltimore, and initially suggested the project's potential for Pittsburgh, which has a surprisingly rich and diverse literary legacy, even as a mosquito-infested frontier town. And while there are so many Pittsburgh poets I admire, who are making the city a literary hub, the focus will likely be on prose writers this time because of the shape of the series' inaugural volume. However, an entire volume about Pittsburgh poets is truly needed.

Now, backwards towards Friday. I finished my monthly 8-reference title LJ Review Column (<--if you click, you must scroll to the bottom to see my stuff). And on Thurday night, I completed a review of Helene Aylon's examination of the Torah, now on view at the Warhol Museum, for The Arty Semite. I undertook a fairly intense education in order to interpret the details because, when I did go to church as a child, it was to my Grandparents' Lutheran congregation (and later, in college, I attended several Episocpalian services with a boy I was dating...yet, a great deal of what i know about the Bible has come not from a pastor, but from Renaissance and Baroque art history courses. Perhaps this is something to be ashamed of, but I have a slightly different view of religion that likely aligns more with Emily Dickinson's conception than any traditional perscription. But this is another matter, somewhat private and much more complex. Not blog material, really.)

Anyway, I've got some other writing projects brewing, but we'll get to that soon. Very soon. In the meantime, check out a fascinating interview Helene Aylon conducted with legendary gallerist and champion of Abstract Expressionism, Betty Parsons, in 1977.

In City Paper, a Review of Sung Rok Choi's "Call of Duty: Operation 100"

Running this week in Pittsburgh City Paper is my review of the artist Sung Rok Choi's exhibition, Call of Duty: Operation 100, currently on display at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.

Sung Rok Choi, "Call of Duty: Seaweed" (2011)
Photo credit: sungrokchoi.com

Here's a small excerpt:

"The Brechtian quality of these naïve depictions points up our conditioned expectations: Where is the impersonal, unfailingly heroic aura assigned to soldiers in recruitment and propaganda videos? There, physical prowess and valor eclipse any sense of individual experience. Here, Choi offers a view of the disillusioned individual. Considering South Korea's compulsory two-year conscriptions, this is likely closer to many men's understanding of 'duty.'"

Read the whole review here:
"A Korean artist's riff on Call of Duty asks us to reflect on warfare"

In Pittsburgh City Paper, my interview with Gary Shteyngart

My interview with author Gary Shteyngart appeared in Pittsburgh City Paper last Wednesday. Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story (2010), Absurdistan (2006) and The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2003), will be reading at Pittsburgh's City of Asylum Series, which takes place at Mattress Factory tonight. The Warhol's Interim Executive Director and Milton Curator of Fine Art Eric Shiner will introduce Shteyngart.

I've reposted part of the conversation with Shteyngart here, just below. To read the interview in its entirety, click here.

"LOVE & RUINS" (from Pittsburgh City Paper)
Savannah Schroll Guz

Gary Shteyngart's novels are both satirical and prescient. And while his books deal with individual experience, his characters offer broader, incisive commentary on the grim nature of the human condition and global society's ever-shifting tectonics.
Born in Leningrad, in 1972, Shteyngart was brought to America at the age of 7 and grew up in an austere Russian household. His first two novels incorporate the tension of his own dueling cultural identities. The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2003) and Absurdistan (2006) -- named one of the year's 10 best books by The New York Times Book Review -- thrum with the angst of second-generation immigrants seeking to establish themselves under the weight of crippling, often parentally imposed, expectations.

This subject takes a back seat in his third novel, last year's Super Sad True Love Story (Random House), whose focus is a seemingly improbable relationship that develops amid a chillingly familiar social and political landscape. In the face of economic and political collapse, a hopelessly backward-looking man in his late 30s teaches an initially insensitive twenty-something female that the most redemptive kind of hope is not found in popularity or politics, but in love. The book, along with his previous work, earned Shteyngart a spot in The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" list of literary stars.

Shteyngart reads at City Of Asylum on Tue., May 10. City Paper interviewed him via email at his home in New York City.

SSG: Since The Russian Debutante's Handbook, you've moved from protagonists in their late teens/early twenties to the late-thirties Lenny Abramov of Super Sad True Love Story. How much do you identify with your main characters?

GS: I like to write about people my age. As I grow older and older I encounter a whole new set of fears and anxieties to add to my list of golden oldies. You should see my cholesterol levels. Vladimir [from Debutante] reminds me of my insecure college years in your neighbor Ohio (that's when I started writing the book); Misha [Absurdistan] is too large and in charge to be autobiographical; and this new nebbish of mine, Lenny, has a very different bald spot from the one I have.
SSG: In an interview with The New York Times, you mention the influence of writers like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. In light of your more recent exploration of American-based dystopia, do you look to any other influences?

GS: Well, I've always been a huge fan of dystopia. I grew up in the Soviet Union and went to Hebrew school in Queens. Enough said. I loved 1984 and Brave New World as a kid. I think 1984 sticks out in my mind because it's a love story set against a horrifying society. Julia and Winston love each other and that's what I remember so well about that book. It was an inspiration when I started writing Super Sad True Love Story....

To read the interview in its entirety, click here.

* * * *

Hysterical Machines at Wood Street Galleries

Bill Vorn's "Red Light" (2005)
currently on view at Wood Street Galleries

For a review I'm working on for Sculpture Magazine, I went to see Wood Street Galleries' recently opened, full-gallery installations, collectively titled Hysterical Machines. These robotic installations were created by Bill Vorn.  I'll have to go back....while the lights show and sounds were pretty spectacular on the third floor, the hydraulic machines seen hanging in the picture at left were not moving, and the second-floor gallery was not accessible via the elevator.

Earlier this morning, at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, I also got a chance to see Sung Rok Choi's series, Call of Duty: Opeartion 100, which I'll be writing a review of for next week's CP.

Also, while this week's CP is not yet online, it is out in print, and I picked up a copy outside the elevator entrance to Wood Street. My interview with Absurdistan author Gary Shteyngart is advertised on the front, which is exciting. I'll include a link in tomorrow's post, when the whole enchillada goes live on the CP site.

More from "Exodus"

Image from Extraordinary Intelligence

I've been working pretty steadily on the new sci-fi story, since my deadline is Sunday night....been consumed by that, so some more substantial postings will appear here as soon as I am done. In the meantime, an excerpt from the developing story...just a shorty for now, since I don't want to steal the thunder of what will eventually appear in the magazine:

"A strange red light seemed to rise over the rubble, and at first, the trio thought the Leviathans had found them. They all ran for cover, even Walter, who had previously wanted to die. Inside the spider-webbed glass front of a boutique, they stumbled over toppled shoe boxes and scattered boots and heels. They did not sit on the cushioned bench once intended for customers, but hunkered down on either side of the entrance, in case they had to move again. Once they caught their breath, Walter said, “I haven’t seen a living soul for the last four days. I was afraid I was the last one.” He paused when his voice cracked. “I tried to ...you know…kill myself, but I…I just didn’t have the guts.” He pulled back his sweater sleeve to show four or five light parallel cuts he’d made across his pale wrist.



Tina, crouched beside Rayray in a way that indicated she still looked to him for physical protection, said nothing. She glanced at the wrist and then shifted her eyes to the black and white floor tiles, where the sun’s light waned. The group could hear thunder, distant at first and then suddenly louder, until it seemed as if it were right overhead. Tina began to shake. Rayray looked through the windows, calmly, as if he already knew what was coming. The old Rayray would have gotten up, kicked the boxes around, raged against whatever was overhead, vainly challenging it. Now, however, he was composed. As the building shook with the percussive impact of the thunder, Rayray said, loud enough for them to still hear, “Behold, the Lord is riding on a swift cloud and comes to Egypt; and the idols of Egypt will tremble at his presence, and the heart of the Egyptians will melt within them.”

Within moments, a heavy burst of yellow-colored rain fell from the sky, striking the ground with the force of tiny hammers.  Walter, kept his place in the doorway, holding the lapels of his cardigan closed. He rolled his eyes around and wrinkled his nose, exposing his teeth, while he tried to see the sky beyond the boundaries of the doorway. The smell of sulfur suddenly rose from the pavement, along with a thick steam." -- from "Exodus"

The Beginning of Exodus

I'm working on a new story for the Winter '11 issue of the online sci-fi and fantasy magazine Strange Weird and Wonderful. Here are the first three paragraphs of a story with the working title, "Exodus":

The sun came up red and angry. It glowered through the gauzy fog, washing with a frail pink light the collapsing bridges and broken, graying asphalt that lay in chunks where highways had once been. While three of the small travel party still slept, protected from immediate sight by an overpass, Tina was awake, and so was Bible. She watched him sitting on the ledge some twenty yards away, looking east and staring with calm concentration into the sun. His braids, grown fuzzy at the roots, filtered the light around his skull so that it looked like a nimbus. Tina shuddered and turned over on her side, looking away from Bible.

Tina had known Bible before the apocalypse. That’s what they all called the invasion. It had come at the end of a very grim economic time. Even the Americans, who were fighting an endless war with sand colored tanks and ground harrowing missiles, were unable to muster the resources necessary to produce suitable weapons. But it did not matter, American science was not yet a match for the baffling nuclear arsenal the invaders had arrived with. Nearly everything around them had been either heavily irradiated or vaporized. In fact, at least two of the people lying near Tina snored quietly in front of human-shaped shadows burned into the concrete.

Tina again turned to look at Bible’s thin back. The sun had shifted. The red halo had disappeared. She could see his vertebrae, his humanity. Her nausea passed, and she remembered the man she had known. His birth name had been Leonard, and once, she and his other girls called him ‘Rayray’. As Rayray, he sat deep in his Cadillac Fleetwood, like it was a velveteen throne, and slowly wet his thumb and forefinger while he counted out twenties, fifties, hundreds. His girls took turns visiting him, went with their money to the Fleetwood at different times. Tina remembered how she drank in the air conditioning while she sat there and he counted, the motor humming beneath them.  Most of his girls hadn’t survived the apocalypse.  When the invaders landed, incinerating most of the inhabitants of buildings that burned and fell, the population in the Metro area fell by three-quarters. The survivors, before dying of radiation sickness or other equally fatal wounds, moved like cockroaches in the darkness, finding shelter for the daytime. Now, most of the city lay in quiet ruins that gently phosphoresced by night.   -- from "Exodus" (in progress)

On La Cigale by Chekov

Some time ago, Michael and I got into a bidding war with an antiques dealer for a set of 1920s classics, published by Black's Readers Service. We got them for $30, which, in my opinion, is a fairly low price for nearly 60 beautifully preserved books.
I suspect they were part of a subscription series, much like the Literary Guild books my mother got at regular intervals when I was a child. They are published in a variety of different years within the 1920s. And each is a beautiful fabric-bound red with spines sun-bleached pink and covered in lovely goldtone caligraphic swirls, now slightly worn from use and age. I can tell that the previous owner liked the Shakespeare volume the best because the spine is well worn, as if it had been pulled off the shelf many times. I even found a partial grocery list in nearly incomprehensible script marking a spot in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Slowly, I've been working my way through each volume (sadly, there is no Proust), but I've read through Zola and Flaubert, stalled somewhere deep in Wilde, but consumed almost all of The World's Greatest Detective Stories (well, 'world's greatest' up to the mid-1920s, of course). Right now, I'm reading through Chekov, having finished "The Kiss," which is a wonderful character study of a antisocial military man, a virtual ascetic who has a high opinion of himself, but very little engagement with the real world. I then moved through "The Chorus Girl" and am just past "La Cigale," (spelled, "La Giglae" in this 1929 edition).

 Writer and Actress Ada Clare
(looking like my conception of Olga Ivanova)
photo credit

According to Babelfish, "La Cigale" means cicada, which is a perfect appelation for the main character, Olga Ivanova, who essentially descends on her husband's life like a plague and destroys it. The story begins with a defining statement: "To Olga Ivanova's wedding came all her friends and aquaintances. 'Look at him! Isn't it true that there is something in him?' She said to them, nodding to her husband, as if to justify her marriage to this simple, commonplace, in no way remarkable man."

She, who circulates within circles of small-time artistic, literary and musical celebrities, fancies herself to have great potential, a potential she never really builds on. She marginalizes her husband's work, feeling that he is somehow a flunky (echoing the way Anna thinks of her own husband in Chekov's Lady with a Pet Dog.) Olga goes about feeling she and her friends are far superior to her husband, who works at a hospital during the morning and moves to dissecting bodies in the afternoon. She has no genuine understanding of his work, and because the third-person narrator follows her line of thinking so closely, we also do not have a concrete understanding of the husband, only of Olga and her motivations. She does not seem to appreciate the fact that he keeps her very comfortable until later, when she's gone off 'on holiday' (again like Anna) without him and begins an affair with one of her artist friends.

All along, she racks up little debts, which her husband, Dymov, sends her money to settle, along with a monthly allowance she runs through very quickly. Each time he sends money, he begs her to come home, but she ignores his requests. Yet, it's interesting that, when the shine goes off her relationship with the artist, faced as they both are with the bohemian squalor of their domestic circumstances during this hot summer in the provinces (read: Olga gets tired of slumming it), she fantasizes about her life with her husband: how clean it is, how he dotes on her, how she will visit her dressmaker, and attend evening concerts. Her life with Dymov becomes the dream.

Yet, when she and her lover quarrel and she finally returns home, she falls into old patterns. Eventually, she takes up with her artist friend again. He belittles her, takes up with another woman, and causes Olga to become consumed with the fractured relationship. She threatens to drink poison more than once.  Finally, her husband, Dymov, begins to suspect that she is having an affair, and he can no longer look her in the eyes. He merely tolerates her escapades, demanding nothing of her. She boasts to others of his "magnanimity." Finally, when he himself makes a great achievement, a professorship, she does not appreciate its significance to him. Instead, she is more concerned about the delay his news has caused her in getting to the theatre. Her indifference crushes him.

When he becomes ill with diptheria, and finally dies, only then does she learn through his friends what a great loss he was to the scientific world, how her demands for money shackled him to jobs that hampered his ground-breaking research. In the end, she was the one with little talent, and he, modest, unassuming, and supportive of her whims as he was, had the superior ability. Perhaps even more crushing to learn is that he infected himself with diptheria by siphoning a sample of the pestulance out of a patient's throat by using his own mouth, something he would have known not to do. In effect, Dymov commits suicide in a horrible way.

I wonder why this story is so overshadowed by "Lady with a Pet Dog". Perhaps it is because "Lady with a Pet Dog" has a hopeful ending: there may be a chance that Dmitri and Anna have a future together (although I wager it is unlikely because what kind of person is Anna really? Her life always seems to be one giant ending, while Dmitri has generally regarded life as an adventure of beginnings, new chapters. His obsession with Anna is based on a short period of time spent with her amid ideal circumstances, rather than the daily challenges of everyday living) Of course, Dymov's death in "La Cigale," extinguishes any sense of hope.

Olga, too, seems made from a template used again and again, a symbol of the problematic woman, the human shackle impeding a man's progress. She is much like Zola's Nana and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, or like T.H. White's Guinevere, who is called a "ruiner of good knights." But the story is so much more than this: it is a parable and an effective character study. Here is a lesson on egoism, its dangers, the outcome of an inability to look beyond one's own ambition and thwarted desires. Olga, darling, it is not all about you.

And so, I wonder, why has this story--so didactic in  its reminders to humanity--been more or less buried among Chekov's oeuvre? Why has this not been a story elevated to the level of "Lady with the Pet Dog" or "The Bishop"? Many people could learn a great deal from this, particularly now, in the age of obsession with fame.