That’s Robert Walser Maira Kalman.

These questions are Steve Benson’s mine:

1) Is there an opening paragraph anywhere more utterly compelling, such that you can’t avoid just choosing to read this whole book next, than that of Mildred Pierce?

2) I never read it before, and now I have to put off all those other novels I was given for Christmas to read this. What is it that grabs me so irresistibly?

[Plagiarist's twist: What books did you get for Christmas, what are you reading, what are you putting off?]

3) And would readers who are now in their twenties and thirties see anything in this at all?

Questions–and that’s not all–plagiarized from poet Steve Benson‘s brilliant facebook wall.

BUT FIRST:

B Y  F A R the BestBook I’ve read this year (so near) was the (Walser &) Co-BestBook last year (2010) and the best blog the year before.

Clue: Its author “loves Robert Walser more than you do.” (I do too. Lew: “It’s true.”)

Fact: We(stern Massachusetts) love(s) Robert Walser so much that we started the Robert Walser Society of Western Massachusetts fiVe Xmases ago and this Very Xmas we watched Sara Majka, Ish Klein and Susan Bernofsky walk five miles to a Flying Firehouse (for Ish is a fireman.)

Myself: I’ve been afraid to write about Walser because he is…mine? Do you know what I mean?

I mean: what writer is yours, who would you walk to fire for, who don’t you write about for fear of?

Walser: I still won’t write about him here, even though Microscripts was the Walser&Co-BestBook of 2010. (You: Word.)

If not mine: take Ashbery’s, Benjamin’s/Burgin’s, (Julia) Cohen‘s, the Devil’s (Accountant), & don’t, e.g., forget Griffiths (i.e. Paul, who, as did Ashbery, picked it for the TLS BOY (print only), and whose own Ophelia Oulipo novel, let me tell you (2008), is primed to be on any list of BestBooks, period. That it’s publisher, Reality Street Editions, is responsible for Bill Griffiths’–otherwise unrelated?–Collected Earlier Poems, which was easily (with Steve Carey, The Selected Poems of) the Walser&Co-BestPosthumouslyPublishedPoetryCollection of 2009&2010, is enough to make own cry conspiracy or, at least, coincidence.)

What I am going to write about: Procrastination.

Well: I’m not gonna write about Procrastination.

Why: because Susan Bernofsky is a better procrastinator than, well, Walser or You or (Walter Benjamin’s) Zerstreuung (distraction itself).

Seriously: Translationista, her new blog on All Things Translation, says so. Read her latest post “Translation & Procrastination” now; no, later.

First: Facebook, where you might find on Susan’s wall: “I am a world-class procrastinator. You think you can out-procrastinate me? Bring it on!”

Or: you could go back and read Kyle Minor’s Maggie Nelson Roundup, where (in an interview) the author of Bluets gets it perfect:

I like being at work. What I like less are the soggy, ill-defined but probably necessary periods between monsoon and drought. The periods of silence, inactivity, and aimlessness that inevitably punctuate a life. Being possessed is pleasurable — it feels good to lose control of the car while also somehow staying behind the wheel. But abiding with a dead or resting or paused brain, or numbness, or ordinariness, or sanity — that’s harder for me. So the best trick I know has less to do with tapping into creativity and more to do with cultivating the capacity to live without it. To let it go, and not feel as if the plug has been pulled on life.

probably necessary periods between…periods of silence…punctuate…possessed is pleasurable…paused brain…plug…pulled: perhaps because I have written (right here) before about Bluets in conjunction with Blue Book by Steve Benson but probably because it–what I’m about to share–had become a lens for viewing everything since I’d read it the night before, Nelson’s “soggy, ill-defined but probably necessary periods between monsoon and drought” (unexpected seasons), prompted me to think of Benson’s facebook status update for Thursday [January 6] at 9:08 p.m.:

I wonder sometimes how my evening disappears, slamming around at or near the laptop, up and down, cross-referencing questions and considerations and responses, and then I realize, I am working on my writing, of course! I am editing my work, across many nameable and unrecognizable parameters, before I write a word.

Possibly procrastinating (not responding to my students who in turn were not responding–i.e. on time. Update: they responded well–to Kharms’ The Blue Notebook from TODAY I WROTE NOTHING), procrastination seemed to me the primary parameter into which an evening disappears. (Parenthetically, my first action was to send it to my students.) Of course, Benson’s update/paragraph is far richer than my initial re/action/duction (see comments). But Zerstreuung had already set in.

For: ten minutes later, Benson posted a Note on the same Facebook wall which had set me both on fire and to (distr)action:

I especially want to ask the impressions of those of you who teach the novel or who teach fiction writing seminars: Is there an opening paragraph anywhere more utterly compelling, such that you can’t avoid just choosing to read this whole book next, than that of Mildred Pierce? I never read it before, and now I have to put off all those other novels I was given for Christmas to read this. What is it that grabs me so irresistibly? And would readers who are now in their twenties and thirties see anything in this at all?

Postman Script:

Without even providing the opening paragraph in question, Benson’s Note made me want to drop everything and read James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce, starring Joan Crawford Kate Winslet. Instead, I read the opening paragraph of Cain’s first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934):

They threw me off the hay truck about noon. I had swung on the night before, down at the border, and as soon as I got up there under the canvas, I went to sleep. I needed plenty of that, after three weeks in Tia Juana, and I was still getting it when they pulled me off to one side to let the engine cool. They they saw a foot sticking out and threw me off. I tried some comical stuff, but all I got was a dead pan, so that gag was out. They gave me a cigarette, though and I hiked down the road to find something to eat.

But instead of reading further, I let Zerstreuung take over again, discovering that Walter Benjamin, too, found distraction in The Postman Always Rings Twice, which he read (“as thrilling as it is discerning” he wrote in a letter–but to whom?) in French translation, in 1937.

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