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December 2009

On Claude Simon’s novel Conducting Bodies (1971)

I read an awesome book and I want to tell you about it. Originally written in French by Claude Simon, and titled Les Corps conducteurs, the translation I read (by Helen R. Lane) is titled Conducting Bodies. It was originally published in 1971, but my version was published by Grove Press in 1974. Sadly, it appears to now be out of print — but used copies are out there.

I stumbled across it a few weeks ago at a used bookstore here in Tallahassee. It wasn’t like I saw it on the shelf and went “Oh yes! Oh my god, I can’t believe I found this.” It was more like, “Claude Simon sounds vaguely familiar…wasn’t he associated with Alain Robbe-Grillet and the Nouveau Roman movement?” I picked it up and did as I always do: I read the first sentence and prepared to put it back on the shelf if that sentence was not exceptional:

In the display window a dozen identical female legs are lined up in a row, feet up, the thighs lopped off at the hip joint resting on the floor, the knees slightly bent, as though the legs had been removed from some chorus of dancers at the precise moment that they are all kicking in unison, and put there in the window, just as they were, or perhaps snipped out, in monotonous multiplicity, from some advertisement showing a pretty girl in her slip pulling on a stocking, sitting on a pouf or on the edge of an unmade bed, her torso leaning backward, with the leg that she is pulling the stocking over raised up high, and a kitten, or a curly-haired puppy gleefully standing on its hind legs, barking, with its pink tongue sticking out.

Funny peculiar?

I tried to write a couple of jokes for a friend of mine who is a stand-up. Here’s one: You know, with all the sneaking around in the dark, the shouting, and the forcible sodomy, a home invasion robbery is pretty much exactly like a surprise birthday party. Except without cake.

Hmmm. As I said, I tried.

Ever try to write a joke? Let’s hear it.

Craft Notes / 21 Comments
December 26th, 2009 / 10:26 pm

Blake Butler—

Anybody get some new cool junk to read? Or eat? Or touch? I have two 700 pp. nonfiction books on my lap, like someone’s sitting on me.

Nick Antosca

TIME DESTROYS ALL THINGS

I tried to write a Christmas message in the sand this afternoon, but within twenty seconds…

Merry Christmas, from John Darnielle from John Prine from Michael Schaub from All of Us to You

via Michael Schaub’s facebook. There are drunk people screaming at each other in the street. Everything in New York is closed except every single bodega everywhere. I’m going to Florida tomorrow. Be bugging you from there, probably–God rest ye merry gentlemen till then. Ladies, too.

Web Hype / 4 Comments
December 25th, 2009 / 1:37 am

Sean Lovelace

Book-o-the-Day: Stoner by John Williams

Ah, the university novel. You know them, lined on the shelf in luxurious elbows: Lucky Jim, Straight Man, Death in a Tenured Position, Wonder Boys, I Am Charlotte Simmons, The Gaudy Night, etc. (I am sure you can name many others–go right ahead.)

We get the usual ideas of the Ivy Tower, layer after constructed layer, grazing grey skies of tile, the empty smiles (can I get a motion? I second that motion!), dusty classroom to cramped office to bewildering department meeting of the bewildered, a city made of suffering elephants, a Matryoshka doll (stop that metaphor!) of sad absurdity. (Here I am addressing English Departments, as do most of these novels. Makes sense, I suppose: Write what you know, and for many writers, the U is nursemaid, benefactor, sad (or happy?) reprieve.

Sad X 2 above, as device, for emphasis. Sad is the one cloistered within, wrapped in gauze and weak coffee, kept from the wobbles and needles and very real pains of the Real World, to fade, fade away…into self-laugh, self-hate, into nothingness.

But Stoner is not like these other novels (at least not the ones I have read).