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Diesel Presents - Jorge Luis Borges

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August 24th, 1899 - June 14th, 1986 Diesel Presents Jorge Luis Borges

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library,” said poet, short story author, and translator Jorge Luis Borges, who’d been writing from the age
of six. And in 1955, he was appointed Director of the National Library of Argentina, despite the fact that, by that time he was completely blind. In a poem, he put it best:

No one should read self-pity or reproach
Into this statement of the majesty
Of God; who with such splendid irony,
Granted me books and night at one touch


Borges considered his blindness an asset, saying, “When I think of what I've lost, I ask, 'Who know themselves better than the blind?' – for every thought becomes a tool.” He was, however, unable to continue writing in the traditional sense of committing ink to paper, and thus dove more into the realm of poetry, able to compose these shorter pieces entirely in his head while still embracing the wideranging themes of his earlier works: memory, reality, labyrinths, mirrors, gardens, animals, scholars, fictitious works, imaginary places, kings, bandits, knife-fights, assassins... Such is the breadth of Borges’ interests and so dizzying are the scope of his ideas that in the space of a few paragraphs, stanzas, and sentences, he packed more twists and turns than could most authors in an entire book. Crucial to this talent was a profound realization he hit upon while attending school in Geneva, Switzerland: inventing the idea of a book is just as effective as writing it; many of his stories deal with the effects of and reactions to fictitious works. 

Borges was never awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he surely deserved as perhaps “the most important figure in Spanish-language literature since Cervantes.” However, in his final years, he at last realized a childhood dream: he was able to stroke the fur of a living, breathing tiger.

At the age of 86, he died of liver cancer.

Some Thoughts on Translated Literature

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"As a writer I can be bad, but I can't be wrong. A translator can be good, but can never be right. Translators are jugglers, diplomats, nuance-ticklers, magistrates, word-nerds, self-testing lie detectors, and poets. Translators rock." (-- David Mitchell)
This interview with acclaimed novelist David Mitchell (discussing his and his wife's forthcoming translation of Naoki Higashida's The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism) clearly spells out much of what makes translated literature endlessly appealing. It's not simply that the settings of such works are different, or because they give us glimpses of cultures not our own -- though these are valuable and often very helpful. It's more that translations are stark reminders that reading forever dances on the divide between hubris and humility. If, as some version of the cliché goes, those who read the most usually are the ones most aware of how little they've actually read, those who read the most translations are all the more sensitive to the fact that what they've read is not actually what was written. For some readers, this creates a distance too far between author and reader. For others, though, certainly for me, it highlights in a real, tangible way the division that's always there anyway. Once this important divide has been established as a feature rather than a bug, something exciting -- and sometimes a little scary -- happens: we find ourselves involved in what we're reading in ways that an assumed intimacy rarely ever allowed.

Don't believe me? Check out these two extraordinary links below that expand on the challenges posed by translation:

1) Over at Archipelago Book's blog, Eric has written a great post reflecting on the multiplicity inherent to translation -- using as an example the poetry of C. P. Cavafy -- and reminds us, as Mitchell does in his interview, that with translations it's rarely simply a matter of right vs. wrong. What's important is that the translation is good, and that the measure of that is rarely so cut and dry. 

Three Good Things: Tuesday Link Trifecta

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1) With her most recent novel, The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner showed herself to be one of the sharpest-tongued writers of her generation. With this insightful essay on the work of Clarice Lispector (another favorite of ours), she's shown herself to have exquisite taste, too.

"Lispector dispenses with, or rather swerves around, narrative altogether, and gives her main subject—being—to us straight, in the form of aphorisms linked together and floating against a background of only white paper. By some sleight of hand she manages to create a sense of forward motion without offering any kind of character development. She writes about thinking, what it’s like to think, and this task is circular, because thought, while not language, is bounded by words, its only tools for expression." (For more see Bookforum . . .)

2) "Four designers discuss their work on recent book covers: first concepts that didn’t make the final cut, and then the cover as published." (For a brilliant slideshow of, and commentary on, recent book covers and those that nearly were see the New York Times . . .)

3) I could listen all day to the late W. G. Sebald reading from his magnificent, but unfortunately final, novel Austerlitz (with a delightful appearance near the end by Susan Sontag). 

 

 

An Open Letter to President Obama

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Earlier this week the American Booksellers Association and Hut Landon, Executive Director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, wrote President Obama stirring open letters we thought you'd like to see. They were in response to the President's visit to an Amazon.com warehouse and on the heels of Amazon's most recent episode of loss-leader predatory pricing. Both letters are clear and to the point, highlighting not simply what independent bookstores are up against but also how we stand out as an alternative to business as usual.

Here's Hut's:

California Bookstore Day!

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A wonderful thing happens when you walk into a Diesel bookstore: you cannot help but notice you're in a space that is not only filled with books, but that you're surrounded by people who love them. As the pace of life and commerce continues to quicken, faster now than a point and click of a mouse, independent bookstores have become all the more important. Here, there is as much room for the busy, quick-in and quick-out shopper as there is the "Sunday-stroller" out on a Tuesday; the woman who knows what she wants and where it is, as well as the guy who just loves the smell of books. Independent bookstores are -- and we think will remain -- cultural destinations. And for this reason, we're excited to tell you about California Bookstore Day

On this special day, May 3, 2014, a number of extremely limited-edition, unique, word-based items and books will be available in more than one hundred independent stores across our great state. Note: these aren’t going to be your run-of-the-mill signed first editions. We're talking literary art projects, one-of-a kind books -- collector’s items created for this event only. And, of course, as California goes, so goes the rest of the country! By 2015, we hope to make Bookstore Day a national celebration.

We can't do it without your help, though, and look forward to working with you to make this happen. For specific details, visit the California Bookstore Day IndieGoGo fundraising page. Join us, and let's spread the joy and love of bookstores. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Diesel Presents - Javier Marias

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Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland, is starting a featured section. Every couple of weeks, we'll highlight an author, a literary theme, or topic that we feel you might want to know about. We started with Roberto Bolaño, in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of his passing. This week, we bring you:

Javier Marías, 1953 - Present

Javier MariasA bit of a celebrity in his native Spain, Javier Marías is a prolific writer, translator, and columnist. He is perhaps best known for his novel All Souls, ostensibly a fiction set in Oxford University, though there are many who believe it is a not-so-subtle roman a clef. In fact, the reception of All Souls prompted Marías to write Dark Back of Time – a “false novel” according to him -- which starts off discussing the effects of publishing All Souls and the ripples it sent through the Oxford community. The book also chronicles the series of events that led Jon Wynne-Tyson, the reigning king of the small, Caribbean island of Redonda, to abdicate the throne and leave it to Marías.   

That's right. In 1997, Javier Marías became King of Redonda. As king, he has bestowed a number of duchies to artists and writers, such as the poet John Ashberry (Duke of Convexo), director Francis Ford Coppola (Duke of Megalopolis), and writer Orhan Pamuk (Duke of Colores).  Marías also created an annual literary prize, the winner of which receives a duchy of their own. Recent winners were Alice Munro in 2005 (Duchess of Ontario), Ray Bradbury in 2007 (Duke of Diente de Leon) and Umberto Eco in 2008 (Duke of La Isla del Dia Ante).   

From the Paris Review: “Marías is forever redrawing the thin line that separates illusion from reality, and they are central elements of his work. It is not only his narrators who are unreliable; the entire world of his novels is unreliable. His books enact the Nabokovian principle that memory is ultimately false, which gives his stories a sense of timelessness.”

His new book, Infatuations, will be available from Diesel on August 13th.

Try Javier Marías if you like Roberto Bolaño or W.G. Sebald.

Melancholy and Creativity

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There is, as has been ably demonstrated by the likes of Kay Redfield Jamison in her splendid study Touched with Fire, an undeniable link between melancholy, madness, and creativity. When we consider the frayed and fraught weave of these connections, though, I think we should be careful to draw a too-quick equivalence between depression and melancholy. If nothing else, this sort of care is the least we can do for our mythological forebears.

The link between Kronos/Saturn and melancholy, of course, is well-known and time-honored. But it is interesting what revisiting it from time to time reveals. To re-rehearse: Kronos was a particularly naughty boy. Killing one’s father tends to earn that label. Castrating one’s dead father and casting his testicles into the ocean, that just makes one disturbed. Such being the happy accidents of mythology, though, this insult upon injury at least gave rise to Aphrodite/Venus and the nymphs -- which at last gave the world somebody to blame when its lust was too often excessive and its love too seldom returned. As naughty as he was, neither was Kronos a fool. For he knew that if he could do in Daddy, surely his own children would eventually desire to do the same to him. So, naturally, he ate them.

Down the hatch, one, two, three, four, five times, until finally, when the sixth was born, Rhea managed to convince him that, yes, a rock and a baby do in fact taste very much the same. And so it was that Zeus was spared because of his father’s undiscriminating palate.

Most of us know the story from here. Zeus eventually manages to induce in his father a profound bout of nausea the likes of which the world has never before or since known, causing him to spew out, newly living, with nary a chew mark even, Zeus’ siblings. And so began the war with the Titans from which Mount Olympus would arise.

Unlike his father, in the case of Kronos’ overthrow the insult was the injury. Whether he was spared his testicles (and instead cut into a thousand pieces) or he was castrated (and remained otherwise intact), the stories vary, his defeat made him subject to everything his peculiar taste in baby had allowed him to avoid. Namely, the onslaught of time. Time/chronos, we might say, finally caught up to Kronos — the cycle of create-to-consume was ended. The specter of death, or at least of life’s limits, had dawned.

And thus, too, was born melancholy, that most heroic of the temperaments, we’re told, of which Aristotle writes:

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