The Saturday morning of the Twin Cities Book Festival marks the high point of the publishing year, at least for me. Sponsored by Rain Taxi, it's been held annually for almost a quarter of a century. I can remember the first one I attended, way back in 2002. It was held on one of the upper floors of the International Design Center, across Lyndale Avenue from the farmers' market on the Near North Side. The space was large but dark, the floors concrete, columns everywhere. My first book of essays, Mountain Upside Down, had just been published by Nodin Press, and I was naively enthusiastic about it. (It's now long out-of-print. I have two unopened cases in the basement. Let me know if you want a copy.)
That morning I traded a copy of the most recent print edition of MACARONI with Scott King, a letterpress printer who ran Red Dragonfly Books, for a copy of a fourteen-page, hand-tied, limited edition of Horace's Poem on Anger translated by Robert Bly.
But I'm suddenly reminded that I attended a book event a year or two earlier held in the Butler Building on the edge of the Minneapolis warehouse district, then still in its infancy as a district. Maybe not a Rain Taxi event, but very exciting stuff all the same. I was on the verge of buying a fine small-press edition of Patricia Hampl's poetry collection Resort but opted in the end for a smaller (and more affordable) eight-page chapbook containing Ronsard's poem "The Salad" translated by Wendell Berry.
The Rain Taxi event later moved down to the atrium of the Minneapolis Technical College, near Loring Park, and it was often lively to the point of frenzy in that bright yet modest space. One year I heard Stephen Pinker speak about the history of violence. With his thick, silver mane he looked like an eighteenth-century philosophe, and come to think of it, some of his controversial theories could have been lifted straight from Condorcet. Later I listened in as New Yorker staff-writer Larry Welschler told us all about "uncanny valley" and eight or nine other random but fascinating topics.
The festival's current location on the state fairgrounds is just fine with me: well-illuminated, food trucks outside, plenty of parking nearby. The event would be stimulating under any conditions, but for me, it offers an opportunity to reconnect with old pals from Bookmen days, writers I've gotten to know through the writer's union, and authors whose books I've editor and/or designed, a few of which I worked with recently but had never met face-to-face.
On top of that, there are the forums, the guest speakers, the used book sale, and the rows and rows of tables where small presses and self-published authors display their books.
Before the event last Saturday I took a look at the line-up and spotted one or two speakers that sounded interesting, including the translator Damion Searls. I also noticed that a few old friends (Cary Griffith, Theresa Wanta) would be there signing books at various times of the day. I drew up a schedule, but it was shot to hell the moment I arrived and noticed the author David Shields sitting alone in front of a camera at a table near the door. I sat down in the chair opposite and said hello.
"What's going on here?" I asked.
"I'm interviewing people. Would you care to answer a few questions?"
"Why not?"
I mentioned that I owned a copy of his book Reality Hunger, though I referred to it as Reality Bites, and added that I liked the aphoristic style. I told him it was the kind of book I liked to take up north; you could read a passage or two and ponder them for the rest of the day. I had found it to contain a much higher percentage of "winners" than the aphorisms of Novalis or Chamfort, for example.
There followed a lively conversation centered around some very interesting questions. Here are a few exchanges, cherry-picked, condensed, edited for length, and essentially fictionalized:
David: "What is the difference between 'nonfiction' and 'fiction'?"
Me: "Have you ever noticed that when we meet the author of a novel, the first thing we want to know is 'Did this really happen?'"
David: "I've written a few novels myself, and yes, I have found this to be true."
We arrived finally at the notion that a novel can't be said to be "true," but a good novel has the contours of truth.
Me: "Any interest in Peter Handke?"
Me: "That's one of the few of his works I haven't read. So you don't read much fiction. Name an author."
David: "I like certain novels by J.M. Coetzee. Elizabeth Costello. The title character goes around giving speeches about various things."
Me: "That reminds me of one of my favorite books: Julio Cortázar's Diary of Andrés Fava. It consists of a number of essays and fragments Cortázar deleted from a previous novel."
David: "I might like that."
From time to time Shields took another look at his list of questions.
David: "What is the difference between truth and belief?"
Me: "Well, Ortega y Gasset says that we rely on our beliefs but we don't really think about them. When we think about something, we're trying it out, so to speak, to see if it offers a reliable concept or explanation."
David: "Does truth really exist?"
Me: "Certainly. But it would be a mistake to imagine we can ever know the truth fully."
At this point there ensued a lengthy discussion of historicism, during which I inexplicably failed to mention Vico's principle of verum factum; We can understand the things we've made ourselves.
David: "Do you believe in ghosts?"
Me: "I saw a ghost once in Cimarron, New Mexico. Something slightly uncanny. But if that realm exists, it doesn't seem to play much of a part in the larger scheme of things."
David: "Are you superstitious?"
Me: "Well, I have a glow-in-the-dark statue of the Virgin Mary on my bedside table. But I don't think about it much. I got it at a party, a gift from a friend who had been raised Catholic and subsequently rejected everything about organized religion. The glow is fading. I need to put it out in the sun more before winter sets in."
I liked the bizarre string of associations, and I'm sure there's some insight to be drawn from its logic, but I was leery of wandering too deeply into politics, and I was pretty sure Shields wasn't at the festival to make a video of himself describing his own book to a stranger who hadn't read it. In fact, I've never read Melville. Nietzsche strikes me as mostly a shallow, confused, and hysterical thinker. More of a gadfly and social critic that a philosopher. I have trouble keeping Spivak and Zizek straight—I haven't read either of them—and I have had difficulty finding any book worth reading from the past half century of "literary theory," though as I looked at the cover David was holding in his hands, an image of Terry Eagleton's essay collection, Figures of Dissent, did flash through my mind.
The formula he drew my attention to seemed to be fleshing out a harrowing descent into chaos—the negative moment of a dialectic, rather than its developmental synthesis.
David's final question was: "Why are you here and not canvassing for Kamala Harris?"
My answer, in brief: "I'm a lifelong Democrat, I give money to the party. But I'm not really a grass-roots-movement kind of guy. And Minnesota is a reliably blue state." It sounded a little lame.
I might have added, "On a day like today, I'd rather be here talking to you, looking at books, and hanging out with friends."
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment