Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

Posted on: December 27, 2008

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by Robert Mueller

Reading Evgeny Zamyatin’s A Godforsaken Hole (Na kulichkakh, 1914), what is the novel like?
First of all, it is very funny. And famil­iar. And yet the strange thing is that those other nov­els and texts that it can remind you of would seem to come after; and it would not be any par­tic­u­lar writer or book, but merely the feel­ing of its being so familiar.

What is funny about this book?  Here we feel in Walker Foard’s trans­la­tion (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988) the full effect of its capri­cious humor.  The magic of caprice does in fact lead to some­thing dif­fer­ent, some indi­ca­tion of Zamyatin’s genius and per­son­al­ity.  But the novel is known for its bit­ing satire, and it got on people’s nerves once they noticed it, and so they burned and banned it: “By decree of the Supreme Commissariat of the Committee of Culture under Special Arrangements of His Most Esteemed the Tsar Nicholas of Russia the Second, any and all pub­li­ca­tion, illus­tra­tion, dis­tri­b­u­tion or infes­ta­tion what­so­ever of the writ­ings pur­ported to be unleashed under the title A Godforsaken Hole authored regret­tably by the pro­fane pen of one Evgeny Zamyatin are now and hereby placed in sub­jec­tion to penalty by law and out­rightly for­bid­den.” (offi­cial quotation mine).…

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Posted on: August 25, 2008

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The Silent Confucius, The Confetti Trees, Hollywood, Who
Else but Barbara Guest
by Robert Mueller

Barbara Guest’s books are won­der­ful because of how they come to us with their boun­ti­ful co-​​​​valencies and lay­er­ing.  The Confetti Trees, a series of short-​​​​short sto­ries or quasi-​​​​filmmaking anec­dotes that qual­ify as prose poems (Sun & Moon, 1999), has this impli­cat­ing char­ac­ter, so that when it takes its mea­sure in the rich play of glit­ter and arti­fice that are Hollywood, one of its expound­ing lay­ers is a blend­ing cos­mic plot.  Guest’s sto­ries, deft and trothfilled-​​​​wacky in their fab­u­lous causes, pro­pose cir­cum­stances that con­cern none other than the com­ing to America of Confucianism.  By way of mak­ing and divin­ing not only events on the set but their twice-​​​​felt reflec­tions, they are the out­pour­ing of sub­lime Tao (tak­ing the con­cept “uni­ver­sal law” to be the appli­ca­tion thereof), and thus the cream of informed under­stand­ing of uni­ver­sal order­li­ness as ever-​​​​changing mobil­ity, and even chanci­ness, all fig­ured, if you like, in a con­cept labeled I Ching, the title of the famous trea­tise that has a com­men­tary believed to be by our Confucius who is much-​​​​endeared (just as Guest’s sto­ries may be).…

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Posted on: August 1, 2008

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The World of Holden Caulfield:
Revisiting The Catcher in the Rye

J.D. Salinger. Photo by Lotte Jacobi. 1951

I read J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye in 1970 as a teenage girl with a dis­af­fected out­look on the world very sim­i­lar to the nar­ra­tor and main char­ac­ter, Holden Caulfield. I recall think­ing it was a won­der­ful book I could relate to on many lev­els: as a child of the 60s, I shared Holden’s dis­dain for pre­ten­tious­ness, dis­cour­tesy, hypocrisy, reg­i­men­ta­tion, and social climb­ing. I longed des­per­ately for some mea­sure of peace with myself and the world around me in spite of my con­tempt for the behav­ior I observed in peo­ple  –  phonies, as Holden would call them. That was as far as I could go with my appre­ci­a­tion for this won­der­ful book at that young age.…

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