Anne Shulock's Open Salon Blog

The Rumpus interview with Dinaw Mengestu

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 11:10:49 -0400

I have an interview up on arts/culture website The Rumpus today with author Dinaw Mengestu.

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Dinaw Mengestu’s name may be hard to pronounce (dih-NOW men-GUESS-too), but you’ll soon be hearing it a lot more. Earlier this year, the Ethiopian-born author was named to The New Yorker’s list of the top 20 fiction writers under age 40, and his second novel, How to Read the Air, was published last week. Like his acclaimed debut, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, the new novel explores the dislocation of African immigrants. This time around, the narrator is Jonas Woldemariam, a withdrawn and slippery character who, following the death of his father and the collapse of his marriage, retraces a road trip his Ethiopian immigrant parents took through the Midwest 30 years earlier. Just don’t believe everything he says.

I caught up with Mengestu last weekend before a reading at The Booksmith in San Francisco, where he talked about the importance of imagination, responded to his “ridiculous” recent New York Times review and lied to my face (by request).

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Check out the interview here!

The Best of The New Yorker Festival

Mon, 4 Oct 2010 09:10:25 -0400

This past weekend, I went to the annual New Yorker Festival, where the magazine rounds up its formidable roster of contributors, subjects and friends for a weekend of talks and performances. The five events I attended had sex, violence, music, humor and mutant radioactive albino crocodiles. Here are the best parts of the weekend:

1. The Jason Schwartzman promo for the magazine’s new iPad app. The short film, which was screened before every event, finds the handlebar-mustachioed actor demonstrating the app in a series of odd situations (in the shower; at a piano singing about the cartoon gallery). It was progressively funnier for the first three viewings; the fourth and fifth were not quite as amusing.

2. Alec Baldwin’s charm. “Alec Baldwin is here because I love him,” said interviewer Ariel Levy. “I’m glad you could all be here for our date.” The 30 Rock boss has an undeniable smarmy appeal, brandished in discussions of his early ambitions (to be President), impressions of Tracy Morgan and Marlon Brando, and mockery of early roles like the tough-guy boyfriend in Working Girl. In 2008, The New Yorker published a fantastic profile of Baldwin, who, far from resting on his laurels (or Emmys), seems perennially dissatisfied with his life and career. At the talk, he pointed out (and repeatedly demonstrated) an acting tick that’s been bugging him, where he adds emphasis to Jack Donaghy’s lines by doing a “vibrating, metronomic” movement with his head. It sounds weird to call a large, 52-year-old man with a history of anger problems endearing, but he was.

3. Childhood memories at the “Sex and Violence” panel. Fiction writers Wells Tower (Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned), Joyce Carol Oates (her latest is Sourland) and Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) were asked about when they first experienced the thrill of violence. Tower revealed some fierce horseplay with his brother: “I hit him in the face with a bat and threw a knife at his throat.” Later, when talking about the hypersexualization of the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic-born Díaz recalled childhood advice: “Always have two girlfriends—play them off each other,” said mom. And from his uncle: “Only women with big asses. Remember that.”

4. The mutant radioactive albino crocodiles in Werner Herzog’s new movie, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. The 3-D documentary is about the Chauvet Cave in France where, in 1994, archaeologists discovered astonishing paintings, depicting rhinos, cave bears, horses and more, that date back 32,000 years. A postscript to the film features greenhouses, some 20 miles from the cave and heated with excess water from a nuclear power plant, that house hundreds of crocodiles, whose offspring include albino creatures. Herzog imagines what those crocodiles might think if they saw the cave paintings. The animals are actually alligators, and their mutation has nothing to do with radioactivity. “So what?” said Herzog. “There should be imagination, the ecstasy of truth.” And indeed Herzog has gone beyond simple documentation, musing, in his offbeat way, on spirituality, history and the very nature of human-ness.

5. The transformative power of performance at “From Russia with Spunk,” with Regina Spektor. In conversation with writer Michael Specter, the 30-year-old musician was adorable: tiny, giggly, with a high voice and a habit of saying “you know” every five seconds. Then when she took to the piano, she unselfconsciously unleashed bold, passionate songs and sounds, from a barking dolphin imitation in “Folding Chair” to the ominously beautiful, pounding “Après Moi." Spektor’s songs have the drama and quirk of musical theater, so it’s welcome news that she’s almost done composing the music for an upcoming Broadway show based on the story of Sleeping Beauty.

6. The range of writer Ian Frazier. The reporter and humorist spoke with editor David Remnick about his ambitious, 500+ page new book Travels in Siberia, which he’s been working on since 1993. He took five trips to the region, which has a tragic and mythic history, a vast geography spanning eight time zones, and a climate that alternates between frozen tundras and mosquito-blanketed swamps. But apparently it’s fun and funny there, too. Frazier, who wrote the well-known humor piece “Coyote v. Acme” (it’s styled as a lawsuit by Wile E. Coyote against the maker of defective, explosive products), described Siberia as a land of “extreme humor”: “Russia is like slapstick, only you actually die.” Little-known fact: before coming to The New Yorker, Frazier worked for the Hugh Hefner-owned magazine Oui, for which he “wrote captions for pictures of naked people."

Anyone else go? What were your favorite parts?

Say it again, Sam*

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 11:09:54 -0400

One of my least favorite things about being a journalist in the era of 800 million news outlets is that you end up interviewing people who have been interviewed a dozen times before, asking them many of the same questions that all the other journalists asked them. I’ve had stories where I think I’ve gotten a good quote, and then I see the exact same one in another article.

But hey, it happens to the best. In the run-up to the release of The Social Network, the Aaron Sorkin-scripted, David Fincher-directed film about the fraught founding of Facebook, New York magazine and The New York Times are among the publications writing about the movie that “defines the decade” (or so says Rolling Stone).

Here’s David Fincher to Mark Harris, in New York magazine’s Sept. 27 cover story, “Inventing Facebook:”

“I know what it’s like to be 21 years old and trying to direct and sitting in a room full of grown-ups who think you’re just so cute but aren’t about to give you control of anything,” says Fincher. “I know the anger that comes from when you just want to be allowed to do the things that you know you can do…”

Fincher to David Carr, in The New York Times’ “A Zillion Friends, and a Few Enemies:”

“I know very subjectively what it’s like to be 21 years old and sitting in a room full of adults who are all taking about how cute your passion for your vision is and how angry that makes you,” he said.

At Jonathan Franzen’s City Arts & Lectures appearance in San Francisco recently, he took a long pause before answering one question about family in his writing. He said that he’d been answering so many questions that he’d found himself repeating answers, and wanted to avoid that, but there were only so many ways to respond.

You can’t fault the press for asking relevant questions, and you can’t fault interview subjects for these semi-canned answers, because they want the press, and there really aren’t that many ways to impart the same information. Most people won’t read multiple articles on the same subject, unless they have read everything by Franzen and/or think Jesse Eisenberg (who plays Mark Zuckerberg) is very cute. There’s just the nagging question, what’s the point of 100, or even 10, articles about the same movie? I defended (or rather, had Lydia Davis defend) multiple translations of classic novels last week. But when I go to, say, the press page of the movie Touching Home, and see the links to 52 articles (not counting TV and radio interviews), one of which is mine, it starts to feel a little pointless.

What to do? A) Only write about really obscure things, or B) keep writing until you can write the best damn article out there, no matter how many similar efforts exist.

*Yes, I know "Sam" has nothing to do with this, but "David" messed up my not-that-funny joke.

The Tricky World of Translation

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 12:09:54 -0400

I have a friend who is translating The Iliad from Latin, for fun, and I have to admit that on hearing of his undertaking my first reaction was, why? Hasn’t that been done already, a lot? Yesterday The Paris Review’s blog provided a great reminder of the importance of new and multiple translations. Short story writer and French translator Lydia Davis, whose version of Madame Bovary comes out September 23, discusses a few cultural issues, then offers this gem:

How many ways, for instance, has even a single phrase (bouffées d’affadissement) from Madame Bovary been translated:

gusts of revulsion

a kind of rancid staleness

stale gusts of dreariness

waves of nausea

fumes of nausea

flavorless, sickening gusts

stagnant dreariness

whiffs of sickliness

waves of nauseous disgust

Multiply that by the thousands and thousands of words in a story or novel, and wow. Of course I knew that translation was far from a literal, straightforward process but this simple example made its nuanced and seemingly fraught nature much more concrete. Davis will be writing at The Paris Review about translation for the next two weeks; it definitely seems worth following.

Discussions about translation popped up this spring and summer in the wake of acclaimed Spanish translator Edith Grossman’s book Why Translation Matters. While addressing an art that is “often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented,” Grossman explains her task and challenge (as Tim Parks cites in this article in The New York Review of Books) as:

‘To hear the first version of the work as profoundly and completely as possible, struggling to discover the linguistic charge, the structural rhythms, the subtle implications, the complexities of meaning and suggestion in vocabulary and phrasing, and the ambient, cultural inferences and conclusions these tonalities allow us to extrapolate.’

After which, the translator seeks to

‘re-create…within the alien system of a second language, all the characteristics, vagaries, quirks, and stylistic peculiarities of the work.’

Whew. In an interview on the New York Times blog Papercuts a couple years back, Natasha Wimmer, who translated Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and 2666, described the special knowledge, beyond language, required of a translator—2666, for example, required her to research Black Panther history, WWII German army terminology and obscure divination and forensic science vocabulary.

Yet much of the time, a reader (or at least this reader) pays very little attention to a translation. A few months ago I read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, which has a peculiar, quirky yet matter of fact voice. I actually forgot that I was not reading the original (Murakami does speak English), until it hit me partway through—“Oh right, this was translated! I wonder what is different.” Turns out, quite a lot: The English-language publication, translated by Jay Rubin, is actually an abridged version of the Japanese (under orders from Knopf, the American publisher). You can read an interesting discussion about translating Murakami on the Random House website.

That conversation also includes another vivid example of the elusive nature of translation (in this case, three-point translation), from Philip Gabriel, who translated the Murakami novel Sputnik Sweetheart:

In chapter five there was a short quote from Pushkin's poem Eugene Onegin. In cases like this--quotes in Japanese from other languages--of course you need to find the original language, and with languages other than English, I try to locate a reputable, existing translation… I located four different versions of the poem, from which I copied out these translations of the lines:

(1) He had no itch to dig for glories/ Deep in the dust that time has laid.

(2) He lacked the slightest predilection/for raking up historic dust.

(3) He lacked the yen to go out poking/Into the dusty lives of yore--

(4) He had no urge to rummage/in the chronological dust.

…Seeing all four versions side by side was a mini-revelation to me. When I got home I pinned these all to my bulletin board--where they still remain--as a reminder of a simple truth, namely that there are so many possible translations of even one line.

These examples are only on a linguistic level, and there is of course much to say about the cultural importance of translation; about how translated texts open up the world of writing and help us connect with people and countries we otherwise never would. With that in mind, I’m going to head over to Words Without Borders—a magazine and website devoted to translating and publishing international literature—and get reading.

The latest literary adaptation: "Baster" and "The Switch"

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 11:08:13 -0400

I have an essay on The Millions today about The Switch, the recent film adaptation of the Jeffrey Eugenides short story "Baster." (Eugenides is best known for his novels Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides, but "Baster" is a sharp, funny little story.)

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In 1999, Sofia Coppola adapted Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel The Virgin Suicides into her debut film. The movie was remarkably faithful—perhaps too faithful—to the book, preserving the languid mood, reverential but impersonal treatment of the doomed Lisbon girls, and unusual, first person plural narrative voice.

Last Friday a very different Eugenides adaptation, The Switch, hit the big screen. Based on a short story called “Baster,” which was originally published in 1996 in The New Yorker, the film stars Jennifer Aniston as Kassie, a 40-year-old single woman who decides to get pregnant using a handsome sperm donor. What she doesn’t know is that Wally, her neurotic best friend (and one-time boyfriend), played by Jason Bateman, has replaced the donor’s sample with his own during the drunken party to celebrate her insemination.

Adapting a short story is a different animal from book-to-movie adaptations, and a challenge I’ve been thinking more about after spending the summer working at Zoetrope: All-Story. Francis Ford Coppola founded the magazine with the idea that short stories are more akin to film (and perhaps better source material) than are novels, as both stories and movies are meant to be consumed in one sitting. Each issue of Zoetrope includes a story that has been adapted to the screen: Steven Millhauser’s “Eisenheim the Illusionist” (The Illusionist, 2006), Alice Munroe’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” (Away from Her, 2006), and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (2008’s movie of the same name), among many others.

“Baster” is a good opportunity for an adaptation. It’s funny, with a high-concept plot, and it’s not impressionistic or experimental. (Neil Burger, who wrote and directed The Illusionist, called the Millhauser story that was his source “unfilmable.”) The story lays solid groundwork, but its length—only 6 pages—and unresolved ending gives the screenwriter freedom to make it his own. And individual short stories rarely have a large audience, so aside from, uh, people writing on literary websites, there aren’t fans of the original telling the writers/directors how they messed up or didn’t honor the source. ...

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Read the rest over at The Millions!