#daniel levin becker

[litafficionado]

ÉRIC CHEVILLARD’S “SINE DIE”: A CORONAVIRUS STORY[tr. Daniel Levin Becker]

The day of deconfinement is approaching. Soon we will be able to publicly show off our bodies transformed by inactivity, compulsive weightlifting, abuse of alcohol and screen time, vitamin D deficiency, approximative hygiene, dietary imbalance, and spousal violence. This will be a new human race that flows out into the street, a species of hunchbacked creatures with bare chests, hypertrophied arms, swollen abdomens, flat buttocks, bister complexions, disheveled manes, red eyes and deformed noses, dressed in rags from another century, droning and stuttering in an unfamiliar language. We may rejoice, however, that kissing remains contraindicated.

As luck would also have it, the faces of these toads will be concealed, at least in part, behind protective masks. Those who have been lucky enough to procure them, in any case. I’ve been thinking of making some for my family and me by fashioning them out of Lachesis’s webs, which have become graceful canopies lining our ceilings. According to my calculations, given the square footage of our home, I should be able to make five hundred thousand masks. But will it be enough?

I still haven’t contracted the virus, though I can’t say I’ve been so successful at resisting its insidious influence. If nothing else, it has jammed the well-oiled—or so I thought—machinery of the book I was writing when it first appeared. Everything stopped. Covid-19 parasited my writing completely. Not so long ago I boasted of having stood up to it at full height, fighting on the battlefield of the page to turn its virulence back on itself. Good luck, Chuck! Grow a pair, Baudelaire! Today this smug naiveté seems pathetic to me. The breathing apparatus I use when I write, and indeed all of my operating systems—circulatory, digestive, nervous—have been gravely damaged by its malignant effects. Cunningly, the virus has insinuated itself into my pen, liquified my language and overturned my turn of phrase; it has phagocyted the force of my words, commandeered their powers, used them as an intermediary host. I even wonder whether they haven’t become one of its primary vectors of transmission.

The coronavirus has embedded itself like one of those secondary characters that the novelist no longer knows what to do with, even though he had assigned him only a lowly or insignificant purpose. How to get rid of him? This miserable wretch has settled down right in the heart of the action. Now he’s calling the shots, dictating the destiny of all the protagonists: I won’t just have to live with him, I’ll have to treat him like the main character, the hero! Nothing will be left for anyone else. At the end of the day, the story will bear his name as its title.

Shame on me, then, for not having managed to maintain my liberty and treat this invader with the scorn he deserves. If literature is a Platonic absolute—and I would like to believe it is—why do I allow myself to be distracted from it and made to dally with these lamentable twists and turns, this ignoble epiphenomenon, all these misadventures, perhaps not so undeserved, of the human race? Wouldn’t I have been better off coughing in my little corner and continuing to write my book as if nothing were amiss? Am I such a plaything of circumstance, even when I believe my will to power is ringing out loud and bright (o, behold its sparkling armor and burgeoning plumage)?

Now where’s that vaccine?

[litafficionado]

Autofiction: Short Prose by Éric Chevillard[trans. Daniel Levin Becker]

I began ejaculating when I was seven.

It came to me one morning, just like that. I started ejaculating feverishly all over my schoolbooks.

My parents disapproved. You’re not old enough to ejaculate. You’ll put an eye out.

So what. I continued ejaculating in secret.

I ejaculated, I ejaculated, I ejaculated, without fatigue, without boredom, without deviation, come hell or high water.

I held in my hand a magic wand. I ejaculated certain that I was creating marvelous things.

It was in my blood, to be sure. At the first free moment, did I play with marbles or chase girls? No. I did not watch television. I didn’t help my father in the garden. What did I do? I ejaculated.

I used all of my leisure time for ejaculating.

I ejaculated. It was uncontainable.

At sixteen my ejaculations were strongly influenced by Rimbaud, but they weren’t very good now that I think about it.

To be honest, what I ejaculated back then was worthless. Inconsistent. Peanuts. Flan. Eggnog.

But already I took pleasure in it, incredible as that may seem. Ejaculating was my greatest joy.

I devoted my vacations to it. At the age when others went out dancing at night, I was ejaculating.

I got up in the middle of the night to ejaculate.

I ejaculated whatever passed through my head. It didn’t go very far.

I started to ejaculate for real around twenty. It became more personal, more substantial. I ejaculated as others might urinate or blow their noses.

I ejaculated my sufferings, my burdens, my solitude.

For I had cut myself off from the world somewhat, ejaculating alone in my room.

It was around this time that I began to want to publicly share what I was ejaculating.

At first, nobody wanted it. Your ejaculations will never interest anyone. It sounds laughable today, of course, and is no doubt difficult to believe, but at first I was often told such things.

You don’t have anything good to ejaculate!

You’re just not cut out for ejaculating!

Stop ejaculating—now there’s a piece of advice I heard more than my fair share of.

And in fact I almost gave it up. I wanted to try something else. I wanted to vomit, or to lay eggs.

But nothing would do. I had to ejaculate.

It’s funny now to think that those people who tried to discourage me are the same ones who today pay me handsomely to go ejaculate for them.

Because people literally fight over my ejaculations.

I ejaculate for all the major presses.

I ejaculate in all the major papers.

At this point, I ejaculate wherever I want.

Eminent professors invite their students to study closely what I ejaculate.

And so I have a great demand to fill, and it can be difficult to deliver. Yes, there are times when I drink in order to ejaculate.

And it impacts my home life. My wife feels neglected. Always ejaculating, she says to me sadly.

Won’t you stop ejaculating for a moment and hold me in your arms? she sometimes asks me in a quiet little voice.

As if I had nothing else to do. She must understand, though, that in my life ejaculating will always come first.

I got up in the middle of the night to ejaculate.

What can I do? I was born to ejaculate.

It’s my livelihood. I have to ejaculate.

I ejaculate mostly at night, but sometimes I also ejaculate straight from morning to evening.

Ejaculate each day, that’s my motto.

If for some reason I go for more than twenty-four hours without ejaculating, it pains me. It’s awful.

So it doesn’t matter where, but I must ejaculate.

I ejaculate on restaurant placemats. I ejaculate on the back of subway tickets.

Sometimes I even ejaculate on myself.

Everything works, any surface: I can ejaculate on a coaster, in the margins of a newspaper, on a facial tissue.

I prefer to ejaculate by hand rather than directly on the computer.

Yes, I believe ejaculation is a sort of therapy for me, or certainly in any case a sort of catharsis.

All that is repressed comes out when I ejaculate, all the incipient concupiscence.

Ejaculating saved my life, I’m not afraid to say it.

If I hadn’t ejaculated I wouldn’t be here today.

More than once I have wanted to die, to kill myself—yes—and instead I ejaculated.

And when you ejaculate in a moment like that it is so good, so powerful, that it nearly vibrates from all the emotion held in for too long.

My most recent ejaculation, for instance, I ejaculated in a sort of trance—there’s no other word for it. It came all by itself.

I barely had anything to ejaculate, and then it began to gush forth, and there it was.

The whole first part I ejaculated all at once in Ibiza.

I ejaculated the next part in New York.

And I ejaculated the ending at home in Paris, door closed, phone off the hook. I need calm to ejaculate.

It’s a burden too, ejaculation. It must be said. Those who are tempted to do it should know that it’s not always easy, that it can take a great deal of effort. Sometimes I have to force myself to ejaculate.

So I go ejaculate in a café, or at a library, where there are people around and it’s less of a chore than ejaculating in the solitude of the office.

I deny nothing when I ejaculate.

It’s been said that my ejaculations convey something universal. It’s not hard to see why.

Many people recognize themselves in my ejaculations. It’s like a mirror for them. I receive an enormous quantity of mail to this effect.

I am invited with increasing frequency to schools to talk about my ejaculations.

Why do you ejaculate? That’s the question I hear most often from the mouths of children.

And I tell them I can’t do anything else. For me it is almost a physical, organic need to ejaculate.

Frankly, I’m surprised that anyone can live without ejaculating.

But at the same time, if you ask me, too many people today ejaculate. The moment someone becomes slightly famous for this or that reason, they are asked without fail to ejaculate something. I abhor the spread of this practice: in such a profusion of treacle, just try extracting the wheat from the chaff without getting stuck to the floor.

I put my soul and my guts alike into everything I ejaculate: reconciled, unified, almost indistinguishable.

I ejaculate only the truth.

I am suspicious of people who need so many methods and complications to ejaculate.

I’m sorry, but to me that’s not ejaculating.

I ejaculate as I breathe.

I ejaculate as I speak.

I ejaculate without worrying about the beauty or the originality of the thing.

I ejaculate because I exist, because I want people to know.

My whole life is in what I ejaculate.

Everything I experience I ejaculate straightaway.

The main challenge is to forget the way we were taught to ejaculate and recapture the innocent joy of that first stroke.

Hear the music of my sentence: flop.

[iishtar]

In keeping with its endlessly inventive play at the boundaries of reality, though, hip-hop shows us the complexity of the relationship between authenticity and value, and the special magic born of these rarefied objects’ interaction with the larger-than-life characters who wear them. In 2020, Biggie’s $6 plastic crown sold at auction for nearly $600,000.

Daniel Levin Becker, A Brief History of Bling

[jeffalessandrelli]

Hip-Hop Heads: Jeff Alessandrelli Interviews Daniel Levin Becker - Berfrois

I value fun and the sense that a rapper is enjoying their own skill rather than just telling me about it...

[davidpotash]

Rap Scholar Warriors

Daniel Levin Becker is a scholar, a critic, a translator, and a massive fan of rap. A wordsmith as well as a literary investigator, Becker knows his way around sophisticated prose, poetry, and lyrics. In What’s Good: Notes on Rap and Language, Becker makes a compelling case for a reappraisal of the genius of rap and hip hop lyricism. It’s a love letter penned by a very smart, very knowledgeable…

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[oldshrewsburyian]

Sunday Tomes and Tea: An Ideal Presence, Eduardo Berti, trans. Daniel Levin Becker.

I really enjoyed this slim novel, constructed of linked vignettes based loosely on the author’s experience of choosing to spend 6 months in residence on a palliative care unit. The vignettes are told from the perspective of staff members: doctors, porters, nurses, aides, the psychologist, and the secretary. Berti himself is an author and translator, which interests me, and Becker’s translation from the French I’m prepared to praise based on the fact that I could often hear/infer the French behind it.

[hyperallergic]

The Oulipo, short for the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Workshop for potential literature), was founded in Paris in 1960 by two polymaths: Raymond Queneau, a former surrealist known for writing Zazie in the Metro, and François Le Lionnais, a mathematician and engineer. 

Rats Build Their Labyrinth: Oulipo in the 21st Century

[booksonthepark-blog]

Daniel Levin Becker, author of Many Subtle Channels, recommends Miriam Toews All My Puny Sorrows (McSweeneys): "This is a novel about all-too-human people who keep on keeping on because what else can they do—which is, importantly, not a rhetorical question. It's sober and unflinching and true, even when it's funny or flippant or strange, and it’s all the more devastating for it. Call it The Wallcreeper with a soul."