#lee klein

[tmaemoll]

[radiofreeblog]

"more than that: contemporary complexity in mathias énard’s street of thieves" - Lee Klein (3:AM Magazine)

"Mathias Énard’s Street of Thieves, in Charlotte Mandell’s fluid translation from the French, relates a straightforward, socio-politically aware, coming-of-age story set two years ago in Tangier, Algeciras, and Barcelona. It’s a peripheral story, backgrounded by recent headline news. For such a tight, timely novel, it must have been composed, edited, and published in French, and then translated and published in English in record time. Yet it doesn’t seem rushed. Compared to other popular language-distribution platforms, novels are generally considered more meaningful or at least less ephemeral/disposable than the ever-updating, über-timely Twitter. Street of Thieves might possibly have risked seeming dated tomorrow in exchange for timeliness today except it’s the sort of novel that endures—effortless animation of a memorable narrator (twenty-year-old Lakhdar from Tangier); precise, forward-flowing descriptions of contemporary reality; and fluent dramatization of the complexity of existence tend to age well.

Énard, a fortyish professor from France who teaches Arabic at the University of Barcelona, is the author of Zone, an ambitious, audacious twentieth-century atrocity exhibition in which an ex-spy on a train from Milan to Rome randomly accesses an encyclopedic memory of the secret history of peri-Mediterranean war crimes. The bodies pile up for every tie his train rolls over, all of it sprinkled with talk of Genet, Burroughs, Joyce, and Pound, rendered in a single discontinuous sentence (discontinuous because the 500+ page sentence is interrupted by chapter breaks and a self-contained, many-sentenced story inserted at some point). Readers expecting Zone Part Deux, encountering a comparatively conventional novel, won’t be disappointed. It’s clearly the same intelligence and sensibility rendered this time in traditional sentences, paragraphs, short chapters, and sections, complete with action, conflict, rising drama, and resolution, but not in a way that feels common.

Formal conventionality makes sense considering Lakhdar’s desire for conventional European opportunity, but also considering his love of cheap thrillers. Lakhdar doesn’t mention Genet, Burroughs, Joyce, or Pound; instead he’s a fan of French thrillers he explicitly uses to escape from a succession of cages. Reading (“the ivory tower of books, which is the only place on earth where life is good”) brings Lakhdar respite from the truth he offers up on the first page: “we are all caged animals who live for pleasure, in obscurity.” All he wants, Lakhdar says midway through the novel, is “to be free to travel, to earn money, to walk around quietly with my girlfriend, to fuck if I want to, to pray if I want to, to sin if I want to, and to read detective novels if I feel like it without anyone finding anything to object to aside from God himself.” He continues: “All young people are like me . . . The Islamists are old conservatives who steal our religion from us when it should belong to everyone. All they offer are prohibitions and repression. The Arab Left are old union members who are always too late for a strike. Who’s going to represent me?”

Ultimately, Lakhdar’s advocate is the author who runs him through a novel-length wringer: “This whole series of coincidences, chances, I don’t know how to interpret them; call them God, Allah, Fate, predestination, karma, life, good luck, bad luck, whatever you want.” The pace of movement across situations and scenes seems almost picaresque, albeit with a narrator who’s a few years older than Lazarillo de Tormes. First, he’s forced from home after his father catches him in flagrante delicto with a comely cousin. He lives on the street for a while and begs (it’s suggested he sells himself, too). He and his best friend Bassam lust after young ladies and long to cross the strait of Gibraltar to Spain and beyond. Bassam introduces Lakhdar to the charismatic and protective Sheik Nureddin and his Group for the Propagation of Islamic Thought. Sheik Nureddin entrusts literate Lakhdar with running their bookstore, selling books and pamphlets (Sexuality in Islam; Heroines of Islam; Islam Against the Zionist Plot). He and Bassam meet attractive students visiting from Spain. Bassam can’t keep his eyes off Elena’s chest and he speaks louder when she doesn’t understand his Arabic, but the smoother Lakhdar speaks some French with Judit, they fall in love, and he begins planning his escape across the strait to reunite with her. Lakhdar then falls out with his Islamist friends when they turn their cudgels on his favorite French bookseller and he suspects Bassam in particular of significant terrorist activity. Lakhdar quickly finds another job transcribing profiles of the “one million three hundred fucking thousand dead” Frenchmen killed in action during World War I. This leads to work on a ferry between Tangier and Algeciras that shuts down thanks to the economic crisis. He winds up working in Spain for a morbid outfit that claims drowned corpses from the sea. Finally, after a riveting, intensely described scene that ends the mortuary episode, he makes it to Barcelona to visit Judit, who’s distant, depressed, and ultimately seriously ill. In the end, Lakhdar finds a shared apartment on the Street of Thieves (Caller Robadors in Catalan) in a district populated by junkies and prostitutes; violent demonstrations enflame Barcelona’s streets; and he eventually reunites with his friend Bassam and Sheik Nureddin, who Lakhdar suspects may be in town to wage some jihad.

Bassam has given himself over to Sheik Nureddin, but God is silent for Lakhdar, and he equates this silence with “the absence of a master that drives dogs crazy.” The masters he finds to replace his family are imperfect, offering temporary protection but also most likely seeking to exploit him. Literature (in the form of Arabic poetry and detective novels) and languages (Arabic, French, Spanish) are his refuge, the keys to the incursions of fate that push his life (and the novel) forward. Otherwise, in the absence of a higher power, Lakhdar wants to take responsibility for himself, and he does on the novel’s last pages when he testifies in court that he is an irreducible human being: “I am not a Moroccan, I am not a Frenchman, I’m not a Spaniard, I’m more than that . . . I am not a Muslim, I am more than that.”

Dramatizing the complexity of humanity beyond oversimplifications of race, religion, region, even a list of one’s sins, is literature’s core competency. If novels have value beyond slow, silent, textual entertainment, it’s this sort of enlightenment. A human being isn’t reducible to a type, a demographic, a number tattooed on the forearm, details about a soldier KIA long ago, or even a profile on a social media site. All Moslems aren’t alike for Christ’s sake. There’s more to the huddled masses than a dream of donning the executioner’s hood, hoping to spill bourgeois blood. Sheik Nureddin, for example, surely a major player in a violent Islamist organization, is described by Lakhdar like this:

 . . . he was good to me and I knew (or liked to believe) that he had taken me in without ulterior motives; he had given me lessons on morality, true, but no more than a father or a big brother. He would often repeat, laughing, that my detective novels were rotting my mind, that they were diabolical books that were driving me to perdition, but he never did anything to stop me from reading them, for example, and if I hadn’t seen him with my own eyes leading the group of fighters at night I would have been incapable of imagining for a single second that he could be connected, closely or remotely, with a violent action.

Street of Thieves is a feat of the imagination propelled by deep cultural familiarity and experience, an extraordinary animation of another person—a particular fictional human being who longs for old-fashioned liberty—superficially unlike the author but surely resembling most readers on a fundamental, intrinsic level. Reading this, I imagined the author inspired to tell the story of someone on the peripheries of the Arab Spring, not caught on camera and distributed around the world, someone longing for what’s so often taken for granted, the freedom to do what we’d like, to cross borders and walk hand in hand with a loved one, to read detective novels or even contemporary Euro Lit in translation.

Other than Ben Lerner’s recent 10:04, which ends with Superstorm Sandy circa Halloween 2012, I can’t think of a novel that relies so thoroughly on recent events (A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers mentions the BP spill but it’s only a line). Novels involving 9/11 took at least three or four years to come out, right? In the final third of Énard’s Street of Thieves, the 2012 demonstrations in Barcelona take center stage. Helicopters churn overhead, rubber bullets fly, protestors smash bank windows, and streets in flames are cordoned off by cops in riot gear:

Subversion was everywhere, you could feel the violence and hatred of the boys in blue rising: they were rushing around, restlessly brandishing their long clubs, their rifles, their shields – opposite them, the young people lowered their pants to show their asses, called the cops assholes and sons of whores; a little group dismantled some metal trashcans to throw at them, others, oddly, attacked a tree, maybe to turn it into a giant spear. The confrontation was unequal and reminded me of a battle of conquistadors, with armor and harquebuses, against of troop of Mayan or Aztec civilians I had seen an engraving of in a history book. Conquest was on the march.

There’s a mention of the Spanish king’s hunting trip to Africa, and a quick Google search reveals that it occurred in mid-April 2012. Inclusion of contemporary events, in part, makes this an urgent read. Pound’s famous dictum is “literature is news that stays news.” Énard’s use of the news as larger societal parallel of the narrator’s troubles comes off more natural than opportunistic or forced.

This sense of the story organically unfolding—despite what could have seemed like pedantic appropriation of news and narrator—owes a lot to the author’s genuine talent and skill. “You can’t teach height,” basketball commentators always say. Something similar applies to Énard’s sensibility and instincts:

Cities can be tamed, or rather, they tame us: they us know to behave, they make us lose, little by little, our foreign surface; they tear our outer yokel shell away from us, melt us into themselves, shape us in their image — very quickly, we abandon our way of walking, we stop looking in the air, we no longer hesitate when we enter a subway station, we have the right rhythm, we advance at the right pace, and whether you’re Moroccan, Pakistani, English, German, French, Andalusian, Catalan, or Philippine, in the end Barcelona, London, or Paris train us like dogs. We surprise ourselves one day, waiting at the pedestrian crossing for the signal to walk; we learn the language, the words of the city, its smells, its clamor . . .

Lakhadar testifies that he’s more than a Moroccan, a Frenchman, a Spaniard, a Muslim. Énard, similarly, is more than a French male writer teaching Arabic in Spain. He’s a writer whose literary identity and spirit seem unbounded. Deep knowledge of the past and presentiments of the future inform his perspectives and insights into the present. With Street of Thieves, he’s written an accessible novel of ideas and politics, propelled by longing for love and freedom. Taken together with Zone, it’s clear I’ll read everything Énard writes from now on: his language jumps across and down the page, he doesn’t fear engaging with complicated ideas, and he manages to animate living, breathing characters who savor the complexities and ambiguities, the beauties and horrors, of life."

Source.

[merryburningparty]

Literary citizenship is about buying books, subscribing to lit mags, going to readings. It isn't about offering superficial, promiscuous support.

Lee Klein, "literary citizenship depletes crystal count and other controversial claims" in 3:AM Magazine

[grandhotelabyss]

The online/indie lit world is populated by a supportive and enthusiastic citizenry. An encouraging community helps when starting out. But later on, exposure to this community’s critical emissions might make you feel queasy. Or more so: suspicious. I trust very little of the praise I read online. Everyone’s connected with everyone or trying to connect with everyone. Writers spray positivity in all directions, hoping to receive it in return. Superficial adulation intended to support and promote makes me distrust it all. It corrodes the endeavor of reading and writing. Instead of successfully supporting and promoting, so-called “good literary citizenry” so often repels.

[mttbll]

For some writer/readers, community support may be more important than upholding standards? Maybe some writer/readers haven’t yet begun to identify their standards because they're too busy maneuvering among the community online, practicing good literary citizenry, doing what they can to support those in need? But I think conflict occurs when those who mostly support make it seem like they're upholding a standard, especially when praise is exaggeratedly positive, hyperbolically supportive, evangelically ululating that someone’s writing is 'great,' thereby equivalent to God in the minds of literary fundamentalists.

Lee Klein

[msarki]

Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir by Ander Monson

Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir by Ander Monson Paperback, 208 pages Published March 30th 2010 by Graywolf Press (first published 2010) ISBN: 1555975542 (ISBN13: 9781555975548) edition language: English It is easy to discount the troubles, and even the successes of others, but you won't find any of that here, or even sparks coming from off the blazing speed of my typewriter.  I, too, like Ander, could type 55 words per minute in Mr. Sventko's typing class, and I probably could have done even better had he not been the feared football coach he was.   My stupid spelling mistakes were what bothered me and made me have to slow down.  His daughter Marcia consistently kicked my ass in typing and it gave her a superiority over me she probably needed in order to get through her routinely boring days.  The recreational drugs that others of us engaged in made for a high school education a little bit more adventurous than the typical high school cheerleader like Marcia.  Try taking mescaline and attending a Paul Butterfield trigonometry class.  Or be a student teacher working under the tutelage of the school's golf coach in a special education classroom.  Once I even dropped a hit of blotter acid too late in the day and had to play a qualifying round for placement seed in our following day's school-sponsored golf match.  There was no possible way to keep track of where my new golf balls were flying off to after striking them so hard with the intensity of a rapidly blooming acid trip.  Thank goodness I was playing with a young square geek who would go on after college to become the county's prosecuting attorney.  Back then he had a proficiency for cheating on the golf course, so me offering him the freedom to blatantly adjust his own score if he would allow my reentry, without penalty, of a new golf ball in place of the lost one still flying around somewhere out there in the cosmos seemed like a very good deal for both of us.  Neither one of us ever spoke of that day together on the golf course again, and we were both lucky not to have been found cheating on our scorecards.  I am sort of a heel for bringing this subject up now but I wanted to make the point of how a born cheater can naturally years later slip into the county prosecutor's seat and seem to do a pretty good job of keeping accurate the public score against its own criminals.

Ander Monson wrote some pretty good pieces collected here in Vanishing Point.  Were they perfect and without blemish? I think not.  There were fits of brilliance to be found here and there, and the first essay titled Voir Dire was fantastic. Voir Dire is an essay about Ander Monson's work as a juror in an important trial. In his essay Mr. Monson related many other side stories and notations, one of which was the absolute necessity for factual truth in nonfiction which by the way both he and I believe is completely impossible. The problem is, however, that magazines such as The Believer stationed out in San Francisco itself demands facticity if you want them to publish your nonfiction. Voir Dire was accepted for publication in The Believer and the magazine insisted on getting their hands on certain documents and that additional contacts be made concerning some of the statements quoted in the essay by Monson in order for the magazine's fact checkers to confirm the accuracy of his piece. Monson did go along with their demands and his piece was eventually published even though in this same essay Monson admits that things are not really as accurate as they seem. 

What I liked about Monson's Voir Dire was his flitting away and into other topics related in ways to himself or the defendant in the case he was chosen to be a juror for. He eventually told us all we needed to know about the case and in the process explained about his colonoscopy he had at the age of thirty-two, a colonoscopy that he didn't need based on wrong information he had about his mother's own early death at the very same age of thirty-two from colon cancer. What interested me most about this was not the error over the actual cause of her death, or the insurance company's confusion over who was responsible to pay for this mistake, or even that Ander had the awful colonoscopy procedure done at such an early age, but that I myself had just had my fourth routine colonoscopy the day before reading his essay. My arse was still sore from all the emptying and wiping, the disgusting four hour lemon-lime liquid prep, the drugs they put me under that permitted me to say such terrible things reported back to me afterwards. And in addition to all that, the (I think) normal flirting with the nurses that one must expect came from being drugged and a not-so-deeper part of my consciousness. 

It was even more uncanny to me that the beginning of this essay was another shared experience with Ander of me also being a juror. A few years ago I was committed myself to jury duty and was picked as one of twelve to decide a criminal case of the alleged defendant's excessive violence against a customer while in the performance of his job as a bouncer at a local strip club. After listening to the testimony of all the witnesses and viewing pictures of the completely pummeled man who ended up in the hospital and would probably never be the same it was obvious to all that the bouncer was definitely guilty and certainly without any sliver of a doubt. None of the jurors ever got to decide the case or even talk about it as the defendant's lawyer knew his client would be found guilty and opted to plea bargain instead of handing his client's fate over to a jury sure to convict him. I felt robbed as I had fairly listened intently to both sides, I had taken good notes and was prepared to argue for a guilty verdict if need be, but we never got the chance to take even an anonymous vote. Monson, on the other hand, took notes too and at least was elected foreman of the juried clan. Besides getting an essay out of his time spent deciding his case in court he also had the honor of standing up and announcing to the judge the jury's decision of guilty. The Voir Dire essay says a lot in a roundabout way about Ander Monson's screed against nonfiction, and the juror story was simply a vehicle for him to say what it was he really wanted to say.  

He also wrote of the Gerald R. Ford memorial funeral service and procession held in Grand Rapids as well as a lengthy, and quite interesting piece on the money brand of snack chips, Doritos.  I did not much like the Dungeons & Dragons essay, but I am not born of that time period and have never played a Play Station type Game Boy slash computer game in my life.  And for the record, I will state that Ander Monson is not David Foster Wallace, and in addition he is no Hunter S. Thompson.  But I will say he is loads better than Jonathan Franzen and the other wannabes out there writing essays today.  To have him compared to an inconsequential writer the likes of Tao Lin I do find more than a bit disconcerting.  There is a whole lot of upside to Ander Monson and I think, almost snidely and certainly happily, that already Tao Lin has had his fifteen minutes of fame, and for what, I clearly am not sure of.   Another fairly new writer I am currently involved in reading goes by the name of John Jeremiah Sullivan and he is not too shabby, and his best work is surely ahead of him too.  Look also for a fellow by the name of Lee Klein.  His star is definitely rising.  But I certainly do recommend this book to anyone wanting a new experience in the form of an essay.  Monson is fresh, and like myself, was fortunate to be born in northern Michigan, and in his case, the Upper Peninsula in a cold and lonely town named Houghton.             

[literaryartifacts]

Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck: Rejection Letters from the Eyeshot Outbox compiles a dozen years of disappointment transmitted via e-mail from a single editor to  hundreds of writers around the world. Performative and funny one minute, respectful and constructive the next, these rejections both serve as entertaining writing tips (suitable for use in today’s more adventuresome creative writing classrooms) and suggest a skewed story about a boy and his seminal semi-literary website, Eyeshot.net, which Lee Klein founded in 1999.

Pre-order here.