I can knit, I can eat

I feel like a horrific idiot. I know it's exhaustion and the aftermath of nearly two weeks of medical emergency, but I don't like not doing anything with my brain. It feels like a major achievement that I got up this morning well before noon and met derspatchel at Raven Used Books in Harvard Square, where I purchased a book I had spotted yesterday and taken the night to think about: Jennifer Teege's My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me (trans. Carolin Sommer, 2015). Yesterday I had bought on sight S. An-sky's The Dybbuk and Other Writings (trans. Golda Werman and David Roskies, 2002), not because I don't already have two or three translations of The Dybbuk, but because I've never read any of An-sky's short fiction or nonfiction that wasn't the ethnographic questionnaire reprinted in Nathaniel Deutsch's The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement (2011), and W. Bernard Carlson's Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age (2015), because through some bizarre oversight I have never actually read a biography of Tesla as opposed to gathering information about him via zeitgeist. I came home via Porter Square Books where I picked up a present for my godchild. I didn't get much done in the afternoon, but at least I didn't fall asleep. I enjoyed the original script of Max Landis' Victor Frankenstein (2015).

Last night I finished Julian Barnes' The Noise of Time (2016). It's one of the most strangely theatrical novels I have ever read. I don't mean that it's flamboyant or full of dramatic devices; I mean that as I was reading it, I kept seeing it as a play. The action is structured around three key moments in Shostakovich's life, in 1937 when he expected every night to be taken away by the NKVD ("On the Landing"), in 1949 after his humiliating participation in the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace ("On the Plane"), and after 1960 when he finally joined the Communist Party ("In the Car"). Within each of these stages, the narrative is nonlinear and free-floating, touching on stories of his childhood, his colleagues, his relationships, his music, all in a tight, self-analytical third person. The omniscient prologue and epilogue wrap around an incident mentioned in the second section. Possibly because the woodcut of the UK cover shows the figure of Shostakovich with his suitcase and his glasses and his apprehensive expression, it was very easy for me to see the same figure onstage, spotlit, in the kind of bare memory space that easily accommodates twelve-year shifts in time and the same handful of cast members doubling-tripling the expressions of Power with which the composer must grapple—or fold—at each point of crisis. Time skitters like an anxious mind; props are what you carry on or off with you, everything could be taken away at any second. The same actor plays Shostakovich throughout, of course. He doesn't get to leave the stage. If he addresses the audience, it should be in the third person. The music is his music or what's the point? This does not usually happen to me with books. Occasionally I think about fancasting them, but I don't usually want to make them anything other than novels. I really think it would work.

Courtesy of strange_selkie: Orestes Pursued by the Furries. Just to end with something classy. You're welcome.