Last week, at last and with great delight, I read my late friend Johnny Strike’s novel The Exploding Memoir. There was so much to enjoy in it—the imaginative evocations of San Francisco’s and Los Angeles’s musical, spiritual, demonic undergrounds, the way the main character, Eddie Knox, discovers his strengths through a series of preposterous trials, many of them assigned him by his mysterious mentor, Dr. Kublar; and the way the prose chuckles throughout. But my favorite thing in the book was the Eddie character himself. He’s a bit of an Everyman—talented in some way, though not obviously brilliant; unsure of what he’s doing in life or even where he’ll be the next day; encumbered with, yet also free of, a somewhat murky past (crimes for which he has never been caught, the threat of reform school, which he escaped by fleeing town)—but he’s open to whatever comes his way, and he figures things out as he goes along.
One of my favorite parts is after Eddie has told Dr. Kublar of his dreams, the dreams in which he hears a voice talking to him and giving him some instructions toward a transformation. Dr. Kublar tells him that this voice is his inner guardian and that he will always learn more from his dreams if he notes them. He offers to help Eddie into a new way of life, and Eddie closes his eyes and has a vision. The next morning (p. 79):
In the wee hours when Eddie woke up it was still dark. He felt transformed, ready for anything. He checked his preparations for his trip and wrote a note for Dr. Kublar:
“Dear Dr. Kublar, You are right. The voice is right. I will attend to it on my return. Thank you, Edward.”
Another favorite part, just a few pages later, is after Eddie accompanies the band Wolf Snake on their short Northwest tour (p. 84):
Eddie had found the experience of traveling with a band interesting, but probably not something he wanted to do much more. And that feeling extended to the Wolf Snake scene in general. Eddie would stay in touch and visit again and definitely check out a show some night, but he didn’t want to be part of the inner circle. He was more interested in Dr. Kublar, what he could learn, how he could be transformed, and how he could become a real writer. It felt good to finally rest his head on the pillow in his own bed, nestled away in Chinatown which is always more mysterious and enchanting in the evening.
He does, in fact, stay in touch with the band—and joins them at their recording session, even writing some lyrics for them in a moment of subconscious inspiration. Much of the novel has to do with listening to music; he listens broadly and deeply, knows his music inside out. When detained by the FBI, he ends up in captivity with some very rough black guys, one of whom befriends him when they start talking music (“Now how does a white boy know the names of the Four Tops”)? There’s plenty of musical satire in the novel as well—at one point Eddie listens to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, is completely blown away and decides “to step into it more, and glam up his looks.”
Much more happens here that I haven’t mentioned, involving loads of drugs (which Eddie realizes he has to take in moderation), a mysterious Tablet, an enormously valuable head, some erotic scenes, and a sweet romance. Within the swirling wildness, Eddie keeps his sanity, which has a lot to do with wanting to learn more about life and not worrying too much about how great or horrible he is.
I was moved by the book because of Eddie and because I see so much of Johnny in him, different as they also are (Johnny was more arch, skeptical, outspoken). A surprise came near the end, where two different characters, in two different passages, say “Si Señor” (spelled and capitalized just like that). I knew that this was a direct allusion to Si Señor, the literary journal that I founded and edited for five years. Johnny contributed prolifically to the journal, not only by sending me his own writing, but by recruiting other artists and writers. (Si Señor is also mentioned in his bio at the end of the book.) When putting the phrase in the mouths of these passing characters, he must have thought I’d enjoy the discovery. And I did.
I had fun reading this book, found lots of truth and imagination in it, and remembered Johnny through it.
My friend and colleague A. A. Rubin’s book of poems and reflections, Into That Darkness Peering, co-created with the illustrator Marika Brousianou, has deserved a comment from me for more than a year now. Inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe (as well as others, such as Dickens, Dickinson, Dali), it could be called a labor of love except that the pleasure of reading it, browsing through it, opening it up to a random page renders the labor invisible. The pleasure is of a brooding sort, but pleasure nonetheless. The dark themes have a lightness to them, which the cover art presages. Light streaming from a trio of elegant lanterns, pouring out even into the skies, and perched on one of them, a raven croaking something (no need to guess what).
My ninth-grade students had just read “The Cask of Amontillado” (both a simplified version and the original, which they vastly preferred) and “The Raven,” so when I brought the book in for them to see, they grasped some of the references. As it went around the classroom, I saw students pausing together over certain pages, reading together, taking time with it. I thought of taking a picture but felt that that wouldn’t be right; it would intrude on something. So a few days later I asked two students if I could photograph them with the book. They cheerfully agreed.
Many of the poems and reflections have twists on common tropes; for instance, in “There’s No Place Like Home,” the ruby slippers whisper that phrase over and over “and silently curse Dorothy’s lack of empathy.” In “The Wine Cellar,” the guest laughs, “I hope you’re not bringing me to see your cask of amontillado” (heh heh… I won’t spill the eerie reply). One of my favorites, “A Monster Lives Inside of Me,” begins,
A monster lives inside of me. Deep inside my heart. You think those lines are figurative, But really, they are not.
There’s a lightheartedness even to lines like that.
But the collaboration between author and illustrator makes the book special and striking. The drawings not only play with light and dark but create dimension. They often do something surprising with proportion. They convey hauntedness and delight. The details provoke awe.
What is it that we love about haunted places and thoughts? Maybe they give a form to what we already sense: that there’s more out there, beautiful and horrifying, comforting and shattering, than our logic makes room for. Ghosts, demons, ravens, witches, taciturn trees plotting revenge, we’ve been told since childhood that they aren’t “real,” which just leads us to seek other words for them (apprehension, intuition, etc.). But the ghosts, demons, and ravens appeal to us partly because of their fun. This book brings out the fun, along with the shivers.
I suppose you can’t fully understand life in Hungary without stepping into a kocsma, a word that means “pub” but has specific Hungarian associations. In all my six years here so far, I had never been to one until Friday night, when I went, at Gyula Jenei’s recommendation, to the Hunyadi Presszó, just a few blocks from where I live, to hear Sándor Sárkány Jr. play songs by Tamás Cseh. A presszó is technically an espresso café, but the term can be used euphemistically for a pub, or rather, it gives the pub a hint of classiness.
A kocsma is typically small and cozy, filled with locals, mostly men. For this reason I hadn’t gone to one before: I had no reason to be there. I didn’t know that they had concerts sometimes. But of course! The pianist is one of the interlocutors in Cseh and Bereményi’s song “Presszó” (which is clearly about a kocsma of this sort).
I stepped into the kocsma/presszó and was immediately offered a seat by a woman who befriended me within minutes. Since the concert hadn’t started yet, we talked for a few minutes; it turns out that she loves Gogol; her favorite of his stories is “The Overcoat.” Many people there looked vaguely familiar to me—and the performer’s girlfriend is one of my former students. There were men and women, and the seats in the concert area filled up fast.
The concert was tremendous. Sárkány, a young composer (he’s twenty-two, if I’m not mistaken), is Cseh’s godson, and inherited the microphone from him. He plays the songs not only well, but as if he had lived them. His timing and pauses were wonderfully instinctive—slightly different from Cseh’s, but they fit the songs. There was nuance, quiet, rage in the playing. Here’s one of the quieter songs he played, “Csönded vagyok,” which I brought up in the previous post. He played an encore, too, at our request; we called out various song titles, and finally three of us agreed on “Lee van Cleef” (which he rendered terrifically, but which I did not record).
Sárkány has also recently released a piano album, his composition Child in the Black Hole. It’s a remarkable album, telling stories through piano that you can feel and ride.
The next day, at the Tisza Mozi, there was a related event: Sárkány played again, this time accompanying the writer. teacher, director, and festival organizer László Bérczes, who spoke about his latest book, Kötőszavak: Beszélgetőkönyv önmagammal [‘Conjunctions: A Book of Conversation with Myself’]. He has a number of “conversation books” based on conversations with others (including Cseh). Like the others, this one goes back and forth in time and seeks to recreate the essence, not the precise details, of what was thought, said, and done. Although this time, as the title suggests, the conversation is with himself, it involves many other figures. He has known Sárkány (and his father) since the latter’s birth, I believe, and the music tied in closely with the themes of his presentation. Sárkány played three songs in all, I think: two by Cseh and one by the band Kex.
Bérczes, who taught at the Varga Katalin Gimnázium (where I teach) from 1976 to 1984, and who knew almost everyone in the audience in some way or other (there were former colleagues, students, theatrical colleagues, and many others), spoke of his time in Szolnok, of how he became acquainted with Cseh, of the nature of the book, of the reasons for the title, and more. He was speaking directly to and with the audience, who shared many of his memories in some way. He told of how, after Cseh’s concerts (in Szolnok and everywhere), some audience members would linger, and Cseh would play still more for them and talk with them, extending the evening until three in the morning or so. Then someone would offer him a place to stay, and he would accept. He stayed at Bérczes’s place more than once, and in that way their friendship began.
I started wondering if musicians did that today and if I had been missing it by hurrying out right after concerts. No, for the most part they don’t; that was a different era. But part of what pulls me out the door so quickly is shyness; I don’t know what to say after a show and don’t necessarily want to say much. This time, after the presentation at the Mozi, I was about to leave, but then I realized Gyula and Marianna weren’t hurrying anywhere, and it would be good to spend a little time with them. I asked Bérczes to autograph two books; many others were waiting to talk with him, so I didn’t start up a conversation. I sat down with Marianna and Gyula, and we talked for an hour or two. Then people started flooding in for the films of the evening, and we took our leave. I walked home, stopping for a few minutes to watch the bridge and its shimmering reflection.
For decades—from graduate school onward—whenever people would ask me, “have you read such-and-such? Everyone’s talking about it,” I would want air. Away from the chatter, away from the pressure to read something (or watch something, or listen to something) because everyone else is doing so. First of all, that’s not how I choose what to read. Second, it leads only to frenzy ; there’s no way to catch up. Third, those “everybodys” quickly drop their latest enthusiasm and move on to something else. Being out of date, reading things at your own pace regardless of who else is doing so or not, gives you space and time.
In fact, when I hear that “everyone is talking about” this or that, you can usually be sure (with exceptions) that I won’t read, listen to, or watch it any time soon. I’ll wait until the noise dies down, and then, if it appeals to me and I have time for it, I might.
Publishing and other industries rely heavily on the “Everyone’s talking about X” ploy: not just when a book comes out, but even beforehand. Months before a book’s release, savvy publicists start buzzing about it. In fact, a kind of “buzz real estate” takes over: the publicists establish that X is the book to read about topic Y, or the novel of the year, or whatever the case may be (when in fact there is an array of worthy books, old and new). Some of these books, films, etc. deserve the clamor surrounding them, others not. Or to put it more precisely: the way buzz works, certain works are deliberately excluded from the discussion; it’s assumed that if a certain book is getting the buzz, another is not allowed any of it.
I have brought this up before, and am long over it: in the months before Republic of Noise came out, my publicist told me that she had tried telling certain people about it, but that, according to them, “everyone” was talking about a different forthcoming book (supposedly on a similar topic). I found this bewildering: the books are in fact quite different in both theme and approach, and anyway, why couldn’t mine join the table? But no, that was out of the question, because the other book was already the talk of the town.
I was temporarily disappointed, but that’s not the point. Republic of Noise did get read (and is still being read, twelve years later); I am honored by the readings. The problem is that if one work is promoted to the exclusion of another, the public isn’t given the chance to consider the issues or possibilities. This happens more often than we know, because the hype presents itself as reality.
Hype and buzz overlap but differ. Hype is the deliberate promotion of an item through numerous high-profile outlets, the higher profile the better. Buzz is more often associated with word-of-mouth promotion, blogs, shares, likes, and so forth.
The problem with both is that they can be engineered and that the process begins long before the public has had a chance to consider the work at all. Even literary agents consider not only the value of what they are representing, but their “vision” for it—that is, how it will ultimately sell and who its customers will be. This vision influences how it is packaged and marketed (or whether it gets published at all). Hype differs from thoughtful attention to a work (say, in a review or interview) in that hype aims to sell, period. A good reviewer picks up on the subtleties in a work, if they exist; hype doesn’t care about subtleties. It cares about talking points and quotable tidbits, whatever will help the work sell.
As for buzz, it has a way of taking on its own life: not only is “everyone talking about X,” but the talking itself takes on an air of indispensability. I couldn’t care less about the music of Taylor Swift—don’t like it, don’t find it interesting, don’t see the point of the hoopla. (I haven’t given it an extended chance, but the few songs I’ve listened to annoy and bore me so much that I feel no need to go further.) I am aware that “Swifties” have become a phenomenon and that their language, activities, and very identities revolve not only around Swift, but around their own fandom. That’s fine—they can do what they want—but even the New York Times assumes that the Swiftie phenomenon is of general interest.
Now, I do enjoy certain kinds of discussions of books, music, film, and so on: thoughtful discussions that aren’t at all concerned about being current. But these discussions typically don’t take the form of “What do you think of X?” Rather, they focus on what is going on within it, at least initially. Whether you like Othello is secondary to how you understand it; and to understand it, you have to read it carefully.
Granted, everyone needs to stay up to date in some way: to check the weather report, find out what is happening in the world, and even learn about contemporary authors. Also, authors and others need some kind of response to their books when they come out; and for a book to make its way into readers’ hands and onto bookshelves, it needs some initial reception. Book releases, record releases, book readings, film premieres, all of these need attendees. How sad it is to release something and receive little or no response. It is good (and exciting) for both the creator and the audience to have people present.
Granted also, some professions demand a degree of currentness. Booksellers, publishers, editors, book reviewers, and so forth need to be well and widely read (within contemporary as well as older literature). This kind of knowledge gives them not only authority, but many frames of reference at once. Writers, on the other hand, also need to read a lot, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be the latest. In fact, it often isn’t.
One more “granted,” while I’m at it: everyone needs recommendations now and then. Some of my favorite works were recommended to me by others, and I often recommend works on this blog. Yet these don’t have to be newly published; they can be decades or centuries old.
There is strength in being out of date, or rather, date-independent: an infinity (or a semblance of it) opens up to you, and you can take your own directions. Some of those directions will lead to conversations. Some will lead to brand-new literature (or music, or film), some to a dusty book in a library’s remote stacks. It is up to you where to go in time, even as you get carried along by it. Time becomes more than a ruthless forward or backward push.
This isn’t a best-of list (I dislike best-of lists), nor is it complete. Rather, here are a few events, albums, and so forth from 2023 that are especially important to me. I might leave something out by accident; so be it!
I listened, whenever I could, to WFMU’s Continental Subway, DJ’d by David Dichelle, who brings us music from around the world, in many different languages, and has often played my Hungarian recommendations. Through this show, I came in contact with all sorts of wonderful music (far too much to list here, but including Elza Soares, Quinquis, Qntal, Gwenno, Tündra, Denis Péan, Abel Lima, and many, many more).
One concert stands out among them all: the one at the Fiumei Road Graveyard, where Platon Karataev accompanied H. Miklós Vecsei as he read passages from F. László Földényi’s A melankólia dicsérete (Praise of Melancholy), which I immediately ordered and read from start to finish, then reread in places. (That is my “book of the year:”)
Another great event of the year—a song-play more than a concert—was Füst a szemében, conceived and directed by H. Miklós Vecsei, and performed by Vecsei, Balázs Szabó, and Huba Ratkóczi, about the songs and life of Tamás Cseh. The show went on a mini-tour of Canada and the U.S.—a friend saw it in Boston—and will be performed again in Budapest on January 5, with Géza Bereményi making a guest appearance. I am going.
There were readings and other literary events; Csenger’s book release and award ceremony; the event celebrating the release of Gyöngyi Hegedűs’s Lehessen bármi, which I intend to read closely this year; several Eső events, including a celebration, last week, of the journal’s 25th birthday; two wonderful events (among others—but these two I attended), featuring Attila Jász and János Háy, respectively, at the Tamás Cseh exhibition at the Petőfi Literary Museum. Speaking of Cseh, the exhibition itself—and the Cseh Tamás Archívum, in a different part of the city—were two of my favorite destinations of the year. Another highlight was H. Miklós Vecsei and Gergő Balla’s performance in which Vecsei enacted the poet Attila József’s life (at the Double Rise Festival in Torockó, Romania).
As for books, as I mentioned, Földényi’s A melankólia dicsérete was my “book of the year,” along with Bereményi’s Kelet-nyugati pályaudvar (Keleti-Nyugati Station), the text of Cseh and Bereményi’s album trilogy. Also: Csenger Kertai’s B. rövid élete (The Short Life of B.), Louise Glück’s Faithful and Virtuous Night, Sasha Stiles’ Technelegy, and Zàn Coaskòrd’s A Valóság, Hit és léleK rejtett csodája (which I first read in late 2022 but returned to many times in 2023). Then, on top of that, many shorter works, many returns, a number of literary journals (including Eső, AGNI, Lowestoft Chronicle, and Literary Matters), and a fair amount of leyning. The reading for teaching was also important: I read Othello more slowly than ever before, and also brought my students a number of poems and stories. This may seem rather thin as a book list, but my energy for reading on top of teaching, translating, leyning, and writing is limited, and I read slowly. Also, I have to read on my own terms, at my own pace. I’m reading Proust now, in French, and it’s going slowly (as it would in English too), but I like it that way. There are lots of people who breeze through books, can talk about them, but didn’t notice half of what was in them. I don’t mean that I’m the most alert and observant reader in the world; I just mean that I read something because it interests or inspires me. I don’t care about staying current; I love old books too much (by “old” books I mean books anywhere from two to several thousand years old).
For writing, translation, and other literary activity, it was a year of years—yesterday I finished a very thorough first draft of the article on Cseh and Bereményi’s Frontátvonulás, and the earlier article (on their first two albums) will be published in February, I believe. And I am already busy planning the 2024 ALSCW Conference, along with the rest of the conference committee and those leading seminars and panels. It will be a terrific conference; I will say more about it later.
As for photos, I’ll end with a few that I took in the evening of December 23, when it was briefly but truly snowing. The last one shows my street.
This did end up sounding a little like a “best of” list, but it’s not meant that way; with one or two exceptions, there’s no ranking, and there’s much that I left out accidentally or for the sake of brevity.
Thanks to everyone who made this a beautiful year.
I made a few edits to this piece after posting it.
Ceremony marks an important beginning, ending, or recurrence and thus brings a change. We hold ceremonies not just to keep tradition, but to break with what we have been until now. Or at least that possibility is there. That is why ceremony and music are so closely intertwined. Music, too, requires a break with everything I have been, even when I listen to the same songs over and over.
This week I was preparing for the last Shacharit service I would lead as the cantor of Szim Salom (for a year at least, and with a few exceptions). Months ago I had decided to take a year off from the role, for many reasons: mostly to focus on my responsibilities as president of the ALSCW (for one year) and my writing, but also to be a little less rushed overall. In any case, I had a lot of leyning (cantillation) to prepare (twenty-three verses with a few complexities) and was practicing every day. These days, I don’t have to spend hours and hours on it to learn it, but I do need to revisit it daily so that it sinks in. To give myself a little extra time, I decided to stay at a hotel (actually, a rentable apartment) overnight in Budapest on Friday night; that way I would be able to wake up there, practice for a couple hours, have breakfast, and head over.
But first things first. The week started out hectic, with long days. Then on Thursday (after a short day of teaching) I went to Budapest to see Csenger Kertai receive a literary award from the Városmajor 48 Alapítvány. That evening, they gave both a lifetime award (to László Garaczi) and a young writer award (to Csenger). Each awardee received a wonderful laudation: Ottó Tolnai spoke in praise of Csenger’s novel B. rövid élete (The Short Life of B.), and Márton László in praise of Garaczi’s work. The ceremony began and ended with Tamás Rónaszéki playing Bach on his 120-year-old Italian violin, which he let me photograph up close in the minutes before the event started. (That’s the picture at the top of this post.)
After the ceremony, I took the train back to Szolnok and arrived home at a respectable 10 p.m., not bad at all. I had managed to practice leyning on the train—almost silently. It was the last evening of Hanukkah, and at the Nyugati train station in Budapest, I saw, to my surprise, a giant menorah and a Hanukkah gift stand. The menorah had been there every day, but I hadn’t seen it. I have seen other outdoor menorahs in Budapest, but this is the first time I saw one at Nyugati.
The next day I headed out to Budapest early enough to check in at the rented apartment and head out to the concert (the Platon Karataev duo, with The Roving Chess Club opening) with plenty of time. However, the apartment hosts were unreachable. I checked my email and saw that Booking.com (through which I had made the reservation) had sent me a message a few days earlier asking me to notify the hosts of my arrival time. However, the check-in time was listed as between 3 p.m. and midnight, and I thought I had nothing to worry about. It turned out that I couldn’t reach them by phone, text, or email. So I continued onward to the concert and figured I’d try to reach the hosts again afterward.
The concert was in the cozy auditorium of the B32 Gallery. I had heard The Roving Chess Club a few times before (two of their members graduated from the Varga Katalin Gimnázium, so I first heard them in Szolnok), and have liked them, but this time the performance and their approach took me in. For several years they played exclusively covers (well chosen and well performed); in the past couple of years they have been adding their own songs. Not only do they learn from musicians who came before them (and their contemporaries), but they inhabit and change those songs, just as they inhabit and make their own. Their music has tune, sophistication and soul, all together.
As for the Platon Karataev, I don’t even know. My mind wasn’t in a critical mood. It might not have been one of the best concerts I have heard from them. But some of the songs, such as “Ki viszi?” and the one that begins, “Fészketlenül,” sent me into something new. I don’t know what did it: maybe a combination of the songs themselves, the way they played them, the atmosphere in the room (dark and quiet), and the way I was receiving them right at that moment. But however it happened, it happened, and yes, I walked out a different person, though it beats me how I have changed.
After the concert, I had no better luck reaching the apartment hosts than before (no answer at all), so I decided to go back to Szolnok, since that would be easier than finding a different place to stay, and I’d have some time on the train to practice leyning, both that night and in the morning on the way back. So that is what I did (and also cancelled the reservation and requested a refund). I got home at midnight and head out the door the next morning at seven (to catch the 7:21 train and allow plenty of time in case of a delay).
The service and the leyning went particularly well—all the preparation mattered, and many people took part in the service and made it beautiful—and then the congregation honored me with a few lovely speeches, gifts (including a book of memories), and—what overwhelmed me—everyone singing “Szól a kakas már.” It’s a song of grieving, hope, and joy; it can be sung in different ways, in different moods, but this time it turned joyous.
I have been Szim Salom’s cantor for a complete six years. I realized at that moment that something will continue, though in a different form. Maybe something unexpected.
The leyning was from Genesis 41 and 42, where there is famine throughout the land, and Joseph’s brothers come to Egypt to buy corn (unbeknownst to them, from Joseph himself). Joseph, who recognizes them, accuses them of being spies–and a number of verses seem to go back and forth along the lines of “—You are spies. —No, my lord, we are not. —Ah, but yes, you are. —No, we aren’t,” though there’s a lot more to it than that: a mounting of pressure until it becomes clear that, to prove that they are not spies, they must send one of them back to Canaan and bring back their youngest brother, whom Jacob had expressly not sent along. All of this ultimately (after a few more ordeals) leads to the reconciliation of Joseph with his brothers, and to his reuniting with his father.
The word for “spy” (מרגל) has the same root as רגל, the word for “foot” and “holy festival” (“pilgrimage”). This makes sense; a spy, too, goes on foot. But how easily holiness and treachery can be confused with each other! That’s what the entire passage is about, as I understand it; Joseph puts them to the test in various ways to make them show their true intentions. Some time needs to pass, and some difficulty too, before they can come back together again. But he has the end in mind; he wants to bring all of them together, he yearns for his youngest brother, who probably had nothing to do with the original betrayal.
The brothers originally hated him not only because he was favored by their father, but because he had dreams that seemed arrogant. “Behold, the dreamer cometh,” they said to each other. They thought to kill him, but instead sold him into slavery—and as it turned out over time, it was his dreams that saved him (and them) in the end. Yet this question of arrogance does not go away. Has Joseph become too confident in his power? Has he forgotten his true status in Egypt? Has he even led his family into a trap? It may be, but even this takes place in a larger picture.
After kiddush and conversations, I headed off to the Petőfi Literary Museum to spend some time at the Tamás Cseh exhibition, which I have visited before but needed to explore more thoroughly. (The exhibition is separate from the Tamás Cseh Archive, which I will get to revisit during the winter break.) This time, I listened to all the interviews, watched all the short films, and took in many more of the details. I was taken by the excerpts from János Szász’s Utóirat, a film interpretation of select Cseh/Bereményi songs (in which Cseh sings his own songs and Bereményi also appears). The film interpretations of the songs are so haunting and apt that I recommend Utóirat to everyone; you don’t need to know Hungarian to understand it. Here is Part 1.
I was trying just now to figure out who Cseh’s face reminds me of when he sings—the movement of the lips and eyebrows. I thought it was Leonard Cohen, but it isn’t; I think he reminds me of two different people I met (one at music camp, in high school, and one much later, in NYC). But in my search, I came upon a special video of Leonard Cohen and Judy Collins singing Cohen’s “Suzanne” in 1976. It’s worth including here. (Cseh and Cohen came close to giving a concert together at one point, but it never came about.) Collins’s gravity and simplicity suit the song; someone else could ruin it with even the slightest exaggeration, but she does not.
After the museum, I decided to head to the Zugló district for a concert by László Kollár-Klemencz and his band, at the Magyar Zene Háza. I had bought the ticket a while ago but had left it up in the air, since I didn’t know whether I’d have the energy for it after everything else. I figured I would go to a Chinese restaurant beforehand. I miss good Chinese food; it’s rather hard to find here (bad Chinese food is ubiquitous). The restaurant in Zugló is superb, and my mouth was already watering with the thought of “century eggs” and a spicy chicken dish. But I took the wrong train and found myself heading out toward Vác. (I have made this mistake once before; the two trains depart at the same time, and the one is the S50, the other the S70.) I managed to backtrack and get out to Zugló, but lost an hour in the process. There was still time for a quick meal, but as it turned out, the restaurant was packed, and they didn’t expect to have a table available for at least another half hour. So I headed on to the concert (and got a tasty gyros afterward, on the way back to the train station).
This concert was a ceremony of its own—their last concert of 2023, and a thrilling performance, with a brand-new song too. This band has such musicianship that you can revel in that alone, musician by musician, but the wit and love of the songs and performance go even beyond the skill. It was a great end to 2023—probably the last concert I’ll attend in December. The video below gives a sense of their concerts.
The train ride home was uneventful, and I got home at a reasonable midnight.
Bob Shepherd recently asked me to list my favorite works of fiction. While I’m sure I’ll leave some out inadvertently, I am especially fond of the fifty works listed below (unranked, since I would have no idea how to rank them). These are all novels or short story collections. All are available in English. I limited myself to fifty for fun, challenge, and expediency.
If something doesn’t appear on the list, it may simply be that I haven’t read it or forgot to mention it. Also, I avoided listing more than one work per author. (A story collection counts as a work.) They are listed in approximate, decade-ish chronological order. This list does not include verse, drama, or nonfiction, though I was tempted to sneak all three in somehow. However, I did treat Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons as fiction, just for the sake of including it. I also wanted to include Neruda’s Book of Questions, but that would have opened the floodgates to poetry at large.
In many cases I chose an author’s shorter works. This doesn’t signal a lack of admiration for the longer works; I simply gravitate, often, toward the taut. Also, I am likelier to read the shorter works many times, whereas the longer ones usually enjoy fewer iterations.
Some of these works I read long ago; I have yet to see what it would be like to reread them now. Still, the impression they made has lasted all this time. Others I have read over and over, over the years. Still others have joined my favorites more recently.
One Thousand and One Nights
Monkey: A Folk-Tale of China, tr. Arthur Waley (I haven’t read Anthony C. Yu’s translation)
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen
Nikolai Gogol, The Nose and Other Stories (I read them in Russian but recommend Susanne Fusso’s translation)
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Edgar Allan Poe, stories (no particular edition preference)
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Henry James, The Aspern Papers
Ambrose Bierce, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Anton Chekhov, 201 Stories (https://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/ac/jr/). Constance Garnett’s translations aren’t the best, but they’ll do for an introduction to these stories. The online resource created and annotated by James Rusk is terrific.
Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
Franz Kafka, The Trial
James Joyce, APortrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Andrei Bely, Petersburg
Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (stories)
Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
Richard Matheson, Born of Man and Woman (stories)
François Mauriac, Thérèse Desqueyroux
Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones (stories)
Albert Camus, The Plague
Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood
Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin
Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet (four interconnected novels)
Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies
Saul Bellow, Seize the Day
James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man (stories)
Julio Cortázar, End of the Game, and Other Stories
Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor
John Cheever, Collected Stories
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
Manuel Puig, Kiss of the Spider-Woman
Don DeLillo, White Noise
Tobias Wolff, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (stories)
Raymond Carver, Cathedral (stories)
László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams
Will Self, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (stories)
The photo to the left I took in Szentendre, where I went for a concert by László Kollár-Klemencz and his ensemble. I was walking back to the train station through the rapt stone streets, along a winding ridge, when I saw, jutting out of a roof, a “Presszó” (espresso café). The song “Presszó” by Tamás Cseh and Géza Bereményi started playing in my mind. It begins:
Mi ez? Ez egy eszpresszó. És Ön? Én zongorázom. És én? Maga egy vendég. Hm, de finom. Príma hely. Hm, de finom. Príma hely.
(In basic translation: “What’s this? It’s an espresso [café]. And you? I play piano. And I? You are a guest. Hm, quite nice. Classy place. Hm, quite nice. Classy place.”)
This whimsical song takes its lyrical and musical twists and turns; but I will be talking about it more in an article that I hope will be published, about the artistic collaboration of Cseh and Bereményi. One of my projects for the week-long autumn break is to finish a draft of this article; on Monday I have an appointment at the Cseh Tamás Archívum. In the meantime, here is the song. A week ago I was overjoyed to find their first two albums at a little record store in Budapest; listening to them on the record player is a challenge because of the cats (I have to shut them out of the room, or they’ll try to play with it). But I have digital versions too, so I can listen to these albums one way or another, again and again.
In the recording below, the song begins after a brief introduction (from the previous track—the second part of the letter, which frames the album); you will know when the song itself starts. The other singer is János Másik, who also plays the piano in this song.
On a different subject that seems related too, I discovered the Israeli writer Etgar Keret today through his interview in the New York Times with Lulu Garcia-Navarro. Of all the opinions, responses, thoughts I have read about the situation so far, this one comes closest to me, even though he’s probably a bit farther left politically than I am. I started looking into his work and know that I have come upon treasures. From the interview:
I think that the most attacked posts on the internet are those of people saying, “Oh, my god, I see people dying in Israel and I see people dying in Palestine, and it breaks my heart.” If you put up a post like that, they will rip you to pieces from both sides. And I’m saying that, in this sense, I do feel some kind of deterioration, a human deterioration.
This needs to be heard. I was dismayed, right after the attacks, to see people posting things like, “If you support Israel, you’re supporting genocide.” Not at all true; supporting Israel can mean thousands of different things, and “genocide” is a loaded term that stacks the decks against anything one might say. Or: “If you’re not taking a public stand against Hamas now, you wouldn’t have lifted a finger for the Jews during the Holocaust.” That’s not true either; their were righteous Gentiles who didn’t take a public stand at all but just saved lives quietly, just as there are those who happily brandish slogans online but might not help someone standing right before them. As Keret points out, “When I see people watching the horrible tragedy that is happening here as if it were a Super Bowl of victimhood, in which you support one team and really don’t care about the other, empathy becomes very, very selective. You see only some pain. You don’t want to see other pain.” There’s also a zest for branding others as terrible human beings. Even the people posting these things are not terrible human beings. Many just want clarity—but the clarity that comes from sorting people into good/bad categories will not last long.
Now to the question of ease and difficulty, the topic of this post. First I will take it up with respect to art (including music and writing), then more generally.
Many who speak about artistic creation emphasize the hard work that goes into it. Yes, it takes work, patience, and dry, unsentimental prudence. You have to discard all the rubbish and keep your eyes on what you know is good. Yet there’s an ease to it too, in that some of the best work seems to require almost no effort. That’s an illusion, partly; the artist must create the conditions for this to happen, must recognize when it is happening, and must see it through. Nonetheless, all of this can happen in the space of an hour. Still, the things that come out easily are not always the best; sometimes it takes time to figure out what a work is supposed to be. Sometimes it goes through many revisions before it approaches its final form; sometimes, even after all that, it comes to nothing. The dogma of difficulty (“work hard, work hard!”) distorts the matter, as does the dogma of ease (“just let it flow”); both ease and difficulty play their part.
People have been telling me (both here in Hungary and in the U.S.) that I have an unusual eye for photography and should show my photos at an exhibit. That surprises me, since I don’t consider myself visually inclined. The photos come out of instantaneous decisions. I see something out of the corner of my eye, or I catch a particular angle, and I stop to take a picture (or several). But there’s also care that goes into it; I discard the many photos that don’t come out right. There are so many that I can pick good ones. The majority aren’t good: the lighting is off, or the angle, the colors, or the proportions.
With my writing, it isn’t the ease or the difficulty that determines whether something will be good. Rather, it’s the discernment itself: the ability to judge whether something I’ve written is finished and worth keeping. In her reflections on Louise Glück, who died on October 13, Brandy Barents describes how Glück praised the title of a rhymed, metered poem she (Barents) had just written but told her to throw out the rest—that is, the entire poem. When she told Glück that the poem was completely different from the one she had originally started to write, and recited the beginning of that one, Glück said, “Now that is the poem I want to read. Bring it in. This? No.” Then she began to explain why. Glück was not perfect in her judgement—and her way of teaching might not have helped everyone—but from what I understand, she helped students see that this was the work of poetry, or at least part of it: recognizing the true poem when it comes through, be it the first draft or the fiftieth.
In the music that I love, there’s both difficulty and ease, and different kinds of both. Detaching the difficult from the easy is tricky; they have to do with each other.
The new single (released yesterday) by capsule boy (Cz.K. Sebő’s electronic project), “Buborék,” builds so gently and subtly, with a Pärt-like beginning, then changing chords, percussion, clickety lyrics, and the wailing “ay-ay-ay,” that I listen again and again, enjoying it so much, and tangling up in it too, feeling some kind of anxiety within the calm. Like lying on the beach and feeling the world collapsing, but still relaxing, sensing all of this at once, the sleepy shore, the collapse, even the bubble itself, the partial consciousness. I can’t make out all the lyrics; they go by at a fast clip, and they’re somewhat buried—but this allows me to imagine them. To me this song has something in common with capsule boy’s “Funeral Circular” and Cz.K. Sebő’s “Felzizeg” (distantly), “Kétezerhúsz,” and “Pure Sense“; it also seems to allude to “A hatvanas évek” by Tamás Cseh, Géza Bereményi, and János Másik. Of the capsule boy songs that have been released so far, my favorites are “Funeral Circular” and “North Maine Woods“; this is probably my third favorite, and it leaves me eager for the album. (Update: The lyrics are now up on Spotify and elsewhere; now that I can read them, I understand the song somewhat differently, but my initial reaction is still true.)
Dávid Szesztay’s new album, Félek nem félni, released on Thursday, is full of soulful momentum. In a Recorder interview he described this album as rawer and more spontaneous than his earlier albums. The spontaneity comes out of decades of playing and composing, along with a willingness to let some of this go and trust what comes out. He says, “It was an intensive journey to the point where I could say: the album is done. Of course I still don’t think it’s 100% there, there are still a few lines I would correct, but that’s it. I think that somewhere deep inside me, this album’s motto became for me to accept my own weaknesses or weakenings, so I feel that what arises is a kind of shuttling between found peace and disturbed states. If I have to sum it up, I’d say that Félek nem félni has to do with letting go and coping with the accompanying spasms.” Just listen to the music itself. Listen to “Tik-Tak,” for instance, or the title song. Listen to the whole album.
Back to the question of ease and difficulty, but this time with regard to life and death (which music, too, is about): in the interview, Keret speaks about the importance of difficult times.
I keep talking about my parents. But when I was a kid, and I first heard about the Holocaust, I asked my father if the Holocaust was the worst time of his life. And my father thought for a moment, and he said: “I don’t split life by good periods and bad periods. I always see them as easy periods and difficult periods.” And he said: “All my life I’ve been chasing the easy times. But it’s the difficult times in which you learn about yourself the most.” I think what he was trying to say was: Take this difficulty and let it change you. Learn things about yourself. Acknowledge the fact that I should have learned how to drive and not have been lazy. Deal with that! You know? And I really feel that this difficult time, it’s kind of an unveiling. It’s like taking off a mask.
I would add—and I imagine he would agree—that the easy times, too, can teach you something. They, too, can unveil something. Ease is not superficial; it can go to the center of things. It can also be difficult to come upon and live out.
The Coen brothers’ film A Serious Man begins with the Rashi quote, “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.” (I don’t know where Rashi wrote this.) What does it mean, to receive something with simplicity? Perhaps it means, simply, to stop saying, “This should not be.” Because the “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” only lead to a futile struggle. The thing that is, is. If there’s any hope for change, it will not come from wishing something away. It will only come from my responses, our responses to it.
Here are a few photos from the past few days: several (river, leaves, school courtyard, rainbow) from Szolnok, two (walls, colored lamps) from Szentendre, and one from the Béla Bár in Budapest, where I heard a delightful concert by Tom Holliston and Simon Wells on Thursday evening. All of this is part of the truth: concerts, leaves, war, rivers, mixtures of feeling, mixtures of thought.
After posting this piece, I added a little to the paragraph that begins, “This needs to be heard” and made a few more small edits as well. I also added section breaks (with dots) so that the changes of subject wouldn’t be so abrupt.
Yesterday contained what the Yemeni-Hungarian writer Ahmed Amran called a “historic moment” (I would call it that too): my translation of his story collection A lélek gőze (Steam of the Soul) received its final touches and is complete. I began this very special project in January. The collection consists of twenty-six stories, each with its own particular character and context, so while the book is not long, it took me some time, especially at first, as I was in the middle of a busy school year. (One of these translated stories, “Earth Mounds,” was published on Asymptote Journal’s blog in April.) In the summer I had longer stretches of time and was able to translate the second half of the book, prepare the manuscript, and go over everything again. Taken together, the stories describe an arc of loss and discovery. They do not necessarily connect with each other (though some do), but over the course of the book, the different narrators wrestle with the same questions: How do you make sense of personal and more general loss: the loss of someone you love, the massive losses in a civil war, the loss of health, the loss of sanity and orientation? How does the soul move during and after these losses? There are no final answers; some stories end with joy, others with rage, others with uncertainty—yet the stories hint at different kinds of homecoming.
Over the past few years I have been contributing to a new volume of Tomas Venclova’s translated poetry. I translated ten of the poems in it; the others have been translated by Ellen Hinsey and Rimas Uzgiris. The book, The Grove of the Eumenides: New and Selected Poems, will be published by Bloodaxe Books in 2025. Two of my translations from this volume will be published by AGNI (one of the best literary journals anywhere) this fall. (My translations of Venclova’s earlier poems have been featured previously in two books, Winter Dialogue and The Junction.) Rimas Uzgiris’s brilliant translations have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere. As for the poet Ellen Hinsey, her dedication to Tomas Venclova’s work over many years is a gift to the world, and her own poetry (featured in the Hot Rocks section of Issue 15:2 of Literary Matters) has inspired and influenced many.
Speaking of Tomas Venclova, he is the 2023 laureate of the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, a highly deserved honor.
Csenger Kertai’s first novel, B. rövid élete (B.’s Short Life) is in press and will be out this fall. I can’t wait to read it in full. A combination of philosophical reflection, story, and poetry, it delves into a young person’s existential and religious quest. A story contained within it, “The Flower-Waterer Who Didn’t Believe His Flowers Were Beautiful,” will be published in my English translation in Literary Matters this fall. (Ten of my translations of his poems from his 2021 collection, Hogy nekem jó legyen, have been published by five journals.)
This summer I also translated János Pilinszky’s “Senkiföldjén” (“In No Man’s Land”), which has been on my mind for a long time. I have been granted the right to publish the translation, so I will send it to a few journals soon.
Last but far from least, I enjoyed translating subtitles (or rather, the transcript that would then be turned into subtitles) for Nyílnak befelé ablakok, Zsófi Szász’s documentary about Platon Karataev, released by 444. This involved translating dialogue, reflection, song lyrics, slang, jokes, fragments of conversation, baby talk, and more. After translating the script, I also worked with the director to get the subtitles right. They came out beautifully; I hope they will help bring the documentary to many speakers of English who do not speak Hungarian. (The documentary is available on YouTube; you can turn the subtitles on and off there.)
“What’s next?” people often ask. I have a few ideas; we’ll see. I don’t do translations on assignment or demand; I choose my projects carefully, not for the money (I get paid here and there, but not much) but for what I see in the work. So if you’re thinking of asking me to translate your work: don’t, unless I have asked about it myself. I know what draws me and what I can take on.
For those interested in all of this, I recommend Always Different: Poems of Memory, my translation, published by Deep Vellum in 2022, of Gyula Jenei’s 2018 collection Mindig más. I love that collection and loved translating it; while the book received two lovely Amazon reviews and a wonderful review in Hungarian Literature Online, it mostly flew under the radar. This is a shame—the poems are unusual and moving! This often happens with books, especially poetry; so much gets published that if a book doesn’t get enough attention when it comes out, it’s unlikely to get noticed later either. Individual translations did get attention, though; one of my favorites of all, “Scissors,” was published by The Massachusetts Review and received an honorable mention in their 2022 Jules Chametzky Prize. Other translations from the volume were published by Literary Matters and The Continental Literary Magazine; see, for example, “Chess” and “Litterfall.”
If you haven’t read Always Different, you can get a copy easily! If you have read it, please consider leaving a short review somewhere.
A few months ago I was invited to contribute to a festschrift in honor of Rosanna Warren’s retirement from the University of Chicago. I decided to write a poem: it started playing in my head, and I knew it would be 100 lines long, with 33 tercets and a final line. I am glad that I didn’t see the other pieces before doing this; their caliber might have intimidated me. My poem is a lacewing crawling among delphiniums. Still, I am fond of it and consider it my best in some ways. It tells a reflective story in a circle, or several concentric circles, with a few surprises and more or less equal measures of humor and melancholy. As for the rest of the book, I am in awe of the translations, the poems, the essays, the recollections, the combinations. All this a tribute to Rosanna, who is a friend, teacher, colleague, and mentor to so many. What various contributors bring up, in different ways, is her insistence on form and precision along with risks and truth; on listening to poems and rhythms across the ages and from around the world, translating from both familiar and unfamiliar languages, reading, writing, considering, leaping. “It’s not hard to be wild on the page,” writes Jordan Zandi in the short introduction to his poem, “but it’s hard to be wild yet tempered by form and restraint. With gratitude for your teachings and mentorship, which buoyed me toward the technique and confidence needed to find my own style—” and then comes the poem itself.
The festschrift was a well-guarded secret for a few months, because the editors—and all of us—wanted it to be a complete surprise for her. Now that she has received it (and it was a surprise indeed!), it’s no longer a secret, but still I hesitate to quote much from it. It exists only in print, in a limited edition. But what delights are to be found in it. Later I might say more about its contents. I am grateful to the editors, Miles Cayman and Michael Rutherglen, who put so much into it, and to all the contributors.
Instead, for now, I’ll quote briefly from Rosanna’s poem “Tashlich,” one of my favorites of her poems. It’s difficult to quote because of the enjambments and the necessity of the whole, so please read it in full.
and how was it how did it come to be that I
crushed someone’s heart It wasn’t like tossing bread in a stream Then how could it be absolved by casting bread That heart wasn’t stale It wasn’t
a lump No More like a wounded pigeon As if I’d stamped on its chest with my heel as it flailed and now the chorus of excuses rises in plainsong
This poem is timely because the Jewish month of Elul, which leads into the High Holy Days, begins tomorrow evening. But beyond that, it has called me back at various times since I first read it in February 2017. My poem in the festschrift quotes a few words from it. There is a throbbing catharsis about it, a punctuation created by spaces, a not-tossing, then a releasing, of bread.
I have several memories of Tashlich (the Jewish atonement ritual of tossing bread into moving water on the first day of Rosh Hashana): hundreds of people along the Hudson River, maybe thousands, walking up and down or pausing with their bread by the water. The privacy of those few minutes of tossing. The uncertainty over whether to toss and what for. The strangers and acquaintances streaming by, the greetings, conversations at a time when one might not want either. The tension, always present in religion, between the solitary and the communal. Why are people talking now? my brain asks without words. And yet it’s beautiful: the streams of people shaking hands, greeting, in various kinds of dress (from formal and Orthodox to casual, colorful) all the way up to Washington Heights and beyond. I say a few hellos for good measure, then head back up the steps, through the park, into the relief of the noisy street.
Since November 2017, she has been teaching English, American civilization, and British civilization at the Varga Katalin Gimnázium in Szolnok, Hungary, where she, her school, and the Verseghy Library founded an annual Shakespeare festival.
On this blog, Take Away the Takeaway, I discuss literature, music, education, and other things. Some of the pieces are satirical and assigned (for clarity) to the satire category.
When I revise a piece substantially after posting it, I note this at the end. Minor corrections (e.g., of punctuation and spelling) may go unannounced.
Speaking of imperfection, my other blog, Megfogalmazások, abounds with imperfect Hungarian.
Take Away the Takeaway 