'…and to all you other cats and chicks out there, sweet or otherwise, buried deep in wordy tombs, who never yet have walked from off the page, a shake and a hug and a kiss and a drink. Cheers!' -- Gilbert Sorrentino
'Gilbert Sorrentino wrote for so long that he became a fixture of the literary landscape, a lighthouse or an island to steer by, a guide and exemplar to like-minded travelers. His writing life spanned a good portion of the twentieth century. Born in Brooklyn in 1929, he was a boyhood friend of Hubert Selby, Jr. After a two-year stint in the Army Medical Corps during the Korean War, he got to know William Carlos Williams, who encouraged him to keep writing. Williams later included part of a letter from Sorrentino in Paterson. As an editor, Sorrentino worked with Alex Haley, publishing the Autobiography of Malcolm X, and helped Last Exit to Brooklyn into print. Selby dedicated it to him, to Gil.
'Sorrentino wrote so well that his work attracted a flock of adjectives, each one insufficient to its simple descriptive task. His early work appeared in small, mimeographed magazines alongside Beat writers and Black Mountain poets, with whom he was sometimes compared. Later, he was by turns modernist and postmodernist, avant-garde until that term lost its faddish charge, and experimental. Few described him as a realist, though Steelwork, his second novel, published in 1970, and A Strange Commonplace, published earlier this year, provide a finely realized blueprint for Brooklyn as he knew and recalled it. Sorrentino, like Selby, wrote about the borough when it was a patchwork of working-class neighborhoods, before gentrification entered the language and prettied up the place.
'His writing—call it what you will, but Sorrentino-esque might be as accurate a term of art as any—was not academic or rarefied. It was humane and warm, touching and exact. Nor did it shrink from the scuzzy, the mean, or the cruel. His novels could school both realistic and experimental writing, by combining realism’s deeply felt details with stories that assumed a variety of forms. Sorrentino’s fictions might appear disguised as improvisations, satiric masques, dirty jokes, or barroom boasts, but however brief, and however seemingly casual, they contain explosions of life. They start quick and they finish fast. Sorrentino’s endings are sometimes as abrupt as those life gives us, like it or like it not.' -- Paul Maliszewski, from 'Uncorrupted: On Gilbert Sorrentino'
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Media
Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (illustration)
Gilbert Sorrentino, extrait lu par Bernard Hoepffner (son traducteur), "Episode de la tomate", in "Petit casino", Actes Sud, 2006
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Interview
from The Write Stuff'
Gilbert Sorrentino w/ son Christopher
In the wake of the media overload and the Joycean overlap, how does art compete with popular culture? What is exactly the position of novel writing in such a cultural situation?
Gilbert Sorrentino: I think that art has always existed with, if not competed with popular culture. When the court was reading "The Canterbury Tales," the illiterates in the street were singing folk tales and watching jugglers and clowns and God knows what. It's always been this way and probably always will be--the novel has somehow been posited for us as a kind of "mass item" and if it sells only 1500 copies is seen as a failure. I don't know if that's even a reasonably intelligent way of thinking. A novel, even a lousy novel, can't command the audience of the least successful TV sitcom, and yet such a form is "supposed to." Outside of the dreary rubbish that is churned out by god knows how many hacks of varying degrees of talent, the novel is, it seems to me, a very special and rarefied kind of literary form, and was, for a brief moment only, wide-ranging in its sociocultural influence. For the most part, it has always been an acquired taste and it asks a good deal from its audience. Our great contemporary problem is in separating that which is really serious from that which is either frivolously and fashionably "radical" and that which is a kind of literary analogy to the Letterman show. It's not that there is pop culture around, it's that so few people can see the difference between it and the high culture, if you will. Morton Feldman is not Stephen Sondheim. The latter is a wonderful what-he-is, but he is not what-he-is-not. To pretend that he is is to insult Feldman and embarrass Sondheim, to enact a process of homogenization that is something like pretending that David Mamet, say, breathes the same air as Samuel Beckett. People used to understand, it seems to me, that there is, at any given time, a handful of superb writers or painters or whatever--and then there are all the rest. Nothing wrong with that. But it now makes people very uncomfortable, very edgy, as if the very idea of a Matisse or a Charles Ives or a Thelonious Monk is an affront to the notion of "ain't everything just great!" We have the spectacle, then, of perfectly nice, respectable, harmless writers, etc., being accorded the status of important artists. I saw, for instance, maybe a year ago or so, a long piece in The New York Times on the writers who worked on some hero-with-guns movie. Essentially a pleasant bunch of middle-class professionals, with the aspirations of, I'd guess, very successful cardiac surgeons. Workmen, in a sense, who do what they're told to make a very good living. Not a shred of imaginative power left in them. But the piece dealt with them in the same way that the paper deals with Sharon Stone, Leonard Bernstein, Mark Rothko, Merce Cunningham, etc., etc. It's sort of all swell! My point, if I haven't yet made it, is that while it's all right to think of something as delicious as Dallas or Dynasty as, well, delicious, it's not a good idea to confuse them with Jean Genet. Essentially, the novelist, the serious novelist, should do what he can do and simply forgo the idea of a substantial audience.
Experimental writing has been undermined by lazy readers and corporate tendencies of editors and publishers. How accurate is the previous statement?
GS: Absolutely accurate. But it's always been absolutely accurate. Joyce, Pound, and Williams commanded the smallest of audiences and were shunned by what we now think of as "major" publishing houses. Publishers have always been craven when the odds are not in their favor, it's just enhanced nowadays because there is so much money to be made if the publisher can hit the shit machine. What is most surprising to me is the number of--what can I call them?-- "absent" books published. These are books that have no literary merit, no spirit of aesthetic adventure, no rough but interesting formal design, and--this is most important--no chance of commercial success! That's what is so amazing to me--not the number of Judith Krantz-like novels published, nor the Calvin Trillin-Garrison Keillor warm and wise and witty and wonderful malarkey, but the novels that just lie there: life and love in a small town in Northern California, sexual awakening in a Baptist family in Pennsylvania--daughter flees to Greenwich Village, meets bum who makes her pregnant, discovers feminism--and on and on. Were I running these houses, I'd can all these editors in a minute. If they can't make millions, would be my thinking, I'll be God damned if they're going to put out excrement that will only break even, i.e., if we want to break even, I'd say, let's publish BOOKS. But, of course, the chances are that the people who own these houses would not know a book if it buggered them.
Joseph McElroy and Harry Mathews seem to be writers that are the most similar to you. All of you are unclassifiable and difficult. There are no real labels for writers outside of black comedy, post-modern, or post-post schools.
GS: No comment, really. I don't much understand groupings and I don't even know if they're legitimate. I do what I feel like doing when I feel like doing it. My new book, for instance, Red The Fiend, is not only unlike anything that any of the writers you mention has done, it's not like anything that I have done. One of the very best things about being as artist is that you don't have to care about anybody's expectations. If people don't like what you've done, they can, to paraphrase Edward Dahlberg, go read another book.
(read the entirety)
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Further
'A View from the Ridge: on Gilbert Sorrentino @ Bookforum
'No End to Trying: Gilbert Sorrentino's Novel Novels' @ The Stranger
Obituary @ The Guardian
Gilbert Sorrentino's books @ Dalkey Archive
Gilbert Sorrentino's 'Gold Fols' @ Green Integer
Audio: Gilbert Sorrentino on NPR's 'Bookworm'
Eugene Lim 'Remembering Gilbert Sorrentino
Gilbert Sorrentino Group @ Facebook
Gilbert Sorrentino defends John Hawkes
Gilbert Sorrentino posts @ Madinkbeard
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Book
Gilbert Sorrentino Imaginative Qualities of Actual ThingsDalkey Archive
'Gilbert Sorrentino's third novel is about the New York artistic and literary world of the 1950s and '60s, specifically the artists, writers, hangers-on, and the phonies who populated that world. In a prose that is ruthless as well as possessed of an enormous comic verve, the dedicated, the stupid, the rapacious, and the foolish are dissected. Eight major characters, many of whom reappear in Sorrentino's later novels, are employed to allow the reader a variety of views of the same world.
'Told in the weary voice of a cynical and sardonic narrator, the novel is crammed with fantastic characters, incidents, and episodes, and moves from wit and satire through elegiac brooding, to bitter invective. It is a superb re-creation of a real time and place.' -- Dalkey Archive
'There is a truculent intelligence behind it all, one given to outrage and joy . . . Its power is unmistakable and its design ambitious, the right sort of antidote for the fakery, the foundation men, and the hangers-on in the literary world.' -- Paul Theroux
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Excerpt
Psychological Background to Assist the Reader in Understanding Sheila's Character Development and Motivations.
When Sheila was ten she masturbated in her father's car outside Nathan's Famous in Coney Island. Rhythmically squeezing together and relaxing her thighs, she ate a hot dog the while.
When Sheila was an innocent ten, she masturbated in her father's sinister car outside Nathan's Famous in sordid Coney Island. Rhythmically squeezing together and relaxing her nervous thighs, she stealthily ate a hot dog the while.
The "hot dog" is a bona fide phallic symbol. Any book dealing with Erotica worth its salt will have a picture or two of some starlet (say Diana Dors or Mamie Van Doren), lips wetly gleaming,* about to surround with eager mouth the pedestrian wiener. These pictures are under the section headed "Fellatio." The reader's response should run: "Looka that, looks like she's suckin' a cock!" This is a subtle business.
* He turns a nice phrase.
* * * *
Here is a test for editors to see if they are fit to pass judgment on books. They must get six right.
1. What contribution to jazz drumming did Big Sid Catlett make? Jo Jones?
2. What is uniquely excellent about Paul Goodman’s fiction?
3. What is a swizzle stick? A swizzle?
4. Name the great trombone section in Ellington's 1938 band.
5. What is Jack Kerouac's best piece of writing?
6. Explain how a critic like John Simon cloaks his ignorance.
7. Recount two legends on how the Gibson got its name. (This should be easy.)
8. What is Kenneth Patchen's best poem?
9. Point out a failure of tone in The Sky Changes.
10. What is the basic flaw in Norman Mailer’s fiction?
* * * *
What if this young woman, that writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings? It’s an old story. Then she asks what you think of the trash you have just read – her latest effort. A use of the arts perhaps more common than any other in this time. Aphrodisia. Powerful as Spanish fly or the scent of jasmine. The most delicate equivocation about the poem, the most subtle relaxation of critical acumen, will hasten you to bed with her. The poem is about a dream she had. In it she is a little girl. Again. Most of her poems are about dreams. In them she drowns in costume, or finds herself flying naked. At the end of the dream she is trapped. Well, critic, tell her the poem has the clear and unmistakable stink of decay to it. Tell her. Is seeing, finally, the hair glossy between her thighs so important that you will lie? About art? You shift your body and hold the poem out –judiciously – before you, one eye half closed. Reach for a cigarette. Well, you say. Well – this poem… Her eyes are shining, they are beautifully sculptured, and dark. She uncrosses her legs, the nylon whispering, and recrosses them. The nylon whispering. Bends forward to accept a light, looking at you, seriously, intently, waiting for your judgement. I have nothing to say, the poem is unknown to me. Others, that I have read, are watery and vulgar, but perhaps her craft has somewhat improved. She’s been reading Lawrence – a bad sign, but…she understands him. As who does not? Well, you say again. Penis a bar of steel. We can have a large third rate abstract expressionist or hard-edge oil behind the scene, or a window with a view of a Gristede’s. If in the country, a small grassy hill falls gently away from the picture window behind which the two figures are arranged, gently away to a lawn on which a group of young drunks is playing touch football in the darkening November afternoon.
* * * *
A brochure from the Gom Gallery announcing a one-man show by Bart Kahane.
Bart Kahane’s sculpture is simply deceptive. It looks joyous and frivolous, like a fading beauty from Proust. Only the serious attention it rewards reveals it to be sternly modal, harshly chaste, and complex with hidden directions.
Central to the sculptor’s vision is the balance of horizontal and vertical conceptions of structured space. Each piece abounds with contradictions; each piece can be seen as a “tone row” of gay themes and unbridled mirth; or as a sort of closed, finite, totemic construct; or yet again, as a marker or signpost gesturing toward that final sculpture which will, perhaps, never be created. The pieces are static, trapping the viewer with their sense of totality. But as we watch, this seeming diamond-ness of the conceptual changes before the eye until the works translate themselves into the simple, yet brilliantly accurate figures of a dreamlike dance.
----Many years a painter, Mr. Kahane shows a healthy, almost a holy respect for boundaries – the piece as conductor as well as frame for the artistic kinesis. Yet he has eschewed the painter’s care for the contrapuntals and harmonics of color. The gluey black and perverse white, bitter gray metal and nagging orange plastic – all have been excruciatingly selected with regard to the colors’ colorlessness. There is no allusive reference here, rather a totally compact extrusive force and thoroughness, a manipulation of mass and density, volume and plane, so subtle as to be almost unnoticeable. Each piece seems to be of that soi-distant gaiety associated with the receding colors a painter, in his bright craft, often makes us long for in the picture plane. Yet Kahane has achieved this special hilaritas without resort to the quiddities of color. The concern here is all with the maintenance of sculptural thrust, pure and unadorned, in spite of itself. Mr. Kahane has brilliantly manifested that concern. – Dick Detective
1. ST JAMES
2. TENTH STREET RAGA
3. LE FOU
4. LEO’S COCKTAIL
5. PORTRAIT FOR HARY BORE
6. JAZZETTI
7. BLUE AND GRAY 1
8. FEMS McCLARK
9. ORANGE SPLIT
10. BLUE AND GRAY 2
11. MISS BROWN
12. TEN EYCK WALK
13. PLUM BEACH
14. LOTT’S HOUSE
15. THE CALIPH
16. OFFISSA PUPP
17. BLACK LADDER
18. QUIERO VERDE
We’ll have to take one more really quick trip to New Mexico, Taos that is. This one is in the nature of a field trip, however, a search for the artifact. We look for a small metal sculpture, dull finish, all in all about the size of a brick. I know it’s in a house out here, because I’ve seen it, sitting on a window ledge, behind it – what else? – the mountains. It’s not a bad sculpture, derivative, obviously the work of a student, a tyro, but one who is talented. The reason that we’ve come out here, friends, is that it may well prove useful for you to see what may well be Bart Kahane’s first successful piece of sculpture. Now we may leave Taos.
----But why Bart Kahane? Or, who Bart Kahane? He is really unnecessary to this tale* and might just as well sit on his ass somewhere in his Mercedes, enjoying life.
*One wonders just who is necessary to it.
I don’t need a sculptor here, or a painter for that matter, it’s just that the other day I got to thinking about old Bart, remembering him with a kind of fondness, that incredibly clear mind, scheme after scheme coming from it, and each scheme aimed at the achievement of success. Big time success, I don’t speak here of the kind of success my old friend Leo K. settled for – a little crumb off the table. Good old Bart. What was so enchanting about him was that he disguised this comptroller’s brain behind a façade of la vie boheme. How many gobs of spit did Bart let fly upon how many rugs? How many times did he piss in the potted plants? Shit in a few bathtubs in his day too, old Bart. One remembers him throwing beer cans in friend’s faces, etc. Punching his wife or trying to kick her in the belly when she was six months pregnant. One can forgive a man who does this, let us say, helplessly. It is incredible to see it all as a matter of choreography. Before he shifted to sculpture, when he was still involved in a kind of painting that might be termed real in some sense, i.e., there was at least a halfway commitment to the work, I remember him figuring how he would act at a particular party that night, or that week. The perfect outrage, etc. He was a Crazy Artist, in spades. The enfant terrible, the young genius. Plotted and planned, the strategy totally worked out when he was still in art school, the tactics candidly revealing the direction of the campaign, thrusting toward that house in Springs, that giant loft on Fourteenth Street, the best of booze and all the art-freak women he could handle. His wife, the charming hostess, entertaining the freeloaders on the Island all summer. A herald of that breed of artist with the sensibility of the Stakhanovite. Make plenty products good, feel nice, put on market for people who need, da! I am fascinated by them all with their paper suits and paper assholes, their faces have supported the hip slicks for at least five years. And Bart Kahane, many years a painter, saw it coming. Saw it coming: saw them all coming, one should say. All the urban rubes in their ruffled evening shirts and lavender dinner jackets. Bart’s feeling was, for every share they own, let there be a painting! One of his own, preferably, but this was too good to be true, and, in less than a month, there were many more people on the scene, so that now it is impossible to prove that Bart first saw the rubes advancing, plenty of dollars in their hands, a lust to speak real American words with real American painters, hang these real paintings with real oil on their real walls. Bart saw them all coming through those lean years, living on Delancey Street, drinking ten-cent dark beer in a dump under his studio, saw it all on the way: a hip nouveau-riche, a class so modern that they call themselves parvenus. The idea is that one is to forgive them because of their candor. Bart saw that one might with safety even spit on certain selected floors here and there among these dazzlers and nippers. Whatever ultimately served the purpose, that he did. I can see him now, upon his arrival in New York, wearing a shirt and tie he had borrowed from a fellow painter three years before. I didn’t know that then. The perfect friend for Bart is Dick Detective, and, of course, Dick was – and is – his friend. A perfect pairing, each seeking that portion from which the other should be forced to eternally give, give, and give some more. That metal sculpture out in Taos is in the house that Anne Kaufman once lived in. She left it there when she moved to the Coast. It was a gift to Anne from Dick D., who had got it from Bart. Now, think about all that for a while and you’ll have a rather arresting diagram. In the minds eye, one sees that sculpture on the window ledge. The setting sun bathes it in a red glow, the same red glow that gives these mountains their fabled name, Sangre de Cristo. Out here one can find peace, so Harlan told Bunny. Why are people so shabby that even fictitious characters stand revealed as corrupt or damaged? Go ahead, tell me to fulfill my obligations by attacking the society that spawns such corrupt people and dismal art. I am attacking the society. While you make the revolution, I make art. The Duty of an Artist Is to Make Art: The Second Declaration of Manhattan.
----But I want you to think of Bart. We’ll build a stairway to the stars with the young man.
----
*
p.s. Hey. So, this morning I have that meeting/work thing I mentioned yesterday, and it starts in about half an hour from now, and that's why this is really short. Tomorrow, it won't be. As far as the post goes, it's pretty obvious, I guess. I was thinking about Sorrentino the other day sort of generally and about this novel in particular, and making a post about some(one/thing) is a good way to put my thinking to work and to turn what might have been a passing thought into a progressive thinkfest then add it to your mix. Or, I've never done anything on this blog about Gilbert Sorrentino before, I'm pretty sure. Interesting writer and ideas man. Worth your attention, I believe. I hope that's true. Enjoy, have good days today, and I'll see and talk with you tomorrow.
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