as if the music were the story (sylvia)

Back To Black, Amy Winehouse

Anna Valenn / VO

I wrote and I wrote, and I tore up everything, and I wrote some more. After a while I didn't know why I was writing. My original desire, complicated enough, became a grueling compulsion, partly in spite of Sylvia. I was doing hard work in the cold room, much harder than necessary, in the hope that it would justify itself.

Writing a story wasn't as easy as writing a letter, or telling a story to a friend. It should be, I believed Chekhov said it was easy. But I could hardly finish a page in a day. I'd find myself getting too involved in the words, the strange relation of their sounds, as if there were a music below the words, like the weird singing of a demiurge out of which came images, virtual things, streets and trees and people. It would become louder and louder, as if the music were the story. I had to get myself out of the way, let it happen, but I couldn't. I was a bad dancer, hearing the music, dancing the steps, unable to let the music dance me.

Writing in the cold room, I'd sometimes become exhilarated, as if I'd transcended all difficulties, done something good. The story had written itself. It bore no residual trace of me. It was clean. A day later, rereading with a more critical eye, I sank into the blackest notions of my fate. I'd wanted so little, just a story that wouldn't make me feel ashamed of myself next week, or five years from now. It was too much to want. The story I'd written was no good. It broke my heart. I was no good.

"Going to your hole?"

I felt I was digging it.

Sylvia by Leonard Michaels (traduit de l'américain par Céline Leroy pour les éditions Christian Bourgois, disponible en format poche.) - New York, les années sex & drugs. Elle est cinglée, il veut être écrivain. Leonard Michaels revient sur sa relation passionnelle avec sa première femme. Un texte court, et fort.

about Leonard Michaels (from The New York Times) : Himself the son of Polish Jewish immigrants, Michaels was born in 1933 (the same year as Roth) and grew up on the Lower East Side. Until he was 6 he spoke only Yiddish. His mother bought a complete set of Charles Dickens. “If you can imagine a little boy ... listening to his mother, who can hardly speak English, reading Dickens hour after hour in the most extraordinary accent, it might help account for my ear,” Michaels recalled. 
Jusqu'à l'âge de 6 ans, Leonard Michaels ne parlait que yiddish. Sa maman, émigrée juive polonaise, se débrouille comme elle peut en anglais. Un jour, elle achète l'intégrale des oeuvres de Dickens, et se met à les lui lire avec l'accent qu'on imagine.

a set of knives (l'amour, en théorie / love, in theory) +1

Girls Just Want To Have Fun, Cyndi Lauper 

Anna Valenn, Le Blog

Whenever Richard meets his high school friends, people he pretended to know because friends were necessary as clothes - they made it less embarrassing to go out in public - he feels a twinge of self-consciousness, an embarrassed moment when he finds himself wondering what they know about his life now. It's not that he's ashamed about the fact that he is gay, quite so the contrary, he imagines rather fatuously that his preference marks him out, makes him part of a lineage of Baldwin, and Wilde, Shakespeare and Socrates, confirms some long-held but vaguely and never quite articulated sense that he is different from the others, born for some remarkable end, which he is only now beginning to suspect he is not.

In the psychology textbooks he had read during his medical training, he recognised this as a Napoleonic Complex, but nevertheless, the feeling has remained, haunting him, especially now when the first blush of youth has passed and his life is rusted with the emotional potholes that soon become one's path in life, and he can no longer imagine himself as anything other than what he is now - a respectable gay radiologist  with a handsome husband, a thirty-year mortgage, and a stable, loving, monogamous relationship from which he sometimes strays.

It is not embarrassment then, but something more like shyness that he feels at the prospect that once again, as throughout his schooling, people might imagine that they know him and are wrong. It's not as if he isn't out to his family, they have absorbed the news like leukocytes massing over a foreign body, surrounding and making it their own. They have produced from the bourgeois surplus of their lives an excess of enthusiasm for Brian. Holiday cards come addressed to them both, as do invitations to Thanksgiving, a set of knives, his and his bath towels, flannel sheets printed with cartoon barnyard animals.

Love, In Theory by E.J. Levy  / L'amour, en théorie traduction Céline Leroy pour les éditions Rivages - A set of 10 short stories about love and relationships. Smart, tender and funny : enjoyable!

Recueil de nouvelles bien plus amusant à lire, et matière à réflexion bien plus subtile qu'un tas de self-help books, manuels de conseils en management de l'amour et des sentiments.

go go go grow grow grow! (la constellation du chien / the dog stars) +1

Finding Beauty, Craig Armstrong

Anna Valenn aime les +1ers romans

J'ai un voisin. Un seul. Nous deux sur un aérodrome de campagne à quelques kilomètres des montagnes. Un terrain de préparation au brevet où ils ont construit quelques maisons pour ceux qui n'arrivaient pas à dormir loin de leur petit avion, comme les golfeurs qui passent leur vie sur un golf. Bangley, c'est le nom inscrit sur les papiers de son vieux pick-up qui ne roule désormais plus. Bruce Bangley. Je les ai déterrés de la boîte à gants alors que je cherchais un manomètre que je puisse garder avec moi dans la Bête. Une adresse à Wheat Ridge. Mais je ne l'appelle jamais par son nom, à quoi bon, on n'est que tous les deux. Rien que nous sur un rayon d'au moins treize kilomètres ce qui représente la distance de plainee jusqu'à la lisière des bois de genevrier au pied de la montagne. Je m'en tiens à Hé ho.

Premier roman de Peter Heller, The Dog Stars / La Constellation du chien, merveilleuse traduction de Céline Leroy, belle belle  écriture sensible, pour les éditions ACTES SUD (aussi en format poche). - Dans une Amérique post-apocalyptique, une histoire de survie et d'amitié et d'amour, écrite dans une langue à forte personnalité.

I just say, Hey. Above the juniper is oak brush then black timber. Well, brown. Beetle killed and droughted. A lot of it standing dead now, just swaying like a thousand skeletons, sighing like a thousand ghosts, but not all. There are patches of green woods, and I am their biggest fan. I root for them out here on the plain. Go Go Go Grow Grow Grow! That's our fight song. I yell it out the window as I fly low over. The green patches are spreading year by year. Life is tenacious if you give it one little bit of encouragement. I could swear they hear me. They wave back, wave their feathery arms back and forth down low by their sides, they remind me of women in kimonos. Tiny steps or no steps, wave wave hands at your sides.

et bam ! bang! (peindre, pêcher & laisser mourir / the painter)

Folsom Prison Blues, Johnny Cash

Anna Valenn / VO

Her hand stirred, woke up. Crept stealthily up under the loose leg of the shorts, worked inward, found me. I don't wear underwear unless it's like some formal event.

My dick was as surprised as I was. Kind of embarrassed. She brushed it with the curled backs of her fingers then pounced. Squeezed and tapped. Amazing how fast an embarrassed cock, one with ethics, social sensibilities and all sorts of reasons to just stay home, amazing how fast it can forget everything and plunge for the prize at a hundred miles an hour. Must be how a venerable, canny trout feels when it triggers on an elk hair caddis - somewhere in its pea brain it knows, knows, this is probably not a good idea, but Fuck it. Also, she was- what? Ten years older than Alce would be, but still, she was young. I shuddered. She- It wasn't right. Any of it.

"Uhh," I said...

"I want you to see me naked. No painting. A person seeing another person."

"Uhh," I said. "I haven't had much luck lately."

"You don't need luck, dummy. I just want you to look at me. C'mere."

She gave the head one more friendly squeeze and took my hand and led me through the screen door into the bedroom.

The Painter, Peter Heller / PEINDRE, PÊCHER & LAISSER MOURIR, trad. de l'américain par Céline Leroy, pour les éditions Actes Sud, en format poche Babel. - Roman d'évasion. Issu d'une famille de bûcherons, Jim Stegner est un peintre coté, pêcheur de poissons, et justicier ardent. Vue d'ici, histoire assez improbable, servie par une écriture magnétique, bien joliment traduite.

Sa main a remué, s'est réveillée. S'est faufilée furtivement sous la jambe ample du short, s'est frayé un chemin, m'a trouvé moi. Je ne porte pas de sous-vêtements à moins d'une occasion formelle.

Ma queue était aussi surprise que moi. Un peu  gênée.  Sofia l'a effleurée du revers de la main avant de s'engager. Elle a serré, donné de petites tapes. C'est fascinant, vraiment 

fascinant de voir combien une queue gênée, avec une éthique, des sensibilités sociales et toutes sortes de raisons de rester chez elle, peut tout oublier d'un coup et se précipiter vers le gros lot à cent mille à l'heure. C'est ce que doit ressentir une  truite noble et futée quand elle gobe une mouche en  poils d'élan - quelque part dans son cerveau gros comme un petit pois, elle sait, elle sait, que ce n'est sans doute pas une bonne idée, mais tant pis. Et bam ! Sans parler que Sofia avait... quoi ? Dix ans de plus que l'âge d'Alce si elle avait été vivante, mais quand même, ça faisait jeune. J'ai frissonné. Elle... ce n'était pas bien. Rien de tout ça ne l'était.

"Hum," ai-je dit.

"Je veux que tu me voies nue. Sans tableau. Un être humain qui regarde un autre être  humain."

"Hum. Je n'ai pas eu beaucoup de chance ces derniers temps." 

"Tu n'as pas besoin de chance, idiot. Je veux juste que tu me regardes. Viens là."

Elle a donné une pression supplémentaire au gland, puis m'a pris par la main et m'a conduit dans la chambre.

celine

On The Road Again, Willie Nelson
Anna Valenn / VO

Celine Watkins was a private eye. It was an odd vocation for someone in the Social Register who had grown up partly in Paris, partly in New York. She may have been the only PI on earth whose father had been a partner at Morgan's in France during the war. The only working PI who had come to New York city when she was seven and attended the Brearley School for girls on the Upper East Side, and then Sarah Lawrence. Where she studied art, and at twenty-one spent a year back in Paris, where she apprenticed with an expressionist and was proposed to by a duke. 

Reading  Celine by Peter Heller was fun (more later - when  published in France, translated by Céline Leroy)

"What good is a gun if you don't load it, Pete? Heavens."