Columbia University Press

This week Columbia University Press goes Badiou! Our featured books are The Incident at Antioch/L’Incident d’Antioche: A Tragedy in Three Acts / Tragédie en trois actes and Plato’s Republic by Alain Badiou, both translated by Susan Spitzer with introductions by Kenneth Reinhard. In today’s post, Ward Blanton discusses the importance of The Incident at Antioch in “rethinking … those old, old questions about ‘Jerusalem and Athens’ which seem to lodge so naturally around the figure of Paul.”

Professor Blanton is a Reader in Biblical Cultures & European Thought in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Kent. Among other books and collections, he spearheaded Columbia’s translation of Stanislas Breton’s A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul. His next book, A Materialism for the Masses: Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life, is in press with Columbia’s series Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture.

Paula Versus the New Philosophers, or, Incident in Beijing

Ward Blanton, University of Kent

I’m not sure whether others have been struck by some of the public interactions of Alain Badiou and Simon Critchley, interactions which invariably start to circulate around the question of whether or how political creation relates to political disappointment. The more the matter is tabled the more memory of older conflicts—for and against Kant, for and against Levinas, or for and against a Lutheran inflection of newness and identity within the Pauline legacy—begin to churn toward the surface. I confess I like such moments as we continue to struggle with how we imagine or conceptualize the political—as we speculate on our own political chances. As if to stir gently what has always for me been a pleasing pot, I could begin by naming a disappointment I have undergone in relation to that remarkable play, The Incident at Antioch. Above all, I was sorry when I realized we couldn’t include portions of it in our Paul and the Philosophers (Fordham, 2013). True enough, it didn’t make any sense to publish a short selection of Susan Spitzer’s beautiful translation at the very moment that the entire play would become available… but for my disappointment logistics are generally beside the point entirely! In truth, I was disappointed that I would no longer have a great excuse to say there what I really wanted to say about Badiou’s play, namely, that I think The Incident at Antioch is one of the most important contemporary spurs for a rethinking of those old, old questions about ‘Jerusalem and Athens’ which seem to lodge so naturally around the figure of Paul.
(more…)

This week Columbia University Press goes Badiou! Our featured books are The Incident at Antioch/L’Incident d’Antioche: A Tragedy in Three Acts / Tragédie en trois actes and Plato’s Republic by Alain Badiou, translated by Susan Spitzer with introductions by Kenneth Reinhard. In this post, Susan Spitzer discusses the experience of translating two very different works by Badiou.

Translating Alain Badiou’s The Incident at Antioch and Plato’s Republic
Susan Spitzer

Although the translator’s initial encounter with the foreign-language text, to which so much time will be devoted, is not often discussed, I doubt I’ll ever forget the heart-sinking feeling I had on first opening Alain Badiou’s L’Incident d’Antioche. The play was utterly different from anything I’d read before, and translating it, I knew immediately, would be a daunting task. As I later remarked in my Preface to the translation, “The Incident at Antioch is characterized by a rich linguistic mélange, a virtual kaleidoscope of styles and genres: poetic or highly elevated literary language, language borrowed directly from the Bible or with religious overtones, pompous rhetoric, made-up proverbs, everyday French that often tends towards the colloquial, if not at times the vulgar, all overlain with the remnants of a certain Marxist vocabulary or with terminology bearing the stamp of Badiou’s own philosophical œuvre, and studded with allusions to, or quotations from, Marx and Engels, Goethe, Shakespeare, Racine, La Fontaine, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Greek mythology, along with myriad references to the contemporary world.”

Fortunately for me, Badiou was (and still is) a regular visitor to Los Angeles, so I was able to corral him into assisting me with the translation issues that confronted me at every turn. Most of the time, thanks to his generosity and patience, I would come away from these sessions relieved to have finally (or so I hoped) understood what was meant. But on one occasion he was of no help at all. Expecting a simple answer to my query about the source of certain lines in Act I that he had enclosed in quotation marks, I was surprised to hear him say, “No, no, it’s not a citation; it’s just the characters reciting their lines in a sort of chorus.” My intuition told me otherwise, but what is a translator to do when the author explicitly tells her she is over-reaching? The answer, it now seems obvious, was: Google! I entered one French phrase after another into the search engine, only to come up empty-handed. I then played around with the lines a bit, in case Badiou hadn’t followed the exact order of words in what I was still convinced was a citation. No luck. Next I tried numerous versions of my own tentative translation of the phrases or lines. Finally, when I was almost ready to concede defeat, I hit the jackpot: the lines, somewhat altered, were from The German Ideology! No one was more surprised, or pleased, I hasten to add, than Badiou himself when I apprised him of this. He had simply forgotten, having written the play some twenty-odd years before, about his own idiosyncratic use of Marx and Engels in this one particular scene.

Translating his Plato’s Republic was a different experience altogether. No dread on first perusing the text; on the contrary, irrepressible laughter. I knew from the outset that the book, a sparkling theatrical dialogue interspersed with novel-like narrative passages, would be a real romp for a literary translator. Not that there weren’t thorny passages – when Badiou’s mathematics met Plato’s, for example, or when the umpteenth appearance of “ce qui de l’Être s’expose à la pensée” (“that which of Being is exposed to thought”? “that aspect of Being which is exposed to thought”? “that of Being which is exposed to thought”?) made me tear my hair out – but overall it was a sheer delight to be part of the process of what was then a still-unfolding work. Badiou would send me each chapter when he finished it, and I would eagerly await the next installment to see what remarkable changes he had wrought on Plato’s immortal work. After receiving his blessing for the American-English slant I was determined to give the translation, I felt free to sprinkle the text with slang, where I deemed appropriate, and even the odd Yiddishism (“these vacationing culture-vultures, these mid-summer mavens of the minor arts”). Socrates, or at least this thoroughly contemporary version of him, was, needless to say, very philosophical about it all. I’m now looking forward excitedly to meeting up with him again sometime soon in the screenplay Badiou is currently writing about the life of Plato.

Copyright 2013 by Susan Spitzer

This week Columbia University Press goes Badiou! Our featured books are The Incident at Antioch/L’Incident d’Antioche: A Tragedy in Three Acts / Tragédie en trois actes and Plato’s Republic by Alain Badiou, translated by Susan Spitzer with introductions by Kenneth Reinhard. Today, we have an excerpt from the introduction to The Incident at Antioch, in which Reinhard discusses Badiou’s under-appreciated literary side and puts The Incident at Antioch in context in the development of Badiou’s political and philosophical ideas.

The Incident at Antioch, by Alain Badiou by Columbia University Press

This week Columbia University Press goes Badiou! Our featured books are The Incident at Antioch/L’Incident d’Antioche: A Tragedy in Three Acts / Tragédie en trois actes and Plato’s Republic by Alain Badiou, translated by Susan Spitzer with introductions by Kenneth Reinhard.

Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of Badiou’s life, works, and particularly The Incident at Antioch/L’Incident d’Antioche and Plato’s Republic, on our Twitter feed, and on our Facebook page. We are also offering a FREE copy of the book to the winner of our Book Giveaway.

To enter our Book Giveaway, simply e-mail lf2413@columbia.edu with your name and preferred mailing address. We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

Set in the turbulent years of the transition from the shogunate to the Meiji Restoration, Kiku’s Prayer embodies themes central to Endō Shūsaku’s work, including religion, modernization, and the endurance of the human spirit. Yet this novel is much more than a historical allegory. It acutely renders one woman’s troubled encounter with passion and spirituality at a transitional time in her life and in the history of her people. A renowned twentieth-century Japanese author, Endō wrote from the perspective of being both Japanese and Catholic. His work is often compared with that of Graham Greene, who himself considered Endō one of the century’s finest writers. Today we have an excerpt from the first chapter of Kiku’s Prayer.

Kiku's Prayer: A Novel, by Endo Shusaku by Columbia University Press

This week our featured book is Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo by Mark C. Taylor. Remember to enter our Book Giveaway to win a FREE copy of Rewiring the Real. Today, the last day of our giveaway and blog promotion for Rewiring the Real, we have a special interview between Mark C. Taylor and one of the authors featured in Rewiring the Real, Mark Danielewski. In this interview, Professor Taylor and Danielewski discuss the influence of film and technology on House of Leaves. The entire interview can be found on the CUP website.

Mark Taylor: All right, let’s talk a little bit about various kinds of technologies and your work. Film obviously pervades your work in a variety of ways. Indeed, House of Leaves is modeled, among many other things, on a horror film, in certain ways. Only Revolutions is something like a road movie through American history. You grew up with a filmmaker as a father. You studied film at USC. Can you talk a little bit about the intersection of film in your writing and how film has shaped the way you think about writing?

M. Danielewski: I was raised by parents who made sure that we were watching movies in our basement. My father would bring home 16 mm prints of films by Kubrick, Welles, Ford and Sturges. I would have to change the reels.

Between reels, there was a discussion about what the movie was about. Some of my friends, who thought they were just there for movie night, would suddenly hear my father’s voice asking, “What is the political angle of this shot?”

My father would talk about choices – of color, costume, angles, camera movement, how a scene was constructed, the grammar of crossing the line or not crossing the line, the kind of equipment used. So, I was very fortunate to internalize that.

I’m always a little hesitant about terms like “experimental” and “avant-garde,” because I feel like so much of what I’m doing is built on what so many profound visualists were already doing. I mean, I’m not the first one to move text around.

But I think one little addition that I’ve been steadily working on is applying to text the grammatical laws of how we see things, in a very specific and limited way. So, there’s a way of leading the eye to a certain place, and then when you change the shot – or the page – if the eye is continuing to where it expects to continue, it’s actually kind of relaxing and pleasing.

But for action scenes, or scenes that have more intensity – you can think of A Touch of Evil at the very end where Heston is following Orson Welles – the camera angles are all over the place, but the eye is specifically being led to different corners of the frame, so that when the sequence is then cut, the eye has to travel from the right side – the upper right corner to the lower left corner.

So immediately, there’s that sense of searching for where the thread is continuing. By applying that to text and to the page, it could actually intensify the emotional experience of the reader.

A simple example is in the labyrinth chapter of House of Leaves. It intentionally slows you down. It confuses you. It disorients you. Then the following chapter has only a few sentences per page, and suddenly, you’re reading 100 pages. No matter who you are, there’s something very satisfying about reading 100 pages in a few minutes

With Only Revolutions, it very much uses light the way James Turrell uses light. It’s about seeing even if there are very few vocabulary words that are even part of the family of seeing. Colors, with the exception of two, are not present – the word “seeing” is not present. The way the world is perceived through the eye is not there . . . So that particular book floats somewhere between light and music.

Mark Taylor: I want to come back to this whole issue of design, which is crucial in this, but there’s another question on various technologies. Film’s not the only technology that’s important for you in many ways. I mean, House of Leaves began, and continues, online. It’s a text that involves not only a house that’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, but it isn’t contained between the covers, as it were. Your new work – we’ll talk about that more later – you’ve described as modeled as something like a TV series. One might say that part of what you’re exploring is what it means to write and read in an age of electronic reproduction, in certain ways. That you are really asking questions about the ways in which these visual technologies transform the ways in which we read and write. Is that something that’s self-consciously in your mind as you –

M. Danielewski: Well, everything transforms us, right? My father said something that was very important, and it was one of those early lessons I’ve held onto, and I see no reason to deviate from it, which is – imagine first, then find the technology that helps you embody that imaginative moment.

So I always start with wandering in my head. I start with a pencil and paper. I start scribbling. I start toying with different things, using my hands, whatever it is. And only then do I start to conceive of the software, the technology, that can be used to tell that story.

[…]

Mark Taylor: Can you talk a little bit about – because that’s an exceptional process, when you look at the complexity and the subtlety of a lot of this design work. So, you delivered to them, more or less, copy-ready text?

M. Danielewski: Yes. And it’s a cycle. While I’m conceiving something, I’m also educating myself on what, for example, CS6 or other various technologies can do. So, of course, that’s going to cycle back into my imagination and begin to influence me in certain ways.

This week our featured book is Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo by Mark C. Taylor. Remember to enter our Book Giveaway to win a FREE copy of Rewiring the Real. Today, we have a guest post from Professor Taylor, in which he discusses Rewiring the Real, Refiguring the Spiritual, and Recovering Place, and tells why Rewiring the Real might have begun, “Philosophy has lost its way.”

“Philosophy has lost its way”
Mark C. Taylor

Rewiring the Real is the second book in a trilogy that includes Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy (2012), and Recovering Place: Reflections on Stone Hill (2014). Refiguring the Spiritual begins, “Art has lost its way;” Rewiring the Real might have begun, “Philosophy has lost its way.” During the latter half of the twentieth-century, art and money entered into an unholy alliance in which artists eager to cash in on new money are selling works to financiers who resell them in hedge funds and private equity funds designed for ultra-rich investors looking for new ways to “diversify their portfolios with asset-backed securities.” While artists are trying to become Wall Street players, philosophers are trying to become scientists. As their work becomes more abstract and highly specialized, philosophers become less concerned about human problems and real world issues.

For art and philosophy to recover their missions, art must become more philosophical and philosophy must become more artistic in and through a rethinking of the interrelationship of art, philosophy and religion. This will require not only a change in substance but, more important, a change in style. This is not an original idea but can be traced to the publication of Kant’s pivotal Critique of Judgment (1790). It is no exaggeration to insist that this work has directly and indirectly shaped all philosophical, theological, artistic and, indeed, cultural discussions and production for more than two centuries. Kant provided the definition of art that became normative for Modernism. During the decade of the 1790s, discussions about Kant’s critical philosophy among a remarkable group of philosophers and writers, including, inter alia, Hegel, Schelling, Schiller, Schleiermacher, Hölderlin, Novalis, and the Schlegel brothers, led to a reconfiguration of the relationship among philosophy, art and religion. While leading thinkers in the eighteenth century had interpreted religion in either epistemological or ethical terms, writers, who gathered in Jena during the seminal decade of the 1790s, reconceived religion in terms of art and aesthetics. In their works, art displaced religion as the primary means for the exploration and expression of religious and spiritual concerns. Some of philosophers who have been most influential recently – Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida – are as much artists as philosophers. But they have all remained writers, whose works are literary or even poetic. Some of the leading twentieth-century visual artists – Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian, Malevich, Rothko, Reinhardt, Newman, Pollack – insist that art has a spiritual dimension.

Refiguring the Spiritual begins with a critique of what I describe as the “financialization of art.” What Andy Warhol is to consumer capitalism, Jeff Koons is to financial capitalism. But there is an importance difference between Andy and his epigone Jeff. While Warhol’s ironic detachment leaves the viewer uncertain whether he is criticizing or endorsing consumerism, there is no ambiguity about Koons. He eagerly endorses practices of the Wall Street wizards who pay excessive prices for eye candy intended to make them feel good. Beuys, Barney, Turrell and Goldsworthy reject this tendency in contemporary art. Each in his own way extends the preoccupations of the modern avant-garde art by drawing on different spiritual traditions (Beuys, Anthroposophy; Barney, Celtic and Masonic mythology; Turrell, Quakerism and Hopi myths and rituals; Goldsworthy, Celtic mythology). Their works are difficult and demanding – they cannot be consumed quickly but take time to appreciate. Though many of their works are expensive to create, they cannot be easily commodified. The primary purpose of their works is not to market them for a profit but to create the opportunity for the cultivation of personal and, by extension, social transformation.

Rewiring the Real extends my analysis from art to literature by analyzing one novel by four important writers: William Gaddis, The Recognitions; Richard Powers, Plowing the Dark; Mark Danielewski, House of Leaves; Don DeLillo, Underworld. Though these writers are very different, they share an appreciation for the ways in which recent technological innovations (Gaddis, electronic media and communications; Powers, virtual reality; Danielewski, Internet and World Wide Web; DeLillo, nuclear power and global financial networks) harbor a latent spirituality in an era that is too often labeled secular and posthuman. Rather than merely critically analyzing these novels, I attempt to engage the authors in a conversation that expands the inquiry beyond the boundaries each writer defines. As these writers begin to “talk” among themselves, we begin to see how their work can help readers understand the ways in which the very sense of reality is morphing in the global world of financial capitalism.

If style is substance and substance is style, then writing must change. In previous works (e.g., Imagologies: Media Philosophy, Grave Matters, Mystic Bones, Hiding, and Motel Réal: Las Vegas, Nevada), I have used different styles of writing and visual design to convey the ideas I am attempting to express. This ongoing experiment continues with this trilogy: Refiguring the Spiritual uses images and design to fashion arguments and Rewiring the Real includes accounts of some of my own artwork as well as my first attempt at writing fiction. Recovering Place will be my most ambitious experiment so far. In this multifaceted work, I take philosophy off the page by creating land art and sculpture (metal, rock, stone and bone) in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, where I live. In addition to a series of aphoristic reflections about the importance of recovering place in a world that is becoming ever more virtual, the book also includes original photographs I have taken of my art in its natural setting. As Kierkegaard, insisted long ago, many of the most important things in life can only be communicated indirectly. I would add to this that there are things that we can apprehend but not precisely comprehend. Through stylistic innovation and artistic design, I have attempted to create performative works that work at multiple levels to transform apprehension as well as introduce new ways of understanding the world in which we dwell.

Mark C. Taylor
Stone Hill

This week our featured book is Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo by Mark C. Taylor. Remember to enter our Book Giveaway to win a FREE copy of Rewiring the Real. Today, we have a fascinating Q&A with Professor Taylor, in which he delves into the relationships between art, technology, and religion he explores in greater detail in Rewiring the Real, and discusses the role of philosophy in a changing world.

Question: Rewiring the Real is part two of a trilogy, the first part of which is Refiguring the Spiritual. Both of these two works discuss important aspects of today’s society through analysis of a single work by important modern cultural figures (novelists and artists respectively). What led you to this conceit?

Mark C. Taylor: Let me begin by placing these two books within the larger trajectory of my work. For almost four decades, I have been developing an analysis of the interplay between religion and multiple aspects of culture. As I explain in After God, religion is not limited to what transpires in churches, synagogues, temples and mosques but pervades all aspects of society and culture. Unfortunately, the hyper-specialization and professionalization of the university discourage the multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural analyses that are, in my judgment, essential to effective critical inquiry.

In a series of books dating back to the late 1980s – Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion; Imagologies: Media Philosophy; About Religion: Economies of Faith in Virtual Culture; The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey and the Ends of Representation; Hiding; Grave Matters and Mystic Bones – I have explored the relationship of religion and philosophy to art. In some of these books, I use design to develop my argument. More recently, I have begun to expand philosophy beyond the printed page by creating artworks in different media – video games, photography. I am also engaged in creating art. In 2002, I had a major exhibition entitled Grave Matters as Mass MOCA and I am now engaged in a major land art and sculpture in the Berkshires.

There is also an historical context for this work. During the crucial decade of the 1790s, art and literature began to displace religion as the means for expressing religious and spiritual concerns. Though rarely acknowledged, it is not possible to understand many major twentieth-century artists and writers without an appreciation for their spiritual preoccupations. Refiguring the Spiritual and Rewiring the Real attempt to rectify this oversight.
(more…)

This week our featured book is Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo by Mark C. Taylor. Remember to enter our Book Giveaway to win a FREE copy of Rewiring the Real.

In Rewiring the Real, Professor Taylor examines four novels–William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, Richard Powers’s Plowing the Dark, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, and Don DeLillo’s Underworld–in order to reveal the similarities of the roles of religion and technology in modern culture. Check out our new Pinterest board focusing on Professor Taylor’s work, and on Rewiring the Real in particular, to learn more! Over the next few days, we’ll be adding more quotes from *Rewiring the Real*, so Like our board to keep up!

Here’s a couple of quick excerpts from *Rewiring the Real* on *House of Leaves* and *Underworld*:

“HOW Danielewski writes is as intriguing as WHAT he writes. Freely mixing high and low culture, he weaves together literary theory, architectural theory, film theory, philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis, modern and postmodern art and literature, detective fiction, and punk rock to create a book that baffles as much as it dazzles.” — Mark C. Taylor, Rewiring the Real

“What DeLillo understood before most others was that the Cold War–even the balance of terror–had been a stabilizing arrangement. The dissolution of the Soviet Union did not insure a secure world governed by one superpower but ushered in a radically unstable world in which power is decentralized, distributed, and dispersed in ways that make it much harder to identify, contain, and control individuals and states and nonstate agents.” — Mark C. Taylor, Rewiring the Real

This week our featured book is Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo by Mark C. Taylor. Today, we have an excerpt from “Nexus,” the introduction of Rewiring the Real. Stay tuned for more great content from Mark C. Taylor coming up this week, and remember to enter our Book Giveaway to win a FREE copy of Rewiring the Real.

Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don Delillo by Columbia University Press

This week our featured book is Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo by Mark C. Taylor.

Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of Rewiring the Real here on our blog, our Twitter feed, and Facebook page. We are also offering a FREE copy of the book to the winner of our Book Giveaway.

To enter our Book Giveaway, simply e-mail lf2413@columbia.edu with your name and preferred mailing address. We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

Gore Vidal, one of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century, passed away yesterday. In honor of his productive and iconoclastic career, we’d like to share a chapter from Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain, in which Italo Calvino discusses the creativity and imagination that characterized Vidal’s work.

Italo Calvino: Imagining Vidal

“I was just awfully good at technical philosophy, and it was the first thing I’d ever been really good at, and so everybody, including me, anticipated I’d make it a career. But it sort of emptied out for me somewhere around age twenty.”—David Foster Wallace

Fate, Time and Language: An Essay in Free Will is David Foster Wallace’s now-famous undergraduate thesis in philosophy. Written while at Amherst, the work challenges the philosopher Richard Taylor’s logical argument regarding human beings’ control over the future.

As James Ryerson points out in his introduction (read an excerpt here), for a period Wallace considered both fiction and philosophy as possible future careers. After receiving his MFA, Wallace was accepted and enrolled in the PhD. program in philosophy at Harvard. Realizing that pursuing philosophy would not allow him to continue writing and grappling with depression, Wallace abandoned his formal pursuit of philosophy.

However, as Ryerson points out in his introduction, philosophy would “forever loom large in his life” and work. Ryerson writes,

In addition to having been formative for his cast of mind, philosophy would repeatedly crop up in the subject matter of his writing. His essay “Authority and American Usage,” about the so-called prescriptivist/descriptivist debate among linguists and lexicographers, features an exegesis of Wittgenstein’s argument against the possibility of a private language. In Everything and More, his book about the history of mathematical ideas of infinity, his guiding insight is that the disputes over mathematical procedures were ultimately debates about metaphysics—about “the ontological status of math entities.” His article “Consider the Lobster” begins as a journalistic report from the annual Maine Lobster Festival but soon becomes a philosophical meditation on the question, “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” This question leads Wallace into discussions about the distinction between pain and suffering; about the relation between ethics and (culinary) aesthetics; about how we might understand cross-species moral obligations; and about the “hard-core philosophy”—the “metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics”—required to determine the principles that allow us to conclude even that other humans feel pain and have a legitimate interest in not doing so.

Taking their cue from The Novelist’s Lexicon: Writers on the Words That Define Their Work, The National Post asked Yann Martel and a cross-section of Canadian writers to choose a word that “opens a door to their work.”

Words selected include: almost, apocalypse, but, centaur, dbaajimoweonini, detergent, mirth, rationality, revolution, and tree. Here’s Peter Darbyshire, author of The Warhol Gang on his word, apocalypse:

Apocalypse is the narrative and social arc of all my work. The inevitable destruction of the characters, of their world, of our world. The end of meaning. But also a search for new meaning in the wreckage. The explosion of the novel itself as I try to find a new form for each work, a form that hasn’t already been done to genre death. The destruction of the writer, as I try to annihilate my past and reimagine myself with each work. But apocalypse also means revelations. I like to think of my books as MRI scans of the present, revealing the tumours hidden in our fantasies. Obituaries of the future. Also, my next book is called The Apocalypse Corpse.

For a much shorter entry there is Yann Martel’s word, up: “I [want] to let the meaning of Up be born in the reader’s mind.”

The Los Angeles Times book blog Jacket Copy called The Novelist’s Lexicon: Writers on the Words That Define Their Work “a fascinating and strangely disciplined set of responses” to the question posed to writers to find one word that creates a window into their work.

The book includes pieces from Annie Proulx, Jonathan Lethem, Tariq Ali, Adam Thirlwell, Rick Moody, Dennis Cooper, James Meek, Daniel Mendelsohn and National Book Award winner Colum McCann. Jacket Copy also excerpted the contribution from Israeli humorist and filmmaker Etgar Keret, who chose the word “balagan.”

Balagan, a word that migrated to the Hebrew language from Yiddish, means “total chaos.” But this word is unique because, contrary to the implied negative value the concept has in other languages, the subtext of balagan is positive. True, that positiveness is not overt — a bit like a proud parent trying to hide a smile from a mischief-making son — but it is completely there. Yet chaos for a society that is itself full of balagan is nothing less than proof of vitality itself.

For more on the book, you can also read Jonathan Lethem’s piece on furniture.

In The Novelist’s Lexicon: Writers on the Words That Define Their Work, writers from around the world were asked to choose one word that opens a door to their work.

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll post some author’s word choices. First up is Jonathan Lethem, who chose “furniture” and here’s why: (And to browse more of the book)

FURNITURE

However appalling to consider, however tedious to enact, every novel requires furniture, whether it is to be named or unnamed, for the characters will be unable to remain in standing positions for the duration of the story. For that matter, when night falls—whether it is depicted or occurs between chapters—characters must be permitted to sleep in beds, to rinse their faces in sinks, to glance into mirrors, and so on. (It is widely believed that after Borges, mirrors are forbidden as symbols in novels. However, it is cruel to deny the characters in a novel sight of their own faces; hence mirrors must be provided.) These rules apply no matter how tangential the novel’s commitment to so-called realism, no matter how avant-garde or capricious, no matter how revolutionary or bourgeois. Furniture may be explicit or implicit, visible or invisible; may bear the duty of conveying social and economic detail or be merely cursorily functional; may be stolen or purchased, borrowed, destroyed, replaced; may be sprinkled with crumbs of food or splashed with drink; may remain immaculate; may be transformed into artworks by aspiring bohemians; may be inherited by characters from uncles who die before the action of the novel begins; may reward careful inspection of the cushions and seams for loose change that has fallen from pockets; may be collapsible, portable; may even be dragged into the house from the beach where it properly belongs—but, in any event, it must absolutely exist. Anything less is cruelty.

Last week, critic Mark Athitakis’s blog American Fiction Notes featured an interview with Kristiaan Versluys author of Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel.

In the interview, Versluys discusses some of the writers included in his study, including Don DeLillo, Art Spiegelman, Jonathan Safran Foer, and John Updike. He also considers the novels in light of the ways in which novels grapple with traumatic events.

Here is an excerpt from the interview:

Q: Critics have been largely (though not uniformly) unkind to the books you discuss, and you elaborate on some of the reasons why. Writing about Falling Man, you note that “the characters are so thin that their whole existence boils down to mere nomenclature” and that “no narrative momentum is allowed to develop.” You note the “flatness” of Grandpa’s character in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and the “soppy happy ending” of Terrorist. But you also point out many rewarding characteristics of these novels that you believe critics missed. Do you feel the negative critical reaction to these books is related more to their unconventional structures and approaches, or more to the way they are, as you write, “subversive of nationalistic imperatives”?

KV: Let’s be clear about one point: the great September 11 novel has not been written yet and maybe it never will. To a point, the negative critical reactions are justified and understandable. No writer has yet been able to capture the magnitude of the event or the shock it produced. The unsayable remains unsaid. The negative critical reactions might, therefore, be understood as the result of disappointment. Here is an event that cries out for a definitive reading and it is not forthcoming. Nonetheless, there is much more to these books than some reviewers have spotted. My study is a tribute to the few writers who have been courageous enough to tackle an impossible topic. Even though they succeeded only partially, there is much insight to be gained from their efforts.