Tag Archives: Peter Nadas

Books, Food, General, Theater

Weekend Scatter: blasts from the past

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A recent (completely fictional) email to Art Scatter began: “Sweet Mother of the Muses, can’t you get over the Shakespeare festival already?” Art Scatter was gob-smacked. Over the Shakespeare festival? Who would want to get over the Shakespeare festival? We are just beginning to sharpen our dull thoughts on the subject. We might even go back this fall! When it isn’t so hot and crowded! So, we aren’t promising anything. But we can already feel our collective attention wandering.

According to the advanced metrics generated by the advanced spyware technology affixed to this site, which, by the way, never really add up, we know that more of you are joining us here than ever before. We now may have enough for a couple of tables of bridge! But from those same metrics (don’t you just love how “metrics” gets thrown around willy-nilly these days? When all we need is “numbers”?), though, we have determined that we need to re-sell a few posts that were washed out to sea in the flood of confessions about what books you haven’t read and the thousands of words we have devoted to the Shakespeare festival.

So, hot links to our OWN POSTS!

Peter Nadas We couldn’t be more excited about this Hungarian writer, some of whose work has just been issued in crisp new Picador editions. Maybe all I have to say to this crowd is “Hamlet, people,” because Nadas on theater is such a delight, but there’s even more than theater in Nadas, who is headed for Nobel Valhalla no doubt.

Thoreau and Bellow We don’t often lump Mr. Thoreau out on the pond with Mr. Bellow in hurlyburly Chicago. But you take the dramatics of Mr. Thoreau and the pastoral moments of Mr. Bellow and they sort of meet in the middle.

Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield.

There will we sit upon the rocks
And see the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

OK, that is neither Thoreau nor Bellow, but it IS Marlowe — and we love Marlow, too!

Tolstoy and the price of rice Look, we city folk, for reasons unascertainable but perhaps linked to our constant exposure to pastoral literature as youths, are fascinated with the country, specifically with farming. We know in our bones that something is wrong with our current practices and maybe we even subvert them a little by buying local or husbanding a plot of our own. We aren’t the first to think along these lines, though, not by a longshot.

So, those should keep you busy, yes? While we devise new ways to describe the Oregon Shakespeare Festival or create a forum that might squeeze yet more personal confessions out of you? Cool… By the way: If you want to comment on those posts (and by all means!), you might double back to this post and leave them here…

Barry Johnson, Books, Theater

Three essays by Peter Nadas, two dishes, one table

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A discussion of three essays by Hungarian essayist/novelist/Nobelist-in-waiting Peter Nadas, dealing with the executions of the Ceaucescu’s, the depths of Hamlet (another killer of tyrants) and the knotty language distortions of Soviet Bloc Hungary, plus some related observations.

I picked up Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays by Peter Nadas based on what short story writer Deborah Eisenberg wrote about it in the New York Review of Books. I’m usually not THAT suggestible, but Eisenberg is obviously passionate about Nadas. Here’s what she said about his novel A Book of Memories in that same review: “After finishing the book, I… felt irreversibly altered, as if the author had adjusted, with a set of tiny wrenches, molecular components of my brain.”

I pictured nanobots, each armed with a multi-tool (including a wrench), scurrying about inside my own skull, opening up some gates to allow more neuronal “flow” and shutting down others. (Until this, I had no idea my mind was like an irrigation project.) Would the sensation be “pleasant”? Or is it simply necessary to experience “what it is to feel or think two mutually exclusive things at once,” which is what Eisenberg says Nadas enables us to do. That doesn’t sound SO impressive, as Eisenberg admits, but frankly we don’t expect it in literature, just our confusing lives, and we certainly don’t expect it to be revelatory in the way Nadas is for Eisenberg.

So, I randomly plucked three essays from the set of 9 short stories and 14 essays and sat down to read. I didn’t hear the clanging of nanobots up there, but I think I understand what Eisenberg has on her mind. Nadas possesses a sharp, insistent intellect that he uses to complicate our thinking, to blur our distinctions, to clog our mental templates. He manages the sweet double of demonstrating the muddiness of our intellectual apparatus in a precise and powerful way: He’s clear about the complexity. More important for my humble purposes, though, these three essays, written in 1977, 1986 and 1998, seemed immediately applicable on all sorts of levels, some of which we’ll get into shortly.
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