Month / May 2009

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Javier Calvo and Mara Faye Lethem

Javier Calvo and Mara Faye Lethem both appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #289.

Javier Calvo is the author of Wonderful World. Mara Faye Lethem is the translator.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Considering the unseen cantaloupe.

Guests: Javier Calvo and Mara Faye Lethem

Subjects Discussed: TK

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

javiercalvoCorrespondent: I must ask then, Mara Faye, if you had read any other books to get the idiom right in English for this. Because both your translation of this book [Wonderful World] and your translation of Pandora in the Congo strike me as far more specific. It’s almost as if the translation itself can be placed within a neat, genre-specific feel in the prose. And I’m curious if you do it more intuitively or if you actually do, in fact, try and read books surrounding a particular genre or a particular place it might end up. So that it might be more palatable to the English ear.

Lethem: No, I don’t do that. I don’t think that that would be fair to the author. I work with the text. And much more so than the author. Even if he’s in the room next door. Because there are two very separate things. The voice I try to pull from the text itself, not from any other text. Obviously, if the author is working with references — as in Pandora in the Congo, with adventure stories and things like that — it should come through in the original. And so I really try to be as faithful to that as I can. I think a mistake in translation can involve feeling that you know more than the author. It’s like a trap. You think, “Oh, I know what he’s trying to say here.” But you sometimes have to be able to say, “Okay, I can make this choice for him.” Because there’s choices to be made. Definitely. Sometimes, there’s the perfect word. And sometimes there isn’t. You know, there’s no one word that means that in English. But I try to avoid anticipating the author.

Correspondent: But in this case, what did you do to insulate yourself? Because the author here is in the next room. Did you essentially communicate as minimally or as little as possible with Javier? Or what happened here?

Lethem: Oh well, we communicate a lot.

(A noisy siren momentarily interrupts the conversation.)

Lethem: Often about what we’re going to have for lunch. Or who’s going to pick up our daughter from school.

Calvo: I think that the situation where your wife is your translator and you’re living under the same roof — or your husband is the author you’re translating — is a potential nightmare. So it was good that she didn’t really come to me that much or I wasn’t bothering her. And we had some space between us. It’s very easy too to create a professional distance in a question like that. But yeah, it was very good that we didn’t try and work together. And she only came to me when she had an important question or something like that. Because imagine. I think translating your husband’s work might be a pretty good cause for divorce. Potentially.

BSS #289: Javier Calvo and Mara Faye Lethem (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

Review: Drag Me to Hell (2009)

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It cannot be an accident that one of Drag Me to Hell‘s central images involves loan officer Christine Brown eating a whole tub of ice cream without apology. And let’s be honest here. We’ve all been in that spot at some point. Christine, however, is lactose intolerant and she has a weight problem buried in her past. She does not care. She spoons down the ice cream anyway. It’s the ice cream that matters now. And while I don’t know how many uptight critics will declare this film some giant tub of ice cream, I’m here to tell you that Drag Me to Hell is one marvelous movie. It’s a grand and enjoyable gift from Sam Raimi — certainly more generous than his 2000 offering — and far more fun than I could have possibly anticipated. If you’re one of those types who’s forgotten the mad and anarchic joys of eating a whole tub of ice cream, then stick to the condescending remakes or reboots or revivals that are made solely to take away your dollars without granting you that cathartic liberation. (It’s worth noting that this movie does feature quite a lot of characters cavalierly asking for money. Perhaps it’s self-aware.) This movie, on the other hand, made me laugh and grin and holler and chortle like an undisciplined eight-year-old. Not many movies can do that. But this one did.

And it’s because Sam Raimi is clearly a man who loves movies. Not the junk shuttling out of the soulless factories supervised by Michael Bay and McG, but the silly stuff and the thrilling stuff. The loud sounds and spastic images that keep us returning to the movies. Raimi has a sense of humor that might be cruel if it weren’t so innocuously bizarre. The filmmaker who dared to insert a highly amusing and utterly gratuitous cabaret scene in Spider-Man 3 has gone even further here. And trust me: it’s all for the best. Here is a movie that introduces its protagonist stuck in traffic and listening to an elocution tape spouting forth such maxims as “There is no friction with the proper diction.” Here is a movie that features a nosebleed gone awry and gives David Paymer a line that is too goofy to be true. Raimi’s even slapped the old Universal logo from the 1980s at the head of his film. This is how movies used to be and could be again if only we wouldn’t settle for less.

Drag Me to Hell is not so much a return to Raimi’s roots, as some have suggested. It is a movie that successfully combines the eyeball-popping humor of the Evil Dead movies (don’t worry: eyeballs do pop here, despite the PG-13 rating), the fey dissolves of Darkman, the classy visuals of A Simple Plan (the deliberately framed crows are replaced momentarily by a cat’s coy positioning at bottom frame), Raimi’s more naturalistic experiments with actors in The Gift (here anchored by Alison Lohman’s earnest performance), and the empathy of the Spider-Man trilogy (thankfully not so sappy). Raimi, as it turns out, has been itching to give into his id all along. And we’re all the better for it.

If being a wild imp means having a vegetarian consulting a book titled Animal Sacrifices in the Services of Deities, then Raimi will go there. What I love so much about this movie is Raimi’s casual audacity. He’s balanced an earnest romance, some ridiculous and often side-splitting comedy, and some genuine jolts. A movie that dares to throw in so many disparate elements should not work this well. But it works because Raimi very much believes that it can work. And since he’s kept the budget fairly low, he doesn’t have to worry too much about studio interference. He’s given himself a safe place to experiment. But who knew the prototype would roll out like a top-of-the-line model?

“I know this is going to sound weird,” says Christine, “but I want to get my fortune read.” When was the last time you saw a movie in which characters were so straightforward about their oddball dealings with the supernatural? When was the last time in which you saw a filmmaker hold his camera on a staircase for suspense? When was the last time you saw a filmmaker commit himself to Val Lewton’s understanding of shadow over the crass CGI effects that are now de rigueur?

Raimi even subverts the usual gender roles, perhaps to atone for the infamous tree-raping scenes in The Evil Dead. The ledger is now corrected. The men in this movie are often hilariously inept — one whimpers at a diner; another boasts of his coin collection — and the women often kick ass. Raimi even explores cringe domestic comedy during one utterly disastrous dinner scene with the prospective in-laws. A psychic and a professor argue about Jung. The camera whooshes as feverishly as Evil Dead II. And the movie even evokes Tolstoy with its lively ending.

Let me be clear on this. If you do not enjoy this movie, then you simply do not have a soul. Drag Me to Hell is a wild masterpiece. And I don’t think I’ll see another movie this year that’s anywhere near as enjoyable. Sam Raimi has restored my faith in Hollywood movies.

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Arthur Phillips

Arthur Phillips appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #288.

Arthur Phillips is most recently the author of The Song is You.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Reconsidering the playlists and those who play him.

Author: Arthur Phillips

Subjects Discussed: Characters who are enslaved to culture, partisan positions in relation to hoarding facts, being in denial about larger arguments within novels, Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature, aesthetic concerns, muses and playing against reader expectations, the myth of an author’s personal connection, listening to headphones, ghosts and Jeopardy experiences gone awry, personal experience and lies within fiction, speculating on the specific conditions in which a man can be a muse, being a male model and a musician, the myth of writing what you know, getting excited about emotion, the distance required to contend with a fictive location, the wall between the personal and the artistic, the magic souffle, predicting 2009 weather in New York, reading time, the danger of boredom, William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, outlines and improvisation, reinventing the wheel, the little changes within a manuscript vs. changing as a writer, the value of urgency, being a metaphorical roofer and upholsterer, Re-Flex’s “The Politics of Dancing,” and the crazy amounts of money one must pay to republish lyrics.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

arthurphillipsCorrespondent: If we’re talking about time, there’s also the notion of reader’s time. And as a stylist, you have some control over how frequently or how long or how short the reader’s going to turn the page. When I read your book, I found numerous passages when I would slow down. And then when dialogue would bump up, particularly with the scenes with the cop, it then sped up.

Phillips: Right.

Correspondent: And so I’m curious. If time on a structural level was important, I’m curious if there was any importance you placed in terms of thinking of the reader and thinking of this notion of how fast the reader’s going to turn the page?

Phillips: That’s such a great question. And on one hand, I want to say, “Jeez, I wish I had more conscious — and I will vow in the future to have more conscious — understanding of those technical matters.” On the other hand, it seems a little impossible to control. Well, not just a little. It’s entirely impossible. I think any time you start getting into what does the reader or what does a reader expect, react to, experience, you’re doomed. I mean, you’re just — it can’t be. If you have one or ten or a hundred or ten thousand or a hundred million readers, they’re just different. And this is just so obvious that it’s just not saying anything. But it says everything. Because if everybody’s going to have a slightly different reaction, even taking a smaller subset of the people who “like” it, they’re going to all have a different reaction. You can’t plan for them. So the only reader that you can really have much planning for is yourself. At which point, I don’t really have to think very consciously about “I need to speed it up here, I need to slow it down here.” All I have is the feeling of “I’m bored.” And so when I’m writing and I go back and I read the draft, I say, “Oh this is just — I’m just bored.” Something has to happen here that is different from what’s happening. Because I don’t like it. And then at the end of it, when I’ve gone and I’ve done that twenty-five times, and I say, “I like the whole thing,” then it’s done.

Correspondent: Well, to deflate my own interlocutory souffle…

Phillips: (laughs)

Correspondent: I should point out that this may very well be the difference between having lots of dialogue and having lots of imagery. I guess the question here is how intuitive is it really. I mean, when you’re getting lost in a long sentence, whether as a writer or even as a reader, you’re going to be aware of the slowness. Or maybe you’re lost in such a fugue state that there really is no sense of time.

Phillips: Right. I’m reading The Recognitions right now and…

Correspondent: First time?

Phillips: First time.

Correspondent: Oh wow.

Phillips: And I’m having all kinds of temporal feelings about that book as I work with it. There are times when I am lost in a fugue state, although not often enough for my taste. And often I’m feeling, “I think Gaddis was lost in a fugue state. And I just can’t join him for some reason.” I don’t know that it’s just images and dialogue. I think that you can have some very impenetrable, hard-to-wrestle-with dialogue. And actually that’s what brings The Recognitions to mind. Because there are passages. Long passages.

Correspondent: The party scenes, I know.

Phillips: You know, there’s a forty page party scene with almost nothing but dialogue. And you have to go, “Oh wait a minute. Is this the same person who four pages earlier was talking? And where is that in relation to the little girl asking for sleeping pills?” And all the rest of it. So it goes on and on. So you can have some very slow-moving dialogue. And actually I was thinking about Gaddis writing that in ’55, and Nabokov in some period around the same time doing one of his customary unappealing little digs at novels that are all dialogue, and thinking, “I wonder if he read this, looked at it, had any feeling about this, would have included or excluded it from that grouping.” Generally speaking, light dialogue goes faster than description or internal thought. But not necessarily, I guess is the short answer. I could have said “Not necessarily” about fifteen minutes ago.

Correspondent: (laughs) That’s all right.

Phillips: There you go. Just cut it down to the dialogue.

BSS #288: Arthur Phillips (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Sarah Waters II

Sarah Waters appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #287. To listen to our previous interview with Sarah Waters, check out The Bat Segundo Show #37.

Sarah Waters is most recently the author of The Little Stranger.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Creeping into the dark shadows of fabricated identities.

Author: Sarah Waters

Subjects Discussed: Research involving poltergeists, country doctors, and other topics, lingering interests from The Night Watch, Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black, similar story elements across multiple novels, the limited elements of a haunted house story, dashed out four letter words, male consciousness in the postwar age, M.R. James, class relations and entitlement, job security, giant manses as characters, noun-heavy descriptions, science vs. faith, the eleventh-hour patriarchy in The Little Stranger, the value of empathy in relation to uncomfortable character qualities, character names, unintentional symbolism, Gyp the dog as a potential symbol of an Old World attitude, when a friend’s dog becomes menacing, writing about characters who could potentially live in the present time, the burdens of living memory and authenticity, on not drawing from real life, the KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON poster, tackling new genres, the paucity of contemporary ghost stories, and sustaining a cringe-worthy romance.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

sarahwatersWaters: He’s about to turn forty.

Correspondent: He’s about to turn forty. But he’s very coy about this particular age. He’s constantly saying, “Oh, I can’t go up in there. Because I’m too old.” It’s nonsense! You’re forty years old. You could still — today, you could go to the gym.

Waters: Today, you could go to the gym. But of course, in the 1940s, I think being forty was being middle-aged. People were older in their style and, even physically, kind of older. So I was very mindful that he’s of a different generation than Caroline — the daughter. He develops a bit of a romance with Caroline. But he’s definitely on the way into old age. I think that’s part of his problem. He feels that he’s been this boy. This young boy of enormous promise. The working-class boy who really clever people have picked him out, singled him out. He’s actually had all the advantages. But all they’ve done really is to alienate him from his own class. And he’s never really lived up to that promise. And here he is at forty about to enter into the second half of his life, not really having achieved very much. Which is why, I think, his exposure to the Hall is so crucial for him. Because it does open up something for him.

Correspondent: But Seely is older than him. And he doesn’t concern himself with his age.

Waters: Well, everybody’s different. It’s not like — for me, I was very interested in the doctor’s individual take on things. So he is a man who’s slightly apart from his colleagues. He has these quite pleasant colleagues. But they are family men. He’s not. He’s a bachelor. He’s quite a lonely figure really. Which again is why he fastens on to the Hall. Which actually was a problem for bachelor doctors. That people would often leave the family doctor alone. Because they knew that he had his own children, his own wife to take care of, and they’d go to the bachelor doctor. And I think the problem for doctors was that they were at risk for giving too much to their patients. That they had to guard against that. And I think that, to a certain extent, that’s what happens to Dr. Faraday. He gets sucked into this extraordinary Hall with these things going on in it.

BSS #287: Sarah Waters II (Download MP3)

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