April 2010 Archives
A new novel hits the bookshelves in Vienna, and the Austrian television network ORF interviews the author on the news. Try getting a novelist interviewed on the evening news in America. Never happen. Besides, we're talking about a book called Manhattan Muffdiver, not exactly a title that U.S. network censors would approve.
It's not altogether surprising that books and writers are TV news in Austria, the land of K&K -- Kunst und Kultur. Austria lives for culture. Although I suppose ORF might have hesitated if it knew the meaning of "muffdiver."
Certainly some of the reviewers knew. Berlin radio called the book "as obscene as it is brilliant." But that would likely not have been a deal breaker. (Have a look at this Dutch TV commercial.)
What's more, there's an aura of glamour associated with the author, due to his renown as the unrivaled German translator of Burroughs, Bukowski, Dylan, Zappa, not to mention Ginsberg, Algren, Leonard Cohen, and many others. Which must have helped sell ORF on a news interview. (Click photo for ORF interview.)
Full disclosure: The author is an old friend. I published his first novel, The Braille Film. It was written in English. Another friend published his second novel online, Death in Paris. It too was written in English. Manhattan Muffdiver is Carl Weissner's third novel, written in German this time. It started off as emails he sent to friends from New York, and reads like a diary. But he elevated the facts, embroidered them with fiction. The result is literature. Here's a sample:
14 April 9:00 A.M.
I have a new hangout a street behind the Edgar Allan Poe Café. It's called NO PORK ON MY FORK because it's an Islamic joint. I waltz in and say:
"Hey, towel heads. I'm an agent provocateur from the FBI. I have an idea for you. We should blow the Trump Tower to smithereens. What do you think, huh?"
"You're not taking this seriously," a character with a filthy beard grumbles.
"Maybe if you'd learn to shove all that falafel into your filthy mouth instead of your ears," I say, and in the next instant there's the sound of breaking glass and crashing furniture and a chorus of "Kill that motherfucker! Al-Hamdulillah!"
Always these nightmares.
This video experiment, first posted by realitystudio.org, was recorded on Dec. 21, 1971, as I wrote there, in William S. Burroughs' London flat at 8 Duke St. The filmmaker Antony Balch, who lived downstairs, brought his movie projector up to the flat, along with the unfinished footage of Bill & Tony, a movie he'd been working on. Burroughs sat in front of the movie projector. He looked remarkably like Buster Keaton, his stare so blank and deadpan he could have been a mummy. We turned off the lights.
Balch ran the footage through the projector, superimposing the image on Burroughs' face. I ran the video camera. It was an Akai portable reel-to-reel video recorder that used 1/4″ black & white tape. The video is purposely not edited, to give the actual context of the experiment. In an interview in Rolling Stone, in May 1972, Burroughs called the video "quite a precise experiment," noting that the film projection "re-photographed on the video camera ... faded in and out ... so that you got a real-time section." In other words, what was actual and what was superimposed. Although the experiment was precise, it was also rudimentary. And after 34 years in storage, the videotape has degraded and now looks primitive. But it still gives the fantastic impression of a ventriloquist dummy coming to life or an ancient Egyptian mummy being revived to cheer the river gods. I think Burroughs got a kick out of that and the demonstration of how easy it was, even with primitive means, to create a televised witch's brew of, say, Nixon's face superimposed on Mao's, speaking with the voice of Hitler or Stalin, or even FDR. Of course, any combination can be applied.It's so secret, We Can't Tell You. That's the catchy headline on today's New York Times editorial about "relentless efforts" to continue the BananaRepublic's legacy of clandestine eavesdropping.
If an Islamic charity is "subjected to warrantless surveillance" by the National Security Agency and is "declared a sponsor of terrorism," what happens when it challenges those claims in court? Well ...
