EDWARD GAUVIN

I have a new idea for my blog: instead of promoting upcoming events, which I never seem to get around to doing in time, whether because I don’t know what to say, or feel self-conscious about self-promoting, or harbor a secret resentment of deadlines and derive a dark joy from failing them, I’ll blog about events after they happened, and hopefully make you wish you’d been there.

This is the feeling I get, anyway, when I read other people’s blogs and find out about happenings I was stupid to have missed, shindigs I can kick myself for not having dragged myself to, or clambakes to which I wasn’t even invited but would very much like to have been a part of.

This plays to my natural nostalgic impulses: for someone so fundamentally wistful, memory is a constant component of daily perception, and instead of past, present, and future, time might better be divided for me into regret, disappointment, and anticipation.

The obvious downside to this is you’ll never know where I’m going to be. But how many people does that matter to, anyway?

I was, for example, at SPX. My first, and a fun time. Ha-hah! Bet you didn’t know that, did you? The AWESOME! anthology, which features the story that the header image above is taken from, debuted there.

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I’m not sure how I feel about this. I hope that doesn’t make me sound a grouch. It’s a mean cutlass, though. And it’s proof positive Sardine is being read, to say the least.

I’d wrapped the next Sardine, on which Guibert flies solo (no Sfar), a few weeks ago. Always a pleasure to see what puns can be smuggled across the language border. Got called in today for an emergency on-site translation of a last-second substitute story. This is about as exciting as the profession gets, folks—frantic editors and a sense of mission! Felt grateful I wasn’t halfway around the world—just in Jersey. On the way into Manhattan, the train stalled twenty minutes for a drawbridge. This was a first. All around me, people shuffled papers, shifted briefcases, sighed, texted, left messages, ruffled their hair so they’d arrive, I suppose, looking frustrated in explanation for their lateness. Across the aisle, a girl bet her grandfather that the Amtrak stopped beside us would get to go first.

“See, I told you,” she said when it pulled away. I shared a smile with the old man.

Money makes the world go round. » Read the rest of this entry «

Chris Fedak, in a phone conversation now years old, once asked me if I watched much TV. I forget the program in question. It might have been Boomtown; if so, this was before he married the lovely Lisa. I was either in France or didn’t own a TV at the time, and the fifth amendment prevents me from further revelations. I said no.

He said, You should. It keeps your dreams humble.

Since then, everything’s happened really fast. TV’s gotten better, the press has admitted that it’s gotten better, and many are the ways to watch it without the actual box taking up precious apartment space in an “entertainment cabinet” (echoes of von Kempelen’s Turk?). We’re a far cry from those yellow ABC billboards of fall ’98, proclaiming the couch potato revolution and the right to dumbness, that delighted my media studies professor so. HBO has, in the meantime, become HBO. People take TV seriously. No longer is the boob tube a sort of purgatory where stars past the prime of their fame are put to Elysian pasture, there to make do with bad dialogue before Friday night family audiences. No more are aging actors banished from the silver screen to the small but, in front of households that have missed them, live out satisfying second lives that fall comfortingly short of total reinvention. Middle age is okay now; it’s socially acceptable. I won’t name names, in case I’m not right. It’s all part of the past coming back and living forever, repackaged. » Read the rest of this entry «

In a former life, I was a literary agent. Yes indeed! A junior literary agent, that is, much as a gumshoe in sneakers is a junior sleuth. Mussed hair and single untucked shirttail, with a casual callow air, I arrived always late and breathless to editor lunches, comps and samples spilling from beneath my arm as might a nerdy middle schooler’s notebooks from his grasp. In fact, I never got very far along the path to enlightened literary property representation, which may be why it sometimes seems to me, as the wheel of career karma turns, that I’m starting out in my new incarnation of freelance translator lower on the gainful employment ladder than before. I have sins to atone, and must with good deeds earn from the gods the benefits and pension contributions granted that higher life form, the full-fledged adult. Of my agent stint, I’ve this to say: it was the best office job I ever had. Four cozy rooms full of books, a magisterial view of Union Square, and my boss, a human being of unsurpassed kindness.

One of the few good things I did (who says they all come back to haunt you?) was pair up indie publisher Pegasus Books and Alexandre Dumas père’s unearthed missing novel, painstakingly assembled over fifteen years by scholar Claude Schopp from segments serialized in papers of the era. Publisher Claiborne Hancock has gone all out for this baby.

And it just came out.

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The American Literary Translators Association, which I joined this summer, a whole year after first being urged to do so by the wise and lovely Susan Harris, has seen fit to bestow on me a Travel Fellowship for its 30th anniversary conference this November in Dallas. I’ll even be giving a short reading. I’m stoked!! To say the very least. » Read the rest of this entry «

I have a problem with this: the default critique these days for books and albums of a somber mood seems to be to imply that they reference or obliquely address a post 9/11 world. The ashes from that day seem to pall every important new work of art. “Clearly a reference to” is a nightstick critics wield with a certain swagger. Of course, as usual when I let myself topple into tirade, I have no example to point to or truck out in my defense except a certain impression of surfeit that must be the result of accumulated instances, right? America suddenly has a copyright on disaster; let no one else’s grief infringe thereon. Of course our Promised Land, ’tis of thee, has always taken woe quite personally, or do I mean myopically and hubristically? Even our disasters, supersized, are bigger than your disasters, and ditto with our suffering, or so the t-shirts for sale in the French Quarter would have had me believe when I was there in November ’05 as a volunteer. Walls plastered with wreaths and photos of missing loved ones existed elsewhere before Ground Zero and Union Square—notably, the 1999 Taiwan quake—though we see them only as 9/11 references. » Read the rest of this entry «

Though I have all the Innocence Mission albums from Glow to the present inclusive, I’ve only really listened to the latest, We Walked in Song, and to the much earlier Birds of My Neighborhood, drawn as I had been to them after hearing a single from the former, posted at a Pitchfork review that concluded they were still going strong: pursuing in their ambling way, along paths only they might see, a by-now distinctive sound into the further reaches of an aesthetic woods where, though few but fans might follow, their artistry continued subtly to refine itself—that is, vanishing from the scene, they had less and less to do with the world and more to do with their private muses, which is I imagine what happens to most artists, or at least how it looks from the outside, once the world is content to drop them and go nosing off somewhere else. Sights from these woods, as I imagine them when listening: birches, leaves that crackle underfoot, loons, sudden clearings like small meadows, still ponds full of sky where mist gathers by morning. In spare, limpid folk dispatches they report on this, back to the rest of us.

I have of late taken up residence. Photos of the building feature on a Newark blogger’s website. Both snob and dandy in me are deeply enamored of this apartment since learning that these towers (another mirrors mine across a common lawn) were designed by Mies van der Rohe of (at the very least, and nearby) Seagram building fame, one of the fathers of architectural modernism and a name on the lips of every 101 survey student. This only confirms my superficiality, since I’ve never actually loved a van der Rohe building: they all look like they were built in the 60s to me, bland and dated basic corporate towers. I haven’t the eye, apparently, for the simplicity and understatedness of his once groundbreaking designs. Truly, as Jean Nouvel remarked in the interview I recently translated, on the contemporary trend for starchitects’ buildings to be considered objets d’art, brazenly plonked down around the world with disdain for indigenous context, as though for admiration on a pedestal of the designer’s ego: “Les villes seront musées ou l’on vient acheter les grands artistes pour les accrocher dans la vie.” Completing the irony is the fact that the architecture major subletting the place to me never brought up van der Rohe, perhaps believing it not a feature to attract the ignorant masses of which he assumed me a member (certainly assuming he assumed my ignorance is more generous than my assuming his?)

Another San Diego Comic-Con come and gone. What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence.

Photo courtesy Poketo,  from whom I also bought this nifty tome.

Yes, this post has nothing to do with its title.  Add a little Dada to your day!

First Second founder Mark Siegel, in an interview at ICv2, has referenced their Cyril Pedrosa Spring ’08 title I’d kept unnamed on the Translations page, alors autant vendre la mèche, moi aussi: Three Shadows, from Delcourt’s Shampooing imprint, is a paean to parental love and the necessity of letting go from the former Disney animator. I can only agree with Mark’s murmured and admiring assessment during our brief San Diego conversation: “angles you’ve never seen before”. The French version, tentative cover above, comes out this fall.