Back from my slumber

A NOTE ABOUT TroL & TRL BOOKS


The Editor regret to inform subscribers, contributors to #22 and others that TroL itself is suspended for at least a few weeks more. The Editor is temporarily unable to perform his usual duties as other matters, of a personal nature, compel his entire attention.




THE IRISH QUESTION

Like much of Europe, where the air has turned bitterly cold and the general economy is in a state of crisis, Ireland is suffering. As in London, Lisbon, Madrid, Rome, Paris, Athens and Brussels, civil servants, students, farmers, unions are demonstrating with the usual folderol: overturned buses, burning cars, placards, breakings-and-entries and so on. The police is reacting firmly and the Euro-Wallahs are meeting hither and yon.

The sources of the trouble are, however, quite evident. Most of us know that we should not spend more than we earn or what we have in the bank, in investments, etc.. The European Union, like the United States, does not seem to recognize this odd little fact.

On the same day in which all the above hullaballoo was going on, the BBC showed us the spanking new headquarters of the EU’s Diplomatic Services, and through it walked the absurd figure of Lady A, a professional Nobody appointed to the post of Foreign Minister of the E.U.. Explaining how useful and necessary it was for the EU to have a Foreign Ministry was a little man from Malta, a little country most of us probably had not often thought of as a member of the Union. He said, with a shrug, that his country couldn’t afford to maintain too many embassies abroad. That is understandable, as Malta does not have a pool of experienced diplomats. Or a pool of much else. It is a lovely place, but its population is only slightly over 400,000.

If we turn our minds back to Eire, those of us who follow such things will remember that Ireland is the country that regularly coaxed enormous subventions for an agriculture largely based on pigs, whether or not those pigs existed except on paper – rather like the olive trees in Italy that turned out to be imaginary. Germans, who like their Schwein, had bought up much of Ireland’s old estates; international companies had stepped in with spanking headquarters to exploit cheap native labor, the banks had a heyday lending left, right and center, the government couldn’t do enough for its people, so it employed civil servants by the hundred thousands. And now that the vultures are hovering overhead, there are protests. The basic sales tax (a regressive tax if there ever has one) is to rise to 27%. Hell, I would protest myself.

All of Europe overspends, as we do. Households are perforce thrifty in bad times, but Lady A. is not a housewife. She can afford to be as profligate as are members of the European Parliament or any of Sepp Blatter’s buddies at FIFA or, for that matter, our own members of Congress, or any bank you care to name. The 89 Greeks who use a notorious rail line with 600 civil servant jobs attached to it, may now have to walk. Such is Austerity. But will the civil servants be disappeared? Will the endless meetings of our World Leaders be curtailed? Where will the Photo-Ops come from? What will all those colorful troops who parade for and are inspected by our leaders do in their spare time? Back and forth doth Hillary Clinton scurry making her pronouncements; the Vice of the Maltese Turtle must be heard in the land.

And British students protest at having to pay ten grand for Oxford and Cambridge, while paying forty Big Ones for a high school education at American universities too many to name?

So queries Candide.

NEWS, SORT OF

TRoL #21 is now out. When our subscribers around the world receive their copies and the bookshops that carry the magazine have been suppplied, we expect to have under fifty copies left for new subscribers. I urge anyone interested in the magazine to e-mail us as soon as possible. We deliberately do not over-print copies. We ran out of #20 within the first week. The three copies in my possession are from subscribers who have moved without telling us.

If you click on our logo above, you will be sent directly to the magazine's main site. Copies will be mailed out to new subscribers or re-subscribers in order of receipt.

It is easier and quicker for payments to be made out directly in the Editor's name and sent to our accountant, Mr. Sidney Williams, at 29 Cunningham Rd, Wellesley MA 02481.:

********

You will note two new icons to the right, announcing the publication of the first two volumes of my autobiography; a third will follow by the summer.

I regret to say that copies are not available. This first edition was published for 'family and friends' in editions of 65 and 50 copies.

I have to admit that what was designed as a 'private' edition, due to take me as far as my twenty-first year, 1949, has now been circulated in so many xeroxes and has aroused so much interest, that bits and pieces have either been published or are about to be published abroad, and that my original aim of a private early life has been entirely subverted. I did not anticipate this. Clearly, however, the volume of letters I have received, including from people who do not know me at all, has touched a nerve. Without exception, those readers closest to me have urged that I not stop there, but continue -- I am currently at work on FRAGMENTS IV (1951-1953). And though I have lost all faith in publishers, I am now more or less compelled to submit it to them. At which point, I suppose copies will become available.

THE PENALIES OF 'SUCCESS'

For the pocket-kandkerchief of readers who maybe panting to receive TRoL #20, I have news: there are no copies available, the entire run having been exhausted even before it arrived on these shores. Yep, it's sold out, like #3, and I haven't even a copy myself. The last time this happened, my Old Pal and co-founder, Mr. Bellow, against my more prudential will, airily ordered up a double, nay a triple print order for #4. We have an awful lot of #4s as a result.
There is a lesson to this. TRoL does not -- with a very few exceptions -- distribute to book stores such as Barnes & Ignoble. Why not? Because they take 60% of the cover price, pulp those that don't sell, and generally have no interest in anything but wiping out independent booksellers: certainly none in literature. We operate purely by subscriptions. Therefore, if anyone out there wants the magazine -- which is doubtful, as doubtful as the arrival of the US cavalry to save a beleaguered fort being betrayed by Richard Widmark -- we pray that you will subscribe. That way you will get #21 within weeks, which contains a whole book, Souvenirs of Starobielsk by Josef Czapski, on which Andrzej Wajda's new film is based. Plus other good stuff.

Maasimo Rizzante: Non siamo gli ultimi (Effigie, Milano, 2009)

In his excellent run-through of the principal themes of twentieth-century literature, Massimo Rizzante (see his text on Roberto Bolano in TRoL 20), a poet and connoisseur, wrote about TRoL as follows:

"In 1997, after fifty years of feverish activity as a writer, journalist, translator, historian and university professor, Keith Botsford, with his great friend Saul Bellow, founded 'News from the Republic of Letters'. This is a cosmopolitan review, entirely without advertising or sponsorship, with a few thousand readers. Part of its purpose, KB explained, was to give some hope to good young writers who found it difficult to publish their work. Saul Bellow spent a good deal of his time reading unpublished manuscripts and defined this task as 'both a duty and an Utopian act' in a world in which attentiveness to quality writing was ever more the province of a very small circle of readers. [. . .] I was at the time a young provincial European, imbued with a natural pessimism. When I met him, this seventy-year-old giant, a constant smoker and full of energy, said: 'You remember the early Christians? Today art survives in the catacombs, and it is in the catacombs that faith retains and strengthens its resolve and its hope to see once more the light of day.' One day, ten years ago, I asked Bellow if there existed any sure way with which to form Sensibility. He said he didn't, unless it might be through taking into oneself certain literary masterpieces as if they were consecrated hosts.

"It is perhaps partly the curiosity of a tourist who becomes an exegete, or an exegete who fancies tourism, someone who is not limited by -- he lacks the necessary time -- the possibilities and limitations of individuals, but who has the illusion that he is able to be, at any time or in any place, at home. As KB said, it was like Augustine's 'vain curiosity', the curiosity that led some to seek out, without any particular purpose, that which lies beyond his own existence, that is outside of himself. [. . .] Every time I open an issue, I am taken miles away from Literaturistan. Every literary review worthy of the name has the same desire to embrace Weltliteratur; it is a desire without limits and should stay such. Goethe defined it as a 'madness': a madness and a faith rising from the catacombs.