David Markson, from This Is Not a Novel (2001).
The occasion: a conference at Hofstra University, Frank Sinatra: The Man, The Music, The Legend, November 1998. The paper was the work of Eleanor Liebman, a University of Chicago graduate student. Full title: “All of Me: The Cartesian Soul of Frank Sinatra.” In Lingua Franca, the historian Jon Wiener deemed it ”the most eloquent presentation at the conference.” The Chicago Tribune recounted his response:
Wiener found it terrific as [Liebman] placed [Sinatra’s] achievements in “the realm of the technical and corporeal — the mechanical replication of contagious passion.”I’d like to read this paper. As far as I can tell, it remains unpublished.
But her mention of the “mechanical” was not to undervalue his grand conversational phrasing since she notes he “communicated passion in sound.”
Sinatra’s artistic canon is one of passion, she concluded, but “the truth of Sinatra’s emotional intimacy existed in the proximity effect of the microphone. It was mechanical knowledge that he had all along, that he trained and trusted.”
Somebody in the audience was still puzzled by the references to the mechanical, believing she was saying his work wasn’t thus “real.” Liebman responded, “Honesty is a claim often made on behalf of Sinatra but some unmediated passion makes uninteresting art.”
Somebody else then said if she wasn’t still saying that Sinatra was merely a machine? “He was one of the best machines in the world,” she replied.
*
April 14: I neglected to add: David Markson’s novel The Ballad of Dingus Magee; Being the Immortal True Saga of the Most Notorious and Desperate Bad Man of the Olden Days, His Blood-Shedding, His Ruination of Poor Helpless Females, & Cetera; also including the Only Reliable Account ever offered to the Public of his Heroic Gun Battle with Sheriff C. L. Birdsill, Yerkey’s Hole, New Mex., 1884, and with Additional Commentary on the Fateful and Mysterious Bordello-Burning of the Same Year; and furthermore interspersed with Trustworthy and Shamelessly Interesting Sketches of “Big Blouse” Belle Nops, Anna Hot Water, “Horseface” Agnes, and Others, hardly any Remaining Upright at the End. Composed in the Finest Modern English as taken diligently from the Genuine Archives (1965) was adapted as Dirty Dingus Magee (dir. Burt Kennedy, 1970), starring Frank Sinatra.
Related reading
All OCA David Markson posts : Frank Sinatra posts (Pinboard) : Dingus and thingy
comments: 2
I loved those late Markson novels. I discovered them around 2006, I think, and devoured them. When I was in grad school in 2006-2011, I wrote a little review of them for our department's in-house zine. I put it on my blog shortly after hearing about Markson's death and added a few extra Markson links that I found at the time: https://brownstudy.info/2010/08/27/david-markson.html
Fellow reader! Now I wonder if I might have found my way to David Markson via your post. I have a 2005 printing of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, but I know that I didn’t read it until years later.
There’s a great interview with Markson in which he mentions that reading for these novels led him into a habit of skimming. It’s reassuring to learn that he didn’t just know all this stuff but had to collect it.
Post a Comment