My Life and Thoughts

In my capacity as a D-list writer, people sometimes mail me books of poetry.  I don’t always know why this happens.  Usually there is some form of an advance warning, like, “Heads up!  I’m gonna send you the first English translation of the works of the twentieth-century Chuvash national poet!”  On the other hand, I recently received, out of the clear blue sky, with no note or anything, a fiftieth anniversary edition of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind—I am still confused about this, but of course very grateful. 

Well, a couple of months ago I got an email from a certain Preeti Majumdar, suggesting that I might enjoy a book called Kamal: Book One: “a novel in verse of five cantos, in structured, mostly iambic tetrameter or pentameter rhyme, totaling 5,472 lines,” written by a New Zealand poet called Zireaux, and edited by “Bernardo Winson, Ph.D., New York City.”  (You can read an excerpt here.)

The Turkish people have a very wise saying: “Free vinegar is sweeter than honey.”  In fact it is very rare that I say “no” to free anything.  So I sent along my mailing address, and it was a matter of time before I received the volume in question, generously shrink-wrapped in some 300 layers of shrink wrap, which I eventually penetrated in order to reveal an interesting cover illustration, depicting what appears to be some kind of human piano-hammer (right).

I am now in a position to inform my much-appreciated readers that Kamal is kind of a weird Nabokov pastiche, whose hero is precipitated, by intimate relations with his own sister (cf. Ada) onto an Americana-saturated road trip (cf. Lolita), as narrated by this guy Zireaux and published—with copious footnotes, but without Zero’s permission—by my fellow-former-graduate-student Bernardo Winson (cf. Pale Fire).

Some highlights: at one point Kamal is painting a nude portrait of his sister, and flies into a rapture ”when the breeze/ makes gumdrops of her areoles.”  I thought that was a pretty good joke about Nabokov.  Later, Kamal’s incestuous desires are ratified by some kind of indigenous Hawaiians (left). 

But what really makes Kamal stand out from the wider field of Nabokov pastiche is that, whereas usually people give up on these things after a page or two, Zireaux/ Winson goes on and on for all those five cantos and 5,472 lines, and you can buy it, in book form, from Amazon. 

One does also feel a certain affinity with the “D-list” narrator, who is worried (a) that people will discard his book in favor of “more handsome heralds in action/ A-list artists like Lucas or Jackson…” (with a footnote explaining that George Lucas and Peter Jackson are “renowned for their epic storytelling and special effects); and (b) that he will “never” find an appropriate Muse:

Never? O surely I could search the Net
for inspiration—”scarlet AND lips,” etcetera,
a yearning Humbert “Googling” his lost nymphet…
But what if heaven’s website tried to get
my own details? I’d frighten off the Sirens!
They want deformities, like Byron’s foot, or synesthesia in childhood,
The taking of drugs and lovers like Wilde would;
And friends at the New Yorker!…

I know, Zireaux, I know… they don’t always answer my emails either.

Anyway, I made it to Canto Three, and then somehow abandoned it in favor of Herzen (I decided it is time for me to actually read My Past and Thoughts, which has been such a huge inspiration for my blog)… but first I took a minute to Google “zireaux AND kamal,” which is how I learned that both Zireaux and Bernardo Winson, Ph.D., have their own blogs, with charming titles!: by Zireaux; and Editor-in-Chief.

I also looked up Preeti Majumdar, who turns out to have a really impressive filmography on IMDB, ranging  from Ali Baba (1937) to Marjina Abdulla (1973).  Would it be inappropriate to describe Majumdar as a diva on the level of J-Lo’s ass?  Oh, because I almost forgot to mention this extra classy touch, which is that Kamal came with a free bookmark:

Watch and learn, Ferlinghetti!

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Tags: academic life, comparative literature, d-list, money, New Zealand, reviews

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.