conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide a description for a book titled Where the Stress Falls about Americans, America, National with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Essays & Correspondence.. Start with the sentence 'One of the few Americans to manage superbly the dual roles of public intellectual and novelist, the author, whose novel In America won a National Book Award in 2000, reaches a big audience even as she divides critics'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: One of the few Americans to manage superbly the dual roles of public intellectual and novelist, the author, whose novel In America won a National Book Award in 2000, reaches a big audience even as she divides critics. First and foremost an essayist, the author tackles varied interests that are compelling in part for their apparent randomness. This new collection of occasional articles includes punditry on literature, film, photography, theater and her own literary career, among other subjects. Once a champion of then-lesser-known writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Roland Barthes, she now boosts the worthy Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis and Swiss writer Robert Walser. Sometimes her enthused advocacy seems overstated, such as when she argues a little too forcefully for Glenway Wescott as a novelist and for the poet Adam Zagajewski as a prose writer. A sugary memorial for New York City Ballet founder Lincoln Kirstein is also inadequate on many levels. Still, the author's appetite for trends and achievements is still so fierce, and she switches subjects so quickly and lithely, that if one short essay does not convince, the next one probably will. One can't help admiring the conviction evident in "Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo," her account of directing a Beckett play in the war-torn city. There is no one quite like the author, and her many admirers will enjoy following up on her reading tips and engaging in debate with her via this book. (Sept.)Forecast: Expect solid sales among the author's fans, some of whom will pick this book up as a first foray into her essays. For those who need assistance in entering the the author oeuvre, biographer and Baruch College professor Carl Rollyson's Reading the author: An Introduction to Her Work is forthcoming in October (Ivan R. Dee).
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Where the Stress Falls
  To start with, we rehearsed in the dark. The bare proscenium stage was lit usually by only three or four candles, supplemented by the four flashlights I'd brought with me. When I asked for additional candles, I was told there weren't any. Later I was told that they were being saved for our performances. In fact, I never learned who doled out the candles; they were simply in place on the floor when I arrived each morning at the theatre, having walked through alleys and courtyards to reach the stage door, the only usable entrance, at the rear of the freestanding modern building. The theatre's façade, lobby, cloakroom, and bar had been wrecked by shelling more than a year earlier and the debris still had not been cleared away.
  Actors in Sarajevo, Pašovi had explained to me with comradely regret, expect to work only four hours a day. "We have many bad habits here left over from the old socialist days." But that was not my experience. After a bumpy start—during the first week everyone seemed preoccupied with other performances and rehearsals, or obligations at home—I could not have asked for actors more zealous, more eager. The main obstacle, apart from the siege lighting, was the fatigue of the malnourished actors, many of whom, before they arrived for rehearsal at ten, had for several hours been queuing for water and then lugging heavy plastic containers up eight or ten flights of stairs. Some of them had to walk two hours to get to the theatre, and, of course, would have to follow the same dangerous route at the end of the day.
  The only actor who seemed to have normal stamina was the oldest member of the cast, Ines Fan ovi , who is sixty-eight. Still large, she had lost more than sixty pounds since the beginning of the siege, which may have accounted for her remarkable energy. The other actors were visibly underweight and tired easily. Beckett's Lucky must stand motionless through most of his long scene without ever setting down the heavy bag he carries. Atko, who now weighs no more than one hundred pounds, asked me to excuse him if he occasionally rested his empty suitcase on the floor. Whenever I halted the run-through for a few minutes to change a movement or a line reading, all the actors, with the exception of Ines, would instantly lie down on the stage.
  Another symptom of fatigue: they were slower to memorize their lines than any actors I have ever worked with. Ten days before the opening they still needed to consult their scripts, and were not wordperfect until the day before the dress rehearsal. This might have been less of a problem had it not been too dark for them to read the scripts they held in their hands. An actor crossing the stage while saying a line, who then forgot the next line, was obliged to make a detour to the nearest candle and peer at his or her script. (A script was loose pages, since binders and paper clips are virtually unobtainable in Sarajevo. The play had been typed in Pašovi 's office on a little manual typewriter whose ribbon had been in use since the beginning of the siege. I was given the original and the actors carbon copies, most of which would have been hard to read in any light.)
  Not only could they not read their scripts; unless standing face-to-face, they could barely see one another. Lacking the normal peripheral vision that anybody has in daylight or when there is electric light, they could not do something as simple as put on or take off their bowler hats in unison. And they appeared to me for a long time, to my despair, mostly as silhouettes. At the moment early in Act I when Vladimir "smiles suddenly from ear to ear, keeps smiling, ceases as suddenly"—in my version, three Vladimirs—I couldn't see a single one of those false smiles from my stool some ten feet in front of them, my flashlight lying across my scripts. Gradually, my night vision improved.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide three more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: There are probably many reasons. Heartless historical clichés certainly figure in the paltriness of the response. There is the traditional bad reputation of the Balkans as a place of eternal conflict, of implacable ancient rivalries. Haven't those folks always been slaughtering one another? (This is comparable to having said when confronted with the reality of Auschwitz: Well, what can one expect? You know, anti-Semitism is an ancient story in Europe.) Not to be underestimated, too, is the pervasiveness of anti-Muslim prejudice, a reflex reaction to a people the majority of whom are as secular, and as imbued with contemporary consumer-society culture, as their southern European neighbors. To bolster the fiction that this is at its deepest source a religious war, the label Muslim is invariably used to describe the victims, their army, and their government—though no one would think of describing the invaders as the Orthodox and the Catholics. Do many secular "Western" intellectuals who might be expected to have raised their voices to defend Bosnia share these prejudices? Of course they do.
  And this is not the 1930s. Nor the 1960s. Actually, we are already living in the twenty-first century, in which such twentieth-century certainties as the identification of fascism, or imperialism, or Bolshevikstyle dictators as the principal "enemy" no longer offer a framework (often a facile one) for thought and action. What made it obvious that one should side with the government of the Spanish Republic, whatever its flaws, was the struggle against fascism. Opposing the American aggression in Vietnam (which took over the unsuccessful French effort to hold on to Indochina) made sense as part of the worldwide struggle against Euro-American colonialism.
  If the intellectuals of the 1930s and the 1960s often showed themselves too gullible, too prone to appeals to idealism to take in what was really happening in certain beleaguered, newly radicalized societies that they may or may not have visited (briefly), the morosely depoliticized intellectuals of today, with their cynicism always at the ready, their addiction to entertainment, their reluctance to inconvenience themselves for any cause, their devotion to personal safety, seem at least equally deplorable. (I can't count how many times I've been asked, each time I return to New York from Sarajevo, how I can go to a place that's so dangerous.) By and large, that handful of intellectuals who consider themselves people of conscience can be mobilized now solely for limited actions—against, say, racism or censorship—within their own countries. Only domestic political commitments seem plausible now. Among once internationally minded intellectuals, nationalist complacencies have renewed prestige. (I should note that this seems true more of writers than of doctors, scientists, and actors.) There has been an implacable decay of the very notion of international solidarity.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I don't have time to tell you any stories about my dialogue with the translators. I'll end by saying that I wish I could stop wanting to be available to them. I wish I could give up trying to see the words, my own sentences, English, shine through. It's melancholy as well as enthralling work. I do not translate. I am translated—in the modern sense and in the obsolete sense deployed by Wycliffe. In supervising my translations, I am supervising the death as well as the transposition of my words.
  The version of the aesthete sensibility I once tried to include under the name "camp" can be regarded as a technique of taste for making the aesthete appreciations less exclusionary (a way of liking more than one really wants to like) and as part of the democratizing of dandy attitudes.
  There is a metaphoric use of translation-as-adaptation, which evokes the older, physical sense of translation: translating (transposing) from one medium to another. Here there are no guidelines about what may be produced by following the original more, rather than less, literally; or (as is often recommended) choosing an inferior work to strut one's stuff. When Berlin Alexanderplatz was "translated to the screen" by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the filmmaker preserved a large part of the spirit of Döblin's masterpiece, and also made a film that is a masterpiece. What might seem a counterexample, with equally exemplary results: Henry Bernstein's Mélo is far from a great play, but Alain Resnais's Mélo, which scrupulously follows the text of Bernstein's boulevard melodrama of 1928, is a great film. Resnais did not have to improve Bernstein's play. He only had to add to it his own genius.
  For information on Picador Reading Group Guides, as well as ordering, please contact the Trade Marketing department at St. Martin's Press.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about Camp, Andy, Warhol, incarnated, leveling.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I don't have time to tell you any stories about my dialogue with the translators. I'll end by saying that I wish I could stop wanting to be available to them. I wish I could give up trying to see the words, my own sentences, English, shine through. It's melancholy as well as enthralling work. I do not translate. I am translated—in the modern sense and in the obsolete sense deployed by Wycliffe. In supervising my translations, I am supervising the death as well as the transposition of my words. 
  The version of the aesthete sensibility I once tried to include under the name "camp" can be regarded as a technique of taste for making the aesthete appreciations less exclusionary (a way of liking more than one really wants to like) and as part of the democratizing of dandy attitudes. Camp taste, however, still presupposes the older, high standards of discrimination—in contrast to the taste incarnated by, say, Andy Warhol, the franchiser and mass marketer of the dandyism of leveling. 
  There is a metaphoric use of translation-as-adaptation, which evokes the older, physical sense of translation: translating (transposing) from one medium to another. Here there are no guidelines about what may be produced by following the original more, rather than less, literally; or (as is often recommended) choosing an inferior work to strut one's stuff. When Berlin Alexanderplatz was "translated to the screen" by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the filmmaker preserved a large part of the spirit of Döblin's masterpiece, and also made a film that is a masterpiece. What might seem a counterexample, with equally exemplary results: Henry Bernstein's Mélo is far from a great play, but Alain Resnais's Mélo, which scrupulously follows the text of Bernstein's boulevard melodrama of 1928, is a great film. Resnais did not have to improve Bernstein's play. He only had to add to it his own genius. 
  For information on Picador Reading Group Guides, as well as ordering, please contact the Trade Marketing department at St. Martin's Press.