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Thursday, June 17th, 2010
I've gotten a little bogged down in the translation process for Réquiem -- I thought I would try writing out some summary data as a way of helping myself get a handle on the story: Slavko (to be precise, his narrator Felipe; having no information to the contrary I am identifying the author pretty closely with the narrator) discovers on June 14, 1986 (he is 16 years old, like I was that year) a strange power: by stealing a book from the shop of his family's friend Fernández and reading the book, he can cause the book's author to perish. The first to go is Borges (as you can see from the date) -- you have to be able to forgive this as an accident, after all he could not have known beforehand what his theft would entail -- and a few days later a local author, a young dentist whose name is never given named BenjamÃn Castro; Felipe stole his book of poetry seeking to confirm whether Borges' death had been his fault. Then in awe of his power, he does not exercise it for several years. But one thing leads to another...
Slavko kills Bioy Casares, by stealing a copy of Morel's Invention on March 8th, 1999. This precipitates the end of his relationship with Susana M (who he believes was already interested in the faculty dean anyways).
The next to go is José Ãngel Valente, on July 18th, 2000, after Felipe steals a collection of his poetry. Here we see Felipe going off the deep end -- he embarks on a career of murdering authors just before he publishes an essay about the author -- Juan José Arreola dies on December 3, 2001; Arturo Úslar Pietri (February 26, 2001), Camilo José Cela (January 17, 2002), "and the majority of the authors whom we've seen disappear in the last few years" (not clear on the precise date of the story -- it was published in Piedepágina in 2008 but may well have been written, and set, a few years before that) -- people begin to notice the sequence of coincidences, the head of his department eventually calls him out. The ending is a nice twist that I don't want to give away...
 This story interests me a bit by the way it draws on and amplifies the theme of the recent Latin American issue of Zoetrope (which is where I found out about Zupcic), the passing of an older generation of Latin American authors and the coming into their own of new authors with new voices and styles.
posted afternoon of June 17th, 2010: 2 responses
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Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
 A few years old, but new for me: in September 2004, R. Crumb and Jerry Zolten produced a one-hour show on Penn State's wpsu-fm, spinning and chattering and nit-picking Crumb's collection of old blues and gospel records. Lots of great music and talk.
I haven't been able to find the mp3 of the show online anywhere but prx.org -- I'm not sure what the nature of that site is, they make you sign up for a free account if you want to listen, it seems benign enough though... Track listing below the fold.
Track listing:
- Cecil Scott and his Bright Boys, "Lawd Lawd" -- played over the title announcement
- "Texas & Pacific Blues" by Frenchy's String Band. The melody I know from "Richland Woman Blues".
- Macon Ed and Tampa Joe (a fiddler who might be Peg Leg Howell -- happy coincidence that yesterday's shuffle has Howell on it), "Warm Wipe Stomp"
- Eddie Head and his family, "Down on Me"
- Rev. J.C. Burnett & congregation, "I’ll Stand & Wring My Hands & Cry"
- The Need More Band (Bobby Leecan and Robert Cooksey), "Washboard Cut Out"
- "Humming Blues" -- ukulele blues by Red-Onion Joe (Joe Linthecome)
- Lottie Kimbrough, "Rolling Log Blues" (with one or both of the Pruitt Twins on guitar)
- Louie Lasky, "How Do You Want Your Rolling Done?"
- Cheikha Tetma -- did not catch the song title
- Cannon's Jug Stompers, "Walk Right In"
- Geeshie Wiley, "Last Kind Word Blues"
- Mississippi Jook Band, "Skippy Whippy" -- played over closing announcements
↻...done
posted evening of June 16th, 2010: 2 responses
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On this date in 1904...
posted morning of June 16th, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, June 15th, 2010
The anniversary of Borges' death just passed -- got me thinking of a couple of things, principally that I should get back to my translation of Réquiem by Slavko Zupcic (in which Zupcic "accidentally" kills Borges); and also about which Borges fictions would be the best ones to start out with for a new reader. (This thanks to a Facebook post of Matt Dickerson's, in which he suggested "The Library of Babel" as a starting point.)I was thinking there might be a good argument for starting off with any of:
- "Tlön, Ukbar, Orbis Tertius" -- Donald Taylor mentioned in that thread that he had not yet read the story of "The Library of Babel" but he appreciated the puzzle of it -- I think Tlön and Babel and the other stories in Garden of Forking Paths (part I of Ficciones) are a great starting point if you are primarily interested (or even "strongly interested") in the intellectual-puzzles aspect of Borges' work.
- "Funes, His Memory" -- this was the first thing I thought of, because I had read it quite recently and been really taken with the quality of Borges' voice and of his narrative. This is the first story in Artifices, which is part II of Ficciones and postdates part I by three years. Drawing of character is much stronger here than in any of his earlier stories.
- "The Immortal" -- This is the first story in The Aleph, published 5 years after Ficciones. A wonderful, wonderful story and a good introduction to the role of time and of infinity in Borges' fictions.
In the end I would probably go with "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" just because having it be one's first taste of Borges seems like a sort of canonical experience among people I know who like his work. But probably would suggest that my interlocutor skip ahead to some later work next instead of reading straight through The Garden of Forking Paths. Certainly I would recommend either starting with the translations in Collected Fictions or with those in Labyrinths.
(Of course I am hoping the person I am recommending these stories to will feel moved to read much more of his work -- these three stories seem sort of like good vehicles for figuring out if you are interested in reading more, I don't by any means think that these three stories in isolation would be particularly enlightening.)
posted evening of June 15th, 2010: 4 responses
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Sunday, June 13th, 2010
Two more pieces from Bocas del tiempo:
One Body
Leaning on their white walking sticks, buoyed up by a slug of booze, they made their way somehow or other through the streets of Tlaquepaque.
It looked like they were on the brink of falling over, but no: when she stumbled, he held her up; when he staggered, she straightened him out. The two walked together; the two sang together. They always stopped in the same place, in the shadow of the gate, and sang in their broken voices, old Mexican airs of love and of war. They were playing some instrument, maybe a guitar, I can't remember, it helped them stay near the key. Between songs, they would shake the dish where they were collecting coins from the respectable public.
Later on they left. Their walking sticks in front of them, they passed through the crowd under the sun and lost themselves in the distance, ragged and torn, arm in arm, supporting each other in the torrent of the world.
The Kiss
 Antonio PujÃa chose at random one of the blocks of Carrara marble which he had collected over the course of the years.
It was a tombstone. It had come from some grave, who knows from where; he had not the slightest idea of how it had come to his workshop.
Antonio lay the stone on a stand, and went to work on it. He had some rough idea of what he would sculpt; or perhaps he had none. He began by wiping clean the inscription: a man's name, his year of birth, the year of his passing.
Next, his chisel bit into the marble. Antonio found a surprise, what he had been hoping to find inside the stone: a vein in the shape of two faces touching one another, like two profiles touching at the foreheads, nose touching nose, lips touching lips.
The sculptor obeyed the stone. He went on excavating, gradually, until he completed the relief contained in that stone.
The next day, his work was done. And then when he raised the sculpture up, he saw what he had not seen previously. On the back of the stone was a second inscription: A woman's name, her year of birth, the year of her passing.
posted evening of June 13th, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, June 12th, 2010
If they were single threads, if they did not yet form parts of a common weft: some of the stories here collected were printed in newspapers, magazines. Wading into this pool, those primary forms have changed in shape and in color.(from the front page of Bocas de tiempo)
Bocas de tiempo I see characterized as a memoir in snatches of poetry, something like Summertime; sort of a poetic essay. Maybe more like Breytenbach than like Coetzee. (Funny that it seems wrong to characterize it as a collection of short stories, it needs to be some other genre presented as short stories.) But "memoir" doesn't quite describe it, since it's about a lot more than the narrator's/author's life. It is in translation as Voices of Time: a life in stories (which I have not read) and I'm wondering about trying it as Mouths of Time. (The artwork in the book, which Galeano describes in his foreword as "[tiendas] miles de años de edad, pero [pareciendas] hechas la semana pasada, " is alas not available that I know of online.*)
Time which speaks
We are part of time.
We are its feet and its mouths.
Time's feet walk, they are our feet.
Soon, you know what I'm talking about, sooner or later time's wind will erase our footsteps.
A journey across nothing, nobody's footsteps? Time's mouths recount its voyage.
And more journeying:
The Voyage
Oriol Vall, whose business is the recently born in a hospital in Barcelona, he says that the first human gesture is the embrace. Coming out into the world, at the beginning of their days, they reach out as if searching for someone.
Other doctors, those who busy themselves with the already born, have told me that the aged, at the end of their days, they die seeking to lift up their arms.
That's how it is, for all the approaches we might try to the subject, all the words we may pile on it. This is what everything comes down to, shorn of all explication: between your two wings is where the journey occurs.**
  And more traces:
Footprints
This pair came walking down the beach, in the east of Africa, the rainy season bathing them. This woman and this man still look enough like monkeys; truth be told they are already walking upright and have no tail. A nearby volcano -- today it is called Sadiman -- has been spewing gusts of ash from its mouth. The dust has preserved the traces of the pair, until this time, across all time. Beneath the gray mantle have remained, intact, the footsteps. These feet tell us -- today -- they tell us this Eve and this Adam came walking together, when at a certain point she stopped, looked away, walked a few paces from him. Then she came back to his side. Human footprints -- the oldest ones -- have left the mark of doubt.*** Some few years have passed. The doubt is still with us.
* Not that I've necessarily spent any time looking for it.
**I wonder about this reading: This is what I initially thought was meant by "Entre dos aleteos, sin más explicación, transcurre el viaje." The authorized translation has, "Between two flutterings, with no more explanation, the voyage occurs." -- the 'flutterings' being the raising of arms at birth and at death. I imagine that is the correct reading...
***cf. Mary Leaky, writing in National Geographic about the footprints at Laetoli:
You need not be an expert tracker to discern this motion -- the pause, the glance to the left, seems so intensely human. Three million, six hundred thousand years ago, a remote ancestor -- just as you or I -- experienced a moment of doubt.
posted evening of June 12th, 2010: Respond
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My and Mariana's exchange of Spanish books continues -- yesterday I gave her El informe de Brodie (she says she and every other Argentinian student read Borges' stories in her High School classes but has not gone back to them since then) and she gave me Galeano's Bocas del tiempo and El palacio japonés by José Mauro de Vasconcelos (translated from the Portuguese, and with a foreword, by Haydée M. Jofro Barroso).
posted morning of June 12th, 2010: Respond
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 At a street fair yesterday, I happened on Patrick Woodruff selling his wares, including Las aventuras de ¡QUIXOTE! -- bought a copy, it's a lot of fun. Take a look at his deviantart gallery, the pages of this comic are all there.
posted morning of June 12th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, June 10th, 2010
 Belle Waring (who is blogging again! Hooray!) alerts us to the ridiculous stance of Apple's iPad App Store, that Buck Mulligan's genitalia may not appear in material distributed to an iPad app -- with the upshot that Rob Berry's Ulysses "Seen" comic would not be sold in the App Store. Berry has agreed to cut the nudity, the expurgated comic will again be available on Apple products...
An interview with Berry and Levitas, at Robot 6. ...Update: Macy Halford at the New Yorker's Book Bench reports that Apple is altering its restrictions on iPad apps and has asked Berry to resubmit the unexpurgated version.
posted evening of June 10th, 2010: Respond
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 Via Elan' Rodger Trinidad, a Russian adaptation of Bradbury's Here There be Tygers:
 For more Soviet sci-fi cartoons, see chewbakka.com.
posted morning of June 10th, 2010: Respond
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