This page renders best in Firefox (or Safari, or Chrome)
Readings
I like to read, and I read a lot of books -- the primary impetus for starting this site was to give myself a way of keeping track of what I am thinking about the books I am reading, and to remember the thoughts as time passes.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
10And Jacob went out from Beersheba, and went toward Haran. 11And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep.
12And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.
13And, behold, the lord stood above it, and said, I am the lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed;
14And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.
15And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.
16And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the lord is in this place; and I knew it not. 17And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. 18And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. 19And he called the name of that place Bethel: but the name of that city was called Luz at the first.
-- Genesis 28 (kjv)
—Está bien, Prudencio —le dijo—. Nos iremos de este pueblo, lo más lejos que podamos, y no regresaremos jamás. Ahora vete tranquilo.
And a reward, for reading all that text: Here is Alison Kraus singing about (another) Jacob's Dream.
* I am not sure what this means. Gregory Rabassa renders it literally in his translation, "and they succeeded"; but it does not mean anything in English. I am leaving it out of my translation. My best guess is that it means some of the travellers *did* die of exhaustion; but no mention of this is made elsewhere, and it seems like it would be a strange thing to throw in with no specifics. ... Got it! (Maybe) -- I think I am misreading this. I wanted "todos estaban dispuestos a morirse de viejos" to mean, "they were ready to drop dead of exhaustion" so I ignored the meaning of the words; viejos is old age, not exhaustion. So estaban dispuestos means "they were ready/prepared" in the sense of what they were planning to do, not what they were about to do -- they meant to die of old age, not to die on the journey. "(and they succeeded)" -- i.e. they did die of old age, years later, not on the journey. I think Rabassa's translation is very unclear. I modified my translation above.
Update: Some further thinking about Jacob (and Macondo) here.
Bolaño names Camus' The Fall as the book "that saved me from hell and plummeted me straight back down again... After Camus, everything changed." He stole his copy of The Fall from the LibrerÃa Cristal by "carrying it out in plain sight of all the clerks, which is one of the best ways to steal and which I had learned from an Edgar Allan Poe story" -- only to have it confiscated later by security guards at another bookstore.
Very nice bit in this story about meeting Mexican authors on the Calle del Niño Perdido, the Street of the Lost Boy, "a teeming street that my maps of Mexico City hide from me today, as if Niño Perdido could only have existed in my imagination, or as if the street, with its underground stores and street performers had really been lost, just as I got lost at the age of sixteen." It is not on modern maps because the street has been renamed the Eje Central Lázaro Cárdenas; but the street's old name has a romantic story behind it, per Ritos y Retos del Centro Historico.
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano BuendÃa would remember that distant afternoon when his father had taken him to learn about ice.
Ellen and I have decided to start reading a book together -- one I have read before, one that she is reading for the first time, the book which inspired this blog's butterfly logo. She is reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in translation, I'll be reading Cien años de soledad in the original. Our goal is to read one chapter every week, and my goal is to post notes on the week's chapter every weekend.
Why now? Why GarcÃa Márquez?... Just happenstance I guess. I've been carrying the book around in my backpack lately, reading bits of it on the train in to work, savoring the language and the imagery. Yesterday I mentioned it to Ellen and asked if she had ever read it; she has not but said she'd be interested in reading it if I have the translation. And lo and behold, I do! Looking forward to sharing it...
Neither should it be forgotten that the 21st of December 1907 wrote in miniature, [and its] defective pantograph would appear imprinted... [on] the morning of 11 September 1973. More or less the same contenders, more or less the same result, more or less the same dead, more or less the same shame, but now all on a gigantic scale.
The events of Chapter 19 of Our Lady of the Dark Flowers are unfolding like a malevolent clockwork, like a bad dream in which events cannot progress any way except toward their preordained, tragic outcome -- in short like history. "They are turning this place into a mousetrap," Olegario Santana thinks as he returns to the school of Our Lady of Iquique, perhaps for the last time -- he tries to persuade Gregoria Becerra to leave the school but she is steadfast in her commitment to the strike.
This impending sense of doom requires that Rivera Letelier move his narration to the past tense. Throughout the book the narrative present tense has been dominant, and the stories being told have focused on individuals, makers of free decisions within the context of the history which is the framework of the book. Here the story is the history, the concrete events of the past, where free choice is no longer relevant, and the events are related in the past tense. (And still there is a quick switch to the present tense when Olegario Santana is pleading with Gregoria Becerra to leave, when she is deciding freely to stand by the union; and somehow this is not confusing to the reader, somehow it flows perfectly.) The last words of the chapter have General Silva Renard making his fateful decision:
At this point, the general was convinced that the situation was no longer maintainable -- «in order not to compromise the prestige and honor of the authorities, of the security forces, I was faced with the necessity of checking the rebellion before the end of the day» is how he put it in his journal. Finally, he made the decision. Rising up on his steed, the sun's rays shining off his military harness, he crossed himself lightly. He raised his hand to give the order to fire.
(It is extremely disconcerting to be reading this story while the unions in Madison are occupying the state capitol and threatening a general strike. Not that I expect governor Walker to call out the state militia and fire on the protestors, although such things have happened in our history as well as in Chile's -- but this book is a sad reminder of the lengths to which those in power will go, have gone, to maintain their power.)
This chapter also features the blind poet, Rosario Calderón, who has made occasional appearances throughout the book reciting popular poetry to the strikers. He is here declaiming what I take to be another verse of his namesake's poem commemorating the massacre:
Hoy por hambre acosado
esta región abandono,
me voy sin fuerza, ni abono,
viejo, pobre y explotado,
dejo el trabajo pesado
del combo, chuzo y la lampa
y esa maldita rampa
donde caà deshojada,
soy la flor negra y callada
que nace y muere en la pampa
Pursued by hunger
I leave this place,
powerless, penniless,
an old man, broken down and poor,
I leave this oppressive work,
this heavy pair, my shovel and my bucket,
this damned mine shaft
I fell down, broken;
I am the dark and silent flower
which grows and dies in the pampa.
Chilean blogger Walterio2 has posted Calderón's verses and a lot of other pampino poetry: La pampa es silente.
↻...done
And yet (fact): Hands lack the anatomical mass required to support the weight of an adult human. Both Roman legal texts and modern examinations of a first-century skeleton confirm that classical crucifixion required nails to be driven through the subject’s wrists, not his hands. Hence the, quote, “necessarily simultaneous truth and falsity of the stigmata†that the existential theologist E. M. Cioran explicates in his 1937 “Lacrimi si Sfinti,†the same monograph in which he refers to the human heart as “God’s open wound.â€
The current New Yorker prints an excerpt of David Foster Wallace's forthcoming The Pale King. It's shocking, beautiful, engaging; it "allows the reader to leap over the wall of self". You can also listen to Wallace reading this fragment, ten years ago, in a recording preserved at The Lannan Foundation.
And more! George Lazenby of 424 W 23rd St, NY 10011—2157 (an address to conjure with!) has a recording of Sunday, February 6th's edition of Endnotes on BBC radio; Geoff Ward presents his research into the life and work of Wallace.
I'm thinking of Santana as the physical presence of Rivera Letelier in the story, for a few reasons. He was the first character introduced; he is a loner, quiet and reserved in his relations with the others, which strikes me as the proper deportment for the author; he is older than the others (Rivera Letelier was in his early 50's when he wrote this book, which I believe is roughly Santana's age -- quite old for someone in his extremely hazardous profession) and is the most skeptical about the odds of their strike having a positive outcome, the first to express worries about the military presence building up in Iquique.
There has been almost remarkably little narrative foreboding vis-a-vis the impending massacre. The book's first half has been about the workers and their friendships, about the blossoming love between Idilio and Liria MarÃa, and about the pampino community's high hopes for a proletarian victory and a new order. The only overt foreshadowings I have noticed that were not explicitly in Santana's voice were in Chapter 7, where it is mentioned that the provincial governor has asked Santiago for military reinforcements "without hope that the unrest will be resolved", and now in Chapter 10, where new reinforcements are arriving from Arica and the situation is "turning ugly."
At the beginning of chapter 10 of Our Lady of the Dark Flowers, Idilio Montaño is passed out in a corner of the schoolroom where the friends are staying, sleeping off his drunken fight of the previous night. As he comes to, he hears an old pampino telling a group of young men the history of John Thomas North's acquisition of the majority of the nitrate fields in northern Chile. This expository technique seems like it should be extremely heavy-handed but I think Rivera Letelier pulls it off. Anyway, I found the history lesson quite useful.
"...This English upstart is the best example of what I'm talking about. His name was John Thomas North and they called him 'The Saltpetre King." It was this proud commoner who instigated, who provided arms and pounds sterling to secure the downfall of Balmaceda, the last rightful president of Chile..."
According to the speaker, Balmaceda intended to nationalize Chile's nitrate resources; North owned vast amounts of the Atacama as a result of having purchased Chile's worthless bonds during the War of the Pacific. North is only dead about ten years at the time of the strike, and the speaker claims to have met him in person. He says the pampinos would joke about "Our Father who art in London..."
Interesting to think about how close to their country's history these characters are. This scene makes me think (in a US context) of an elderly Civil War veteran telling some young compatriots about a famous general he had met... Or to put it in the labor context, a grizzled old Teamster or Longshoresman telling about... My familiarity with labor history in the US (and indeed with US history in general) is far too limited to build a satisfactory scenario for either of these examples, alas.
I was happy to stumble upon Dion Chrysostom's 11th discourse, Maintaining that Troy was not captured. Kirill Yeskov cites Chrysostom as "the founder of this literary tradition of playing with others’ masks and backdrops" -- Chrysostom argues that Homer cannot be trusted as a reliable narrator, that the Achæans were in fact defeated at Troy. A refreshing read. Chrysostom's To Plato in defense of Homer has been lost to the ages.
posted evening of February 24th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Iliad
Kurt Gegenhuber of The Celestial Monochordlinks to two very fine music blogs, both new to me: Old, Weird America, where gadaya uses "the Folkways Anthology as a roadmap to explore American folk music"; and Excavated Shellac, where Jonathan Ward is exploring world music and posting recordings of old 78's. His latest post is a real treat: Hausa praise music from Nigeria, from (probably) the 1950's.
Some text! Let's look at two longish quotes.
Ellen and I have decided to start reading a book together -- one I have read before, one that she is reading for the first time, the book which inspired this blog's butterfly logo. She is reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in translation, I'll be reading Cien años de soledad in the original. Our goal is to read one chapter every week, and my goal is to post notes on the week's chapter every weekend.
Olegario Santana (the calichero with the 
Sydney on Guestbook