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Friday, September 7th, 2012
 The cloud formations over Oaxaca are more spectacular each time you look at them.
I've never been able to capture their grandeur on my camera, and I'm hardly enough of a poet
to describe them to you, you'll have to take my word for it. They roll in slow over
the mountains to the north-east, creep slowly toward the city, they pile up around the
edge of the sky. I can hear the thunder far off, I look nervously upward, wonder
if I can make it home before the rain gets here. I can already feel the first drops
on my shoulder.
Laura told me I was making a mistake, and she's probably right.
 It's raining a little harder now. I duck in to Hernán's cafe, I'll wait here until it
passes, it usually goes by in a half hour or so. (The thunder is louder than before --
it may last longer than usual this evening.) I order an espresso and ask after Hernán's
wife. He has a distant smile as he tells me Soledad is getting better, she should be
coming home Friday at the latest. I'm leafing through the book of poetry I've been
carrying around all day, I'm looking for the piece about la madre paralizada de la noche, it caught
my eye this morning, made me think about Soledad, when the lights go out. Hernán mutters
a curse and looks down the street to see if there is a blackout everywhere. For a few
minutes now it has been raining with the fury of Poseidon over Athens.
It was in this very cafe that Laura and I met, just a few months ago -- it seems like much longer.
I'm sipping my coffee in the darkness and trying not to think about Laura. The rain
is lightening up a bit, I'll head home before too long. I'm concerned about Soledad:
Hernán's wistful confidence seems false, seems forced, and I don't think she's going to
be back any time soon. The two of them have made this cafe my favorite place in the city
over the past year that I've been here -- maybe they're the closest thing to friends
that I've found here.
Laura's glad I came over but wishes I would have called earlier. Yeah, whatever...I'm not sure what to say here. So you're serious about going back to California?
Listen, of course I am. You're coming, too.
The firmness of her tone always startles me -- the line and contour of her body always catch me off guard. She takes my hand, gives me an inquisitive look and a squeeze, turns away to the book she was reading. I'm a little edgy right now (thanks to the espresso I guess, thanks to the glint in Laura's eye) and trying to figure out what I can say. What's holding me here? What future do I see? How the fuck can I justify letting her go without me? I'm responding with my own wistful, confident smile, trying to get her attention, mumble something about a friend up in Santa Cruz, maybe I could stay with him... But she's pissed off. I'm giving her too little too late, and we aren't really talking.
...I'm worried about Soledad.
She sighs, Yeah, I know,... She turns in the soft evening light. Not to mention her husband.
I look at her more closely, she's been crying. Catch her eye, I want to be with you.
Peter, it doesn't make any sense for you to stay here. What we have is what you're looking for.
...
Laura yawns and looks away. Suddenly I flash on an image of her and Soledad, the first time I saw her at the cafe, I know I'll be leaving Oaxaca with Laura and I know I'll regret it. What to say, what to say, I don't feel like I can tell her quite what's on my mind. I'm not sure how much I have left in the bank, exactly, I may have to lean on you some while I look for work... And she's holding me, leaning against me as she shakes her head, her brown hair is rubbing fuzzy against my cheek.
↻...done
posted evening of September 7th, 2012: Respond
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paralizada
sus movimientos lentos
crecen como las nubes
que crezca hipnotica, paralizada
que sea la totalidad
que sea la madre de la noche
lejano la miro
le sonrío
a ella
paralizado
posted evening of September 7th, 2012: Respond
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Friday, August third, 2012
(This post is a continuation of the earlier Peter's Voice thread -- I am trying among other  things to make my reading of La universidad desconocida be Peter's reading, trying to get in his head and read through his eyes and hope to fully realize his character. Hope that anybody's going to be interested in reading about this guy and the books he is reading and translating; but of course this hope has always been intrinsic to the READIN project...)
 Walking down Partition Street in the light summer rain and watching the lightning across the river past Rhinebeck. A really impressive storm but it's far enough off, the air's not moving here. You have to strain to make out the thunder. Nice -- I'm glad to fantasize the soundtrack and just watch the show, glad to get a little wet, glad to get home and inside and dry off. Laura's a little spacey tonight. Dale and them had a gig down at Tierney's, we smoked some grass on the way over there and she really got into it --the intoxication goes very nicely with Megan's chops on the washboard, with Dale singing "Rag Mama Rag," it must be said... a lovely time but all too short as they only had a half-hour set. The other acts? Nothing really that interesting, so here we are back home and Laura's prowling catlike by the bookcase. I'm smiling and asking her what she's reading. -- Eh, nothing's really grabbed my attention much since Snow. I grin, and flash on the "Love and Happiness" scene and Al Green singing, and feel the little twinge of uncertainty that's always present around Pamuk, like I'm not really getting it or am getting the wrong thing. (And hm, I should really mention that song to Dale...) -- Want to check out some poetry I've been working on? I found these pretty intense old Chilean poems over at Calixto's blog... and don't mention, or perhaps it goes without saying in this context, these poems from Ãvala seem to me like good trip material -- but I've mentioned Chile, and Laura would rather listen to Bolaño. Nice --I open The Unknown University at random and hit on "El dinero"; and it seems to me like this is the perfect poem for today, being as I am in receipt of a check from the Reality Fusion job, feeling confident about our rent for the next few months, even about a shopping trip over to Amazon... Still not much headway on the literary translation thing. But I remain hopeful; how could I not be, with Laura snuggled against me here on the couch as I read to her.
posted evening of August third, 2012: 7 responses
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Saturday, July 21st, 2012
Why no flowers:
Señor Josner your sexless poems your notes cry out
They plead for love
For love
Be loved
Then love
que yo escribo
que yo intento
que yo intento escribir
que yo intento escuchar
escuchar
escucharé
escribiré, iré, irÃa
posted morning of July 21st, 2012: Respond
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Tuesday, July 17th, 2012
As I was writing the other day in the voice of Maximiliano Josner Ãvala -- one who has been working on his project a good deal longer than I on mine -- and I felt again, strongly, how strange it seemed that he did not have a title for it, a proper name, or indeed a clear sense of what it was. My sense of what my project is is becoming a little clearer each day -- clear first of all that I should just describe this activity as "writing a book" and leave it at that, with the blog archives open to the curious; and herewith, a working title for the book I'm writing about Ãvala and his grandfather, and the grandson's translator: It will be called "This Silent House" for the time being, after a line from the son's journals.
posted evening of July 17th, 2012: Respond
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Monday, July 16th, 2012
(from the journals of Maximiliano Josner Ãvala: Jan. 14, 1903)
This silent house is filled with voices. I fear I've made little progress this year, indeed I am beginning to worry that the project as a whole is misconceived. An encouraging letter from Arroncoyo, his enthusiasm for the project buoys my spirit. Concerned that I am not the philosopher he has built me up to be. I'll have to go into town tomorrow and buy some paper from Calixto López. ... It is clear to me that the divinity in man is his perception of the passage of time: perceiving and feeling this elapsation around him is the closest he can approach to the Godhead. I am having trouble framing this in an analytical fashion though, as anything more than just an impression... I cannot escape the din of my grandfather's and my father's family's voices in the walls of this house. I shall take some flowers to Carolina's grave tomorrow.
posted evening of July 16th, 2012: 1 response
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Thursday, July 12th, 2012
I haven't really written much narrative (that I can recall) in the first person voice. Let's give this a try. Peter seems like a good place to start with the first person, being as he is at least roughly modeled after myself. (The plan as it now stands is, write fragments as they come to me. Revise and post at READIN those that seem worth while. Wait and see, see if anything is coming together. And if not, well, I'm having fun with the fragments and the revisions...)
 I found Fragmentos de la universidad desconocida when me and Laura were visiting Mexico City. What a poorly-planned trip! We had both just fallen in love with The Savage Detectives -- the idea came up on the spur of the moment, that we should make the trip as, well, an homage to Bolaño or something like that, something along those lines... didn't really bother to do much or any research though I guess, I guess we were both pretty busy with work around that time, felt lucky we could both take a week off and have it be the same week, and by the time we had gotten off the plane and stumbled to our hotel and stumbled out of the hotel, down the street, it was Day 1 and we were standing in the Plaza de la Constitución, rubbing our eyes, pawing at the map, trying to figure out how to get to the Calle Bucareli, and it was beginning to dawn on me that there were way better things we could be doing with our week than trying to retrace the footsteps of Leopold Bloom around Dublin.
It wound up being a good week, too -- we did not actually find our way to any of GarcÃa Madero's bars, but we did visit a couple of his bookshops, and the Bosque de Chapultepec, and Trotsky's house. Ate well. When we came home my suitcase was stuffed with books.
I've been a sucker for Spanish poetry ever since college -- the professor had us reading Neruda and Cardenal, and then I found an old book of Pablo Antonio Cuadra, and I was hooked. Something about the foreignness of it, the unfamiliarity of the language (well and of course the specific lilt and rhythm of Spanish) makes it touch me, ring clear in a way that only rarely happens with English language poetry. But Bolaño! I had no idea he had written any poetry. (I know -- it sounds dumb now, just a few years later on; for me he was just the author of The Savage Detectives, like how I didn't know anything about Kerouac beyond On the Road, for what seems like an inordinately long time past my tenth-grade year.) But, but there it was on the bookshelf, right in front of me in LibrerÃa Sotano: The fragments of the unknown university. What a title! Seeing it felt like a revelation. I know, I know, the structurally correct thing would have been for me to steal it... The cashier gave me a Sotano bookmark, I was meaning to hang on to it but no idea where it has gone.
That was our last day in Mexico.
↻...done
posted evening of July 12th, 2012: 11 responses
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Monday, July 9th, 2012
There is another variant of the Bartleby syndrome which I have not seen yet in Vila-Matas' enumeration -- one which seems to me like it must be pretty well-represented in the history of letters: writing the wrong book. Two, and possibly three characters in the story I am writing (and it goes without saying, possibly this applies to myself as well) spend their lives working hard on the wrong book.* They are not exactly emulating Bartleby -- they are after all striving to create, to produce -- but in terms of actual output it comes to very much the same thing.
Maximiliano Josner Ãvala is a gifted poet, one who, however, never pursues poetry; he believes his calling is to theology and to metaphysics, and he works all his life writing a manuscript which will never be published. He leaves behind him thousands of pages, but his only publication is his thesis on the traditions and institutions of the indigenous tribes of Peru.
Ãvala's young disciple Miguel Arroncoyo de Matoa is manically devoted to his teacher's philosophical work, and is too shallow of a thinker to really see the holes in it. He is also a seeker after fame, one who is bound to be disappointed; his dream is to use Ãvala's manuscript as a stepping-stone to his own success in the field. He publishes some fragments of poetry from Ãvala's journals with his own commentary, as a way of preparing the ground for what he considers the more important work, and then spends the remaining decades of his life attempting unsuccessfully to tame the monster manuscript. The volume of poetry does not make much of an impression, and is pretty well forgotten by the time Bolaño finds a copy of it in the university library in Santiago.
Bolaño includes some references to Ãvala in the poems in La universidad desconocida, which is how Peter Conlay, a young man in upstate New York, catches wind of his existence. He finds a copy of Finidades on Abebooks and falls in love with Ãvala's voice. So the question becomes, can Peter's translations succeed in introducing this forgotten and foreign poet to the world? Or is he too working on the wrong book? I see Peter as having things in common with both Ãvala and de Matoa...
*And have I mentioned how it is tripping me out, that I picked up Bartleby y compañÃa just when I was starting to piece this story together?
posted evening of July 9th, 2012: Respond
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Thursday, July 5th, 2012
La cuerda corta: finidades, la poesÃa de Maximiliano Josner Ãvala fue 1914 publicada en la prensa Universidad Técnica del Estado, editado y con introducción del colega y discÃpulo de Josner Ãvala, Miguel Arroncoyo de Marcoa. Fue el único libro de Josner Ãvala desde su tesis Sobre las tradiciones y instituciones de los peruanos indÃgenos casi 40 años antes, y fue publicada unos seis años despues de su muerte inoportuna. Su opus magnum, un tratado acerca de la divinidad del tiempo, nunca se completase.
La ambición de Miguel Arroncoyo editar y publicar ese tratado puede bien haber influido el escogimiento de poemas que componen las Finidades -- esas 229 estrofas representan las miles de páginas de los diarios que fueron donados a la biblioteca de la universidad, en armonia con el último testamento de Josner Ãvala. De Marcoa las define en su introducción como «poemas breves y crÃpticos sobre magia» y como una «investigación en la divinidad»; pero las leyendo en el contexto de los diarios, se muy fácil entienden como notas personales, pensamientos sobre su infancia y su orfandad, la pérdida de la madre y luego de los abuelos.
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Wednesday, July 4th, 2012
Here's a bit of how I'm imagining Maximiliano Josner's voice...
corta euforia ya no ciego
gustarÃa a mi abuelo ver
la cuerda corta que lo separa
de dios
del tuerto el juego de manos
sonrisa, rápido ofuscamiento
el robo consagrado
posted afternoon of July 4th, 2012: Respond
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