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Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
Scott McLemee has an interview with Marcela Valdes -- whose essay Alone Among the Ghosts prefaces the newly published volume of Bolaño's non-fiction -- at Inside Higher Ed today, on the subject of the new book and Bolaño's writing in general, and his current popularity. Asked about the "Bolaño myth", Valdes observes, "The fact that American publishers have used Bolaño's life story to sell his books? Is this really a mortal sin? The book industry is in such terrible shape these days that publishers are trying everything to sell books." -- this is a nice perspective, a good way to step back from the dire imprecations of Castellanos Moya... McLemee quotes a line from Bolaño's Playboy interview; when asked about his feelings on posthumous works, he responded, "Posthumous? It sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, an unconquered gladiator. At least that's what poor Posthumous would like to believe. It gives him courage." -- I had not realized this: Bolaño had been battling the disease which would kill him since the early 90's, which means a great deal of his corpus, including The Savage Detectives, was written under the shadow of death. I wonder what led the interviewer to ask that question -- was Bolaño's health public knowledge? It seems almost indelicate... Earlier today I happened on his The Many Masks of Max Mirebelais at Words Without Borders -- it is one of the biographical sketches that make up Nazi Literature in the Americas. Its closing line comes across as extremely dark given the knowledge of its author's health: "Death found [Mirebelais] composing the posthumous works of his heteronyms." Based on this excerpt, Nazi Literature in the Americas looks like an extremely demanding read -- if anything moreso than The Savage Detectives; I think my understanding of the passage is really severely hampered by not being familiar with the poets he mentions (and of course by being familiar in only a limited, general way with Haiti's modern history).
posted evening of December 16th, 2009: 2 responses
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Monday, December 14th, 2009
I've noticed several times Bolaño's statement that he was "less embarrassed" by his poetry than by his novels -- don't remember where I first read that, but it was recently referenced at MobyLives -- it crossed my mind today when I remembered his poem about Lupe in The Romantic Dogs: She worked in la Guerrero, a few streets down from Julian's,
and she was 17 and had lost a son.
The memory made her cry in that Hotel Trébol room, ... -- very similar material to what he will later write about Lupe in The Savage Detectives. And the funny thing is, that poem seemed to me like about the weakest one in The Romantic Dogs, whereas the writing about Lupe in the novel is strong and resonant. Not sure exactly what to make of that... Perhaps that Bolaño wrote his fiction best as prose, that his best work as a poet was not narrative; perhaps that this poem was a rough draft for a characterization in the novel?
 Update: ...or another possibility, that The Romantic Dogs does not contain Bolaño's strongest poetry work at all -- this is the assertion made by Chad Post in today's edition of Making the Translator Visible -- Post interviews Erica Mena, translator of (among other things) Bolaño's poem "Tales from the Autumn in Gerona," which will be published in the March issue of Words Without Borders [link] and which Mena and (tentatively) Post find to be much better than the poems in The Romantic Dogs. Something to look forward to, certainly.
posted evening of December 14th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, December 13th, 2009
 Mariana has been telling me for a while that she thinks I would like La sombra del viento, today she loaned it to me. She describes it as a sort of Borgesian mystery story set in Barcelona. Interesting -- I've never heard of Carlos Ruiz Zafón... The beginning is indeed sounding that way -- I'm in love with the idea of a Graveyard of Forgotten Books.
Cada libro, cada tomo que ves, tiene alma. El alma de quien lo escribió, y el alma de quienes lo leyeron y vivieron y soñaron con él. Cada vez que alguien desliza la mirada por sus páginas, su espÃritu crece y se hace fuerte. Hace ya muchos años, cuando mi padre me trajo por primera vez aquÃ, este lugar ya era viejo. Quizá tan viejo como la misma ciudad. Nadie sabe a ciencia cierta desde cuándo existe, o quiénes lo crearon. Te diré lo que mi padre me dijo a mÃ. Cuando una biblioteca desaparece, cuando una librerÃa cierra sus puertas, cuando un libro se pierde en el olvido, los que conocemos este lugar, los guardianes, nos aseguramos de que llegue aquÃ. En este lugar, los libros que ya nadie recuerda, los libros que se han perdido en el tiempo, viven para siempre, esperando llegar algún dÃa a las manos de un nuevo lector, de un nuevo espÃritu.
 Each book, each tome you see here, has a soul. The soul of the one who writes it, and the soul of those who read and live with and speak about it. Each time someone slides his gaze across its pages, its spirit grows and becomes strong. Many years ago now, when my father brought me here for the first time, this place was already old. Perhaps older than the city itself. Nobody knows in any precise way how long it has stood, or who brought it into being. I'll tell you what my father told me: whenever a library disappears, whenever a bookstore closes its doors, whenever a book is lost to forgetfulness, those who know this place, the keepers, we are assured that it will come here. In this place, the books that nobody remembers anymore, the books which have been lost in time, live forever, awaiting
the arrival of some new reader's hands, of a new spirit. (possibly this passage is laying the mysticism on a little thick -- also there is something awkwardly paternalistic in having Daniel's father tell him about this. Now I am thinking of The Never-ending Story -- this could be a good association or a bad one, not sure.) Also this very nice description of a used bookstore:
El piso estaba situado justo encima de la librerÃa especializada en ediciones de coleccionista y libros usados heredada de mi abuelo, un bazar encantado que mi padre confiaba en que algún dÃa pasarÃa a mis manos. Me crié entre libros, haciendo amigos invisibles en páginas que se deshacÃan en polvo y cuyo olor aún conservo en las manos.
 The flat was right on top of the bookstore, specializing in collectable editions and used books, inherited from my grandfather; an enchanted bazaar which my father let me know would pass into my hands one day. I was brought up among books, making invisible friends in their pages, pages which crumbled into dust and whose odor I still keep on my hands.
 ...I'm thinking, three works which it might be fun to compare and contrast, are this, The Never-ending Story, and The New Life.
En una ocasión oà comentar a un cliente habitual en la librerÃa de mi padre que pocas cosas marcan tanto a un lector como el primer libro que realmente se abre camino hasta su corazón. Aquellas primeras imágenes, el eco de esas palabras que creemos haber dejado atrás, nos acompañan toda la vida y esculpen un palacio en nuestra memoria al que, tarde o temprano -- no importa cuántos libros leamos, cuántos mundos descubramos, cuánto aprendamos u olvidemos --, vamos a regresar. Para mÃ, esas páginas embrujadas siempre serán las que encontré entre los pasillos del Cementerio de los Libros Olvidados.
One time I heard a regular customer of my father's bookstore saying that few things mark a reader as strongly as the first book which really opens a path to his heart. Those first images, the echo of those words which we think we have left behind, stay with us all our life and build themselves into a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later -- it's not important how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, how much we learn and forget --, we return. For me, those enchanted pages will always be those which I found in the aisles of the Graveyard of Forgotten Books.
This first chapter could as easily be either the enclosing narrative for a fantasy like The New Life, or for a story-within-a-story retelling of the book he has found. I think it is going to be different from either of those.
posted evening of December 13th, 2009: Respond
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I was telling a friend today how much I'm loving The Savage Detectives and how he ought to take a look at it, and came up with: "Imagine if Jack Kerouac had been 30 years younger and lived in Mexico City." Interesting -- this is the second time I've been trying to describe Bolaño and come up with a Beat point of reference. (Previously I described one of his poems as sounding like Ginsberg.)
posted evening of December 13th, 2009: Respond
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I checked The Savage Detectives out from the library yesterday and started reading it. (This may have been a foolish decision: it looks as of 20 pages in, as if this book is going to devour my consciousness utterly, and for a long time; when I had been planning to spend the next two weeks working on an essay about Pamuk.) What joy! Every page is just delightful. But here's the thing: on nearly every page, Bolaño is telling me about source material that I ought to read if I want to really understand where he is coming from. For example, on November 8, Madero writes: "I've discovered an amazing poem. They never said anything about its author, Efrén Rebolledo, in any of our literature classes," and goes on to quote El vampiro -- he says it haunts him in the same way as his reading of Pierre Louÿs -- and then on November 10, at the end of a truly breathtaking scene, he mentions 9 books that the 3 visceral realists he has met are carrying:
- Manifeste électrique aux paupiers de jupes -- an edition of poetry by "Michel Bulteau, Matthieu Messagier, Jean-Jacques Faussot, Jean-Jacques Nguyen That, and Gyl Bert-Ram-Soutrenom F.M., and other poets of the Electric Movement, our French counterparts (I think)."
- Sang de satin, by Michel Bulteau
- Nord d'éte naître opaque, by Mattieu Messagier
- Le parfait criminel, by Alain Jouffroy
- Le pays où tout est permis, by Sophie Podolski
- Cent mille milliards de poèmes, by Raymond Queneau
- Little Johnny's Confession, by Brian Patten
- Tonight at Noon, by Adrian Henri
- The Lost Fire Brigatde, by Spike Hawkins
So much new! Most of these authors I have not even heard of, much less read. (In this I find a point of identification with Madero, who at 17 is discovering poetry.)
A few more authors, from November 14: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is one of the earliest Mexican poets (unrelatedly, I am entranced by Madero's line from November 7, "I finished Aphrodite, the book by Louÿs, and now I'm reading the dead Mexican poets, my future colleagues.") -- RodrÃguez wanted to name the visceral realists' magazine after her; and Laura Damián is (according to RodrÃguez) "a poetess who died before she turned twenty, in 1972, and her parents established a prize in her memory."
posted morning of December 13th, 2009: 3 responses
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Saturday, December 12th, 2009
...another chapter in the annals of me learning Spanish comes with Juan Goytisolo's story "Los amigos" (from Para vivir aquÃ) -- two things about this story are, a very high proportion of the clauses have "we" as their subject -- so I'm getting used to another set of conjugations that I have not seen as much of so far -- and, it seems like a lot more of the verbs are in imperfect past tense than I'm used to. So that adds a new wrinkle, trying to figure out how to read that tense. The Spanish language courses say, imperfect indicative X == "was X'ing" -- this seems to generally work, although it would get extremely tedious to translate everything this way. Until now I have recognized imperfect by the "-aba" ending -- verbs which end in -ar, which is most verbs, form their imperfect this way. But I come to find out, verbs which end in -ir and -er do not exhibit this behavior; their imperfect looks roughly like a preterite with -a tacked on to the end. I think I have been reading this, until now, as if it were a preterite -- this may account for why this story seems to have so much more imperfect in it. (Also: I had not realized that first person plural preterite construction is almost exactly the same as first person plural indicative -- when I started reading this story I thought it was being told in the present tense.) I love the way Goytisolo opens stories. Look at this:
For the past six days I had not been getting a moment's rest. The rhythm of life in the city had changed quickly; in the faces of the men and women who covered the sidewalks was written a firm resolution, full of hope. We had discovered that we were not alone, and after so many years of shame the discovery was astonishing. Our gazes would intersect and they were gazes of complicity. The most insignificant gestures of daily life -- the simple act of walking -- took on a miraculous aura. People followed their ordinary paths silently, and this silence, from hundreds and thousands of people, was more eloquent than any word.
The story is about some friends who find themselves in a political upheaval. One (the narrator) decides to leave the country, the others are taking leave of him. The imperfect tense that's used throughout is a little confusing -- it makes it seem like the upheaval has been going on for a longer time than the "six days" mentioned at the beginning. And it's insanely frustrating not to have any idea what happened a week ago -- the narrator does not refer to that again after the first sentence. This gives me a feeling similar to The Life and Times of Michael K , of wanting more setting -- though I guess the lack of exposition is more forgivable in a short story. Is the city Barcelona? Is the political leader whose "familiar silhouette stood out on a background of airplanes, tanks, guns, ships" in the newspapers Franco?
posted afternoon of December 12th, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, December 10th, 2009
 El PaÃs today publishes the first chapter of Antonio Muñoz Molina's new novel, La noche de los tiempos, along with a glowing review. Looks like a fine book -- I'm drawn in by the first few pages, by the specificity of location and date -- October 1936, Pennsylvania Station (New York) -- and by the levels of imagery -- "Each man and woman a figure very similar to the others and yet bestowed an identity as indubitably unique as the distinct trajectory each one follows aiming for a precise destination..."
posted evening of December 10th, 2009: Respond
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John was over this evening -- we're going to play the open mic at Summit Unitarian Church on Saturday, looks like our set list will be "Louisville Burglar" and "California Stars" for our primary 2 songs, and "Prodigal Son" (which turns out to sound much better in E than in D) and "Meet Me in the Morning", if we get a chance to play more than 2 songs. We mostly went over stuff we have played before; the new songs we tried out: - "Somewhere East of West Berlin" (Stonewall Jackson) -- Cold War Country/Western.
- "The Growling Old Man and the Growling Old Woman" -- French Canadian fiddle tune; I've been working on this a fair amount the past few days, using my metronome technique. It sounded very nice.
- "Uncle Pen" -- I did not know this tune at all, it was kind of tough to catch the tune. But worth working on.
We also played "Jockey Full of Bourbon" in A minor (instead of E minor) -- I'm finally getting to work out a good fiddle part for that.
Someone who found my site by searching for "Louisville Burglar" sent me a link to this magnificent version of it, by John Specker: Grassroots Festival, 1996.
(John reminds me, we also played Neil Young's "I am a Child", and "Ophelia" by The Band.)
posted evening of December 10th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, December 6th, 2009
Saramago addresses a new post to the Italians who marched in protest of Berlusconi's regime yesterday.
Si Cicerón todavÃa viviera entre vosotros, italianos, no dirÃa "¿Hasta cuando, Catilina, abusarás de nuestra paciencia?" y sÃ: "¿Hasta cuando, Berlusconi, atentarás contra nuestra democracia?". De eso se trata. Con su peculiar idea sobre la razón de ser y el significado de la institución democrática, Berlusconi ha transformado en pocos años a Italia en una sombra grotesca de paÃs y a una gran parte de los italianos en una multitud de tÃteres que lo siguen aborregadamente sin darse cuenta de que caminan hacia el abismo de la dimisión cÃvica definitiva, hacia el descrédito internacional, hacia el ridÃculo absoluto.
Con su historia, con su cultura, con su innegable grandeza, Italia no merece el destino que Berlusconi le ha trazado con frialdad canalla y sin el menor vestigio de pudor polÃtico, sin el más elemental sentimiento de vergüenza. Quiero pensar que la gigantesca manifestación contra la "cosa" Berlusconi, donde serán leÃdas estas palabras, se convertirá en el primer paso para la libertad y la regeneración de Italia. Para eso no son necesarias armas, bastan los votos. En vosotros deposito mi confianza.
If Cicero still lived among you, O Italians, he would not say, "How long, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience?" but rather: "How long, Berlusconi, will you transgress against our democracy?" This is how it is. With his unusual ideas about the basis and significance of the democratic institution, Berlusconi has in a few years transformed Italy into a grotesque shadow of a country; a great part of the Italian people, into a mob of puppets who go on, ovine, without understanding that they're marching toward the abyss of definitive civic resignation, towards international discredit, towards absolute ridicule.With her history, with her culture, with her undeniable grandeur, Italy does not deserve the destiny which Berlusconi has mapped out, with brutal coldness and without the least vestige of political modesty, without the most elemental sentiment of shame. I want to believe that the massive demonstration against the Berlusconi "thing", where these words will be read, will become the first step for liberty and for the regeneration of Italy. For this arms are not necessary; votes will suffice. In you I place my confidence.
posted evening of December 6th, 2009: Respond
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Something new is opening up for me musically as I start using the metronome -- I was able tonight to learn a new tune in about an hour, where it usually takes me weeks before I can think of a song as something I feel comfortable with. I learned "Boys of Blue Hill" -- which is a vaguely familiar tune from my youth but I have not listened to consciously in a long time -- from sheet music; starting with a very slow metronome (80 or so) I played the notes to rhythm, adhering to the metronome's time even when I stumble on the melody. Play it through a few times until the slowness begins to feel like a drag, and speed the tick up to 108, which is the very slowest I can play most reel or jig type of fiddle tunes and have them sound anything like a song. And repeat; keep playing until the slowness feels like a drag, and raise the speed a bit, for a few iterations, until the speed has begun to feel right; only then do I start thinking about really learning the notes by heart -- and by then I have played them enough times that they are already fairly solid! I tried this with a second tune, "Harvest Home" -- which is much less familiar, which a lot of YouTube fiddlers seem to like to make a medley of with "Boys of Blue Hill" -- and spent about half an hour on it, not getting nearly as close to knowing it as I feel with the other song, but still making palpable progress with it. I made a recording of "Boys of Blue Hill" which I will post if I can get my browser to coöperate in uploading it to a host.
Update -- got my browser walking on the straight and narrow again. The "Boys of Blue Hill".
posted evening of December 6th, 2009: Respond
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