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READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
I'm wondering how many of the characters in The Savage Detectives are real people from Bolaño's cohort in D.F. in the mid-70's. According to infrarrealismo.com, Ulises Lima is based on Mexican poet Mario Santiago Papasquiaro*; clearly Arturo Belano is Bolaño himself. I am assuming GarcÃa Madero is made-up, and that the Font family must be based at least loosely on real people. The rest of the Visceral Realists must be a mix of real poets and inventions...
A couple of videos for your viewing pleasure and enlightenment. From paledave at Orbis TerQuintus, an animated visualization of The Known Universe, from the surface of the earth to 5 billion light years away, and back. It is done by the American Museam of Natural History and the Rubin Museum of Art -- I have seen similar productions before, this one is really graceful and pretty.
I have seen a lot of links over the past few days to this story about the observation of tool use by octopodes in Indonesia -- today my dad sent me the link and I finally went and took a look. Thanks, dad! Pretty amazing to watch:
I will never forget your kindness and your breakfast.
A friend at work has been recom-mending movies to Ellen; so far her picks have been fantastic. Tonight we watched Bread and Tulips, about its heroine's escape from her unsatisfactory, stifling home life into a world of romance and creativity -- it caught both of us up and took us out of ourselves into its Venice. The anarchist florist and the gossipy holistic masseuse, the sentimental Icelandic waiter, the bumbling would-be P.I.; I just wanted to dive into the screen and live with them. This is the right way to make entertainment.
posted evening of December 19th, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about The Movies
If you're going to be in the city next weekend and you like folk music, be sure to come down to Cake Shop Records, 152 Ludlow St. to see Pete Stampfel and friends play all evening long -- 8 - 12, only $5 at the door!
posted morning of December 19th, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
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).
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:
-- 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 ➳ More posts about Readings
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.)
...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?
If you're going to be in the city next weekend and you like folk music, be sure to come down to Cake Shop Records, 152 Ludlow St. to see Pete Stampfel and friends play all evening long -- 8 - 12, only $5 at the door! 
