READIN

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

🦋 Signing off (and soup!)

Off for the winter break -- I'll be visiting the Painter of Blue in a far warmer clime than my own, for a week. So no blog activity for a few days -- I'm trying to stay off the computer while down there and work on writing a piece about Museum of Innocence and Snow. I haven't been particularly active on weekdays anyway for a while, so there won't be that much difference; but this gives me an opportunity to share a soup recipe that I cooked for Ellen and myself tonight.

We've been in a pattern lately of cooking a large pot of soup on the weekends and then keeping it in the fridge for a couple of days and warming up leftovers for lunches and dinners... Clearly that is no good today, when we're going away. So here is a soup that serves two people without being too little or too much -- I'm pretty happy about having reckoned the quantities accurately. It is a lovely cold-weather soup, and vegetarian if you do not use chicken stock; adapted pretty freely from a larger recipe in Barbara Kafka's Soup: a Way of Life.

Pasta Fajul for 2

• 1 small yellow onion diced
• 2 ribs celery diced
• ½ cup canned tomato purée
• 1 tsp. tomato paste
• 1 can white beans, drained and rinsed
• 2 c. vegetable or chicken stock
• 2 small carrots, cut into chunks
• a handful of pasta -- penne or ziti is good, or whatever you like.
• ¼ c. parsley chopped fine
• 2 cloves garlic chopped fine

In a medium skillet, sauté onion and celery for a few minutes with a sprinkle of salt. Add tomatoes and tomato paste; cook over low heat, stirring occasionally, for about 15 min.

In a saucepan, bring stock, beans, carrots and tomato mixture to a slow boil. Mix in pasta and cook until noodles are soft, about 10 minutes. You need to stir it every minute or two, so the bottom does not scorch. Add parsley and garlic, cook a minute longer and serve.

See you after Christmas! I am planning out my reading list post for the end of 2009.

posted evening of December 20th, 2009: 3 responses
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🦋 Who's who? -- the Visceral Realists

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 García 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...

* Oops, and Papasquiaro is itself a pen name, just as Ulises Lima is; the poet's actual name is José Alfredo Zendejas Pineda -- that Wiki page also lists a number of other poets who are presumably represented in The Savage Detectives.

posted morning of December 20th, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Science!

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.

posted morning of December 20th, 2009: 1 response
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Saturday, December 19th, 2009

🦋 Escapist Fantasy Romance Done Right

I will never forget your kindness and your breakfast.

posted evening of December 19th, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Hoodoo Bash!

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
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Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

🦋 Intimations of Posthumity

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

🦋 Poetry, prose

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, ...

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

🦋 The Shadow of the Wind

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 espíritu crece y se hace fuerte. Hace ya muchos años, cuando mi padre me trajo por primera vez aquí, 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 mí. Cuando una biblioteca desaparece, cuando una librería cierra sus puertas, cuando un libro se pierde en el olvido, los que conocemos este lugar, los guardianes, nos aseguramos de que llegue aquí. En este lugar, los libros que ya nadie recuerda, los libros que se han perdido en el tiempo, viven para siempre, esperando llegar algún día a las manos de un nuevo lector, de un nuevo espíritu.

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.

El piso estaba situado justo encima de la librería especializada en ediciones de coleccionista y libros usados heredada de mi abuelo, un bazar encantado que mi padre confiaba en que algún día pasaría a mis manos. Me crié entre libros, haciendo amigos invisibles en páginas que se deshacían 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 oí comentar a un cliente habitual en la librería 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 mí, 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.

posted evening of December 13th, 2009: Respond
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🦋 A point of reference

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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🦋 Visceral realism

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

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.") -- Rodríguez wanted to name the visceral realists' magazine after her; and Laura Damián is (according to Rodríguez) "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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