READIN

Friday, November 19th, 2010

🦋 A Human Document

Via a post of LanguageHat's I discover a new work that is utterly sui generis -- author Tom Phillips' ongoing project A Humument -- potentially infinite (or Babelianly astronomically finite) stories extracted selectively from W.H. Mallock's novel A Human Document, by altering the book:

This reminds me in certain ways of asemic writing -- though clearly the words have meaning, are to be read as pieces of language and not only as a visual arrangement of forms, I react to them as I would to the shapes and scribbles of Roberto Altmann or Mindy Fisher or Serafini, where the semantic element of the language is "all in my head".

posted evening of November 19th, 2010: Respond
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Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

🦋 Salitrera

posted evening of November 17th, 2010: Respond
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🦋 Filthy asemic birds

Mindy Fisher's ornaglyphic logograms resonate between violence and innocence:

posted evening of November 17th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, November 14th, 2010

🦋 Santiago

A new story from Jorge López, a walk through his neighborhood in Santiago.

It all happened in Providencia

by Jorge López

On the metro, at Manuel Montt station. An old woman is having trouble trying to get off, unable to find a handhold anywhere. The train brakes and the woman steadies herself against me. I hold her up, I give her my hand. Hold on, I say. She grips my hand firmly and smiles at me. Thank you, you’re very kind. I hold her up and help her move up until she’s able to get to the exit. She again thanks me. Have a good day, I say. You too, young man.

That’s all it would have been, one event in the course of the day, if it weren’t for a voice -- grave, reproachful -- inside the train car as the doors closed.

-- That lady’s too old to be fooling anybody.

The light at the corner of Guardia Vieja and 11 de Septiembre is red; a few pedestrians are waiting to cross. I’m watching, my earphones on, a bit cut off from the world. In the few seconds of silence between the end of one song and the beginning of the next, I overhear a bit of conversation between two of them, perhaps a mother and her daughter.

-- Well, it was just that poor-person smell!

The way poverty smells. It hurts me, it moves me to hear that; what moves me the most is that I recognize it, I see its reflection in myself. I too have spoken of the odor “of poor people,” always doing an embarrassed double-take, I who work with poor people, it has nothing to do with poverty.

I’m walking along Providencia, Galería Drugstore is one of those over-designed, over-priced shops. One of the customers is saying to the woman at the counter:

-- You know, I have to make so many adjustments when I come by here, I live up in La Dehesa, I never come down here...

I leave the store quickly, almost automatically.

Night is falling on a rainy day. A man on the sidewalk, a drunkard, a homeless man I’m sure, sheltered by the eaves of the Portal Lyon. It’s not unusual to see homeless around here. Today it is cold, and he is not even covered by the customary cardboard boxes. I move a bit closer and notice the smell of spilt wine. So drunk he cannot stand up, I guess. But it’s not the ordinary box wine. Shards of glass are glittering on the sidewalk, I step carefully trying to avoid them. Did he throw the bottle down after he drank the last drops? Did somebody smash the bottle against him? I don’t see any blood, he appears to be conscious, sitting, doesn’t seem to be hurt. I don’t ask him what happened, just go on my way, don’t get involved.

I’m as much to blame as anyone, only thinking of how to get home without getting wet, the few more blocks remaining, perhaps the McDonald’s on my street will still be open.

At what point did we lose our solidarity, our understanding? We shut ourselves off so coarsely from the world. When did this moment come?

posted afternoon of November 14th, 2010: 3 responses
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🦋 Barroco chileno

Reading Rivera Letelier is putting me in mind of Faulkner or Saramago. His sentences have a dense lushness, a gentle rhythm that allows the mind to wander and then pulls it back in to the flow of the syntax. (This effect is really heightened for me by the sentences being in a language I don't fully understand -- I find myself reading over several times, first to establish the rhythm, then slower, to get a fuller understanding of the meaning, then over, slowly the rhythm and the narrative come into sync for me.)

posted afternoon of November 14th, 2010: Respond
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Friday, November 12th, 2010

🦋 ¡Feliz cumpleaños Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz!

At the forefront of Mexican literature stands Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who lived from 1651 to 1695; her birthday has been National Book Day in Mexico since 1979.

Tell me Rapacious conqueror
conquered by my persistence --
Where has your arrogance gone,
how will you disrupt my solid grace?
Now even though you conquer
with the tip of your harpoon
the hardest heart
What matters this violent rage
if in spite of your conquest
reason lives on?

↻...done

posted evening of November 12th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, November 11th, 2010

🦋 Plasma

Lead ions collide in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN,
generating temperatures a million times hotter than the heart of the sun
and producing a quark-gluon plasma.

posted morning of November 11th, 2010: Respond

Wednesday, November 10th, 2010

🦋 Eye

Your wallpaper search is over: this picture by Roland and Julia Seitre is all you will ever need for desktop background. (Select, of course, for it to be "tiled" rather than "stretched".)

posted evening of November 10th, 2010: 3 responses
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🦋 Too Many Teardrops

Oh my God what a fantastic performance. Here are the Texas Tornados covering ? and the Mysterians:

posted evening of November 10th, 2010: Respond
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🦋 The Christ of Elqui: "Fact" and "Fiction"

Doing a little more research about Rivera Letelier's book: I was apparently imprecise in calling it an homage to Parra's poem. It looks like both the poem and the book are based on the life of a real historical figure named Domingo Zárate Vega who preached imminent apocalypse in the Elqui Valley of the 1930's. (I am hedging a bit because I'm not finding much primary source material about Zárate Vega on the internets. But multiple pages about the book and about the poem make reference to their being based on real history. An article in the Patagonia Times states that Rivera Letelier "researched the actual existence of the Christ of Elqui for his book and includes a bibliography at the end to avoid accusations of plagiarism" -- I am not finding this bibliography in my copy, which is disappointing and confusing.)

From the same Patagonia Times article, a beautiful anecdote about how Rivera Letelier, who grew up in a lower-class family and initally worked as a miner, came to his writing career:

Rivera Letelier began to write when he was 21 years old “because of hunger.” Listening to the radio with an empty stomach, he heard the announcement of a poetry competition whose award was a dinner in a luxurious hotel. He wrote a four-page love poem and won the meal.

Update: a little information about Zárate Vega in this post from Loruka, who lives in La Serena.

posted afternoon of November 10th, 2010: 1 response
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