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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 am working on understanding the trajectory Hernán Rivera Letelier followed from being unknown to being, as Dorfman says, "one of the very few writers in Chile who can make a living writing books." His first novel was wildly successful, La reina Isabel cantaba rancheras, and made of him an overnight literary sensation. That was in 1996, only 8 years before Dorfman is talking with him, but you get a very firm sense of Rivera Letelier as an established literary presence. A lot can happen in eight years -- he has by this time published several novels.
Time for a story. In the fifth chapter of Desert Memories, Dorfman takes a detour from his tour of northern Chile, to relate a yarn; and he does so in a very clever way. Rivera Letelier is talking to him about the town of Pampa Unión -- this is remembered from a frame in which Dorfman is standing in the ruins of Pampa Unión on the following day, after he has left Antofagasta -- last night Rivera Letelier was telling him a story about this town of bordellos, this town which features in his novels Fatamorgana and The Art of Resurrection. The year is 1929 and the president of Chile, General Carlos Ibáñez de Campo, will be passing through the Pampa Unión station, where his train will stop for water.
The band of musicians is ready, they've been practicing for weeks. The children are waiting to sing. The train is coming, the train can be seen chugging on the horizon. And people begin to cheer and they are hushed by one of the organizers. Things have to look orderly and nice. They want to use the occasion to ask the president if he could bestow upon this town some sort of legal status, recognize them as a municipality, put them on the map.
Accept them into the fold of the great Chilean family.
"And the locomotive," Hernán had said, taking his time, savoring our interest, "pulls into the station at exactly 3:08 in the hot, transparent afternoon."
And here Rivera Letelier's wife interrupts the story (and Dorfman's retelling of the story) to tell them supper is served, and Dorfman interrupts himself to talk about the meal -- so the meal serves as a frame internal to the story we have been hearing retold. From the mention of Mari he moves further back to talk about Hernán meeting Mari in the restaurant her mother ran out of her kitchen (and here we get an elaboration on the bit that Laura Cardona referred to in her review of The Art of Resurrection), and about his working in Pedro de Valdivia and listening to the stories of the viejos -- although "miners tend to die young," the men who have been working with explosives in the fields of caliche for years are called "old men" because they look old. And much, much more about his childhood and his path to becoming one of the most successful authors in Chile...
And after all this, Dorfman brings us back to last night in Antofagasta, after they have eaten supper, and he is asking his friend,
"At Pampa Unión. When the train with the president pulled in? We're going to pass through there tomorrow, you know."
"Oh, yes. At exactly 3:08 in the afternoon the train pulls in. Everybody waits and waits, the Boy Scouts from the nearby towns, the Red Cross, the fire brigade, from every little hamlet, the basketball team, the soccer team. And the man who was going to make the speech clears his throat and gets ready to hand the president their petition to make them into a real and recognized locality and they keep on waiting while the locomotive is serviced. And then..."
"And then at 3:14 in the afternoon, the train pulls out of the station."
"No president."
"He did not even poke his head out the window...."
"As if they did not exist," I had said to him last night, I say to myself again as I contemplate the desolation in which the whorehouses of Pampa Unión now lie, that whole town built for no other purpose than for men to make love in the desert. "As if those people never existed."
My mind is still resonating with Hernán's answer.
"Except for me," Hernán had said to us last night, whispers to Pampa Unión today. "I'm here to tell their story."
Despite the hospitable welcome... I was not entirely at ease. ...I feel uncomfortable whenever I meet members of Chile's business class, all too aware of their complicity with Pinochet's dictatorship, which in the case of Soquimich was particularly egregious, as our dictator's then son-in-law, Julio Ponce, had been one of those who acquired these salitreras from the state when they were privatized in the early 1980's in what observers consider dubious circumstances. And Eduardo Arce hints, at some point between the abalone and the sea bass -- or was it just before we were served the meringue dessert? -- when I inquire about his family, that his father had been traumatized by the experience of losing his hacienda in the South during the agrarian land reform program of President Eduardo Frei Montalva in the late sixties -- a process carried out by some of my best friends. But this is also Chile -- a country where people, at least of the elite, sit in close proximity to their former enemies and smile and chat about vintage wines and make believe the past does not really exist, that Arce is not a supporter of Pinochet and that I have not come to the North to search for the disappeared body of Freddy Taberna, not mention that Arce would lunch tomorrow at this table at the same time that I would be seated at a table in Antofagasta with the pampinos who were evicted from their homes because of decisions taken in this very room where we were having our midday meal.
Another animal that migrated across the Bering land bridge and east and south throughout the Americas and eventually down as far as Chile: the polyommatus butterfly. Dr. Naomi Pierce of Harvard et al. have vindicated Nabokov's hypothesis regarding the introduction of this genus of butterfly to the Americas, as Carl Zimmer reports today for the NY Times. The slideshow attached to the article has to be seen to be believed.
Below the fold, a piece from The Art of Resurrection that came to mind as I was reading this article. (I have that book on my brain now...)
At the opening of Chapter 4, the Christ of Elqui is walking along the rail line through the pampa, from Sierra Gorda to Providencia (or as the two he met in Sierra Gorda told him it is known locally, La Piojo -- they also warned him to stick to the tracks so as not to get lost in the desert) --
Across the pampa's wide expanse, the dry four o'clock wind was beginning to blow.
The Christ of Elqui, he had been hiking for a long hawl with no rest, his long hair blowing into his eyes, when he stopped; he lifted up his gaze, making a visor of his hands. All of a sudden it seemed as if he could make out the gravel lot of the plant over there where the hills began to rise -- in the pampa, such a sight gives one the illusion of seeing "a ship foundering on the desert plain," as some northern poet's verses call it. But the railroad line just followed its interminable southerly right-of-way.
Surely a little ways further, and it would turn off to that side.
Just at that moment, miraculous in the open pampa, under the brutally incandescent midday sun, a butterfly crossed over the iron rails. "An ephemeral butterflyâ€, he said in wonder, the Christ of Elqui; he could not imagine from how far off it had flown. It was an orange butterfly with black markings.*
As he watched it disappear, fluttering off to the east, that was when it occurred to him. Why not take the short cut, save some hiking, save some time? Clearly, more powerful than all the desert’s misdirections and illusions would be the Eternal Father, guiding his steps.
So he thought; and that is what he did.
(Is it clumsy, this having the two warn him to stay on the tracks, then having him take the short-cut and get lost? Possibly. But, very beautiful. Some of the subsequent portion of the chapter is quoted in this post from a few months back.)
I wonder who the northern poet being quoted in the second paragraph is. The closest thing to the quoted phrase I have been able to find with Google is from Elisabeth Nox' recently published first novel La ciudad de los hombres perdidos, "Pero en ningún momento llegó a preguntarse cómo habÃa llegado el barco a encallar en mitad del desierto." Interesting but probably not what I'm looking for...
* One of the butterflies that Nabokov named, the Pseudolucia aureliana, is native to the Atacama; however it is blue with yellow markings, oh well.
I found this lovely anagram at neatorama -- it's the work of Torontonians Micah Lexier and Christian Bök. Among other things, Bök has written Eunoia (2001), consisting of five univocalic chapters and some poetry.
Up ahead, to one side of the route, is a gigantic granite hand thrusting up from a slight mound in the desert. Yes, I did say a granite hand and I did say gigantic -- towering twenty or thirty meters high -- a smoth rock statue, this Mano, erected here in 1992 by the Chilean sculptor Mario Irrarrázaval as a way of commemorating the presence of humans on this land, both the Europeans who had arrived in 1492 and those who had made the journey so many millenia before Columbus.
Our answer to the desert, that hand.
For more, see Karl Fabricius' writeup of the Hand of the Desert at Environmental Graffiti, with photography from Wikimedia Commons and Flickr.
So right now I'm reading Ariel Dorfman's Desert Memories -- a fantastic book, one I recommend highly though I have yet to write anything about it -- it is making me think I should start keeping a bibliography of books dealing with northern Chile. This book will serve as the jumping-off point I think, for one thing because this bibliography would be directed towards an English reading audience and the book is written in English (and Dorfman seems like a marvelously interesting figure, certainly worth seeking out the rest of his work); all of Rivera Letelier's work will be on the list with big stars next to it indicating it ought to be published in translation; what else?
I expect The Motorcycle Diaries includes a lot of time riding through the Atacama and probably belongs on the list.
Juan Ignacio Molina's Geographical, Natural and Civil History of Chili should be present as background information.
Escritores desde el lÃmite describes itself as a blog dedicated to the literature and history of northern Chile; I have not looked at it any further yet.
What else? If you've done any reading about the north of Chile, fiction or history ot otherwise, please post in comments. Movies too! (imdb gives me an Argentine film from 1959 called Salitre and a Portuguese short from 2005 of the same title, and a brand-new Mexican documentary called El salitre, esbozo de una historia en fuga. And Patricio Guzmán's Nostalgia de la luz looks well worth watching.)
posted afternoon of January 23rd, 2011: 6 responses
Another example of woodshedding a melody with variations. This is "Amazing Grace" and "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." (I noticed the other night that the two songs are extremely similar to each other -- you can tell the difference between them by the rhythm, but it would be very easy to sing either song to the other one's melody.)
This is the first recording I have made with my new chin rest. It comes off of the lovely old, broken violin which Eric (guitarist for the Lost Souls) bought at a garage sale for a couple bucks and keeps on his mantel. It's got an extremely low profile, just what I've been looking for -- chin rests are generally too bulky for me to find them comfortable. The edge of the rest is inscribed "Becker's chin and shoulder rest" which appears to date it mid-to-late-19th C. Frederick Douglass' violin, pictured to the right, has the same chin rest.
posted afternoon of January 22nd, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Fiddling
