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Friday, November 4th, 2011
Los poetas mexicanas (supongo que los poetas en general) detestan que se les recuerde de su ignorancia.
The opening pages of Savage Detectives made me fall down laughing when I read them last time around (about two  years ago now) -- they are holding up in quality the second time around and in a different language. I could not find my copy of the book (indeed I may never have owned one, perhaps it was a library book), so have bought a Spanish copy and... will see how it goes keeping up with the group read. Even if I don't end up reading the whole book (which seems like it would be a stretch), I am getting some lovely reading experience out of it.
 A nice coincidence, also, for the opening paragraph to have yesterday's date on it. A good omen of sorts -- it must be exactly the right time of year to be starting this book. (Shades of October 3rd, 2005!) And GarcÃa Madero? -- he seems like sort of a brat, but in a lovable way -- I can identify with him.
posted evening of November 4th, 2011: 4 responses
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I thank Rise of in lieu of a field guide for hipping me to the group read of Savage Detectives happening in January. The participants include (but are not limited to, nudge, nudge),
posted evening of November 4th, 2011: Respond
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Thursday, November third, 2011
Midway through a third read of Zupcic's collection Dragi Sol -- I just wanted to post a few sentences about each of the stories, trying to get them straight in my mind...
Most of the stories are about the same family. The central figure is the adult son Vojislav Didic; his father, Zlatica Didic (or Slavko Didic?) emigrated from Croatia to Venezuela in the early 50's and married. Vojislav was born in 1970, and soon afterwards his father left, possibly meaning to return to Yugoslavia. Vojislav has never seen his father except in old photos.
- "Return" -- Zlatica (not named here) is on the beach in Venezuela, wishing he were back home in Netretic. He decides to leave.
- "The Same" -- Vojislav (not named here) is telling the history of his father's time in Yugoslavia and Italy during the second World War, and his emigration. He ends by cursing his father whom he has never known, hoping he is dead.
- "Señor Gray" -- I have not read this story as closely as the others; it's not clear to me whether or how the narrator is connected to the Didic family. Señor Gray and his brother are the priests of an old religion worshipping a god named Dios Kirou; they initiate the young narrator in its illumination.
- "Correspondence: Towards a Novel" -- Vojislav reads and translates his father's correspondence from the 40's and makes a case that it is a tissue of lies constructed to save the memory of his uncle Zlatko, who died during a battle between Yugoslavian and German forces in 1944.
- "Who Killed You, Vinko Spolovtiva?" -- The narrator of this story is named Vinko Spolovtiva and so is his father; but they seem to be the same characters as Vojislav and Zlatica Didic. The father has gotten in touch with his grown son and arranged to meet him in Plaza BolÃvar de Valencia. The son has come armed and planning to shoot his father.
- "Beautiful Life" -- The central character here appears to be Vojislav's grandfather in Netretic (although he refers to his emigrant son as Slavko, not Zlatica -- the other sons he mentions have the names of Vojislav's uncles). He is an old man riding his bicycle around Netretic, thinking about all he has lived through.
- "Returning to EloÃsa" -- an old man, a senescent man, thinking about his dead lover.
- "The Real Death of Vinko Spolovtiva" -- The narrator insists he has not killed his father.
- "Letter to Nowhere" -- Vinko Spolovtiva writes a letter to Señor Caragrande about his name and its history. I need to read this more closely.
- "Mary Monazin" -- The longest story in the collection, I am not going to try to summarize it now. The narrator is Vinko Spolovtiva -- I'm a little curious since the only other place in the book that Mary Monazin is mentioned is in the last paragraph of "The Same" -- this makes me think the narrator of that story is Vinko Spolovtiva -- I'm trying to figure out why there are the two characters Vojislav Didic and Vinko Spolovtiva? Seems like the book would be more cohesive if only one of them was here -- I haven't been able to differentiate between the two of them.
posted evening of November third, 2011: Respond
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Monday, October 31st, 2011
I was wondering a while ago, where I could find source material for O livro dos conselhos, the mediæval text from which José Saramago  took several of his epigraphs. Turns out I was looking for the wrong title -- the primary title of the book is O leal conselheiro and several editions of it are available through Amazon in case you read (mediæval) Portuguese. Not finding any Spanish translation which I would have expected to be available... The text does not seem to be available online AOTW; but there is a Leal Conselheiro Project being pursued in collaboration between João DionÃsio of Universidade de Lisboa and Paloma Celis-Carbajal of Madison, which aims to have a digitization of the sole extant manuscript copy of O leal conselheiro online by the end of next year.
 Update: Hmm, seems I spoke too soon.
Márcio Ricardo Coelho Muniz of the UEFS has a paper online on "The Faithful Advisor and the Book of Exhortations" which makes clear that the Livro dos conselhos is a separate, lesser-known work of Edward's.
posted afternoon of October 31st, 2011: 3 responses
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Sunday, October 30th, 2011
Man, am I glad we cut down that dogwood tree this summer! The storm last night brought down large (but ultimately insignificant to the giant tree) pieces of maple and most of the burning bush on the side of the house -- the power lines are rather miraculously none the worse for wear.
posted evening of October 30th, 2011: Respond
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We spent last night in Philadelphia -- walking around this morning I saw many lovely murals. This picture is a detail from a mural on 20th Street or so, a few blocks north of the Museum of Fine Art.
posted evening of October 30th, 2011: Respond
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Friday, October 28th, 2011
The story "Cartas para escribir una novela" is the central piece in Zupcic's book Dragi Sol -- all the stories are meditations on the narrator's relationship with his absent immigrant father, this story is likely the most successful. I think it is the heart of the work. Read the opening to get an idea of the voice he is developing and the complexity of narrative style he is achieving.
Postcards: towards a novel.by Slavko Zupcic
The personal journal of Vojislav Didic
(Notes on the life of my father, Zlatica Didic;
his postcards and photos. His memory.)
for Leticia Z
"Huyo de mi semejante;
en todo semejante hay un doble."
-- Georges Braque
Yes -- I know what Anton said on his recent visit, I know all he said; but this will not be the day I regret having translated, having copied out fresh, written out on good white paper my father's old postcards. Quite the contrary: there is something to having saved these cards from oblivion, something enchanting, something heartening -- the marvel of seeing a new world, a new universe, just an ocean away from my own. Some -- the majority -- were written in Serbo-Croatian; others in a mix of English and French, a jargon my father picked up as he made his way through Europe during the Second World War; and a few letters, two or three, written in Spanish, a Spanish peppered liberally with Serbian idiom. Almost all were sent from my father to his brother Vinko Didic (Hrastovica, zp: Petrinja), and to his best friend in Yugoslavia, Stevo Valec (L.R. 168, Karlovac); also to Ankika Car in the United States (R.R.I. Box 118A, Hobart, Ind.), who was his first girlfriend, and Van Hecke Zimmerman (JunÃn 1689D, 1233 Buenos Aires), a German engineer my father had met on board the Fontainbleau -- not the legendary ship, one built in imitation of it which sailed the Atlantic Ocean for many years under an Argentine flag. The others are replies to his letters, from Vinko, Stevo, Ankiko and others my father wrote to occasionally.Of his siblings, my uncles and aunt, Vinko was the only one he wrote to very frequently, and the only one he received letters from. He wrote a few times to Marko and to Nikolas. Never to Anna, or if he did those letters were among those that we destroyed, my sister and I, ten years ago. We know her name and where she lived (Leigh Creek, S.A., Australia), because these points are mentioned frequently in the letters, as are the corresponding data for Zlatko -- how he sings, how he pisses. And Zlatko, he never could have written to my father: dead men*, as dead as he has been for the past 40 years, do not write. *Information in my father's letters suggests that Zlatko Didic died in 1944, fighting with partisan troops against a German convoy, drilled through by a bullet from the Nazi front. Anton B., an old Yugoslavian diplomat in the service of the Italian government and lately a friend of our family, had no trouble confirming the date and locale of my uncle Zlatko Didic's demise. Where his skepticism lay was with the circumstances under which it took place. Indeed he appears to be taken with a complex theory which suggests that not even the address we have for my aunt Anna is accurate.
(I think "Correspondence" would actually be a better word to use in the title and header.)
posted evening of October 28th, 2011: Respond
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On this date in 1886, the Statue of Liberty was dedicated on Bledsoe Island in New York harbor. Talking Points Memo runs some great pictures of the statue under construction; below, her left hand.
posted evening of October 28th, 2011: Respond
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Tuesday, October 25th, 2011
 I'm happy to find a couple of new Lovecraft links this week --
- The Fungi from Yuggoth is a sequence of 36 sonnets, the narrative of a man's encounter with the spawn of the Nameless Ones; YouTube user ChurchofTjolGtjaR has uploaded a reading of it with spacey music. Wikipædia lists 5 recordings of the sequence; I do not know which one this is.
- Chris Lackey and Chad Fifer's H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast features weekly readings from Lovecraft and discussion. Good stuff! (Thanks for the link, Eleanore!)
(Speaking of the Elder Gods, they put in an appearance in Dorothy Gambrell's latest Very Small Array cartoon: What is Coming to Get Us?)
posted evening of October 25th, 2011: Respond
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At Norway's Cafe Mono, Robyn Hitchcock reminisces on his first visit to Norway, on tour with the Egyptians in 1982, and the years since then. Morris Windsor posts a cover of "The End", live in Oslo in '82, the "culmination of one of the weirdest tours ever" -- "The closing remarks contain the seeds of 2009's Goodnight Oslo."
posted evening of October 25th, 2011: Respond
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