Somehow, Cleveland has survived, with her gray banner unfurled -- the banner of Archangelsk and Detroit, of Kharkov and Liverpool -- the banner of men and women who would settle the most ignominious parts of the earth, and there, with the hubris born neither of faith nor ideology but biology and longing, bring into the world their whimpering replacements.
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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.
Un poquito sublime y un poquito siniestro. Como en todo amor loco, ¿no? Si al infinito uno añade más infinito, el resultado es infinito. Si uno junta lo sublime con lo siniestro, el resultado es siniestro. ¿No?
—Felipe Müller October, 1991
The narratives in the latter half of part 2 of Savage Detectives are spinning farther and farther away from the core of the book (which I stubbornly continue to insist is Belano and Lima's search for Cesárea Tinajero in 1975-6) -- long narratives by minor characters which involve Belano and Lima only glancingly or only in parts. Look at Felipe Müller's narrative from October, 1991 -- Müller summarizes a short story by Theodore Sturgeon, one which he is pretty sure Belano told him, "since he was the only one of our crowd who read science fiction."
The story is "When You Care, When You Love" -- it strikes me as curious and interesting that a full three pages are spent on relating this story, more adjacent space than has been devoted to any other work referenced in this book so far. Add another entry to the long list of influences for Bolaño, I guess...
In this autumn of 2011, the peak concert experiences are coming fast and furious. Last night John and I went out to Union Hall in Brooklyn, the basement of which contains about the nicest performance space of its size that I can remember being in, to see Jeffrey Foucault and Mark Erelli touring their new album, Seven Curses. We showed up about a half hour early and got a chance to mingle with the other concert-goers, a lovely crowd of folkies, chat about the music, the weather, the neighborhood... talked up Mountain Station to a couple of people who seemed receptive...
Jeff came on stage looking like Ulysses S. Grant with a Gibson J-45 and Mark picked up his mandolin; sat down about ten feet away from us. After a little loose strumming and tuning up they broke into a clear, insistent rhythm, chords ringing out, sweeping us away. The two sets were a mix of covers and originals from both artists, tracks from the new record and from their back catalogs, murder ballads and love songs -- one particularly charming moment in the second set came when a man from the audience called out a request for Dylan's "Shooting Star" -- Erelli knew it, Foucault said he could figure it out, and (after a brief debate over whether they should play Bad Company's "Shooting Star" instead) the two of them improvised a rocking cover version on the spot.
posted morning of December third, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Gig Notes
Our old dog, Lola, is at the very end of her days. She has been elderly for a long time now -- she is 19 years old, she's been blind for a couple of years and recently has only been able to walk in circles. Her health has taken a real turn for the worse in the past couple of days, and today (at Ellen's behest) we started talking about euthanasia.
This evening Sylvia and I picked out some wood for a coffin and started measuring and cutting.
posted evening of December first, 2011: 2 responses
The more I read from Quim Font's monologues, the more I like him. He is beginning to remind me of Amadeo Salvatierra, who I think is the only other narrator in the same age bracket... The two are not at all the same person, but they share a few endearing mannerisms.
Brandon Holmquest's analysis of the practice of translating poetry is well worth reading. Holmquest translates Borges' poem "El general Quiroga va en coche al muere" and examines closely the decisions he is making at each juncture.
It is good to know that Pieldivina's death in Savage Detectives is not part of the historical infrastructure of the book -- that he is alive and "in fact did not die a singularly depressing death of a brain tumor." He is (to my ear) a fantastic sculptor of syllables -- check out his poem "Tell them who you are", in both English (Brandon Holmquest's able rendering) and Spanish at that link.
Todo habÃa empezado, según Piel Divina, con una viaje que Lima y su amigo Belano hicieron al norte, a principios de 1976.
— Luis Sebastián Rosado March, 1983
Piel Divina, homeless poet in Mexico City, puts together a paranoid narrative in which Lima has been pursued by some nameless, evil organization since the trip to Sonora; that his disappearance in Managua is part of his flight from the organization. Interesting... This is the approximate halfway point of the book, and we see Piel Divina putting himself forward as a detective. I had been thinking of the "savage detectives" as being Belano and Lima searching for Cesárea Tinajero; but this works too, and it makes the reader also into a savage detective, one on the trail of the visceral realists.
