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Sunday, January 8th, 2012
The first chapter of The Corrections makes Alfred Lambert seem very much like José Arcadio BuendÃa; I wonder if there is anything to this parallel, if it will be further elaborated upon in the rest of the book. I certainly did not notice that the last time I read The Corrections; but then I would not have been looking very closely for such a parallel... When I'm reading about Alfred's metallurgy lab in the basement and about Enid's clearing away of his features from upstairs, and about the growing distance between the two of them, it seems to be shot through with echoes of GarcÃa Márquez.
The gray dust of evil spells and the cobwebs of enchantment thickly cloaked the old electric arc furnace, and the jars of exotic rhodium and sinister cadmium and stalwart bismuth, and the hand-printed labels browned by the vapors from a glass-stoppered bottle of aqua regia, and the quad-ruled notebook in which the latest entry in Alfred's hand dated from a time, fifteen years ago, before the betrayals had begun.
posted evening of January 8th, 2012: 2 responses
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At the Wooster Collective, a marvelous street painting:
posted morning of January 8th, 2012: Respond
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So I am thinking (as 2012 rolls itself out before me like a glittering carpet...) that the READIN reading theme of 2012 might just be rereading. Somehow the Savage Detectives reread of the last few months seems to have primed me for getting new insight from books I am already familiar with... Rereading The Crying of Lot 49 last week set the course; and today it looks like I am starting to reread The Corrections (a book, it must be said, which owes a whole lot to TCoL49 if my memory of it is any guide).
 Here is me reading The Corrections. Thanks for the photo, Sylvia!
posted morning of January 8th, 2012: Respond
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More news from your Republican party (and thanks for the link, Henry): At Salon, Tracy Clark-Flory speaks with some analysts of sex and of politics about the stridently anti-sex rhetoric coming our way from such as Rick Santorum and Rick Perry, at a time when America's Puritan sexual ethic is perhaps less in the ascendant than in the past couple of decades. One can only hope this is the year the panderers to reactionary "Christianity" will be hoist for their own petard. (As one has been hoping every election year since 1988 or therabouts.)
 Also: Perry's lunatic belligerence makes for a nice juxtaposition with the crazy anti-sex talk. ...And on a more coherent note, Robert Reich talks straight about where Republican values are taking our country.
posted morning of January 8th, 2012: Respond
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Friday, January 6th, 2012
Found (with some help from Mr. Huddell and Mr. Berman) some fantastic versions of two songs from The Basement Tapes. - Joan Baez, "You Ain't Goin Nowhere"
- The Byrds, "You Ain't Goin Nowhere"
- The Byrds, "This Wheel's on Fire"
- Dylan and the Band, "This Wheel's on Fire"
- Dylan and the Band, "You Ain't Goin Nowhere"
- The Rave-Ups, "You Ain't Goin Nowhere"
- Robyn Hitchcock and the Venus 3, "Olé Tarantula"
- Robyn Hitchcock, "You Ain't Goin Nowhere"
- Julie Driscoll, "This Wheel's on Fire"
- Julie Driscoll, "The Season of the Witch"
I compiled a video playlist of most of these songs on YouTube -- particularly recommend checking out the almost hallucinatory quality of the two The Byrds versions and the really striking fan video for the Rave-Ups' version. And the Venus 3 number, while it strays a bit from the theme of the playlist, fits in quite nicely and fits into a broader playlist theme of "Songs I would wish to cover". (Plus some bonus tracks added, if you listen to the end...)
posted evening of January 6th, 2012: Respond
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Ladies and gentlemen, your Republican party: From a collection of Rick Santorum quotes cast as captions to New Yorker cartoons, at Buzzfeed. (Thanks for the link, Lindsay!)
posted evening of January 6th, 2012: Respond
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Wednesday, January 4th, 2012
 Jenny Volvoski is an artist with a very cool project: To design one or more covers for each book she reads, as she reads it. Check out her blog From Cover to Cover to see what she's come up with so far. (via Richard of Caravana de recuerdos, who reminds us that the Savage Detectives group read is coming up)
posted evening of January 4th, 2012: Respond
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I am very happy to hear, this morning, that Slavko Zupcic's new short story collection Médicos taxistas has been published. The story that got me interested in Zupcic, "Tuesday Meetings", is in there, as is the story that I translated, "Requiem". (Or at least, both stories were blurbed as being "from Zupcic's forthcoming collection Médicos taxistas".) And lots more... "Médicos, taxistas de Caracas". "Tescucho, Italia". (This one especially looked interesting and worthwhile. I'm going to take a little closer look now.) Excited to read it!
posted evening of January 4th, 2012: Respond
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I was pregnant and was composing a letter to Steve and Vera (or possibly a Facebook status with them tagged) about a model house I was building, square, boxy, yellow, the house where I wanted to live -- just straight descriptive prose, but I had gotten stuck on a sentence describing the fence which enclosed the back yard. I kept adding adjectives but could not seem to get a complete image, and the sentence was at this point several times longer than the rest of the letter.
posted morning of January 4th, 2012: Respond
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Monday, January second, 2012
April 9th, 1948: The mob dragging the corpse of Juan Roa Sierra.
Photo W. Torres - El Tiempo.
The pavement of 7th Ave. is broken there by the tram tracks (that don't go anywhere, that get lost under the pavement, because the trams, those trams with blue-tinted windows that my father told me about, haven't existed for years), and as I, standing in front of the AugustÃn Nieto building, read the black marble plaque that describes the assassination in more sentences than strictly necessary, Sara, thinking I wasn't looking, crouched down at the curb -- I thought she was going to pick up a dropped coin -- and with two fingers touched the rail as if she were taking the pulse of a dying dog. I kept pretending I hadn't seen her, so as not to interrupt her private ceremony, and after several minutes of being a hindrance in that river of people and putting up with insults and shoves, I asked her to show me exactly where the Granada Pharmacy had been in those years when a suicidal man could buy more than 90 sleeping pills there. A year and a half after Konrad Deresser's suicide, Gaitán's murderer had been taken by force inside the pharmacy to prevent the furious mob from lynching him, but he'd been dragged from the pharmacy by the furious mob, which had punched and kicked him to death and dragged his naked body to the presidential palace (there is a photograph showing the body leaving a trail of shedded clothing behind like a snake shedding its skin: the photo isn't very good, and in it Juan Roa Sierra is barely a pale corpse, almost an ectoplasm, crossed by the black stain of his sex).-- The Informers
posted evening of January second, 2012: Respond
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