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Tuesday, March 13th, 2012
Christopher Jobson of Colossal has posted an interview with Anna Schuleit, along with some pictures of her spectacular installation at the former site of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. (via Heebie-Geebie)
posted morning of March 13th, 2012: Respond
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Sunday, March 11th, 2012
Spent this weekend working on a translation of Fernando Iwasaki's A Troya, Helena, and I think I came up with a pretty convincing rendering by this morning's (submitted) draft. A couple of fun bits from researching meanings in this short story:
- "Helena habÃa resistido demasiado, más de lo que se
le podÃa pedir a una chica que se casa a los veinte años con un
huevón de oficio pero sin beneficio."
I spent a while trying to figure out "de oficio pero sin beneficio" -- my first guess was that the narrator was referring to himself as a jerk "with a job but with no money," which would sort of fit the story but not particularly add much to it... Mariana laughed when she saw the phrase and said he is calling himself un "heuvón de oficio", i.e. an asshole by trade, and then bringing in the phrase "sin oficio ni beneficio" to say he was not doing well even in that chosen trade.
- "Parissi se esmeraba en prolongar el último
orgasmo de Helena hasta el lÃmite de las gunfias."
It took me a long time to get anywhere with this last word, and I'm still not quite comfortable with it. It turns out to be a word from Cortázar's invented jargon glÃglico, from Hopscotch. I've taken what might be the coward's way out and rendered it as gunphies, which is the word Rabassa uses in his tranlation, out of a desire to keep the Hopscotch reference intact. (And yes, Cortázar is another big hole in my literacy...)Daniel González Dueñas says, in his post on glÃglico (which is based on the Porteño dialect Lunfardo), that ‘gunfia’ is an apheresis of ‘esgunfiola’ and can be used to mean ‘boredom’ or ‘disgust’; that “hasta el lÃmite de las gunfiasâ€
is something like (if I'm reading right) "as far as propriety will allow." Which sounds, well, a little strange in the context in which it occurs here; but the narrator is a very strange dude to be sure. Maybe "for as long as she would let him." - "Parissi aferró enhiesto la odalisca
cintura que se apretaba contra su cuerpo y ordenó con voz ronca y
temblorosa: 'A Troya, Helena. Ahora vamos a Troya'."
My first reaction was, Why would Parissi say something like that, in that situation? It did not seem to make any sense and kept me from really processing the last two or three paragraphs. It took several rereads of this and the following sentences before I got that Parissi was talking about anal sex; and even after I hit on that interpretation, although it made a lot of things about the closing paragraphs make sense which had not, I was reluctant to go with it. Then I found Francisca Noguerol Jiménez' paper "Vitality, Sensuality, Erudition, Ingenuity: the narratives of Fernando Iwasaki" in which she comments that "The expression ‘To Troy, Helen’ is a clear reference to ‘Greek’ love ‘from behind.’"
posted evening of March 11th, 2012: Respond
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The Pacific is really a tranquil ocean now, as white as a large basin of milk. The waves have warned it that the earth is approaching. I try to measure the distance between two waves. Or is it time that separates them, not distance? Answering this question would solve my own mystery. The ocean is undrinkable, but it drinks us. ... What will the new day illuminate? I'd like to give you a very fast answer because I'm losing the words to tell you, the survivors, this tale.
I started looking at Carlos Fuentes' Destiny and Desire (tr. Edith Grossman) this weekend -- I must say this book is going to take me a long, long time to read. It is a thick enough book to be sure, more than 500 pages; but what is slowing it down for me is the inability to start anywhere else besides the first page when I pick the book up. I've read the opening pages several times over now and they are not losing any of their appeal.Fun bit of intertextuality -- last thing I remember reading that is narrated by a murder victim, was the opening chapter of My Name is Red. So Destiny and Desire (a title I find corny, oh well) is starting out with a very positive association... Fuentes is a bit of a hole in my literary experience -- I made a couple of stabs fairly recently at Artemio Cruz but got nowhere -- this new book sure seems at first impressions like it will be a good place to start.
posted evening of March 11th, 2012: Respond
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Tuesday, March 6th, 2012
In last night's dream, I was listening to a radio program devoted to pop standards whose original versions were written about, or in, Modesto, CA. This was followed by a number of secondary dreams concerned with explicating and recording the original dream -- the secondary dreams were not always clear on the "dream" status of the original dream.
 Only song I remember at all from the radio program, is a Hank Williams-y tune that started out, "Standin on the corner, waitin for the bus to Oakland, or Encina; and if the bus don't come,..."
posted morning of March 6th, 2012: Respond
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Sunday, March 4th, 2012
In Juan Villoro's phrase, the column is the platypus of prose.
These approaches -- and more besides -- are outlined in Jaramillo's introduction: fifty pages determined, with the help of Norman Sims and of the columnists themselves, to bring the reader to the river where this platypus bathes.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez' column this week, La crónica, o cómo ponerle cercas al rÃo, is sending me scrambling to look up references... Vásquez is here a columnist writing about understanding the genre of the column. Some of the references:
posted afternoon of March 4th, 2012: Respond
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...one could only conclude that humanity, rather than being a ballast against the arbitrary, was, through paperwork and foms and stamps and considered judgments and all that was officialdom, its very agent. There was something amusing in the time it took the universe to make its point to this white kid who lived in a very nice suburb and who had to work really hard to add things to his list of traumas, which still consisted of lost toys and, lower down, dead grannies.
Jack Viljee, 11-year-old narrator of Jacques Strauss' The Dubious Salvation of Jack V. (my reading material in yesterday's family album post), spends the 250 pages of Strauss' first novel coming of age. Or perhaps not -- the narrator is an older Jack Viljee looking back on his childhood -- he is still a child at the end of the novel. As a reader you get the sense that the events of the story are what set in motion the process of his coming of age, which will then happen outside of the pages of the book. I reckon this is a good thing as it allows Strauss to get away with some vagueness about what growing up actually consists in, and concentrate on the immature character of his subject and his responses to those events, and to the circumstances of his childhood. Jack grows up in a northern suburb of Johannesburg, the son of a Boer father and an English mother and cared for by a black maid, unsure about where he fits in to the spectrum of South African life in the waning days of Apartheid. His discoveries and his intuitions about his family, about his friends and neighbors and schoolmates, about the society he is living in, make for great, thought-provoking reading.
posted morning of March 4th, 2012: Respond
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Saturday, March third, 2012
Lying around the house on a rainy Saturday.
Here's a little Saturday morning fiddling for you.
posted afternoon of March third, 2012: Respond
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Let's watch the Threepenny Opera -- online in its entirety in Criterion Films' restoration, with subtitles that can be turned on or off via the "CC" button at the bottom of the frame:
You're welcome. (And thanks for bringing this to my attention, Allan!)
posted morning of March third, 2012: Respond
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Friday, March second, 2012
The latest addition to The Kitchen Tapes is my arrangement of Nat King Cole's "Frim Fram Sauce" -- and right now it feels like this playlist is complete, it encapsulates my sound very nicely. I'm going to keep recording songs and uploading them to YouTube or SoundCloud or whatever other such service; but The Kitchen Tapes playlist will remain as is -- I'll start working on the next playlist. I've been doing a lot of asking friends to listen to it and link to it over the past week or so -- if you are one such friend I hope you don't mind the spamminess of it all. (And thanks for the link, cleek!) Very happy and proud about how the tapes are sounding -- I have this thought in mind that somehow if enough people put the link out, it could find an audience not composed solely of my close friends and family... If you listen to it and like what you hear, do me a favor and pass it along.
  (What I mean to say, I'm really excited about having made a record.)
posted evening of March second, 2012: Respond
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Tuesday, February 28th, 2012
Latest addition to The Kitchen Tapes mix is short and sweet. It is an old fiddle tune that I've been wanting to learn for a long time; last night I went ahead and tried it out. After five or six takes I got a version I'm pretty happy with.
posted morning of February 28th, 2012: Respond
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