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Thursday, July 12th, 2012
I haven't really written much narrative (that I can recall) in the first person voice. Let's give this a try. Peter seems like a good place to start with the first person, being as he is at least roughly modeled after myself. (The plan as it now stands is, write fragments as they come to me. Revise and post at READIN those that seem worth while. Wait and see, see if anything is coming together. And if not, well, I'm having fun with the fragments and the revisions...)
 I found Fragmentos de la universidad desconocida when me and Laura were visiting Mexico City. What a poorly-planned trip! We had both just fallen in love with The Savage Detectives -- the idea came up on the spur of the moment, that we should make the trip as, well, an homage to Bolaño or something like that, something along those lines... didn't really bother to do much or any research though I guess, I guess we were both pretty busy with work around that time, felt lucky we could both take a week off and have it be the same week, and by the time we had gotten off the plane and stumbled to our hotel and stumbled out of the hotel, down the street, it was Day 1 and we were standing in the Plaza de la Constitución, rubbing our eyes, pawing at the map, trying to figure out how to get to the Calle Bucareli, and it was beginning to dawn on me that there were way better things we could be doing with our week than trying to retrace the footsteps of Leopold Bloom around Dublin.
It wound up being a good week, too -- we did not actually find our way to any of GarcÃa Madero's bars, but we did visit a couple of his bookshops, and the Bosque de Chapultepec, and Trotsky's house. Ate well. When we came home my suitcase was stuffed with books.
I've been a sucker for Spanish poetry ever since college -- the professor had us reading Neruda and Cardenal, and then I found an old book of Pablo Antonio Cuadra, and I was hooked. Something about the foreignness of it, the unfamiliarity of the language (well and of course the specific lilt and rhythm of Spanish) makes it touch me, ring clear in a way that only rarely happens with English language poetry. But Bolaño! I had no idea he had written any poetry. (I know -- it sounds dumb now, just a few years later on; for me he was just the author of The Savage Detectives, like how I didn't know anything about Kerouac beyond On the Road, for what seems like an inordinately long time past my tenth-grade year.) But, but there it was on the bookshelf, right in front of me in LibrerÃa Sotano: The fragments of the unknown university. What a title! Seeing it felt like a revelation. I know, I know, the structurally correct thing would have been for me to steal it... The cashier gave me a Sotano bookmark, I was meaning to hang on to it but no idea where it has gone.
That was our last day in Mexico.
↻...done
posted evening of July 12th, 2012: 11 responses
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Monday, July 9th, 2012
There is another variant of the Bartleby syndrome which I have not seen yet in Vila-Matas' enumeration -- one which seems to me like it must be pretty well-represented in the history of letters: writing the wrong book. Two, and possibly three characters in the story I am writing (and it goes without saying, possibly this applies to myself as well) spend their lives working hard on the wrong book.* They are not exactly emulating Bartleby -- they are after all striving to create, to produce -- but in terms of actual output it comes to very much the same thing.
Maximiliano Josner Ãvala is a gifted poet, one who, however, never pursues poetry; he believes his calling is to theology and to metaphysics, and he works all his life writing a manuscript which will never be published. He leaves behind him thousands of pages, but his only publication is his thesis on the traditions and institutions of the indigenous tribes of Peru.
Ãvala's young disciple Miguel Arroncoyo de Matoa is manically devoted to his teacher's philosophical work, and is too shallow of a thinker to really see the holes in it. He is also a seeker after fame, one who is bound to be disappointed; his dream is to use Ãvala's manuscript as a stepping-stone to his own success in the field. He publishes some fragments of poetry from Ãvala's journals with his own commentary, as a way of preparing the ground for what he considers the more important work, and then spends the remaining decades of his life attempting unsuccessfully to tame the monster manuscript. The volume of poetry does not make much of an impression, and is pretty well forgotten by the time Bolaño finds a copy of it in the university library in Santiago.
Bolaño includes some references to Ãvala in the poems in La universidad desconocida, which is how Peter Conlay, a young man in upstate New York, catches wind of his existence. He finds a copy of Finidades on Abebooks and falls in love with Ãvala's voice. So the question becomes, can Peter's translations succeed in introducing this forgotten and foreign poet to the world? Or is he too working on the wrong book? I see Peter as having things in common with both Ãvala and de Matoa...
 *And have I mentioned how it is tripping me out, that I picked up Bartleby y compañÃa just when I was starting to piece this story together?
posted evening of July 9th, 2012: Respond
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Sunday, July 8th, 2012
...Why did I write? At the end of the day, the normal thing is to read. My accustomed answer was twofold: that firstly, my poetry consisted -- though I did not know this -- of attempts to invent a personality for myself. ...And furthermore, that it was based on an elementary confusion: I believed I wanted to be a poet, but essentially what I wanted to be was a poem.
-- Jaime Gil de Biedma
quoted in Bartleby y compañia
Mi intenta en decir «últimamente sobre nada» fuera igual que cuando yo decÃa antes, «escribir sobre escribir sobre»; la iteración se puede infinitamente reflejar: una reflexión de la realidad y de una realidad reflejado. Si los espejos el otro precisamente alinean, si la recurencia puede proceder sin fin, últimamente se produce el contrario exacto de la realidad descrita, asà precisamente nada. (Lo anterior es válido en doble en relación a «hablar sobre escribir sobre...»)
posted evening of July 8th, 2012: Respond
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Welcome to visitors from Caravana de recuerdos -- I am glad to be observing Spanish Lit Month this July along with Richard and the rest. Reading Bartleby y compañÃa, watching CrÃa cuervos... And principally I seem to be using this Spanish Lit Month as an occasion to create some Spanish language poetry (and/or prose, hasn't really gelled into one or the other yet) of my own! Perhaps this will interest you, perhaps not -- this link will (loosely) track that project. For the time being, I'll be writing all or most of my posts going back and forth between English and a clumsy, stilted attempt at Spanish; hoping people will bear with me...
Some archival material that may interest you: Slavko Zupcic, The Art of Resurrection and Our Lady of the Dark Flowers both by Hernán Rivera Letelier, endless nattering about Borges... A poem I quite like from Unamuno, and some from Pablo Antonio Cuadra. A few fun Argentine stories.
posted afternoon of July 8th, 2012: 3 responses
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Mi esperanza es (supongo) que esa especie de composición (intento decir, el movimiento de imagen vaga, abstracta, nada muy especÃfica, en combinación con ritmo escuchado -- justo al español, sin intervencÃon de inglés en la medida en que soy capaz de eso) vale la pena si nada más, en la instrucción idiomática... El español que hallaré con ese método de instrucción sonará muy ajeno, muy forzado, y de vez en cuando incoherente, pero también (tal vez) muy distintivo, una voz verdadera/engañosa. No tengo idea qué destinación busco, vamos a ver luego, cuando llegamos.
Mi tÃa descansa, su cara resplandece
Con luz infinita y magia y misterio
Viva retrato de dios
Hija
posted afternoon of July 8th, 2012: 1 response
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One day,  -- the next, 
posted morning of July 8th, 2012: Respond
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Saturday, July 7th, 2012
... His second book was even more successful than the first, professors in North American, and some of the most distinguished ones among the academic world of those long-past days, wrote enthusiastic reviews, wrote books about the books which were commenting on the Fox's books.
And from this moment on, the Fox felt -- with good reason -- that he was content; the years passed by without his publishing anything.
Well, people started talking. "What's up with the Fox?" -- when he showed up right on time for cocktails they would come up to him and be like, You ought to publish something more.
-- But look, I've already published two books.
-- And good ones, too! -- would come the reply -- That's exactly why you should publish another one!
And here the Fox did not say anything, but thought to himself: "What they're really looking for, is for me to publish a lousy book. But because I am the Fox, I'm not going to do it."
And he didn't. "Fox is the smart one."
The Black Sheep and other fables
Augusto Monterroso
 It's the funniest thing -- somehow I had gotten it into my head that the title of Bartleby y compañia was Bartlett y companÃa -- this despite many times of reading the correct title, and of writing it out, and even of ordering it on Amazon [and it occurs to me now that I have not really read anything, anything that sticks in my memory, about it, just references to the title]... thinking it had something to do with the quotations dude. (And to be sure there are a lot of quotations in the text -- that's not really here nor there though.) This is my introduction to Vila-Matas and it sure is a pleasant one. The idea of "un cuaderno de notas a pie de página que comentaron un texto invisible" is just about exactly what I am wanting to be reading right now -- and here I am experiencing that reverse-projection which I refer to as identification with the text in spades, I feel like the first chapter of the book is written in my voice. Thanks for the impetus, Richard. (And I am going to throw caution to the wind disregarding the hinted warning in Jean de la Bruyère's epigraph. Tal vez soy yo entre los otros a quienes la gloria consistirÃa en no escribir, pero...)
posted afternoon of July 7th, 2012: Respond
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It's foreign, outlandish, in Spanish extraño,
the moving hand writes and escribe la mano
you play with your meanings and juegas con rima
built up from an image, imagen encima
posted morning of July 7th, 2012: Respond
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Friday, July 6th, 2012
Still not sure what to call this project. At first it was a poem, then a story, now something is nagging at me to think of it as a book, a novel! I wonder if there will actually be that much material in it... Details of the work keep cropping up and interesting me and changing, I want to look at the project as a whole for a minute. The idea is that Peter, a conflicted youngish man with anxieties and a love of Spanish poetry and a love for his girlfriend, Laura, who also has some anxieties, though different ones; Peter is making a project of translating poetry from this 19th-C. Chilean poet Maximiliano Josner Ãvala. And woven into this is a back-story about Ãvala's work being mostly unpublished, and about Ãvala's life and work. Everything is still very unfocused; I'll be thinking over the next couple of weeks how to bring portions of it into focus.
posted evening of July 6th, 2012: Respond
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Está bien te dices
Déjalo sencillamente
Transpirar acerca de ti
Solamente hunde
En el momento ajeno
Luego harás.
Se llama ésto «técnica»,
Técnica desechable.
posted evening of July 6th, 2012: Respond
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