The alternatives are not placid servitude on the one hand and revolt against servitude on the other. There is a third way, chosen by thousands and millions of people every day. It is the way of quietism, of willed obscurity, of inner emigration.
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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.
Spanish Lit Month continues... At in lieu of a field guide, Rise has been poking around the dusty antiquarian book dealers' shops of Intramuros, and has discovered a most interesting manuscript folded between the pages of a tattered, dog-eared edition of Bartleby and Company. I am having trouble surpressing the urge to print out his post dozens of times over, and head down to the Barnes & Noble and fold them into the copies on the shelves -- somehow the book without this post will never seem like a complete thing to me.
...Not sure quite how many times of looking in passing at the cover of La universidad desconocida it took me, before it clicked what the picture I am looking at is...
For more Bolaño/Duchamp pairing, check out part 2 of Savage Detectives.
Loving the poems certainly. I need to read them more closely and repeatedly before I will have anything worthwhile to write about them though.
'Unnecessary complication? I don't think so. An expansion. Like breathing. Breathe in, breathe out. Expand, contract. The rhythm of life. You have it in you to be a fuller person, Paul, larger and more expansive, but you won't allow it. I urge you: don't cut short these thought-trains of yours. Follow them through to their end. Your thoughts and your feelings. Follow them through and you will grow with them. What was it that the American poet fellow said? There weaves always a fictive covering from something to something. My memory is going. I become vaguer with each passing day. A pity. Hence this little lesson I am trying to teach you. He finds her by the riverside, sitting on a bench, clustered around by ducks that she seems to be feeding – it may be simple, as an account, its simplicity may even beguile one, but it is not good enough. It does not bring me to life. Bringing me to life may not be important to you, but it has the drawback of not bringing you to life either. Or the ducks, for that matter, if you prefer not to have me at the centre of the picture. Bring these humble ducks to life and they will bring you to life, I promise. Bring Marijana to life, if it must be Marijana, and she will bring you to life. It is as elementary as that. But please, as a favour to me, please stop dithering. I do not know how much longer I can support my present mode of existence.'
Slow Man is a much, much weirder book than Elizabeth Costello. I found it just spell-binding to watch the growth of intimacy between her and her character, after her shocking introduction midway through. The first half of the book had a couple of faults I thought in terms of pacing and tone; but they were more than made up for by the latter half. Indeed the second half made those missteps part of the story.
Coetzee's books about Costello are as much about the craft of writing, I think, as about anything else. Here Costello, midway through a story that is threatening not to go anywhere interesting, inserts herself into the story's reality and tries to involve her characters in creating themselves and their stories; she is not ultimately successful*, she cannot woo Paul out of his shell, the story of his recuperation will just be the story of him living out his days, slow, uneventful. It makes for about as weird a bit of metafiction as I can imagine, and a fascinating read.
*(And it occurs to me here that what I said about Goldberg: Variations absolutely does not apply to this book.)
As I was writing the other day in the voice of Maximiliano Josner Ãvala -- one who has been working on his project a good deal longer than I on mine -- and I felt again, strongly, how strange it seemed that he did not have a title for it, a proper name, or indeed a clear sense of what it was. My sense of what my project is is becoming a little clearer each day -- clear first of all that I should just describe this activity as "writing a book" and leave it at that, with the blog archives open to the curious; and herewith, a working title for the book I'm writing about Ãvala and his grandfather, and the grandson's translator: It will be called "This Silent House" for the time being, after a line from the son's journals.
And Spanish Lit Month continues: at Caravana de recuredos, Richard writes up a short story from Fogwill which sounds almost like an Argentine take on Gravity's Rainbow; and links to another one that he calls "one of the best short stories I've ever read."
