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Saturday, August 21st, 2010
ParecÃa un gusano blanco, con su sombrero de paja y un Bali colgándole del labio inferior.
The first line of Bolaño's story "The Worm" (from Llamadas telefónicas) jumps out at me, makes me do a double-take. The same line occurs in his poem The Worm, from The Romantic Dogs, which was the first text of Bolaño's I ever read...The story is an amazing one, indeed I think it might be my favorite so far from either Llamadas telefónicas or Putas asesinas. It will not really bear (that I can see) any summarizing on my part...  I hope it is in translation so I can tell people to read it. And, yes! It is included in Last Evenings on Earth as The Grub. One thing that really hit me as I was reading it was recognizing the setting -- I was walking through the Alameda and the Palacio de Bellas Artes only a week ago! I was right outside the Sótano bookstore -- a couple of locations, including the one across from the Alameda. This makes the story nicely concrete. The story includes a lot of Bolaño's other work, specifically (of course) the above poem and some imagery from various parts of The Savage Detectives. And a note as I'm Googling around -- I see Jorge Ferrer-Vidal Turrull has a novel from 1966 called El gusano blanco; I wonder if Bolaño is intending any reference to that book.
posted morning of August 21st, 2010: 4 responses
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A magnificent look at some rescued big cats, from Big Cat Rescue in Tampa, Florida.
Look at Alex's graceful power, the hugeness of his neck and jaw, his long sharp teeth! Donate to Big Cat Rescue to help them work against animal abuse.
posted morning of August 21st, 2010: 2 responses
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Thursday, August 19th, 2010
This week's sensory overload from bright stupid confetti includes a feast of color by San Francisco artist Sarah Applebaum.
posted evening of August 19th, 2010: Respond
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Monday, August 16th, 2010
 "Everybody threw him away."
posted evening of August 16th, 2010: Respond
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  Javier Cercas and Joan Ollé, who directed the film adaptation of Soldiers of Salamis, appeared on the Catalan TV program La Mandrà gora; some of the actors from the movie were also there. Stills and quotes (in a mix of Spanish and Catalan) here; Ollé says, "The letters of the novel do not move, do not dance. This is not a fault: the movement is internal. One word provokes ten thousand images of everything you have lived." An earlier appearance of Cercas' (from 2002) is written up here, and video of that interview is in three parts starting here.
posted evening of August 16th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, August 15th, 2010
Cercas' Soldados de Salamina is one of the most difficult books to put down that I've read in recent memory. (And thanks for turning me on to Cercas, Rise!) I'm fascinated by how he is putting his book together -- at every moment the focus is strongly on whatever bit he is talking about at the moment, rather than on fitting it in to the rest of the book; and yet the quite diverse elements of the book seem to be fitting together well, in an almost instinctive way. I really enjoyed his note about the composition process at the beginning of part 3:
| EscribÃa de forma obsesiva, con un empuje y una constancia que ignoraba que poseÃa; también sin demasiada claridad de propósito. ...Por descontado, yo suponÃa que, a medida que el libro avanzase, este designio se alterarÃa, porque los libros siempre acaban cobrando vida propia, y porque uno no escribe acerca de lo que quiere sino de lo que puede; también suponÃa que, aunque todo lo que con el tiempo habÃa averiguado sobre Sánchez Mazas iba a constituir el núcleo de mi libro, lo que me permitÃa sentirme seguro, llegarÃa un momento en que tendrÃa que prescindir de esas andaderas, porque -- si es que lo escribe va a tener verdadero interés -- un escritor no escribe nunca acerca de lo que conoce, sino precisamente de lo que ignora.
| | I was writing obsessively, with a drive and a constancy which I had not known I possessed; but also without too clear of a thesis. ...Needless to say, I figured that as the book progressed, its design would come clear; books always end up taking charge of themselves -- one does not write about what one wants to write but about what one is able to write. I was also thinking that, although what I had learned about Sánchez Mazas would make up the nucleus of my book, the core that would let me feel safe, there would come a moment when I would have to dispense with this safety net: If the writing is to hold any real interest, an author never writes about what he knows, but precisely about what he does not know.
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In this book the composition process is extremely visible on the surface of the reading. It is beautiful to watch the book taking charge of itself...
posted morning of August 15th, 2010: 1 response
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Saturday, August 14th, 2010
Two readings that were rattling around my brain this past week as I practiced understanding Spanish:
| ¿Que lee? Novelas policiales en francés, un idioma que apenas entiende, lo que hace que las novelas sean aún más interesantes. Aun asà siempre descubre al asesino antes de la última página. | | What is B reading? Detective stories in French -- a language he scarcely understands, which makes the novels even more interesting. And even so, he always figures out who was the killer before he reaches the last page. |
This is from Bolaño's "Wandering in France and Belgium" -- I like the way he points out that not fully understanding the language can make the reading experience (even) more interesting. This ties in very nicely with B getting interested in Altmann's asemic writing later in the story.And a longer passage, from Borges' lecture on Dante published in Seven Nights -- Borges is talking ("now that we are among friends") about his own introduction to the Comedia:
| El azar (salvo que no hay azar, salvo que lo que llamamos azar es nuestra ignorancia de la compleja maquinaria de la causalidad) me hizo encontrar tres pequeños volúmenes... los tomos del Infierno, del Purgatorio y del ParaÃso, vertido al inglés por Carlyle, no por Thomas Carlyle, del que hablaré luego. Eran libros muy cómodos, editados por Dent. CabÃan en mi bolsillo. En una página estaba el texto italiano y en la otra el texto en inglés, vertido literalmente. Imaginé este modus operandi: leÃa primero un versÃculo, un terceto, en prosa inglesa; luego leÃa el mismo versÃculo, el mismo terceto, en italiano; iba siguiendo asà hasta llegar al fin del canto. ... He leÃdo muchas veces la Comedia. La verdad es que no sé italiano, no sé otro italiano que el que me enseñó Dante y que el que me enseñó, después, Ariosto cuando leà el Furioso. | |
Fate (except of course there is no Fate, of course what we call Fate is our failure to understand the complex machinery of causality) led me to three slim volumes... the books of Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise, rendered in English by Carlyle (not by Thomas Carlyle, of whom we will speak later). They were lovely little books, published by Dent. They fit in my pocket. On one page would be the Italian text and facing it, the text in English, rendered literally. Picture this modus operandi: first I would read a verse, a tercet, in English; then I would read the same verse, the same tercet, in Italian; and I went on this way until I reached the end of the canto. ... I have read the Comedia many times. But the truth is, I don't know Italian, I don't know any more Italian than what Dante has taught me, and what Ariosto taught me later, when I read the Furioso.
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Cool! Borges learned to read Dante the same way I learned to read Borges!I'm interested in the point about not knowing "any more Italian than what Dante has taught me" -- I think that this method of learning to read a foreign language teaches a particular voice before it teaches the language in a more general sense. I am at this point extremely comfortable with Borges' voice, and pretty comfortable with Bolaño's; but opening up a book in Spanish by some other author, I may understand it (like Soldados de Salamina, which I picked up yesterday and have just been breezing through), or it may be like reading Greek (like Hernández' La paloma, el sótano y la torre, which I opened a few days ago and could not make head or tail of).
posted morning of August 14th, 2010: Respond
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Ellen and I spent the past week in Mexico City -- our first vacation by ourselves since 2001! A great time, wandering through the neighborhoods and the parks -- the above picture is from the courtyard of the Palacio Nacional, on our first day there; click through for many more photos. I surprised myself by being able to speak Spanish a little more clearly and correctly than I thought I would be able to, and by not being able to understand spoken Spanish quite as well as I thought I would be able to. We both got a lot of practice with speaking and understanding the language.
posted morning of August 14th, 2010: 3 responses
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Sunday, August 8th, 2010
Via bldgblog (thanks for the link, Doug!), two magnificent slideshows of David Taylor's photography from the border between the United States and Mexico.
posted morning of August 8th, 2010: 1 response
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Saturday, August 7th, 2010
Today, I finished reading Super Sad True Love Story. Today, Michael Woods reviews Super Sad True Love Story for the Times Book Review (inspiring Molly Fischer to wish for "someone to love me as the Times loves Gary Shteyngart"). It's a good, insightful review of a good, insightful book. (I wish the review did a little less summarizing of the story-line though.) When I opened the book and read the first pages, I was thinking this was going to be a magnificent book. It started feeling overly scripted, a little plodding, somewhere in the first third of the book... but by the last hundred or so utterly gripping pages, it had won me back completely. I find the Times' love for Shteyngart well directed.
posted morning of August 7th, 2010: Respond
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