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We poets will write a thousand words to get at a single one.

Roberto Bolaño


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Saturday, July 7th, 2012

🦋 Notas marginales

... 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 companía -- 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 consistiría en no escribir, pero...)

posted afternoon of July 7th, 2012: Respond
➳ More posts about Bartleby y compañía

Wednesday, June 27th, 2012

🦋 Suicide is Painless

The truth is you already know what it's like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.
"Good Old Neon", the fifth story in David Wallace's 2004 collection Oblivion, is just an excruciating story to read. Especially (of course) in light of Wallace's ultimate fate, and especially the last two pages of the story; but even without the author's suicide, even without those last two pages, the story brings the reader unbearably close to the mental process of contemplating suicide and of being driven to contemplate suicide. The act of identifying with the narrator (and of identifying with the author, identifying with his character) is excruciating.

posted evening of June 27th, 2012: Respond
➳ More posts about David Foster Wallace

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

🦋 Manual of Poetry and Blogging

(Keywords pastiche, mistranslation?)

Si, en suma, fuese un acto carente de honestidad el simple gesto de coger un pincel o una pluma, si, una vez más en suma (la primera vez no llegó a serlo), tengo que negarme a mí mismo el derecho de comunicar o comunicarme, porque habiéndolo intentado fracasé y no habrá más oportunidades.

...No soy pintor.

What comes to mind as a means here of identifying with the narrator, or rather as a way of explaining the identification that is occurring, is to mistranslate his stream of consciousness, to replace the references to painting and to calligraphy with one's own arts and shortcomings; of course one would not be able to hew too closely to the original text for long/at all, and it might straightaway degenerate into pastiche and thence to original writing (a degeneration devoutly to be wished, one might assert) -- one might well veer off into pedagogy, might feel compelled to instruct one's (sparse, and ever dwindling!) audience in methods of blogging, on how to write without having to consider it writing, on how to take heart in one's feelings of inferiority to the successful bloggers and/or successful writers and journalists, to rejoice in one's own failure and lack of intellectual cred. Talk (to them, since you know who the couple of people are who read your journal, though perhaps without being up front about whom it is you're addressing) about composing posts with a particular ear in mind, and about how to avoid feeling slighted when you fail to engage, and here of course you will want to be careful about laying down a guilt trip, and will wonder if this bait will be sweet enough to pull anyone in. Push them away more likely!

Hm: an idea worth pursuing perhaps.

posted evening of June 12th, 2012: Respond
➳ More posts about José Saramago

Friday, April 13th, 2012

🦋 Almost Never/Casi nunca

I'm finding that Sada's book (which takes a pretty sleazy guy as its protagonist!) is giving me an unnerving sense of identification with Demetrio, for all the amoral douchebag that he is. This book is bringing to mind some of my very favorite novels.

I'm finding the beauty of Saba's syntax -- the rush of phrases and colons and chanting authorial voice -- intoxicating and exciting, finding it is rubbing off on my own stream of consciousness. In certain ways the book reminds me of Bolaño, of his situations and characters. The flow of Sada's cant pulls me into the action like the opening of Snow. Absolutely want to seek this out in Spanish as well; I think Katherine Silver's translation is brilliant and that I could learn something from it if I could figure out how she brought this insane rhythm across.

posted evening of April 13th, 2012: Respond
➳ More posts about Almost Never

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

🦋 Hurrying back

Dora was hurrying now and wanting her lunch. She looked at her watch and found it was tea-time. She remembered that she had been wondering what to do; but now, without her thinking about it, it had become obvious. She must go back to Imber at once. Her real life, her real problems, were at Imber, and since, somewhere, something good existed, it might be that her problems would be solved after all. There was a connexion; obscurely she felt, without yet understanding it, she must hang onto that idea: there was a connexion. She bought a sandwich and took a taxi back to Paddington.
Reading Murdoch's The Bell lately, I have been conflicted as to how I feel about the characters. I identify with them at points; but they have an air of falseness around them, the characters and plot elements seem almost like scenery for Murdoch's philosophizing and fable-telling. Not sure I mean this as a point against the book -- I am liking the book a lot -- but it does seem like an important stylistic element.

Then again I got a similar vibe from The Little Stranger, which was pretty clearly not written for philosophical argument.

posted evening of January 19th, 2012: Respond
➳ More posts about Iris Murdoch

Saturday, November 5th, 2011

🦋 Escape reading: Among the poets

One of the most pleasant aspects of reading Savage Detectives, I am finding to be ease with which I can identify with the narrator and his scene, can picture myself in the crowd of real visceralistas and wannabees -- picture myself perhaps not as García Madero, who is after all just a kid*, certainly not as Lima or Belano; but as a minor character, a walk-on. It is an escapist pleasure, I am taken out of myself and out of my immediate world while I am reading (and really, it seems worth pointing out that that is an aspect of the experience of reading almost any Spanish-language text for me).

Without even spending any time/mental energy on the García Madera - Rosario sex scene (which believe me, could divert enormous quantities of both), it is worth considering how much like or unlike reading pornography this reading experience is. I'm going to assert that they are unlike in some key ways; but given first that feeling of imagining yourself in a character's boots (and, well, in his whatever) -- how will the distinction be drawn?

*Hm, and all of a sudden I find I am casting blogging friends of mine in some of this book's key roles...

posted evening of November 5th, 2011: 3 responses
➳ More posts about The Savage Detectives

Saturday, September 10th, 2011

🦋 Identification with Walt Whitman

(It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the tongue of you,
Tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen'd.)
We had a great time last night watching More or Less I Am -- such a great idea for a show, and put together pretty flawlessly and on a shoestring budget... I was struck throughout the poem (which I have not read since high school, IIRC) by how strongly and explicitly Whitman invites the reader into his head and vice-versa. I kept thinking of how a second-person pastiche might start out,
You celebrate yourself, and sing yourself,
And shall assume what you assume;
For every atom in yourself is yours is me is you.
Interesting... there were a enough spots in the poem where the poet identifies himself with the reader, the act of identification seems to be a primary theme of this poem. I ought to spend some time with it.

posted afternoon of September 10th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Readings

Monday, August 29th, 2011

🦋 Whenever I say „ I ” I also mean „ you ”.

This post is inspired partly by a conversation I had with Ellen last night. I asked what she thought of the poem I had posted about writing poetry, and she said she thinks that kind of writing is worth while mostly for working it out of your system in order that you can write more immediate poetry... I'm finding interesting that much of Spring and All, at least the prose sections of it, is just this kind of writing about writing, about what I can write and how I can expect the reader to respond to it.

This is from the opening section of Spring and All (perhaps what Williams needs to work out of his system before he can move on to poetry) --

The reader knows himself as he was twenty years ago and he has also in mind a vision of what he would be, some day. Oh, some day ! But the thing he never knows and never dares to know is what he is at the exact moment that he is. And this moment is the only thing in which I am at all interested. Ergo, who cares for anything I do ? and what do I care ?

I love my fellow creature. Jesus, how I love him : endways, sideways, frontways and all the other ways -- but he doesn't exist ! Neither does she. I do, in a bastardly sort of way.

...

And if when I pompously announce that I am addressed -- To the imagination -- you believe that I thus divorce myself from life and so defeat my own end, I reply : To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force -- the imagination. This is its book. I myself invite you to read and to see.

In the imagination, we are henceforth (so long as you read) locked in a fraternal embrace, the classic caress of author and reader. We are one. Whenever I say „ I ” I also mean „ you ”. And so, together, as one, we shall begin.

Well, this seems great. I can picture myself saying this, can identify fully with Williams, as he is quite explicitly inviting me to do. Of course my project is not complete there -- I want to say something of my own, that's why I'm writing...

(A side note: the introduction to this edition (New Directions, 2011), written by C.D. Wright, is just great.)

posted evening of August 29th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Spring and All

Friday, October second, 2009

🦋 Being in the movie

(spoiler alert -- there is an argument to be made that this post contains information about Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window that would make watching the movie less enjoyable for someone who has not already seen it...)

posted evening of October second, 2009: 4 responses
➳ More posts about Rear Window

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

🦋 Identification with the text

We must approach spirituality with a hard kind of intelligence. If we go to hear a teacher speak, we should not allow ourselves to be carried away by his reputation and charisma, but we should properly experience each word of his lecture or each aspect of the meditation technique being taught. We must make a clear and intelligent relationship with the teachings and the man teaching.
I guess part of my project in reading Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism is to identify reading novels as a form of spiritual experience. I expect there is a lot of "spiritual materialism" bound up in my desire to draw this equivalency. Trungpa's notion of "properly experienc[ing] every word of his lecture" sounds to me like what I am trying to do with the books I read -- this is the filter through which I am experiencing his book.

posted evening of May 27th, 2009: Respond
➳ More posts about Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

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