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Saturday, May 8th, 2010
Something that is driving me a little batty about "The Prefiguration of Lalo Cura" (in Putas asesinas) is trying to work out the chronology of Connie's pregnancy. She was impregnated by the Preacher, who then left, and later she was a hooker in New York and met Bittrich and came back to MedellÃn and started acting in porn movies; but some of the movies are made while she is pregnant, and there's no indication that she has a child when she's in NYC. The only way that would work is if she lived with the Preacher and got pregnant after she had come back from New York and started working for Bittrich; but I thought the narrator said that was not the case. -- No that's wrong, he says "Abandoned by my imbecile father, here's Connie, with Doris and Mónica Farr" -- but that doesn't include anything about the abandonment (or the liaison) preceding the acting career. A couple of translation things -- I think this uncredited (uncredited? I cannot find the translator's name on it) English translation in the New Yorker does the story some violence by breaking it up into paragraphs and sections. The original story is all one paragraph and it's characterized by a really driving, insistent force of pulling the reader along -- really difficult to put down. I'm trying to do a translation all in one paragraph, don't yet know if I'll be able to communicate that effect in English. Is this a typo? When Connie and Mónica get together with Bittrich, echaron a rodar los dados por la Séptima Avenida, el artista prusianao y los las putas latinoamericanas. Ya no habÃa nada que hacer. Cuando sueño, en algunas pesadillas, vuelvo a verme reposando en el limbo y entonces oigo, al principio lejano, el golpe de los dados en el pavimento. -- I can only make sense of that if both instances of "dado" are actually "dedo".*
 * No, not a typo: As Rick points out in comments, "rodar los dados" and "golpe de los dados" both refer to the act of rolling dice.
posted evening of May 8th, 2010: 8 responses
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One of the nicest, most springlike days of 2010 so far. Here are some photos:
posted afternoon of May 8th, 2010: 4 responses
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Tuesday, May 4th, 2010
 For the first time in a little while, I've found a new fiddle tune I want to learn. Here is the Ether Frolic Mob (featuring Peter Stampfel, Craig Judelman, Stacey Samuels, Eli Smith, Jeffrey Lewis) playing "Billy in the Lowground":
A few other versions:
Also, turns out "Billy in the Lowlands", which is what I thought this song was called, is a movie.
posted evening of May 4th, 2010: 1 response
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Monday, May third, 2010
The two principal characters of Distant are both, in distinct ways, very very unlikeable. That's kind of too bad because you spend (well, I spent) much of the movie sympathizing with them, seeing yourself reflected in Mahmut's lonely, arrogant voyeurism as much as in Yusuf's awkward, creepy incompetence. These characters are not individuals I want to identify with -- yet Ceylan seduced me into it...
posted evening of May third, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, May second, 2010
So Monterroso's essay on flies references José Milla y Vidaurre's essay on flies (this piece turns out to be completely beyond my limited abilities as a translator -- the final two paragraphs depend on the double meaning of mosca, which can be "fly" or "cash"), which references a piece by Lucian In Appreciation of the Fly. (Have I mentioned how happy Google Books, in all its imperfection, makes me?)
 ...Both Milla and Lucian reference Iliad XVII:487-92, in which Athena blesses Menelaos: in Chapman's translation, "For which grace she kindly did bestow/ Strength on his shoulders, and did fill his knees as liberally/ With swiftness, breathing in his breast the courage of a fly,/ Which loves to bite so, and doth bear man's blood so much good will,/ That still though beaten from a man she flies upon him still;/ With such a courage Pallas filled the black parts near his heart."
posted evening of May second, 2010: Respond
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For the past few nights I have been watching Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Distant -- a movie I just found out about and which I'm finding immensely gratifying as a collection of images and sounds, and simultaneously difficult to grasp intellectually. Part of the problem is the smallness and lack of definition of the TV screen -- I keep pausing and rewinding to tease apart what's happening in the picture. For instance in the middle of the opening sequence, while Yusuf is looking for his brother, the shot switches to a woman leaving her building a few doors down -- the woman is small and blurry enough that I at first thought it was a shot of Yusuf from a new angle. Yusuf enters the shot in the foreground a few seconds later, clearing up that misperception -- but I think on a larger screen, there would have been no mistake to begin with.
 But the movie is also just extremely dense with information. Take the scene at the end of the opening sequence where Mahmut comes home and finds Yusuf asleep in the entryway of his building. In the previous shot, it was still morning and Yusuf was waiting outside for Mahmut to come home -- then a cut, it is suddenly dark, you see a silhouetted figure coming up the steps of the building and assume it is Yusuf still; not until he comes into the building and starting up the steps, flicks on the light, do you realize it's not -- and at that point, your attention is occupied by the stray cat mewing in the entryway, you don't pick up on what's going on until Mahmut comes back down the steps and sees Yusuf. Then (if you're me) you think Wait, how could I have not gotten that? How could Mahmut have not gotten that? (And Mahmut's line soon after this, apologizing for having forgotten Yusuf was coming, is also the first indication the viewer gets that this visit had been set up in advance. If Mahmut had picked up the phone when his mother called, would she have reminded him that Yusuf was coming?) This movie is really making me want to read Pamuk's Istanbul.
 Oh and one other thing -- the moment when Mahmut flicks on the light and you the viewer see Yusuf sleeping there -- or if you are distracted by the cat at that point, a couple of seconds later -- this moment contains the whole period of the afternoon and evening, leaves you to imagine what Yusuf has been doing this whole time. This is the information density I'm talking about above.
posted morning of May second, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, May first, 2010
posted morning of May first, 2010: Respond
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Friday, April 30th, 2010
 The funny is over here:
 ...‘A homeopathic attack could bring entire cities to a standstill,’ said BBC Security Correspondent, Frank Gardner, ‘Large numbers of people could easily become convinced that they have been killed and hospitals would be unable to cope with the massive influx of the ‘walking suggestible’.’
The severity of the situation has already resulted in the New Age terror threat level being raised from ‘lilac’ to the more worrisome ‘purple’ aura. Meanwhile, new security measures at airports require that all water bottles be scanned to ensure that they are not being used to smuggle the memory of an explosion on board a plane.
‘Homeopathic weapons are the ultimate Smart Bombs,’ warned President Obama, ‘They are so smart that they only affect the gullible. The only defence is for everyone to remain calm, vigilant and to always wear a magic vibrating crystal.’
↻...done
posted evening of April 30th, 2010: Respond
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The rest of the piece I started yesterday -- Monterroso explains some of the role flies play in our universe.
...And think about what I believe Milla said (an author whom of course you will not know but whom thanks to having occupied yourself with the fly, you are hearing mentioned for the first time today), that the fly is not as ugly as it appears at first sight. But this is because, at first sight it does not appear ugly -- precisely because nobody has ever seen a fly for the first time. Nobody ever thinks to wonder, were there flies before me? will there be flies after me? In the beginning was the fly. (It's practically impossible that such a phrase would not appear here -- in the beginning was the fly or some such thing. We live out these phrases. Phrases which --fly--, like sorrow --fly--, mean nothing. Grievous phrases which fill up our books.) Forget it. It's easier for a fly to land on the Pope's nose than for the Pope to land on the nose of a fly. The Pope, or the king or the president (the president of the country of course -- the president of a financial company or a corporation or a maker of product X is in general foolish enough to be considered better than that) is not able to call out his Swiss Guard or his Royal Guard or his Presidential Guard to kill a fly. On the contrary, he is tolerant; perhaps he will just scratch his nose. You know. And you know that the fly knows too, and watches out; you know that what we actually have is a guard of flies, who take care at every hour lest we fall into mortal sin -- which would require a guard of angels, who would soon slack off and turn into accomplices, like the angel in Hitler's guard or the one in Johnson's. But it doesn't have to be that way. Let's return to noses. The fly who lands on yours is a direct descendant of the one who dropped in on Cleopatra's. And once again you fall into these prefabricated rhetorical allusions which everyone has used already. And still you want to create literature. The fly wants you to wrap it in this atmosphere of kings, popes and emperors -- and it wins out. It is your master. You cannot speak of it without an inclination towards grandeur. Oh Melville, you had to sail the seas in order finally to make up this great white whale on your desk in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, without realizing that all the while, since the hot evenings of your childhood when Evil would flutter around your strawberry ice cream and, as the years passed by, over you yourself in the dusk as you pulled out one by one the brown hairs of your beard, reading Cervantes and polishing your style; and not necessarily in that enormous mass of bones and sperm incapable of doing any evil, but rather in him who interrupts your nap, like the crazy Ahab, and Poe and his raven? Ridiculous. Take a look at the fly. Observe. Think.
...Well, much of this is pretty rough. That last sentence in particular, about Melville, is a monstrosity that is going to take a while to figure out. The author Milla whom Monterroso refers to at the top of this piece is José Milla y Vidaurre, who has an essay about flies in his Book Without a Name. Not sure why Monterroso doesn't think his audience would have heard of Milla -- the Wikipædia entry makes it sound like he was an important author in Guatemala. Come to think of it I don't know if Monterroso was writing for a specifically Guatemalan audience, or if he was even living in Guatemala when he wrote this book. Lots to find out... The next book Milla wrote was called Book With a Name.
posted evening of April 30th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, April 29th, 2010
Monterroso writes, "There are three topics: love, death, and flies" -- and right away I'm thinking of Robyn Hitchcock... This is the introduction to part II  of Monterroso's collection Complete Works (and Other Stories).*
There are three topics: love, death, and flies. Since humanity has existed, this sentiment, this fear, these presences have accompanied him everywhere. Let others deal with the first two; I will occupy myself with flies, which are greater than men (if not than women). For years I've had in mind the idea of putting together a universal anthology of the fly. I still mean to do it -- but, I soon came to realize the task was practically infinite. The fly pervades literature; anywhere you cast your eye, you are sure to find the fly. There is no true author who has not taken the opportunity to dedicate a poem, a page, a paragraph, a line to him; if you are an author and have not done this, I advise you to follow my example, to hurry up and do it. Flies are the Eumenides, the Erinyes; they are chastisers. They are avengers, for what we don't know -- but you know that they have persecuted you; as far as you know, they will go on persecuting you forever. They are vigilant. They are the avatars of something unnameable, something benevolent or malign. They pursue you. They follow you. They watch you. When at last you die, it's likely (and it's too bad) that one fly will suffice to carry your poor, distracted soul who knows where. Flies convey -- and they come over the course of the ages to own their cargo -- the souls of our dead, of our forebears, who thus remain close to us, accompanying us, determined to protect us. They are a means for our small souls' transmigrations; they accumulate wisdom -- they come to know everything that we do not dare to know. Perhaps the ultimate propagator of our tired western culture will be the body of this fly, who has come down through the course of the centuries, furthering his line without enriching himself....
You can read the original at valdeperrillos.com, where they have the beginnings of the anthology Monterroso dreams of -- I am surprised not to see Denevi's God of the flies in there as well.
* It appears this piece is actually from a different collection, Perpetual Motion; the two collections were published together in translation under the title of the first.
posted evening of April 29th, 2010: Respond
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