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Friday, October 28th, 2011
The story "Cartas para escribir una novela" is the central piece in Zupcic's book Dragi Sol -- all the stories are meditations on the narrator's relationship with his absent immigrant father, this story is likely the most successful. I think it is the heart of the work. Read the opening to get an idea of the voice he is developing and the complexity of narrative style he is achieving.
Postcards: towards a novel.by Slavko Zupcic
The personal journal of Vojislav Didic
(Notes on the life of my father, Zlatica Didic;
his postcards and photos. His memory.)
for Leticia Z
"Huyo de mi semejante;
en todo semejante hay un doble."
-- Georges Braque
Yes -- I know what Anton said on his recent visit, I know all he said; but this will not be the day I regret having translated, having copied out fresh, written out on good white paper my father's old postcards. Quite the contrary: there is something to having saved these cards from oblivion, something enchanting, something heartening -- the marvel of seeing a new world, a new universe, just an ocean away from my own. Some -- the majority -- were written in Serbo-Croatian; others in a mix of English and French, a jargon my father picked up as he made his way through Europe during the Second World War; and a few letters, two or three, written in Spanish, a Spanish peppered liberally with Serbian idiom. Almost all were sent from my father to his brother Vinko Didic (Hrastovica, zp: Petrinja), and to his best friend in Yugoslavia, Stevo Valec (L.R. 168, Karlovac); also to Ankika Car in the United States (R.R.I. Box 118A, Hobart, Ind.), who was his first girlfriend, and Van Hecke Zimmerman (JunÃn 1689D, 1233 Buenos Aires), a German engineer my father had met on board the Fontainbleau -- not the legendary ship, one built in imitation of it which sailed the Atlantic Ocean for many years under an Argentine flag. The others are replies to his letters, from Vinko, Stevo, Ankiko and others my father wrote to occasionally.Of his siblings, my uncles and aunt, Vinko was the only one he wrote to very frequently, and the only one he received letters from. He wrote a few times to Marko and to Nikolas. Never to Anna, or if he did those letters were among those that we destroyed, my sister and I, ten years ago. We know her name and where she lived (Leigh Creek, S.A., Australia), because these points are mentioned frequently in the letters, as are the corresponding data for Zlatko -- how he sings, how he pisses. And Zlatko, he never could have written to my father: dead men*, as dead as he has been for the past 40 years, do not write.  *Information in my father's letters suggests that Zlatko Didic died in 1944, fighting with partisan troops against a German convoy, drilled through by a bullet from the Nazi front. Anton B., an old Yugoslavian diplomat in the service of the Italian government and lately a friend of our family, had no trouble confirming the date and locale of my uncle Zlatko Didic's demise. Where his skepticism lay was with the circumstances under which it took place. Indeed he appears to be taken with a complex theory which suggests that not even the address we have for my aunt Anna is accurate.
 (I think "Correspondence" would actually be a better word to use in the title and header.)
posted evening of October 28th, 2011: Respond
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On this date in 1886, the Statue of Liberty was dedicated on Bledsoe Island in New York harbor. Talking Points Memo runs some great pictures of the statue under construction; below, her left hand.
posted evening of October 28th, 2011: Respond
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Tuesday, October 25th, 2011
 I'm happy to find a couple of new Lovecraft links this week --
- The Fungi from Yuggoth is a sequence of 36 sonnets, the narrative of a man's encounter with the spawn of the Nameless Ones; YouTube user ChurchofTjolGtjaR has uploaded a reading of it with spacey music. Wikipædia lists 5 recordings of the sequence; I do not know which one this is.
- Chris Lackey and Chad Fifer's H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast features weekly readings from Lovecraft and discussion. Good stuff! (Thanks for the link, Eleanore!)
(Speaking of the Elder Gods, they put in an appearance in Dorothy Gambrell's latest Very Small Array cartoon: What is Coming to Get Us?)
posted evening of October 25th, 2011: Respond
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At Norway's Cafe Mono, Robyn Hitchcock reminisces on his first visit to Norway, on tour with the Egyptians in 1982, and the years since then. Morris Windsor posts a cover of "The End", live in Oslo in '82, the "culmination of one of the weirdest tours ever" -- "The closing remarks contain the seeds of 2009's Goodnight Oslo."
posted evening of October 25th, 2011: Respond
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Sunday, October 23rd, 2011
(from Chapter 3 of Our lady of the dark flowers)
From the four points of the compass they came, the strikers on their way to Alto de San Antonio in their long, dusty caravans. The village was boiling over with excitement. As you looked into the chaos of the crowds streaming through the village's streets, you could see signs bearing the names of salitreras, La Gloria, San Pedro, Palmira, Argentina, San Pablo, Cataluña, Santa Clara, La Perla, Santa Ana, Esmeralda, San AgustÃn, Santa LucÃa, Hanssa, San Lorenzo, others that we hadn't even heard of. And that's not all -- covered with dirt from their heads to their feet,the strikers came singing, shouting, not only the oficinas in San Antonio's district, but from every district in the Pampa del Tamarugal. The influx of people showed no signs of letting up. The strike had spread across the pampa like a duststorm -- "Good dust, the dust of righteousness, my brothers" crowed Domingo Dominguez, walking among the crowd. To the bird's eye, there were more than five thousand of us, pushing together into the streets of the village, bringing our power to the strike. Men of every race and nationality, groups which had clashed in bitter fratricidal wars, were coming together now under the sun, under a single standard -- that of the proletariate.
posted afternoon of October 23rd, 2011: Respond
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Saturday, October 22nd, 2011
I feel like I give short shrift here at READIN to quick, intense reads, like it is mostly the books that take me a long time to read that I am moved to write about. (This is not always true, Costaguana was a pretty quick read -- but anyways.) Three books that I've devoured recently and found most satisfying, nourishing meals.
- Feeding on Dreams by Ariel Dorfman.
His memoir on revolution and repression in Chile and principally on the paths of exile and seeking a home (and seeking a voice) that his life has followed in the decades of the dictatorship and the decades since.
- Golden Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li.
Short stories about life in China and as an immigrant. Fascinating sense of dread and pointlessness. You can read the title story in the New Yorker.
- In the sea there are crocodiles by Fabio Geda and translated from Italian by Howard Curtis.
Telling the emigrant story of Enaiatollah Akbari, his journey in his tenth through fifteenth years from Afghanistan to Italy by way of Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Greece. Akbari's encounters -- friends and strangers who help him survive and make his way to his home in Italy, soldiers and thugs and police who make his way more difficult, the family that ultimately decides to foster him and help him seek asylum -- are gripping, moving, haunting stuff.
 (It is not until after mentioning these three in the same breath that I realize they share (very loosely) a common theme of homeland and exile. Not sure what to make of this...)
posted evening of October 22nd, 2011: 1 response
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More from Shorpy: a breathtaking view of the Toledo, OH waterfront in 1909. Here is a snip of it, click through for the whole (huge) picture.
...And, we're off to Occupy Wall Street today.
posted morning of October 22nd, 2011: Respond
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Wednesday, October 19th, 2011
 Mountain Station is opening Friday's Songwriter Showcase at Studio 12 in Montclair. Come on time at 8 if you want to hear our music! -- We're doing two short sets, the first at 8 and the second later on after some of the featured acts have their sets. We'll be playing a couple of our old favorites and a couple of brand-new songs. Hope to see you there.
posted evening of October 19th, 2011: Respond
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Tuesday, October 18th, 2011
 So for about 3 years now I've had the vague notion that I would really like to take a two-week vacation from work, travel to Mexico or some other Latin American country and enroll in an intensive Spanish language program. Unfortunately the artisan who fashioned me and put me here on Earth did not see fit to give me any capability of making plans; so it has remained a vague, unrealized notion. Every quality has its antithesis, every vacuum has its corresponding completeness; and Ellen is a very good planner. So thanks to her persistence it looks like we have a plan, a palpable plan, for the three of us to travel to southern Mexico late next summer and study Spanish as a family, at the Instituto Cultural Oaxaca. I can't wait!
posted evening of October 18th, 2011: Respond
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Sunday, October 16th, 2011
Sylvia and I carved a Jack O'Lantern this afternoon.
posted evening of October 16th, 2011: 3 responses
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