First term reading list

Seeing as how we just began the second term at school this past week, I decided to lift a great idea from Bookdwarf and post a few mini-reviews. Because I have neither the time nor the talent to write real reviews about the books I read, I think this sort of recap at the end of each academic term is good goal to have. I don't how much attention my "books on the nightstand/back on the shelf" sections get, plus it helps me say something about some wonderful books that may not have provoked their own posts (through my own fault rather than theirs!).

In reverse chronological order:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ~ Purple Hibiscus

I first heard of Adichie in a 2004 post of Maud's and made a mental note to get to "that book" someday. Nearly three years and a continent later, I've finally read it (a Saturday well-spent) and would recommend it without hesitation. Faith and legalism, abuse and love, oppression and liberation all coexist not only under one roof, but in one man. That the daughter, Kambili, seems unobstrusive is an understatement. It's almost as if she is slowly disappearing into the background of events she can do nothing to affect or control. (I completely identified with her startling self-effacement and desire to be unseen.) There is suffering, but she accepts it. Her journey is made all the more real by her refusal to reject and judge, even while she learns how unacceptable many aspects of her world have become. Adichie's description of life in Nigeria reminded me a lot of what life is like here in Santa Marta. I loved the richness of the particulars of her world, and the pain expressed by those who had to leave it. (Of note: Laila Lalami's conversation with Adichie.)

Philip Pullman ~ The Amber Spyglass

I was deeply intrigued by The Golden Compass, but just plain disappointed with this last book in the trilogy. The theology (and its inversion) didn't bother me, neither did his take on Paradise Lost (although it would be interesting to read C.S. Lewis' Preface to Paradise Lost alongside this series). I freely admit to loving Lewis and Tolkien and Pullman (the latter's venom against the former doesn't bother me as it's the work I'm interested in, not petty hatreds). But this doesn't change the fact that I closed this novel on several unanswered questions. The mysterious nature of the name of the series, His Dark Materials, was very much tied into the nature of Dust. But this intriguing aspect of the book was never brought to bear on the outcome of the last novel. I guess you could say that it was, technically, but there were many missed opportunities to tie in the fate of these particles with the fate of the characters and all that they discover. Let's just say he didn't do Blake justice. (Also, can someone please explain to me why none of the movie stills include any of the characters' daemons?)

John Barth ~ Lost in the Funhouse

I made no secret of what I think (and learned) about Barth (and I still have another post in the draft stage). This is a book that anyone with even a passing interest in literature should read. These innovative stories should be read and then reread--not because they're clever, but because he achieves another level of understanding of world-weary humanity.

Here readers will find: a story in the form of a cutout Mobius strip; a story narrated by a spermatazoon on its journey of fertilization; a story in which the narrator (the author's recorded voice) pleads with the author himself (standing by) to put it out of its misery; a story narrating its own coming-into-being; a story about speaking in tongues in which each of six brief speeches is "metrically identical" to the Lord's Prayer; a story that takes the notion of story-within-story to its hilarious limits; and stories such as "Life-Story" and "Lost in the Funhouse" itself, perhaps the prototypical and most influential metafictions in postmodern American literature.

Enough said. Go read it.

Arthur Conan Doyle ~ A Study in Scarlet

Picked it up on a Saturday morning and read it for the first time while snuggled in a hammock. I was surprised by Holmes' youth (although the arrogance was to be expected) and didn't realize a trip to 19th-century Utah would be part of the experience as well. It was really fun to read. Watson's skepticism goes nicely with his new housemate's enormous self-assurance, and the vivid prose keeps the urgency of the empty-house murder alive in the back of the reader's mind, even while the focus is elsewhere.

Michael Chabon ~ Wonder Boys

My sister brought this down with her on a visit last year, and I began reading it one night when I was having trouble sleeping. (She had taken a class on novel-to-film adaptation in the Netherlands, and to my delight, the book was filled with her notes.) Let's just say it solved the problem quite nicely, and I kept it by my bed for a few months until I hit the Passover scene, and then finished it a couple of days later. At some point it stopped being a "cleverer-than-thou" take on writers and their besetting demons and became more about the characters. I still think Richard Russo's Straight Man is much more funny and heartbreaking, but I would pick up Chabon again.

Laird Hunt ~ The Exquisite

I began writing about it here, but it soon blossomed into its own post. Here are some more insightful links:

• Laird Hunt's official website
• Matt Cheney's reprint of Hunt's talk on "Nonrealist Fiction"
• Go on a "photographic dream tour" of the The Exquisite's East Village (photos by Chris Narozny).
• Bud Parr's illuminating conversation with Laird Hunt
• A beautifully atmospheric trailer for the novel
• Matt Cheney's review
• Largehearted Boy concocts a playlist for Tulip.
• Matthew Tiffany's review
• A fascinating interview with Hunt at Bookslut (love the nods to Tolkien)
• Bud's inspired one-minute Exquisite clip
  

Vladimir Nabokov ~ Speak, Memory

I offered a few thoughts in prior posts on this rich memoir. I suspect that all memoirs (past, present, and future) will be compared to Nabokov's. The dense, tangible details and the immediacy with which he recalls the moments that comprised his childhood made me feel as if I were sitting next to him, watching it all on an old reel. There is no artifice or pretense about how he relates the history of his family, just that familiar biting frankness and open tenderness that I've always loved him for.

Agatha Christie ~ And Then There Were None

I'd read this before as a teenager (and was suitably creeped out), but this copy came with the adventure game based on it, which I received for Christmas (and which I have yet to finish, as it's an endless inventory hunt). I read it one night in my hammock on the balcony and it still sent chills up my spine. I'll head back to the house at some point soon... (Also of note: The Official Agatha Christie Website.)

Patrick Süskind ~ El perfume: Historia de un asesino

A friend gave me a copy of this novel (a favorite of hers), and I gladly read it before seeing the movie. Süskind's description of Grenouille's unemotional, detached thought processes are fascinating, and his refusal to sentimentalize or make judgments on events make this a curiously objective read. Alas, it wasn't quite that way with Tykwer's film. Although highly competent, the film softens the ending and opts to moralize on what's taken place, robbing the very last line of its power.

Julio Cortázar ~ Historia de cronopios y de famas

Another one I went on about at length. It's a brilliant book--a good thing to read while slowly working my way up to Rayuela. As Pablo Neruda said,

Anyone who doesn't read Cortázar is doomed. Not to read him is a grave invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who had never tasted peaches. He would be quietly getting sadder, noticeably paler, and probably little by little, he would lose his hair. I don't want those things to happen to me, and so I greedily devour all the fabrications, myths, contradictions, and mortal games of the great Julio Cortázar.

Stendhal ~ The Red and the Black

A selection of a group blog discussing the classics. It took me awhile to catch up, but I'm very glad I did (and also proved that I can read books online). Stendhal's masterpiece frustrated and provoked me, while unveiling societal hypocrisy and one young man's desire to navigate it all while striving for a heroic end.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o ~ Wizard of the Crow

The book that helped me usher in this new year: a rollicking, intimate, hilarious, dire, prophetic work on the nature of dictatorship and the wealth of wisdom possessed by the people of Africa. It was the Winter 2007 pick of The Litblog Co-op, and there are many excellent conversations about the book and interviews with the author to be found. It's an immensely readable yarn that improves upon our limited Western understanding of Africa's problems and strengths, and takes a "both/and" approach to such issues as faith vs. magic, politics vs. art, male vs. female. Brilliant and highly recommended.

UPDATE: ...And winner of the fiction prize at the California Book Awards! (Via the Literary Saloon)

A curious singularity

On Thursday I posted my thoughts on Isaac Bashevis Singer's story "Gimple the Fool":

I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't this freewheeling, compassionate, absorbing tale. Most of us feel like dyed-in-the-wool cynics these days, and probably have a hard time fathoming Gimple's actions. But such wide-eyed gullibility doesn't stem from idiocy, but from hope and a helpless compassion:

I believed them, and I hope at least that did them some good. [...] Besides, you can't pass through life unscathed, nor expect to.

Making memories

I just discovered a beautiful little clip at Alfaguara's site. Last November, Azinhaga, the little town in Portugal where José Saramago was born, planned a special celebration and homage for him on the occasion of the publication of his childhood memoirs and his 84th birthday.

Concentric circles

On the strength of Bud's praise for Laird Hunt's novel The Exquisite, I picked it up while I was stateside in January, hoping to save it for a rainy day. In his review Bud quips, "It’s not as confusing as I make it sound, not, that is, if you don’t try too hard to make sense of it."

Very true. Read it for enjoyment (and the language!)--don't worry about figuring it all out. I look forward to rereading it because although I liked it the first time around, I know there are a lot of "echoes" and references I missed. I was, however, struck by the description of "an interesting picture in a brushed-silver frame":

Concentric rings drew the eye into a cloud of intersecting lines in the center. To get there you had to go through a number of color combinations: yellow gave way to green-yellow gave way to salmon then to salmon-gray then gray-silver then gray-yellow, etc., to dizzying effect. The smooth-edged somewhat irregular outer rings looked to have been laid down by hand with colored pencil, while the mesh-textured inner rings looked a little like they had been created with Spirographs, those grooved plastic drawing rings that were in vogue in my childhood, and that I used a few times at a friend's house, though it goes without saying that the results were nothing like this.

As soon as I read this, I felt it was the perfect visual metaphor for the novel (and not only because of the allusion to Sebald's The Rings of Saturn). By placing this Emma Kunz reproduction in the front room of Henry's first job, Hunt alerts the reader to the "wheels within wheels" nature of the story.

Elsewhere, Henry observes,

I looked out the window. No balloon came. No bird blew by. The sounds of the street seemed very distant. I seemed very distant. Empty circles within circles. Inertia clearly had the upper hand.

Henry also posits a "theory of two New Yorks," which Mr. Kindt "calculated became a dizzying sixteen million New Yorks if there was one of each for each New Yorker":

The one contains the other, I said.

The larger the smaller, or is it the other way around?

I don't know.

It is nevertheless a lovely notion, he said. All cities must be wrapped in a similar doubling embrace.

And all people, I said.

Yes, Henry, of course, we are all of us wrapped in the darkened shadows of our afterselves.

Later in the novel, in a chilling hint of minor revelation, Kindt the invader is invaded by an invader of his own--more circles leading nowhere. More references to the sadness that "builds like sediment with the kind of predictability that still manages to astonish, the kind that often ends by masking its original cause[.]"

But there is humor here, too. Henry describes an illustration by "fellow fifth-grader" Eva Grace Cotrero of "a moon lamp, a device she was working on that was supposed to promote healing by harnessing moonbeams." The book is dedicated to Hunt's daughter, Eva Grace.

As Matt Cheney noted,

The two main stories converge and diverge without explaining each other. They are echoes of echoes, their original sources lost, or at least distant, and so the echoes go on inhabiting the same air. This is a book so full of plots that everything that seems important also seems tangential. It's no surprise that Aris Kindt is a connoisseur of herrings; within the mysteries of The Exquisite, plenty of the herrings are red, but they're part of an entire rainbow -- or, to switch metaphors, an ocean of tributaries filled with plotting fish. No resolution is for sure, and every version of the truth tells some sort of story, with each story being as valid as the other -- the point is not the resolution, but the pleasure of the telling, just as the joy of murder stories is not in how they end up, but in the planning, preparation, and execution that lead to the end. Cut out all possibility of an end, and most of the pleasures still remain, while new pleasures reveal themselves.

As Hunt himself said, "The Exquisite doesn't so much call for readers to solve puzzles, but, in the face of multiple vectors of narrative, etc., to do some puzzling."

P.S. I believe I've found the Kunz piece in question--the 18th work of the online gallery slideshow.

Word magician

In today's edition of El Tiempo, there's an interesting review of Margret S. de Oliveira's La lengua ladina de García Márquez, a glossary of 1600 "colombianisms" found in his work. The meanings of words such as embullar, halalcsillag, mambí, sinecura, ferragosto, guatacuco, and jofaina are given in the context of the particular passages in which they're found.

"García Márquez es un prestidigitador de las palabras. Tiene una relación muy particular con ellas, juega, hace magia con ellas. No solo son la materia prima de su oficio, sino que hace maravillas", sostiene Oliveira.

In her 40-year study of García Márquez's work, Oliveira traveled to Colombia's northern coast [Ed. note--My lovely home!] and spent time in Aracataca. She also read his entire body of work in its English, French, and German translations, because of the help he would give his translators:

Sé que García Márquez a veces ayuda a sus traductores, ellos le envían listas de preguntas y él se las responde, o les da guías para hacer la traducción. Entonces, me leí toda su obra en español, inglés, francés y alemán porque a veces no encontraba una referencia lexicográfica de ciertas palabras y así fue como encontré algunos giros que no aparecían en ningún diccionario", dice la autora.

Another one destined for the TBR stack!

UPDATE: Just found a more in-depth article that appeared ten days ago, which contains examples of 24 entries such as,

envainado prnl coloq Col.

Enredado; metido (alguien) en líos, contrariedades, problemas. "...la desgracia de mi pobre hijo a quienes los infantes de marina tenían traspuesto en la casa presidencial, tan lejos de su madre, señor, sin una esposa solícita que lo asistiera a media noche si lo despertaba un dolor, y envainado con ese empleo de presidente de la república por un sueldo rastrero* de trescientos pesos mensuales..." ('El otoño del patriarca')

filipichín m obsol

Persona vestida con elegancia o con excesivo esmero. SIN lechugino, petimetre. "Yo caminaba ansioso de que me tragara la tierra dentro de mi atuendo de filipichín, pero nadie se fijó en mí, salvo un mulato escuálido que dormitaba sentado en el portón de una casa de vcindad." (Memoria de mis putas tristes)

zurullo m coloq vulg

Pedazo de excremento sólido. SIN mojón."Tantos conventos en esta ciudad y el señor obispo nos manda los zurullos', protestó la abadesa." (Del amor y otros demonios)

The whole point

Scott Esposito writes,

A single volume of Nietzsche will furnish you with far more quotable theories about the world than any of these [books]. But Nietzsche tells you what to think. These novels, like all great art, embody interesting ways of viewing the world and rely on you to decide what they mean.

What kinds of novels is he talking about? Head over to Conversational Reading and enjoy Friday's column.

Shaving syllables

Publisher's Weekly presents an all-too brief conversation with Annie Dillard about The Maytrees. Sounds like her m.o. this time around is completely different from The Living, but the delight in words is the same:

Isn't it hard to kill off your own characters and writing?

I've made the decision many times. Of course, I always save them in a file. And then I got to the part that was really interesting: shaving the book by the syllable. If there was a three-syllable word, I'd say, is there a two syllable word for this, etc. That was really fun. And then I told my husband, Robert Richardson [author of William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism], "I'm having so much trouble." And he said, "Decide what the book is about and take away everything that isn't about that." That's a really good guideline. I always put a little index card above my desk that says: "This book is about THIS!"

So, what is this book about?

It's about the marriage of these two people. It's about their lifelong love. I wanted to call it a "Romantic Comedy about Light Pollution." Sadly, my editors made me remove my joke.

Looking forward to more interviews with her as the release date nears.

Again, I highly recommend reading "The Two of Us" (Harper's, Nov. 2003) if you're at all iffy about this one.

(Via TEV)

Shakespeare's "Tarantino phase"

Scott McLemee spends some quality time with Titus Andronicus:

[Q]uestions of context and literary intertextuality are one thing, while the experience of watching the work itself performed is quite another. For Titus Andronicus is, to repeat, one batshit crazy play. It is surreal, nightmarish. It is also, to a surprising degree, rather vile. Some members of the audience weep, which is understandable; but I can testify that at least one patron wanted to take a shower afterwards.

(A friend of mine passed out while watching Julie Taymor's film version.)

During the forum at the Shakespeare Theatre over the weekend, Denise Albanese mentioned that she frequently teaches Titus at George Mason. I gave her a call to ask about that. And also, frankly, just because I wanted to discuss about the play with somebody who had lived with it for a while. (Exposure to its surrealistic overload does leave you wanting to “talk it off,” as it were.)

“It’s almost always the first play I teach,” she said. “I do that because very often students have only encountered Shakespeare in high school and have a misunderstanding of him as safe, moral, and dull. This one really dislodges the idea that Shakespeare is full of eternal moral truths. It takes place in a different world from what they expect.”

And how does Titus go over with her students?

“Many of them have a very hard time with it,” she told me. “They expect to be able to like somebody in a piece of literature, to find somebody they can identify with, and that is quite difficult in this case. It’s hard to identify with Titus, who kills his own son for dishonoring him. The moral ambiguity of the play is very, very difficult for some of them.”

Such confusion seems appropriate, in a way. Yet I suspect that there is a certain moral ambiguity about experiencing Titus Andronicus as containing moral ambiguity.

Lights and tunnels

Arriving back to work after an uneventful semana santa, a colleague gifted me with a golden ticket: the business card of an English-language bookstore in Bogotá. This is going to go a looong way towards reducing the amount of complaining I do around here about having no access to new titles in English.

Authors looks lovely:

As a direct importer of titles from the US, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and South Africa we are delighted to offer terrific prices on any English language titles you may be seeking.

Oddly enough, this has renewed my resolve to make it through the present stack and keep building my Spanish library.

Last Tuesday, A. and I day-tripped it to Barranquilla, where I found Spanish translations of Philip Pullman's Count Karlstein and G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. Today I went on an (incomprehensibly) unsuccessful search for José Eustacio Rivera's La vorágine, but picked up the newly-revised edition of Cien años de soledad (which is selling like the proverbial hotcakes around here) and José Saramago's recent memoir, Las pequeñas memorias. I began the latter this evening and am glowing. His wife, Pilar del Río, translated it from the original Portuguese, and the dedication is hers alone:

A Pilar, que todavía no había nacido,
                      y tanto tardó en llegar.

Things are definitely looking up.

Now. If I could only find an affordable bookcase...

Blogging as croquet

Quoting Darby again:

I've said it before, and I hate that it has to be said again: if you, in the literary criticism and analysis world, make fun of people who should naturally be your primary audience (i.e., people who love literature and love talking about literature and love responding to discussions about literature and generating new discussions about literature), you are a huge recursive tool. I'm sorry, but it's true: you are a monkey wrench you have thrown into your own self.

Bloggers are readers too, you know. Seems that most who criticize us forget that we simply love books.

And Another Thing.

Whatever happened to that old sentiment of Chesterton's? "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly," right? I may be reckless, but I think this is worth bringing up:

[I]t is a towering levity, an uproarious amateurishness of the universe, such as we felt when we were little, and would as soon sing as garden, as soon paint as run. To smatter the tongues of men and angels, to dabble in the dreadful sciences, to juggle with pillars and pyramids and toss up the planets like balls, this is that inner audacity and indifference which the human soul, like a conjurer catching oranges, must keep up for ever. This is that insanely frivolous thing we call sanity.

Or maybe we should all just read this:

"Oh, Parkinson, Parkinson!" I cried, patting him affectionately on the head with a mallet, "how far you really are from the pure love of the sport--you who can play. It is only we who play badly who love the Game itself. You love glory; you love applause; you love the earthquake voice of victory; you do not love croquet. You do not love croquet until you love being beaten at croquet. It is we the bunglers who adore the occupation in the abstract. It is we to whom it is art for art's sake. If we may see the face of Croquet herself (if I may so express myself) we are content to see her face turned upon us in anger. Our play is called amateurish; and we wear proudly the name of amateur, for amateurs is but the French for Lovers. We accept all adventures from our Lady, the most disastrous or the most dreary. We wait outside her iron gates (I allude to the hoops), vainly essaying to enter. Our devoted balls, impetuous and full of chivalry, will not be confined within the pedantic boundaries of the mere croquet ground. Our balls seek honour in the ends of the earth; they turn up in the flower-beds and the conservatory; they are to be found in the front garden and the next street. No, Parkinson! The good painter has skill. It is the bad painter who loves his art. The good musician loves being a musician, the bad musician loves music. With such a pure and hopeless passion do I worship croquet. I love the game itself. I love the parallelogram of grass marked out with chalk or tape, as if its limits were the frontiers of my sacred Fatherland, the four seas of Britain. I love the mere swing of the mallets, and the click of the balls is music. The four colours are to me sacramental and symbolic, like the red of martyrdom, or the white of Easter Day. You lose all this, my poor Parkinson. You have to solace yourself for the absence of this vision by the paltry consolation of being able to go through hoops and to hit the stick."

Oh, Gessen, Gessen! I freely admit that I have no clue what I'm doing here most of the time, but I absolutely love it.

[Overeager emphasis mine.]

New Dillard

Thanks to Brook, I now know that Annie Dillard has not only updated her website, but has recently published a new book!

To whit:

FORTHCOMING APRIL 5---a SHORT novel of lifelong love in marriage, set on Cape Cod among the Provincetown artists' colony people, starting in the 1940's.

Checking in at Amazon, I see that the release date has been pushed up to 1 June (and will also be an unabridged audiobook). Here's what Booklist has to say:

Dillard, a member in good standing of the school of Emerson and Thoreau, reads the living world with the elevated attention accorded sacred texts. This habit of mind shapes her prized nonfiction, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) to For the Time Being (1999), and underlies her fiction, first, in The Living (1992), a historical saga set in the Pacific Northwest. And now in this rhapsodic novel of our times set on Cape Cod and portraying free-spirited characters dazzled by the sea, stars, sun, wind, and dunes. Deary, a country-club escapee, sleeps in the sand's cradling embrace. Poet Toby Maytree cherishes the beach shack his coast guard father built, which is where he takes beautiful and meditative Lou, launching a epic love. Dillard's gift for combining scientific precision with soul-stirring lyricism has never been more beguiling and philosophically resonant. Can Lou and Maytree's seaside idyll last? Yes and no. Broken bones and broken promises do not altogether slay love, or dispel osmotic understanding. The ocean gives, takes, gives back. Lou is an anchorite, free of clock time and clutter, devoted to the story of the land. Maytree is a voyager who, in old age, returns home. In this mythic and transfixing tale, Dillard wryly questions notions of love, exalts in life's metamorphoses, and celebrates goodness. As she casts a spell sensuous and metaphysical, Dillard covertly bids us to emulate may trees--the resilient hawthorn--the tree of joy, of spring, of the heart.

This review sounds a bit too...sweet for Dillard. If her last published work of fiction, "The Two of Them," is any indication, this new novel will be a searing work of beauty.

Incidentally, "The Two of Them" was published in Harper's November 2003 issue. (As Maud said, "Looks like I do have that 17 bucks, after all"!)

Filling in the gaps in my education

I've just finished Lost in the Funhouse and officially adore John Barth. So what's a girl estranged from further book access to do? Learn all she can...

I took so many lit courses in college that I accidentally double-majored in my own major, but still did not make it to Barth. (Shameful, I know.) So I flip through Annie Dillard's Living by Fiction (published in 1982) and reread:

When a writer like Barth speaks up in his fiction today, he returns to Sterne, he parodies the eighteenth-century novel, and he makes a virtue of his own self-consciousness. Barth parodies his self-consciousness too, brilliantly: he even celebrates the self-awareness of the writer whose chosen art is so developed and all its possibilities so known that he cannot enter into it forgetfully.

I admire how she gets his "playful irony" and the joyful nature of his work (pulsing with life, energy, and reader involvement).

But I need more, and so I find some great links to audio interviews with him and begin to listen (starting here). I dig up Dan Green's posts on Barth and reread this (because it's what helped me to pick up Barth in the first place):

[I]t is Lost in the Funhouse in which Barth most purposefully engages in literary experiment. So singlemindedly does he do so, in fact, that readers who encounter this book now, shorn of the context in which it was both so controversial and so influential, might think it dated, a relic of an era in which experiment in fiction could be so noteworthy. (They would be mistaken to judge it so, however, as it is an example of the sort of fiction that, in Barth's own words, is still "au courant" but also "manage[s] nonetheless to speak eloquently and memorably to our human hearts and conditions, as the greatest artists have always done.") [...]

I do believe Barth will ultimately be judged an important postwar writer, largely because of the accomplishment of a book like Lost in the Funhouse, which, however much it absorbs the influence of writers such as Borges and Nabokov, also transforms that influence into a frequently outrageous kind of comic fiction that discloses the many ways in which storyelling can trip over its own narrative feet, but in the process demonstrates that fiction still has plenty of innate if unexploited resources from which it might continue to draw.

Regardless of what anyone has to say about the "flaws" of litblogs, the solace and shared appreciative enjoyment of literature that I continually find will always keep me coming back. Yet it's also the constant learning that I love: discovery, revelation, and insight galore for the hungry reader.

From one more girl who loves Pynchon

What she said.

This is ridiculous. (And what's even more heinous is the fact that--at this posting--42% agree with him...)

Highlight of the month

Being confused with Darby Dixon of Thumb drives and oven clocks. Every time I visit his place, I feel better about my inconsequential keyboard tapping--more inspired and more willing to venture out with my own thoughts on what I've been reading.

It's an honor, sir.

Lost and found

How is it some authors inspire absolute trust? How is it that after reading "Lost in the Funhouse" I want to give John Barth a huge hug, while after reading, say, The Exquisite, I would give Laird Hunt a friendly handshake and happily consider reading more of his writing?

It's different for everyone, I know--the subtle somethings that win your confidence and hand you a lovely sense of relief (a cool breeze in locked room). Many have already written on Barth's particular brilliance and this tale's perfected melding of form and content (at least I imagine they have). But what struck me was the spot-on articulation of...this:

Strive as he might to be transported, he heard his mind take notes upon the scene: This is what they call passion. I am experiencing it.

and

[...] he has...some sort of receivers in his head; things speak to him, he understands more than he should, the world winks at him through its objects, grabs grinning at his coat. Everybody else is in on some secret he doesn't know; they've forgotten to tell him.

and

He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he's not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator--though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.

But what is it? The chronic experiential detachment of... Whom? Writers who don't know they're writers? Over-analytical types? Artistically precise crazies who should all live on their own deserted islands? Emotionally constipated naturalists? Bicultural bookworms with nomadic tendencies?

There was some simple, radical difference about him; he hoped it was genius, feared it was madness, devoted himself to amiability and inconspicuousness. Alone on the seawall near his house he was seized by the terrifying transports he'd thought to find in toolshed, in Communion-cup. The grass was alive! The town, the river, himself, were not imaginary; time roared in his ears like wind; the world was going on! This part ought to be dramatized. The Irish author James Joyce once wrote. Ambrose M____ is going to scream.

Sex and spirituality fail, while the ordinary sings loud and clear. Why are some like this? Why can't we be struck likewise? Why do I find cause for concern in the fact that it only happens sometimes--that I'm neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring?

Best ponder this:

When you're lost, the smartest thing to do is stay put till you're found, hollering if necessary. But to holler guarantees humiliation as well as rescue; keeping silent permits some saving of face--you can act surprised at the fuss when your rescuers find you and swear you weren't lost, if they do. What's more you might find your own way yet, however belatedly.

Maybe it just means I'm an incorrigible reader.

(Art by Kozlov Nickolay: "Three". Indian ink on paper. 1995.)

UPDATE: Ed steps up...

I too want to give John Barth a huge hug. If I had been at AWP, I would have given John Barth a huge hug. He may have been weary of this. He may have thought me insane or a fanboy to be avoided at all costs. But in Barth’s case, the hug is necessary. I encourage you to read John Barth (particularly, The Sot-Weed Factor), so that you too can feel compelled to give John Barth a huge hug. I think more writers can really use huge hugs. If you know an author who hasn’t been hugged, please hug them. Or promise to hug them. Or if the writer is shy about hugs, hug someone else in the author’s presence and tell the writer, “You see, I would apply this affection to you, but I understand your position about hugs. And I have no wish to invade your personal boundaries. So perhaps you can live vicariously through this third party, who is also deserving of a hug for his own achievements.”

That piece of paper

An inspiring interview with Anne Carson:

Carson took Latin in high school because it was the alternative to typing. Her Latin teacher was also conversant in ancient Greek, so Carson took Greek lessons in her lunch hour. "Greek is one of those things that, when you do it, you realise it's the best experience in the world, there's no reason ever to stop. It's just some amazing combination of the kind of puzzle-solving that goes into crosswords and amazing literature. You think, well, they're nerds, they were born that way. But they're not just nerds, they're all kinds of people who stumble into this happy field of endeavour and stay there." To her parents' alarm, she announced that she was going to pursue these two, entirely impractical dead languages at university. "My father kept telling me to get a marketable skill on the side. He suggested typing. He was worried for some time. And then I got a job at Princeton and he sort of calmed down."

If her study of Greek and Latin has affected her own writing style, Carson suspects it is to be found in the way she makes patterns between things. "There is something about the way that Greek poets, say Aeschylus, use metaphor that really attracts me. I don't think I can imitate it, but there's a density to it that I think I'm always trying to push towards in English. It's a kind of compacting of metaphor, without a concern for making sense ... it's just on the edge of sense and on the edge of the way language should operate."

The danger with this, and with Carson's writing, is that it drifts into whimsy or nonsense. "It does fall apart a lot. It gets just too weird for anyone to care about reading, or else it gets diluted into a sort of parody of itself. Intuition is the only way to keep on the line between them. And also focusing back on to the first time the idea came into your head has some kind of pristine conviction that it gradually loses." Carson returns to the actual piece of paper on which she wrote down the beginning of the idea, usually a coffee-stained back of an envelope. "Because there's something almost magically convincing about that piece of paper. The same words typed on a nice clean piece of paper wouldn't have whatever it is - fidelity, to your original thought."

(via The Page)

When you run out of books

I knew there had to be more of us out there--readers without adequate access to books. In her post "Reading as an Expat," Gretchen of Readers Without Borders (a site I just discovered last week) proposes that the Sony Portable Reader is a potential solution for those of us who can't pay the hefty shipping costs (or wait the extra month) for new books. It sounds like a good idea and has the potential to provide a quick fix for stranded bibliophiles. However, the selection doesn't look all that fantastic and not quite worth the investment at this point. Hopefully, this changes in the next couple of years. It would be amazing to have near-instant access to new books: the perfect motivation for concentrating on getting through my current stacks and not worrying about running out.

That said, there's still plenty for me to read and investigate in my second language. My present practice of always having two books on hand--one in English, one in Spanish--is helping considerably. I'm hoping (as ever) to be able to share some coherent thoughts on John Barth and José Edilberto Zuluaga soon. (I read a critique that complained of certain aspects of the latter, including the fact that after finishing the novella, the reader still couldn't understand what the title referred to. Needless to say, I felt pretty happy about figuring out the title's double meaning by page 15, but that doesn't necessarily mean I understand it any better than he does.)

But for now, there are report cards to do. I let Pandora play as I sit here on the tile floor and revel in my newly-acquired broadband connection. Yes. I am actually typing this from home.

A new leaf.

The apartment I'm renting was sold, and although I'll be here till November, the former owner had her furniture hauled away last week. It's nice, though. Very clean and minimalist. (I am currently typing away on top of a cardboard box.) I regret the loss of the cheap, black bookcase, but my stacks now surround me as I sit here and hope to write some sense into things.

Sunlight in March

The Innocence Mission--one of my all-time favorite bands (I've been a fan since the age of 15)--just released a new album yesterday: We Walked in Song. Once a upon a time, I penned a brief review of their previous album, which was posted online in the days before I started this little blog. I can't say enough about the spare beauty of their music, with lyrics that tap into the literary influences of Eudora Welty, William Maxwell, and Gerard Manley Hopkins (among others).

Give a listen to "Into Brooklyn, Early in the Morning". Fragments of "Brotherhood of Man," "Lake Shore Drive," and older favorites "Tomorrow on the Runway" and "You Are the Light" can be found here.

The finite within the infinite

Nabokov, Speak, Memory:

Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love--from my heart, from the tender nucleus of a personal matter--to monstrously remote points of the universe. Something impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behavior of nebulae (whose very remoteness seems a form of insanity), the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helplessness, the cold, the sickening involutions and interpenetrations of space and time. It is a pernicious habit, but I can do nothing about it. [...] I have to make a rapid inventory of the universe, just as a man in a dream tries to condone the absurdity of his position by making sure he is dreaming. I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence.

I was going to add some sort of personal comment to this passage, but rapidly realized there was nothing to say. Even in posting it, I feel as though I'm intruding on something sacred (which it is), and still marvel that I held these words in my hands at all.

Love etches itself into our skin, then down into the bone. We smell a fragrance in a recently-entered room and after a decent period, adjust. It no longer stands out, calls the attention. It becomes a part of us even as we begin to forget it's there. We know we need all the help we can get to help us see what's right in front of our faces.

And so we read.

Coffee, coffee, coffee

A new Juan Valdez has recently opened in one of our two local malls. I'm there nearly every other day reading, writing, grading, or planning classes. The coffee is amazing. I've never had such marvelous espresso. Now all we need is another bookstore and I could live here forever...

(Outside Colombia, there are locations in Philadelphia, New York, Seattle, Washington D.C., and Madrid, Spain.)

A world unto themselves

This weekend, I picked up a copy of Diners. There's a marvelous homage to Gabriel García Márquez, which includes the words and works of

Paul Auster - John Updike - Gay Talese - Norman Mailer - Gregory Rabassa - Jon Lee Anderson - David Manzur - Ana Mercedes Hoyos - Maripaz Jaramillo - Omar Rayo - Carlos Jacanamijoy - Darío Ortiz - Lorenza Panero - Enrique Grau - Juan Goytisolo - Manuel Vicent - Belisario Betancur - Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza - Juan Carlos Botero - Héctor Abad Faciolince - Mario Mendoza - Jorge Franco - Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda - Ruven Afanador - Richard Avedon - Carlos Duque - Nereo López - Hernán Díaz - Indira Restrepo

It's a gorgeous issue.

Here's Paul Auster's contribution, "A Memory":

It was the spring of 1970. I was twenty-three years old, writing and translating poems, writing essays and reviews, but also dreaming of one day being able to write novels. By then, I had read nearly all the masters of the twentieth century--Joyce and Proust, Kafka and Beckett, Faulkner and Nabokov, Fitzgerald and Céline--and was feeling a little crushed. How on earth could one ever get out from under those giants?

One day, I read a highly enthusiastic review of a novel by a South American writer whose name was unknown to me. At the time, thirty-seven years ago, buying hardcover books was an extravagance I could scarcely afford, but my curiosity had been aroused to such a degree that I went out and sprang for the book anyway. I started reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in the early afternoon and I didn't put it down until I had finished reading it late that night. Here was soemthing new and fresh and altogether mesmerizing: an imagination, a voice, a sensibility that resembled nothing I had encountered before. And yet Gabriel García Márquez's novel, in the masterful translation by Gregory Rabassa, contained many old-fashioned virtues as well, most of which can be summed up in a single phrase: love of storytelling.

This love is what creates pleasure in the reader, the sense of amazement and happiness that washes over us whenever we stumble upon one of those rare books that changes the way we look at the world, exposes us to the infinite possibilities of what a book can be. Every passionate reader has had that experience, and each time it happens, we understand that books are a world unto themselves and that world is better and richer than any we have traveled in before. That is why we become readers in the first place. That is why we turn away from the vanities of the material world and begin to love books above all other things.

(Painting by Darío Ortiz)

Bilingual blogging

After having ruminated on one day making this blog more bilingual (rather than just the odd Spanish quote--kind of like the opposite of what Mauricio Salvador does, but much less extensively), I finally discovered The Book's Den. A very happy development, which bears futher investigation...

Any more Spanish-English bilingual litblogs out there? Or, for that matter, any more Spanish-language litblogs? I'd love to link to you.

Happiness is...

...finding copies of Gabriel García Márquez's novels at supermarket check-out counters. (Have I mentioned how much I love living here?)

The coverage continues...

~ 21 articles up at Semana.

~ The cover of Cromos was a delightful photo and article ("Los 80 años del niño de Aracataca").

(I picked up copies of both of these magazines last night. Joy!)

Mysteries practical and profound

From Colleen Mondor's Bookslut interview with Scarlett Thomas:

I have always been a bit of a geek, I suppose, and I have been helped in this by not having any desire to marry or have children or get swamped by any of the domestic stuff that often (but by no means always) snaps women out of their geekdom and forces them to think in terms of nappies and bottles of baby oil and to be normal for God’s sake because if you’re not normal other parents will look at you funny and eventually someone will come and take your kids away...

Aristotle says that fiction should do one of two things: reflect the world as it is, or make it better. While this is a little too cheerful for where I am at the moment, there’s a lot of truth in it nevertheless. People sometimes forget that real women, even ones covered in nappies and shit and bleach etc., do not spend all their time thinking about dresses and princesses and kisses--it’s women in stories that do that. And these are stories that make things worse. So my stories seem different because they’re not like other stories, perhaps. I don’t know. Most women out there are geeky in some way, and you’re right that not much fiction reflects this. I guess the more common experience is for women to be somehow restricted by domestic life or to live under the threat of this restriction, and of course there’s a lot of fiction that reflects this beautifully--like The Bell Jar, which is probably my favorite novel, in which Esther Greenwood pretty much has to stop being a geek or else. Oranges are Not The Only Fruit does something similar, too, where the character Jeanette has to try to find a new way of inhabiting all the fairy stories and religious myths she’s grown up with.

(Emphasis mine.) As a fellow geek, I think many women (fully aware of their geekiness), are finding ways to not be caught up in either of the two extremes that Thomas articulates so well. A kind of non-domestic domesticity exists, where responsibilities are met, but in liberating and non-restrictive ways. I would hazard to guess that it all depends on the type of spouse and on the joy one takes in "nappies and shit and bleach". Elements of non-traditional "domesticity" can survive if one refuses to sacrifice personal geekiness and the desire to live an authentic life.

Incidentally, Happy Women's Day! The Guardian has a smart quiz on female authors, in honor of today (via Books, Words, and Writing). Funny how having spent most of my life in the U.S., I was completely surprised by the hugs and kisses from my students celebrating today. (Evidently, there are many things right about Colombia.)

Another aspect of the Thomas interview I loved is this:

All learning is independent. However, I’m not really striving to make any point about this. But now I think about it I realise that almost all "knowledge" I’ve been given within an institution is to serve someone else’s purpose, not mine, and most of it is just wrong, or not even wrong. I work in a university now, and the only way my students learn is by doing things themselves or by reading complicated writing that doesn’t give them any facts. I actually have some sort of undiagnosed medical condition, I think, because I am incapable of remembering any dates, facts or figures -- even ones I make up myself! I can remember long strings of abstract numbers, but not ever four figure dates. When I was younger I felt stupid all the time because I didn’t know Latin and Greek, and my mathematical skills weren’t that great, and I hadn’t read enough "classic literature." I think I’ll always feel like that, but now I am learning bits of Greek, and I’m reading stuff I missed out on at school, and I am finding that what all good professors and lecturers tell you is true: read books, all by yourself, and work out why they are or are not important yourself.

Truer than true.

The End of Mr. Y sparked many long-held thoughts of mine, and was just the thing to validate personal theories and inspire further thought. When I read lines like, "Thought is what encodes matter," I'm reminded of Genesis and the narrative of how spoken words brought matter into being. Be it myth, literature, or a matter of faith (or all three at once), I find it fascinating that this common idea/thread is found in literature, ancient and contemporary. There is harmony in paradox.

I also found myself wondering about the cause and effect nature of this (word or thought) does that (encode or create matter) and the possibility of everything happening at once...light as particle and wave...how traveling at the speed of light would show you reality as a cubist painting: an all-encompassing present, an eternal Now....

Birthday wishes

El Tiempo has a lovely spread on Gabriel García Márquez, who turns 80 today. Aside from the six (Spanish) articles, which include an interview with fellow author Álvaro Mutis, there are also six interesting photo albums containing recent pictures, snapshots during his acceptance of the Nobel Prize, and various book covers. There are also recent shots of Aracataca, a few movie stills, and many from last year's Hay Festival in Cartagena.

Many happy returns to the man who celebrates four times this year. Not only is it his birthday, but it is also 60 years since he published his first story, 40 years since the publication of Cien años de soledad, and 25 years since winning the Nobel Prize.

Catala tregua tregua espera

It’s taken me ages to find the quiet mental space in which to reflect on Julio Cortázar’s marvelous Historias de cronopios y de famas, but I finally sat at a small table in the corner (next to the bookcase by the balcony) and scribbled a draft of this post with pen and ink. For now, it’s the only way. (We’ll see what happens afterwards in this new month.)

In the opening pages, Cortázar confronts us with the sad reflection of our hopes and the crystal brick in which we live. But it isn’t all bad:

Y no que esté mal si las cosas nos encuentran otra vez cada día y son las mismas. Que a nuestro lado haya la misma mujer, el mismo reloj, y que la novela abierta sobre la mesa eche a andar otra vez en la bicicleta de nuestros anteojos, ¿por qué estaría mal?

The ordinary both hides and reveals struggle (as the open novel on the table remounts the bicycle of our reading glasses). And so he offers us instructions on how to cry, how to be afraid, how to understand three famous paintings (by Titan, Rafael, and Holbein, respectively), how to kill ants in Rome, how to climb stairs, and how to wind a watch (“No te regalan un reloj, tú eres el regalado, a ti te ofrecen para el cumpleaños del reloj.”).

Then there are the “strange occupations” of the extended family that build a gallows in their garden and drop strands of hair down bathroom drains in order to recover them. An aunt has an unholy fear of falling on her back, to such a degree that the father accompanies her throughout the house to examine the floor for potential trouble, the mother sweeps the patio several times a day, the sisters go around picking up stray tennis balls, and the cousins eradicate any trace left by the various dogs, cats, turtles, and chickens that wander the house. Her obsessive terror is a mystery--especially since she’s darkly hinted at never being able to get up again, even though there are 32 other people in the house to help her. That is, of course, until the night the eldest brother finds a helpless cockroach stranded on its back on the kitchen floor.

Aside from Kafka’s kitchen, there’s the room where they trap tigers (celebrating afterwards), and the strategic and carefully dramatized way in which they crash local funerals and wakes. But none of this is a big deal. As he puts it, all that matters is doing something, which is why his only motive for this telling is to prevent the rain from getting too oppressive on an empty afternoon.

Next come the discursive notes on “unstable stuff” (according to translator Paul Blackburn). We are given instructions on singing (and admonished to leave Schumann in peace), notes on office work, the nobility of bicycles, how mirrors behave on Easter Island, the possibilities of abstraction, the interchangeable lives and deaths of a newspaper, a satire on bureaucracy, the sensory experiences of a headless man, a theme for a tapestry, history as perceived by a chair, a wise man with a hole in his memory, plans for a poem, an undesirable camel, a bear’s discourse, a portrait of a cassowary, the tragedy of falling raindrops, a story without a moral, and the portentous journey of the lines of a hand. My favorite piece is “Fin del mundo del fin,” a fanciful exploration of the consequences of writers writing without end and what happens when books multiply like rabbits. The poor use books for bricks to build cabins and the books eventually create new land masses. Boats are no longer able to sail, so they’re converted into casinos and the public walks to them on foot over the bibliographic (or well-versed) sea. I also love “Qué tal, López”, which contains a line I believe to be part of Cortázar’s artistic motivation:

Pero las cosas invisibles necesitan encarnarse, las ideas caen a la tierra como palomas muertas.

“But invisible things need to become incarnate, ideas fall to earth like dead doves.”

And so we find ourselves at the book’s last section, “Historias de cronopios y de famas,” which is divided into two. After a brief primer on the nature and customs of famas, cronopios, and esperanzas (where we learn of their habits, joys, and griefs), we come to the little tales of their “days and ways”--slight vignettes which whimsically capture their essence. There’s an indefinable delicacy about the way in which Cortázar recounts these stories. Dry wit mingles with compassion, leaving an indelible impression on the imagination that is stronger than mere mental pictures.

Famas conserve their memories carefully, wrapping them (from head to foot) in black sheets and placing them upright against the living room wall with small place cards attached. Cronopios are disorderly and let their memories wander about the house amid happy shouting, and when they run into one, they softly caress it and tell it to take care.

They all go on trips, wind clocks, eat lunch, own handkerchiefs, start businesses, conduct experiments, sing and dance, walk down streets, have trouble with utility companies, build houses, treat psychiatric patients, entertain academics, explore caverns (with tragic results for the intrepid cronopio who was given ham sandwiches instead of his beloved cheese), mail letters, send telegrams, and have encounters with flora and fauna. Hence:

TORTOISES AND CRONOPIOS

Now tortoises are great admirers of speed, as is natural.

The esperanzas know it, and don’t give it another thought.

The famas know it, and make fun.

The cronopios know it, and every time they meet a tortoise, they take out a box of colored chalk, and on the tortoises’ round blackboard, draw a swallow.

I miss reading about them and wish it wasn’t finished.

(Image via UNESCO)

Ink and paper

I discovered this lovely Catalog Card Generator over at fade theory. Nice way to affix reading-notes-to-self or marginalia on blog posts.

Everything Gabo

The website of Cambio, a Colombian magazine, has 17 articles on Gabriel García Márquez, in celebration of his 80th birthday in March. Covering topics that range from film to Fidel, the site also showcases a short story originally published in Cambio, "En agosto nos vemos" ("We'll Meet in August").

One point of time

Nearing the end of Nabokov's Speak, Memory I come across his beginnings in poetry as a teenager (remembering my own overly-earnest false starts) and listen his thoughts on the matter:

But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members. Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. Lost in thought, he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighboring porch, and old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-gray sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur--all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair, at Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus.

That summer I was still far too young to evolve any wealth of "cosmic synchronization" (to quote my philosopher again). But I did discover, at least, that a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.

Ashes

There was a brief respite yesterday when we interrupted classes for an Ash Wednesday mass. It was as if someone poked holes in the crystal brick (see Cortázar) in which I live. Later, I wanted to sit in this room and write about Eliot's poem, but (of course) there was no time. Even now, there are only small scraps of it.

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And so in two seconds I tried and found something more to think about...

The first long poem after his conversion was "Ash Wednesday" (1930), a religious meditation in a style entirely different from that of any of the earlier poems. "Ash Wednesday" expresses the pangs and the strain involved in the acceptance of religious belief and religious discipline. This and subsequent poems were written in a more relaxed, musical, and meditative style than his earlier works, in which the dramatic element had been stronger than the lyrical. "Ash Wednesday" was not well received in an era that held that poetry, though autonomous, is strictly secular in its outlook; it was misinterpreted by some critics as an expression of personal disillusion.

I love this tension between the content of "strain" and the form of "a more relaxed [...] style". Both and. All at once. At the same time. Opposites only helping each other...

Oh to lock myself away with a stack of books for days on end! But for now there is this, and it will have to be enough.

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.

Of note

It's been virtually impossible to get much done around here without having the internet at home. I'm currently on a waiting list that may take another month (!), so posting will continue to be sporadic for awhile. Nevertheless, I still have the notes from my favorite session at Cartagena to post...and I'm enjoying Cortázar hugely. What saves my sanity during the workday are the brief times I can duck into this cool, quiet computer room and read what's going on at the blogs over on the left... Here are a few bits and pieces that caught my eye today.

~ Tori Amos talks to Alan Light about putting together A Piano: The Collection. (I've always loved the comparison of songs on an album to chapters in a book.)

~ I have to agree with the esteemed proprietor of The Literary Saloon--putting all world literature onto separate shelves isn't the way to go. (I'd even say that the existing shelves would be gutted too significantly--what's the point?) But I loved exploring the site he recommended as an alternative: Reading the World.

~ Bud Parr points to an excellent piece on The Slow Reading Movement. Waters writes,

I am convinced that most speed-reading is impaired reading, just like the sort you do when you have a fever or are tired or engaged in other tasks at the same time you are supposed to be reading. Unless you are very smart, speed-reading forces you to ignore all but one dimension of a literary work, the simplest information. What we lose is the enjoyment that made people turn to literature in the first place. [...]

There is something similar between a reading method that focuses primarily on the bottom-line meaning of a story in a novel and the economic emphasis on the bottom line that makes automobile manufacturers speed up assembly lines. If there is any truth to the analogy, it provides grounds for concern. [...]

The issue is more than just savoring literary experience. I am suggesting that there is more than meets the eye in reading, literally. If we attend to the time of reading, we might notice that our relationship to a literary work changes over time. One consequence is that we begin to be charitable to "bad" readers, whether they are our students, our acquaintances, or our former selves. Most important, though, we learn to drop the idea that we can neatly distinguish good from bad reading because we realize that, at some time in the past, we were not up to reading a particular work. Or perhaps we see that while we missed a great deal, we did respond strongly to parts of the work. It begins to make sense, then, to track our career with a certain work, in order to open it up as literature.

UPDATE: The Little Professor offers a sound critique of this piece, questioning the connection between speed reading and literary criticism. Although I agree with her points, I must confess that what really appealed to me about the article was his stance regarding certain academic approaches to literature (and the dearth of close reading): "Thematic approaches to literature have triumphed, emphasizing the moral of the story over formal and aesthetic analyses. At the college level, earnestly moral or political readings have pushed aside the pleasure of waywardness in plot and rhyme." I think the connection between the mentality behind "bottom-line" capitalism and these "thematic approaches" to literature is valid. Reducing works of art to culture, morals, or politics is similar to how erroneous readings surface in other camps (such as with certain right-wing fundamentalists). People ban books (in part) because of simplistic approaches to literature. Why not encourage the complexity of authentic reading experiences? (This is probably what I should've said in the first place!)

Event #25: Wole Soyinka...

...in conversation with Colombian author Juan Manuel Roca.

We didn't think we'd be able to attend this one since the bookstore in Barranquilla where we bought event tickets said it was sold out. Unbeknownst to us, it was only "sold out" as far as the number of tickets sold at that particular bookstore. So a tip to future festival-goers: try to get tickets the day of, even if they tell you it's sold out. (It still hurts to think that I missed out on seeing Chimamanda Adichie speak due to a technicality, but I'll be much wiser next time.)

What follows is basically a neatened version of my notes. Since the events had simultaneous translation (both in English and in Spanish), it was interesting to watch the exchanges on stage. Both Soyinka and Roca wore headsets. This is the first interview I've witnessed where neither party could speak the other's language. They both did a remarkable job: Roca was very well-informed and perceptive as the interviewer and Soyinka was gracious and nuanced in his responses. (A. had a headset and I listened in on the Spanish translator a bit--she was excellent.)

Soyinka had visited a barrio of Cartagena earlier in the day, and when asked about his experience, he spoke of how much he loved being with the children--how natural it feels to him to enter into their world. He said that it is a big mistake on the part of the Western world to pretend that children are the same as adults. They should be respected for the worlds they create.

He spoke of growing up in a Christian family in Nigeria under colonial rule and how inspired he became by regionalism. He did not find much contradiction between the mix of religions. The religious traditions of Nigeria were seen as "cultural," and so there was not much conflict with the Christianity he was raised with. (This site gives good background.) The role of tribal historians was never questioned--certain individuals able to recite the names of all members of the tribe for up to two generations back. He or she was viewed as the voice of the tribe (and it was a musical one as well).

Roca asked him about the part played by women in the fight for liberation in Nigeria. He talked about how they led open rebellions...how the bearing of breasts was an act of resistance...and how many were shot by colonial officers. In spite of this, the women of his region drove the local monarch off his throne.

Roca then asked about his view of democratic monarchies. (I got the feeling he actually meant democracies that become monarchical in nature--perhaps alluding to the U.S. in Iraq.) Soyinka talked about constitutional monarchies--how in England, Spain, and Sweden, having a king or queen is ok, but that such situations in Africa are seen as examples of feudalism. He said that constitutional monarchy in Africa is actually a controlled system.

Every society has its poets (oral tradition, etc.)... UNESCO's current fight regarding immaterial intellectual property is particularly important for the preservation of oral tradition.

When asked about his connection to Caribbean writers, he launched into an interesting discussion about the terms "blackness" and "negritude" and how they were invented by expatriate intellectuals in Paris as an act of resistance against the cultural colonialism of a specific time and place. (At one point, the exam for citizenship to a French colony required a dinner invitation at the home of a colonial officer. The applicant's table manners were carefully studied and taken into account.) Although the terms helped combat the existing oversimplifications of cultural differences (e.g., "reason" is Greek, "emotion" is African), the term "negritude" came to substitute real ideologies.

A "radicalization of sensibilities" occurred in the U.S. and people were forced to choose sides on issues of "black" and "white." Much of it came down to the correct "look" or style. But exploitation exists on both sides, so Marxism came in. Writers like LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka helped the focus move from race to class. Soon after the advent of groups such as the Black Panthers in the '60s, white and black radicals found themselves on the same side. "Liberation" was defined in different ways by different movements, confusing the original issue.

Roca then asked Soyinka about his thoughts on the humor in African poetry. Soyinka admitted a personal theory that he thinks he'll one day be able to prove: that the humorous archetypes of commedia dell'arte began with the arrival of a certain African slave to Italy. (I wish I could remember more of his examples--it was obvious he's been thinking about this a long time, and there was much encouraging laughter from the audience.)

He observed that many liberation movements (which also included the feminist movement) had no sense of irony...and he loves the idea of the African figure Exu, whose role is to deflate pomposity (quietly laying down banana peels before the self-important).

Roca asked him about his love of film, and he confessed his penchant for the "frailty and tenderness" of Fellini's work.

Soyinka was then asked about his role in the International Parliament of Writers. He explained that during the time of the fatwa against Rushdie, many were finally made aware that his was not a unique situation. Many writers have always been living under these kinds of situations. While Rushdie had asylum in Strausburg, a group of writers worked together so that now, all over the world, there is a network of safe places for writers in exile or in hiding due to political persecution.

During the Q&A, he was asked about the place (or role) of writers in "Third World" countries. He said that more organic development must happen if the effects of colonialism are to be counteracted. Many countries are bedeviled by the East vs. West struggle and that this sort of focus only produces wasted energy. He says we're not looking inward to what we already have and so become surrogates of other blocs. After gaining independence, many African nations became dependencies because they relied on the economic power of others. Civil wars have drained away many countries' own resources--this is a direct result of the insecure foundations built during the original liberations. He declared that what's needed is leadership that is ready to completely break with the past. This is why current efforts are so important: the answers lie in the history of the liberations of these countries.

The last question was asked by a young boy in the balcony who asked, "What can children give to literature?" Soyinka gazed up at him and--without the least bit of hesitation--said, "Write."

He encouraged him to start now and never stop. The packed theatre errupted in hearty applause.

On a related note, this week over at The Litblog Co-op, they've been discussing an absolutely marvelous novel: Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. It was one of the few that I was able to read while up north, and I strongly recommend it to everyone. (I was reminded of it many times while listening to Wole Soyinka. It was the perfect book to have read just before hearing him speak.) Check out the book discussions and interviews with the author. It will be time well-spent.

Epilogue

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

~ Robert Lowell


Never thought writing could be such a battle. Time tears away every last pure motive and leaves the skid marks of desire in its wake. Black stains and empty space. But...

The boxes are back in the apartment. Will begin unpacking my books today. Hope to get connected to the internet later this week. Still have those notes to post. So many ideas, never enough energy or time. But this will change soon... It must if I'm to make it out of here alive.

Event #23: Las dos orillas

Guillermo Arriaga (Mexico--absent), Luisa Valenzuela (Argentina), Tomás González (Colombia), and Horacio Vázquez Rial (Argentina)--moderated by Pere Sureda (Spanish editorial director of Editorial Belacqva), sponsored by La otra orilla, Grupo Editorial Norma

Pere Sureda began by commenting on the book as connection between reader and writer--that the tangible artifact is the point of unification between the two--and asked the writers their thoughts on this.

Louisa Valenzuela mentioned how she views books as cultural contraband--how writers sneak parts of themselves beneath country boundaries...and how it's always exciting to find out about alternate interpretations of her work. She finds the unexpected reverberations exciting.

Horacio Vázquez Rial commented on a book tour he'd done in Germany, and how startling and surprising it was to encounter his work in an entirely different context.

Tomás González discussed how literature is constantly contributing to the reunification of Latin America--how we share a common universe because of the books we read.

Sureda then talked about a tendency of Latin American writers wanting to be published in Spain, and Spanish writers wanting to be published in Latin America. He asked them, When do you feel fulfilled?--that you've reached far enough beyond your cultural sphere?

Valenzuela asserted that "it's our language that both unifies and separates us". She's against a neutral (which I initially understood as "neutered"!), standardized Spanish and loves regionalisms... That there were huge Spanish publishing houses in Latin America during the epoch of the Spanish Civil War and there was much cultural interchange during that era as a result. She also said that this "fulfillment" really depends on one's own view of it. Some even dream of being translated into English! (This provoked a lot of laughter onstage and off, which I found really interesting. Would my hope of one day translating Latin American novels into English be viewed as an essentially commercial one?)

But Vázquez Rial remarked that things have changed a lot since the '30s--that the perception of the book is very different today from what it was then. He debated a bit in favor of the use of a "standard" or neutral Spanish and stressed its "unifying" effect on readers.

González took the middle ground, saying that either have the potential to be powerful. Valenzuela went on to expound on her origial statements. She considers Argentinians ("mi gente") to be people of exile, which is why it's important to communicate to your own as well as the rest of the world. It's about honesty, not about trying to gain readers by changing your own voice. She believes that identity is part of truth and she refuses to betray her language for the sake of a greater readership. She longs to write ("me muere escribir") for the sake of discovery. This is what impells her.

Vázquez Rial concurred, but continued to say that it's important to reach beyond your own audience as well, while González reiterated that he would never change anything merely for the sake of the commercial.

It was interesting to see how the conversation of the editor and the writers proved how at cross-purposes they can be. Even the tenor of the questions was something that the writers used as springboards to assert different opinions than the editor was (perhaps) expecting. Sureda admitted that his interest is somewhat opposite to that of the writers, but he then asked them which writers outside their community have influenced them.

Valenzuela immediately listed Nabokov, Kafka, Beckett, and Woolf, particularly stressing that Woolf's love of writing is one of the things she loves most about her. (She also mentioned Cortázar, but then withdrew him because he's a fellow Argentinian.)

Somehow the conversation veered toward the issue of translation. González admitted that it was a problem--that writers are at the mercy of their translators. Vázquez Rial wasn't much worried by it. He quoted something Machado said about Tolstoy--that it had been translated from Russian to French to Spanish and it was still great. (That greatness isn't necessarily affected by translation.) Valenzuela again mentioned how she wants regionalisms in the books she reads--she loves discovering new things, new turns of phrase. Vázquez Rial added that the issue of translation itself is exciting because everyone says things in different ways.

Sureda then asked about their thoughts on modern-day bookstores. Readers are growing in numbers... He asked if Spanish-language writers feel threatened by the work of writers of other languages in Spanish bookstores?

Valenzuela doesn't think it's an issue--but she does have a problem with the fact that most Argentinian bookstores don't have display tables for new books by Argentinian writers. It's her big complaint. She admires how bookstores in Colombia (particularly Bogotá) do display new work by Colombian writers, and wishes it were this way in Argentina. She also remarked that she does not think that people read as much today. Vázquez Rial observed that it really doesn't matter that there are so many bookstores these days because they all offer the same things...that the lack of diversity is a sad development. And González said he was more optimistic regarding the modern reader.

Sureda then asked about the tension between reader and writer--which side of themselves robs from the other?

Valenzuela said that the passion is the same for both, but it's difficult to find the same amount of time for reading as it is for her writing. Vázquez Rial (as a literary critic) declared that new books don't excite him much anymore. With most he can't get past the first few pages. But he said that readers and writers in general are much closer to each other now--that the "other shore" is not so far away.

There may have been one last question--all I have here are Valenzuela's comments regarding what her initial thoughts were on hearing that the session was to be about "the two shores." She immediately thought of Henry James' short story "The Private Life" (she referred to it as "Vidas íntimas," so I believe this is the story she meant). She was also reminded of Rabindranath Tagore's "The Other Shore" and her desire to not have to pick sides, but to be everywhere at once, like God. Not wanting to settle anywhere... Her enthusiasm and candor made me smile--she was a joy to listen to.

Then the floor was opened for questions from the audience. Someone asked if there are valid respectful limits for a writer to maintain concerning the reader. Valenzuela commented on how being banned by a dictatorship didn't stop her from writing--that censorship takes all forms and that literature is about confronting our own demons. Vázquez Rial clarified earlier statments and said that his remark in favor of a more standardized Spanish is for the sake of reader understanding, not commercialism.

There was a question for Sureda about translations and he replied that he assigns books to translators whom he believes are appropriate for the respective works, and puts them in contact with the authors. His aim is a rendition that's as faithful as possible to the author's original intent, but with a certain space for creative freedom. González remarked that books that are translated into Spanish must use standard Spanish--that it isn't a bad thing at all in this sense.

Interestingly, later that day, I found a Spanish copy of Flannery O'Connor's Complete Stories at the Ábaco bookstore (and coffee shop!) down the street from the theatre. A. began "Parker's Back" immediately, but it wasn't until he was halfway through with "Revelation" that he pointed out what the translator had done to the speech of O'Connor's southerners. The dialogue was full of the costeño way of speaking--dropped consonants and half-spoken words. I'm still not sure if this is an entirely appropriate equivalent...but I think it was a good idea to do something to communicate the "regional" manner of speaking... (Still thinking about this.)

Also (as another aside), here's a recent Semana article on the question as to why Spanish writers aren't read much in Latin America (in general) and Colombia (in particular). Responses come from various participants in this year's festival.

Weekend in Cartagena

Having been lost to the litblogosphere for nearly two months (due to life changes and certain bizarre experiences that stem from my current situation as a nomadic educator), I now attempt to post something worth your while. I sadly could not contribute to Jeff and Trevor's marvelous Underrated Writers Project 2006, but I think there'll be some names from this post that will crop up in next year's list.

A. and I hopped the bus up to Cartagena this weekend for the Hay Festival, and were able to make it to five sessions. It was a glorious and complex experience. I hadn't been to Cartagena since I was 3, but the circle finally swung 'round and found us exhausted and happy, our heads buzzing with new authors, titles, and renewed longing to spend hours reading in quiet corners.

The weather was perfect--clear sky over a wide sea--and the walled colonial city held lovely sights around every corner: huge wooden gates with life-sized iron lizard knockers, balconies overflowing with flowers and ivy over narrow streets, and people from all over the world conversing about literature.

So this week I hope to post some notes from the many Moleskine pages I filled... (For each events' blurb, see the original program.) Although three of the writers I'd hoped the most to see were inexplicably absent at their respective sessions (Guillermo Arriaga, David Mitchell, and Chimamanda Adichie), my disappointment vanished as soon as the sessions began.