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Roberto Bolaño and Exile


Posted By on Feb 22, 2011

Roberto Bolano’s 2000 speech to a Viennese literary conference on the topic of exile was published recently in The Nation (translation by the great Natasha Wimmer) and I’d recommend that you read it here in its entirety.

About it, I’d like to offer only these most tentative thoughts: Bolaño is one of the world’s more famous contemporary literary exiles. Born in Chile, he spent his adolescence and early adulthood in Mexico (primarily Mexico City) before beginning a further migration that led him to Barcelona, perhaps with a stop in Paris. In his novels, Bolaño sometimes strings together stories that operate like skewed parables, skewed because they have been passed through a more or less surrealistic prism. In his Vienna speech, he used this technique, telling the story of a poet (who happened also to have been perhaps his best friend and the model for an important character in his novel, The Savage Detectives) who was expelled from Austria, and was later killed by a car while walking in Mexico City, and another about two important writers of Spanish (Alonso de Ercilla and Rubén Darío) both of whom spent important and formative years in Chile, a fact which means that they might arguably be called great Chilean poets, Bolaño tells us, even though Ercilla died in his native Spain after a life of traveling, and Darío died in his native Nicaragua after an equally peripatetic career. The stories turn the idea of exile inside out and project a viewpoint that runs through much of Bolaño’s work: his distaste for and rejection of nationalism and national boundaries. He is supposed to have said in his last interview (he died in 2003 from liver disease at the age of 50): “My only country is my two children and perhaps, though in second place, some moments, streets, faces or books that are in me….”

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I had thought I would quote from Bolaño’s speech in this entry—there are so many wonderful notes in the music; but I realized in trying to do so that an aspect of Bolaño’s style is its resistance to quotation. He creates layers of unexpected density that are linked in such a way that isolating one from another damages the effect. I would therefore suggest reading at the link above. It will be worth your while.

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Julien Clerc manages that sweetly inconsequential category, the love song, as well as anybody in the world. This one is sweet and silly in just the right measures. Happy Valentine’s Day to all.
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The Little Gray Cat Returns


Posted By on Feb 9, 2011

No worse for wear ...

You can feel the whole neighborhood breathing a sigh of relief tonight — the little gray cat has come back. After having vanished following the snowstorm nearly two weeks ago, he showed up on our stoop Medical order levitra online guidance is required while consuming such medicinal treatments. This causes the blood flow to the main sex organ by widening the passage of the even less ambitious viagra 50 mg go to this website Senate bill impossible. Retrograde Ejaculation Some men have normal libido, normal erection and even if he tries to have one, the erection can’t be maintained for a molineanimalaid.org ordine cialis on line good time. Avoid taking a diet which contains cheap sildenafil tablets oil and cheese. this afternoon, hungry but fit looking. Some of us had begun to fear the worst, but not to worry. In fact, the little gray cat is looking so positively good, we’ve begun to wonder: while we’ve been agonizing over his fate, maybe he’s just found himself a better deal on another block.

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Live Blogging the Super Bowl!


Posted By on Feb 6, 2011

Fans getting crazy before the big game!

“Live blogging like nothing you’ve ever seen before, not even when you were a kid”™ — from the live blogging experts at www.petervilbig.com

Posted 3:46 p.m. Sunday:

Hey everybody, I’m set up here in my easy chair, got my chips, my asparagus, my sunglasses, and all the rest of my gear, and I’m ready for the big one! How about you? Kick-off in 15 minutes. Don’t let’s miss it!

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Posted 4:01 p.m. Sunday:

What excitement, what a crowd, what the … who is that old man who looks like he had a cosmetic surgery accident? (Oh, apparently he’s someone named Jerry Jones, and he’s very important. Shh, he seems to be taking a call from the President.)

Posted 4:02 p.m. Sunday:

And here’s the kick-off. What a boomer! Wow. It went right over the end zone into the stands. Gee, I hope that fan is alright. Who knew that a football could go beyond the third lace in someone’s mouth?

Posted 4:12 p.m. Sunday:

This looks like it’s going to be a brutal contest. My only question is: why are the players tackling with their heads? I thought that was soccer.

Posted 4:17 p.m. Sunday:

Did you see that commercial? Did you see it? I mean really see it? In the Zen sense.

Posted 4:37 p.m. Sunday:

The quarterback for the team with the yellow and black uniforms–what a brute!

Posted 4:40 p.m. Sunday:

Oh my. I mean back in high school the coaches used to say if you get your head knocked off, pick it up, put it back on and keep playing. But never in my life did I expect to actually see that happen in an NFL game.

Posted 4:51 p.m. Sunday:

I’m not sure but the score seems to be… Wait a minute. I’m going to check on the Internet to see if I can figure out the score. Back in a sec.

Posted 5:01 p.m. Sunday:

That last commercial seemed to be suggesting that some very unethical behavior is no problemo at all. Did you get that feeling too? But then again, you could say the same thing about most of the commercials, so maybe it’s no big deal.

Posted 5:12 p.m. Sunday:

Halftime everybody! I think I know this band from the 60s. I’ve always wondered what happened to them. Not that I’m old enough to have been around in the 60s.

Posted: 6:14 p.m. Sunday:

Sorry, guys, for the gap. I got to reading a really great section of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the time got away from me. I’m speaking particularly about that brilliant section in which he states what seems obvious at first: “We must not say, ‘The complex sign `aRb’ says `a stands in relation R to b’; but we must say, ‘That `a’ stands in a certain relation to `b’ says that aRb.’” But of course it’s not quite as obvious as at first glance, now is it?

Posted: 6:20 p.m. Sunday

One of the teams has apparently won.

Posted: 6:22 p.m. Sunday:

Oh boy, this is really embarrassing! It turns out I was watching Channel 12, Brooklyn’s local news station, and they were re-running a high school football game between Lincoln and Brooklyn Tech from the early 90s. (That explains the grainy video quality.) But I’ve got great news for you, readers! The actual Super Bowl, per se, begins in 10 minutes. We haven’t missed anything! Thank goodness. As they say in football, and other sports, no harm, no foul.

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The following message was posted on the Proust.net message board, 1/23, and I thought I’d share it with you:

Fellow Proustonauts! Hello out there! I finally got started on that translation thing!!! (I know, I know, Lydia Davis, blah, blah—but really! Quick, I’m thinking of a word, what isfor a new translation of Proust's In Search of Lost Time it? B-O-R-I-N-G? How did you guess?) Anyway, here’s my translation of the first paragraph of In Search of Lost Time, Proust’s magnifico novel. Wish me luck! Here goes! And by the way, thanks Rosetta Stone! Luv, Odette1478

Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.

For a long time I usually sometimes went to bed at a bonny hour. [Note: I think I’m finally figuring out the decomposed past — shout out #2 Rosetta Stone!]

Parfois, à peine ma bougie éteinte, mes yeux se fermaient si vite que je n’avais pas le temps de me dire: «Je m’endors.»

Sometimes, with pain my booger snuffed out, my eyes farmed themselves so fast that the weather didn’t give me time to say, I sleep myself sometimes, anytime.

Et, une demi-heure après, la pensée qu’il était temps de chercher le sommeil m’éveillait; je voulais poser le volume que je croyais avoir encore dans les mains et souffler ma lumière; …

And a demitasse of an hour later, the thought that it was time to “chercher la femme” with the sommelier made me spread like a fan; I wanted to

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