I’m in love…

Is 2666 a useful book? I set out to test its usefulness last night when I used one of the recipes provided in the Part About Fate, when Mr. Seaman preaches about usefulness to his congregation. And I quote:

I see lots of fat people in this church, he said. I suspect few of you eat green vegetables. maybe now is the time for a recipe. The name of the recipe is: Brussels Sprouts with Lemon. Take note, please. Four servings calls for: two pounds of brussels sprouts, juice and zest of one lemon, one onion, one sprig of parsley, three tablespoons of butter, black pepper, and salt. You make it like so. One: Clean sprouts well and remove outer leaves. Finely chop onion and parsley. Two: In a pot of salted boiling water, cook sprouts for twenty minutes, or until tender. Then drain well and set aside. Three: Melt butter in frying pan and lightly saute onion, add zest and juice of lemon and salt and pepper to taste. Four: Add brussels sprouts, toss with sauce, reheat for a few minutes, sprinkle with parsley, and serve with lemon wedges on the side. So good you’ll be licking your fingers, said Seaman. No cholesterol, good for the liver, good for the blood pressure, very healthy.

Verdict: Yes, 2666 is indeed a very useful book.  I was able to make the above dish without too much effort.  Although I had some brussel sprouts lately that were much more delicious, it would probably not be fair to compare the usefulness of 2666 with a proper recipe book.   The ones I made last night were also very good, slightly lemony and oniony, although my stomach felt a bit weird after eating way too much of it.

I’m not the first one to do this, I found another blog post and their photos look much more fingerlicking than mine :)

There’s a Group Read going on for the book 2666, and I’ve been following along on the forums and stuff, but here is my first blog post about it.  I’ve never read Bolano before and I find it alternating between engaging and frustrating.  Often, I have no idea what he is trying to get at mainly because there is just so much there.  He throws so much at the book (it is 900 pages long) that it seems inevitable to make connections, but are the connections really there?  Or is it just the result of there being so much there?

I kept most of my comments on The Part About the Critics on the forums or to myself, but here are a few things I noticed about the Part About Amalfitano (please excuse the messiness of these notes)

Parallels with Part 1: Right off we start in a similar territory as part 1.  Instead of the critics going from Europe to Latin America to look for Archimboldi, we have Lola going to ??? looking for the poet.  Interesting: Amalfitano says there is no way she really met him since he introduced him to her.  So (knowing this) the long passages where she writes of meeting him and making love to him at a party read to me almost like one of the dream sequences.  Also: parallel with part 1 in that a woman (Lola in part 2, Norton in part 1) is leaving/abandoning a man (or 2 men, in part 1) and writing to him/them from the new location.

What strikes me about these looking-for-a-writer scenes: these people don’t know who they are, and they are invested in this other thing that defines them, because they can’t define themselves.  The critics write ABOUT Archimboldi’s writings.  It seems like a modern condition Bolano is highlighting, wherein people’s identity is so lost and so caught up and dependent on others… but it’s dependent on others not in a close-knit-community kind of way… there is a very ego-centric, selfish neediness in their searches and reliance on some kind of literary hero.

Character notes: we know so little about these characters… who is Lola and what is her background, why did she suddenly leave so mysteriously?  Who is Imma and what is her motivation for going along with Lola?  We know very little about Amalfitano, though this section is about him… it gave him a page or two and then went head first into Lola’s adventures.  Only later in the section do we get more into his head.  Also: Lola is an interesting choice of name… traditionally Lola is a name of a prostitute or a drag queen… just based on many songs with the name Lola in it… I’ve actually thought about this before encountering the name here.  It’s interesting here considering Lola’s relationship with the poet is through sex, and also how she implicitly allowed the guy who hangs out at the cemetery to pay her for sex.

Stylistic notes: why is part 2 suddenly devoid of paragraph breaks? Except in the last page, where Yeltsin speaks in the dream to him, that is the only paragraph break.

“Madness is contagious”

Neighbor’s fort-like walls w/ broken glass on top.  This part compares Amalfitano to a medieval lord.  I found this metaphor kind of curious, and out of nowhere, but Bolano returns to it a few times.

A quote:

Anyway, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions.  They named the pain of others into memories of one’s own.  They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, breif, and eternally elusive.  They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility.  They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight.  They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity.

p. 189.  If you didn’t know he was talking about Amalfitano’s ideas on jet lag, you’d think he was talking about the role of novels like 2666 here.

Testamento geometrico:

“three books ‘each independent, but functionally correlated by the sweep of the whole’” (sounds like 2666, with its 5 independent parts)

“the friends’ last names had been printed in capitals while the name of the man being honored was in small letters.” (ego?  sounds familiar to the Critics)

Book hanging on line = symbolism too much? i.e. literature meets the elements/real world.  For those of you wondering, yes I did hang 2666 on the clothesline in the photo above.  It seemed a good tribute.

“We’re not animals” Rosa says, about the book hanging on line

“I take it back” p 191, weird rhetorical device here.  Anyone get this?

Random thought: I think Bolano is trying to say you can look to art and literature for your answers all you like, you can worship art and forget what you were looking there for to begin with, you can become a professor of literature and scrutinize a piece of text for years, you can even follow the writer, the originator of the art, the questions, but there are some things–in the real world–that you can never understand.  (like the murders)

chincuales – 1 flea or bedbug bites 2 a restless scratcher 3 a restless mind

Books It is interesting that in the first part about the critics, we don’t get any sense what Archimboldi’s books are like.  And yet in the second part, we get the nitty gritty of 2 books Amalfitano is reading.  At least more nitty gritty than the ones mentioned in part 1.  The book on Araucanians is described in detail in terms of how Amalfitano is reading it, and I found especially interesting his imagination while reading it, imagining even scenes of the writer trying to publish the book and get a discount (which goes into this region of is-it-imagined or did-it-really-happen-this way).  p224.  The other book of course is the geometry book, which he hangs out in the elements (also a way of reading?).  And which pervades his thoughts in a totally different way, perhaps influencing him to draw geometrical shapes with names of thinkers at different intersections of these diagrams.  Maybe Bolano is highlighting the way Amalfitano is “reading” these books and how it is different and unconventional compared to the way the critics are reading their books (which aren’t even worth mentioning in depth).  Perhaps Amalf. is the active reader as envisioned by Cortazar, and referenced on p. 224.  And then he goes on to imagine Kilipan to have not existed at all, he imagines him as all these other people writing under the name Kilipan.  This person who was just made so real to us a second ago by the same imagination.

Young Guerra:
Not sure what I think of this yet.  Or how he fits in.  He’s a little off his rocker.  But then so is Amalfitano.  Is it just 2 ways of being mad/dealing?  Lola was a little mad too.

I found this postcard yesterday. Caption on back reads:

Story-picture drawn by Lewis Carroll (Charles L. Dodgson) at the age of 9 (1841).  The Rosenbach Foundation Museum, 2010 DeLancey Place, Philadelphia.

Some photos I found at Kudzu Antiques recently:

I love how it looks like the mom is lowering the kid into the puddle. “Go play with your brothers in the mud!” The photo is dated September 1963.

Anyone have any ideas where this could have been taken? Seems like a nice scene.

Photo dated February 1952, San Antonio Texas.

Now for some animals:

Not of silver nor of coral
But of weather-beaten laurel
Carve it out.

II
Make a body long and thin
And carve hairs upon the skin.
Make a snout.

III
On the order of a tower
Faintly wrinkled like a flower
On the paws

IV
Carve out heavy feline toes
Make each claw an eagle’s nose.
Carve great jaws.

—Marianne Moore

Bonus: this from a letter Marianne Moore wrote to Robert McAlmon on September 2, 1921, found on page 179 of her Selected Letters:

You are right; the intellect has not the last word today—any more than it ever had.  Sophistication is no match for nature and as I have written Bryher, I have a respect for nature, blind or conscious.  The blind instinctive behavior of old fashioned unenlightened society has many advantages over our conscious behavior today; psychoanalysis is a fascinating study and in some ways a useful one but it pre-empts too much of the mind and people tend to feel that a situation analyzed is a situation solved.  In rapping marriage on the head as it sometimes does, it is unscientific—when you consider the evolution of the marriage relation and the instinctive tendency to idealize it, and to explain religion away is ludicrously superficial.  Religious conviction, art, and animal impulse, are the strongest factors in life, I think, and any one in the ascendant can obliterate the others.  We see different phases of them, for example, Bryher’s interest in education and in securing freedom to the race, are a tangent of religion.  Religion may be pigeonholed as a transference but religious conviction in operation has always made room for itself over the head of every obstacle.  It is apparent that sincerely religious people are contented and are not easily at their wit’s end.

Novels

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by Cesar Aira, and…

How I Became a Nun by Cesar Aira

in which Argentinian writer (and we all know about them Argentinian writers) takes us on adventures involving surreal shape-shifting narratives, philosophical insights, and much attention to language (yes, it’s well translated).

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke

in which I emerge from a fog of folklore and historic tangents infused w/ personal memories of a little boy Malte (read: Rainer in feeble disguise) all grown up and wandering the streets of Paris having excessive thoughts on death, poverty, and ghosts.  WTF, Rainer?  Is this really what you call a novel?  Whatever, at least it’s fucking great.

A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes

in which a bunch of pirates end up accidentally kidnapping a bunch of kids.  Poor pirates.  These kids are merciless.  Forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.  I recommend this book for people who love kids.  Bonus: many animals, death, and various other perfundities.  Is that a word?

Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles

in which two serious ladies engage in various random acts of nonconformity in order to escape from their dull lives.  Many strange people met on the way.  Funny and charming and sad and indeed.

Frances Johnson by Stacey Levine

in which one, Frances Johnson, is introduced wherein she is worried about various contrivances say her warts or some other thing or where oh where her bicycle takes her.  A very experimental novel, but also a touching and soft one too, which is nice to know: that that is still possible I mean.

Stoner by John Williams

in which a most boring college professor’s life is recounted in bibliographic and chronological order which sounds really boring but actually I have no idea how it snuck up on me and was just the most powerful book ever and made me cry and cry and cry.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

in which a little girl grows up in the slums, and finds ways to be positive around every corner, and somehow almost always evading sentimentality.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

in which Gustave my man Gustave writes his tercid prose is that a word tercid?  does it mean turd-like?  Well, no matter, this book that bowled me over with passage after passage, is about a woman who is never satisfied and almost never happy.  Sweet lord, what a book.

Moviegoer by Walker Percy

in which something happens in New Orleans inside of the head of Binx Bolling who happens to have some ideas in there as well, and they knock around, and this book came out.  Funny, I remember hardly anything about this book anymore.

Non-Fiction

The Story of Mary Maclane by Mary Maclane

in which Mary Maclane, a nineteen year old girl stuck in Butte Montana in 1901, writes a sort of definition of herself… or a manifesto, of sorts.  She is a genius!  She has a “peripatetic” philosophy inside of her “wooden heart”.  She has a crush on a lady friend.  She worships Napoleon and has 17 portraits of him.

Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill: The Story of Mary Bell by Gitta Sereny

in which the true story of Mary Bell, an 11-year old girl who killed 2 boys ages 3 and 4 many years ago, is finally revealed through intense writing and recounting of the events that followed the events preceeding, as well as through personal interviews with Mary Bell, who is now out of jail and has children of her own.  Did I mention “intense”?  This book is enough to give you a fever, and make you think twice about why children do the things they do.  Was Mary Bell evil?  Or was something else at work here?

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

in which the secret of happiness is revealed to be a state of mind achieved through unriveted attention, well-defined goals, clear feedback, and the perfect level of difficulty (not too hard, not too easy).  A very interesting book, which doesn’t just stop at the science, but includes very human elements.

Breaking the News by James Fallows

in which the horrid state of journalism is detailed in every way possible.  Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, you realize that this book was written during Clinton’s era, and that things have gotten much worse with Fox News, Reality TV, and a bunch of other things that I don’t even want to think about.  Someone kill me now.

Poetry

Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Stephen Mitchell

in which Rainer Maria Rilke is very poet-like in the traditional sense of being inspired by angels while holing up in a castle for ten years.  The Duino Elegies blew my mind, and I can’t believe I had not discovered Rilke until 2009.  Get this translation, especially, it is superb, if I can say that.

The Making of Pre by Francis Ponge

in which Francis Ponge, being French, labors over the phenomenological atoms of rivers and plains, coming up with a meadow on which theoretical swords are crossed and yet one is felled in practice.  Mr. Ponge, you killed me on the Pre, but this is a very interesting read.  Bonus: lots of words vehemently crossed out.

Isle of the Signatories by Marjorie Welish

in which nobody else got it but I did and started reading it all the way from the bookstore till I got home.  Something about words or signs and what they pointed to, and how pretentious that is, and how like an academic with a tenure track going round and round.  But more visceral, in my opinion, more stabby.

The Romance of Happy Workers by Anne Boyer

in which no word is the blip of its own passing, and Anne Boyer is a woman of sufficient means moving over the page with slight curtsies because, well, just because.  I think I’m turning into Dawn with this review.

1. Yi Yi (Edward Yang)

I try to watch this movie about once a year, and every time, I see something new to admire in it.  It’s hard to sum up, because it has so much in it, but Reverse Shot has written a really good article on it.

2. What Time Is It There? (Tsai Ming Liang)

Its humor and its sadness seem interconnected, or seem to flourish from the same place, making both emotions more painful.  A film about alienation, as only the Taiwanese can do it.  When I saw it last, I wrote this review:

A re-watch.  This time, the movie was less funny, but more tender, and even sadder than before. I was struck by the sadness of seemingly awkward private gestures, the girl stuffing her face with crackers and bananas in a hotel room in Paris… the mother masturbating with the container of her dead husband’s ashes. The silence is not really silence but tapestries of odd rhythms. Sounds emanating from all corners to penetrate and intrude the characters. In fact, everything is a form of penetration while on the surface looking rather harmless: penetration as a substitute for connection. I was also a bit surprised by how much I related to the girl this time, more so than the other two characters. I thought her scenes were the saddest and most awkward. I imagined the movie as a musical composition (keeping tune to the odd beat of a watch being smashed against the railings) with 3 different parts (bass, alto, tenor?) played by the three different characters, all separate (and separated) but in synch, crescendoing almost literally as all three are brought to a sexual climax, although one that is illusively disappointing, perhaps inherently so because of what they’re expecting from it: human connection. And yet these three musical parts always remain alone. The last shots of this movie are some of the most memorable and affecting I have seen, with the father walking into a sunset… or what stands for a sunset in this movie: the carousel in the fairground, perhaps the same fairground that 400 Blows was shot, when Jean Pierre Leaud was pushed against the wall.

3. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

Weerasethakul is one of the most promising new directors.  I’m excited to see what he comes up with next.  I wrote a short review of this movie on this blog before.

4. Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako)

A film from Mali by a director I haven’t seen enough of yet. One of the few movies I loved despite political themes being explicitly stated (here it is not preachy). I remember only the invigorating feeling of the narrative told in a jagged inventive manner, with all the energy of a new way of making movies.

5. Ten (Abbas Kiarostami)

A mother drives around town and has ten separate conversations. Kiarostami’s digital camera focuses on half of the story at any one time, but delivers so much raw emotion from these performances.

6. Bemani (Dariush Mehrjui)

Can’t find much on the internet; can’t even find a decent screenshot. I saw this at the Iranian film festival at the High Museum a few years back. On the surface it was about a few women and their struggles, but the way it was told was what impressed me. I can’t point to a single thing, but just the whole attitude and style towards filming reminds me of many other Iranian films where I feel like they are making movies for the first time, without relying much on staid conventions.

7. Innocence (Lucile Hadzihalilovic)

If you watch movies for mood, then run out and watch this. It’s got plenty of story too: but one that is amorphous, mysterious, constantly on the line between creepiness and commonplace. Is it an allegory? A fairy-tale? A dream?

8. 2046 (Wong Kar Wai)

A sequel, of sorts, to In the Mood for Love. The first time I saw it I didn’t like it as much. ItMfL was a straight forward restrained love story. This movie, by contrast, was complicated and confusing. And what was up with those scenes of the future? But every time I watched it, I understood more of what was going on and loved it more as well. This is a wild tangled investigation of memory that grows on you the more you watch it.  It is serpentine and layered and full.

9. Kandahar (Mohsen Makhmalbaf)

A film set in and about Afghanistan directed by one of my favorite Iranian directors. Really beautiful and depressing, it’s hard to describe the feeling this movie gives me. Why am I even trying to write about any of these movies? They are all so hard to describe with these damn words.

10. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch)

This film needs no description. You’ve probably already seen it and hate it.

11. The Visitation (Nathaniel Dorsky)

Screenshot Not Available.

One of the few shorts by Dorsky I was able to see at Andy Ditzler’s Film Love. This one is “about” aliens!

Remaining on the West Coast (once again San Francisco, specifically), next is Nathaniel Dorsky, an artist whose devout approach to the cinematic image transforms daily sights and sounds into wondrous moments of reverential contemplation, embodied through the use of “polyvalent” montage, which seeks to “redirect editing away from the dialectics that energized the Russian films of the 1920s and from the narrative demands of pop cinema, toward a refinement of viewers’ ability to perceive the subtleties of particular images and the complex webbing of interconnections between them.” (A Critical Cinema 5 pg. 79)

12. All the Real Girls (David Gordon Green)

Quirky indie-flick about young people angst, but actually good. There’s something amateur about it that I love, and something Terrence Malicky about the cinematography. Also, it has some seriously funny dialog.

13. Talk to Her (Pedro Almodovar)

Twisted love. Almodovar can be too heavy handed sometimes, or too dramatic, or his plots too contrived. But still, you gotta love this movie, which made me forget about all those flaws.

14. Half Moon (Ghobadi)

A surreal journey to find death, where moments of reality and moments of dream are indistinguishable in the vast landscape, and left open to interpretation. I loved this movie. Also from Iran. If you watch the YouTube video above, try to ignore that ugly name that scrolls across the screen. Whoever made that video put that in, but it wasn’t in the movie.

15. Punch Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson)

My favorite PT Anderson movie.

16. La Pianiste (Michael Haneke)

Brutal and depressing. Not for the squeamish. Isabelle Huppert gives a great performance. I really liked Cache by the same director, but one Haneke is enough for any list.

17. L’Intrus (Clair Denis)

Obscure as fuck, but really good if you’re not too concerned with figuring out what everything means.

18. Inland Empire (David Lynch)

David Lynch at his scariest and rawest. I saw it in the theater when it came out and it was one of the most visceral experiences ever.

19. The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda)

Agnes Varda makes movies like nobody else. Her charm is too big to be contained off camera, and in this documentary about the history and continuation of gleaning her stamp is all over, which is the way I like it.

20. Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt)

A subtle and slow film. Relaxing with just enough tension to form the tatters of a story. More films should be like this, where the story unfolds so organically from the characters, the scene, and the mood.

21. Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (John Gianvito)

“The day will come when our silence will be more important than the voices you are throttling today.”

A simple concept and restrained execution. It’s a documentary with no voice-over narration; a chronological tour of important gravestones, from labor leaders to civil rights leaders to people who sacrificed themselves for these causes. These are mixed in with beautiful shots of trees rustling in the wind, and little pencil sketch animations. It sounds pretty lame in words, and perhaps for some it would be lame. It’s definitely not for everyone. It lasts for an hour but I felt like it was only 20 minutes. I highly recommend you try it and see if it’s for you.

22. The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming Liang)

A sequel of sorts to What Time Is It There? in which things get a lot weirder. You’ll never look at a watermelon the same way again. Oh yeah, did I mention there are musical numbers?

23. All About Lily Chou Chou (Iwai)

Japanese school kids can be mean. It’s all those uniforms they’re forced to wear.

24. Triplets of Belleville (Chomet)

Beautiful old-style animations, strange somewhat creepy story with an off-kilter sense of humor, and a happy ending. All you can ask for in a movie!

25. Five Dedicated to Ozu (Kiarostami)

This movie is five scenes, all with a static camera capturing things coming in and out of the frame. A good movie to meditate to.