September 15th, 1917

“You have the chance as far as it is at all possible, to make a new beginning. Don’t throw it away. If you insist on digging deep into yourself you won’t be able to avoid the muck that will well up. But don’t wallow in it. If the infection in your lungs is only a symbol, as you say, a symbol of the infection whose inflammation is called X and whose depth is it’s own deep justification, if this is so, then the medical advice (light, sun, rest) is also a symbol. Lay hold of that symbol.”

from Kafka’s Diary

Reading 2666 is like trying to appreciate the Sistine Chapel from up close. I wanted constantly to step back in order to get some bigger-picture perspective, and because it is so hard to do this with a work of literature (basically you have to contain the whole thing in your mind and try to imagine it from afar) it makes certain sections (let’s say almost all of it) frustrating, or slightly unsatisfying. But by the end, you start to see some connections, though they are not simple connections. It is more like a feeling of a worldview, than any kind of easy conclusion. If there is any big picture, it is very hard to encapsulate without trying to re-tell the whole thing. Or drawing rather meaningless diagrams, as I have done below:

This makes sense to me, even though I feel like I’m still leaving out a whole bunch, and even though it might not make any sense to anyone else.

I don’t think it is a great novel, although I think its strongest point is creating an internal logic so full that it approaches madness. I think the book lacks some basic things like joy, humor (there was humor, but not the type of humor that sustains one in the act of reading), and characterization. The people in the book seem flat and do not develop; they are almost like chess pieces Bolaño uses to illustrate his points. On the plus side, the book is unlike any other book I’ve read and its strengths are very different from those that I’m used to. I feel that this is a very difficult book to think about in terms of “good” or “bad”. I honestly did not enjoy reading most of it, but I did feel compelled to continue. There is a sense that I am not immersed in the novel’s world, but am only reading a synopsis of ‘what happens’, almost like reading a list of ingredients. There is something enticing about lists to me, perhaps that’s why I kept reading.

2666 Group Read Experience:

I was excited to read 2666 partially because of the Group Read aspect.  I like that there is not one forum for discussion, but rather everyone uses their own modes (whether it be twitter, blogs, forums, GoodReads, etc.).  But while I found a lot of interesting perspectives, the book seems so open-ended that I started to not really get too much out of these perspectives, but instead felt an overwhelming sense of becoming a book-hermit.  This book especially, while going outward, has a spiraling down and inwards feeling to me, akin to becoming slightly insane and illogical.  What I didn’t expect was that I liked not explaining or reading others explanations the more I got into the book, and felt a sense of guardedness towards the experience of reading rather than an expansion outwards.  My gut feeling is that this would have been different with another book.  I can’t explain why.  I remember after finishing The Brothers Karamazov, that I wished to discuss it with people.  But with this book, I didn’t have that feeling at all.  Partly, I think any discussion of this book—which seems to have an infinite number of nodes for making connections—would be at least 80% bullshit, but maybe that’s the cynic in me speaking.

Another great Radiolab podcast. It’s not one of their hour-long shows; this one is just under 15 minutes and is well worth listening to.  It hits close to home for me because my recent trip to Hong Kong was partially to visit my grandfather, who now lives in an old folk’s home.  His memory is almost gone now, though he has good days and bad days.  He acts like a quiet child, and is very fond of eating.  At night, they have to tie him up because he often gets up to steal food from the kitchen, and his balance is not well, so he could easily fall.

Festival celebration footage I shot in Hong Kong.

Working on a visual poetry project with the help of Nisa Asokan and her microscope. Here are some of the images we captured from household items.

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: