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Epigraphs
Saramago says if you don't have time to read his novels, just read the epigraphs... These are some posts I have written considering books' epigraphs -- what I think about them, where they are drawn from, how they influence my reading.
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
Carmen Boullosa's Libro de Eva has some introductory materials at the front. It is presented as the transcription of a "rough manuscript", but there is no enclosing story to tell us where it was found or how we come to be reading it. There is however an introduction listing the contents; a brief letter with no attribution, bidding the reader to pass these papers along after reading them -- "Do not retain them, at the risk of your destruction" -- an unattributed note found among Eve's papers exhorting us not to allow Eve's voice to be lost to oblivion; and a prologue attributed to St. Teresa of Ávila. St. Teresa finds the document to be meaningless, putrid blasphemy; her advice is to ignore it.
Every beginner ought to be given, as you have surely received, the tools of the craft. Or else one must beg, borrow or steal them. (Better still to fashion one's own...)
Pamuk takes his epigraph to The New Life from the first chapter of Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen -- the passage in full,
Wo eigentlich nur der Fremde herkam? Keiner von uns hat je einen ähnlichen Menschen gesehn; doch weiß ich nicht, warum nur ich von seinen Reden so ergriffen worden bin; die andern haben ja das nämliche gehört, und keinem ist so etwas begegnet.
"Be quiet the doctor's wife said gently, let's all keep quiet, there are times when words serve no purpose, if only I, too, could weep, say everything with tears, not have to speak in order to be understood."
-- Blindness, Jose Saramago
"Doc tried calling her name but of course words out here were only words."
-- Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon
What I'm looking for is that the spectator, too, that he take the time to reflect. I bid him place himself before some images that demand he look at them from within. ... that he make the effort to wonder what's coming; or better, how to perceive what has come. Look, you see nothing. It's completely abstract: an image composing itself.
The world gives you of itself in chips, in fragments: At bifucaria bifurcata, Rise reports that Wave Press will be publishing Mario Santiago's Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic in translation. You can read the original (which is dedicated to Bolaño and to Kyra Galván) at infrarrealismo.com -- it is 2000 words which seems a bit short for the description "book-length poem" but I imagine the book will have some supplementary material in it as well, and/or the material online is not the complete poem.
The poem has a nicely Tractatus-y quote from Auden as its epigraph: "We must remember here, too, that nothing is beautiful, not even in Poetry, which is not the case." (Back-translated -- I don't know the source of the quotation.)
2. Adaptation
The first of Bolaño's novels to reach the silver screen will be (the as-yet unpublished in translation) Una novela lumpen; Chilean director Alicia Scherson has filmed it as Il Futuro, currently screening at Sundance. The trailer: Thanks for the link, Jorge!
Possibly premature (heh) but I have a title page totally thought out for This Silent House... I had been thinking a snippet from "Lullaby for Laura" would be the epigraph, but I just found a JoaquÃn Pasos poem that makes me think of Ãvala: it is the one.
Here is the utterly beguiling epigraph Saramago chose for his short stories:
If man is shaped by his environment, his environment must be made human.
It is from Chapter 6 of Marx and Engels' The Holy Family, a critique of the Young Hegelians which was their first collaborative effort. Saramago's method of carrying out this transformation of the environment, while I cannot imagine it to be just what Marx and Engels had in mind, is somehow exactly the right thing.
That rare treasure arrived in today's mail, a book towards which I have no predjudices one way or the other... All I know about Michael Stutz' Circuits of the Wind is that its protagonist is roughly my coeval and vaguely that he grows up with computers and hacking and such.* A wonderful epigraph from Ecclesiastes sheds a little light on the title:
The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north ; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.
I'm sort of sniffing around the edges of the book trying to figure out how to approach it now, looking at the epigraphs and the dedication and acknowledgements (to among others, "the gurus, Daniel Frank Kirk [this Daniel F Kirk? this Daniel Kirk?] and Irwin Allen Ginsberg" and "Bill Burroughs for the blessing")... Some fun stuff.
*(Well and that its author considers READIN a worthy target for a review copy, which I'll grant is a big prejudicial point in his favor.)
