READIN

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

🦋 Pre-historic Migration

Below the fold, a piece from The Art of Resurrection that came to mind as I was reading this article. (I have that book on my brain now...)

At the opening of Chapter 4, the Christ of Elqui is walking along the rail line through the pampa, from Sierra Gorda to Providencia (or as the two he met in Sierra Gorda told him it is known locally, La Piojo -- they also warned him to stick to the tracks so as not to get lost in the desert) --

Across the pampa's wide expanse, the dry four o'clock wind was beginning to blow.

The Christ of Elqui, he had been hiking for a long hawl with no rest, his long hair blowing into his eyes, when he stopped; he lifted up his gaze, making a visor of his hands. All of a sudden it seemed as if he could make out the gravel lot of the plant over there where the hills began to rise -- in the pampa, such a sight gives one the illusion of seeing "a ship foundering on the desert plain," as some northern poet's verses call it. But the railroad line just followed its interminable southerly right-of-way.

Surely a little ways further, and it would turn off to that side.

Just at that moment, miraculous in the open pampa, under the brutally incandescent midday sun, a butterfly crossed over the iron rails. "An ephemeral butterfly”, he said in wonder, the Christ of Elqui; he could not imagine from how far off it had flown. It was an orange butterfly with black markings.*

As he watched it disappear, fluttering off to the east, that was when it occurred to him. Why not take the short cut, save some hiking, save some time? Clearly, more powerful than all the desert’s misdirections and illusions would be the Eternal Father, guiding his steps.

So he thought; and that is what he did.

(Is it clumsy, this having the two warn him to stay on the tracks, then having him take the short-cut and get lost? Possibly. But, very beautiful. Some of the subsequent portion of the chapter is quoted in this post from a few months back.)

I wonder who the northern poet being quoted in the second paragraph is. The closest thing to the quoted phrase I have been able to find with Google is from Elisabeth Nox' recently published first novel La ciudad de los hombres perdidos, "Pero en ningún momento llegó a preguntarse cómo había llegado el barco a encallar en mitad del desierto." Interesting but probably not what I'm looking for...

* One of the butterflies that Nabokov named, the Pseudolucia aureliana, is native to the Atacama; however it is blue with yellow markings, oh well.

↻...done

posted afternoon of January 26th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Pretty Pictures

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

🦋 Unknitting, reknotting

posted evening of January 25th, 2011: Respond

Sunday, January 23rd, 2011

🦋 La mano del desierto

(found in Dorfman's Desert Memories)

Up ahead, to one side of the route, is a gigantic granite hand thrusting up from a slight mound in the desert. Yes, I did say a granite hand and I did say gigantic -- towering twenty or thirty meters high -- a smoth rock statue, this Mano, erected here in 1992 by the Chilean sculptor Mario Irrarrázaval as a way of commemorating the presence of humans on this land, both the Europeans who had arrived in 1492 and those who had made the journey so many millenia before Columbus.

Our answer to the desert, that hand.

posted afternoon of January 23rd, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Desert Memories

🦋 La literatura del Norte grande

So right now I'm reading Ariel Dorfman's Desert Memories -- a fantastic book, one I recommend highly though I have yet to write anything about it -- it is making me think I should start keeping a bibliography of books dealing with northern Chile. This book will serve as the jumping-off point I think, for one thing because this bibliography would be directed towards an English reading audience and the book is written in English (and Dorfman seems like a marvelously interesting figure, certainly worth seeking out the rest of his work); all of Rivera Letelier's work will be on the list with big stars next to it indicating it ought to be published in translation; what else?

• I expect The Motorcycle Diaries includes a lot of time riding through the Atacama and probably belongs on the list.
• Juan Ignacio Molina's Geographical, Natural and Civil History of Chili should be present as background information.
• Andrés Sabella Gálvez's Norte grande.
• The work of José Joaquín Vallejo Boscoski (Jotabeche) appears to be seminal to the literature of salitreras.
• Escritores desde el límite describes itself as a blog dedicated to the literature and history of northern Chile; I have not looked at it any further yet.
• Another potential source of information is this article on El salitre en la literatura, from rionegro.com.
• Lessie Jo Frazier's Salt in the Sand. And Dr. Frazier's bibliography is quite huge, and could mostly be incorporated.
• Sergio González Miranda's Ofrenda a una masacre: La emancipación pampina de 1907.
• Wars are popular subjects for fiction and history -- I'm sure there is a good deal of reading to be done about the War of the Pacific.
• Parra's Sermones y prédicas del Cristo de Elqui.

posted afternoon of January 23rd, 2011: 6 responses
➳ More posts about Ariel Dorfman

Friday, January 21st, 2011

🦋 Zen, Archery

I read Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I was a freshman in college, and Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery a year or so later. I don't have much of a strong memory of either of them anymore, but I remember getting a general sense from them that a way of attaining enlightenment was through mastery of a technique; and I think this sense had a pretty strong formative influence on me.

It was interesting to read Yamada Shōji's beautifully written paper on Herrigel, The Myth of Zen in the Art of Archery, in which he argues quite convincingly that Herrigel's understanding of the art of archery was mistaken: that Herrigel's archery teacher Awa Kenzō was wildly eccentric and non-mainstream and that furthermore, Herrigel did not understand Japanese well enough to understand what Awa was telling him. Along the way Yamada lays out a terse, informative history of Japanese archery. (Although his listing of the lineages of the various schools of archery is slightly less readable than the Old Testament listings of Hebrew patriarchs.) Interesting, convincing reflections on the shortcomings of Herrigel's work as a study of Japanese culture and on what role it has played in Western understanding of Japanese culture.

posted evening of January 21st, 2011: 2 responses

Exciting news from 3% -- Open Letter Books will be publishing Margaret Carson's translation of Mis dos mundos this summer! This should be great -- I remember loving the excerpt printed in BOMB.

Open Letter will be publishing two more of Chejfec's titles, The Dark and The Planets.

posted evening of January 21st, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about My Two Worlds

Sunday, January 16th, 2011

🦋 Textual claymation

The genius of Rivera Letelier's Art of Resurrection does not lie in the writing of the plot or the character development. There are events narrated that in aggregate form a plot, to be sure, and it's not (with sufficient suspension of disbelief) a bad plot, but not (by itself) a masterpiece either. The characters are pretty static (except for the two main characters -- and in their cases "development" consists largely of flashbacks sketching out their life stories, more to give context to the narrated events than as part of the main story) -- indeed one could say that in the narrated moment, the characters are almost wooden.

But somehow this does not work out to be a criticism of the book: it is precisely this almost-wooden quality where the æsthetic greatness of the work can be found. Rivera Letelier's calmly focused lens can zoom in onto his characters frozen in the moment of his story like bugs in amber* and communicate to the reader their rich complexities.

Update: It occurs to me that this quality of woodenness and of masterful exploitation of it, is something the book has in common with Buñuel's Simon of the desert, the movie from which its cover illustration is taken.)

*(If not indeed birds in perspex)

posted evening of January 16th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about The Art of Resurrection

Saturday, January 8th, 2011

🦋 Socket Wrench

David Bonta (blogger at Via Negativa) has published a book of Odes to Tools with Phœnecia Publishing -- some beautiful thoughts about the things we use.

Ode to a Socket Wrench

Better than all power tools
Is the socket wrench:

Its accomodating nature
Its chrome-plated steel
Its handling of torque.

posted morning of January 8th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Toolbox

Friday, January 7th, 2011

🦋 Un escuchador

A tantalizing bit of insight into Rivera Letelier's story-telling abilities is in this review of The Art of Resurrection, by Laura Cardona, book reviewer for La nación:

...As a young man, Rivera Letelier eaves-dropped on the conversations of the adults around him in Algorta, where his mother and his sisters (and likewise, later on, his wife Mari) balanced the family budget by serving meals. Every night, forty or more old miners would come by the house looking for a meal; young Hernán would pass whole evenings under the table, making note of every anecdote.

(Found the Cardona review via Proyecto patrimonio's archive of writings about Rivera Letelier. Found the Dorfman book being remaindered by Amazon marketplace sellers.)

posted evening of January 7th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Hernán Rivera Letelier

Sunday, January second, 2011

🦋 Characters and Occupations

Here is the state of play ⅓ of the way into Our Lady of the Dark Flowers, as the striking workers, having marched from Alto de San Antonio to Iquique, settle into their quarters at the Escuela Santa María* to wait for the mining companies' response to their demands:

The primary characters are four friends who work at San Lorenzo, the salitrera where the strike was initiated: Olegario Santana, a 56-year-old loner and a hard worker, a veteran of the War of the Pacific; Domingo Domínguez, a barretero, the most gregarious of the group; José Pintor, a widowed carretero who is virulently opposed to religion and religiosity; and Idilio Montañez, a young herramentero and a kite-builder. In Alto de San Antonio, these four meet up with Gregoria Becerra, an old neighbor of José Pintor's when he worked in San Agustín, and her two children, 12-year-old Juan de Dios and 16-year-old Liria María. Gregoria Becerra was recently widowed when her husband was killed in a mining blast, and there is some suggestion (as yet undeveloped) of a romantic connection between her and José Pintor. Idilio Montañez and Liria María fall deeply in love with one another during the march to Iquique (Chapter 4). Her mother initially disapproves** but by Chapter 6 she seems resigned to it and even warming to the young man.

The male characters' occupations are central to their identities; Dominguo Domínguez is often referenced as "the barretero" and likewise for Idilio Montañez and José Pintor. I think Olegario Santana has not yet been referred to by his occupation, except maybe as a calichero. Here are my understandings of some of these terms, I'm not sure how accurate they are:

• Barretero is a worker at the mine who digs trenches.
• Carretero is a mechanic who works on the carts used for hauling caliche, the nitrate ore.
• Herramentero is (at a guess) a blacksmith.
• Calichero is a mine-worker; I think it is a generic term covering anyone who works at the nitrate mines. There are several words derived from caliche that occur quite frequently in the text.
• Particular is one of the jobs in the nitrate fields; I think it might refer to someone who works with explosives.
• Derripiador is one of the jobs involved in processing nitrate ore.
• Patizorro is (I think) another term for particular.
• Perforista: another term for barretero.

Some of this stuff is pretty specific to nitrate mining in Chile, I'm not sure how it could be brought over cleanly into English. Album Desierto has a great glossary of salitrera terminology.

*It is difficult reading (mostly in the present tense) about how excited the striking workers are, how happy and hopeful they are in the face of their hardships, when you know how the history is going to end up.

**At one point Gregoria Becerra says her daughter "does not need any idilios"; Idilio Montañez' name means "love affair".

posted morning of January second, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Our Lady of the Dark Flowers

Previous posts about Readings
Archives