READIN

Monday, March 7th, 2011

🦋 A matter of scale

Neither should it be forgotten that the 21st of December 1907 wrote in miniature, [and its] defective pantograph would appear imprinted... [on] the morning of 11 September 1973. More or less the same contenders, more or less the same result, more or less the same dead, more or less the same shame, but now all on a gigantic scale.

Eduardo Devés, Los que van a morir te saludan.
quoted by Lessie Jo Frazier, Salt in the Sand.

posted evening of March 7th, 2011: Respond
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Sunday, March 6th, 2011

🦋 It was twenty minutes after three.

The events of Chapter 19 of Our Lady of the Dark Flowers are unfolding like a malevolent clockwork, like a bad dream in which events cannot progress any way except toward their preordained, tragic outcome -- in short like history. "They are turning this place into a mousetrap," Olegario Santana thinks as he returns to the school of Our Lady of Iquique, perhaps for the last time -- he tries to persuade Gregoria Becerra to leave the school but she is steadfast in her commitment to the strike.

This impending sense of doom requires that Rivera Letelier move his narration to the past tense. Throughout the book the narrative present tense has been dominant, and the stories being told have focused on individuals, makers of free decisions within the context of the history which is the framework of the book. Here the story is the history, the concrete events of the past, where free choice is no longer relevant, and the events are related in the past tense. (And still there is a quick switch to the present tense when Olegario Santana is pleading with Gregoria Becerra to leave, when she is deciding freely to stand by the union; and somehow this is not confusing to the reader, somehow it flows perfectly.) The last words of the chapter have General Silva Renard making his fateful decision:

At this point, the general was convinced that the situation was no longer maintainable -- «in order not to compromise the prestige and honor of the authorities, of the security forces, I was faced with the necessity of checking the rebellion before the end of the day» is how he put it in his journal. Finally, he made the decision. Rising up on his steed, the sun's rays shining off his military harness, he crossed himself lightly. He raised his hand to give the order to fire.

(It is extremely disconcerting to be reading this story while the unions in Madison are occupying the state capitol and threatening a general strike. Not that I expect governor Walker to call out the state militia and fire on the protestors, although such things have happened in our history as well as in Chile's -- but this book is a sad reminder of the lengths to which those in power will go, have gone, to maintain their power.)

This chapter also features the blind poet, Rosario Calderón, who has made occasional appearances throughout the book reciting popular poetry to the strikers. He is here declaiming what I take to be another verse of his namesake's poem commemorating the massacre:

Hoy por hambre acosado
esta región abandono,
me voy sin fuerza, ni abono,
viejo, pobre y explotado,
dejo el trabajo pesado
del combo, chuzo y la lampa
y esa maldita rampa
donde caí deshojada,
soy la flor negra y callada
que nace y muere en la pampa

Pursued by hunger
I leave this place,
powerless, penniless,
an old man, broken down and poor,
I leave this oppressive work,
this heavy pair, my shovel and my bucket,
this damned mine shaft
I fell down, broken;
I am the dark and silent flower
which grows and dies in the pampa.

Chilean blogger Walterio2 has posted Calderón's verses and a lot of other pampino poetry: La pampa es silente.

↻...done

posted morning of March 6th, 2011: Respond
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Monday, February 28th, 2011

🦋 Contorsion, Stigma

And yet (fact): Hands lack the anatomical mass required to support the weight of an adult human. Both Roman legal texts and modern examinations of a first-century skeleton confirm that classical crucifixion required nails to be driven through the subject’s wrists, not his hands. Hence the, quote, “necessarily simultaneous truth and falsity of the stigmata” that the existential theologist E. M. Cioran explicates in his 1937 “Lacrimi si Sfinti,” the same monograph in which he refers to the human heart as “God’s open wound.”

And more! George Lazenby of 424 W 23rd St, NY 10011—2157 (an address to conjure with!) has a recording of Sunday, February 6th's edition of Endnotes on BBC radio; Geoff Ward presents his research into the life and work of Wallace.

posted evening of February 28th, 2011: 1 response
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Sunday, February 27th, 2011

🦋 Yolanda

Olegario Santana (the calichero with the pet buzzards) smokes Yolandas; he has a two or three pack-a-day habit, and he thinks of the woman on the front of the pack as his feminine ideal. Rivera Letelier returns to this several times; taking a cigarette and looking at the pack and thinking about women is by now (halfway through) sort of a master gesture for Santana. I'm torn about this -- it strikes me at first glance as a bit clichéed, a bit simplistic; OTOH Santana is a pretty alien figure to me. This could well be an accurate representation of his character.

I'm thinking of Santana as the physical presence of Rivera Letelier in the story, for a few reasons. He was the first character introduced; he is a loner, quiet and reserved in his relations with the others, which strikes me as the proper deportment for the author; he is older than the others (Rivera Letelier was in his early 50's when he wrote this book, which I believe is roughly Santana's age -- quite old for someone in his extremely hazardous profession) and is the most skeptical about the odds of their strike having a positive outcome, the first to express worries about the military presence building up in Iquique.

There has been almost remarkably little narrative foreboding vis-a-vis the impending massacre. The book's first half has been about the workers and their friendships, about the blossoming love between Idilio and Liria María, and about the pampino community's high hopes for a proletarian victory and a new order. The only overt foreshadowings I have noticed that were not explicitly in Santana's voice were in Chapter 7, where it is mentioned that the provincial governor has asked Santiago for military reinforcements "without hope that the unrest will be resolved", and now in Chapter 10, where new reinforcements are arriving from Arica and the situation is "turning ugly."

posted afternoon of February 27th, 2011: Respond
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Saturday, February 26th, 2011

🦋 A history lesson: El rey de la salitrera

At the beginning of chapter 10 of Our Lady of the Dark Flowers, Idilio Montaño is passed out in a corner of the schoolroom where the friends are staying, sleeping off his drunken fight of the previous night. As he comes to, he hears an old pampino telling a group of young men the history of John Thomas North's acquisition of the majority of the nitrate fields in northern Chile. This expository technique seems like it should be extremely heavy-handed but I think Rivera Letelier pulls it off. Anyway, I found the history lesson quite useful.

"...This English upstart is the best example of what I'm talking about. His name was John Thomas North and they called him 'The Saltpetre King." It was this proud commoner who instigated, who provided arms and pounds sterling to secure the downfall of Balmaceda, the last rightful president of Chile..."

According to the speaker, Balmaceda intended to nationalize Chile's nitrate resources; North owned vast amounts of the Atacama as a result of having purchased Chile's worthless bonds during the War of the Pacific. North is only dead about ten years at the time of the strike, and the speaker claims to have met him in person. He says the pampinos would joke about "Our Father who art in London..."

Interesting to think about how close to their country's history these characters are. This scene makes me think (in a US context) of an elderly Civil War veteran telling some young compatriots about a famous general he had met... Or to put it in the labor context, a grizzled old Teamster or Longshoresman telling about... My familiarity with labor history in the US (and indeed with US history in general) is far too limited to build a satisfactory scenario for either of these examples, alas.

posted afternoon of February 26th, 2011: Respond

Thursday, February 24th, 2011

🦋 Sophistry

I was happy to stumble upon Dion Chrysostom's 11th discourse, Maintaining that Troy was not captured. Kirill Yeskov cites Chrysostom as "the founder of this literary tradition of playing with others’ masks and backdrops" -- Chrysostom argues that Homer cannot be trusted as a reliable narrator, that the Achæans were in fact defeated at Troy. A refreshing read. Chrysostom's To Plato in defense of Homer has been lost to the ages.

posted evening of February 24th, 2011: Respond
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Saturday, February 19th, 2011

🦋 The Blue Man

Blogger Alison Sampson has uploaded scans of Alberto Breccia's comic El hombre azul (1978) -- thanks for the link, Domingos! Breccia was an Argentine cartoonist, working from the mid-20th-Century to the 90's; definitely looks worth finding out more about him. I see he illustrated texts by Ernesto Sabato, Lovecraft, and Poe, among others...

posted morning of February 19th, 2011: Respond
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Thursday, February 17th, 2011

🦋 Song for his Disappeared Love

Thanks are due Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson of Montevidayo for making available these recordings of Raúl Zurita and his translator Daniel Borzutsky, appearing together at Notre Dame last month. They are reading from Zurita's book Canto a su amor desaparecido (1985), newly published in translation.

Pegado, pegado a las rocas, al mar y a las montañas.
Murió mi chica, murió mi chico, desaparecieron todos.

Desiertos de amor.

posted evening of February 17th, 2011: Respond
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Tuesday, February 15th, 2011

🦋 History is told by the victors

With that proverb in mind, Kirill Yuryevitch Yeskov set out to relate an alternate history of Tolkein's Middle Earth from the point of view of the losing side: Yeskov tells the story of the War of the Ring as seen by the forces of Mordor. Fascinating! Yeskov published his book Последний кольценосец in 1999; it does not look like a commercial translation in English will be forthcoming any time soon because the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien does not cotton to infringement on its intellectual property... But fandom to the rescue! Blogger Yisroel Markov has made available his translation of The Last Ring-Bearer (done over the course of "a few dozen lunch hours," and vetted and corrected by Eskov) for free download. Far out. Thanks, Mr. Markov! (and thanks for letting me know about this, Gabe!)

(Readers of Russian can peruse the original at lib.ru.) ...And more: an essay by Yeskov at Salon.

posted evening of February 15th, 2011: Respond
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🦋 Elige tu propia aventura

Stanislaus Bhor of Hermano Cerdo calls our attention to Raúl Quirós Molina's new multimedia work, Un hombre cae de un edificio, and particularly to its first story, Un día soleada en Königsberg -- "A Sunny Day in Königsberg". Oh look, a hypertext adventure that lets you determine the course of the plot! Fun! A bit of a downer perhaps, compared to the old Choose Your Own Adventure young-adult books... Opening line: "At the end of this story, the protagonist -- that is to say, you yourself -- dies." Now let's figure out how that's going to come about...

posted evening of February 15th, 2011: Respond

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