Tag: Literature

Peru: In Search Of Arguedas

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

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Jose Maria Aguedas (1911-1969) (photo by Jose Gushiken)

I have to begin with Mariategui, the street in Cuzco, Peru, and then the man.

We decided to take a cab to find Don Francisco’s new house in Cuzco, Peru.  He is a Q’ero Shaman.  We wanted to do a shamanic ceremony with him and his wife and eat lunch with them.  We wanted to visit him at his home as he had visited us at ours in the US.  He gave us the address.  He gave us his cell number.  He gave us a land mark. We ended up calling him on the cell phone to say, “We’re parked at the church.  We don’t know where you are.”  He walked down the hill and found us.  Pointing, he said, that street is Mariategui.  That’s where the bus goes into Centro.  That’s where you have to walk.  That’s where the house is.

Did he know who Mariategui was?  Probably not.  I forgot to ask him.  I am quite certain that he never read him.

Please join me in Peru.

Literary America: “Too isolated, too insular”

A couple days ago, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy — the body that decides who will be the laureate for the Nobel Prize in Literature — stated Europe was the center of the literary world and America was “too isolated, too insular”.

This is what Horace Engdahl said in an interview he gave exclusively to the AP:

“Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world … not the United States.”

WWYMNHHO: Adolfo Bioys Casares, The Invention of Morel

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

Wonderful Writers You Might Not Have Heard Of (WWYMNHHO) is an occasional, erratic, idiosyncratic series.  It’s like an island that floods at high tide and migrates in the turquoise sea.  Sometimes it appears.  But I digress.

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Adolfo Bioys Casares (1914-1999)

Adlofo Bioys Casares’ 1940 novel The Invention of Morel is a short gem.  Jorge Luis Borges, Bioys’ mentor, wrote in the prologue, “To classify it (the novel) as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole.” And Mexican Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz wrote, “The Invention of Morel may be described, without exaggeration, as a perfect novel.”  Given this kind of praise, it seemed imperative to read it.

I have no intention of spoiling this book by revealing the plot.  I will tell you this much: Morel is a person and not a mushroom, and the invention is his, it is not that he is invented.  This is the kind of thing that happens when better translators than I render La Invencion de Morel as something other than Morel’s Invention.

The narrator has escaped from a crime to an island with peculiar tides.  He hides.  Sometimes there are two suns; sometimes, two moons.  Events appear to repeat on the island; perhaps there is some fatal disease there.  At some point, Faustine appears and without ever talking with her, watching her carefully from a distance, he falls in love with her.  It is a love of the idea of a person, a love for an image of a person, a love of a phantom.  It’s not quite real, but it’s very deeply felt.  And Bioys manages to convey this mystification, if it’s fair to call it that, beautifully.

There is more, much more to this.  But it’s just not fair to give it all away.  If you’re going to read the book, try to avoid the Wiki on the book and the one on Bioys (though I’ve linked to them).

The book is only 103 pages long.  You could gobble it up in an afternoon or evening, or you could read it in small bits over a week, as I did.  There is enough going on to ponder that a slow reading can be especially enjoyable.

Adolfo Bioy Casares was born in Buenos Aires, the grandson of a wealthy landowner and dairy processor. His parents were keen alphabet enthusiasts, which explains their choice of his initials “ABC”. He wrote his first story (“Iris y Margarita”) at the age of 11. He was a friend and frequent collaborator of Jorge Luis Borges and wrote many stories with him under the pseudonym of H. Bustos Domecq. He won the Gran Premio de Honor of SADE (the Argentine Society of Writers, 1975), the French Légion d’honneur (1981), the title of Illustrious Citizen of Buenos Aires (1986), and the Premio Miguel de Cervantes.

Enjoy.

“The Investigation”

I was reading Cassiodorus’s Through the Looking Glass on Abrupt Climate Change, which is quite a good read, and realized that this was the third time this week that I’d seen that same quote he uses from Humpty Dumpty.

The other two citations, which I have no idea where they are, were both in the context of the Obama/Mcbush mashup this past week. The English language has been sorely abused these last eight years, by politicians and the traditional media, and I expect things will only get worse as the campaign season runs on.

Some years ago I used that same quote from Lewis Carroll as an epigraph to a short story. I’d like to share “The Investigation” with you now, so…

Hop in a barrel and follow me over the fa-a-a-a-alls……

Connie Willis and why she’s fabulous

When you despair, as I do, frequently, of what will become of you…

When you are out of work and have no money to pay the rent…

When your boss is a tyrant and you don’t know how you can last another day…

When the politics finally has you beaten down because the idiots outnumber you…

There is an answer.  Albeit a temporary answer…an answer nonetheless…

And her name is Connie Willis.

Connie is one of the most brilliant people I have ever met…and I consider it an incredible privilege that I was able to meet her at all…at a few cocktail parties, years ago.  She probably doesn’t remember me, but that’s all right.

She is a brilliant writer.  That’s all that matters.

More below the fold.

THE GOLDEN PEACH

With all of the horrors inflicted upon us-as so well documented here at DD and elsewhere-it’s good to take a mind-break and go somewhere else.

This is a short story I wrote about 12 years ago. It was published in Bricolage, which has about 500 readers, in 2002. It used to be online but has since been taken down (along with everything else from 2001 and thereafter.)

I’ve been thinking about posting this here for quite a while and have finally decided to do so.

I recommend that you have a dictionary at hand or have another browser window opened to an online dictionary. (My brother laughed when I made this same recommendation to him, but later admitted that a “few” of the words were unfamiliar to him.)

I wrote the last sentence of this story first. Originally it had almost 500 words, but for the purposes of the story I edited it down to a mere 365 words. (Bonus points for anyone who can guess why it was originally just under 500 words.)

I hope y’all enjoy reading The Golden Peach as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Best American Essays

If there were one thing I could get everyone to buy, it would be the annual Best American Essays anthology put out by Houghton Mifflin Company.  I’ve been getting them every year since 1992, and they have some of the best writing in the genre of the personal essay you will ever read.

Some of these clips are funny, some serious.  These are essays that, once read, I have never forgotten.

Profiles in Literature: E. E. Cummings

Greetings, literature-loving Dharmiacs.  Last time we discussed gay Harlem Renaissance author Richard Bruce Nugent, who tapped into the experimental cadences of black modernist literature to spin fantasies on queer life long before it became acceptable to do so.  This week we’re going to talk about another American experimental writer, albeit one who achieved enormous popularity both at home and abroad.

With torture and extraordinary rendition so much in the news, it may come as something as a surprise that today’s subject experienced the agony of unjust political imprisonment first hand.  But in 1917, this recent Harvard graduate and volunteer in a World War I ambulance corps found himself thrown in prison for “espionage” without recourse to any legal defense.    Fortunately for history (and for us) the experience did nothing to crush his puckish personality, and he went on to become one of America’s most warmly loved artists.

Follow me below for a jaunt with this 20th century master:

Sweeney Todd and cannibalistic Capitalism

There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit

And it’s filled with people who are filled with shit

And the vermin of the world inhabit it.

But not for long.

This past week I had the great luck to attend an advance screening of Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, now the third (and a half) major incarnation of Sondheim’s 1979 musical, based on a 19th century pulp slasher.  Sweeney is the greatest of all musicals, combining sophisticated music and well-written characters in an almost impenetrably dark moral fog.  

What’s most interesting from our perspective is the way Sweeney Todd grapples with the problem of capitalism, an issue foregrounded in the classic Broadway staging and to some extent in the new film version.  Let’s take a closer look at a few moments that emphasize this critique.

Note: This essay contains spoilers, and plenty of them.  If you don’t want to know what happens in the musical/film, stop reading now.  

Profiles in Literature: Richard Bruce Nugent

Greetings, literature-loving Dharmenians!  Last time we met over the wreckage of the Civil War and acid humor of one of its most famous veterans.  This week we’ll stay in the United States, but jump ahead a few generations to an almost-forgotten writer who merits a closer look.

After World War I, black soldiers returning from the front were disgusted by the treatment they received from countrymen they’d fought and died defending.  At the same time, black intellectuals like W.E.B DuBois and Alain Locke began to envision a cultural project that would elevate the African American experience in the eyes of its otherwise cultural oppressors, while political activists like Marcus Garvey brought pan-Africanism to the streets of New York.  Throw in a sudden burst of artistic imagination and some seriously talented writers, and you’ve got all the ingredients for the Harlem Renaissance.  

Today we’re going to talk about one of its most fascinating personalities.  

Profiles in Literature: Ambrose Bierce

Greetings, literature-loving Dharmiacs!  Last week we sailed to ancient Mesopotamia to search for everlasting life with the great king Gilgamesh, and along the way we learned about ancient Sumeria from the venerable Moonbat.  This week we’ll jump forward to 19th century America, where a journalist with a bitter sense of humor is reshaping the horrors of war into brutally incisive portraits of human nature.

Ambrose Bierce: soldier, journalist, war correspondent.  He fought in the most brutal Civil War battles and waged a one-man war against the entrenched interests of Big Railroad in California.  He moved in all levels of society both here and abroad, then disappeared during the Mexican revolution, possibly killed by Pancho Villa’s forces.  He was suspicious of politicians as of human nature in general, and since his death has become synonymous with acidic misanthropy.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the works of this distinctly American writer…

Rollo May – The Courage To Create

In college I was asked to read The Courage To Create by Rollo May, I was a bit skeptical at first that something could be gleaned from looking at the lives of past artists and creative geniuses.  I assumed that inspiration was as fleeting as a dust devil so how could one possibly present inroads into the creative process?  

Mark-making was the mindset I was in at the time, focusing on every individual stroke of the charcoal or brush.  It was myopic but necessary in order to progress.  A popular term for this is “Art Marks”, you’ll often see them around focal points to represent distant objects or atmosphere.

The book does not promise that you will become a genius if you follow the steps but it does show you that a lot of the more creative types have similar patterns amongst them.  Starting with long sessions of work, round the clock, with short catnaps, followed by a period of relaxation, like a day off and a hot bath.  Sounds funny huh?  Well follow me beyond the fold to find out why this makes sense.

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