Log: Masterpieces

Around the time we first began to build Comma Directory, I acquired a little notebook which I wrote about in my very first post: "The Small Bibliographic Log" from the independent Colombian press, Rey Naranjo. Almost eight months later, the log is now filled to the brim with the readings and thoughts that have accompanied me from Colombia to Cyprus to Sweden to France, and finally, to England.

To commemorate the completion of my first pequeña bitácora bibliográfica, I have picked out a selection of quotes, some of them dug out of the tight corners that I stuffed them into as I ran out of space on the page. And so, ...

"Recuerdo que [...] escribía sobre toda la superficie del papel, sin respetar ningún margen. Eso me daba la sensación de llenar completamente un vacío".
– Mario Bellatin, El libro uruguayo de los muertos

"At the end of my patient reconstruction, I had before me a kind of lesser library, a symbol of the greater, vanished one: a library made up of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books."
– Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

« Nous voyons ces filets, leur beauté, leur appartenance tout à la fois à la liberté et à la capacité de capturer, oui capturer. »
– Franklin Arellano & Julia Bejarano López, Entretierras

"Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia's inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long."
– Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

"What is the consciousness of guilt but the arena floor rushing up to meet the falling trapeze artist? Without it, a bullet becomes a tourist flying without responsibility through the air."
– Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

« Est-il aucun moment
Qui vous puisse assurer d'un second seulement ? »
– Jean de La Fontaine, Fables Choisies

"Il faut sinon se moquer, en tout cas se méfier de bâtisseurs d'avenir. Surtout quand pour bâtir l'avenir des hommes à naître, ils ont besoin de faire mourir les hommes vivants. L'homme n'est la matière première que de sa propre vie".
– Jean Gino, Refus d'obéissance

"Whatever he did allowed him to be told [...] that he indeed existed, that he was not, as he had always dreaded, a figment of his own imagination, or of God's imagination, who disappeared when the lights went out."
– Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

"¡Morir, Dios mío, morir así tísica a los veintitrés años, al comenzar a vivir, sin haber conocido el amor [...] morir sin haber realizado la obra soñada, que salvará el nombre del olvido; morir dejando al mundo sin haber satisfecho las millones de curiosidades, de deseos, de ambiciones [...]"
– José Asunción Silva, De sobremesa

"Pienso, antes de ponerme polvos
que aún no he comenzado
y ya estoy por terminar".
– María Mercedes Carranza, El oficio de vivir

« Elle rêvait aux palmiers droits et flexibles, et à la jeune fille qu'elle avait été. »
– Albert Camus, L'exile et le royaume

"I think here I will leave you. It has come to seem
there is no perfect ending.
Indeed, there are infinite endings.
Or perhaps, once on begins,
there are only endings."
– Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

"I shall soon enter this broad desert, perfectly level and boundless, where the truly pious heart succumbs in bliss. I shall sink into the divine shadow, in a dumb silence and an ineffable union. And in this sinking, all equality and all inequality shall be lost [...] I shall fall into the silent and uninhabited divinity, where there is no work and no image."
– Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

"In the midst of the word he was trying to say;
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away—
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see."
– Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark

- Andrea

It has been a while since I last read and wrote. Work has been overwhelming, and the time I had to spare went into exploring the fundamentals of Linux.

But today, I finally managed to read a bit again. When I was younger I used to hate Swedish literature, perhaps because of traumatic recall to school. However, reading in a language other than English–especially in a Swedish from a time when the world carried less universal cultural references–is interesting. And thus, I have discovered a newfound love for Swedish literature.

I have begun to read Willy Kyrklund's Solange. It kicks off with a poem and an intro I want to share:

Where does all song go, that becomes suffocated and trapped?
Where does all hope go, that reaches nothing?
Could be that it abounds in the earth and water.
Could be that it whistles in the wind all around.
– Karin Boye

Or in Swedish:

Vart går all sång, som blir kvävd och innestängd?
Vart går all längtan, som når ingenting?
Kanhända den i mullen och vattnet ligger mängd.
Kanhända den viner i vinden omkring.
– Karin Boye

Followed by this intro:

This story shall tell the tale of Solange and Hugo. It carries, thus, not both names–Solange and Hugo. It carries only the name of the loved one: Solange.

- Marc

When the world appears to be pregnant with possibility, I take it as an invitation to embark upon a journey. Or, when I embark on a new journey, the world often appears to suddenly be pregnant with possibility, such as it appears to me now, after some recent day trips to Paris. But even after returning to the rolling muddy hills of the Yonne, I continue to be restless, yearning to visit and revisit as I have just done at the Palais-Royal, the courtyard of the Louvre, the narrow roads from Opera to Châtelet and the Centre Pompidou.

Wandering up and down the streets of a beloved city brings me a quiet but intense joy, akin to the feelings evoked by my favorite books, films, images, music. And so, I decided to embark on another journey, but this time through my memory, the internet, and some ink.

It has resulted in maps and constellations of those special works of art that move me and renew my gaze. Perhaps these are the transcendental feelings that others find in religion, ritual, patriotism, and/or mind-altering substances. I guess this could be a creative ritual of sorts, but I find the language around ritual and transcendence to have become so tired lately.

So, here is a brief inventory of my eclectic mental re-collections of sights, sounds, and feelings.

Books

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Le Diable au corps by Raymond Radiguet
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
La muerte de Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes
Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Glück

Music

"The Wuthering Heights" by Sakamoto Ryuichi
"Amore" and "Solitude" by Sakamoto Ryuichi
"The Girl - Theme" by Trevor Duncan
"Yumeji's Theme" by Umebayashi Shigeru
"Romeo and Juliet" by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
"Overture" and "Metempsychosis" by Zhao Jiping
"Blackstar" and "Station to Station" by David Bowie

Film

Les Quatre Cents Coups by François Truffaut
Raise the Red Lantern by Zhang Yimou
Russian Ark by Aleksandr Sokurov
2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrik
La jetée by Chris Marker
In The Mood for Love by Wong Kar Wai
L'Ascenseur pour l'échafaud by Louis Malle
Hiroshima mon amour by Alain Resnais
La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc by Carl Theodor Dreyer
The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman

And More

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes by Simon Flesser & Simongo

- Andrea

While we are now well into September, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on some memorable August reads, books that I still think about and will be thinking about for a while.

I read two books last month, one poetry and one prose (very unconventional prose, however).

El oficio de vivir, or (roughly) The craft/work of living, is a collection of poetry by María Mercedes Carranza. Compiled posthumously and prefaced by her daughter, the collection sinks, poem by poem, deeper into the despair that plagued Carranza, especially in her final years. Despair about aging, despair about Colombia’s endless violence, despair about injustice, meaninglessness, despair about despair. Death weighs heavy on almost every page. Her words manage to covey the hollowness of depression in a way that I have not seen captured in any other piece of writing (even books and memoirs about war or genocide). It is grim, very grim.

El libro uruguayo de los muertos, or The Uruguayan Book of the Dead, on the other hand was much less grim, despite of the title. It did take me a very long time to read. Along with García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca, it might be one of the toughest books I’ve ever gone through. In short snippets destined to a mysterious correspondent, Mario Bellatin melds fact and fiction to speak about everything and anything. Some themes do stand out: writing, publishing, illness, death, family, truth, falsehood and mysticism. Like the Twirling Dervishes he describes, cyclical snippets of narrative appear, disappear, only to reappear later, the same or almost the same or altered incomprehensibly. Temporality is warped, contradictions appear, and, as a reader, offering resistance only makes the read more painful. At some point you just have to let go and let Bellatin take you on a trip that goes round and round. And in the end, I was left a bit dizzy.

El oficio de vivir was close to making it on my favorites list—it is a true work of art. But the art that resonates with me the most is that which peers into the void, but with defiance. There is a will to live and an affirmation of life, the renewal of life. With Carranza, we succumb to the void, even if the last poem of the collection offers a glimmer of hope.

Mario Bellatin’s Salon de belleza (Beauty Salon) is one of my favorite books, but I can’t say the same for El libro uruguayo de los muertos. There are very interesting ideas about the nature of truth and fiction, about the pain of creation, and about life, death and creation as cyclical. The unconventional form resonated with these themes, but maybe it went on for too long. But then again, watching Twirling Dervishes perform is fascinating, but it can also feel eternally long after a while. But isn’t that what we’re all after, eternity? Reading El libro uruguayo de los Muertos definitely felt like it took an eternity too, but maybe that's what Bellatin was trying to do—approach eternity, which also means to approach death.

Other Interesting August “Reads”

• “Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic”
• “The Betrayal of American Border Policy”
• “The Funeral: At a Loss” (recommend reading this only after watching Itami Juzo's film)

- Andrea