Notebook

Ill

If you must write a poem
and that poem is about a
civil war in your country,

does this civil war follow
you to another country
(also yours), regardless

of how distant it might
be? This question writes
the illest lines for me.

Epigram

"poem from the hand of the god of love"

(U.M., 14 January 2004)

The Rings of Saturn

"Elegy, in England, is easy to buy, especially the country-house kind. But what distinguishes Sebald from most English elegists is the deep unease of his elegy--its metaphysical, Germanic insistence. Sebald does not just see a Romantic-political decline in England, as say Larkin did; he sees a decline of which we are not just the inheritors but the creators, too. This, I think, is because he believes in a kind of eternal recurrence. He does not say exactly this; but his book suggests that in every historical moment we have already been there. Standing in a camera obscura on the fields of Waterloo, he looks down on the old battlefield, and remarks that history is always falsely seen: "We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do no know how it was." Now, "survivors" is an odd word. How can we be the "survivors" of Waterloo? We were not there. Typically opaque, Sebald proceeds in mournfully shuffled sentences touched with comedy, never underlining anything. But I take him to be suggesting that we are always survivors of a history that we attended in a previous incarnation. Sebald's subjects, in both this book and The Emigrants, can escape nothing; they are always "survivors," even of events which they never directly experienced. The virus of history infects even the inoculated."

(James Wood, "W.G. Sebald's Uncertainty," The Broken Estate, 1999)

Del otro lado


Como un reloj de arena cae la música en la música.

Estoy triste en la noche de colmillos de lobo.

Cae la música en la música como mi voz en mis voces.



(Alejandra Pizarnik, El infierno musical, 1971)

Telenovela rarities

What we live is so exhausting and so ludicrous that the telenovela is a perfect metaphor. It portrays our irrationality, our earnestness in full perspective, seeing ourselves through exaggeration, or versions of our phantasmas. The procurement and dissolution of ghosts. Carried around as a ticket or library notice. One is frozen for a style's epoch. Or one acknowledges living failures sweep the floor, read more, answer the trees in their language, quiet.

Plan to work with Simón and Yelimar on translating sections of Caracas Notebook into Spanish. Likewise, I'll work with Yelimar on translating a recent poem of hers into English. From their apartment in Fenway the Prudential tower hovers over the fourth floor windows.

The failure in translation is undeniable. A static of languages dissolving into one another. Te cuento que a los cuatro o cinco años ya había ido dos o tres veces a Caracas desde Boston. Al mudarnos permanentemente a Caracas en 1976, nos fuímos en un barco de carga. Pasamos una semana al mar entre New York y el puerto de La Guaira. Habia otra familia viajando en el barco tambien, y me hice amigo de una muchacha de mi edad. En la novela Ifigenia, de Teresa de la Parra, se escribe la misma odisea: llegar al puerto de día, con el sol brillando desde los cerros rojos en la costa. La vision de subir hacia Caracas en ferrocarril, viendo un conjunto de palmeras desde arriba, en tiempo lento. Podríamos llamarla "modernidad." La modernidad llegando por entre los árboles.

The idea is the realization of a novel on television, a complex novel. W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, or Vertigo as a mini series of several days or weeks. In one-hour installments, just as the current telenovelas do in their own inimitable, if dubious, manner. How would Roberto Bolaño's Los detectives salvajes or Ana Teresa Torres's Los últimos espectadores del acorazado Potemkin look on national (which nation?) television.

But the phrase also refers to the absurd qualities of suffering encountered. Writing is the film of the novel, after the second edition's prologue. All that dramatic accompaniment. Certain poetics assign failure and tragedy their daily place. Cedar Sigo's Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003) incorporates a "ghostly"preface of tercets that segue into the brilliant long poem "O Twist No Inferno":

"...Do I need anything besides
The heat on? Yes, cocaine, and the first
Tangerines of the season are in.
I hear they're wonderful."

Another writer who also traces vision from the elementary world of daily objects and pauses is Zadie Smith, in her second novel The Autograph Man (2002). The paragraphs that take her protagonist Alex Li Tandem through the streets and rooms of Brooklyn and Manhattan evoke that city sought throughout the book. The unreal city of art, the book of books certain Romantic or Symbolist poets alluded to or evoked. The sacred book or the sacred city, depending on one's focus. Eliot's recorded voice reading from The Waste Land, when he moans: "Unreal." Again, the novelistic display of action and rhetoric, the sometimes unnecessary tangle of plot, these can be forgiven because they allow the structure for those brief "visions" Smith so artfully writes of or disguises.

Apartment: A makeshift miracle?

Series: Distinctive Digs, Peculiar Pads; I.D. TAMPA
St. Petersburg Times; St. Petersburg; Sep 8, 1994

by MICHAEL CANNING;

Abstract:

So which is it? Guillermo Parra and Jason Herring, both 23 and short-spoken, aren't ones to philosophize. Sharing the place with two other guys, they each like having an economical $150 share of the rent, even if their neighbors are a cigar factory and a bunkhouse.

"Definitely not having a full kitchen's a pain," said Parra, who moved in in May. "Not having like a sink, or a stove, that's probably the main drawback. The main reason I moved in was because the room was a good price."

Their home at 1404 N 19th St. in Ybor City is a high-ceilinged, rectangular section of a circa-1920 warehouse. Inside, the living quarters are makeshift, with guy clutter and sporadic, artsy decor.


Full Text:

In one sense they're urban pioneers, living a do-it-yourself lifestyle in a spartan, historic Ybor building.

In another sense they're scraping by in a scruffy old warehouse space ducking the world of decent amenities for cheap rent.

So which is it? Guillermo Parra and Jason Herring, both 23 and short-spoken, aren't ones to philosophize. Sharing the place with two other guys, they each like having an economical $150 share of the rent, even if their neighbors are a cigar factory and a bunkhouse.

"Definitely not having a full kitchen's a pain," said Parra, who moved in in May. "Not having like a sink, or a stove, that's probably the main drawback. The main reason I moved in was because the room was a good price."

Their home at 1404 N 19th St. in Ybor City is a high-ceilinged, rectangular section of a circa-1920 warehouse. Inside, the living quarters are makeshift, with guy clutter and sporadic, artsy decor.

What functions as a kitchen is a section of doorless floor cabinets, a couple of portable burner units, a toaster oven and a refrigerator.

Two of the four bedrooms are contained in a drywall box that juts out from the north wall. The space above the bedrooms provides ample room for a lofted den, and is served by a simple staircase. No railing, no bannister.

Standing up there leaves an edgy feeling of airiness. You even get an urge to invite several friends over to fill it up.

"There's a lot of people coming in and out," Herring said. "We see a lot of people."

Herring, an English literature major at USF, arrived in January and initiated some modest renovations. "It wasn't as nice as it is now. We had to fix it up and paint everything."

A shower head was installed over the bathroom's antique footed bathtub, and the common area's large floor tiles were painted gray and black. "Actually, it's a poor choice of colors," Herring said, "because they're so dirty we have to paint them again. Maybe something darker, like black and blue."

Herring is appreciative of the neighborhood, and not just Seventh Avenue, a few blocks to the north where he sometimes walks.

"It's a really, really safe neighborhood. You can walk around here at night. There's a little bar down here, the Bop City Bar. You can hang out there...."

The openness of the room has its advantages.

"I like having a lot of space here," said Parra, who is studying American and British literature at USF. "Even with four people, there's enough space that you can have your own part. If I want to write on my walls or do a mural in my room, I can."

And he has.

Parra is half Venezuelan, and has adorned his wall with a crude depiction of a Venezuelan petroglyph - rock carving.

Parra hopes to continue the theme. "Actually my brother does some pretty good graffiti. We're trying to get him to come over."

Copyright Times Publishing Co. Sep 8, 1994

&
 
Roberto Bolaño, Los detectives salvajes
Julio Cortázar, Rayuela
Teresa de la Parra, Ifigenia
Goethe, Los sufrimientos del joven Werther
Wilson Harris, The Palace of the Peacock
N.Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn
V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas
W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Edward Upward, Journey to the Border
Arturo Uslar Pietri, Las lanzas coloradas

A vision

speaks languages we will never own

carries hurt while reading insomnia

is younger than me and beautiful

"una joven visionaria" who lets

me inhabit the heaviest loss

talking under palm fronds in a

backyard facing Gulf sky heat

there were freshly-cut sea grape

branches stacked on the front

sidewalk, from where I end up

here to blur its course, write

her tablets on these airplane feet

loop-drawn song for two repeats

three oranges plucked from dawn