Famous writer talks about being classified as a "science fiction" writer

For many readers and even some writers of science fiction, debates on who is or is not "mainstream" writing in the field may seem to be a relatively new development, or at least one that has developed new branches.  However, fifty years ago there was this author, Kurt Vonnegut, who seemed to be astride all sorts of these literary "fault lines" that are all the rage these days.  In his 1965 essay, "Science Fiction," it is interesting to see how germane his observations are in relation to what various puppies, kittens, roadkill, and other sundry SFnal groups want to argue about in regards to the "soul" of science fiction.  Below are some selections from this 3.5 page essay, reprinted in 2012 by the Library of America for Kurt Vonnegut:  Novels & Stories 1950-1962:

Years ago I was working in Schenectady for General Electric, completely surrounded by machines and ideas for machines, so I wrote a novel about people and machines, and machines frequently got the best of it, as machines will.  (It was called Player Piano, and it was brought out again in both hard cover and in paperback.)  And I learned from the reviewers that I was a science-fiction writer.

I didn't know that.  I supposed that I was writing a novel about life, about things I could not avoid seeing and hearing in Schenectady, a very real town, awkwardly set in the gruesome now.  I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer label "science fiction" ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

The way a person gets into this drawer, apparently, is to notice technology.  The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city.  Colleges may be to blame.  English majors are encouraged, I know, to hate chemistry and physics, and to be proud because they are not dull and creepy and humorless and war-oriented like the engineers across the quad.  And our most impressive critics have commonly been such English majors, and they are squeamish about technology to this very day.  So it is natural for them to despise science fiction. (p. 781)

In light of scores of similar commentaries from other writers and readers over the intervening half-century, Vonnegut's opening statements sound very familiar.  Perhaps there is already this image of an ivory tower doing battle against the unwashed heathens of "popular fiction" floating in some readers' minds now, but the next couple of paragraphs derail this apparent train of thought, as Vonnegut veers into another topic, one that I think can still sting those who become so invested in "their" field of reading/writing:

But there are those who adore being classified as science-fiction writers anyway, who are alarmed by the possibility that they might someday be known simply as ordinary short-story writers and novelists who mention, among other things, the fruits of engineering and research.  They are happy with the status quo because their colleagues love them the way members of old-fashioned big families were supposed to do.  Science-fiction writers meet often, comfort and praise one another, exchange single-spaced letters of twenty pages and more, booze it up affectionately, and one way or another have a million heart-throbs and laughs.

I have run with them some, and they are generous and amusing souls, but I must now make a true statement that will put them through the roof:  They are joiners.  They are a lodge.  If they didn't enjoy having a gang of their own so much, there would be no such category as science fiction.  They love to stay up all night, arguing the question, "What is science fiction?"  One might as usefully inquire, "What are the Elks?  And what is the Order of the Eastern Star?" (pp. 781-782)

Now this, this puts in words my own feelings in recent years when it comes to SF:  why is it so damn important to belong to a created "community" in which there are some seemingly oddball customs and traditions whose purpose seems more to categorize and exclude, all in the name of some nebulous "essence of science fiction," while leaving those who tinker and dabble, mix and match, all on the outside, being a sort of pariah or leper to those who are in the club?  What is the sort of mentality that fuels such desires to belong and to exclude?  Vonnegut continues with a discussion of taste and desire that span several paragraphs.  Below are two segments from paragraphs that cover nearly half of the essay:

[...]The people in the field who can be charged fairly with tastelessness are 75 percent of the writers and 95 percent of the readers – or not so much tastelessness, really, as childishness.  Mature relationships, even with machines, do not titillate the unwashed majority.[...]

I taught for a while in a mildly unusual school for mildly unusual high-school children, and current science fiction was catnip to the boys, any science fiction at all.  They couldn't tell one story from another, thought they were all neat, keen.  What appealed to them so, I think, aside from the novelty of comic books without pictures, was the steady promise of futures which they, just as they were, could handle.  In such futures they would be high-ranking noncoms at the very least, just as they were, pimples, virginity, and everything. (pp. 782-783)

Yet this is not a blistering attack on "immature" readers, but rather an acknowledgement of just who, in the so-called "Golden Age of SF," read those early SF pulps.  There is something of that attitude, that desire to recapture, if not outright replicate, that initial burst of excitement, of being able to place one's self, just as we are, into stories of derring-do and heroism.  This sense I suspect underlies part of the protests of those who claim that SF has moved into realms in which they cannot participate as much.  It is never easy dealing with a sense of exclusion, especially after a period in which those with similar views were doing much of the excluding, implicitly as well as explicitly.

But this sense of inclusion also encompasses particular interests.  Sometimes readers (and occasionally writers, critics, and editors) feel the need to draw in "outside" interests to make everything nice, tidy, and all of one piece.  This can be seen in attempts to include certain literary works as SF (or inversely, to deny that certain other works cannot be viewed through other, non-SFnal perspectives).  Vonnegut addresses this in the following paragraph:

Most of them did graduate from high school, by the way.  And many of them now cheerfully read about futures and presents and even pasts which nobody can handle – 1984, Invisible Man, Madame Bovary.  They are particularly hot for Kafka.  Boomers of science fiction might reply, "Ha!  Orwell and Ellison and Flaubert and Kafka are science-fiction writers, too!"  They often say things like that.  Some are crazy enough to try to capture Tolstoy.  It is as though I were to claim that everybody of note belonged fundamentally to Delta Upsilon, my own lodge, incidentally, whether he knew it or not.  Kafka would have been a desperately unhappy D.U. (p. 783)

Vonnegut wraps up his article with a prediction, one that can be seen today.  Somehow, I suspect that if this essay could be updated with references to recent events that the substance would still stand:

The lodge will dissolve.  All lodges do, sooner or later.  And more and more writers in "the mainstream," as science-fiction people call the world outside the file drawer, will include technology in their tales, will give it at least the respect due in a narrative to a wicked stepmother.  Meanwhile, if you write stories that are weak on dialogue and motivation and characterization and common sense, you could do worse than thrown in a little chemistry or physics, or even witchcraft, and mail them off to the science-fiction magazines. (p. 784)

Something tells me that Vonnegut might take a dim view of self-professed "geek culture" advocates, or at least view them as being merely yet another iteration of a long line of those who conflate material details with subject essences when it comes to discussing the components of a cultural artifact.  But that is more likely my own interjection into some interesting thoughts initially published in 1965.  Hopefully by the time I am truly an old man that even this latest "lodge" will have dissolved and the literary circles of exclusion/inclusion of readers, writers, and ideas will have either been broken or at least transformed into something else.

A fine quote for a Friday in December

However the topic is considered, the problem of language has never been simply one problem among others.  But never as much as at present has it invaded, as such, the global horizon of the most diverse researches and the most heterogeneous discourses, diverse and heterogeneous in their intention, method, and ideology.  The devaluation of the word "language" itself, and how, in the very hold it has upon us, it betrays a loose vocabulary, the temptation of a cheap seduction, the passive yielding to fashion, the consciousness of the avant-garde, in other words – ignorance – are evidences of this effect.  This inflation of the sign "language" is the inflation of the sign itself, absolute inflation, inflation itself.  Yet, by one of its aspects or shadows, it is itself still a sign:  this crisis is also a symptom.  It indicates, as if in spite of itself, that a historico-metaphysical epoch must finally determine as language the totality of its problematic horizon.  It must do so not only because all that desire had wished to wrest from the play of language finds itself recaptured within that play but also because, for the same reason, language itself is menaced in its very life, helpless, adrift in the threat of limitlessness, brought back to its own finitude at the very moment when its limits seem to disappear, when it ceases to be self-assured, contained, and guaranteed by the infinite signified which seemed to exceed it.

– Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, beginning to Chapter 1

Maybe I'll re-read it and write a review in January?  Would that be of interest to any?

An interesting quote on power and "freedom of speech"

Going to be writing a review of Robert Darnton's Censors at Work:  How States Shaped Literature in the next few days, but I thought this quote from his introduction might provide some food for thought when it comes to discussing the concept of freedom of speech:

In arguing for fundamental rights, philosophers use abstractions, but they generally understand that ideas take root in systems of power and communication.  John Locke, the philosopher most identified with theories of natural rights, did not invoke freedom of speech when pre-publication censorship ceased to be a rule of law in England.  Instead, he welcomed Parliament's refusal to renew the Licensing Act, which provided for censorship, as a victory over the booksellers in the Stationers' Company, whom he despised for their monopolistic practices and shoddy products.  Milton also railed against the Stationers' Company in Areopagitica, the greatest manifesto in English for freedom of press – great, but limited (no "popery" or "open superstition" to be permitted).  These examples, and others one could cite (Diderot, for instance) do not prove that philosophers failed to advocate the freedom of press as a matter of principle but rather that they understood it as an ideal to be defended in a real world of economic interests and political lobbies.  For them, liberty was not an unworldly norm but a vital principle of political discourse, which they worked into the social reconstruction of reality that took place in seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Europe.  Many of us live in the world that they created, a world of civil rights and shared values.  The Internet did not condemn that moral order to obsolescence.  Nothing would be more self-defeating than to argue against censorship while dismissing the tradition that leads from the ancients through Milton and Locke to the First Amendment and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This argument may sound suspiciously high-minded.  It has more than a whiff of Whiggishness, and it may smell like rank liberalism.  I must confess to liberal sympathies myself and to finding Areopagitica one of the most moving polemical works that I have ever read.  But I also should amit that I sympathize with a second approach to the subject, which undercuts the first.  Whether spoken or written, words exert power.  In fact, the power of speech operates in ways that are not fundamentally different from ordinary actions in the everyday world.  Speech acts, as understood by linguistic philosophers, are intended to produce effects in the surrounding environment; and when they take written form, there is no reason to associate them exclusively with literature.  Some literary theorists go so far as to argue that it is meaningless to separate out a category, hallowed and hedged by constitutional restrictions, called freedom of speech.  As Stanley Fish proclaimed in a provocative essay, "There is no such thing as freedom of speech – and it's a good thing, too." (pp. 18-19)

Yes, I sense a very detailed review in the near future.

A few quotes from books I've been browsing through recently

Interesting how a few of them can be connected thematically:

It is not that religion is delusional by nature, nor that the individual, beyond present-day religion, rediscovers his most suspect psychological origins.  But religious delusion is a function of the secularization of culture:  religion may be the object of delusional belief insofar as the culture of a group no longer permits the assimilation of religious or mystical beliefs in the present context of experience.

– Michel Foucault (1962), Mental Illness and Psychology, p. 81, used as an epigraph for Religion and culture, edited by Jeremy R. Carrette

Once inside the house again I remembered to try not to listen to the sound of the machines so long as all those others so I would be smarter when I got older and less hurt inside for certain whiles about the way things went on without me in the daily organism, though as that went on too I began to feel too I wasn't changing and anyway the effect of our inbred-from-Adam-and-Eve origins were beginning more and more to make effect in all of us.  Some days inside the house the days inside the house went on so long and still the digits on the machines' clocks would not blink; I could feel inside me, as the time stayed like that sometimes for some great lengths, the old National Anthem squirting through my organs into the surrounding furniture and glass, sucked out of my teeth and face in all its daily iterations of ads and silent thinking and holy money, into the house where then the house would chew it up; soon each time the house would kill the Anthem into a silence longer than all my cells lined up one after another in a queue inside my wanting and that silence was the new Anthem and that was warm.

– Blake Butler, 300,000,000 (pp. 10-11)

Life became severe for Marius; eating his clothes and his watch was nothing, but he also went through that indescribable course which is called "chewing the cud."  This is a horrible thing which contains days without bread, nights without sleep, evenings without candle, a house without fire, weeks without work, a future without hope, a threadbare coat, an old hat at which the girls laugh, the door which you find locked at night because you have not paid your rent, the insolence of the porter and the eating-house keeper, the grins of neighbors, humiliations, dignity trampled under foot, any work taken, disgust, bitterness, and desperation.  Marius learned how all this is devoured, and how it is often the only thing which a man has to eat.  At that moment of life when a man requires pride because he requires love, he felt himself derided because he was meanly dressed, and ridiculous because he was poor.  At the age when youth swells the heart with an imperial pride, he looked down more than once at his worn-out boots, and knew the unjust shame and the burning blushes of wretchedness.  It is an admirable and terrible trial, from which the weak come forth infamous and the strong sublime.  It is the crucible into which destiny throws a man whenever it wishes to have a scoundrel or a demi-god.

– Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, Part III, Book V, Chapter I

My grandmother tells us
it's the way of the South.  Colored folks used to stay
where they were told that they belonged.  But
times are changing.
And people are itching to go where they want.

This evening, though,
I am happy to belong
to Nicholtown.

– From "at the end of the day," Jacqueline Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming (p. 54)

A quote from Tolkien's translation of Beowulf

I've been reading J.R.R. Tolkien's just-published prose translation of Beowulf for the past few days, alternating between that and the bilingual verse translation done by Seamus Heaney.  While I recognize that Tolkien's prose translation was more of a "working notes" edition that perhaps could have been polished a bit more (and sadly, a direct verse translation, incomplete as it was, was not included in this book), there certainly are passages that have charmed me, such as this one:

The flame flashed forth, light there blazed within, even as of heaven radiantly shines the candle of the sky.  He gazed about that house, then turning went along the wall, grasping upraised that hard weapon by the hilt, in ire undaunted the knight of Hygelac.  That blade the warrior bold did not despise; nay, he thought now swiftly to requite Grendel for those many dire assaults that he had made upon the Western Danes, far oftener than that one last time, slaying in slumber the companions of Hrothgar's hearth, devouring as they slept fifteen of the people of the Danes, and others as many bearing forth away, a plunder hideous.  For that he had given him his reward, that champion in his wrath, so that on his couch he saw now Grendel lying weary of war, bereft of life, such hurt had he erewhile in battle got at Heorot.  Far asunder sprang the corpse, when Grendel in death endured a stroke of hard sword fiercely swung; his head was cloven from him. (pp. 58-59)

For comparison's sake, here's Heaney's verse translation of the same part:

A light appeared and the place brightened
the way the sky does when heaven's candle
is shining clearly.  He inspected the vault:
with sword held high, its hilt raised
to guard and threaten, Hygelac's thane
scouted by the wall in Grendel's wake.
Now the weapon was to prove its worth.
The warrior determined to take revenge
for every gross act Grendel had committed –
and not only for that one occasion
when he'd come to slaughter the sleeping troops,
fifteen of Hrothgar's house-guards
surprised on their benches and ruthlessly devoured,
and as many again carried away,
a brutal plunder.  Beowulf in his fury
now settled that score:  he saw the monster
in his resting place, war-weary and wrecked,
a lifeless corpse, a casualty
of the battle in Heorot.  The body gaped
at the stroke dealt to it after death:
Beowulf cut the corpse's head off.
(lines 1570-1590, p. 109)

I'll leave it up to you to decide which version appeals to you most.

Here are the first three paragraphs to a new book. Would these captivate you?

I just started reading Porochista Khakpour's recently-released second novel (and one based on Persian legend), The Last Illusion, when I read these first three paragraphs:

Exactly once upon a time in a small village in northern Iran, a child of the wrong color was born. 

Khanoom (the Persian word for "lady," what everyone knew his mother as) was forty-seven when she gave birth to the boy.  He was the last child of eight, his closest sibling nineteen years older and all grown.  He had been a mistake from the beginning – sex being Khanoom's least visited whim – a cursed gift from her husband as he lay on his deathbed. 

Nobody imagined a dying man could produce the seed of another child, and yet.  But a child like that, sure – there should have been a cautionary tale about it, a proverb at the very least.  When Khanoom had him, months after her husband was dead, she looked at that sick yellow-white thing in her arms, and the only thing that made sense was to blame the child's problems on the diseased seed.  This tiny silently crying baby – his crying made no sound, which made her suspect he was mute – was clearly not well, having come from a half most unwell.  His hair and skin were the color of – no use to sugarcoat it, Khanoom would snap – piss.  He was something so unlike them, unlike all of nature.  It made her miss her dead husband less, the memory of that final hard explosive orgasm she recalled – an ejaculation that she imagined like a hot toxic pus, a poison that would have spawned an even more unthinkable demon, had it not been for Khanoom's own khanoomly egg.  It gave Khanoom nightmares to hold the boy even, no matter what the cousins and neighbors who visited said, trying their best to make the best of it.

Knowing beforehand that this is a modern take on a millennia-old Persian poem on a legendary fighter, what struck me was Khakpour's use of digressions to stretch out the "problem" of her newborn son, as it made me more curious about the events leading up to his untimely birth than I otherwise would have been if she had written this in a more straightforward fashion.

Way too early to tell if The Last Illusion will live up to the promise of its blurb (I had singled this out for future purchase back in January due to a brief description on The Millions), but it certainly is off to a promising start.  But what about you?  Would this sort of writing appeal to you or would it leave you feeling indifferent or even disinclined to read it?

Interesting quote regarding history and borders

Finished reading Croatian writer Daša Drndić's 2007 novel, Sonnenschein (released in English in 2014 as Trieste), Friday night.  It is a very, very moving novel and I plan on reviewing it over the next week.  Here is a quote from early in the novel that should give readers a little clearer image of what this story is about:

The war ends and what is left of the Baar family returns to Gorizia, to the new border rife with invisible malignant cells resembling particles of atomic dust.  Along that border, as along all borders, deep into the soil is thrust the steel axis of a Ringelspiel, a merry-go-round, a lively carousel doomed to repeat eternally the invidious drama of family sagas.  History – that lying, traitorous mother of life – continues, logorrhoeically, to spin its tiresome story, secretly dreaming up new borderlands one after another.  And a border, like every long, deep wound, even if it heals and does not turn into a wellspring of putrid stench, is streaked with proud scar tissue that separates the living from the dead.  A border is a "land" of spirits howling as they seek a form to assume. (e-book p. 31)

Hopefully, this quote will lead to a few readers deciding to take a chance on this fine book.

Currently reading Miklós Szentkuthy's Towards the One & Only Metaphor

Below is a quote from an early part of Miklós Szentkuthy's 1935 novel, Towards the One & Only Metaphor, published in English translation in 2013 and translated by Tim Wilkinson:

Yesterday a friend of mine, who for me will be a permanent symbol of a non-lyrical, 'objective' person (an absolute musician and absolute mathematician temperament, with heaps of ethical 'douceur') took me into the observatory and, among the other things, pointed out a ball-shaped star cluster (Messier 13) on the telescope; on his table I found masses of mathematical books (afterwards I bought Eddington's New Pathways in Science).  Nowadays I do not perceive nil in love and a mathematizing scientific realism as being an antithesis:  these scientific truths can lead 'out of' life just as much as poetic lyricism.  Life is:  comble d'imprécision.  What do I mean by life, I ask myself?  In what way do I arbitrarily narrow down and broaden out the word, the elastic boundaries of which everyone has already exceeded with the most comical irresponsibility, whether they be a buffoon politician or a dogmatic religious nut.  By life I mean the life of an average man on the street, an ordinary Joe, but at the same time also of a few sober 'heroes.'  For him poetry is not infralife, science not ultralife. (pp. 24-25)

Very promising Modernist work so far...

An interesting quote by Nobel Prize winner Odysseas Elytis on poetry and death

I was thumbing through a used copy of Odysseas Elytis's Eros, Eros, Eros:  Selected & Last Poems  when I saw this highlighted passage from his "Open Papers" (translation from the Greek by Olga Broumas):

It is correct to give the unknown its due; that's why we must write.  Because Poetry unlearns us from the world, such as we find it; the world of decay we come to see as the only path over decay, just as Death is the only path to resurrection.  I know I speak as if I had no right, as if I were almost ashamed to love life.  It's true, once they forced me even to this.  No one knows; no one has ever discovered from where our passionate hatred toward the possibility of our salvation comes.  Perhaps we'd rather not know – but do know – that it exists, and that we are the reason we can neither know nor surpass it.  Willing or not, we are all hostages of the joy of which we deprive ourselves.  Here springs love's pre-eternal sadness. (p. 104)

His comment about "Poetry unlearns us from the world" rings very true for me.  One of the reasons why I enjoy reading poetry of all sorts is that sense of being unraveled and spun into something different, an experience I do not get anywhere near as much when I read prose or even when I watch a drama being performed.  Elsewhere in the collection, he returns to this theme when he states:  "Poetry begins where death is robbed of the last word."  This timeless yet deeply intimate quality of well-constructed poetry is something that I would love to teach others how to appreciate, but yet it is akin to walking up to a couple in a deep, engrossing conversation and trying to butt our ways in; decorum does play a role, sometimes.  But perhaps the key to entering into the poetic conversation will be easily discovered, if not in this time and place, then in another locale and period.

An interesting quote on reviewing by Joseph Brodsky

I was reading this article over at Brain Pickings on Nobel Prize-winning writer Joseph Brodsky's essays when I came across this quote:

The trouble with a reviewer is (minimum) threefold: (A) he can be a hack, and as ignorant as ourselves, (B) he can have strong predilections for a certain kind of writing, or simply be on the take with the publishing industry, and (C) if he is a writer of talent, he will turn his review-writing into an independent art form — Jorge Luis Borges is a case in point — and you may end up by reading reviews rather than the books themselves.

As as reviewer, I always fear A), likely commit B) fairly often, and have aspirations of C) on occasion, at least in terms of writing reviews worth reading, if not quite in the style of a Borges.  It is perhaps a trite truism when taken out of context, but I suspect that when considered at length, this quote can apply to more than just the composition of an 800-1500 word essay on a story or group of stories.  Yes, composition is the best word for this:  of what are we composed and how are our composed elements reflected in the things that we create?

Now I have another book to order in the near future, it seems.

Quotes from a few books I'm reading this week

Wise and knowing old women narrate that once, during the days of the Auspicious Fair at the Noble Village of Mehrauli around the sky-touching portal of the shrine of Khvajah Qutb sahib, Wazir Khanam and her father were on their way back to Delhi from the Fair.  Evening had broken out in the sky.  All those on the road were in a hurry to reach home.  For, in those days, the ruins of the Hauz-e-Shamsi had been clandestinely adopted by some Pandari rebels as their hideout.  Grabbing opportune moments, they preyed on the travellers of the night on that road.  So everyone was trying their best to get quickly past the environs of the Hauz-e Shamsi and the Hauz-e Khas.  AN axle of the light two-bullock cart in which Wazir and her father were travelling was worn out to start with, and had deteriorated further over the journey.  It was feared that the axle could break if the cart was driven faster.  The bullock cart was moving at a gentle pace and had been overtaken by everyone else on the road:  bullock carts, palanquins, tom johns.  Those who rode elephants, dromedaries, buggies or horse had easily overtaken all others and had disappeared quickly from sight and sound.

– from The Mirror of Beauty, by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi

One morning in the predawn Loreen roused Fan from her spot next to a sweaty-headed slumbering Star and ordered her to pack a bag.  They were going to go with Quig on a trip for a couple of nights.  Loreen didn't have to explain what was happening – she'd outlined the possibility several days before – but the reason for her presence was a mystery.  Fan had no choice, so she didn't ask any questions and simply readied her few things.  Within the hour the three of them were in a newer SUV kicking up a storm of dust on the road that led down to the bottom of the hill.  The weather had been hot and dry for a long time but now it seemed a genuine drought had descended upon the Smokes.  The rains came infrequently, and when they did come, they were brief.  The streams had all but disappeared and the level of the two wells of the compound had dropped below a meter and the men were arguing about where they ought to dig a third.  Cold Pond, where Fan swam with Sewey and Eli, was plagued with spongy islands of bright green algae, and even after the water drawn from it was boiled, the essence of something reptilian or freshly born of the mud stuck to the tongue in an undying time.

– from On Such a Full Sea, by Chang-rae Lee

She was the first to arrive where it seemed the wind no longer exhaled.  Several miles from town, the trees had entangled one another.  Their branches grew toward the ground, burying the leaves in the soil to blind their eyes so the sun would not promise them tomorrow with its rays.  It was only the path that was reluctant to cloak its surface completely with grasses, as though it anticipated it would soon end its starvation for the warmth of bare feet that gave it life.

The long and winding paths were spoken of as "snakes" that one walked upon to encounter life or to arrive at the places where life lived.  Like snakes, the paths were now ready to shed their old skins for new ones, and such occurrences take time with the necessary interruptions.  Today, her feet began one of those interruptions.  It may be that those whose years have many seasons are always the first to rekindle their broken friendship with the land, or it may just have happened this way.

– from Radiance of Tomorrow, by Ishmael Beah

Which of these passages most interest you and why?  Are there any that would put you off of wanting to read the book from which they came?

Some choice quotes from one of my favorite writers

The following are taken from excerpts/pieces that appear in Music & Literature:  Issue Two Spring 2013, which is devoted to Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai and two collaborators, film maker Béla Tarr and illustrator Max Neumann.  The first two are by Krasznahorkai himself:

I speak of that which has never existed, of a state between people, the continuance of which everyone, every human being has desired with inconceivable yearning for the whole duration of these bloody millenia, but which precisely because of him, because of this yearning human creature, indeed, directly because of the scandalous equivocation of his desire, has never been attained.  A mere human is a destructive being, a mere artist is not.  In every one of his creations, even if it is often abhorrence that motivates him, a joyful pain may make itself felt, a joyful pain, yes, that what he is bringing to life, the work, is capable of giving a form to that which truly cannot be uttered here, a mere word – comprised, altogether, of five letters in English, and in Hebrew of four – a word in connection with which I should like ot make a recommendation:  that for the duration of this festival we remain silent and do not utter it, that we remain profoundly and mutually silent, but with such strength that our entire Festival will only be about that, about this silence:  so that it may be present without having to be pronounced; because silence, silence mutually maintained about something has its own intensity, and grants to a word a mighty weight, a word, which of course is still just a word; a word evoked, with my counsel, in silence; and the broken fragments, the components of which now, with your permission, I would like to show to you. (pp. 3-4)

 שָׁלוֹם

 – from a speech given at the May 2012 Jerusalem Book Fair.  Translated by Ottilie Mulzet

The second passage is from an interview conducted by Noémi Aponyi and Tibor Sennyey Weiner:

Not long ago, an interview appeared in which you stated that it would be best if "only writers and poets occupied themselves with literature again."  Does this imply that such writers who have "put themselves up for sale" should not talk about literature, and neither should such critics? 

No.  I was speaking of a desire, namely, that it would be beautiful, really and truly beautiful, if Hungarian literature would regain its independence and its freedom from that system of cultural power, that system against which it is fighting a losing battle because it forms a part of it, that is to say it is compromised.  The greater part of the contemporary literary world (a large part, but not the entirety) gave itself blindly over to this system in newly capitalist Hungary, and it itself venerates the laws propagated by this system as something irrevocable, although these laws are anything but irrevocable.  Who made artists believe that art can be practiced only "successfully?"  Who made them believe that for a book to reach its goal and its readers, the "taste-makers" are absolutely necessary?  How could they have allowed the critics, the editors, the owners of the chain bookshops, and so on, to have so much power?  And who made them believe that they are truly artists?  It is one huge mistake, and by this I mean not only in Hungary but in all of European literary life, and it is not that I feel any personal affront, I am adequately insulated – the situation is far graver than that.  Artists have come to believe that they too, just like other people, need money and fame, money and fame for everyday life, moreover for being able to live a bourgeois lifestyle; and that these two repugnant things are seen as necessary for everything is not only tragic but ridiculous as well.  What kind of artist or writer lives like that?  Who is going to believe even a single line that he writes?  What kind of esteem can the art of our age garner for itself after even one such bout of deal-making?  No, the artist's needs are few:  let there be something for him to eat and a place to live, and then every day he should circumambulate the city, the country, like the mendicant monks of old.  Nothing whatever can be more important for him than his own personal dignity, and this is exactly what he loses forever after the very first deal-making transaction. (p. 30)

And finally, a quote from Jonathan Rosenbaum's "Sátántangó (Film and Novel) as Faulknerian Reverie":

As someone who grew up in northwestern Alabama and spent the first sixteen years of my life there (1943-1959), I have treasured Light in August, which I first read shortly after I left for a New England boarding school, as the novel that best captures the quasi-totalitarian climate of that culture, especially in relation to race.  Undoubtedly one of the reasons why Sátántangó, which I first encountered as a film seventeen years before I could read the novel in English translation but after having intermittently read portions of Joëlle Dufeuilly's 1993 French translation, Tango de Satan, reminded me of Faulkner's masterpiece was its own implicit depiction (and implicit moral indictment) of another totalitarian climate.  Even though this is not clearly not addressed as directly as Faulkner addresses racism in Light in August, it seems no less clear that Tarr and Krasznahorkai recognize and understand this climate with comparable depth, not to mention sorrow and outrage, and regard it no less metaphysically as a blight on humanity.  So, whether it's willed or not, Sátántangó deserves to be regarded in both its forms as one of the great narratives about Stalinism and its alienating effects upon individuals and a collective – including, one should stress, the lingering effects of that Stalinism on a capitalist society. (p. 128)

I still have over half of this bound-volume issue to read, but hopefully these quotes will make a few readers here curious enough to investigate Krasznahorkai's writings.  He is one of the more important writers of the past quarter-century, I believe.

"The question of whether suicide helps man or not"

Currently reading (and sometimes thumbing through passages) the just-released English translation of 19th century Italian poet/writer Giacomo Leopardi's epic Zibaldone, a notebook of jotted-down thoughts and short essays and other assorted hodge-podges of thought.  Here is a lengthy quote taken from manuscript pages 2549-2552, which deals with suffering.  Here is the first part:

The question of whether suicide helps man or not (which is what knowing if it is reasonable or not, and can be chosen or not, comes down to) can be reduced to these simple terms.  Which of the two is better, suffering or not suffering?  As for pleasure, it is certain, [2550] immutable, and eternal that man in any condition of ife, even if he is happy according to the common definition, cannot feel it, since, as I have shown elsewhere [–>Z 532-35, 646-50], pleasure is always future, never present.  And just as, consequently, each man can be physically certain of never feeling any pleasure in his life, so, too, each can be certain of not spending a day without suffering, and the majority of men can be certain of not spending a day without suffering, and the majority of men can be certain of not spending a day without many serious sufferings, and some of not spending one without long-lasting and extremely serious sufferings (these are the so-called unhappy:  poor, incurably ill, etc. etc.).  Now I ask again, which is better, suffering or not suffering.  Certainly enjoyment, and maybe also enjoyment and suffering, would be better than simply not suffering (since nature and self-love propel us and carry us so strongly toward enjoyment that enjoyment and suffering is more pleasant than not being and not suffering, and, by not being, being unable to enjoy), but since enjoyment is impossible for man, it remains necessarily and naturally [2551] excluded from the whole question.  And we conclude that since not suffering is more helpful to man than suffering, and since he cannot live without suffering, it is mathematically true and certain that absolute not being is more beneficial and more fitting to man than being.  And that being is, precisely, harmful to man.   And therefore anyone who lives (if you take away religion) lives because of a pure formal error of calculation:  I mean the calculation of utility.  An error multiplied as many times as there are instants in our life, in each of which we prefer living to not living.  And we prefer it in fact no less than in intention, in desire, and in the mind's more or less deliberate, more or less tacit and implicit discourse.  An effect of self-love, deceived as in many other bad choices that it makes by thinking of them from the point of view of good, and the greatest good that is proper to it in those [2552] circumstances.

– Quoted from p. 1069 of the Michael Caesar and Franco D'Intino translation of Zibaldone  

I am going to have to think on this some while before providing my thoughts (plus I should note that Leopardi continues for another book page on this topic; this is a preface of sorts), but I think this quote should underscore why Leopardi's Zibaldone (just only now being translated in full into English) is an important work even in the early 21st century, nearly two centuries after the author's early death.

"If death is a postman"

I just started reading the English translation of Iraqi writer Sinan Antoon's The Corpse Washer (which was published in the US this month) when I read this passage:

I can almost hear death saying:  "I am what I am and haven't changed at all.  I am but a postman."

If death is a postman, then I receive his letters every day.  I am the one who opens carefully the bloodied and torn envelopes.  I am the one who washes them, who removes the stamps of death and dries and perfumes them, mumbling what I don't entirely believe in.  Then I wrap them carefully in white so they may reach their final reader – the grave.

But the letters are piling up, Father!  Tenfold more than what you used to see in the span of a week now pass before me in a day or two.  If you were alive, Father, would you say that that is fate and God's will?  I wish you were here so I could leave Mother with you and escape without feeling guilty.  You were heavily armed with faith, and that made your heart a castle.  My heart, by contrast, is an abandoned house whose windows are shattered and doors unhinged.  Ghosts play inside it, and the winds wail. (p. 3)

This novel, set primarily in 2003 Iraq, promises to be haunting for me, if this passage is any indication.  Not too many Anglo-American fictions these days are as direct and as poetic simultaneously as this quote.  Hopefully I'll find The Corpse Washer to be excellent; it certainly is off to a good start.

Here are the openers to two books. One of them won a major award. Can you guess which one?

Here are two quotes, each from books recently read or at least in the process of reading.  One of these two has won a major award.  Can you identify which won the award and who the two authors are for these quotes.  Quote #1:

One should never tell anyone anything or give information or pass on stories or make people remember beings who have never existed or trodden the earth or traversed the world, or who, having done so, are now almost safe in uncertain, one-eyed oblivion.  Telling is almost always done as a gift, even when the story contains and injects some poison, it is also a bond, a granting of trust, and rare is the trust or confidence that is not sooner or later betrayed, rare is the close bond that does not grow twisted or knotted and, in the end, become so tangled that a razor or knife is needed to cut it.  How many of my confidences remain intact, of all those I have offered up.  I, who have always laid such store by my own instinct and yet have still sometimes failed to listen to it, I, who have been ingenuous for far too long? (Less so now, less, but these things are very slow to fade.)  The confidences I shared with two friends remain preserved and intact, unlike those granted to another ten who lost or destroyed them; the meagre confidences shared with my father, and the chaste ones vouchsafed to my mother, which were very similar, if not the same, although those granted to her did not last very long, and she can no longer break them or, at least, only posthumously, if, one day, I were to make some unfortunate discovery, and something that was hidden ceased to be hidden; gone are the confidences given to sister, girlfriend, lover or wife, past, present or imaginary (the sister is usually the first wife, the child wife), for in such relationships it seems almost obligatory that one should, in the end, use what one knows or has seen against the beloved or the spouse – or the person who turns out to have been only momentary warmth and flesh – against whoever it was who proffered revelations and allowed a witness to their weaknesses and sorrows and was ready to confide, or against the person who absent-mindedly reminisced out loud on the pillow not even aware of the dangers, of the arbitrary eye always watching or the selective, biased ear always listening (often it's nothing very serious, for domestic use only, when cornered or on the defensive, to prove a point if caught in a tight dialectical spot during a prolonged discussion, then it has a purely argumentative application).

And now quote #2:

Thud, thud, thud.  Old Roger was banging a stick on our group log to get us up and out of our shelters.

'Wake up, you lazy newhairs.  If you don't hurry up, the dip will be over before we even get there, and all the bucks will have gone back up Dark!'

Hmmph, hmmph, hmmph, went the trees all around us, pumping and pumping hot sap from under ground.  Hmmmmmmm, went forest.  And from over Peckhamway came the sound of axes from Batwing group.  They were starting their wakings a couple of hours ahead of us, and they were already busy cutting down a tree.

Feel free to comment on the qualities/deficiencies of these introductory passages as well as guess who the two authors are.  I'll withhold my opinion of each for the time being; one I haven't yet finished reading.

Would you want to read this book after encountering this passage?

Taken from Jean-Marie Blas de Robles' Where Tigers are at Home, p. 313 American hardcover:

THE VERY END OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY:  "In consideration of the criminal proceedings, charges and information, the interrogations, replies and confessions of the aforesaid prosecutor; of the replies and confessions of the accused made in the presence of his lawyer and everything that has been placed before us, we declare the aforesaid Legaigneux guilty in fact and in law of copulation with a female donkey belonging to the same.  As public atonement for this crime we condemn him to be hanged and strangled by the executioner, from a gallows that will be erected in such and such a place; and before this death sentence is carried out, the aforesaid female donkey will be stunned and killed by the aforesaid executioner at the aforesaid place, in the presence of the accused."

If the animal is punished it is because it shares responsibility for the act with the man:  the man guilty of sodomy has stooped to the level of brute beasts, but the donkey committed the unpardonable crime and raising itself to the level of thinking beings.  They are both "against nature."  By betraying the laws of the their species, they equally endanger the order of the world.

THE VERY END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY:  "Accused of attempted sodomy with a dolphin called Freddie, Alan Cooper, 38, justified the act by saying that he was only masturbating the animal to gain its friendship.  His lawyers based his defense on the fact that dolphins are notoriously licentious and are some of the rare animals who indulge in the sex act purely for pleasure.  Alan Cooper risks ten years in prison if the charge of clear intention of rectal or vaginal penetration is accepted and life if sodomy is proved beyond reasonable doubt." (Newcastle upon Tyne, England.)

Nearly halfway into this 817 page book and this is a fascinating look at 17th and current human attitudes toward life, sex, and existence (among a great many other things).  It contains Latin passages regarding the fucking of a woman and her pleasure in having not just her vagina but her anus penetrated, the etymology of "piranha," and a plethora of other things such as 17th century attempts to decipher hieroglyphics.  Certainly not for the prudish, but then again, I suspect there aren't too many regulars here who are prudes.  The squirrel erotica to the right doubtless weeds those out, no?

Fiction or Non-Fiction?

Here are some quotes taken from certain volumes of the Library of America that I own.  Some will be fiction, others non-fiction.  Can you identify which is which? (bonus if you can pinpoint the author(s) as well):

I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.  I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead.  With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road.

Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century.  This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.

The guitars cried out "Polk Country," "Red River" and just instrumental hits with no name, that still are played by all good box pickers.  The dancing was hilarious to put it mildly.  Babe, Lucy, Big Sweet, East Coast Mary and many other of the well-known women were there.  The men swung them lustily, but nobody asked me to dance.  I was just crazy to get into the dance, too.  I had heard my mother speak of it and praise square dancing to the skies, but it looked as if I was doomed to be a wallflower and that was a new rôle for me.  Even Cliffert didn't ask me to dance.  It was so jolly, too.  At the end of every set Joe Willard would trick the men.  Instead of calling out the next figure as expected he'd bawl out, "Grab yo' partners and march up to de table and treat."  Some of the men did, but some would bolt for the door and stand about the fire and woof until the next set was called.

When John Burns, the great English labor leader and present member of the Cabinet, visited Chicago, he was asked by a reporter for his opinion of that city.  "Chicago," he answered, "is a pocket edition of hell."  Some time later, when Burns was going aboard his steamer to sail to England, he was approached by another reporter, who wanted to know if he had yet changed his opinion of Chicago.  "Yes, I have," was the prompt reply.  "My present opinion is that hell is a pocket edition of Chicago."

An army of cavalry and foot was passing.  It moved like a mob; its lines broken, as though fleeing from some terrible defeat.  The dolmans of the hussars, the heavy shakos of the guards, Hanoverian light horse, with their flat leather caps and flowing red plumes, were all jumbled together in bobbing disorder.  Behind the cavalry came the infantry, a wild sea of waving sabertaches, sloped muskets, crossed shoulder belts and swinging cartridge boxes.  Tod recognized the scarlet infantry of England with their white shoulder pads, the black infantry of the Duke of Brunswick, the French grenadiers with their enormous white gaiters, the Scotch with bare knees under plaid skirts.

As we travelled towards a land of liberty, my heart would at times leap for joy.  At other times, being, as I was, almost constantly on my feet, I felt as though I could travel no further.  But when I thought of slavery with its Democratic whips – its Republican chains – its evangelical blood-hounds, and its religious slave-holders – when I thought of all this paraphernalia of American Democracy and Religion behind me, and the prospect of liberty before me, I was encouraged to press forward, my heart was strengthened, and I forgot that I was tired or hungry. 

It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is gone through.  There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there may be a caster of state.  How they use the salt, precisely – who knows?  Certain I am, however, that a king's head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad.  Can it be, though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery?  Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this regal process, because in common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing.  In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere.  As a general rule, he can't amount to much in his totality.

Brief reaction to a quote from Jim Holt's Why Does the World Exist?

Currently reading the National Book Critics Circle Award-nominated Why Does the World Exist?:  An Existential Detective Story, by Jim Holt.  Fascinating reading about 1/3 into it.  Here's a quote from Holt's interview with Richard Swinburne:

And why, I asked, is simplicity such an epistemic virtue?

"There are innumerable examples to illustrate this," he said, "and not just from science.  A crime has been committed.  A bank has been robbed.  There are three clues.  A chap called Jones was reported to be near the scene of the crime at the time of the robbery.  Jones's fingerprints were found on the safe.  Money from a bank robbery was found in Jones's garret.  Plausible explanation:  Jones did the crime.  Why do we think that?  Well, if the hypothesis that Jones did the crime was true, you would probably find such clues; and if it wasn't, you probably wouldn't.  But there are an infinite number of other hypotheses that meet this dual condition – for example, the hypothesis that somebody dressed up like Jones as a joke and happened to walk near the bank; and another person, not in collusion with the first, had a grudge against Jones and put Jones's fingerprints on the safe; and a third person, having no connection to the previous two, put the proceeds from a quite different robbery in Jones's garret.  That hypothesis also meets the dual condition for being true.  But we wouldn't think much of any lawyer who put it forward.  Why?  Because the first hypothesis is simpler.  Science always reaches for the simplest hypothesis.  If it didn't, one could never move beyond the data.  To abandon the principle of simplicity would be to abandon all reasoning about the external world." (p. 96)

While this line of reasoning was used to set up a rationale for the existence of God (i.e. the simplest explanation for how an universe that contains everything that it does is one that posits God), I was struck by some tangential explanations that can be found in Swinburne's last few sentences.  The first is the "science always reaches for the simplest hypothesis."  If this is in fact true, then could it be that in this grasping for the most concise and "simple" that scientists may dismiss the more complex and complicated explanations because they do not jive with held beliefs on the theories with the fewer dependent conditions being most likely to be most valid?  In a perverse way, this could take Adolf Grünbaum's comments earlier in the book regarding complex theories not necessarily being the least valid and turn his non-theist conclusion on its head. (Mind you, this is a conclusion that in turn could be reached through a simplistic interpretation and not something that would refute Grünbaum's stance on the question of the origin of "something", if there can be such a thing as "origin.")  Furthermore, for some, the possible resultant distrust in the conclusions reached by a methodological "scientific" approach can perhaps explain some of the rationale for views of the world, its prime movers, etc. that others might consign to the category of "conspiracy theories."  Reductionism by some oddly seems to cause a reactive expansion of (im)plausible hypotheses and guesses on the part of others.

Curious to see if Holt's book will address these tangential thoughts of mine, because it seems to me so far that he's setting up a lot of metaphysical and theoretical physics pins for a giant bowling ball to come crashing down (or not) on them.

An interesting quote from a literary study I'm reading

Currently reading Lauren Elkin and Scott Esposito's recently-released The End of Oulipo?, which touches upon the possibilities that could conceivably still be mined from this famous literary movement.  I am particularly enjoying right now Esposito's opening essay, in which he makes this observation about the work of Argentine writer César Aira (an author I've praised here before, if not quite as coherently as in the quote below):

The yield from Aira's experimentation is a distinct, idiosyncratic feeling of lightness that infuses his prose, as well as an openness to juxtaposition that creates unusual metaphors and novelistic structures.  The ideas of spontaneity and improvisation are constant tropes in Aira's literature; he has claimed that when he writes in cafes he regularly puts into his fiction whatever he happens to observe, no matter how incongruous to whatever he is writing at the moment.  But this is far from the semi-automatic writing of Jouet:  a day's work for Aira will occasionally yield a page of writing, and he has stated that he throws away far more novels than he completes after being disappointed with his results.  Aira relies on his eccentric method to spur his intellect and harness improvisation, but he does not subsume his creativity to it.  Also in contrast to Jouet – fêted as a member of the Oulipo and published by France's most prestigious presses –  Aira is constantly at odds with the market, viciously satirizing literary culture and artistic pretension while publishing his books with tiny micropresses on the margins of the Argentine scene.  Aira has tipped the sacred cows of Latin American letters and argued passionately for new heroes; his authentically polemical spirit puts the lie to Jouet's critiques from within the mainstream (p. 49/135, e-book)

I could easily quote more, but this alone has made me reconsider when I am planning to re-read/read more of Aira's fictions (there is a new e-book edition of his short fiction, Relatos reunidos, that comes out on Valentine's Day in the US).  The description of Aira's approach and how it touches upon and then diverges from "traditional" Oulipo approaches provides a framework from which I myself, a reader of several of Aira's short novels in Spanish, can re-evaluate his work and test the observations that Esposito has made in his essay.  If I like nothing else from The End of Oulipo? (a lie, as I did like some of the comments on Georges Perec), then this little segment alone has made the book worth reading.

Don't know when I'll write a formal review, though.  May write an essay in conjunction with my recent reading of the newly-expanded English translation of Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style that came out back in January.  If so, it'll likely appear first on Gogol's Overcoat and then here after some delay, as I'm going to be alternating between posting original essays/reviews there and here, depending upon the subject matter.

Frases de unos libros que estoy leyendo

En Facebook la semana pasada, escribí que quería escribir más en español.  Sin embargo, lo que no dije que era quería también leer y escribir más reseñas de las historias (y novelas) latinoamericas y españolas.  Aunque continuaré escribir las reseñas en inglés aquí, a veces publicaré unas citas de los libros que estoy leyendo.  Aquí son unos ejemplos:

Adelaida García Morales, El Sur:

Mañana, en cuanto amanezca, iré a visitar tu tumba, papá.  Me han dicho que la hierba crece salvaje entre sus grietas y que jamás lucen flores frescas sobre ella.  Nadie te visita.  Mamá se marchó a su tierra y tú no tenías amigos.  Decían que eras tan raro...Pero a mí nunca me extrañó.  Pensaba entonces que tú eras un mago y que los magos eran siempre grandes solitarios.

Javier Marías, Los enamoramientos:

La última vez que vi a Miguel Desvern o Deverne fue también la última que lo vio su mujer, Luisa, lo cual no dejó de ser extraño y quizá injusto, ya que ella era eso, su mujer, y yo era en cambio una desconocida y jamás había cruzado con él una palabra.  Ni siquiera sabía su nombre, lo supe sólo cuando ya era tarde, cuando apareció su foto en el periódico, apuñalado y media descamisado y a punto de convertirse en un muerto, si es que no lo era ya para su propia conciencia susente que nunca volvió a presentarse:  lo último de lo que se debió de dar cuenta fue de que lo acuchillaban por confusión y sin causa, es decir, imbécilmente, y además una y otra vez, sin salvación, no una sola, con voluntad de suprimirlo del mundo y echarlo sin dilación de la tierra, allí y entonces.  Tarde para qué, me pregunto.  La verdad es que lo ignoro.

Isabel Allende, Mi País Inventado:

Nací en medio de la humareda y mortandad de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y la mayor parte de mi juventud transcurrió esperando que el planeta volara en pedazos cuando alguien apretara distraídamente un botón y se dispararan las bombas atómicas.  Nadie esperaba vivir muy largo; andábamos apurados tragándonos cada momento antes de que nos sorprendiera el apocalipsis, de modo que no había tiempo para examinar el propio ombligo y tomar notas, como se usa ahora.

Silvina Ocampo, Cornelia frente al espejo:

De todo el mundo me despido por carta, salvo de vos.  La casa está sola.  A las ocho Claudio cerró con llave la puerta de la calle.  ¡Cornelia!  Mi nombre me hace reír.  Qué quieres, en los momentos más trágicos me río o enciendo un cigarrillo y me echo al suelo y te miro como si nada malo tuviera que suceder.  Ciertas posturas nos hacen creer en la felicidad.  A veces estar acostada me hizo creer en el amor.

Ángela Hernández Núñez, El pesp del rocío:

Vi a Felipe Alfonso olvidar por instantes su nombre, obcecado con la idea de su posible inexistencia.  Día a día, absorto en minucias que antes no merecieron su atención, extrayéndoles relieves forzosos con el único instrumento que manejaba:  la palabra.  Lo reconocí angustiado por instalar cada suceso cotidiano en coordenadas que conjuraran su discurrir voluble, y unieran su mundo mental a inmediatas materialidades.

Alina Diaconú, ¿Qué nos pasa, Nicolás?:

Acabo de vomitar en la calle.

Ignoro qué es lo que pudo haberme caído mal, si sólo tomé un desayuno liviano (té y dos galletas de agua).

Qué me sucedió, no lo sé.

Sé que apoyé en un poste, y que de mi boca salió una viscosa catarata amarilla.  Mientras tanto, la gente – desde los automóviles – me miraba.  Mientras tanto, la gente – desde la vereda de enfrente – me miraba.  Mientras tanto, los que pasaban a mi alrededor, todos, me miraban.