memory is Hell (a museum)
Someone asked me if I joined in the Hispanic-American Immigration walk-outs/marches of the past few weeks, being that I'm Mexican and darkly so. Did I feel any obligation to attend? Nope, not at all, I'm no copper ingot. I was there at the very first rally downtown, not totally, I was merely there. I woke up that morning in a mood to go swimming, it was very hot, but I wound up doing quite the opposite or perhaps the same, that is, milling around. For days, there was a peculiar message being circulated among my countrymen, an eager plot to suffocate a street with bodies--a street I'm rather fond of seeing--and although some of the sweatier bodies I can do without, I dressed mine up in white and answered the call. As a whole, it reminded me of recess in the second grade, some Halloween event with a specific theme: white zombies or Greek tunics. In the end, when the streets were scarce of undergrowth, when the build-up of Brown had trickled down into its operative silence, I felt so full of sweets and, as I do at the severance of any warm embrace, a little childish and alone. I long for those soft touches that we lose without a sound. I want to wire my guts with ringing bells.
My journal gives the impression that I don't much care about politics or world affairs. You can go ahead and accuse me of thinking like a dinosaur, you're quite right. I think about the future and past with alarming consequence, but I'm too involved in the present to perceive it rationally enough. See, when a writer writes a good story, I mean, a story that's mostly free of her own egotistical intrusion, she originates a beginning and an end, and then it's easy for her to exert a middle. The middle is mostly composed of ample pairings, subtle contrasts that mimic right/wrong, fun/boring, pain/pleasure, man/woman, etc. in object and action. A writer who is constantly thinking about writing has better commerce with memories and hopes, she will sally forward and hook into as many variable futures as possible, in effect her present state is the nexus of a taut web, never static, always vibrant, yet adhering to timeless themes. Working with the present is oppressive, bothersome. Or maybe I'm just incapable of setting forth opinions on subjects which need be informed via up-to-the-minute news and reports. For example, I've never felt the slightest urge to reveal my thoughts on the war. Most of the time, my imagination conspires with my memory and--in cahoots--both get the better of my passion, such that I can't get down to brass tacks, gentlemen. Intelligence is a tool of the will. I'll say one thing though: people were sure waving a lot of American flags. The streets were absolutely crowded with American flags! I had this funny thought that these were probably the same flags that lay stored and unused in people's closets and bins since after 9/11, the last real squeal of patriotism. It's nice to see the upheaval of forgotten playthings. I wonder when I'll see some Lakers flags again, flapping by on a car window. Not too long ago, this was a city of champions.
There's something funny about getting spam from "Single Blacks" claiming to be able to find my soulmate.
I had a dream where I was wandering around a museum with windows in the style of trompe l'oiel. Well, you wouldn't know it was a museum, because the windows looked real enough, and there weren't any security guards or signage or soft benches (or people!), and you'd think it was perhaps a hospital or another seemingly helpful, strikingly empty building, with a maze of hallways, doorways with no doors, and a surplus of painted windows, arranged in such a manner that resembled exhibits or displays, and these were the sole objects that could draw a passerby's attention. In dreams, you tend to know things automatically, it's disconcerting, you're always somehow privy to terrifying categorical information. I knew that there was no use fleeing down the halls, screaming for help, because, for starters, you can only help yourself in dreams, and secondly, I was well aware that such an action would only succeed in thrilling the halls. In other words, I felt that the halls would experience a perverse joy in my panic, and they would shudder blissfully as they unravelled in senseless paths before me. I decided that it was better for me to take on an exaggerated, stately posture, a very boring one, and waddle around like an admirer of fine crystal. This would stall the storyline, which was edging towards a nightmare. What follows gets confusing or contaminated, and if you read as much as I do, you can blame the intrusion of books for the derivative tricklings that arrive to take center stage. Each faux window opened into a greeny quadrangle, a space which seemed uniform in appearance, going from window to window, but a troubling difference could be spotted in the minute glyphs etched on the enclosing walls. These symbols were as random and unintelligible as any circular or linear design on an exotic animal hide. There was no sense in trying to read them, even if they were left as instructions or warnings. The windows all seemed to point to (perhaps fawn over) a shimmering gem set in the centre, what was surely--I knew in dreams!--a minor aleph in the Borgesian sense, a piece of glass that contained the sun, the stars, basically an exact model of the universe, perceived as an assemblage of views or a small haystack of splintered memories, but I was no longer peering through (at?) a window at all ... I was standing over a small, nondescript table, atop which was placed a flat fish bowl with rounded edges. Two submerged eyes swam about inside, lively as leashed fish or insidious balls-and-chains. Remarkably, these sentient orbs were unusually independent, they lacked the presence of a master brain fixed behind them. Instead, the thin membranes were loosely connected to a flat leech-like disc pressed to the rear of the glass, what might have looked like a scummy wall outlet. This mass was disturbingly oval and textured like ground meat, not grayish as would be expected, but verdigris. I realized very suddenly that, in order to employ the staggering visual effects of the aleph, I would have to devour those slippery, darting eyes; those same eyes which occasionally came together in unison, in cooperation, to stare at me with strange intensity. Frankly, it was a win-win situation!
At times, Livejournal feels like the misbegotten offspring of a likewise building. I figured that, since I haven't posted publically in a while, I'd assemble a few comments that feature minor stories or minor characters and thread them into a body that resembles content. I want this journal to be convenient. I feel I must apologize about my comments. They are so packed with bombast, so final--seemingly dying for attention, but denying any two-way--that people who respond to them are, on the regular, numbed into carving out arrowhead compliments, they're bewildered, they scratch their scalps for flakes of ideas. I can't explain how much this bothers me, but I can offer an explanatory image. It's like arriving at an abandoned lot full of street urchins, ahem, mischievous rascals such as yourself. Their games lack toys, they're poor, see, so they make use of sticks and stones and their scenarios are purely imaginary. You want to join in on their game of cowboys and Indians, but, once you proclaim a word of creativity, an action, such as shooting a feather off a Native's head, they announce that your one shot, that zigg-zagging bullet, has run a murderous course and killed ALL the Indians, you are the winner, and wouldn't you know it, this makes you an American hero. They all run home to their mothers and you, my dear orphan, are left behind, impotent, looking dumbly at your makeshift gun, nothing more than a pencil, no handle or trigger to speak of... Surely, you've read the Kipling anecdote about the two hunters. Two prehistoric hunters return to their cave with a sizeable carcass trophy, a triumph, a delight for their starving clan; however, once the meal has been savored and absorbed, and the opportunity presents itself to tell the tale of the kill, the master hunter cannot find the words to express neither the thrill nor the quality of his actions. It falls on his partner, who might have merely played a distraction, the dramatic bait, to best describe the hero's techniques, his heroics, how he pounced upon and captured the beast. The tribe was so marvelled by the exactness of the account that their wonder immediately turned to fear, and they suspected that he was some sort of demon, a proteus, a maker/warper of reality. This is prehistory, the fear of the present moment! Of course, they had to kill the tattle-tale in order to prevent his spinning veritable stories about anyone else, to keep him from affecting or making drastic changes in reality.
hipsterbookclub: Gentrified to the max. Basically, you take the locked content of a private post, and you run it through a cheese grater, so you can then sprinkle the stuff onto communities, as if it were a fish tank. That's a community's appeal: scattered solidarity. If you keep reading my comments, you will notice something right away: I recycle certain items, stories and details, but I don't do it for the acclaim. People should know these things. Anyway, if you turn over any of these articles for further examination, you will notice the recycling stamp clearly embossed on the bottom.
youcantwrite: I write reviews of other people's journals. Ever since mengus wrote a post that was akin to a headlock, I've agreed to write about two a month. It's the only writing that I do which adheres to a definite system of rules, I suppose. I felt guilty about this review immediately after I wrote it, because it kept reading back to me as stark elderly abuse, but all the high fives I got from my fellow hecklers made me feel like I was doing the right thing (although I most certainly was not). Thanks guys! With your reassurances, I can terrorize a thousand grandmas!
theskimyoucrew: One of the last remaining sites on the web, along with les_voyages and the_reviewers, to still bear mention to the enprise/Brian Sullivan creature on the splash of their front page. Now, I don't read enprise's last surviving threads, but they persist in wanton of a writing community, and it discomforts me to know of their final resting place, their ghastly permanence, on these desert sands of Livejournal. It's like the weathered bust of Ozymandias. Anyway, it doesn't seem right, after all, having a place where writers are supposed to congregate. Instinctually, writers are not supposed to act in any way already supposed by others before them. They'll find comfort in a dark crevice before they'll relax under a common eslabon, a strict symbol. Needless to say, my application here was dimly received, but what's this? It's like a homeless person offering you a pair of pennies. I must admit to being disgustingly irate back then. Not very graceful at all. It's shocking, actually, reading it over makes me wince. I would much rather read a more collected invective. Maturity is far more relaxed. You'll forgive the agency of the quote in the link, it's really Thomas Carlyle, but as echelle duly noted, I'm partial to the old bait and hook.
mmmrorschach: Note these rave reviews from the aforementioned community. The second to last one or third or fourth, depending on the future, will go to show that I can also gush when I stumble upon such writing that I find pleasing. This journal is A+. I hereby recommend it to everyone. It makes you think a little far out, more than usual. I forgot to ask uberdionysus if he'd ever read Rampo Edogawa in that inner-inner post of almost a year ago. Afrirampo, a girly Japanese import, and Japanther, local Brooklyn sweethearts, both played shows in his journal before I ever got to see and meet them in person. If reading Livejournal is a slavish sort of dreaming, then I must choose to dream portentously, and dreams really do come true. He's my favorite journal for peeking into the drudgery of New York living and the art one snacks on. To be honest, I can't deal with as much art as he juggles on a regular basis. Sometimes I'm gripped with a fear that so much exposure to art will drastically age me. The brain will burst forth with shoots of gray. The face will mimic the wrinkles of thought. I can imagine the sustained convolution as I'm forced to consider the manifold networks of influence in each piece. The constant fermentation would be overwhelming. For example:
I am riding the bus one day when a Black guy with an IPOD sits next to me. He's listening to my favourite 2Pac album, Me Against The World, very loudly, in fact, we could be splitting his earpieces. Let it be written, I HATE IPODS. I can't help myself. I make a quick elbow seem like an accident. No response. I give him an inquisitive tap on the shoulder. Excuse me, I ask casually, is that Me Against The World you've got ON BLAST? Incidentally, once we get to talking, it turns out that we prefer the very same songs, in nearly the same order, down to the best track: Temptations. I assume that he's a high calibre fan and that, at the very least, he's seen the documentary Tupac: Resurrection, not only seen it, but taken it to heart, so I pose the following question while he's half-listening to track ten, It Ain't Easy: Right before track two, you know, If I Die 2Nite, some guy, a hype man, not 'Pac, utters a saying, it sounds like a proverb, right? Like clockwork, an implacable gear whirs and turns in his noodle, he repeats it, Yeah! he says, A coward dies a thousand deaths, a soldier dies but once... I think it's an African proverb. I laugh in his face without a hint of remorse and I likely spit on him unvoluntarily. It occurs to me that he, like so many others, is a mere keeper of common knowledge, and even though he is quite adept at retaining abstract information, it is devoid of usefulness and application. No, I regret to inform him--I don't know why people ever say this--rather I take great satisfaction in telling him, that the quote is undoubtedly ... Shakespeare! You know, a lot of things in life are plain derivatives, and if you can detect these patterns in a fluid manner, then life becomes the freshest of breezes! Tupac thought Shakespeare was dope, see? The original verse goes something like this: Cowards die many times before their deaths/the valiant taste of death but once. Does he even know what that means? He counters by invoking the expression he who flees will fight again, saying that cowards have many more opportunities to die and therefore die many deaths. Wrong again! However, a wrong answer couldn't seem more correct. Shakespeare was referring to the dangers of excessive thinking, that fatal hesitancy in the overly conscious. One should imagine a WWI trench and a coward peeking over the edge in absolute fear. Shakespeare implies the many scenarios a coward runs through his head while he's cowering--fractured visions of heroism--all of which result in horrible death. True heroes, in essence, are mindless, lucky bastards, but their glory is absolved of the sneakiest pretension. There's also a funny story by Mark Twain that illustrates this same principle.
perfectlylegal: Dirty girls tell dirty stories. They can also coax one out of you. They keep a piece of you and place it in a locked glass case. There are displays like this at every bend. I realize that not all of these links are available for everyone. Livejournals should be less guarded, especially when they have amusing players that frequent their forums for fun. It must be a preoccupation that a funny comment in the comments section can trivialize the owner's whole post and perhaps their immediate existence. Livejournal needs a lot more oh_the_ironing, for reals though, because he trivializes the majority of its users.
oh_oh_sheila: She posted En Vogue tracks. Do you ever do anything as cool?
tambourineman: Defriended me as a result of this post. See, it happens to everyone, Sharon. He was immediately replaced by a far more entertaining writer, kadigan. It's the circle of life and it rules us all.
proa: The middle journal between you, my books, and most of my translations. This post will mark the last of my translations to appear in this journal. Coming up: poetry by Silvina Ocampo, Evaristo Carriego, Enrique Banchs, Almafuerte, José Saramago, etc., never before translated opinions of J.L.B., and stories by Leopoldo Lugones, Horacio Quiroga, and Rubén Darío.
Finally, hotlavamonster: There was something about this poem, which I'm about to share with you, that I really liked. I forgot who it was that said writers should be original, but if they must steal, then steal from the best. Perhaps you've read the story by Borges called The Immortal, it's one of his best. There's a paragraph or two where he attempts to describe the City of Immortals, but more so he expresses the anxiety of trying to describe it. These are the words of a daunted man:
The City is so horrible that its mere existence and perdurance, though in the midst of a secret desert, contaminates the past and the future and in some way even jeopardizes the stars. As long as it lasts, no one in the world can be strong or happy.
The following poem predates the story by more than twenty years.
La Blanca Soledad
by Leopoldo Lugones
Bajo la calma del sueño,
Calma lunar de luminosa seda,
La noche
Como si fuera
El blando cuerpo del silencio,
Dulcemente en la inmensidad se acuesta...
Y desata
Su cabellera,
En prodigioso follaje
De alamedas.
Nada vive sino el ojo
Del reloj en la torre tétrica,
Profundizando inútilmente el infinito
Como un agujero abierto en la arena.
El infinito,
Rodado por las ruedas
De los relojes,
Como un carro que nunca llega.
La luna cava un blanco abismo
De quietud, en cuya cuenca
Las cosas son cadáveres
y las sombras viven como ideas,
y uno se pasma de lo próxima
Que está la muerte en la blancura aquella.
De lo bello que es el mundo
Poseído por la antigüedad de la luna llena.
y el ansia tristísima de ser amado,
En el corazón doloroso tiembla.
Hay una ciudad en el aire,
Una ciudad casi invisible suspensa,
Cuyos vagos perfiles
Sobre la clara noche transparentan.
Como las rayas de agua en un pliego,
Su cristalización poliédrica.
Una ciudad tan lejana,
Que angustia con su absurda presencia.
¿Es una ciudad o un buque
En el que fuésemos abandonando la tierra.
Callados y felices,
y con tal pureza,
Que sólo nuestras almas
En la blancura plenilunar vivieran?...
Y de pronto cruza un vago
Estremecimiento por la luz serena.
Las líneas se desvanecen,
La inmensidad cámbiase en blanca piedra,
y sólo permanece en la noche aciaga
La certidumbre de tu ausencia.
Bleached Solitude
Beneath the calm of sleep,
a lunar calm of glowing silk,
the night
as if it were
the soft body of silence,
beds itself down in immensity
gently, sweetly...
And unleashes
its mane
in a phenomenal bloom
of boulevards.
Nothing lives but the eye
of the clock in the dismal tower
pointlessly probing the infinite
in depth
like an open hole in the sand.
The infinite
encircled by wheels
of the clocks,
like a car that never arrives.
The moon delves an ivory pit
of stillness, in whose bowl
things are cadaverous
and shadows live on as ideas.
One shudders at the immediacy
of death in the whiteness thus,
of the beauty of a world
gripped by the antiquity
of a moon in full,
and the doleful anxiety
of being loved
sorely trembles in the heart.
There's a city in the sky,
a city suspended, nearly invisible
whose vague outlines
turn sheer across the clear night
like rays of water down a sheet of glass,
a polyhedral crystallization.
A city so distant that
its audacious presence
arouses misery.
Was it a city or a boat
on which we might have cast off earth
speechless and happy
and with such purity
that only our souls
would thrive in the white
of the harvest moon?
Suddenly, a vague commotion
crosses the halcyon light.
The lines evaporate,
immensity shifts to white stone,
and the only debris
in the ominous night:
the clarity of your absence.
My journal gives the impression that I don't much care about politics or world affairs. You can go ahead and accuse me of thinking like a dinosaur, you're quite right. I think about the future and past with alarming consequence, but I'm too involved in the present to perceive it rationally enough. See, when a writer writes a good story, I mean, a story that's mostly free of her own egotistical intrusion, she originates a beginning and an end, and then it's easy for her to exert a middle. The middle is mostly composed of ample pairings, subtle contrasts that mimic right/wrong, fun/boring, pain/pleasure, man/woman, etc. in object and action. A writer who is constantly thinking about writing has better commerce with memories and hopes, she will sally forward and hook into as many variable futures as possible, in effect her present state is the nexus of a taut web, never static, always vibrant, yet adhering to timeless themes. Working with the present is oppressive, bothersome. Or maybe I'm just incapable of setting forth opinions on subjects which need be informed via up-to-the-minute news and reports. For example, I've never felt the slightest urge to reveal my thoughts on the war. Most of the time, my imagination conspires with my memory and--in cahoots--both get the better of my passion, such that I can't get down to brass tacks, gentlemen. Intelligence is a tool of the will. I'll say one thing though: people were sure waving a lot of American flags. The streets were absolutely crowded with American flags! I had this funny thought that these were probably the same flags that lay stored and unused in people's closets and bins since after 9/11, the last real squeal of patriotism. It's nice to see the upheaval of forgotten playthings. I wonder when I'll see some Lakers flags again, flapping by on a car window. Not too long ago, this was a city of champions.
There's something funny about getting spam from "Single Blacks" claiming to be able to find my soulmate.
I had a dream where I was wandering around a museum with windows in the style of trompe l'oiel. Well, you wouldn't know it was a museum, because the windows looked real enough, and there weren't any security guards or signage or soft benches (or people!), and you'd think it was perhaps a hospital or another seemingly helpful, strikingly empty building, with a maze of hallways, doorways with no doors, and a surplus of painted windows, arranged in such a manner that resembled exhibits or displays, and these were the sole objects that could draw a passerby's attention. In dreams, you tend to know things automatically, it's disconcerting, you're always somehow privy to terrifying categorical information. I knew that there was no use fleeing down the halls, screaming for help, because, for starters, you can only help yourself in dreams, and secondly, I was well aware that such an action would only succeed in thrilling the halls. In other words, I felt that the halls would experience a perverse joy in my panic, and they would shudder blissfully as they unravelled in senseless paths before me. I decided that it was better for me to take on an exaggerated, stately posture, a very boring one, and waddle around like an admirer of fine crystal. This would stall the storyline, which was edging towards a nightmare. What follows gets confusing or contaminated, and if you read as much as I do, you can blame the intrusion of books for the derivative tricklings that arrive to take center stage. Each faux window opened into a greeny quadrangle, a space which seemed uniform in appearance, going from window to window, but a troubling difference could be spotted in the minute glyphs etched on the enclosing walls. These symbols were as random and unintelligible as any circular or linear design on an exotic animal hide. There was no sense in trying to read them, even if they were left as instructions or warnings. The windows all seemed to point to (perhaps fawn over) a shimmering gem set in the centre, what was surely--I knew in dreams!--a minor aleph in the Borgesian sense, a piece of glass that contained the sun, the stars, basically an exact model of the universe, perceived as an assemblage of views or a small haystack of splintered memories, but I was no longer peering through (at?) a window at all ... I was standing over a small, nondescript table, atop which was placed a flat fish bowl with rounded edges. Two submerged eyes swam about inside, lively as leashed fish or insidious balls-and-chains. Remarkably, these sentient orbs were unusually independent, they lacked the presence of a master brain fixed behind them. Instead, the thin membranes were loosely connected to a flat leech-like disc pressed to the rear of the glass, what might have looked like a scummy wall outlet. This mass was disturbingly oval and textured like ground meat, not grayish as would be expected, but verdigris. I realized very suddenly that, in order to employ the staggering visual effects of the aleph, I would have to devour those slippery, darting eyes; those same eyes which occasionally came together in unison, in cooperation, to stare at me with strange intensity. Frankly, it was a win-win situation!
At times, Livejournal feels like the misbegotten offspring of a likewise building. I figured that, since I haven't posted publically in a while, I'd assemble a few comments that feature minor stories or minor characters and thread them into a body that resembles content. I want this journal to be convenient. I feel I must apologize about my comments. They are so packed with bombast, so final--seemingly dying for attention, but denying any two-way--that people who respond to them are, on the regular, numbed into carving out arrowhead compliments, they're bewildered, they scratch their scalps for flakes of ideas. I can't explain how much this bothers me, but I can offer an explanatory image. It's like arriving at an abandoned lot full of street urchins, ahem, mischievous rascals such as yourself. Their games lack toys, they're poor, see, so they make use of sticks and stones and their scenarios are purely imaginary. You want to join in on their game of cowboys and Indians, but, once you proclaim a word of creativity, an action, such as shooting a feather off a Native's head, they announce that your one shot, that zigg-zagging bullet, has run a murderous course and killed ALL the Indians, you are the winner, and wouldn't you know it, this makes you an American hero. They all run home to their mothers and you, my dear orphan, are left behind, impotent, looking dumbly at your makeshift gun, nothing more than a pencil, no handle or trigger to speak of... Surely, you've read the Kipling anecdote about the two hunters. Two prehistoric hunters return to their cave with a sizeable carcass trophy, a triumph, a delight for their starving clan; however, once the meal has been savored and absorbed, and the opportunity presents itself to tell the tale of the kill, the master hunter cannot find the words to express neither the thrill nor the quality of his actions. It falls on his partner, who might have merely played a distraction, the dramatic bait, to best describe the hero's techniques, his heroics, how he pounced upon and captured the beast. The tribe was so marvelled by the exactness of the account that their wonder immediately turned to fear, and they suspected that he was some sort of demon, a proteus, a maker/warper of reality. This is prehistory, the fear of the present moment! Of course, they had to kill the tattle-tale in order to prevent his spinning veritable stories about anyone else, to keep him from affecting or making drastic changes in reality.
hipsterbookclub: Gentrified to the max. Basically, you take the locked content of a private post, and you run it through a cheese grater, so you can then sprinkle the stuff onto communities, as if it were a fish tank. That's a community's appeal: scattered solidarity. If you keep reading my comments, you will notice something right away: I recycle certain items, stories and details, but I don't do it for the acclaim. People should know these things. Anyway, if you turn over any of these articles for further examination, you will notice the recycling stamp clearly embossed on the bottom.
youcantwrite: I write reviews of other people's journals. Ever since mengus wrote a post that was akin to a headlock, I've agreed to write about two a month. It's the only writing that I do which adheres to a definite system of rules, I suppose. I felt guilty about this review immediately after I wrote it, because it kept reading back to me as stark elderly abuse, but all the high fives I got from my fellow hecklers made me feel like I was doing the right thing (although I most certainly was not). Thanks guys! With your reassurances, I can terrorize a thousand grandmas!
theskimyoucrew: One of the last remaining sites on the web, along with les_voyages and the_reviewers, to still bear mention to the enprise/Brian Sullivan creature on the splash of their front page. Now, I don't read enprise's last surviving threads, but they persist in wanton of a writing community, and it discomforts me to know of their final resting place, their ghastly permanence, on these desert sands of Livejournal. It's like the weathered bust of Ozymandias. Anyway, it doesn't seem right, after all, having a place where writers are supposed to congregate. Instinctually, writers are not supposed to act in any way already supposed by others before them. They'll find comfort in a dark crevice before they'll relax under a common eslabon, a strict symbol. Needless to say, my application here was dimly received, but what's this? It's like a homeless person offering you a pair of pennies. I must admit to being disgustingly irate back then. Not very graceful at all. It's shocking, actually, reading it over makes me wince. I would much rather read a more collected invective. Maturity is far more relaxed. You'll forgive the agency of the quote in the link, it's really Thomas Carlyle, but as echelle duly noted, I'm partial to the old bait and hook.
mmmrorschach: Note these rave reviews from the aforementioned community. The second to last one or third or fourth, depending on the future, will go to show that I can also gush when I stumble upon such writing that I find pleasing. This journal is A+. I hereby recommend it to everyone. It makes you think a little far out, more than usual. I forgot to ask uberdionysus if he'd ever read Rampo Edogawa in that inner-inner post of almost a year ago. Afrirampo, a girly Japanese import, and Japanther, local Brooklyn sweethearts, both played shows in his journal before I ever got to see and meet them in person. If reading Livejournal is a slavish sort of dreaming, then I must choose to dream portentously, and dreams really do come true. He's my favorite journal for peeking into the drudgery of New York living and the art one snacks on. To be honest, I can't deal with as much art as he juggles on a regular basis. Sometimes I'm gripped with a fear that so much exposure to art will drastically age me. The brain will burst forth with shoots of gray. The face will mimic the wrinkles of thought. I can imagine the sustained convolution as I'm forced to consider the manifold networks of influence in each piece. The constant fermentation would be overwhelming. For example:
I am riding the bus one day when a Black guy with an IPOD sits next to me. He's listening to my favourite 2Pac album, Me Against The World, very loudly, in fact, we could be splitting his earpieces. Let it be written, I HATE IPODS. I can't help myself. I make a quick elbow seem like an accident. No response. I give him an inquisitive tap on the shoulder. Excuse me, I ask casually, is that Me Against The World you've got ON BLAST? Incidentally, once we get to talking, it turns out that we prefer the very same songs, in nearly the same order, down to the best track: Temptations. I assume that he's a high calibre fan and that, at the very least, he's seen the documentary Tupac: Resurrection, not only seen it, but taken it to heart, so I pose the following question while he's half-listening to track ten, It Ain't Easy: Right before track two, you know, If I Die 2Nite, some guy, a hype man, not 'Pac, utters a saying, it sounds like a proverb, right? Like clockwork, an implacable gear whirs and turns in his noodle, he repeats it, Yeah! he says, A coward dies a thousand deaths, a soldier dies but once... I think it's an African proverb. I laugh in his face without a hint of remorse and I likely spit on him unvoluntarily. It occurs to me that he, like so many others, is a mere keeper of common knowledge, and even though he is quite adept at retaining abstract information, it is devoid of usefulness and application. No, I regret to inform him--I don't know why people ever say this--rather I take great satisfaction in telling him, that the quote is undoubtedly ... Shakespeare! You know, a lot of things in life are plain derivatives, and if you can detect these patterns in a fluid manner, then life becomes the freshest of breezes! Tupac thought Shakespeare was dope, see? The original verse goes something like this: Cowards die many times before their deaths/the valiant taste of death but once. Does he even know what that means? He counters by invoking the expression he who flees will fight again, saying that cowards have many more opportunities to die and therefore die many deaths. Wrong again! However, a wrong answer couldn't seem more correct. Shakespeare was referring to the dangers of excessive thinking, that fatal hesitancy in the overly conscious. One should imagine a WWI trench and a coward peeking over the edge in absolute fear. Shakespeare implies the many scenarios a coward runs through his head while he's cowering--fractured visions of heroism--all of which result in horrible death. True heroes, in essence, are mindless, lucky bastards, but their glory is absolved of the sneakiest pretension. There's also a funny story by Mark Twain that illustrates this same principle.
perfectlylegal: Dirty girls tell dirty stories. They can also coax one out of you. They keep a piece of you and place it in a locked glass case. There are displays like this at every bend. I realize that not all of these links are available for everyone. Livejournals should be less guarded, especially when they have amusing players that frequent their forums for fun. It must be a preoccupation that a funny comment in the comments section can trivialize the owner's whole post and perhaps their immediate existence. Livejournal needs a lot more oh_the_ironing, for reals though, because he trivializes the majority of its users.
oh_oh_sheila: She posted En Vogue tracks. Do you ever do anything as cool?
tambourineman: Defriended me as a result of this post. See, it happens to everyone, Sharon. He was immediately replaced by a far more entertaining writer, kadigan. It's the circle of life and it rules us all.
proa: The middle journal between you, my books, and most of my translations. This post will mark the last of my translations to appear in this journal. Coming up: poetry by Silvina Ocampo, Evaristo Carriego, Enrique Banchs, Almafuerte, José Saramago, etc., never before translated opinions of J.L.B., and stories by Leopoldo Lugones, Horacio Quiroga, and Rubén Darío.
Finally, hotlavamonster: There was something about this poem, which I'm about to share with you, that I really liked. I forgot who it was that said writers should be original, but if they must steal, then steal from the best. Perhaps you've read the story by Borges called The Immortal, it's one of his best. There's a paragraph or two where he attempts to describe the City of Immortals, but more so he expresses the anxiety of trying to describe it. These are the words of a daunted man:
The City is so horrible that its mere existence and perdurance, though in the midst of a secret desert, contaminates the past and the future and in some way even jeopardizes the stars. As long as it lasts, no one in the world can be strong or happy.
The following poem predates the story by more than twenty years.
La Blanca Soledad
by Leopoldo Lugones
Bajo la calma del sueño,
Calma lunar de luminosa seda,
La noche
Como si fuera
El blando cuerpo del silencio,
Dulcemente en la inmensidad se acuesta...
Y desata
Su cabellera,
En prodigioso follaje
De alamedas.
Nada vive sino el ojo
Del reloj en la torre tétrica,
Profundizando inútilmente el infinito
Como un agujero abierto en la arena.
El infinito,
Rodado por las ruedas
De los relojes,
Como un carro que nunca llega.
La luna cava un blanco abismo
De quietud, en cuya cuenca
Las cosas son cadáveres
y las sombras viven como ideas,
y uno se pasma de lo próxima
Que está la muerte en la blancura aquella.
De lo bello que es el mundo
Poseído por la antigüedad de la luna llena.
y el ansia tristísima de ser amado,
En el corazón doloroso tiembla.
Hay una ciudad en el aire,
Una ciudad casi invisible suspensa,
Cuyos vagos perfiles
Sobre la clara noche transparentan.
Como las rayas de agua en un pliego,
Su cristalización poliédrica.
Una ciudad tan lejana,
Que angustia con su absurda presencia.
¿Es una ciudad o un buque
En el que fuésemos abandonando la tierra.
Callados y felices,
y con tal pureza,
Que sólo nuestras almas
En la blancura plenilunar vivieran?...
Y de pronto cruza un vago
Estremecimiento por la luz serena.
Las líneas se desvanecen,
La inmensidad cámbiase en blanca piedra,
y sólo permanece en la noche aciaga
La certidumbre de tu ausencia.
Bleached Solitude
Beneath the calm of sleep,
a lunar calm of glowing silk,
the night
as if it were
the soft body of silence,
beds itself down in immensity
gently, sweetly...
And unleashes
its mane
in a phenomenal bloom
of boulevards.
Nothing lives but the eye
of the clock in the dismal tower
pointlessly probing the infinite
in depth
like an open hole in the sand.
The infinite
encircled by wheels
of the clocks,
like a car that never arrives.
The moon delves an ivory pit
of stillness, in whose bowl
things are cadaverous
and shadows live on as ideas.
One shudders at the immediacy
of death in the whiteness thus,
of the beauty of a world
gripped by the antiquity
of a moon in full,
and the doleful anxiety
of being loved
sorely trembles in the heart.
There's a city in the sky,
a city suspended, nearly invisible
whose vague outlines
turn sheer across the clear night
like rays of water down a sheet of glass,
a polyhedral crystallization.
A city so distant that
its audacious presence
arouses misery.
Was it a city or a boat
on which we might have cast off earth
speechless and happy
and with such purity
that only our souls
would thrive in the white
of the harvest moon?
Suddenly, a vague commotion
crosses the halcyon light.
The lines evaporate,
immensity shifts to white stone,
and the only debris
in the ominous night:
the clarity of your absence.