Loop by Brenda Lozano (2019), translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott (2019)
Loop by Brenda Lozano (2019), translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott (2019)
8
The word of the day, according to the online Oxford Dictionary, is Hikikomori: ‘(In Japan) the abnormal avoidance of social contact. Japanese origin, literally “staying indoors, (social) withdrawal”.’
Dear Oxford Dictionary, Kafka wants to argue back: ‘There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you’ (34).
9
At the party I told one of the guests about my ideal notebook. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. ‘Nothing happens? A waiting room?’ What she didn’t say: the work in progress, the story with no beginning or end, useless things. Studying communication, buying books and records. Watching films. Going to La Lagunilla to browse the second-hand furniture, going to a flea market, a garage sale. Buying a vase and some artificial flowers. Buying an ashtray to keep the house keys in. Making things useless. Taking the hands off the watch, wearing it as a bracelet to make it useless. Writing, reading. I’ve done all these things. This is more or less how I spend my days (47).
18
I read, in an essay, that one of Flann O’Brien’s Irish Times columns described a strange service for the owners of unopened books: ‘For a given sum the books would be handled; passages would be underlined, the spines would be damaged or words would be written in the margins such as “Rubbish” or “Yes, but cf Homer, Od., iii, 151” or “I remember poor Joyce saying the very same thing to me”, or inscriptions would be added to the first page along the lines of “From your devoted friend and follower, K. Marx”.’
Marginal, useless work. In fact, I’m drawn to the very idea of uselessness because there’s something almost fictional about it. A piece of work, an object, the more ridiculously useless it seems, the more fascinating I find it. All those objects, all those services that serve no one seem to me like the triumph of fiction. How I’d like to offer the book-underlining service, write in the margins, add false dedications, drink coffee, and now and then leave marks on the covers with my mug.
The more useless something is, the more subversive.
Let me unravel that.
The more useless something is, the more independent it is from reality.
It’s the music. It’s the neighbour’s music, the bus driving by, the aeroplane in the distance, a dog barking here, a car horn over there. I’d like to be a sound so I could contribute to the night. If I were a sound I could be independent from reality. If I were music I could travel further (86-7).
26
Tania on the phone: ‘No, forget Picasso, you want some real gossip? At the party last night, the Most Important Artist in Mexico seriously overdid it. Marcelito was so drunk he broke the sink in the bathroom, imagine. And Natalia slept with Manuel. She said it was a bad idea. Unbelievable, right? She told me herself, I ran into her just now buying a coffee. She’s not embarrassed - if you see her having breakfast, pull up a chair and she’ll tell you everything that happened last night. I have the feeling that if she’d seen a film, she would have quoted some of the dialogue for me. I think the way she is matches her work, I like that about her’ (113).
A note on the text
Whenever possible, references to quoted texts were taken from existing translations. Here are the bibliographical details of this cited material, in order of allusion within Loop:
Alexander Vvedensky, The Gray Notebook, trans. by Matvei Yankelevich, New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2002.
Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, ed. Max Brod, trans. by Ernest Kaiser & Eithne Wilkins, Cambridge: Exact Change, 1991.
Machado de Assis, ‘The Alienist’, The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis, trans. by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, New York: Liveright, 2018.
Clarice Lispector, The Foreign Legion, trans. by Giovanni Pontiero, Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 1986.
John Cage, Transcript of story 1: Indeterminacy... Ninety Stories by John Cage, in Die Reihe No. 5, ed. by H. Eimert and K. Stockhausen, London: Theodore Presser Co., 1961.
Ovid, Heroides, trans. by Grant Showerman, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914.
Clarice Lispector, ‘The Smallest Woman in the World’, Complete Stories, trans. by Katrina Dodson, New York: New Directions, 2015.
Fernando Pessoa, ‘A morte é a curva da estrada’, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, trans. by Richard Zenith, New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. by Richard Zenith, New York: Penguin Classics, 2002.
Emmanuel Bove, My Friends, trans. by Janet Louth, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1986.
Homer, The Odyssey, trans. by Robert Fagles, New York: Penguin Classics, 1997.
8
The word of the day, according to the online Oxford Dictionary, is Hikikomori: ‘(In Japan) the abnormal avoidance of social contact. Japanese origin, literally “staying indoors, (social) withdrawal”.’
Dear Oxford Dictionary, Kafka wants to argue back: ‘There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you’ (34).
9
At the party I told one of the guests about my ideal notebook. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. ‘Nothing happens? A waiting room?’ What she didn’t say: the work in progress, the story with no beginning or end, useless things. Studying communication, buying books and records. Watching films. Going to La Lagunilla to browse the second-hand furniture, going to a flea market, a garage sale. Buying a vase and some artificial flowers. Buying an ashtray to keep the house keys in. Making things useless. Taking the hands off the watch, wearing it as a bracelet to make it useless. Writing, reading. I’ve done all these things. This is more or less how I spend my days (47).
18
I read, in an essay, that one of Flann O’Brien’s Irish Times columns described a strange service for the owners of unopened books: ‘For a given sum the books would be handled; passages would be underlined, the spines would be damaged or words would be written in the margins such as “Rubbish” or “Yes, but cf Homer, Od., iii, 151” or “I remember poor Joyce saying the very same thing to me”, or inscriptions would be added to the first page along the lines of “From your devoted friend and follower, K. Marx”.’
Marginal, useless work. In fact, I’m drawn to the very idea of uselessness because there’s something almost fictional about it. A piece of work, an object, the more ridiculously useless it seems, the more fascinating I find it. All those objects, all those services that serve no one seem to me like the triumph of fiction. How I’d like to offer the book-underlining service, write in the margins, add false dedications, drink coffee, and now and then leave marks on the covers with my mug.
The more useless something is, the more subversive.
Let me unravel that.
The more useless something is, the more independent it is from reality.
It’s the music. It’s the neighbour’s music, the bus driving by, the aeroplane in the distance, a dog barking here, a car horn over there. I’d like to be a sound so I could contribute to the night. If I were a sound I could be independent from reality. If I were music I could travel further (86-7).
26
Tania on the phone: ‘No, forget Picasso, you want some real gossip? At the party last night, the Most Important Artist in Mexico seriously overdid it. Marcelito was so drunk he broke the sink in the bathroom, imagine. And Natalia slept with Manuel. She said it was a bad idea. Unbelievable, right? She told me herself, I ran into her just now buying a coffee. She’s not embarrassed - if you see her having breakfast, pull up a chair and she’ll tell you everything that happened last night. I have the feeling that if she’d seen a film, she would have quoted some of the dialogue for me. I think the way she is matches her work, I like that about her’ (113).
A note on the text
Whenever possible, references to quoted texts were taken from existing translations. Here are the bibliographical details of this cited material, in order of allusion within Loop:
Alexander Vvedensky, The Gray Notebook, trans. by Matvei Yankelevich, New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2002.
Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, ed. Max Brod, trans. by Ernest Kaiser & Eithne Wilkins, Cambridge: Exact Change, 1991.
Machado de Assis, ‘The Alienist’, The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis, trans. by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, New York: Liveright, 2018.
Clarice Lispector, The Foreign Legion, trans. by Giovanni Pontiero, Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 1986.
John Cage, Transcript of story 1: Indeterminacy... Ninety Stories by John Cage, in Die Reihe No. 5, ed. by H. Eimert and K. Stockhausen, London: Theodore Presser Co., 1961.
Ovid, Heroides, trans. by Grant Showerman, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914.
Clarice Lispector, ‘The Smallest Woman in the World’, Complete Stories, trans. by Katrina Dodson, New York: New Directions, 2015.
Fernando Pessoa, ‘A morte é a curva da estrada’, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, trans. by Richard Zenith, New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. by Richard Zenith, New York: Penguin Classics, 2002.
Emmanuel Bove, My Friends, trans. by Janet Louth, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1986.
Homer, The Odyssey, trans. by Robert Fagles, New York: Penguin Classics, 1997.