I’m Not Dead Yet!

Jeff Anderson2 Comments

I know Daryl has wiped his hands clean of 2666, and I know I’ve been absent for about a month now, but I wanted to pipe up one last time on that group read before moving on to Moby-Dick. First of all, an apology: I committed myself to this thing and then it eventually got squeezed right out of my week, time and again. I’m sorry for having vanished on y’all.

A couple excuses. The prosaic one is that I simply ran out of time. Let me tell you this sincerely, and may you believe and remember it: The U.S. Census Bureau gets your money’s worth from its employees. (If you read here at Infinite Zombies from someplace beyond our polluted and too-often discouraging U.S. American shores, I’m sure it’s the same by you, mutatis mutandis.) I’m grateful for the employment, but it has pulped me these past weeks, and the 2666 group read was unfortunately not among the residua. I did keep reading, though; I kept my word that far.

Which leads to my next excuse, which is that I simply lost the spirit to continue coming up with narrow, somewhat technical topics to write on. That was about the only tactic that allowed me to grapple with the book—describing only the tail or foot or trunk, willfully blind, leaving the whole elephant studiously ignored in the middle of the room. As I began the Part About Archimboldi, I thought I might finally have a chance to open myself up some to the book. The writing was stylistically…on purpose, there was a plot of sorts, and the deliberate torment seemed to have run its course.

Then came that faggot sea urchin, and I thought to myself, In the context of Nazi Germany—where gay people also were rounded up, sent to work-and-torture camps, forced to wear badges to identify just which kind of disfavored non-citizen they were, and shot when they finally outlived their usefulness to the state—couldn’t Bolaño have laid off that “faggot” shit for a couple hundred pages? But we’ve hashed out the homophobia in this book as well as I think we’re going to, here (although surely the maricón-doesn’t-mean-it-that-way defense is vitiated in a setting outside of Latin America), so I read on. Then came a crucifixion. And then alcoholic children forced to massacre Jews because the grown-ups had killed themselves sick.

I mean really.

And I just couldn’t make myself make time to write about it. Here I admit it: This book defeated me. There were many pleasures in the Part About Archimboldi, perhaps particularly by contrast to what preceded it. But after all that, and with the delicious spice of still more unpredictable brutality with no purpose that revealed itself even to informed investigation, I ran out of things to say. I read to the end, was occasionally moved, and then closed the book with a sigh of relief.

If I even keep it, I doubt I’ll open it again. I’m grateful for the experience of having read it with everyone who participated, I was privileged to read some truly amazing thoughts on the book, and I made some new Internet friends, and that was worth all the rest. But reread 2666? I can’t imagine why I’d ever want to.

(Moby-Dick, on the other hand, I’m raring for.)

Moby-Dick Schedule

Daryl L. L. Houston6 Comments

We are just two short weeks and two short days away from the beginning of the Moby-Dick group read. Actually, that’s when the first milestone lands, which means that people who want to follow our calendar should read a bit in advance so that the first batch of chapters is all wrapped up in time for discussion beginning on May 24. I’ve decided for now to stick with a six-week reading schedule; we’ll see how we feel about this after the first couple of weeks and can expand a bit then if there’s an outcry, but I think six weeks will be about right. Moby-Dick is conveniently divided into numbered, titled chapters, so it doesn’t matter a whole lot what edition you’re using. Just stick to the chapter divisions and you should be good to go.

In parceling the chapters out across the several weeks, I tried to find a good balance between keeping a roughly equal number of pages per week and finding reasonable breaks within the content itself. I extended the first week’s reading by a chapter more than I had originally planned, for example, because I thought it would be a shame to break two linked chapters up.

Please note that there’s some front-matter (about which more in a later post) that makes the first week’s reading a bit longer than the other weeks’ readings. I don’t think it’ll be too onerous to complete it all, but I thought I’d mention it in case you’re counting numbered pages (the front-matter most likely falls outside the Arabic-numbered pages) to arrive at a pages-per-day count.

See the sidebar for the official schedule.

For any who want to track their reading semi-publicly on Facebook, I’ve added an entry for Moby-Dick to the InfiniteSummer Facebook app. Since there are so many different editions of the book, I just set the page count to 600, so this will be very much an approximation. When you update your page count in the app, it adds a little blurb to your Facebook profile that includes a picture of the book, your page count and approximate percentage complete, and links back to here. This is totally optional and isn’t something I derive any benefit from. If you want to show people your progress, add it; if not, that’s fine too.

Literary Journals

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

I have one more set of dreams to document for Matt over at the mothership, but once I’ve done that (this evening), I’m wiping my hands for the time being of 2666. Over the next week or two, I’ll begin posting some teaser material for Moby Dick, along with a couple of announcements that I’m really excited about. For today, I have a tangential question unrelated to any particular book. It’s actually a whole series of questions.

What do you look for in a literary journal? Are there any you subscribe to or make sure to browse regularly at the library? How often do you find journals to be really well-targeted to your interests? That is, do you often find yourself reading the things nearly cover-to-cover or are they hit-or-miss? And which ones are which? What do you most like to read in such journals (fiction, poetry, nonfiction, journalism, something else)? Bear in mind that I’m asking in particular about literary journals and not necessarily any periodical. I wouldn’t include Harper’s, for example, though it often features literature and reviews of literary books. Do you tend to read niche journals or more general-interest journals? If the former, what niche? Do you favor print or online journals or do you not discriminate on the basis of medium? Anything else?

I ask because I’m putting some thought into my own subscriptions. I subscribe to Poetry, for example, but I find it almost always to be really uneven. Sometimes they publish stuff that’s almost unreadable to me. Other times, there’s really good stuff. The only part I read faithfully and all the way through is the section of letters to the editor. So I’m curious what others’ experiences with journals are. Am I just a picky or a lazy reader, I wonder, or do others have problems with unevenness in journals as well?

Food and the End of the Road

Daryl L. L. Houston10 Comments

Several times in 2666, we see strange, somehow disjunctive scenes that form themselves around food. Early on, we have Morini reading an old cookbook (which Maria wrote about). This takes place alongside a discussion of catch phrases and jokes emblazoned on mugs, and how the man who used to work at the mug place was saddened by a change in the composition of the phrases.

Later, we have Barry Seaman giving his lecture partially about food while pushing his barbecue cookbook. How much profundity there is in Seaman’s lecture is up for debate (some seem to read Seaman straight; others take him to be something of a clown), but there is, at any rate, what seems to be an attempt to link profundity with appetite (or with satisfaction thereof).

Next we have Kessler and his associate overheard in a diner during the part about Fate. This discussion of people at the edge of society is one I’ve come back to a number of times. I think the topic is central to much of what Bolaño is doing in 2666.

And finally, here at the end, we have Archimboldi talking the merits of ice cream vs. ices with a descendant of the man for whom a certain type of German ice cream (basically Neapolitan) is named. The treat’s namesake might have been remembered for any number of other accomplishments, but his name is remembered for its association with ice cream. Certain statements the descendant makes about his forebear one can imagine Bolaño hoping might one day be used in his own honor. It’s interesting to note that Morini’s encounter and his reading of recipe names occurred in the Italian Gardens and that Pückler of ice cream fame was considered something of an artist of a landscape gardner, and he spent some time in Italy.

I find myself wishing now that I had thought earlier in the book to make a more complete catalog of the consumption of food. In addition to these examples, there are of course Arcimboldo’s paintings that compose portraits out of pieces of fruit and other viands. There are a number of references to cannibalism and vampirism. Surely there are others, and perhaps someone with the stamina to read this thing yet again (twice in two years will tide me over for a while) will find more to the food motif (if it can be called that). I can’t say much more about it but that it stood out to me here at the end.

Ah, and the end. Anti-climactic, no? Maybe a little disappointing. We do confirm that Archimboldi makes his way to Santa Teresa, so there is at least a little closure.

I’ve enjoyed this group read but am glad it’s over. Onward!

Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

A few weeks ago, I wrote a review of Joe Meno’s The Great Perhaps that was less than favorable. Having failed to find much satisfying in that book, I thought I owed both Meno and myself a second shot and reread his short story collection, “Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir,” which I had read and enjoyed when it first came out several years ago. I’m happy to report that it holds up with age.

The physical book itself is a pleasure to hold. This perhaps merits mentioning in the days of the iPad and the Kindle. It’s a small, thin, square book — six or seven inches per per side — with spacious margins, comfortable line spacing, and the titles of the stories running vertically in the margin of right-hand pages so that you always know right where you are. Something about the book makes me want to call it a boutique book. It strikes me as one that wasn’t your average ordinary print run. So +1 for book design.

The writing in “Bluebirds” is easy. I don’t mean that it’s simplistic or lacks depth but rather that it goes down smoothly. It is easy but not necessarily light or lightweight. Or, it is even mostly very light but is light without being lightweight. It’s a hard distinction I’m trying to draw here. It reads, let’s say, like lightweight writing, but there is substance to it. I think this is probably a very hard thing to pull off, and Meno does it very well. It’s clear that he’s going for something similar in The Great Perhaps, but in the novel, the substance isn’t quite there. Where he tries to force the substance in the novel, he makes it seem effortless and exactly right in the stories.

“Bluebirds” is composed of seventeen stories averaging low-double digits each in page length (some a bit longer, some a bit shorter). Most of the stories are told in the first person, and they all seem like explorations of voice or perspective. The curious thing about this, to me, is that there seems to be something approaching uniformity of voice. That is not to say that the same voice tells all the stories, for it surely doesn’t, but even where there are clear sociocultural boundaries that would distinguish one voice or outlook from another in real life, the voices are often similar. It’s almost as if the various stories are being chewed up and retold to us by someone with a knack for turning a nice phrase (which of course they are). Whether this is Meno’s intention or is a lapse I can’t say. I like the voice and the easy way in which it tells the stories, so I’m comfortable with the similarity.

Meno writes about connection and about loneliness. Loss and loneliness and yearning run through all of the stories, and yet he avoids monotony by dreaming up wacky, quirky circumstances around which to drape the sadness (and occasional happiness, moments of real humanity and connection). It is a reflective book but not a melancholy one. I’m reminded very much of Daniel Wallace both for the sometimes fantastical stories and for the light way in which they both address dark subjects.

This is a good book, one that was given to me by a friend and one I’ll recommend to friends. It doesn’t require a significant investment of time to read, and for me, the payoff was phenomenal. It’s the sort of book that makes me want to write short stories. It’s not life-changing, but I’d go so far as to call it day-changing, for it’s a delight almost cover to cover. I’ll leave you with a few quotations that I dog-eared (only the first two are from the same story).

Junior, Carrie, and I went to the Olive Garden on Pulaski. We lounged in the fake Italian setting. We loaded up on bread sticks and free salad. We ate until we couldn’t speak. I thought, Olive Garden! You have saved us with your imitation Italian cooking!

I got this idea that for some reason I should be thankful for my father leaving. If my dad never left, my mom would never have gone crazy, and, well, my brother and I would not be living together and I would never have met Carrie, and this moment with my brother and me standing here like this would definitely never have happened. I was suddenly thankful for all of it, the comings and goings. I thought I would tell my brother about it sometime later when he wanted to talk about it, maybe, and I started to hope that this moment, this one here, would be the one we looked back on. It was too soon to tell, I guess, and we settled for standing there for a moment, watching the whole world take off and land.

There are some things that might make me angry, some things that are very wrong, and some things that are only for me — things that are very beautiful, full of beauty, like the old pistol and the tiger tattoo and the girl with the wig lit up by the sun. They are moments I refuse to share. They are moments I have never told anyone.

When I came back to the couch, Margaret was trembling. In the soft crook of her elbow, her pulse was beating like a hidden rabbit.

Birdie McCoy is a girl I make cry in third grade. When I do it, I doom myself forever. In the woods behind the elementary school, blue bows in her brown hair, her face red from a race, she is given a yellow ribbon for winning. I say, out of breath, “Who’s going to marry an ugly girl like you?” and she begins to cry quietly, for being faster than me, smarter, so small, so pretty. As she cups her hands over her eyes, I fall in love for the first time. Many years later I realize it is there, that moment, that dooms me forever. I fall in love with a woman as soon as she begins crying, which always, always occurs at the end of everything.

Concealment

Daryl L. L. Houston4 Comments

This is a book about concealment. From the very beginning, with the epigraph pointing to an elusive oasis of horror within a desert of boredom, all the way through to this week’s milestone, we’ve seen many instances of concealment.

Archimboldi’s history and person are concealed. Emotions and true feelings (consider Pelletier’s secret near-hope that Espinoza has gone down in a plane crash) are concealed. Edwin Johns’s real motivation for chopping off his hand is concealed. Evidence is concealed. And writing is used for concealment. Kessler speaks of this last at some length, and I’ve quoted it at length elsewhere and won’t do so again here. He speaks, in the same exchange, of people being inside or outside of society. The inside/outside pairing that I’ve explored elsewhere also seems to me to have something to do with concealment. Things go on inside jail that you wouldn’t expect, for example; they are concealed. Ansky’s manuscript is concealed, Reiter and company conceal themselves while watching the baroness and Entrescu have sex. The meaning of the book’s title has so far remained concealed. Examples abound.

In this week’s reading, the man from whom Archimboldi rents a typewriter says the following of authors:

He writes like someone taking dictation. His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of *concealment*. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter.

This resonated strongly for me with some earlier passages in which Florita (a magic flower of winter?) is portrayed as a sort of instrument or taker of dictation for whatever spirit or power is giving her visions of the murders. In the cases of both the seer and the author, Bolaño suggests that something like the vatic voice is at work. I love the comparison he makes, by proximity/association in the Florita passage, to the roles played by the ventriloquist and his dummy. The vatic voice is a funny thing, in that in work written in that voice, the identity of the real speaker is hidden. As you can’t know for sure whether the ouija board’s planchette is moved by a fellow-occultist or by the spirits themselves, you can’t know whether it’s the author/seer’s voice or some other, inspired voice that’s working. (Was Yeats hearing voices or was he just batshit crazy?) This too is a sort of concealment. The problem of concealment of the author (in general) in his or her work has stoked the fires of the intentional fallacy for ages.

On page 787, Bolaño says a bit more about concealment and art (and more):

Play and delusion are the blindfold and spur of minor writers. Also: the promise of their future happiness. A forest that grows at a vertiginous rate, a forest no one can fence in, not even the academies, in fact, the academies make sure it flourishes unhindered, as do boosters and universities (breeding grounds for the shameless) and government institutions and patrons and cultural associations and declaimers of poetry — all aid the forest to grow and hide what must be hidden, all aid the forest to reproduce what must be reproduced, since the process is inevitable, though no one ever sees what exactly is being reproduced, what is being tamely mirrored back.

This is a critical passage in the book, I think, for it ties together things like the inside/outside pairing (fencing) and concealment while also touching on problems in the academy, in government, in culture, and in the sort of mass reproduction a key product of which is poor factory workers in St. Teresa who become so much refuse. Let’s not forget that the St. Teresa murders themselves are largely concealed from the rest of the world.

In these late sections of the book, it begins to feel more literary to me. Bolaño is slowly beginning to pull a drawstring closed. It’s not tidy, but things begin to hang together a bit; themes and plots mingle more promiscuously. A typewriter-lender in the middle of the century (with its holocaust) says things that resonate very purposefully with speech acts and events across the world late in the century (with its smaller-scale holocaust), and there’s mounting suspicion that they’ll all wind up revolving somehow around Archimboldi (I suppose the suspicion is mounting; I read of such suspicions way back and just this week read of a desire for Archimboldi to make an appearance in St. Teresa). This is what literature does. It’s why, despite all the problems of this book, it is ultimately a good and an important book.

I’ll leave you with a couple more neat quotes about concealment, the first by Bolaño (p. 790) and the second by Matthew Arnold:

Jesus is the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not to frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it.

I knew the mass of men conceal’d
Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal’d
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;
I knew they lived and moved
Trick’d in disguises, alien to the rest
Of men, and alien to themselves–and yet
The same heart beats in every human breast!

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

Daryl L. L. Houston12 Comments

Of Katherine Hepburn’s death, Zadie Smith wrote the following:

Two days ago she died, aged ninety-six. I don’t know why I should be surprised, but I was, and when I found out, I wept, and felt ridiculous for weeping. How can someone you have never met make you cry?

I’m not the first to express a similar sentiment about the death of David Foster Wallace. There’s a crucial difference, however. His death, for those of us well outside of his intimate circle, was a very big surprise indeed. Still — Smith gets this part just right — to have felt so ragged after his death felt strange. I felt somehow orphaned.

Intimacy is concentric, and fortunately for those of us stuck in orbit on the outer rings surrounding the bright light that was David Foster Wallace, David Lipsky was admitted to a nearer circle during the final week of the book tour for Infinite Jest. Or, I should say, he was admitted to one slightly more interior circle and seems to have worked his way yet closer. And he recorded it all.

Just out from Broadway Books, Lipsky’s chronicling of a handful of days on the road with Dave (I’m going to call him Dave sometimes from here on out, because it makes me feel better and because the book made me think of him as Dave) might have been a savage, painful read. I expected as much, imagining myself with a box of tissue in a dimly lit room trying once again to work out how a guy like Dave could be gone and what the ramifications of that were for a know-nothing yutz of a no-talent hack like me.

With one minor exception in part of the afterword, Lipsky has avoided the maudlin, and instead of finding myself wallowing in the book and the sadness that attends the realization that its subject is no longer with us, I found it invigorating and validating and playful and fun and mostly delightful.

Lipsky gives us something of a soft landing in the preface, which provides just a teensy bit of background information before setting us gently on our way. The afterword he places curiously before the main body of the text, but even this turns out to be a considerate gesture, for Lipsky wants to leave us with the words of the living Wallace rather than sending us home from the journey with a meditation on his death. Read the afterword when you will, Lipsky advises us, at some break of your own choosing within the text.

I, being sort of rigidly conformist in some ways, chose to read the afterword last, and even that turned out to be an ok decision. For though there was that one crushing moment in the middle of the afterword, Lipsky leaves us with two wonderful things. First, he has given us a picture of Dave as a real live human being (with flaws, yes, but with many personalizing charms as well), which sister Amy had written that she hoped might happen. And second, looking back to a conversation about books as a way of seeking refuge from loneliness, Lipsky closes by saying this lovely thing about his road trip with Dave: “I’d tell him it reminded me of what life was like, instead of being a relief from it, and I’d say it made me feel much less lonely to read.”

This sort of escape from the loneliness of the inner self was, of course, one of Wallace’s projects. Late in the road trip, Dave says, of the particular edge good fiction has over other art forms:

And the big thing, the big thing seems to be, sort of leapin’ over that wall of self, and portraying inner experience. And setting up, I think, a kind of intimate conversation between two consciences.

I am in here.

I’ve listened to many interviews and readings Dave gave, and so I have something of an idea of what he must have been like to listen to. Yet in interviews and readings, people tend to speak in different registers than in everyday life. (I’m reminded of the distinction Dave makes in the grammar essay between time and place for saying “that ursine juggernaut bethought himself to sup upon my person” and “goddamn bear!”) One of the great pleasures of Lipsky’s book for me was his emphasis on Dave’s midwesternisms. They reminded me always that Dave was, mostly (especially after the first day or so of the trip), just a guy having a conversation. Taken in hand with the audio I had previously heard of Dave, they made Lipsky’s transcription seem real and alive. I felt as if I could hear Dave himself speaking the words. It was kind of Lipsky to have emphasized this for us.

Some have complained that Lipsky himself was too present in the text, that he peeks in with a too-high frequency with brief bracketed interpolations. I found the interjections helpful and well-meaning where others have found them self-serving and annoying.

The deeper into the book I got, the more pages I dog-eared, so that by the end, I figured I might as well just enlist the help of a strong friend and fold the corner of the whole book down on itself. The two men talk about movies, parties, fame, loneliness, the genesis of Infinite Jest, and much more, and it’s all riveting.

Lipsky’s book is a real gift. He brings us maybe one concentric ring closer to a sort of intimacy with Wallace, who sought in his work to learn how to leap over (and outward from) the walls of the self in which he was (we are) imprisoned. While Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself can’t help but remind us of Wallace’s death, it is most concerned with a pivotal point in his life, and it was — contra my fears — a real joy to read. Gaudeamus igitur.

Dismemberment

Daryl L. L. HoustonLeave a comment

A couple of months ago, I wrote about disembodiment. Tonight, I’ll give brief consideration to dismemberment, of which there is no shortage in 2666 without even counting all the severed nipples in the fourth part. First, a brief list taken from this week’s reading (some of these aren’t dismemberment precisely, but they’re disfigurings, at any rate, or catastrophic disabilities):

  • Reiter is shot in the throat and loses his voice for a while.
  • Ansky meets a soldier missing an eye and an arm (709)
  • A hunter is described whose sex organs have been torn off. He goes searching for them until at last he marries, at which point, having aged thirty years after being unmanned, he ages in reverse to get the thirty years back. Is there something of the Actaeon myth here?
  • There’s a curious episode with some indigenous people whom the Europeans believe to be cannibals but who actually take the European habit of shaking hands and making eye-contact to be a sort of threat of soul-rape. This isn’t exactly dismemberment, but gosh there sure does seem to be a threat of it, and it just feels related to me.
  • Reiter returns to his war buddies to find that Kruse now speaks as if he’s been castrated (738)
  • Reiter’s mother is blind in one eye.
  • Reiter’s father lost a leg and has some interaction with a sergeant who has also lost a leg.
  • Here’s a real stretch: There’s lots of talk of masturbation in this week’s reading. Can masturbation be construed to be a sort of almost imagined dismemberment of another person?

Some dismemberment  is to be expected, I suppose. It’s war time during this section, after all.

Still, some other body-wholeness or health issues occur to me.

Bolaño was dying as he wrote 2666 and in fact didn’t actually finish writing and editing the book (there’s supposedly a sixth part floating around somewhere). His terminal illness surely must have informed some of his impressions about death. Can it also have led him to focus on body/health issues, or do you suppose that was part of his project to begin with?

Bolaño writes a bit about art and body as well. We can’t forget Edwin Johns and his lost hand, of course, and what to me remains an open question regarding his real motivation for chopping off his hand. And then there’s Archimboldi’s namesake, Arcimboldo, about whom I wrote earlier with an eye toward the critics as a sort of composite character. As Arcimboldo composes some of his pictures as bodies made up of bodies, so Bolaño has made two big piles of bodies (at least two — the biggest or most explicit or pronounced being those of the Jews mid-century and of Mexican women late-century). And then there’s the matter of Bolaño’s health — perhaps worsened by the vagabond artist’s lifestyle he indulged in for much of his life? — and his own decision to switch gears in 1990 to write fiction rather than his beloved poetry, a decision fueled by a perception that he needed to be able to support his family, which he couldn’t do with poetry. Was Johns telling the truth after all, and betraying Bolaño’s own sense of having somehow sold out?

The final section of 2666 feels very mythological to me. It’s almost like a folk tale in tone and content at times. It tells the creation story of the man whose elusiveness set the opening part of the book in motion. Reiter is described as a giant many times, has a strange, counter-intuitive resistance to gunfire in spite of his height, and in fact has a mythology built up around him by the critics. He travels the world on adventures, is stripped of powers (speech) that he later regains, and even has something of an experience, in Castle Dracula, that one might liken to a trip into a labyrinthine underworld complete with a view of a chanting devil. He is awarded the medals of a hero.

As I contemplated the idea of Reiter/Archimboldi as a mythological figure, I tried to think of mythological figures who had been somehow disfigured. Cyclops with his one eye was, I suppose, born that way, but he bears mentioning because of all the one-eyedness in this section and before (blind justice, the mural of the winking saint). Another one-eyed figure were the Graeae, a set of crones (sisters to the Gorgons) who shared one eye and one tooth and whom Perseus outwitted. Prometheus had his liver perpetually torn out by eagles. Medusa, who has made a couple of appearances in Bolaño’s book, was ultimately decapitated, her head used as a weapon in future adventures. There are probably lots that I’m missing.

But the one that seems most relevant to me is Orpheus.  He was the son of a river god, and it’s hard for me to put aside the strange water associations Bolaño assigns to Reiter. Orpheus was linked more to community and to his disciples than to any one race or family; similarly, Reiter/Archimboldi, with his mixed-nationality name and his multi-national appeal, transcends boundaries of country and race. Orpheus was a great singer (and by extension poet) famous for his trip to the underworld to retrieve his wife, Eurydice. After failing to rescue her (he looked back into Hades before she had emerged and thus broke the deal), he became so despondent that he forsook all gods but Apollo, and when he went one morning to the oracle of Dionysus and began to praise Apollo, the female followers of Dionysus ripped him limb from limb. As his head and lyre bobbed down the river, he continued singing. Archimboldi’s final book (at the time of the story’s action, at least) will be called The Head, though I don’t think we know what it’s about. It’s an interesting title, given these little similarities between Orpheus and Reiter and the occurrences of art and disfigurement or dismemberment.

Consider also the story of Medusa. There are different renderings of the myth, but a couple of them suggest that she was actually very beautiful until she faced the wrath of Athena for defiling her temple by having sex in it. In one of the accounts, Poseidon desired Medusa, which angered Athena, who then allowed Poseidon to rape Medusa in her (Athena’s) temple, whereupon Athena punished Medusa for the defilement with the famous head of snakes and stony glance. I think it’s interesting to think of this story — relevant in a way to the murders in St. Teresa — with its ultimate beheading of a snake-haired head alongside that of Orpheus and his own decapitation: dismemberment of a woman for her uninvited sex set up next to dismemberment and subsequent immortalization of a poet for love of his wife, who died at the fangs of a snake.

Moby Dick

Daryl L. L. Houston12 Comments
Moby Dick group read prep

Well, there was pretty good response to my query about whether or not people were interested in a group read of Moby Dick. I’ve mentioned it a couple of times on twitter and Facebook as well and gotten a few encouraging responses. I had been waffling on whether or not to try to lead this thing, since I’ve been at this group read thing for nearly a year now, and it’s darned time-consuming for me. But I finally decided to go ahead and do the thing. And now I’m so excited I’m just about shaking in my skin about it. I’ve downloaded an audio version for potential listening to in the car and on the old elliptical machine. I’ve bought the authoritative text for this read and am poking into the end-matter as I have time. I’ve begun reading (and in some cases rereading) books about whaling and whales and Melville’s books. I’ve lined up a couple of neato bloggers who for the moment will remain nameless but whose participation I’m really excited about (not to diminish the efforts my siblings-in-arms already blogging here). And I’ve set a schedule.

Mark your calendar for May 24. That’s a couple of weeks after the 2666 read wraps up. We’re going to go pretty fast. I think that the longer a read goes along, the more fatigued people become. I know it’s been the case with 2666 (made worse by that big oppressive fourth section), and there are certainly parts of Moby Dick that some will find fatiguing or boring (though I find them fascinating). So this is going to be a 6-week whirlwind read. In the edition I cut my teeth on (the Penguin edition pictured front left above), that’s about 115 pages a week, or 16 pages a day. It seems like a lot, I guess, but the prose itself isn’t hard. If you were able to pull off 70 pages a week of Infinite Jest, this will be an absolute cinch. (And if people come at me with pitchforks and torches in the comments, I’ll consider stretching it out to an 8-week read instead.)

So there you have it. Bone up on your nautical lingo and get ready to chase the white whale. I’ll write a few more posts in preparation for the read in the mean time, but look for my post on the first few chapters on May 24.

If you’re already blogging for IZ and would like to be considered an official blogger for the Moby Dick read, please let me know one way or another so that I can add you to the about page when I make one. If you’re not a blogger for IZ but would like to be, please make your case in the comments (or if you’re too shy to make a case in the comments, at least leave a comment expressing your interest, and I’ll email you).

Castle Dracula

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

When I wrote about vampirism in 2666 about a month ago, I had forgotten entirely the events that take place at Castle Dracula in this week’s swath of reading. Or maybe there was some little synapse way back in the recesses of my brain that remembered, but it sure wasn’t something I had in my conscious memory. But sure enough, Hans Reiter gets shipped off this week to a strange assignment at Castle Dracula that culminates in let’s just say really impressive and ultimately at least slightly disturbing (or is it just humorous?) coitus complete with blood and chanting.

So why all the vampirism? And why this specific strange interlude, with its dream of cannibalism, at the castle of Dracula himself? In the comments on that older post of mine, it’s demonstrated readily enough that vampirism lines up rather nicely with the consumption of others, parasitism, etc., that’s so pervasive in the part about the crimes. It would be simple enough to allow that the Dracula interlude is just a solidification of the conceit.

But I think there’s more to it. Those who read along when we did Dracula this past October may remember that the author of that classic if really sort of disappointing text was Irish and that there are plenty of bits of the text that can be reasonably said to comment on the landlord debacle that Ireland is known for (I wrote about it briefly here). At the heart of that debacle was the misuse of poor people on the margins — outside of society, to use Kessler’s phrasing — by those within society. It kind of sounds familiar within our context, doesn’t it?

Further, consider how Bolaño lingers on the story of Benito Juarez earlier in the novel (I believe it’s in the section in which we first meet La Santa, and I assume that the city of Juarez, after which Santa Teresa is modeled, is named after this former Mexican president). During Juarez’s terms as president, Mexico was the subject of invasions by the U.S. and by France. Both nations had loaned money to Mexico for economical and political reasons, and both fought for influence in the country. Compare this to the history of Ireland, whose landlord problem arose as a result of England’s play to control Ireland for political reasons (it was a buffer from invasions by Spain and France). So yet again, we see pointers in Bolaño’s book to parallels with Irish history that happen also to be addressed, if obliquely, in Stoker’s book.

And then finally, at the end of this week’s section, we see the strange courtship of Reiter and Ingeborg in which we learn of her fascination with the human-sacrificing Aztecs and Reiter’s oath sworn by the Aztecs. Bolaño here is tying World War II and, by not very lengthy extension, the human sacrifice of the holocaust, back to the Mexico in which the heart of his story is centered. That one of Ireland’s most well-known writers couched the landlord matter in terms of cannibalism hardly seems tangential.

Someone who has a better head for history than I do may be able to provide additional color or nuance, but I definitely have the sense that Bolaño is using the vampirism in the story, and Dracula in particular, to tie together some of the threads he’s been unwinding pertaining to insiders and outsiders, parasitism and consumption of people, and a sort of larger parasitism of nations.