So Alive

No estoy muerto, ando de parranda.

One week more, and then I will come back to online life and to our regular programming. Cheers y salud.

A History of (Google) Reading

After his History of Writing, I am really enjoying Steven Roger Fischer’s A History of Reading (thanks, Jon). Unlike the one on writing, this one does explore “the future” (very much the present) of reading and “technology.” (I use inverted commas because I do not like using the tech term to refer merely to what’s digital). Beyond the obvious discussion of the “e-Book”, I think it is essential to engage critically with the phenomenon of RSS and, more specifically, Google Reader. Even those of us who feel confident reading in online environments cannot deny the profound transformation that feed readers are exerting on human communication. Just like any serious book reader becomes an improvised librarian and archivist, netizens are becoming, sometimes without realizing it, informal digital information managers. There is no other way to stay afloat in the fast stream of digital information. Harold Blooms’s “influence anxiety” is definitely becoming a “feed anxiety” (or “link anxiety”).

My Own Memories

no hay lugar para visitas, avenida universidad, 2007

Because I am a vivid and trembling memory, a flaming memory that feeds and burns itself up, that consumes itself to be reborn and spread its wings. I have eagle wings that I stole from a Mexican flag. I have angel wings that sprouted out as I dreamed of you last night, while I created you in my dreams. I’m nothing if I don’t create my own memories.

-Fernando del Paso, News from the Empire (Dalkey Archive, 2009), p. 692

Mañana veremos la unreal city, infinita e iluminada, bajo nuestras alas de metal.

Ways of Writing

There are many ways of writing. Some people sit in a room and do nothing but write. They are the happy ones. Their lives are sad because they are lonely, because they gaze at women the way dogs gaze at the moon, and they complain bitterly to the world, singing their woes, telling us how much suffering they undergo on account of the sun, the stars, autumn and death. They are the saddest of men but the happiest of writers because their lives are dedicated to worlds alone: they breakfast on proper nouns and go to sleep with a well-fleshed adjective in their arms. They smile in a faintly wounded manner when they dream. And when they wake in the morning they raise their eyes to heaven because they are under a permanent spell and live in some cockeyed rapture, believing that by grunting and stuttering their way through all those adjectives and proper nouns they will continue to succeed in articulating that which God himself has succeeded in articulating once and once only. Yes, the happy writers are those who walk about looking sad, and women deal gently with them, taking considerable care of them as they might of their simpleminded nearest and dearest, as if they were the writers’ more fortunate, wiser sisters, obliged to comfort them and prepare them for death. I wouldn’t want to be a writer who does nothing but write…

-Giacomo Casanova, in Sándor Márai’s Casanova in Bolzano

Los Reduccionistas

Next Thursday, I will be reading with Brenda Ríos from our collaborative project, Los Reduccionistas, at Mexico City’s 81. DJ Maza will provide the evening’s soundtrack.

That’s gonna be a hell of a party, I’m tellin’ ya.

Worriers

You cannot miss Mark Young’s Terracotta Worriers, available as a PDF.

Hope Not Hate

If you live in the UK and you think the BNP does not represent Britain, please sign this petition.

The News Today, Oh Boy!

Happy news:

This Summer, I’ll be an intern at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University.

I am ecstatic.

—
I’ve been so nervous and stressed I thought that a very important meeting with a very important person was on Thursday, when in fact it was today. I am terribly embarrassed and sorry. Too many emotions today…

Spider

Tattoo

The light is like a spider.
It crawls over the water.
It crawls over the edges of the snow.
It crawls under your eyelids
And spreads its webs there–
Its two webs.

The webs of your eyes
Are fastened
To the flesh and bones of you
As to rafters or grass.

There are filaments of your eyes
On the surface of the water
And in the edges of the snow.

-Wallace Stevens

No pasarán?

The fascists are among us, and will attempt to speak for a nation.

Utterly depressed at the election results.

Beware, Europe. Be afraid, world.

The Non-Prodigal Son

This time next week, I’ll be waking up in Mexico City.

Indifference

“Indifference, not sadism, is the cardinal sin. Indifference implies a lack of imagination, an inability to feel what it is like to be another and the result is cruelty, epitomised in the novel by the Duchese de Guermantes’ refusal to listen to Swann telling her he is mortally ill because to respond to that would mean the ruin of her evening out. We have all, at one time or another, acted like the duchess; what is hard for us to accept is that such actions place one in Hell no less than the deliberate treatment of others as vermin. For Hell has many circles and there is no essential distinction between the adoring Francesca clinging to ther Paolo and the cannibal Ugolino gnawing the skull of his enemy, between the duchess’s refusal to hear what Swann is telling her and Gregor Samsa’s family not wanting to accept that is their son who has turned into a revolting insect.

Reading Proust, walking round museums and art galleries, listening to Beethoven, will not necessarily save us from such a fate. It may indeed be that such activities only reinforce our indifference (’In the room the women come and go,/ Talking of Michaelangelo’). Sadism, on the other hand, at least in the form practised by Mlle Vinteuil, like the masturbation explored a few pages earlier, represents a striving to escape the solitary confinement of indifference, a wild strategy to force an apparently indifferent world to touch us, if only for a moment. Unfortunately it can never truly succeed, for it is always we who instigate it and what we need is precisely the opposite: it is for the world to touch us unawares. Thus it has to be repeated, over and over again, in ever more desperate and ineffectual efforts. But then how are we to act once we have fallen into the solitude of our lives, once the aura which had lit up the world and which we had, until one fateful moment, taken for granted, seems to have been lost for ever? Are we to wait, like Chaplin’s flower-girl, for that miracle which may never happen? Or is there some other way in which we can help it into being, as less melancholy less desperate way?”

-Gabriel Josipovici, “Transgression”

Illuminations

Pictographies