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Missed Opportunities
An astute and intellectually fiery post here by John Latta, re: missed opportunities of the avant-garde.Read More
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Breadcrumbs: A Personal Anthology of 2009 (Part One)
Inspired by Bob Arnold’s playground, I’m going to leave some breadcrumbs here that others might want to follow. My aim is to whittle down two large stacks of reading done in the past year, which had built up while I slowly came to the realization that I will never have the time or strength to write in any detail about them all. These morsels I offer in lieu of the more in-depth reactions all of these books deserve.Read More
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Generosity
From an interview by Héctor Soto and Matías Bravo with the great Roberto Bolaño, published as “Literature is Not Made from Words Alone” in Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview and Other Conversations: In one way or another, we’re all anchored to the book. A library is a metaphor for human beings or what’s best about human beings, the same way a concentration camp can be a metaphor for what is worst about them. A library is total generosity.Read More
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Mexico Books 2009: The Violent Foam
Unless one is promiscuous by nature, one needs a decent interval between leaving one lover and finding another.* One needs a similar interval after reading writers as strong as Bolaño and Parra. But I’d brought a stack of books to Mexico with me, and some secret drive to read them all before coming home made me move directly on to Daisy Zamora’s The Violent Foam: New and Selected Poems, published by Curbstone Press in 2002.Read More
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Mexico Books 2009: Let the Truth Be Told
I promised in an earlier post to write about the second book I read in Mexico this year, Nicanor Parra’s After-Dinner Declarations. But every time I try to write about the book I get stuck: Parra’s book is brilliant but, for me at least, unsummarizable. The collection contains five long poems in the form of speeches, which Parra actually delivered on various occasions.Read More
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Mexico Books 2009: Distant Star
I started reading Roberto Bolaño’s novel Distant Star at Denver International Airport, where we waited three hours for the first leg of our flight to Cancún. Thunderstorms over Dallas had grounded flights there, where we were supposed to connect, so I started out with an overhanging mood of distress, uncertainty, and not too far below the surface, anger—at the weather, the airline, and the idiocy of my choosing a connecting flight to save a few bucks.Read More
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His poems weren’t bad…
Here’s a brief excerpt from Roberto Bolaño’s amazing posthumous novel 2666. It concerns a young poet who is hanging around in the hope that an older poet whom he admires will take a look at his poems. The speaker, a woman, is also there to see the famous poet: His poems weren’t bad. His only problem was that he wrote just like the poet. These things can’t have happened to you, I said, you’re too young to have suffered this much. He made a gesture as if to say that he didn’t care whether I believed him or not.Read More