More Stuff I Like: The Savage Detectives

Why is it that we have the easiest time talking about the most trivial, mundane things, but when it comes to those things that matter, that move us, that shake us to the core –love, death– words always fail? A year ago I tried blogging about a TV show (RuPaul’s Drag Race) and although –or rather, precisely because– it was so unabashedly vacuous, I found the words pouring out of me: sharp, funny, piquant. To this day I think (and regret) that it was probably one of the best pieces I ever wrote.

Meanwhile when I want to speak about things of substance and sublimity I find myself grasping at chaff as the living grain slips through my fingers. (But, if the grain which falls to the earth does not die, it stays alone; while if it dies, it brings forth fruit.) Which is why I am struggling as I sit here trying to write something about Roberto Bolaño.

I first encountered Bolaño in the Strand Bookstore a bit over a year ago. Not in the flesh, of course (he died in 2003) but in the form of a tall, teetering stack of his (at the time) most recently translated book, The Savage Detectives. I think I had read something about him somewhere (he would soon become omnipresent) and so I idly picked up a copy and flipped to the first pages:

NOVEMBER 2

I’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way.

NOVEMBER 3

I’m not really sure what visceral realism is.

And from there on out I was pretty much hooked.

Coming Home

The sun was coming up over the horizon as my plane came in for a landing – over Rome, because Alitalia had been the cheapest way to get back from New York to Amsterdam. I had some time to kill before my next flight, so I found the one open coffee bar and stood with the few half-drowsy morning travellers and ordered a cappucino and the Italian equivalent of a brioche. Everything was so ridiculously cheap (even at the airport) and equally delicious, and I spent a moment fantasizing about an exotic future life in this most exotic (to me) of European capitals, but I knew it was just that –a fantasy– because, despite the old saw about all roads leading to it, Rome would never, I knew, be my home.

Paroxysm of pleasure interspersed with the usual liberal guilt

Today I ate a bowlful of strawberries. They probably were shipped from South America in an environmentally devastating and totally unsustainable way. But. They tasted really good.

Stuff I like

A quick break from my paper writing (about corporate personhood and vampires!!) to give a shout-out to things I like. I figure I spend enough time on here being negative… might as well point out some things that spark my interest/enjoyment. Today I chose two: one old, one new. The new: this wonderful little capsular world from artist Thomas Doyle. He constructs miniature, emotionally-weighted worlds inside glass jars! He says he was obsessed by dioramas as a kid! I was too: I used to cull grass and moss and flowers from the yard and create miniature “gardens” inside shoe boxes, only to be tragically distraught when they inevitably died. And, seeing as how I  have such problems with much of modern art, and how a trip to the MoMa for me is generally like Dante’s trip through purgatory (fascinating, but not exactly enjoyable), it was thrilling to find myself so captivated by Doyle’s work.

Obama and the Age of Iconicity

For those of us who came out of school and into the “real” world this past year it has been a disheartening time, to say the least: with the economy in shambles, and entry-level jobs disappearing more rapidly than free beer at a college kegger, we’ve watched the seemingly sudden evisceration of the American workplace as we (or rather, our parents) knew it. Freshly endowed with our flashy diplomas and a skill-set supposedly primed to find us a place in the “new” knowledge economy, we instead found ourselves signing on for yearlong unpaid internships, taking jobs we’d turned down at seventeen (Starbucks, anyone?) or, like me, beating a hasty retreat towards the preserving walls of academia.

Bated breath

Chatted with a friend yesterday about a mutual acquaintance who is joining the Peace Corps. We both mentioned how, to us, this choice seems odd: how the Peace Corps seems an anachronistic remnant of the Cold War, the “soft” approach to diplomacy (“winning hearts and minds”) to complement the hard approach (“bombing brains and bodies”). How there’s something uncomfortably imperialistic about it, about the idea that all these “natives” need to “rescue” them from hardship is a 22-year-old liberal arts student with a Lit. degree and no remotely relevant experience; analogous to the “Mighty Whitey” trope in film and fiction, also known as What These People Need Is A Honkey.

“At the same time,” I said, “I envy these people their ability to believe in something.” Our friend’s belief in the American Way and its relevance to completely different cultures, while deeply problematic and sort of shockingly naïve, allows him to go out into the world and accomplish something. It’s analogous to religious faith: as with many deeply religious people, his unquestioned, blinkered “faith” is a source of strength. And like many religious people, he’s a genuinely good-hearted person.

“Myself,” I went on, “I don’t have that kind of faith – not in a chosen people and not in a chosen country. I used to sort of “believe” in literature, but even that has become problematic for me in recent years. I guess I don’t know what I believe in, anymore, not really.”

“Hmm,” said my friend, after a pause. “I guess I believe in breath.”

And I thought that was as good an answer as any.

Pic by Adriana Petit via here

My New Year’s Resolution “Anti-List”

So, I got this idea (in an effort to ignore those looming paper deadlines) to post a list of the top ten trends which I hope will not continue into 2010 – trends like those “my year in the life of” things in which some previously unknown blogger (someone just like us!) rises to pop culture fame through their willingness to cook all of Julia Child’s recipes, follow all of Oprah’s dicta, or try every position in the karma sutra. I figured I could get in a couple pithy zingers about how, in this stage of late capitalism, the only remaining form of stardom resides in a parasitic appropriation of past images and icons, recycled remnants of a culture which we revive at the very moment of its final evisceration. A.k.a. your usual quasi-Marxist cultural commentary with a  splash of snark, a few sly asides, and enough pop references to show that I’m still (despite it all!) culturally au courant.

And then I realized: that to engage in such snarky commentary would be, in fact, to embody the very trend(s) I set out to criticize.

Indecision

My father told me to stop leaving half-empty beers around the house: “It’s 48 dollars a case, the least you can do is finish it.” I’m like that with cigarettes, too: halfway down the stick, and I’m burned out (but they’re not). I even keep two ashtrays, one for the sad, shrivelled, definitively burned-out butts; the other for the halfsies, the failed attempts, the ones with a few drags left.

Today I tore the nail on my right ring finger and started paring down the others to match, but halfway through I lost steam, or got sidetracked, or thought of something else. Now the nails on my right hand are cut close to the flesh, while the left hand… didn’t get the memo about what the right was doing. Can I tell everyone I’m a guitar player?

It’s like a bad joke, or a bad metaphor for, like, our modern condition and… stuff. Or like a scene from Benjamin Kunkel’s novel, Indecision– a great book, but I never finished it.

In the bathroom, Oct. 16

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The international office of Leiden University resides in the old house of the Counts of Holland, a sort of miniature fairy-tale castle (complete with turrets, battlements and dungeons) which subsequently served as the town prison. The inevitable jokes aside (about administration as a form of torture, etc.) I find something uplifting about this fact: the old inner partitions have been hollowed out; only the façade remains; iron bars replaced by enormous panes of glass. As if the very site of history could be transformed, with time, into something useful, hollow, innocent (transparent).

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I have this thought from across the street, sitting in a bruin café whose mounted photographs attest to its continued existence in 1960, 1920, 1910. In this last picture the burghers of the houses surrounding the square have come out to pose in the street; some of the boys wear knee-length britches; one has wooden shoes. It is easy to imagine them pushing open the door of the coffeeshop with its warped, antique panes, or standing around the bar counter with its peeling (green) paint and countless knots, reading the Volkskrant with greater ease than I am today as I try to decipher the sense of an article on “the modern relevance of the holocaust.”

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In the bathroom I am overcome by a sudden sense of peace and security – a baffling sensation until I realize that the curved walls of the narrow room, its sliding door, and the distant hum of conversation perfectly recall the feel of lavatories in certain (old) trains. “Nothing so soothing as the transitory,” I think. But what am I here in Holland if not transient? Then I realized: security comes from either total rooted- or total rootless-ness, from the château or the high-speed train. Whereas I am somewhere between these two: here, but not for long. (But aren’t we all?)

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I’ve erased all my previous blog entries, which I wrote –after all– before “coming here.” But tomorrow this current writing will be before the “there” à venir: every writing is passed. Alongside the desire for some sort of total, historical journal –pages upon pages documenting what I was and what I’ve become– lies another: not mounting pages but one page, continually erased and rewritten: the illusion of a fresh start. Illusory because we cannot, of course, erase history; we can’t even redeem it; but perhaps (like these classrooms in old dungeons) we can learn to live with/in it.

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