Sunday, March 26, 2006

You know the drill by now.

Wisdom of Solomon

I expected this to be an apocryphal version of Proverbs, but no! Rather, it reminds me of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. It is not a sequence of pithy epigrams, but rather a panegyric to Wisdom herself. Very nice.

Bret Easton Ellis: Glamorama

I respected Robert far more before he suggested this book to me. It was nice, but why is it his favorite? Just because people's vaginas fall out of the bodies in response to virulent poisons and others' intestines shoot out of their rectums in a purple foam while being electrocuted does not make it a classic. Funny, but not a classic.

Augustine: Confessions

I can relate, Augustine, old boy. I have, like you, been a slut, a prey to my baser--if not basest--instincts. Like you, I have grown tired with it, but found myself unable to give it up entirely. And like you, I have searched for meaning in religion and found it wanting. What was it that made you change your mind? Did you have an epiphany? If so, where can I get one? You make it sound like you simply decided on a purely rational basis that devotion was the way to go, but I have reasoned myself to a different--if compatible--conclusion. Where did our paths diverge?

Oh, and the commentary on Genesis? Boooooring.

Monday, March 20, 2006

Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Poems

I have been working on this for years. I started by reading the English translations on the converse and looking for inaccuracies. Gradually, I would read the Spanish obverse in its entirety By the time I got to Dos Versiones De "Ritter, Tod und Teufel," I barely looked at the English. Now I move on to do the same with Lorca, Quevedo and Neruda.

Part of what made Borges such a provident beginning to this project was his apparent amnesia. He wrote only a handful of poems, as prolific as he was. Uns Rosa Amarilla is the same poem as El Golem, and Mi Ultimo Tigre, from his penultimate volume Atlas, is a prosaic version of El Otro Tigre from his early El Hacedor. I henceforth use the translated versions of the texts to spare myself the effort importing tildes.

Every poem seems to ask and answer the questions, "What am I? Am I nothing or everything?", the answer to which is a guarded yes. In his underrated short story, Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote, Borges makes it clear that all literature ceases to belong to the author as soon as it is read. This volume now belongs to and was authored by Brandon Payne, who spilled a casserole in the margins to notarize his ownership. In his poetry, Borges expands on the idea; not only literature, but all sensation and experience is owned by and composes myself. Borges never wanders far from the banks of Heraclitus' river, which wears labyrinthine arroyos into experience, and faces itself to reflect an endless succession of mirrors. Things and people float on the surface of this river, on which we bump into each other like driftwood, and often Borges poems are simple lists of the things he is:

The Colors of a Turner when the lights
Are turned out in the narrow gallery
And not a footstep sounds in the deep night.
The other side of the dreary map of the world.
The tenuous spiderweb in the pyramid.
The sightless stone and the inquiring hand. (Cosas)
My cane, my pocket change, this ring of keys,
The obedient lock, the belated notes,(Las Cosas)
The circular time of the stoics,
The coin in the mouth of the dead man,
The sword's weight on the scale, (Las Causas)
Death, the weight of dawn, the endless plain
And the intricacy of stars,
And to have seen nothing or almost nothing
But the face of a young girl in Buenos Aires. (Elegia)

I feel like cutting the titles out of all the poems and conflating them into a prose work of remarkable depth, insight, and repetitiveness. Perhaps Borges simply became senile and forgot what he had written (he suggests as much in the prologue to El Oto, El Mismo), but I suspect that he simply had succumbed to the knowledge that all thoughts, all poems are one:

Soon, I shall know what I am.

Friday, March 10, 2006

Philip Levine: Breath

To quote a Poem by Borges, the title of which I forget, "Soon I will know who I am." And as Philip Levine might say, I am in the process of naming myself, of discovering, "What did I bring to the dance?" (Gospel).

In what I consider the central poem of this collection, Naming, Levine endeavors to define himself via a series of Joycian vignettes from his life. In this poem, he shows the reader, "All the small secrets that contain [him]." He and his Brother go through life, "growing into the names they answered to / until they thought they were those names," in other words, without authentic names of their own. It is only through the act of experiencing life that Levine, and the human for which he speaks, actually develops a name, an identity.

That defining moment comes

. . . outside the Avalon at 2 A.M.
when the lights blink off, the kids leave in pairs,
to be alone then, hearing only breath,
your own breath rising to answer with words
you didn't know you knew the pale questions
of the full moon, to know for the first time
you are a name without a number.

I have had this very moment. If you scour my other blog, you will be able to locate it under the entry, "Please, Blue Fairy, Make Me A Real Boy."

The Pages Creep on Apace

Books I've read since last posting:

Haggai-Malachi

Didn't take much away with me here.

Tobit, Judith, Esther (Greek version)

Fascinating as these stories are, I can understand why they are considered Apocryphal. They just don't live, they don't cut the way the rest of the bible does. Whether this makes them better or worse is open to interpretation, but they are clearly of a different species, more akin to The Decameron than The rest of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Charles Dickens: Nicholas Nickelby

I read this monster simply out of arrogance. I couldn't stand knowing that Mark Hennesy, that bag of wind, had read an iportant book I had not. And glad I am to have read it. That Complete Oxford Illustrated Dickens I bought on a whim five years ago has been gathering far too much dust. And it was enjoyable as well. I disagree with the common complaint that young Nicholas is too perfect, too earnest. He is as tragically flawed as any well written hero in literature, a hot-headed, impetuous, thoughtless, if loyal and stalwart figure.

Interestingly, I believe I have now read as many books so far this year as I did all year 2005.