El buen pastor

- Me parece innecesario ese ir y venir entre el pasado y el presente en la película, creo que era mejor que fuera una historia lineal porque hasta en ciertos momentos de la trama, esos giros parecen confusos.

Ese era el comentario de un hombre hacia su novia o esposa a la salida de la película El Buen Pastor. El tipo no parecía sincero y sonaba a que buscaba impresionar a la chica con su crítica, ya que comenzó a hacer una especie de árbol genealógico de la cinta.

A mí me gusto bastante el film y pensé que si la historia hubiera comenzado cuando Matt Damon era un niño y al espiar a su papá veía que se suicidaba hubiera sido una película igual de interesante, pero probablemente mucha gente hubiese sentido que era aburrida.

Siento que giros en los planos temporales de la película son necesarios porque vivimos en una época con mucha información y estamos ya acostumbrados a cambiar nuestra atención de una cosa a otra con mucha rapidez. Zapeamos de un canal a otro constantemente, brincamos de una página de interneta otra en cuestión de minutos, hace falta tiempo para navegar por youtube o los feeds de RSS, sentimos que no leemos lo suficientemente rápido y queremos terminar una novela cuanto antes para empezar la más nueva de un autor de renombre, etcétera.

De cualquier forma. el debate sobre la forma de abordar una historia siempre sera un debate y no hay una fórmula para hacerlo, cada quién desde su punto de vista calificará el resultado final.

Bolaño y Dalton

Desde la muerte de Roberto Bolaño muchas de las anécdotas alrededor del escritor chileno se han repetido una y otra vez en diversos medios. En medio de la cascada de comentarios repetidos encontré una (no sé si falsa o verdadera) que por fin es nueva:

I was in San Salvador to assist C. with research she's conducting on Roque Dalton (1935-1975), so that most of the week was spent learning about his chaotic and prolific life and career. As I learn more about his life and work, his writing strikes me as one of the most important and vibrant literary projects Latin America has ever seen. As I've written here before, I'm especially fascinated by the brief encounter that occurred sometime in late 1973 or early 1974 between Dalton and Roberto Bolaño in San Salvador. Dalton had returned to El Salvador from Cuba on Christmas Day 1973, in order to join a small group of leftist guerrillas in the struggle to bring a revolution to his country.

I haven't been able to find any information on when exactly Bolaño arrived in San Salvador (he never published an account of his time there and his references in interviews are brief), but I believe it would have been after his escape from Chile, as he made his way back up to Mexico fleeing the overthrow of Salvador Allende. From the time he arrived in El Salvador in late 1973 until he was assassinated by his own "comrades" in the ERP, Dalton lived clandestine in San Salvador. Having been marginally associated with a revolutionary group for a few months in Santiago de Chile and having escaped jail and certain death there, Bolaño would have been clandestine as well during his time in San Salvador.

Tomado de Venepoetics

Gore de vuelta en Washington

De acuerdo con el Drudge Report el ex vicepresidente de Estados Unidos, Al Gore se apresta para hacer una aparicón en el Capitolio y se espera que sea muy agitada:

Temperatures are predicted to reach a high of only 43-degrees on Wednesday in Washington, but look for high-heat to come out of Al Gore's scheduled appearances on The Hill!

Gore is set to solo before Rep. John Dingell's [D-MI] all powerful Energy and Commerce Committee in the morning and Sen. Barbara Boxer's [D-CA] Environment and Public Works Committee in the afternoon.

Both are expected to have overflow seating, and protesters, both for and against Gore.

Gore will get a 30 minute opening and then Boxer and her republican counterpart, Sen. Inhofe, each get 15 minutes each of questioning in addition to their opening statements. Other senators will only get 5 min of Q & A.

"Democrat Dingell is a big global warming skeptic, so do not expect him to go too lightly on Gore," predicts a congressional source.

Proposed questions for Gore, which are circulating behind-the-scenes, have been obtained by the DRUDGE REPORT -- question that could lead Gore scrambling for answers!

Mr. Gore: You have said several times that we have 10 years to act to stave off global warming. Was that 10 years from the first time you said that or 10 years from now? We just wanted to get a firm date from you that we can hold you to.

Mr. Gore: How can you continue to claim that global warming on Earth is primarily caused by mankind when other planets (Mars, Jupiter and Pluto) with no confirmed life forms and certainly no man-made industrial greenhouse gas emissions also show signs of global warming? Wouldn’t it make more sense that the sun is responsible for warming since it is the common denominator?

Mr. Gore: Joseph Romm, the executive director for the Center for Energy and Climate Solutions, has said we must build 700 large nuclear plants to stave off climate change. Where do you stand on the need for nuclear energy?

Mr. Gore: Do you think the earth is significantly overpopulated and that is a major contributor to your view of climate change. (If yes, what do you think is a sustainable population for the planet?)

Resultado insospechado

No me atraía mucho ver el juego Barcelona-Real Madrid porque supuse resultaría un juego sos y aburrido, luego de que ambos equipos fueron eliminados de la Champions League. Pero me equivoqué... fue un partido muy emocionante (me imagino que no excelentemente bien jugado, de acuerdo a los cánones) y lo mejor es que sí lo vi y fue muy gratificante ver el empate a tres del Barcelona (he simpatizado con ellos desde niño). Tenía un buen tiempo sin ver un partido completo de futbol soccer y si bien no es mi deporte favorito, me queda claro que hay momentos climáticos como ese para su impacto en todo el mundo.

Scared

Del album Albert Hammond Jr.

GRANTA & NEW AMERICAN LITERARY TALENT

Llevo varios meses leyendo primordialmente a escritores estadounidenses y de inmediato me atrajo este post de Verbumlogos:

Eleven years ago, the British magazine Granta fired a shot heard round the world, or at least the literary world, by publishing a list of the 20 best American novelists under 40. Some of the small names on the list grew very big, like Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. Other hot names at the time, like David Foster Wallace, were left off the list entirely. But as critics fussed about who was included and who was excluded, a clear snapshot of American writing emerged from the scuffle: It was clean, safe, and obsessed with realism. "The ghost of Raymond Carver haunted many American writers then," says Granta editor Ian Jack. "Not a bad ghost—far from it—but you can have too much of a good thing." The magazine's next issue, Granta 97: Best of Young American Novelists 2, due out this spring, is once more devoted to the top young authors in America, and it seems times have changed.
Back in the prosperous year of 1996, America's bubble had yet to burst. A war in Iraq had come and gone from our national attention as quickly as a video game. Only about 20 percent of adults used the Internet, and two Stanford Ph.D. students had just begun a research project called "Google." We weren't living in a global village yet, and it showed in our literature. "Writing was much more 'American' then—it was devoted to depicting the U.S.A.," says Jack. Most of the 1996 Granta winners concerned their novels with their hometowns, describing them in clear and sparse prose. For example, Sherman Alexie's short-story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven featured inhabitants of the Spokane Indian Reservation where he was raised; Washington State native David Guterson set Snow Falling on Cedars near Puget Sound; and Eugenides grew up in Grosse Point, Michigan, the affluent suburban-Detroit backdrop for The Virgin Suicides.
Now, novelists in the U.S., like many filmmakers nominated for Academy Awards this year, seem to find their inspiration overseas. "Today so many young American writers were born and raised abroad—China, Africa, Asia, Latin America—and they have different concerns and experiences," says Jack. But even Americans born here are worried about issues that extend well beyond the borders of the United States: war, terrorism, global warming, outsourcing, and immigration. "America seems part of a wider world now in a way it didn't then, and also much less certain of itself," says Jack. "That comes through in the writing."
Among the 21 new winners, there are certainly many authors with a global perspective, including hot properties Jonathan Safran Foer, Nell Freudenberger, and Gary Shteyngart; critical darlings Olga Grushin, Daniel Alarcon, and Uzodinma Iweala; and lesser known lights Rattawut Lapcharoensap and Jess Row.

You dont love me yet

El título sin duda es sugerente: You dont love me yet y la idea de comprar y leer el nuevo libro de Jonathan Lethem se vuelve más sugerente tras leer el siguiente trabajo de Zach Baron en The Village Voice

Steal this Band
Theft and plagiarism are at the heart of Jonathan Lethem's rock 'n' roll novel
by Zach Baron
March 1st, 2007 9:07 PM

Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude faded to the sound of Another Green World, Brian Eno's haunting, monochromatic set piece. Dylan Ebdus, Solitude's semi-autobiographical main character and his father, Abraham, disappear on the last page of Lethem's sprawling book into a Massachusetts blizzard: "We were in a middle space then, in a cone of white, father and son moving forward at a certain speed. Side by side, not truly quiet but quiescent, two gnarls of human scribble, human cipher, human dream."

Is there a more beautiful invocation of pop music in literature than Lethem's? A better transubstantiation of rock 'n' roll records—"the middle space they conjured and dwelled in, a bohemian demimonde, a hippie dream"—into something so transcendently valuable?

Now Lethem—who once spoke of music as "the art that other art flatters itself by bending towards"—has come finally, with You Don't Love Me Yet, to the thing itself. Reviewers' galleys of his new novel arrived affixed with a letter, inscribed on Doubleday stationery and penned by Falmouth Strand, fictional conceptual artist and gallery owner. "Here, minor characters have been given undue prominence, while major characters have been relegated to the margins," goes the author's wink-and-nod. "Real art has been willfully confused with fake art."

To wit: In an unnamed Los Angeles museum, we are introduced to Lucinda Hoekke and Matthew Plangent, a pair of lovers and bandmates who quickly put Strand's prophecy about art to the test. There to end their affair, they instead dip into one of Strand's sculptures for one last mutual appreciation. When next they meet, it will be at band practice.

Lucinda has a gift for appropriating other people's work. Answering phones at a complaint line—another Strand art project—she begins a hotline romance with professional slogan-coiner Carlton Vogelsong, whose initial telephone complaints and later, repetitive utterances during innumerable sex acts with Lucinda, become the lyrics to the songs that will make the as-yet-unnamed band locally famous.

Matthew, lead-singer and about-to-be-former Los Angeles zoo employee, is in the midst of stealing something as well: a kangaroo (reminiscent of the gun-toting marsupial of Lethem's first novel, Gun, With Occasional Music) named Shelf. Shelf is undergoing a crisis due to "a certain lack of realistic perspective," a problem Matthew understands because he shares it.

Theft and plagiarism, identification and misidentification—not coincidentally, the subjects of a February Harper's essay by Lethem titled "The Ecstasy of Influence"—are at the heart of You Don't Love Me Yet. When the band's stunted genius, Bedwin Greenish, becomes blocked—"My problem is I don't believe in the place where the sentences come from anymore," he tells his band—Lucinda rescues him (and jumpstarts the book) by secretly supplying Carlton Vogelsong's words, expropriated without notice from her new lover. As one character notes toward the end, "theirs was a band whose secret genius had a secret genius."

Genius, as a noun, figures large in the novel, and it becomes a kind of burden for Lethem—what does a song written by a pack of geniuses sound like on the page? The band's signature achievement, a song called "Monster Eyes," begins with "a bass thrum and a chiming guitar figure" (the former played by Lucinda, who, on bass, "possessed all anyone needed: she swung" ) and comes sometime after "Astronaut Food" and sometime before "Canary In A Coke Machine" in the band's set list. Their "lead-singer handsome" (1) lead-singer brings out the words: "Get you/out of range/of my/monster/eyes" ; Carlton Vogelsong, whose eventual disastrous price for the phrases that make up the band's lyrics is a place with them onstage, plays "his wonky organ fills in the manner of free jazz." Call it bohemian demimonde by way of a high school talent show: "Monster Eyes," as Lethem writes it, is tough to imagine as a song written by adults, let alone enjoyed by hundreds of fans.

The odd deafness to nuance when it comes to the band is even more apparent in contrast with Lethem's gift for setting. Plangent's zoo is "an abrasion, Los Angeles' arid skeleton poking into evidence." The city itself is a place where "the freeway was like a saddle on the splayed city, a means both of mastering it and of shrinking from intimate contact with its surfaces."

Surfaces, in the novel, always matter: The book's big idea is that what's out there is as valuable as anything intrinsically within. Vogelsong, the book's gnomic center of wisdom, even mints a slogan saying so—"You can't be deep without a surface." When the inevitable battle over ownership eventually tears the band apart, this bit of advice returns, via Lucinda, as a final reproach to those less free with art, or more hung up on the real thing, than she.

By the time Lucinda enacts her last plagiarism, the gap between Lethem's love-and-theft and the absurd superficiality of what the novel deems worthy of repurposing becomes disorientingly wide. Lethem is as lucid about art here as he is anywhere else. But You Don't Love Me Yet asks us to delight in the borrowing of that which doesn't always seem worth taking.

Hit the road, Jack

Pasaba de la media noche y escuchaba en la radio una estación llamada "Horizonte" cuando empecé a escuchar el clásico de Ray Charles Hit the Road Jack. Un semáforo se puso en ambar y pensaba acelerar, pero al ver a un individuo próximo a cruzar la calle, decidí frenar. Comencé a cantar el clásico y de pronto vi frente a mí al peatón. Al ver que movía la boca quizá supuso que le estaba lanzando un improperio o algo así para que se apurara a pasar. Entonces me dirigió algunas palabras de evidente disgusto y me mentó la madre. Me dijo que me bajara, como si buscara pelea. Todo porque mal interpreto el Hit the road, Jack and don't you come back no more, no more, no more, no more... Hit the road, Jack and don't you come back no more. Actué como si no entendiera y en cuanto se quitó del camino, arranqué y salí de ahí.

How to be alone

En su libro de ensayos How to be Alone Jonathan Franzen escribió en 1995, luego de deshacerse de su TV:

Not just Negroponte (Nicholas), who doesn´t like to read, but even Birkerts (Sven), who thinks that history is ending, underestimates the inestability of society and the unruly diversity of its members. The electronic apotheosis of mass culture has merely reconfirmed the elitism of literary reading, wich was briefly obcured in the novel´s heyday. I mourne the eclipse of the cultural authority that literature once possessed, and I rue the onset of an age so anxious that the pleasure of a text becomes difficult to sustain. I don`t suppose that many other people will give away their TV´s. I´m not sure I´ll last long myself without buying a new one. But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.