Mi Top 10 de 2011

Los libros preferidos del año (en orden alfabético por autor)

1) Rayuela, de Julio Cortázar (1963)

2) The Duel [Der Zweikampf], de Heinrich von Kleist (1810)

3) Nada, de Carmen Laforet (1945)

4) The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity, de Jill Lepore (1998)

5) Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí, de Javier Marías (1994)

6) Tu rostro mañana. 1 Fiebre y lanza, de Javier Marías (2002)

6) Tu rostro mañana.  2 Baile y sueño, de Javier Marías (2004)

6) Tu rostro mañana.  3 Veneno y sombra y adiós, de Javier Marías (2007)

7) Tiempo de silencio, de Luis Martín-Santos (1962)

8) Crónica del pájaro que da cuerda al mundo, de Haruki Murakami (1994)

9) Los adioses, de Juan Carlos Onetti (1954)

10) Swann's Way [Du côté de chez Swann], de Marcel Proust (1913)

10) In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower [À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs], de Marcel Proust (1919)

11) Glosa, de Juan José Saer (1985)

Ok, bueno, hay un libro de sobra.  Gracias por visitar y ¡feliz año nuevo! a todos.

Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero

Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero (Ediciones Era, 2001)
por César Aira
Argentina, 2000

Para gente como yo que se aburre fácilmente con la novela histórica, leer Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero es casi como rendirse a un gran chiste surrealista.  Me gustó.  A caballo entre una biografía ficcionalizada y una novela histórica fingida, esta novela corta de 74 páginas admirablemente cuenta lo que pasa durante un día en los años 1830 cuando el pintor viajero Johan Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858, el artista de carne y hueso retratado en la portada arriba), de paso entre Mendoza y Buenos Aires en la Argentina de las luchas con las fuerzas indígenas, tiene la mala suerte de recibir un rayo en la cabeza.  La descripción del narrador es apropriadamente horrorosa.  "Como una estatua de níquel, hombre y bestia se encendieron de electricidad.  Rugendas se vio brillar, espectador de sí mismo por un instante de horror, que lamentablemente habría de repetirse" (31).  Según se verá, el segundo rayo le cae al pobre pintor menos de 15 segundos después del primero con "efectos más devastadores".  El hombre y el caballo "volaron unos veinte metros, encendidos y crepitando como una hoguera fría.  Seguramente por efecto de la descomposición atómica que estaban sufriendo cuerpos y elementos en la ocasión, la caída no fue fatal" (32).  A pesar de la tragedia física de Rugendas, que sobrevive el acidente pero con la cara destrozada y con heridas a los nervios faciales que se hace parecer a un monstruo y que se requiere la morfina, la provocación de Aira se revela cuando el narrador da a intender que la estética del pintor ha cambiado y quizá ha mejorado a causa del accidente.  ¿De dónde sale esta nueva inspiración artística?  ¿La electricidad, las drogas, o ambas cosas a la vez?  No se sabe por cierto, pero sea lo que sea el pintor viajero, en tiempos pasados el representante por excelencia de su género de realismo, ahora descubre que el mundo real es más y más irreal y llena de sorpresas como la escena en cuál un indio aparece con "un descomunal salmón" y indica a Rugendas que parece querer decir "me lo llevo para reproducción" (61).  ¿Un poco raro?  Sí, clarinete, pero deliciosamente incomformista al mismo tiempo.  (www.edicionesera.com.mx)

César Aira

Washington's Crossing

Washington's Crossing (Oxford University Press, 2006)
by David Hackett Fischer
USA, 2004

David Hackett Fischer's Washington's Crossing, like Jill Lepore's über-arresting The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity earlier in the year, is a timely reminder of just what I've been missing out on by doing so little history reading these days.  I intend to rectify that in 2012.  A superb narrative history of the New York and New Jersey campaigns in winter 1776-1777 when the fate of the young American republic was hanging in the balance, Fischer's Pulitzer Prize-winning work breathes frigid, lifelike life into Emanuel Leutze's famous Washington Crossing the Delaware portrait by combining a meticulously detailed battle chronicle with some marvelously understated writing about the American, British, and Hessian forces.  The result is a reading experience which, while often rousing due to the story that's being told, succeeds as a result of a careful marshalling of the sources rather than a reliance on sensationalistic anecdotes.  In a book that Fischer himself contends in his conclusion "is mainly about contingency, in the sense of people making choices, and choices making a difference in the world" (364), I'd like to single out a couple of notable examples of how the historian's own storytelling choices served him particularly well in this effort.  First, I was delighted by Fischer's careful attention to regional differences among the American army and various state militias.  In recounting a battle scene where a dense fog suddenly arose to provide unexpected cover for a U.S. retreat, for example, Fischer wryly notes: "New Englanders received this event as a 'providential occurrence.'  Virginians regarded it as a stroke of fortune" (101).  Secondly, Fischer's unobtrusiveness as a narrator makes you really take note on the infrequent occasions when he does command center stage.  On Thomas Paine's publication of The American Crisis: "The first sentence had the cadence of a drumbeat.  Even after two hundred years, its opening phrases still have the power to lift a reader out of his seat.  'These are the times that try men's souls,' Paine began.  'The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW deserves the love and thanks of man and woman'" (140).  Having not yet even said anything about the complex but essentially favorable portrait of General George Washington that eventually emerges here, I'll merely confess that even this cynic was moved by one of the teachable moments that Fischer, a longtime professor at nearby Brandeis University, produced about the tribulations of Washington and his army near the end: "We celebrate 1776 as the most glorious year in American history.  They remembered it as an agony, especially the 'dark days' of autumn" (363).  Great stuff--and yet another resounding victory for real history over its watered-down progeny, historical fiction. (www.oup.com)

David Hackett Fischer

The Oregon Trail

The Oregon Trail (The Library of America, 1991)
by Francis Parkman
USA, 1849

For a book that I'd checked out of the library several months ago and then basically overlooked month after month after month, Francis Parkman's 1849 travel classic The Oregon Trail--a riveting first-person account of the then 23-year old Parkman's trip out west along about half of the Oregon Trail in 1846--delivered all the nonstop reading entertainment that I could ask for during the short amount of time that it was actually in my hands.  What a fantastic read.  A marvelous--if often merciless--observer, the recent Harvard grad and future eminent historian Parkman's colorful travel diary is laced with anecdotal scorn for almost everybody he ran into during the course of his journey--be they frontier emigrants ("some of the vilest outcasts in the country" [13]), Mormons ("armed fanatics" [333]), or any of the dozens of American Indian tribes he encountered along the trail ("savages" for the adults or "miniature savages" for the children).  Given his unabashed racism toward non-whites in general and Native Americans in particular, I should probably note that Parkman's period prejudices, while unflattering in the extreme, actually acount for some of the most fascinating clash of culture moments in the text.  He claims, for example, that he had "come into the country almost exclusively with a view of observing the Indian character.  Having from childhood felt a curiosity on this subject, and having failed completely to gratify it by reading, I resolved to have recourse to observation" (111).  To this end, in one of the highlights of the work, he recounts an extended pit stop spent among the Sioux Indians in the Black Hills country.  So what does this representative of Christian "civilization," who has already declared that the Indian soul is "dormant" from a spiritual point of view (99), manage to take away from his anthropological moment in the sun?  In one of the more uncomfortable moments, we get this confession:

For the most part, a civilized white man can discover but very few points of sympathy between his own nature and that of an Indian.  With every disposition to do justice to their good qualities, he must be conscious that an impassable gulf lies between him and his red brethren of the prairie.  Nay, so alien to himself do they appear, that having breathed for a few months or a few weeks the air of this region, he begins to look upon them as a troublesome and dangerous species of wild beast, and if expedient, he could shoot them with as little compunction as they themselves would experience after performing the same office upon him.  Yet, in the countenance of the Panther, I gladly read that there were at least some points of sympathy between him and me.  We were excellent friends, and as we rode together through rocky passages, deep dells and little barren plains, he occupied himself very zealously in teaching me the Dahcotah language (242-243).

I have to admit that the first time I read this passage, I was more than a little creeped out by Parkman's apparent willingness to exterminate members of a tribe who had offered him hospitality.  Upon rereading the passage tonight, I'm now more struck by the mutual mistrust and suspicion that must have marred many potential white-native friendships similar to this one.  I think Parkman was very honest in that regard, and it's just this sort of unvarnished candor--more than his observational skills or his often-amusing tendency to badmouth others or the unfortunate racism on display--that helps make his narrative such bracing and compelling reading even today.  In any event, an unexpectedly juicy delight.  (www.loa.org)

Francis Parkman at age 20

Abandoned Furniture on the Prairie

Parkman's descriptions of his Indian encounters are so fascinating from a historical point of view that it's easy to overlook the way that he manages to make the mundane seem memorable in less adventurous moments along the trail.  Here's one of my favorite quiet moments from early on:

  It is worth noticing, that on the Platte one may sometimes see the shattered wrecks of ancient claw-footed tables, well-waxed and rubbed, or massive bureaus of carved oak.  These, many of them no doubt the relics of ancestral prosperity in the colonial time, must have encountered strange vicissitudes.  Imported, perhaps, originally from England; then, with the declining fortunes of their owners, borne across the Alleghanies to the remote wilderness of Ohio or Kentucky, then to Illinois or Missouri; and now at last fondly stowed away in the family wagon for the interminable journey to Oregon.  But the stern privations of the way are little anticipated.  The cherished relic is soon flung out to scorch and crack upon the hot prairie (84).

More on Parkman

Amateur Reader (Tom) has written four interesting pieces on Parkman to date.  They can be found here, here, here, and here in the order they were written (all recommended, natch).

The Widow

The Widow [La veuve Couderc] (NYRB Classics, 2008)
by Georges Simenon [translated from the French by John Petrie]
France, 1942

Although it's not too difficult to find any number of otherwise sensible people willing to tell you that Simenon's one of the greatest crime writers ever, man, I'm not sure what the eff they're talking about w/r/t the seriously uninvolving The Widow.  At its heart a nod to the eternal appeal of both senseless crime and "the stale breath of love" (108), this bleak boy meets girl noir introduces you to an unlikely (and unlikable) couple in the form of the dull Jean, a former rich kid who has just been released from jail for murder, and the equally dull Tati, a middle-aged schemer who spends most of the mercifully brief novel annoying both Jean and the reader with her bossy, jealous, and clingy ways.  That things don't turn out happily ever after for the two charmers is maybe nobody's fault but their own, but Simenon himself is definitely to blame for the unconvincing dialogue and a brutal ending that's telegraphed so far in advance as to seem contrived.  Note: readers who enjoy Jim Thompson's lesser works and/or an unnecessary amount of attention paid to sordid characters' farmyard chores may find this book much less vachement décevant than I did!  (http://www.nyrb.com/)

Georges Simenon

Up for Grabs
If anyone's interested in trying their luck with The Widow, I'd be happy to surrender my ex-TBR copy (bought remaindered in 2009 for $5.99) to the first person who claims it in a comment.

Man vs. TBR

Now that my book-hoarding prowess has been amply demonstrated for any/all of my book blogging peers to take note of (for the record, the list still isn't quite complete), I'd like to shift gears for a moment and deliver a post that's a conceptual slap in the face to both the holiday shopping season and to excess in general: yes, that's right, I hereby publicly announce a plan to limit myself to a grand total of seven new book purchases between now and the end of 2012.  Three reasons why this crackpot plan will fail: 1) I have no willpower.  2) I love buying shiny new paperbacks.  3) Buying books is a noble way to help support the arts--especially if you have no willpower.  Three reasons why this voluntary simplicity plan might succeed: 1) I've been so successful at stockpiling cool books that most chain bookstores only elicit elitist disdain from me these days.  2) I have access to a great university library system that I somehow perennially underuse with my usual buy now and ask questions later acquisition methodology.  3) Simon from Savidge Reads went a whole year without book-buying in 2010, thus proving that it's not necessary to have to pepper spray other consumers to get to that IQ84 Murakami endcap--if you have a well-stocked TBR at home.  More posts on my experiment in fiscal austerity later and/or when I come to my senses and throw in the towel.  Until then, what I hope will be my last three purchases for 2011: Juan Carlos Onetti's La vida breve (Punto de Lectura), José Lezama Lima's Paradiso (Cátedra), and Volume II of Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities (Vintage).  Hey, it's been zero days since my last book purchase.  How about you?

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow [Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne] (The Harvill Press, 1997)
by Peter Høeg [translated from the Danish by F. David]
Denmark, 1992

If you just finished season one of the juicy Danish TV series The Killing and are now looking for another Copenhagen-centered crime drama to keep your genre buzz going, this novel might do the trick in a pinch.  Otherwise, I'm not so sure.  "Readable" but increasingly implausible crime caper that essentially prostitutes its complex, anti-social title character--a bicultural 37-year old Inuit/Danish loner prone to making trenchant observations about how Greenlandic culture fits in with the post-colonial West in general and post-colonial Denmark in particular--by pimping her out in the service of a not particularly happening storyline which begins with a potentially interesting investigation into a neighbor child's mysterious death and ends with a laughable adventure involving meteorites, otherworldly parasites and mad scientist Bond villains.  Noted hack/annoying overactor Tom Wilkinson appears in the late '90s film adaptation of Smilla's Sense of Snow, so it's possible that the movie--now long forgotten by me--is even more of a mixed bag than the book.  In other news, spoiler alert!  (www.randomhouse.co.uk)

Peter Høeg

Louie Louie

THE SONICS, "Louie Louie" (1966)

Best "Louie Louie" ever!

The Duel

The Duel [Der Zweikampf] (Melville House, 2011)
by Heinrich von Kleist [translated from the German by Annie Janusch]
Germany, 1810

Apparently I need to deepen my acquaintance with the smash hits of German literature.  Superb long short story/short novella which, in addition to providing an easy way to pad one's reading statistics for the year, dares to investigate the question of whether God's will is at all fathomable to mere mortals.  That in itself would be unexceptional, of course, but even godless bloggers will have to admire Kleist's audaciousness in advancing his theme--spinning a spare page-turner of a tale in which a duel pitting one Count Jakob Rotbart, a fourteenth century ladies' man accused of killing his brother the duke but who has a seemingly airtight alibi predicated on the claim that he was otherwise busy seducing an aristocratic woman on the night in question, against Sir Friedrich von Trota, the murdered duke's chamberlain and a valiant defender of the disgraced Lady Littegarde von Auerstein's honor after her denial of Rotbart's claims goes unbelieved even by her immediate family in the wake of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, will reveal God's "infallible verdict" in a trial by combat that's binding by law.  That the answers provided by the duel can be seen to reflect poorly on God's judgement, man's interpretation of same, the value of honor, innocence, true justice, and mercy, or any and all of the above is just one example of Kleist's slippery winning ways, but I won't dwell on the primal ambiguities since I'm led to believe that most bloggers want only simple solace and maybe a costume drama/retro vibe outta their goddamn historical fictions.  While there's little of those things here, on an entirely unrelated note I'm tickled by the fact that the 19th century icon Kleist, at least in the promo photo below, is probably the first author to be featured on this blog who could ever be mistaken for a band member in one of the mid-1980s incarnations of the Fall or the Psychocandy-era Jesus and Mary Chain.  Yes! (www.mhpbooks.com)

Heinrich von Kleist

Doctor Faustus

Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend [Doktor Faustus.  Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde] (Vintage International, 1999)
by Thomas Mann [translated from the German by John E. Woods]
USA, 1947

Doctor Faustus, a German novel written in sunny southern California exile but with the grim presence of World War II serving as the aging Mann's strumpet muse, is a sort of unholy trinity: part intellectual pseudo-biography exploring the link between creativity and madness, part Faust rewrite involving a composer who may have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for twenty-four years of uninterrupted artistic greatness, part political allegory of Germany's rise and fall in the period comprising the two world wars.  How does one manage to tell such a tale?  In the hands of narrator Dr. Serenus Zeitblom, Ph.D., a lifelong friend of the composer Adrian Leverkühn, the answer seems simple enough: a biography/memoir.  It's clear from the outset, though, that this won't just be any ordinary biography as the scholarly Zeitblom here moves from a childhood reminiscence about carefree kids eating berries in the invigorating country air to drawing careful attention to the way that art and fate fought it out in Leverkühn's later life:

I am moved to look back not out of nostalgia, but for his sake and at the thought of his fate, which ordained that he ascend from that valley of innocence to inhospitable, indeed terrifying heights.  His was an artist's life; and because it was granted to me, an ordinary man, to view it from so close-up, all the feelings of my soul for human life and fate have coalesced around this exceptional form of human existence.  For me, thanks to my friendship with Adrian, the artist's life functions as the paradigm for how fate shapes all our lives, as the classic example of how we are deeply moved by what we call becoming, development, destiny--and it probably is so in reality, too.  For although his whole life long the artist may remain nearer, if not to say, more faithful to his childhood than the man who specializes in practical reality, although one can say that, unlike the latter, he abides in the dreamlike, purely human, and playful state of the child, nevertheless the artist's journey from those pristine early years to the late, unforeseen stages of his development is endlessly longer, wilder, stranger--and more disturbing for those who watch--than that of the everyday person, for whom the thought that he, too, was once a child is cause for not half so many tears...  I urgently request the reader, by the way, to credit what I have said here with such feeling to my authorial account and not to believe it represents Leverkühn's thoughts.  I am an old-fashioned man, stuck in certain romantic views dear to me, among which is the heightened drama of an antithesis between the artist and the bourgeois (27-28).

I've quoted from this passage at length both because it provides a representative sample of the narrator's voice and a measure of the gripping, philosophical way aesthetics and inspiration are engaged with as a matter of course in this work.  Leverkühn's life as a man of genius separates him from the pack artistically and socially, but his good friend Serenus is aware of the price that he's had to pay as the result of a life devoted to his music.  Is the tradeoff worth it to advance his craft?  While fellow Doctor Faustus readers will have to judge for themselves, Mann ups the metaphysical ante in Chapter XXV when the narrator introduces a "secret manuscript" bearing "Adrian's unmediated voice" (237).  The subject?  A purported dialogue between the composer and the Devil in which extravagant claims are debated at a feverish pitch that may anticipate the title character's looming mental illness and subsequent breakdown: "The artist is the brother of the felon and the madman" (252).  "What is art today?  A pilgrimage upon a road of peas" (254).  "Parody.  It might be merry if in its aristocratic nihilism it were not so very woebegone" (257).  "Psychology--merciful God, you still hold with that?  It is but a poor, bourgeois, nineteenth century thing!" (264).

Although the shaken Zeitblom--perhaps himself an admirer of that "poor, bourgeois, nineteenth century thing" in his role as a middle class traditionalist/scholar trying to understand the human psyche--resumes his narrator role for the rest of the work, his biography is increasingly marked by the way Leverkühn's downfall-in-progress mirrors Germany's turbulent war years.  Confronted with his old friend's guilt over a war caused by German aggression, for example, Leverkühn manically opines: "Germany has broad shoulders.  And who would deny that such a real breakthrough is worth what the meek world calls a crime!"  (325)  Later, while working on the score for an apocalyptic work to be performed under the title of The Lamentation of Dr. Faustus, the obsessive composer prompts this reflection on the nature of German Kultur from a friend who has seen one man's road to madness parallel a nation's:

Meanwhile a transatlantic general has the inhabitants of Weimar file past the crematoria of their local concentration camp and declares (should one say, unjustly?) that they, citizens who went about their business in seeming honesty and tried to know nothing, though at times the wind blew the stench of burned human flesh up their noses--declares that they share in the guilt for these horrors that are now laid bare and to which he forces them to direct their eyes.  Let them look--I shall look with them, in my mind's eye I let myself be jostled along in those same apathetic, or perhaps shuddering, lines.  Our thick-walled torture chamber, into which Germany was transformed by a vile regime of conspirators sworn to nihilism from the very start, has been burst open, and our ignominy lies naked before the eyes of the world, of foreign commissions, to whom these incredible scenes are displayed on all sides now and who report home that the hideousness of what they have seen exceeds anything the human imagination can conceive.  I repeat, our ignominy.  For is it mere hypochondria to tell oneself that all that is German--even German intellect, German thought, the German word--shares in the disgrace of these revelations and is plunged into profoundest doubt?  Is it morbid contrition to ask oneself the question: How can "Germany," whichever of its forms it may be allowed to take in the future, so much as open its mouth again to speak of mankind's concerns?  (505-506)

A profound and arresting work not least for grappling with these sorts of questions so soon after the war and from the vantage point of a justly defeated people in the narrator's eyes.  The fatherland, c'est moi, is it not?  (www.vintagebooks.com)

Thomas Mann (1875-1955)

Destiny--or at least a happy coincidence--led me to read Doctor Faustus in conjunction with the German Literature Month program that's now underway here and here.  Thanks to Sergio Pitol, whose specific raves about the novel in El arte de la fuga (Mexico, 1996) first led me to become interested in the work, and to Anthony and Caroline and Isabella for more general blogger motivation to check Mann out for the first time.

El gaucho insufrible

El gaucho insufrible (Anagrama, 2009)
por Roberto Bolaño
España, 2003

Ya que siempre había imaginado que El gaucho insufrible figuraba entre las obras menores de Bolaño por alguna razón, vaya sorpresa descubrir que esta recopilación de cinco cuentos y dos ensayos ofrezca dos de las mejores obras cortas del chileno.  El cuento titular, por ejemplo, es un homenaje ruidoso a El Sur de Borges que cuenta la historia de un abogado bonaerense que trata de escaparse de la caída económica de Argentina en los años de 2001 y 2002 por refugiarse en un lejano lugar en la pampa.  Una vez instalado en el campo, de modo divertido el abogado Pereda se convierte en "el gaucho insufrible" en una tierra donde "ya no quedan caballos...sólo conejos" (27).  A pesar del escenario principalmente rural, el sentido de humor malicioso es puro Bolaño:  "Es difícil, decía, no ser feliz en Buenos Aires, que es la mezcla perfecta de París y Berlín, aunque si uno aguza la vista, más bien es la mezcla perfecta  de Lyon y Praga" (17).  Para mí, la otra joya obvia es el ensayo Los mitos de Cthulhu, una polémica sobre la literatura latinoamericana contemporanea en la cual Bolaño grita contra las supuestas virtudes de "la legibilidad" y "la respetabilidad".  El ejemplo que sigue es típico de la retórica corrosiva y desenfrenada: "Latinoamérica fue el manicomio de Europa así como Estados Unidos fue su fábrica.  La fábrica está ahora en poder de los capataces y locos huidos son su mano de obra.  El manicomio, desde hace más de sesenta años, se está quemando en su propio aceite, en su propia grasa" (168).  Entre las otras obras, las que más me gustaron fueron el cuento "El policía de las ratas", un noir con roedores supuestamente basado en Josefina la cantora o el pueblo de los ratones de Kafka, y el ensayo autobiográfico Literatura + enfermedad = enfermedad, que me dieron risas + crítica literaria + trauma en las dosis esperadas.  (http://www.anagrama-ed.es/)

*

Since I'd for some reason long harbored the sneaking suspicion that El gaucho insufrible [The Insufferable Gaucho] probably figured among Bolaño's lesser works, what a nice surprise it was to discover that this slender collection of five short stories and two essays contains at least two of the Chilean's best short pieces.  Take the title tale, for example, a riotous homage to Borges' "El Sur" which presents us with the story of a Buenos Aires lawyer who tries to escape from Argentina's 2001-2002 economic collapse by fleeing to a remote outpost in the pampas.  Once installed in the country, the city slicker Pereda undergoes a super amusing transformation into "the insufferable gaucho" in a land where only rabbits and no horses now remain.  Despite the mostly rural setting, the mischievous sense of humor is pure Bolaño: "Es difícil, decía, no ser feliz en Buenos Aires, que es la mezcla perfecta de París y Berlín, aunque si uno aguza la vista, más bien es la mezcla perfecta de Lyon y Praga" ["It's difficult, he used to say, not to be happy in Buenos Aires, which is like the perfect combination of Paris and Berlin--although if one looks more carefully, it's more like the perfect combination of Lyons and Prague"] (17).  For me, the other obvious standout is the essay "Los mitos de Cthulhu" ["The Myths of Cthulhu"], a screed on contemporary Latin American literature in which Bolaño rails against the twin nemeses of "legibility" and "respectability" for providing exactly what we don't need from our literature.  The example that follows is typical of the corrosive, no holds barred rhetoric: "Latinoamérica fue el manicomio de Europa así como Estados Unidos fue su fábrica.  La fábrica está ahora en poder de los capataces y locos huidos son su mano de obra.  El manicomio, desde hace más de sesenta años, se está quemando en su propio aceite, en su propia grasa" ["Latin America was the insane asylum of Europe just as the United States was its factory.  The factory is now in the hands of the foremen and fugitive madmen supply the labor.  The insane asylum, for more than 60 years now, is burning in its own oil, in its own fat"] (168).  Among the other pieces, I most enjoyed the short story "El policía de las ratas" ["Police Rat"], a rodent noir supposedly modeled on Kafka's "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk," and the autobiographical essay "Literatura + enfermedad = enfermedad" ["Literature + Illness = Illness"], which delivered laughter + literary criticism + trauma in the expected dosages.

Roberto Bolaño, el superhéroe

¿Qué pueden hacer Sergio Pitol, Fernando Vallejo y Ricardo Piglia contra la avalancha de glamour?  Poca cosa.  Literatura.  Pero la literatura no vale nada si no va acompañada de algo más refulgente que el mero acto de sobrevivir.  La literatura, sobre todo en Latinoamérica, y sospecho que también en España, es éxito, éxito social claro, es decir es grandes tirajes, traducciones a más de treinta idiomas (yo puedo nombrar veinte idiomas, pero a partir del idioma número 25 empiezo a tener problemas, no porque crea que el idioma número 26 no existe sino porque me cuesta imaginar una industria editorial y unos lectores birmanos temblando de emoción con los avatares mágico-realistas de Eva Luna), casa en Nueva York o Los Ángeles, cenas con grandes magnitarios (para que así descubramos que Bill Clinton puede recitar de memoria párrafos enteros de Huckleberry Finn con la misma soltura con que el presidente Aznar lee a Cernuda), portadas en Newsweek y anticipos millionarios (171-172).

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What can Sergio Pitol, Fernando Vallejo and Ricardo Piglia do against the onslaught of glamor?  Hardly anything.  Literature.  But literature's not worth anything if it's not accompanied by something more refulgent than the mere act of surviving.  Literature, above all in Latin America but I suspect in Spain as well, is success, social success of course--which is to say big publishing runs, translations in more than thirty languages (I can name twenty languages, but beginning with #25 I begin to have problems--not because I think that #26 doesn't exist but because it's difficult for me to imagine a publishing industry and a few Burmese readers trembling with emotion at the magical realist transformations of Eva Luna), a house in New York or Los Angeles, dinners with business magnates (so that we can thereby learn that Bill Clinton can recite entire paragraphs of Huckleberry Finn by heart with the same ease that Aznar reads Cernuda), Newsweek covers and million-dollar advances (171-172).

One More Fact

Holly Golightly & the Brokeoffs, "One More Fact" (2009)

The Crime of Father Amaro

The Crime of Father Amaro [O crime do Padre Amaro] (New Directions, 2003)
by Eça de Queirós [translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa]
Portugal, 1880

Since I saw the "steamy" Mexican film adaptation of The Crime of Father Amaro long before I ever got around to reading Eça de Queirós' outrageous Portuguese original, I was pleased to discover how fresh and humorous a novel this is despite the devastation that lies in wait for several of its key characters. Seriously, whoever would have thought that a self-destructive love affair between a provincial parish priest and one of his beautiful parishioners could prove so amusing?  Perhaps because Eça was more interested in exposing the hypocrisy of his times than in delivering a traditional morality tale, few people or things are spared when it comes to skewering his victims.  Early on, for example, the narrator introduces us to an odd devotional work said to be "both devout and titillating" and "breathing mystical lust"; not content with a full paragraph of such descriptions, he then gleefully blurts out, "it is the canonical Spanish fly!" (88). Elsewhere, malicious Tacitean slander is the weapon of choice used to eviscerate one unfortunate character's reputation ("He always looked rather grimy, and his sallow, effeminate face and debauched eyes spoke of ancient, infamous vices" [144]).  Given the novel's focus on sham piety, the characters naturally badmouth each other as well: Canon Dias' joking description of his sister as "a veritable Grand Inquisitor in skirts," while undoubtedly deserved after an excess of religious zeal has led the bitter old maid to burn the personal items once belonging to an unfairly excommunicated romantic rival of Father Amaro's, is entirely typical of the more playful sorts of attacks (269).  Aside from the humorous touches and the anti-clerical satire, I just greatly enjoyed Eça de Quierós as a stylist.  Here are two almost Proustian soundbites.  On the Marquesa de Alegros, one of Father Amaro's patrons: "Her two daughters, having been brought up both to fear Heaven and to care deeply about Fashion, were at once excessively devout and terribly chic, speaking with equal fervour about Christian humility and the latest clothes from Brussels.  A journalist of the time said of them: 'Every day they worry about what dress they should wear when it comes to their turn to enter Paradise'" (24).  On a lecherous city administrator: "And with that, he turned on his heel and went out onto the balcony in his office--the same balcony on which, every day, between eleven and three, he defiled Teles' wife with his gaze, all the while twirling his blonde moustaches and smoothing his blue cravat" (257).  Having talked up Eça's comedic and descriptive flourishes for long enough, I should probably note that the illicit love affair between Father Amaro and Amélia, while well-depicted throughout in terms of the characters' sexual tension, "courtship" and jealousy and startlingly situated against the social backdrop of a Portugal in transition (i.e. the Church and monarchy vs. secularism and republicanism), does take a predictable turn for the worse near the end.  While I'm not sure that the novelist really could have written his way out of that 19th century ending, in one sense it doesn't matter at all because he entertainingly keeps you off guard throughout most of the novel--and virtually all of Portuguese society gets blasted by the final page.  In short, a fine and unexpectedly edgy read.  (www.ndpublishing.com)

Eça de Queirós

Having wanted to read The Crime of Father Amaro for at least two or three years but never quite able to get my act together for it on my own, I'd like to thank Amateur Reader (Tom) for the push provided by his Portuguese Literature Challenge that's now in session over at Wuthering Expectations.  Tom, Litlove of Tales from the Reading Room, and possibly one or two others will also be writing about The Crime of Father Amaro on their own blogs sometime soon (update: Litlove's review can now be found here).  Until then, here's one more Eça de Queirós broadside for you from pages 123-124 of the Margaret Jull Costa New Directions translation:

What did it matter to him that he had the right to open or close the doors of Heaven?  What he wanted was the ancient right to open or close the doors of dungeons!  He wanted clerks and Amélias to tremble at the mere shadow cast by his cassock.  He would have liked to have been a priest in the old Church, when he would have enjoyed the advantages brought by the power of denunciation and by the kind of terror that an executioner inspires, and there, in that town, under the jurisdiction of his Cathedral, he would have made all those who aspired to the joys that were forbidden to him tremble at the thought of excruciating punishments, and, thinking of João Eduardo and Amélia, he regretted not being able to bring back the bonfires of the Inquisition!  In the grip of a fury provoked by thwarted passion, this inoffensive young man spent hours nursing grandiose ambitions of Catholic tyranny, for there is always a moment when even the most stupid priest is filled by the spirit of the Church in one of its two phases, that of mystical renunciation or that of world domination; every subdeacon at one time or another believes himself capable of being either a saint or a Pope; there is not a single seminarian who has not, albeit for an instant, aspired longingly to that cave in the desert in which St Jerome, looking up at the starry sky, felt Grace flow into his heart like an abundant river of milk; and even the potbellied parish priest who, at close of day, sits on his balcony probing the hole in his tooth with a toothpick or, with a paternal air, slowly sips his cup of coffee, even he carries within him the barely perceptible remnants of a Grand Inquisitor.

Bolaño Infra. 1975-1977: los años que inspiraron "Los detectives salvajes"

Bolaño Infra.  1975-1977: Los años que inspiraron Los detectives salvajes (RiL Editores, 2010)
by Montserrat Madariaga Caro
Chile, 2010

A great little find for fans (and maybe even future fans) of a certain 1998 Roberto Bolaño novel, Bolaño Infra.  1975-1977: Los años que inspiraron Los detectives salvajes [Infra Bolaño, 1975-1977: The Years That Inspired The Savage Detectives] provides a short but thoroughly satisfying account of Bolaño's mid-twenties in Mexico during the time when the then aspiring poet was co-founding the Infrarrealist movement and raising hell with a gang of bohemian friends and sympathizers who would later become immortalized within the pages of The Savage Detectives as the "visceral realists."  While part of the fun in reading Bolaño Infra is getting to hear something from and learn something about many of the real life infras who inspired various Savage Detectives characters, an unexpected bonus for me was the faded snapshot of Mexico City's mid-1970s underground art and literature scene that eventually took shape as a result of Chilean journalist Montserrat Madariaga Caro's interviews and research.  For example, there are at least two wonderful anecdotes about how the infrarrealists targeted poet Octavio Paz for art terrorist attacks on multiple occasions for the crime of representing  establishment culture.  In the first such account,  José Vicente Anaya tells how "en una de esas reuniones donde discutían sus ataques, se le ocurrió ir con pistolas de salva a un recital de Octavio Paz para disparar y gritar: ¡la poesía ha muerto!  Pero la idea se desechó por un posible infarto del señor Paz" ["at one of those meetings where they planned their attacks, it occured to them to go to an Octavio Paz recital with starter pistols to shoot and to shout: 'Poetry is dead!'  But the idea was scrapped because of the possibility of Paz having a heart attack" (67).  In the second, Paz is remembered reading a poem of his called "La vista, el tacto" ["Sight, Touch"] that  plays with repetition of the word luz [light].  An unknown infra  begins to interrupt with shouts of "mucha luz, cuanta luz, demasiada luz" ["a lot of light, how much light, too much light"] to which Paz gets up, asks to see who's mocking him, and demands: "Qué es lo que tiene usted contra mí?" ["What is it that you have against me?"].  To which the infra replies: "Un millón de cosas" ["A million things"] before being ejected from the ironically titled "Encuentro de generaciones" ["Generational Encounter"] held at the UNAM bookstore (133). Great story!  In addition, there are several memorable word portraits of the young Bolaño.  Mexican novelist Juan Villoro, not an infra but a contemporary who became a friend of Bolaño's after meeting him in 1976, describes the Chilean wearing Groucho Marx glasses with hair "agitado por un viento imaginario que conservaría dos décadas después" ["agitated by an imaginary breeze that would still be preserved two decades later"].  "Imposible olvidar sus locuras, el entusiasmo, el disparate, su vitalidad para provocar conversaciones increíbles...  Roberto siempre fue muy exagerado y muy elocuente; sus elogios se disparaban hasta el cielo y sus críticas te llevaban al séptimo círculo del infierno, donde están los asesinos" ["Impossible to forget his craziness, enthusiasm, absurdity, his vitality for provoking incredible conversations...  Roberto was always very exaggerated and very eloquent; he'd praise things to high heaven, but his criticisms would take you down to the seventh circle of hell, where the killers are"] (101).  In one of the nicest surprises of all, an entire chapter is dedicated to the little-known Mexican poet Mario Santiago, the longtime best friend of Bolaño's who was the model for the Ulises Lima character in The Savage Detectives.  While details of the Bolaño-Santiago friendship were surprisingly affecting to learn about, one of the heads-up things that the author does with the material is to contrast how the ex-partners in crime approached life and literature after their infrarrealism days.  Bolaño, according to some who knew him in his pre-fame Mexico City youth, was a kind of sellout to the cause--a guy who wanted to be recognized as a writer so much that he turned his back on poetry and entered the world of the commercial novelist instead.  The eccentric Santiago, on the other hand, chose to live his life as a poem, circulating his poetry among friends and writing poems on apartment walls and other stray surfaces.  Which path was more honest?  To her credit, Madariaga Caro doesn't render a verdict on the question, instead leaving us with this:  "A fin de cuentas, los dos próceres del Infrarrealismo tenían la escritura tatuada en la sien.  Ambos vivieron intensamente y codificaron esas sensaciones en poemas, cuentos y novelas.  Murieron jóvenes.  Murieron sabiéndose deteriorados, como consumidos por sus letras pero aún así escribiéndolas" ["When all's said and done, the two leaders of Infrarrealism had writing tattooed on the brain.  Both lived intensely and codified those sensations in poems, short stories and novels.  They died young.  They died knowing themselves deteriorated, as if consumed by their literature but still writing it"] (124).  And this on what Bolaño hoped to achieve with his portrait of Mexico in The Savage Detectives: "Conoció a quienes hacen arte para poder vivir bien, y a los que viven mal para poder hacer arte; en consecuencia, aprendió la naturaleza dual de las cosas y concluyó que 'México es un país tremendamente vital, pese a que es el país donde, paradójicamente, la muerte está más presente.  Tal vez solo así, siendo tan vital, puede tener a la muerte tan presente'" ["He knew those who create art in order to live well and those who live poorly in order to create art.  As a consequence, he learned the dual nature of things and concluded that 'Mexico is a tremendously vital country in spite of the fact that it's the country where, paradoxically, death is most present.  Maybe only like that, being so alive, can it have death so present'"] (140).  An unexpectedly inspiring feat of research and one that's even more of a treasure trove for the fan on account of the "Primer manifiesto del movimiento infrarrealista" ["First Manifesto of the Infrarrealist Movement"] and some Bolaño-Santiago correspondence tacked on at the end.  (www.rileditores.com)

Photo originally published in Pájaro de calor, ocho poetas infrarrealistas, 1976.

Top: Margarita XX, Mario Santiago, José Rosas Ribeyro, Roberto Bolaño, José Vicente Anaya.  Bottom: Rubén Medina, Dina XX, Ramón Méndez, Guadalupe Ochoa, Ramón Méndez.

Montserrat Madariaga Caro

An Un-Review: La boda de Hitler y María Antonieta en el infierno

Just so you know, I've been wanting to read more of that crackpot J.R. Wilcock's oeuvre ever since a reread of his "Llorenç Riber" mini-pseudobiography last month reminded me of how devilishly entertaining most of his La sinagoga de los iconoclastas [The Temple of Iconoclasts] was for me a few years back.  So imagine my delight when, in aimlessly trolling around the internet last night, I discovered that the still as yet unseen by me El templo etrusco [The Etruscan Temple] that I'd requested for pick-up at the library today comes with this utterly genius descriptive blurb on the back of the book: "Wilcock despliega una vez más su destreza narrativa con una prosa de elegante terrorismo verbal, cuya gran precisión no nos ahorra detalles sádicos, y aun atroces, pero tampoco atisbos de una bellezza indómita" ["Wilcock displays his narrative skill once again with a prose of elegant verbal terrorism, the great precision of which does not spare us sadistic and even inhuman details nor inklings of an untamed beauty"].  "Elegant verbal terrorism"?  That, my friends, is a description of a book I want to read--and will soon.  However, the Wilcock title that I really, really want to read now is the one pictured above that I just found out about even later last night. La boda de Hitler y María Antonieta en el infierno [The Wedding of Hitler and Marie Antoinette in Hell], which sounds like one of the spurious works that appear at the end of Wilcock fan Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas, is a book written in collaboration with one Francesco Fantasia and only published after Wilcock's death.  What is it about?  Duh.  However, I love the sound of this thing as described by Guillermo Piro in his Página/12 non-un-review of the 2003 Argentinean edition:

La organización del libro recuerda un poco una famosa escena de Pierrot le fou de Godard, en la que Pierrot-Belmondo, al comienzo del film, se pasea entre la mayoría silenciosa invitada a una fiesta, simplemente escuchando las conversaciones que se suceden a su paso (conversaciones ridículas, en las que todos hablan enunciando slogans publicitarios).  En la boda...  los visitantes del infierno registran las conversaciones que tienen lugar entre los habitantes del infierno mientras se realizan los preparativos para la gran boda entre Hitler y María Antonieta.  Pero María Antonieta duda: Hitler la desea, es digno de ella, pero también Garibaldi cumple con todos los requisitos para poseerla. Y ella duda.  Hay un modo de resolver el asunto; una carrera.  El primero que llegue será aceptado; el perdedor deberá desaparecer inexorablemente de su vida.

[The book's organization is somewhat reminiscent of a famous scene from Godard's Pierrot le fou in which Belmondo's Pierrot, at the beginning of the film, strolls among the silent majority of guests invited to a party, overhearing the conversations that take place in his wake (ridiculous conversations in which the people that speak do so in advertising slogans).  In The Wedding..., the visitors register the conversations that take place among hell's inhabitants while the preparations are being made for the great wedding between Hitler and Marie Antoinette.  However, Marie Antoinette gets cold feet: Hitler desires her, Hitler is worthy of her, but Garibaldi also meets all the requisites for possessing her.  There's a way to resolve the matter: a race.  The first to arrive will win her, but the loser will need to inexorably disappear from her life.]

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La boda de Hitler y María Antonieta en el infierno was published by Emecé in Argentina in 2003 after originally appearing in Italian as Le nozze di Hitler e Maria Antonietta nell'inferno.  Man, would I love to get my mitts on a copy of it.  How about you?

Borges oral

Borges oral (Biblioteca Borges, 2008)
por Jorge Luis Borges
Argentina, 1979

En mayo y junio de 1978, Jorge Luis Borges fue invitado dar una serie de cinco clases a la Universidad de Belgrano en Buenos Aires.  Cada viernes el escritor elegiría un tema particularmente importante para él --"El libro", "La inmortalidad", "Emanuel Swedenborg", "El cuento policial", "El tiempo"-- y, como resultado de la publicación de las conferencias en Borges oral, los lectores de hoy en día pueden entender cómo sería asistir a un curso dado por el profesor Borges.  Pues, ¿cómo sería tener Borges como profe?  La clase sobre "El libro" nos da un buen ejemplo de un acercamiento aparentemente sencillo pero que hace reflexionar.  Después de decir que le gustaría escribir una historia del libro sobre "las diversas valoraciones que el libro ha recibido" al estilo de la Decadencia de Occidente de Spengler, Borges empieza por explicar que los antiguos "veían en el libro un sucedáneo de la palabra oral" (10).  Avanzando al asunto de cómo el Oriente introdujo el concepto de libros sagrados a los griegos y romanos, Borges entonces lleva su historia del libro hasta la modernidad al describir cómo muchos bibliófilos reales tienen interés en el libro como objeto físico y no sólo por su contenido.  Dado que esta forma particular del culto de libro no interesa a Borges para nada, él llama la atención a las ironías de cosas como la idea de que los países han elegido obras nacionales paradigmáticas "que no se parecen demasiado a ellos": "Cervantes es un hombre contemporáneo de la Inquisición, pero es tolerante, es un hombre que no tiene ni las virtudes ni los vicios españoles", dice de Don Quijote y España; "Nosotros hubiéramos podido elegir el Facundo de Sarmiento...pero no...hemos elegido como libro la crónica de un desertor, hemos elegido el Martín Fierro, que si bien merece ser elegido como libro, ¿cómo pensar que nuestra historia está representada por un desertor de la conquista del desierto?", pregunta de la épica gaucha y Argentina (17-18).  En otra parte, Borges cita a pensadores como Montaigne y Emerson en apoyo de su creencia que la lectura debe ser una forma de felicidad sobre todo.  Algunas de sus conclusiones son sorprendentes: "Por eso considero que un escritor como Joyce ha fracasdo esencialmente, porque su obra requiere un esfuerzo" (19).  Otras no son sorprendentes: "Les debemos tanto a las letras.  Yo he tratado más de releer que de leer, creo que releer es más importante que leer, salvo que para releer se necsita haber leído.  Yo tengo ese culto de libro" (21).  Qué lástima que sea la hora de acostarme porque hubiera querido hablar un poco más acerca de las otras conferencias en esta tapa de 99 páginas. (www.alianzaeditorial.es)

*

In May and June of 1978, Jorge Luis Borges was invited to give a series of five lectures at the Universidad de Belgrano in Buenos Aires.  Each Friday the writer would choose a topic particularly dear to him for one reason or another--"The Book," "Immortality," "Emanuel Swedenborg," "The Detective Story," "Time"--and as a result of the publication of the lectures in the unfortunately titled Borges oral, today's readers can now know what it'd be like to attend a course given by Professor Borges.  So what was it like to have Borges as a prof?  Borges' plainspoken but thought-provoking lecture on "The Book" gives us a pretty good idea.  After stating that he's long wanted to write a history on the reception of the book modeled on Spengler's book talk in The Decline of the West, Borges begins by explaining how the ancients regarded the book as a poor substitute for the spoken word.  Moving on to the matter of how the East introduced the concept of sacred books to the Greeks and the Romans, Borges then brings his history of the book up to modern times by noting how the bibliophiles of today often place as much importance on the book as a physical object as on the content of the book itself.  Since this particular cult of the book doesn't interest Borges at all, he draws attention instead to ironies like how frequently the paradigmatic works of national literatures are in conflict with the values of the nations that they're said to represent: : "Cervantes is a man contemporaneous with the Inquisition, but he's tolerant, a man who has neither Spanish virtues nor vices" ["Cervantes es un hombre contemporáneo de la Inquisición, pero es tolerante, es un hombre que no tiene ni las virtudes ni los vicios españoles"]) he says of Don Quixote and Spain; "We would have been able to choose Sarmiento's Facundo" as our national book, "but no...[instead] we chose the account of a deserter, we've chosen Martín Fierro, which even though it certainly deserves selection on its merits as a book, what are we to think of our history being represented by a deserter of the conquest of the desert?" ["Nosotros hubiéramos podido elegir el Facundo de Sarmiento...pero no...hemos elegido el Martín Fierro, que si bien merece ser elegido como libro, ¿cómo pensar que nuestra historia está representada por un desertor de la conquista del desierto?"] he asks about the gaucho epic and Argentina (18).  Elsewhere, Borges quotes thinkers like Montaigne and Emerson in support of his belief that reading should deliver a state of "happiness" above all else.  Some of his conclusions may surprise you: "Because of that, I think that a writer like Joyce has essentially failed because his work requires a real effort" ["Por eso considero que un escritor como Joyce ha fracasdo esencialmente, porque su obra requiere un esfuerzo"] (19).  Others may not: "We owe so much to literature.  I've tried to reread more than to read, I believe that rereading is more important than reading, except that in order to reread one needs to have read.  That's my cult of the book" ("Les debemos tanto a las letras.  Yo he tratado más de releer que de leer, creo que releer es más importante que leer, salvo que para releer se necesita haber leído.  Yo tengo ese culto del libro"] (21).  Too bad it's time to go to bed because I would have liked to talk a little more about a couple of the other lectures in this 99-page appetizer. (www.alianzaeditorial.es)

Borges

The Savage Detectives Group Read

There's still plenty of time left before 2012, of course, but what the hell: to help put an exclamation point on the end of the 2011 Roberto Bolaño Reading Challenge and to help usher in the new year in style, Rise of the Bolaño challenge and in lieu of a field guide and I will be hosting a group read of The Savage Detectives (original title: Los detectives salvajes) in January 2012.  For those not very familiar with the work, The Savage Detectives is the 1998 novel/pistol to the head of magical realism that provided the commercial and critical breakthrough to set the Chilean Bolaño on his path as the most important writer to come out of Latin America since Gabriel García Márquez.  Many Bolaño fans consider it Bolaño's best work--yes, even better than his posthumous, much more critically-lauded 2666--and while I won't get into that argument here, I can see why some people might feel that way given its livewire writing style, narrative experimentation, and scabrous humor.  In any event, I hope many of you will consider reading or rereading the novel with Rise and me in what will be the second time around for both of us and the first time I've picked up this personal favorite of mine since those wild and wooly pre-blogging "formative years" of yore--just let us know if you want to read along and then join us for discussion with participating fellow bloggers during the last weekend in January (Friday, 1/27 thru Sunday, 1/29) or thereabouts.  P.S. Emily, Frances, Nicole, Tom, others--always the charmer, I'm personally inviting you/calling you out to an under-600 pages de-humiliation party.  What do you say?

Savage (and non-savage) Readers
Rise of in lieu of a field guide
Amateur Reader (Tom) of Wuthering Expectations
Amy of The House of the Seven Tails
Anthony of Time's Flow Stemmed
Becky of Page Turners
Bellezza of Dolce Bellezza
Bettina of Liburuak
Caroline of Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat
Claire of kiss a cloud
Col of Col Reads
Emily of Evening All Afternoon
Frances of Nonsuch Book
Gavin of Page247
Jeremy of READIN
Mel u. of The Reading Life
Nicole of bibliographing
Sarah of A Rat in the Book Pile
Sarah of what we have here is a failure to communicate
Scott of seraillon
Séamus of Vapour Trails
Selena of luxe hours
Stu of Winstonsdad's Blog