Blogging Bolaño 2666 6/29

Had to get a day away from 2666 most of the day, it was too sunny out for the dark stretches of the book. 'The Part About The Crimes' section (4)is drawing to an end and has been harrowing. I should make it through tomorrow and then start on sec. 5 p. 637 which I will not finish on that day but likely Tuesday, or more likely Wednesday on the train ride up to Seattle. We are leaving Portland in the afternoon and arriving in Seattle for dinner with Maya's cousin and probably Zabel. The next day we're headed to Vancouver to see my friend Virginia and hang for the weekend of the forth. We're not expecting any fireworks up there.

Blogging Bolaño 2666 6/28

Got a while further through Bolaño in the afternoon, though the insufferable heat sapped my initiative. The murders are really picking up in Santa Teresa, and a panorama of Mexican society emerges. From the crookedest cop to the simplest psychic, and through the jails, streets, bordellos and borders of México we go. Some gringos make appearances, though the preferred nomenclature is the ‘North Americans’; but the most numerous and saddest characters in 2666 are the young women.

Blogging Bolaño 2666 6/27 11:45 PM

He was at the bar reading like a maniac, getting caught up in the flow; sensing the texture and tone; feeling the cyclone structure spiraling out brutality, farce, sex, inchoate love-dreams; and aching out its eye a demand for intimate examination, in some sections practically tears as well; if only to feel a little human.

He was on page 512 and felt himself swirling down a giant drain, so large that those kinked hairs and dark fluids took on monstrous proportions, a familiar, filthy prelude to the inevitability of that dark tube at the bottom.

Blogging Bolaño 2666 6/26/08

Along the way into day three of this 2999 sprint, he carved out time for a little two-person asado o barbacoa, out in the little yard behind their triplex apartment house: that little patch of grass that neither their upstairs nor their basement neighbors seemed to pay much regard. They, he and Maia, had the little mini-Weber grill that had survived in Oregon before, during and after their time in Bogotá. Bogotá is only relevant because Maia grew up there, though truth be told government records can prove clearly, to her everlasting discomfort, her legal birthplace as Cali.
Maia was taking a rest while ‘the rake’ was marinating the ‘organic’ split-breasts, a steal for just over $6.09, in thick Petaluma red ale, fresh tarragon from his parents’ garden, a splash of olive oil, lemon pepper, lime-rind and salt on the kitchen counter. And while he divided the lines of coals on either side of the lop-sided, squat little cruddy black grillgnome and sprinkled them liberally with lighter fluid. His preferred method of achieving the desired grilling temperature (since the charcoals ought to be synthetic and mesquite-mashed) was to vigorously fan either side of the mounded coals with a broken-flat wheat cracker box. That particular brand of wheat cracker box he admired with utilitarian satisfaction, combining as it did equal parts flexibility and strength, not to mention the air displacement ratio coincidence apropos of the little rusted, busted down mini-Weber.
He sat out in the yard, buffeted occasionally by a clean, early summer wind. He read through his tome; an endless chronicle of fictional lives that though less-described, were often equally essential as our own.
This sort of dark, analytical, joyful, shivering novel existence struck him, as he watched the resplendent green foliage on the southern hill of the yard swing back and forth and tried to concentrate on the hollow sorrow of the wind chimes hanging under the stairs leading to the houses upper floor. How superior they must feel tramping about up there unfettered, he thought. This sensation struck him as logically as the dark flow of Bolano’s characters’ narratives, caught up as they were in upsetting yet not truly dire endeavors that one nonetheless feels building in the way every word and phrase is supposed to in a short story pushed to the shifty red limits, pushed outward by an ‘event’ the circumstances surrounding which are subject to strenuous daily debate. He got into his mind the scenes from Terry Gilliams’ film Brasil, in which terror and farce are pushed to the limits of absurdity: a place where suicide bombers and fine dining need not disturb each other provided that the ‘central bureaucracy’ keeps all its documents in order.
Being a bona fide bureaurcrat {he never could spell it properly}, his occupation felt phantom-like to him, as though—as he’d ready recently—a short course of mirror therapy might produce in him astounding results, seeing as how it had proved quite intriguing in the treatment of those whose brains had mal-functioned in the face of a shorted-out interpretation. ‘Just hit the right reset bundle and you can be cured by correction the expectation of a part that’s no longer ‘objectively’ there, by exploiting the image of the good brains’ reflection, allowing the previously atrophied side of the brain to unclench, declench and bench press a new realization of nothing. This seems to have happened to Liz Norton, the English professor in section 1 of 2666.
That’s why the phantom limb mirror treatment can’t be applied to those the most disturbed by a select few disorders. Those kinds of experiments minted not a few but at least seventeen documented cases of death or dire damage to the applicator {foot} etc. by the applicated. There were even cases posted on YouTube, before those got taken down by popular and legislative demand, showing grainy, muffled rampages.
‘It’s like watching fucking freddy cougar with shards of glass glued to his fists!’ one stoned adolescent had declared, the U-Tube video of his reaction quickly virating to the those in the know gawkers.
Back before, during the waiting part of the backyard BBQ for two, while she slept, he tended the grill and his book, the newly acquired coal design succeeding beyond expectations. Then they were inside and La Maita—looking stunning and sated after a long day of wall-painting at the perennially under-funded public media office on MLK—was raving about her roasted corn and he was devouring his chicken with two hands like a maniac. Mostly during the grilling process he had burned himself adjusting the food and wiping his greasy, black-flecked hands on his green corduroys and trying not to get any stain on the 2666, but at the same time absolutely drug into the story of the black magazine reporter who’s mother dies at the beginning of section 3 ‘The Part About Fate’. He heard the wind chimes again, blown to swinging by the warm gusting winds, and heard the meat sizzle and downed the rest of the 22 oz. Lagunitas as he fumbled around back by the wild yellow roses planted in the corner lee of the house under the stairs leading to the third floor. He was slated to read another solid 100 pages this evening but he only dreamed of plowing through fifty assuming he kept himself sober. That would be enough, he thought, to still allow him plenty of time to catch up on Saturday.

Blogging Bolaño 2666 6/25/08

Finished up section 1 ‘The Part About the Critics’ today and made it through section 2 ‘The Part About Amalfitano’. Amalfitano is a philosophy professor who is introduced in section 1 when the professor’s travel to Sonora in search of the elusive German author Benno von Archimboldi. Amalfitano is a Chilean of Italian descent who ends up teaching in México after leaving a position in Spain after his wife leaves him to go visit a poet living in an asylum. This mirrors an incident in section 1 where the European professors go to a Swiss asylum to visit a famous painter who has mutilated himself. Professor Amalfitano is in the midst of a nervous breakdown and almost oblivious to the troubling series of unsolved murders of young women that plague the border town of Santa Teresa and our upsetting many residents. He is hearing voices, has some strange run-ins with the son of the philosophy department dean and the section ends with him dreaming about chatting with Boris Yeltsin. Strangely enough, this all makes sense.

Blogging Bolaño – 2666 6/23/08

The reading was going in a different direction. I was at a bar sipping a beer and working through Cortazar's Rayuela, consulting my Spanish dictionary frequently but actually making progress. After a couple hours, someone approached me from behind and slipped their arms around me. I reacted rather calmly, though I had no idea who it was. Turns out it was one of the bartenders who I have a passing familiarity with: one of those guys who ignores you when he's sober and gropes you when he's loaded. It was around 6:30 and he was loaded. His hair was dyed pink. After some nonsense talk, he convinced one of his co-workers to shave his head at a table behind the pool table. Another duded, who was also very smashed, decided to get in on the action. I tried to read a little more and made it through another chapter before things got too loud and I left. Later, I went to Carson's to pick up some furniture my brother had left there before heading off to Maine. We formulated the idea that Saturday evening after Carson had gotten off work at Powell’s. He had a surprise; an advance copy of the final Roberto Bolaño novel: 2666. My idea was to read it in a week, or as much as could be accomplished, and put in a brief daily blog entry recording my progress. The book is just under 900 pages so I figured I would need to get through around 130 pages a day. I’m on 127 now, though I haven’t really had the kind of uninterrupted periods one really needs to burn through a text—seeing as how my full-time academic clerkship covets my hours. I’m thirty pages from being through the first of the five sections of the book, entitled ‘The Part About The Critics’. I cheated a little, it must be admitted, by reading a handful of pages before today – less than twenty – just to fortify myself for the endeavor. I won’t get into summary or critical platitudes. After the main characters--a Spaniard, Frenchman, Italian and English woman--are brought together by their common literary interests and modern European academic dispositions, around pg. 121 or so, after three of them embark on a trip to México in search of an elusive literary figure – a quest not unfamiliar to those who’ve have read Bolaño’s previous knockout novel The Savage Detectives – comes one of those break-free prose passages that justify investing in fiction by putting into perspective some of the many ways that investment can go sour.

Can Having Colored Dreams be a Habit/

I’ve taken to reading Montesqiueu on the toilet, his Persian Letters, of late. This is a new habit. My ages old habits include biting my nails, reading, scribbling dubiously, lying effusively, and soccer. I was watching some of the latter (soccer sucker that I am) this afternoon: the Colombian national side against the powerhouse, smooth-oiled, Bleu French machine. The Colombians were taking such a drubbing that I had seemingly no choice but to lay into a long nap.I had green dreams; another new habit. Can having colored dreams be a habit? This I don’t know. I figured it was because of that expanse of white-lined green turf, and those streaks of bleu and yellow uniforms blending into a hectic habit of sport in that French stadium that caused the green dream. I’d had a citrus acid red dream the previous weekend involving a pink Greyhound, Latin American history, and a large pitcher of red ale; and even the least literary understand it when I tell of having had a night of bleak black dreams.When I woke from my green nap I scrambled to work on a pair of stories—not this story—but those two others that I’ll soon be getting graded on. I’ve got a two-day deadline. They grate on me, deadlines, and that is perhaps their greatest quality. Without the flesh they rend from my back I am but a naked, one-pound block of sharp cheddar cheese; but when those deadlines threaten, I transfigure my habitual smoke and my habitual mirrors into something satisfactory.

Like a Quesadilla, or The Saddest Factory

I’m squeezing something satisfactory out of a long nap and a lousy soccer match and an Ouza with coffee at the corner pub where I’ve gone to find some salty peace. The other stories, those suffering from deadline syndrome, are coming along. Neither is too ambitious, that much can be said for them at the least. One of the stories is about a sad story and the other also, but unintelligibly. I wouldn’t be surprised to wake up tomorrow to take in the anguished flight of a brother colored dream; the color of the backyard mass of grass mulch that a recent great friend of mine was jumping up and down on in the gravender light of a cold, cloudy early June Oregon evening. I would not be surprised that he’d have been telling me about a recent lucid dream of his in which his ailing grandmother and Heaven and heaving sighs all played starring roles. I would hope that a dream like this would convince me unequivocally of the habitual potential of colored dreams.

I lost my phone today

I sent a text message to M when I woke up. I punched in “hi” and “I love you.” When she wrote back, “ah shucks,” I plugged my phone into its charger and the charger into the wall and left to have breakfast with two friends at the café up the way.

After I ate I left my friends at the café and walked home to get ready to bike to work. When I unplugged my phone I noticed I had a voice mail. It was from M, and the message she left was about a radio program she was listening to. She thought of me because the syndicated show was being broadcast from the campus of the college in which I attended for five years, five years ago. I didn’t call her back. I rode to work.

At work I was going to send a text message to M. There was a parade downtown and I saw the parade set-up and I thought her because we—we’ve been together a little longer than a year—went to this particular last year. I reached my right hand into my right pocket, where I normally keep my phone and noticed it was not there. I checked the left pocket and also the back pockets, but my phone was not on my person.

I retraced all of my steps from the locker room to the break room to the workspace where I work and to the computer station where I checked my email. My phone was not at any of these places. I asked the manager on duty if anyone had turned in a cell phone. He checked around, but no one had.

I called my phone but no one answered. I wasn’t there. I could be called but I couldn’t answer. I had to let my friends and family know. From work, I sent out emails. I lost my phone, I wrote. Call my friends. They’ll hand their phones over to me. I’ll have to borrow their phones to call you when I can, but there’s no sense in calling me. I lost my phone. It’s gone, I wrote in the bodies of messages.

I went to lunch, but didn’t call M like I normally do on my break. Instead, I tried to read. I couldn’t because of conversations going on around me. I re-retraced my steps. I searched but found no phone. One minute you have all your contacts, the next you have none.

The Internet connection at my house went out the other day. I can no longer send email messages from my house. I can’t receive them either. After work, as I rode my bike home I wondered if people would reply to the messages I earlier sent how would I know.

Because of the parade I had to take an alternate route home. I rode my bike down streets I’d never been on. I made a wrong turn and had to turn around at one point. I worried if I got lost I wouldn’t have a phone to use to call for help. I got back on course, though, and made my way home. When I arrived at my house friends were in the garage and on the stoop. They said hello. Words went directly from their mouths to my ears. Communication was certain.

I went into my bedroom and turned on the light. There, on my bed’s blanket was my phone. I flipped it open. I had no messages. I had missed one call. It was my work’s number. It was from me.