Sin titulo

movements of thought answers the question: "--¿Cómo es su disciplina de blog?" today. My own blog discipline is based on daily entries, at times forcing myself to add a few words, like tonight, rushed at library or work late. Flip through newspapers and other blogs, look in notebooks and fight invisibility with daily presence. Although invisibility is sometimes necessary.

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I'm not quite convinced by the conclusion of Roberto Bolaño's Los detectives salvajes. The shooting seems forced, as though it were following a tired Tarantino script, in a desert with screams and dust. Maybe the book is meant to fall apart gracelessly in the final chapters. Regardless, it's a brilliant novel.

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"I climbed through the woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird-
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood..."

{Ted Hughes, "The Horses," The Hawk in the Rain, 1957}

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dawn speaker lowered to trickle
noise for us to wear night correctly

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"(¿quién es más indio, un mixteco de Oaxaca o uno emigrado a Los Ángeles?)"

{Rogelio Villarreal, "El Gran Rechazo,
Underground y contracultura"}

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All those Indian names around me the whole time, and I never knew.

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Hello to Isabel and Ramana in Calcutta, and to Juan on tour in Japan.

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At El Meollo, Roberto Echeto writes a letter from Caracas to the novelist Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez in Spain, regarding the latter's novel, Árbol de luna. The letter begins:

"Dear Juan Carlos,

I hope things are going well for you over there in Spain. Over here we're on guard, surrounded by the daily disgraces. My life is beautiful when I'm in my house. However: as soon as I step onto Francisco de Miranda Avenue my existence unravels and becomes miserable. But, what can we do? I suppose this feeling marks all of us who live in Venezuela. At home we're fine, but on the street we become paranoid when confronted with so much disgrace turned routine. Patience, carajo. There's no other way. [...]"

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Unfortunately, at this moment the Chavistas are wrapped in their pseudo-revolutionary, apocalyptic mantle. Walcott writes, in "The Gulf":

"age after age, the uninstructing dead."