"En la noche dúctil con un gladiolo en tu casa"


Waiting for the blizzard to arrive, snow us in all over Boston. There's a recent photo of Slint at David Pajo's blog (scroll down to 12/25/04 post). They'll be playing with three from the band's original lineup along w/ a replacement bass player. It'll be a one-time only tour and it seems unlikely they'll record anything new.

I'm reading 2666 as a Borgesian detective story, which opens in Europe with hardly a trace of Latin America. The writer that four literary scholars are researching, a mysterious German novelist named Beno von Archimboldi, seems at times to be a version of W.G. Sebald. The implied mystery of Bolaño's novel is clearly established in the opening pages, using what's almost a cliche by now, the figure of the great semi-lost or mysterious writer. A Rimbaudian recluse or legend that the four scholars investigate. As with Borges, Bolaño maintains a masterful control over the narrative, opening entire worlds around a central thread that leads from Europe to Mexico. The legends that literature creates and their dismantling and archiving.

Juan Sánchez Peláez writes, in his book Por cuál causa o nostalgia (1981), of a park in Paris where someone once glimpsed Paul Verlaine. In another piece from an earlier book he writes, "In the ductile night with a gladiola in your house..." The poems he wrote in Venezuela and France during the 1950s and later evoke a repetition of charms, vibrations that language carries and doesn't always understand. A translation beyond nation, exile or insomnia.

In yesterday's TalCual Oswaldo Barreto writes about his friendship with Jesús Rafael Soto in France during the 1950s, when the artist made his living as a guitar player and singer in Paris. It was during the mid-fifties that Sánchez Peláez also lived in France. In an interview he mentions how Barreto helped him find housing in Paris when he first arrived from Venezuela. The poems from Sánchez Peláez's first two books, Elena y los elementos (1951) and Animal de costumbre (1959), could be read as reflecting some of Soto's early ideas about painting and sculpture. Particularly the painter's interest in what he called "vibraciones" (vibrations).