"What art thou that usurp'st this time of night"


I'm rereading Hamlet this weekend because its quick-paced revenge narrative and certain speeches have been recurring in my memory. I haven't read it since college. Enjoying the tangled structure of the play, as it dismantles itself into compartments, a formal wonder.

Also slowly reading 2666, where Bolaño finally announces his shadowing of parts from The Odyssey directly, on p. 67:

"Y ya que hemos mencionado a los griegos no estaría de más decir que Espinoza y Pelletier se creían (y a su manera perversa eran) copias de Ulises, y que ambos consideraban a Morini como si el italiano fuera Euríloco, el fiel amigo del cual se cuentan en la Odisea dos hazañas de diversa índole."

Along with Wilson Harris's recent The Mask of the Beggar, and Walcott's Omeros, this book takes on a revision of the canon that implies some pre-established map for its own machinery. The palimpsest, "translationese" quality of these texts. Bolaño's ability to simultaneously write a Chilean, a Mexican, a Spanish and a European novel/poem.

Walk through Allston, Brighton and Cambridge today through the melting snow. The sky a purple blue at dusk walking out from coffee. The character mentioned above, Morini, has a terrifying dream of a pool in a back yard that grows into a lake and then a harbor, which then drains and leaves a wide deserted valley. Books that maybe deal with evil by facing it directly, writing it clearly into their forms. Evil stanzas.