Post subject: Re: Roberto Bolaño (Bolano for the search engine)
Posted: Wed Nov 18, 2009 3:35 pm
Stone's Bitch
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2004 6:41 am Posts: 5867 Location: Providence, RI Gender: Male
Also: there's a great line in Shakespeare where a woman says to her husband, "Come, come, my little paraketo / And I shall break your little finger"...she'll snap off his wang, apparently. No idea if Bolano read that.
_________________ "I wish that I believed in fate / I wish I didn't sleep so late"
"The real truth about it is: no one gets it right / The real truth about it is: we’re all supposed to try"
Post subject: Re: Roberto Bolaño (Bolano for the search engine)
Posted: Wed Nov 18, 2009 7:32 pm
Force of Nature
Joined: Mon Nov 09, 2009 7:44 am Posts: 481 Location: Souf Gender: Male
Simple Torture wrote:
Also: there's a great line in Shakespeare where a woman says to her husband, "Come, come, my little paraketo / And I shall break your little finger"...she'll snap off his wang, apparently. No idea if Bolano read that.
I feel like Bolaño has read everything.
_________________ I'm at the pizza hut I'm at the taco bell I'm at the combination pizza hut 'n taco bell.
Post subject: Re: Roberto Bolaño (Bolano for the search engine)
Posted: Fri Nov 20, 2009 3:47 am
Supersonic
Joined: Mon Sep 05, 2005 1:34 am Posts: 12029
The city center was old, with three- or four-story buildings and arcaded plazas in a state of neglect and young office workers in shirt-sleeves and Indian women with bundles on their backs hurrying down cobblestoned streets, and they saw streetwalkers and young thugs loitering on the corners. Mexican types straight out of a black-and-white movie. Toward the east were the middle- and upper-class neighbourhoods. There they saw streets with carefully pruned trees and public playgrounds and shopping centers. The university was there, too. To the north were abandoned factories and sheds and a street of bars and souvenir shops and small hotels, where it was said no one ever slept, and further out there were more poor neighbourhoods, though they were less crowded, and vacant lots out of which every so often there rose a school. To the south they discovered rail lines and slum soccer fields surrounded by shacks, and they even watched a match, without getting out of the car, between a team of the terminally ill and a team of starving to death, and there were two highways that led out of the city, and a gully that had become a garbage dump, and neighbourhoods that had grown up lame or mutilated or blind, and sometimes, in the distance, the sillhouettes of industrial warehouses, the horizon of the maquiladoras.
The city, like all cities, was endless. If you continued east, say, there came a moment when the middle-class neighbourhoods ended and the slums began, like a reflection of what happened in the west but jumbled up, with a rougher orography: hills, valleys, the remains of old ranches, dry riverbeds, all of which went some way toward preventing overcrowding. To the north they saw a fence that separated the United States from Mexico and they gazed past it at the Arizona desert, this time getting out of the car. In the west they circled a couple of industrial parks that were in their turn being surrounded by slums.
They were convinced the city was growing by the second. On the far edge of Santa Teresa, they saw flocks of black vultures, watchful, walking through barren fields, birds that here were called turkey vultures, and also turkey buzzards. Where there were vultures, they noted, there were no other birds. They drank tequila and beer and ate tacos at a motel on the Santa Teresa-Caborca highway, at outdoor tables with a view. The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.
Post subject: Re: Roberto Bolaño (Bolano for the search engine)
Posted: Fri Nov 20, 2009 4:12 am
Supersonic
Joined: Mon Sep 05, 2005 1:34 am Posts: 12029
Here is the reference to 2666 in Amulet:
Guerrero, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.
Post subject: Re: Roberto Bolaño (Bolano for the search engine)
Posted: Fri Nov 20, 2009 4:17 am
Unthought Known
Joined: Sat Dec 04, 2004 7:46 am Posts: 6099
invention wrote:
Here is the reference to 2666 in Amulet:
Guerrero, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.
Post subject: Re: Roberto Bolaño (Bolano for the search engine)
Posted: Fri Nov 20, 2009 4:26 am
Supersonic
Joined: Mon Sep 05, 2005 1:34 am Posts: 12029
These two passages really get me knowing that he was basically writing from his death sentence.
"The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man's sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave."
...
"Sometimes, however, as they sat on a cafe terrace or around a dark cabaret table, an obstinate silence descended inexplicably over the trio. They seemed suddenly to freeze, lose all sense of time, and turn completely inward, as if they were bypassing the abyss of daily life, the abyss of people, the abyss of conversation, and had decided to approach a kind of lakeside region, a late-romantic region, where the borders were clocked from dusk to dusk, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, an eternity, like the minutes of those condemned to die, like the minutes of women who've just given birth and are condemned to die, who understand that more time isn't more eternity and nevertheless wish with all their souls for more time, and their wails are birds that come flying every so often across the double lakeside landscape, so calmly, like luxurious excrescences or heartbeats. Then, naturally, the three men would emerge stiff from the silence and go back to talking about inventions, women, Finnish philosophy, the building of highways across the Reich."
Post subject: Re: Roberto Bolaño (Bolano for the search engine)
Posted: Fri Nov 20, 2009 4:32 am
Unthought Known
Joined: Sat Dec 04, 2004 7:46 am Posts: 6099
invention wrote:
These two passages really get me knowing that he was basically writing from his death sentence.
"The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man's sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave."
...
"Sometimes, however, as they sat on a cafe terrace or around a dark cabaret table, an obstinate silence descended inexplicably over the trio. They seemed suddenly to freeze, lose all sense of time, and turn completely inward, as if they were bypassing the abyss of daily life, the abyss of people, the abyss of conversation, and had decided to approach a kind of lakeside region, a late-romantic region, where the borders were clocked from dusk to dusk, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, an eternity, like the minutes of those condemned to die, like the minutes of women who've just given birth and are condemned to die, who understand that more time isn't more eternity and nevertheless wish with all their souls for more time, and their wails are birds that come flying every so often across the double lakeside landscape, so calmly, like luxurious excrescences or heartbeats. Then, naturally, the three men would emerge stiff from the silence and go back to talking about inventions, women, Finnish philosophy, the building of highways across the Reich."
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 7 guests
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot post attachments in this forum