Parataxis

At Bookforum, a review by Wayne Koestenbaum of Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait begins:

Parataxis is Édouard Levé’s best friend. Parataxis—also John Ashbery’s best friend—concerns the placement, side by side, of two sentences whose meanings don’t transparently connect. Parataxis, however, as concept, has leached its glories onto the landscape at large; any reader of contemporary culture is contaminated by paratactic energies, a stylistic phenomenon that Levé defends in his penultimate book, a work of unrepentantly naked yet stylistically errant autobiography, Autoportrait. He writes: “Raymond Poulidor is one of the least sexy names I know. I like salad mainly for the crunch and the vinaigrette.”

This paw-swiping gesture is nice: “any reader of contemporary culture is contaminated by paratactic energies.” Parataxis is, too, a good word for rendering the anonymous, deadpan syntactical purity of the Harper’s “Findings” section. (Of Harper’s two dominant flavors, the one I like best is not the prolix old-school progressive-polemical [Thomas Frank's "Easy Chair" columns, Rick MacArthur's distrust of the internet] but the hyper-distilled literary-bizarre ["Readings," the Weekly Review, Jim Shepard short stories]).

Last night I read this May’s delicious, oblique history of Byzantium by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi (subhead: “Their ears were uncircumcised”); a part of it is excerpted on the website. Imagine behind its paratactic compression a fanatically precise series of copyediting stress tests, a paragraph of fact-checking appended in pencil to every modifier . . . It reminds me, a little bit, of Calasso, but it’s funnier:

What were the laws and practices of the lawgivers? The Great Code of Theodosius forbade the impersonation of nuns by female mimes and the trampling of Jews by gentiles; the edicts of Leo VI permitted eunuchs to adopt; the Orthodox patriarchs anathematized the Manichaeans’ belief that all things fermented are alive.

The rulers of Byzantium were accustomed to blinding their rivals. With ornamental eye scoops, with daggers, with candelabras, kitchen knives, and tent pegs, with burning coals and boiling vinegar, with red-hot bowls held near the face and with bandages that left the eyes unharmed but were forbidden to be removed; sometimes it was sufficient merely to singe the eyelashes, for the victim to bellow and sigh like a lion as a trained executioner pantomimed the act. Sometimes cruelty was intended beyond the enucleation itself, as when the emperor Diogenes Romanus was deposed and “they permitted some unpracticed Jew to proceed in blinding the eyes” and “he lived several days in pain and exuding a bad odor.” In 797 the empress regnant Irene blinded her son Constantine VI and caused an eclipse that lasted seventeen days. Basil II blinded fifteen thousand Bulgarian soldiers, and every hundredth man he left with one eye to lead another ninety-nine, and when these men returned home to their king Samuel he looked upon them and died. Michael V blinded his uncle John the Master of Orphans. The iconoclasts blinded the eyes of the icons.

It was said that the city would fall when ships sailed by over dry land.

Birthday

My newest age, going by the Harper’s Index: The number of moles on the average adult’s body (Dec ’88), and the number of fishing rods and tackle boxes that can be checked out of Georgia’s Tybee Island public library (Oct ’98). The estimated number of Cobra attack helicopters privately owned by Americans (April ’97). The maximum running speed (in miles per hour) of a wild turkey, and the average lifespan (in years) of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon (Nov ’90 & ’95). The number of days it takes an adult in Los Angeles to breathe in more air pollution than EPA guidelines recommend for a lifetime (Dec ’02), the estimated California black-market price, in dollars, of a state-issued handicapped parking permit (July ’91), and the minimum number of times that Frederick Douglass was beaten in what is now Donald Rumsfield’s vacation home (March ’06). The percentage of Americans who believe their presence at a sports event influences its outcome (Dec ’84). The average number of miles by which the magnetic North Pole moves each year (Dec ’02).

Yesterday I was only as old as the 1989 percentage of Iowans with lawn ornaments.

Does John Berger speak Spanish?

It’s an honest question. I have “The White Bird” quite literally taped up in my room, so I was happy to see him on the back page of my Monday El País, where they have a ‘lunch with so-and-so’ feature that I think the Guardian does too, something between a short interview & voyeuristic glimpse of eating habits. No sooner do we sit down, writes the correspondent, than Berger has something profound to say — in this case, in response to a question he was apparently asked bullfighting, after ‘sitting in silence for almost a minute’:

Que si me gustan los toros? No tengo nada en contra, desde luego. Detrás de cada tradición hay un enorme sistema de valores y creencias que no se pueden borrar teniendo en cuanta uno solo de sus aspectos. En ese sentido las protestas civiles contra ellas suelen ser superficiales. El sufrimiento de los animales es algo a tener en cuenta, pero sólo se refiere a un pequeño aspecto. Es como el vento contra el velo de las mujeres musulmanas que ignora las nociones sobre lo secreto, lo privado y lo público en esas sociedades. La vida es cruel. Y en todos los continentes hay mayores vejaciones que éstas contra los oprimidos.

It’s an interesting enough statement taken on its own, and I more or less agree with it (that is, I’ve said myself, in Spanish, I don’t have anything against it, and for roughly the same reasons — that it’s a ritual, it enacts a whole system of values & beliefs, it is something akin to religious sacrifice, and that, to add something that Berger didn’t say, as cruelty it’s nothing compared to the invisible processes of industrial meat production & agriculture, which are far more immoral) — although the quick, easy shift Berger executes in comparing (as missing the point) protests against bullfighting because of animal cruelty to protests against the veil in Muslim countries because of Western feminism makes me instantly wary.

Berger, incidentally, is eating in Casa Salvador: a plate of lentils, merluza in green sauce, some house wine, coffee for desert. This is Madrid, so it’s on the order of 35€ per person.

But putting aside what Berger said, I’m left with the question of in what language, exactly, he said it. El País publishes translated op-eds from newspapers in Britain & the States, usually crediting, if I remember correctly, the original publication & maybe even the translator. Berger’s sitting in a restaurant in Madrid, of course, and in the lovely elegaic essay “The company of drawings: For Marie Claude” I just read in Harper’s, he mentions as an aside talking to a Zapatista subcomandante named Marcos in Chiapas in ’07, & writing letters to him. (1)

You think that a person who’s eating in Madrid & traveling through southeastern Mexico probably can get around in the language, but, of course, as I know to my perpetual disappointment, that is not the same thing as fluency, if fluency exists. John Berger probably speaks Spanish, yes. (A cursory google search in English & Spanish tells me nothing.) But was he interviewed in Spanish? Did he offer an opinion on toreo in castellano? Would his opinion in English have been the same? Nothing about the article says.

One of the unexpected entertainments (last year, at least, when I watched a lot of Spanish television; this year, hardly any at all) of living here, wherever ‘here’ is, is knowing which American celebrities speak Spanish. Bryan Singer, for instance, knows enough to say ‘hablo un poco’ in a maladroit California accent. Will Smith gets by o.k.  on talk shows, although he answers in English the questions he’s asked in Spanish. Viggo Mortensen sounds like a native speaker (edit — oh. He is. Lived in Argentina when he was a kid.)

Anyways. If John Berger, answering in Spanish, makes a small mistake in gendering a noun, is it transcribed in the article or silently corrected? What if he uses a false cognate, doesn’t shade the meanings as well as he’d like? Or does he speak so well that this isn’t an issue? If he’s answering in English, who’s translating, & where’s the original? I don’t know. At some point this dissolves into questions. But it interests me, in part because it’s something I have to deal with every day & is usually suppressed into silence in conversations or articles like these, and maybe too because my American monolingualism is showing, my eyes pop out at anything more.

It ends with a nice bit on cooking:

Me gusta cocinar. La pintura y la cocina tienen muchas coasas en común. El color, la improvisación, las texturas. Entre los pintores hay muy buenos cocineros.

Which is to say (and am I retranslating something he already said, or translating it into something he could have said?):

I like to cook. Painting & cooking have many things in common: Color, improvisation, the use of texture. Among painters there are some very good cooks.

(Andrew Bird, who I saw live in Paris in November, & who reconstructs his songs alone onstage, rushing around playing snatches of things on the violin, singing for a beat, playing with loop pedals: “Just cooking, up here.”)

_______

1. The last few paragraphs of that piece I like very much, both for the way they illustrate process & seem to say something about writing, as well:

Then the days of working at home on it. The image in my head was often clearer than the one on the paper. I redrew and redrew. The paper became gray with alterations and cancellations. The drawing didn’t get better, but gradually she, about to stand up, was more insistently there.

And today, like I said, something has happened. The effort of my corrections and the endurance of the paper have begun to resemble the resilience of María’s own body. The surface of the drawing, its skin, not its image, makes me think of how there are moments when a dancer can make your hairs stand on end.

We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.

“La banda terrorista”

Opening my morning paper today in the café-bar, past Haiti & an article on immigration, I find a small article summarizing a new book, Vidas rotas (Broken Lives) — which (I cannot help but think — the article is filed out of Madrid) in the very Spanish El País is summarized by the headline as “Una niña, primera víctima de ETA” — a little girl, ETA’s first victim, ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna) being, of course, the Basque separatist group that has carried out bombings & assassinations since the 60s — or, I should say, since the article gives the name of the girl & the date, since June 27th, 1960, when a child named Begoña Urroz Ibarrola died in the bombing of the train station in San Sebastián.

Vidas rotas, then, is a book that records every single person killed by ETA over the last 50 years, in chronological order, as well as, if known, the people who killed them, & in what manner.

Its 1,310 pages, say the article, “contribuyen a recordar, en carne viva, que la histora y la política del País Vasco no pueden entenderse sin aceptar el vasto coste humano del terrorismo.” The history & politics of Basque Country cannot be understood without accepting the vast human cost of terrorism. This is, of course, true — & yet writing it makes me nervous, ties my tongue. Of course, it’s true that the murder of a little girl for political ends is unspeakably ugly.

The article lists:  361 civilians, 209 Guardia Civil, 149 national police, 97 soldiers, 16 special police & 25 city cops. A murder every year except for 1999, 2004, & 2005. The book closes with the two Guardia Civil killed in Calviá (Islas Baleares) last July.

I’m not sure how this story would be told if I were reading it in something aside from El País, if I were hearing someone from here tell it, & part of that is what makes me hesitant, nervous — I’m reading this in a café-bar, after all, in public, & in public you just don’t talk about these things, particularly if you’re a foreigner. The rest of Spain, as far as I can tell from the reaction of friends of mine in Jaén when I told them where I was going — “You’re going where?” — views Basque Country with a kind of irrational, ignorant fear tinged with exoticism, as though I weren’t living 4 & a half hours by car from Madrid but in some kind of magical land on the far end of the earth, or rather, not magical but wartorn. It feels like talking to college freshmen in Boston about living in Jamaica Plain.

You can’t argue with the weight of the dead. But of course here the relationship between the kind of political sentiment that ETA represents & a rejection of the violence they carry out is much more contingent & embroidered. Yes, I can hear someone saying, yes, this was wrong, this was horrible. But — and I don’t know what would follow. Something, assuredly. All I have after four months here are bare fragments, & maybe I’d be better off keeping quiet until I know what I’m talking about, but part of me wants you, dear reader, to share my confusion.

I wasn’t planning on writing about this this morning.

Web design

Someday, when I’m not supposed to be packing for an international flight, I’ll get around to remaking this thing for good. Until then, here’s an artifact of what I just did to it as a placeholder. I like the idea that I can use scissors, thick paper & a typewriter in website design, however uneven or impractical it turns out to be.

PS, (after a moment’s consideration). —In case you’re wondering, yes: Only now do I remember that I habitually misspell “calendar.”

Legacies

Advertisement, p. 10 of the Tuesday, May 19th El País.

Always fun to check up on the home front in a Spanish daily. This is a different angle from what I think is that January luncheon with all living presidents, photo taken in the Oval Office, Obama then still the president-elect. (Though if it is that photograph, Jimmy Carter, who was standing to the right of Clinton, has been cut out entirely). Each president conveniently labeled with his accomplishments, next to Obama’s as-yet blank yellow circle. The ad is for a daily political talk radio program. (Click for a larger view of the text.)

George Bush is remembered for signing the treaty that ended the Cold War – Él y Gorbachov firmaron un pacto de cooperación, poniendo fin a la guerra fría en 1991.

Clinton, for his popularity – Terminó su mandato con un 66% de aprobación. El más alto desde la 2ª guerra mundial.

Carter is, by Spaniards, not remembered at all.

And our most recent office-holder? Interestingly, he’s not even gifted with one of his legacies as president – the bubble remembers him as Governor of Texas: Como gobernador, tiene el record de ejecuciones – He holds the record in executions, highest in toda la historia de Estados Unidos.

Now, speaking of legacies, isn’t this an odd sort of thing to say? Everything else the man did or was during his presidency taken as a given, I mean – wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, one election decided by judges, torture instrumentalized as foreign policy, a major American city left to drown, etc, etc, etc, etc. The obvious stuff.

But what do you do with the obvious stuff when it’s almost unsayable? You can’t argue with the number of people executed during his term of governor, even as the number of Iraqi civilians we’ve killed continues to be debated in terms of orders of magnitude. All of which puts me to mind of these pieces at the excellent academic blog zunguzungu, and the exchange  he quotes from an English teacher in the Sudan:

“So,” I said at length. “I hesitate to ask this question, but what is America famous for?”

“Killing people,” said one young lad sitting at the back, without hesitation.

Obama & Bush are the only presidents in the photograph wearing flag pins.

Mixtape

 

A typewriter lends an odd kind of official cast to anything you label with it – and more things than you think can be spooled into the carriage: post-it notes, pieces of cardpaper, envelopes, stationary of varieties & thicknesses impossible for a commercial laser printer.

This is yet another version of my History of American Music mix, made for the music teacher at my school. I taught a lesson in American traditional & folk music that I made up to complement the unit in the textbook, which was all about Spanish traditional music (and so virtually impossible to translate usefully – all of the teachable vocabulary were loanwords); this mixtape I made after the fact, because the teacher asked me what some of the songs were, which is why most of it is outliers. Because I don’t have access to a lot of music out here, most of the track choices are less carefully weighed exemplars & more of a scramble to give a general impression of the sweep of things.

I have no ready explanation as to why the cover is Marvin Gaye in a sailor hat, but it was the only usefully American musical image I could find in last week’s El País Sunday magazine.

EL PAÍS, domingo 22 de marzo

I become ever-more ambivalent about reducing a print medium to collage, but it’s so difficult to fit the words in – and how many of my readers speak Spanish, anyway?

In this week’s El País, co-fraternities in Sevilla (who sponsor & carry on their shoulders the platforms & floats during Holy Week) issue a joint declaration stopping the display of anti-abortion signs during Semana Santa. The search for the body of Marta, the young woman whose murder at the hands of her ex-boyfriend has transfixed all of Spain, continues in Sevilla’s garbage dump, after the murderer admits that he did not put her body in the river Guadilquivir. The corruption investigation into key national members of the PP, the Partido Popular (right-wing opposition party to the socialist PSOE) continues, and Spain offers more troops to be deployed in Kosovo & Afghanistan.

The FMLN triumphs in El Salvador, & the paper surveys ex-guerillas in political power in Latin America. There are massive public demonstrations in Naples against the mafia. Isreali soldiers are wearing t-shirts that feature a pregnant Arab woman in crosshairs with the subtitle “1 Shot, 2 Kills.” An editorial by Timothy Gartan Ash, translated from The Guardian, compares Britain’s diplomatic strategy re: America to P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves:

Maneras impecables; una sonrisa discreta; siempre, perfecta lealtad en público; mientras que, en privado, no se deja de murmurar: “¿Es eso prudente, señor?”.

But, he continues, this has been a national strategy with fewer benefits every day, and one with no remedy in the circumstance that the boss, Bertie Wooster, goes insane:

¿Qué hace Jeeves cuando Wooster empieza a torturar a gente en un cuarto trasero o cuando hace que un carnicero marroquí se dedique a cortar penes en su nombre? ¿Qué hace cuando Wooster se embarca en lo que Jeeves considera una guerra peligrosa y equivocada? Por lo que sabemos hasta ahora, la respuesta del Jeeves británico fue murmurar, alternativamente, “¿puedo ayudarle, señor?” y “¿es esto prudente, señor?”.

Having gone to the Guardian‘s website & looked up the original, I think I actually like the Spanish translation better.

Room with a view

I have the luck to be in Spain for the new Almodóvar film, Los abrazos rotos. This is the view from the desk in the hotel room where he wrote the first complete draft of the script.

A friend of mine wrote me in a letter a few months ago, “[Writers] aren’t as dependent on good light as painters, but it can help.”

EL PAÍS, domingo 8 de marzo

Above, the Sunday, 8 March El País boiled down to the size of two postcards.

Pérez Roque is named by the epithet, “talibán fidelista,” a Madrid designer coins the plural adjective “sexys” in an interview in order to make it line up with Spanish grammar, & the Spanish title of There Will Be Blood is Pozos de ambición.

An article in the peach-colored economics section uses a giant panoramic photograph of the olive groves outisde of Martos to illustrate its article on rural agriculture – Martos being the pueblo outside of Jaén where I was nine days ago, in a pleasant tiled courtyard with tables set with cups of different oil varieties, bread, water, & cubed apples, touring a traditional olive oil plantation.

I took notes again this week on the English loanwords italicized & used – this being the Sunday edition, I thought I’d net an even a bigger catch.

There were the usual suspects: Words for technology (web, online, banner [ad], blog, wi-fi), for celebrity & music (fan, celebrity, tour manager, memorabilia, shows).

Words filling up the business section – bonus, broker, cash flow, freelance, headhunters, hedge fund, marketing, outsourcing, rating, stock, subprime.

Words for consumption, fashion, nightlife – after hours, blazer, chaqueta de bomber, duty free, fitness manager, gentleman, glamour, grunge, indie, “it girl”, jeans, light [as in diet], “look”, outlets, play rate, pub, sexy, skate, sponsor, videoclip, video de aerobic, vintage.

Words for media – country, western, folk [music], thriller, “making of”, noir [instead of estilo negro], porno.

And the occasional outliers: “bloguero” [for blogger], dominatrix, doping, noodles, porridge, sheriff.