fiction & caffeine

No matter what I’m working on, I will find an excuse to take Between Parentheses off the shelf and run my fingers through the index, looking for the day’s relevant name. This morning I ended up reading most of “the last interview” and weeping a bit over the shit that came out of Bolaño’s mouth, the fully formed hilarity and pathos. I’ve read it so many times, but for some reason I always forget this, how it ends:

Playboy: Do you confess to having lived?
Bolaño: I’m still alive, I’m still reading, I’m still writing and watching movies, and as Arturo Prat said to the sailors of the Esmeralda before their last stand, so long as I live, this flag will fly.

And then I breathe a little more loosely, because alive as defined “reading, writing, and watching movies” is validation.

Right here. I cared for it at the sentence level, but on the whole I just did not give a shit. Which was weird, considering I’ve given a shit about every other one of his books that’s been translated. AIRA FATIGUE?

The tone attempts formalness, but is markedly manic and hysterical; I could be projecting, though, for I attempt togetherness yet am manic and hysterical.

In my brain, Roberto Bolaño and I are friends. We sit at the bar and he drinks a lot and I’m full after one beer and I listen to him. He speaks. I nod, laugh, relish his company but worry for him. My personality, like everyone’s, is dependent upon context. Here, with Bolaño, I am straitlaced and together; with someone else, I’m the one gesticulating, drinking too much, getting overexcited. I am happy here at the bar with him. Probably because this could only exist in death.

A week ago, an interview I did with translator Kerri Pierce went up at The Awl. Her translation of Kjersti A. Skomsvold’s The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am is out from Dalkey Archive this week. It’s really freaking good, and this woman works in seven languages. This is the second interview with a translator I’ve done for Awl, a site I super-love, and I’m really appreciative of the opportunity. I am a feeble interviewer but hope to improve.

“You guys know about vampires? … You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, “Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist? And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.” —Junot Díaz

“It’s not hero worship,” she said, explaining this sense of affiliation and identification with other artists, living and dead. “It’s not that I have low self-esteem. I feel magnified by these people. I had a very good conversation with Allen Ginsberg about this very thing. He was like me, in his own way. He felt that he walked with Blake and Whitman. They were his people.” —A.O. Scott profiles Patti Smith. Many of her pictures are included, most important among them, of course, the one of Bolaño’s chair.

Remember when I said I was reading some poetry for a review and was in way over my head? The review’s up at PANK. It was a lot of fun to try to review poetry…

“This time jump at the end. This dramatic shift. Like a shift in tone, perspective, everything. It becomes more narrative, and less poetic. I think that’s what happens. In adolescence you start to make narrative about your life. You have the vocabulary to start thinking about your experience differently. In childhood, you just don’t have any of those words. There’s just poetry, and imagination and wonder.” —Justin Torres

This is the articulation of something I have long wanted to articulate. It is why I am obsessed, in love with child narrators.

And from an interview with Mother Jones:

“Sometimes I would be very upset because my memories are very murky from my childhood, but there are certain emotional memories or emotional truths that are painful, and things that I know to be the case and I had to nail them down, and that was difficult. And other times I think I was trying to write my way back towards my family. If I could make characters out of these people, then I had to understand, as a writer, their motivations. I had to understand, like, why would a father punch his son? So that was a practice in empathy; it kind of expanded my conception.”

“But every night I am subdued by an anxiety that knows no irony…” —Vila-Matas in a Paris Review interview the McNally Jackson Tumblr quoted. This fragment is exquisite, and reminds me that Montano’s Malady is in my trunk.