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Newyópolis

Ilustración original de FronteraD para el blog Newyópolis.

A partir de esta semana empecé a escribir una página-blog para la revista madrileña online FronteraD. Se llama Newyópolis y es una bitácora de experiencias vividas en esta ciudad que si a veces duerme lo hace bien caleta para que nadie se de cuenta. Esta es la primera entrada, publicada hoy. Se llama El nuevo idioma. Espero que les guste:

En una plataforma de la estación Times Square tuve mi primer gran encuentro con el subterráneo. Era mi primer día de clases de inglés intensivo en Nueva York. Ahí estaba yo, dudando en subirme o no a ese ruidoso tren con un número 1 al frente, cuando se abrieron las puertas y vi gente. ¿Cómo averiguo si va “uptown” o “downtown”? ¿Cómo se dice en inglés lo que yo quiero preguntar? pensé. En un impulso, dirigiéndome a un muchacho que viajaba aferrado a un pasamanos, le pregunté en castellano: ¿Va a la 34? y el muchacho me respondió “Sí, sí va” con perfecto español y amable acento de México.

Recuerdo haber experimentado una sensación de alivio. Pasara lo que pasara, el idioma que yo manejaba me iba a servir de herramienta en esta nueva ciudad. Y así se los digo a mis amigos que me visitan de vez en cuando, o a las tías que temen perderse en los laberintos turísticos del tren subterráneo: “Si necesitas ubicarte, mira alrededor. Siempre hay alguien que habla español”. A mi padre no tuve jamás que sugerirle nada, pues él, con desparpajo, se lanza a preguntarle en español tanto al chino del restaurante de Chinatown como al polaco de la bodega de Astoria. A veces tiene suerte y recibe una correcta respuesta en ese idioma, otras veces recibe una sonrisa de ignorancia y de vez en cuando un “no hablou espaniol” como excusa. Pero él no desespera y pasa a su siguiente víctima hasta que alguien lo entiende y le responde. Si hablas español no puedes perderte en Nueva York: Ciudad Gótica se ha castellanizado.

Casi once años después de aquella primera experiencia en el subterráneo, esta semana vi a mis estudiantes sufrir en un examen de conjugaciones: pretéritos perfectos e imperfectos. Era una prueba solo con verbos regulares. Sin embargo, para  algunos de ellos, esas palabras parecen ser acertijos indescifrables.

Mi clase está compuesta por estudiantes que provienen de familias hispanas pero que han nacido y crecido en Nueva York. Les menciono los viajes que podrían hacer a ciudades interesantes como Buenos Aires o México DF. Les enseño imágenes de lugares que podrían visitar, como el barrio de La Candelaria, como las pirámides de Chichen Itza,  las ruinas de Machu Picchu, las cataratas de Iguazú o el volcán Arenal; y les digo lo útil que les sería el español en estos sitios. Los insto a viajar porque sé–por experiencia–cuantas cosas nos enseñan los viajes cuando no sabemos nada de la vida. Y así creo que estos jóvenes le toman un poco más de gusto a memorizarse palabras como “pretérito”, “participio” o “gerundio”.

Uno de ellos tiene padres puertorriqueños. Aprendió con gran facilidad a identificar el pasado imperfecto del pasado perfecto, pero cuando habla no puede deshacerse de un fuerte acento “gringo”. Tiene solo 18 años. Me dice que siente vergüenza cuando encuentra hispanos que le hablan en español y él tiene que responder que no les entiende. Le sugiero que viaje y aprenda el idioma hablando con personas de otro país. Él me responde que en la esquina de la avenida Grand Concourse con la calle Fordham en el Bronx puede escuchar todo el español que quiera. Otra de mis estudiantes habla de un abuelito que le conversa en un inglés quebrado. Yo le sugiero que le converse en español todos los días “aunque sea un ratito”. Ella tiene una perfecta pronunciación, pero le ha tomado tiempo entender la diferencia entre el pretérito perfecto y el imperfecto; o más aún,  diferenciar una palabra grave de una aguda o una esdrújula. “Suena muy extraño” me dice uno de ellos cuando pronuncia “ce-ná-ba-mos”. Yo trato de convencerlo de que para los verbos regulares de primera terminación hay una reglas que son como las matemáticas: apréndete las terminaciones e identifica la raíz.

Sin embargo, hay momentos de gran felicidad en este proceso. La última clase uno de mis estudiantes se acercó y me dijo “profesor, pregúnteme cuantos países conozco” “¿Cuántos países conoces?” Su dedo señaló el suelo y me dijo “Solo éste”. Él quiere viajar a Sudamérica. Quiere ir a la Argentina y ver un partido de fútbol. Me complace saber que tal vez un día él estará en Buenos Aires, tal vez con la duda de cómo llegar hasta la cancha de Boca; y preguntará–como lo hice yo en Nueva York, mi primer día–direcciones en español. Habrá entonces vencido el temor a esas palabras extrañas que debió aprender para una clase universitaria, el miedo a todas aquellas reglas que dificultan el aprendizaje; y se sentirá en posesión de una poderosa herramienta: un nuevo idioma.

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William Carlos Williams under the influence



William Carlos Williams under the influence
Borrowing from The Cantos to write the greatest American epic

«Ain’t it enuf that you so deeply influenced my formative years
without your wanting to influence also my later ones?»

WCW’s letter to Ezra Pound, 12 April 1954 (1)

William Carlos Williams’s aim of writing an epic using as a raw material a small New Jersey city is very ambitious. Perhaps even more ambitious than Pound’s agglutination of eras and languages in the Cantos, or Eliot’s purpose to representing the decadence of the whole modern world in The Waste Land.

To write the 5 books of Paterson, Williams borrowed patterns and music from Eliot’s poems and ideas and sources from Ezra Pound. The rhythm and cadence of T.S. Eliot is everywhere in Paterson, and Pound’s Cantos is used by the Rutherford poet as a pattern to write his own big epic. Paterson is the “magnus opus that I’ve always wanted to do” as Williams call it in a letter to Pound in November of 1936.

The two poets that Williams disdained publicly most of his life are the ones he imitates the most. He was not happy about that influence, but he could not deny it either, as he says in this letter to Robert McAlmon:

Pound is] a one sided bastard if there ever was one, who has borrowed from everybody, including myself in the old days, but he’s done a good job, surpassingly good. And I’ve borrowed from him much more than I’ve given. Everyone has who has followed him. Yeats specially (qted, In Thirlwall, 220).

Pound’s influence is clear in all William’s first books. But by 1946, when he published the first book of Paterson, Williams thought that those influences had been erased and lost among the fabulous structure of his work. However, as the critic K.L. Goodwin says “ the one whose work has been touched at the greatest number of points by Pound, and the one who has shown the greatest ability to avoid mere imitation, is William Carlos Williams” (Goodwin, 144).

One of the main influences of Pound in Williams’s Paterson is the imagist theory of poetry. Paterson is full of images, from the beginning of the first book: the city-person is described using some of the best imagist lines written by Williams. Paterson certainly is an imagist epic, which has sudden changes of voices and breaks of verse, combined with long portions of prose. Goodwin connects this treatment of Paterson as Williams’s intention of using merely descriptions to generate sensations, avoiding any kind of subjectivity:

Many passages from Paterson are imagistic. The reason for the frequency of such passages may be that the whole poem is a symbolic treatment of man through the features of the city, Paterson, and as this symbolic connection is partly brought out through prose interludes, Williams felt that he could indulge in objective description without having to make the relationship between it and the theme explicit (Goodwin, 150-151).

When using certain images, Williams seems to be looking for them. He’s not getting what image he gets from inspiration and putting them into the poem. He seems to be looking for images that he needs to fit a certain plan. He seem to be looking for images to replace ones that he had seen before in other epic poems. Some of the images that Williams is looking for, seem to have their origin in The Cantos. I think that a good example of this kind of research is found in this lines from A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930):

City of patterned streets; again the vision:
Down in the viae stradae, toga’d the crowd, and arm’d,
Rushing in populous business,
And from parapet looked down
And North was Egypt,
The celestial Nile, blue deep,
cutting low barren land,
Old men and camels
Working the water-wheels (Pound, 17).

The fragmented city of these lines of The Cantos, could be traced to the unreal city that T.S. Eliot evokes in The Waste Land. In Eliot’s poem there is an interest to describe poetically the interdependence of cities and water. The water manifestated as river, sea, or rain. There is a historical fact of dependance of cities and rivers. But there is also a pattern in the way Pound, Eliot and Williams use the relationship water-city, as in these lines from the Book One of Paterson (1946):

Immortal he neither moves nor rouses and is seldom
seen, thought he breathes and the subtleties of his
machinations
drawing their substance from the noise of the pouring
river
animate a thousand automatons (Williams, 6)

The connection between the people of a city with the river and the implications of productivity and some kind of technological activity in Pound’s Cantos is there, even if transformed, in the verses of Paterson. The talent of Williams is that since Paterson is a city and a man at the same time, the figure of “populous business” of The Cantos kind of vanishes. In Paterson there is a transformation of the images coming from The Cantos. It is not very difficult to trace the steps of their change, however In The Cantos, The Nile river is a source of productivity, an instrument of “progress” who moves the water-wheels, while the “pouring” Passaic river and the “machinations” of Paterson are combined to move those thousand “automatons”. The technology is different, but both poems are connected by the idea of the river as an agent of transformation.

The particular talent of Williams is that he applies the technique of imagism not just to static objects. There is qualitative jump from the stillness of Eliot’s images in The Waste Land to the way Williams sees the world, as Goodwin writes:

Williams’s assimilation and adaptation of Imagism seems to me to be one of the most successful uses of the technique (…) He applied imagism not just to static images but to moving ones: to the swaying of the trees, the flight of birds, and the fall of water. As a result his imagistic poems lack the stillness that occurs in those of Eliot… (Goodwin, 151).

In addition, Williams used a group of personal letters in Paterson. He intercalates them through the poem. Some of these letters are the ones from the underprivileged mother of one of his patients, Marcia Nardi to which Williams points as the letters that helped him to unify some of the main topics of his epic. Nardi’s letters were very important to the purposes of Williams to fit some of the gaps of his “magnus opus,” as Paul Mariani details in William Carlos Williams A New World Naked:

Nardi’s letter would serve to recapitulate nearly all the major themes with which his autobiographical poem had been concerned: The woman as victim, complaining, accusing, crying out in pain; the divorce between the two sexes and the danger that the woman would turn to other woman for solace; the woman as the energy and the flower of a man’s life; the poem itself as a confession of inadequacy; the socioeconomic ills that had created so many of the tensions between men and women, making of the man a false nurturer and forcing the woman into an unnatural dependency on man (…) that letter turned out to be, as Williams would explain years later, a found object paralleling Eliot’s infamous use of footnotes at the end of The Waste Land (Mariani, 462-463).

What kind of “voice” was Williams looking for? A comparison between an excerpt from Nardi’s letter and a famous one from The Cantos, proves that maybe he was looking for more than a simple voice to explain his points. Williams was looking for a voice to match this famous letter from Pound’s Canto XXVI:

To the supreme pig, the archbishop of Salzburg:
Lasting filth and perdition.
Since your exalted pustulence is too stingy
To give me a decent income
And has already assured me that here I have nothing to hope
And had better seek fortune elsewhere;
And since thereafter you have
Three times impeded my father and self intending departure
I ask you for the fourth time
To behave with more decency, and this time
Permit my departureWolfgang Amadeus, august 1777 (Pound, 128).

Williams found the match, in this excerpt of a long letter from Nardi that he published at the end of Paterson’s Book 2 (1948):
The anger and the indignation which I felt towards you now has served to pierce through the rough ice of that congealment which my creative faculties began to suffer from as a result of that last note from you. I find myself thinking and feeling in terms of poetry again. But over and against this is the fact that I’m even more lacking in anchorage of any kind than when I first got to know you. My loneliness is a million fathoms deeper, and my physical energies even more seriously sapped by it; and my economic situation is naturally worse, with living costs so terrible high now (Williams, 89).

There is in both letters, a feeling of the anxiety from somebody with a creative mind, suffering a state of dependence, trapped in the hands of somebody who has the power to control his destiny. It is very interesting to deduce that in this playful use of Nardi’s letter, Williams is assuming the position of “The supreme pig.”

The different voices struggling in Patterson are the different Personæ that Pound brings into The Cantos. There is the remarkable similarity between the criticism of usury made by Pound in The Cantos and criticism that Williams made of usury. As Goodwin notes, Williams “was not yet ready to follow Pound by attempting to versify it but such an attempt was made in a vehement attack on usury” (Goodwin, 156.) Williams attacks usury in these lines from Book 2 of Paterson:

The Federal Reserve System is a private enterprise…a private monopoly… (with power)…given to it by a spineless Congress (…)
They create money from nothing and lend it to private business (the same money over and over again at a high rate of interest), and also to the Government whenever it needs money in a war and peace… (Williams, 73)

This is a very similar point of view as the one of Pound about usury. But the similarity of ideas is not the most important to confront the borrowing of ideas from The Cantos.

The main point is that, like the idea of a river as the source of life for a city and main center of the economic activity, or as the anger of the creator against his master, many of the topics defined already by Pound in his A Draft of XXX Cantos from 1930, are present in Paterson.

It is true that Williams mastered the technique of imagism. Constraining his poem to the sources provided by documents about Paterson and people of New Jersey, he created a poem that is proudly 100% American in its content. But he was following some rules established by Pound. Old Ezra defined most of the topics that could be considered in a twentieth-century epic. Writing Paterson, Williams is filling the gaps, taking out European or Asian references and filling them with American elements.

In many ways, The Cantos is also a 100% American epic, because its creator is a product of the different brooks that shaped this country. And he is the original source. In many ways The Cantos is the blue Nile that running from above, higher than spires, higher even than the office towers watered the minds of many poets of this country and developed into brilliant poems like Paterson.

Bibliography

Breslin, James E. William Carlos Williams An American Artist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
Goodwin, K.L. The Influence of Ezra Pound. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Mariani, Paul. William Carlos Williams A New World Naked. New York: Mc Graw-Hill, 1981

Pound, Ezra. The Cantos. London: faber and faber, 1986.

Thirlwall, John C. The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1957

Williams, William Carlos. Paterson. New York: New Directions, 1995.

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The Best Critical Essay


Ejem. Estoy muy orgulloso. Quisiera agradecer. No tengo palabras para..
Bueno, una breve ceremonia en el auditorio de la Art Gallery de Lehman College. La profesora Patricia Cockram se encargó de llevar una fotocopia de mis poemas para que yo se los leyera al pequeño auditorio (Yo que creía haberme salvado de eso). Y me entregaron dos diplomas. El de poesía por mis tres breves experimentos en inglés, mi mezcla de Li Po con Ingmar Bergman, García Márquez y Mircea Eliade. El otro, el que he puesto aquí, es el que mejor me hace sentir, porque es el premio al mejor ensayo crítico del programa de maestría del departamento de literatura inglesa: The Best Critical Essay in the Field of English or American Literature, por el ensayo que escribí el semestre pasado sobre las influencias de Ezra Pound y sus Cantos en el poema Paterson de William Carlos Williams. Un honor. Muy agradecido, muy agradecido, muy agradecido.

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Waiting for the Barbarians

And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
Constantine P. Cavafy.Waiting for the Barbarians

The expeditionary force against the barbarians prepares for its campaign,
ravaging the earth, wasting our patrimony.
J.M.Coetzee. Waiting for the Barbarians

J.M. Coetzee’s book is a parable about the use of fear to control the masses. At the same time, Waiting for the Barbarians is the tale of a man who wants to decipher himself through the interpretation of his dreams and of other people.
Colonel Joll is fighting the Barbarians. Their power has been multiplied by the rumours: “The barbarian tribes were arming, the rumour went” (8), “A rumour begin to get the rounds that they are diseased” (13), “The rumour going about brigade headquarters … is that there will be a general offensive against the barbarians in the spring” (50), “Instead the air is full of anxious rumours” (123.)
Joll is the creation of an Empire that needs the fear to survive. Joll is the irrational product of an irrational fear.
It is impossible not to see an uncanny parallel between the current war on terror and Coetzee’s Empire. Like the Magistrate, people who opposed the invasion of Iraq were ridiculed. The power of these barbarians has been multiplied artificially by the Empire, to create a scenario where the population permits torture and unnecessary violence. There is no difference between the Barbarians and the Empire: “Of what use is … to raise the alarm when the criminal and the civil guard are the same people?” (123).
Another big subject of the book is the decadence. There is a permanent reference, to the cycles of nature opposed to the artificial cycles of the Empire: “For the duration of the winter the Empire is safe” (38), “How can I accept that disaster has overtaken my life when the world continues to move so tranquilly through its cycles?” (94), “Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jugged time of raise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe” (133).
The Magistrate fights his own war against aging and decadence. He discovers himself trapped in an invisible and powerful contract where he had changed his freedom for the promise of a peaceful life at the end of his life: “I have not asked for more than a quiet life in quiet times”(8), “All I want now is to live out my life in ease in a familiar world, to die in my own bed and be followed to my grave by old friends” (75).
The Magistrate is also an interpreter. One of his hobbies is to decipher the hieroglyphics on the ancient slips that he finds under the dunes. There are recurrent dreams throughout the whole book, and he tries to interpret them as if they were the clue to understanding his weaknesses, the decadence of his own desire, and his relationship with women. He knows that he is controlled by lust: “Sometimes my sex seemed to me … a stupid animal living parasitically upon me … anchored to my flesh with claws I could not detach”(45). However, the Magistrate tortures himself and not the others; he tries to live in peace with the people that he rules.
The Magistrate is a simple man. It is in his opposition to Colonel Joll, and the blindness of the Empire that he looks like a hero. He risks his life to prove himself that he is not a slave of the Empire: “I must assert my distance from Colonel Joll! … There is nothing to link me with torturers” (44), “My alliance with the guardians of the Empire is over … the bond is broken, I am a free man” (78).
The war transforms the Magistrate into a symbol against irrationality. He is the only one who seems not to be controlled by the fear of the Barbarians: “show me a Barbarian army and I will believe” (8). And he is the only one who understands the consequences of the Empire’s crimes: “ ‘When some men suffer unjustly,’ I said to myself, ‘it is the fate of those who witness their suffering to suffer the shame of it’” (139).

Waiting for the Barbarians J.M. Coetzee. Penguin Books, New York, 1980

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Leyendo Half of a Yellow Sun

La discusión más importante fue sobre el final de la novela. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie crea varios personajes prometedores. Odenigbo, el profesor, anti imperialista, amante de los buenos libros, el buen brandy y la música clásica; Ugwu, el campesino que llega a la casa de Odenigbo, el devorador de libros, el pequeño hombre que aprende las ventajas dedesarrollar el intelecto, Kainene & Olanna, las dos gemelas no idénticas, hijas de padres adinerados, muy educadas: Olanna idealista y bella, capaz de hablar igbo e inglés con perfecto acento; Kainene la práctica (y no tan bella) capaz de lidear con bandidos, bribones políticos y contrabandistas ,heredera de los mismos instintos de negociante de su padre. Richard, es el británico perdido en este pais que no entiende y al que ha llegado para encontrarse a sí mismo. Richard en proceso de escribir un libro, Ugwu en el proceso de aprender a escribirlo.

La historia está bien contada, los personajes se desarrollan, se complican, crecen. Sin embargo, hacia la tercera parte la mayor parte de ellos se desinfla (un cierto sabor amargo en la boca, como si la novela estuviera inconclusa o como si la escritora no se hubiera tomado todo el tiempo necesario para construir el desenlace.

Interesante la perspectiva histórica-la guerra civil en Nigeria y la lucha por crear el estado independiente de Biafra.

Pero sólo Tolstoi puede contar toda una guerra y a la vez escribir una obra maestra (claro, con 800 páginas más).

 

Response paper to Half of a Yellow Sun

Ugwu wonder[s] if he had died and this was what happened at death: an unending journey in a car. (395)

 

“War is very ugly” says Adichie’s father. Adichie’s book is the novel of a group of people and their transformation through the war’s experience.

Like the best novels, the heroes are depicted as human beings, with all their defects. Ugwu will never forget the day when the worst of him emerged. His sister’s rape reminds him of a guilt that he will carry on his shoulders all his life.

I admire the way Adichie used the disappearance of Kainene to give Half of a Yellow Sun a mood that stays with the reader after finishing the last page of the novel.

Kainene represents the people who disappeared in the war, but at the same time creates in the reader a sense of loss that is stronger than the death of a character. Nobody knows, we can even imagine that not even the writer knows, what has happened to Kainene.

Adichie creates a character that redeems herself through the experience of the war. For exemple, Kainene seems to be more human than ever when she helps the people at the refugee camp. Kainene is the one who seems to understand better than anyone else the mechanics of the war.

The transformation of Richard surprised me also. He seemed to be a character lost in an unknown territory–a version of Conrad’s Marlow. Marlow is surrounded by a hostile land and people who will never understand him completely. However, Richard ends like Lord Jim, because he is the one that Ugwu looks to find some comfort after the war. He is the one who understands Ugwu’s heart, and what to do after the news of tragic death of Eberechi.

Madu, the patriotic and heroic symbol of the military resistance, seems at the end to be the one who can’t understand Richard.

Olanna and Odenigbo, who started as the crucial characters of the plot, ended as the more crumbled, the more deteriorated. Their faith let them survive the war, but they look as weak and hollow as the house they found back in Nsukka.

Through all, the book is very important in mentioning books that play an important role in the development of the plot. One of the books is the one that Richards is writing. The other is the one that Ugwu writes, inspired by the Narrrative of Frederick Douglas.

Like Adichie, the books are used as vehicles of transformation and healing. They inspired the authors, and the authors write their owns book looking to inspire others.

Maybe the best revenge for Adichie is the scene when Ugwu discovered the pile of books burned in the patio of the Nsukka house: “Why did they have to burn them?” Ugwu asks (418). Maybe it is the same reason that explains why people have to write books after a war–to keep the memory of what has happened alive.
As Adichie says at the end of her final note: May we always remember (435.)

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Un nuevo invierno, 8 de marzo


Al comenzar enero me quejaba porque estaba haciendo clima de verano. Poco después de salir a conocer la estación de tren en Riverdale, disgustado por lo grueso de los blue jeans, Miguel llamó para decir si no quería trabajar el domingo en el club de golf. El mundo estaba loco ¿Caminando en polo y extrañando un short? ¿Golf en los primeros días de enero?

Pero haciéndole caso a los que presagiaban malos tiempos, el invierno llegó. Ya cayeron varias nevadas y las temperaturas en estos dias siguen alrededor de los 18 F (-15 C ). Ya perdí un par de guantes y un gorro de lana en el metro (lo usual son dos pares por invierno), ya tuve que palear nieve y hielo para sacar mi auto y patinarlo de una a otra vereda. Anoche hacía demasiado frío dentro del departamento y las pístas amanecieron otra vez cubiertas de nieve. Así que podemos decir que el invierno y yo ya estamos parches. Ya estamos marzo. ¿Dónde está la primavera?

Pasando a otra cosa, no mencioné nada de mis lecturas de In Memorian de Tennyson. En la misma clase de Victorian Poetry and Poetics donde estuvimos leyendo a Matthew Arnold. Tennyson se demora diecisiete años para escribir lo que a Arnold le tomó unas cuantas líneas en Dover Beach. La decadencia de la fe, el advenimiento de una era que prometía calamidades y cambios impredecibles. In Memorian es un auto bombo a Tennyson y a su arte poética (¡Autobombo!, geniales los peruanismos). Bellísimo para los cánones de su tiempo, intragable para los de hoy. Hay líneas bellísmas. Es cierto. La reina Victoria llegó a decir que In Memorian era el segundo libro más importante escrito en la historia de la humanidad. Bueno ¡Qué diablos sabía de libros la reina! Y la Biblia es muchísima más interesante. Sólo el capítulo de Noé y sus relaciones con las hijas tiene cosas más interesantes que contar que Tennyson. No hablemos de los nuevos testamentos. Lo que deben haber sufrido los primeros escribanos tergiversando los testamentos para que todo coincida. Para borrar a María Magdalena. Ahora, leo en el New Yorker, James Cameron viene a decir que se encontró la tumba de Jesús. Con sus padres, su hermano, la Mariamne y su hijo Judah.

¿Y si no hubiera resucitado? Pues se cae todo el edificio católico. ¿Se cae? Estuve leyendo un libro que cuestiona la existencia de Dios y pone en duda a todos los que dicen que el mundo estaría peor si no fuera por la religión. No sabía que en algunas parroquias de EEUU se cantaba el Imagine de John Lennon censurando la parte Imagine NO RELIGION.

Lo que hay que escuchar.

Tuve un sueño en el que nadaba en alta mar en una corriente escandalosa, con mi hermano Nicolás. Al querer regresar encontraba un muro de alambre altísimo. Lo trepé y me lancé al otro lado, a seguir nadando. ¿Dónde se quedó Nicolás? Si hay algún psicoanalista por allí que me de la interpretación del sueño. La escena era fabulosa. He tenido un montón de sueños rarísimos por estos días. Algunos muy interesantes. El problema es que sólo recuerdo fragmentos.

Alejandra llama para quejarse que nadie la quiere sacar al cine. Prometo llevarla uno de estos días con Frances. Es muy raro que Alejandra llame siquiera a decir hola. Ayer escuché el podcast de Poetry magazine y había un poema interesante (pero no creo que tan bueno como lo pintaban, sobre el Report to the Academy de Kafka. Tengo que leer a John Ashbery, he escuchado su nombre bastante en las últimas semanas. Tengo que empezar a leer el libro de una nigeriana para la clase de Literatura anglófona en el mundo, tengo que terminar el ensayo sobre Neuromancer, tengo que hacer un comic para una antología del comic peruano, tengo que mandarle un ensayo para Hueso a Don Abelardo. Tengo que mandar una lista de los mejores prosistas peruanos. Tengo que hacer algo con mis libros. ¿Ponerlos en un storage, por mientras?

Toby nos mira en la mañana desde la alfombra, contrito, silencioso y con las orejas congeladas. Como decía al principio, el invierno y yo ya estamos parches. ¿Dónde carajos está la primavera?

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The God of Small Things

 

This is my review for the class English and the Anglophone World.
The book is The God of Small Things by the Indian writer Arundhati Roy.

 

The clue to Arundhati Roy’s story is in this passage taken from the khatakali episode. As a kathakali dance, Roy mixes real life and mythology to create great story:

The Great Stories are the one that you heard and want to hear again. The ones that you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet though you listen as though you don’t…In the Great stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again (Roy, 218)

The novel is a Heart of Darkness where you have to enter with your heart on your hand. The plot of The God of Small Things develops in circles around a single event, a single day. The novel is made of small things, significant things. All of them together build the whole drama.

There is a villain who loves, Baby Kochama who still writes I love you in her diary, many years after the death of Father Mulligan. And there are lovers who are villains: all the other characters. From the ambassador Estha «Elvis» to the Ambassador Rahel, from Velutha to Ammu or the laconic Sophie Mol. Everybody loves and everybody kills in their own way. And even some of the most pathetic stories of love in this book are full of sadness and crime at the same time.

Is it a tragedy? Is it a love story? Both of them. A tragic love story. A Romeo and Juliet with Indian flavor, with a river and magnificent secondary characters. It is difficult not to get surprised by some of the turns of the plot. I was amazed by the narrative of Margareth Kochamma and Chacko’s first encounter. And through the whole episode after the death of Velutha and Sophie Mol, as a good optimist, I was looking for the pony too.

There is play with destiny. The unavoidable destiny where all the characters are conducted by their own choice. As Rahel and Estha noticed, they choose to save Ammu, comdemning Velutha. Velutha choose to condemn himself, loving Ammu.

The drama of Rahel develops through the whole book. They are the more developed characters, the most intriguing. However, the big tragedy is Ammu’s one. The episode at the end, the full description of Ammu and Velutha’s first sexual contact, after the recitation of the whole tragedy, serves to reaffirm the triumph of love over death, if not in real life, at least in the mythical world.

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Mens sana in corpore sano


No había escrito nada en el blog sobre las interminables mañanas de gimnasio en Lehman College, que empezaron cuando mi madre (siempre las madres) llegó a Nueva York en agosto del 2006 y con una sola frase me tiró al suelo: ¡ESTAS GOOOOOOOORDO!

Así que, empecé a comer mejor e ir al gimnasio. Hace mucho tiempo que no me metía en este tipo de rutina diaria. 30 ó 40 minutos de abdominales, carreras en la faja y un poquito de pesas. En Lima lo combinaba con un par de vueltas a La Molina en bicicleta, pero el clima en este momento no lo permite.

Al principio la idea era jugar tenis, pero una pequeña lesión en los músculos de la pierna izquierda, han impedido que me transforme de nuevo en el Agassi que yo era en mi adolescencia (bueno, exagerando. Un poquito. La verdad es que no jugaba tan mal a los 15…)

Regresando a Nueva York después del descanso de año nuevo, y gracias al empujoncito de Frances que es una water rat como yo, empecé a ir diariamente a la piscina temperada de la universidad. Qué placer.

Así que ahora, combinado con el gimnasio, tengo una excelente rutina de 7 a 10 vueltas cada tarde en la piscina olímpica (dependiendo del cansancio). No está nada mal. Uno se siente mejor al terminar de nadar, todo el cuerpo se relaja. Totalmente recomendable.

Claro que hay que seguir trabajando en el peso. Si bien estoy 6 kilos por debajo de lo que pesaba cuando mi madre me atacó con esa frase concluyente. Incluso hasta me bailan los jeans talla 31. Hoy en una revista vimos que el green tea ayuda a bajar el porcentaje de grasa, así que ese va a ser el próximo ingrediente de la dieta diaria, un poquito de té verde todos los dias.

Y ahora que el invierno-gracias al calentamiento global-está bastante moderado,y que la pierna se ha recuperado completamente de la lesión, estamos buscando unas canchitas de tenis en el Bronx para empezar con el raqueteo. Porque no hay deporte más bacán que el tenis, para jugar de a dos.

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Crash

En Canadá abundan los caraduras. No hay suficiente gasolina para apuntalar todas las cosas que habría que reventar de una vez por todas. Líos legales, papeles, fresas desparramadas sobre la consola del automóvil. De pronto todo está estático. Un mal movimiento y las cuatro ruedas se escapan de control.

El espacio galáctico ha sido formado por seres de la misma calaña de Vaughan. No hay que ser un genio para percatarse que los espacios se han acortado, que el tiempo corre cada vez más rápido, que ya no tenemos ni siquiera una hora y media de nuestra vida para dedicarla a escuchar un concierto de música clásica. El espacio galáctico está cubierto con las cicatrices de seres como Vaughan y tal vez sea lo mejor.

Recuerdo las carreras de motos en la playa, una chica rubia con el pezón escapándose ligeramente de la ropa de baño. ¿Sentía lo mismo que yo? ¿Es indispensable el vértigo para evolucionar? ¿Seremos en algún momento máquinas? ¿Y la poesía?

En algún momento nacerá en este país la niña robot poeta. Sus lágrimas se deslizarán por sus mejillas y su voz temblará con la misma calidad con que tiemblan las niñas reales. Y alguien exclamará entre sollozos en el público reunido para apreciar su arte: ¡Te amo!

Escondido entre las cortinas del teatro, su creador sonreirá orgulloso, pero sin olvidar los tres o cuatro detalles que deberá modificar y reparar para su siguiente modelo.

Los e-mails cada vez serán más personales y podremos verter lágrimas en ellos con la misma facilidad con que caían las gotas en las cartas antiguas. Y los errores gramaticales serán menos comunes. Serán nuestras cartas y nuestra escritura y las amaremos porque nosotros seremos tan mecánicos como ellas. Nuestros circuitos tendrán marca de fábrica, como ya la tienen algunos corazones, pulmones, córneas, estómagos.

En ese tiempo, no tan lejano, nuestros pensamientos estarán todavía rondando y alguien los captará entre la telaraña de señales y mensajes del pasado. En ese instante mis dedos correrán, listos para agarrarlo: El futuro.

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