I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: CHELSEA LIGHT MOVING-“Burroughs” (2013).

Chelsea Light Moving is Thurston Moore’s new band [no comments about the state of Sonic Youth/Kim Gordon will be included in this post].  I don’t know anything about the other members of the band; I’ve not heard of any of them.  “Burroughs” is one of four new songs streaming on the Matador Records site.

The song is spot on for the noisy/sloppy style of Sonic Youth.  Fans of Sonic Youth will certainly detect some differences–the counterpoint of Lee Ranaldo is definitely absent, indeed, the entire low end sounds very different from what SY would create given this song.  But man, if you’re jonesing for some chaotic noise, this song has it in spades.

Moore is capable of creating some traditionally beautiful songs (see his Trees album), but here it’s all about discord.  The song is over six minutes long and the last 3 or so are devoted to some noisy guitars in both chords and solos.

While SY has not shied away from long songs, this song doesn’t feel like an epic–it’s not multi part or “extended” exactly.  It’s a fairly straightforward rock song with an extended solo section.  It’s really great.  I’m looking forward to the whole album (and I love the cover, too),

[READ: March 23, 2012] The Literary Conference

This has been my favorite Aira book so far.  And that’s probably because it is wonderfully over the top, mixing fantasy, sci-fi, genetics and literature.  All in 90 pages.

The story is about César Aira, translator.  He has been invited to a literary conference in Venezuela.  While there, he solves the age-old problem of The Macuto Line.  The Macuto Line is, essentially a rope which is attached to a pirate treasure.  For generations, people have tried all kinds of  things to impact this line–but it has proven to be unsolvable and indestructible.   Aira happened to be staying near the Line in a hotel.  He claims that he is no genius, but it just happens that the elements of his life have given him the exact information he needs to solve the puzzle.  And with a simple touch of the rope, the treasure is his.

But that’s just part 1 and has nothing to do with the rest of the story, really.  For despite his newfound wealth, he will still be attending the literary conference.  Primarily because he knows that Carlos Fuentes will be there (Fuentes is a real person, a Mexican author who died in 2012).  For, you see, Aira is planning to clone Fuentes in his bid to take over the world.  (In addition to being a translator, Aira is a mad scientist).

While he is at the conference, he watches a play of his performed (he’s a playwright too) at an airport.  He meets a woman who reminds him of a woman that he had loved twenty years ago.  And he watches in horror as his cloning experiment goes horribly wrong.  The details behind the error of the cloning are wonderful–the “wasp” that he cloned from other species (and which is the size of a poppy seed) was able to extract a cell from Fuentes, but because it can’t tell animate from inanimate objects, it selects the wrong item.

The thing about Aira. and this may be apocryphal, is that he claims to not edit his work at all.  He begins writing on one day, picks up where he left off on the next day, and just keeps going–never looking back.  At times it feels like that is true.  His stories don’t always have a lot of continuity to them.  And in that way they are kind of like Tintin or Curious George–one thing happens after another after another and then they stop.  So we never find out anything more about the treasure, there’s no future plans for any more cloning, it just sort of stops.  In some ways that’s frustrating, and if these were epic novels that would be maddening.  But his books are short and, like Jackie Chan films, the plot is almost beside the point.  You read to see what kind of ideas he’ll come up with–both internal and external.  You also look to see what kind of inventiveness he’s going to include (and to see what new skills he (Aira as the main protagonist of all his stories) will be granted.

He’s definitely not for everyone, but he is a lot of fun.  And at 90 pages, what’s there to lose?  This was translated by Katherine Silver.  Silver pulls out some really impressive words.  Since I don’t know exactly how translation works in terms of word choices, I assume that Aira uses a lot of very big words as well.  It’s awesome to read a translation with an excellent vocabulary  it really adds a tone to the narrator’s voice.  If Silver can translate another book this well, she will rapidly become one of my favorite translators.

For ease of searching, I include: Cesar Aira