I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: ABAJI-Tiny Desk Concert #47 (February 15, 2010).

This is the only time I have heard of Abaji. He is an unimposing man with roots in Greece, Turkey, Armenia and France.  He sings gently (often in Arabic with some English) and he plays while he sings.

The impressive thing about Abaji is his skill and love of musical instruments.  The notes say “when recording his latest album, Origine Orients, he played 10 different instruments, many of them simultaneously, with no second takes or overdubs. It took him just two days.”

“Min Jouwwa” (which means “From Inside”) is played on  what looks like a normal guitar but which sounds so very different. The notes say it’s “a tricked-out Western-style guitar with extra strings, giving it the sound of an Egyptian oud.”

“Steppes”  is a brief haunting instrumental.  It’s played by bowing a soft-toned kamancheh (a three-stringed instrument that you hold upright on your lap for a scratch, middle eastern sound).  He often times rocks the instrument instead of the bow back and forth.

The final song is played on the Greek bouzouki (with whistling as accompaniment).  “Summertime” is the Gershwin song (which is only recognizable from the words–the first verse anyhow, which he sings in English–the second verse he sings in Arabic).  It sounds nothing like the original with the serpentine riffs and that unique bouzouki sound.

I only wish the cameras were still rolling after the set because “he demonstrated a large duduk (an Armenian cousin of the oboe), an Indonesian suling (flute) and a Colombian saxophone (of sorts) made from bamboo that looked more like a snake.”

This is what I love about the Tiny Desk–seeing very different instruments and unconventional performers up close.  Abaji is fun to watch.

[READ: May 7, 2015] The Secret of Evil

This has got to be the final posthumous collection of writings from Bolaño.  The Preliminary note from Ignacio Echevarria explains that this book is a collection of the final fragments that were found on Bolaño’s computer.  As such, the book consists primarily of works that are unfinished (some barely even started).

This isn’t as disappointing as it sounds because Bolaño seemed to write very thoroughly right form the beginning with his stories.  So even though they are incomplete, the section that is written feels fully fleshed out–and you can imagine that more will be coming. Echevarria says that “Bolaño rarely began to write a story without giving it a title and immediately establishing a definitive tone and atmosphere.”  This of course made it difficult for Echevarria to know what to compile here.

Not everything in this collection if unfinished.  And indeed, with Bolaño sometimes it’s unclear if the unfinished things were actually unfinished.

The first file contained the pieces “The Troublemaker,” “The Tour,” “The Room Next Door,” “Vagaries of the Literature of Doom,” “The Colonel’s Son,” “Scholars of Sodom,” “The Secret of Evil” and “Sevilla Kills Me.”

The rest: “I Can’t Read,” “Labyrinth”, “Daniela,” “Death of Ulises,” “Suntan” “Colonia Lindavista,” “Beach,” “The Old Man of the Mountain,” The Days of Chaos” and “Crimes” come from second file.  And “Muscles” was in a file of its own.

“Vagaries” and “Sevilla” are the texts of speech which Bolaño wrote and “Beach” was published in El Mundo.  These along with “Beach” were previously collected in Between Parentheses (translated by Natasha Wimmer and are presented exactly as they were in that edition).  The rest were translated by Chris Andrews

“Colonia Lindavista”
This is story about moving to Mexico in 1968.  His family lived in an apartment above Dona Eulailia.  She had additions put onto the apartment so that her four children could live with her as long as they wanted.  The only ones he saw were her son Pepe and his wife Lupita.  They desperately wanted children but it was suggested that they could never relax enough while they were under the Dona’s roof.  The narrator was old enough to spy on them (he stayed up late writing).  He heard them having sex very late at night (he was only old enough to know about sex from movies and porn). Occasionally one of their friends would come over and stay late and they would play music and have a good old time.  I’d love to know where he was going with this excerpt.

“The Secret of Evil”
“Stories like this don’t have an ending.” So begins the story that gave this collection its name.  This is indeed a very brief look at an incident involving a journalist receiving a call in the middle of the night and being told to meet someone immediately.

“The Old Man of the Mountain”
The retelling of the lives of Belano and Lima and their chance meetings.

“The Colonel’s Son”
This piece felt more like an exercise than a story. But it was fantastic.  In it, Bolaño recounts a zombie movie that he watched last night.  He says the movie was terrible and yet he tells it to us in great detail.  It’s weird and funny that he does this, and I enjoyed his telling of the movie, which he calls The Colonel’s Son because he never saw the title.

“Scholars of Sodom”
This is an essay about V.S. Naipaul, a writer whom Bolaño admires.  He wanted to write a story about Naipaul (but ultimately couldn’t) called “Scholars of Sodom.”  Naipaul had visited Buenos Aires and written an essay about the country and his visit with the Peron family.  However, “without giving the reader any sort of warning,” Naipaul starts talking about sodomy.  Sodomy as an Argentinian custom.  Not just among homosexuals–“in fact, now that I come to think of it, I can’t remember Naipaul mentioning homosexuality at all.  He is talking about heterosexual relationships.” What a weird conceit and I feel like it would be interesting to read the original just to see if the transition is really out of nowhere.  [Turns out the essay is “Argentina: The Brothels Behind the Graveyard” in The New York Review of Books, September 19,1974.

“The Room Next Door”
Living in a boarding house, Bolaño overheard men talking about killing someone.  Was it all real?

“Labyrinth”
This was printed in The New Yorker.  It also feels like an exercise.  Like he looked at a photo (of eight writers/thinkers sitting around a table.  They are: J. Henric, J.-J. Goux, Ph. Sollers, J. Kristeva, M-Th Réveillé, P. Guyotat, C. Devade, and M. Devade.) and decided to write a lengthy story about what led them all together.  It’s really fascinating–you can read a longer appraisal here.

“Vagaries of the Literature of Doom”
This is the essay about Argentine writers.  He really goes through so many writers in this essay–praising some, mocking others and suggesting that they should all be bowing to Borges.  Some current writers he mentions are Osvaldo Soriano “You have to have a brain fill of fecal matter to see him as someone around whom a literary movement can be built.  I don’t mean he’s bad.  As I said he’s good, he’s fun, he’s essentially an author of crime novels or something vaguely like crime novels” (69).

Then there’s Roberto Arlt–a contemporary of Borges–and Arlt disciples Ricardo Piglia “one of the best Latin American novelists writing today.  “The problem is, I find it hard to stand the nonsense–thuggish nonsense, doomy nonsense–that Piglia knits around Arlt” (72).  Whatever that means.

The final big gun is Osvaldo Lamborghini, and his disciple César Aira.  He says that Lamborghini is a [metaphorical] “little box on a shelf in the basement.  A little cardboard box, covered in dust.  And if you open the box, what you in inside is hell…  Sometimes I pick up one of his two books…and I can hardly read it, not because I think it’s bad but because it scares me…I read two or three pages at a time, not a page more, only when I feel especially brave.”  Sadly, none of the books has been translated into English.

Although he has praised Aira on other occasions, his praise is somewhat muted here: Aira “maintains a gray, uniform prose that, sometimes, when he’s faithful to Lamborghini, crystallizes into memorable worlds, but that in it’s neo-avant-garde…drift, is mostly just boring.”

“Crimes”
Another story about a journalist.  In this one the journalist is a woman.  It begins by telling us that she is sleeping with two men.  But she cannot stop thinking bout a woman who was murdered because she too was sleeping with two different men.  The journalist feels a creepy kinship with the victim.  And why is there a guy who is selling socks door to door in her office so late at night?

“I Can’t Read”
This is a story about Bolaño’s son and how he became friends with a boy who was much younger than him when they were little.  The takeaway moment is when his son is at a pool sand asks if he can go to the bathroom so he drops suit and pees into the pool from the edge,  But there’s also a cool part where the boy has learned how to sneak up on automatic doors and have them not open–patience is what it takes.

“Beach”
This is one of those stories in which the narrator (“I”) is on heroin, leading many to believe that Bolaño was too. This is set at the beach and is about an addict spending most of his day there focusing on an old skeletal man and his large wife.

“Muscles”
This story has a similar (but not identical) opening to A Lumpen Novella.  The premise is the same.  Two children orphaned by their parents’ death in a car crash, the son works in a gym.  There’s even the two visitors from the gym. But the main story is rather different.  It ends far too early to make any real comparison though.  Nevertheless, it’s an intriguing premise and I thin I like the set up better than Lumpen.

“The Tour”
Another fanatics exercise.  It is about a band.  The band had a lead singer and they released two successful album to which he contributed most of the music and lyrics.  Then he left the band and they continued without him.  And they even went on to greater success.  Releasing double albums and being successful for decades afterward.  Everyone assumed the original singer was dead, but then he was discovered. I have to assume this is based on Pink Floyd.  And I love that he decided to fictionalize a story like this.

“Daniela”
This is a very short excerpt about a woman who is a citizen of the universe (not just the world).  No mater what her family did they could never get above their station in life.

“Suntan”
This is the story of a woman who takes in a foster child (named Olga).  When the summer was over and Olga went back the woman was very upset.  She happens to be an actress.  There’s a lengthy section about being an actress and ways to get publicity.  She swears she didn’t take Olga for the publicity.

“Death of Ulises”
This is an interesting look at Belano going to visit the old apartment of his friend Ulises Lima.  He knows Lima isn’t there anymore, but he needs to see it.  And what will his neighbors think?

“The Troublemaker”
This is about an artist and his protests against the Iraq war.  It ends long before it can go anywhere.

“Sevilla Kills Me”
This is about the new Latin American novel. In this essay he praises Daniel Sada, César Aira, Juan Villoro, Alan Pauls, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Ibsen Martinez, Carmen Boullosa and many others.

“The Days of Chaos”
A very brief excerpt (just five paragraphs) set in th year 2005 (Bolaño died in 2003).  In it, Bolaño’s fifteen year old son Geronimo has disappeared in Berlin.

It’s hard to say anything much about these pieces since they are clearly unfinished.  I love that Bolaño’s excerpt are so well constructed that you can really get a feel for what was going to come next.

For ease of searching I include:  Cesar Aira, Roberto Bolano.