"Let there be Light!!!!"

(editor's note: the use of four exclamation marks in the text above, for the biblical scholars amongst my 5-8 readers, was purely in keeping with the mystifying and yet somehow endearing trait practiced by all latin americans - female, male, young, old, professional, student  alike - of book-ending all written communications with an obscene, dare i say - pornographic - miss-use of exclamation marks.  to the average cold-blooded and painfully inexpressive anglo-saxon this trait surely finds itself onto most anyone's top-ten list of most perplexing cultural phenomenon.  were the humble exclamation mark a species of faun or flora, it most certainly would have gasped it's last extinctive breath on central or south american soil.)

lovely mural next to Montevideo's seawall with, oddly enough, a decaying stingray (center bottom) beneath it.

"I advise you to put away all thoughts of work.  That is imperative.  Haven't you been at work all your life long?  Can't you spare a pitiful little twelvemonth to health and idleness and pleasure?"

Henry James

 A Most Extraordinary Case

- - - - gone to Montevideo for the weekend - - - -

biblioteca nacional

the brilliant El Consultorio del Psicoanalista, by Leandro Erlich at Fundación PROA.

having come to the conclusion (helped in no small part by my thorough enjoyment of Salinger's short stories) that i had been a bit hard, or at least misguided historically in my general dislike of short stories, i've taken up the task of reading the works of other great authors known for their mastery of the short story or novella.  this has lead me at present, and for essentially the first time i might sheepishly add, to the writing of Kafka.  what i have found is quite enjoyable and very accessible writing; all the more-so given that he was virtually unpublished in his lifetime.  in its entirety below, one of his short stories:

"When I meet a pretty girl and ask her: 'Please, come with me!' and she passes me in silence, then what she means is this:

'You're not a duke with a name to conjure with, no powerfully built American Indian with square-shouldered physique, with calm impassive gaze, with skin laved by the air of the prairies and the rivers that irrigate them, you have never been to the great lakes, or sailed on them, wherever they are to be found.  So tell me, why should a pretty girl like me go with you?'

'You forget that no automobile is carrying you swaying through the streets in powerful thrusts; I don't seem to see a retinue of gentlemen pressed into livery attending you, murmuring blessings as they follow you in a pedantic semi-circle; your breasts are stowed away tidily enough in your corset, but your hips and thighs make up for their parsimony; you are wearing a taffeta dress with plissé pleats of the sort that delighted us last autumn, and - garbed in this menace as you are - still you don't scruple to throw us a smile from time to time.'

'Yes, we are both quite right, and, lest we become irrefutably persuaded of the fact, why don't we now each go to our separate homes.'"

The Rejection

Franz Kafka

if new york's historic and dare i say (from the bottom of my unrepentantly biased heart) perfect architectural specimen, the Puck Building, were a woman then i wholeheartedly fell in love with her graceful contours from first glance and she never failed, over the course of 18-odd (as well as 18 odd - to rob from salinger) months to present me with a different face each and every time i looked out my fifth floor window at her.  every season, every single weather condition, every single nocturnal light polluted ray which was cast down upon her classically beautiful figure presented itself in the form of a unique and fleeting image; never the same twice.  if presented with the choice of a view out to sea, waves lapping at the pristine shore or this most urban of landscapes i'd have to request a few days to mull over the agonizing decision.  as an insignificant (and sadly unsurprising) footnote, i'm fairly certain Ms. Puck failed to share such feelings towards myself.)

i really cannot over-emphasize enough how much this humble man's pickled heart longed to produce a poem of great beauty and resonance to accompany the shot above - a poem worthy of the hallowed place which all pickled goods (aside from those most hated of pickle impostors: the lowly bread and butter gherkin) rightly occupy in the culinary world.  it took all of two seconds to come to the sensible conclusion that the task be better left to someone of much finer literary grandiloquence (credit due to Merriam Webter's online thesaurus).  that being said, has anybody ever seen a label of such exquisitely honest simplicity on a jar of pickled asparagus - or rather, esparrago?  sodium content be damned.

today's entry into the generally frightening and yet oddly alluring window display contest.

let me reiterate that it has been one of my greatest ongoing pleasures during these days of underemployment, to read (and none too seldom re-read) the works of the great and the good.  surely an indulgence, a luxury akin to a minor recreational drug habit, or at the least an inclination towards full-fat dairy products.  one of the more pleasurable of these weaknesses as of late has been the genius work of J.D. Salinger.  my friend Dariusz had made mention recently of his enjoyment of Franny & Zooey and thus got me thinking that a re-read was necessary, as neither of those novellas made much of an impression on me upon first glance, five or six years ago in bull-market, post break-up, tiny-studio-era London.  2009 finds me absolutely loving these and others of his short stories, most of which are written through the voice of one of the seven absurdly intelligent Glass children.  to quote at length from one such story:

"It seems to me indisputably true that a good many people, the wide world over, of varying ages, cultures, natural endowments, respond with a special impetus, a zing, even, in some cases, to artists and poets who as well as having a reputation for producing great or fine art have something garishly Wrong with them as persons: a spectacular flaw in character or citizenship, a construably romantic affliction or addiction - extreme self-centeredness, marital infidelity, stone-deafness, stone-blindness, a terrible thirst, a mortally bad cough, a soft spot for prostitutes, a partiality for grand-scale adultery or incest, a certified or uncertified weakness for opium or sodomy, and so on, God have mercy on the lonely bastards.  If suicide isn't at the top of the list of compelling infirmities for creative men, the suicide poet or artist, one can't help noticing, has always been given a very considerable amount of avid attention, not seldom on sentimental grounds almost exclusively, as if he were (to put it much more horribly than I really want to) the floppy-eared runt of the litter.  It's a thought, anyway, finally said, that I've lost sleep over many times, and possibly will again."

Seymour - An Introduction

J.D. Salinger

nothing says optimism like a casual stroll around recoleta's cemetary

"The trouble with me is, I don't trust any out-of-towners in New York.  I don't care how the hell long they've been here.  I'm always afraid they're going to get run over, or beaten up, while they're busy discovering some little Armenian restaurant on Second Avenue.  Or some damn thing."

Zooey

J.D. Salinger

i love these enameled brick pictures on the facade of one of palermo's many mechanic shops - such places not historically being known for their artistic pursuits.

"The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness."

David Foster Wallace

(Kenyon commencement address 05/05)

admittedly a slightly extremist interpretation of "old" palermo vs. "new" palermo - and i say the following whilst painfully recognizing the part myself and all expats unwittingly play in the gentrification of a neighborhood - but you will always find me on the side of the beautifully dilapidated building with character and history over the glass towers which spring up like weeds in every single city the world over the moment they experience a modicum of economic growth.  if one's desire is to live in an architecturally homogenous tower devoid of any character whatsoever, then one needn't ever leave the warm bosom of [insert any north american, western european, or antipodean metropolis here].

paid no heed by porteños; even less so than parisians.

(si c'est même possible)

as i'm sure anyone who takes a passing glance at the "Americas" section of the NYT, BBC, Globe&Mail, etc. will have noticed, Argentina's first democratically elected president (post-military junta), Raul Alfonsin, died April 1st.  my lack of knowledge in 20th century political science in general and 1980's argentine politics in particular preclude me from making any editorial comment whatsoever.  even my in-depth survey of (count 'em) 4 authentic argentines provided little in the way of conclusive statistical evidence concerning the overall popularity of Señor Alfonsin (2 respondents thought him to be a good leader "mas o menos", one thought him a bad man and one respondent felt it irresponsible to answer given that she was not yet alive when he was in power).  i'm not taking this in any particular direction other than to comment that the 20th century (particularly its latter half) was quite obviously littered with the rotting political corpses of leaders who took it upon themselves to lead their bruised and battered countries out of the darkness implicit in any dictatorship.  i'm quite certain even the most well-intentioned of leaders would fail in the face of 700% inflation. at any rate, i'm in no positon intellectually to be hammering on at length on such topics (or any topic come to think of it) but truth be told, i was searching for a feeble segue into the topic of military dictatorships and their horrific architecture thus enabling me to post the above photo.  nothing says military dictatorship like a concrete monstrosity.

as someone who has made a concerted effort in recent years to live in the proverbial moment - and it's ALL a series of moments, people - i can readily admit to the difficulty of maintaining a sense of intimacy and continuity in one's friendships in the face of lives lived on separate continents (or at the very least in separate cities).  frantically intense long-weekends in the world's metropolises and the odd ten day holiday spent trying to carefully balance tan maximization, culture and hedonism (*technically not possible within the aforementioned time frame)  - although ridiculously fun are also sad emotional reminders of how seldom we get to hang out with the "boys/girls" compared to days gone by.  a life lived in the moment, by definition, must not wander into wistful, sentimentality lest we should fail to enjoy one (or several) of life's great moments.  i write this clearly from the temporary perspective of wistful sentimentalist, trying in vain to pretend that the recent week whereby i was joined by two of my best friends - mike & tyler - will be sufficient to tide me over until the next long-weekend/ten-dayer.  mercifully the wistful sentimentality is being partially tempered by the secure knowledge that no three adult males over the age of thirty could possibly have been more productive (read hedonistic) with their insufficiently allotted boy's time.  the partial list above containing some of buenos aires' best (and worst) bears witness to that fact.  until next time.