A List
A List
Some Things
Because it’s been a while since I posted, I’m going to offer up a list of recommendations.
A song. “Shadows” by Au Revoir Simone off their excellent recent release, Still Night, Still Life.
A blogpost. This one. No, actually, “Leyendo Londres,” by Alberto Fuguet. A city travelogue for a Chilean periodical, a travelogue about London. Near the beginning of it he writes, “Dónde ir, qué hacer, cómo conocer Londres en 44 horas y treinta minutos. Me tomó un té y decido optar por lo sano. No conoceré Londres. Lo que haré será leer.” “Where to go, what to do, how to see London in 44 hours and thirty minutes. I had a tea and opted for the healthy. I’m not going to see London. I’m going to read.”
Michel Butor, in an essay on reading the city as text, noted that arrival into any city was to be always preceded by text: historical texts, literary works, guidebooks. Then he goes on to note that wandering around a city is to also always be accompanied by text. Fuguet’s essay works literally with this idea of the city as text: he decides to spend 44 and a half hours wandering around the bookshops of London.
From his blog, Apuntes autistas.
An album. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, by The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. If this had been made in the 80’s, a song (probably “Young Adult Friction,” or “This Love is Fucking Right”) might have ended up on a soundtrack to one of those John Hughes films that always seemed to be attuned to indie/alternative sounds (the March Violets on Some Kind of Wonderful, sure it was a boringish March Violets song, “Turn to the Sky” —why not “Snake Dance” for instance—, but it was the March Violets; that same soundtrack also had Flesh for Lulu and Jesus and Mary Chain; New Order, OMD, Psychedelic Furs, and the Smiths on Pretty in Pink).
A lunch. The torta de carne asada from this hole in the wall Mexican tiendita/taquería near my house in Iowa City. I think it’s called El Paso. The torta is stuffed with carne asada, lettuce, tomatoes, crema, jalapeños, and pickles. The bread is toasted. The torta is put together and then cut in half. It is delicious. On the way out I bought some Maseca to make some tortillas de maíz.
Two websites you probably already know. Look At This Fucking Hipster, and FMyLife. Pictures of people you don’t want to know and stories of people you already might.
A book. Los vivos y los muertos, by Edmundo Paz Soldán. Paz Soldán, already one of my generation’s (Gen X, McOndo, whatev) major literary voices in Latin America offers up in his ninth novel a story not set at all in his fictional community of Río Fugitivo, nor is it set at all in his native Bolivia. Rather, it is set entirely in his second home, the fictional community of Madison, New York. Through the perspective of numerous first person narrators, the novel unfolds rapidly from an idyllic portrait of a community to one that faces its first loss —the death in a traffic accident of a high school football star—into an almost Lynchian —almost a tone of Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet—, image of a town traumatized by a series of violent, and seemingly meaningless, deaths. The novel successfully captures those ties that bind small rural towns: the sense of community and the often camouflaged horrific links that sometimes lie beneath. This novel needs to be translated into English.
Thursday, May 21, 2009