Gonzalo Barr

The UK Royal Mail announced that they will in 2010 print a series of stamps bearing the covers of ten well-known British albums from the last forty years.  The album covers are –

Rolling Stones, Let It Bleed (1969)
Led Zepellin Untitled Fourth Album (1971)
David Bowie, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)
Mike Oldfield, Tubular Bells (1973)
The Clash London Calling (1979)
New Order, Power, Corruption & Lies (1983)
Primal Scream, Screamadelica (1991)
Pink Floyd, The Division Bell (1994)
Blur, Park Life (1994)
Coldplay, A Rush of Blood to the Head (2002)

Pictures of the stamps are here.  All the stamps show the album cover and a vinyl record partly removed from the sleeve.

You could say that this is snail mail trying to look edgy.  More likely it represents the embrace of what was once outre by one of the stodgiest establishments.  Or maybe we’re just getting older.

Sources:  “Discos que valen un sello,” abc.es (Oct. 20, 2009), “Design Classics: Classic Album Covers — 7 January 2009,” norvic-philactelics.co.uk (Jan. 7, 16, 2009), entries on each album in Wikipedia, as linked

Forbes published their list of the ten most expensive cities in the US and Miami came in sixth.  The study used a “basket of goods” to measure the cost of living in each city.  The basket included rent, the cost of groceries and eating out at a variety of restaurants, as well as others.

The complete list of the ten most expensive cities in the US, in order of most to least expensive, is (1) New York, (2) Los Angeles, (3) White Plains, NY, (4) San Francisco, (5) Honolulu, (6) Miami, (7) Chicago, (8) Boston, (9) Houston, and (10) Washington.

Photo:  Gonzalo Barr, Two Old Men on Calle Ocho; Source: “America’s Most Expensive Cities,” forbes.com (Oct. 7, 2009)

And perhaps the cure for “writer’s block” –

Even if you have nothing to write, write and say so.

Image: bust of Marcus Tullius Cicero by Bertel Thorvaldsen (1799-1800), after the Roman original, Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen, Wikipedia; Source: brainyquote.com

The truism, “write what you know,” probably got its start with the French realists and, if names be named, my guess is that it started with Gustave Flaubert’s almost maniacal approach to creating a scene.  One of the copies that I own of Madame Bovary brings with it a facsimile of the manuscript and notes Flaubert himself scratched, including the duration of each leg of the infamous Hirondelle passage.

Rules are made to be broken (albeit at your own risk), so it is no wonder that such a fundamental rule as “write what you know” is also a prime target in the know-it-all atmosphere of some creative writing workshops.  (The rule is scorned as simplistic by students and workshop leaders alike, until the day you write about something you do not know and fail miserably. Then the same workshop leader who earlier laughed off such a simpleton rule will look you straight in the eye and recommend that you stick to writing what you know. The world is full of people like that and they are not all in politics.)

James Collins, author of Beginner’s Greek, set part of his novel in southwest France.  After the novel was first published in 2008, Collins described the public’s reception –

[…] I received particular compliments on these passages, which made me enormously proud. Why? Because I had never in my life been near [that part of France], and my descriptions of it were entirely made up. To a writer, it may be gratifying to capture reality with uncanny accuracy, but it is even more gratifying to successfully fake it.

Later, Collins accepted an invitation to rent a house in the region that he had described in his novel.  That’s when he discovered how much he had gotten wrong in his made-up passages.  He had missed the wildflowers, the foie gras, and the warm summer evenings.  Collins concluded –

Reality is usually so disappointing!  But in this case, the opposite was true.

Some places are like that.

Perhaps the moral of this post is first, write what you know, but if you don’t, if you make it up and you are successful at faking it, don’t tempt fate any further by then verifying how close your invented passages came to the real thing.

Image: Detail of Flaubert’s drawing showing the route that Emma Bovary and her lover took by coach, in Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Conard ed.1930), at 499; Source: James Collins, “Better Than Fiction,” Departures (Oct. 2009), at 84

the hardest part is picking yourself up to do another draft.

Photo: Nick Hornby, by Joe Mabel, Wikipedia; Source: John Jurgensen, “‘An Education’ in Filmmaking
Novelist Nick Hornby writes for the big screen,” Wall Street Journal (accessed Oct. 3, 2009)

Metí todo en el visor (con el arbol, el pretil, el sol de las once) y tomé la foto. […]

Lo podría contar con mucho detalle pero no vale la pena. La mujer habló de que nadie tenía derecho a tomar una foto sin permiso, y exigió que le entregara el rollo de película. […] Por mi parte se me importaba muy poco darle o no el rollo de película, pero cualquiera que me conozca sabe que las cosas hay que pedírmelas por las buenas.

***

I framed it all in the viewfinder (the tree, the hand rail, the eleven o’clock sun) and snapped the photo. […]

I could relate this with a lot of detail, but it isn’t worth it. The woman said that no one had the right to take a picture without permission and she demanded that I give her the roll of film. […] As to me, I couldn’t have cared less whether or not to give her the roll of film, but anyone who knows me knows that you must ask nicely.

Entonces tengo que escribir. Uno de todos nosotros tiene que escibir, si es que esto va a ser contado. Mejor que sea yo que estoy muerto, que estoy menos comprometido que el resto; yo que no veo más que las nubes y puedo pensar sin distraerme, escribir sin distraerme (ahí pasa otra [nube], con un borde gris) y acordarme sin distaerme, yo que estoy muerto…

[…] Ahora pasa una gran nube blanca, como todos estos días, todo este tiempo incontable. Lo que queda por decir es siempre una nube, dos nubes, o largas horas de cielo perfectamente limpio, rectángulo purísimo clavado con alfileres en la pared de mi cuarto. […Y] a veces en cambio todo se pone gris, todo una enorme nube, y de pronto restallan las salpicaduras de la lluvia, largo rato se ve llover sobre la imagen, como un llanto al revés, y poco a poco el cuadro se clara, quizá sale el sol, y otra vez entran las nubes, de a dos, de a tres. Y las palomas, a veces, y uno que otro gorrión.

***

So I have to write. One of all of us has to write if this is going to be told. Better that it be me. I am dead and less compromised than the rest. I, who doesn’t see anything except the clouds and can think without distraction, write without distraction (there goes another [cloud], with a gray border) and remember without distraction. I, who am dead…

[…] A great white cloud passes now, as it has all these days, all this uncountable time. What is left to tell is always a cloud, two clouds, or long hours of a perfectly clean sky, a pristine rectangle held by pushpins on the wall of my room. […And] sometimes, in turn, everything becomes gray, everything is an enormous cloud. And suddenly the splashing raindrops snap and for a long time, you can see it rain over the image, like a tear in reverse, and little by little the picture becomes clearer, maybe the sun comes out, and again the clouds enter, in twos, in threes. And the pigeons sometimes, and one or more sparrows.

Sources: Excerpts from Julio Cortázar, “Las babas del diablo,” Las armas secretas (Ed. Sudamericana 1976, trans. from the Spanish by Gonzalo Barr), rearranged to tell a slightly different tale from the short story that inspired Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, Blow-Up (1966); Video clip by dorlec01, “‘6699′ BlowUp Remake (Longer Version)” (2008), juxtaposing in split screen the first park sequence from Antonioni’s Blow-Up with the same views of Maryon Park today; Still photo by Gonzalo Barr

Yes, and in that month when Proserpine comes back, and Ceres’ dead heart rekindles, when all the woods are a tender smoky blur, and birds no bigger than a budding leaf dart through the singing trees, and when odorous tar comes spongy in the streets, and boys roll balls of it upon their tongues, and they are lumpy with tops and agated marbles; and there is blasting thunder in the night, and the soaking millionfooted rain, and one looks out at morning on a stormy sky, a broken wrack of cloud; and when the mountain boy brings water to his kinsmen laying fence, and as the wind snakes through the grasses hears far in the valley below the long wail of the whistle, and the faint clangor of a bell; and the blue great cup of the hills seems closer, nearer, for he had heard an inarticulate promise: he has been pierced by Spring, that sharp knife.

Photo:  Gonzalo Barr; Source: Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel (Modern Library 1929), at 95

In the US, Labor Day marks the end of summer and a time to return to work.  This is a formality for everyone except the full-time student.  The employed adult has a different story to tell, especially in a country where “workaholism” is a kind of virtue.  But there is still something about summer as a period of legitimate idleness that lingers into adulthood.

Writers don’t vacation.  They may travel or take a day off, but if they are in the middle of writing anything — and they usually are — the work continues in the unconscious.  Which explains why you can put something aside and come back to it later with fresh eyes.  You see problems that you did not see before.  The work has not changed.  You have.  And the reason you have changed is because you have continued to work on it, even if you did not do so consciously.

That is what happened to Ernest Hemingway with his first novel –

“I started ‘The Sun Also Rises’ on the 21st of July, my birthday, in Valencia,” he wrote.  Work on the first draft was continued through the last ten days of July and the month of August in Valencia, Madrid, St. Sebastian, and Hendaye, and a complete run-through was finished in Paris on September 21, 1925.

“There is only one thing to do with a novel,” he once told Fitzgerald, “and that is to go straight on through to the end of the damned thing.”  […]  The first draft of The Sun Also Rises was set down in approximately forty-eight writing days, but Hemingway nearly killed himself in the process.  “I knew nothing about writing a novel when I started it,” he realized in 1948, “and so wrote too fast and each day to the point of complete exhaustion.  So the first draft was very bad…I had to rewrite it completely.  But in the rewriting I learned much.”

Following a rest period…[to give] the first draft a chance to settle and objectify itself, he went down to Schruns in the Voralberg in mid-December.  Here he spent the period before Christmas in skiing and revising his book.  A trip to New York in mid-February provided a brief interlude in the concentrated labors of rewriting.  These filled January, part of February, and the month of March.  By April first the book was ready for the typist.  Heavy cuts in the original opening and elsewhere had now reduced a much longer novel to about 90,000 words.  The completed typescript was mailed to Maxwell Perkins on April 24, 1926. The total operation had covered nine months of extremely hard work.
– Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (1972), at 75-76 (emphasis mine)

The word, “objectify,” is not in quotation marks, but it might as well be.  It sounds like a word Hemingway would have used.  And it refers to what happens when you set aside your manuscript and give the unconscious a chance to work.

One day, I am certain neuroscientists will strip away the veneer of mystery surrounding the creation of art.  Until then, it is enough to know that we must make time and room for the unconscious and accommodate it as part of creating fiction.  Writers too need their vacations, even if they are still working.

Photo: Gonzalo Barr; Source: Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (1972), at 75-76

Forty-eight years ago today, Ernest Hemingway woke early, loaded a shotgun, and killed himself in the kitchen of his house in Ketchum, Idaho.  He was sixty-one years old, though he was a very old sixty one. (The picture above shows Hemingway in Cuba, still in his fifties.)

For years, Hemingway had been suffering from depression (which he called “black ass”) and receiving electroshock (ECT) treatments at the Mayo clinic for it.  We don’t know yet if there is a suicide gene or even a depression gene, but we do know that people with relatives who suffer from depression have an increased likelihood of suffering from the disease themselves. The same is true for suicide. Hemingway’s father, sister, and brother committed suicide. His granddaughter did as well.  (Only this week, three scientific teams reported their findings that schizophrenia and manic-depression are linked genetically. The abstract, dated July 1, 2009, is here.)

The argument that he killed himself because he knew he was finished as a writer is wrong on two counts. First, even if Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) was his worst novel (and a terrible novel it was too), shortly after that he wrote, The Old Man and the Sea, a novella that would vindicate his reputation. More significantly, when he died, he was working on A Moveable Feast and The Garden of Eden, both of which were edited and published posthumously and both of which are among his best works. He was also working on Islands in the Stream, which though not a masterpiece, was a good, solid novel, especially when you consider the fact that it was left in its early stages. Hemingway had intended it to be a sweeping epic-length book of which we have a small part.

Debunking Hemingway became the favorite pastime shortly after he died. Wrestling with the person, a creation of the media that he was more than willing to exploit himself, proved too easy for those proselytizing the “Sixties.”  Now that the dust has settled and all the crap about his “gender” can be trashed as so much Freudian gobbledygook, we are free to look at his work and judge it on its own.

One hundred years ago today, Juan Carlos Onetti was born in Montevideo to a Uruguayan father who worked as a clerk in customs and a Brazilian mother, a Gaúcha (in Portuguese), from Rio Grande do Sul.  Unlike so many other writers, whose relationships with their families can be described as difficult at best, Onetti once referred to his parents as “encantadores” (charming) and his childhood as a happy one.  And though most commentators would place him next to other writers comprising the Latin American “Boom,” Onetti was a lone wolf.  (In the interviewed he gave to Spanish television, below, he said that he had been “dragged” into the Boom.)  He never flirted with any form of activism or indulged in “magic realism” (something that thankfully has been abandoned by most contemporary writers in Latin America) or nativism, naturalism, or any of the other -isms that can obfuscate the nature and quality of a writer’s work.  Some commentators have referred to him as one of the few existentialists in Latin American writing, but the fact is that he was his own writer.

Onetti dropped out of high school after the first year to work at odd jobs — doorman, stadium cashier, adding machine salesman.  In 1930, he married and moved from Montevideo to Buenos Aires.  In 1933, he published for the first time, Avenida de Mayo-Diagonal-Avenida de Mayo, a short story, in the Argentine newspaper, La Prensa.  A year later, he returned to Montevideo, divorced his first wife and married her sister.  The Spanish Civil War forced a large number of Spaniards to emigrate to America.  They settled everywhere on the continent, but the largest numbers settled in Cuba, Venezuela, and Argentina.  (In the same television interview, below, Onetti credited this influx of Spaniards with the explosive growth of publishers at the time.  According to him, he and a lot of other writers would not have published but for this growth.  It would be an interesting thesis to explore — the role of Spanish immigrants in America, the development of modern publishing houses, and the origin of the “Boom.”  Stated differently, would the “Boom” have happened without the Spanish Civil War?)

In 1939, Onetti was named editor of the magazine, Marcha, where he lived in a back room.  And he published his first novella, El pozo (The Pit), a work that is still considered one of his best.  Only 500 copies were published and it was not published again until 1965.  In the story, he introduced a kind of protagonist who would dominate his works, the modern male as a recumbent and lazy do-nothing [my translation to English follows the original Spanish] –

Me paseaba con medio cuerpo desnudo, aburrido de estar tirado, desde mediodía, soplando el maldito calor que junta el techo y que ahora, siempre, en las tardes, derrama adentro de la pieza. Caminaba con las manos atrás, oyendo golpear las zapatillas en las baldosas, oliéndome alternativamente cada una de las axilas. Movía la cabeza de un lado a otro, aspirando, y esto me hacía crecer, yo lo sentía, una mueca de asco en la cara. La barbilla, sin afeitar, me rozaba los hombros.

* * *

I paced, half-naked, bored of lying down, since noon, breathing this damned heat that sticks to the ceiling and that now, always, in the afternoon, pours into the room. I walked with my hands behind me, listening to my slippers slap the tiles, smelling each axilla. I turned my head from one side to the other, inhaling, and this made worse, I could feel it, a look of disgust on my face.  My chin, unshaven, rubbed my shoulders.

It isn’t difficult to see why some commentators tried to label his work “concrete realism.” The quoted paragraph was hardly the stuff for polite society, especially in the 1930s.   I’ve always found the application of the term “realismo concreto” to Onetti’s work more telling of the person using it or of the period in which it was used than of the work itself.  After all, no one ever tossed anything like that at Joyce’s Ulysses. And it’s hard to think of a bodily function that isn’t narrated by Joyce, sometimes (to use an Americanism) “graphically” so.  Perhaps what was deemed obscene in Joyce’s time was considered “realistic” a few years later.

El pozo is the story of a man, a laborer, who is plagued by the memory of a rape he committed years before.  That his victim later died only adds to the guilt the man feels.  He imagines the girl’s ghost stalking him.  The story also introduces Onetti’s view of life as claustrophobic rented rooms filled with heat and stagnant air and hopelessness.

In 1941, he left Marcha and worked for Reuters.  He also published his first full-length novel, Tierra de nadie (No Man’s Land) and returned to Buenos Aires.  A couple of years later, he published another novel, Para esta noche (For This Night).  In 1945, he married for the third time.  Four years after that, he published in the Buenos Aires newspaper, La nación, the short story, La casa en la arena.  There, he introduced the city of Santa María, which would become the scene of many more novels and stories, a fictional city, like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha county.  And he introduced the recurring character of Dr. Díaz Grey (sounds like “gray days”).

In 1950, Onetti published, La vida breve (A Brief Life).  He considered it his best work. (Many think it is his masterpiece.) It was also his breakthrough novel, the work through which he became known outside a narrow circle of intellectuals in the Southern Cone.

Five years later, he moved back to Montevideo and married his fourth and last wife.  He also edited the daily, Acción.  In 1961, the first translation of his work, the short story, Bienvenido, Bob, appeared in French.  Six years later, he won second place in the Rómulo Gallego literary prize given in Caracas.  The first place winner that year, which was also the first year the prize was given, was Mario Vargas Llosa for La casa verde, who nonetheless graciously lauded Onetti’s work.  (Only this year, Vargas Llosa published a book about Onetti’s work.  From the description of the book, “The subject of fiction and life is a constant that, since distant times, has been expressed through literature. Yet in the work of no other modern author does it have the force and inventiveness as it does in the short stories of Juan Carlos Onetti. It is not an exaggeration to say that Onetti s work is almost entirely conceived to show the subtle and rich way in which human beings have built a parallel existence made up of words and images as unreal as they are persuasive to take refuge in when we want to escape the tragedies and limitations that real life imposes upon our freedom and dreams. In this essay, Vargas Llosa examines how Onetti used fiction to create an alternate reality a reality in which the answer to our daily defeats is fleeing to a fantasy world.”)

In 1975, Onetti moved to Madrid.  Meanwhile, his work was translated to Italian, as well as gathered and published in several collections.

Here is a 1977 interview of Juan Carlos Onetti (about 44 minutes, in Spanish) –

He received several literary prizes of distinction, but in 1980 he received the biggest prize of all, the Premio Cervantes, the most prestigious prize in Spanish-language literature.  He published his last novel, Cuando ya no importe (Past Caring) in 1993, as a kind of literary testament.  A year later, he died in Madrid.

One can speculate why so few of Onetti’s works have been translated into English.  It would be easiest to chalk it up to the mythical three percent, that belief by many that only three percent of books published in any year are translations.  Like so many figures, the “three percent” is likely a myth, a number created out of thin air with no factual support.  Still, no one can refute the fact that translations comprise a very small number of fiction books in the US.  And of those books, an increasing number are devoted to the more commercial works of a Pérez Reverte or a Ruíz Zafón, whose mysteries sell by the millions in countless other translations.

Another reason why Onetti may not be well known in the US is the fact that he preferred the short story and the novella over the novel.  Anyone who has ever tried to publish fiction here will know the truism that short story collections are next to impossible to sell, this in a country that gives so much lip service to the genre.

One can speculate why Onetti remains unknown in the US and why so few of his works have been translated to English.  He was never a “boy wonder” or the “it” writer of the moment.  He did not burst into the literary scene, as we have come to expect in an age of media hype.  It took Onetti’s work decades before it was widely recognized in the hispanophone world for what it is, a singular and unique body of fiction that merits being placed among the very best.  Perhaps it may take decades before the same occurs to his works in English.  Meanwhile, too many people in the US are still drunk with “magic realism.”  Like partygoers suffering from a bad hangover, they linger unsteadily in Macondo, long after everyone else has left it behind.

My colleague and friend, Palimp, wrote a moving personal note on his discovery of Onetti’s work.  Another colleague and friend, Bartleby, also wrote two posts on the works of Onetti.

Photo: Juan Carlos Onetti;  Sources: The official website of Juan Carlos Onetti. See also Antonio Astorga, “Cuando Onetti sí importa,” ABC (accessed July 1, 2009), Mario Vargas Llosa, “El viaje a la ficción,” Letras Libres (Feb. 2008)(accessed July 1, 2009)(an essay that was perhaps the germ of the book cited above), Javier Rodríguez Marcos, “Cien años de un genio perezoso,” El país (June 21, 2009)(accessed July 1, 2009).  Video:  Radio Televisión Española and Joaquín Soler, “A fondo,” (1977), Google videos.