Gonzalo Barr

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

Remember this scene?

Unfortunately, Jack Torrance died before he could find a publisher for his experimental “novel” or whatever it was.  For years, the manuscript lay forgotten, until now.

Phil Bueler has written a book in which the phrase, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” appears over and over again, formatting each page differently.  The Guardian quotes Bueler –

“The idea has probably been marinating for years, because I loved the movie and the Stephen King book. […] I’d just finished my own obsessive art project [and] it was an idea I had over the Christmas holidays.”

He said he decided to stick to type and formatting that could have been created on a typewriter, with the first ten pages duplicating shots of Torrance’s work from the film. “I thought ‘if he continues to get crazier, what would those pages look like?’” he said. “I hit writer’s block about 60 pages in, and I had to get to 80 [pages] - that went on for about a week.”

Let me see if I get this straight:  Bueler is typing the same phrase over and over again.  There are no characters or plot or ending to grapple with, just how he is going to organize that phrase on the page so that the repetition of it forms a design.  And he hit “writer’s block” at page sixty?

Bueler attributed authorship of the book to “Jack Torrance.”  His own name appears at the bottom of the cover page as the “editor.”  You can “see inside” the self-published book here.

Thanks to Christian Garp via Facebook

Sources:  Allison Flood, “Stephen King fan publishes Shining’s Jack Torrance’s novel,” The Guardian (Jan. 7, 2009)

The Spanish newspaper El mundo reports that Franco-Vietnamese film director, Tran Anh Hung, plans to make a feature film based on Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood.

Murakami has approved the project, which will be undertaken by Asmik Ace Entertainment and Fuji Television. Filming will start in two months and a release date is foreseen for 2010.

Image: UK Verso edition of Norwegian Wood, Wikipedia; Source: El mundo (Spain)

The works of Roberto Bolaño, coming as they have in a tumble after his death, have attracted almost hagiographic attention.  Where did he live?  How did he become a writer?  What did he read?

El Mundo in Spain reports on the premiere in Barcelona of a 40-minute documentary by Eric Hasnoot titled, Bolaño cercano (Bolaño Up Close). The documentary is made up mostly of interviews with his family and friends who share with the camera their remembrances of the deceased Chilean author with some footage of the author himself. Oh, and in case you wondered, Bolaño refused to read anything by Isabel Allende or Paulo Coelho.

Here is the trailer (in Spanish) –

Source: El Mundo (July 24, 2008)

The film was released April 6, 1968, according to the Wikipedia article, which makes it forty years old. Both the director, Stanley Kubrick, and the author, Arthur C. Clarke, are dead. And looking back from this vantage point, it isn’t clear whether the film remains as important a work of art as it was once thought to be.

Certainly Kubrick made better films than this one. A Clockwork Orange was a far better adaptation of a novel. As for Clarke, Childhood’s End, one of his earliest novels dealing with the theme of alien-assisted human evolution, was superior to the novel that resulted from his collaboration with Kubrick on this film.

I remember the first time I saw the movie. I was a child and loved all science fiction movies and TV programs and books. Not long after seeing it, on a flight back to Miami after visiting my father, I sat next to a sailor. He was on his way to his base in Key West and had not seen the movie. For the entire flight, from take-off to landing, I related every scene, every word of dialogue, and every special effect in the kind of painful detail that only children are capable of rendering. The sailor listened to every word I said.

2001 introduced audiences to a different way of looking at science fiction movies. First, there was the music. Instead of going with a purely electronic (and futuristic) sound, like that of Louis and Bebe Barron in the 1956 film, Forbidden Planet, Kubrick relied on classical and contemporary serious music, an eclectic choice that included compositions by Strauss, Shostakovich, Ligeti. Gone too were the smooth-skinned silver space ships. The ships in 2001 looked used, the area around the engine nozzles and exhausts darkened, as one would expect them to be if they were real. The film changed model-making and special effects forever.  But the film as art?  Can we really put 2001 on the same shelf as 8 1/2 or The Seventh Seal?

The film, as prediction, too was wrong on many counts. The Soviet Union went broke, so did Pan Am. We still don’t know how to put humans in suspended animation and there’s no soft-spoken HAL 9000 computer. There’s also no space station like the one in the movie. Remember the spacious, well-lighted corridors? There was even a Hilton inside. You can visit the ISS, sure, if you are willing to pay more than twenty million dollars to go up in a Russian spacecraft, breathe air that smells like a locker room, and pee into a plastic bag. There’s no human colony on the moon. And no aliens have hailed us from outer space. Not yet.

One last thing the movie did not and could not have predicted was the change that occurred over the last forty years in the way we view the future. That change has nothing to do with technology and nothing to do with “progress,” as that word was used in the twentieth century. It has to do with a shift in our world view, in our expectations, the Weltanschauung, if you like. In 1968, the year 2001 represented promise. In 2008, it means something else entirely.

Sources: Wikipedia articles on the movie, on Forbidden Planet, and on the Barrons.

Michel Houellebecq is not widely known in the US, not like Sartre or Camus were in their day, but it is probably still accurate to state that he is among the best known contempoary French authors.  His novels are available in English translation, which says a lot.

His first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte (translated into English as Whatever), was a best-seller in France.  The protagonist is a thirty-year-old computer engineer who hasn’t had sex since he broke up with his girlfriend two years before and who is bored with his life.  The company where he works sends him and a colleague, Bernard, to the provinces to consult with a client, but not much work gets done.  Bernard is ugly and sexually voracious.  He remains undeterred even after women reject his every advance.  While still on the job, the protagonist (who is never named) suffers a heart ailment and is hospitalized.  Toward the end, the protagonist tries to get Bernard to murder a woman with a steak knife in a scene that Publisher’s Weekly described as “gratuitous.”

Yet the novel has integrity.  It is a thematic one and it can be summarized in one word – despair — even if in Houellebecq’s hands that well-worn literary cloth comes laced with strands of other more minor themes in the work, such as sexual exploitation and misogynism.

His second novel, Les particules élémentaires (translated into English as The Elementary Particles), was published four years after the first and translated into more than 25 languages.  Two half brothers, Bruno and Michel, are abandoned by their hedonist mother and grow up separately, ignorant of their relationship to each other. Bruno grows up ugly and sexually voracious. He is rejected by women. And most of his early adult years are spent exposing himself. After his marriage fails, he travels to a sex resort and meets Christiane. Michel meets and dates the incredibly beautiful Annabelle in college, but being devoid of feelings, he cannot kiss her and so he loses her. He becomes a molecular biologist and develops a method for cloning human beings. Michel and Annabelle meet again later in life. Nothing happens, though.

Lanzarote (Lanzarote in English) is a novella about vacationing Europeans. In the French edition it is barely 60 pages long. The thin paperback comes with four other pieces, essays, in the last one of which, “Ciel, terre, soleil,” Houllebecq writes about writing –

Faut-il en conclure que l’écriture m’est devenue nécessaire? L’expression de cette pensée m’est pénible: je trouve cela kitsch, convenu, vulgaire; mais la réalité l’est encore bien davantage. Il doit pourtant y avoir eu des moments, me dis-je, où la vie me suffisait; la vie, pleine et entière. La vie, normalement, devrait suffire aux vivants. Je ne sais pas ce qui s’est passé, sans doute une déception quelconque, j’ai oublié; mais je ne trouve pas normal qu’on ait besoin d’écrire. Ni même qu’on besoin de lire. Et pourtant.

Plateforme (Platform in English) was his next novel. There the protagonist, Michel, goes on vacation to a sexual retreat in Southeast Asia, which is attacked by Muslim terrorists. It was while being interviewed for this book that Houellebecq gave his now infamous opinion of Islam, leading a group of Muslims to sue him for inciting racial hatred, which is an offense under French law. Houllebecq eventually prevailed in court. I don’t recall if it was as a result of the lawsuit or shortly before it was filed that Houellebecq left France and moved to Ireland. Today, he lives in Spain.

His most recent novel, La possibilité d’une île (The Possibility of an Island in English), the theme of sexless reproduction through cloning returns in its most developed form. The novel tells the stories of several characters, all different cloned versions of the original one. Daniel is a contemporary comic and a very successful one. He is a social comic. Approaching the age of 50, he has a mid-life crisis and wonders whether he had achileved anything of note. He also begins a relationship with a much younger woman. That is when he joins a cultish group called the Eloihimites. The group promises immortality through cloning and the transplanting of memories from one body to the next. In the distant future, which is told through the character Daniel 25, the neohumans no longer reproduce and need little food. They also live underground. Their society is linked by email, which is how they spend their time.

In his solid literary blog, Peruvian writer Iván Thays, while I was writing this post, also wrote on Houellebecq, who recently toured Argentina and Chile. He linked to this interview in the Argentine newspaper, La nación [translation to English mine] –

¿Por qué escribió en su blog “cuando era escritor”? ¿Ha decidido dejar de escribir?

Es que escritor no es una profesión. No veo por qué, cuando uno no escribe, tiene que presentarse como escritor.

¿En verdad usted es totalmente insensible a la juventud, a la belleza y a la energía?

Sí.

¿Y por qué razón?

No sé.

¿Es cierto que, para usted, la muerte justifica la vida?

Eso es un disparate. ¿De dónde sacó eso?

De una entrevista que dio hace un tiempo a una revista. Allí decía, además: “Saber morir bien debería ser un objetivo fundamental”.

Condeno con energía esa afirmación. Yo no puedo haber dicho eso.

Antes de ir más lejos, ¿es verdad que usted es partidario de mentir cada vez que le resulta posible, sobre todo en las entrevistas?

Yo creo que no hay que dudar en decir cualquier cosa cuando la pregunta es desagradable.

Pero, en el caso de su biografía, usted también suele cambiar detalles con frecuencia.

Puede ser.

***

Why did you write in your blog, “when I was a writer?” Have you decided to stop writing?

It’s that writing is not a profession. I don’t see why, when one is not writing, you have to hold yourself out to be a writer.

Are you really completely indifferent to youth, beauty, and vivaciousness?

Yes.

What’s the reason?

I don’t know.

Is it true that, for you, death justifies life?

That’s nonsense. Where did you get that?

From an interview that you gave a while back in a magazine. In the interview, you also said, “Knowing how to die should be a fundamental objective.”

I energetically comdemn that statement. I couldn’t have said that.

Before we go any further, is it true that you believe in lying whenever possible, especially in interviews?

I believe that one should not hesitate in saying anything when the question is unpleasant.

But, when it comes to your biography, you also tend to change details quite frequently?

Maybe.

About Houellebecq, we know this — he was born Michel Thomas in February 1959 on the French island of Réunion, to the east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. His mother was an anesthesiologist and his father a mountain guide. When he was six years old, they abandoned him to the care of his grandmother, whose last name, Houellebecq adopted. He attended agronomy school in France and made his living as a computer technician before he was published. In 1998, he married Marie-Pierre Gauthier.

John Updike, in The New Yorker wrote about Houellebecq’s most recent novel –

But how honest, really, is a world picture that excludes the pleasures of parenting, the comforts of communal belonging, the exercise of daily curiosity, and the widely met moral responsibility to make the best of each stage of life, including the last? The island possible to this airless, oppressive imagination has too few resources. The final edition of Daniel has sunk to the condition of a mollusk: “I bathed for a long time under the sun and the starlight, and I felt nothing other than a slightly obscure and nutritive sensation.” The sensations that Houellebecq gives us are not nutritive.

Whatever one may think of Houellebecq, he is periodically very quotable, being able to encapsulate a world view in a pithy phrase with telegraphic brevity –

Cette mort subite me frappait par son injustice; on ne pouvait pourtant pas dire que j’avais abusé de la vie.

This sudden death struck me for its injustice. One cannot say that I have abused life. — From Extension du domain de la lutte

Le temps est un mystère banal…

The times are a banal mystery — from Les particules élémentaires

It est curieux de penser à tous ces êtres humains qui vivent une vie entière sans avoir à faire le moindre commentaire, la moindre objection, la moindre remarque.

It is curious to think about all those human beings who live their entire lives without making the slightest commentary, the slightest objection, the slightest remark. — from Plateforme: au milieu du monde

Dans le monde moderne on pouvait être échangiste, bi, trans, zoophile, SM, mais il était interdit d’être vieux.

In this modern world, one can be a cross-dresser, bi, trans, zoophile, SM, but it is prohibited to be old. — La possibilité d’une île.

Sources: Luisa Corradini, “El amargo profeta del apocalipsis” La nación (Dec. 1, 2007), “Biography,” Michel Houellebecq Website, article in English on Michel Houellebecq, Wikipedia, John Updike, “90% Hateful,” The New Yorker (May 22, 2006)