Read Online No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) by Darren Koolman Luis Chitarroni - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Darren Koolman Luis Chitarroni
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those hated novels 62: A Model Kit or Revol’s Mutaciones bruscas (Sudden Changes).
Both of which I read so fondly when I was at the cusp of adolescence. But it does resemble them, sad to say. We can’t escape our early influences—there’s my attempt at rationalization. And more: there’s no denying the pressure exerted upon us at that most crucial moment—at the threshold between childhood and adolescence—by our reading. Just plain reading. The burden of those early devotions—like stamp collecting. And, even worse, the fact that your writing forever advertises every last baffling and muddy trace left behind by that confessional devotion: a sort of damper placed on your entire life, a humiliating expulsion of those errors you accumulated in the name of experience. To quote Lope de Vega’s fundamental, eternal, infrangible enjambment: “That I have loved at other times / I cannot deny.”
1971. Girri / El Carapálida: Diary of a Book. In the letter , ambiguous forest
We return to James
Lydia—perhaps because she had a genuine faith in his judgment, or because she was being indifferently compliant, or because something had alerted her to the exigencies of the day—had left before the end of his oration. It was startling, a miracle of indecisiveness. Even his questions were somewhat vacuous, empty, so that they sounded like irresolute twangs redoubling in an echo chamber. But it mattered not in those instances how obvious those empty spaces were, how provisional, how inane the suspense they induced in the hearer, for they reflected his own unwholesome diet, his discipline of misgiving, his false modesty.
In the study with Max, his first thought was that he need not wait for George’s traps to fulfill their function, that Max could catch the rat on his own … And he recalled an anecdote of Doctor Johnson’s—or only half-recalled, rather, according to his customary mode of recollecting—: It was strange, uncanny really, especially for it being a piece of prose, and more so because he managed to remember all the subtleties of accent and rhythm, the variable cadences of the piece, and yet none of its sense. No, it wasn’t entirely strange: it was a confirmation of what he had believed his entire life, without realizing it, and certainly without regard for metrics or prosody; something that was difficult to explain without exhaustive preamble, for the belief required much correction and refinement over the years, during which time it grew like the spider’s web that eventually ensnared him, disrupted his life. Life, with its senseless task. To grumble every day and night scratching one’s head in an effort to apprehend what makes as much sense, superficially, as a black dog barking in the street. Because the substance of an event was never fully captured in the considered act of describing or defining as much as by a fleeting grammatical discharge, which reveals as much as can be revealed respecting an event’s fugacity or fixity, above all that mobile quality, that acoustic quality, imitated again and again, although the meaning was lost, or was relegated to the limbo of one’s memory.
Miracle of verbal effusiveness and emotive inhibition that so irritated Mailer (and, I suppose, Gorey too), “The Pupil” begins as follows: “The poor young man hesitated and procrastinated …”
Let’s see if we can finish it today:
In the afternoon he dictated all he could to Miss Weld, everything he only half-recalled, with inadequate words, words like fading echoes and fragments of that immense inexpressible reality—intimations, as the ruffle of a curtain after closing on a scene—and worse even, of the ever diminishing recollection of what was said and of what transpired. Nevertheless, when Miss Weld had finally retired for the day, her hand stiff as usual, the late afternoon etched a sunset so false, so painterly, only a mawkish poet or adolescent (and perhaps the two are kindred)
Both of which I read so fondly when I was at the cusp of adolescence. But it does resemble them, sad to say. We can’t escape our early influences—there’s my attempt at rationalization. And more: there’s no denying the pressure exerted upon us at that most crucial moment—at the threshold between childhood and adolescence—by our reading. Just plain reading. The burden of those early devotions—like stamp collecting. And, even worse, the fact that your writing forever advertises every last baffling and muddy trace left behind by that confessional devotion: a sort of damper placed on your entire life, a humiliating expulsion of those errors you accumulated in the name of experience. To quote Lope de Vega’s fundamental, eternal, infrangible enjambment: “That I have loved at other times / I cannot deny.”
1971. Girri / El Carapálida: Diary of a Book. In the letter , ambiguous forest
We return to James
Lydia—perhaps because she had a genuine faith in his judgment, or because she was being indifferently compliant, or because something had alerted her to the exigencies of the day—had left before the end of his oration. It was startling, a miracle of indecisiveness. Even his questions were somewhat vacuous, empty, so that they sounded like irresolute twangs redoubling in an echo chamber. But it mattered not in those instances how obvious those empty spaces were, how provisional, how inane the suspense they induced in the hearer, for they reflected his own unwholesome diet, his discipline of misgiving, his false modesty.
In the study with Max, his first thought was that he need not wait for George’s traps to fulfill their function, that Max could catch the rat on his own … And he recalled an anecdote of Doctor Johnson’s—or only half-recalled, rather, according to his customary mode of recollecting—: It was strange, uncanny really, especially for it being a piece of prose, and more so because he managed to remember all the subtleties of accent and rhythm, the variable cadences of the piece, and yet none of its sense. No, it wasn’t entirely strange: it was a confirmation of what he had believed his entire life, without realizing it, and certainly without regard for metrics or prosody; something that was difficult to explain without exhaustive preamble, for the belief required much correction and refinement over the years, during which time it grew like the spider’s web that eventually ensnared him, disrupted his life. Life, with its senseless task. To grumble every day and night scratching one’s head in an effort to apprehend what makes as much sense, superficially, as a black dog barking in the street. Because the substance of an event was never fully captured in the considered act of describing or defining as much as by a fleeting grammatical discharge, which reveals as much as can be revealed respecting an event’s fugacity or fixity, above all that mobile quality, that acoustic quality, imitated again and again, although the meaning was lost, or was relegated to the limbo of one’s memory.
Miracle of verbal effusiveness and emotive inhibition that so irritated Mailer (and, I suppose, Gorey too), “The Pupil” begins as follows: “The poor young man hesitated and procrastinated …”
Let’s see if we can finish it today:
In the afternoon he dictated all he could to Miss Weld, everything he only half-recalled, with inadequate words, words like fading echoes and fragments of that immense inexpressible reality—intimations, as the ruffle of a curtain after closing on a scene—and worse even, of the ever diminishing recollection of what was said and of what transpired. Nevertheless, when Miss Weld had finally retired for the day, her hand stiff as usual, the late afternoon etched a sunset so false, so painterly, only a mawkish poet or adolescent (and perhaps the two are kindred)
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