Hemingway Translated

It may turn out Hemingway was often secretly writing in Spanish. He got so he hated English. Language, really, but English especially. He was with young Beckett there. Beckett said he liked Finnegans Wake because it didn’t use words as “mere polite symbols.” He said “form is content and content is form,” the writing “not about something; it is that something itself.” Beckett swears in Finnegans Wake the language gets drunk. The words go to sleep. Usually, words know exactly what they’re doing. They don’t touch a drop, or wear themselves out too much. They don’t ever come too near this mess at all. They breeze along meaning the same old things according to the same damn polite codes we’ve stuck them in by talking about the world in the same old ways over and over. Especially the English ones. “The English talked with inflected phrases. One phrase to mean everything,” thinks Jake Barnes in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926). Beckett thought it was “worth while remarking that no language is so sophisticated as English. It is abstracted to death.” Hemingway’s bone with language gets personal. (more…)

Tess is working on some “thrilled illuminations on great pages, in the styles of their authors” Here is commentary on:
Borges’s “The South” (“El Sur”) as the Thousand and Second Night

[‘Gauchesca’ in broad strokes: The dominant literary genre of early twentieth-century Argentina, self-consciously derived from the region’s traditional rural ballads (payadas) and built around the life of the gaucho – that solitary, horse-straddling, knife-wielding, poncho-wrapped and lasso-whirling character of the South American pampas. The paradigm would be José Hernández’s Martín Fierro (1872 & 1879), hailed again in 1913 by leading nationalist poet Leopoldo Lugones as the country’s foundational epic and most binding literary inheritance – an opinion from which, in times of Peronist censorship, dissension could get one “promoted” from state-employed librarian to official inspector of chickens and rabbits, as Borges was in 1946]. (more…)

Friend Joanna has moved back from San Diego, and life just got 30 times more entertaining. A notable Joanna gem (from a while ago): “I went to the fish market, and the fishmonger was a black man and I had to ask him, ‘Do you have sole?’ “

so, guys, i’ve started working at Walker Farm (in Dummerston VT for those who are not familiar with the smokin’ Southern VT organic vegetable scene). i pick the veg, i sell the veg. while i pick, if i break it, i even get to eat the veg. you know that song by the Dire Straits, “money for nothing and the chicks for free”? it’s like that. i really like doing this kind of work right now.

 anyone want to come up to VT and hang out with me? my mom’s out of town in a couple weekends! party at mom’s house!!!!

“St. Augustine was greatly influenced by Cicero’s vivid image of Etruscan pirates’ torture of prisoners by strapping a corpse to them face to face.”

(Image: paper cutout by Kako Ueda. Quote: Paul Bloom)