Blogging Bolaño 2666 5/24/08

Finished up section 1 ‘The Part About the Critics’ today and made it through section 2 ‘The Part About Amalfitano’. Amalfitano is a philosophy professor who is introduced in section 1 when the professor’s travel to Sonora in search of the elusive German author Benno von Archimboldi. Amalfitano is a Chilean of Italian descent who ends up teaching in México after leaving a position in Spain after his wife leaves him to go visit a poet living in an asylum. This mirrors an incident in section 1 where the European professors go to a Swiss asylum to visit a famous painter who has mutilated himself. Professor Amalfitano is in the midst of a nervous breakdown and almost oblivious to the troubling series of unsolved murders of young women that plague the border town of Santa Teresa and our upsetting many residents. He is hearing voices, has some strange run-ins with the son of the philosophy department dean and the section ends with him dreaming about chatting with Boris Yeltsin. Strangely enough, this all makes sense.

I plan to start the third section, 'The Part About Fate' p. 230, tomorrow. I'm a little behind schedule because I was up a little late last night and got consumed by a monster, drool-soaked nap when I got home from work today.

Blogging Bolaño – 2666 6/23/08

The reading was going in a different direction. I was at a bar sipping a beer and working through Cortazar's Rayuela, consulting my Spanish dictionary frequently but actually making progress. After a couple hours, someone approached me from behind and slipped their arms around me. I reacted rather calmly, though I had no idea who it was. Turns out it was one of the bartenders who I have a passing familiarity with: one of those guys who ignores you when he's sober and gropes you when he's loaded. It was around 6:30 and he was loaded. His hair was dyed pink. After some nonsense talk, he convinced one of his co-workers to shave his head at a table behind the pool table. Another duded, who was also very smashed, decided to get in on the action. I tried to read a little more and made it through another chapter before things got too loud and I left.

Later, I went to Carson's to pick up some furniture my brother had left there before heading off to Maine. We formulated the idea that Saturday evening after Carson had gotten off work at Powell’s. He had a surprise; an advance copy of the final Roberto Bolaño novel: 2666. My idea was to read it in a week, or as much as could be accomplished, and put in a brief daily blog entry recording my progress. The book is just under 900 pages so I figured I would need to get through around 130 pages a day. I’m on 127 now, though I haven’t really had the kind of uninterrupted periods one really needs to burn through a text—seeing as how my full-time academic clerkship covets my hours. I’m thirty pages from being through the first of the five sections of the book, entitled ‘The Part About The Critics’. I cheated a little, it must be admitted, by reading a handful of pages before today – less than twenty – just to fortify myself for the endeavor. I won’t get into summary or critical platitudes. After the main characters--a Spaniard, Frenchman, Italian and English woman--are brought together by their common literary interests and modern European academic dispositions, around pg. 121 or so, after three of them embark on a trip to México in search of an elusive literary figure – a quest not unfamiliar to those who’ve have read Bolaño’s previous knockout novel The Savage Detectives – comes one of those break-free prose passages that justify investing in fiction by putting into perspective some of the many ways that investment can go sour.

Can Having Colored Dreams be a Habit?

SU 6 – 08

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Can Having Colored Dreams be a Habit?

I’ve taken to reading Montesqiueu on the toilet, his Persian Letters, of late. This is a new habit. My ages old habits include biting my nails, reading, scribbling dubiously, lying effusively, and soccer. I was watching some of the latter (soccer sucker that I am) this afternoon: the Colombian national side against the powerhouse, smooth-oiled, Bleu French machine. The Colombians were taking such a drubbing that I had seemingly no choice but to lay into a long nap.
I had green dreams; another new habit. Can having colored dreams be a habit? This I don’t know. I figured it was because of that expanse of white-lined green turf, and those streaks of bleu and yellow uniforms blending into a hectic habit of sport in that French stadium that caused the green dream. I’d had a citrus acid red dream the previous weekend involving a pink Greyhound, Latin American history, and a large pitcher of red ale; and even the least literary understand it when I tell of having had a night of bleak black dreams.
When I woke from my green nap I scrambled to work on a pair of stories—not this story—but those two others that I’ll soon be getting graded on. I’ve got a two-day deadline. They grate on me, deadlines, and that is perhaps their greatest quality. Without the flesh they rend from my back I am but a naked, one-pound block of sharp cheddar cheese; but when those deadlines threaten, I transfigure my habitual smoke and my habitual mirrors into something satisfactory.

Like a Quesadilla, or The Saddest Factory

I’m squeezing something satisfactory out of a long nap and a lousy soccer match and an Ouza with coffee at the corner pub where I’ve gone to find some salty peace. The other stories, those suffering from deadline syndrome, are coming along. Neither is too ambitious, that much can be said for them at the least. One of the stories is about a sad story and the other also, but unintelligibly. I wouldn’t be surprised to wake up tomorrow to take in the anguished flight of a brother colored dream; the color of the backyard mass of grass mulch that a recent great friend of mine was jumping up and down on in the gravender light of a cold, cloudy early June Oregon evening. I would not be surprised that he’d have been telling me about a recent lucid dream of his in which his ailing grandmother and Heaven and heaving sighs all played starring roles. I would hope that a dream like this would convince me unequivocally of the habitual potential of colored dreams.