Don't Participate in the Death of the Subjunctive

The English language has but three moods, and one of them—the subjunctive—is dying. Unlike their abused and misunderstood sister, the indicative and the imperative live lives of luxury, basking in the certainty that they will never be without work, as humans will always need either to be doing something or to be ordering someone else to do it for them.

But not so for the lowly subjunctive, that Cinderella of moods: trampled, despised, ignored, and yet imbued with such fragile beauty that even the most unregenerate misogrammatist would pause if he knew how near his carelessness was bringing her to the brink of oblivion.

So to cross the US Mexico land border now, supposedly all US citizens need a passport. But it seems like if you are a citizen at least you can still make it without one. This post at Across the Border talks about it. It's also my experience. Just FYI.

Hay cuatro partes del video en Youtube. Vale la pena ver toda la entrevista. Es un encanto el Dani. Y me encantan sus libros favoritos: todos los libros de Aira y Mujeres que aman demasiado. A huevo.

Work is not a shame. Wealth is not a shame. Lying is.

- Eileen Myles


I hear this song a few weeks ago for the first time on 107.5 Tejano radio in San Anto. All the gente calling in to say how good it is. I swear they're playing it every hour on the hour. Then this viejito calls in and says, "He sings alright, yknow, he sings alright, but you know what he oughta stick to what's his. They got their music y'know, they should sing it. Not try to sing our music." The old man is getting upset. And the Tejano DJ's try to calm him down, tell him it's okay, that toda la gente's digging the song. The old man saysGeorge Strait doesn't roll his R's right and he says Strait corta sus palabras en español. Que a él no le gusta que la gente corte las palabras. The DJ's say a lot of Tejanos cortan their words too, y'know? But the viejito doesn't care. He just keeps saying, "We got our stuff. They got theirs. It oughta stay that way."

Let's write like we were in the thick. That gray mass of space and air bamboo and dust. We can't float long no we crash into the mist. I wouldn't have ever made the team. La madre y su hija hoy en la mañana las vi frente al Family Dollar. Estaban llorando. The mom obviously struck a nerve. When we all went spinning out to the margins. Estás tan lleno de emoción que you're gonna burst. I saw you there at the bus stop or where it used to be before they took out the bench and left two square holes where the posts used to be. Me aburro tanto cuando se duerman los niños. The girl's favorite star is Johnny Depp but all the homies she ever gets with don't live up to her high standards. Those guys couldn't swashbuckle, just crybabies. At the corner at the taquería we go there to pig out on Sundays when mom's not trying to cook. Johnny likes his chicken nuggets with syrup. Stop. The crickets idle on bubble gum wrappers. The dog's weights depresses the porch's foundation. The weeds grow up in the edges where the cars can't park. We wandered through like kids again, wondering about babies and burrs.

This would be somewhere between I-10 and Nogalitos. Roll highway roll on all sides of the little house. Outside the light glinting off of windshields and paper. As the day emerges before the heat rolls through. Dogs linger on bent wooden porches and contribute to decay and sinking. Each step pushes the earth lower. Flea-bitten bodies invade the boundaries burrow in the soil unroot plants and futures. Despiértate. Ya viene el sol por la ventanilla. Ya es el momento. Stepping out a relief from the heightening sun. A minute to gather one's thoughts en la mecedora before the everyday flood of words and obligations. Stretching legs out to sit ponder basil and ironworks. How little knowledge there is about dusty streets and early morning construction work. And even with so little room for stragglers. Twinkling of metal hummingbirds and a far off drone of weedwackers. A churning before the launch of day.

Rupert: A Confession

Rupert: A Confession by Dutch author Ilja Leonard Pfeiffer is an unfortunate exploration in the first person of the psychoses of a porn-obsessed voyeur with troubling rape fantasies and delusions of grandeur. The book is organized into a monologue delivered over the course of three hearings as Rupert attempts to defend himself in court against the accusation he committed a crime (we only learn the crime in the last pages of the book.) The premise is an interesting one, one that kept me reading to the end of the book. Despite this, Rupert's pompous tone and narcissism were difficult to read; it was exactly the kind of person I am least interested in hearing from: a misogynistic, self-obsessed man prone to repition and longwindedness. At times, it felt like listening to sick, secret thoughts of a rightwing talk radio host. Most of the book is devoted to Rupert's lonely wanderings around the city as he stalks women or derides them silently to himself in bars and cafes. Not only is this material really depressing and gross, it also seemed like the kind of vicious misogyny I've seen and read so many times before in movies and books.

Publishers Weekly called this book "a deliberate provocation" and even the promotional material from Open Letter says the book is "offensive." No doubt, I do not think all literature needs to be uplifting or inspirational; I like dark and disturbing as well. I also think literature should question established norms, including the confines of leftist doctrine about what is "right" and "good." However, this book seemed to provoke for no real reason other than to make obvious something that I already knew: men can be sick and cruel, arrogant and self-centered. The book made all of this disgustingly clear. Perhaps some would find something exceptional in the prose (which seemed well translated by Michele Hutchinson) but while it was captivating, the language itself wasn't enough to mask the essential vacuousness and insanity of the main character.

I should mention here that I am a dedicated fan of Open Letter, the publisher of Rupert: A Confession. I support their mission of publishing and disseminating literature from around the world in English translation.

Despite all this and especially after reading Rupert, I have to wonder if it isn't time for Open Letter (now in its second year of publishing) to provide its readers with a few more books from outside of Europe (and by non-Euro women!). The only non-European books (all by men) offered by Open Letter are by Rubem Fonseca of Brazil, Macedonio Fernández of Argentina and Jorge Volpi of Mexico (and his book seems to be set in Russia and other northern climes). As far as forthcoming titles, there will be three more one author from Argentina, Juan José Saer. Now, I definitely understand that the press is young and new, but I do hope in the future to read translations from other languages and other continents. If the mission of the press is to "open cultural borders," I'd hope the fluid and cultural borderlines demarcating the "European" tradition from the rest of the world would also be crossed.

And for now, a moratorium on self-centered, psychotic European men.

To edit oneself would be to retrace one’s steps, go backwards, when the idea is to always move forward. To judge yesterday’s writing session, to censor a lapse into the absurd or the irrational, to revive a character your work-in-progress sent tumbling over a cliff—all of these actions go against Aira’s procedure. Instead, the system prioritizes an ethic of creative self-affirmation and, I would say, optimism. To labor to justify previous work with more strange creations that in turn establish the need for ever more artistic high-wire acts in the future—this is the continuum, the high-wire act the artist must perform when he refuses to submit to any rule that is not his autonomously chosen procedure. It is an act performed with deep abysses yawning to each side of him—conformity, market pressures, conventionality, self-repression of all kinds . . .

-- From a piece on César Aira here.

For most of his adult life, he has earned his living by translating the book of other writers. He sits at his desk reading the book in French and then picks up his pen and writes the same book in English. It is both the same book and not the same book, and the strangeness of this activity has never failed to impress him. Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months, if not many years, of one's man solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of solitude. A man's solitude, so that he is confronting a particle of that solitude. A man sits alone in a room and writes. Whether the book speaks of loneliness or companionship, it is necessarily a product of solitude. A. sits down on his own room to translate another man's book, and it is as though he were entering that man's solitude and making it his own. But surely that is impossible. For once a solitude has been breached, once a solitude has been taken on by another it is no longer a solitude, but a kind of companionship. Even though there is only one man in the room, there are two. A. images himself as a kind of ghost of that other man, who is both there and not there, and whose book is both the same and not the same as the one he is translating. Therefore, he tells himself, it is possible to be alone and not alone at the same moment.

A word becomes another word, a thing becomes another thing. In this way, he tells himself, it works in the same way that memory does. He imagines an immense Babel inside him. There is a text, and it translates itself into an infinite number of languages. Sentences spill out of him at the speed of thought, and each word comes from a different language, a thousand tongues that clamor inside him at once, the din of it echoing trough a maze of rooms, corridors, and stairways, hundreds of stories high. He repeats. In the space of the memory, everything is both itself and something else. And then it dawns on him that everything he is trying to record in The Book of Memory, everything he has written so far, is no more than the translation of a moment or two of his life –those moments he lived through on Christmas Eve, 1979, in his room at 6 Varick Street.

FROM PAUL AUSTER'S THE INVENTION OF SOLITUDE

Thanks Manuel.



Somewhere along the way 
somewhere in the day to day 
somewhere in the night to night 
somewhere between 
feeding salivating dogs and watering drooping oxcalis 
computering dimness and aching hand tendons
putting in light bulbs and done been inserted into the basest human dramas
this monotonous beating and that rush of cool from the air conditioning vent 
ear drops and nasal sprays 
the suffocating heat of dark cars and the stickiness of sweaty jeans
sitting uncomfortably on patios at midnight and staying home to watch the bricks 
falling asleep midmorning and weighted down by darkness on a bar stool
searching for a reason to say and not wanting to say anything at all
not believing and being afraid to walk outside at dark
somewhere between here and there
you and me.

Somewhere between 
this brain forgot that life was to be shouted and joyed and spent
and then remembering
wrote.