Calm

"There was no calm, and all that existed was movement, which is the mask of many things, calm among them."

- from 2666, by Roberto Bolaño, trans. Natasha Wimmer

Imprescindible

No trates de vivir contra la vida.
No destruyas lo que el movimiento te ofrece para estar tranquilo.

Roberto Bolaño

Translation

I am thinking about translation, and about Richard Pevear's accent. I am wondering how Tolstoy can be both delightfully wry and a supreme drag in the same sentence, and about what makes the difference. I wonder what Radiolab would sound like in Spanish, and what it would feel like to see a New York street through your tongue. I am wondering at the fact that the first story in Putas Asesinas, the first story I am reading in my adoptive language, has sent me back to India, and whether Bolaño can telescope me through the imaginative possibilities of another language back to a native truth. I am curious about what would happen if I were to photocopy 'El Ojo Silva' and begin to translate it for myself, elbows deep in the wet clay of Spanish, into overbearing English. I wonder if there exist Hindi subtitles for Chico y Rita, and how you might caption the subtleties of Chak De! India for Mexico.

Manifesto for Psycho-Social Sedentariness

or How to Fail Bolaño 

Why read?
Why fuck?
Why travel?

Watch television.
Nurture an emphatic solitariness.
Quash your instinct for risk and adventure.

Cultivate a bouquet of dependencies. 
Turn your back to the shelves, filling up.
Insist on returning to the same bed every night.

Lose your appetite for touch.
Gather ye insecurities while ye may.
Accumulate an insurmountable inertia.

Forget words.
Unrehearse flirtation.
Become a homing pigeon.

Why don't you write a book?

"Lift a stone and you'll find a girl
writing about her little life." 

- Roberto Bolaño

Lit Wit

"Listen: I don't have anything against autobiographies, 

so long as the people writing them have penises that are at least a foot long when erect."

- Roberto Bolaño

"She had to make a supernatural effort not to die"

Dying can seem satisfactory as a response.
But let's all try to live instead.

Marquez, Bolaño and Bakshi: A Summer Conversation Series

Better-er

Reading is always more important than writing.
- Roberto Bolaño

Bolaño knows better.

"Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite,but the desire to read and to fuck are infinite;
it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace."

- Roberto Bolaño.

(Responding to Stéphane Mallarmé: “The flesh is sad—and I’ve read every book.”)

Amulet sucked me in and spit me back out again.
And now I am asking myself: Where shall I go from here? Everywhere, I suppose.
Somebody told me this evening that I am better equipped for the world than it is for me.