"As a thief as long as he can remember," or, A Question of influence

To prepare for a review I'm writing for the next issue of the Quarterly Conversation of Japanese poet Kazuko Shiraishi's new book My Floating Mother, City, I've been reading her best-known book, Seasons of Sacred Lust (1970). Comared to her newer work, it feels a bit dated, more obviously surrealistic and beat-influenced--while nonetheless remarkable at times, as in the poem "Tiger," whose opening gives an idea of how Shiraishi's images can function when deployed well:

All day long
A tiger kept coming in and out.
The room was falling into ruin and
Broken arms, legs, and chairs were
Crying at the sky.

What made me sit up and take notice more than anything, however, were a couple of lines from book's long centerpiece, "Seasons of the Sacred Sex Maniac" (and oh, the disappointed Google searchers who are going to end up here because of that title!):

A black motorcycle runs
Tearing an August night right in two with its sound
The black motorcycle that runs up some raw flesh
Which is nobody
But myself
I'm a high holy master of the occult
A lewd detective that
Has mastered the art of self-division

I expect a lot of you are having the same reaction I did: Black motorcycles? Detectives? Hell, even raw flesh? These are images that immediately call to mind Roberto Bolaño's poetry. The black motorcycle turns up in a couple of poems in Bolaño's collection The Romantic Dogs: in the closing stanza of "The Last Savage"--

I'd gone to see "The Last Savage," and on leaving the theatre
had no place to go. In a sense I was
the character from the film, and my black motorcycle
carried me
straight to destruction.

--and in "The Donkey," where it is "like a donkey from another planet" and

A stolen bike, the last bike
Stolen to travel through the poor
Northern Lands, toward Texas,
Chasing an unnameable dream,
Unclassifiable, the dream of our youth,
Which is to say, the bravest of all
Our dreams.

Detectives, meanwhile, turn up throughout Bolaño's oeuvre, from the poetry--where they are frozen detectives, lost detectives, crushed detectives--to the title of The Savage Detectives to the criminally ineffectual police detectives of 2666.

Neither image, the black motorcycle or the detective, is so unusual that it's impossible to imagine the two poets hitting upon it independently. But their conjunction in "Seasons of the Sacred Sex Maniac" does make me wonder whether Bolaño might have come across Seasons of Sacred Lust as a young man in the early 1970s. It doesn't seem too far-fetched to imagine that Shiraishi's connections with the beats and her popular jazz-backed public readings could have brought her to Bolaño's attention, even if she wasn't translated into Spanish (which, for all I know, she might have been). And much of her imagery--sexual and violent, awkward and surreal--could easily be read as a precursor to and influence on Bolaño's startling, uncanny metaphors.

I don't have any sort of definite answer; I'd hoped that The Savage Detectives, with the staggering number of obscure poets it name-drops, might offer the key, but Shiraishi's name is nowhere to be found in its pages. Yet again, as has happened countless times in the past year, I find myself wishing that Bolaño's essays were already available in English translation--maybe, once they are, they'll offer a clue.

Until then, anyone out there know anything more about this possible connection?

"Great poets / foretell their own deaths in a single line"; I, instead, use up several on trifles

{Photos by rocketlass.}

The morning's snow is but a memory, the clouds that brought it now on their way to New York, leaving us with a cold sliver of moon . . . and what's that it illuminates? Oh, no--it's that lazy columnist's friend and succor . . . the Notes Column! Like a Rod Blagojevich press conference, this post is unlikely to offer any coherent theme or defense of its existence, but it might quote some poetry!

It's been months since I've resorted to one of these; how about this time rather than a numbered list, I tart the blog up as if it were a gossip column?

ITEM! I ventured to Chicago's Harold Washington Library on Monday to pick up some supplementary volumes for a review that is due now. {Note the italics. They're to remind me of what I ought to be doing right now rather than assembling this list. They're not, you'll note, working.}

I easily found the books I was after, but when I laid them on the circulation desk I hit a snag: according to the librarian, one of the volumes I had handed him, The Selected Poems of Tomaž Šalamun (1988), didn't exist. Or at least it didn't exist in their system; despite what the computer asserted, the physical book did to all eyes appear to be right there in hand.

I'm familiar with the frustration of looking on a library shelf for a missing book that the system assures you is there, but this was my first experience with its opposite. Could this be some tendril of the Invisible Library infecting an actual library?

Oh, and I owed an $.80 fine. Ed, do we levy fines at the Invisible Library?

ITEM! Speaking of looking for books on shelves: anyone who has ever worked in a bookshop has experienced the dreadful moment when, as you search the shelves in vain for a book requested by a customer, you realize that the customer looming at your elbow is the author of the book in question, attempting in a decreasingly subtle way to determine whether his fears of irrelevance and disregard are quite justified. It is a singularly awkward situation, for which the only remedy is the white lie, a suddenly recovered memory of the satisfied customer who left the store mere moments ago, beaming with joy, day made because you'd sold her that very book. You're sure you'll have another copy in any day now, in anticipation of another such customer.

Well, reading Fanny Burney's journals has confirmed my suspicion that authors were always so--as, fortunately, were quick-witted booksellers:

We amused ourselves, while we waited there, at a Bookseller's shop, where Mrs Thrale enquired if they had got the Book she had recommended to them. "Yes, Ma'am," was the answer; "and it's always out--the Ladies like it vastly."

ITEM! Speaking of the Invisible Library: this blog has been remarkably free lately of writing about that master of invisible book creation, Roberto Bolaño. My mind, on the other hand, has not: nearly five months after I read it, 2666 still staggers around in my thoughts. If you're having the same problem, you might as well go read what I think might be the best review of the novel yet, Sam Sacks's at Open Letters Monthly. More than anyone else I've read, Stark assembles a coherent argument about the book's aims, starting with this proposition:

But it must be reemphasized that, with one significant exception that I’ll look into later, every character, every occurrence, and every development of this book is brought into existence for the purpose of being negated. Nothingness is the single connecting motif of the five disparate sections, and it doesn’t bind them so much as drape across them like a shroud.

His overall assessment is a more harsh than mine, but it is forceful and convincing, one of the few writings on 2666 that I'm confident will stay with me and inform my eventual rereading of the novel.

Bolaño fans should also check out the appreciative review of his collection of poetry, The Romantic Dogs, that Ed Pavlic (author of the exceptionally good prose poem collection Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway) wrote for Verse. Pavlic opens with a quotation from the fragments of Empedocles that reads like an uncanny anticipation of Bolaño's fictions:

I shall tell thee a twofold tale. At one time it grew to be one only out of many; at another, it divided up to be many instead of one. There is a double becoming of perishable things and a double passing away. The coming together of all things brings one generation into being and destroys it; the other grows up and is scattered as things become divided. And these things never cease continually changing places, at one time all uniting in one through Love, at another each borne in different directions by the repulsion of Strife.

The Romantic Dogs has mostly been drowned out by the hubbub surrounding 2666, but Pavlic makes a good case for why it's worth taking a look at.

ITEM! Way back in June when I read The Savage Detectives, I unexpectedly found myself comparing the young, horny, violent infrerealists of Bolaño's Mexico City to Giacomo Casanova. Casanova's wonderfully amoral twelve-volume History of My Life frequently finds him reciting poetry, but always in an instrumental fashion: poetry is a marker of his refinement and sensibility, one of many tools that he uses in his neverending quest to get into women's pants. There is never a sense, as Casanova is recounting his recitation of a poem, of a poem truly affecting him; the reader--or at least the contemporary reader--gets the sense that he would have used whatever was to hand, that if knowing obscure facts about CC Sabathia or Dungeons and Dragons would have pitter-patted the hearts of the ladies, he would have been just as happy to deploy those.

The infrarealists, on the other hand, while they certainly do use poetry as an aphrodisiac (part of the overly masculine atmosphere of the early part of the novel that would have turned me off were Bolaño's prose not so captivating). At the same time, however, Bolaño makes us believe that poetry also is a crucial part of their self-definition, and even their way of understanding the world. Of all the poses to adopt, they've chosen a relatively marginalized one, and the enthusiasm and vigor with which they enact it--especially late in the novel when the youngest of them, Garcia Madero, reveals an encylopedic knowledge of poetic form--is bracing. Poetry is an instrument for these young men, but it's not solely or merely an instrument; its roots and its effects run far deeper.

ITEM! Which reminds me: I promised you some poetry, didn't I? How about this, which Melville includes in the "Extracts" assembled by a "poor," "hopeless, sallow" sub-sub-librarian with which he opens Moby-Dick--and which thus, almost Ouroborically, brings us back to where we started, with libraries:

Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him;
One would think the deep to be hoary.

It's from Job, which I believe Blagojevich has yet to quote--but fear not, Rod! There's still time to work it in!

Whatever it is I think I see, seems like Roberto Bolaño to me.

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Those of you who've heard enough about Roberto Bolaño lately should take heart: I've moved Anthony Trollope's Phineas Redux to the top of my stack for this week, and if anything can help me detox from Bolaño's cryptic inventions and haunting weirdness, it's Trollope's general confidence in the things of the world and their proper places.

For now, though, I remain sufficiently dogged by Bolaño that even such relatively innocuous passages as this one from Patricia Highsmith's The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), encountered over the weekend, bring 2666 blazing back into my mind:

"You expect to meet the brother? And the detective?" Reeves laughed as if at the word "detective," as he might laugh at anybody whose job it was presumably to track down crime in the world.

If you're looking for writings on Bolaño of a bit more substance, you should check out the newest issue of the Quarterly Conversation, which just went online. I'm in there with a review of the new collection of Bolaño's poetry that New Directions has published, The Romantic Dogs, while Quarterly Conversation editor Scott Esposito turns in what is the most perceptive review of 2666 I've seen so far.

The Quarterly Conversation is also giving away a complete set of Bolaño's works in English; click here for details. Oh, and there's plenty of non-Bolaño content as well, including an article on William Gaddis and a piece by Barrett Haycock about freelancing alumni profiles, and what that did to his fiction writing; any writer who's turned out copy for a living will recognize the frustrations (and the occasional pleasures) that Haycock describes.

Speaking of work, you weren't really planning to get anything done at the office today anyway, were you? It's the end of a holiday weekend; you've got to ease back into this job thing; best to just go read the Quarterly Conversation until the coffee kicks in.