Everything collapses in pain. All eloquence springs from pain.

This is one of those books I’ll probably never get out of my head. There’s nothing I could really recommend more, ever, and I’m already planning my re-read.

As you’re well aware, this is a macho country full of faggots. The history of Mexico wouldn’t make sense otherwise.

What are you doing, moon, up in the sky? asks the little shepherd in the poem. What are you doing, tell me, silent moon? Aren’t you tired of plying the eternal byways? The shepherd’s life is like your life. He rises at first light and moves his flock across the field. Then, weary, he rests at evening and hopes for nothing more. What good is the shepherd’s life to him or yours to you? Tell me, the shepherd muses, said Florita Almada in a transported voice, where is it heading, my brief wandering, your immortal journey? Man is born into pain, and being born itself means risking death, said the poem. And also: But why bring to light, why educate someone we’ll console for living later? And also: If life is misery, why do we endure it? And also: This, unblemished moon, is the mortal condition. But you’re not mortal, and what I say may matter little to you. And also, and on the contrary: You, eternal solitary wanderer, you who are so pensive, it may be you understand this life on earth, what our suffering and sighing is, what this death is, this last paling of the face, and leaving Earth behind, abandoning all familiar, loving company. And also: What does the endless air do, and that deep eternal blue? What does this enormous solitude portend? And what am I? And also: This is what I know and feel: that from the eternal motions, from my fragile being, others may derive some good or happiness. And also: But life for me is wrong. And also: Old, white haired, weak, barefoot, bearing an enormous burden, up mountain and down valley, over sharp rocks, across deep sands and bracken, through wind and storm, when it’s hot and later when it freezes, running on, running faster, crossing rivers, swamps, falling and rising and hurrying faster, no rest or relief, battered and bloody, at last coming to where the way and all effort has led: terrible, immense abyss into which, upon falling, all is forgotten. And also: This, O virgin moon, is human life. And also: O resting flock, who don’t, I think, know your own misery! How I envy you! Not just because you travel as if trouble free and soon forget each need, each hurt, each deathly fear, but more because you’re never bored. And also: When you lie in the shade, on the grass, you’re calm and happy, and you spend the great part of the year this way and feel no boredom. And also: I sit on the grass, too, in the shard, but an anxiousness invades my mind as if a thorn is pricking me. And also: Yet I desire nothing, and till now I have no reason for complaint. And at this point, after sighing deeply, Florita Almada would say that several conclusions could be drawn: (1) that the thoughts that seize a shepherd can easily gallop away with him because it’s human nature; (2) that facing boredom head-on was an act of bravery and Benito Juarez had done it and she had done it too and both had seen terrible things in the face of boredom, things she would rather not recall; (3) that the poem, now she remembered, was about an Asian shepherd, not a Mexican shepherd, but it made no difference, since shepherds are the same everywhere, but if it was true that all effort led to a vast abyss, she had two recommendations to begin with, first, not to cheat people, and second, to treat them properly. Beyond that, there was room for discussion.

The Spaniards, who were hot-blooded and didn’t think too far ahead, mixed with the Indian women, raped them, forced them to practice their religion, and thought that meant they were turning the country white. Those Spaniards believed in a mongrel whiteness. But they overestimated their semen and that was their mistake. You just can’t rape that many people. It’s mathematically impossible. It’s too hard on the body. You get tired. Plus, they were raping from the bottom up, when what would’ve made more sense would be raping from the top down. They might have gotten some results if they’d been capable of raping their own mongrel children and then their mongrel grandchildren and even their bastard great-grandchildren. But who’s going to go out raping people when you’re seventy and you can hardly stand on your own two feet?

[P]eople knew many different kinds of stars or thought they knew many different kinds of stars. He talked about the stars you see at night, say when you’re driving from Des Moines to Lincoln on Route 80 and the car breaks down, the way they do, maybe it’s the oil or the radiator, maybe it’s a flat tire, and you get out and get the jack and the spare tire out of the trunk and change the tire, maybe half an hour, at most, and when you’re done you look up and see the sky full of stars. The Milky Way. He talked about star athletes. That’s a different kind of star, he said, and he compared them to movie stars, though as he said, the life of an athlete is generally much shorter. A star athlete might last fifteen years at best, whereas a movie star could go on for forty or fifty years if he or she started young. Meanwhile, any star you could see from the side of Route 80, on the way from Des Moines to Lincoln, would live for probably millions of years. Either that or it might have been dead for millions of years, and the traveler who gazed up at it would never know. It might be a live star or it might be a dead star. Sometimes, depending on your point of view, he said, it doesn’t matter, since the stars you see at night exist in the realm of semblance. They are semblances, the same way dreams are semblances. So the traveler on Route 80 with a flat tire doesn’t know whether what he’s staring up at in the vast night are stars or whether they’re dreams. In a way, he said, the traveler is also part of a dream, a dream that breaks away from another dream like one drop of water breaking away from a bigger drop of water that we call a wave…Really, when you talk about stars you’re speaking figuratively. That’s metaphor. Call someone a movie star. You’ve used a metaphor. Say: the sky is full of stars. More metaphors. If somebody takes a hard right to the chin and goes down, you say he’s seeing stars. Another metaphor. Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming. In that sense a metaphor is like a life jacket. And remember, there are life jackets that float and others that sink to the bottom like lead. Best not to forget it. But really, there’s just one star and that star isn’t semblance, it isn’t metaphor, it doesn’t come from any dream or any nightmare. We have it right outside. It’s the sun. The sun, I am sorry to say, is our only star.

I was really struck by that passage, and just this morning figured out why. It’s a riff on passage this from Moby Dick, which takes place after Ishmael becomes confused in the night and mistakes the harpooners working the Try-Words for devils, before nodding off at the helm:

Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp–all others but liars!

Or, anyway, it seems like a riff to me. But, then, there are times when everything seems like a riff on that passage.  It comes from a chapter titled “The Try-Works,” and it’s one of my favorite pieces of writing ever set down anywhere. I’ve even got a tattoo to prove it.

This, by the way, is also from that same chapter, immediately following the above.

Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, nor Rome’s accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true — not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. “All is vanity”. ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing grave- yards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly; — not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon.

But even Solomon, he says, “the man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain” (i. e. even while living) “in the congregation of the dead”. Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me.

There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

When I first read Moby Dick I was leveled by that passage. I remember thinking that it was the truest thing I’d ever seen on the page about books or life. The fifteen years since haven’t done much to convince me otherwise.

I used to be a fairly good hand at shoplifting books, at just about the same time in my life that he was doing it. I think some of it was even inspired by Camus, starting with The Plague. In fact, after finishing The Plague, I distinctly remember stealing The Rebel. Never finished the fucking thing, but I carried it around for about two years.

I don’t do it anymore. For one thing, I’m not nearly as desperately broke as I was. For another, I’ve got access to a good library now. But I’m not ethically opposed to the idea. Sure as hell not in chains, anyway. I guess I’m against it in independent bookstores. Real independent bookstores, anyway, not the kind that act just like a chain.

Chris La Tray wrote this on his blog recently:

I see a lot of calls to support independent bookstores, local businesses, etc. Sometimes I think the call to support independent artists gets overlooked. Support your independent artists, people!

Not gonna name names, but I get sick of that call from book and music stores that don’t do shit for independent artists. They’re fine to steal from, go nuts. Somebody even told me about one bookstore around here where they charge writers to let them give readings. I’d say that’d be a good place to steal from. Or even set on fire, your choice.

Anyway, the essay:

The books that I remember best are the ones I stole in Mexico City, between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, and the ones I bought in Chile when I was twenty, during the first few months of the coup. In Mexico there was an incredible bookstore. It was called the Glass Bookstore and it was on the Alameda. Its walls, even the ceiling, were glass. Glass and iron beams. From the outside, it seemed an impossible place to steal from. And yet prudence was overcome by the temptation to try and after a while I made the attempt.

The rest.

What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

The truth is, I don’t believe all that much in writing. Starting with my own. Being a writer is pleasant — no, pleasant isn’t the word — it’s an activity that has its share of amusing moments, but I know of other things that are even more amusing, amusing in the same way that literature is for me. Holding up banks, for example. Or directing movies. Or being a gigolo. Or being a child again and playing on a more or less apocalyptic soccer team. Unfortunately, the child grows up, the bank robber is killed, the director runs out of money, the gigolo gets sick and then there’s no other choice but to write.

I’m finally reading 2666, and, yeah, it’s fucking great.

• Seven significant purchases.
• “And, of course, what Bolaño is doing is laughing at the idea of writers–writers of any nationality or galaxy–getting together to talk about literature. In Bolaño’s opinion–then and always–literature should inhabit books, not bars.”
• A banner year for Glocks in movies.
• Anthony Lister.
• Violence that art didn’t see coming.
• “When revising, consider whether you have written anything that will hurt or offend a member of your immediate family. If the answer is no, go back and add something.”
• CNN firearms expert killed in African hunting trip. (Okay, maybe not, but he sure as hell would be if he ever tried to hunt lions or elephants with a .223 sporting rifle.)

I’ll admit that it’s more than likely impossible for me to give an objective review of Jimmy Santiago Baca’s debut novel, A Glass of Water.  I have been a devoted fan of his poetry for almost a decade, ever since I first readImmigrants in Our Own Land on the recommendation of a family member.  Baca’s poems are both refreshingly direct and grimly lyrical, constructed of the kind of startling concrete images which you can, as a poet friend of mine once put it, almost walk on.  Recently, while reading Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, I kept thinking of Baca’s work as an example of the “visceral realist” poetic movement which The Savage Detectives chronicles but never provides examples of – something which, I’m pretty sure, is fair to neither Bolaño nor Baca.

The rest.