final del juego

magic

2006-02-01T08:34:03Z

OK, this is a sad couple of points to be making, but...

Listening to the Today programme, and a piece on Gabriel García Márquez suggested that the Colombian is "often known as the father of magica realism."

Um, no, not really.

And for what it's worth, even google suggests that the most common wearer of that crown is Miguel Angel Asturias.

(Me, if I had to choose I'd plump for one of either Giorgio di Chirico or Alejo Carpentier.)

And then a brief interview with Will Self, who tried to sound sophisticated, but just sounded stupid when he couldn't pronounce Maria Vargas Llosa's name. Hell, either say "Llosa" as if it were an English word, or say it in one of the various ways it is pronounced in Spanish, but don't invent your very own pronunciation!

rain

2006-01-29T22:02:16Z

It rains here. It has been raining for most of January. The other night it was raining hard, the sound of the water splashing and coursing off the eaves ever-present. Today is just drizzle.

Last year I don't think I noticed or cared much about the rain. This year there's either more of it or the city is less of a novelty, so with fewer obvious distractions.

And it is true that when the sky clears, the views of the surrounding mountains and the snow are marvellous. It was like that for one day last week. It almost made up for the other days of rain. Almost.

And it's also true that it's much less rainy in the summer. But just now, that seems a long way away.

UPDATE: Ha! I notice I posted an entry with the same title before. I think that's the first time I've reused the same title word. I knew the day would come when I would accidentally repeat. It's just fitting that now that day's arrived, the word should be "rain."

Magic Numbers

2005-11-08T03:43:21Z

I haven't updatd this for a while, but I wanted to report on the fact that we went to see the Magic Numbers last night. And that they were good. They were also rather overwhelmed by their reception in Vancouver. And showed their appreciation with rather sweet, not very rock'n'roll, delight.

Their second encore was an acoustic version of Beyoncé's "Crazy in Love."

That is all.

340 for 8

2005-08-15T17:02:41Z

Listening on the internet is just not the same. That sounds like an amazing catch on the rebound from Jones.

boss

2005-08-14T07:32:20Z

We just saw Springsteen. It turned out that it was the last night of the tour, in fact. A stripped down show, only him, playing mostly acoustic: guitar, piano, once perhaps twice electric guitar, keyboards, and memorably a blues version of "Reason to Believe" that was just him, a harmonica, and his stamping his foot on the floor. A big venue, but remarkably intimate.

His son, Evan, acted roadie at one point and brought a new guitar to him on the stage.

Unlike Bob, Bruce cares about us. A lot. He wants to tell us about his life. He wants us to be happy, to keep dreaming and smiling. But if we're not happy, he feels our pain.

He played "Because the Night," which was cool. But I think the best two numbers were "The Rising" and "4th July, Asbury Park (Sandy)," which he sang as his (penultimate) encore.

Very fine.

icons

2005-08-11T19:49:35Z

I've been watching Andrei Rublev over the past day or two. Just in dribs and drabs, because it is very long, and in any case divided up into chapters. (This is part of a little Tarkovsky season I've arranged for myself, via the good people at Videomatica.)

It would seem that there are people who argue that this is the greatest film ever made. I haven't yet joined that camp. But I must say I liked, in a strange way, the past two episodes.

Assorted stonemasons and icon painters in early fifteenth-century Russia are working on a cathedral for a local prince. He's not particularly happy with the results, but has in any case short-changed them by not ponying up for the best materials. When they're done, the masons and carvers say they're off to do a church for his brother, who's a prince over the way, and who has promised to spare no effort in ensuring that everything is up to scratch. The first prince is less than happy with this, fearing his brother will get one up on him. So he arranges for the craftsmen to be ambushed in the woods as they're heading out of the estate, where the prince's men gouge their eyes out.

As payback, the brother comes back sometime later with a horde of Tartars, who sack the village, kill most of the men and rape most of the women, raze the cathedral, and inflict vile and unspeakable tortures on the prince, not least having him branded with a red hot cross before tying him to a horse set to gallop away out of the cathedral, dragging him along the ground. It is the painting of the "Last Judgment," meawhile, which goes up in flames.

Much Ecclesiastes is quoted. "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity." And so on.

But Medieval Russia was obviously not a happy place.

hotels

2005-08-09T05:20:32Z

For my birthday a couple of days ago we went across to Victoria, which is on Vancouver Island. And a nice enough place it is, too. We looked around the waterfront, had a hotdog, wandered around the BC museum, had a drink or two, went to a lake, and then back on the ferry. Much summer warmth and activity: street artists offering to draw caricatures, Native Americans selling (and carving) artefacts, stalls of one kind or another, people, whale watchers, balloons, face painting...

Victoria's harbour front is dominated by a huge, colonial era hotel, The Empress. Very imposing and impressive, and pretty fancy inside, too, where they were offering "high tea" in the Tea Lounge, drinks in the "Bengal Lounge" and so on.

It reminded us of Raffles, in Singapore. Both are like souped-up versions of the various "terminal hotels" that the railway companies used to build next to stations (the Adelphi, Liverpool; the Midland Grand by St Pancras), which were meant to impress and accommodate passengers whose mode of travel was rather more leisurely and luxurious than is ours today.

We wondered why Auckland didn't seem to have one of these hotels. What other stop-offs for colonial tourists and bureaucrats still have their luxurious watering places? I'd have thought there would be a website out there about this (there is about most things, after all), but the best I can find after a brief searches is a site called Famous Hotels.

back

2005-08-03T17:56:12Z

The rellies who have been staying here over the weekend have just headed off, I've read the last book I have to review, so now there's little excuse not to do some proper writing once I've finished the review itself.

Time to get back into the saddle.

In other news, the weather continues to be glorious. And we have zillions of dandelions on the front lawn. That's probably a bad thing, but they look nice just at the moment.

celebrate!

2005-08-01T04:31:14Z

Happy British Columbia Day!

OK, so strictly speaking for British Columbians our day has yet to start, but why shouldn't our friends in the Motherland get a little celebration in now before it's too late?

I'm looking forward to our Lieutenant Governor's speech, having read what she had to say last year. I feel I should locate and ride on the West Coast Railway Association’s Mini Rail, as my bit to express civic pride in my adopted multicultural, historic, and lively land. And look, here's a picture of the train. And here's our Lieutenant Governor on the train. (She's the one with the hat.) And feast your eyes on some colourful if not very unruly multiculture.

Even though there are still two and a half hours to go before I can start my celebration, I already feel proud. Truly proud.

Russian

2005-07-29T21:06:59Z

I think it was besskeloid who put me on to real_funny_lady, who posts cool photos and pictures on a regular basis.

Do you think that by reading comments such as the ones in response to this entry, I'll be able to learn Russian?

I take it for instance that "Класс!!!" is a signal of approbation. And what's the betting that "великолепно" means "beautiful"?

I remember Fred Jameson reporting TS Eliot's opinion that the best way to learn a foreign language was to read its poetry (without a dictionary, natch).

Hmmm.

doonesbury

2005-07-29T07:42:15Z

It would seem that doonesbury has been suspended from Live Journal. How so, I ask? I was enjoying by daily dose of Trudeau. Otherwise, I might have to buy a newspaper...

In other news, tonight we went to have chicken wings with a friend who has just finished and sent off his dissertation. Six long years, and finally he can reward himself at Wing Nuts. (My goodness, who'd have thought the place had a website?) On the wall were polaroid photos of people who'd eaten 12 or more spicy wings at a single sitting. The wing nut "champ" had consumed 86 wings, in less than an hour. Our friend was a little more restrained, however, even after his dissertation-writing achievement. But he did afterwards ask that we move on to Duffin's Donuts.

Duffin's doesn't have a website, but it is mentioned in this news story, which features "Carl, David and Greg--a group of chain-smoking, leather-bomber-jacket-wearing middle-aged men who've been coming to Duffin's for years [. . . ]. They come to Duffin's for the coffee, the camaraderie and a place to smoke, sometimes spending as much as five hours a day there. None of them eats doughnuts, for health reasons." They were there this evening, I swear, next to another table of old guys speaking (I think) Portuguese.

bobbies

2005-07-23T01:49:48Z

Special armed squad first to use tactics developed with Israeli aid. That's all we need.

In other news, we went to see His Bobness last night. Very good. Though we were right at the back, being right at the back of the Orpheum Theatre, Vancouver, beats being right at the back at the MEN Arena, Manchester.

Mind you: Bob doesn't care very much about us. He's just doing his own thing. Him and his mates play a bit of music. A little jig here, a little jig there. There was a microphone on a stand centre-stage, but he didn't deign to use it. Only veered towards it sometimes when he was out from behind his keyboard, playing his harmonica solos. And he was gripping the harmonica like a little talisman as he acknowledged the lurve at the end of the show.

chorizo

2005-07-21T06:40:57Z

So we got back into the country a day or so ago. Filling out the customs form on the plane, I pointed out that we should indeed indicate that we were bringing food in, as we'd bought some chorizo in the airport in Seville. The chorizo was to be our contribution to the paella party this weekend.

At the baggage carousel, a customs agent came up to me, looked over the form, asked about the food, and then said we needed to go talk to the guy from the Ministry of Agriculture (or whatever it's called). He said "let's take a look at it," then promptly threw it in the bin.

Hmm. The chorizo was bought at the airport, and all sealed in plastic. Now, apparently, it has been incinerated, as a threat to the Canadian state. (Though I suspect that the Agriculture guy takes such stuff home for his tea.) I feel less enthused about the prospect about being honest in my customs declarations in future.

dancer

2005-05-23T14:49:59Z

Oh, and having watched it last night, I can report that what I'd heard was wrong: The Dancer Upstairs is far from a dreadful movie; in fact, it's pretty good, I thought.

2678

2005-05-23T14:47:45Z

See the word count plummet... 2,678. (Or even only 1,678 words if I go for a revised limit of 16,000.)

No more snippets today, however, as the cuts are mostly unsutured; and where they have been closed up, the stitches are still showing.

speakers

2005-05-22T01:16:01Z

Want to book a speaker for your next event? Try The Harry Walker Agency. They claim to be able to get you anyone from Bono to Harvey Weinstein, via Cherie Blair and Bill Clinton etc. No prices mentioned, but I somehow doubt they come cheap.

Perhaps I should write and offer my own services?

I stumbled across this site while looking for the precise dates of Fernando Henrique Cardoso's presidency of Brazil. (Yes, Harry Walker represents Cardoso, too). Cardoso, before becoming president, was one of Latin America's leading Marxist intellectuals, and later one of the leading theorists of civil society. (By the time he became president his politics had changed somewhat.)

Anyhow, I am now 2,673 words over my target for this chapter. So, the attempt to rein it in is going well, eh?

2249

2005-05-20T21:15:30Z

That's how many words I'm over limit now. So much for the attempt to cut, eh?

I hope to be able to report back with better news by the end of today...

sendero

2005-05-20T21:10:57Z

OK, here's a snippet or two from what I'm writing at the moment:

Despite the amount that has been written about Sendero, the movement is still for the most part little understood. The best English-language introductions to the movement are Gustavo Gorriti's The Shining Path (a narrative account of the insurgency in the early 1980s) and Steve Stern's collection, Shining and Other Paths (which is exceptionally good at providing the history of Sendero's rise and providing its political context and effects). I have no desire here to romanticize Sendero, or to champion their cause: the movement was undoubtedly vicious, and deservedly almost friendless. At the same time, nor am I interested (here) in demystifying Sendero. Stern explains that "the agenda of [his] book is to move 'beyond enigma'" (8), but enigma was a fundamental aspect of the way in which the group functioned: they worked hard to maintain a sense of their invisibility, mysteriousness, and unrepresentability. Demythologizing them too fast makes it hard to understand the power they gained over their own supporters, but more importantly also over the imagination of middle class and urban Peru in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Gorriti's book, written in the very midst of that period, is much better at conveying quite viscerally just how "the insurgency's very obscurity seemed to add to its power" (xv). Moreover, in that "enigma, exoticism, surprise" (Stern 1) conditions the ways in which the group is (mis)perceived and (mis)understood, stripping them of that enigma too fast also prevents us seeing how they figured not only within Peruvian social and political life, but also within the discourse of Latin American political and cultural theory. I am concerned with precisely the ways in which Sendero serves as a limit, an unassimilable movement at the horizon of both neoliberalism and civil society theory.

[and a little further on...]

Within a couple of years of the insurgency, Sendero already demonstrated that they could operate virtually without impunity in the city of Ayacucho (otherwise known as Huamanga), as well as in the countryside. In March 1982, they attacked the city's jail, taking the security forces completely by surprise and freeing almost 250 prisoners. In the face of withering fire, the Civil and Republican Guard blockaded themselves into their barracks. "On Ayacucho's streets," Gorriti reports, "mobile Shining Path teams dedicated themselves to hunting down the isolated policemen serving as sentries. [. . .] In less than thirty minutes, the Shining Path had established complete control over Ayacucho" (167). An hour or so later, the Sendero fighters had disappeared back to the countryside ("they vanished on the road to Huancavelica" [169]), but the damage had been done and the "siege of Ayacucho" had begun. In December, the bridge linking Ayacucho with the neighboring provinces of Andahuaylas and Cusco was dynamited. Two days later, the city's mayor was shot and seriously wounded; when the doctor who had been treating him went to leave the hospital, opening his car door "on the driver's seat he found a written note: 'The people have a thousand eyes, a thousand ears'" (259). Sendero's mobility, the fact that they could turn up anywhere, at any time, contrasted with the immobility of a petrified police force, who had been "undermined morally, not defeated in battle" (258). Their only movement was the jitters: "Fear of an attack like the one that had taken place in March was intense. [. . .] Few officers dared walk on foot at night--even downtown--for fear of the trembling trigger fingers of their own men." And the jitterbug: "in a not entirely incomprehensible paradox, the discotheques were filled to capacity" (258). That same year, Sendero's siege of Lima also began. "On December 3, the Shining Path celebrated the exalted Guzmán's birthday. [. . .] A simultaneous blackout darkened Lima and Ayacucho. On San Cristóbal Hill, which overlooked colonial Lima, and on Ayacucho's La Picota Hill, hundreds of cans with burning material inside drew a fiery hammer and sickle in the blackness" (253). Both provincial and national capital were confronted by a burning presence, uncomfortably close and (not quite) visible at their margins.

concise

2005-05-10T08:24:31Z

More progress has been made on chapter two: the introduction is now essentially brand new. It's going slowly, but I like to think that it is now much clearer. Right now I'm trying to define what I'm calling "civil society theory" and to outline its differences from as well as its relations with cultural studies.

I'd like the basic theme of my comparison to be that cultural studies stresses antagonism while civil society theory prefers mediation. The twist being, of course, that under the guise of antagonism, mediation lurks at the heart of cultural studies; while beneath the insistence on mediation, civil society theory is above all concerned with a very particular antagonism.

However, as with all these general or broad claims, the trick is to make them without either a) providing rope with which others may hang me or b) hedging them around with so many caveats that I'm no longer really saying anything. The solution is in part to provide readings of particular texts, but then that raises the question of why those texts rather than others, as well as, pragmatically, taking up both space and time that I don't really have. So the trick is to be pointed, concise, and provocative, without being overly tendentious.

book

2005-05-09T05:54:27Z

A little behind schedule, after a week or so taken up by Other Things, I am now returning to the Book. I have until June 15th to complete the necessary revisions. It's do-able, but will be hard work: under a week for each chapter. And I have plenty else to do in that time, too.

I'm starting on chapter two, which is about civil society theory and Peru. This is the chapter that needs most work. For instance, at present it starts with a discussion of global frameworks that is, I see now, rather irrelevant. Elsewhere, too, I need to work on the chapter's coherence, especially when it comes to juggling the various levels of analysis and argument. Plus I want to ensure that it more effectively balances and complements chapter one. There will therefore also be reciprocal changes in chapter one, to enhance symmetry and correspondences in the two chapters' structure.

Especially as I don't want to cut what are, it has to be admitted, pretty long chapters--each is around 15,000 words, or 60 pages each--I need to work much harder with the subheadings and constituent sections. In some ways sorting out the subheads is a cosmetic change, but I think that in fact it will improve the book as a whole immeasurably.

Meanwhile, I just read William Germano's very useful From Dissertation to Book, just out from the University of Chicago Press. I very much like his stress on "clarity, clarity, clarity" (103). He goes on to say that "it seems to me that clarity, and not just finding the right solution, is the goal most writers most prize" (129). Of course he also points out that clarity enables you to see your way through to the right solution, and I'm certainly hoping and expecting that I will by the end of this process be better placed to articulate the book's final conclusion, with which I've never been particularly happy.

election

2005-05-06T03:22:29Z

"Watching" the UK general election via the BBC's internet video feed, with (now) glances also at the Guardian's election weblog.

It feels very odd sympathizing with the Lib Dems. Just saw the Brent East result, for instance, and felt good about it. I so want Blair to be punished for the stupid Iraq war. (And plenty else.)

In Sedgefield, standing against Blair, the independent, father of a soldier who'd died, gave a strong speech, pointing out amongst other things that Blair had never gone to a hospital to visit troops injured in the war. He won something like 10% of the vote there.

pose

2005-04-24T18:53:08Z

I have to get this review out of the way today.

There are a number of other inconsistencies in Richard's book (I'm thinking here of Cultural Residues). For instance, at times she attacks the superficiality of the "pose," as well as its rigidity compared to the mobility of the aesthetic practices she generally favours, whereas in her analysis of Dittborn's collection of portraits, the pose rather "exhibits a certain recalcitrance [. . .] that insistently belies the visual plasticity of the electronic catalog of globalized identities and the oblivion-laden fluidities of its market recyclings" (72).

Likewise, the "cosmetic" is sometimes associated with the flotsam and jetsam of the neoliberal market (all surfaces, no passion); at other times, however, the cosmetic is associated with the baroque, with metaphor, and with the subversive destabilization of identity.

I think this problem, this ambivalence, is compounded by the fact that it's not always clear what or who the enemy is: is it (as it is most often) the politics of the postdictatorial consensus, with its rationalization, functionalization, and suppression of real difference? Or is it the neoliberal market, with its serial production but also mobility and evanescence? Or is it the forces of traditionalism, above all the Catholic church? Of course, it's all three, but there's certainly some confusion between them.

I'm also not sure I buy what Richard implies about the series--which she never really addresses, mind you, except in numerous scathing references to "serial production" and the like. I'd have thought that, even mathematically, the series is rather more interesting than she suggests: for a start, is it not incomplete, and so non-totalizing? In the same way that the market is also (from at least one perspective) also always incomplete, always foreseeing another possible exchange, and then another.

And what's the relationship between the series and either a) Fordism (the assembly line, etc.) or b) post-Fordism (supposedly a matter of feedback loops, non-linearity and so on)?

Meanwhile, I'm also trying to think of a place to start this review. Or maybe I should simply start in the middle.

residues

2005-04-18T08:35:23Z

(I will get to pirates soon, I promise...)

In the meantime, I've been reading Nelly Richard's Cultural Residues. This for a review essay that will also take in her two other recently translated books, The Insubordination of Signs and Masculine/Feminine. Though all of her books are more collections of essays than a single, consistent narrative, Cultural Residues is by some way her most significant publication. I read it in Spanish some time ago, shortly after it came out, and it's interesting (as whenever one revisits a book you think you know well) to see what I remember of it and what I don't.

In short, and perhaps unsurprisingly, overall I remember the readings rather than the more purely theoretical chapters. I still very much like, for instance, what she has to say about Eugenio Dittborn's collection of portraits taken by a Santiago street photographer in the 1970s. Also her analysis of the circulation of used clothes from the US is still illuminating. I'm looking forward to getting (back) to the chapter where she discusses the Chilean contribution to Seville's Expo 92.

But there's a fundamental contradiction in the text, only sometimes obscured by what is (especially in translation) rather tortuous prose. The general gist of her argument is that fragments are good; seriality and exchange, bad. And fragments are associated with the marginal residues of a semi-repressed aesthetic and popular culture, while seriality is associated with the neoliberalism ushered in by the Chilean postdictatorship. But this underestimates the series that lies at the heart of the neoliberal market: is it not as incomplete as any of the poetic renderings of crisis that Richard otherwise celebrates? And are not these same residues not the basis around which a nostalgic discourse is elaborated, mourning the fullness either of pre-coup society, or of the utopianism that still seemed possible before 1973?

Symptomatic of this contradiction is Richard's very ambivalent relationship with popular culture: on the one hand, as popular, it is to be affirmed; on the other, in its alliance with the (allegedly) homogenizing anti-culture of television and advertizing, it is to be lamented. So it is given a twist, and finally (for instance) the prime figure in her account of the second-hand clothing market is a transvestite: the popular has to be viewed under the sign of the marginal if is to be valorized, so the sexual or social "deviant" (here, transvestite, elsewhere prostitute, mental patient, or guerrilla) is taken as synechdoche for the people. Which is something of a distortion.

Anyhow, I have to write this review essay, and then at some point something on Richard's art criticism. And then I will write about her no longer.

argentina

2005-04-14T21:03:35Z

I just, rather belatedly, got around to finishing Negri's Diálogo sobre la globalización, la multitud, y la experiencia argentina. Really, it doesn't tell us much about Argentina, of course--neither Negri's own contribution to the book, nor the essays by Argentines that follow. The one thing I thought interesting, and that might rather set Negri's analysis apart from Virno's, is the notion that the Argentine crisis arises from the fact that postfordism hasn't been an option there:

la crisis del desarrollo en América latina en general y en particular en la Argentina está fuertemente determinada por la ausencia de aquellos rasgos de libertad que son necesarios par tener acceso a la posmodernidad, al pos-fordismo. Los regímenes de control estatal de tipo nacional-desarrollista eran incapaces de introducir aquellos elementos de libertad y de innovación/invención por parte del trabajo vivo, que son necesarios para construir una sociedad civil. (58)

In fact, I think I disagree with most of this argument: the association of postfordism with civil society, the notion that the Argentine state (or other Latin American states) remain states of national development, or even the idea that such societies have lacked the requisite elements of liberty and innovation (what about the informal economy?). But still, it's an interesting take.

In other news, I'm busy grading at the moment, but with formal teaching otherwise over, it'll be time soon to move first to the book and then to the new (SSHRC-funded!) pirates project. So that should be fun.

assassins

2005-04-13T22:49:49Z

The final book I taught on my Spanish-American survey course was Fernando Vallejo's La virgen de los sicarios: Our Lady of the Assassins. A splendid book, which I recommend whole-heartedly. And on the whole the students loved it too, bar the guys who were upset about its thematizing a gay relationship between an older and a younger guy. In fact, the relationship (rather, the relationships, as the narrator takes up with another boy after the first one is killed) are very interesting, and quite ambiguous--a factor flattened out in the film version, that portrays them in much more conventional terms. But they're what drive the book: a learned, educated older man takes up with a young assassin in the Medellin of the 1980s. He learns about Medellin's lawless underbelly, learns in fact how little he knows about a subculture that is quickly becoming the only culture left in the city.

Quite plotless, the narrative takes us through one assassination after another, almost all equally random, or sparked by the half-reasons of petty annoyance. A neighbour plays his drums too loud. The narrator moans that he'd like to kill the guy. Next day, seeing the neighbour on the street, the narrator's boyfriend pops him one. A common theme is the search for silence, for peace, for quiet. A taxi driver refuses to turn down the radio. The boyfriend takes him out. Official political discourse is nauseating and hypocritical: the solution is to shoot the television as it shows the president making a speech. (A better solution would be to shoot the president.)

The book is gripping not least for the narrator's humorous, curmudgeonly voice. In the end, however, this is what makes it so deeply disturbing: it tries to seduce the reader into his near-fascist outlook. Misanthropy has seldom been so attractive. Given the problems of crime, violence, and misery in Medellin the answer, he tells us, is simply to kill the poor. Prevent them reproducing. The assassins are exterminating angels, imposing order where God and the State have failed. Soon enough they'll polish each other off, too, and then we'll be done with the problem. He says all this with a half-smile, with his world-weary cynicism. It's almost a joke. But not quite.