Today I take refuge in Borges.
"Reality is not always probable, or likely." -- Jorge Luis Borges
A sentinel, the cat.
Not that he’s guarding my house from danger, but that he hisses at conventional literature. He can sniff the blight and he skips through it. But he would dig into literary narrative with the left paw, with the right, he thrashes traditional expectations. That’s my cat!
I'm a fucking immigrant.
With my family, I left Cuba as a political refugee.
I learned English as a second language.
I was the first student in my high school to attend Harvard University.
I did so on a partial scholarship. The rest of the money I needed I earned by washing dishes.
I graduated Cum Laude in engineering (even when my knowledge of English was limited).
I became a physician.
By the way, I paid my student loans in full.
I earned a Masters Degree in Latin American Literature.
I became a psychiatrist in New York.
With the help of federal grants, I advanced the knowledge in the field of adolescent schizophrenia and autism.
I helped thousands of patients in my psychiatric practice.
I earned a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.
I have published two very provocative novels. (More are coming)
And at this stage in my life, I’m very sad about the country that embraced my ambitions.
I recently left the US in search of a more enlightened society.
I'm a fucking immigrant.
Moving ahead Shakespeare style
"Our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything." --William Shakespeare
And I will find the tongues in trees, the books in the running brooks, the sermon in the stones, but above all, the good in everything and everyone.
About bread...
"This must be the smell of life. I don’t know how else to describe this sensation. So simple, yet so deeply rooted inside my brain. Bread can keep me alive, or maybe I’m alive so I can eat bread. So powerful, so elemental. And it doesn’t matter where I am, what city, what continent. This smell burs inside of me and reaches the core of my existence. More compelling than ecstasy, more potent than fear. I think of bread as the primordial substance. The man makes bread so he can continue to be a man who eats bread. Circular, never ending." --Viator
Freud on human nature
"In the depths of my heart I can't help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless." --Sigmund Freud
Looking at the world around me, I agree with him 110%.
A medal and a review
The 2016 Goethe Medal goes to writer Yurii Andrukhovych from Ukraine. Every year the Goethe-Institut confers the official decoration of the Federal Republic of Germany to honour figures who have performed outstanding service to convey the German language and promote international cultural relations. And coincidentally, my review of Andrukhovych's novel TWELVE CIRCLES (Spuyten Duyvil, 2015) was just published by Rain Taxi Review of Books.
Flaubert on books and pyramids
"Books aren't made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids. There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it's back-breaking, sweaty, time-consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously." --Gustave Flaubert
Winterson on art as antimatter...
"It is certainly true that a criterion for true art, as opposed to its cunning counterfeit, is its ability to take us where the artist has been, to this other different place where we are free from the problems of gravity. When we are drawn into the art we are drawn out of ourselves. We are no longer bound by matter, matter has become what it is: empty space and light." --Jeanette Winterson
Hot from the press...
So happy to receive advance copies of "Air," my new novel. Coming this September from Spuyten Duyvil Press.
At the edge of the Mediterranean Sea
After several years of eating a Mediterranean diet, I decided not to just eat the food, but to live there, at the edge of the very body of water. Not a surprise since I'm only following the tracings of my genetic map. And pierced by the line between the two blues, I will write my best prose.
The Matrix
Ahead, the interconnected neural chords. Join me.
Woolf on breaking fiction...
"The proper stuff of fiction does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction; whatever one honestly thinks, whatever one honestly feels. No perception comes amiss; every good quality whether of the mind or spirit is drawn upon and used and turned by the magic of atto something little or large, but endlessly different., everlastingly new. All that fiction asks of us is that we should break her and bully her, honour and love her, till she yields to our bidding, for so her youth is perpetually renewed and her sovereignty assured." --Virginia Woolf
Viator
When the path becomes a river, and the waters burn. When a step is nothing but a dream. When leaping forward grows flowers on its skin, we know we are viators. So we burst, ahead.
Enrique Vila-Matas on writing...
"He admirado siempre los escritores que cada día emprenden un viaje hacia lo desconicido y sin embargo están todo el tiempo sentados en una habitación. Las puertas de sus cuartos están cerradas, nunca se mueven, y sin embargo el confinamiento les proporciona una absoluta libertad para ser quienes deseen ser, para ir donde les lleven sus pensamientos." --Riba in "Dublinesca"
Sneak preview of the cover of AIR, my new novel
Forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil Press
Not all books are for all people.
Considering possible readers, Clarice Lispector tells us the following about her novels, and I agree unanimously:
"This book is like any other book. But I would be happy if it were only read by people whose souls are already formed. Those who know that the approach, of whatever it may be, happens gradually and painstakingly--even passing through the opposite of what it approaches. They who, only they, will slowly come to understand that this book takes nothing from no one." --Clarice Lispector
Hominem Viator
Rules to consider when drafting my next novel:
Rule #1 - You have to get away from where you are.
Rule #2 - Once you get somewhere, repeat Rule #1.
Before the next book I stand.
“Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome.”
--Marguerite Duras, Writing
On words...
"Words mean the world when the world means little to me, which is all I can say."
--Nadya, in THE ROAR OF THE RIVER