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
The Bliss of Unawareness
"The room becomes a monumental absence. Absence of music, absence of moaning, absence of suffering, absence of a personal history, absence of a reason to be present. In this limbo I hover uninterrupted by my bird comrade. And I imagine the bliss of unawareness, the not knowing what we miss. Perhaps existing without the awareness of an absence is the most sublime experience of presence. If so, why do we need music for? Even when music does not involve any other senses, it is certain to arouse an aural experience and therefore a presence. If music then conjures a presence, would it not negate the possibility of this beautiful unawareness of absence? And if that were the case, the primordial purpose for my existence, the fundamental function of my violin nature, would deprive me, and those around me, access to the bliss of unawareness. But I should not be dammed for what I am." --The Lesser Violin
Vargas Llosa on the Death of Culture
“It is not surprising that the most representative literature of our times is ‘light,’ easy literature, which, without any sense of shame, sets out to be — as its primary and almost exclusive objective — entertaining. Chefs and fashion designers now enjoy the prominence that before was given to scientists. The vacuum left by the disappearance of criticism has been filled, imperceptibly, by advertising. Today . . . people usually play sports at the expense of, and instead of, intellectual pursuits. Today, the mass consumption of marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, crack, heroin, etc., is a response to a social environment that pushes men and women towards quick and easy pleasure.”
--Notes on the Death of Culture by Mario Vargas Llosa
Author | Reader Counterbalance
In the act of reading, we are to undergo a kind of transformation, such as W. Booth has described in connection with fiction in general: "The author creates, in short, an image of himself and another image of his reader; he makes his reader, as he makes his second self, and the most successful reading is one in which the created selves, author and reader, can find complete agreement."
Writing under the moon.
"The moon shines a shameless light, drunk, spilling everything. I take the blubbering of the moon on my skin as I take life unexpected." --The Lesser Violin
"I am water..."
In keeping with his oceanic identity, Teaston maintains the presence of THE BOOK OF I on the walls of Barcelona.
The Book of I
Borges on literature and the mind.
"I believe in psychological literature, and I think that all literature is fundamentally psychological." --Borges
Naturally! Why bother writing if we are not to delve into the inner realms of the mind?
Path Making is Really Path Breaking
"Caminante, son tus huellas el camino, y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace camino, y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino, sino estelas en la mar."
Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing else;
wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking.
Walking makes the road, and on glancing behind
one sees the path that he will never trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road, just foam in the sea.
--Antonio Machado
On Authenticity...
“Human beings are normally complex rather than seamless abstractions. Individual people have added one identity to another in ways that strain the very concept of identity. We need to learn how to negotiate the otherness of the world. Real authenticity means being more than one.” --Doris Sommer
The Lost Identity of Our Sounds
"Because all the sounds, once their time is past, enter a vast amalgam of vibrations that merges and travels to the stars. Other sounds get absorbed by material bodies in close proximity, like people, animals, plants, concrete, and dirt. These bodies vibrate in turn and produce their own sounds that will travel to the stars as well. Every audible entity rises to the stratosphere and loses itself in the process." --The Lesser Violin
