I was terribly bad last week, and bought books: Sabine's Notebook, by Nick Bantock, and The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano.

They are both good, but the latter is Most Wonderous.

However, in the first 20 pages, there are pencil notes scribbled all over it by some poor, poor reader who didn't seem to get it. They apparently seemed to believe that every comment, every pretty image and glorious, decadent, heavily laden scentance was hiding some overwhelming Political Philosophy. Which probably would be watered down into a rank statement such as: "I am Communist," "Christianity is Evil," "The Map Is Located Southeart of the Himalayas between Two Large Rocks over which is the Symbol of a Falcon Eating a Woman's Afterbirth." Whatever the note-writer had preconcieved, which looked like some combination of the above.

No such luck, methinks.

It is beautiful and it is More Than What The Words Say, but not that way. I don't know how to describe it, save to say that one shouldn't try to read Galeno, Neruda, Pavic, Plath, Nabokov or Lewis Goddamn Carrol like they were Marx or Freud. Or worse, like one is Marx or Freud, or McCarthy.

And you can't-- or you oughtnt-- read every book the same way.

Try to read e.e. cummings like W.H. Auden. Try to read Milorad Pavic like... well, almost anyone else. Maybe Suniti Namijoshi (and it is verily worth it to read Building Babel, by the way, which I read /after/ starting The Tower) is comparable. As a matter of fact, I'm desperate to find other Serbo-Coratian authors to see if his style is simply because he is genius, or if that level of metaphor and imagery is a Serbian Thing.

A part of me wonders why I care, as long as they are reading, eh?

Because they seem to have given up after 20 pages, confused. And here I was relieved, because now I wouldn't have to put up with more of their pedantic scribbling. Aii...

This is what Pavic says about readers and writers in the introduction to The Dictionary of the Khazars:

"Imagine two men holding a captured puma on a rope. If they want to approach each other, the puma will attack, because the rope will slaken; only if they both pull simultaneously on the rope is the puma equidistant from the two of them. That is why it is so hard for him who reads and him who writes to reach each other: between them lies a mutual thought captured on ropes that they pull in opposite directions. If we were now to ask the puma--in other words, that thought--how it percieved these two men, it might answer that at the ends of the rope those to be eaten are holding someone they cannot eat..."

<<agé chose>>

0 comments.notation.profile.DW.Quois.Lochinvar.smut.Tambourin.DiaryLand.DeadNazi