After a wonderfully summery fall, the winter has arrived all of a sudden to San Francisco. Today has been dark, cold and rainy. I’ve spent the last couple of days at home, hiding under piles of blankets and books and chocolate and silence. Tonight will be a long night, we’re gaining an hour because it will supposedly save us light (wtf), and my usual insomnia is making me catch up with my blog reading. I just had a couple of glasses of Bosnian wine and I read this:

No tomar alcohol significa acercarse a todas las situaciones en la desnudez pura de la incomodidad social. “All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment”, dijo Walt. En este caso, el castigo es sobrevivir a los que no queremos (a los extraños, a los conocidos casuales, a la familia lejana) en un doloroso estado de sobriedad. Cuando uno está ebrio nunca se pregunta qué estoy haciendo aquí (la respuesta es bebiendo, pues), ni hace cuánto. Estar sobrio significa estar tristemente apegado a la cronologí­a y los hechos: los minutos perdidos en la aridez brutal del small talk, las horas interminables en casas ajenas, las largas superficialidades necesarias para establecer tenues conexiones personales. Lo único que nos entretiene es pensar la forma más ágil de emprender la huída, las creativas excusas que hay que elaborar para irse temprano, no vaya uno a decir la verdad: “I’d rather go home to my dog and read a 500 page book about the IRS”.

Even drinking I find small talk incredibly exhausting and soul-sucking. So I also make excuses to be able to go home and make quiche. Or hide under piles of blankets and books and chocolate. And drink wine by myself. Which reminded me of this poem by Charles Baudelaire, “Get drunk” from “Paris Spleen”.

One should always be drunk. That’s the great thing; the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and bowing you to the earth, you should be drunk without respite.

Drunk with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please. But get drunk.

And if sometimes you should happen to awake, on the stairs of a palace, on the green grass of a ditch, in the dreary solitude of your own room, and find that your drunkenness is ebbing or has vanished, ask the wind and the wave, ask star, bird, or clock, ask everything that flies, everything that moans, everything that flows, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask them the time; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird and the clock will all reply: “It is Time to get drunk! If you are not to be the martyred slaves of Time, be perpetually drunk! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please.”

And here’s the original version in French, “Enivrez-Vous”:

Il faut être toujours ivre.
Tout est là:
c’est l’unique question.
Pour ne pas sentir
l’horrible fardeau du Temps
qui brise vos épaules
et vous penche vers la terre,
il faut vous enivrer sans trêve.
Mais de quoi?
De vin, de poésie, ou de vertu, à votre guise.
Mais enivrez-vous.
Et si quelquefois,
sur les marches d’un palais,
sur l’herbe verte d’un fossé,
dans la solitude morne de votre chambre,
vous vous réveillez,
l’ivresse déjà diminuée ou disparue,
demandez au vent,
à la vague,
à l’étoile,
à l’oiseau,
à l’horloge,
à tout ce qui fuit,
à tout ce qui gémit,
à tout ce qui roule,
à tout ce qui chante,
à tout ce qui parle,
demandez quelle heure il est;
et le vent,
la vague,
l’étoile,
l’oiseau,
l’horloge,
vous répondront:
“Il est l’heure de s’enivrer!
Pour n’être pas les esclaves martyrisés du Temps,
enivrez-vous;
enivrez-vous sans cesse!
De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise.”

[via Poetry Dispatch and Other Notes from the Underground]

Beautiful video by filmmaker Andrea Dorfman, and poet/singer/songwriter, Tanya Davis.

Davis wrote the beautiful poem and performed in the video which Dorfman directed, shot, animated by hand and edited.

Society is afraid of alonedom, like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements, like people must have problems if, after a while, nobody is dating them. but lonely is a freedom that breaths easy and weightless and lonely is healing if you make it.

[via Paloma]

Almost since its publication in 1930, the comic book Tintin in the Congo has attracted criticism for its racist portrayal of the Congolese. Most notably, in 2007 a Congolese student in Belgium sued the publisher (and I gave my opinion on the controversy here). Four years later, he finally got his hearing. From Africa is a Country:

It’s been a long time coming. The case that was opened in 2007 by Bienvenu Mbutu Mondono against the publishers of Hergé’s ‘Tintin in the Congo’ (published in some languages as ‘Tintin in Africa’) finally got its hearing at the Brussels court yesterday. “The problem is not Hergé’s,” Mondono’s lawyer told the press. “The problem is the commercialisation of a comic manifestly spreading ideas that are based on racial superiority.” The publisher’s lawyer warned a ban would be like opening Pandora’s Box. “What with the anti-Semitic passages in Dickens’s work? Mark Twain? The Bible?” It’s unlikely the judge will forbid the future publishing of the comic outright. Settling for a warning (like the English editions carry these days) sounds more probable. After being postponed several times, the case should come to a close later this year. That’s when Spielberg’s Hollywood version of Tintin will hit the theatres here. Timing is everything.

* That is Henri Dendoncker in the photo. He played Tintin for a publicity stunt back in 1931. During World War II, he was caught spying by the Gestapo but survived. He later moved to Great Britain. And to South Africa in 1960. Never to be heard of since.

I can’t wait to see the movie.

When I first started learning English nobody told me about the different forms of “y’all” to talk about you in plural. Years later, working as a Spanish teacher for foreigners, I always had trouble explaining “vosotros” to English speakers. It wasn’t until I moved to the US that I discovered the existence, and the virtues, of the “y’all” form. If only I had known earlier… So why do most English speakers keep it almost a secret from foreigners? As the Johnson blog points out, for stupid reasons…

The common view, among outsiders, is that insofar as “y’all” is from the [American South], it’s also a bit sub-literate and redneck.

That’s a bit snooty. The fact is that “y’all” is pretty useful, as formal English doesn’t have a distinctly plural version of “you.” There is no “yous” (except in places like New York city and New Jersey, sometimes in the form of “youse guys”). This suggests that the referent is usually clear enough in context. But the existence of “y’all,” the related “you-all” and “all-y’all,” and other workarounds like “you guys” and “you lot” show that there is, in fact, room in the market for new second-person plural pronouns. Visitors to Texas typically realize the value of “y’all” within 48 hours.

New York City based Nigerian writer Teju Cole has taken an interest in fait divers, those brief news stories usually about a minor event, usually bad, often written with a certain dry irony. A similar journalistic genre exists in Spain under the name sucesos, although as Cole explains, the fait divers has a long and important history in French literature, influencing the writing of Flaubert, Gide, Camus, Le Clézio and Barthes. In Francophone literature, Cole says, it crossed the line from low to high culture. Here are two examples he gives:

Raoul G., of Ivry, an untactful husband, came home unexpectedly and stuck his blade in his wife, who was frolicking in the arms of a friend.

A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frérotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake.

Inspired by this type of writing, and while doing research for his new non-fiction boock about Lagos, Cole decided to write his own fait divers about the current news from Nigeria and started posting them on his twitter feed. Here some examples:

In Ikotun, Mrs Ojo, who was terrified of armed robbers, died in her barricaded home, of smoke inhalation.

“Nobody shot anybody,” the Abuja police spokesman confirmed, after the driver Stephen, 35, shot by Abuja police, almost died.

Knowledge is power. He graduated in business administration in Calabar,and Charles Okon has since administered sixteen armed robberies.

To signal certain differences between his writing and that of the French journalists, Cole calls his take on this form small fates. “I like the near-rhyme of fates and faits”, he says, “even though they have nothing to do with each other”. And this is how he explains the significance of this genre for Nigeria:

Fifty years after British colonialism, ten years after military rule, Nigerians are free. Not economically free, not yet, and we see the effect of that lack of economic freedom in the kinds of crimes that are committed. But they are free in important ways. You can live where you want, associate with whom you want. You can sue people in court, gather to practice your religion, under the leadership of whichever holy man or charlatan you prefer, and you can marry and divorce as you please. This is a major thing. This is modernity, and to tell these stories, to give the protagonists of these losses even that little bit of attention, is to honor the fact that they are there, that their life goes on. It’s not depressing at all, just as reading the Brooklyn Eagle and New York Herald from a hundred years ago is not depressing, though just about the only mention of blacks was as protagonists in crime reports. The fact is: they were there. And fate arranged a small form of immortality for them in that crime report.

These pieces are generally not events of the kind that alter a nation’s course. They are not about movie stars or, with exceptions, famous politicians. They are about the small fates of ordinary people. The idea is not to show that Lagos, or Abuja, or Owerri, are worse than New York, or worse than Paris. Rather, it’s a modest goal: to show that what happens in the rest of the world happens in Nigeria too, with a little craziness all our own mixed in. In this odd sort of way, bad news is good news because these instances of bad news reveal a whole world of ongoing human experience that is often ignored or oversimplified.

Go read the whole thing here. And once you’re done, go read his brilliant debut novel Open City.

Hillary Rodham Clinton visited Spain on Saturday for the first time since she’s been Secretary of State (her last visit was in 1997 as a First Lady). And although her flash visit was less than 24 hours she managed to squeeze in several meetings, including the King (who should be limited to photo ops as, really, what is he to say about foreign policy?), the Spanish foreign minister Trinidad Jiménez, as well as President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and the presidential hopeful Mariano Rajoy. I’m not going to comment on the contents of such meetings, which are always quite predictable (“We are very grateful that the ties between our two nations run deep”, “Spain is a trusted partner and a valued friend”, bla bla bla).

Instead, let me present you with this picture:

Hillary Rodham Clinton meeting with President Zapatero and opposition leader Rajoy who both needed translators (photos from Albert Cuesta's blog)

WTF, Spanish politicians, isn’t it time to start brushing up your English? It might be too late for Zapatero, but why isn’t Rajoy spending a bit less time trimming his beard or discussing tennis in his Facebook page, and instead spending more time studying some English? It would be nice if the Secretary of State of the US, where Spanish is the second language and growing, could speak some Spanish too. But c’mon guys, it’s 2011 and it’s time to make some efforts.

No wonder Spanish language politics are so fucked up. Sigh.

In a recent article, journalist Johann Hari explains why he thinks good old-fashioned books will survive electronic reading devices arguing that, in the age of internet, “physical paper books are a technology we need more, not less”.

Hari quotes critic David Ulin, who in his book The Lost Art of Reading – Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, admits that in the last few years, in an apartment full of books, he can no longer find within himself the quiet necessary to read. I’ve been increasingly feeling that way, too, with books full of promises gathering dust on my shelves while my reading diet continues to be dominated by internet pickings.

Hari’s article is just a reminder of why some days I miss books so much, and why we need them:

And here’s the function that the book – the paper book that doesn’t beep or flash or link or let you watch a thousand videos all at once – does for you that nothing else will. It gives you the capacity for deep, linear concentration. As Ulin [author of The Lost Art of Reading – Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time] puts it: “Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction…. It requires us to pace ourselves. It returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise.”

[...]

That’s why we need books, and why I believe they will survive. Because most humans have a desire to engage in deep thought and deep concentration. Those muscles are necessary for deep feeling and deep engagement. Most humans don’t just want mental snacks forever; they also want meals.

Poetry can be so disappointing sometimes…

(seen on Dolores Park, where else?)

Learn French in one word, according to Michelle. It works in 99.5% of situations. But like good jam, use it sparingly.

[via While you were sleeping]

There’s been a bit of a flurry in the internets over VS Naipaul’s latest, in which he keeps insisting on showing the world what a pompous ass he is:

In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society on Tuesday about his career, Naipaul, who has been described as the “greatest living writer of English prose”, was asked if he considered any woman writer his literary match.

He replied: “I don’t think so.” Of Austen he said he “couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world”. He felt that women writers were “quite different”. He said: “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.”

The author, who was born in Trinidad, said this was because of women’s “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world”.

“And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too,” he said. He added: “My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh. I don’t mean this in any unkind way.”

His views on women (and blacks, for that matter) are so dated that they become laughable and not something to get angry about. His stupidity speaks for itself (especially because he probably wouldn’t pass this test).

That’s why I enjoyed Ta-Nehisi Coates’ comment about the pointlessness of trying to “educate” someone like Naipaul:

I frequently mention that I am a product of black consciousness. One of the better lessons of my faith is that you don’t waste your time trying to win over people who do not like you. I deeply believe in black people’s right to ponder themselves and their place in the world, minus the burden of educating white racists. Likewise, I am convinced that people who construct their canon based on what is, or isn’t, swinging between the author’s legs must confront themselves.

This is what I was driving at in my comments about women’s lit being something more than a tool for convincing men to be less sexist. I’m looking to avoid a subtly demeaning subtext which holds that reading, say, Jamaica Kincaid is something you should do–like flossing or taxes or laundry. I don’t want to speak for women writers, but I recoil at the idea of someone reading my book because they really should read a black author or two. I don’t want to be an icebreaker at your corporation’s Kwanzaa gathering.

This prompted a response by a female commenter named Hilzoy who said that he’s still a writer “deeply worth reading” as he’s one of the writers she’s learned the most from and so she would “hate to have been deprived of that”. To which Coates agreed, pointing at the “the crucial importance of not becoming a shallow reactionary”. I tend to agree, especially with the way he phrased it in an older column:

Ty Cobb was both a great baseball player and a bigot. The notion that we must choose between the two, that one mitigates the other, that good people don’t do deplorable things, that deplorable people don’t do great things, emanates from our own inability to understand that bigotry is not strictly the preserve of orcs.

However, I also agree with the points made by Zunguzungu chiming in the debate:

The problem with Naipaul isn’t that there is no profit in reading him, if you read nimbly and carefully and thoughtfully. The problem is that another world is possible and inevitable, one that he has never known and which you will not know better from reading him. And there are so many writers who see so much more clearly than him — so many writers who will challenge your inheritance of passed illusions, in ways he never will — that to spend your time with him is to close your eyes to a great deal that is within your grasp.

I have read less than a book by Naipaul (A bend in the river, and didn’t finish it because of reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of the book), so I can’t say whether I find his writing really is that gorgeous, or to know if I agree with Zungungu when he says that he’s famous mainly because he “didn’t challenge the myopic blind spots of a world long been confused by the humanity of brown people”. But I do tend to avoid biographical details about authors (or filmmakers for that matter) that I enjoy. Because at the end of the day, there are too many people out there with questionable views. And many assholes with talent.