Article in Lacanian journaclass="underline" “The Scopic Drive and the Wandering Quest for the I.”
Contest. A Downbeat “Blindfold Test.” Charles vs. the narrator.
After all his many occupations and avocations, we finally arrive at the truth, the ultimate truth about Charles: jazz. His fanatical competitiveness — the pure form of that same quality which, more often than not, leads instead to enforced mediocrity among Argentine intellectuals — knows no limits.
Around the time María Elvira was captivating me.
— And do you recognize this one?
I had learned to adopt a poker face in this situation, whether the song in question was obvious or obscure, because my answering in the affirmative (or, I imagine, at all) seemed to send him into a profound depression.
Luckily, it was one of those Miles Davis records some of my other friends had bored me with before.
— Kind of Blue, I said.
I even managed to identify a piece by Chet Baker — thirty years since he’d last been “cool.”
— Ah, but what about this one?
I listened attentively for a moment. John Coltrane, I told him.
— The dove is mistaken, cooed Charles triumphantly — and what about this one …?
It was a question of saving face. I didn’t want to compound my error, but went all-in just the same. I tossed out all the names I knew, like a juggler with his pins, but I still managed to get several wrong in a row, mistaking Johnny Hodges for Ben Webster, Archie Shepp for Ornette Coleman, Cannonball Adderley for Albert Ayler, and Sun Ra for Lester Bowie, all to Charles’s great amusement, as I went on trying both to win and to lose — hoping in this way to win either my friend’s respect or, barring that, his gratitude.
— You’re a phony. And Marina even told me you write a music column for El Canditato Gauche! The Madagascan Candidate, more like …
— I focus on rock.
— That’s no excuse. Still, it must be hilarious. [a riot]
Then he made another thrust. Thankfully, I knew this one too. His selections were getting worse and worse. John McLaughlin, Mahavishnu Orchestra — a nightmare from which musical history is still trying to awake, and which continues to baffle and horrify neophytes. And then, my most reviled band of alclass="underline" Weather Report. What they used to call “Fusion,” a decade or more ago. All these played on a Revox turntable with tangential tonearm.
After the last piece (embarrassingly, I’d nodded off after getting another one wrong), I said:
— This one sounds like one of those interminable Beatles gag-songs, like “You Know my Name, Look up the Number …”
— No, you Neanderthal. It’s Mingus.
— I may write for a jazz magazine, but I did say it was a rock column …
Sad skin of the universe / Triste piel del universe.
Then: Morecambe & Wise / Gilbert & George. Dream sequence.
Second story: “St. Mawr.”
Vera Villalobos fax about what not to miss in London.
The D. H. Lawrence story Leavis was so enamored of (and, likewise — though [Y.W., J.W., D.T.F., W.S.?] didn’t mean to let this slip — Octavio Paz), and from which I derived no pleasure at all. Was I even capable? Have another look.
Get the cheap Penguin paperback. It has another story or novella included under the same cover. A no-frills sort of edition.
Kitaj’s The Londonist.
Note: as I’ve already stated (I think), I read “St. Mawr” in the village of Tor, Spain, in an Argentinian edition with the title La mujer y la bestia (The Woman and the Beast).
Detective Stories
Venus Cascabel
Venus Rattlesnake
Regina Constrictor
Vernon Gish
Bruce — Bruno — Terrier
Inés
Completes first edit in Basavilbaso—
He worked as if piecing together court records (here or in La Plata?)
Nail-biter, like Ada
Ways of dining, both indoors and out
Maspero / Betelgeuse.
Basilio Ugarte
Someone confuses Basavilbaso with Virasoro.
Deafness: as used by Kermode.
O Viamonte. Ob-viously
Parallel confusions (i.e., the same ones): Barnett Newman / Wallace Stevens. Additionally: Jakobson on Nabokov. Samuel Butler / Pessoa: lies as imprecision.
Others: Lino and Lalo Scacchi. Remo Sabatani. Eloi eloi lama sabachthani?
Time to decide on our own, true name for Dos, a.k.a. Delfín Ambrosio Hurtado Iriondo. A transcription of the process. The minutes from some kind of rite or ceremony of initiation:
The Quintain
The … have a look in Chatwin and Pessoa
The Invunche
The manipanso / maniputo / African fetish
The Go-Between(er?)
Committee members present: Elena, Nicasio, Belisario.
And once you’ve come up with a good name: sell the rest, settle for the leftovers.
Parsnip & Pimpernel (Waugh): Auden & Isherwood.
Central committee, without Nicasio. “Sircular Cymmetry.” Liturgical glossary. Lycergical glossary. The noise of many glossaries
The journey. List
Cheap Penguin edition: The Virgin and the Gypsy. The cover of La Mujer y la bestia.
Passive apnea: Monitor / Merrimac.
The passive voice, using “one” as a third-person pronoun.
What goes around comes around / Snowball.
The story of my friends visiting the dying Virgilio Piñera. Modest porteño scene of a man sitting at his desk writing, a scene very much like the one in that Kubrick film where a Marcos Zucker lookalike (Krapp?) is writing a book with the same title as the movie (or, anyway, the book on which the movie is based). With an Angolan nurse (male). Disease located right there. The comment: “What goes around comes around.” The lumbar religion (Nurlihrt dixit).
Sluglike. Non-peristaltic virgin.
A pinnacle of elegance vs. the Mamarracho.
First catalogue of stories (written and partially written):
Early
The Imitation of an Ounce
The Scent of Thunbergias
America (The Fasting of Lourdes?)
Occupation (after Henry James)
Returns
The Old Bachelor