tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post4048754509219922243..comments2024-03-29T03:04:00.853-05:00Comments on Wuthering <br>Expectations: I believe in their infinite number - or Pessoa's fun with heteronymsAmateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-85343217166542417682012-01-24T17:20:46.836-06:002012-01-24T17:20:46.836-06:00How weird. Quibbling with some details aside, and ...How weird. Quibbling with some details aside, and limited by what I have & haven't read, and blah blah blah, that <i>New Yorker</i> list is how I would organize Bolaño. One of the books of short stories or <i>By Night in Chile</i> are great places to start. The latter might actually have some resonance with the French WWII literature that you know well.<br /><br /><i>Ma femme</i> is a great champion of <i>Paris Peasant</i>, which for no good reason I have not read. <br /><br />Michel Leiris is another ex-Surrealist with a real sense of humor.Amateur Reader (Tom)https://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-79007213504128859052012-01-24T17:02:32.175-06:002012-01-24T17:02:32.175-06:00Breton was so ripe for parody because he was so bl...Breton was so ripe for parody because he was so bloody self-important. A few of the Surrealists had a sense of humor, though. My own favorite is Louis Aragon, who translated "The Hunting of the Snark" into French and said of shining shoes that it was art: "Art mineur je le concède mais art art art."<br /><br />I just ran across this user's guide to Bolano:<br /><br />http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/01/in-the-labyrinth-a-users-guide-to-bolano.html#entry-more<br /><br />Can I trust it, roughly, about where to begin?Jennyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00251983804060081813noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-68553425847442289992012-01-23T23:18:33.871-06:002012-01-23T23:18:33.871-06:00Someone who wrote The Savage Detectives had been r...Someone who wrote <i>The Savage Detectives</i> had been reading Pessoa, at least. One of the entries - <a href="http://wordswithoutborders.org/article/the-many-masks-of-max-mirebelais/" rel="nofollow">this one</a> - in <i>Nazi Literature of the Americas</i> is about "the Caribbean's bizarre answer to Pessoa," except this faux Pessoa does not write poems, but only plagiarizes them.<br /><br />With the purges, though, I was actually thinking of Pessoa's Parisian contemporaries, Breton and the Surrealists. The purges among the visceral realists are presumably Belano and Lima's deliberate parody of Breton.Amateur Reader (Tom)https://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-23345509017735482902012-01-23T22:57:19.162-06:002012-01-23T22:57:19.162-06:00I do not believe that Pessoa ever expelled any of ...<em>I do not believe that Pessoa ever expelled any of his creations from the movement which would have been a good joke, especially if the poet he expelled had been Fernando Pessoa.</em><br /><br />Do I detect (ahem) that someone's been reading <em>The Savage Detectives</em>? If not, even funnier!nicolehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17532641082944082516noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-88521425003162841672012-01-23T13:23:37.089-06:002012-01-23T13:23:37.089-06:00Yes.
That's a great comparison. Pessoa write...Yes.<br /><br />That's a great comparison. Pessoa writes about himself as a kind of dramatist, but an improvisatory actor works similarly.Amateur Reader (Tom)https://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-75377993721911989342012-01-23T12:37:18.728-06:002012-01-23T12:37:18.728-06:00Perhaps it's the same phenomenon as Peter Sell...Perhaps it's the same phenomenon as Peter Sellers, who claimed he did not exist apart from his creations onscreen. He said, "There is no real me. I do not exist. There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed."Jennyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00251983804060081813noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-18925405032200988052012-01-20T17:19:24.383-06:002012-01-20T17:19:24.383-06:00Pessoa took an idea implicit in the Modernist proj...Pessoa took an idea implicit in the Modernist projects of a number of writers and pushed it to an extreme (and difficult) conclusion. This would be interesting even if the poems were not as good as they are. <br /><br />And then it turns out that Pessoa was a genuinely world-class poet, once he figured out how to disappear, which makes the whole thing even wilder.Amateur Reader (Tom)https://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-91281680286061792082012-01-20T11:56:36.572-06:002012-01-20T11:56:36.572-06:00Zenith's introduction to the poems (which I gl...Zenith's introduction to the poems (which I glanced at last night) puts the heteronyms in the context of other authors' experiments with other-authorness, but it's still striking, the extent to which Pessoa goes to make himself (what self?) disappear amid this created throng. I can't stop connecting this to your post about the end of Little Dorrit; one almost expects Pessoa to finally just - *pop*- disappear altogether.seraillonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17654593356535433945noreply@blogger.com