Monday, December 06, 2010

Argumentos

BORGES «Tiene razón. El argumento es importante para un cuento; para una novela, no; basta para dar ocasión a que los caracteres se expresen». Cómo ha cambiado; yo cambié antes, en este sentido. Hoy, pese a todo, elijo defender los argumentos, porque algo debe decirse en su favor. BIOY «Sin embargo, yo creo que el gusto que nos lleva a leer novelas es el gusto por lo narrativo; es el mismo para el niño que oye un cuento que para un adulto que lle una novela; es el gusto de las historias, los cuento, las aventuras. Yo he creído siempre que el encanto de La Chartreuse de Parme proviene de que es un libro de aventuras para gente culta».

BIOY CASARES, Adolfo. Borges. 1a. ed. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Destino S.A., 2006. 1663 p. (Colección imago mundi; vol. 101). ISBN 950-732-085-7

Thursday, November 04, 2010

Girls don't

"Look - you upset Cho when you said you were going to meet me, so she tried to make you jealous. It was her way of trying to find out how much you liked her"

"Is that what she was doing?" said Harry, as Ron dropped on to the bench opposite them and pulled every dish within reach towards him. "Well, wouldn't it have been easier if she'd just asked me whether I liked her better than you?"

"Girls don't often ask questions like that," said Hermione.

Harry and Hermione en Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Citas Citables

Con motivo del estreno de la séptima película de Harry Potter estoy releyendo la saga completa y me doy cuenta de lo poco citables que son estos libros. Creo que el principal inconveniente es que casi todos los comentarios memorables tienen referencias in universe que no serían claras para lectores ajenos a la saga. Aunque la gran mayoría de los lectores de este blog tienen un conocimiento de moderado a vasto acerca de la obra de J.K. Rowling, me cuesta abandonar mi intento de universalidad.

Monday, August 09, 2010

Otras curvas

Borges me habla de una muchacha, parecida a Emita, pero más importante, evidentemente uruguaya, rica en caderas y otras curvas, muy simpática, que, por quién sabe qué circunstancias, ha llegado a los ventitantos años y a ser bastante culta, sin tener noticia alguna sobre la falsedad de los dragones.

Adolfo Bioy Casares en Borges

Monday, August 02, 2010

¿En qué iba?

Últimamente este blog está dedicado a presentar citas de los libros que leo, si ha estado desierto por un rato es porque he leído poco. Releer el archivo de mi blog es volver tras los pasos del gaviero, la tristeza de Alejandra, las lecciones de Gombrich y varios fragmentos. Si este post está pesado de citas, disculpen, es que me estoy desatrasando (desatrasándolos) de viajes y lecturas. Tanto el último libro que leí (This Book is Broken de Stuart Berman) y el que estoy leyendo ahora (Borges de Adolfo Bioy Casares) han cambiado la forma en que veo a algunos de mis héroes, los ha hecho humanos. Ambos son libros llenos de historias nimias, llenas de carisma, de eventos de la vida diaria, de humanidad, de cercanía.

On the subject guitar playing

I identified myself as a guitar player, but I wasn't a good guitar player by their standards. At one jam, Kevin came up behind me and grabbed my arms and pretended I was a puppet, saying, “I'm not gonna bring my guitar tomorrow!” And I thought, “Okay, that's his way of telling me I'm not up to snuff.” So my opinion changed on what my role was going to be in this band. I realized that, since I wasn't going to play guitar anymore, I was going to sing a couple of songs every now and then. I guess it changed my level of security/commitment. I was trying to get the chance to play the guitar next to Charles Spearin, who was blowing my mind, and Priddle was there, and we were making this beautiful noise sculptures. So to be told, “No, you're not going to play guitar anymore,” was like saying, “You're not invited to trick-or-treat with us.” But there are no hard feelings . . . and Kevin hates that I remember this story.

Leslie Feist en This Book is Broken

On the subject of Broken Social Scene

Broken Social Scene will be a band even when we're old and gray, even if it's just a potluck, because it was never something that needed to be defined.

Leslie Feist en This Book is Broken

Every interview I've ever fucking done has asked, “Is Broken Social Scene breaking up?” But you can't break something that's already broken! It's broken, it's permanently broken. The only way you could destroy it would be to actually fix it!

Emily Haines en This Book is Broken

Acerca de Borges y las mujeres

Marzo: Estela quería que Borges se acostara con ella. Una tarde, en la calle, se lo dijo brutalmente: “Nuestras relaciones no pueden seguir así. O nos acostamos o no vuelvo a verte”. Borges se mostró muy emocionado, exclamó: “Cómo ¿entonces no me tenés asco?” y le pidió permiso para abrazarla. Llamó un taxi. Ordenó al chofer: “A Constitución” y agregó, para Estela “Vamos a comer a Constitución. We must celebrate”.

Borges estaba muy enamorado de Silvina Bullrich. Un día, ésta le preguntó: “¿Qué hiciste anoche, cuando volviste del Tigre?”. Borges: “Fui caminando a casa, pero pasé frente a la tuya; tenía que pasar frente a tu casa esa noche”. Silvina le preguntó a qué hora había pasado. Borges: “A las doce”. Silvina: “A esa hora yo estaba en mi cuarto, en mi cama, con un amante”.

Adolfo Bioy Casares en Borges

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Voyagers

Then, at last, completing their long good-bye to the Solar System, broken free of the gravitational shackles that once bound them to the Sun, the Voyagers will make for the open sea of interstellar space. only then will Phase Two of their mission begin.

Their radio transmitters long dead, the spacecraft will wander for ages in the calm, cold interstellar blackness-where there is almost nothing to erode them. Once out of the Solar System, they will remain intact for a billion years or more, as they circumnavigate the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

We do not know whether there are other space-faring civilizations in the Milky Way. If they do exist, we do not know how abundant they are, much less where they are. But there is at least a chance that sometime in the remote future one of the Voyagers will be intercepted and examined by an alien craft.

Accordingly, as each Voyager left Earth for the planets and the stars, it carried with it a golden phonograph record encased in a golden, mirrored jacket containing, among other things; greetings in 59 human languages and one whale language; a 12-minute sound essay including a kiss, a baby's cry, and an EEG record of the meditations of a young woman in love; 116 encoded pictures, on our science, our civilization, and ourselves; and 90 minutes of the Earth's greatest hits-Eastern and Western, classical and folk, including a Navajo night chant, a Japanese shakuhachi piece, a Pygmy girl's initiation song, a Peruvian wedding song, a 3,000-year-old composition for the ch'in called "Flowing Streams," Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky, Louis Armstrong, Blind Willie Johnson, and Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode."

Space is nearly empty. There is virtually no chance that one of the Voyagers will ever enter another solar system-and this is true even if every star in the sky is accompanied by planets. The instructions on the record jackets, written in what we believe to be readily comprehensible scientific hieroglyphics, can be read, and the contents of the records understood, only if alien beings, somewhere in the remote future, find Voyager in the depths of interstellar space. Since both Voyagers will circle the center of the Milky Way Galaxy essentially forever, there is plenty of time for the records to be found-if there's anyone out there to do the finding. We cannot know how much of the records they would understand. Surely the greetings will be incomprehensible, but their intent may not be. (We thought it would be impolite not to say hello.) The hypothetical aliens are bound to be very different from us-independently evolved on another world. Are we really sure they could understand anything at all of our message? Every time I feel these concerns stirring, though, I reassure myself. Whatever the incomprehensibilities of the Voyager record, any alien ship that finds it will have another standard by which to judge us. Each Voyager is itself a message. In their exploratory intent, in the lofty ambition of their objectives, in their utter lack of intent to do harm, and in the brilliance of their design and performance, these robots speak eloquently for us.

But being much more advanced scientists and engineers than we-otherwise they would never be able to find and retrieve the small, silent spacecraft in interstellar space-perhaps the aliens would have no difficulty understanding what is encoded on these golden records. Perhaps they would recognize the tentativeness of our society, the mismatch between our technology and our wisdom. Have we destroyed ourselves since launching Voyager, they might wonder, or have we gone on to greater things?

Or perhaps the records will never be intercepted. Perhaps no one in five billion years will ever come upon them. Five billion years is a long time. In five billion years, all humans will have become extinct or evolved into other beings, none of our artifacts will have survived on Earth, the continents will have become unrecognizably altered or destroyed, and the evolution of the Sun will have burned the Earth to a crisp or reduced it to a whirl of atoms. Far from home, untouched by these remote events, the Voyagers, bearing the memories of a world that is no more, will fly on.

Carl Sagan in Pale Blue Dot

Friday, May 28, 2010

Uncertainty

This uncertainty has been a blessing and a curse for as long as we have been a touring ensemble, one that has taken its show from Halifax to Chicago to Mexico City to Moscow. And this uncertainty has frustrated (and will continue to frustrate, I'm sure) girlfriends, wives,parents, fans, managers, label peeps, agents, bandmates, producers, video directors, and, lest we forget, the press - but they all stick around for some reason. Probably because everyone likes a good dramatic epic, playing out in the saga that is our lives... and maybe in the music.

We are friends first, then bandmates. That has always been our ethos, and is what allows us to keep our sanity. What we created together in Toronto is a most wonderful thing to be a part of. It can keep you up at night, but it will get your ass out of bed in the morning too.

Brendan Canning in This Book is Broken

Friday, May 07, 2010

Correos

Las cartas que recibía Gilberto concluían, casi siempre, con el anhelo de una respuesta. Yo, en cambio, no anhelo nada.

Monday, April 05, 2010

Picasso

Acaso sea precisamente su maravillosa facilidad de dibujo, su virtuosismo técnico, lo que le haya hecho buscar afanosamente a Picasso lo sencillo y sin complejidades. Debe haber experimentado una especial satisfacción en dejar a un lado todas sus astucias y habilidades para realizar con sus propias manos algo que recuerda a las obras de los campesinos y los niños.

Picasso niega que experimente. Dice que no busca, sino que encuentra. Ridiculiza a los que quieren entender su arte. "Todos quieren comprender el arte. ¿Por qué no tratan de comprender el canto de un pájaro?" Naturalmente, tiene razón. La pintura no puede ser explicada por entero con palabras. Pero las palabras constituyen, a veces, indicaciones útiles, ayudan a esclarecer incomprensiones y pueden darnos, al  menos, un vislumbre de la situación en que los propios artistas se encuentran.

E. H. Gombrich en La Historia del Arte

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Fragmentos - Diplomacia

Para Lina Mondragón

Acuerdos, silencios
inflexible diplomacia

Ventanas, puertas
el gusto del misterio

razón, reflexión
distancia artificial

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

A petición de Sara

Hace unos días Sara pidió algo de Alejandra Pizarnik quien ha sido para mi la compañera de un viaje emprendido a fines del año anterior y que ahora me lleva por rumbos que no me esperaba en lo más mínimo. Ahora con motivo del regreso de Sara citaré dos poemas que fueron representativos cuando los leí, pero ahora parecen tan lejanos como el día en que Sara partió para España.

Cold in hand Blues

y qué es lo que vas a decir
voy a decir solamente algo
y qué es lo que vas a hacer
voy a ocultarme en el lenguaje
y por que
tengo miedo

Alejandra Pizarnik en El Infierno Musical I Figuras del presentimiento

La palabra que sana

Esperando que un mundo sea desenterrado por el lenguaje, alguien canta el lugar en que se forma el silencio. Luego comprobará que no porque se muestre furioso existe el mar, ni tampoco el mundo. Por eso cada palabra dice lo que dice y además más y otra cosa.

Alejandra Pizarnik en El Infierno Musical III Figuras de la ausencia

Monday, January 18, 2010

Hubiese querido más que esto y a la vez nada.

Alejandra Pizárnik en Extracción de la piedra de la locura IV, Extracción de la piedra de la locura.