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devitalise · 1 year ago

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Omg I really thought this would be the month I'd beat you to the punch with a check-in but once again time has evaded me & May is, in fact, over in a mere few days 🤥 I think I need to start keeping a physical calendar again to avoid these jumpscares BUT ANYWAY!!! MAY READS!!!! END OF SUCCESSION THOUGHTS!!! WHAT ON EARTH IS IMO GONNA WATCH & READ NEXT!!! 🎤

maybe next month you'll get me.. answering this a lil early so excuse any thoughts that aren't Fully Developed i'll just be away from my laptop and you know how much i love these

may book wrap up

in cold blood by truman capote

i can't remember what i said about this last month. maybe i'm the only person in the world who didn't know this was a "true crime novel" i thought i just picked up a fictional crime genre book. my mistake! general personal thoughts on the gross peversive nature of true crime aside, i think this as investigative journalism (with a questionable bias, fictionalised events, general capote tendecy to lie and gossip) i didn't hate reading it. i could absolutely tell how taken Capote was with Perry Smith in this, he kept coming back to reiterate details about his upbringing and i had to skim parts just because they were of little interest to me. i haven't read anything where the author has managed to so completely remove themselves from their writing like this before. took me a while to read it was a kindle choice and i struggled with reading this month.

podcast: overdue (really enjoyed this podcast set up, actually.) music: red dead redemption 2 soundtrack and this playlist

the piano teacher by elfriede jelinek

unlikable loathsome woman in Austria, this time. really dislike books like this, and this was barely any different. i think Jelinek as an author is neat, i see why she won a nobel peace prize, i'd love to be able to read German to get what was lost in translation. didn't love the story at all here. menacing and gross. what i found most interesting (and hated reading in equal parts) was erica's fucked up relationship with her mother. hate your mother hate the part of her that lives within you, etc etc. i thought this would be sexier, or at least just have more sex like the blurb promised, but other than a few voyeuristic encounters it lacked it completely. sexless and stale. a lot of men dislike this book, though, so if anyone asks then i absolutely loved it.

i read two reviews about this, both with opposing views to my own but interesting to read. music: this soundtrack that almost sent me to sleep. won't be watching the movie

heatwave by victor jestin

it got hot towards the end of last week and i could finally crack open this short little book. i didn't hate it, wasn't blown away by it either. apparently i don't read blurbs - another shock here! i think because these are books that i bought so many months ago when it comes to reading them it's like oh?? well. i was distracted and tanning and drinking gin & tonics whilst reading, and i think this needed more of my attention than i could give. or maybe that's just me being generous.

no links for this one. pending.

i'm currently reading bonjour tristesse by francoise sagan. i've actually finished it but there's two stories in one so i'm on A Certain Smile now. more french books, they're the only books i have set in the summer at the moment. i started reading it on the beach, too.

i bought some new books: season of migration to the north by tayeb smith, the thief's journal by jean genet, my father's diet by adrian nathan west, and diary of a film by niven govinden. i've been reading some really hard books this year (and have bought four more) so i'm gonna switch lanes to some easier reads. the atlas six and nightbitch are probably the easiest of the ones i own at the moment.

AHHHH SUCCESSION.

kendall roy....

i have mixed thoughts about the ending i think it makes perfect sense what went down with the siblings, it doesn't mean that kendall being betrayed hurts me any less. i'm emotionally exhausted after finishing it so i've been watching cooking competitions on netflix. next is the sopranos as my Drama of Choice

also i've been listening to the once upon a time at bennington college podcast you recommended! really enjoying it so far

#book talk #djservo #i didn't know if i'd even finish one book this month tbh #saving my next rachel cusk read for when i really need a pick me up

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farsouthproject · 11 months ago

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Books of the Year 2023

Strange, but as usual, I didn’t think I’d read so many books this year. Then I count them up and get to thirty-eight. Not bad. Jon Fosse novels were a stand-out at the beginning of the year.. At the end of 2022 I’d read the first two volumes of Septology and was then was gifted the one volume version. Trilogy and Aliss at the Fire followed. Interesting how trends in my reading continued from the previous year: a couple of Denis Johnson books, one a reread, the other one I’d missed when it came out. Reread Mary Gaitskill. Spent less time with the Beat Reading Group but I joined in with Interzone and Kerouac’s Doctor Sax; in addition I reread Burroughs’ Last Words. Dipped into Tanizaki again with Seven Japanese Tales that had some great stories – notably The Bridge of Dreams. Pushkin Press put out a short story collection - The Siren’s Song – that showcases three of Tanizaki’s early works. A little poetry in troubled times was welcome in Philip Gross’s Deep Field. On the noir front, The Cage by Kenzo Kitakata gave me a lot of insight into ordinary Japanese supermarket business and a parallel insight into the Yakuza world. I followed up with Ashes, his Yakuza story of a ‘dog’ rising through the ranks of a crime family. Andrew Nette’s Orphan Road was trip into the past with reverberations in the present: an unsolved heist story with a gothic twist. Gary Chance, the main character from his previous novel Gunshine Coast goes on a dangerous peregrination through the Melbourne underworld and beyond.

O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker was a delight recommended by Val in Seattle. I was deeply impressed by the ambition and prose style of When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut. I was a bit disappointed by his follow-up The Maniac. The final section on AI was excellent, so no complaints. Whenever a Pascal Quignard volume comes out, I’m excited: The Fount of Time was no exception. I was completely absorbed by Jeremy Cooper’s Brian that delved into the mind of a lonely bookkeeper who becomes a film-buff. Cooper has an unsentimental compassion for Brian’s social awkwardness, his ordinariness and a deep respect for his knowledge of Cinema. A masterpiece even? Maybe so.

Septology – Jon Fosse (trans. Damion Searls)

Trilogy – Jon Fosse (trans. May-Brit Akerholt)

Aliss at the Fire – Jon Fosse (trans. Damion Searls)

Interzone – William Burroughs (reread)

Doctor Sax – Jack Kerouac (reread)

Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs

Deep Field – Philip Gross reread

Bad Behaviour – Mary Gaitskill reread

The Name of the World – Denis Johnson reread

Angels – Denis Johnson

The Kingdom of this World – Alejo Carpentier (trans. Harriet De Onis)

The Year of Living Dangerously – Christopher Koch – more depth after seeing the movie.

Brian – Jeremy Cooper

When We Cease to Understand the World – Benjamin Labatut (trans. Adrian Nathan West)

The Maniac – Benjamin Labatut

O Caledonia – Elspeth Barker

Selected Poems – George Barker

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept – Elizabeth Smart

Seven Japanese Tales – Junichiro Tanizaki (trans. Howard Hibbert)

The Siren’s Lament – Junichiro Tanizaki (trans. Bryan Karetnyk)

Noir

The Cage – Kenzo Kitakata (trans. Paul Warham) – chance find on the library shelves

Ashes – Kenzo Kitakata (trans. Emi Shimokawa)

The Dark Room – Junnosuke Yoshiyuki (trans. John Bester) – following on from Japanese Film Festival showings of the films of Ko Nakahira.

The Strangers in the House – Georges Simenon (trans. Robert Baldick)

Black Wings has my Angel – Elliot Chaze – chance find on the library shelves

He Died With His Eyes Open – Derek Raymond – recommended by John L Williams

How the Dead Live – Derek Raymond– recommended by my mate John L Williams

Orphan Road – Andrew Nette – a great heist story set in Melbourne

Nonfiction

Kazuo Ohno’s World from Within and Without – Kazuo Ohno and Yoshito Ohno (trans. John Barret with Toshio Mizohata)

Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Grey Grits – Bruce Baird

Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings – Susan Sontag ed. – (trans. Helen Weaver)

Maya Deren: Choreography for Cinema – Mark Alice Durant – an excellent biography

Getting Carter – Nick Triplow – a great biography of Ted Lewis and the Birth of British Noir

Time Within Time – Andrey Tarkovsky (trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair)

Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors – Ian Penman – personal essays time and cinema

Unclassifiable

The Fount of Time – Pascal Quignard (trans. Chris Turner) – Inimitable and Brilliant.

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01sentencereviews · 2 years ago

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2022

Ask Any Buddy (Elizabeth Purchell) @ Anthology Film Archives

Nope (Jordan Peele) in IMAX @ AMC Lincoln Square 13

De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel) @ 60th NYFF

We Met In Virtual Reality (Joe Hunting) @ 2022 Virtual Sundance Film Festival

The Rehearsal, Season 1 (Nathan Fielder)

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras)

TÁR (Todd Field)

Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg)

Skinamarink (Kyle Edward Ball)

Jackass Forever (Jeff Tremaine)

Aftersun (Charlotte Wells)

Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron) in IMAX 3D @ AMC Lincoln Square 13

Artists at the Center: Tiler Peck @ New York City Center (curated by Tiler Peck)

The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg)

Pearl (Ti West)

Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook)

Blonde (Andrew Dominik)

RRR (S. S. Rajamouli)

The Batman (Matt Reeves)

Liquor Store Dreams (So Yun Um) @ 2022 Tribeca Film Festival

Resurrection (Andrew Semans)

Will-o’-the-Wisp (João Pedro Rodrigues) @ 60th NYFF

Orphan: First Kill (William Brent Bell)

There There (Andrew Bujalski) @ 2022 Tribeca Film Festival

Sharp Stick (Lena Dunham) @ 2022 Virtual Sundance Film Festival

+++

The African Desperate (Martine Syms)

After Yang (Kogonada)

Ambulance (Michael Bay)

Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood (Richard Linklater)

Babylon (Damien Chazelle)

The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh)

Deep Water (Adrian Lyne)

Disney Channel’s Theme: A History Mystery (Kevin Perjurer)

Halloween Ends (David Gordon Green)

Irma Vep (2022, Olivier Assayas)

Jacaranda Joe (1994, George A. Romero) @ Webinar w/ University of Pittsburgh

Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy (Chike Ozah & Coodie Simmons)

Kate Berlant: Cinnamon in the Wind (Bo Burnham)

Kimi (Steven Soderbergh)

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (Dean Fleischer-Camp)

The Munsters (Rob Zombie)

On the Count of Three (Jerrod Carmichael)

Terrifier 2 (Damien Leone)

Top Gun: Maverick (Joseph Kosinski)

Shin Ultraman (Shinji Higuchi)

Shit & Champagne (D’Arcy Drollinger)

Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt)

Starfuckers (Antonio Marziale)

Vortex (Gaspar Noé)

The White Lotus [Season 2] (Mike White)

#best of 2022 #ask any buddy #nope #de humani corporis fabrica #The Rehearsal #we met in virtual reality #lists #personal #all that beauty and bloodshed #TÁR #crimes of the future #skinamarink #jackass forever

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dreamy-conceit · 8 months ago

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To observe influencers at work is to observe a living metaphor of civilization meeting its ignoble end, and you can only take so much before you need to click on the accounts of reply guys and wannabes, to console yourself with the thought that there isn’t that much worth saving.

— Adrian Nathan West, 'Steroid to Heaven' (The Baffler, Jan 2024)

#influencers #social media #chronically online #internet personality #quotes

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milksockets · 1 year ago

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To what extent is it possible to consent to future events, given that in doing so, we speak on behalf of a person -- our future self -- who does not exist? At one time, I would not have given in to degradations to which, now, I am regularly subject; and when I look back, I am often repulsed by undertakings to which I offered myself willingly at the moment in question. My self in the past, which is no longer quite here and yet cannot be said to have vanished, shall remain in endless vassalage to my selves in the present and future, and the latter will never cease to suffer from their predecessors' despotism.

The Aesthetics of Degradation - Adrian Nathan West

#quote

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7r0773r · 1 year ago

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Brenner by Hermann Burger, translated by Adrian Nathan West

. . . the stalwart maxim nomen ist omen. . . . (p. 4)

***

And Proust says of novel-reading that it is magical like a deep dream . . . (p. 10)

***

There are ur-phenomena of tone, color, and scent often predestined, so to speak, irrespective of their contingent nature, to tune an existence like a stringed instrument; and the adult, when he attends a concert, an exhibition, a theater opening, searches, as though after a vanished picture book, for the traces of these earliest magical impressions. I remember very clearly one afternoon at the Waldau, my grandparents' restaurant, I must have been three at the time, when I was ordered to take my obligatory nap, which was always a torment to me, for just as in the corner in my parents' bedroom in the manufacturer's villa on the Sandstrasse in Menzenmang — fabrikants, the noblest genitive — there, too, in the so-called Jews' Salon on the landing overlooking the salon, I was tied down with rubber cords, the door was left open, I could hear the rush of the Wyna coursing through the valley, the hammering of the riveters in the die works or the rolling mill, the shunting of the Rollbock boxcars at the aluminum factory, the piping of a locomotive, perhaps, like a faraway shriek, schoolchildren on the playground, apart from all that just tedium, counting dead flies, the scuff of chair legs in the parlor, the click and clack of billiard balls muffled at times by felt, my parents often helped my father's sisters during service, if a special occasion was afoot, they'd shwoop in, they may have been setting the table for the Frohsinn men's choir, because the swinging door to the office flapped repeatedly open and closed, and a diffuse activity reigned in the garde-manger. The child, bound and sleepless on a very bright day in bed — paradox of paradoxes — tries to orient himself, and all of a sudden hears a scattering of piano chords curtly struck, gliding up so softly they bring tears to my eyes, a breath of Sylvester's Day magic in the midst of a summer workday; I was still a little cheroot, I understood nothing of music, but years later, when I had my harmony lessons where my father's cousin lived, at the Pfendsack house on the Ölbergstrasse, I managed finally to grasp what it was that had taken hold of me, to analyze this series of tones that seemed to drift like flakes of gold in bottles of Danziger Goldwasser, a descending melody from major and minor sixths, the series, intended for C major, must have opened with the G-E interval and ended with F-D, that is, descending from the tonic with the 6/4 chord without C from dominant to subdominant — which corresponds to the melancholy of blues — but instead of stopping at A-F, it fell two steps further to D minor.

As we know, the young Mozart could drive his father to the verge of madness with an unresolved seventh, but far more galling was this insistence on F-D, an interval which, with its suppressed A minor, demands the G seventh and a release through the tonic, and I had to endure this tension not only through two hours of nap time in the Jews' Salon, but through the entirety of puberty until my harmony lessons began; and considering it might just have been the servant girl, Irmeli, in a transport of sportiveness or sorrow, who struck the nicotine-yellow keys of the ordure-brown Burger & Jacobi piano, the indulgent reader may gather from these tobacco sheets the ways fortuity reigns in the childhoods of creators, artistes, better said, but even more so, how immense is the power of music — here nothing less than magic — over as yet uncultivated natures. Still, I couldn't help but cry, because the descending cadence G-E, F-D, E-C, D-B, C-A, B-G, A-F, G-E, F-D recalled to me the painting of corn fields in the salon, a restrained landscape study in tender lilac, muted gold, and dusty green, showing the stretch of land beneath the Stierenberg, not far from the Waldau, where the Erlkönigstrasse skirts the Wachtal meadow next to de drüeich, the three oaks, before wending its way to Rickenbach. All the little oil in its white stucco frame showed was a softly curving path lost in the stalks of a swaying grain field with hints of red poppies under the taut, desolate balloon silk of a summer sky with scant ribbons of storm clouds. Just like the major sixth, with its polka-like opening, the breach in the cornrows ended in a no man's land that presented a riddle to the child stewing in his boredom, yearning all the while for his mother: what happens to the path after it curves, is it even still there in the depths of the picture? Decades later, gravely ill, in autogenic training, as I recited over and over the mantra "My breath is calm and effortless, my forehead is cool," I would hallucinate this mauve-gold cornfield; in the deckchair beneath the Canadian silver poplars on the gravel terrace in Menzenmang, I felt the ache for this painting of cornstalks; on Doctor Rohnstein's couch in Buchs, this image from the Waldau materialized; everywhere, always, this single landscape. (pp. 21-24)

***

. . . Nonsense alone makes bearable a world where everything strives for a higher sense. (p. 73)

***

Though it is only late in life, via a gratifying digression on cigars, that I have finally put ink to paper, let the apprehensive rest assured, l'appétit viendra en mangeant, my debut in this dubious métier will likewise be my farewell, but there is one thing I know, to second Bert May: our backbreaking labor is an archeology of the soul, there is no remembrance without fiction, no recollection without invention, true poets, from whose ranks this thwarted tobacco salesman is naturally excluded, are those who live by lying, who lie like print, as the German adage has it, and as we note here a certain consonance among the words lie, lure, and louche, we cast doubt on how things really were and cajole the indulgent reader to follow us into the regions where the subjunctive reigns, how things might have been; we use metaphor — from the Greek metapherein, to carry across, according to Bert May — to grant coherence to that which simply cannot have occurred, for life is a dice game, through a long night of play you may wait in vain for the six to come up, out rolls one after exasperating one; or else a wheat-blonde fairy announces six lotto numbers on the TV screen — a stroke of luck that never comes for millions but lands twice for a select few — hence the high art of creation may be thought superior to life, because the scribbler does not leave the order of the balls to chance, literature is the award of that once-in-a-lifetime jackpot. Here my friend Adam Nautilus Rauch will vigorously object, that still and all, the world has its laws, physical, botanical, chemical, astronomical, and it would be a deep affront to his earnestness in the enjoyment of life — a credo for which I would declare my utmost respect, were the duration of my existence not curtailed by a terminal diagnosis — to see literature and art confounded with magic and games of chance: what do craft and trickeration have to do with the linguistic organism, the swindler relies on the marvels of a moment, the epic poet is an artist of perpetuity, the sorcerer's appearances deceive, the creator's, however much he lies, do not. And the critic — my two boys' local Sigismund Markus — has urged me, after a cursory inspection of these pages, to stick to the relevant facts of my life as a cigarier, ye hef te know how te dishtinguish relevant en irrelevant. (pp. 129-30)

***

The method of the captioned sketch, as opposed to the snapshot taken with the camera, I owe to my first-semester drawing lessons with Professor Hans Ess, it allows us a horizontal projection with four planes, same as the ones I executed as a child absorbed in simultaneous perspective; in contrast to the photograph, it puts not everything to paper, but only what corresponds to the inner architecture of our intentions, we may magnify details, scale becomes flexible, and, let me add, the drawing takes us an hour, whereas controlling for lighting, fiddling with the bells and whistles, pressing click takes no more than a few minutes. In this hour's work we see more, and more precisely, than during that post-mortem pasting of our memories into an album; we are not like tourists reminiscing about having been "there," even if, admittedly, these tobacco leaves attempt to share with the reader how, for the span of a brief, heady happiness, we were allowed to be citizens of the earth. (pp. 165-66)

***

You see, Herr Brenner, what we have here is a marriage of poetry and tobacco, in the fifties of the preceding century the custom in the workshops of Don Jaime Partagas was to read Victor Hugo aloud while binder, wrapper, and filler were rolled, and in the days before the war for Cuban independence, the galleys were hotbeds of agitation. They banned reading or commenting on the news of the day, and this led to popular uprisings. In his memoirs, Zino affirms that the Cuban independence movement, which finally proved victorious in 1901, had its birthplace in the historic cigar factories. Radio first made inroads at Cabañas y Carbajol, a top brand that is sadly no longer around; nowadays, Castro's teachings and pop music have pushed poor Hugo aside. Imagine if, instead of the oldies, they recited Gabriel Garcia Márquez, whom admittedly I myself have never read? And so on and so forth with our disputation . . . (p. 204)

***

Will neither of the esteemed versifiers take a bit more trout? No, Frau Irlande has had enough, Bert has already lit one of his black cigarettes, betraying his boorishness par excellence, but Hermann Arbogast Brenner, as per previous, will not stage a war of religion over the sore point of dry drunkenness, he gathers the fish scraps as his cemetery-grandmother used to do, and while poetess and poet amble off into the garden, perhaps to recite in tandem Hesse's "Lanterns on a Summer Night" in the niche or next to the gurgling fountain, I take the plates to the hunter's room and try to persuade Hombre, still sleeping off his stupor from the cider, to partake of a cold fillet of trout. He is lying there beneath his woolen blanket; his smooth skull, dotted with warts, moles, and pimples, is tucked into the crook of his arm; he has not even removed his coattails, and I think to myself, no one incapable of describing such a soul's inner life deserves the title of poet, for on the brackish surface of its waters, where the fires of eau-de-vie burn, skim the wrecks of svelte ships that poetesses have sent forth sailing into night, it may be, I think heretically, staring at the serpent in the spirit jar, that the eminent Georges and Rilkes and their like thrive in a soil of profound inhumanity; men like Hombre are the base matter their hearts transform into sublimity, the fate of the nameless is the price paid for the crystalline phrases printed in cursive in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the elf-queens suck their blood, inhuman, because their verses tread on corpses. The precious essence of O-so-noble compassion is only to be had at the cost of someone else's going to the dogs. And this is the basis of the thoroughgoing mendacity of the artist's calling, because what the public sees is the twinkling diamond and never the fathomless shafts where the kaffir breaks off the precious stones, it's a fact, the lyricist's trade is Apartheid. (pp. 304-05)

***

When my beloved wife and two sons, whom I coddled like seedlings in the soil of Vuelta Abajo, fled Brunsleben like rats abandoning a sinking ship after years of attrition from my illness, one and all among my circle agreed that I couldn't hold it against them. My friend Fernanda Blanca of Blankenberg shot me a stare hot with indignation: Don't you understand, no one could take all that. Her feminist-tinged protest suffers from a single logical failing. There is one person who must take it, and that is the depressive himself. And here is where the glaring injustice lies: he is forced to cling to the war hero's code, the kamikaze mentality of fight to the last man. O numberless dilettantes of mercy! A rule-abiding Exitus exitus with the help of one hundred tabs of Vesparax could still be portrayed as euthanasia. Do you not see that Hermann Arbogast Brenner could more calmly make his peace with the world if a higher court would lend him a thoughtful hand in view of his life's unbearableness? Do you not see his salesman's pride prevents him from taking the blame for this faillisement? But no: all others have the right no longer to stand him, he alone is condemned to endure his own sinister company. And he will never forgive you this grave offense: that in your schadenfreude, you left him to smolder in his hell. Let us temper that a bit: he would never have forgiven you had he not discovered in the Stechlinesque spirit of Brunsleben a medium that unmasks your diabolical self-righteousness — in tobacco, a potion against the danger of earthquakes in mind and spirit. (pp. 350-51)

***

A miser is not just someone who pinches pennies, who doesn't like to splurge or give, it is a person who never treats himself. He labors under the delusion that a little ledger exists in Heaven with an annotation in the profits column stating that he made it to a hundred by shopping at the organic market. All the world's misery originates with underachievers. Hitler had to kill millions for failing to achieve his dream. Had he known, like Churchill, how to savor a Havana, there would never have been a Second World War. (pp. 352-53)

***

At this point, at the latest, Hermann Arbogast Brenner must bring this analogy to an end, for a lover never is and never will be a luxury good to be savored, but a person with her own contradictions. A cigar can be procured when the craving strikes, a woman who shares not just our bed, but our miseries, cannot. To meet one is a gift, a bit of mercy, even. Love is not an exchange of hormones, but the highest, happiest hours this crippled planet holds in store for us. You can be happy alone with a cigar, but not in love. The blue haze gets lost in the ether, our wish to be understood by someone will never go away. If it did, we would be lost forever. The rose may bloom without ifs and buts, and unfold its splendor in a graveyard. But it can only be called happy when it is found and plucked. (p. 354)

***

One formal reminiscence after another rose to the surface. If I registered every detail of the artist's treatment of the satchel as it floated off in the tragedy of Johnny-Head-in-the-Air, if I saw there was no need to redraw the river in every scene, that the narrowly hatched waterway already suggested distance, this was the discovery of an important aesthetic principle: the representation of the general through the particular. I turned my entire attention to these details now. Here were the three fish. They jumped from the cool water as Johnny stepped over the wall of the quay, they swam off in haste as he tumbled inside, bunched together they observed as he was pulled out with a long pole, with a laugh they looked up at the sopping wet dimwit. This was the foundation for my success as a draftsman in all the contests held by clothing brands, department stores, and automobile factories that I sent my sketches to. I must thank Amden for this, in part. For it was pain that made me see. (pp. 379-80)

***

Unto ashes shalt thou return, for nowhere is it written man has a right to a modicum of bliss. (p. 399)

#book quotes #hermann burger

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captainmdhridoyhossain-blog · 1 year ago

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[ad_1] There have been two powers operating Guatemala after the 2d International Struggle, and simplest certainly one of them used to be the federal government. The opposite, an American company referred to as the United Fruit Corporate, used to be recognized within the nation because the Octopus, as it had tentacles far and wide. It used to be Guatemala’s greatest employer and landowner, and it managed the rustic’s simplest Atlantic port, virtually each mile of the railroads, and the country’s sole phone and telegraph amenities. U.S. State Division officers had siblings within the higher ranks of the corporate. Senators held inventory. Working United Fruit’s exposure division, in New York, used to be a mythical adman who claimed to have a listing of twenty-five thousand reporters, editors, and public figures at his beck and make contact with. They shaped, in his phrases, “an invisible govt” with “true ruling energy” over the U.S., to mention not anything of the international locations beneath American sway.By way of 1952, the President of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz, used to be combating a struggle he couldn’t win. He used to be seeking to get United Fruit to pay taxes on its huge holdings. Now not simplest had the corporate been exempt for many years—it had additionally secured a ensure that it might by no means must pay its workers greater than fifty cents an afternoon. To handle the rustic’s rampant inequalities, together with its feudal exertions device, Árbenz handed an agrarian reform legislation to transform unused non-public land into smaller plots for peasants. A average institutionalist, he argued that the legislation mirrored his capitalist bona fides. Weren’t monopolies thought to be anathema within the U.S., too?In reaction, United Fruit unleashed a constant lobbying marketing campaign to influence reporters, lawmakers, and the U.S. govt that Árbenz used to be a Communist sympathizer who had to be overthrown. It used to be the beginning of the Chilly Struggle, which made American officers into simple marks. “We must regard Guatemala as a prototype space for checking out method and techniques of fighting Communism,” a member of Dwight Eisenhower’s Nationwide Safety Council mentioned, in 1953. Over the next 12 months, the C.I.A. and the United Fruit Corporate auditioned figures to guide a “Liberation” pressure in opposition to the federal government. They ultimately landed on Carlos Castillo Armas, a rogue Guatemalan army officer with darkish, diminutive options and a toothbrush mustache, who got here throughout as flighty and dim. (“He gave the impression of he were packaged via Bloomingdale’s,” one commentator mentioned on the time.) His leader qualification used to be his willingness to do regardless of the American citizens instructed him. In June, 1954, after an invasion staged with American bombers and choreographed via the U.S. Ambassador, he used to be rewarded with the Presidency. Árbenz used to be flown into Mexican exile, however no longer earlier than Castillo Armas compelled him to strip to his undies for the cameras as he boarded the airplane.The 1954 C.I.A. coup and its aftermath are the topic of “Harsh Times” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a brand new novel via Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel laureate, which has been translated via Adrian Nathan West. At eighty-five, Vargas Llosa is now not only a guy of letters however a pundit, with a syndicated column, and his pronouncements on politics generate their very own information—in Peru, in his followed house of Spain, and throughout Latin The united states. The creator has all the time been within the lures and predations of energy. Of the just about twenty novels to his identify, a few of his maximum memorable—“Conversation in the Cathedral” (1969), “The War of the End of the World” (1981), “The Feast of the Goat” (2000)—are research of the mental struggle wrought via politics. The person himself isn't any stranger to lofty ambitions. After changing

into a vocal critic of Peru’s left-wing populist President within the overdue nineteen-eighties, Vargas Llosa ran for the process, in 1990, and misplaced. His spouse on the time warned him that his motivations weren't solely natural. “The ethical legal responsibility wasn’t the decisive issue,” she mentioned, as he gamely recounts in his memoir, “A Fish in the Water.” “It used to be the journey, the semblance of dwelling an enjoy filled with pleasure and possibility. Of writing the nice novel in genuine existence.”To the novelist and political aspirant, the occasions in Guatemala dangle an plain hobby, and the historic document provides an in depth plotline. With the help of U.S. govt cables dislodged via years of public-records requests, reporters and historians were ready to reconstruct the operation, from the jobs of the State and Protection Departments and United Fruit (“Bitter Fruit,” via Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer) to the machinations of the C.I.A. (“Secret History,” via Nick Cullather). However Vargas Llosa takes up a subplot that continues to be murky: the homicide of Castillo Armas, in 1957, and the section that Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic, could have performed in it. The legit narrative used to be all the time suspicious. One night time, in July of that 12 months, Castillo Armas used to be strolling together with his spouse in the course of the courtyard of the Presidential palace when two photographs rang out, and he fell to the bottom, killed at the spot. Government pinned the homicide on a supposedly left-leaning soldier within the President’s safety element, who used to be discovered useless close to the scene, in an obvious suicide. In line with certainly one of Trujillo’s biographers, a supply with reference to the dictator as soon as mentioned, “The affair of Castillo Armas is a type of mysteries that Trujillo took with him to the grave.” For Vargas Llosa, that brush of chance is the ebook’s animating spark.A lot of the unconventional is structured round Trujillo’s henchmen as they shut in on their quarry. There’s Johnny Abbes García, the malevolent, sex-crazed director of Trujillo’s intelligence products and services, who stations himself at a resort in Guatemala Town, courts Castillo Armas’s mistress (“Omit Guatemala”), and creeps into the President’s interior circle. His guy at the within, a member of the Guatemalan safety provider, is a thug who respects Trujillo way over his personal boss. “He’s were given a couple of balls as giant as an elephant’s,” the person says of Trujillo. “Shall we use a few of that round right here.” Then there’s Mike Laporta, a C.I.A. guy posing as a climatologist, who “couldn’t glance extra like a gringo if he attempted.” In next appearances, Laporta is known as the “odd gringo” and “the person whose identify wasn’t Mike.”Structuring the unconventional across the assassination is obviously intended to create suspense, however the result's combined, partially as a result of Castillo Armas’s fall wasn’t as vital as his upward thrust. From the day he took the Presidency, he used to be necessarily dwelling on borrowed time. He used to be one of those strongman manqué, without a genuine global view or perspective of his personal—not anything that, in novelistic phrases, may just cross for an abnormal inside existence. American Chilly Struggle orthodoxy made it simple on such operators; all they needed to say to earn U.S. reinforce used to be that they hated Communists. Even via that normal, regardless that, Castillo Armas used to be a little bit of a laggard. Vargas Llosa, having some a laugh at his expense, writes, “He instructed his males this incessantly, in each assembly the place they accumulated in his place of job: ‘The gringos’ Puritanism makes them dawdle, and once they in any case do take motion, they transfer at a snail’s tempo.’ He didn’t in point of fact know what he intended via that, however he felt pleased with himself for pronouncing it, and he thought to be it a weighty, philosophical insult.

”Extra promising characters, like Árbenz, live on their attackers however endure in alternative ways. When Vargas Llosa introduces him, he’s simply gained the Presidency, in 1950, and wishes a stiff drink: “His frame used to be quivering, particularly his palms. He needed to take hold of the glass in all ten arms to stay it from falling and splashing whiskey in all places his pants. You’re an alcoholic, he concept, scared. You’re killing your self, you’ll finally end up like your father.” Árbenz’s father, a Swiss pharmacist who immigrated to the western highlands of Guatemala, died via suicide when Árbenz used to be a kid. The long run President spent his early formative years dwelling with relations, then enrolled within the nationwide army academy, the place he excelled. He changed into concerned about politics simplest after falling in love together with his long run spouse, a Salvadoran aristocrat who embraced social-justice reasons. There’s a wealthy interior existence right here, and but one thing oblique and secondhand shrouds the unconventional’s depiction of Árbenz. His ideas are most commonly restatements of the general public document (“They must trade the feudal constructions that reigned within the nation-state”), and his analyses are the similar ones we’ve learn within the historical past books. (“In essence, his duty used to be to stay politics from using the military aside and to stop incitement to conspiracy: the everlasting tale of Central The united states.”) Actually, virtually the entire characters within the novel be afflicted by the similar drawback. They act much less like other folks than spokespeople, channelling the voices of reporters or historians who’ve instructed their tale earlier than.The result's that “Harsh Instances” covers a large number of flooring with out burrowing into the loam that would possibly distinguish the ebook from a piece of nonfiction at the similar matter. There’s no scarcity of dramas all over those years from which to select, and one of the crucial extra compelling plots get brief shrift. Within the ultimate days of Árbenz’s Presidency, beaten via the inexorable conspiracy in opposition to him, he jailed and attacked various his political combatants. He left Guatemala a damaged guy, and later drowned in a bath, in Mexico Town, on the age of fifty-seven. Regardless of their alliance, the U.S. govt and United Fruit ultimately got here into warfare. The 1954 coup (code identify: Good fortune) used to be the type for the Bay of Pigs invasion, in Cuba, a impressive failure. And, following Castillo Armas’s assassination, the rustic lurched into greater than thirty years of civil struggle, with a dying toll that exceeded 2 hundred thousand.The most important drawback with construction the unconventional across the Castillo Armas plot is that it leads Vargas Llosa into rewriting “The Dinner party of the Goat,” the unconventional that he printed, two decades in the past, about Trujillo. That ebook is a masterpiece, weaving in combination the tale of the exiled daughter of a Trujillo loyalist with the plot of the 3 males who—in a mix of rage, desperation, and spasmodic braveness—in any case assassinated the dictator, in 1961. “Harsh Instances” isn't flattered via the comparability, but it’s inconceivable to keep away from at each flip. The similar varieties of scenes and insights recur in pallid reprise: Trujillo’s affectedly stiff, machista bearing when he meets with underlings, Johnny Abbes’s baroque sociopathy. The construction of each books may be strikingly equivalent, with the assassination plot (and its aftermath) diced up and assuredly intercut from the other views of the ones concerned. In “The Dinner party of the Goat,” the assassins must battle in opposition to their very own internalized sense of powerlessness and concern, which evinces the binding psychic energy of Trujillo. Castillo Armas’s assassins, in contrast, play a little bit section. Their motivations (together

with Trujillo’s) are difficult to understand to the tip, and, since we all know the President will die, it’s only a topic of looking ahead to the general photographs to sound.It’s conceivable that Vargas Llosa simply desires to spend extra time together with his outdated characters. Nevertheless it’s something to profile the deranged psychology of guys in energy, and some other to take pleasure in it. Take Abbes, whose existence the novelist chronicles to the sour finish. When the person isn’t plotting murders, he’s most commonly simply getting off. His fetish for cunnilingus is matched simplest via Vargas Llosa’s compulsion to explain it again and again, in language this is awkwardly blunt and stodgy. “You by no means trade, do you?” Abbes’s within guy tells him. “At all times the similar factor: torture, ladies whose gash you licked or wish to lick . . . . You understand what you're? An obsessive. To not say a pervert.”Vargas Llosa has succeeded in a single admire: he’s controlled to spot an lost sight of historic determine who rather well may well be the idiosyncratic, mesmerizing persona the unconventional wishes. The issue is that she’s solid much less as a protagonist than as an object of lust for the entire males within the ebook, together with Trujillo, Abbes, Castillo Armas, or even the puritanical C.I.A. agent. Her identify is Marta Borrero, higher referred to as Omit Guatemala. She meets Castillo Armas when she’s twenty, and he falls for her straight away, putting in her in her personal area with servants, guards, and different luxuries. Abbes and the C.I.A. guy befriend her, hoping to suss out knowledge—however, since Borrero is very dedicated to Castillo Armas, and is some distance from naïve, her openness to them by no means makes general sense. At the morning of the homicide, when she realizes that one thing is afoot, it’s too overdue to warn Castillo Armas with out implicating herself.Mins after the killing, certainly one of Trujillo’s males whisks her off to El Salvador, the place Johnny Abbes is ready. He’s had designs on her all alongside, one thing she seems to simply accept now that she will’t go back to Guatemala. They transform enthusiasts and transfer to the Dominican Republic, the place Borrero embarks on an illustrious occupation as a right-wing political commentator, extolling the virtues of dictators around the area. One in every of her lodestars is Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, the successor to Castillo Armas and the American citizens’ new guy in Guatemala; this ultimate endorsement is made to look like a quid professional quo, in trade for envelopes of cash given to her via “the person whose identify wasn’t Mike.”The most productive a part of the unconventional is the epilogue, through which the creator gives an ostensibly nonfictional account of a contemporary consult with he made to the U.S., the place the real-life type for Borrero resides in unbothered outdated age. Her exact identify remains out of the ebook, and Vargas Llosa situates her area between Washington and Virginia, “no longer very some distance from Langley.” However he's following real-life coördinates, established via the analysis of 2 of his buddies, Soledad Álvarez and Tony Raful, Dominican writers who're discussed within the ebook’s willpower. The novelist’s scrupulous vagueness flows from a writerly decorum that Borrero doesn’t seem to proportion. She assists in keeping a weblog, the place she plies her outdated business, asking, “What would have came about to Latin The united states if it hadn’t been for the armies?” Every day, Vargas Llosa writes, “she renders them homage” whilst fulminating in opposition to Communist cabals.Virtually immediately, because the pretense of fiction begins to fall away, “Harsh Instances” comes alive. Borrero each is and isn’t what we would possibly be expecting. Her home is one of those aviary, thick with vegetation and filled with tropical birds in cages, and she or he treats her visitor with haughty, theatrical aptitude, brushing aside Vargas Llosa’s notions as “preposterous fantasies.

” Ultimately, he turns into satisfied that “it is going to be inconceivable to get the rest extra of price from her,” and he will get as much as go away. She accompanies him to the door. “Don’t trouble sending me your ebook when it comes out, Mario,” she tells him. “I can completely no longer be studying it. However I alert you, my attorneys will.” Finally, there’s a significant pressure: the creator arrives armed with main points and questions, and his matter, realizing that she has the higher hand of direct enjoy, mocks his effort to get on the reality of items. If simplest she’d challenged him faster.New Yorker Favorites [ad_2] #Mario #Vargas #Llosa #Returns #Dictator

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ledenews · 1 year ago

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The Basketball Tournament (TBT) Releases Field and Matchups for 2023 West Virginia Regional

Region Hosted by West Virginia Alumni Team Best Virginia Also Features Alumni Teams from Marshall, Georgetown, Pitt, and VCU The Basketball Tournament (TBT) – the $1 million, winner-take-all summer basketball event broadcast live on ESPN networks – today announced the bracket for this year’s tournament. Best Virginia, the West Virginia alumni team, will serve as the featured team for one of TBT’s eight regionals, and compete against seven other teams for the chance to advance closer to TBT’s $1 million prize. The games, which will take place July 25-29, will be played at WesBanco Arena. TBT will also host a quarterfinals game at WesBanco, which will be played July 30. Best Virginia, the number one seed in the West Virginia Regional, is organized by former West Virginia standouts John Flowers and Kevin Jones. The team will once again be coached by former West Virginia guard James Long. The Best Virginia roster currently includes: - John Flowers (2007-11) - Kevin Jones (2008-12) - Jaysean Paige (2014-16) - Nathan Adrian (2013-17) - Teyvon Myers (2015-17) - Kedrian Johnson (2020-23) - Jamel Morris (Glenville State/Fairmont State) The rest of the region includes: - #2 seed Sideline Cancer: A longtime TBT team looking to create awareness around pancreatic cancer, their roster is loaded with talent like Marcus Keene, Tyrese Rice, and former NBA player Dominique Jones. - #3 seed Challenge ALS Florida: A merger between TBT teams Challenge ALS and Florida TNT brings together two teams with a rich history of success in TBT. Former NBA point guard Darren Collison serves as the head coach. - #4 seed Herd That (Marshall alumni):. Former teammates and Marshall’s two all-time leading scorers, Taevion Kinsey and Jon Elmore, reunite on a roster that also includes Jarrod West, Stevie Browning, James Kelly, Ryan Taylor, among others. - #5 seed Zoo Crew (Pitt alumni): The University of Pittsburgh alumni team includes Nelly Cummings, Nike Sibande, and Greg Elliott, who this past season led the Panthers to their first NCAA Tournament since 2016. - #6 seed Dawg Town (Georgetown alumni): A first year TBT participant, the Georgetown alumni team includes program legends and former NBA players Chris Wright and Henry Sims. - #7 seed Ram Nation (VCU Alumni): Returning to TBT for the first time since 2019, VCU’s alumni team features players from different eras, like Juvonte Reddic, Marcus Santos-Silva, and Deriante Jenkins. - #8 seed Dubois Dream: Dubois Dream secured their spot in the West Virginia Regional via buy-in. Best Virginia will take on the #8 seed Dubois Dream in the team’s first-round game on Tuesday, July 25 at 7 pm ET. If The Ville advances to the second round, they will face the winner of #4 seed Herd That and #5 seed Zoo Crew on Thursday, July 27 at 7 pm ET CONFIRM GAME TIME. The West Virginia Regional championship game will be Saturday, July 29 at 2 pm ET. The West Virginia regional winner will take on the Syracuse Regional winner in TBT’s quarterfinals game at WesBanco Arena on Monday, July 30 at 4 pm ET. The winner of that game will advance to TBT’s semifinals in Philadelphia on Wednesday, August 2, and the $1M winner-take-all championship game will also be in Philadelphia on Thursday, August 3. For more information on the West Virginia Regional or to purchase tickets, visit TheTournament.com/WestVirginia. Read the full article

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