This Guernica essay about the American mythmaking of Roberto Bolaño is pretty fantastic.

It was no casual fact, then, that the majority of articles profiling the author laid the emphasis on the episodes of his tumultuous youth: his decision to drop out of high school and become a poet; his terrestrial odyssey from Mexico to Chile, where he was jailed during the coup d’état; the formation of the failed infrarealist movement with the poet Mario Santiago; his itinerant existence in Europe; his eventual jobs as camp watchman and dishwasher; a presumed drug addiction; and his premature death. “These iconoclastic episodes coupled with Bolaño’s death at fifty,” writes Pollack, “are too tempting to narrate as anything but a tragedy of mythical proportions: here seems to be someone who actually saw his youthful ideals through to their ultimate consequences.” “Meet the Kurt Cobain of Latin American literature,” wrote Daniel Crimmins in Paste magazine.

No North American journalist highlighted the fact, Sarah Pollack warns, that The Savage Detectives and the greater part of Bolaño’s prose work “were written as a sober family man” during the last ten years of his life—and an excellent father, I’d add, whose major preoccupation was his children, and that if he took a lover at the end of his life, he did it in the most conservative Latin American style, without threatening the preservation of his family. Pollack notes that “Bolaño appears to the reader, even before one crosses the novel’s threshold, as a cross between the Beats and Arthur Rimbaud (another reference for his alter ego Arturo Belano), his life already the stuff of legend.” Yet the majority of critics have passed over the fact that Bolaño didn’t die as a result of drug or alcohol abuse, but from a case of poorly cared-for pancreatitis that had destroyed his liver; or that his case was more similar to those of Balzac or Proust, who also died at fifty after a tremendous work effort, than it was to those of North American pop idols.

I will be the first to admit that I completely bought into the Bolaño hype but I at least consider myself one of the first-wave Bolaño American fans, the ones that discovered him through The Savage Detectives in 2007. That counts for something, right?

Neologism contest (Thanks Perri!)

1. Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one coughs.
2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.
3. Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
4. Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.
5. Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent.
6. Negligent (adj.),a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown.
7. Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.
8. Gargoyle (n.), olive-flavoured mouthwash.
9. Flatulence (n.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.
10. Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline.
12. Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
13. Pokemon (n), a Rastafarian proctologist.
14. Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.
15. Frisbeetarianism (n.), (back by popular demand): The belief that, when you die, your Soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.
16. Circumvent (n.), an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men

The New York Times published an op-ed by Zizek. I am flabbergasted. This isn’t England!

p.s. Some friends and I want to make a road trip-cum-pilgrimage to the Rare Books library at Duke because it has a copy of the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog for which Zizek wrote the text.

Is Technology Dumbing Down Japanese?

Now the Japanese language is being transformed by blogs, e-mail and keitai shosetsu, or cellphone novels. Americans may fret over the ways digital communications encourage sloppy grammar and spelling, but in Japan these changes are much more wrenching. A vertically written language seems to be becoming increasingly horizontal. Novels are being written and read on little screens. People have gotten so used to typing on computers that they can no longer write characters by hand. And English words continue to infiltrate the language.

So what do these changes mean for a language long defined by indirect locutions and long, leisurely sen­tences that drift from the top of the page? Is Japanese getting simpler, easier or just worse?

“Despite its pretenses to social realism, the gentrification novel is only magic real-estate-ism.”

Tonight, my friend Carla pointed me to Frederick Crews‘ absolutely genius books. He reads Pooh through different theoretical lens: Marxist, Freudian, and whatnot in The Pooh Perplex and then reads Pooh in terms of deconstruction, gender theory, and all that other trendy theory stuff in Postmodern Pooh.

Read an excerpt here! I may find this more hilarious than, well, most because I’ve recently struggled my way through Subjects of Desire, which I described to people as “Butler reading Kojéve/Foucault/Derrida/etc. reading Hegel.” And here I thought I was original. Crews has definitely got a handle on Butler’s voice. That is a feat.

Crews’ project reminds me of my own Postcolonial Girl idea (this blog entry counts as my copyright). This is a play on, or should I say reinterpretation of, the American Girl franchise.

Pipe dream #1

For Postcolonial Girl, instead of short chapter books about watershed moments in U.S. history, the books will be children-friendly versions of post-colonial works, i.e. Orientalism, Imagined Communities, Can the Subaltern speak?, The Location of Culture. Not all the doll-book pairs will be strictly postcolonial. The name is there for humor purposes. There will also be children’s versions of noted works like Gender Trouble, Phenomenology of Spirit (think of the cute lord/bondsman illustrations!), etc. I’m still working on the doll accompaniments, but I am really looking forward to creating a mini-Spivak, sari and all. I figure that while Columbia may not have prepared me for ‘the real world,’ I have met a bunch of people who could rewrite all these books for children. Why not work with what I’ve got? I’ve told a few people about this pipe dream and the general consensus is that there definitely exists plenty of yuppie parents who will buy these books for their children (some of my potential writers could also fall into this category). I think this will make me rich.

Tonight, after a meal of lentil soup and couscous, my friend Ruben Gutierrez (Columbia 2011) bemoaned his internet absence. He wrote an email to our advice columnist friend Veronica, but she told him that his question was not suitable for her column at The Faster Times. I figured I’d reprint his question on my blog so the next time he googles himself, he will find this post on the 12th page.

Dear Veronica,
I am having something of an existential crisis, or crises since it’s midterm season. During one of the particularly productive points in my studying I decided to google myself. Some people find embarassing pictures, others find links to their Facebook profiles or blogs. What did I find? NOTHING. Nothing at all. I typed in my full name: nothing. I typed in my name and my hometown: still nothing. I typed in my name, hometown, and high school: rien. I typed in my name, hometown, high school, and graduation date: nada. How is this possible? Am I a killer on death row? Or have I become a famous artist in Monterrey, Mexico? I’ve often felt I had a knack for the piano, so maybe I’m actually a piano jazz player from California! I know how its logisticly possible for me not to show up, search engines all run the same way, but how is it possible that I am completely invisible to the Internet radar? What does this say about my future? I go to a relatively prestigious college, so why aren’t I searchable? Where is my college tuition going? How will I survive in the real world post graduation?
Sincerely,
Lost in Cyberspace.

I suddenly remembered why I kept Fluxblog on my google reader. From “She Got Hot, They Did Not”:

Weezer “The Girl Got Hot”

I like late-period Rivers Cuomo because he’s basically like Martin Short in Clifford trying to make faces like a “human boy.” He is a deeply bizarre man who is going far out of his way to be “normal” and make music for “normal” people, but his attempts at banality are so affected and deliberately dumb that he comes off seeming much weirder than he would if he was writing total nonsense. The lyrics and music on Raditude are all signification and no meaning, and push the willful vacuity of his last few albums to an absurd extreme. Interestingly, the only tracks that outright fail on the album are the ones that display some degree of self-awareness, as in the dreadful club pastiche “Can’t Stop Partying” featuring Lil Wayne. This sort of thing can only work with a glassy-eyed, poker-faced commitment to ridiculousness, and that’s certainly in evidence on “The Girl Got Hot,” a cheery pop tune that comes across like a long-lost collaboration between Gary Glitter and The Gas Station Dogs.

“The Girl Got Hot” is about being out at a rock party and running into a girl who was homely in junior high, but has blossomed into a total babe. (If we’re operating on the logic of Hollywood, and it’s pretty safe to say that we are, she simply ditched her glasses for contact lenses. Whoa!) The interesting thing here — and a woman had to point this out to me — is that the scenario in the song is not at all a typical male fantasy, but it is something a lot of young girls imagine for themselves. That he makes a point of harping on the notion that all the other girls from school are now basically unfuckable hags only highlights the wish fulfillment aspect for insecure girls. It’s empty objectification, but a triumph all the same. There’s no subtext in this song, no perspective or criticism. It’s just “Hey, wow, the girl got hot! Awesome!,” and out. But the context adds some weight to this glorious fluff, because the whole time I just imagine this cable news ticker scroll in Rivers’ head reading “This is normal, right? Parties. Girls. Malls. Fun. Normal! Normal! Normal! Right?”

The song is really terrible but the analysis of Rivers Cuomo is so on point. Rivers Cuomo is one of my fallen childhood heartthrobs. RIP Rivers circa The Blue Album.

(Rivers during his celibate phase.)

Three Halloween costumes that I will not be wearing this year but wish I were:

Winona Ryder in Reality Bites

Salome with the head of John the Baptist

Jean Seberg in Breathless (After last Halloween, I was planning to be this. But then you know, a year’s worth of news transpired, hipster grifter, etc…)

Also, Meat Loaf is absolutely epic! I forgot how much I loved Meat Loaf.

Village Voice’s 2009 Best Grad Student Bar (via Juli)

1020 Bar

A pretentious dive bar? No, although the Ph.D. candidates at 1020 Bar will be more than happy to engage you about the ongoing debates in the humanities. Or they might just want to match you Jack for Jack. This is where the elite of Columbia University’s brainiacs come to unwind—the few, the poor, the all-but-dissertation—and they play a mean game of darts. Think you can’t discuss string theory after two rounds of sloppy pool and four Amstels? Well, neither can they, but it’s deliciously stupid to try. And you may have just learned this without shelling out for tuition, so who’s the smarty now?

Now this is just bad reporting. Anyone who’s been to 1020 knows that only law students, creepy GSers, and undergrads frequent 1020. Caveat: my statement is less true on weeknights and during daylight hours. Also, a sleazy man once used the line, “I don’t eat meat, but I do eat pussy,” on me at 1020.