2-DAY SHOPPING PASS

at one point i intended to toil the summer away like the animals of a particular fable that i saw in cartoon form. the lazy animals are bailed out because the hard-working animals hold a monopoly on virtue and they are also charitable. still there are books on my shelf, some of which are my sick idea of pleasure reading, some are generally known as pleasure reading in some circles, and one or two would be considered by all to be pleasure reading.

i just finished one of the first column, which led me to make a series of interlibrary loan requests which, if fulfilled, will have a very long shot at being honored by my reading the whole thing or even any significant part thereof.

i got armagnac for my birthday. since i am not quite the lazy animal but only the animal who just manages answer to the consequences of his idleness without a bailout, for unmerited occasions i only drink the cognac that we got for deglazing, which is still a highly respectable and often rapped about mark because everything had to be perfect.

which shows that if i am to use time less than optimally, i want to at least be somewhere on the target, which is why i read the neglected books whose reading would be wreckless indulgence during the proper work season, but whose reading in the aorist sense is considered to be an enrichment.

i mean to confess that i shot and posted on youtube a cat video and played grand theft auto in two fruitless hours of trying to shoot down the helicopter of the woman who betrayed me, catalina.

2666 by Roberto Bola?o:

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after this novelist's death and the heavily publicized release of the english translation of his posthumous novel, i wanted to read the spanish edition (which did not enjoy the wide distribution and publicity of the english translation) and ended up recalling it from a fellow library patron who, i calculated, is also a graduate student. this person never counter-recalled it, so maybe it was just sitting on their shelf and they didn't want to call my bluff. i read 100 pages or so then put it down for a few months, then this week read another 100 pages until i got to a section break.

there are some literary critics who are all single and who have flexible work schedules and ample savings. this is why they freely travel within europe. they are all interested in the same novelist, and three of them have a menage a trois. there is one part where two of them (at this point everyone had travelled to mexico on a whim) decide to stop waking up early and stop eating breakfast in their hotel and they go to breakfast on chilaquiles and beer.

although i have never participated in a menage a trois with literary critics, i did have the good fortune to find at the grocery store the kind of sale where you know that it is so below cost that someone is intentionally losing money, and you wonder why. a brand of beer normally retailing for $7 the six-pack was going for $1.50 the six pack. i brought home ten, and after learning about the characters' breakfast, even though i intentionally kept the beers at room temperature to prevent myself from drinking them, i could not stop myself from obeying product placement, even if it meant drinking beer with ice cubes.

by strange coincidence, while at the store i also bought ingredients to make chilaquiles, all this well before having read about the critics' breakfast.

i read a collection of stories by the same author and the characters of these stories always visited prostitutes and their real problem was not knowing how to pass the time, because they never had a job. i think it is important to represent this kind of challenge in literature, so that when i have a vacation i can be informed of real or imaginary techniques for passing time when no one will notice if you're not working.

also the characters, in 2666 and the short stories, face opaque personal crises. the author only portrays the outward symptoms of their personal crises, as if he were reporting on these imaginary people scientifically and wanted to only report the facts and leave out all speculation. we only know that fulano ate chilaquiles and woke up late and seduced a working class woman and promised to mary her and one time felt tired, and previously felt sick. there is no indication of what causes him to behave this way. other writers might instead spend the whole time writing about the thousand natural shocks and how they jostled their protagonist's thinking, and what he was thinking and how his feelings caused him to eat chilaquiles, etc. i can't say which style i prefer, but i find that bola?o handles this technique with skill. i the reader feel like a voyeur and i don't feel omniscient like readers of other works of fiction might.

the narrator of the bola?o stories is above it all. in the works of onetti i have read the narrator is more or less ignorant of the contents of the characters' minds, but still has some kind of opinion about them, though he bases it on things he has fabricated.