Thursday, August 31, 2017

the last book I ever read (Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken, excerpt four)

from Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken:

Then I read it: the sentence that would change my life.

“To be very blunt, and God watch over Paul’s soul, I am a 99 percent improvement over Paul Wellstone.”

“I am a 99 percent improvement over Paul Wellstone.” I’m sorry, but you don’t say that about anyone who died within the last six months. And, my God, you don’t say it about a guy who everyone agreed was a compassionate, tireless champion of the little guy, a loving husband and father, and a colleague whom every senator recognized for his passion and decency.



Wednesday, August 30, 2017

the last book I ever read (Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken, excerpt three)

from Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken:

Of the original cast, Danny was the one we teamed up with the most. He and Tom created the Coneheads after taking a trip together to Easter Island. Tom and I wrote Danny as Julia Child bleeding to death after cutting herself deboning a chicken. We collaborated with him on sleazy characters like Irwin Mainway, purveyor of dangerous toys for kids, like Bag o’ Glass. Danny played two presidents with mustache: a hyper-competent Jimmy Carter early in his term, taking phone calls with Billy Murray’s Walter Cronkite and masterfully talking down a young man on a bad acid trip (played by Tom, of course), and an inebriated Nixon talking to White House portraits during those stormy Final Days.

I worked with so many talented men and women going through exhilarating but also sometimes very difficult periods of their lives. Putting on a live ninety-minute comedy show week after week can be thrilling, and it can be painfully stressful. And of course, we were all of a very tender age. People had sex and fell in love. But mostly had sex. I personally had 227 sexual encounters during my fifteen years at SNL. All of them with Franni.



Tuesday, August 29, 2017

the last book I ever read (Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken, excerpt two)

from Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken:

Dad loved comedy, and I loved watching it with him and Owen and Mom in the TV room. His absolute favorite was Buddy Hackett.

Now, Dad inhaled a pipe all his adult life. When I was a kid, if Dad got on a laughing jag, he’d start coughing at some point and inevitably end up coughing up phlegm into the clean, neatly pressed white handkerchief he always carried in his right front pocket. So if Johnny Carson said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Buddy Hackett!” Mom would get up and leave the room. But the phlegm didn’t bother me and Owen.



Monday, August 28, 2017

the last book I ever read (Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken, excerpt one)

from Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken:

For most of my childhood, I thought I was going to be a scientist of some sort. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, my parents, like the rest of America, were terrified. The Soviets had nuclear weapons and now were ahead of us in space. So my parents marched me and Owen into our living room, sat us down, and said, “You boys are going to study math and science so we can beat the Soviets!”

I thought that was a lot of pressure to put on a six-year-old. But Owen and I were obedient sons, so we studied math and science. And we were good at it. Owen was the first in our family to go to college. He went to MIT, graduating with a degree in physics, and then became a photographer.

I went to Harvard, and became a comedian. My poor parents.



Sunday, August 27, 2017

the last book I ever read (Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman, excerpt fourteen)

from Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman:

After his on-air confession, Letterman decided that after every episode he would have a postmortem meeting with his top staff. It would be in Barbara Gaines’s office and it would often go on for hours. His longtime employee and now producer Jude Brennan and the Stangel brothers were there, too. What made this unusual was that no one at the postmortem was allowed to actually talk about the show. This meant that it wasn’t really a postmortem at all but a way for Letterman to cope with and avoid his personal life.

“I can’t go home,” Letterman told his staff. “I am the most hated man in America.” And so everyone sat there and talked about television shows or a documentary about Hitler’s final days, by which Letterman had become fascinated. Sometimes he would take a call, and everyone would be quiet while he talked. The staffers had to stay, even though no work was being done. “It was like a hostage situation,” said one staff member.



Saturday, August 26, 2017

the last book I ever read (Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman, excerpt thirteen)

from Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman:

Sitting as his desk, David Letterman cleared his throat. “I have a little story that I would like to tell you,” he said, adding a folksy flourish right out of a kindergarten class: “Do you feel like a story?” Then he began describing the details of what sounded like an ordinary morning three weeks earlier. He woke up early and got into his car. Letterman explained that he was surprised to find a package there. The audience laughed, even though he hadn’t made a joke. In the package was a letter. This was how he described its message: “I know that you do some terrible, terrible things. And I can prove that you do these terrible things.”

The audience laughed again. Letterman had been telling comic fictions with conviction for so long that it was hard to tell if this was real. His tone sounded more like that of a producer pitching a hostage movie to a studio than a guy making a contemplative confession. Then he described the threat from the man who had written the letter, which made the situation even more ridiculous. He’d told Letterman that he would write a screenplay filled with the terrible things he did unless he got money. Gliding right past what those terrible things were, Letterman stopped and gesticulated. “That’s a little—and this is the word I actually used—that’s a little hinky,” he said.



Friday, August 25, 2017

the last book I ever read (Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman, excerpt twelve)

from Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman:

During this time, Letterman began to speak openly about suffering from depression. In interviews, he said antidepressants had saved his life. On the show, he talked frankly with Howard Stern about his social awkwardness. “There are certain kinds of people who lament the fact they don’t have close friends but don’t do anything to create close friendships,” he told Stern on the Late Show. “I’m kind of like that.”

As you might expect from a celebrity who had been stalked, Letterman became protective of his privacy, hesitant to expand his circle of friends. Rich Hall recalled that once during a commercial, he was talking to Letterman about Montana, where they both had homes. Hall was returning there that night but had not booked a plane ticket. After a friendly exchange in which he asked Letterman which flight he normally took, Hall realized from the answer that Letterman had a private jet. When Hall suggested that he could ride with him that night and then take a taxi after they landed, the scene that followed was a textbook case of a talk-show host shifting gears from off camera to on with alacrity.



Thursday, August 24, 2017

the last book I ever read (Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman, excerpt eleven)

from Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman:

In the short amount of time since the Late Show started fading in the ratings, Letterman had lost many of his key collaborators and wasn’t speaking to others.By the end of the 1990s he would become distant with even some of his closest and most loyal employees. Barbara Gaines had a quieter and briefer falling-out, after getting upset about not being invited to London to work on the shows they shot there right after the Academy Awards. They had long had an amiable, needling, but also affectionate rapport, not only in the office but also on the show. But after not going to London, she wrote Letterman a letter expressing her unhappiness, and they didn’t talk for three years, outside of perfunctory professional exchanges.

When Burnett returned to the show, his relationship with Letterman became strained. “Dave got hurt and burned by Rob, and everything changed after that,” said one longtime staff member. “Dave felt like he found his guy. He’s going to make his production company and his legacy. Dave felt Rob was then like, ‘Okay, thanks, bye,’ Dave became depressed. He lost his person. It left a void.”



Wednesday, August 23, 2017

the last book I ever read (Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman, excerpt ten)

from Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman:

Several years later, in 2009, news broke of a sex scandal on the Late Show. David Letterman had been threatened with blackmail by the boyfriend of a staffer with whom he was having an affair. The staffer was Stephanie Birkett. When Merrill Markoe heard this news, her mind flashed back to the talk with Gaines. David Letterman wanted her to write jokes for the intern he was having an affair with behind the back of his wife, the former staffer whose affair helped end her relationship with him? Markoe’s mind reeled. “I felt like Bugs Bunny the time that Daffy Duck woke him up by putting the lid of a pot on his head and beating it with a spoon,” she explained. “I could feel my eyes rolling in different directions, and my head vibrating back and forth like a tuning fork.”

Markoe spent some time considering the proper response, and on her blog she wrote this joke: “As you can imagine this is a very emotional moment for me because Dave promised me many times that I was the only woman he would ever cheat on.”



Tuesday, August 22, 2017

the last book I ever read (Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman, excerpt nine)

from Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman:

Every time Markoe drove up La Brea Avenue, she saw a billboard with Letterman’s gap-toothed grin. She stared blankly at an ad on the back of a bus on the freeway. Another day, she turned on the television and saw a Hard Copy report on the women in Letterman’s life. There she was: “the ex-girlfriend.” She nudged her dog: “Lewis, look who is on TV.”

Merrill Markoe had been David Letterman’s critical collaborator for the most formative years of his television career, creating so many essential parts of the show. As much as anyone, she helped invent the aesthetic of David Letterman. Now, at the height of his success, she was treated as just another ex-girlfriend. “It made me really angry,” she explained. “Really, really, really, really angry. Four reallys.”



Monday, August 21, 2017

the last book I ever read (Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman, excerpt eight)

from Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman:

Larry “Bud” Melman (who was addressed on the Late Show as Calvert DeForest, because NBC claimed intellectual rights to his character’s name) had a diminished role. Letterman found new ordinary people from the neighborhood to play off of. In a remote on one of his first shows, Letterman visited the Bangladeshi owners of a gift shop, named Mujibur and Sirajul. Rupert Jee, who ran the shop Hello Deli, took on an even more prominent role on the Late Show. They were in the tradition of his old remotes that poked fun at strangers and immigrant names. Letterman never seemed happier than when he was saying Sirajul.

Whereas Letterman had long hosted comics who pushed the limits of good taste, he suddenly became cautious. In October of the show’s first season, he booked the polemical political comic Bill Hicks, who had performed on Late Night with David Letterman many times and was well known in comedy circles for uncompromising and extremely funny rants about politics and religion. He began with a joke about the singer Billy Ray Cyrus and moved on to abortion and religion. “A lot of Christians wear crosses around their necks,” Hicks said in one setup. “Nice sentiment, but do you think when Jesus comes back, he’s really going to want to look at a cross?”



Sunday, August 20, 2017

the last book I ever read (Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman, excerpt seven)

from Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman:

The CBS Late Show proved to be a hit right from the start. Bill Murray was Letterman’s first guest, just as he had been on Late Night with David Letterman, and not long after he rushed onstage, he told Letterman he had some advice. He explained how Chevy Chase (who would start an infamously terrible talk show on the Fox network one week after Late Show premiered) had told him it’s important to get your name out there. He took out a can of spray paint and spelled DAVE on Letterman’s desk.

Two weeks after Letterman started his new show, Conan O’Brien, a former Simpsons writer plucked from obscurity by Lorne Michaels, started his hosting tenure at Late Night with a video that portrayed him preparing for his new job, walking through the streets of New York as strangers repeatedly compared him to Letterman (Tom Brokaw warned, “You better be as good as Letterman”) until finally he arrived at his office and decided to hang himself. The intimidating prospect of following David Letterman was the subject of a joke even on the network that he’d spurned. O’Brien would eventually establish his own distinct style. Six months after his premiere on CBS, Letterman returned to his old studios to appear on Late Night. O’Brien asked him if he was surprised by how much attention leaving Late Night and moving networks had received. “I had no idea that it was that important,” Letterman said, then couldn’t resist a shot at his old employers. “And NBC had no idea that it was that important.”



Saturday, August 19, 2017

the last book I ever read (Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman, excerpt six)

from Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman:

The most famous example of Hal Gurnee’s cutaway might have been the time, a decade later, when Madonna cursed more than a dozen times during an interview that quickly turned awkward. Gurnee, recognizing Letterman’s discomfort, took control of the segment by shifting the point of view to an elderly couple in the audience. As Madonna cursed and Letterman groused, Gurnee simply kept returning to shots of members of the audience, which gave the host something else to talk about.

What other television director would take the focus away from the biggest pop star and television comedian of the era with a simple camera switch? Who even had the leeway and courage to do it? Gurnee did, and it worked, getting a big laugh.



Friday, August 18, 2017

the last book I ever read (Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman, excerpt five)

from Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman:

More than any other comedy figure, Letterman redefined countercultural cool as knowing, square, and disengaged. Authenticity, the currency of cool for ages, was out; only a fool still believed it existed. What mattered was signaling that you knew it. You saw this clash of old and new styles play out when the pop star Billy Idol appeared as a guest on Late Night.

Idol adopted a glossy version of Sex Pistols style with all the usual signifiers of a punk rock aesthetic: black leather jacket, shock of white spiky hair, a scowl. Idol told Letterman that his songs were so popular that drug dealers were naming their products after them. Instead of chuckling merrily or changing the subject, Letterman injected some antagonism into the exchange and sneered, “You must be a very proud young man.”



Thursday, August 17, 2017

the last book I ever read (Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman, excerpt four)

from Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman:

By late 1983, Late Night with David Letterman had reached a crossroads. About half the writing staff had left the show. At one point, there were only six writers. “I do remember there being a small element of desperation and fear,” said Steve O’Donnell, who replaced Downey as head writer. Letterman was concerned. When another Lampoon writer, Jeff Martin, interviewed, Letterman asked when he could start. Martin said he could quit his job tomorrow. “That’s just the kind of loyalty we’re looking for,” Letterman said sarcastically.

But Martin would become part of a new team of writers who stayed together for around six years, through the first explosion in popularity for the show. This new group was composed entirely of white men. This blanket homogeneity was in part a reflection of the comedy scene, marked by institutional sexism and racism, but it was also specific to the show. Its only female writer was its first, Merrill Markoe, who had a major role in hiring the first group of writers. One of the lessons she took from the morning show was that the disparate voices on the staff didn’t mesh well. She aimed to get people who could do one thing: write for the sensibility of the host. Having people who were similar seemed like an asset. “That seemed good to me back then, because it was harmony,” she said, “people who all thought the same.”



Wednesday, August 16, 2017

the last book I ever read (Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman, excerpt three)

from Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman:

George Meyer also wrote satire, though he favored nonsense, abstract jokes like the giant doorknob. In one sketch, he wrote a character who would interrupt Letterman, shout about Stupid Pet Tricks being fixed, and then get dragged off the stage. He became known as the Conspiracy Guy and was played by Chris Elliott, then a runner on staff. This sketch set the template for a series of characters played by Elliott in the same vein, including the Guy Under the Seats, the Panicky Guy, and the Fugitive Guy.

In a segment Meyer proposed, two stagehands participated in a contest between a humidifier and a dehumidifier. Letterman called this “the single most brilliant idea on the show ever.”



Tuesday, August 15, 2017

the last book I ever read (Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman, excerpt two)

from Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman:

Merrill Markoe was thrilled when she got offered a job writing on a new variety show starring Mary Tyler Moore, called Mary. The day after spending the night with Letterman, she went to work on the show for the first time. At the writers’ meeting, she checked out the list of cast members and was shocked to see Letterman’s name. Even though they were spending most nights together, he had never mentioned he was working on the same show. She later learned he had known she was up for the job. Looking back, Markoe said this was “a portent of many things to come.”



Monday, August 14, 2017

the last book I ever read (Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman, excerpt one)

from Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman:

New York’s drinking age was eighteen, and Letterman took advantage of it. He left the tour of CBS and walked to the bar at the Hotel Edison. Later, he and his friends headed uptown to check out the Sigma Chi house at Columbia University.

On their last day, Letterman and two friends went to a bar to watch a Rangers hockey game, got drunk, and lost track of time. When they check the clock and realized their train was about to leave, they rushed to Penn Station, late. They hadn’t packed their bags, so Tomlinson had to send someone to the hotel. When they returned to Ball State, Tomlinson called them into the office and said they could be expelled for their behavior.



Saturday, August 12, 2017

the last book I ever read (An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira, excerpt ten)

from An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira:

Like a Mater Dolorosa, Krause held the unconscious body of his friend and master, under crowns of foliage multiplied to infinity. The trills of a sky-blue cephalonica encircled the silence. Night was falling. It had been falling for some time.

In the last, miraculously drawn-out light, soldiers and ranchers gathered at the fort to debrief. The horses were exhausted. The riders hung their heads, speaking in mournful grunts; all were grimy, their faced powdered with dust, some were falling asleep in the saddle. Krause joined one of the parties, with Rugendas slung over the back of his horse, sleeping off a dose of powdered poppy extract, his head hanging level with the stirrup, which gave it a ding like a bell’s clapper at every step. The mantilla, however, had remained in place. Night had fallen by the time they reached the fort, and they reached it none too soon, for the darkness was absolute.



Friday, August 11, 2017

the last book I ever read (An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira, excerpt nine)

from An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira:

Mounted squads emerged periodically from El Tambo – a complex of low buildings adjoined by extensive corrals – with all their firearms blazing, momentarily breaking the rings of savages, which reformed within seconds. The dairy cows had lain down; they looked like dark lumps. The dances of the Indian horsemen attained extremes of fantasy when it came to displaying their captives. This was a distinctive feature of the raids, almost a defining trait. Stealing women, as well as livestock, was what made it all worthwhile. In fact, it was an extremely rare occurrence, and functioned more as excuse and propitiatory myth. Unsuccessful as usual, the Indians at El Tambo displayed the captives they had not been able to take, with defiant and, again, extremely graphic gestures.

They came around the hill by the stream, a little group of them, lances raised, yelling: Huinca! Kill! Arrghh! The loudest, in the middle of the group, was triumphantly holding a “captive,” perched sideways on the neck of his horse. Naturally this was not a captive at all, but another Indian, disguised as a woman; he was making effeminate gestures, but no one could have fallen for such a crude trick, and even the Indians seemed to be treating it as a joke.



Thursday, August 10, 2017

the last book I ever read (An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira, excerpt eight)

from An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira:

Whatever the truth of the matter, the Germans found themselves in natural surroundings that were excitingly unfamiliar, so unfamiliar that Rugendas required confirmation from his friend that what he was seeing existed objectively and was not a product of his altered state. Urgent, impertinent birds flung outlandish cries in the tangled vegetation, guinea fowl and hairy rats scampered away before them, powerful yellow pumas kept watch from rock ledges. And the condor soared pensively over the abysses. There were abysses within abysses and trees rose like towers from the deep underground levels. They saw gaudy flowers open, large and small, some with paws, others with rounded kidneys of apple flesh. In the streams there were siren-like mollusks and, at the bottom, always swimming against the current, legions of pink salmon the size of lambs. The deep green of the auraucaria trees thickened to a velvety black or parted to reveal floating landscapes that always seemed upside down. Around the lakes, forests of delicate myrtle, with trunks like tubes of yellow rubber, smooth to the touch and cold as ice. Moss plumped up to form wilderness sofas; the airy lacework of fern fronds quivered nervously.



Wednesday, August 9, 2017

the last book I ever read (An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira, excerpt seven)

from An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira:

For his recovery, though miraculous, was far from complete. He had hoisted himself out of the deep pit of death with the vigor of a titan, but the ascent had taken its toll. Leaving aside the state of his face for the moment, the exposed nerve, which had caused the unbearable suffering of the first days, had been encapsulated, but although this meant the end of the acute phase, the nerve ending had reconnected, more or less at random, to a node in the frontal lobe, from which it emitted prodigious migraines. They came on suddenly, several times a day; everything went flat, then began to fold like a screen. The sensation grew and grew, overpowering him; he began to cry out in pain and often fell over. There was a high-pitched squealing in his ears. He would never have imagined that his nervous system could produce so much pain; it was a revelation of what his body could do. He had to take massive doses of morphine and the attacks left him fragile, as if perched on stilts, his hands and feet very far away. Little by little he began to reconstruct the accident, and was able to tell Krause about it. The horse had survived, and was still useful; in fact, it was the one he usually chose to ride. He renamed it Flash. Sitting on its back he thought he could feel the ebbing rush of the universal plasma. Far from holding a grudge against the horse, he had grown fond of it. They were fellow survivors of electricity. As the analgesic took effect, he resumed his drawing: he did not have to learn again, for he had lost none of his skill. It was another proof of art’s indifference; his life might have been broken in two, but painting was still the “bridge of dreams.” He was not like his ancestor, who had to start over with his left hand. If only he had been so lucky! What bilateral symmetry could he resort to, when the nerve was pricking at the very center of his being?



Tuesday, August 8, 2017

the last book I ever read (An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira, excerpt six)

from An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira:

What happened next bypassed his senses and went straight into his nervous system. In other words, it was over very quickly; it was pure action, a wild concatenation of events. The storm broke suddenly with a spectacular lightning bolt that traced a zigzag arc clear across the sky. It came so close that Rugendas’s upturned face, frozen in an expression of idiotic stupor, was completely bathed in white light. He thought he could feel its sinister heat on his skin, and his pupils contracted to pinpoints. The thunder crashing down impossibly enveloped him in millions of vibrations. The horse began to turn beneath him. It was still turning when a lightning bolt struck him on the head. Like a nickel statue, man and beast were lit up with electricity. For one horrific moment, regrettably to be repeated, Rugendas witnessed the spectacle of his body shining. The horse’s man was standing on end, like the dorsal fin of a swordfish. From that moment on, like all victims of personalized catastrophes, he saw himself as if from outside, wondering, Why did it have to happen to me? The sensation of having electrified blood was horrible but very brief. Evidently the charge flowed out as fast as it had flowed into his body. Even so, it cannot have been good for his health.



Monday, August 7, 2017

the last book I ever read (An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira, excerpt five)

from An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira:

Locusts. The biblical plaque had passed that way. That was the solution, revealed to them at last by the guide. It he had delayed doing so, it was only because he wanted to be sure. He had recognized the signs by hearsay, never having seen them with his own eyes. He had also been told about the sight of the swarm in action, but preferred not to talk about that, considering the results, fancy could hardly have outstripped the facts. Alluding to his friend’s disappointment at having missed the Indians, Krause asked if he did not regret having arrived too late on this occasion too. Rugendas imagined it. A green field, suddenly smothered by a buzzing cloud, and, a moment later, nothing. Could a painting capture that? No. An action painting, perhaps.



Sunday, August 6, 2017

the last book I ever read (An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira, excerpt four)

from An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira:

They spent a delightful month in and around Mendoza and its environs. The locals bent over backwards to welcome the distinguished visitor, who, invariably accompanied by Krause, made the obligatory excursions to the ranges (which were no doubt more interesting for travelers who had come from the other direction), toured the neighboring estates and generally began to soak up the spirit of Argentina, so similar to Chile in that town near the border, and yet, even there, so different. Mendoza was, in effect, the starting point for the long eastward voyage across the pampas to the fabled Buenos Aires, and that gave it a special, unique character. Another notable feature was that all the buildings in the town and the surrounding country looked new; and so they were, since earthquakes ensured that all man-made structures were replaced approximately every five years. Rebuilding stimulated the local economy. Comfortably riding the seismic activity, the ranches supplied the Chilean markets, exploiting the early maturation of the cattle, speeded by the dangers emanating from the underworld. Rugendas would have liked to depict an earthquake, but he was told that it was not a propitious time according to the planetary clock. Nevertheless, throughout his stay in the region, he kept secretly hoping he might witness a quake, though he was too tactful to say so. In this respect, and in others, his desires were frustrated. Prosaic Mendoza held promises that, for one reason or another, were not fulfilled and which, in the end, prompted their departure.

His other cherished dream was to witness an Indian raid. In that area, they were veritable human typhoons, but, by their nature, refractory to calendars and oracles. It was impossible to predict them: there might be one in an hour’s time or none until next year (and it was only January). Rugendas would have paid to paint one. Every morning of that month, he woke up secretly hoping the great day had come. As in the case of the earthquake, it would have been in poor taste to mention this desire. Dissimulation made him hypersensitive to detail. He was not so sure that there was no forewarning. He questioned his hosts at length, supposedly for professional reasons, about the premonitory signs of seismic activity. It seemed they appeared only hours or minutes before the quake: dogs spat, chickens pecked at their own eggs, ants swarmed, plants flowered, etc. But there was no time to do anything. The painter was convinced that an Indian raid would be anticipated by equally abrupt and gratuitous changes in the cultural domain. But he did not have the opportunity to confirm this intuition.



Saturday, August 5, 2017

the last book I ever read (An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira, excerpt three)

from An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira:

The landscape revealed by this backward glance revived old doubts and crucial quandaries. Rugendas wondered if he would be able to make his way in the world, if his work, that is, his art, would support him, if he would be able to manage like everyone else . . . So far he had, and comfortably, but that was due in part to the energy of youth and the momentum he had acquired through his training at the Academy and elsewhere. Not to mention good luck. He was almost sure that he would not be able to keep it up. What did he have to fall back on? His profession, and practically nothing else. And what if painting failed him? He had no house, no money in the bank, and no talent for business. His father was dead, and for years he had been wandering through foreign lands. This had given him a peculiar perspective on the argument that begins “If other people can do it . . .” All the people he came across, in cities or villages, in the jungle or the mountains, had indeed managed to keep going one way or another, but they were in their own environments; they knew what to expect, while he was at the mercy of fickle chance. How could he be sure that the physiognomic representation of nature would not go out of fashion, leaving him helpless and stranded in the midst of a useless, hostile beauty? His youth was almost over in any case, and still he was a stranger to love. He had ensconced himself in a world of fables and fairy tales, which had taught him nothing of practical use, at least he had learnt that the story always goes on, presenting the hero with new and ever more unpredictable choices. Poverty and destitution would simply be another episode. He might end up begging for alms at the door of a South American church. No fear was unreasonable, given his situation.



Friday, August 4, 2017

the last book I ever read (An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira, excerpt two)

from An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira:

Rugendas and Krause got on well and had plenty to talk about, although both were rather quiet. They had traveled together in Chile a number of times, always in perfect harmony. The only thing that secretly bothered Rugendas was the irremediable mediocrity of Krause’s painting, which he was not able to praise in all sincerity, as he would have liked. He tried telling himself that genre painting did not require talent, since it was all a matter of following the procedure, but it was no use: the pictures were worthless. He could, however, appreciate his friend’s technical accomplishment and above all his good nature. Krause was very young and still had time to choose another path in life. Meanwhile he could enjoy these excursions; they would certainly do him no harm. Krause, for his part, was in awe of Rugendas, and the pleasure they took in each other’s company was due in no small measure to the disciple’s devotion. The difference in age and talent was not obvious, because Rugendas, at thirty-five, was timid, effeminate and gawky as an adolescent, while Krause’s aplomb, aristocratic manners and considerate nature narrowed the gap.



Thursday, August 3, 2017

the last book I ever read (An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira, excerpt one)

from An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira:

Western art can boast few documentary painters of true distinction. Of those whose lives and works we know in detail, the finest was Rugendas, who made two visits to Argentina. The second, in 1847, gave him an opportunity to record the landscapes and physical types of the Río de la Plata – in such abundance that an estimated two hundred paintings remained in the hands of local collectors – and to refute his friend and admirer Humboldt, or rather a simplistic interpretation of Humboldt’s theory, according to which the painter’s talent should have been exercised solely in the more topographically and botanically exuberant regions of the New World. But the refutation had in fact been foreshadowed ten years earlier, during Rugendas’s brief and dramatic first visit, which was cut short by a strange episode that would mark a turning point in his life.



Wednesday, August 2, 2017

the last book I ever read (My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel, excerpt fourteen)

from My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel by Patricio Pron:

Among the things I was remembering were the stories my father’s comrades told about the flurry of activity in the city of *osario during that period and how students and workers marched side by side in their demonstrations. Tapes of speeches by Juan Domingo Perón that he recorded in exile in Madrid and that periodically, through more or less mysterious channels, came into the hands of members of the organization, who spread them around the neighborhoods; by this I don’t mean the content of the tapes—which I seem to remember my parents’ comrades had forgotten—but rather their physicality, the tapes in their reels and the devices used to reproduce them, including one particular device that I used during my childhood and was black and white and often didn’t work. A monument in the shape of an inverted spider that my parents and their comrades called the Mandarin, in a working-class neighborhood beside a stream of polluted water filled with prodigious fish. The stories of belonging to the organization, of its members’ private lives, including the story of one comrade who had been expelled for having gone to bed with a member of a rival organization. The defections of some of its members, described with indignation but also with something like bafflement and compassion for their former comrades. A statistic—one hundred fifty members of the organization dead during the illegal crackdown—that had been determined by human rights organizations. My mother explaining to me one day how to create a barricade, how to unhitch a trolleybus and how to make a Molotov cocktail. The memory, real or imagined, of my father telling me that he had a press pass for the box where Perón was supposedly going to speak when he arrived at Ezeiza (this is the real part of the memory), and that, when the crossfire began, he hid behind the case of a double bass in the orchestra pit (in what might be the imagined part of the memory). Also my mother’s stories about her march to meet Perón on his first return in 1972, her crossing the Matanza River with its thick rotten water up to her waist and some white pants she’d had to throw out, her stories and the stories of her girlfriends about Perón’s death on July 1, 1974, and the lines to bid farewell to the great man in the cold driving rain that covered their tears, and the people approaching the young folks to give them food or a cup of coffee as they waited their turn out in the rain, more exposed to the elements than they’d ever been before; and later, the return by train, a train with broken windows that let in the cold and rain and all the death that would take place in the months and years to come; and the sadness and the crying and the feeling that everything had ended. I also remember the death of one of my parents’ comrades, which they had once told me about; it happened in January 1976 and sent my mother into hiding at my paternal grandparents’ house. When my father took her there, he told her: If you haven’t heard from me in a week, don’t look for me, and my mother stayed there, in that town, with my father’s parents, drifting through the days of that week with her eyes closed. Then, the powerlessness in the face of everything that was happening and the fear, which as a child I’d thought my parents didn’t feel and yet they felt much more than I’d thought: they lived with it and fought against it and they held us in it like one holds up a newborn in a hospital room so that the baby becomes one with the air that surrounds him and will surround him and therefore lives; and the lack of an organization, which in those years meant a lack of boundaries and of direction and of binding ties, and friends who couldn’t be seen again because of the risk that such meetings would be interpreted as a return to the struggle, and the loneliness and the cold. Also, the private rituals that were going to end up leaving marks on all of us, particularly those of us who were children at the time: the ban on parties, the precautions in using the telephone, the compartmentalization, my father walking to the car every morning, my siblings holding hands and avoiding objects on the sidewalks, my walking against traffic and lowering my head whenever a police car passed, sharing the silence with my parents and my siblings, being somewhat perplexed every time that—but this happened many years later—my parents got together with their comrades and the painful memories and the happy ones were layered in their voices, along with the nicknames or noms de guerre that they still used, and got mixed up and melded into something difficult for me to explain and perhaps inconceivable to their children, and that was an affection and a solidarity and a loyalty among them that went beyond the differences they might have had in the present and which I attributed to a feeling that I too could have had toward other people if we’d shared something unique and fundamental, if—and this, of course, sounds childish or perhaps metaphorical, but it’s not in the least—I’d been willing to give my life for people and those people had been willing to give their lives for me.



Tuesday, August 1, 2017

the last book I ever read (My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel, excerpt thirteen)

from My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel by Patricio Pron:

I was born in December 1975, which means I was conceived around March of that same year, slightly less that a year after the death of Perón and just a few months after the dissolution of the organization my parents were part of. I like to ask people I meet when they were born; if they are Argentines and were born in December 1975, I think we have something in common, since all of us born in that period are the consolation prizes our parents gave themselves after failing to pull off the revolution. Their failure gave life to us, but we also gave them something: in those years, a child was a good cover, a sign of a conventional life, far from revolutionary activities; a child could be, at a checkpoint or in a raid, the difference between life and death.