Luis Chitarroni - The No Variations - Diary of an Unfinished Novel

Without saying a word, I admitted no. But [I must say in my defense that] the gesture of admitting denial isn’t an easy [simple] one.

— Well, I won’t be too hard on you; after all, your cases aren’t exactly unique. Many things were obliterated in the Great War [as, for example, proper instruction on methods of reproach], but I have to find at least one book on which I can speak with the same authority.

— What about this Terry Eagleton fellow? Do you think you’ll be able to get a copy of his book in Cambridge?

— Eagleton is just plain Terry, whom I sure you’ve already met. Egerton, like the other George — Eliot, Mary Evans, as you’ll recall — is a lady: Mrs. Golding Bright. As in my case, remember the dash [between the two surnames].

— I see, I see … — I said, nodding.

— As regards your Argentine friend’s favorite subject, the metrical arrangement of Spenser’s Mutability Cantos , it wouldn’t hurt to consult T. S. Omond …

— He consults it regularly — I said, trying at least to preserve his honor.

— The Oxford edition or the mutilated new edition?

— I don’t know — I huffed — I wasn’t paying attention …

— How odd, you being an editor and all …

It was impossible. I’d read somewhere that the number of English surnames with a hyphen was seven, and, after a day, I’d already found three in my notebook.

Zi Benno (and his collected series of novellas that can be read as one very long novel) and Edgar Alan Meaulnes (and his very long novel that can be read as a garbage heap of literary scraps, both his own and those of others) persuade me. NO

Eiralis?

Writing a masterpiece isn’t something anyone can do, only he who heeds blindly the prediction concerning his fate to be alone on a tiny stage or in a cramped laboratory, an exclusive space where exclusive work is done, has any hope of writing one.

Mirceau Eliade’s unease at the proselytizing propaganda of Jim Joyce. Scruples of the artist corrected by the superstition of impersonality — never of anonymity — that lends to his art a link / vehicle that’s functional, inconsequential, invidious, equinoctial, marketinero.

I think I copied this way of writing from Girri. Marketinero, NO.

[In preparation]

And don’t dare enlighten them; it’s best if they continue as they are, in pursuance of something we’re not sure we know ourselves, something we may ourselves be ignorant of; if we do in fact know it, we haven’t been told what good it will do to communicate it to others; if we’re ignorant of it, then perhaps one day, your Excellency, we will come to know it. Nevertheless, let us prepare ourselves since they do not: when the truth overtakes them, memory and volition will give way, melt into one another and evaporate, and the [luminous] day and [certain] night will also cease to be. I’m here to tell you that it’s better if, in this world, they remain in obscurity and confusion; I’m here to tell all of you that it would benefit the pack if the light of civilization never dawned on them.

Francisco Aldecoa Inauda, from the letter to Saavedra Fajardo

(original epigraph of “The Imitation of an Ounce”)

As the editor-in-chief and publisher of [responsible for] the irresponsible literature we produce at Agraphia , it’s left to me to apologize [rhet. Captatio benevolentiæ ]. It was difficult converting the anesthetic [set of] abstractions they believed [was] to be literature into something readable. Although I tried my best, it suffices to read “The Mass in Tongues” and “Lycergical Glossary,” both of which were printed in those forgettable notebooks, to see I did not succeed. The collaboration with Victor Eiralis added very little: he was a jealous and inexorable defender of the same [abstruse and elusive] esthetic. I often say that whoever’s responsible for a literary journal has two jobs: keeping up appearances and bridging gaps — tasks more worthy of a [suicidal] theologian or [inhibited] geometer than a publisher. As to “keeping up appearances,” this basically demands that the one responsible uses his moral scruples to present to the reader a coherent [and consistent] intellectual pattern in the publications; and for “bridging gaps,” that risks must be taken with every literary adaptation, accepting that there can be no fixed model or approach for doing this, or if there is, it must be unintelligible. Of course, I was far from perfect in executing these tasks, but I am grateful for the interest, goodwill, and counsel of those individuals who helped me to exhibit the results.

César Quaglia, On the Effects of Delay, Reflections on Distance

[ Reflections from Afar, on the Effects of Delay [ Distance ]]

Time suspended in the real-time of “Diary of Xochimilk”

#10 [in Liturgies]

It was the moment for which all other moments are either altered or bartered. It was my turn to answer. “Was it true about Nicasio and Elena in Spain?” It was true, insofar as they refused — or didn’t bother — to deny it, though they were all too familiar with the enemy rumor . Yes, she was pregnant by another — the late fifties, it was — and yes, it was because she had taken a risqué stroll to the bohemian corner that beckoned them with promises.

Adventure of the sun [Gastr del Sol], revenge of the solstice. A ray suddenly — I suddenly exclaimed — fretted Aída’s divine [marmoreal] thigh and magenta shorts … And was it true what they said about us, that no one paid attention to us, that no one — to put it bluntly—“gave a damn” about us? That we were the writers without a legend or story, that all we ever did was read? Lies, Lies. Not entirely. It so happens that the books arrived — our books arrived — in the editorial hands of someone who wanted, in short, to take his revenge. Someone, a bigwig in the editorial department, whose wife had cheated on him with Nicasio or Remo — or perhaps it was both — a good man, a gentleman, the boss of the supplement, who said to his employee, an unpaid employee, an intern: “Look, I want you to fuck this book up. And don’t worry about the consequences. The author’s an imbecile. I don’t know if you’ve ever met him. He used to go to all the cocktail parties. Morally, he’s retarded; but intellectually, he’s a survivor, and of nothing resembling a battle or a tragedy …” And I heard all of this first hand, because I’m practically invisible.

Another source?

I saw, from a great height, the tiny dot of our boat, and I prayed to return to myself. I prayed to return to the group. But the supplication was to no avail, [the] my prayer was quenched in the utterance. The jungle was stretching in the distance, water lapping the shoreline. Old gray god. Capybaras in the pampas transformed into [a herd of] neutrinos. And afterwards, from the same height, still presbyopic, I squinted at a little bark where four people were tirelessly rehearsing sham civilities, and the fifth, forcing himself to cooperate in the farce in situ —a dissimulation that would be obvious to anyone [else] (especially to someone remote [like me]) — which would seem less ridiculous with repeated exercises in loyalty. [Then,] once again, I was peering at the telltale oval of my watch before once again trying to rejoin the [lost, niggardly] conversation. It was sixteen after twelve: a prosaic piece of information that makes one forget about the adverbs of time, as I used to say in my palefaced infancy.

The specular soup [vision] is the saline solution of the imitation of an ounce .

As a result of an involuntary sacrifice, the effects of the drug that only one of us had consumed — nothing less than the specular soup — we were floating on high, manning the wicker basket of a hot-air balloon. We? So I thought, at first, but none of my companions were actually with me. “Come on, Phileas dear, tell the truth, tell me about that friend of yours, Nicasio Urlihrt, you so often mentioned in conversation … What did he do, what did he create?” It was my late Chilean friend, Onofre Borneo, a ghost summoned out of death, out of absence, out of a change of custom. “Urlihrt was a difficult man,” I said, “very difficult.” We flew to a cruising altitude of at least two-and-a-half thousand feet above sea level. It was late, very late. “In the final days, he left Elena Urlihrt all on her own, and she was dead before he died afterwards. But she started doing the same after she met Bindo Altoviti — standing him up on dates — and he was dead not long before she died on her own. And she was doing the same earlier when it was Remo Sabatani, not Bindo Altoviti, who frequented her place.”