La gatera de Beguemot

Willemessant, the founder of Le Figaro, characterized the nature of information in a famous formulation. “To my readers,” he used to say, “an attic fire in the Latin Quartier is more important than a revolution in Madrid.” This makes strikingly clear that what gets the readiest hearing is no longer intelligence coming from afar, but the information which supplies a handle for what is nearest. Intelligence that came from afar–whether over spatial distance (from foreign countries) or temporal (from tradition)–possessed an authority which gave it validity, even when it was not subject to verification. Information, however, lays claim to prompt verifiability. The prime requirement is that it appear “understandable in itself.” Often it is no more exact than the intelligence of earlier centuries. But while the latter was inclined to borrow from the miraculous, information must absolutely sound plausible. For this reason, it proves incompatible with the spirit of storytelling. If the art of storytelling has become rare, the dissemination of information has played a decisive role in this state of affairs.

[...]

The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its energy and its capable of releasing it even after a long time.

“The Storyteller.” Selected Writings. Vol 3, 1935-1938. Ed. Howard Eiland, and Michael W. Jennings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott, et al. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP,  2002. 143-166. p.147. p.148

Continuará…

Admittedly, the first result of the predominance of the newspaper is to expose the fat that literary production has been integrated into the production of commodities [...]. But the second result stands in a dialectical relationship to the first. For as writing gains in breadth what art loses in depth, the separation between the author and the public–a separation that journalism maintains in a corrupt way–starts to be overcome in an admirable way. The reader is ready at any moment to become a writer–that is to say, a describer and prescriber. From every form of material knowledge, a path leads to the writing about it: in short, work itself finds a voice. And its representation in words becomes a part of the ability that is needed for its exercise. Literary competence is based not on consumption, but on working practice; in other words, it becomes a popular activity. The popular nature of writing is based not on consumption, but on production; it is part of an expertise. In a word, it is the literarization of living conditions, which becomes master of what are otherwise the insoluble antinomies that dominate all artistic activity in our age. And the stage on which we see enacted the profoundest debasement of the printed word–that is, the newspaper–will be the site of its regeneration in a new society.

Benjamin, Walter. “Diary from August 7, 1931, to the Day of My Death”. Selected Writings. Vol 2, 1926-1934. Ed. Michael Jennings, et al. Trans. Rodney Livingstone, et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, . 501-506. pp. 505-506. (Mis cursivas)

Las “nuevas voces” de la blogosfera no son más que voces articuladas en un espacio territorializado por la prensa y los grandes medios. Son consumidores-autores que no pueden trascender lo que ya apareció en papel. La novedad es cuantitiva, de identidades personales que acaso no han podido acceder a publicar en papel (aunque podrían dadas circunstancias ventajosas), y no “cualitativa”, no “otra”. Regeneración del periodismo, golpe de palacio en la ciudad de la prensa, nada más, permitido por un dispositivo de edición y reproducción nuevo para que lo ya existente se extienda como ameba idéntica a sí misma. Que los “periodistas-ciudadanos” escuchen y aprendan de los “ciudadanos-periodistas” en un loop de retroalimentación acaso sea novedoso en términos de articular nuevas relaciones dentro de esa ciudad, y acaso haya alguna transferencia de poder dentro de la ciudad y nuevos individuos puedan añadir la suya a las voces comúnmente más oídas, pero la ciudad de la prensa (más que ciudad, barrio dentro de la ciudad letrada) no es más diversa. Tal vez regeneración, no utopía. Como mucho más buen periodismo y escritura del mismo tipo del ya existente. Lo cual no es poco.

“You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world’s intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there’s cataclysm. Like the church we hate, anarchists also believe in another world. Where revolutions break out spontaneous and leaderless, and the soul’s talent for consensus allows the masses to work together without effort, automatic as the body itself. And yet, sena, if any of it should ever really happen that perfectly, I would also have to cry miracle. An anarchist miracle. Like your friend. He is too exactly and without flaw the thing we fight. In Mexico the privilegiado is always, to a finite percentage, redeemed one of the people. Unmiraculous. But your friend [Pierce], unless he’s joking, is as terrifying to me as a Virgin appearing to an Indian.”

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. NY: Harper & Row, 1986. p.120.

Le dice Jesús Arrabal, yucateco anarquista exiliado en San Francisco, donde regenta un restaurante, a Oedipa. (Ese Arrabal ¿es por Arrabal? ¿Tan al día estaba Tom?).

Bueno, una cita más para la tesis. Sigo leyendo mi novella de vampiras lésbicas…

Iba a citar a Yeats, pero me basta para el título del post porque esto en realidad no es más que un emblema de mi tesis. 250 páginas en la cabeza que incluyen no saben uds. qué. Hagan click y lean el poema; hagan click y observen un desbarajuste aún más grande. Por supuesto, nada de esto ha de ver conmigo, sino que se trata de una escultura de Gilles Barbiere encontrada en ca’ Valentina. Allá do los arquitectos podrán contemplar cómo a un museo, si un arquitecto lo desea, le puede salir una casa en lo alto como le salen cuernos a un viejo en una comedia cínica, de esas que nunca se han escrito en español…

April 6
In Calif, a stranger is a [potential] friend until he proves otherwise; in NY, a stranger is an enemy until he proves otherwise. One uses up a lot of energy in NY by that hypothesis.

Cita hallada vía la petí en los diarios de Susan Sontag, neoyorquina. Por algún motivo y a riesgo de parecer el típico sevillano superficial, soy irremediablemente californiano. Pero mañana al fin me enteraré de las plazas académicas para el curso 2006-2007…

Ese afán de imitación, que tantas veces nace de un alto aprecio, no será nunca del todo satisfecho por cuanto quien lo sufre rara vez es capaz de lograr su identificación con el modelo en que se mira que no sólo cambia sino que, por la diversidad de su conducta y por la riqueza y variedad del medio que le rodea, no siendo susceptible de ser conocido cabalmente siempre puede y sabe presentar una nueva actitud ignorada, revistiéndose en cada una de esas pequeñas evoluciones caleidoscópicas de una nueva vestidura tantalizante que para aquel que pudo o supo remedar tan sólo una de sus caras sirven para exacerbar su apetito, intensificando el aprecio hasta transformarlo en admiración para dar lugar a esa inquieta naturaleza que no sabe encontrar su acomodo sino en la incesante búsqueda de un parecido insensato.

Benet, Juan. Una meditación. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2004. p.20.

Es lógicamente “ese” afán, específico, y por eso hay que juzgar la frase en términos precisos y limitados. De ser una afirmación general, habría que destacar que le sobra bipolaridad (no hay un tercero contra el que se imita, vuelto el imitado arma para someterlo(s)) y falta rencor.

Imagine that I am a teacher: I speak, endlessly, in front of and for someone who remains silent. I am the person who says I (the detours of one, we, or impersonal sentences make no difference), I am the person who, under cover of setting out a body of knowledge, puts out a discourse, never knowing how that discourse is being received and thus forevcer forbidden the reassurance of a definitive image–even if offensive–which would constitute me. In the exposé, more aptly named than we tend to think, it is not knowledge which is exposed, it is the subject (who exposes himself to all sorts of painful adventures). The mirror is empty, reflecting back to me no more than the falling away of my language as it gradually unrolls.

Thus, in accordance with psychoanalytic description (Lacan’s, the perspicacity of which in this respect any speaker can confirm), when the teacher speaks to his audience, the Other is always there, puncturing his discourse.

–Roland Barthes, el teórico simpático.

Total, faltan énfasis del original, la experiencia solamente sirve verdaderamente para las letras y para un tipo de clase, pero no deja de describir interesantemente la experiencia de enseñar a un pequeño grupo, de ese número limitado que precisamente me pone tan incómodo: en el uno a uno se comprueba continuamente cómo van las cosas, ante las masas uno simplemente actúa y se olvida del otro, con 6-12 uno les ve las caras calladas a todos pero son demasiados para darte a revisar qué reciben.

La segunda cita se salva por ese glorioso paréntesis que es sencillamente imposible tomarse en serio… Puñalada que no tengo claro si es típicamente francesa o inglesa.

The Country of Marriage

VI

What I am learning to give you is my death

to set you free of me, and me from myself

into the dark and the new light. Like the water

of a deep stream, love is always too much. We

did not make it. Though we drink till we burst

we cannot have it all, or want it all.

In its abundance it survives our thirst.

In the evening we come down to the shore

to drink our fill, and sleep, while it

flows through the regions of the dark.

It does not hold us, except we keep returning

to its rich waters thirsty. We enter,

willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.

Wendell Berry; el poema entero. Epígrafe para El libro de la tribu, de Carlos Gardini, novela de vampiros de ciencia ficción sobre los desaparecidos y los vuelos de la muerte que empieza con una escena de intimidad literaria extrema.

Men Made Out of Words

What should we be without the sexual myth,

The human revery or poem of death?

Castratos of moon-mash–Life consists

Of propositions about life. The human

Revery is a solitude in which

We compose these propositions, torn by dreams,

By the terrible incantations of defeats

And by the fear that defeats and dreams are one.

The whole race is a poet that writes down

The eccentric propositions of its fate.

[Wallace Stevens, from Transport to Summer, 1947, 355-356]

Muy, muy, muy de lejos lo mejor que he tenido que leer en los textos en mi tesis. Los dos últimos versos son un epígrafe.

No, la foto no es mía… ni siquiera es la foto de una tesis. Pero bien podria serlo.