Alex Kudera's Blog, page 67

Goldman on Bolano

Francisco Goldman on Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

customs

"Rosa was seventeen and she was Spanish. Amalfitano was fifty and Chilean. Rosa had had a passport since she was ten. On some of their trips. . . they had found themselves in strange situations, because Rosa went through customs by the gate for EU citizens and Amalfitano went by the gate for non-EU citizens. The first time, Rosa threw a tantrum and started to cry and refused to be separated from her father. Another time, since the lines were moving at different speeds, the EU citizens' line quickly and the noncitizens' line more slowly and laboriously, Rosa got lost and it took Amalfitano half an hour to find her. Sometimes the customs officers would see Rosa, so little, and ask whether she was traveling alone or whether someone was waiting for her outside. Rosa would answer that she was traveling with her father, who was South American, and she was supposed to wait for him right there. Once Rosa's suitcase was searched because they suspected her father of smuggling drugs or arms under cover of his daughter's innocence and nationality. But Amalfitano never trafficked in drugs, or for that matter arms."

~~ from 2666 by Roberto Bolano

a place where they would be fed

". . . in other words near the settlement of El Obelisco, which was neither a village nor exactly a suburb of Santa Teresa, but a way station for the poorest of the poor who came each day from the south, people who slept there at night and even died in hovels that they didn't think of as homes but as one more stop along the road to something different or at least a place where they would be fed."

~~ from 2666 by Roberto Bolano

what's wrong with college?

Joseph S. Salemi on higher education in the new edition of The Agonist: https://t.co/SXQocWwkjf#literary #journal #HigherEducation #adjunct #awp2020— Alex Kudera (@kudera) April 16, 2020

Kimarlee Nguyen, R.I.P.

"Ms. Nguyen earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Vassar in 2008 and a master of fine arts degree from Long Island University Brooklyn in 2016. Her writing has appeared in PANK, Hyphen Magazine and The Adroit Journal; she has had numerous fellowships and residencies and was at work on a novel, Lion’s Tooth, about a Cambodian-American family living in Cambridge, Mass."

"Intimacy, Six Feet Apart" by Yoojin Na

Writer and ER doctor Yoojin Na's "Intimacy, Six Feet Apart" describes romance in the age of social distancing.

Adam Zagoria

Sports reporter and college classmate Adam Zagoria survived the novel coronavirus and wrote about its debilitating impact and his "scariest times" while recovering.

Letter from Les Banlieues

"The approach has left residents vulnerable to both the police and the virus. Paris had 732 virus deaths compared with 402 in Seine-Saint-Denis as of April 8, but the city has half again the population of the suburb, where many of the metropolis’s cashiers, deliverymen, transit workers, nurses and couriers live."'This is getting really tough,' said Larry Karache, an out-of-work shopkeeper, standing outside Chêne Pointu, the housing project where France’s 2005 urban riots were born, and which was depicted in last year’s hit film Les Miserables. 'We’re actually in prison here.'"

Reading

"I was doing something useful. Something useful no matter how you look at it. Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach. And you, who are so kind, now you must be asking: What did you read, Barry? I read everything."

~~ from 2666  by Roberto Bolano

Bolano's Geometry

"Espinoza went out into the backyard and saw a book hanging from a clothesline. He didn't want to go over and see what book it was, but when he went back into the house he asked Amalfitano about it.

"'It's Rafael Dieste's Testamento geometrico,' said Amalfitano.

"'Rafeael Dieste, the Galician poet,' said Espinoza.

"'That's right,' said Amalfitano, 'but this is a book of geometry, not poetry, ideas that came to Dieste while he was a high school teacher.'

"Espinoza translated what Amalfitano had said for Pelletier.

"'And it's hanging outside?' said Pelletier with a smile.

"'Yes,' said Espinoza as Amalfitano looked in the refrigerator for something to eat, 'like a shirt out to dry.'"

~~ from 2666 by Roberto Bolano