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in the desert I saw a spot moving along an endless ribbon and the spot was Cesárea and the ribbon was the road that led to a nameless city or town and then, like a melancholy buzzard, I swooped down and landed my ailing imagination on a rock and I saw Cesárea walking,
Sometimes I would just watch my father, who painted too, when he went out with his canvases and easel, and strange ideas would come to my head. Ideas that were like dead fish or fish on the verge of death at the bottom of the sea.
Life is full of problems, although life was wonderful in Barcelona in those days, and problems were called surprises.
For a while we sat there without saying anything, thinking, as the elevator went up and down and the noise it made was like the sound of all the years we hadn’t seen each other.
In a brief moment of lucidity, I was sure that we’d all gone crazy. But then that moment of lucidity was displaced by a supersecond of superlucidity (if I can put it that way), in which I realized that this scene was the logical outcome of our ridiculous lives. It wasn’t a punishment but a new wrinkle. It gave us a glimpse of ourselves in our common humanity. It wasn’t proof of our idle guilt but a sign of our miraculous and pointless innocence.
I sighed and blew smoke rings into the tainted air of that hideous beach and the wind whipped the rings away instantly, before there was time for anything,
For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it’s the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short. Then the Readers die one by one and the Work continues on alone, although a new Criticism and new Readers gradually fall into step with it along its path. Then Criticism dies again and the Readers die again and the Work passes over a trail of bones on its journey toward solitude. To come near the work, to sail in her wake, is a sign of certain death, but new Criticism and new Readers approach her tirelessly and relentlessly and are devoured by
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I see a lonely hallway. Pallor × iceberg = a lonely hallway slowly peopled by our own fear, peopled with those who wander the feria of the hallway, looking not for any book but for some certainty to shore up the void of our certainties.
In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we’re no more than castrated cats. Castrated cats wedded to cats with slit throats. Everything that begins as comedy ends as a cryptographic exercise.
Charm, or ingratiation: visiting writers at home or going up to them at book parties and telling them exactly what they want to hear. What they desperately want to hear. And being patient, because it doesn’t always work. There are assholes who’ll give you a pat on the back and then act like they’ve never seen you before in their lives. There are some hard, cruel, vicious bastards out there. But they aren’t all like that. You have to be patient and keep looking. The best are the homosexuals, but be careful: you have to know when to stop and exactly what you want, or you’ll end up taking it up
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The best are the heterosexual men over fifty or approaching old age. Whatever it takes, you must get close to them. You must cultivate a garden in the shadow of their grudges and resentments.
the same thing happened to them that almost always happens to the best Latin American writers or the best of the writers born in the fifties: the trinity of youth, love, and death was revealed to them, like an epiphany. How did this vision affect their works? At first, in a scarcely perceptible way: as if a sheet of glass lying on top of another sheet of glass were shifted slightly. Only a few friends noticed. Then, inescapably, they headed for catastrophe or the abyss.
I’d heard of him, I’m a photographer, and for us López Lobo was what Don DeLillo is to writers, a phenomenon, a chaser of front-page shots, an adventurer, a man who’d won every prize Europe had to offer and photographed every kind of human stupidity and recklessness.
I’m a photographer, and for us López Lobo was what Don DeLillo is to writers, a phenomenon, a chaser of front-page shots, an adventurer, a man who’d won every prize Europe had to offer and photographed every kind of human stupidity and recklessness.