Don’t dance at the top of the house: Summer mix 2009.

Since 2006, this blog—whose only reason for still existing is that I haven’t quite decided whether to delete it or not—has featured ‘official’ mix tapes every summer. (See the track lists for 2006 and 2007.) I kinda didn’t do it last year because I was trying to have a life that didn’t need to be written about and posted online. Not that I’m deluding myself into thinking anybody missed the summer play lists, or missed witnessing me embarrass myself in this here blog. Anyway.

I know it’s kinda trite to depend so much on Brazilian music when making a summer mix, but it works well for me. (The mix tape’s opening track, from Japanese-Brazilian Curumin, is totally beachy, even if I don’t understand what he’s singing about.) And then of course there’s my usual tactic: the musical version of going on a world tour. There’s stuff from France, Mexico, Scotland, Cuba, Sweden, England, and Spain. And there’s just one track from the US—from New Orleans’s Hot 8 Brass Band—a fact I feel vaguely smug about. Even the fact that I’m using that song as the final track is vaguely smug-making too.

Anyway. Following is the track list; you can download the zip file here. Enjoy.

1. ‘Compacto,’ Curumin. (Japan Pop Show, 2008.)
2. ‘Lalala,’ Nouvelle Vague feat. Julie Delpy. (Two Days in Paris OST, 2007.)
3. ‘Sufoco,’ Alcione. (O Samba: Brasil Classics vol. 2, 1990.)
4. ‘1901,’ Phoenix. (Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, 2009.)
5. ‘Azul,’ Natalia Lafourcade. (Hu Hu Hu, 2009.)
6. ‘French Navy,’ Camera Obscura. (My Maudlin Career, 2009.)
7. ‘En Casa del Trompo, No Bailes,’ Orquestra Riverside. (Sí, Para Usted: The Funky Beats of Revolutionary Cuba, vol. 1, 2007.)
8. ‘Dance, Dance, Dance,’ Lykke Li. (Youth Novels, 2008.)
9. ‘Olerê Camará,’ Alcione. (O Samba: Brasil Classics vol. 2, 1990.)
10. ‘Introducing Mr Furia And Professor Manso,’ The Pinker Tones. (BCN Connection, 2003.)
11. ‘Smokebelch II,’ Sabres Of Paradise. (Sabresonic, 1993.)
12. ‘Te Queria,’ Seu Jorge. (Samba Esporte Fino, 2001.)
13. ‘Su Recuerdo,’ Single. (Pío Pío, 2006.)
14. ‘Sexual Healing,’ Hot 8 Brass Band. (Rock with the Hot 8, 2007.)

Mere Christianity.

In man there is an inextinguishable yearning for the infinite. None of the answers attempted are sufficient. Only the God himself who became finite in order to open our finiteness and lead us to the breadth of his infiniteness responds to the question of our being. For this reason, the Christian faith finds man today too. Our task is to serve the faith with a humble spirit and the whole strength of our heart and understanding.

--Joseph Cardinal Ratizinger, speaking in Guadalajara, Mexico, May, 1996.

Two years of reading.

Been an awesomely busy year, and because of the overall busyness I haven’t gotten much reading done. Well, that isn’t entirely accurate: I’ve been reading—books, articles, stuff online, recipe instructions, the fine print of several dozen contracts, archival stuff, stuff I have to line-edit for work, street signs, et cet.—but I haven’t finished too many books this year.

But I’ve read a few really good ones. Here they are.

The favorite: ‘The Gastronomical Me,’ M. F. K. Fisher.

The others:
‘A Death In The Family,’ James Agee.
‘Gilead,’ Marilynne Robinson.
‘Innocence,’ Penelope Fitzgerald.
‘Austerlitz,’ W. G. Sebald.
‘Twenty-Eight Artists And Two Saints,’ Joan Acocella.
‘Three Gospels,’ Reynolds Price.

Also: I don’t care if you don’t care, but I’m also posting a list of the books I liked in 2007.

The favorite: ‘The Sign Of Jonas,’ Thomas Merton.

The others:
‘The Savage Detectives,’ Roberto Bolaño
‘Lions, Harts, Leaping Does, And Other Stories.’ J. F. Powers.
‘Housekeeping,’ Marilynne Robinson.
‘Pig Perfect,’ Peter Kaminsky.
‘The Periodic Table,’ Primo Levi.
‘A Tomb For Boris Davidovich,’ Danilo Kiš.
‘Varieties Of Disturbance,’ Lydia Davis.
‘The Man Who Ate Everything,’ Jeffrey Steingarten.
‘The Lover,’ Marguerite Duras.
‘Veronica,’ Mary Gaitskill.
‘Divisadero,’ Michael Ondaatje.
‘The Arrival,’ Shaun Tan.

A celebration.

Music by Satie, 'Gymnopedie no. 1'

Six months of a marriage, finally made legal and binding and qualified for tax-related micro-benefits. Her first birthday as a wife, with specific God-sanctioned pareunial privileges. It is November 19, and we are at home—actually half a home, which we share on weekday mornings with people working with the urban poor and which we share on certain evenings with Mangyans in transit—where we expect to spend the next couple of years before we move in to a much smaller space that currently exists only as scheduled deductions on our checking account. In the fridge cools a bottle of a complicated grape-based beverage, which is prepared to let loose an army of bubbles as soon as the cap is popped. There is risotto on the stove, demanding to be stirred. Each grain of rice is taunted into obesity and softness by fire and the incremental addition of a broth engineered to plagiarize the flavor of a blue cheese; Gorgonzola, maybe, or Roquefort, something that, joyfully, can trick our palates into perceiving as the real thing. The oven has also been preheated, while I try to do my best impression of a KitchenAid mixer, harassing butter and sugar and flour and vanilla and eggs and chocolate into forming a hopefully tasty mixture, something that I’m almost sure will compare unfavorably, once tasted, with the Platonic ideal of a chocolate lava cake. Castrated for our enjoyment are several tulips, whose scandalously pretty reproductive organs are now making a slow descent to flaccidity and death and decay in a water-filled vase on the table. Under the table is a beautiful aging dog, the de facto daughter, obsessively licking the air around her face or hiding from the threat of medication, which she is scheduled to receive in a few minutes. It is a night that is vastly different from the night my wife made for me, in celebration of my first birthday as a husband, a grand feast involving the hacked corpse of a lamb, homemade yogurt (which is nothing but milk made cozy for the survival and reproduction of certain forms of microorganisms, if you think about it, except the mixture has made a wise leap to deliciousness), homemade paneer (another species of milk-based food), and chocolate–peanut-butter cheesecake. It is also not readily mistakable with the night when all we had for dinner were leftovers, and, to allay feelings of poverty and deprivation, we dressed up before we sat at the table, she in a dress and heels, I in a long-sleeved shirt and tie. But tonight is also like these nights: all these nights have us trading words and smiles and touches, all those things that we were paralyzed from giving for so long, in fear of appearing mortally sappy or irony-deficient. These are nights when we affirm that succumbing to sentimentality and squareness is not a problem at all; the inability or refusal to risk sentimentality so that what is genuinely felt and known can be expressed nakedly is the problem.

Now out of the oven, the cakes provide sufficient proof to my failure as a baker; what should’ve approximated the consistency of molten volcanic material look more like Pompeii several decades after the eruption of Vesuvius. I make my apologies, but she waves them off. For her, rescuing cakes are not nearly on the same level of difficulty as mitigating droughts and famines and financial crises. I will turn the cakes into a kind of chocolate–coffee trifle, she says casually. I say thank you, meaning it, meaning it very deeply.

Token post.

I’ve been meaning to post stuff here. Really. But I’ve been lazy, although I’m probably going to post my year-end lists soon. (A reminder: I’ve made too many promises here that I haven’t fulfilled, haven’t I?)

So if the reader I’m addressing in this post (and to whom I’m apologizing profusely) actually exists, here’s a token post: a meme!

1. Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
2. Turn to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post that sentence along with these instructions to your blog.
5. Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

Here it is:

Sin embargo … tales consideraciones y clasificaciones, no resultan en exceso apropiadas para dar cuenta de lo que sucedió en España entre 1940 y 1958.

— from ‘El grupo de Cuenca,’ published 1997 by the Fundación Caja de Madrid. The book is about the works of the members of the Cuenca group (Gerardo Rueda, Gustavo Torner, and Fernando Zóbel, as well as José Guerrero, Antonio Lorenzo, Manuel Mompó, and Eusebio Sempere). Their works form the core of the collection of the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in Cuenca, Spain.

Canine pose-striking.

Kitty Roldan-de Guzman, subjected to an instant photo session using Photo Booth by her fawning parents, inexplicably tilting her head to one side when the beeping starts. Pop quiz: Why?

1. She just loves to turn tricks for photo equipment (i.e., the ‘using more words when one would do’ version of that strangely outdated infinitive, ‘to camwhore’).
2. The cervical-vertebral/cranial axial tilt is a transient neurological reaction to certain combined aural and visual stimuli, in this case the green pinlight coming from iSight and the soft beeping sounds.
3. She damn well knows she’s pretty, and whatever ridiculous thing she does is pretty too.

Pre-eulogy.

There’s going to be a post about David Foster Wallace in this space. (A number of Pinoy writers have posted stuff on him: see here, here, here, and here.) ‘Infinite Jest’ remains one of the books I consider really important, as are the stories ‘Good Old Neon,’ ‘Little Expressionless Animals,’ ‘Forever Overhead,’ and ‘Church Not Made With Hands,’ and goddamnit his speech at Kenyon College a few years back continues to speak to me—but right now the only words I keep going back to are the ones I already posted here, this sentence from ‘Infinite Jest’: ‘The very imprisonment that prohibits sadness’s expression must itself feel intensely sad and painful.’

A few days before my thirtieth.

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes to the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.

—Marilynne Robinson, 'Gilead.'

Yup. I read that somewhere.

I liked the idea behind this enough to write my own ‘certain book read in a certain place’ story.

‘The End Of The Story’ by Lydia Davis.
Read in Paris, France, and Manila, Philippines.

In the spring of 2006 I was walking around Paris, missing a girl whom I’d been sort of seeing for years in Manila, and who just two months earlier had left for Seoul on a writer’s grant. I’d promised to take a flight to Seoul to visit her, before I flew back home. Unfortunately my Schengen visa had come only three days before I left for Paris, so I didn’t have enough time to apply for a South Korea visa.

Some parts of the city had become familiar. The previous winter, when it had gotten too cold to be out in the streets, I descended to the nearest métro station and started hopping on and off trains just to get warm. That spring, when waves of tourists started flooding the city, I decided to go in and out of any bookstore I could find.

At Shakespeare & Co.—the formerly legendary turned trendy (thanks to ‘Before Sunset’) Paris bookstore—I found a copy of Lydia Davis’s ‘The End Of The Story,’ which, although I’d wanted to have it for the longest time, I decided, inexplicably, to give to the girl in Seoul. There might be something too pointed about giving a book with that title—and a book about a woman remembering the breakdown of a middling relationship—to someone who didn’t seem like I was going to be with anymore, when I saw her again. And yet I was thinking of her while the book was in my hands. I decided to get it. When I walked out of the bookstore, it was raining. I ran down rue de la Bûcherie, entered a touristy café, and started reading.

I listened to the voice saying the words on the page, and I could hear very clearly someone trying mightily to speak softly and slowly so she wouldn’t have to cry. It was someone trying to cover up pain with clarity and specificity. It was someone struggling to achieve a certain grace out of the minutiae of pain.

But it was also a quietly playful voice, as she continued to ask how true, how reliable her memories were. Recovering a memory is a mind game, the voice seemed to be saying; the sheer act of remembering, together with knowing that one is engaged in the act of remembering, is like the mind trying to catch itself play tricks on itself.

It was the only book I could read on the way home. From Roissy to Schiphol, and then flying over eastern Europe, Russia, the Himalayas, and China, and then over eighteen hours of waffling from city to city, airport lounge to airport lounge and over six years of waffling from ‘sort-of relationship’ to ‘sort-of-not relationship,’ it didn’t seem fair to keep dicking around, what a character in a different book, probably less smart than the one in Davis’s but just as honest, described as jumping from rock to rock until there weren’t any rocks left. This was probably the last rock.

Soon after I finished the book I knew that something good would happen when the girl returns from Seoul in September. And yet just a few weeks after I’d arrived in Manila, what wasn’t planned until three months later happened.

There was a phone call, and it was her calling. ‘Hello,’ I said. She began to speak.

*

This was two years ago. I haven’t returned to Paris since then. The girl from Seoul is back in the Philippines. We live in a house in Quezon City.

Three years, one blog, two poems.

Disgraceland*
by Mary Karr
(‘Sinners Welcome,’ 2006)

Before my first communion, I clung to doubt
as Satan spider-like stalked
the orb of dark surrounding Eden

for a wormhole into paradise.
God had formed me from gel in my mother’s womb,
injected by my dad’s smart shoot.

They swapped sighs until
I came, smaller than a bite of burger.
Quietly, I grew till my lungs were done

then the Lord sailed a soul
like a lit arrow to inhabit me.
Maybe that piercing

made me howl at birth,
or the masked creatures whose scalpel
cut a lightning bolt to free me.

I was hoisted by the heels and swatted, fed
and hauled around. Time-lapse photos show
my fingers grow past crayon outlines,

my feet come to fill spike heels.
Eventually, I lurched out
to kiss the wrong mouths, get stewed,

and sulk around. Christ always stood
to one side with a glass of water.
I swatted the sap away.

When my thirst got great enough to ask,
a clear stream welled up inside,
some jade wave buoyed me forward,

and I found myself upright
in the instant, with a garden
inside my own ribs aflourish.

There, the arbor leafs.
The vines push out plump grapes.
You are loved, someone said. Take that

and eat it.



Late Ripeness
by Czeslaw Milosz
(‘New And Collected Poems, 1931–2001,’ 2003)

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.

One after another my former lives were departing,
like ships, together with their sorrow.

And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas
assigned to my brush came closer,
ready now to be described better than they were before.

I was not separated from people,
grief and pity joined us.
We forget - I kept saying - that we are all children of the King.

For where we come from there is no division
into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.

We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part
of the gift we received for our long journey.

Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago -
a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror
of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel
staving its hull against a reef - they dwell in us,
waiting for a fulfillment.

I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,
as are all men and women living at the same time,
whether they are aware of it or not.



* Mary Karr uses some snazzy formatting in this poem that I can't seem to reproduce, so just see the original here.