Speech and Silence

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Spent the night listening to mp3 recordings of interviews of Paul Auster. He was reading from Invention of Solitude. And although he was talking about the transparency of words, a mythic no-language of the effective piece of art, i think auster (paul? hehe) was all too aware of his language's opacity when he, in the end, admits to a kind of rhythm that he attempts to create in his fiction. A form of body speech, which I like to think is music (although he never uses the word).

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Names. First ones. To think, when we read a good book, we are privy enough to its author to call him/her by her first name. I think this the first possible sign that a possible conversation actually transpired in the reading of the text. One is deluded to a certain degree of intimacy. A faux dialogue of one-speech that is sometimes, more dialogical (diabolical?) than any of the "real" conversations that we have in the world, meaning outside(?) the page(?).

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How does one escape it? That temptation to read. People. That almost inevitable way in which we approach (and assess?) other people as if they were books themselves. Anthologies of, if not poems, then stories. Mostly poems. Even if everyone thinks they have a story inside of themselves. Huge laughable delusion of a story!! When perhaps what we most have are really snatches of dialogue, phrases. I cannot tell a story for the life of me.

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Once upon a time, I believed in the devil. I believed in evil. To structure one's days in the shape of an evasion, a strict surveillance of temptation. St. Benedict jumping into a bush of thorns (a thorn of bushes? a burning bush?) to dispel the vision of a beautiful woman. No, not beautiful. Sexy is what I remember. The ability to be gifted with that. That sense of being able to elicit evil. To necessitate someone else to decide on one's sense of the good, one's sense of being what one wished to be: In heaven, a choir of angels were singing already one's welcome: It will take a camel. It will take a camel to enter the eye of the needle to enter the kingdom of God. Who wanted to watch this beautiful woman? Sexy.

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Here's the latest essay that I wrote for my column:
http://sunstar.com.ph/weekend/09-23-2006/dog%20ears.html

Basquiat Basquiat!

Because all vandalism is the translation onto the public space an otherwise private and invidividual obsession.

This better be good

"(CNN) -- In the wake of an enraged response to his comments about Muslims, Pope Benedict XVI planned to address the controversy when he gives his regular Sunday blessing, or Angelus."

Strike 2: Once again, this pope makes me ashamed to be Catholic. Someone kick him out already.

21st century version of the French Renaissance

When you're bored, and you find someone who can match your boredom with an equally complex sense of the slow, and the no, and the oh-no not another day: there are many possibilities. Here's a retelling done by me and em of a painting. On a sunday evening. After I had spent the day at the book fair. And had talked about nudity, and men's and women's bodies. And that phantom space that is like a castrated sense of an absence. Where is the not-having that we men have lost?
Thanks for indulging us den!

Salamat

Thanks to everyone who texted, emailed, etc. Salamat, salamat, salamat. For your thoughtfulness.
Mabuhay ang sining!