michaelhafford

May 25, 2012

Happy Friday. Here’s a history of the Drug War.

A stirring reminder that William Randolph Hearst was an asshole.

May 23, 2012

on Nazi Literature in the Americas

Roberto Bolaño’s massive, immediate, ex post facto literary fame that sprang up around The Savage Detectives and peaked with the publication of Natasha Wimmer’s 2666 mystifies me. How did a Chilean ex-poet several years into the grave achieve American literary superstardom based on a couple of decades-old translations of intensely navel-gazing tomes which problematize and discuss Latin American racial and artistic identities? I mean, those books are amazing, and The Savage Detectives has a place on my favorite’s shelf between Infinite Jest and The Corrections (ironically, none of those books is actually on my shelf), but it’s a poet-novelist’s journey into himself as he deals with the personal-emotional fallout of switching from poetry to the impure form of fiction. And, of course, there’s a healthy dose of artistic society (I mean society in the way that Gertrude Stein might speak of the society she kept) but ultimately it’s an improbably long book about two poets travelling across Europe, separately, after a disastrous love affair. His next, more famous (?) book, 2666 is an impenetrable mass of death and human suffering that defies easy summary, except to say that it is probably the longest, grimmest work that anyone will ever occasionally enjoy reading.

Nazi Literature in the Americas, which predates both of those novels, and would be considered by nobody a major work, is remarkable in its own right. Foreshadowing Bolaño’s enthusiasm for the list-presented-without comment, Nazi Literature in the Americas is a book of short stories masquerading as a catalog of the Nazi authors in the American continents. Two things stand out about it—Bolaño’s ability to create these authors’ lives and weave them into the fabric of the American literary-political scene while only occasionally detouring into hysterical realism. And, his formal experiment with sympathetic Nazi characters. As these stories build on top of each other, the natural tendency is to sympathize with the protagonists. That’s what we, as readers, do: we find or create ourselves in the protagonist and then we root really hard for them to succeed. The problem is that the protagonists in this collection are all, as the title suggests, Nazis.

Bolaño uses the tension arising from our natural protagonist-feelings to create a fairly unique reading experience; many of these people seem totally normal and even worthy of our admiration, but as a reader we have to constantly remind ourselves that these people are assholes. The result is a pitched battle between the reader’s natural assumptions of any main character and her own, presumably, anti-Nazi feelings. That tension isn’t present within the text itself, as Bolaño seems to avoid overt value judgments, but rather something that we as the reader carry into the text. Bolaño’s roots as a poet show through here, as he suggests an interpretation of all of these stories by the fact of their collection in a summary of fake American Nazi authors.

The most remarkable story in this collection is “The Infamous Ramirez Hoffman,” which I read while eating lunch (it’s my opinion that the setting in which you read is wildly important for the work’s impact—you’re probably not going to have a religious experience reading something while sitting in a van waiting to get your kids from elementary school. Actually, scratch that, that does sound kind of religious & amazing.) and it left the twist-in-your-gut feeling that all great art does. I won’t do it the disservice of summary, but it was later expanded to a novella (Distant Star) and features one of the few unlikable characters throughout the entire work. My point is that it’s only 20 pages (the story) and you should read it because it’s basically a prose poem that creates a dialogue between public art and death which must be contemplated, no matter how uncomfortable it may be.

That’s it. That’s all I have to say.

May 21, 2012

This is a picture of the last solar eclipse for 59 years that I took from my living room window. I guess I have a question: what is an eclipse supposed to look like? Pretty much just looked like the sun to me, although normally I don’t look at or photograph the sun enough to know what the sun typically looks like. If I showed you this picture and asked you what it was, you would say “Sun.” and not think twice about it unless I told you it was at the height of the most recent eclipse.

Anyways, eclipses are a bunch of hype dreamed up by Big Astronomy to try to manufacture interest so they can cut mom-and-pop astronomers out of business. I blame the Republicans.

May 21, 2012

picturedept:

Photo of the Day: May 21, 2012

No Joking
Anti-government demonstrations rage in Chile.

PHOTO OF THE DAY ARCHIVE

Is there anything more simultaneously threatening and heartening than clowns? Also, when did all the anti-clown sentiment start? Was it Stephen King’s “It”? or did it come before that?

Seriously, though clowns have been around forever and I feel like in the last 20 years we started seeing them as phenotypically evil or objects of pity. I guess I get it—it is sort of creepy to spend your career dressing in face paint and moving between children’s birthday parties—but these generally seem like good people. Except this clown (above) which looks sinister as fuck.

I’m bored, can you tell?

May 17, 2012

gqfashion:

Reel Style: Blow Up

Introducing Reel Style: Stylish looks from classic films and how to put it all together.

Think Swinging London was just Twiggy and twits? Liam Goslett revisits Blow-Up, the 1966 Mod thriller that captured Brit-hip style at its finest.

This is an amazing, amazing movie.

May 12, 2012