View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
Borges, who wrote absolute masterpieces, explained it once already. Here’s the story: Borges goes to the theater to see a production of Macbeth. The translation is terrible, the production is terrible, the actors are terrible, the staging is terrible. Even the seats are uncomfortable. And yet when the lights go down and the play begins, the spectators, Borges among them, are immersed once again in the fate of characters who traverse time, shivering once again at what for lack of a better word we can call magic.
Something similar happens with the popular Passion plays, in which the eager amateur actors who once a year stage the crucifixion of Christ manage to transcend the most dreadful absurdity or unconscious heresy on the wings of divine mystery, which isn’t actually divine mystery but art.
How to recognize a work of art? How to separate it, even if just for a moment, from its critical apparatus, its exegetes, its tireless plagiarizers, its belittlers, its final lonely fate? Easy. Let it be translated. Let its translator be far from brilliant. Rip pages from it at random. Leave it lying in an attic. If after all of this a kid comes along and reads it, and after reading makes it his own, and is faithful to it (or unfaithful, whichever) and reinterprets it and accompanies it on its voyage to the edge, and both are enriched and the kid adds an ounce of value to its original value, then we have something before us, a machine or a book, capable of speaking to all human beings: not a plowed field but a mountain, not the image of a dark forest but the dark forest, not a flock of birds but the Nightingale.
But these aren’t Huckleberry Finn’s wrists, they’re Tom Sawyer’s. And that’s Mark Twain’s primary misfortune and also our delight, hypocritical readers, because it seems clear that if Twain had become Huck at some point in his eventful life, he would surely have written nothing or almost nothing, because boys and men like Huck don’t write, they’re too busy, satiated by life itself, a life in which one fishes not for whales but for catfish in the river that splits the United States in two, to the east the dawn, civilization, everything that strives desperately to be history and to be storied, and to the west the clarity of blindness and myth, everything that lies beyond books and history, everything that we fear in our innermost selves. To one side the land of Tom, who will settle down, who may even triumph, and who will surely have descendents, and on the other side the land of Huck, the wild man, the loafer, the son of an alcoholic and abusive father, in other words the ultimate orphan, who will never triumph, and who will disappear without leaving a trace, except in the memory of his friends, his comrades in misfortune, and in the ardent memory of Twain.
There are those who reproach Bayly for his neglect of form. On rare occasions, I’ve been one of them. But actually I don’t think that Bayly neglects the formal aspect so much as it might seem at first glance. Especially beginning with his third novel, I think he tries to seek a form that suits his narrative strength, his inexhaustible verbal flow. Because let’s be clear: Bayly’s strength as a storyteller, his strength as a writer of dialogue, his ability to escape from any predicament, is extraordinary. Enough to satisfy any writer. No one asks Balzac to be Stendhal. All anyone asks of Balzac is that he be God. What we should demand of Bayly isn’t formal perfection but worlds, crowds, soap operas of real life, torrents of humor, what we should demand of Bayly is what he’s already giving us: the most wonderful ear in new Spanish fiction, an often poignant gaze that turns inward without complacency and that is turned on others with humor and irony and also tenderness, the tenderness of a survivor of a time that’s already past and that probably only existed in the narrator’s dreams, a Peru in its death throes or a Peru that is now only a glimmer of what it once was.
[...] it was a novel that saved me from hell and plummeted me straight back down again. The novel was The Fall, by Camus, and everything that has to do with it I remember as if frozen in a ghostly light, the still light of evening, although I read it, devoured it, by the light of those exceptional Mexico City mornings that shine — or shone — with a red and green radiance ringed by noise, on a bench in the Alameda, with no money and the whole day ahead of me, in fact my whole life ahead of me. After Camus, everything changed. I remember the edition: it was a book with very large print, like a primary school reader, slim, hardback, with a horrendous drawing on the jacket, a hard book to steal and one that I didn’t know whether to hide under my arm or in my belt, because it showed under my truant student blazer, and in the end I carried it out in plain sight of all the clerks at the Glass Bookstore, this is one of the best ways to steal, which I had learned from an Edgar Allan Poe story. After that, after I stole that book and read it, I went from being a prudent reader to being a voracious reader and from being a petty book thief to being a book hijacker. I wanted to read everything, which in my innocence was the same as wanting to uncover or trying to uncover the hidden workings of chance that had induced Camus’s character to accept his hideous fate. [...]
PLAYBOY: Have you shed any tears over all the times you’ve been criticized by your enemies?
BOLAÑO: Many tears. Every time I read that someone’s said something bad about me I sob, I throw myself on the floor, I claw at myself, I stop writing for an unspecified length of time, I lose my appetite, I smoke less, I exercise, I go for walks along the shore, which as it happens is less than thirty yards from where I live, and I ask the seagulls, whose ancestors ate the fish that ate Ulysses, why me, when I’ve never done them any wrong.
i enjoyed this
[...] I hope to expose the lie that the housing crisis is a market question of supply and demand. Governments of all stripes have argued that we simply need to loosen plannning restructions and build more homes for sale. It may seem logial enough to argue that if we increase housing supply then prices will come down and there will be more homes to go around, but the UK housing market doesn't function like a pure market: it is linked to global capital flows, not local circumstances. These global flows are distorting the market and ensuring supply is being skewed towards investors.
The free market answer to the malfunctioning planning system is simply to remove it, loosening regulations as much as is politically possible to make it easier for developers to build more, smaller homes and therefore bring prices down. This is ridiculously simplistic. It's derided even by right-wing thinkers: a report from the Conservative think tank the Bow Group rejects the conventional wisdom of the property lobby that planning deregulation and government subsidies for lenders and buyers will solve the affordability crisis. Report writer Daniel Valentine writes: 'The solution is not extra supply. Extra supply feeds house price inflation, by reassuring investors that house price inflation will continue. The property lobby says that price is a function of supply and that increasing supply will eventually prices. The opposite is actually the case.' Conversely, he points out that when supply fell following the financial crisis, prices fell as well. Investment markets operate differently from user markets, with investors attracted to the rising prices which exclude users. [...]
[...] More than 40 per cent of the entire housing benefit bill goes straight into the pockets of private landlords. The money is not reinvested in housing, although this booming market is driven by demand from councils who desperately need the properties because they don't have enough social housing. The result is that nearly every local authority operates private sector leasing schemes, leasing back former council properties from private landlords--at huge expense.
the sheer inefficiency of "subsidising" private services rather than investing in public services is staggering
all this really accomplishes is allows private landlords to accumulate savings (because ofc they're charging way more than they need to, because the market can bear it) in exchange for doing very little
One of the consequences of the exodus from London is that the same pattern of property specuation and displacement is spreading to other cities such as Bristol, Hastings and Margate. And while population shifts to other towns might seem to some like a good way of rebelancing the economy, the problem is that the majority of jobs remain in London; nearly every FTSE 100 company is headquartered in the capital. With a weak private sector in the regions and existing public sector jobs shrinking rapidly as a result of cuts to public services, it is not possible to contemplate real solutions to the housing crisis without profound structural economic change. [...]
[...] Top of the list is a need for a development land tax to recoup rising land values and keep markets under control, championed by luminaries from Adam Smith and Lloyd George to Churchill. [...]