Reading Antonio Muñoz Molina’s SEPHARAD

A few days before leaving California, self began reading Antonio Muñoz Molina’s novel, Sepharad (in a translation from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden, published 2001 by Harcourt) So far, she’s gotten only as far as p. 22.

Every trip is different (Beginning a new trip is similar, in many ways, to beginning a new book).  This trip, self knows, will not be like the one she took only a month ago, in December, a trip when self’s normal everyday writerly anxieties were suddenly overturned by a fresh determination to travel to as many villages and towns as she could in her Dear Departed Dad’s native Negros (also because she knew she had a driver —  Joel —  she could trust absolutely).  That trip, she couldn’t even finish one book:  Jose Saramago’s The Cave.  (And, wildly optimistic, she’d brought three with her, including Orlando Figes’ immense Natasha’s Dance:  A Cultural History of Russia)

Anyhoo, here she is staying in Dearest Mum’s townhouse (As self just said, every trip is different —  har har har!), and Dearest Mum has taken herself off to early mass and then breakfast with some friends, hence self finds herself with reading time.

And, it just so happens that the passage self reads is about traveling.  Here’s an excerpt:

Sometimes in the course of a journey you hear and tell stories of other journeys.  It seems that with the act of departing the memory of previous travels becomes more vivid, and also that you listen more closely and better appreciate the stories you’re told:  a parenthesis of meaningful words within the other, temporal, parenthesis of the journey.  Anyone who travels can surround himself with a silence that will be mysterious to strangers observing him, or he can yield, with no fear of the consequences, to the temptation of shading the truth, of gilding an episode of his life as he tells it to someone he will never see again.  I don’t believe it’s true what they say, that as you travel you become a different person.  What happens is that you grow lighter, you shed your obligations and your past, just as you reduce everything you possess to the few items you need for your luggage.  The most burdensome aspect of our identity is based on what others know or think about us.  They look at us and we know that they know, and in silence they force us to be what they expect us to be, to act according to certain habits our previous behavior has established, or according to suspicions that we aren’t aware we have awakened.  To the person you meet on a train in a foreign country, you are a stranger who exists only in the present.

Travel, exactly.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Your Favorite Filipino Food

Apologies, dear blog readers, but self decided she needed to take an informal survey based on the question:

What is Your Favorite Filipino Food?

The memories of Dear Departed Ateneo prof Doreen Fernandez are flooding self’s brain today, triggered by an e-mail she got from Doreen’s niece, telling her about the Doreen Gamboa Fernandez Food Writing Contest!

So, self decided that in order to get some really good ideas, she needed to take a survey. She called up one aunt after another. (The theme of the contest is “biskwit,” but so what, self just wanted an excuse to bother people today!) The only aunt to pick up was the one in Daly City. She rattled off:

Adobo

“Chicken, or pork?” self inquired.

“Chicken and pork,” aunt responded.

“Very

Linh Dinh Interview/ Outtakes

Linh posted on his blog the portions of self’s interview with him that were not included in the Pacific Rim Review of Books. Looking over these outtakes, self finds most compelling his answers to her questions about being a visual artist and critic as well as a writer :

MV: You were also a critic. You seem awfully young to be a critic. Where/ how did you get your start as a critic?

LD: My first publications were art reviews, which I wrote for the New Art Examiner, a Chicago journal. I also wrote a few exhibitions essays and in 1994, I was a guest-curator of a show called “Toys and Incense,” at Moore College of Arts. This show was built around the notion of creativity as a form of play or improvisation. The title I got from Rimbaud, “Why not toys and incense already?” That same year, I was a critic-in-residence for Art In General in NYC, for which I wrote an essay, “Hell’s Bells.” I was also asked to be a judge in the art grants program in Houston. In short, I was deeply involved in the visual arts, but it was a tremendous struggle, since I had no money, and was working as a house and office cleaner, then as a window washer, art installer and house painter. I ran out of money frequently and had to pay for packets of instant noodles and cans of Spam with pennies. Art making is very expensive because you need a studio and endless art supplies. In 1993, I won a $50,000 Pew grant for both my visual and literary work. This money was paid in installments over two years. For the first time in my life, I could inch up on the hog, from its hind hoof to its back side. I used some of this money to take a trip to Vietnam in 1995, after being away for 20 years. It was also my first trip outside the USA since I arrived in 1975. Before I left, I went up to Brooklyn to see my friend Phong Bui, painter, critic and publisher of the Brooklyn Rail. Boozing in the The Brooklyn Ale House, he introduced me to my future publisher, Dan Simon of Seven Stories Press. Hearing that I was about to leave for Vietnam, Dan suggested that I gather material for an anthology on new Vietnamese fiction. The result was Night, Again. Dan has also published my two collections of short stories, Fake House and Blood and Soap. In 2002, Dan arranged for my wife and I to spend two years in Tuscany, through the intervention of the Paris-based International Parliament of Writers. I had just returned to the US after living in Vietnam for 2 ½ years. My wife was a fresh immigrant. We were destitute.

MV: Who are your favorite painters?

LD: Max Beckman, Pierre Bonnard, late Philip Guston and Martin Kippenberger. Also Albert Pinkham Ryder, especially his transcendental cows, Vincent van Gogh, early Francesco Clemente and James Ensor.

The Assignment: To See if Self Can Write A Lovely Piece Revolving Around the Subject of “Food”

My grandmother came from a village called C______. Her name was Disgracia/Flordeluna/Esperanza (pick one, dear reader), and she loved to eat. She and my grandfather, Salvador/Enrique/Arturo (pick one, dear reader) emigrated to the United States in 1940/1945/1950 (pick one, dear reader). During the next 40/50/60 years (pick one, dear reader), they dined out at most 10/15/20 times (pick one, dear reader), usually after baptisms/weddings/funerals (pick one, dear reader). It was only when they had reached their 70s/80s/90s (pick one, dear reader) that my father/mother/uncle (pick one, dear reader), their son/daughter/nephew (pick one, dear reader) and I convinced them that they had worked hard all their lives and now deserved to eat out with some regularity. Thus began a culinary adventure that lasted for the last few years/the last decade (pick one, dear reader) of their lives.

Right? Has self succeeded in writing an enchanting opening to a story?

Not!

Self’s grandmother hated cooking. She wouldn’t have spent five minutes in the kitchen if she could help it. She came from La Paz, Iloilo but wanted to forget that fact. She and my grandfather emigrated to the States as soon as they could escape the country. They never ate out because it would have been an unimaginable luxury.  When she was 74, my grandmother died, felled by a stroke in the parking lot of Sam’s Restaurant in Placerville, while my grandparents were on their way to spend a weekend in Lake Tahoe. That marked the end of the adventure.

The above are the facts. Now, self has to think of a story. * * * ## @@ !! ## ## @@ !!

Stay tuned, dear blog reader, stay tuned.

Goya, Oh Goya: The Church of San Antonio de la Florida

Self stayed up till the wee hours of the morning (3 AM) reading the Goya book. She learned that the painter was laid low by a mysterious illness in the 1790s, an illness that seriously damaged his hearing (Goya became utterly deaf). In spite of his disability and anxiety, Goya was able to execute one of his most ambitious public projects: painting the frescoes of a newly erected church, the Church of San Antonio de la Florida.

The church was located in what was then the outskirts of Madrid. “In Goya’s time,” Hughes informs us, “the church was surrounded by woods and meadows at the edge of the royal park known as the Campo del Moro; today it abuts, more or less, Madrid’s largest railroad station.”

Goya had been in serious financial doldrums since the dreadful illness with its attendant deafness brought him down in 1792, and he needed a big project to restore him to the public eye. Nevertheless, it cannot have been easy to take the task on. Goya’s vertigo had been so extreme in the early phases of his illness — he could scarcely walk upstairs and keep his balance when he was convalescing . . . that he must have had many doubts and second thoughts about working on the scaffolding of a cupola thirty-three feet above the floor and almost twenty across . . . Did he have assistants? Apparently not; at least none are recorded . . .

Whether Goya had help or not, none of the strain of working high in the dome shows in the completed work — only a radiant and diaphanous joie de vivre. The frescoes of San Antonio, with their butterfly-winged and deliciously sexy angels, are young man’s art, created in defiance of oncoming age, by a man past fifty.

— Robert Hughes,

Goya