v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

All of these killings

The manga of Yuichi Yokoyama

Connections

Vallejo Nocturno 2009- electric lines

Lydia Davis

THE MICE

MICE LIVE IN OUR WALLS but do not trouble our kitchen. We are pleased but cannot understand why they do not come into our kitchen where we have traps set, as they come into the kitchens of our neighbors. Although we are pleased, we are also upset, because the mice behave as though there were something wrong with our kitchen. What makes this even more puzzling is that our house is much less tidy than the houses of our neighbors. There is more food lying about in our kitchen, more crumbs on the counters and filthy scraps of onion kicked against the base of the cabinets. In fact, there is so much loose food in the kitchen I can only think the mice themselves are defeated by it. In a tidy kitchen, it is a challenge for them to find enough food night after night to survive until spring. They patiently hunt and nibble hour after hour until they are satisfied. In our kitchen, however, they are faced with something so out of proportion to their experience that they cannot deal with it. They might venture out a few steps, but soon the overwhelming sights and smells drive them back into their holes, uncomfortable and embarrassed at not being able to scavenge as they should.

What is good for you. . .

Salon Interview with Michael Pollan, author of  "The Omnivore's Dilemma":

In your book's introduction you write that "The Omnivore's Dilemma" probably isn't for people who are perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain. What do you mean by that?

Well, there are a lot of people who are happy to eat at McDonald's a couple times a day. They don't see it as a problem, and I'm not expecting to turn everybody around. Those of us who are concerned about food issues often make the mistake of preaching too much. But when it comes to food, doing the right thing is often the more pleasurable thing. That's why I like the Slow Food approach. When McDonald's came to Rome, they didn't drive a tractor through the plate glass the way José Bové did in France. They set up a table outside and had Italian grandmothers cook their favorite traditional dishes as a way of saying, "Isn't this better? Isn't there more pleasure at this table than at that one?" It's a better strategy to invite someone to a better table than to turn over the table they are at.

Was access much of problem in writing this?

Yes, it's amazing that it should have become so hard. I wasn't able to get into the factories where corn is turned into high-fructose corn syrup, which you wouldn't think would be so controversial, and I wasn't able to get onto the kill floor of a large meat plant. They allowed me to see everything but the knocker who actually administers the fatal blow. It's become more difficult since Sept. 11. The food industry has a new argument, which is partly sincere. They've recognized that with such a centralized food supply, somebody dropping a vial of bacterium into a vat of hamburger could reach tens of thousands of people. But it has also become an excuse to keep the prying eyes of journalists away from how our food is made, which is unfortunate because we would be better off if we had more transparency in our food system. If there was a right of access to meat slaughterhouses, they wouldn't be slaughtering 400 beefs an hour, allowing manure to be smeared on carcasses, and going so fast that live animals get cut open. The best we could do for the safety of our food supply, for the beauty of our landscape and for the quality of our water would be to decentralize meat and agriculture.

So why don't we see more pressure to change the regulations?

The food industry takes advantage of the fact that we're really out of touch. I mean, some people would be shocked to learn that you can't get a steak without killing a cow. And for some reason food policy is treated as a parochial issue in this country. It's a debate between the senator from Nebraska and the senator from Iowa. The senators from New York and California don't think they have a dog in that fight, which is an enormous error, because these are the rules of the game in which we all play as eaters. And we're giving the right to set these rules to a very small number of interested parties. Maybe we need to start calling it a food bill instead of an agriculture bill. Maybe then people in New York and California would pay more attention. I know as a writer I've learned that you can't pitch a story on agriculture to an editor in New York, but if you call it a story about food, suddenly people are interested. And the same goes for the politics of it. I mean, why are we essentially subsidizing high-fructose corn syrup when we have an epidemic of obesity? These connections don't get made. But I'm hoping that in this next farm bill, since the obesity crisis has come to the public's attention recently, that we'll figure out a way to make public health a consideration.

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Macedonio Fernández - Borges' Literary Father

Marcelo Ballvé writes on his essay at The Quarterly Conversation regarding the playful but unknown Macedonio, undoubtedly one of Borges' greatest influences:

Humor was one of the hallmarks of Macedonio’s writing—a refined and cerebral humor typically flavored with paradox (in one piece he describes a man who is always rushing around so as to be the first one to arrive late). The affinity for the paradoxical proposition is one of the many ways in which Borges took after his old friend, but hardly the only one. Both men were enamored of speculative philosophy, and arguably it was Macedonio who was responsible for making a metaphysician out of Borges. Both writers were incessant explorers of a handful of themes: the inexistence of the individual personality, the elastic nature of time, the permeability of waking life to dreams and vice-versa; one might say: the instability of reality in general. In both writers’ work the supposedly bedrock concepts by which we live are revealed to be unstable isotopes, slippery and layered, none being in essence what they appear to be and all of course eminently moldable, especially within the pages of a story, poem, or essay.

There is an ongoing debate in Argentine literary circles about the extent to which Borges was influenced by Macedonio, an eccentric genius who spent the final three decades of his life drifting through Buenos Aires boardinghouses and country hermitages, absorbed in writing and thinking. Some critics believe that without Macedonio’s influence, the Borges we know would have never existed. Noé Jitrik, who might be described as the dean of academic literary critics in Argentina, said last year in an interview with Buenos Aires’s leading newspaper, Clarín, that “Borges is a product of Macedonio.”³

For other critics, Borges’s friendship with Macedonio is instrumental, but hardly determinant. They point out that Borges published his famous short stories in the 1940s, a decade or more after the period in which he was closest to Macedonio. Also, Borges’s own reading appetites were omnivorous and prodigious: Who’s to say whether he absorbed this or that idea from Macedonio or from a tome in his own library? Also, they regard the debate as somewhat spurious: even if the fodder for Borges’s iconic short stories like “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” or “The Circular Ruins” came via Macedonio’s influence or idea bank, it’s certainly Borges’s consummate art as a stylist and storyteller that enabled him to fashion flawless prose from the material.

Whatever the outcome of this critical debate, if there is one, it’s clear Macedonio left a deep imprint on Borges, one of the 20th century’s great writers. And yet Macedonio Fernández’s name and his work are hardly known outside Argentina. What’s needed is a proper estimation of Macedonio’s legacy; toward this, it’s still useful to examine his friendship with the much better-known Borges, as well as the ideas they decanted together amidst the general intellectual ferment of 1920s Buenos Aires.

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