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

A Lost Gem

 

From  Pseudo-Intellectual Reviews:

The Lime Twig could be considered a genre exercise, but the plot is a thoroughly minor point. Hawkes is all about the writing. Crime fiction offered him delicious set-pieces – murder in a steam bath, smuggling on a fog-bound dock, intimidation in a public restroom, etc, etc. One feels he isn’t caught up in the drama but is simply enchanted by what his imagination has produced. There’s a subtle amiability in the author’s voice and that the end result remains so eerie and atmospheric is a credit to his writing ability: It is dark in Highland Green, dark in this public stable which lies so close to the tanks and towers of the gasworks that a man, if he wished, might call out to the old watchman there. Dark at 3 A.M. and quiet; no one tends the stables at night and only a few spiritless horses for hire are drowsing in a few of the endless stalls. Hardly used now, dead at night, with stray dogs and little starved birds making use of the stalls, and weeds choking the yard. Refuse fills the well, there is a dry petrol pump near a loft building intended for hay.

Hawkes’ style is hypnotic and oddly beautiful, even when describing filth, but it takes some getting used to. When violence breaks out he prefers to layer it in confusion. Clarity returns only as he describes the body left behind (His throat was womanly white and fiercely slit and the blood poured out. It was coming down over the collar bone, and above the wound the face was drained and slick with its covering of steam. One hand clutched the belly as if they had attacked him there and not in the neck at all.) – leaving the reader to wonder what the motivation was. That the plot doesn’t entirely hang together is hardly surprising but it doesn’t damage the narrative. It actually succeeds in making it more sinister, as the killers’ actions become more random, senseless and secretive.

The Lime Twig could be considered a prime example of style over substance, but who needs a moral and meaning attached to everything one reads? John Hawkes is one of the great discoveries waiting for the adventurous reader, with a Gothic imagination put to truly creative use. His alluring style is the main draw, but it also presents obstacles to overcome – this second read of mine revealed several mistakes I’d made about the storyline in the first go round, and even the New Directions cover copy struggles with the plot. You can untangle all the important bits if you want to take the time, or if not, you can simply choose to be swept along by the imagery, to conclude puzzled yet intoxicated. “What was that?”

Eva Cortes' Sounds

From Latin Jazz Network:

Eva Cortés is not Lucia Pulido. Nor will she ever be. But frequently on her album In Bloom she shows flashes of such brilliance that it is hard to comprehend, why this sublimely talented chanteuse should be not better felicitated. Ms. Cortés is a Spanish language singer but on this album she also steps out as a highly skilled singer of English language songs equal to or even perhaps even better than her performances on the Spanish language repertoire. The vocalist approaches her material with distinctive melodic energy and carries it into an improvisatory world very much of her own making. Every once and awhile Ms. Cortés even soars so high that it feels that she has ascended to a truly rarefied realm. Her ululation, uncommon in Latin music is tempered by a low and unwavering execution often associated by flamenco vocalise. In her English language repertoire, Ms. Cortés sings music—“Pretending,” for instance—in a relatively straight voice tending more towards a sweet, folk-like sound rather than a jazz one. But at other times she reels off into an expressive spectrum of riffs, scats and virtuoso extended vocal techniques. While this isn’t jazzed-up Spanish-language repertoire, there are moments when the music approaches high-class contemporary improv that draws on those styles to create a fascinating range of sounds and textures that constantly develops within a certain emotional framework of restrained intensity.

The melodic disc opens with a ravishingly hushed performance of her own song, “Sol,” which is arguably one of the best on this disc. After that there are both rarities as well as beautifully crafted repertoire composed by the singer as well as a couple of standards. The finest performance without a doubt—and rather surprisingly as a matter of fact as it is sung in English—is “Pretending”. This is rapturously beautiful and sexy. There are other quite intimate and sultry performances, usually of Spanish-language songs and each is informed with picturesque detail. Ms. Cortes’ smokey vocals are always spectacular and reach unassailable peaks every now and then. There are many memorable moments on this disc. One of them is on “Hablo De Tí,” which is beautifully dreamy and features an exquisite interplay with pianist Romain Collins. The choice of Mr. Collins is an inspired one. The pianist plays music as if he were melted into the heart of the melody. Because of this he is able to produce music that comes from the deepest recesses of his own heart. And in this way his playing suggests that he is made almost completely of music. This is something that may also be said of bassist Luques Curtis, whose playing is also bewitchingly beautiful throughout. While on the subject of bassists, the appearance of Christian McBride is a welcome one and although he almost steals the limelight with his own exceptional virtuosity his playing then settles into a largely sympathetic performance.

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Clarity

From Isola di Rifuti:

John Berger, out of “Post-Scriptum,” a note found in Audible Silence: Cy Twombly at Daros (2002):

      It has been said that Cy Twombly’s paintings resemble writing, or are a kind of écriture. Certain critics have seen parallels between his canvases and wall graffiti. This makes sense. In my experience, however, his paintings refer to more than all the walls I pass in cities and gaze at, or the walls on which I too once scrawled names and drew diagrams; his paintings, as I see them, touch upon something fundamental to a writer’s relationship with her or his language.
      A writer continually struggles for clarity against the language he’s using or, more accurately, against the common usage of that language. He doesn’t see language with the readability and clarity of something printed out. He sees it, rather, as a terrain full of illegibilities, hidden paths, impasses, surprises, and obscurities. Its map is not a dictionary but the whole of literature and perhaps everything ever said. Its obscurities, its lost senses, its self-effacements come about for many reasons—because of the way words modify each other, write themselves over each other, cancel one another out, because the unsaid always counts for as much, or more, than the said, and because language can never cover what it signifies. Language is always an abbreviation.
      It was Proust who once remarked that all true poetry consists of words written in a foreign language. Every one of us is born with a mother tongue. Yet poetry is motherless.
      I’ll try to make what I’m saying simpler. From time to time I exchange letters and drawings with a Spanish friend. I do not (unhappily) speak Spanish, I know a few words, and I can use a dictionary. Often in the letters I receive there are quotations in Spanish from poets—Borges, Juarroz, Neruda, Lorca. And I reply with other quotations of poems in Spanish, which I have sought out. The letters are hand-written and, as I carefully trace the letters of strange words in what is to me a foreign tongue, I have the sense, as at no other time, of walking in the furrows of a poem, across the terrain of poetry.
      Cy Twombly’s paintings are for me landscapes of this foreign and yet familiar terrain. Some of them appear to be laid out under a blinding noon sun, others have been found by touch at night. In neither case can any dictionary of words be referred to, for the light does not allow it. . . .

Hopscotch

From BookForum:

IN THE WORK of the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, the shortest distances are often also the greatest: The space between self and other can be maddeningly difficult to traverse. Full of magical transformations, ritual sacrifices, and turbulent prophetic dreams, Cortázar’s writing abounds with troubled pairings, unlikely and uneasy doppelgängers who come apart even as—especially as—they converge. In one of his stories, “The Distances,” a wealthy Argentine woman dreams repeatedly of a Hungarian peasant. When she finally encounters the object of her visions on a bridge in Budapest, she embraces the woman and watches, helpless, as her double walks off in her body. The image is one of distance bound up in proximity: the exchange is a “total fusion” that is, in the end, as much of an estrangement as it is an embrace. In another story, “Axolotl,” a man who feels a mysterious affinity with the axolotls in an aquarium is transformed into one of their number. His former human self, he reports, is “more than ever one with the mystery that [is] claiming him.”

Both of these tales, along with Cortázar’s landmark “counter-novel,” Hopscotch, appear in the new Everyman’s Library anthology of his writings. This splendid collection, assembled in honor of the centennial of Cortázar’s birth, also contains Blow-Up and Other Stories and We Love Glenda So Much and Other Tales. Hopscotch, a sprawling experiment in nonlinear narrative, takes up well over half the volume: The novel consists of 155 chapters, many of which, as Cortázar writes in his preliminary “Table of Instructions,” can be read and re-read in any order. The first through the fifty-sixth are to be read straightforwardly; the order of the rest, which wind their way backwards and forwards, is up to Cortázar’s readership.

Reading Hopscotch—reading Cortázar—is a bit like navigating a labyrinth. Behind each corner, each chapter doubling back on itself, lurks the prospect of an unforeseen encounter, at once disturbing and tantalizing. Distances are distorted. Ostensible shortcuts will lead you on a scenic route that provides alternate, unexpected perspectives. All the while, Cortázar’s work invokes a sort of Zeno’s Paradox: The closer we come to the objects of our fear or fascination or love, the farther away we find ourselves.

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Sleep

Vallejo Nocturno 2015 - Up for sale

Street Food

Vallejo Nocturno 2015 - Dona Pochita in Lince

From El Pais:

En la gastronomía peruana abundan las recetas que no todos los estómagos toleran: el suri, un gusano que brota de la putrefacción del árbol de aguaje, es considerado un manjar en territorio amazónico; el cuy o conejillo de indias se usa en la cocina tradicional de los Andes; el gato se sigue metiendo en el potaje –casi en la clandestinidad– en algunas comunidades afroamericanas asentadas en la costa… La peruana puede considerarse una gastronomía para paladares aventureros. Entre los platos que levantan suspicacias, el más popular y extendido es el anticucho, elaborado con corazón de vaca.

El anticucho se cocina a la parrilla. El secreto de su receta se encuentra en la sazón, de "tradición morena" (afroperuana). Para adobar la carne se emplea generalmente ajo, aceite vegetal, vinagre y una combinación de especias en la que predominan la pimienta molida y el ají panca. El anticucho, que se sirve ensartado en palitos de caña, siempre viene acompañado de papa sancochada, un pedazo de choclo –maíz cocido– y salsa de ají picante. Para los que tienen más saque, a las brochetas de anticucho se les puede añadir rachi –estómago de res–, mollejas y choncholí –intestinos de res–, también preparados a la parrilla. Y de postre, picarones, un dulce frito hecho a base de harina de camote –patata dulce– y calabaza, que se sirve bañado en miel de chancaca.

En sus orígenes el anticucho era un plato de pobres. Durante la época colonial los esclavos africanos de las haciendas hicieron comida de aquello que los patrones consideraban las sobras: las vísceras de animal. De la carne desechada, la más cotizada era la de corazón de vaca. Algunos historiadores sitúan la invención de los anticuchos en los alrededores de la plaza de toros de Acho, en Lima. Hoy el anticucho es uno de los platos más exóticos y genuinos de la gastronomía peruana.

Este pincho se come cuando se pone el sol. Al atardecer, van a apareciendo las anticucheras con sus carretillas para atrincherarse en las aceras, generalmente en algún cruce de caminos, en las esquinas, o junto a los paraderos de buses que hierven de gente al final de la jornada. Los fines de semana también surgen puestos en las zonas de cantinas y discotecas, y en los aledaños de los estadios, las iglesias, los parques... Las anticucheras –porque el anticucho es por tradición cosa de mujeres en el Perú– saben situarse en lugares estratégicos, donde los anticuchos se vuelven un anzuelo irresistible para los sentidos, tanto para el olfato, con ese aroma sabroso y picante que despierta instantáneamente el apetito, como para la vista, cuando las llamas de sus parrillas refulgen en la penumbra y resulta inevitable contemplar a las anticucheras cocinando las brochetas, macerando, dando vueltas a la carne.

Es fácil orientarse en Lima a la hora de ir en busca de anticuchos: basta con lanzarse a la calle después del atardecer y tentar la suerte. Aunque hay nombres propios que se han ganado su fama a fuerza de cocinar a la intemperie, como es el caso de doña Pochita, quien tiene su puesto en la calle Ignacio Merino, junto al mercado del distrito de Lince. Noche tras noche, su clientela hace cola en la acera para degustar sus famosas brochetas. También se reúnen numerosos transeúntes en torno a las brasas de doña Pascuala –esquina de la calle Santa Rosa con la avenida Angamos, junto a  la iglesia San Vicente de Paul, en el distrito de Surquillo– y de doña Delia –esquina de la calle Héctor Velarde con Juan Torciguera, también en Surquillo–.

La tía Grimanesa prepara los anticuchos más conocidos de Lima. Durante casi 40 años regentó una carretilla en el cruce de las calles Enrique Palacios y 27 de Noviembre, cuya esquina se convirtió en uno de los lugares más transitados del distrito de Miraflores. Su éxito le permitió dejar la calle y montar su propio local, que se encuentra en Jirón Ignacio Merino 466, también en Miraflores. La tía Grimanesa cambió de parrilla, pero el toque de sabor de sus anticuchos no se ha resentido. No se puede decir lo mismo de los precios.

Lost in Iran

From Juan Cole:

Republican House Majority leader John Boehner secretly invited Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to Washington to address Congress and then once it was set up he let Barack Obama know about it.

The reason for bringing Netanyahu is that Boehner wants to craft a super-majority in Congress that can over-ride Obama’s veto of new sanctions on Iran. He doesn’t have enough Republican votes to do so, but if he can get Democrats beholden to the Israel lobbies of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to join the veto over-ride effort, he might succeed.

Obama has spent a great deal of time and effort trying to negotiate with Iran over its civilian nuclear enrichment program, intended to allow Iran to replicate the success of France and South Korea in supplying electicity. (That would allow Iran to save gas and oil exports for earning foreign exchange).

Because nowadays producing enriched uranium for fuel via centrifuges is always potentially double use, this program has alarmed the US, Europe, and Israel. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has given several fatwas (akin to encyclicals) orally in which he forbids making, storing or using nuclear weapons as incompatible with Islamic law (a position also taken by his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhullah Khomeini). So maintaining that Iran is committed to making a nuclear bomb is sort of like holding that the Pope has a huge condom factory in the basement of the Vatican.

But, there are no doubt Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps commanders and maybe some engineers and scientists who really wish Khamenei would change his mind (he won’t).

So if you wanted a compromise between Iranian nuclear doves (the hard line leadership) and Iranian nuclear hawks (the subordinates who have to take orders from the doves), what would you do? You’d keep options open. And keeping options open also has a deterrent effect, so it is almost as good as having a nuclear bomb. That is, if Iran has all the infrastructure that would be needed for a nuclear weapons program but didn’t actually initiate such a program, you’d put enemies on notice that if they try to get up a war on you the way Bush-Cheney got one up on Iraq, they could force you into going for broke and abruptly making a bomb for self-defense. This posture is called in the security literature “nuclear latency” or colloquially “the Japan Option” (we all know Tokyo could produce a bomb in short order if they felt sufficiently threatened).

I started arguing that this policy was what Iran was up to some 7 or 8 years ago, and I think it is now widely accepted in policy circles.

So the point of the UNSC plus Germany negotiations with Iran is really about how long Iran would take to break out and produce a bomb. Will it be 3 months or one year? Iran wants a shorter timeline (for maximum deterrence, since they already saw what happened to Baghdad). The P5 + 1 want a much longer timeline. They would also like to spike the centrifuges and make sure there is no heavy water reactor (plutonium builds up on the rods).

If the two sides can reach an acceptable compromise, sanctions would be lifted, Iran would run its Russian-built reactors to produce electricity (though likely within a decade they will be undercut in price by solar panels; still, solar doesn’t have deterrent properties ), and there would be thorough frequent UN inspections of its enrichment facilities (plutonium leaves a signature). It isn’t really possible to have a big nuclear facility hidden from US satellites; the US spotted Fordo immediately. You need a lot of water, truck traffic, etc.

But Iran would have latency and therefore deterrence and I suppose might be emboldened that Israel wouldn’t dare nuke it because it might well be able to nuke back some months later.

US hawks in both parties and the Israeli political right wing want to prevent Iran from having any nuclear enrichment program at all, so as to prevent Iran from having the security that comes from the deterrence Lite produced by latency.

The US Joint Chiefs of Staff looked at this issue and have decided that only an Iraq-style invasion, occupation and regime change could hope to abolish the nuclear enrichment program.

If that is what it takes, the US and Israeli hawks are perfectly all right with it. It would be good times for the military-industrial complex, and Israel’s last major conventional enemy (though a toothless one) would be destroyed. An irritant to US policy and a threat to Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, our big volatile Gasoline Station in the Sky, would also be removed.

Iran is three times as populous and three times as large as Iraq. So I figure this enterprise would cost at least 15,000 troops dead, 90,000 seriously wounded, and altogether $15- 24 trillion dollars over time (including health care for the 90,000 wounded vets). Given the size of the country and the nationalism of the population, it could be much more like the US war in Vietnam than Iraq was, i.e. it could end in absolute defeat. Russia and China would almost certainly aid insurgencies to weaken the US.

And that is what the right wing psychopaths in Washington DC and Tel Aviv have planned for us. If they can over-ride Obama’s veto and scuttle the negotiations, they set us up for a war down the line, as Obama warned in the SOTU.

In contrast, professional Israeli intelligence analysts are warning against new sanctions and any torpedoing of the Iran talks. Because they deal in the coin of pragmatism and the real world.

Readers should please let their congressional representatives know they would prefer not to be subjected to this disaster.

Brooklyn Time

Vallejo Nocturno 2015- Face Lift

Not A Good Guy

 

From The Intercept:

After nearly 20 years as de facto ruler of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah ibn-Abdulaziz al-Saud died last night at the age of 90. Abdullah, who took power after his predecessor King Fahd suffered a stroke in 1995, ruled as absolute monarch of a country which protected American interests but also sowed strife and extremism throughout the Middle East and the world.

In a statement last night Senator John McCain eulogized Abdullah as “a vocal advocate for peace, speaking out against violence in the Middle East”. John Kerry described the late monarch as “a brave partner in fighting violent extremism” and “a proponent of peace”. Not to be outdone, Vice President Joe Biden released a statement mourning Abdullah and announced that he would be personally leading a presidential delegation to offer condolences on his passing.

It’s not often that the unelected leader of a country which publicly flogs dissidents and beheads people for sorcery wins such glowing praise from American officials. Even more perplexing, perhaps, have been the fawning obituaries in the mainstream press which have faithfully echoed this characterization of Abdullah as a benign and well-intentioned man of peace.

Tiptoeing around his brutal dictatorship, The Washington Post characterized Abdullah as a “wily king” while The New York Times inexplicably referred to him as “a force of moderation”, while also suggesting that evidence of his moderation included having had: “hundreds of militants arrested and some beheaded”. (emphasis added)

While granting that Abdullah might be considered a relative moderate within the brazenly anachronistic House of Saud, the fact remains that he presided for two decades over a regime which engaged in wanton human rights abuses, instrumentalized religious chauvinism, and played a hugely counterrevolutionary role in regional politics.

Above all, he was not a leader who shied away from both calling for and engineering more conflict in the Middle East.

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Troublesome Words

From LA Review:

The gold standard for terminological precision — another quintessentially intel quirk — is set by Style Manual & Writer’s Guide for Intelligence Publications. This was compiled by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Intelligence, though in a sense, per its preface, it has many fathers: “The works of Barzun, Bernstein, Copperud, Follett, Folwer, the Morrises, Strunk and White, Gregg, and other recognized arbiters of English usage.”

What’s happened, here, to the CIA’s trademark protection of sources and methods? For all we know, Barzun is now in grave danger; Copperud can fend for himself. Ancestry aside, much of Style Manual’s pedantry is innovative and telling. The second footnote, to cite one example, is beautifully hegemonic: “Note that, even in proper names, we always use the American spelling for English words spelled differently in the British Commonwealth.” The Labour Party? I think you mean the Labor Party. On this side of the Atlantic, we speak the President’s English; that much we earned in the Revolution.

Nothing is left to chance. The spy writer is advised, “In paraphrasing communist statements, put [Socialist or socialist] in quotation marks. The same applies to imperialism and imperialist (and to anti-imperialism and anti-imperialist), which are terms communists use in describing their opponents.” Not in this century, granted, but the point is well taken. There is no such thing as imperialism, only “imperialism.” There was also no Korean War or Vietnam War, though there was a Vietnam war and a Korean war. The distinction is required because these wars were “‘undeclared.’” I don’t add my own political or interpretive bias here: undeclared carries quotation marks in the original.

Most informative is Style Manual’s “Word Watchers List,” which deals with “possibly troublesome words, word types, and word problems.” Here its authors show off a heady command of language, the talent by which the security services get reality to behave itself. They are so bold as to gainsay the United States Constitution — “The Preamble […] is out of bounds grammatically when it speaks of a more perfect Union” — and they are so delicate as to advise that regime “has a disparaging connotation and should not be use when referring to democratically elected governments or, generally, to governments friendly to the United States.” Best yet: “The DI [Directorate of Intelligence] is not in the business of deciding whether something is good or bad.” More than nitpicking, this is worldview maintenance — the point where use of language becomes use of weapons.

Torture becomes “enhanced interrogation.” Word choice is world choice, the spies know.