Chapinismo: Al chilazo

...double-quick.

Severe Weather

This cute little snowman on Masthouse pier this morning betokens a modest overnight snowfall, that still somehow managed to shut several airports around the capital.

In spite of the advance warning we had of this "severe weather" the ramps leading down to the piers along the Thames will only have been gritted in time for the evening rush-hour.

Soho Square was looking slippery around 11 o'clock this morning.

McCarthyisms #3

These all occurred within the space of three pages.

"Hack away you mean red nigger, he said, and the old man raised the axe and
split the head of John Joel Glanton to the thrapple."

A thrapple, according to Dictionary.com, is another word for the thropple or windpipe.

"The judge was standing on the rise in silhouette against the evening sun like some great balden archimandrite."

An archimandrite, according to Dictionary.com, is a senior abbot with multi-monastery responsibilities.

"He stamped his feet on the boards and flared his arms like some wild
thaumaturge out of an atavistic drama."

A thau....oh, can't be bothered.

I guess this is what Hyperwords was invented for!

McCarthyisms #2

Scott alluded to Cormac McCarthy's "King James cadence" in his comment on my last post. It's an intriguingly un-situated narrative voice that brings us these blood-red borderland shenanigans from the 1850s. It's not quite dialect, yet McCarthy does permit himself the anachronistic liberty of referring to African Americans (and his characters to Native Americans and Mexicans) as "niggers" and the mentally handicapped as "idiots" or "it".

Recently Michael Chabon spoke of McCarthy's "densely-foliated" prose in a New York Review of Books article, suggesting that in Blood Meridian "lushness of prose counterbalances aridity of setting." Well, for me at least, this lush prose tends at times to get itself a tiny bit blotto.

Indeed, in trying to invest his narrative with all the poetic trappings of a kind of apocalyptic anti-mythology, McCarthy himself repeatedly crosses back and forth across the frontier of well-judged metaphor. And sometimes I experienced the contrast between the opulence of the language and the comparatively prosaic nature of the thing being described as a sudden suspension of involvement. Some more examples:

"Those riders seemed journeyed from a legendary world and they left behind a strange tainture like an after image on the eye and the air they disturbed was altered an electric. "

"They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discreet unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whose whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds."

This next double-whammy simile is also fairly typical. The first one in the pairing just about stimulates a visceral 'visual' impression, but the second one requires more imagination, and struck me as a little superfluous. (I've heard these described as analogical similes, where the typical linking phrase − like some − sets about conjuring up an abstract/hypothetical likeness, rather than a more familiar visual one.)

"All about her the dead lay with their peeled skulls like polyps bluely wet or luminescent melons cooling on some mesa of the moon."

And yet, the cadence of the sentence as a whole just seems to work, regardless of its mixed success with regard to the direct conveyance of meaning.

These are of course ultimately matters of taste and experience. One man's lushness is another's pretentiousness. My own pet-favourite composer is Prokofiev, and I'm sure there are plenty of people that would declare his works for solo piano overblown...while I get that special buzz everytime I put them on.

Apparently Cormac McCarthy is a big fan of Melville, whose Moby Dick I am yet to take on. Though according to one leading American cultural commentator "the Bing Bang wrote Moby Dick".

Sometimes McCarthy's fiction reads like the result of a Big Bang originating in the offices of the Oxford English Dictionary.

McCarthyisms #1

When not completely purple, the prose in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian has a certain evening redness of its own.

This is not, I hasten to add, a blanket criticism of an author whose talents as a scribbler are quite possibly greater than any other working in the world's favourite language. Yet as I near the end of this book, and a more serious commentary starts to take shape in my head, I have been wondering what to do about all those deliciously over-baked passages I have been marking out along the way; far more than I could realistically find a place for in my critique.

So, here they are, in daily-ish blog digest form. And the first is one I recited to my father over the weekend, extracting from him the kind of scowl he usually reserves for AA Gill's columns in the Sunday Times. ("Why use one word when you can use ten..." etc.)

"Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all."

Stick your oven thermometer in that one! If I could be bothered, I would be counting the number of times McCarthy starts a simile in Blood Meridian with "like beings...".

Extension du domaine de la lutte (Whatevaaarr)

'L'Etranger for the info generation', according to Tibor Fisher. "The tale of an unhappy Frenchman, decently though darkly done," according to the Complete Review.

I was looking for my copy of Camus' much-brandished novel the other day, but when V started quoting bits back at me on the phone, I realised that I must have left it in the downstairs loo in Antigua!

A compare and contrast exercise does seem to recommend itself.

Both Mersault and Houllebecq's narrator − an information technology professional whose belief that he is nicely adapted to a life of vacuity proves to be wildly optimistic (for the sake of brevity in this post let's call him Loïc) − are young men mired in indifference. And it is the ebb and flow of their of moral indifference that gives these stories their particular edge.

An act of violence on an otherwise deserted beach becomes the key moment in both novels. Mersault's just happens because the weather had taken shape that day in a particular way. Loïc's is pre-conceived, and fails to happen because his chosen proxy lacks the necessary psychotic buzz about him.

Whereas Mersault maintains a stance of genuine indifference even to the full consequences of his own indifference (in spite of the determination of the state to make him suffer for it) Loïc's rather more obvious existential discomfort involves a good deal of sobbing and vomiting as the gradient of his decline steepens.

Compared to the novels that followed it Whatever goes easier on the caustic humour and has not a single pornographic sex scene to speak of. (Which may explain why the story doesn't quite achieve climax itself.)

There's nothing in there that made me chuckle quite as much as Nicholas Lezard's review in the Guardian: "The book slips down easily like a bad oyster...it's a sly drawing pin placed under your bottom in the Spirit Zone of the Millennium Dome". (Though I did like the episode when Loïc tells a psychologist that it's not so much that he is feeling down, it's just that "the world about me appears high".)

Like later Houellebecq mouthpieces, Loïc appears to harbour nostalgic yearnings for an old-fashioned kind of Love, which has been undermined at the societal level by sexual liberalisation (which "leads to the phenomenon of absolute pauperization", rather like its economic equivalent), and on the more personal level by his having generally missed the boat.

"Desire itself disappears, only jealousy and fear remain...one becomes less
seductive and on that account bitter."

At odds with both enterprise and consumer culture, his lifestyle is one of prolonged tedium leading "to feelings that are acutely more painful..in general I see nobody at the weekends. I stay at home, do a bit of tidying. I get gently depressed." (Hmm. This sounds a bit too familiar right now...)

At first he seems to have some amusing coping mechanisms, like reporting his lost car as stolen, because "saying that you've lost your car is tantamount to being struck off the social register." Yet a ill-fated training exercise in the provinces soon has him convinced that the time for trying to hold it all together has definitively passed:

"For years I have been walking alongside a phantom who looks like me and who lives in a theoretical paradise strictly related to the world. I've long believed that it was up to me to become one with this phantom. This is done with."

Pyschoanalysts and dentists are singled out for tour-de-force tirades. Of the former he observes that "a ruthless school of egoism, psychoanalysis cynically lays into decent, slightly fucked-up young women and transforms them into scumbags of such delirious egocentrism as to warrant nothing but well-earned contempt...a woman fallen into the hands of the pyschoanalysts becomes absolutely unfit for use."And that the latter are "exceedingly venal creatures whose only goal in life is to wrench out the most teeth possible and buy themselves a Mercedes with a sun-roof."

He also sneers at the people in his own industry that believe in the inherent value of extending the volume and flow of information, and "that freedom is nothing other than the possibility of establishing various interconnections between individuals, projects, organisations, services." This makes him a rather intriguing sort of modern heretic.

For the first fifty pages or so it struck me that this novel was revealing to me a younger, more compassionate author, still just about keeping pace with his own shadow. He even has some kindish words for the opposite sex: ("A prick can always be cut off but how do you forget the emptiness of a vagina.?") Darkness − and to some extent dullness − then descends on the punchline-free final act, the promising office satire having petered out around the halfway mark.

It's as if Houllebecq needed to novelistically examine the mess in his own mind, before he could embark on his life's mission of messing with everyone else's. The Complete Review haven't yet critiqued any of the later novels , yet I doubt whether the adjective "decently" would feature so prominently if they did.

La Caravana del Zorro

Uno de los mejores amigos de V murió atropellado este fin de semana mientras participaba en este evento. Formaba parte de una flota de 20 mil motociclistas, y era uno de los 3 quienes fallecieron en diferentes accidentes de tránsito.

En el velorio V escuchó que la mujer que le habia atropellado bajó enrabiada de su vehículo para patearle mientras que agonizaba en la calle. Sólo en Guatemala...

Despues de que la vieja aquella se habia marchado, el aún logró pedirle a un amigo que llamara a su mamá para contarle que estuvo en un accidente...pero que estaba bien. La ambulancia tardó como 45 minutos en llegar, y el ya habia muerto al alcanzar al hospital en Esquipulas.

Nos hemos quedado re-chocados. Era una de las mejores personas en Antigua. Un joven abogado con un buen corazón y con ganas de buscar un papel positivo en la política de su pais. Tenia una hija de 10 meses. Un desperdicio total.

Tenia tambien dos hermanas, gemelas idénticas, bastante atractivas pero caqueras y por lo general, pesadas. Dice V que se portaron en el velorio como se fuera una fiesta cualquiera. Pero la gente de Guatemala se acostumbran a la muerte repentina. Pero yo aún no me he adaptado.

V se habia encontrado con el en la calle la semana pesada. Se aproximó a ella en su moto y le dijo "si no te saludo ahora, ya nunca lo haré." Cuando el chisme del accidente llegó a nuestra casa este domingo, V inmediatamente intentó llamarle en su celular, sin poder creer en lo que le habian contado.

La Caravana del Zorro se lleva realizando en Guatemala por 45 años consecutivos. Tiene como propósito el agradecer al Cristo Negro por las bendiciones derramadas sobre los mensajeros y cobradores de Guatemala.

Near perfect blandness

AA Gill was laying into Theo Randall at the Intercontinental in today's Sunday Times, scoffing that "it's so perfectly bland and devoid of personality, it could be a late-night DJ on Classic FM."

Very drole...especially as my niece has just taken over the 4am weekend presenting slot on that channel!

Meanwhile the staff of the Times online, bloggers excluded it seems, are having a bit of a beer break.

800 pages too long?

I have enjoyed the minor furore in the lit-blogosphere created by the refusal of (paid) Newsweek reviewer Malcolm Jones to push through to the end of Vikram Chandra's new 900-page novel Sacred Games.

Frankly, I'm with Jones on this one. The first, and less spurious of his self-justifications, is based on the opportunity cost that a "good but not great" (and clinically obese) novel presents to mid-life consciousness:

"My time is precious. Your time is, too. Who has enough time in the day to do all that we want? When I go home after work, it’s triage every night. I can listen to music. Or I can play music. Or I can answer letters or write. Or I can read a book. Or watch TV. Or watch a DVD on TV. Or go out to a concert or a movie. And those would be the nights that I don’t have to clean up the kitchen, do the laundry or help with homework...If you’re going to write 900-plus-page novels, you’d better be as good as Dickens, or I … or I’m going to read Dickens."

Though of course he's supposed to be reading fiction as his day job, which is the part that most irks the lit-bloggers.

I'm less sympathetic to the line his second excuse takes: If the conscientious sort of literary reviewer dedicates the kind of time to reading a mighty, mediocre tome that might otherwise be spent picking his children up from school, he ends up compromised, unable to assume a position of mild indifference to its quality:

"Most reviewers get invested in the books they review, one way or the other. So the books are either panned outright or praised. The praise isn’t necessarily over the top, but it is praise. The reviewer has an investment now. He or she has spent a lot of time reading this book. Can’t just say, oh, it was OK. So you wind up with positive reviews that lack something—heart, maybe?"

V has very set views on the appropriate BMI for fiction. She still hasn't forgiven me for reading War and Peace (in Spanish) and is currently singing the praises of The Outsider, mainly because of its brevity. I have just embarked on a book that certainly looks dauntingly podgy to me, Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots: Why we tell stories, but when I flicked through to the final page last night to check out its payload in pages, I discovered that it has but a paltry 705. The qualities of the first chapter nevertheless suggest I may yet make it all the way through. The plants only need watering once a week anyway.

Photoblog excerpts

A nice pic of Tikal at dawn here, and a few clicks back this one of two girls beside the lake at Santa Catarina Palopo.

Rome

The second series whereof is proving to be very entertaining, especially now that the main characters have filled out and seemingly settled into their correct dramatic groove within the historical narrative. This week's episode had the delightfully menacing Mark Anthony pissing into Cicero's pot plants and Octavia and her Sloane Ranger girlfriend "inhaling hemp". It also featured more of the kind of zesty dialogue that we've come to expect:

"Nobody in my family sucks cock without I say so."

Meanwhile Titus Pullo continues to explete his way through the story, a "cack!" here and a "Juno's cunt!" there, with the occasional more obviously anacronistic "oh bollocks!"

I'm glued.

Ideologically suspect

Back in my post-student days I applied for a job at Waterstones in Notting Hill and was asked in the interview to name a writer I particularly admired. I suppose this was my opportunity to align myself with the rather scruffy bunch sitting expectantly across the table from me. James Joyce or D.H. Lawrence would have done the trick, but the name that formed on my lips immediately drew out grimaces of disapproval: Plato.

There's no denying that my sympathy for this particular philosopher, and perhaps by implication his elitist masterplan for solving the general problem of politics, might be said to place me on the same bench as all those whose commitment to egalitarian democratic principles is at best lukewarm.

Yet Plato's principal mouthpiece is close to being a Jesus-like figure of love and self-renunciation for all non-believing rationalists. And underlying the parable of the cave is surely one of the best metaphoric ideas anyone has ever had, anwhere, anytime.

Anyway, wouldn't it be worth at least trying to let a selected panel of intellectuals run at least one small country somewhere as a kind of test?! Surely they can't make a worse hash of it than the fuckwits that currently control most of the world's polities?

Strangely enough the people I know who are most vociferous about democracy and freedom (especially information technologists turned amateur social engineers) tend to get by by ignoring the potential the masses have for spoiling their cosy peer-to-peer utopia. Computers inherently filter out a given percentage of dummies and the rest can largely be delimited by virtual barriers that are at present not legislated against. Nevertheless this smart, participatory Athens is without doubt surrounded by the babbling barbarians of trivia. And they want in.

For the last few years this horrible horde has spread their ideology of inverted snobbery to almost every corner of the mass media. Jade Goody, herself something of an iconic figure within this movement, surely had every reason to suppose that her treatment of hoity-toity Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetti would win further burps of approval from the habitual Big Brother constituency. Indeed, previous voting patterns suggested that foreigners and/or anyone native with a basic education and standards was likely to be villified.

Yet many of the Asian community in the UK remain as straightforwardly bourgeois in their aspirations as television (or at least the BBC) itself used to be before the mid-80s, and the dissing of their idol by this cackling pack of oiks not only had them rushing to exercise their television suffrage but stimulated, through their many complaints, the rest of Britain's slumbering middle classes to stir themselves into a decisive confrontation in which the offending vulgarians have seen their future earnings startlingly diminished and their dreams of celebrity perhaps trashed forever. Instead three vaguely eloquent, vaguely already successful foreigners came through. Unheard of.

Democracy is a system not a state of mind. But strangely enough a society permeated by snobbery and prejudice, such as Guatemala, can in some ways function better as a democracy than one permeated by the kind of inverted snobbery that has seemingly taken hold of our popular culture in the UK. A snob society does at least benefit from elite (and middle-class) participation. An inverted snob society tends to suffer from mass apathy, because to have what in the ancient world was the basis of status in civic society, is nowadays a sure way to single yourself out as a "tosser", and our current crop of politicians are only vaguely cool when they invite slobs like the Gallagher brothers round for a spot of vino.

A gang of teenagers behind the Phoenix theatre threw a rock at me tonight as I made my way home. I think they had just been to see Blood Brothers.

Teide petition

Teide on Tenerife, the world's third largest volcano, is using the Web to petition for inclusion on UNESCO's list of World Heritage sites.

Travel insurer's nightmare

Scott Esposito laments the loss of Kapuściński to the literate world, yet uses his obituary in the LA Times to suggest that we were actually quite lucky that he made it to the ripeish old age of 74: "He was beaten and nearly set on fire by soldiers in Nigeria. He was rendered unconscious by cerebral malaria, came down with tuberculosis, then survived treatment in a Tanzanian hospital, where his injections were given with a communal syringe. Four times, at the direction of various despots, he was sentenced to death."

Spain, my ten favourite spots (2): Cuenca

It's taken me nearly four months to get this list moving along again.

Cuenca sits on top − or rather hangs over the edge − of a deep gorge where the Júcar and Huécar rivers meet, making it hard to detect a seam between the walled medieval town and its ancient geological seat.

It sports Spain's earliest Gothic cathedral and its famed "hanging houses" have earned it a place on UNESCO's list of World Heritage sites.

The town's name may come from the Latin conca, meaning river basin, or perhaps from that of its ruined Moorish fortress Kunka.

Driving back from the south, we decided to return to the east of Madrid and Cuenca is pretty much the only significant urban attraction on that route. Just the day before we has been basking in January temperatures of over 20 degrees, but on our approach to Cuenca up a winding hillside road our car was dusted with snow and the thermometer showed outside temperatures of below zero for the first time on that particular journey.

We discovered that Cuenca is one of the best places in Spain to buy top quality ceramics at very reasonable prices. The bedroom in our hotel, the Leonor de Aquitania, afforded us a spectacular view across the gorge of the local Parador, which occupies a well-situated building, formerly the convent of San Pablo.

Next time we pass through V is keen to visit the nearby Cuidad Encantada, a landscape of bizarre geological protuberances. (That's her standing on that particular protuberance overlooking the gorge.)

Amazing Discovery

Amusing little story here describing how the Texas Video store in Zone 13 of Guatemala City was 'denounced' by neighbours for harbouring pirated movies. The headline reads "Another pirate shop is discovered".

The uncovering of this stash of VHS tapes is no doubt a huge victory in the battle against copyright theft. Nevertheless, just round the corner from the market in Antigua (where plenty more of these fortuitous discoveries could readily be made) there's a DVD rental shop called JennyStar, which proudly describes itself as an NGO whose "purpose is to donate ALL profits to support disabled and poor children around Antigua."

"By renting a DVD," they add "you agree that your money, after deduction for our costs, will be made into a donation." Fortunately, costs are kept to a minimum by renting out bootleg copies.

Chapinismo: Chiriz (Small kid)

See also Patojo and Güiro.

We spotted this young and growing Guatemalan family on New Year's Eve in Antigua: six chirices and one more on the way.

V still regrets not having asked how far they had come to see all the acts in the Calle del Arco that night. But they'd made the effort, and they seemed very happy.

It occurred to me later on during my stay that I can think of very few examples of lastingly happy (or at least stable) marriages amongst the people I know out there.

"Come and discover the mistery"

Last night V asked me to check out Guatemalaenvivo.com. Not sure why yet, but I did.

It has a few good pics and this excellent little glossary of chapinismos. I only picked up amishado myself this winter.

Ladinos, we are told, are "a race product of the biologic and cultural crossing between Indians and Europeans," Gringo "a term frequently used to name the US citizens" and Baboso, a "dummy".

Meanwhile Ala!, is an "expression of astonishment or surprise," and not something you'd want to exclaim mid-tunnel on the London Underground these days, unless you want burly off-duty firemen throwing themselves on top of you.

Later this week I reckon will blog about my favourite Guatemaltequismos missing from this list.

The Island

This is the second film in a week to make me think of Logan's Run...and Capricorn One and... and...

It's an entertaining if formulaic grand-conspiracy black chopper chase caper.

Djimon Hounsou clearly didn't make a great impression as a ruthless French mercenary as he is back doing noble Africans again in Blood Diamond; though towards the end, having already laid waste to LA, Monsieur Laurent does seem to be experiencing weird transplanted memories of these anterior, more honourable roles.

Sean Bean isn't at his best. He was more sinister as the by-the-book pilot in Flightplan than as would-be-God Dr Merrick here. Nor is Steve Buscemi's comic turn especially successful.

On the plus side I hadn't quite got the point of Scarlett Johansson before seeing this film. (Though at one stage she pauses to watch her 'sponsor' in a Calvin Klein ad. Blatant. )

One of the problems here is that the director seems to assume everyone already knows where the plot is headed, and so doesn't waste much time setting up (or exploding) the mystery of Lincoln 6 Echo's anodine existence. Alas black choppers alone do not a Philip K. Dick paranoid nightmare make.

Overall, there's a bit too much mayhem and general running around, and the fugitive agnates have far too many fortuitous getaways. Plus the plot ultimately hinges on the ease with which firearms can be smuggled into secret underground facilities.

Along with all the other movies it is a messed-up clone of, perhaps it needed to borrow a few chromosomes from quieter, more poignant sci-fi stories, like AI: Artificial Intelligence.

The chapel at the finca