Things I had to look up: José Juan Tablada

Over a year ago, the New Yorker published a Roberto Bolaño story, "Prefiguration of Lalo Cura," which I really had a hard time reading. I kept the copy of the magazine on my bedside table for the day when I would finally have time to try reading it again, and I have finally got to it.

The story is narrated by a man whose mother was an actress in minor porn movies of, I guess, the 1980s, and is really about the oeuvre of the German filmmaker who wrote and directed the films, which are described in hallucinatory detail. Along the way, as was his habit, Bolaño makes a passing reference to an obscure poet:

For example, Oscar Guillermo Montes [one of the actors in the pornos] in a scene from a movie I've forgotten the rest of: he's naked from the waist down, his penis hangs flaccid and dripping. Behind the actor, a landscape unfolds: mountains, ravines, rivers, forests, towering clouds, a city, perhaps a volcano, a desert. Oscar Guillermo Montes perches on a high ridge, an icy breeze playing with a lock of his hair. That's all. It's like a poem by Tablada, isn't it? But you've never heard of Tablada.

Emphasis mine. Quite right, I had never heard of Tablada -- who was he?

A poet of the early 20th century, José Juan Tablada (1871-1945) is known as the poet who introduced haiku to the Spanish language. According to this article, he lived a fascinating life. Among other pursuits, he traveled to Japan several times and was honored by the emperor, lived in Paris for a time and consorted with the surrealists, ran a bookshop with his wife in New York City, and represented the Mexican government in Columbia and Venezuela.

That article (by Ty Hadman on his website Aha Poetry), which starts out a little amateurishly, is actually very well-informed and is worth reading in full. As for the Bolaño story, it's interesting, but you have to be in a mood to slow down and get into it.

In Tablada's honor, then:

Wandering, visiting, writing,
    Tablada wielded his pen and brush
        like a warrior with one master:
    poetry

Universe begins collapsing on itself: Facebook at fault

We're reaching the point where irony is so widely employed and ubiquitous that language itself is losing its meaning:

The idea is that you are pretending to speak in the common language of Facebook, and are in fact speaking in that common language, but are aware of how unoriginal you are being; so when you write "omg" you are ironically commenting on the use of "omg," but when other people write "omg" they are seriously saying "oh my God."

-- Kaitie Roiphe in the New York Times, 13 August 2010
in article entitled "The Language of Facebook"

That is, if you want to call "omg" (and put as many quotation marks around that as you want before you get tired and start drinking, even though it's only 9:30 in the morning) language. And it is, of course.

Yesterday I had a chat (not a face to face [or F2F] conversation, but a Google chat) with a friend yesterday in which she was telling me about her college students indulging in "code-switching," which in her case is "heritage speakers" in her Spanish classes -- i.e. students whose first language is Spanish -- speaking in a mixture of English and Spanish without even realizing they're doing do. At least they don't write like that, though I don't see why they should stop themselves in certain forums -- including Facebook, no doubt. I immediately thought of Thomas Merton's use of Macaronic language (which is the intentional practice of using multiple languages in a text to shade, obfuscate, or enhance meaning) in his poetry. Merton's work is the only Macaronic poetry I'm familiar with, and I couldn't find a good example online in a short time, but here is an example "from the early 15th century" (!):

A celuy que pluys eyme en monde,
of alle tho that I have found,
    Carissima,
saluz od treye amour,
with grace and joye and alle honour,
    Dulcissima.
Sachez bien, pleysant et beele,
that I am right in good heele,
    Laus Christo!
et mon amour doné vous ay.
and also thine owene night and day
    in cisto.

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- Special Alexis edition

Judging by her submission of an instance of Bad Behavior in this completely off-topic comment, my pal Alexis either has forgotten my email address, or just misses the Bad Behavior feature of this blog, which has languished since I got my new job three weeks ago.

Okay, kid, this one's for you: a 20-year-old off-duty Northwest Airlines employee was arrested this week for sexually assaulting a sleeping passenger. And in other airlines news, two Delta employees were found to have used their employee status to smuggle guns and drugs on flights. Finally, a customer revolt has caused Air New Zealand to reconsider not giving out "biscuits" (which I think refers to what we call a cookie) on flights.

Of course, this week we had the flap over Ann Coulter's f-bomb. A SF Chronicle reporter compiled the condemnations, which included denunciations from Republican presidential candidates on the right and the not-quite-so-far right, and concludes that the reaction might represent a tipping point in favor of less tolerance for such language. Of course reporter Wyatt Buchanan is totally gay himself.

In Chicago, of all places, a columnist attempts to answer the question: Should you eat food that's been dropped on the floor? I know that is going to get a lot of hits, for even 80 years ago, T.S. Eliot was wondering, "Do I dare to eat a peach?" and many people have wondered about that line in "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock." The best explanation is, of course, that the narrator had dropped his peach on the floor.

Finally, best of all: the Westchester Co., New York dominatrix who was recently busted pleaded not guilty to prostitution charges, declaring:

I am fighting for the women of America.

technorati: Ann Coulter, dominatrix, Delta Airlines