As I write this on Saturday, November 8, I’m simultaneously joining Facebook. Since this is the weekend and I’m home, online via our excruciatingly slow Verizon DSL, I have to sit and wait for pages to load so there’s lots of time to shoot back here and compose this blog posting.
It’s a slow, rainy Saturday and I’ve been crashing, exhausted from this exciting week and its late late nights. I’d hoped to get some writing done this weekend but I fear ‘tis not to be. In fact, I have basically not written anything since my Saltonstall residency ended in late July. There are some good excuses, like back injuries and eye surgeries, but still I know this is awful. I can also admit that, even when I don’t have a ridiculously long hiatus like this, I’m generally not very disciplined, hewing to nowhere near the every-day routine all the writing experts counsel. For many reasons – menopause-induced sleep problems combined with full-time work creating ongoing fatigue plus general busyness primary among them – I have never been able to do the hour-a-day thing. Over the years, however, I’ve relaxed about it. I’ve come to trust that, even when it’s uneven and comes in spurts and starts, my writing time will be productive. If I’m awake and alert and relaxed, if I have quiet and calm, the words will come, even if I haven’t tried to summon them for quite some while.
So I’m not going to freak out about the fact that, no, it looks like I won’t recommence the writing this weekend after all. Nor next, because next weekend is the very important national conference of Workers World Party. The party conference is always important, of course, but especially at this critical juncture, right after the historic presidential election and right as the economy crashes ever deeper. Anyone interested in discussion and analysis of where we go from here should consider coming to the conference.
And afterward? It doesn't take a crystal ball to know that I'll be energized politically and reawakened artistically. The combination should result in a ramping up of my lagging activism and, at the same time, a revitalization of my writing. Ideas will flow and the keyboard will take a pounding. I'm looking forward to it.
Today's low energy was matched (or was it induced?) by my read of tomorrow's New York Times Book Review. One of the more boring editions in recent memory. That includes the interminable cover review of the most recently translated final novel by the late Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. The review, by Jonathan Lethem, did nothing to reawaken my interest in Bolaño after having read his The Savage Detectives last year. The U.S. bourgeois literary establishment has lionized Bolaño's work, which is itself a clue about its political character. His novel, far from being an incisive or moving cri de coeur from the broken heart of fascist-Pinochet's Chile, underwhelmed me. I found in it no genuine emotion and little political relevance. Now, reading Lethem's comparison of Bolaño to David Foster Wallace, whose Infinite Jest evoked an almost identical reaction in me, I get a clearer view of why Bolaño is so championed here. And why I can’t connect with his work. All this raises once again the question of who gets published and especially who gets translated into English and published in this country. There can be no doubt that there are genuine voices of the working-class struggle in Latin America and everywhere who are writing fiction that truly speaks of and to that struggle, but it's so difficult for readers here to find our way to what they have to say.
