Questions of Style

"Throughout the unbroken sequence of world war, revolution, and civil war, these men feverishly pursued their trades. While battles raged on the outskirts of Petrograd, they met in icy, sometimes flooded rooms to argue abstruse questions of literary style and structure. After showing the members of Opoyaz how novels are assembled, Shklovsky would return to his unit and show his students there the more mundane techniques involved in assembling armored cars."

—Richard Sheldon, (first) introduction to Viktor Shklovsky's A Sentimental Journey

Because today marks 3,300 days without Joe Strummer

"We've got loads of contradictions for you," says Strummer, shaking off his doldrums with a smirk. "We're trying to do something new; we're trying to be the greatest group in the world, and that also means the biggest. At the same time, we're trying to be radical — I mean, we never want to be really respectable — and maybe the two can't coexist, but we'll try. You know what helps us? We're totally suspicious of anyone who comes in contact with us. Totally. We aim to keep punk alive."

—Mikal Gilmore in Rolling Stone, 1979.

Samuel Bing

Not too long ago (summer?), an old friend and I spent a few days in the desert. My friend slept through the daylight hours. Most of them, anyway. My dog, who is very clever, pretended she had been bitten by a rattlesnake. The neighbors behaved oddly, even by desert standards. (Why the onion rings strewn along the fenceline? Why the pork loin in the yard? What about the lunch meats?) Every few hours, artillery exercises at the Marine base 20 miles distant made the windows shiver in their frames. America! The sky made me dizzy, especially at night but also at dawn. I was reading Virgilio Piñera, who looked like this:

The point of all this, though, is that my friend and I spent a few hours talking with a voice recorder running and that some small portion of our conversation (the part about his music) was just posted on Bomb's website.

Update on Tuesday, January 10, 2012 at 03:26PM by b.

Bomb posted the other half of the interview today, in which I'm the one answering and he is the one asking.

Number Two

"I had even a song, a song I made in English. It’s called ‘Number Two’. At the beginning, they gave us a bucket to piss and shit. They told us to call ‘Number One’ or ‘Number Two’, and they would take out the bucket. We started to throw buckets of shit on the guards through the fence. It was quite easy. So we called any bad thing made to a guard a Number Two.

And when I sang it, every detainee in the corridor used to sing with me. And even some good guards.

Number Two, Number Two!
I will never regret what I do!
You will never forget it, Number Two!
If you treat us as human, human beings,
We will treat you as human, human beings!
If you treat us as animals, so will we,
We will treat you as animals!
Number Two, Number Two, Number Two!

When the guards disrespected us, I told them: ‘Don’t make me sing “Number Two”.’

Did I tell you I was a bad boy in Guantánamo?"

—Mohammad el Gorani, in the December 15 London Review of Books

A Third Thing

"I taught myself to understand a little the peculiar delight to be had from taking up a position on a blurred border, where none of the segments into which the space is divided have any particular claim on us, where suddenly we encounter the existence of something neither left nor right, neither the same nor different, a third thing which is impossible yet real; we encounter a space the world does not know and that no world would allow, but which provides a strange, rather pleasant place to stay. I believe this space's magical charm is somehow reflected in all the border territories we pass through in our travels, that it gives both shelter and danger, is at once a citadel and a trap. It is there in the city's mysterious edges, where the fringes of a garden give sanctuary to ghosts woven of moisture and shadow..."

—Michael Ajvaz, The Golden Age (again)