word: madrugada

(Spanish)

The period between “the dead of night” and “early morning”. Roughly 1am-4am.

James Joyce - "Araby"

A boy, in absolute love with a girl he has hardly exchanged a few words with, leaves his childlike ways and tries to visit a bazaar to buy her a present. His uncle, having forgotten his wish to go, comes back home late and when the boy finally arrives, only a few stalls are still open. He does not dare to buy anything, and “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” [the end]

From a storytelling point of view, I love the descriptions that Joyce gives us. The houses gazing at each other. “where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothes and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness.” These are amazing, gripping descriptions of a boy’s world. Even the romantic descriptions, which can be very cliche written from a young boy’s perspective, are good.

I am not sure though that I ‘get’ the story. It is a coming of age event, he is finally acknowledged by “his” girl and can’t wait to fulfill her request. He fails… and then considers himself the fool of vanity. Wasn’t it his uncle’s fault? Is it an event that describes both the coming of age and the realization that we’re all love’s fools? I cannot seem to care much for the boy’s anguish, and the revelation after the conflict does not truly seem to resolve for me.

Barry Hannah - "The Agony of T Bandini"

His character, in the raw way Hannah describes it - “near vomitous with joy” - is not somebody one would quickly love to hang out with, but the reader is almost forced to acknowledge the honesty in his approach to life. There’s a brutal, raw directness to them. “Don’t take the cheap way out. Nobody is really… anything. Everybody is just a collision.”
There is no overwhelming urge in this story to see what happens next, no “whodunnit” feeling, but his character is intriguing in its disgust, its directness, that the reader is kept on a leash all through the pages.

Richard Selzer - "The Knife"

Amazing short about the scalpel in an operation theatre. I shouldn't say more, just reread it, time and again, and see how it accomplishes just that, the story of a knife, through the words and sentences.

Shilpa Ray - (misc)

Championed by Nick Cave, she plays raw punky song. Nice enough, nothing crazy though.

London Calling sampler

• Nadine Shah - "Runaway" : grungy-guitars with an echo-y voice. Repetitive and interesting.
• Outfit - "House on Fire": rhythmic, hard to place.

28 Days Later

Cool. Thought I had seen it, but not sure.

Lydia Davis - "Television"

There is no plot - in the traditional sense - but a state is being described that slowly arcs from happy, “They say it will be exciting and it always is,” to intensily sad: her own life has become complicated, “so hard to understand, that I want to watch a different movie… simple and easy to understand.”
Television as a drug, as an escape, is nothing new. What this story lacked, for me, was increasing the depth of her pain, her longing, a hint at why her own life has become too complicated. To tell us it is complicated without describing - or even just suggesting - why it is so, seems to use it as a stock trait of life: difficult, complicated, making us want to escape.
The format of the narration does not really change. She keeps using shows and show details as examples, superfluously to explain why she likes them, but indirectly to tell us what her life lacks. I missed a deeper caring for her situation, I lacked a convincing “truth”, and the repetition of the storytelling format did not help.
I couldn’t help but compare it to “As I stand here ironing”, and unfortunately Davis’ story suffers greatly in the comparison.