Over the last year or so I am finding I have more and more unread or half finished books on my desk and shelf. I think that has to do with an issue of focus and depression. And I have revision tasks I’ve put off and off for far too long as well. My Monte Stories manuscript I am now calling simply Carlos Montoya I’ve yet to get back to in a more meaningful way. And this is distressing because I’ve always prided myself on my work ethic. Maybe in the past I have had a way of focusing on work and distracting myself from family, personal and work issues.
So what are my excuses? The year has been stressful and I chalk it up to grieving personal losses. I blame my lack of discipline and my own loss of a literary way. I don’t stick to schedules of reading and writing I make for myself. I devote most of my time to teaching and grading–prepping for classroom lectures. So balancing family issues and work have gotten the best of me. I have blogged quite a bit on this site about the need for the writer to balance writing and teaching and obviously I have put teaching first and the writing has fallen by the wayside unfortunately.
So what to do about it? Well I did happen to get my stuff together in terms of applying for a sabbatical from my school. So I do have the time in the near future to focus on my writing and my revision. And now I want to get on track by focusing on a lists of books and a goal of reading. My thought this last weekend was to to do something I’ve wanted to do for a while–reading more of Donald Barthelme’s suggested books from his syllabus. There are 82 books listed on here and hopefully I can get back on track by devoting more time to read these 82 selections or as many of these 82 as I can.
Can I stick to it?
After a long semester of teaching I found some time to indulge in studying the novella Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo. I’ve been an admirer of Rulfo’s career and this book reads as a tremendous progression from his short stories I was introduced to in his book The Burning Plain. What I found in this work is a complex, surreal story of a long abandoned town, Comala, and the stories from the ghosts of the townspeople. The book masterfully shifts from third person omniscient narration to first person narration. The book is filled with ghosts and spirit guides revealing their traumatic stories to the visiting narrator, Juan Preciado. We learn all about the dead city’s heritage from the ghosts of the past. In fact the sometimes narrator and his life aren’t very important to the story and this narrator only acts as a relayer–intermediary really–of spirits and voices from Comala. It’s been a few days and after much thinking and re-thinking on some of the motifs I think the book is simply about voices associated with place and a town dealing with generations of tragedy and grief–how objects and buildings can stand as totems for past traumatic events. How pain and suffering from the most horrible of moral offenses–murder, rape and incest–can stand at the center of entire town’s spiritual demise. The ghosts I found to be eccentric and odd yet always memorable. In fact, the book reminded me of Twin Peaks–David Lynch and Mark Frost’s masterpiece from the 1990’s. The narrator travels to Comala the way Agent Cooper travels to Twin Peaks to find answers about loss and death. From passage to passage I am wondering if the voices are real or from a spirit world.
Recently I rewatched David Lynch’s Fire Walk with Me and I am finding so many similarities between Rulfo and Lynch. We have a small town holding onto psychic pain and suffering as well as intense secrets associated with the death of several young women. The film is filled with flawed and inept investigators who though despite being clever and observant cannot seem to crack the code to the murders as well as the spirit voices guiding them. The “lodge” mythology from the film and the television show are very different but the film has a cosmic and supernatural context I find so similar in the so-called magical realism work of Rulfo.
