Dirty Havana Trilogy - Book 2

This collage of the stink and press of poverty with the slightly less confident celebration of  sex and rum continues.  At the moment he is trying to sell a bucket to make 20 pesos, he's starving, his partner of the moment is spending a week with a rich Spanish tourist, so there will be no money or food until she gets back. I'm wondering where it's all going, but that's just the thing, at this level of poverty there is nothing but the next meal, the next sleep, the next day, the next fuck if you're lucky.

Dirty Havana Trilogy pt 1 Day 6-7 , Zona Day 2-3, Stalker, New Yorker Magazine, Mar 18

So a messy weekend and a quiet, crawl back under a duvet whenever possible Monday. In fact i watched the Stalker on YouTube, where all of Tarkovsky's movies are now, on my Nexus, because I'm reading Zona, which goes through the entire film step by step. Third time,maybe fourth, watching Stalker  and maybe the best time. The sound is quite faint so I used my iPod earphones and lay in bed watching this small but clear screen.  I could stop whenever I wanted, and somehow, even tho' it's only a 7 inch screen it was more immersive than watching it on the TV in the sitting room, with all the intervening space of floor, rug, coffee table getting in the way of you and the film. It's why I like cinema so much more than watching a film on TV - it's dark, it's quiet (unless you're watching a blockbuster in some prole pit like the Odeon, when people just can't shut up), it fills your vision without interruptions.  Amazingly watching on the Nexus captured some of that feeling, and my attention was kept on the images.

There's a famous sequence, where the Stalker and the Writer and the Professor are on a small petrol driven rail cart, rail clanking along at a steady speed - we just see the backs of their heads, each in turn, while this grey, ruined mix of countryside and abandoned buildings and industry passes by. It's restful, interminable in a good way. Then the cart stops, and the film immediately goes from this weird monochrome to full colour, a long steady shot of greenery, trees, long grass, big weeds, overgrown meadow.  It's a very gentle startling moment of great power, I'm not sure why. I've seen it done before, in Heimat, where in a time of leanness and hunger the camera focuses on potato cakes frying in a pan in black and white - they fill the whole screen, until colour floods in and blasts you with the smell and taste to be of the potato cakes, a kind of cinematic synaesthesia. Zona is good enough, it has a real respect for Tarkovsky, while not sidestepping the issue that so many auteurs can be such wankers. Just had to quickly look up auteur, to make sure I was using the right word, and I think I was. Yet again the internet's availability changes reading, having the film of Stalker right by me, in my fucking hand, watchable in an instant while I'm reading Zona, changes how I would have read the book.  I can instantly see where he's right or wrong - he's mainly insightful and right, but it is a beetle that crawls over the Stalkers hand , not a fucking ant. Unless they have huge ants in Russia. That look like beetles. I could go and check again, but I can't be arsed.

I've finished the first book in the Dirty Havana trilogy, which ends abruptly in rural idyll, staying in a hut on his cousins farm, helping out with crops, 5am starts in sky, land and sun.It works this ending - you just feel that the intensity of Havana has got too much, everybody needs a break, even the reader, everybody needs to go somewhere quiet, natural and away. 

The New Yorker Magazine though. Crazy magazine, but so much more interesting than any English equivalent - though maybe I should check out an issue of the New Statesman but I hate well meaning po-faced left journals nearly as much as shit slinging right wing rags like the Spectator.  

I read these long articles on:

• Transgender reassignment, pre-puberty issues and more
• The throwing of acid in the Bolshoi directors face earlier this year
• The Republican leader and their retreat to lick their wounds after their defeat
• Florida's sinkhole peril
• a profile of Ruth Bader Ginsburg ( a Supreme Court Judge)
• Aaron Swartz - the guy indicted for downloading millions of articles from an academic database, who then committed suicide

Highlights might be:

• advice given  to (male) Republican politicians in campaigning - don't talk about rape
• The history of the sheer corruption and in-fighting at the Bolshei ballet - always a badge of respectability for every tyrannical politician from Stalin to Putin
• said of Swartz - he had " a tremendous and in some ways pathological capacity for compassion"
• it costs over $100,000 to get a dick made out of your vagina if you are F.T.M (Female to Male), but it's cheaper and easier the other way round (M.T.F). That's a bit of a cheap thrill highlight actually - the article does spend time explaining that sexual identity isn't all that gender re-assignment is about. 

The New Yorker Magazine is great for reading at the table, around 7am, when I've made coffee, breakfasts, sandwiches and am drinking my own black liquid kick-start and beginning to feel ready to face the day.

Dirty Havana Trilogy Day 4, Day 5 , Zona Day 1

Starting to get a bit lost in some of the unevenness of the stories in the first book of the Dirty Havana Trilogy, so have slowed down reading. Then Zona came though the post today, - as it says on the cover "a Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room" - it's a book about Tarkovsky's Stalker, one of my favourite incomprehensible films. So I started reading that - the first few pages anyway. I hope it gets a lot fucking better than the start, which is mildly interesting, a bit laboured. But the man thinks that if he hadn't seen Stalker his responsiveness to the world would have been "radically diminished".  It pisses me off that he has said that, firstly because I agree, and secondly if this guy turns out to be a right little tosser who's written a crap book about one of my top films, I will , in some sense, feel radically diminished myself in some unexplained way. And if you think that is unclear, then you had better watch the Stalker.  

So. I'm actually writing this waiting for a poker tournament to start - there seems no point to stopping until it does start as what would I do?  I don't like to read things while I'm keeping an eye on something else. Writing is ok.  It's like the mental equivalent of lifting your eyes from the screen to look out the window to rest them, watching out for the names that should soon appear in the tournament roster. I have to keep an eye on them because I look up their status, and make a decision whether these players are crap (fish in poker terminology), or good, or there isn't enough information to decided. You can look up every poker players online results for all their poker playing career, unless they have actively written to a site to block their stats being shown.  Which some do. I don't - I'm quite proud of my ROI (Return on Interest) - at least it's positive - yes I win money at poker! But not very much. A few hundred quid every six months (total profit that is).

Dirty Havana Trilogy Day 3

It's still good but is there more to say about it? I'm along for the ride with this sex obsessed rum obsessed, sometimes down sometimes out, journalist who's got none of the material trappings of Hunter. S. Thompson. He is where he is and we're jogging along fine in a Havana that is literally falling down, whole walls of apartments block crumbling away in a storm.
As one 83 old lady says in the book,  "There's no place in the world where the government can take care of everything".

Then I get to thinking, this is a big dysfunctional fucked up city with a big dysfunctional fucked up government - but this is Castro's Cuba right, and Pedro Juan Guatierrez still lives there. So how does he manage to stay clear of being arrested?.  He's already said that when he was journalist half his writing was censored. So maybe it's pretty good in Cuba, just hot and run down (blame the US embargo as well as Castro for that)  and full of people in skimpy clothing - see what he says here: Pedro Juan Guatierrez.   I like this man. Two extra obsessions at the moment, just discovered (apart from the usual that is) - reading Guatierrez and listening to Lily Allan.  I think we all share a love of sex, drugs and profanity, but above all sheer enjoyment and interest in the world. And none of us would have anytime for Bush. 

Dirty Havana Trilogy Day 2

I was going to say that the Dirty Havana Trilogy was about as far as you can get from Philip Roth, apart from the preoccupation with sex and fucking, but then another  parallel struck me - the protagonist is a writer (well a journalist), another (Cuban) Zuckerman.  It's all heady stuff, full of poverty, dirt, sex, and racial comment. I was going to say racism, but although there are comments that you could easily say, hey that is really racist, it's more reportage, repeating the casual unexamined attitudes that you find under the surface almost anywhere.  I remember an Indian colleague of mine who said that going to Cuba was the first time that he had been anywhere where there wasn't a hint of racism in his reception, where he felt the colour of his skin was completely irrelevant.  

The poverty is in your face, it smells, it's not clean, it's not a fastidious book, or a book for the fastidious.  There used to be a kind of American literature branded "Dirty Realism", whole Granta anthologies of it which were good to read, but this really fits the term.  Instead of nice apartments and houses backing onto mountains there are shacks with no plumbing, single rooms with wooden platforms where a child sleeps in one corner while they fuck in the other, the building seemingly collapsing around them as stones and dust rain down.  The whole feel is episodic rather than constructed, hot, dusty, drug and alcohol hazed chaos. Like Charles Bukowski in a hot climate, without any grinding post office to work in, just the occasional hustle to move things along and get some cash, food, drugs, drink, sex.

Exit Ghost - Day 4, Day 5; Dirty Havana Trilogy Day 1

I'm struggling to find a voice that's appropriate to talk about Exit Ghost.  Finished reading it this morning courtesy of a snow-stopped day and lie in (everything stops around here when it snows). I want to read the rest of the Zuckerman novels for sure.  Come to that I want to read all the rest of Philip Roth.  There's some great railing against biographers of writers.  I agree with him. I read Clare Tomalin's biography of Thomas Hardy and, although I wanted to know more about Hardy, it really irritated me the way she dug and insinuated with her scabby dry biographer mole claws, trying to dig out the dirt and the sex in Hardy's life.  Not that I wasn't interested, but it was the way she shaped her dusty little researches into a sexy little mound, that might be true, might not be, all surmise and selling.

Biographies of politicians, of generals, of scientists yes - but of writers - well I guess I've read them, yes and still will.  But not the ones that are bending over backwards to get "an angle", that'll increase the £ and the $, and titillate as much as inform.

On to the next book, that I bought by accident thinking it was an author that had been read in the New Yorker Magazine - the Dirty Havana Trilogy - by Pedro Juan Gutierrez. No need to dig about in this author's biography for the sex and the dirt, it's all there in the fiction. There's a skeletal biography of him in Wikipedia, but his own website is great. It's a shame my Spanish isn't up to reading him in the original language. But it will be. Eventually.