My grade-school paper put Myanmar on my map
The news from Myanmar is disturbing and lamentable. After the recent coup-d’etat, reports indicate a descent into chaos. The images have been startling and indelible: the viral video of the young woman doing her exercise routine while, in the background, the army rolled in to topple the government; the protest rallies, with scores of mostly young people, many in construction helmets, holding up the three-finger salute, familiar to The Hunger Games fans; the nun kneeling in front of riot police begging them not to shoot; and the protester, now known as Angel, shot in the head while wearing a t-shirt…
BOOKS I READ: The Underground Railroad (2016) by Colson Whitehead. The harrowing tale of three generations of women snared in slavery’s degradation and misery. Cora, the granddaughter, prodded by her friend, Caesar, decides to escape the Randall plantation in Georgia. He’s the one with a connection to the underground railroad. Thus begins her life on the run. Unfortunately for Cora, her adventures lead to oases that turn out to be mirages obscuring violence and heartbreak. Besides slavery, the book’s other villain is Ridgeway, a blacksmith’s son who becomes a slave catcher. His hunts for runaways rotting him from the inside out.
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BOOKS I READ: Dissipatio: H. G. (The Vanishing) (1977) by Guido Morselli (translated by Frederika Randall, 2020). The digressions and philosophizing of the last man on Earth, a flawed character who somehow survives dissipatio, the Event, when all other members of the humani generis vanish. The narrator goes into a cave near his mountain home intending to commit suicide. When he is unable to act on his plan, he comes back out, discovering everyone else is gone. Much of the book is spend trying to answer his question, “Me: chosen one or outcast”?
Guido Morselli, upon having this, his seventh novel, rejected by the publishers, committed suicide. His books were published posthumously.
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BOOKS I READ: To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918 (2012) by Adam Hochschild. The insanity of the Great War, kept alive by the ruling class and national fervor in service of the British Empire. The horrific trench warfare foments an evolution of weaponry, from machine guns and shells, to poison gas, and, finally, tanks. The casualty numbers for a given battle or even for a single day of charges across no-man’s-land are staggering. To hammer home the point, “If the British dead alone were to rise up and march 24 hours a day past a…
My essay from August 2020 gets a new life. A story I wrote for The Junction was republished yesterday at KoreanAmericanStory.org. Their mission is “documenting the Korean American experience through personal stories.” In this essay, I recall my part-time job assembling the Sunday New York Times at the Choi’s newsstand. The only change in the new version is the inclusion of a photograph from my high-school yearbook. The photo is of the school’s Math Squad, where I look the nerdy part. Here’s the original in The Junction:
A new take on Pablo Neruda’s poem
Why I decided to translate this poem: I had been reading Isabel Allende’s latest book, “A Long Petal of the Sea,” a historical novel whose title is taken from Neruda’s simile for Chile. Neruda is a key character in the book and each of the book’s chapters has an epigraph with lines from his poems. During a break from the book, I grabbed from my bookshelf a collection of Neruda’s poems, an old paperback that, from the inscription, had been a birthday gift in 1982. (Thanks, MM.)
The first poem in those yellowing pages was Enigma con una flor, which…
BOOKS I READ: A Long Petal of the Sea (2020) by Isabel Allende. A love story, the novel tracks the long lives of Victor Dalmau and Roser Bruguera, Catalonian refugees of the Spanish Civil War. Evading Franco’s dictatorship, they secure passage on the Winnipeg, a rescue ship organized by the poet, Pablo Neruda. The couple and son restart their lives in Chile, only to see their new world upended by another right-wing strongman, Pinochet.
The dynamics of class, abetted by the powerful Catholic Church, is like a musical drone underscoring the story. If you listen closely, you notice it is always there.
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BOOKS I READ: The Public Image (1968) by Muriel Spark. Annabel Christopher, a movie star living in Rome, nurtures her English Tiger-Lady public image. Her husband’s suicide, if not properly contextualized, is poised to mar her public image, permanently, if his suicide notes get out.
The dark energy lurking in Spark’s book recalls the public gaze that props up today’s influencers of the social media age, and the outrage that sinks them.
Tidbit: after reading the book, I learned that Johnny Lydon/Rotten named Public Image Ltd, his band after the Sex Pistols, after Spark’s book.
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From Queen’s fourth album, A Night at the Opera, the song epitomized my father’s fascination with automobiles.
Yearly, around Presidents’ Day, I share a memory from my childhood to commemorate my father’s life on the anniversary of his death in February 2015. He was eighty-two.
WNEW-FM, the premier rock station in New York in the seventies, whose deejays we knew like disembodied friends, held a promotional giveaway to accompany the release of Queen’s fourth album, A Night At The Opera. I was a lucky winner, getting in the mail the LP, a t-shirt with the cover art, and two tickets to their concert at the Beacon Theatre, scheduled a few days before Valentine’s Day.
Days before the…
BOOKS I READ: The Transit of Venus (1980) by Shirley Hazzard. The book follows Caroline and Grace, Australian orphans whose lives are capsized more than once.
A deeply layered book, with enough folds to hold atrocious characters and saints, TToV is the kind of book that you have to re-read to scrape away at the depth of Hazzard’s genius. After finishing it, I had to find essays about how others grappled with its immensity. I found a handful. Matthew Specktor is “hard-pressed to think of a better novel” (The Paris Review, 2016); and Charlotte Wood’s extraordinary essay discusses her re-readings (Sydney Review of Books, 2015).
NB: trying out Medium’s shortform posts to chain my recent reads. Follow the chain; go to previous book:
Mauricio Matiz
I write reflections—personal stories and poems—that spring from where I live, New York City, often touched by where I was born, Bogotá.
