Awit ng Bilanggong Politikal / Axel Pinpin

Song of the Political Detainee

My prison walls more than cold and sticky,
Are framing whips of twisting agony.
My floor isn’t only rough and dirty,
In it is trapped a searing ennui.
The iron bars coated with rust,
The freedom I so want has greased its crust.

Smear with verses the slippery freedom!
Tear and tear down the silken iron!
Shut and shut off the plague’s kingdom!
Rise from the darkness lighted by anguish!
Smash and smash the walls of cowardice!
Smash the corral with the cry of release!





{ Axel Pinpin, Tugmaang Matatabil, Southern Voices Printing Press, 2008 }

2666: The part about the title

Previously, the only connection that I found between the Roberto Bolaño novels 2666 and Nazi Literature in the Americas was the character of General Entrescu who appeared in "The Part About Archimboldi" and whose name was listed in Nazi Literature's "Epilogue for Monsters." Recognizable because of the mention of the general's “asset” and his cinematic (if weird) death.


A clue to the book's title can be found from the epigraph of 2666 taken from Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Le Voyage”:

An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.

The original poem in French and several English translations can be found in here. The exact quote from the book comes from the version of Geoffrey Wagner; it is the last poem in the above link.


In part VII of “The Voyage”, the first stanza reads in full:

O bitter is the knowledge that one draws from the voyage!
The monotonous and tiny world, today
Yesterday, tomorrow, always, shows us our reflections,
An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom!

The last line ends in an exclamation here and the thread is explicit in the futuristic aspect of the year 2666: “today / Yesterday, tomorrow, always …” The implication is that 2666 is just an arbitrary year, albeit a convenient and conscious choice as the number refers to the mark of the beast, thereby invoking an apocalyptic resonance. The Quarterly Conversation's great review of 2666 interpreted these extended lines of the epigraph as a direct evocation of the heinous crimes in Santa Teresa. The translator Natasha Wimmer, in her biographical essay on B, points out from these poetic lines the literal health hazard posed by a long and arduous travel in the desert.


The book’s subject matter supports the notions of apocalypse and the futuristic in the enigmatic title. Throughout the book, individual and collective histories are given a chilling treatment, from the world wars to the holocaust to unsolved mass murders in Santa Teresa. Human struggles and the persistence of evil are the voids that characterize the desert of human heart. The traveller’s journey, into the “desert of boredom”, will invariably lead him and his thirst into “an oasis of horror”. A pure black vision.


The notion that evil is here to stay, that it is a permanent feature of existence, is terrifying and, what’s more disturbing, it is of our own making. Because by our silence and omission, we manifest our refusal to act against the tides of injustice and crime. Etc., etc.


Anyway, what strikes me is that the lines quoted can very well constitute the general framework of 2666. The world that men created here on earth, at this time, at any time (past, present, future), is just a reflection of human folly. It just “shows us our reflections.” This phrase of Baudelaire’s occur in other translations as “shows us our image”, “The horror of our image will unravel”, “we see / ourselves today, tomorrow, yesterday”, “The small monotonous world reflects me everywhere”, “So terrifying that any image made in it / Can be splashed perfunctorily away”, “where trite oases from each muddy pool / one thing reflect: his horror-haunted eyes!”


Our reflections. In terms of Jared’s chosen quote in Nazi Literature, the novel’s pages are “darkly mirroring” a book of history.


To contextualize further the intertextuality between 2666 and Nazi Literature, I'm quoting in full Jared's brilliant take on it:

In Nazi Literature in the Americas, the entry on Harry Sibelius contains the following quote describing Harry's own monstrously-sized (and -charactered) novel: "Then the novel proper - The True Son of Job - begins: 1,333 pages darkly mirroring Arnold J. Toynbee's Hitler's Europe."

Which is interesting. This "novel" is a kind of negative image of Toynbee's, it is in fact "darkly mirroring" it, which is to say that it presupposes another alternate set of 1333 pages, totaling out to 2666 of them.

Further down the page, another interesting passage materializes: "In the final analysis, the British professor's [Toynbee] aim is to testify against crime and ignominy, lest we forget. The Virginian novelist seems to believe that 'somewhere in time and space' the crime in question has definitively triumphed, so he proceeds to catalogue it."

These two sets of quotations easily reminded me of the novel 2666, especially of the 2nd volume's exhaustive and brutal account of the murders in Sonora. The sheer amount of ink devoted to the individual murders is vastly unsettling, and leads the reader to question why Bolano would have him/her sit privy to such a bloody catalogue. The first hypothesis mirrors Toynbee's motivation: perhaps Bolano wants to testify against crime and ignominy, lest we forget. And I believe that this is a part of it. But the answer seems more complicated than that, too. Bolano touches on each murder case with the cold but meticulous gaze of a forensics expert, devoid of judgment, but casting an extremely intimate eye, infringing on the privacy of each character with the kind of omniscience that only an author can possess. And yet there's a public aspect, too, in which the sheer frequency of the publicizing resembles newspaper articles. The great paradox of news media is that horrific events are prodigiously reported, but that such reports reported in such magnitude lose their emotive effect; the public becomes numb to violence, and reports become mere catalogues. Bolano, I think, takes this paradigm to its most taut logical extension: around 250 pages (I admit, I haven't read the book in about 6 months' time) of brutality, daring you not to wince, daring you to ignore it. This, to me, is one aspect of 2666, the theory of narrative strategy: if one wants to write about horror, the horror of history or the recurring horrors behind it, how does one most effectively communicate that horror? To testify sometimes seems naive, and too overtly subjective; perhaps even too optimistic at this point. Perhaps selection is more important: instead of using declamatory statements or opining or rallying, one ought to simply record, record, record, organize, and publish. If the criminal horror exists, if it already exists and will continue to exist up to the year 2666, one might as well write about it and leave it at that.

Or something.

Elsewhere in Baudelaire’s poem, one can associate the main character in 2666 with the desert traveler: the novelist Archimboldi, perennial dreamer in sleep, disappearing without a trace:

… the true travelers are they who depart
For departing's sake; with hearts light as balloons,
They never swerve from their destinies,
Saying continuously, without knowing why: "Let us go on!"

These have passions formed like clouds;
As a recruit of his gun, they dream
Of spacious pleasures, transient, little understood,
Whose name no human spirit knows.

And the poem’s ending can also loosely refer to Archimboldi, a bold diver of the depths of the sea, welcoming Death should it join him swimming amid the seagrasses and seaweeds:

O Death, my captain, it is time! let us raise the anchor!
This country wearies us, O Death! Let us make ready!
If sea and sky are both as black as ink,
You know our hearts are full of sunshine.

Pour on us your poison to refresh us!
Oh, this fire so burns our brains, we would
Dive to the depths of the gulf, Heaven or Hell, what matter?
If only to find in the depths of the Unknown the New!

Ah sunshine! The sun whose metaphor so suffuses the book in many instances. And there is certainly a hope that in the horrifying depths of the Unknown (void), something New can still be found. It does not matter whether the discovery of the (shocking) New is for the good or bad. So long as the sunlight accompanies the journey.


In her essay, Wimmer also quoted Bolaño about the closed-looping relation of the Unknown to the New (which in effect is the Cure):

While we search for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, the new, that which can only be found in the unknown, we must continue to turn to sex, books, and travel, even knowing they will lead us into the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place we can find the cure.

How elusive the cure. Meanwhile we can read more books, we can take leave and travel, and then we make love.

The return of Roberto Bolaño

It seems like B's second collection of stories in English will be called The Return instead of Assassin Whores ("Putas asesinas"). I wonder why the publisher New Directions did not stick to the original title.

They called the first collection Last Evenings on Earth instead of Telephone Calls ("Llamadas telefónicas"). This could be justified by the jumbling of stories between the two books. The contents of Last Evenings are selected stories from each of the two collections in the original Spanish while the contents of The Return are presumably the remaining stories not collected in Last Evenings. But then, thinking hard of the adopted title, it does have its charm. Through these stories, B will "return" to us again. Anyway, I love the draft book cover:





Meanwhile, the cover art of Antwerp goes for an unassuming clean text look. This one obviously deviates from the usual font (see above) of the author's name in previous New Directions books. Does the employment of translator affect the cover design of B's books? The books translated by Chris Andrews, such as the above book, have the distinctive font and font placement - the O's in "ROBERTO" and "BOLAÑO" aligning in a mysterious order - in the cover text, while the cover layout of those translated by Natasha Wimmer, as below, is different in the way the artworks of 2666 and The Savage Detectives (which are released by FSG) are. Too, the Chris Andrews translations have lately been featuring the photographs of Allen Frame, who I bet took the above photo. In any case, I always love the tilde! (Wimmer's book covers always seem to emphasize the diacritic more.) And Antwerp is bound to be another idiosyncratic masterpiece. It was called the "Big Bang" of Bolañoverse.

Roberto Bolaño – a bibliography

Bolañophile that I am, I have made it a point to read all of the Chilean's works. I have come to anticipate the English translations that are slowly coming in trickles.


I have only ever read Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) in English. Of the first 8 books I encountered (I have yet to receive my copy of The Skating Rink, the latest publication in English translation, it's on its way now), my favorites thus far are the large novels The Savage Detectives and 2666. As for the small ones, I loved Last Evenings on Earth, Nazi Literature in the Americas, and Amulet, as well as the poems in The Romantic Dogs (review).


Here then is a listing of the works of Bolaño (so far), in chronological order of book publication in Spanish language. The ones in English are highlighted. I took them from various sources available online. The years in which the English translations appeared are also indicated. Anthologies containing poetry and story pieces by Bolaño are excluded.



1982 La senda de los elefantes ("The Elephant Path", reissued in 1993 and later published as "Monsieur Pain" [1999, see below]) / Monsieur Pain (novel, January 2010)

1984 Consejos de un discípulo de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce ["Advice from a Morrison Disciple to a Joyce Fanatic"] (co-written with Antoni García Porta)

1993 La pista de hielo / The Skating Rink (novel, 2009)

1993 Fragmentos de la universidad desconocida [perhaps an earlier or a shorter version of "La universidad desconocida" (2007)]

1996 Literatura nazi en América / Nazi Literature in the Americas (novel, 2008)

1996 Estrella distante / Distant Star (novella, 2004)

1997 Llamadas telefónicas (“Telephone Calls”) / selected stories here and several more from the second collection "Putas asesinas" (2001) appear in Last Evenings on Earth (short stories, 2006)

1998 Los detectives salvajes / The Savage Detectives (novel, 2007)

1999 Amuleto / Amulet (novella, 2006)

1999 Monsieur Pain (“Mister Bread”) / Monsieur Pain (novel, January 2010)

2000 Nocturno de Chile / By Night in Chile (novella, 2003)

2000 Tres [“Three”] (poems)

2000 Los perros románticos: Poemas 1980-1998 / The Romantic Dogs (poems, 2008)

2001 Putas asesinas / The Return [contains selection of stories in "Putas asesinas" and "Llamadas telefónicas" that were not collected in "Last Evenings on Earth"] (short stories, June 2010)

2002 Amberes / Antwerp [actually written in 1980, which makes it Bolaño’s earliest novel] (novella, April 2010)

2002 Una novelita lumpen (“A Lumpen Novella”) [strangely, no publication in English was scheduled for this book]

2003 El gaucho insufrible / The Insufferable Gaucho (5 short stories + 2 essays, August 2010)

2004 Entre paréntesis / Between Parentheses [a collection of articles, columns, interviews and speeches, edited by Ignacio Echevarría] (nonfiction, June 2011)

2004 2666 / 2666 (novel, 2008)

2007 La universidad desconocida [“The Unknown University”] (poems)

2007 El secreto del mal / The Secret of Evil [a posthumous collection edited by Echevarría] (short stories, November 2011)

2009 Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (compilation of final interview and conversations with reporters in Latin America, in English translation)

2010 El Tercer Reich (“The Third Reich”) [shown to publishers at a book fair in 2008, believed to be written before 1996] (novel, 2011)

unpub. “Diorama” [novel, found in 2009]

unpub. “The Troubles of the Real Police Officer” [novel, found in 2009]

unpub. “part 6 of 2666(?)" [novella?, found in 2009]






A total of 23 (or more) works were listed here. Four of them were unpublished as they were just discovered in the past year ("found" among the author's papers in Spain). What is so impressive about this list is that the bulk of Bolaño's outputs was practically written in the last decade of his life, from 1993 to 2003. To have written that quantity of books in such a short time, and to have sustained a high quality of writing in a variety of forms (novel, novella, poem, essay, book review – it seems the only thing lacking is dramatic play), he must have been a fast and furious writer. He must have hoarded a stockpile of imagination.


A purported last part of 2666 is included among the newly discovered materials. Surely Bolaño never intended this chapter for publication? Otherwise he would have included this in 2666's 'final draft'. He had specifically outlined the contents of the novel and given instructions on how it is to be published, as what the editor mentioned in the book's Afterword.


There also exists a book called Una novelita lumpen (2002). It's strange that no publication date for an English translation was scheduled for it, either from the publisher New Directions or Picador. Whatever the reason (copyright issues?, no price bidding yet?), this book will surely be in the mainstream soon, not only because it is part of brand Bolaño, but because it also has an interesting premise. Here's how it is described in The Columbia Guide to the Latin American Novel Since 1945: "With Una novelita lumpen ... Bolaño changes the setting [of his book, from Chile in By Night in Chile,] to Rome, so his typically extreme characters are now engaged in new types of experiences, including the discovery of some of the best and worst aspects of sexuality."


Extreme characters. New experiences. The best and worst aspects of sexuality. That sounds like a Bolaño, alright.



Note: I shall be revising the above bibliography as new information about B's books comes along.

Cross-posting with Facebook

We're now linked with Facebook too. It's done via an app called NetworkedBlogs.


All these hyperlinking and forking paths, did Borges really dream of these labyrinths?

Cross-posting with Multiply

This blog is now directly linked to my Multiply account. The linkage enables me to post simultaneously in Blogger and in Multiply. Neat. I was able to import in Multiply all my previous posts here. The comments to the posts however were not preserved.


Actually this is a test. Right now I'm typing this in Blogger. The moment I click "Publish Post" is the moment it will be cross-posted in Multiply? The only way to know is to check if the teleportation will indeed take place. How long before the radioactive material decay and trigger the release of poison gas? Now, should I write in Multiply too and check if the whole thing appears here?


Is that Shrödinger's cat meowing?


UPDATE: It's not working so far. I'll open the box again later.

2nd UPDATE: It worked!

3rd UPDATE: However it appears that whatever I edit here will not be reflected there. So much for astral projection.

Trese: Murder on Balete Drive (Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo)

Note: This review may contain spoilers.


The reference code, according to the French thinker Roland Barthes, is that mode of writing characterized by a confident appeal to a universal (or consensual) truth, or a body of shared cultural (or scientific) knowledge. This appeal can be made on the text sprinkled with cultural references that are constantly being alluded to, inverted, elided, or (perhaps its highest attainment) transcended. The rich commonsensical and supernatural beliefs and belief systems can be the text's sources and materials: the references. The symbols fashioned after them are the writer's referents. The seamless integration of reference and referent constitutes an artist's repertoire of the reference code, also called the cultural code.


As an example, the reference code is the mode of analysis that the über-critic James Wood used (in his guide book How Fiction Works and in his other review essays) in interpreting the fictional works of Leo Tolstoy and José Saramago. The writings of these two novelists are grounded in naturalism that are floating in a sea of imaginative events. The repetitive appeal of these writers to everyday-life acts and situations, including their character's surprising responses to (actual) experiences, shapes a narrative that is reference-driven. The schema and structure of their novels themselves are designed in such a way as to capture the references.


So what gives, this painstaking introduction?


I see no reason why the reference code cannot be applied in the reading of graphic fiction. In comic books we see scenes boxed and captioned, progressing in their visual narrative through the accumulation of details. Comics is a medium most receptive to the omniscient point of view, a major requirement of the free indirect style of narrative progression. Visually at least, we are privy to the introspection of the hero, and the frozen details are captured in a swirl of action. The illustrations and texts strive to communicate verisimilitude and references. Taken as a whole, the graphic's universe is a frieze or a tableau, built up from its constituent references and can itself be an ultimate reference point.


The weird world of Trese, as written by Budjette Tan and illustrated by Kajo Baldisimo, is one such universe rife with mysterious happenings and references. The Philippine mythos and legends are the references. The referents are the unusual suspects: the white lady, the tikbalang, the nuno sa punso, the Santelmo (St. Elmo's fire), and the superhero. All these figments appear in a new light. Tan and Baldisimo have successfully reinvigorated the mythos with new meanings and they have provided new ways of looking at their indigenous source materials. It is a great credit to them that they have given a deep interpretation of Pinoy mythos in the modern setting. They have commanded deep respect to their material and sources.


Take the case of the "double dead" white lady, the first case in the first volume of the series (Murder on Balete Drive). The story starts simple enough but then suddenly the weird takes a turn for the weirder. Alexandra Trese, the "para-crimes" consultant investigates a case where a white lady was found murdered. Clearly the logic of Trese operates within a dimension where the unwritten rules of the otherworldly are meant to be violated, that is to say, where everything is possible. The goal is perhaps not so much a quarrel with clichés but peacefully working around them. After all, there will always be white ladies in Balete Drive, so we might as well permit the killing of them once in a while.


The reference code here operates on the simple idea of the immortality (or rather, mortality) of ghosts. This unique variation, an inversion, is novel enough but around this neat trick, the story is given perfectly fitting details, each of them also grounded in manipulated references: the consultation with a resettled nuno sa punso, the fine dust made from a truly exotic material, and the aswangs (ghouls).


The three other cases in Trese 1 demonstrate the skillful use of the reference code. The second case ("Rules of the Race"), that of an unbeatable drag racer, is another refurbished look at a supernatural being. In the race, as in the world of Trese, there are in fact no rules and whatever remains of the rules are to be bent. From tell-tale hoof prints found in the scene of a car accident, Alexandra Trese, aided by her opposable emoticon-masked twin sidekicks (charismatic characters, they are), begins her investigation and proceeds like a vampire, sniffing the elusive imprints of a delinquent underworld. In these cases, Ms. Trese's unearthly-like informers are "slightly" cooperative, and they hide where you least expect them: in a manhole, in a penthouse suite of a tall tower, in a spa.


The fourth case ("Our Secret Constellation") is something else. It is a masterful rendition of the story of fallen heroes. Sure enough, heroes and villains here are permanent fixtures of old Pinoy comics. But what else can be gleaned from them? The genius here is in the slow realization, in the slow recognition, of the identities of characters and their tragic situation. The genius here is in how it portrays a destructive force that is love, in how it can be the true weakness of a seasoned hero, yet with another referential twist to the superhero myth: a nod to the psychological repercussions of sibling love, love that is too much, too sensitive, too loving. For strangely enough, love is a recurring theme in the first Trese installment. The fragility of love is such that it can be misguided, misdirected, and distorted. The hero is out to save the world, her will power and dedication will propel her to achieve her objective (fight evil), but she can, will, never control the force of feeling around her.


Love is the primary motive for perversion, in its varying permutations in the four cases handled by Ms. Trese. To save the world with just a swallow of a stone. How does one invert that innocent notion? That simple act, of swallowing a stone, can also turn innocence into monster. It is perhaps one of the greatest homages one can give to Philippine comics artists like Mars Ravelo: to produce a work that is not just a sheer parody of one's creations but a recreation and inversion of meanings and possibilities. It is after all in the Philippine komiks that these references are popularized. The referent-creatures may be borne by folk fairy tales and oral traditions, but their appearance in Philippine komiks is the major instrument in the cultivation of our generation's consciousness of them, their aesthetic and their cultural value.


The first four cases told in the first volume of Trese herald a new appreciation of the tradition of Philippine comics. Their creators' handling of the reference code is done with glee and panache. The art work, black and white grit, illustrates a city that is full of seething passions and black motives. There has never been a unique case where the arid landscape of the supernatural and monsters is being resurrected with a nudge to the impossible.


Trese is now at the forefront of a new interest in Pinoy comics. And it now inspires a well deserved cult following. In the byways and pathways of Trese, be it in Balete Drive or C-5, Paco or Malate, are creations and creatures which can be referred to their original templates but which, when viewed from the perspective of the reference code, will easily hold their own.


In re-mystifying rather than demystifying Pinoy mythos and urban legends, Tan and Baldisimo upended an old set of references, imbued the perception of meanings with extra-sensory recognition, and created a new (modern (alternative)) code from which to view supernatural realities, replacing old spectacles with a new set of contacts.


* * * * *


Hold on to your references. Trese continues with the second volume, Unreported Murders. And something I look forward to: The 3rd volume is out.



(The above photo is of the enchanted hundred year old Balete tree of Siquijor Island, which my friends and I visited on September this year.)