¡Bemsha SWING!: Midnight in Paris

13 jul 2011

Midnight in Paris

I saw this Woody Allen film, "Midnight in Paris," in which the protagonist gets to travel back in time and meet Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, Buñuel, Dalí, and Stein in Paris. I thought back to a time about a year and a half ago in Madrid. I was at the Círculo de Bellas Artes with my favorite Spanish critic, Miguel Casado, my favorite living poet, Olvido García Valdés, and then was introduced to a woman who turned out to be my favorite Spanish novelist, Menchú Gutiérrez. She was very impressed I had read every single one of her novels, including a very obscure one about a light-house keeper. I didn't need a magical automobile at midnight to meet these people. Of course if I went back in time in Paris I'd travel to see Cortázar rather than Hemingway But in any case my experience had something at once magical and real to it, while completely lacking the cartoonishness of Allen's vision of the lost generation. I guess the point was supposed to be that our vision of the past is, in fact, cartoonish and unreal.

3 comentarios:

Vance Maverick dijo...: Ugh, glad in a way to see this impression confirmed, though it cost you an evening. Everything from the way the movie has been praised to the inanity and incompetence of the poster has screamed out the same warning.

I recently trusted critical praise of Evelyn Juers' biography of Heinrich Mann -- it too seems to think the only interesting people in the past were the ones who are famous now, and at the same time not to have anything interesting to say about them.; 9:07 a. m.
Jonathan dijo...: Actually I enjoyed the movie quite a bit as I was watching it. A bit kitschy, for the reasons I outline here, but it seemed to work for the audience I saw it with. There was a funny moment when the main character tells Buñuel the plot of The Exterminating Angel, and Buñuel doesn't get it at all.; 1:37 a. m.
Professor Zero dijo...: The film was vaguely amusing because I got to see it in an art house that had an art nouveau type bar, and I guess if I'd been in a mall I'd have been grateful to look at Paris. But.; 4:30 p. m.

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Blurbs & Reviews

"Jonathan Mayhew’s new work belongs to a certain class of surprising books: those so obviously necessary once they appear that it apparently required a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for them."

--Daniel Katz

"Jonathan Mayhew's Lorca is less the distinctive Spanish poet, whose murder in 1936 marked the beginning of the Civil War, than he is an American invention. From the 1940s to the end of the century, our poets have invoked Lorca-in translation, of course-as a Romantic, exotic, radical, and, in many cases, gay icon-the poet of mystery and the duende. The Lorca myth, Mayhew argues persuasively, has enriched American lyric, but it has also been an obstacle to a more adequately grounded understanding of Spanish poetry in the 20th century. Apocryphal Lorca is revisionist criticism at its most acute."

-Marjorie Perloff

"Enhanced by copious notes and an excellent bibliography, this book offers a perceptive, intriguing assessment of the Garcia Lorca created by the postwar generation of American poets." (Choice )

"Mayhew is a critic who is at the top of his game; he combines a breadth of knowlege of the field with acute analysis."

--John C. Wilcox, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Let me just cut through all the usual, boring book review preliminaries and say the following thing: Jonathan Mayhew has, in Apocryphal Lorca, written an amazing book. "

--Brandon Holmquest, Calque

"The great merit of Mayhew's study is his sustained effort to document and interrogate Lorca's reception, unique among American encounters with foreign literatures in its nature and extent."

--Lawrence Venuti, TLS.

"Se trata de Jonathan Mayhew y su extraordinario estudio Apocryphal Lorca. Translation, Parody, Kitsch. Esta obra se ocupa no de García Lorca sino de cómo los escritores estadounidenses han reinventado a Lorca, desde Spicer y Rothenberg hasta O’Hara y Koch. Asimismo, es una discusión de la Deep Image —¡cuánto hay que desmenuzar de ese capítulo!— y la manera en que la poética norteamericana se ha apropiado de lo lorqueano (o lorcaesco) y del concepto de lo 'otro' que éste representa. Éste es un libro repleto de sutilezas, de tesis, apuntes, datos."

--Heriberto Yépez

"Apocryphal Lorca, sin embargo, es mucho más que un estudio de las vidas posteriores de Lorca en la poesía americana entre principios de los años 50 y 70. También ofrece un acercamiento histórico a la traducción de su obra, descubriendo reseñas de prensa significativas y discurriendo acerca de reconocimientos críticos. El texto es elegante y fresco; el análisis amplio e históricamente específico."

--María Delgado, Revista de Literatura

¡Bemsha SWING!

13 jul 2011

Midnight in Paris

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