i lost track of my vacation schedule, visiting a friend who was around when «The Old Blog» was created, and forgot i hadn’t written this week’s post yet. i had my work laptop, but my copy of pedro páramo remained at home, with my girlfriend, cat, and somewhere on a fedex truck somewhere a new guitar that hadn’t arrived yet. my friend and i caught up about what we’ve been up to lately. she likes her new job and new home a lot more. i’m in a band that started playing shows this year and is going to «record» next month, and i wrote and sing one song for that collaborative project. i got a book deal for a «secret nonfiction book». and i also made this little return to the world of book recap blogging. she asked who this was for, referring to the book, but i thought she meant a recap blog for that book. i explained, unsure if the book sounded like it did enough to guide the reader through its difficulty, even though this isn’t really the question the recap blog is asking. we talked about at what point a book has earned its difficulty, insofar as i decided the book was short enough to reread so why not. what happened really was i thought as long as i needed to take notes about it to so much as follow it why not post that somewhere, and at that point why not just start a new blog. we talked about reading virginia woolf’s the waves together, the only virginia woolf she hasn’t read yet because it looks extremely difficult to read, and, well, we’re not in college anymore. she already wrote her virginia woolf senior thesis. we tried to remember who else was in our thesis seminar and what they wrote about eleven years ago.
pedro páramo’s translator douglas j weatherford, believes that the point of juan rulfo’s novel’s difficulty is, as he asks in his note following the novel, –what exactly do you understand?– if this is the intention, then the meaning must be an answer to the implied follow-up question –what does pedro páramo want you to do with the inherent unknowability of the extent of your understanding?–
pedro páramo’s ghosts are allowed to bleed through to the living. pedro’s son miguel has his first appearance in the text as a ghost after his death, where he is offered gratitude for saying goodbye. his next appearance, at least corporeally, is his funeral, where he is denied forgiveness. the narrator is told the first story by his mom’s living best friend. he is told the latter story by the memory of the priest interrupting the book someone still living is narrating.
pedro páramo didn’t exactly interest me during my first read. was the pull towards giving it another shot about wanting to understand a book i only vaguely understood to be about the corrupting influence of power and maybe ghosts. or was the pull just towards having something to write about it. or was the pull towards «Content».
this is not my original observation that under capitalism it is difficult or impossible to determine what you want to do versus what you feel compelled to one day monetize. i have always liked to write. i wrote a great deal as a child. my oldest friend sent me a picture last year of an old 50-page parody i wrote of harry potter he had found in his childhood bedroom. friends today still frequently ask me if i still do «The Old Blog». i tell people about the «secret nonfiction book» because that feels like looking forward, as though actively looking towards the future instead of dwelling on the past is only legitimized by the promise of «Content». when does a child playing with expression become a «Content Creator». under capitalism, maybe they always were. or if they can’t make money that way, maybe they never will be.
is writing on the internet fun to do. is this recap blog fun to do. is it an attempt to bridge a gap. an attempt to recapture a long-gone «audience» before i have yet more new «Content». is the gap between «Content» or between «audiences». is «Content» still «Content» without the «audience». pedro páramo’s ghosts are allowed to bleed through to the living; a dissipated and unrecaptured «audience» is no longer here yet still it bleeds through interrupting «Content» with its memory. what do you do with all this not knowing what exactly do you understand.