No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) Read Free Page A

illnesses:
     
    Aldecoa Inauda / Hilarión Curtis
     
    Kleptolalia / Cryptodermia
    And vice-versa: kleptodermia—cryptolalia
    Oliverio’s story about the Venus who repeatedly swaps her true form for human “furs” … Nicasio’s instance of cryptolalia: the mute little brothers in his short story, “The Imitation of an Ounce.”
    Collaborative writing. Comprised of two varieties:
     
    Analysis of all possible combinations
     
    Plagiarism
    Laurence Sterne / Lautréamont
     
    Stewart Home / Bajarlía
     
    Basilio Tregua / Belisario Ugarte
     
    Incoherency / Contradiction. Postpone dealing with this for the time being.
    Title of the first story: “Early”
    Or else rename it “Too Late”? It’s quite an old story (from back in ’86, or earlier) about the wanton world of plagiarism, a two-dimensional world existing in a two-dimensional space, populated by ferociously competitive inhabitants with two-dimensional outlooks. It appeared in an anthology published by Monte Ávila of Venezuela, edited by Héctor Libertella.
     
    Unease: there are always extenuating circumstances.
     
    Strategic reassurance and remorse. Would like to include the sestinas on departure and return (formalist nonsense!)—and the short poems in English from The B(achelor) in B(edlam) that Charlie was so fond of.
    I wrote “Early” for a meeting of The Cause —which was either a writer’s group none of us founded or a magazine none of us launched, in order to fulfill the mandate to start such organizations that was issued by (cacophony of resentment) the magazine El periodista de Buenos Aires (ah, that brings me back!). And before that?
     
    I think I was the only one who did his homework that time. The meeting was held in Charlie’s flat on Independence Street (the one from Ignatieff’s The Lesser Evil ). Charlie, Alan, Chefec, Guebel, Bizzio, and myself. I remember them all going over the pages I typed on my mechanical Hermes while I waited, having nothing better to do. The Pole was the first to finish reading, or the only one who didn’t give up. “I like it,” he said, “I think it’s very sentimental.”
    The capriciousness of memory. I can’t imagine even Sergio or Danny being able to follow all this.
    Speaking of Sergio, in Trichinopoli (a novel I was writing in jest while others were working on theirs in deadly earnest), the basic unit of currency was the “chefec” (derived, supposedly, from the phrase check feckless coin ). Sergio B[izzio], who was always prissy and pedantic, told me he could never read a book with such a title. It’s the name of a city in southern India, I puffed affectedly (being even more prissy and pedantic than he). There’s also a brand of breadsticks called Grissinopoli .
    Now let life obscure the difference between life and art .
    — J.C.
    Another reminder re: “Early”: The Répide Stupía book the narrator plagiarizes is a collection of poems, not short stories. Same title, however: Accents .
    The beginning [#5]
     
    I won a literary competition with a story actually written by Francisco Répide Stupía. Every page of the story is basically a word-pimp’s larding-on of obscurities and contradictions, the better to obfuscate the plagiarism—and written in a light tone to sugar over the gravity of the crime.
     
    Although I’m not really a writer, I’ve had many things published in my name. I knew others who did the same: Marina Ipousteguy, for example, who spent the summer writing, living with a man who wrote. As soon as she stopped living with the man who wrote, she published a book of poems; the man who wrote is still writing, but now Marina lives with an architect who reads. The whys and wherefores of all this escape me, as they would anyone. But I’m not writing this to resolve them.
     
    We’d been friends for quite a while, so, at Marina’s request, I happily agreed to write the foreword to her book. Due to my interest in encyclopedic trivia, the more esoteric the better, I made