No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) by Darren Koolman Luis Chitarroni Read Free Book Online Page B

from everyone , en fin
     
    ( There was a crueller month than April ).
     

     
    In homage to what he heard , he listens .
     
    Around the deserted isle , autumn fluxes ,
     

     
    he listens to what was (it’s supposed to be music ,
     
    it is noise
     
    But not for me).
     
    In “The Scent of Thunbergias,” Misia Taboda. Lady Obstreperous . Bette Davis. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve . W. S. Maugham’s The Letter . Dotty Dabble. Mme Marasm. Mme Sarcasm.
    There’s no better place for hiding a secret than an unfinished novel (Calvino, Italo). Quoted by someone else, citation needed.
    Voices: George Sanders, Tom Conway.
    Finally decided on a title: The X-Positions ( Las equis distantes )
     
    And, incidentally: no one else seems to like it.
    (Appendices)
     
    1. Concerning the enigma of The X-positions
     
    “Today I put an end to—which is to say, I found names for—two of the enigmas in my life, now banished forever,” wrote Nicasio Urlihrt in his diary shortly before his death. “They were in a terrible poem,” he added, “by a terrible friend: his worst, I’d say, although I admit its intended meaning was lost on me. Love’s got to be good for something. Time’s got to be good for something.” Those who want to pursue this matter further (or destroy the evidence) can take a break from reading this apologia and seek out the material in question, as published in the journal Agraphia . If nothing else, you’ll get a kick out of the punctuation.
     
    X-Positions refers more to unresolved puzzles, the unknown, than to the old question of anonymity; this according to a somewhat biased interpretation of the second hemistich of the last line of the first stanza of the sonnet by Sabatani—“It wasn’t yesterday the world we call old / Nor the secret lost on a mystery / Cult. Be grateful for the levity in the grave: / The bad poets, the x-positions”—that precedes the three Spanish versions of Mallarmé’s “sonnet on X” in his chapbook.
     
    The ability of the X to contain conflicting concepts is both a blessing and a curse, bestowed by accident and by amphibology, among other things. Xs are, according to Sabatani, “symmetries of opposition or denial similar to the phenomena of inverse relations studied by Lévi-Strauss.” The genealogy of these Xs goes back to the “the Arcadian period” of Agraphia [Urlihrtian terminology]—to its very first issues, in other words, in one of those supposedly popular articles Lino Scacchi wrote for Sherbet Aria (“Todo Sobre la equis” [All About X] later published in Idiomatics as “Todo sobre equis, nada sobre Zeda” [All About X, Nothing About Z]), later translated into English by Hermione Hepburn and published in a journal called Bible Black (Tantrum Press, 1978) with the title restored to “All About X” (for a brief description of how all this came about, see “Early”). In his essay, Scacchi unleashed all the voodoo-erudition of a man who nonetheless ended up as the crossword-writer for a small-town paper. He ascertained, for example, that the Dictionary of Defiance by the mysterious L.F. [Louis Felipon], traces the sound of the letter X to that of the Greek word chrestos , or Christ. And according Scacchi, who cites “the best prose in the world,” to adduce that the letter X “cheered and chastened the best man in the world, Thomas Browne, who said ‘the letter X … is the Emphaticall decussation, or fundamentall figure.’”
     
    After two pages of frenetically-written fustian, full of unconnected ideas and obscure references, Scacchi proceeds along the following line of thought: “It’s curious to trace in the history of this feeble cruciate sign the adventitious influence that has led to its being given coronal rank in the hierarchy of letters. Nonetheless, in the majority of cases, writers, from Ben Jonson to Gertrude Stein, Confucius to Cummings, Argensola to Gerardo Diego, have rejected it with disdain. Ben Jonson wanted to remove poor X