Naked

I have stood naked atop the city,
its towers of babel reaching toward the unpronounceable,
and I have held a glass in my hand,
with wine like a mouthful of time,
and I have looked down upon a thousand street lamps
a thousand flickering screens,
and I have waited for someone to recognize my nakedness,
to no avail.

It grieves me that he will have no more stories for us.

Roberto Bolano, 2666 – hardcover

Roberto Bolano, Nazi Literature in the Americas

Roberto Bolano, The Skating Rink

Elias Canetti, The Play of the Eyes – hardcover

Colette, Flowers and Fruit – hardcover

Colette, The Ripening Seed – clothbound

Gilles Deleuz, Nietzsche and Philosophy

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Notebooks for The Brothers Karamazov – clothbound

Ralph Ellison, Flying Home and Other Stories – hardcover

Carlos Fuentes, The Years with Laura Diaz – hardcover

John Gardner, Michelson’s Ghosts – clothbound, first edition

William Godwin, Fleetwood

Graham Greene, Doctor Fischer of Geneva – clothbound

Graham Greene, The Human Factor – hardcover

Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Path

Ernest Hemingway, Under Kilimanjaro – clothbound, first edition

Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls – hardcover

Milan Kundera, Ignorance – hardcover

Milan Kundera, Immortality – hardcover

Doris Lessing – The Marriage Between Zones Three, Four, and Five – clothbound, first edition

Mario Vargas Llossa, The Bad Girl – hardcover

Mario Vargas Llossa, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service

Mario Vargas Llossa, The Cubs and Other Stories – hardcover

Mario Vargas Llossa, Death in the Andes

Mario Vargas Llossa, The Green House

Mario Vargas Llossa, The Language of Passion

Mario Vargas Llossa, Making Waves

Mario Vargas Llossa, The War of the End of the World

Mario Vargas Llossa, The Way to Paradise

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera – hardcover

Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing – hardcover

V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival – hardcover

Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural

Ben Okri, Infinite Riches – hardcover

Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel – a gorgeous, clothbound, illustrated edition

Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands – hardcover

Salman Rushdie, Luka and the Fire of Life – hardcover

Jose Saramago, All the Names

Jose Saramago, The Elephant’s Journey – hardcover

Mark C. Taylor, Nots

Paul Theroux, Patagonia Revisited – clothbound

Ivan Turgenev, The Torrents of Spring – clothbound, illustrated

Some of these may seem like odd choices for me, but I was often choosing on the basis of price and edition, and I am well pleased with the additions to my library.

Most of my viewing has been in the Doc Shop, where industry representatives can access most of the films on demand through computer terminals.  The viewing experience is not quite the same as the theatre, of course, but it is much more convenient that running around Toronto from theatre to theatre , and it enables me to see films that are not actually playing while I am here.  Of those that I have been able to see in theatre, I particularly enjoyed the festival’s opening night doc, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, about Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei.  Weiwei’s story alone would probably carry the film, because of the issues it involves, particularly those of censorship and activism in modern China, but Weiwei’s art and personality add a depth and a humour and an intimacy that make the film stand apart from the others that I have seen so far.  Though the choice of which films come to GFOMM is certainly not mine, I will recommend this one very highly to those who are making the selections.

There are several other films that I will recommend also: Smoke Traders, which explores the role of cigarette trade in Canadian native communities; Crayons of Askalan, a partly acted, partly animated, partly documented look at an imprisoned Palestinian artist, though this one may be a bit  experimental for our audience; One Day After Peace, the story of an Israeli woman pursuing reconciliation in the wake of her son’s death by a Palestinian sniper, which includes some absolutely astonishing scenes, like a former South African minister coming to wash the feet of a woman whose son his orders had killed; Planet of Snail, a really lovely portrayal of the relationship between a deaf/blind poet and his physically disabled wife, which includes a great scene of him changing a complicated lightbulb that she cannot reach and he cannot see;  Breath, the life of a female chimney sweep in Estonia; Mom and Me, a partly animated look at the Hell’s Angels turf wars in Quebec; Canned Dreams, an almost surreal portrayal of how a can of ravioli is made; and Brooker’s Place, in which a filmmaker returns to a documentary that his father made during the civil rights movement that may have resulted in a man’s death.  I think any and all of these would make great editions to our festival, and hopefully we will be able to bring at least some of them in this year.

In 1517, Fray Bartolome de las Casas, feeling great pity for the Indians who grew worn and lean in the drudging infernos of the Antillean gold mines, proposed to Emperor Charles V that Negroes be brought to the isles of the Caribbean, so that they might grow worn and lean in the drudging infernos of the Antillean gold mines.  To this odd variant on the species of the philanthropist we owe an infinitude of things:

W. C. Handy’s blues;

The success achieved in Paris by the Uruguayan attorney-painter Pedro Figari;

The fine runaway-slave prose of the likewise Uruguayan Vicente Rossi;

The mythological stature of Abraham Lincoln;

The half-million dead of the War of Succession;

The $3.3 billion spent on military pensions;

The statue of the imaginary semblance of Antonio (Falucho) Ruiz;

The inclusion of the word “lynch” in respectable dictionaries;

The impetuous King Vidor film Hallelujah;

The stout bayonet charge of the regiment of “Black and Tans” (the colour of their skins, not their uniforms) against that famous hill near Montevideo;

The gracefulness of certain elegant young ladies;

The black man who killed Martin Fierro;

That deplorable rumba The Peanut Seller;

The arrested and imprisoned Napoleonism of Toussaint L’Ouverture;

The cross and the serpent in Haiti;

The blood of goats whose throats are slashed by the papaloi’s machete;

The habanera that is the mother pf the tango;

The candombe.

Market Girl

I dreamt I saw a market girl,
I dark-eyed apple seller girl,
Shy ruler of the autumn dawn,
Of frost-etched windowpanes that shone
Their lace-light on the still-dark street,
Of mulling spices, strange and sweet,
And of the applecart propped door,
Through which I looked to see her more.

Light

Through the afternoon window,
More cloud-silver than sun-gold,
Tracing lines on my water glass,
Quivering and refracted,
Light,
In the flesh,
The incarnation of a setting sun.