only young poets and old whores can appreciate

A poet can endure anything. Which amounts to saying that a human being can endure anything. Except that it's not true: there are obviously limits to what a human being can endure. Really endure. A poet, on the other hand, can endure anything. We grew up with this conviction. The opening assertion is true, but that way lie ruin, madness, and death.

[...] it has to be said that he wrote badly [...] He wanted to be a poet, and threw himself into this endeavour with all his energy and willpower. He was tenacious in a blind ,uncritical way, like the bad guys in westerns, falling like flies but persevering, determined to take the hero's bullets, and in the end there was something likable about this tenacity; it give him an aura, a kind of literary sanctity that only young poets and old whores can appreciate.

Soldiers of Salamis - Javier Cercas

p.1 - lame joke about career

p.146 - 'To write novels you don't imagination,' Bolano said. 'Just a memory. Novels are written by combing recollections.'

p. 169 -

'It's different now,' I said. 'He's a successful writer.'

'Really? I'm glad: I always thought he was talented, as well as an out-and-out liar. But I suppose you have to be an out-and-out liar to be a good novelist, don't you?'

Silence

‘One has to be responsible, as I have always said. One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one’s actions, and that includes one’s words and silences, yes one’s silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them, and only God understands and judges them, so one must be very careful with one’s silences. I am responsible in every way. My silences are immaculate.’ (Bolaño: 2003, p.1)

Bolaño, Roberto (2003 [2000]) By Night In Chile, trans Chris Andrews, New York: New Directions

Another Russian Tale – Roberto Bolaño

The Russian who knew German asked him what he was doing there, what his job was and his rank. The Andalusian tried to explain, in German, but it was no use. The Russians opened his mouth, and with a pair of pincers, which the Germans had used on other body parts, they started pulling and squeezing his tongue. The pain made his eyes water, and he said, or rather shouted, the word coño, cunt. The pincers in his mouth distorted the expletive which came out, in his howling voice, as Kunst.

The Russian who knew German looked at him in puzzlement. The Andalusian was yelling Kunst, Kunst and crying with pain. In German, the word Kunst means art, and that was what the bilingual soldier was hearing, and he said, This son of a bitch must be an artist or something. The guys who were torturing the Andalusian removed the pincers along with a little piece of tongue and waited, momentarily hypnotized by the revelation. The word art. Art, which soothes the savage beast. And so, like soothed beasts, the Russians took a breather and waited for some kind of signal while the rookie bled from the mouth and swallowed his blood liberally mixed with saliva, and choked. The word coño transformed into the word Kunst, had saved his life. When he came out of the rectangular building, it was dusk, but the light stabbed at his eyes like midday sun.

(trans. Chris Andrew)

"50. Summer" from Antwerp, p.69 - Roberto Bolaño

There’s a secret sickness called Lisa. Like all sicknesses, it’s miserable and it comes on at night. In the weave of a mysterious language whose words signify without exception that the foreigner “isn’t well.” And somehow I would like her to know that the foreigner is “struggling,” “in strange lands,” “without much chance of writing epic poetry,” “without much chance of anything.” The sickness takes me to strange and frozen bathrooms where the plumbing works according to an unexpected mechanism. Bathrooms, dreams, long hair flying out the window to the sea. The sickness is a wake. (The author appears shirtless, in black glasses, posing with a dog and a backpack in summer somewhere.) “The summer somewhere,” sentences lacking in tranquility, though the image they refract is motionless, like a coffin in the lens of a still camera. The writer is a dirty man, with his shirt sleeves rolled up and his short hair wet with sweat, hauling barrels of garbage. He’s also a waiter who watches himself filming as he walks along a deserted beach, on his way back to the hotel… “The wind whips grains of sand”… “Without much chance”… The sickness is to sit at the base of the lighthouse staring into nothing. The lighthouse is black, the sea is black, the writer’s jacket is also black.

Excerpt from Chapter 9 'Distant Star' by Roberto Bolano

Vertical Submarine's latest project is not only unoriginal but mild in comparison to St. Martin's School of Art's Sculpture class of 1969 or the story below by Bolano:

In 1968, while the students were building barricades and the rising generation of French novelists were putting bricks through the windows of their school or losing their virginity, he decided to found the sect or movement called "the barbaric writers." While intellectuals were taking to the streets, the ex-legionnaire shut himself up in his tiny caretaker's flat in the Rue des Eaux and began to hatch a new kind of writing. the apprenticeship consisted of two apparently simple steps: seclusion and reading. In order to take the first step, one had to purchase provisions sufficient for a week or go hungry To avoid inoppurtune visits, it was also neccessary to make it clear that one was not to be disturbed for any reason, or pretend to be away travelling for a week or to have contracted a contagious disease. the second step was more complicated. According to Delorme, one had to commune with the master works. Communion was achieved in a singularly odd fashion: by defecating on the pages of Stendhal, blowing one's nose on the pages of Victor Hugo, masturbating an spreading one's semen over the pages of gautier or Banville, vomiting onto the pages of Daudet, urinating on the pages of Lamartine, cutting oneself with a razor blade and spattering blood over the pages of Balzac or Maupassant, in short, submitting the books to a process of degradation which Delorme called "humanization." A week of this "barbaric" rituals resulted in a flat or room full of filth, stench and ruined books, with the apprentice writer wallowing in the mess, naked or in underwear, drivelling and wriggling like a new-born baby, or, rather, like the pioneering fish that had decided to make the break and live out of water. The barbaric writer, said Delorme, emerged from this experience with a new inner strength, and, more importantly, a deeper understanding of the art of writing, a wisdom acquired through what he called "real familiarity" with and "real assimilation" of the classics, a physical familiarity that broke all the barriers imposed by culture, the academy and technology.

Excerpt from 'Distant Star' by Roberto Bolano P.71

Because of the time and the weather (it was winter) the station was almost empty despite the fact that the 1:00am train for Paris was about to leave. Most people were in the bar or the main waiting room. Soto, for some rason, perhaps he heard voices, went to look in another room, some way off. There he found three young Neo-Nazis and a bundle on the ground. The youths were diligently kicking the bundle. Soto froze on the threshold until he realised that the bundle was moving, he saw first a hand and then an incredibly dirty arm emerging from the rags. The tramp shouted, stop hitting me. It was a woman's voice. But no one was listening, no one except the Chilean writer. Perhaps his eyes filled with tears, tears of self-pity, because something told him he had met his destiny. Now he wouldn't have to choose between Tel Quel and the OuLiPo. For him, life had chosen the crime reports. In any case, he droppped his bag and the books at the door and approached the youths.