mexico city
by uzwi
An old Ford Taunus with a drift of fallen petals across its bonnet; sunshine at the end of a side street off Reforma; guns in the cafes. At dawn yesterday, I thought Mexico City had this strange brown soapy light, but it’s the dust on the outer window. Already bored with the resurgence of the disaster story, I wonder if you could write something like that in which the charge was reversed & the world became beautiful. Still broken, & still freed from meaning –built environments & ideologies– but unbearably beautiful.
Advertisements
[…] View post: mexico city « the m john harrison blog […]
Enjoy Mexico City, and the rest of the country if you have the chance to see any; it’s an awe-inspiring place, and I’d go back at a drop of the hat of opportunity.
In the Days of the Comet?
You probably look a bit Mexican.
Dear M. J. Harrison, my name is Roberto Mendes, i am a Portuguese fan of your work and a author of fantasy and Science Fiction and a student of Law! I have a blog with more portuguese writers called correio do fantastico (correiodofantastico.wordpress.com ); Such as me and my partners in this blog there are many other portuguese sites regarding the Science Fiction. We have created a different tipe of post, in wich in a certain day (21 of March) all the sites post a review of one of the best science fiction masterpiece of all time. This time we choose your awsome work “The Centaury Device” to make a review. I was wondering if you would be so kind to make a little interview with me, to be posted along side with the review? Nothing would let your Portuguese Fans more Happy, i reckon, than a few words from you regarding your masterpiece “The Centauri Device”. I will wait for your answer, my email is igdrasil@sapo.pt .
Hi MJH
“I wonder if you could write something like that in which the charge was reversed & the world became beautiful. Still broken, & still freed from meaning –built environments & ideologies– but unbearably beautiful.”
I’ve been wondering something like that for a while myself, ever since reading this (at http://www.thedrunkenboat.com/croggonprose.html):
“We are used to thinking of beauty as a limitation, a series of ideals, or stereotypes, which art, confined by its historicity, assimilates and perpetuates. But is this in fact the case? Might not the terror of beauty lie in the fact that everything is beautiful: that beauty is not a matter of idealisation, but of attention?
Perhaps, to use a Lacanian model, beauty is the chaotic self, the chaotic body, the chaotic world: fragmentary, diffuse, unassigned to meaning.”
Croggan has some other thoughts about it here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2008/jun/20/thepoetryofdisaster.
She’s written some above average YA fantasy, but it’s her criminally-as-yet-unpublished Rilke translations that really made me notice.
And, sorry for the appallingly Luddite non-linkiness of the links – it’s one-something-or-other in the morning, I’m at work that’s full of ill people, and I don’t recognise this computer…
I was also going to say that I find Alan Weisman’s ‘World Without Us’ post-unfathomable-apocalypse scenario beautiful too, both the idea and how it would look – but then it occurred to me that, well, um, there’d be no one there to find the beauty unbearable, or to utter the words, or to know what ‘words’ were, or…
Yeah, well. Like I said, it was so early in the morning it was still late at night, and the ambient dementia must have been accreting in my cortex…
Hello Roberto Mendes. Many thanks for your post. It’s the 20th as I write, & I can’t get your email to work, otherwise I would be happy to give you a little interview. (It will have to be little as I am on holiday.)
Hi Robert: thanks for that. I’ll follow those links when I get back from Mexico. I am suddenly quite interested in this stuff.