I. P R O L O G U E

" - Larry, can I ask you a favor?
- It depends.
- Tell me what you see when you close your eyes and pretend you're terribly afraid. Maybe I could try to see the same things when fear overcomes me.
- You want to know my defences?
- I want to know your enemies; close your eyes and tell me what they're like. They seem almost tame."




I was at this bookstore last night, slouching on a couch, acting out a potato, quietly perusing George Steiner's No Passion Felt and wondering at the glamour of his language coefficient with his job as a literary critic. He was, at the outset, analyzing the 18th century French Master Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin's painting Le Philosophe lisant while aiming to determine the profile of The Uncommon Reader.

Steiner was struck by the garb of the painting's subject - a man reading a book - which he considered to be very formal and ceremonious, and saw the man as "dressed for the occasion". The occasion, obviously, was the reading of a book; this must have been utterly ritualistic during that period (the painting was finished in 1734) that it prompted Steiner to describe his furred bonnet as suggestive of a scholar "when he seeks the flame of the spirit in the momentary fixity of the letter", and the furred robe as implying his indulgence in a "ceremony of intellect, of the mind's apprehension of meaning."

Whether it was in the real world or the realm of art, the disparity left me with a bitter taste in the mouth. There I was, a 21st century plebeian-reader in tattered jeans, crumpled shirt, and faded El Tucano Costa Rica cap, construing the sensibility of 18th century bourgeoisie towards reading as a venerated but ostentatious pursuit. The disparity, mind you, could not have been as confounding if it were solely based on our, and their, manner of appreciating the art of reading per se. Surely, leafing through Shakespeare's Hamlet was highpoint in daily cultural existence, in whatever time and milieu, and if one generation pursued the passion in solitude and the other in pomposity, the end would have justified the means. But under 18th century consideration viewed by my 21st century plebeian sensibility, reading was exclusively aristocratic.

So I shook myself out of that sag, welcoming the possibility of being classified by Steiner as The Average Reader. I stood up and headed towards the bookshelves in search of another book, this time to fulfill my other passion, writing, even if my ability on that one was also average. I had been toying with this game, you see, as my toast to intellectual imposition, my roast to literary conceit.

Through a long row of bookshelves, teeming with books, empty of readers, I walked with eyes closed and arms outstretched. On both sides the tip of my fingers touched the smooth texture of the books' covers, fulfilling my need to connect to the right book as I slowly and calculatedly navigated in darkness. Despite that pseudo-disabled posture, my aura was of plain sternness to impress everyone that for a brief moment the entire row was mine. At a certain point I faced the left shelf, ran my open palms over books within my arms' radius, plucked a book from somewhere, dug a fingernail to open that book to whatever page, ran my forefinger over the face of the opened book, then stopped. I opened my eyes to see the title of the book and read the paragraph where my forefinger rested.

The book I happened to pick was entitled Eternal Curse On The Reader Of These Pages, written by the Argentinean Manuel Puig (Kiss Of The Spiderwoman), and the paragraph where my finger stopped was the dialogue quoted above. The main objective of my game was to put the randomly selected quote from the randomly selected book as teaser for this initial blog entry and, as ponderous literary challenge, to create an entry spawning from that quote.

I did not read the book save for the quote and had no inclination what the story was about except that the conversation was between protagonists Larry and Mr. Ramirez as they roam Washington Square. My game fulfilled its purpose of throwing a challenge, and as I retired in bed going over and over the quote with no creative thought coming out, I concluded that I was neither The Average Reader nor The Average Writer. The game had to end due to a literary fallout.

Until these notions came from nowhere and hit me swift and hit me hard.

First - I realized the coincidence that my game, and Mr. Ramirez' request to Larry, involved the closing of the eyes;

Second - I realized the coincidence that the title of Puig's book and Steiner's subject have something to do with the reader; the former was directly referring to me as the reader, the latter was an analysis of somebody that was directly opposite me, The Uncommon Reader;

Third - I realized the coincidences that I had this co-worker named Larry; that there was a time when I was dubbed Mr. Ramirez by my high school classmates (for sharing the same first name with a popular figure in the community); and, hold your breath - this is true - that Larry and I once had this conversation that closely resembled the one quoted above. Over bottles of beer, I tried to uncoil him from the past that haunted him, his enemy.

From that point I had been in search for something more far-reaching that George Steiner's Uncommon Reader. I needed to know if I were indeed cursed for reading Puig's pages, and if yes, what the curse was all about. The curse could probably be the act of blogging all my life, and for which you may also be cursed into following my blogs all your lives. Remember that, technically, you have read part of Puig's book, too.