[T. Mare l’ha llegit!] [Yuri Mother read it!

[T. Mare l’ha llegit!] [Yuri Mother read it!]



Quan de jove (i des febrer del 74 fins a desembre del 77) era a una ciutat nòrdica, hi llegia molt de recapte a les biblioteques de la Universitat. Tenien a l’indret de les publicacions hebdomadàries i mensuals, moltes de revistes i d’estudis, a més d’altres tractats especialitzats i més esporàdics, i hi havien posat un paper en blanc al capdavant de cadascuna perquè els estudiants qui mai les consultessin hi signessin, perquè així sabrien, als llocs administratius, si ningú les llegia; i si doncs, molt pocs d’estudiants, o ja no cap ni un, no les llegís, per què continuar la inútil despesa?

Hi llegia les publicacions esquerranes i educadament literàries i sempre hi afegia al paper del davant el meu nom inventat, d’aquesta faisó: Yuri Mother read it! Hi tenien certes (escasses) publicacions en català, com ara “Serra d’Or”, i aleshores hi escrivia: T. Mare l’ha llegit!

Després feia això amb els llibres; en llapis, a la pàgina del darrere de tot, hi escrivia el mateix estirabot, T. Mare l’ha llegit, perquè prou sovint m’he vist rellegint llibres sense tenir-ne verament la intenció.

Fa un grapat d’anys que he deixat de fer-ho, mes prou m’hauria fet servei, si més no amb els llibres de la biblioteca de casa. M’estalviaria rai les relectures si fa no fa perdudes.

Sí ves; tant se val. I ara doncs potser que ens espitxéssim, tu; car ja triguem massa a dir què, ara que (justament per culpa d’aquesta “pàgina”) ja no ens ho apuntem al llibre blau.



Doncs som-hi.
D’en Rex Stout:

Llegit (25-febrer-2012). The Silent Speaker (1946)

Un mort qui parla a través de qualque gravació en cilindres.

—Opinions, from experts, cost money.

—[Massa tard.] [Parla, amb to irònic, un inspector.] So... I mustn’t get tough with refined people who have got to the point where they employ tax experts to make sure they’re not cheating the government. [El complicat sistema de taxes només dissenyat perquè els rics no en paguin, amb l’ajut dels “experts”.]

[Neguitejat Archie, envaït pels suspectes; és clar que tota invasió de domicili per amics, coneguts i família és letal per al desenvolupament intel·lectual o simplement per a viure com cal.] —If it was a weird experience for me, all these aliens trampling all over the house as if they owned it, I could imagine what the effect must be on Wolfe.

—One old picture of the people in the sleigh throwing the baby out to the wolves that were chasing them. [...] One way of looking at it, it was heartless to toss out the baby, but on the other hand if they hadn’t the wolves would eventually have got the whole works, baby, horses, and all.

Bé.


(...)


Llegit (14-abril-2012). Some buried Caesar (1939).

Perduts, per causa de l’automòbil fent figa a mal indret, en poble de ramaders, amb fira de bovins, o potser de tota mena de bestiar.

En Nero Wolfe descobrint qui et dóna gat per llebre, fent-te veure garses per perdius. O qui feia veure que un brau llavorer mort no era el mateix qui valia molt més. Embolics de riquetes famílies provincianes qui s’odien, rai.

—Do you know what A R means? Advance Register. What a cow has to do to get on the A R is to produce a daily average of so much milk and so much butterfat over a period of one year.

—What’s the difference between a catholic and a river that runs uphill? [?] [Cap. Cap dels dos no faran mai cap on, crèduls i infantiloides, i molt datspelcul, es pensarien mai fer cap.]

[En Wolfe sap qui és propietari del propi sensori]...
—Why the hell didn’t you spill it when the sheriff was there? When the cops were there on the spot?
—I represented no interest last night, sir. [Respon en Wolfe.]
—What about the interest of justice? You’re a citizen, aren’t you? Did you ever hear of withholding evidence...
—Nonsense. I didn’t withhold the bull’s face or the pick. You must know you’re being silly. My cerebral processes, and the conclusions they lead me to, belong to me.


—Innocence is a negative and can never be established; you can only establish guilt. [Toc!]

—The bull... dead.
—What killed him?
­—Anthrax. [...] Technically it’s a disease, of course, but it’s so swift and deadly that it’s more like a snake or a stroke of lightning.


[Hà!] —Financial banditry... I either condemn it or I don’t; and if I do, without prejudice, where will I find jailers? [Car tota la bòfia la paguen els lladres més rics.]

—One test of intelligence is the ability to welcome a singularity when the need arises, without excessive strain.

Bé.


(...)


Rellegit (i que ja l’havia llegit no me n’adonava fins a tres-quarts de narració), el 9-maig-2012, Bad for Business (1940). Sense en Neró Llop.

Sabotatge en fàbrica de qualque porqueria enllaunada o embolicada.

—[She]... hoping that her face was not betraying the vague discomfort, the mild repulsion, she had always felt at the sight of him, especially his mouth with its hint of strain at the down-turning corners... the mouth, properly, of a fanatic or a fiend stoically enduring unheard-of and ceaseless torture. [Hà.]

—Elimination of the “I” from a recital of a personal experience requires training and acquired discipline.

—His self-assurance abruptly retreated from his eyes to some inner line of defense.

En Tecumseh Fox [en Guineu, doncs, i no pas en Llop]: —It’s the worst boner I ever pulled in my life.

—A man in the conventional uniform closed the door and stood ready for anything, from negation of his existence to decapitation, without change of expression. [La bòfia “manada” sempre assassina sense cap mena de recança.]

[Hà, amb ressonàncies sempre actuals.] —The statesman Charles James Fox... wagered fifty thousand pounds with Richard Brinsley Sheridan on a raindrop race down a club window.

[Més complicitat entre bòfia i rics] —You realize that I am not bound, as the law officers are, to protect the embarrassing secrets of prominent people from the public curiosity.

Bé.


~0~0~


Llegit (4-V-12), d’en Richard S. Prather, Take a Murder, Darling (1958).

[Amb estàtues de beutat xarona... Fan pensar en la de na Myra Breckinridge.]

He was tall, thin, thin-featured, thin-lipped, and his expression of combined distaste and resignation indicated that he smelled something obnoxious, and that it was his nose.

The guy who first said that barking dogs don’t bite must have been an expert on cats.

Fàbrica de llenceria fina.
—I’m looking through this jungle for Ad Adams. Which cage is he in?
—He’s next door. [...] Cage indeed. [...] Emporium of the hard sell... the soft sell... and the padded cell.


Bryce was one of the Mighty Hunters who kill animals for pleasure. Perhaps it is true that the animal has an equal chance, since it is in its own habitat when shot, not in the man’s; but I go along with the idea that there would be less stuffed heads on walls if the animals could shoot back. I only shoot people. [Diu amb tota la raó en Shell Scott.]

Bé.


~0~0~


Dues d’en Talmage Powell. [Les dues amb el dur Ed Rivers, qui no es mou de Tampa. Rep mastegots contínuament; ell en deu acabar donant un de més als “dolents”, car al capdavall “guanya”.]

Corpus Delectable (1964). Llegit el 14-maig-2012.

Vella rica qui es mor; els hereus fan trampes i decepcions rai, per a cobrar més. El xeic (o el xic) ho descobreix tot.

[Anella al nas per al banyut. Com bou.] He had himself one hell of a woman — or an icy queen with a firm grip on an invisible ring in his nose.

Res.


(...)


Start screaming Murder (1962). Llegit l’u-d’agost-2012.

Alex is a man of many frustrations. Nothing he has ever done turned out quite right. He’s one of those people who’re always off balance in the world, and he seethes with the continuous effort to get in the rhythm of living... There are so many like him...

[Cuba sota els americans.] He was killed... Like numerous others in Cuba’s seemingly endless history of such occurrences.

He was scared silly, the chicken in him really spreading its wings.

The murderers, the expropriators always fear retaliation. They never feel safe. They are of the blood-purge school.

Res.


~0~0~


Acabat el sis de gener 2010.
D’en Sinclair Lewis, un llibre dolentot, lat i mocós, It can’t happen here (1935).

Se’n fot amb raó de l’associació feixista de les Filles de la Revolució Americana (DAR). —It is composed of females who spend one half of their waking hours boasting of being descended from the seditious American colonists of 1776, and the other and more ardent half in attacking all contemporaries who believe in precisely the principles for which those ancestors struggled.

—Now you boys never mind about the moral side of this. We have power, and power is its own excuse. [Exacte, l’argument o justificació de tots els feixismes, com assenyaladament i de sempre el castelladre. Només als impotents els calen excuses per al crim.]

[Tot com ara. El nacionalisme ridícul.] —Our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut “liberty cabbage” and somebody actually proposed calling german measles “liberty measles”? And wartime censorship...? [...] Remember kissing the... well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist? [...] Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to W.J. Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution? Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Prohibition... shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor..? Not happen here? No, that couldn’t happen in America! [Hà!] Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for dictatorship as ours!

—They are all of them like the Bourbon kings, of whom it was said [i pots continuar dient-ho, tots feixistes] that they forgot nothing and they learned nothing.

[The itch for notoriety (de tots els barrals buits, qui tanmateix es presenten al públic) on their faces the simper of fake humility.]

[Ben a propòsit, se’n fot de tots aqueixos repulsius malparits enganyavelles qui (com qualsevol miserable evangelitzador) van de casa en casa tractant de vendre merda, com ara revistes i subscripcions a causes bordes (sempre escanyadores, sempre dretanes) amb l’excusa que amb els profits de llur endemesa podran entrar a la universitat, i... who at all cost should be kept out of college.]

[Com més assassí, més “heroic”.] —Each of these heroes (els grans estadistes, hà!) had a higher degree of ambition (que el romanent de desgraciats al món) and more willingness to kill.

—Under a tiranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn “reasonable” and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to stop and speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.

—Waiting. So much of a revolution for so many people is nothing but waiting. That is one reason why tourists rarely see anything but contentment in a crushed population. Waiting, and its brother death, seem so contented.

—Rape. Do you honestly suppose that since the New Civilization began, say in 1914, anyone believes that kind of thing is more serious than busting an ankle?

[Els soldats a l’engròs, cruels marietes.]

—All fascists, like all drunkards, seem to function most vigorously at night.

—Dead skunk stinks worse’n a live one. [Cert. I aquest llibre, mofeta morta, amb qualque escarbat necròfag qui de cops en diu de bones, i prou.]


~0~0~


I ara un d’excel·lent. Llegit, el quatre de febrer, 2012, d’en Nigel Dennis, Cards of Identity (1955).

Amb tota la primera part, de les tres que té, i el conte d’en Shubunkin [en Sure Bunkin’] com a millors bocins. [Aquest conte podria ésser, amb més raó, un prolegomen de Myra Breckinridge, el llibre d’en Vidal que eixiria 13 anys més tard. (Adopting as best I could a neuter tone, I said: “Harold, I promise not to lay a finger of either sex upon you. Only find me some place where I can hide from Violet. She was going to turn me over to a surgeon, Harold.”)]

Ets el que tens (o, en el cas dels il·lusos, el que et penses tindre), i com menys tens, menys ets. I prou.

Tota la nostra identitat és il·lusòria, i il·lusòria d’una manera tan ridícula que tots plegats som ninots d’enzíssima, beneitíssima, farsa.

—I think of you, in full maturity, as comparable to one of our generals, earning his living by bloodshed but convinced that he is at heart a student of poetry. [Típic carnisser sentimental.]

—Though lecherous, nurses are a nesting type — true cuckoos, one might say, in every respect, including monotony.

[La identitat, compulsió que hem de patir per la insistència dels repressors.] (Tot i que a ningú li fa re com et diguis o et deixis de dir, the governments refuse to take such a lax view.)

—They insist that everyone has an identity, however slight, and people who will not admit to themselves are often sent to prison.

—The old days are over, when you could take your identity for granted. Nowadays, all the old means of self-recognition have been swept away, leaving even the best people in a state of personal dubiety. Even dispossession, the surest means of bringing home the naked identity, has disappeared. Very wisely, governments all over the world have sought to stop this rot before the entire human population has been reduced to anonymous grains. They give you cards, on which they inscribe in capital letters the name which your fading memory supplies before it is too late. It is their hope that by continually reading and re-reading your name, you will be able to keep your hold of a past that no longer exists, and thus bring an illusion of self into the present. As you see, the authorities have been obliged to reverse the normal procedure — which is, of course, first to create a world and then to name the things that inhabit it. Now, by doing the naming first, they hope creation will follow as a result of association and suggestion.

—She lives in a state of chronic potentiality. The future is, to her, what the past is to Mrs. Paradise. Every morning is a thrilling anticipation of what the following morning may bring. She builds the superstructure today in hope of laying the foundation-stone tomorrow.

—An artist took real people and transformed them into painted ones: how much finer and more satisfying is the modern method of assuming that people are not real at all, only self-painted, and of proceding to make them real by giving them new selves based on the best available theories of human nature. [Aquest és el propòsit de la societat del llibre.]

—Carry some money in your pocket and wrap your fingers round it. Often, in the last two months, I have overcome a sense of identity desintegration simply by leafing through my cheque-book. [Només els diners donen pes a la identitat del carallot.]

—People who can deliver this sort of talk [pseudofilosòfic] at a moment’s notice are always able to take care of themselves, no matter how limply they may dangle their hands. [Es tracta d’un marieta, o...?] Clearly, my visitor was disguised. But as what?

—God forbid that I should object to the sexes having changed places, but I do think sometimes that the women are going a little far. Let them be men by all means; I gladly abdicate that exhausting role. But must they be Visigoths? Do they have to look so repulsive? Do they have to carry imitation to the point of parody?

—(I must know who I am.) (Your own play isn’t going to tell you.) Of course not; it’s the critics who’ll tell me. At the moment I don’t exist; I don’t even know what to become. But once my play’s done, I’ll know. One critic will say: “Harold Snatogen reveals himself as an embodiment of the fashionable anti-Moon Goddess revival.” Anothe will say: “In Snatogen we see what Hegel called...” and then he’ll tell what Hegel called. After that it will be quite simple: I shall become the most flattering definition.

—For the first time I knew what poor Io felt when she saw that abominable bull.

—It used to worry me not to know who I was, but I find it far worse not knowing when I am. [L’espai és el temps... o viceversa.]

—I suggest that your first decision should be anatomical. [El cos et defineix, el cos t’assenyala on començar i fins on anar. Només en pot rajar d’on n’hi ha.]

—[Qui se sotmet als capricis i falòrnies dels eclesiàstics, s’aliena completament. Parla un eclesiàstic.] Your spiritual authority — myself — will always be at hand to tell you how far logic may be pressed, and at what point a word, under the leverage of faith, begins to mean its opposite. [Hà! No ets prou lliure ni de definir-te ni de definir els mots que dius. Depens totalment del bisbètic dogmàtic. No crec pas que arribis ni a lloro.]

—No sound has quite the sweetness of the bending spine.

—Thieves’ separate quarrels indicate conjunctive guilt. [Es podria aplicar als dos partits franquistes castellans —pp i psoe — que, si es barallen, ho fan per foteses i sempre per tal d’amagar com són de fet cul i merda, i com van a l’uníson quant a espletar els qui consideren colonitzats i doncs esclaus.]

—What’s more delectable than old identity? [Només quan ets plenament tu, et pots sentir ple.]

—Those that have no identity but that which is foisted upon them, must embrace it or create a better. [L’esclau n’esdevé a consciència, o diu no.]

[Esclau, com, per exemple, els maleïts degenerats balemfianos, els encanfeliputridits de la comuna balemfiana del canfelip, qui es veu que s’han encastelladrits fins a l’anorreament... o el contrari, per exemple, qui s’afirma i esdevé (reesdevé català, per exemple, és a dir, com cal).]

Excel·lent, ja ho he dit. ~0~0~ Llegit (17-VI-2012). Horace McCoy, I should have stayed home (1938)

Relat d’un noiet de Geòrgia qui tampoc no reïx a Hollywood. L’accent del sud que encara serva, el seu pitjor malgrà. L’afligeix i el perjudica.

Ingenu: “Thinking this was wonderful; not the naked girl, but to be in a town where nobody paid any attention to what anybody else did. In the town I was brought up in, what everybody did was everybody else’s business and somebody was always trying to tell you how to live your life.”

“As innocent as you are, a woman would have to start taking your pants off before you got suspicious .”

El cony (és a dir, infantívolament, la nafra que féu el virató de l’indi): “The naked girl saw I had on trunks, she pointed her finger at me and began jeering. ‘Hoohoohoohoo,’ she said. ‘A sissy, a sissy!’ She was standing in the shallow part of the pool with only her head and shoulders out of the water, but the lights along the side, under the water, made it transparent, and you could see everything she had, even the place where the Indian shot her.”

Dos escriptors: “You support the Anti-Nazi League because every producer in this lousy town’s a Jew and you think he thinks you’re being heroic because you’re a gentile fighting his fight. Don’t tell me. If all the producers were Nazis you guys couldn’t wait to start a pogrom. Good God, fellow, be honest.”

Les grans companyies cinematogràfiques: “ ‘Can do any goddam thing they want to,’ he said. ‘They can coerce and browbeat and violate all the laws they want to. What the hell, they make the laws. They make the laws and they own the courts — didn’t they elect a governor by the simple and subtle expedient of so-called news reels? Don’t you remember what they did to Upton Sinclair?’ ”

Algunes mestres són així, tret que sense calces, feliç memòria: “The same kind of feeling I remembered having when I was about thirteen years old when I would go on picnics with the Bible class and Mrs. Smith, the teacher, would get me alone in the woods and sit opposite me, telling me about Christ and all the apostles, but all the time opening her legs, letting me see the tops of her black stockings and her underwear, pretending not to notice that I was looking...”

Ràpid i ben contat. Bé.


~0~0~


Llegit (15-VII-12). Manuel de Pedrolo, Mecanoscrit del segon origen (1974)

Historieta per a jovent sense gaire idea científica. Uns supervivents de qualque vibració portada per vaixells extraterrestres que pela totdéu (pràcticament) tret de peixos i ocells, i insectes. Absurd. Xiqueta i xiquet tractant d’anar fent després que romanguessin com qui diu sols a la terra. Fotent una mica l’Odisseu, però tampoc no gaire. Odisseu casolà, diguem-ne.

Potser no és pas que siguin els darrers humans, potser és que són els darrers catalans. Car... “no tan sols eren probablement els darrers humans, sinó que ara vivien en terreny ocupat...” i quan són a Itàlia, i són atacats per uns energúmens, podria ésser que fos com els catalans en terres llunyes on si mai han de tenir por d’ésser atacats per algú és sempre pels maleïts “epanole” enverinats de castelladre, els quals, tot i exiliats, encara consideren que els catalans (no botiflers!) són els culpables de tot i cal anihilar-los s’amaguin on s’amaguin. En tot cas és bo de saber que els invasors poden ésser estossinats, car “tenien el consol de saber que eren mortals i que els podien vèncer”.

I per què ocells i insectes han d’ésser “més nombrosos...” “ara que podien salvar totes les cries”... Com si els ocells ja no s’ataquessin entre ells? Com si pler d’ocells no mengessin insectes? Com si bacteris i virus tampoc no suressin? Tret que això, entre una munió d’inconsistències, només n’és una altra.

Ves.


~0~0~


Llegit (8 de març, 2003). D’en Joan Benejam, Ciutadella Veia (1910).

Aquell bon homo va quedar com es blat de l’any tretze. [Amb cara de ruc, completamet sorprès, mut. L’any tretze (1613!) el blat romangué atuït per la maltempsada.]

Si no menges gaire (perquè no pots menjar com caldria per manca de salut o de calers). En tens prou... untant-te un budell.

Gent important, de més prosopopeia: De més caloma. [De més fondària, de més corda; la caloma la cadena de l’àncora.]

Un al·lot que essent d’un paratge anàs a s’altre, ja tenia prou pa taiat, en certes ocasions. Un de capvespre en van despuiar un de nua mare, amagant-li sa roba, i si de ca seua no n’hi haguessin duit d’altra, se n’haguera anat en pèl.

Ja ho dirà qui serà viu/ com ho passaven es pobres;/ de favet i de garroves/ per poder passar s’estiu. [Favet: favó, favolí.]

Es senyoriu avui està molt confús, i de pares menestrals vénen fiis senyors... i no fóra estrany que de pares senyors venguessin fiis menestrals.

Ves.


~0~0~

El mateix racó de biblioteca entrevingut per Na DS - la Deessa del Sàpiguer