The Musical Brain: And Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

of insight, understand why the world rocked when she walked, why
the hems of her dresses were cut on the diagonal, and why the lord chamberlain
rushed to give her his arm each time she had to descend a staircase. They had
resorted to the language of flowers, that eternal vehicle for messages of love. She
had to choose the most beautiful flower in the kingdom, just as I had been obliged
to choose between the two gifts offered by the genie . . .
    At that moment I too had my flash of insight, and the smile froze on my face. Why
this hadn’t occurred to me before, I couldn’t understand, but all that mattered was
that it was occurring to me now. As in a nightmare, an insoluble problem loomed,
engulfing me in anxiety. I was still inside the museum: sooner or later I would have
to leave; my life as a rich man could only begin outside. And how could I leave the
Picasso Museum with a Picasso under my arm?
    NOVEMBER 13, 2006

Athena Magazine
    WHEN WE WERE TWENTY, ARTURITO and I launched a literary magazine
called
Athena
. With youthful enthusiasm and a fervent sense of mission, we
devoted ourselves body and soul to the work of writing, layout, printing, and
distribution . . . or at least the diligent planning of those activities, the
scheduling and budgeting. We knew nothing about the publishing business. We thought
we knew all about literature, but were happy to confess our almost total ignorance
of the concrete mechanisms that convey literature to its readers. We’d never set
foot in a printing works, and didn’t have the vaguest idea of what had to happen
before and after the printing. But we asked and we learned. Many people gave us
helpful advice, warnings, and guidance. Poets with long experience of
self-publishing, editors with ten short-lived magazines to their credit,
booksellers, and publishers, they all made time to tell us how it worked. I guess we
seemed so young to them, just a pair of kids, so keen to learn and make it happen,
they must have been moved by a fatherly concern, or by the hope that our naïveté
would alchemically transmute their own failures, and bring about the long-delayed
triumph of poetry, love, and revolution.
    Of course, once we gathered all the necessary information and began to do the sums,
we saw that it wouldn’t be so easy. The obstacle was economic. The rest we could
manage, one way or another; we didn’t lack self-confidence. But we had to have the
money. And no one was going to give it to us just like that, as we realized when our
first timid appeals came up against an impenetrable barrier. In those days, there
weren’t any funding bodies that you could apply to for publishing grants. Luckily,
our families were well off and generous (up to a point). We had another advantage
too: intrepid youth, without burdens or responsibilities, taking no thought for the
far-off tomorrow. We were prepared to stake everything we had, without hesitation.
That’s what we were doing all the time, in fact, because we were living from day to
day.
    We managed to scrape up enough money to pay for the first issue. Or we anticipated
that we would have the right amount when the moment came to pick up the copies from
the printer. Reassured on that account, we set about gathering, organizing, and
evaluating the material. Since our ideas and tastes coincided, there were no
arguments. We let our imaginations run wild, invented new provocations, discovered
new authors, laid claim to the forgotten, translated our favorite poets, composed
our manifestos.
    But although we were deeply absorbed in the intellectual aspect of the enterprise, we
didn’t forget about the money. Not for a moment. We couldn’t have, because
everything depended on it, not just the existence of the magazine, but also its
physical appearance, the illustrations we could include (in those days, anything
other than type required the use of costly metal plates), and especially the number
of pages, which was essential for any calculation. At the