My ignorance is boundless. In the early morning (my best time to read,) I have been searching names on my smart phone with Never Any End to Paris open before me. Vila-Matas is referring to all sort of people I might have heard of, but never remembered or pursued. ‘
- Edgardo Cozarinsky. Argentine. His name didn’t seem familiar, but Borges on Film is sitting on my shelf, unread. Where to begin seems a tough choice. Maybe Urban Voodoo? Bill seemed more excited about The Moldavian Pimp. Here’s him interviewing David Rieff on Susan Sontag’s diaries.
That’s a bit of a tangent. - Copi. Argentine cartoonist and playwright. I’ve never heard of him, but he collaborated with that group Pánico that included Arrabal (whose The Tower Struck by Lightning is sitting on my shelf queued up) and Jodorowsky (hell yeah.)
- Julio Ramón Ribeyro. Peruvian writer. Again, don’t know where to begin. I’ve only spotted two collections of his short stories translated to English so far.
- Boris Vian. French. I’ve stumbled onto him before, oddly and most recently, when i was messing around with the customer service website at work. It’s horrible, in that my bookstore carries so few books, even compared to the inadequate selection we carried several years ago. However, when i get bored at work, if a foreign author pops into my head, i search the name, then click the translator or person who wrote the foreward, to see if any unfamiliar authors appear. Messing around with Ramond Queneau rewarded me with Boris Vian last night, and it was quite the surprise that Vila- Matas dragged him back to my attention this morning. One of the commenters on this video that turned up calls him “the jazz pataphysician.”
