Hopscotch!

Literature constructs for us scenarios and spaces in which, at least for a time, other habits and customs are in play, and which thus allow us to see that the rules of the everyday games that we play are as arbitrary as any others.

By Jon Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia

00:00 Introduction 02:17 Patterns of Commonality and Difference 04:00 Questions 16:06 Seeing and Playing Difference 30:56 Credits

As with a game we have started that gets out of hand, it can feel that all we can do is look on as events unfold when confronted with the seemingly irresistible force of a hyperobject in motion once a tipping point has been passed.

By Jon Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia

00:00 Introduction 06:27 The Chemistry of Anxiety 14:10 Questions 17:56 The Shadow of the Hyperobject 26:03 Credits

A conversation for SPAN 312 about Cristina Rivera Garza's The Taiga Syndrome. With Cristina Rivera Garza and Jon Beasley-Murray. In which we talk about tone, translation, and escape, among other things.

This is the wild west (wild north?) Russian style—or Swedish or Latvian, even Mexican or Argentine, it matters little, as it is the same almost everywhere now that untrammeled extraction reduces and eliminates any refuge a forest may offer, for wolves or for children, or for lovers on the lam.

By Jon Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia

00:00 Introduction 03:37 Beginnings, Endings, and Limits 15:39 Questions 18:26 Forests, Failures, and Low-Level Fear 29:17 Credits

A conversation for SPAN 312 about Rita Indiana's novel, Papi. With Arturo Victoriano and Jon Beasley-Murray.

In a world in which movies, adverts, music videos, video games, and television all blend and cross-contaminate, new cross-cultural and transnational jargons and slang arise, and new roles to play, to compensate for the increasing inequalities and unbridled violence that are also associated with unregulated markets, be they legal or illegal.

By Jon Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia

00:00 Introduction 04:34 Constructing Excess 15:16 Questions 17:47 Loving the Game 32:06 Credits

A conversation for SPAN 312 about Chilean Pedro Lemebel's novel, My Tender Matador. With Juan Poblete and Jon Beasley-Murray.

We are encouraged to take surfaces or appearances seriously in their own right.

By Jon Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia

00:00 Introduction 02:56 Names, Playacting, and Embellishment 09:44 Questions 14:55 Power, Performance, and Impurity 24:11 Credits

A conversation for SPAN 312 about Giannina Braschi's Yo-Yo Boing! With Giannina Braschi and Jon Beasley-Murray. In which we talk about language, cosmopolitanism, the collective, and the end of the twentieth century.

Braschi’s novel resists translation both because it is already in translation—and translation cannot be translated—and because it touches on the untranslatable, on the limits of language and meaning.

By Jon Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia

00:00 Introduction 06:37 Translation, Movement, and Nonsense 11:11 Questions 16:05 Kairos and the Future Event 26:43 Credits

A conversation for SPAN 312 about Roberto Bolaño's post-dictatorship novel, Distant Star. With Ryan Long and Jon Beasley-Murray.

Literature can never forget that it is first and foremost an index of barbarism, and only secondarily (if at all) any kind of recompense or restitution.

By Jon Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia

00:00 Introduction 14:31 Art and Atrocity 15:42 Fascism's Contradictions 18:58 Questions 30:24 Ni Olvido, Ni Perdón 34:40 Credits

A conversation for SPAN 312 about Rigoberta Menchú's famed but controversial testimonio, I, Rigoberta Menchú. With John Beverley and Jon Beasley-Murray.

However much we imagine or hope we are in solidarity with her and her struggle, we are reminded that the basis of that solidarity has to be difference and respect. Her struggle is not ours, and never will be.

By Jon Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia

00:00 Introduction 10:44 Private Pacts and Public Secrets 19:55 Questions 22:53 Captivation and Betrayal 33:28 Games of Entrapment 42:50 Credits

A conversation for SPAN 312 about Mario Vargas Llosa's comic novel, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service. With Phil Swanson and Jon Beasley-Murray.

In Vargas Llosa’s world, something is almost always fucked up—a death, a massacre, a marriage, a disappearance—and it is up to him or his characters to find out why and how.

By Jon Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia

00:00 Introduction 09:19 Making Fun of Seriousness 10:47 Questions 15:46 Taking Fun Seriously 28:08 Credits

A conversation for SPAN 312 about Clarice Lispector's last novel, The Hour of the Star. With Sonia Roncador and Jon Beasley-Murray.

It is about an ethics of writing, about how writing can be true to life, to “a life,” without necessarily laying claim to the truth of that life. It is about the hesitations, affirmations, and disruptive explosions that mark any text as it tries to describe and negotiate the world.

By Jon Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia

00:00 Introduction 11:03 A Hesitant Ethics 13:24 Questions 21:33 An Interrupted Consumption 31:06 Credits

A conversation for SPAN 312 about Gabriel García Márquez's most famous book, One Hundred Years of Solitude. With Gerald Martin and Jon Beasley-Murray.

It is perhaps because ultimately Macondo is so full of the ghosts of the motley cast of characters that have wandered through the book’s pages, that García Márquez can only put an end to it all by shouting “enough!” and bringing on a cataclysmic hurricane that tears the whole place down.

By Jon Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia

00:00 Introduction 03:38 Ruins as Destiny 07:22 Questions 10:45 Open and Shut 18:53 Multiple and Singular 26:14 Credits

The book militantly refuses regimentation, but is aware that “proliferation” can also be a “plague,” even as it flirts with excess at every turn.

By Jon Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia

00:00 Introduction 07:30 An Intricate Game of Confusion 14:34 Questions 16:43 A Gigantic Organization of Games of Luck and Chance 24:18 Credits

Here, the signs and impact of the sovereign, the legacy of a bitter past, are everywhere to be seen. But he is haunted by murmurs, voices, that never entirely go away.

By Jon Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia 00:00 Introduction 03:37 Life, Death, and What Lies In Between 07:52 Questions 12:29 The Shadow of the Cacique 18:46 Credits

A conversation for SPAN 312 about Alejo Carpentier's novel of the Haitian Revolution, The Kingdom of This World. With Luis Duno-Gottberg and Jon Beasley-Murray.

It is the fact that in Haiti—and the Americas more generally—two (or more) perspectives rub up against each other and clash, shattering the notion that they can harmoniously be contained within the same organic totality, that provokes the surprised awe and wonder that Carpentier reports experiencing, and attempts to recreate in this novel.

By Jon Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia

00:00 Introduction 06:46 The Real Marvellous 10:24 Questions 17:54 History Replayed 27:48 Credits

A conversation for SPAN 312 about Jorge Luis Borges's collection of translated stories and other short texts, Labyrinths. With Daniel Balderston and Jon Beasley-Murray.

Borges exposes secret complicities, as when apparent oppositions hide more fundamental similarities. But he is also concerned with how novelty and change emerge from repetition, how real difference arises from the most minor of variations.

By Jon Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia

00:00 Introduction 04:22 Undermining Difference 09:24 Questions 13:44 Questioning Similarity 22:04 Credits

A conversation for SPAN 312 about the collection Madwomen: The Locas mujeres Poems of Gabriela Mistral. With Licia Fiol-Matta and Jon Beasley-Murray.

Mistral takes advantage of her status as representative, and the representational capacities of language, to make visible the traces of what otherwise escapes the official order of things.

By Jon Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia

00:00 Introduction 03:24 Literary Value, Representation, and Iconicity 05:23 Questions 15:12 Doubles, Madness, and Femininity 23:37 Credits

A conversation for SPAN 312 and RMST 202 about Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. With Brianne Orr-Alvarez and Jon Beasley-Murray.

A great writer not only writes great work, but also, more fundamentally and importantly, changes our sense of what great work is, and even charts a new role for the writer in society.

By Jon Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia

00:00 Introduction 02:51 This is Not a Love Song 05:50 Questions 15:16 Tonight I Can Write 27:15 Credits

A conversation for SPAN 312 about Nellie Campobello's novel of the Mexican Revolution, Cartucho. With Ryan Long and Jon Beasley-Murray.

Campobello restores the idea that something was truly at stake in a conflict that can otherwise appear so chaotic and disorderly: at its best, it was fought for the right to play, to laugh, to feel, to be free from constraint.

By Jon Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia

00:00 Introduction 03:10 Fragmentation and the End of History 13:05 Questions 15:50 Play and the Revolution as Game 26:24 Credits

A conversation for SPAN 312 about Mariano Azuela's novel of the Mexican Revolution, The Underdogs (Los de abajo). With Ignacio Sánchez Prado and Jon Beasley-Murray.

Azuela reveals aspects of the Revolution that are apolitical, anti-political, or even infrapolitical (the non-political conditions of possibility for the political), in that he depicts it in terms of drives and emergent habits that have not yet fully coalesced into political form.

By Jon Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia

00:00 Introduction 03:52 From Affect to Ideology 07:59 Questions 12:39 From Sublime Articulation to Infrapolitics 20:05 Credits

This is a “backwoods” history that aims, with gentle irony, to question the usual privileging of “civilization” over “barbarism” that otherwise structures most literary depictions of nineteenth-century Latin America.

By Jon Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia

00:00 Introduction 01:48 Publication and Betrayal 06:24 Questions 12:14 Domination without Hegemony 20:58 Credits

What is the “play”—the “freedom, opportunity, or room for action; scope for activity”—that literature offers, once we realize that there is no one “right” way of reading?

By Jon Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia

00:00 Introduction 01:36 Playing with Context 11:36 Hopping from Theme to Method 14:49 Questions 23:20 Credits