Latin American Literature

[Beppo]

Had a cold afternoon beer on the terrace of the Hotel Borges a couple of days after finishing The Stone Raft... 

Mexico City has street view.

Currently reading The Savage Detectives - a character runs a business from this square writing letters for people who can't read or write.

Quite like the idea of accessing locations at a whim. Roll on Buenos Aires...

[pugetopolis]

“He returned to Mexico City in 1974. At a café on Calle Bucareli—Mexico City’s Left Bank—Bolaño met Mario Santiago, a defiant, acidly intelligent poet of Indian extraction. The two men, along with a dozen or so friends, formed a band of literary guerrillas, whom Bolaño christened the infrarealistas. The group’s aesthetic, Bolaño later said, was French Surrealism fused with “Dadaism, Mexican style.” They published iconoclastic magazines and engaged in myriad forms of provocation, such as shouting out their own poems at readings given by their “enemies” in Latin America’s cultural establishment—in particular, Octavio Paz, the poet who eventually became Mexico’s first Nobel Laureate. Another prominent Mexican writer, Carmen Boullosa, has spoken of her “fear,” before approaching a lectern, that infrarealistas might be lurking in the audience: “They were the terror of the literary world.”

 http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/03/26/070326crat_atlarge_zalewski

[pugetopolis]

“Bolaño’s fury toward the literary mainstream—deeply felt and bordering on puerile—endured even after his own work became canonical. (At a convocation of writers in Seville, Spain, six weeks before Bolaño died, he was declared to be the most influential Latin-American writer of his generation.) Bolaño is notorious in Spanish-speaking countries for having proclaimed that magic realism “stinks.” He derided Gabriel García Márquez as “a man terribly pleased to have hobnobbed with so many Presidents and Archbishops”; he called Isabel Allende a “scribbler” whose “attempts at literature range from kitsch to the pathetic.” (Allende, interviewed in 2003, dismissed Bolaño as an “extremely unpleasant” man, adding, “Death does not make you a nicer person.”) Bolaño’s obstreperousness was sometimes a pose—much like his preference for being photographed in a black leather jacket, sternly sucking on a cigarette—but his self-described “gratuitous attacks” had salutary effects. He helped liberate Latin-American writing from the debased imitations of magic realism that followed the global conquest of García Márquez’s 1967 novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude”—all those clairvoyant señoritas and intercourse-inspiring moles—and reëstablished the primacy of such cosmopolitan experimentalists as Borges and Julio Cortázar. (For Bolaño, Cortázar’s moody novel “Hopscotch” was the Beginning and the End, precisely because it has neither a beginning nor an end.) Of course, some calculation lay behind his position. There was one living Latin-American novelist whose avid bookishness and formal cleverness made him the obvious heir to the modernist tradition: Roberto Bolaño.”

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/03/26/070326crat_atlarge_zalewski

 

[pugetopolis]

I liked the Three Percent review of Bolaño’s The Skating Rink:

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=2184

Jorge Volpi’s “Latin America, A Hologram” (The Future of Latin American Fiction Part V) was especially sobering. Yuri Herrera’s Trabajos del reino (2004), for example, about “the vileness, inexperience, and fear of the hired assassins; the unavoidable corruption of the environment; and the way in which art becomes an accomplice to crime.” The new Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez Tex-Mex “Under the Volcano” Latin American novels—but nothing close to the masterpiece of the genre: Bolaño’s harrowing reconstruction of the Santa Teresa crimes in 2666.

[pugetopolis]

Tlön Trick

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O__i1b6GBmQ&feature=related

“a little at first, not
quite all the light, and
then all of it, all, all, all,
all, total darkness suddenly
in which you can’t cry out
because in the dark you
can’t find your voice to
call for help”—José Donoso,
The Obscene Bird of Night

Feigning facetiousness—a delicate artform.

Joking & jesting often inappropriately, trying to be witty and snide at the same time, being waggish about indelicate facetiae like who has a face lift and who doesn’t and who needs one awfully terribly bad as soon as possible. Like myself—into the Other.

It takes a special feigned fictitiousness—almost a fetid feline cattiness—to feign and felicitate with joie de vivre the various & sundry jodhpur-booted fascismo pricks—coming to us from that feverish feuilleton SF Novel of the future. It is here—Now.

Approaching us slowly but surely in fervid sickening FOX-News installments—“Disco Inferno” is its nom de plume. Apocalypto Denouement—is his name. The Gulf of Mexico—its Futural Fabulation.

Actually, the Boy has no name. At least the Boy from the Future who visits me in my sleep. Sometimes his pubes are as blond as pale corn tassels—none of that drugstore-blond fake peroxide stuff like some of the young hustlers I’ve known.

But other times, his sleek greased-back “Elvis the Pelvis” bouffant—it’s the most lovely purest jet-black octopus-inky black you’ve ever seen. Like last night he appeared to me—his slim hips inviting me to rumba with him, then tango into the deep recesses of some louche Titan nightclub without a name. He had a squid in his pants—tentacles down the side of his leg.

I’ve grown decadently expectant of his various android androgynous appearances—they seem to be much more frequent now than they used to. It’s a pity that his sugar daddy creator—Don Jerónimo de Azcoitía—insists on shaving him hairless each night.

Don Jerónimo is such a gangster grown-up thug who never quite grew-up—he’s forever and a day a hopeless interplanetary desperado. His corporate chicken-queen tastes like the Vatican—he tends to hairless rough trade roustabout Exxon choir boyz dontchaknow. BP butch trade—just ask Lord Browne.

Don Jerónimo keeps all his clone kept boyz—in suspended animation. He lets one out periodically—when he wants to divert himself. When he’s full of weltschmerz—when he gets bored with the usual offshore young riffraff & BP roustabouts.

He wines and dines them—he woos them. He takes them for jaunts to lovely tourisimo spots throughout the solar system—he flaunts his young android angels to provoke & make other queens green with jealousy. Green as the swirling clouds of Neptune—chartreuse as the green radioactive rain forests cloned on the fetid dark side of Venus.

The Boy who visits me is the latest Nexus droid to be disembalmed from Deep Sleep—knowing full well what his inevitable fate will be. Usually strangulation by the varicose-veined cruel surgeon’s hands of his Master—or if he’s lucky the other quickie way to go. The noose, the long drop, the snap of his young neck. Instead of the way Ulrich Friedrich Wilhelm Joachim von Ribbentrop got it—for half an hour…

Neo-noir planet. I dream about him sometimes at nite. Or does he dream me? It dreams me—the young android darke one. The sullen angel of darkness—coming from all the way in the obscene future.

Was the Boy real—did he really come from the noir future? Was I the fabulated one—just a facetious fictional fag stuck in the present tense? Just a figment of his tortured droid dreams—conversing with himself as if I were really him?

How often have I felt the strange stirrings and return of some Other long-gone adolescence? How else can one explain such mysterious Proustian happenings—as waggish wetdreams or sudden nocturnal emissions in the middle of the night? Petulant tea and marmalade flashbacks—an idle toke of hashish? How strange to be—stoned in another’s dream…

All of him, savage detectives, occurring in darkness—darkness at first everywhere and then nowhere in my dreams. But usually, almost always—the disturbing presence of a certain young male fellatio facetiousness. It was him—the Boy from the future.

The one in suspended animation—dreaming telepathically back from the future. Back to me—a minor character indeed at the edge of something else. The edge of his darkness—a mere figment in the fetid light at the end of a long labyrinthine tunnel…

I couldn’t call for help—I couldn’t find my voice to call desperately in the middle of the night. The fine dark night you sink into—when you’re lost in the sudden darkness that has no name. The dark darker than darke—the darkness at the end of time.

It doesn’t require any strength—I had no strength left. It was like being chased by a monster—with that usual nightmare paradox: my feet couldn’t or wouldn’t move. They were stuck and mired down—sunk deeply into the muck and mire of some Krell quicksand horror. Soon I was up to my knees in Id—and then my frantic elbows.

I would be doing something inane—like moiling about in some fetid courtyard. There beside the pilasters—beyond the windowpanes somewhere. Whiling away the time picking pouty petunias and snide snapdragons—for a spectral bouquet to decorate my new spectral wooden coffin.

In it tho would be poor Mercedes Barroso or miserable Menche already—both who left this earth with a scream. One dying in sheer fatness—the other after a fall from the ruined balcony. See this Coca-Cola vase—all wrapped up in Christmas wrapping paper? It’s all that’s left—that and some yellowing photographs of the Ruiz family. Just trash to most people—filthy junk for the incinerator. The last of the twenty-first century—the terrible world of the future muttering like rats in the faded wainscoting.

Back in my bedroom, I’d turn on the vidscreen—better that than my nervous fingers fidgeting with a laptop for now. The past can be so expensive—the future so very cheap. I’m sleepy so I toss back the satin quilt—and there is the Boy smirking at me in the nude. At least some expensive things—haven’t degenerated into kipple yet, I say to myself.

Somewhere far off in the distance—I hear the Mass being sung in some sinking Ardennes cathedral. Sinking down deep into the Sargasso Sea—or is it the Gulf of Mexico? The sullen Boy spreads his nefarious legs—manhandles his rude up-periscope uncut tool just teasing & tantalizing me. He’s wearing one dirty tennis shoe—and a strawberry-mauve bathing cap. How can I resist?

“Do you mind if I smoke while you eat?” he inquires with a haughty smirk. Long, wiggling, obscene nightcrawlers for pubes—he yawns nonchalantly as usual. Turns off the light—in the cheap dented motel lampshade. A light velvety soft radioactive sequin dust—covers his nude body like silky, delicate fuzz. His armpits flex and pounce on my wrap-around lips—demanding immediate suction and the usual abject swinish worship.

And then there’s that other thing—like an umbrella ready to snap open. I have to give it a quick hum-job—with plenty of obscene lip-synch locomotion. To avoid any premature ejaculation—that might stain my fine embroidered sheets. I’m all polite manners—like at a queen’s funeral. His sullen goodlooks—and male sluttish pulchritude. He’s passing the Last Judgment on my every move—he’s such a cruel taskmistress.

He’s no Pinup beauty that’s for sure—but he has that combination of hard-edged righteousness and willowy, sex-kitten poutiness that I find so virgin and vertiginous. Like many other young males I’m usually attracted to—he’s somewhat, well, actually extremely intoxicating. I’d simply lose my sanity during each visitation—the way he struts or limps to the louche bathroom afterwards. Depending on how much I got outta him—how demanding my lips were.

That’s usally when in my dream—all the old queens would come out of their hiding places under the bed or from behind the curtains. I felt sorry for them—but not much. Decrepit old queens—from some wretched, abandoned other crypt-fabulation in my mind. Complaining and suffering—their usual sexual frustration and constant penis envy.

They drove me crazy—these projections of old age anarchy from my subconscious. They wanted it all—fist call on everything. Poor old things—working themselves to death. Resurecting themselves from the dead—all because of some lousy stupid wetdream from the future. Wrinkling their noses and raising such a fuss—over too much peach-fuzz and longgone uncut Uranian roses.

Debris—simply debris and more debris everywhere, my dear. Crummy android kipple for a soap opera rummage sale—who’d want these oneric heaps of trash in my stupid dreams anyway. My mind was simply a mere hovel for future chicken-shit dystopias anyway—little could be salvaged inside me except for flotsam from a hopeless future and jizzy jetsam from a moth-eaten old gone planet called Earth.

The pretense of present future tense was sheer nonsense—my mad dreams simply minor diversions. Surely there was finer stuff in the Future—rather than these same old queens, scourges, dictators, judges inside my mind? FDR’s dog Fala and Stalin’s suspicous grin and Joan Crawford’s huge shoulder-pad gowns, her hard sharp red fingernails digging into my bored limp petulant crouch?

If this was the rustic homespun idyllic Future—then surely there was something wrong with these grarled keyboard fingers and pleading gummy eyes? They can have it if that’s what the future is gonna spawn—quick I say to myself I need an extra-dry martini fast. Fuck it—make it a double scotch & soda will you. Oh, all right—make it a sixpack of Silver Bullets.

I need it really bad, honey—my so-called fabulated imagination has got a flat tire. My Mercedes had ditched itself into the gutter. I’m down there with Harry Slime—moping in the dirty Viennese sewers. Gimme a break—let me make love to the Third Man.

But it’s always the Third Boy who shows up instead—who comes to me in my fevered faux-pas dreams each night. Just a ho-hum Boy of no importance—not a prince, soldier, warlock, wailer, screamer, healer, servant or purveyor of forbidden talents and powers.

Not a young feudal lord from postcolonial interstellar times, not a bitch-boy, mercenary or even handsome Titan hustler. Not a Jupiter he-man—even tho he’s good at sex sometimes. Not your typical gimpy hunchback Boy of Notre Dame either—running away from something he won’t or can’t talk about.

Do android boyz dream wetdreams? I have to laugh—surely I jest? What could be more fallacious—than a blowjob dream with a robot? What could be more fickle & fictive—than an android dream in the middle of the night?

What could be more spontaneous and impromptu—than a dream Boy coming outta the Titan blue? What could be more ad lib and Now in the moment—than a lucid dream cuming true? Way out there—or in here deep.

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius—trick or treat?

[nnyhav]

A little disappointed by Shiva Naipaul's (Love and Death in) A Hot Country: short social commentary on poco Guyana, splendid atmospherics but largely archetypal characters.

[Elporteñito]

“Latins are tenderly
enthusiastic. In Brazil
they throw flowers at
you. In Argentina they
throw themselves.”
—Marlene Dietrich



...to the lowes.


NOT the best of times for argentines to read about or from Germans.



I say the referee!!!...the bloody referee is to blame. We should have won, we deserved it.

Those Germans, did Youse see them?...they could hardly avoid tripping over the ball, pure luck the bastards!

[pugetopolis]

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2010/07/03/we-really-do-live-in-a-horrible-world

We Really Do Live in a Horrible World
POSTED BY CHARLES MUDEDE ON SAT, JUL 3, 2010 AT 4:30 PM

Greedy corporations, environmental degradation, and now this:

The tanker flipped over Friday afternoon, said Omalanga, the country's minister of communications. It was attempting to overtake a bus in Sange, in South Kivu province, on the country's eastern border.

When oil began to spill from the overturned tanker, local residents attempted to collect the oil. One was smoking a cigarette, causing the tanker to explode, Omalanga said.

The largest group of victims had been sitting in a bar near the accident site watching the World Cup match between the Netherlands and Brazil, he said.

I do not blame the smoker; I blame the system.

[pugetopolis]

The sad thing is that it took an exceptional environmental catastrophe for this kind of information to float to the top of our daily news stories. Without the spill, all claims about how the government should not intervene in economic matters, and how the poor are just lazy, welfare bums, would have continued without checks or challenge. What is it we are now seeing? (“The flow of revenues to oil companies is like the gusher at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico: heavy and constant...”) These corporations and their political representatives wanted neoliberalism for the poor and socialism all for themselves.

 

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2010/07/03/absolute-greed

[pugetopolis]

Speaking of soccer…

Dutch Soccer Star Wesley Sneijder NAKED! Exclusive PHOTO!
POSTED BY CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE ON FRI, JUL 2, 2010 AT 6:21 PM

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2010/07/02/dutch-soccer-star-wesley-sneijder-naked-exclusive-photo

The man who knocked Brazil out of the World Cup earlier today with his head has, well, more than one beautiful head! Apparently! According to a photo that just surfaced! It surfaced in my email inbox. Its veracity has not been determined, but as we are celebrating freedom this weekend, and nothing says freedom like a naked soccer player, it would be downright un-American to not share this with you. It is after the jump.

Here’s the hot porno shot link, amigos:

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2010/07/02/dutch-soccer-star-wesley-sneijder-naked-exclusive-photo#more

 

[pugetopolis]

Saramago has died.I cannot but remember all of you,my friends and the great times we had reading this Master of Literature. I hope you are all well. At present I am opening a third floor in my outlet so I am really busy.

Let's hope the elevator works better this time. Three floors down is quite a bump.

 

[pugetopolis]

Some interesting germane glimmerings:

“José Donoso, The Obscene Bird of Night (Hardie St Martin & Leonard Mades): a monstrous unrelenting shifty labyrinthine pile (unjustly eclipsed by the Boom's headliners)…”

“While the latest Aira and Bolaño available in English weren't up to the usual high standard (though Antwerp may be Bolaño's Eleuthéria), many Nobelaureates also underdelivered…”

“(Gulf gibbering: BP's position atop the League Table of Evil may not hold should the infernal depth-plumbing of Goldman Sachs' bathyscaphe Vampire Squid come to light ...)”

“cultivating solitary arts
I alone reaped the mow
and would as soon disown what I'd sown”

http://nnyhav.blogspot.com/

[nnyhav]

Some interesting germane glimmerings:

Glimmering's about all ... can't even say I've been making up for quantity with quality ...

[pugetopolis]

Some interesting germane glimmerings:

Glimmering's about all ... can't even say I've been making up for quantity with quality ...

Perhaps being an ‘itinerant kibitzer’ or an abstruse unfinished commentator—is a good way to understand such a fragmented writer as Bolaño. And perhaps fragmented postmodern Latin American novels and other POMO Fabulist fiction as well?

For example, in the New Yorker article “Vagabonds” on Bolaño—David Zalewski goes into detail about how fragmented the second part of The Savage Detectives seems to be:

1 “The second part of “The Savage Detectives” offers a melancholy gloss on Bolaño’s nomadic period. In the manner of Faulkner’s hazy oratorio “As I Lay Dying,” he introduces a disorienting array of new narrators: four dozen eyewitnesses, from the United States to Austria to Israel, who report on the wanderings of Lima and of Belano since 1975.”

2 These accounts, each preceded by a journalistic dateline, resemble extended interviews[/u]—and reading them feels like combing through the unedited footage of a documentary.

3 With so many overlapping perspectives, the resulting portraits of Lima and Belano have a Cubist ambiguity.

4 Are the visceral realists ardent visionaries or drugged-out miscreants? It depends on who’s talking.

5 This is a devilish game to play with an alter ego; Bolaño could have titled this novel “Self-Portrait in Fifty-three Convex Mirrors.”

6 Meanwhile, he gets to inhabit a wild range of narrative voices: a pompous Galician lawyer who calls Belano a “third-rate Julien Sorel”

7 a foulmouthed gringa who refers to one visceral realist as a “hemorrhoid-licking old bastard.”

8 One of the most riveting speakers is Auxilio Lacouture, a garrulous Uruguayan woman who begins with a proclamation: “I’m the mother of Mexican poetry. I know all the poets and all the poets know me.”

9 Lacouture, having known Bolaño since he was a teen-ager, gives the novel’s most detailed account of his imprisonment in Chile.

10 In her view, his efforts against the Pinochet regime were noble but tainted him, as he returned to Mexico a preening radical who looked down on his old friends “as if he were Dante and he’d just returned from hell.”

So that these multiple narrators, various eyewitness accounts, journalistic interviews, unedited documentary snippets, overlapping perspectives, ardent visionary insights, foulmouthed dialogs, alter-ego self-portraits, different speakers, Chile reminescenses and Pinochet-tainted attitudes—all of these fragmented storytellers telling the literary detective story called The Savage Detectives are multiple-narrator techniques similar to your Stochastic Bookmark “abstruse unfinished commentary" style.

Other writers have mentioned the same style—such as the SF author Philip K. Dick in regard to The Man in the High Castle. He uses the third-person voice in an intimate, hovering manner—with characters shifting quickly into and aout of prominence. He called this his “multiple narrative viewpoint” technique. The focus is on individuals whose lives are bonded by coincidence, conscience and yearning:

“In the forties I got into novels written around that time by students at the French Department of Tokyo University; these students had studied the French realistic novels and the Japanese students redesigned the slice-of-life structure to produce a compact, more integrated form. When I went to write The Man in the High Castle, I asked myself, How would this novel have been written—with what structure—if Japan had won the war? Obviously, using the multiple viewpoin structure of these students.”—Lawrence Sutin, “Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005, 114

This “multiple narrative viewpoint” technique in both Bolaño and PKD has been used by many other writers as well—but surely next two clipped, kinetic diary entries go far beyond PKD:

“Depressed all day, but writing and reading like a steam engine” and “I’m reading the dead Mexican poets, my future colleagues.”

So, nnyhav, Imho there is a great deal of merit to your ‘itinerant kibitzer’  and abstruse unfinished blog commentary style.

Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas—reminds me of this “multiple narrative viewpoint” style. It’s fictive—but in a mock-Lit Crit ersatz style. While The Savage Detectives does it more along the lines of a novel, I suppose.  Or mythical autobiography.

What I did with the two Donoso-esque pastiches here in the LA forum was something similar. Picking two meta-chunks outta “The Obscene Bird of Night”—and doing my own meta-translations of the two texts.

Posting them in Snarke—then following up with a couple of other brief 5-page renditions based on Mickey Spillane’s “Dead Street.” One of his last novels. So yes, there’s a method, so to speak, to fragmented narrative/commentary/pulp fiction…Kinda. Sorta.

 

 

[pugetopolis]

Deformity Lover

“The door opened from inside and Boy appeared, stark naked, with the authority of his huge sex organ dangling between rickety legs, with his short arms, his sunken chest, the weight of his hump throwing his face forward, where the pointed arch of his mouth was trapped between his nose and his chin, with his artificial forehead, his ears and his lips incomplete like those of a fetus, the electric arc o f his blue eyes uncovered by lizard eyelids…for the first time, Emperatriz felt those electric eye scorching her, and her will power reduced to ashes. Boy greeted the couple.”—Jose Donoso, The obscene bird of night (386)

Well, nnyhav, I’m up to Chapter 27 and getting close to finishing this rather obscene, grotesque little piece of morbid magic realism, thank god.

I really don’t see what’s so great about “The obscene bird of night,” although Luis Buñuel hailed it as "a masterpiece" and Carlos Fuentes called it "one of the great novels not only of Spanish America, but of our time.”

I suppose so—if you’re a deformity lover. Personally, I’ve had worse blind dates back during my wretched university days. Yawn.