Latin American Literature

[martinbeck3]

MADUPONT:

Look at this:

http://www.ilab.org/db/detail.php?booknr=334467183&source=vialibri&lang=en

Victoria Ocampo was a friend of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf.

My grandmother was called Josefina and everybody called her Pepita.She was a darling. Died when she was 99, but really 100 because she always pretended to be a year younger.

[madupont]

Glad you caught it. I noticed the picture of Virginia, among Ocampo's guests;but, I also noticed that Victoria O.'s style began to strongly resemble Vita's at a certain period of time. (and what was Virginia doing there?)  Vita often dressed in striking outfits inspired by her Grandmother, she knew that she was made to wear that black sombrero,well, let's face it, she dressed like a gaucho.

When Vita was attending some evening invitation to a society function, she would cool it and look as feminine as Victoria Ocampo in her formative years, except that Vita prefered her feminine wardrobe to be at least flamboyant.  It was when she sat down to write, expecially in later years, when they took a place called Sissinghurst that she and Harold went in for their usual hobby of planning the garden but, she also had a tower into which she would climb for the privacy of writing and almost always masculinely attired. For an example of how this plays out in her writing, take a look at Orlando. And, I mean, take a look: at the film with Tilda Swinton prior to trying to make sense of the writing as one of those projects for another time, as you have enough on your plate as is.  But a movie is a movie and this one is an exception. It even has the great Quentin Crisp in one of his last roles, as Queen Elizabeth I

You will never be able to take an English person, of either sex, seriously again, after this philosophical eye-opener that is also food for thought.

[Beppo]

nnyhav - regarding a new tango, I'd say yes sirreee!

[martinbeck3]

THANKS A MILLION READER!!!

[martinbeck3]

MADUPONT,Victoria Ocampo was the owner of an editorial house and magazine Sur so it´s no surprise that she would be in contact with Virginia Woolf.Victoria was a feminist and she "drove a car with her sleeves rolled up!".Her sister Silvina who married Bioy Casares was a lesbian and her lover was a younger Argie poet(ess) whose name I can´t remember. I think all the Ocampo group -Borges included- could be the Argie version of the Bloomsbury group: well to do, intelligent,not forced to work,book worms.

[madupont]

Really cannot locate the Boca over at the nytimes.com unless you are referring to the literary vote?

[S2B]

Soccer ?! missed the semi final between Mexico and Argentina while en-route back to the northland from 1deg50min (Singapore)

I have in my hands a copy of the a book by Rudolfo Anaya entitled "Curse of the ChupaCabra" which is YA fiction, however, I have yet to read it as I am still reeling from jetlag...it seems it was written in English ?

yes MB3, Singapore for a couple of years...and while on a visit there I went to the National Library and two very large bookstores and did not find even one untranslated title in Spanish    though the library had plenty GGM on the shelves in English

so it will be a lonely literary time, unless I can stock up before I go or as I mentioned, head south to the International Bookstore in Boca's stomping grounds there...

I will catch up with the meanderings here when I get into synch again...though just to mention I used to have Myriam's email address somewhere, I can't find it now    and I have a copy of the book "Imagining Argentina" which I've had for years...I think there was a follow up title I think I have entitled "Naming the Spirits" while not as powerful is certainaly evocative...

[Beppo]

Trivia:

Borges dedicated Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote to Silvina Ocampo and The Garden of Forking Paths to Victoria Ocampo.

[martinbeck3]

BEPPO AND SUNDRY LURKERS:

Don´t forget that JLB behind all those "artist in an ivory tower" air was quite a lady´s man.I think all the dedications were a way of saying thank you to them.Like sending 24 roses.many were married.

Silvina was a lesbian though and Bioy was The Ladies Man,a friend of my aunt had an affair with him when he was in her 40´s and she in her 20´s.

I remember the name of the Argentine poet(ess) that was Silvina´s lover:
Alejandra Pizarnik(I´m not into poetry ).Critics say she was broke off.

http://www.ggbb.org/about/broads/alejandra.html

Silvina was quite ugly,she had a mind but no beauty with that huge nose.Not like Victoria.Silvina when older got into the habit of rubbing her face away with acid from her pictures.The Fiery Pen remembers her from her childhood summers in Mar del Plata as the Bioys had a tent close to her family´s.The FP says she was " as ugly as a witch but thin and tall", the latter makes up for her,usually in the FP´s language anybody who is "thin and tall" can get away with crime.

[martinbeck3]

NNYHAV & BEPPO
I HAD THIS BLINDING VISION AND SUDDENLY:

my mind was properly illuminated with the following tango

"The snow in B.A. falls mainly in the plains(*)

...and so on.How creative of I, how inspirational!

(*) plains= pampas

Nobody can doubt that even though I don´t like poetry I have this amazing gift for tango lyrics !!!!

BOCA, if thee,my co-patriot art around watching us from webheaven:
this 1 is for thee:

"No llores hermano ,no llores
no llores que Olga no viene
mientras sigan aullando los lobos
mientras siga callendo (sp.cayendo?) la nieve"

"No llores hermano ,no llores,
que B.A. está cubierto de nieve
mientras sigan aullando los gatos
mientras en el Chocon(*) no llueve"
(*) Chocon= the electical plant down in Patagonia

Nobody can translate such versifying,it should be left undtouched by vile hands.

[martinbeck3]

READER please , what´s Negev?

[martinbeck3]

Found NEGEV is not a thing nor the short for Negative Empire and Governmental War on Violence  but a writer whose work is being read at the Lunatic Asylum there-to-fore I posted Boca over there .I told him about today´s football match Argentina-Brazil in the Final for the American Cup.If that doesn´t bring him back to life nothing will.He´s totally depressed in his mittle-european genes and won´t get up at 6 am. aussie time to watch it.

[madupont]

The Negev is a desert.

(a one line poem by madupont)  I have been writing today about deserts and desert customs, as I did yesterday including  about killer-ladies instead of lady-killers who have lived there.
 
S2B
That was the worst part about the scenes played by Banderas, for:
Imagining Argentina.  He was quite believable in other areas such as discovering the Germans who live as if in a bird sanctuary.  But he must have made a concession in his mind as to how he was to convey "contacting the spirits".  I think that he told himself,well,I run a theater, it is like acting if I tell these people one by one what I sense has happened to their loved ones who have disappeared.

Disturbingly enough he often did experience scenes shot in the film as harrowing hallucinations, such as watching his wife be pushed over the edge of a building and falling many floors to the ground and actually walking up to her body.  So he is in a crazed state when  he starts tracing where she could have been taken, laughing at an owl who leads him to where she has been, as he's learned that much from the Germans who explain the significance of all the birds who visit their house and walk the lawns. This goes on until he recognizes his wife quite by accident at a fiesta and the family is reunited.

Technically, for his little concession, it is a seance but the religious aspects of  psychologically  envisioning the dead (or, not),he realizes is comforting to all these women who attend, the majority are women, in what appears to be part of a church because his theatre has been busted up and boarded up by the authorities. So, at most what Banderas tries to effect is something that falls more on the side of the professiona; theatrical charlatan who Reads Minds at random for the audience. He throws his head into his hands, stretched fingers apart, like a table tapper about to make a table float into the air by getting everybody to concentrate and touch hands around the table.  It is performance art.

Thus, as a film, it is very uneven in interpretation as compared to a book, although there are times where I have read some unusual views right here in river city when a forum works by opinion, not this forum of course, I am speaking of novels, poems,plays in English that somehow go awry in this venue or that.

Nevertheless the good of the book is there, when the film has introduced viewers inadvertently to something unknown to them politically. That fact is likewise encountered and not a day goes by without a wrangle about what's best for the world.

[Beppo]

martinbeck

Just got a chance to watch the youtube video. That's a long time to wait for some snowfall - 90 years!

[Beppo]

Picked up today from the library, Cultural Amnesia by Clive James.

The essay on Sabato says some interesting things about the Tango. "No two tangos are the same," states the author, no doubt echoing the sentiments of many a noble dockside city gaucho. James is a big fan of the Tango and it comes through when reading the Sabato essay but the text is fuelled by a quote from Sabato which for me in a way - and these things are easy to think in retrospect - says more about the Tango in a few pages than anything I've read beyond The History of the Tango by Borges. James criticizes Borges for laying wreaths on a subject that was in his opinion still evolving and when you discover that James dances the Tango it comes as no surprise. It also turns out that the Tango is the national dance of Finland.