Sancho's Panza

The smugglers on the bus

2008-07-15T16:27:00.000-07:00

17 de enero
Now, right out of foz, we crossed big pretty rolling fields of soybeans and there was one big green valley, almost like colombian countryside, and i thought bonito campo brasileiro. and i saw the long Brazilian flat trucks just like the ones that come to costanera sur in Buenos Aires and park in rows next to the river. The first town we stop in is rich looking and well fed like any in southern santa fe province in Argentine soy country, w/ last names like polanski and sbardeletto on the shop signs. I saw a well fed golden girl, castaño hair and brown shoulders, w/ a peasant blouse off the shoulders and a jean miniskirt. on the way to londrina, driving through the red dirted campo paranaense during sunset, or really before sunset, i saw a rainbow, which i took as a sign confirming my albeit vague plans for the immediate future. and i saw a tree w/ the palo borracho flowers but a different trunk; and on the bus they screened "city of men" until the audiovisual system stopped working, right before the rainstorm, at least there was another show.

at some point toward the beginning of the bus ride, after cascavel, the passengers' ringleader, who looks like a carioca, but i suppose is a gaúcho since he drinks tereré (or a paranaense), took up a cash collection from the passengers, which i suppose was a tip for the driver or a recourse for bribing any roadside cops. oh and i forgot to write that my danish friend oni told me he has "diary," by which I think he meant a bad stomach, something later aboundingly confirmed. and i thought about how benign and dorky the traveling danish and dutch always seem to be. we passed a place called fazenda neblina, and some beautiful ceramic tiled roof fazendas overlooking a long and wide valley snuggled into the folds of round brazilian mounts. there is niebla around here, there are lots of warning signs and each road toll (the company i think is called viapar) has an adjacent lot for crashed and totaled cars, and many on a cursory glance seem to have suffered frontal collisions. martín and his sugar momma are kissing in the seat in front of me, talking hoarsely. it's so funny, how argentines always travel with their gaseosas soft drinks and industrial cookies galletitas, as unaware of their idiosyncrasies as americans when they travel. i'm on a trip; what's the idea, when did the rainbow appear? when i thought about getting strong and clear, reducing things to their simplest, working hard, like the smugglers.

18 de enero
i should remember some of the episodes from last night, my 3rd night in a row of traveling. one of the camelos (smugglers) came and sat down next to me and said he lost 8,000$ usd, trying to get digital cameras across the border from duty free paraguay, he said he wasn't there when it happened; i suppose he has some sort of agent that crosses the stuff for him. i should also remember some of the things i overheard last night: 'brasil sua," the smugglers said, "brazil sweats," as the bus drove away, and the southern carioca peeked out the window to make sure the cops were in fact being left behind. They sweated because they almost got busted. then they also kept saying "caxinha, caxinha," meaning the bus was a cash register for the cops. the other funny thing they said was i think someone, the dane, went to the bathroom, and someone said, "o gringo comeu carne de bufalo,"-- the gringo must have eaten buffalo meat. the bathroom smelled pretty rotten the whole trip (not quite as bad an odor as the rotten rail-side soybeans on the train ride, though).

i went out for a smoke when the cops stopped us and saw some of the guys wearing baseball caps getting out their wallets and scrambling to get money together w/ the fat guy in a yellow shirt ("FUSSBALL" it said), and others. It was clear they were getting ready for the handoff of a wad of bills. In my view, the policía militar rodoviaria guy who came on board was putting on a show. He put a flashlight on the luggage rack, and began to ask questions of the two guys with the baseball caps. Then he followed them down to the luggage compartment, but he left them alone down there as if to let them sort out amongst themselves how much money to get together. The police officer had the air about him of someone going through the motions of a performance. He had a guilty look, as if he had pigged out at lunch but was still looking for cookies or something else: pig. He had a clean tight fitting khaki uniform with lots of pockets, a gun belt, black, with lots of velcro, and a bullet proof vest with a soft mesh covering it. The night was uncomfortable, I almost want to say, I don't know quite why, it was less comfortable than the train. I guess 70 percent inclination on a seat is not necessarily better than none at all.

Right now, the Brazilian girl that is often running her mouth, with a high pitched voice, and a Paraná accent I can't understand, along w/ the camelos, are telling horror crime stories involving Foz de Iguaçu & Paraguai. The way the camelos invoke Paraguai, it's more like a land of opportunity than ghettoville, as it's considered in Argentina, although, yes, a dangerous place. The camelo eating chips and drinking guaraná who sat next to me, the one who lost everything, said, "Lá no paraguai, a gente pode comprar droga, armamento ..." You can buy guns, weapons ... He also told me that the Rio favelas were now full of Angolans, who also trafficked drugs and arms. The same guy told me that he had 5 women, just in Rio alone, and that he sometimes makes the Foz Iguaçu run twice a week. Now, he said, he's going to go home, rest, and try again in a few days. He said it's more stressful, what happened to him, because he doesn't know exactly what happened, how the shipment went wrong, it wasn't within his realm of control. He said he had to trust his middle man when he was told: "Voce perdeu." "You lost." "Então perdi." "So I lost," he said.

Right now, already in São Paulo, one of the camelos is unloading his bulky rectangular blue and black packages that have to be carried by two people. All the other people on the bus are like: "Caralho! A mudança!" "Fuck, a move ..." And, "O bicho traz de Paraguai tudo para sua casa." "That bitch is bringing a whole house's worth of stuff from Paraguay." The guy had someone waiting for him here, at a random stoplight by the canal in São Paulo, and a car waiting. I wonder how much he had to pay the bus driver for the unscheduled stop.

I forgot to mention that the orange shirted guy I spoke to last night requested Roberto Carlos from a friend with a music player, Brazilian rock; now one of the guys quotes part of that Caetano and Gil song, "Aquele Abraço." "Torcida de Flamengo, aquele abraço ..." So they're Flamengo fans. Orange shirt guy: "Tudo que me deu a vida, me deu Paraguai." "Everything that I have in life, Paraguay gave me." He said that if he went to Paraguai with 5,000$, he could make 7000$ or up to 40%, depending on what store he sold the goods to. Once we were on the homestretch to Rio he half unpacked his bag to treat the Argentines and I to some Amarula liquor, made from the African marula fruit, and it turned out to be a moment bathed in bathos, because in the bag he had two big duffel bags in which he had planned to carry his merchandise. They were folded up. "Agora mesmo," he tapped his watch, "em paraguai, tem alguem chorando porque perdeu a mercaderia." Right now in Paraguay, there's someone crying because they lost their merchandise.

He says the smuggler's is a hard lifestyle because in his neighborhood, all his neighbors are all pendientes of what everyone does, and no one knows he's a camelo. He said his neighbors "passam a vida tomando conta da vida dos outros," they're always up into everybody's business. Now he's making a cellphone call to someone in Rio, talking of his misfortune. He's planning to get some money together, maybe even sell his car, and go back to the tri-border region tomorrow, to try to get his money back. His plan had been to road-trip to Salvador with his girlfriend, with the money he was going to make. Now, all he's bringing for her is a bottle of Johnny Walker red label and a bottle of Amarula. "Chorei," I think he said on the phone, I cried.

He also talked to me about what is likely another risk of his traveling lifestyle (he lives with his mother, it seems), which is that another of his girlfriends cheated on him. "As cariocas botam chifre cara." "Carioca (Rio) girls cuckold you, dude." He also told me he was drunk for a week and cried when a girlfriend cheated on him. He said he should have known it, everyone in the neighborhood knew apparently, but didn't realize it until he saw her making out against a wall with a big black guy. "Uma me boto ums chifres assim de grande," he said, "Dissem que o homem no chora, chorei." "One of the girls put horns on me this big, they say men don't cry, I cried." This was orange shirt camelo's vision of Paraguai: "Tem coisas lá que ninguem tem visto ..." "There are things there no one has seen." He said in a little plaza in Ciudad del Este there's a little guy that goes around to people saying, "Balas, perfume ..." Bullets, perfume. Then, I don't know if later, if you hang around, he tacks some more stuff on: "Balas, perfume, drogas, armas ..." Bullets, perfume, drugs, weapons ...

"Volto a casa com minha saude, gracas a deus, perdi tudo em ceu azul." "I'm going home with my health, thank God, I lost everything in Blue Sky." Blue Sky is the name of the place near the border where he actually lost it all. "Bald, broke, toothless," that's the expression he uses for having lost it all. He said he's got a good girl now, though, and he knows she's a good girl because when he met her the first time he also was bald, broke and toothless and so she must really like him for who he is. His girlfriend had to shell out the 10 reais for their first beer together. He had just lost everything in Paraguay back then too, but that time he had been mugged. We're reaching the certain point where we begin the descent to Rio after peaking the Serra das Araras.

enero 19
The name of my friend, orange shirt smuggler, was Aleixandre. When we said goodbye, he said he was sad he had lost it all, but at least he had made a new friend. Once we were arriving in Rio, a tall, white-haired smuggler the others called "Paraiba" was crawling under all the seats in the bus, trying to find the digital memory cards he had stashed throughout the bus. He couldn't remember where he had put them, he hadn't written down the seat numbers. I think he only found three out of five.

P.S.

2008-07-05T22:14:00.000-07:00

I couldn't find a good version of "Tem mais samba" on YouTube but as compensation here's Chico Buarque and Donga singing the first samba song ever, "Pelo telefone," which is from 1916. Donga, the man singing with Chico, is the man who wrote it. Also in there is Pixinguinha, the Brazilian choro master and saxophonist.

More Samba

2008-07-05T22:01:00.000-07:00

There's a 1 minute and 44 second song, by Chico Buarque, from the mid-1960s, the song is called "Tem mais samba," (loosely translated: "There's more samba") that I decided to translate. The lyrics are below, in English; they're just great lyrics. The original is below that.

There's more samba in the meeting than in the wait
There's more samba in meanness than in the wound
There's more samba in port than in the sail
There's more samba in forgiveness than in a goodbye
There's more samba in the hands than in the eyes
There's more samba in the ground than in the moon

There's more samba in the man who works
There's more samba in music from the street
There's more samba in the chest of those who cry ...

There's more samba in the tears of those who see
that good samba doesn't have a place or a time
Heart on the sleeve
Samba without meaning to
It Comes and Goes
Your Suffering
If the whole world samba-ed
It'd be so easy to live

It Comes and Goes
Your Suffering
If the whole world samba-ed
It'd be so easy to live

It Comes and Goes
Your Suffering
If the whole world samba-ed
It'd be so easy to live

It Comes and Goes
Your Suffering
If the whole world samba-ed
It'd be so easy to live

-----

Tem mais samba no encontro que na espera
Tem mais samba a maldade que a ferida
Tem mais samba no porto que na vela
Tem mais samba o perdão que a despedida
Tem mais samba nas mãos do que nos olhos
Tem mais samba no chão do que na lua
Tem mais samba no homem que trabalha
Tem mais samba no som que vem da rua
Tem mais samba no peito de quem chora
Tem mais samba no pranto de quem vê
Que o bom samba não tem lugar nem hora
O coração de fora
Samba sem querer
Vem que passa
Teu sofrer
Se todo mundo sambasse
Seria tão fácil viver

The Twisted Angel

2008-07-01T10:57:00.000-07:00

I've decided to dedicate a post today to Torquato Neto (1944-1972), a Rio de Janeiro poet, lyricist and newspaper columnist who died young but enjoyed a short efflorescence in 1970s Brazil. His poems and lyrics are simple and honest, but I think emotionally incisive. It was his talent to put a few words together to explain the most complex worlds of feeling, which is why so many of Brazil's best-known musicians have utilized his lyrics. He's one of a certain kind of poet that seemed to flourish in Rio in the 1970s, people like Waly Salomão, Paulo Leminski, Ana Cristina Cesar, and others; either they were directly connected to the counterculture, as Leminski, Salomão and Neto were, or they shared a certain sensibility, a pessimism and self-involved dark-tinged romanticism that was nothing like the bombastic near utopianism and optimism of the Tropicália crew (Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, etc.), although the two groups intersected in many ways.

Essentially Nocturnal Poem

In the absence of someone,
today I'll also love the absence of the old feelings,
and I'll remember that the days once were sunlit
and the nights only dark
when we didn't know the word fear
or we didn't feel fear.

I'll love the old feeling of chaste tenderness
palpable, in those days, within me
or distributed among the big house's rooms
the front entrance's three steps,
the sun rising through the points of the mosquito net
and warming the walls of the nun's school
(it's just that these memories are not enough).

Because the person isn't there,
and I walk sad through the streets of Rio
and I arrive at no destination, because I have none
I will love the distance that separates me as a child
from myself here, desperate,
and I'll lose myself in the paths tangled up in one another
and I'll roll with pleasure in my shadow,
I'll cry afterward because I don't know how to return.

(translation by me)

There's a good website out there (in Portuguese), called "Twisted Angel," which is about his life and work. He committed suicide in 1972.

Latin American Intelligence Services, a short story (fragment)

2008-06-26T10:51:00.000-07:00

Tuesday
Every day, I write into this notebook for a half-hour at least, because it is the best way I know, the best method at hand, for unburdening myself of the difficulties inherent in managing these damn people. I am a social worker in the employ of my neighbors, but here are two interesting additional facts: they don't pay me, and they are ex-spies. Being experts, or having been experts, in clandestine procurement, they know how to wrangle goods and services from me. Their tactics vary, they change them up as expediency requires. Sometimes they taunt, often they bully, always they emotionally extort. They describe to me their experiences in Cali, Coroico, or Santiago (Cuba), and lard them up with horrific detail to convince me of the mind-laceration they have suffered in their line of work, as servants of their governments, most of them malefic. They present themselves as soldiers of misfortune, rank-and-file agents who gave due obedience to their superiors and believed themselves to be doing the right thing until an episode of abuse, a plane crash, or a massacre spun their heads out of whack and they fled, like me, to New York. How they found me, I don't know. Today I feel much better than I did yesterday, which was Monday, perhaps because none of the men and women, former Latin American intelligence service workers, came calling. I spent most of the time in my home office, combing patiently through my files for evidence of malfeasance against my physical and legal person perpetrated by the various insurance, medical, financial, and government offices I must contend with in this country. I was braced for my bell to ring, and it did not, thankfully.

I do find it difficult, however, to keep myself from writing the words Coroico and Cali, over and over again, on this page in my notebook. Coroico, I have learned, is a small city, downslope from La Paz, one gets there on the Highway of Death, intermittently trickled on by streams of water running down the mountainsides, and as one descends toward Coroico, in the general direction of the Amazon Basin, the landscape becomes greener and lusher, and in the deeper folds of the mountains, along the Highway of Death, rows of market stalls run by the Indians sell overstuffed plastic bags, pastel pink and blue, semi-translucent, of semi-crackly dull-green coca leaves; and in Coroico the landscape opens up around the town and there are rolling low green mountains, and hotels with swimming pools for the moneyed of La Paz who descend on the weekends in order to warm their bones. Coroico and Cali, and to a lesser extent Santiago (Cuba), have entered into my day's lexicon and become toponyms I can't extract from my mind, try as I might. Cali, because people from that city inland from the port of Buenaventura are called Caleños and still occasionally enjoy a breeze or wind signaling the presence of the ocean, and dance salsa in the Caleño style and spend a great deal of time out on their sidewalks and collect tropical fruit by the bucketfuls from their own gardens.

Caleño is a far more desirable moniker than New Yorker; I am not a New Yorker, I am a displaced person (as are my friends), and some of us have been, at one time or another, displaced once or twice before too. We are children like sea trash, flung into the water by villagers, only to return to the same beach the next day, and wallow in the shallows, or cling to a foamy line of debris. We are not wanted anywhere, but nor are we so easily disposed of, we've developed sticking power. It is hot enough today that my desk lamp adds intolerably to the heat and I must not write any longer, as I am drenched, but return to my files and telephone calls, for which I am amassing my patience and my most flawless accent, even as I write.

O Que Será

2008-06-18T23:52:00.001-07:00

There are a couple of times when this video starts to look like a Benson & Hedges commercial, but it's Chico Buarque and Milton Nascimento in the same room, having a good time, intense, but technicolor and all that. So it's worth watching. "O Que Será," it's a very philosophical notion too: what will be will be, and so on, the year is 1976 ...

Cultural critics as disc jockeys

2008-06-18T23:02:00.000-07:00

I'm reproducing this because it's true.

Ignacio Echevarría is probably Spain's best working book critic, and for a while now he's been out of a job at Babelia, which is the literary supplement of Madrid daily newspaper El País, which might be called The New York Times or the newspaper of record for the Spanish-speaking world. He's been out of a job for four years because of a particularly negative review he wrote about a book published by one of the publishing arms of the media conglomerate that owns El País, Grupo Prisa. The book, published by Alfaguara, is called El hijo del acordeonista, by Bernardo Atxaga. In any case, Echevarría wrote a bad review of the book, felt he was being given the evil eye afterward by his editors, and announced his resignation, after 14 years of working for the supplement, in an open letter sent to one of the editors Lluís Bassets. It's interesting to look at, before I get to the text I wanted to share, part of the missive Echevarría received from his editor after publishing the aforementioned negative review. Babelia's director, María Luisa Blanco, wrote to him, after publishing it, and said this: "It has been said, and I suppose you've heard, that your criticism was like a weapon of mass destruction and that the newspaper for a long time now has renounced the use of such weapons against anyone."

In his open letter, Echevarría says he finds it highly suspicious that he was reprimanded for that review, and not for other equally negative takes on books that were published by other houses not affiliated with El País.

The point is, he's a brave critic, and he risked a lot by breaking with the juggernaut of Spanish media.

He now has a column with El Mercurio, in Chile, and he's written something that interested me: he says the cultural critic, instead of maintaining his or her independence, has been shoehorned into the role of disc jockey. In other words, cultural critics lately write about only about what people want to hear, and so the general cultural atmosphere is more and more at risk of becoming a kind of echo chamber. This is bad.

Anyways, here's a translation of the relevant paragraph: "The way things are ... the critic tends to act exactly like a disc jockey. The DJ's success, just like the new critics', depends on his capacity for tuning in to the dance floor's occupants, whose appetites, tastes, and level of excitement or euphoria he must divine, stimulate and encourage."

It's more necessary than ever for there to be critics who illuminate ideas and change opinions, rather than pander to the dance floor. A DJ is a DJ, a critic has the obligation to go against the grain, if that's the way the gut goes.

On the media patina and ethics and aesthetics of airbrushing

2008-06-16T21:43:00.000-07:00

Is it just me or has the whole world become airbrushed? At least in the way we perceive it through the lens of media. The rampant manipulation of pixels and layout is rendering reality more manageable, more slick, and more ... "glossy" is the word that comes to mind. This isn't coincidental, since the glossies, monthly magazines, were progenitors of this now generalized glossifying tendency. This visual sanitizing distorts the manner in which the world is absorbed by many of us.

Consider the front page of The New York Times, whether it is in digital or print format. For sure, a more beautiful and aesthetically assured representation of the world isn't possible. I admit I myself visit the webpage of The New York Times at least once a day on average, maybe some days I skip it, but I can't deny its attractiveness as a narrative and a representation of all the "news that fits to print." A more visually satisfying arrangement representing the state of the world as of yesterday (or a few hours ago, on the Web) is hardly fathomable. Whether it's word choice in the headlines, or the headlines' relative size one to the other, or whether it's in the arrangement of the page elements, or the mere abundance of the words, images and columns cascading on the well-designed page-- the point is the overall impression transmitted is of harmony: chaos contained, reality reined in by master designers and wordsmiths.

I wonder if reading the newspaper these days is less about being informed and educating oneself and more about feeling relief in seeing that someone is taking all the chaos of the world and painting it over with order. Oftentimes the cover photographs on The New York Times front page will correspond to one another like clothing accessories in a Spring fashion show-- they will somehow match, even if depicting utterly different scenarios: an earthquake in China, a U.S. presidential campaign, a societal trend in Japan. Perhaps a spot of color in each of the photos will resonate, or a compositional element will be repeated. There is a master hand at work. The New York Times (and other newspapers, although I would argue that the Times is more guilty of this wannabe omnipotency than other dailies), is like God interpreting the world. It says: look at all this chaos, and see how I make sense out of it, make something palatable and even aesthetically pleasing out of it. Much of this effect is rendered by the beautiful photographs of death and disaster and political stagecraft that are reproduced, but again, the word choice, the play of fonts and column space, sub-headlines, etc.-- all these elements play a role, as does the reassuring retro quality of newspaper mastheads.

In The New York Times, even the most horrific war is made pretty. It's true that individual reporters (I remember Steven Erlanger's visceral reports from the bombing of Serbia in the late 1990s) will go out of their way to describe in graphic detail the impacts of war. But often not only is their prose too gorgeous, but so is the work of the designers and the photographers framing their words. It may be useful to recall that the best books about war might be singled out for their tendency toward dissonant, understated or lackluster prose. This is true about The Red and the Black, The Naked and the Dead, War and Peace (which has more than just a dollop of grotesqueness, off kilter description, and jerky movement in every battle scene), The Red Badge of Courage, and Farewell to Arms. These are books that ring true about war not because of over-revved description, but because of a mass of detail that seems right because it is so odd.

In the magazine world, the warm aesthetic bath effect is the rule. Of course, unlike newspapers, magazines have always been more about serving up fantasy than reality. So we shouldn't be surprised to read an extensive profile in The New Yorker (which itself specializes in being a factory of pretty, authoritative, and effective prose, in serving up a certain sterile and safe view of the world, as bien pensant as anything else, even when its journalism is at its most potent and critical) about a pixel specialist who is hired by fashion magazines and other glossies to doctor images in their ads, shoots and photo spreads, in order to render each of them as visually appealing as possible. After the treatment applied by this magician of the 21st Century's benday dots (if Roy Lichtenstein were alive today, he might find a way to show up the layers of hypocrisy and complacency compacted into your average magazine cover image), there is nothing amiss in any of the images in the magazine's pages. Your eyes glide right over them-- satisfied. All is seamless, an imperturbable patina applied over everything, an inevitable varnish of "as it is," except it's not what it is at all.

Likewise, it seems to me, the better written a magazine article is, especially if the subject is something that should get citizens up in arms, then the less likely that it will have any impact at all.

A friend and I would often talk with one another about the "patina" that coats everything in prosperous communities. The patina is a result of comfort, affluence, and a certain self-satisfied assurance that enlightenment is in fact an abundant quality in one's very fortunate community. The patina means: clean environments, attractive facades, new appliances, slick packaging, intelligent signage, smooth transitions, etc. There is nothing jagged, nothing too obviously out of step, nothing jarring. This patina is the environment of The New York Times (perhaps ironically, smaller and less prestigious newspapers don't achieve it to quite the same degree), the shopping mall, the average Hollywood film, TV in general, mass circulation magazines, etc.

I remember a few years ago there was a controversy about a Reuters photograph of Israeli bombing in Lebanon because it turned out it was retouched beyond acceptable ethical standards: the smoke was made blacker and more voluminous, the sky lightened to bring out the contrast, etc. But I would argue this kind of digital and design tinkering is done everyday, in our media, and in our visual culture generally, in less blatant ways, and the aim is not at all to make reality sensationalist-- but instead to create a cocoon-like, reassuring visual environment. Look around you: especially in areas and media designed for general consumption and mass observance. Doesn't everything seem too cleanly made? And it's not a question of publishing photos with dead bodies and blood, or "shock" strategies of any sort, or punching holes in walls or throwing rocks through chain store windows. The element that is missing isn't blood or a healthy streak of yellow journalism, or overt protest, it's the willingness to indulge in the incongruent message, the dissonant image, the un-resolvable juxtaposition, the friction of images that don't and won't respond to the eye's and brain's addiction to sense-making.

I would argue that most visual art today, especially in the rich nations, in part lacks any real power because it doesn't truly address these facts, and instead of seeking actively to rupture the cocoon of an airbrushed visual culture falls into the trap of also seeking seamlessness, flawless craftsmanship, some brand of slickness.

As a counterexample to the bumpless texture of our visual culture, I submit the political cartoons of Carlos Latuff, a Brazilian cartoonist. Apparently, his website has been repeatedly visited by U.S. government agencies like the Pentagon, State Department and individual military branches, because of his cartoons' popularity in the Arab world. To me, it is irrelevant whether you support the Iraq War or not, what his cartoons do (and I haven't even reproduced some of his more controversial ones) is thrust us directly into the heart of the matter, without making us wade through the overstuffed prose and analysis of newspapers and websites, and without having to distill tragedy from the flawless composition of a newspaper's front page photo, which may be showing a bombing casualty's funeral, whether it is a U.S. victim or an Iraqi, but which for some reason has to strive to emulate the compositional mastery and deft lighting effects of a Caravaggio. In our visual culture, that amounts to a trivialization of the subject (a war death, a civilian death, a soldier's death) and only an aggrandizement of the newspaper's and the photographer's ego.

Probably it's not coincidental that the winning image in the World Press Photo awards recently was of voyeurism amidst the ruins after Israel's bombings of Beirut (one of the photo's subjects holds a handkerchief to her nose, she can't stand the smell; meanwhile another takes a photo of the ruins with her cell phone, and another looks out from behind gold-plated sunglasses; it wasn't the only image of its kind to become famous in the wake of this news event: another widely-reproduced photo was of two comfortable-looking Lebanese on a rooftop taking pictures of surrounding smoke and destruction, also via a cellphone).

It's my theory the World Press Photo award-winning image didn't strike a chord necessarily as a statement on Lebanese society, but because of its depiction of our voyeur culture, and how we've become spectators inclined to see even the most destructive and morbid events as shows.

So it's media's job now not to indulge us. Before, it may have been necessary to pull a reader in with a well-made, narrative-rich image, a beautiful shot with classic composition, well distributed light and color. Now, it may be that visual culture will be that much more effective in terms of forging a vital connection when it breaks the rules, when it jars and becomes jagged, or grainy, sufficiently illegible-- at least slightly abrasive, maybe even a bit heavy-handed (like Latuff's work).

Today, there's nothing more surprising to our eyes than that which purports to represent reality but has some loose ends, some crooked flaps, some dissonant element. The media is educating our eyes, and words and images seem to wash over us, unless there is something in them that might stick into our skin. We need the barbs so that something might poke us and linger, and not merely slip away with the rest of the media bath, down the drain of daily forgetting.

Political cartoons by Carlos Latuff

Resuming The Book of Disengagements

2008-06-11T22:35:00.000-07:00

The Book of Disengagements is a difficult to classify book of aphorisms, off-the-cuff metaphysics and meditative writing. Like Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet it is not so much a book as an anti-book, formless; it is also a user's manual to life that constantly undermines its own utility.

It is thought to have been written by a late 19th Century Uruguayan intellectual, but all we know of his or her identity are the initials, "Q.B." The book experienced a short spurt of popularity in early 20th Century Uruguay, but soon faded into obscurity. The author's identity has never been revealed.

I found an old copy at the famous blocks-long Tristán Narvaja street fair in Montevideo in early 2005, and after a couple of years spent with the book and savoring its odd tone, have decided to translate all of it, little by little. Here is one entry, a few more are at the website linked above.

Entry #4:
Writing is an untangling of the mind knot, and once it is untangled, a gesture: the ribbon is allowed to float away and twist and turn in the wind.

I'm in Iowa

2008-06-11T08:08:00.000-07:00

I'm in Iowa. For reasons I can't get into right now, I'm in the northeastern corner of the state, the Mississippi River east of me, the Turkey River also to the east, but closer (both are full-throated right now, the Turkey flooded its banks and has washed families out of a trailer park down the road, but I'm not here for the floods). I drove to the Mississippi River on a break yesterday afternoon, observed it from my car on the edge of the waterfront park in historic McGregor, Iowa. The Mississippi looked immobile and was a much darker brown than I would have expected. There's a high point called Pike's Peak in that town, it's the dwarf sibling to the Pike's Peak near Colorado Springs, Colorado, which is somewhere around 14,000 feet high. A man named Pike apparently named both on his way west, it's just the peaks got bigger as he moved-- he should have saved his name for the Rockies.

Czech composer Antonin Dvorak composed the "American Quartet" during a summer he spent in the 1890s just north of here, in Spillville, Iowa. He left New York, where he was living, and traveled hundreds and hundreds of miles west to spend the summer with a few hundred Czech farmers who had settled the town. I think he was homesick, wanted to be with his own people. In New York, he had just finished writing the New World symphony, which would become his best-known work; perhaps he also was after some rest and relaxation in a bucolic setting. In Spillville he was inspired by a tanager's song, by bohemian beer, and by the rolling prairie, which apparently is a lot like the landscape in the Czech countryside. It's said that during his stay, Dvorak harassed the local townspeople, simple folk, by stopping them on Main Street and asking them personal questions about their lives; he was curious about these fellow Czechs he had traveled so far to see and be amongst. I behave much the same way, I talk to strangers, ask them questions. In the town where I go I speak mainly to Guatemalans, who all immigrated to this small Iowa town from rural towns and villages far away, across two national borders.

This is the longest period of time I've ever spent in the Midwestern United States. There's a strange flintiness or caginess to the local people I can't quite make out. It's an attitude, just as an urban put-on toughness might be, but it's not quite aggressive. It's more of a sardonic observance of the awkward outsider. Perhaps it's nothing more than the usual manner of small town people, but I can't be sure, in New York things are different. They say music scholars still aren't sure whether the Czech farmers in Spillville liked Dvorak, who came so far to be amongst "his people." I'm not sure if I'm liked either. All I can be sure of in Northeast Iowa is that I am west of the Mississippi, and that all the rivers are threatening to spill over their banks, or already have. But I'm not here for the floods.

Termites but no tango in the news

2008-06-10T22:14:00.000-07:00

Here are two articles I wrote for The Daily News in New York. One is on an art show, the other a preview of Latin American productions in a theater festival. When I get a chance, I'll write more about Juhasz-Alvarado's work and our phone interview, which got pretty crazy as soon as we started talking about termites.

Puerto Rico artist Charles Juhasz-Alvarado leads termite attack

Photo gallery on Juhasz-Alvarado's exhibit

'Other' Argentina is the focus of 'Harina' at TeatroStageFest

Viva Macedonio

2008-06-10T22:02:00.000-07:00

My essay on Macedonio Fernández, "The Man Who Invented Borges," has been published by The Quarterly Conversation. It'd be great to hear from any people that get through the thing. It gave me an opportunity to re-read Borges's short stories, and after this round I came away re-confirming to myself that "Funes the Memorious" is my favorite, but I also have a new favorite: "The Immortal." There's a moment in that story that literally sent a chill down my spine, that I thought was completely thrilling. I don't want to give anything away, but I think it comes midway though the story, and is analogous in a narrative sense to that moment at the end of a Scooby Doo episode when the mask comes off the ghost or monster and the real identity is revealed.

Also, something about the story reminds me of the atmosphere of the movie "300" but maybe that's just me.

Quitting writing

2008-05-28T07:37:00.000-07:00

The following quotation is from Literatura de izquierda, a short, incendiary book of literary criticism published by Argentine critic and novelist Damián Tabarovsky in 2004 on Beatriz Viterbo editora. Despite the idea one might form from the book's title, it's not about Socialist Realism, or a polemic in favor of some neo-Marxist literature, and instead a lucid, vigorous and convincing defense of the spirit of revolution and the avant-garde in literature and art. Despite the fact that critics and even writers all over the world bewail ours as an era in which nothing really new can be created in art, in which no aesthetic controversies can be effected, in which art has been de-clawed of all its potential to shock us or surprise us into new states of awareness, Tabarovsky says that it is still the writer's role to destabilize, subvert, and renew received notions, especially: language. The following passage from the book underscores Tabarovsky's idea of the writer as a perpetual outsider, so much so that he must renounce his guild before he can really begin:

If literature is opposed to consensus, then it is also opposed to the notion of being something or other: 'I'm a writer,' 'I published four novels and I have an unpublished manuscript'; big deal. The transitive state is more fitting, it has to do with movement, with transformations, with bad luck: 'I was a writer, but I am not any longer.' 'So, now what are you?' 'Now I am nothing.' That is the state in which literature begins.

Original:
Si la literatura se opone al consenso, entonces se opone al verbo ser: "soy escritor", "publiqué 4 novelas y tengo una inédita", poca cosa. El verbo estar es más justo, tiene que ver con el tránsito, con el pasaje, con la mala suerte: "Era escritor, pero dejé de serlo" "¿Ahora qué sos?" "Ahora soy nada". En ese estado comienza la literatura.

Art from Argentine website Los Trabajos Prácticos, where there's an essay in Spanish on the debate triggered in Argentina by Tabarovsky's combative book.

P.S.
People may have noticed that for the last couple of weeks I've basically been writing about Argentine literature. That may change in the next couple of weeks, days, minutes, or it may not ... bear with me?

A man named Macedonio

2008-05-20T17:41:00.001-07:00

Note: These are the proposed two first paragraphs for my essay on the relationship between Jorge Luis Borges, and his unjustly unknown (outside of Argentina) mentor Macedonio Fernández. If editor Scott Esposito likes it, the essay will appear, exclusively, in the summer issue of The Quarterly Conversation. The essay is tentatively and provocatively titled "The Man Who Invented Borges," although the final titling of course, is the editor's prerogative:

In 1921, a well-to-do Argentine family arrived in Buenos Aires on a grand transatlantic ship, the Reina Victoria Eugenia. If they were on deck to watch the city come into view after seven years in Europe and a three week ocean crossing, they would have first seen the curved art nouveau facade of the Argentine Yacht Club at the port's entrance, its spire evocative of a lighthouse; then they may have noted the belle epoque customs house, which rose higher than the loading cranes and warehouses of the Dársena Norte port complex; and finally, once they arrived at the passenger pier, they would have seen the crowd eagerly awaiting the ship. On that pier, if we are to trust the memory of Jorge Luis Borges, began the most pivotal friendship in Argentina's 20th Century literary history.

The family on the ship was Borges's: along with him traveled his father, mother, sister and paternal grandmother. Among the friends and relatives waiting to greet them was one Macedonio Fernández, a longtime friend of Borges's father who had graduated with him from the University of Buenos Aires law school. This Fernández may have been a lawyer by education, but he was a writer and philosopher by inclination, and had been recently widowed-- all circumstances that would contribute to his affinity for the 22-year-old Borges, who everyone called "Georgie." Likewise, no one ever referred to Fernández by his last name; he was always known by his beguiling and unusual first name: Macedonio.

Premeditated artistic genius

2008-05-15T14:57:00.000-07:00

At the online Argentine literary magazine La Lectora Provisoria, there's an article on novelist César Aira (who has been published in the United States by New Directions). The article deals with his latest books, an extensive novel or novels-within-a-novel called Barbaverde put out by a major publishing house, and a micro-novel titled Picasso published by the Belleza y Felicidad arts collective on only eight pages of photocopied paper. These add to the scores of novels already published by this writer with dozens of publishing houses, an output that perpetually overwhelms anyone trying to take stock of his work. In fact, critics often fail to agree on exactly how many novels he has published. Reflecting on Aira's strange brand of prolific output (his novels are usually short, sometimes absurdly so, but published individually nonetheless), the article's author, a well-known critic who uses the byline Quintín, cites another writer who says Aira's method is in fact a coldly calculated approach to the production of ... genius:

"Not so long ago I was able to hear another Argentine writer (Fogwill), explain that (Aira's) plan was to be found in one of Aira's first and unpublished works, and was based, if I didn't misunderstand it, on the idea that artistic genius, far from being a trait of the spirit, akin to talent, or a verdict of posterity, is actually an absolutely premeditated and long-term creation of the artist's work, which expands until it becomes, thanks to its omnipresence, the center of gravity for aesthetic thought in its time."

In other words "genius" is not a quality inherent to the writer or creator, but a result of a patient strategic deployment of effective artistic ideas until they achieve enough resonance to be everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, in other words, simply the state of aesthetic affairs. Once a creator has saturated his time with ideas and sensibilities, the halo-crown of genius descends upon them, but in fact all the time they were hard-headed artistic strategists, like Clausewitzes of literature. It's an interesting way of turning the usual romantic ideas of inspiration, genius and talent somewhat on their head.

The new Argentine essay and the new possibilities of 'essaying'

2008-05-14T08:55:00.000-07:00

The most interesting literary art form in post-millennium Argentina is not poetry or fiction, but the essay. And it is partly a symptom of this fact that the most influential novelist of right now in Argentina-- the prolific, performative and slippery César Aira-- laces his novels with essayistic asides and premises. In Latin America and Spain the ensayo or essay genre is broader and more generous than it is in the English-language world. Typically the term "ensayo" can be applied to any general work of nonfiction, unless it is overly technical or circumscribed to a very specific field. For example, Anagrama, the great Spanish publishing house, holds a contest every year for manuscripts in two categories: novela and ensayo. In other words, a manuscript submitted in the ensayo genre might be a reflection on virtually any subject or event.

Notice that the terms "fiction" and "nonfiction" are not used, as they rarely are in a publishing or book-selling context in the Spanish-speaking world. This fact liberates both the essay and the novel from the exigencies of prescriptive categories and allows them both to do what they do best, which is to process the world we live in through their filters, incredibly flexible and incisive lens in both cases, and not because of a tendency toward truth or untruth. We might say, casting aside the veils of fiction and nonfiction, that the novel usually tells a story and an essay refines and creates ideas, but of course there is a great deal of overlap and for that reason there are novels of ideas and narrative essays. Not to mention the important fact that the meta-subjects of both, in every case, are language and its evolution, culture and its transformations, ethics and its political manifestations.

As a recent takeout on the new Argentine essay in newspaper Clarín notes, it is in the intersection between narrative and conceptual innovation that some of the great contemporary writers work: J.M. Coetzee, Spaniard Enrique Vila Matas, and the sadly departed W.G. Sebald (as does the aforementioned César Aira and the Mexican Mario Bellatin, also mentioned in the essay).

The word ensayo also has another felicitous and still very much used connotation in Spanish, it can be a synonym for practice, as in a band practice or a theater practice. The implication then is that an ensayo is not the final word, but an exploration, a reconnoitering of the territory, a first foray. In other words, it is part of a larger process in which perfection and comprehensiveness are eternally a step away. It's a healthy and I would argue bracing and liberating paradigm for the ensayo: an aesthetic of imperfection and incompleteness. Ensayando or essaying means to practice or try something out.

This Clarín article, written for the newspaper's literary supplement Ñ, does a good job of summarizing new trends in the Argentine essay and singling out two representative writers, the self-described "full-time" essayist Rafael Cippolini, who I have written about before, and the poet and occasional novelist and essayist Fabián Casas. It isn't only the "amphibious" space between nonfiction and fiction that these writers explore, in the sense that the first-person essay, necessarily a performance, is as much about a provisional truth or a hypothesis and a pose as it is about any steadfast truth. But these two writers are also "amphibious" (Cippolini's term) in the sense that both are indelibly marked by the Internet, their use of the medium for publishing drafts of their essays at various stages of gestation, even as they also simultaneously function in the slow speed of book publishing. They are also amphibious in the sense that they swim between high and low culture, theory and slang.

The third book mentioned in this article is by Reinaldo Laddaga, an essential Argentine critic who has been ahead of the curve in identifying emerging and social forms of art such as online collectives and mass performative projects. His book on Aira, Brazilian writer J.G. Noll and Bellatin, is called Espectáculos de realidad. These fiction writers are arguably the other face of this essay-writing streak, since their texts are marked by a continual interpenetration of reality and fiction, conceptual dances that mix the theoretical depth of the essay with the quick gloss of narrative; these writers make a "spectacle out of reality" in the sense that their fictions escape from the bounds of book culture and aim at something else, a kind of transmigration into our daily lives and a transfiguration of our comfy metaphysical contours, a subversion of the mental lazy boys which we lean back in, complacent that what we think, believe and feel is complex enough as it is.

Here is Laddaga as quoted in the article, referring to the self-referential writing culture bred by the Internet and communications technology (blogs, text messages, twitter, flikr, etc.):

"We live in the midst of a generalized explosion of fictional acts, which disconcertingly, are carried out in the name of sincerity. Spectacles of reality are indivisible from this situation. I don't see how an artist, today, could fail to be interested in them. I also don't see how an artist, confronting this form of spectacle, could prevent himself from imagining a fantastic version of it, which would extend some of its principles and cancel some of its more lamentable elements."

In other words what Laddaga sees is an aesthetic opportunity, and arguably it is one that already has been seized, intentionally or not, by the essayists and novelists already mentioned. It involves an immersion in the language and rhetoric of self-exhibition, arguably the cultural lingua franca of our age, with the aim, through distortion or astringency, to alchemize it into art.

Art by Daniel García; top illustration created for publisher Beatriz Viterbo and Laddaga's book, Espectáculos de Realidad

A new García Márquez novel, or not

2008-05-12T15:40:00.000-07:00

On May 6 and 7, the news raced up and down the Americas and the Spanish-speaking world that Gabriel García Márquez was putting the "final touches" on a new novel, also focused on love, as were Love in the Time of Cholera, and Memories of My Melancholy Whores. This news came out after Gabo was interviewed by an old friend, radio journalist Darío Arizmendi, who went to see García Márquez at his residence in Mexico City. Arizmendi also claimed that the novel would be published before the end of the year. Since Arizmendi's considered a credible source and a friend of the Colombian writer, the news was taken at face value.

But the next day, after the news made the rounds, his publishers, both on the global level and in Colombia, denied having any news of a forthcoming novel, although they said they knew García Márquez was working on something. According to the culture editor of Bogotá's El Tiempo, Andrés Zambrano, quoted in Argentine newspaper Los Andes, it may have all been a misunderstanding:“Although Arizmendi is a very serious journalist and has had a long friendship with Gabo, he is not part of his most intimate circle. Let's compare his version with another source that does have a very close relationship with García Márquez and confirmed the fact that the news was not true. Also, the editor of Norma Colombia said that at 81 years of age, the author has his moments of not very much lucidity and he very well might have given that information out to Arizmendi."

Another possibility occurs to me: The novel does exist, and will be released before the end of the year, but publishers are being extra-secretive because of the piracy problems surrounding the release of García Márquez's more recent books.

I don't know, whatever the exact truth, for me it is another signal of the great man's decline, when friends and associates must talk over one another to disclaim or reaffirm news of a forthcoming book. The literary reputation of García Márquez will remain intact, but the solid, radiant man in the guayabera shirt who received the Nobel prize has given way to a man no longer in total control of his increasingly blurry public image.

On the other hand, I seem to remember vaguely reading somewhere that in fact Cholera and Melancholy Whores were part of a projected trilogy on the theme of love. I will not give up hope that PR flaps aside, Gabo has another trick up his sleeve, and will redeem what to me seemed to me the anemic Memories of My Melancholy Whores, with his next and perhaps final novel, if it exists.

(Note: Thanks to Out of the Woods Now for the original alert on this story.)

Five years without Mr. Sailormoon

2008-05-12T08:35:00.001-07:00

Poet Waly Salomão, aka "Waly Sailormoon," was a key part of Brazil's literary/musical/artistic counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s and remained influential until his death in May 2003. He published criticism, poetry and wrote song lyrics for many of the greats to emerge out of the ferment of the Tropicália movement: Gal Costa, Maria Bethania and her kid brother Caetano Veloso, and perhaps most significantly, since their collaboration was a deep ongoing partnership between poet and musician: Jards Macalé.

With Macalé, Salomão wrote two of the best-known songs ("Vapor barato" and "Mal secreto") on Gal Costa's famous 1971 live album FA-TAL, Gal a todo vapor, a late brilliant product of Brazil's by-then beleaguered counterculture, which had gone semi-underground or been scattered to the four winds by the military dictatorship. Salomão also wrote a third song on that album, "Luz do sol," in collaboration with Carlos Pinto. Not only that, but he directed the live show, which went down as perhaps the most influential single live pop music performance in Brazilian history. This is how poet and journalist Torquato Neto described the show in the October 25, 1971 edition of his newspaper column "General Jelly," which evaded censorship with its cryptic, fragmentary, poetic, mystical language: "Gal's show, friends. FA-TAL is decisive, there's no drama in this fact. The poet Sailormoon, thank God, does not wash his hands. And how many blind and defeated people are out there, with well-scrubbed hands, my friends. Everything flowing, everything is an understatement, everything was on that stage ...

Macalé's second album Aprender a nadar (1974), a deeply textured and melodic sonic adventure, was also the product of a meeting of minds with Salomão. Their musical partnership was also anthologized in a more recent Macalé album called Real Grandeza. On its cover, there's a picture of the two chilling out together, in the hairy, bearded days of the so-called desbunde (slang that can be loosely translated as "letting loose"). This was the generalized term for the hedonistic, individualistic, somewhat post-ideological 1970s aftermath to the more protest-oriented late 1960s in Brazil.

Salomão is also known for his own poetry and a reflective critical biography of visual artist Hélio Oiticica called Qual É o parangolé? When he died, in May 2003, Salomão had been appointed four months before to head a national books promotion program by Culture Minister Gilberto Gil. In the Youtube video below, you can see Salomão recite part of his "Mal secreto" while sitting in a Rio bar; the song is then performed by Luiz Melodia.

2666: a critical odyssey

2008-05-08T09:51:00.001-07:00

So it looks like the fat advance copies of Roberto Bolaño's novel 2666 in English translation have begun arriving in reviewers' mailboxes. It will be interesting to see how this book is received, after the gush of critical (and reader) enthusiasm for The Savage Detectives last year. My opinion, which goes against the opinion of many writers and critics (such as pioneering Bolaño booster Francisco Goldman), is that The Savage Detectives is the better work, more satisfying, less self-conscious, more fun, more a book that will outlast whatever hype becomes attached to it. And I think The Savage Detectives is a deeper book in the end though the themes of 2666 would seem perhaps to carry more ballast: death and evil.

I wrote about Bolaño for The San Francisco Bay Guardian in 2004, the year after Bolaño's death, and the review/essay was finally published on the cover of the Lit supplement in early 2005. I wouldn't add much more to my appraisal of Bolaño, except maybe a more detailed analysis of The Savage Detectives and how it fits into the context I lay out in that essay.

Scott Esposito also has an essay in Hermano Cerdo about Bolaño hype, his slight embarrassment over it, and what it might say about Bolaño's future place in the English-language literary marketplace (read: "world" literature canon).

Latin America's food problem

2008-05-07T13:07:00.001-07:00

I've been interested lately in the big changes I see in Brazil and Mexico. Kind of like in China, large sectors of the underclass have come to access more prosperous and stable lifestyles, including everything from home ownership to private education and home computers, and in general opportunities that they were formerly marginalized from. But now global economic crises like the food panic and the spiking price of oil threaten that fragile but I think very positive change in these societies. The article is published below, with thanks to New America Media.

I have recently rejoined New America Media as a New York-based contributing editor. I'll be writing about Latin America, Latin Americans in the United States, politics, culture, media, etc. New America Media produces, aggregates and disseminates multimedia content for and from the youth, immigrant and ethnic media sectors on a national level.

Here's the story:

Food Crisis Reverses Middle Class Trend in Latin America

Editor’s Note: The food crisis in Latin America is eroding the spending power of the new middle class, and with it, their optimism in the future of the region’s economy, writes NAM contributing editor Marcelo Ballvé.

In Latin America, the global food crisis has done more than just trigger protests and force governments to scramble for stopgap solutions. The crisis has begun to reverse the most positive regional trend of recent years: the decline of poverty and the nascent emergence of a new middle class.

Boosted by consistent economic growth, low inflation and government social spending, working poor people across Latin America –especially in Brazil and Mexico – saw their spending power climb during the last five years, until they achieved the trappings of a middle class lifestyle. They began to enjoy expanded access to consumer goods, home ownership and credit, as well as more stable jobs and careers.

In Brazil, this phenomenon was dubbed the "China effect," since like in China it seemed as if a new consumer class had been created overnight.

The advent of a new middle-income sector (in reality a post-industrial working class or lower-middle class tied to the services industry) was widely hailed as a sign that Latin America was finally turning the corner in its struggle against poverty and inequality. As recently as late last year, The Economist published a long feature on the theme, headlined, "Adiós to Poverty, Hola to Consumption."

For a time it seemed as if there were no clouds on the horizon, and the economic rise of these households couldn't be checked. But now the food crisis is unraveling their spending power, the basis of their new opportunities. In every country in the region, inflation has reared its head again, mainly because of the spiraling upward trend of oil and food prices. Pay raises, if there are any, are not keeping pace, and the end result may be that millions slip back into poverty, their incomes slowly gnawed away by grocery bills.

One study, released April 18, estimates that the food crisis will cause up to 15 million Latin Americans to fall – or return to their former place – below the poverty line.

"This is a dramatic situation for a large number of people," said José Luis Machinea, director of the U.N.'s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, which released the study.

Many Latin American leaders have raced to limit or regulate grain out-shipments (Argentina's government has slapped a 27 percent tax on soybean exports), instill price controls, or promise government-financed food stockpiles. But after decades of deregulations, privatizations and free trade agreements such as NAFTA (which led to the liberalization of Mexico's corn market), it seems unlikely that state-directed efforts will turn out to be more than improvised defenses against the tide of price pressures.

What's certain is that the crisis is inflating the prices of Latin America's most emblematic and widely consumed foods.

In Mexico, an alliance of farm groups recently sent a strongly worded message to President Felipe Calderón, the subtext of which was this: It's the price of tortillas, stupid. It was their attempt to shake his administration out of what they believe to be its complacency in the face of the food crisis, which in Mexico has caused the price of staples like eggs, milk and corn to shoot up.

Their communiqué said that within months the price of corn-based tortillas would likely reach the psychological significant threshold of 11 pesos a kilo, or roughly the equivalent of one U.S. dollar. For over a year now, since the January 2007 protests against tortilla price-hikes dubbed "the tortilla wars," Mexicans have feared the advent of the one-dollar kilo. If it arrives, a return of the tortilla wars seems likely.

But instead of racing to implement concrete solutions, Mexico's government "has assumed a calming attitude of 'there's nothing wrong here,'" said Victor Suárez Carrera, head of the Asociación Nacional de Empresas Comercializadoras de Productores del Campo (ANEC), an association of small and medium-sized farms.

Although the government assures Mexicans that there will be no food shortages, "they don't say at what prices or with what economic consequences," Suárez added.

In Brazil, the trouble lies with beans and rice. For most Brazilians, it is the side dish – and sometimes the main course – of every meal. Delivering a report on inflation last month, Brazil's finance minister Guido Mantega said that if it wasn't for the "fiejãozinho" Brazilians eat every day (deploying the affectionate diminutive in reference to “fiejão,” or beans), then the projected inflation for this year would be significantly lower than the official figure of nearly 5 percent.

However, Brazilian media were quick to respond that inflation was worrisome precisely because it was being increased by the soaring price of everyday staples like beans.

As in Mexico, Brazilian leaders have tried to sound upbeat. Because their country is an agricultural powerhouse, one of the world's top producers of foods like corn, soybeans and rice (the only non-Asian country in the rice-producing top 10), government ministers have been quick to sound a positive note and hint at Brazil's invulnerability.

"If there's a country that can reposition itself quickly in order to increase its food production, it's Brazil," said Planning Minister Paulo Bernardo.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva has gone on a counterattack, blaming rich countries' agricultural subsidies and corn-based biofuels (as opposed to Brazil's own sugarcane-based ethanol) for the food panic.

The reality is that despite Brazil's aggressive diplomacy on the subsidies issue and self-perception as the world's tropical food basket, it can do little in the short term to control the commodity markets, which are driven by speculation based on a variety of factors, including the spiking demand of India and China.

Meanwhile, hunger and riots are not precisely what Latin America's governments should be worried about. The food crisis threatens the region with something more corrosive: a creeping erosion of the optimism and belief in participative democracy that accompanied families' emergence out of the grind of poverty.

P.S.
I also wrote a related article recently for World Politics Review, on how this new working middle class was leading to precedent-setting statistics in Internet usage and home computer ownership in Brazil.

Fania Rumbles in Kinshasa (1974)

2008-05-06T06:01:00.001-07:00

Researching something totally unrelated the other day I came across these videos of the FANIA collective and their performance in Zaire ahead of the historic "Rumble in the Jungle," between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in 1974. The two videos are priceless: Hector Lavoe's oversized glasses, red pants hiked up above the belly button, green shirt; Celia's exuberance, completely effortless, obviously, what a smile. There's a case to be made for Fania as one of the most interesting artistic avant gardes of the 1970s in the Americas. People like to talk about how the avant garde died after Dada and the heyday of crazy art for art's sake in the 1920s, "the religion of art" as Malcolm Cowley calls it. But I think the avant garde spirit just leaked into the space between art and life, and manifested in the form of a joyous philistinism, an art of living, and art that can't be recognized as such, singing, dancing, and walking down the street, or brushing your teeth, "nothing in your pockets, no ID," to quote Caetano Veloso. In short, the spirit of spontaneity, openness and flow embodied by Fania's musicians, individually and collectively.

Getting creole with it

2008-05-02T14:45:00.001-07:00

Creolization of language is an ongoing process that is occurring up and down the Americas and accelerating in certain areas. Here are some of the most recent avatars of the generalized mongrelization: Spanglish, Portuñol or Portunhol, Jopará-- and heavily hispanicized Quechua, spoken everywhere in the Andes, with thousands of borrowed words peppering it (and a dynamic relationship with the Spanish-speaking linguistic context). In the past I've also written about a new emerging language, a written language more than a spoken one, called Engañol, which I postulated as a more radical version of Spanglish.

Some of the other representatives of this expanding creole genre, some long established: Haitian Kreyol, Jamaican Patois, Papiamento, Belizean Kriol, Saramaccan.

I'm sure linguists and university types argue about whether Spanglish is a dialect, a more minor linguistic aberration, or a creole-in-formation, or whatever. But in my mind, and thinking of friends' speech patterns as an example, it represents the same trend as those that led to the more established creoles: the melting down of standardization in established languages, cross-pollination, the softening in general of hardened patterns by a combinatory, inventive juxtaposition and/or fusion.

In any case, the creolization trend is seeping into the culture, not only in song lyrics: dancehall reggae, reggaetón, Belizean Punta Rock, but also in literature. In Brazil, poet Douglas Diegues, raised on the Paraguayan-Brazilian border, writes in what he calls "Portunhol Selvagem."

People are beginning to publish novels in the United States with titles like Loosing my Espanish (I don't like that title at all). Junot Diaz has been praised for his use of Spanglish, although having read Drown twice and begun The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I think what he's notable for is a wise, sparing and responsible use of Spanglish and a more liberal but also responsible use of Spanish-- in other words, the correct measures of each so as to avoid cheesiness and the sometimes gratuitous act of trotting out Spanish and/or Spanglish simply to impress upon the reader that, yes, this is an exotic piece of work.

One day at a book fair I heard a very well known Cuban American author refer to the "rich pulse of Spanish" or something like that, which "beat like a heart" beneath her English prose, and I almost wanted to vomit. People talk as if Spanish were somehow a less sober and exact language than English, more impassioned or something. In my opinion those are silly ideas to get caught up in.

Unless one is experimenting responsibly as Diaz does, or writing simply as one knows best, the same way one speaks, then one should leave the "exotic" sauce on ice in the fridge.

Until someone writes a book that deploys a hybrid of Spanish and English with the same fluidity and seamlessness that Anthony Burgess for example displayed with his invented language or dialect in A Clockwork Orange, then the correct measure for an English-Spanish hyrbid creole literature I think will always be restraint.

Prologue to eternity translated

2008-04-30T08:26:00.000-07:00

I've been working on an essay for the Quarterly Conversation about Macedonio Fernández (1874-1952), an Argentine author who mentored the far more famous Jorge Luis Borges and lent him many of his key ideas in 1920s Buenos Aires, and yet receives little credit for it, at least outside of Argentina. Arguably, Borges the international literary legend, would not have existed without Macedonio as a precursor. Some of Borges's principal metaphysical ideas, the illusory nature of time, the trap of individual personality, the permeability of life to dreams and vice-versa, the love of paradox, can be traced back to Macedonio. Here is a small translated fragment, one of many prologues (which take up over half the novel), from Macedonio's posthumously published Museo de la Novela de la Eterna:

Prologue to Eternity

Everything has been written, everything has been said, everything has been done, God heard this said to him, and he still had not created the world, nothing existed yet. That too already has been said to me, he countered perhaps, from the old, indented Nothing. And he began.

A popular musical phrase was sung to me by a Romanian woman, and later I rediscovered it ten times in different works and composers from the last four hundred years. Without a doubt, things don't begin; or they don't begin when they are invented. Or the world was invented ancient.

Prólogo a la eternidad

Todo se ha escrito, todo se ha dicho, todo se ha hecho, oyó Dios que le decían y aún no había creado el mundo, todavía no había nada. También eso ya me lo han dicho, repuso quizá desde la vieja, hendida, Nada. Y comenzó.

Una frase de música del pueblo me cantó una rumana y luego la he hallado diez veces en distintas obras y autores de los últimos cuatrocientos años. Es indudable que las cosas no comienzan; o no comienzan cuando se las inventa. O el mundo fue inventado antiguo.