Cultural critics as disc jockeys

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.

Viva Macedonio

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

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

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

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'

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

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

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

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).

Getting creole with it

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

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.

Nasty resurgent nationalism and the regional antidote

Where do you live? I live in the Hudson River Delta, on the largest of the islands washed by the river's effluence: Long Island, precisely on its far-western bulge, coursed and carved here and there by sounds and channels-- and run-off, much of it put underground by the city. Notice that I have not mentioned political geographies, by which I mean nation and other arbitrary divisions such as provinces or states or counties. Cities also are arbitrary at least in terms of their official limits, because metropolises spread stain-like across their territory, brooking no attempts to contain them, conquering even geographical divides, such as mountains or rivers (as is seen in images of the world at night, depicting the diamond-like sprinkle of lights clustered in highly urbanized regions, such as the Hudson River Delta and surrounding shores).

When most of us imagine the world, we imagine it politically. I suspect most of us are still more familiar with the political map of the world, its multi-colored patchwork of countries, and can bring this representation of the world to the mind's eye more easily than the physical map with its large swaths of green and expanses of brown, its relatively un-parceled look. We know nation is a fiction. Yet we cling to it very firmly, and the imagination latches onto it, drunk on the romance, the sentiment, the emotion of being a patriot, a lover, a belonger, a devotee of a certain arbitrarily determined parcel of land.

As of late nation has been making a comeback. We were fascinated with the idea that the world's borders were being erased, but as connections between nations multiply-- as immigrants, ideas and guns and money flow back and forth and squiggle through borders, illicitly or not-- the reaction is a palpable re-entrenchment of nationalisms. It has occurred previously, this nationalistic reaction to openness and an era of intense exchange. The 19th Century's last years were heady with the idea of cosmopolitan simmering, chock-full of trade and huddled masses of moving peoples and steam engines sprouting here and there, and this lasted until: World War I, when Europe's nations dug themselves into trenches for mutual massacres in order to gain a few paces in a field. OK, perhaps it amounted to more than a few paces, I mean the land at stake, but really, whether a border was here or there, or whether Alsace and Lorraine or this or that entity ended up on this side or that side, that wasn't the point, really. The point of course was to affirm nation.

When nation is threatened its fangs come out, and they do so in the form of jingoism, ultra-patriots, watchmen of all sorts, walls, trenches, fences. When nation is threatened it becomes nasty. Globalization does not mean the end of nation, but the morphing of it into something more vicious: a normalized jingoism.

It has become fashionable to speak of the rising nationalism of the Chinese, the Brazilians (flush from their recent oil finds and rising agribusiness potency) or the Russians (less so lately the Indians, but when the South Asian nuclear race activates again, the Indians will join this axis ). Yet clearly it is the United States that has been flailing its national dragon tail around with the most aggressive intent. "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer," goes the proverb. No, we are not at war with China, Russia or India, but perhaps the unspoken aim of all this warring against terror is to send them a message, in the way Hiroshima and Nagasaki were messages to the Soviet Union. I remember very well a pre September 11, 2001 essay I read on the nature of U.S. power, and which made a good case that it's not so much an exercise in quelling rogue nations, but a constant gamesmanship in which Europe, East Asia and Russia are continually intimidated so that they will play cards at a rhythm dictated by the big dog at the baccarat table.


After Sept. 11, 2001, it's all about stopping terrorists, and nukes in suitcases, etc., but terrorists may just be convenient foils for the desperate need of nation to confirm its reason for existence, seizing on an opportunity to produce jugfuls of patriotic antibodies. The terrorist, seen from this perspective, isn't just a threat and a murderer of civilians, which he most definitely is, but also a reason for the state's existence. I do not believe Sept. 11, 2001 conspiracy theories. I do not believe that world leaders in their heart of hearts welcome terrorists in order to prop up their crumbling nations, I simply observe that nationalism is on the rise, not coincidentally at a time of a global Dirty War against terror, in an age when here in the United States we've begun to build a high-tech border wall across thousands of miles to cleave ourselves from a peaceful, friendly neighbor to the south.

The counterweight to this nasty nationalism cannot be globalization, because globalization is too insubstantial. This is where the free marketeers and anti-globalization protesters have both gone wrong. You cannot be for or against globalization because in effect it does not exist. It is vapor, something in the air. It is like saying you are for the speeding up or the slowing down of history or time; it can't be done. Certain things can be accomplished, reforms and wholesale rejiggerings of systems can be achieved, whether your aim is to deregulate or to control certain aspects of economic and social change, but to either stop or fully unleash the forces of globalization is absurd, because like nationalism and other abstractions that humans become enamored of and are willing to fight and die over, it does not in fact exist.

That is why region might save us. I mean a regionalism based on the tangible realities of landscape and natural resources, and an ethic, probably, of stewardship, with regards to both human inhabitants and non-human entities. Also, the creation of a responsible built environment. There is a fellow who writes out of Louisiana named Max Cafard who in the 1990s published something called the Surre(gion)alist Manifesto. In it, he identifies himself as an inhabitant of the Mesechabe Delta, meaning the area around New Orleans, and offers a eerily prescient analysis (given Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath) of how the city's cavalier way of dealing with nature and landscape made the city vulnerable and, he hints, its continuity precarious. Interestingly, the most defining characteristic of region, as Cafard points out, may be its very undefinability, not because it does not exist and is only an abstraction, but because it is impossible to tell exactly where it ends or begins. Where does the Hudson River Delta end and begin? Where do the Everglades begin and end, or the U.S. South, or the Caribbean? Who can draw a boundary around the Sonoran Desert?

Cities are real, more real at least than provinces or nations, which are completely arbitrary, but what is not real is the politically-determined geographical entity that represents a city. Its metropolitan area is always only a fragment of the total urban weave, which has incommensurable tentacular offshoots and spokes and scattered spores. A city is like water: it loves to fill a vacuum.

Regionalists are able to see beyond the fool's gold of nation, province, county and metro area, and understand that all the complexity on which their life depends is ultimately tied in to concrete cycles of energy exchange that begin and end with nature, and ultimately, the sun itself. Everything depends on our relative location on this orb floating in space, and the contours of the land around us. Each place, whether highly anthropomorphized or not, has its spirit, which is another way of referring to its zillions of characteristics that add up to make it into something unique, tangible, real. Region is rooted in landscape and climate, not anthems or slogans, and region can't be penned in by any border, imagined or real.

In many places around the world regionalism is beginning to enter into a symbiotic positive feedback loop with ecological thought. Regionalism is a natural ally to environmentalism because it encourages thought and lifestyle based on natural systems such as a watershed, a mountain range or the idiosyncrasies of desert or rainforest. This points to what may be the saving grace of the fact that some of the most critical environmental problems are in poor countries with weak central governments, which can exercise only limited power in ecologically critical regions. If regional identities, like the caboclo culture of Amazonia, can be properly collaborated with, and local wisdom be well-tapped, then regionalists, and not capital city nationalists, could become the main protagonists in regional moves toward sustainability sprung from the grassroots.

In Latin America, and in many other parts of the world that have been shaped by weak nations, we are accustomed to think in terms of region: Llanos, Pampas, Cerrado, Amazonia, Altiplano, Costa, Sertão, Patagonia, Yungas, Chaco, etc. It is probably because of this that in Latin America we have produced so many regionalist authors of international relevance: Ricardo Palma, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Gabriel García Márquez, Jõao Guimaraes Rosa, Romulo Gallegos, Juan José Saer. Other Latin American authors have taken the very concept of region and have made it a subject of their books, molding fictional areas that are not stand-ins for a real region as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County was, but a sort of ur-region, in which the very mind-frame of rooting oneself in a region is investigated (Alejandro Rossi).

In Exile's Return, his collective biography of U.S. writers of the 1920s, Malcolm Cowley says the emergence of the self-consciously separate "Lost Generation" of artists and writers was in part due to the jettisoning of regional identities that had tethered creators to land or region in the past (the New England Transcendentalists, etc.)

I think that soon, in art and literature, region will return. Eco-ethics, regionalism, and a healthy obliviousness to nationalism might coalesce into a new, morally rigorous, clear-eyed, non-sentimental and scientifically exacting regionalist style that might serve as the antidote to so much art and literature that is excessively national, fixated on the myths of nation, whether it is to critique them or elevate them. Our new Gods, someone has said, will be more intimate. It's true, they may be nearer to us than we think, they may reside in our own watershed, in the clefts between our hills, in the local forest that has shadowed generations.

Top photo: Martin Dürrschnabel

A rose by any other name is a novel by cosmogonist García Márquez

I got to thinking about love as represented in literature after re-reading Love in the Time of Cholera and watching the film in order to write about it on PopMatters. My conclusion is that as much as Gabriel García Márquez lathers stuff up rather rosily, the book is still an essential of late twentieth century literature, even if it's not my favorite of his novels. My essay talks about the book's flaws (occasional temperature glitches in the greenhouse, too torrid) and its principal strengths: the almost eerie God-like prescience García Márquez injects into his prose voice (which would be insufferable if it wasn't balanced by equally deep humor), and the book's handling of time and geography, and its deep wisdom. I think somewhere in there I start reeling off examples of classic love stories and I come up with the Brazilian rock ballad "Eduardo e Monica" by Brasília-born Legião Urbana (Brazil's capital is known for its vintage avant garde architecture, which I like, its weird culture of New Age cults, and this band). I also mention El Libro del Buen Amor, a ribald treatise about "crazy love" published by Spanish priest Juan Ruiz in 1330.

In any case, García Márquez proves the adage that great writers don't create books, they create worlds, realities, universes. They are in the business of cosmogony.


Photo by: F3rn4nd0

The age of info-fiction

Journalism isn't dead. It's just being eclipsed by storytelling that is doing a better job of reflecting us back to ourselves, and doing so more honestly, while journalism struggles to find its footing. It may make journalists nervous to admit it, but as storytellers they should understand that in certain contexts, such as those in which censorship exerts a strong influence (as it has systemically in much of the U.S. media since Sept. 11, 2001, in the form of self-censorship), the kind of truth we look for in journalism wriggles out from constraints imposed on it in the news media and migrates, often, to strike its roots elsewhere: in the heart of novels, song lyrics, poetry, film or other "fictions."

(In Latin America, we are well aware of this phenomenon. In country after country there are examples of novels, songs, or poems that circulated under the worst dictatorships like candles in the darkness. Whether these were samizdat editions or published under the nose of censors incapable of understanding the symbolism, or whether they were allowed into circulation only to be later blackballed, the fact is that fiction does better under censorship than journalism, because fiction or poetry has a subtle power and hides some of its cards, and censors, perhaps unadvisedly, tend to view it with a bit more permissiveness than the news media itself. Also, fictions circulate more easily, as songs and tales, or as poems printed on a single page-- they are viral and efficient in conveying information in a way that news is not. An allegory about a dictatorship applies to all dictatorships and all phases of a dictator's rule, while an editorial quickly loses potency over time since inevitably it addresses only the subtleties in effect at a particular point in time and a certain place.

In Argentina, in the blackest period of the 1970s Dirty War, virtually the only voices of real protest, the only intuitive and subtle analyses of the smeared national conscience were heard in the lyrics of Argentine rock songs. Either because the junta's censors couldn't bear to listen to rock, or because they simply couldn't follow the poetry well enough to understand the message, the clearly dissident messages of the songs were allowed to filter out and into the minds of millions of young people, who were hungry for these lyrics precisely because they were the most impacted by disappearances and torture.

What I'm trying to get at is the way that information is processed civically in the here and now, the different ways in which it is interpreted, the surest ways to insure its absorption and assimilation by the body politic. I'm mainly writing with the U.S. situation in mind, but the mainstream news media and even the alternative media seem to be suffering from discredit everywhere I look. That is certainly true in Latin America, the other region I am familiar with. So, the vacuum of media credibility seems to be a global phenomenon. Fact-based journalism is in crisis. Obviously it will persist somehow and perhaps flower again into the dominant form (I suspect it will reemerge as an information-rich multimedia amalgam of content, including text, that will allow folks to truly steep themselves in the texture of the news and information they're seeking).

But for now it seems that fact-based journalism has taken a back seat to what I will call info-fiction, in which truth and objectivity are not necessarily what is valued (although they are still important, depending on the audience, their prejudices and tastes). What is valued is narrative force, depth of analysis, emotive charge, as well as texture and persuasiveness.

Disclaimer: I'm not intending here to wave the flag for irresponsible spewing of lies and innuendo and misleading information. Nor am I a believer in a postmodernist shattering of all ideas of truth, objectivity or the relativizing of all claims to reliability. Having said that, the increasingly sensationalist CNN and the reliably shrill Fox News are the worst kind of evidence of the hybridizing of journalism into a form that is no longer purely facts-based. Whatever one might say about these media, to the extent they are successful, they are arguably so because they have embraced overarching narratives that they can color in with emotion: Fox and its jeremiads on terrorism and the culture wars, or CNN's Lou Dobbs and his anti-immigrant crusade.

Today, journalism is clearly a product competing alongside music, films, DVDs, as well as non-news Internet sites, radio and books. It's just another product in the market bins of the "infotainment telesector," as one analyst calls it. Many media critics point to the increasingly trivial nature of news coverage, and the seepage of celebrity gossip and rumor (which are forms of untruths) into its bandwidth. This trend is there, but so is its more productive complement: the work of Michael Moore, which integrates entertaining plot lines, video-editing and rhetorical styles (which conservatives like to call demagoguery or fact-bending) with documentary content and form. In fact political writer Theodore Hamm has written a book called The New Blue Media, which is about how people are increasingly getting their information and views not only from Michael Moore but from sources like The Onion, The Colbert Report, and Jon Stewart (the book is out next month). Definitely not "just the facts ma'am" media. Perhaps more central to my point, there's "The Wire," an encyclopedic War and Peace-style X-Ray of U.S. decline, created (not coincidentally) by a disgruntled former news reporter.

"The Wire" is info-fiction par excellence. I went to see David Simon speak at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (my alma-mater), where he was invited after an article on his TV series was published by the Columbia Journalism Review. The auditorium he spoke in is down the hall from the rooms where the Pulitzer Prizes are awarded. In this sanctum santorum of fact-based journalism, Simon let loose on an institution ( the print newspaper, the eminence grise of fact-based journalism) he no longer believes in, but still loves. Basically, he said newspapers had committed suicide by cutting reporting staff and shrinking their news hole when newspapers became corporatized and consolidated over the course of the 1980s and 1990s. Then, he said, when the Internet came, newspapers already were weakened, agonizing, and were "no more able to withstand the tidal wave of the Internet than anything else that is flimsy and insubstantial." In the end, newspapers were reduced to giving away their content for free online, and in any case it already was a watered-down dribble. The result is that only two or three newspapers still do great journalism because they have the resources to do so as national publications (The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc.) and Simon said he sees no way out of the crisis for newspapers. He himself took a buyout in 1995 from the news chain that bought The Baltimore Sun.

And what did he do in lieu of writing investigative features for his old newspaper? Simon created a fictional universe of characters and stories, many of them drawn from his twenty years as a crime reporter. Except instead of trying to constrain these stories into column inches and editor-ordered word counts, and the inevitably somewhat antiseptic language of newspapers, he created hours and hours of gritty, curse-laden television, in which the city of Baltimore and all its intricacies are patiently unfolded, with scores of characters coming and going meanwhile, their lives intersecting, ending and beginning. These are not facts he is representing, but a deeper kind of truth. As many critics have pointed out-- the kinds of truths we look to novels for.

Yes, many of The Wire's characters-- including the most famous, Omar, the lone-wolf stickup artist specializing in robbing drug dealers-- are based on real-life characters or are composites of them. But "The Wire" is a fiction, and by Simon's own admission, in it he was able to tell stories journalists wouldn't be able to tell because since he was making a fiction he had access to facts and insider information he would not have been told if he had been a reporter. His sources would have been too nervous to give him some information for fear he would publish it. But since he was making a TV series, he heard the uncensored accounts of back-room deals, till-skimming, intra-bureaucratic sabotage, street feuds, etc. In some ways, then, "The Wire" is truer than fact-based journalism covering the same phenomena. "The Wire", as whole, is like a five part newspaper series on the decline of the U.S. city. Except incomparably richer in texture, emotion, narrative potency, in short-- a million times more interesting and illuminating-- than anything in newspapers. We can call it a reported fiction, or as I suggested, an info-fiction.

An analogous phenomenon to "The Wire" is the explosion in Brazil of locally produced, relatively high-budget films and TV series exploring the day-to-day reality of life in slums (Cidade de Deus, Tropa de Elite, Cidade dos Homens), prisons (Carandiru), and urban underworlds (Onibus 174, Madame Sata). These films and series are doing journalism's job. The fact that it has fallen to on-screen fiction to communicate this reality to audiences is likely a symptom of journalism's ineffectiveness, and definitely evidence of directors and writers learning to craft powerful stories from social analysis and topical themes. Audiences apparently cannot get enough of this gritty, topical vein in Brazilian film.

Today's truth is the truth of story and narrative. We're seeing the return of fiction. Arguably, up to the 19th Century, and even well into that century, people all over the world gained most of their information and truths in the most efficient form yet invented: story. And story liberated from the exigencies of hewing exactly to memory, fact, and the niceties of an institutionalized newspaper or magazine style can do amazing things. Before fiction became calcified as a section in a bookstore, it encompassed vast realms of human memory into which fed anecdote, storytelling, folk tales, legend, myth, jokes, poetry, rumor, oral history, testimony, song, etc.

We should get it straight: fiction is not the opposite of truth, rather it is poetic representation, in other words, art. To say we may be entering an era in which info-fiction displaces journalism is to say that art is again becoming ascendant in its longstanding role as a dispenser of information, even topical or "current" information. It is art's inherent ability to skirt censorship, even when the muzzle is rigorously applied, which makes it so powerful.

We are living under censorship. The media and publishing worlds, rather than enabling illumination, have become de-facto censors. The censorship is self-inflicted, and often takes the form of a lack of imagination, or fear to imagine moral alternatives, or new and daring ways of telling stories, graphically, grittily, as "The Wire" does, as Hollywood does, as Tolstoy's War and Peace, (an info-fiction on Napoleon's Russian campaign) does. How else can we explain the pre-Iraq War blindness and jingoism, other than by self-censorship? How else can we explain the slick and antiseptic way the worst atrocities committed in the name of freedom around the world are presented, the bloody and abominable reality of a global Dirty War air-brushed into a spectacle devoid of moral taint?

"The Wire" showed the pulsating reality behind the flat portrayals of cities in the media. When will we see what lies behind the Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo show, beyond pretty magazine-style writing, beyond bylines, beyond Pulitzer prizes and circulation figures? And when we all see what's there, will we call it truth or fiction?

Censorship art by Eric Drooker

On false oppositions: Kahlo color or no color

Why is it that there either has to be a whole basket of flowers on a peasant woman's back, or no flowers at all and instead an overdosed blond in a party dress listening to Fleetwood Mac on a vintage couch in a cold and gritty Spanish or Portuguese speaking metropolis (I'm referencing here a Diego Rivera painting and my recollection of the cover photo of a fairly recent Latin American novel published by Alfaguara)? Why does it have to be either all about exoticism and folklore or all about the absence of it? There's a constant vacillation among those of us who make and observe Latin American art and literature that we either have to traffic in exoticism, in color, or in its opposite. Of course it is a false belief, a false dichotomy, and one that withstands no scrutiny once we look at the history of Latin American creation, because all the great artists understood the tension between primitivism and universalism and transcended it, instead of trying to fall on one side or the other of it.

Frida Kahlo. Now, she's the color and the exoticism and the monkeys and the supercilious hormonally hinting eyebrows and mustache; she's sex and nature and violence, which along with music, form the quad bearing up the edifice of Latin American stereotype. Rousseau gave us the noble savage, and Frida gave us his fable and his dream once he's been bound up in the gear and catwalks of the 20th Century. Gabriel García Márquez, he's the sidewalk caricaturist with more wisdom than Methuselah and a rose-tipped paintbrush; he's got more swirls in his canvases than the snake in the Disney version of the Jungle Book. They're primitivists, exoticists, color specialists, supposedly.

It reminds me of the old Russian hang-up, whether Russia was a thing of Europe or a fully wild and burly and soot-covered Slavic thing, its own were-creature. Russian culture was dominated by the Europhilic types but kept honest by its Slavophiles, I think. And how could "The Master and Margarita" exist, with its felicitous feline Satan, without a painful soldering of the two together: East and West.

In Latin America we have Jorge Luis Borges. He wrote the definitive word on this binary fallacy, really, a long long time ago. People would have him be a sort of pioneer of McOndo (the literary movement started in the 1990s as a sort of wannabe black beast to García Márquez's universe), but Borges was deeper about it, honest to himself. He did not advocate a break with the color, with the soil, with the roots that weave so many into the very dirt of this hemisphere. What he said was: the whole world is your Pandora's Box, man, take it, open it, and feed from it, because it is your material. He wrote this in the 1930s, in an essay called "The Argentine Writer and Tradition."

Of course Borges shunned anything that seemed too earthy, to loamy, to mulchy. He had his gauchos, his urban toughs, his 19th Century warlords and soldiers, his detectives. That was enough. It's just that Borges, he was as white as they come, he didn't feel it, the man was not the type to inhabit his body down to every pore, like perhaps others did-- Horacio Quiroga let us say, a man of the generation preceding that of Borges, and a seeker of Rousseau's garden.

Borges was a ghost, and he wrote like a ghost and in part lived like one. Read Paul Theroux's "Patagonia Express" and you will hear Borges defending Jorge Videla, head of the Argentine military junta during much of its genocidal phase, and calling him a "gentleman." He didn't know, no, he didn't know anything, sure. Because Borges lived like a ghost, or a ñandú, with its head in a flour sack. Borges didn't need to know anything except what was in his head and between the covers of his books. He wasn't dry or cold, the man had a deep sense of humor, he independently invented or downright originated every trick in the genre mixer's bag of tricks, but he didn't know. There's really not a drop of blood in his work, just exhilaration for the gray matter. But that's his idiosyncrasy, his position was clear, and generous: the world is yours, all of it, Uqbar too.

I write all of this prompted by an article in The New York Times Magazine about the curator of Latin American art at the museum in Houston. She says Frida Kahlo is not such a great painter, and that her problem with Frida is that her work, with its power, is a kind of many-hued smokescreen through which many can't see the truth about Latin American art. And the truth, of course, is that it is not a backwater filled with people that like to spend a lot of money on color paints and squirt out of them flowers and Aztec massacres, but also a wellspring for things like Brazilian post-concrete art, with its more straight lines and non-figurative shapes, its bichos and parangolés and off-kilter blue polygons. And there's also what came before, the actual concrete stuff-- even more straight lines and these on actual canvases. And there's kinetic art, and so on ... These are more, well, universal things, more identifiably avant-garde, more apt to prove that Latin American art is not some parade of ardent, hairy, tormented color-spewers who either paint on walls or invite pet monkeys into their self portraits or paint figures sitting against oversized cactuses (Tarsila do Amaral) and just can't quit it with the bright colors.

I say, bring it on. The color and the anti-color, the monkeys and the robots, the cities and the amber waves of corn and soybeans, the gauchos and the Indians and the Patagonian Nazi. Who is trying to protect who from whom? Frida Kahlo overexposed? I see a day after reading The New York Times Magazine article that Frida is having her first major U.S. show in 15 years right now at the Philadelphia museum. If she's waited 15 years, then maybe she's on too many posters and T-Shirts, but how can it be said that she's getting too much attention among U.S. collectors or art patrons or museums or whoever the authority is supposed to be? And Helio Oiticica isn't getting enough love, supposedly, but the Tate Modern just did a big thing on him (theming it on color, because despite his total non-figurative tilt Oiticica liked the color and was basically a sensualist). And the very same New York Times Magazine article notes that Oiticica's now what everyone is drooling to have in their catalogs, their art history theses, their prestigious collections.

Either/or? Why?

We need Oiticica and Frida Kahlo, Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Luis Guerra and Juana Molina, etc. etc. Not Macondo or McOndo. But Más Hondo, deep, deep enough to contain everything, and more, y siempre, algo más. Admit it, the baroque always was a congenital thing in Latin America, a baroque built around the depth of the culture's carrying sack, which has no breaking point, just eternal inordinate strain. One thing is marketing exoticism, another is indulging in it because it's in your bones; one thing is marketing a universalist's sophistication and dominion of forms being trafficked in Paris-New York-London-Berlin-Rome, another is actually having that sophistication, effortlessly. And being secure enough in your possession of it to not require the upturned nose when in range of a Frida's or a Gabo's flowers.

The brief life and long, increasingly influential after-life of Andrés Caicedo

Andrés Caicedo is bound for iconic status. With his long hair, goggle-like, thick-rimmed glasses, and penchant for emotive, savage prose, this kid from Cali, Colombia, who wrote all his fiction, essays and criticism in the late 1960s and 1970s, and who committed suicide in 1977 at age 25, is already firmly a part of the Latin American counterculture canon. And if some of his current champions have their way, he'll ascend to the list of the all-time greats as well. Lately, with Caicedo-mania flaring across Latin America, it doesn't seem like that day is too far distant.

I first heard of Caicedo on the blog maintained by Alberto Fuguet, a Chilean novelist (most widely known, to his occasional chagrin, for the McOndo movement) who is generous with his discoveries and has turned into one of the world's main proponents of Caicedo's work. This isn't the first enthusiasm I've shared with Fuguet after being tipped off about something on his blog, but this particular author has really become important to me. It's not only because of the quality and vitality of Caicedo's writing, or the fact that he was foreshadowing some of the post-Boom writer's innovations while most of the world was still under the thrall of Gabriel García Márquez & Co. (some of Caicedo's fiction is reminiscent of Roberto Bolaño, Manuel Puig and César Aira, for reasons of tone, mood, and technique more than content). To me, Caicedo is most interesting because he embodies something distinctive about Latin American culture in the late 1960s and 1970s, and that is it's ability to be hybrid, its tendency to create artists and movements that thrived on fusing and appropriating from a host of mediums, combining art, literature, and music, bringing everything together and refusing to be highbrow about it.

Caicedo was a graphomaniac, a short story writer, a film critic and filmmaker, and a novelist, who was saturated with the language and visual sense of the screen (he also wrote and directed movies), and was drunk on music-- specifically the brand of salsa that was being pumped out of New York and the Caribbean in the 1970s and struck such deep roots in Cali (Colombia's salsa capital). The craze for 1970s-style salsa in Cali became a sort of epiphenomenon of the worldwide salsa explosion. The early salsa of legends like Richie Ray and Bobbie Cruz or Hector Lavoe and the FANIA collective would never go out of style in Cali, and Caicedo, also a Rolling Stones, Cream, and Beatles-head, was there for its first efflorescence, as Caleños embraced as their own a musical renaissance with its epicenter elsewhere (and dominated by transplanted Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and Panamanians). Caicedo documented this period in Cali's musical history in ¡Que Viva la Música!, his most widely read novel. It is narrated by a beautiful young woman named María del Carmen Huerta, a blond, who becomes a walking salsa encyclopedia, a consummate dancer and a frequenter of all of Cali's salsa bars and clubs.

¡Que Viva la Música! ends with a comprehensive discography listing all the songs that influenced the writing of the book, an impressive list. And I recommend, for anyone wanting to read Caicedo, to first get their hands on some of the tracks on that list, before turning to this novel, or the rest of his work. Sadly, I suspect none of his prose has been translated into English, though I'd like to translate a couple of his very short stories and post them on this website if time allows. For now, I'll provide the aforementioned list, and a portfolio of links that collectively offer a nice introduction to the life and work of a tormented, madly creative, neurotically brilliant, precociously dark soul. Caicedo committed suicide in 1977, the same day he had received, in the mail, his advance copies of ¡Que Viva la Música!, his first published novel. A slim autobiographical novel, El Cuento de mi vida, which contains self-analytic pieces and eerily melancholic accounts of his depressive periods, was also recently published. In Bogotá in December, I also bought an anthology of his short fiction called Destinitos Fatales, published in 1984 by Colombian publisher Oveja Negra.


1. Definitely, I would begin with this very attractive and easy to use website put together by the major public university in Cali. The website reviews his life, work, and legacy. There's a bibliography, but I would go directly to the section called music ("Música"), where you can hear tracks that play as MP3s embedded on the site, while you read related passages from ¡Que Viva la Música!

2. These are all relevant Caicedo-related posts from Alberto Fuguet's blog (the link takes you to a page with all his posts that include the search term, Caicedo). The latest big news is that editorial Norma is publishing Caicedo's autobiography, which will be assembled from published and unpublished autobiographical writings with Fuguet as the editor, and this book will be available in all of Latin America (Caicedo's other books were only available in Colombia, despite the fact that they have all gone through many editions, which makes Fuguet angry).

3. Now for a contrary opinion: Here is a review of Caicedo's ¡Que Viva la Música!, which questions whether or not Caicedo's newfound popularity has more to do with his romantic figure, his tragic suicide, and his tendency to write about drugs, sex and violence, than with his real ability as an artist (which, reviewer Valeria Luiselli claims, he might have not really had time to develop given his early death). The review is from grumpy Mexican magazine Letras Libres, which might have been expected to try to deflate enthusiasm for Caicedo's under-appreciated work. Here's a bit from the review: "In his literary incursions, Caicedo suffers from literary bulimia: his writing is a self-provoked vomit, more self-complacent than provocative." Damn, she's grumpy ...

4. Finally, here is the list of songs contained at the end of ¡Que Viva la Música!, which is a good excuse as any to fill up your music player with salsa and rock tracks from the late 1960s and 1970s:

— "Que viva la música", Ray Barreto (Fania).
— "Cabo E", Richie Ray / Bobby Cruz (Alegre).
— "Si te contaran", Ray / Cruz (Fonseca).
— "Here comes Richie Ray", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "Guaguancó triste", Ray / Cruz (VAYA).
— "Guaguancó raro", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "White Room", The Cream (Phillips).
— "Moonligth Mile", Rolling Stones (R.S.R.).
— "Ruby Tuesday", Rolling Stones (London).
— * "Llegó borracho el borracho".
— "Salt of the Earth", Rolling Stones (London).
— "She's a Rainbow", Rolling Stones (London).
— "Loving Cup", Rolling Stones (R.S.R.).
— "Amparo Arrebato", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "Toma y dame", Ray / Cruz (U.A.).
— "Bailadores", Nelson y sus estrellas (P.O.N.).
— "Bembé en casa de Pinki", Ray / Cruz (VAYA).
— "A jugar bembé", Ray / Cruz (U.A.).
— "Piraña", Willie Colon (Fania).
— "Lo altare la araché", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "Sonido bestial", Ray / Cruz (VAYA).
— "Te conozco bacalao", Willie Colon (Fania).
— "Feria en M", Ray / Cruz (U.A.).
— "El diferente", Ray / Cruz (U.A.).
— "Convergencia", Johnny Pacheco (Fania).
— "Agúzate", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— * "Sufrir... ".
— "El guarataro", Ray / Cruz (U.A.).
— "Ay compay", Ray / Cruz (U.A.).
— "Bomba de las navidades", Ray / Cruz (VAYA).
— "Bomba cámara", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "Babalú", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "Adasa", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "Agallú", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "El hijo de Obatalá", Ray Barreto (Melser).
— "Iqui con iqui", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "La música brava", Andy Harlow (Melser).
— "Ponte duro", Roberto Roena, Fania 73 en vivo (Fania).
— "Ricardo Chaparro", Ray / Cruz (U.A.).
— "On with the Show", Rolling Stones (London).
— "Play with Fire", Rolling Stones (London).
— 'The last time", Rolling Stones (London).
— "Heartbreaker", Rolling Stones (R.S.R.).
— "Les only Rock'n roll butt I like it", Rolling Stones (R.S.R.).
— "I got the blues", Rolling Stones (R.S.R.).
— "Richie jala jala", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "Colombia's bugalú", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "Pa chismoso tú", Ray / Cruz (Fonseca).
— "Che Che Colé", Willie Colon (Fania).
— "Quien lo tumbe", Larry Harlow (Fania).
— "Que se rían", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "Colorín colorao", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "Lluvia", Ray / Cruz (VAYA).
— "Lluvia con nieve", Mon Rivera (Alegre).
— "Ahora vengo yo", Ray / Cruz, Fania 73 en vivo (Fania).
— "Traigo de todo", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "Guasasa", Harry Farlow (Fania).
— "Mambo Jazz", Ray / Cruz (Fonseca).
— "Suavito", Ray / Cruz (Fonseca).
— "Comején", Ray / Cruz (Fonseca).
— "Qué bella es la Navidad", Ray / Cruz (Fonseca).
— "Micaela", Pete Rodríguez (Alegre)...
— "Se casa la rumba", Larry Harlow (Fania).
— "El paso de encarnación", Larry Harlow (Fania).
— "Vengo viaro", Larry Harlow (Fania).
— 'Tiembla", El Gran Combo (Melser).
— "Anacaona", Cheo Feliciano, Fania 73 en vivo (Fania).
— "Tengo poder", La Conspiración (Fania).
— "Si la ven", Willie Colon (Fania).
— "La voz", La Conspiración (Fania).
— "El día que nací yo", La Conspiración (Fania).
— "Alafia cumaye", Ray / Cruz.
— "La Peregrina", Ray / Cruz.
— "El abacúa", Ray / Cruz.
— "Trupetman H", Ray / Cruz.
— 'The house of the rising sun", The Animáis.
— "Canto a Borinquen", Willie Colon.
— "Salsa y control", Lebrón Brothers.
— "Bongó loco", Lebrón Brothers.
— "Monte adentro", Monguito con Fania 72 (?) en vivo (Fania).
— "Seis tumbao", La Protesta.
— "San Miguel", La protesta.
— "Mi guaguancó", Ray / Cruz.
— "A mí qué", Típica Novel.
— "La ley", Sexteto Juventud.
— "La canción del viajero", Nelson y sus estrellas.
— * "El gavilán pollero".
— * "Vanidad".
— *"La vida no vale nada".
— *"¿Qué será de mí"?
— "Pachanga que no cansa", Manolín Morel.
— "Oye lo que te conviene", Eddie Palmieri.
— "Changa con pachanga", Randy Carlos.
— "Charanga revuelta con pachanga", Randy Carlos.
— "En la punta del pie Teresa", Cortijo y su Combo.
— "Pal 23", Ray Pérez.