Argentina has seen a lot of progressive movement the past year on a bill that would legalize same-sex marriage. After much debate, on May 5, 2010, the Chamber of Deputies approved the bill, which would allow same-sex couples to marry. Next, the bill will be considered by the Senate. For now, same-sex marriage is not legal in Argentina.
The comic below came out in the January 2010 Fierro: La Historieta Argentina and is a comedic treatment of the very heated issue in Argentina (like in the US) where the catholic church holds a lot of sway.
In the first 60 pages of The Savage Detectives the reader is introduced to the Mexico City literary underworld of the 1970s through the eyes of 17-year-old Juan García Madero. His point of view is that of the desperate adolescent reader: impressionable, impassioned, idealistic and longing. He vies to get the visceral realists acceptance. Not literally because they have already accepted him into “the gang,” but as friends. In their world the stars are the visceral realists, other poets and Cesárea Tinajero, a long-lost poet.
García Madero wants to study literature but his Uncle wants him to be a lawyer, so like many frustrated literature enthusiasts, he signs up for the responsible law school route in the university’s “hallowed halls.” But he also signs up for the poet Alamo’s poetry workshops. García Madero finds the regular workshops mundane until they are interrupted by a visit from two leaders of the visceral realists–a Mexican literary movement, kind of. They are Arturo Belano (arguably a thinly veiled Roberto Bolaño) and Ulises Lima. When they scuffle with Alamo, García Madero shows literary prowess while siding with Belano and Lima and they invite him to join their group.
The Encrucijada Veracruzana, the bar on calle Bucareli, is the local hangout of the visceral realists when not at the upscale Font family house. In the bar storeroom García Madero has his first sexual experience. The waitress Brigada takes him into the storage room where she gives him “a blow job” (Bolaño 16) as he tries to think of The Vampire, a poem he admires for its obscure and dark eroticism. I find this funny.
García Madero alludes to a Santo film when describing the lighting in photos of San Epifanio and Billy. El Santo was a masked professional Mexican wrestler, film actor and folk icon. Above is a promotion for the film Santo vs The Vampire Women
What I especially like about this section is its inclusion of eroticism alongside class tensions. The eroticism of García Madero’s sexual awakening, first with poetry, with the poem The Vampire, precedes his meeting with waitress Brigada, and then finally with María Font. This appeals to the body of the reader, but Bolaño also knew how to appeal to the mind, or at least to make the reader feel intellectually justified in taking pleasure from the sex scenes.
On pages 49 through 55 Garcia Madero walks into the Font’s backyard cottage to find Angélica Font, María Font and Ernesto San Epifanio looking at a series of photos. In the photos San Epifanio is having sex with Billy, the son of a Honduran ambassador. The situation could not be more offensive. Not only is it a sexual act between a man and a boy captured by a mysterious photographer (perhaps Ulises Lima) but the boy’s sister was also present, watching, and it all took place in a run-down hotel with bad lighting “like something from a Santo movie.”(Bolaño 53)
In their usual artistic pretensions the Font sisters are discussing the photos–asking whether they are pornography or erotic art.
“What do you think of the pictures?” Angélica said.
“Hard-core.” I said.
“Hard-core? That’s all?” San Epifanio got up and sat in the wooden chair where I had been. From there he watched me with one of his knife-blade smiles.
“Well there’s a kind of poetry to them. But if I told you they only struck me as poetic, I’d be lying. They’re strange pictures. I’d call them pornographic. Not in a negative sense but definitely pornographic.”
“Everybody tends to pigeonhole things they don’t understand,” said San Epifanio. “Did the pictures turn you on?”
“No,” I said emphatically, although the truth is I wasn’t sure.
“They didn’t turn me on, but they didn’t disgust me either.”
“Then it isn’t pornography. Not for you at least.”
“But I liked them,” I admitted.
“Then just say that: you liked them and you don’t know why you liked them, which doesn’t matter much anyway, period.”(Bolaño 54)
The reader asks his/herself a similar set of questions during parts of the Bolaño novel. Undoubtedly, some readers decide to leave the novel based on their answers–especially those expecting high literature propriety, who may leave with a distaste in their mouth. Overall, I think what is created is a great moment of subversion of the high and low art opposition, which takes place through the novel’s acute self-awareness. One imagines Bolaño wearing a sardonic smile as audience members get up and leave the theater.
I am gripping this keyboard, at the edge of a chair in my Mom’s kitchen, asking the figure of a beautiful mulatta woman holding a mango, in a hanging Paul Gauguin print (Vahineno te vi, Woman of the Mango) for a hint of inspiration. I’ve lost it.
Why? The question is one of how to discuss my favorite novel The Savage Detectives on this blog. This is the assignment and it is totally free and up to me. It is a dream assignment. Since my first year when I read the novel I have wanted to engage it. As of now there are no limits. Professor Labrador-Rodriguez only said I need to set them myself, defining a practice for digesting the 577-page novel, introduce it here on the blog and move forward recording the ensuing journey. There should be no problem; it’s my favorite novel. Still.
To change the subject for a minute, Cerca y Lejos (this blog) is at the halfway point and the first mod of the semester at New College is over. I’m home on spring break and I’m thinking this blog has been a huge help. I have refined and deepened my interests, practiced reading and translating in Spanish and decided on what will hopefully be my senior thesis topic.
New College is amazing and as a student there, the freedom in academic pursuits is incredible—also incredibly scary. An art history professor once told me what sets academics at New College apart from the intellectual journey of other undergraduate programs is an emphasis on students creating their own knowledge in their work, not summarizing and reiterating the work of others.
Natasha Wimmer translated the novel into English.
Bearing that in mind, I begin to consider framing my reading of The Savage Detectives as a “reader-response” and taking off the pressure to produce something that seems “literary” with all the right terminology, and replacing it with my reflections on reading the novel. American literary critic Stanley Fish is associated with reader-response theory, which says the meaning of a text is not in author intentionality but in the meaning created by the act of reading–in the reader. Following this theory there is no one “correct” reading of a text and I am free to be affected by The Savage Detectives and record that here.
Never heard tango music? Now is a good time to tune in. Daniel Melingo is a classically trained, punk rocker musician from Buenos Aires (where else) who is resuscitating the folk music form with life, mixing its rich tradition with musical innovation and a voice comparable to that of Tom Waits or Nick Cave. His songs are heart-wrenching melodies that feature the host of unsavory characters and seedy nights fitting of the genre.
Many of Melingo’s song lyrics are directly influenced by the verse of Lunfardo poets of old Buenos Aires, where tango has its roots. Lunfardo was the slang of criminals and prisoners before it assimilated into general Porteño (Buenos Aires) culture. Melingo claims that the slang developed between inmates who didn’t want to share conversations with prison guards.
Melingo’s latest album, Maldito Tango, was recorded in Paris and Buenos Aires. Most songs are set in city backstreets at the turn of the twentieth century, the historical moment that gave birth to tango in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. It includes the tracks Pequeño Pariah “a prayer for a child raised in loneliness.” A Lo Magdalena, the story of an abandoned girl, saved by a nun, who eventually falls back into disgrace, crying when she hears the tango, remembering her past. En Un Bondi Color Humo is the story of the arrest of a pickpocket.
Some have called it low-life soap opera. England’s Independent newspaper called it cool.
Currently on tour through Europe, most of Melingo’s audiences won’t understand the Spanish lyrics anyway. The music seduces enough on its own: the mixture of wailing violin, birdcalls, rhythmic double bass, and twanging guitar, all shuffling, mixing, and turning with the bandoneόn (similar to an accordion, but a little different) accompanying the scruffy yet tender, charismatic voice of Melingo, is more than enough to keep listeners intrigued, even turned on.
In the genre of world music, in which Melingo fits, other artists are at work on similar projects converting traditional music into newer, edgier forms. One of these groups is Gogol Bordello. The nine person group plays eastern European gypsy music, turning it into high-energy punk rock. This turning of folk culture on its head led to a backlash for Gogol Bordello by purist, traditionalists. Not the same for Daniel Melingo, who won the 2009 best male artist tango album with Maldito Tango at the Premios Gardel a la Música in Argentina. Another common ground between these artists: theatrical and over the top on-stage performances that excite audiences. Melingo has a background in theatre, which shows in his on-stage presence as the eminent tanguero.
Melingo’s music is a bridge into tango for today’s and tomorrow’s generations. It is more accessible to modern audiences than tango’s classic performers, such as Carlos Gardel, Astor Piazzolla, Alfredo De Angelis, Miguel Calo, yet retains the sentiment–the reek of nostalgia, cologne, and the dim lights of the tango club.
Oliverio Girondo is an argentine poet, born in Buenos Aires to a wealthy family, who lived from 1891- 1967. He traveled extensively between Argentina and Europe during his lifetime. His contemporaries included Jorge Luis Borges. Pablo Neruda and Federico García Lorca were among his friends.
Abroad in France, in 1922, he published 20 Poems to Be Read in a Trolley Car, his first volume of verse, influenced by the Parisian scene and Guillaume Apollinaire.
Girondo also wrote plays, known for being avant-garde, and later in his life painted in the surrealist style, though his visual work was never well-known.
He was an active contributor to Martín Fierro, an important Argentinean journal of arts and culture. The journal’s manifesto, appearing in 1924, was Girondo’s work.
The front page of Martin Fierro, issue n.4, with Oliverio Girondo's manifesto. (May 15, 1924)
Martín Fierro believes in the importance of the intellectual contribution of America, cut from any previous umbilical cord.”
The manifesto claimed that the American cultural movement would no longer serve mornings “as a toothpaste, a towel to France and a soap to England.”
In 1946 he married the poet Nora Lange. After his death from injuries sustained after he was hit by a car, the surrealist poet Enrique Molina collected his last works. Little translated into English, he remains popular in Argentina and for readers of Spanish.
A new, early book of literary crossover star Roberto Bolaño was released this month in Spain. The novel, The Third Reich, was one of Bolaño’s early works, unedited by him during his lifetime. Now, Anagrama, a Spanish editor, published the book in Spain.
The Latin American writer topped the New York Times’s top 10 books list two years consecutively. His novel 2666 was translated into English in 2008 and made it on the high-profile list. The previous year my personal favorite, The Savage Detectives, topped the New York Times’s list as well.
Now he has a cult following, spanning continents, an audience to whom this oncoming edition of The Third Reich, which is especially curious since he wrote it early on in his career as a writer, in 1989, will be a welcome addition in a growing arsenal of Bolaño’s works.
El Tercer Reich está escrito en forma de diario y su protagonista es un joven alemán, Udo Berger, a quien la vida parece sonreirle. Nazismo, juegos y sexo son los temas principales de esta “novela primeriza, que no de principiante”, según precisó el crítico y escritor Ignacio Echevarría.
The newly released novel takes place on la Costa Brava of Spain, where protagonist Udo Berger travels on vacation with girlfriend, Ingeborg (they are German). Berger is 25 and in the prime of his life. Obsessed with the tabletop war strategy game The Third Reich, at the onset of the vacation, Berger is more interested in his games than with the beach or sun.
When Ingeborg and Berger go out to a nightclub they meet another young German couple, Charly and Hanna. They drink, make plans for tomorrow, and when they leave the beach at the end of the night, Charly disappears.
English readers of Bolaño will have to wait to find out what happens. Most likely, Natasha Wimmer, who translated to English both The Savage Detectives and 2666 will translate El Tercer Reich.
Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile in 1953. He died in 2003 at the age of 50 where he was living in Barcelona.
Sudestada is an arts and culture magazine based in Buenos Aires, Argentina with a leftist spin. In November 2008 they published a series of articles on Alfredo Zitarrosa's life and works that form the basis of this post.
Alfredo Zitarrosa (b. 1936, d.1989, Montevideo, Uruguay) is Uruguay’s most beloved folk singer. He is often compared with Carlos Gardel, another of the most famous folk singers of Latin America. Often, their songs express the spirit of Latin America. Zitarrosa sang folk milongas, he even had songs to Jose Artigas, the national hero of Uruguay. Zitarrosa, more than Gardel, also lead a life of letters and was a well-known poet, journalist and composer during his life.
He wrote some of his first poems in the attic of the pension his mother, Blanca Iribarne, rented out to sustain them. The hotel was on the street Yaguarón in Montevideo across from a cemetery. There he had his books, figure of Beethoven, portrait of Vallejo. His first poems were urgent verses or the perceptions of a sensitive man, his memories as he recalled them.
At the age of 23, he had little expectations when he sent a short book of poems, Explicaciones, to be judged in a contest of the Premio Municipal de Poesia Inedita, which he won. Juan Carlos Onetti, the famous Latin American poet, was among the judges.
Following he became friends with many other Latin American poets, writers, and anarchists. They would go to literature workshops and perfect his style, read over everything that crossed before his quiet gaze. Bécquer Puig was another man of letters with whom Alfredo shared his love of the arts.
The Other Zitarrosa
It was interesting that he always admired the parents of his friends. Perhaps this was because of the painful absence of his biological father and his constant changes of identity during childhood. Between the time of his birth to his sixteenth birthday Alfredo adopted three distinct last names: Iribarne, for his Mother, Durán for the adopted family that raised him, and finally, the one for which he is known, Zitarrosa, for the husband of his Mother.
By the end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties, Alfredo continued being Alfredo, “El Flaco,” or “el pocho.” He was still not the Alfredo Zitarrosa known today in Latin America, nor was he even dreaming yet of being a singer, it hadn’t crossed his mind.
Alfredo continued writing as he worked as a newscaster at the radio, El Espectador, sometimes reading the editorials of his friend Vicente Basso Maglio, from whom he learned the craft of journalism, which he would later adopt as a profession.
Alfredo continued to write during his many years in front of the microphone.
He always remained humble. Even after his writing and singing career advanced, he would say that he was no writer, no poet. He would say being a poet was a privilege of humanity which it gave to itself as a gift, and that he was no such thing, that if anything he was basically and fundamentally a Uruguayan.
Zitarrosa is Gardel
Later in the early sixties when his singing career brought him outside of Uruguay, he would stay in contact with his friends thought letters. The letters were about simple, heartfelt themes: revolution, love, absence. “El amor es mutación constante, así nos lo parece y no amamos tampoco sino a lo que se nos niega; no reconocemos al amado sino en la apariencia que ya había abandonado cuando se nos mostró…”
Throughout his life Alfredo would write and reflect in his many letters to friends. Exiled in Mexico, after losing his passport, he wrote to then President of Uruguay Gregorio Álvarez asking for permission to re-enter his country.
He always wrote on the inner side of his LP’s. Later he would write for the periodical Marcha.
Revolution and “el pueblo” were the themes of so many of his compositions and his concerns. He held a firm belief in the youth. To friends he was known to ask: “does a revolutionary leader have to be a Marxist?”
The respected writer and journalist Carlos María Domínguez said about Alfredo: it is difficult to speak about “el pueblo” but somehow curiously enough when Alfredo Zitarrosa speaks about “el pueblo,” even after his death, it exists.
During his exile in Mexico he traveled to Nicaragua with Argentine producer, Modesto López. They were making a series of reports on “el pueblo,” the Uruguayan exiles in Nicaragua, and chatting with Sandinistas, Toms Borge and Daniel Ortega, among others. The work was never completed, though notes from the reports appear in Guillermo Pellegrino’s book Cantares del alma.
Upon his return to Uruguay in 1988 he worked on a program “Fábulas materialistas” that was published in the cultural supplement to the newspaper La Hora.
Five months before his death, August 8, 1988, he released the book Por si el recuerdo. The book contained twelve stories, written in distinct stages, over the course of 30 years. They are about childhood, humor, sadness; they range from autobiographical to fantastic, but always with a sense of continuity.
Alfredo Zitarrosa, today popular myth in Uruguay and Argentina, is a bridge crossing over into a world of deep passion, of life and its contradictions; an artist who got to the heart of simple, resounding things, a singer that put into words an epoch and a world that dreamed, a constructive doubt that never ceased, but with some unalterable convictions until the end of the road. “El futuro es de los que trabajan. Ese futuro se llama socialismo. A mi me falta hoy la canción que proponga en términos apropiados profundidad ideológica y la operatividad política necesaria. La canción de hoy me esta faltando, vacilo, escribo, escucho, leo, propongo cosas a los compañeros, consulto, pido critica, y me sigue faltando la canción nuestra de hoy, necesaria, viable…”.
An updated ZITARROSA still inspires today’s Latin American artists. The famous Uruguayan/Argentine group BAJOFONDO made a song called Zitarrosa, they performed the song live in 2009 in Rio De Janeiro.
“Zitarrosa” lyrics- La milonga.
Ladies and gentlemen
a man.
Milonga.
His music.
La milonga es.
He`s ask tonight
he`s here
Alfredo Zitarrosa.
Milonga
Milonga.
Ladies and gentlemen
ladies and gentlemen.
La milonga es hija del candombe
asi como el tango es hijo de la milonga.
He’s ask tonight
he’s here.
La milonga es hija del candombe
asi como el tango es hijo de la milonga.
Cerca y Lejos 