My son Jason and I took a 6-hour walk into the mountains behind Casa Tobalá today, 4 hours up and two hours down, counting getting lost in the descent and ending up the range over, at one point having to cross a foot-wide cement dam spanning a ravine to avoid backtracking to who knows where. That's the problem with taking a wrong turn--after the first every other turn is by definition the wrong one. But we managed to find a path that brought us in fact to the very bottom of our property, where an old abandononed house looks over the little river. Our place sits at about 5800 feet and we climbed high, high, high, up to the summit of one mountain, literally where every step was a step down, and looked out over the city of Oaxaca to the south and our own little shack in the valley to the north. Sitting on top of the world is a cliche I guess, but it's really possible to do so. I strongly encourage trying it.
It was so great share this trek with my son, visiting us for the holidays from Chicago, where he is doing his masters in architecture. He is very attuned to forms and structures per se, and here in Oaxaca they abound in such diverse examples, from ancient pyramids to colonial buildings to foot paths carved out by streams and the force of nature. And what a luxury to spend so much time alone together, where both the conversations and the silences on the mountain paths acquire such density. I learned from Jason about the concept in physics of the unit of "work," velocity x acceleration, and why we were generating "negative" force when going down hill compared to up.
Last week some friends invited us along on a journey to Ixtlan, the native terrain of Benito Juárez, way up in the Sierra Juárez mountains a couple of hours outside the city of Oaxaca. What dramatic beauty, especially when one is higher than the clouds. We drove miles up a twisted dirt road and reached another peak. It's an amazing thing to look down upon the world instead of up into the sky.
sábado, 26 de diciembre de 2009
Journey to Ixtlan
Etiquetas:
Benito Juárez,
Casa Tobalá,
Ixtlan,
Jason Miskowiec,
Oaxaca,
Sierra Juárez
viernes, 4 de diciembre de 2009
Guadalajara International Book Festival
"Y mi vida se detiene en la hoja de un libro."
["And my life stops on the page of a book."]
"Tres," Claudia Barreda Gaxiola
I just got back from four days at the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL, in its Spanish acronym), the largest book festival in Latin America and the second largest in the world after Frankfort's. This year's highlighted region was the city of Los Angeles (some 53 writers from the city were in attendance) and so the gringo presence was notable. In addition to hundreds of booths and thousands of exhibitors there were lectures and conferences, informal conversations with writers and editors, presentations of books, a film festival, music and theater performances, academic study groups, and being in Jalisco wandering groups of mariachis. And of course muchos escritores, especially from Latin America: Carlos Fuentes, Monica Lavin, Mario Vargas Llosa, Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, as well as political and social figures like Mexico City mayor Marcelo Ebrard, frontrunner for the PRD presidential candidacy in Mexico's 2012 election...perhaps the biggest event within the event was news that the great Mexican poet Jose Emilio Pacheco had won the Cervantes Prize, the most significant literary award in the Spanish language, just weeks after winning another biggie, the Premio Iberoamericano de Poesia Reina Sofia. The day after the announcement I saw Pacheco walking through the international area and though he bears his 70 years, he still eminates a vibrancy that comes from being so in touch with the human condition.
It's amazing how at an event so huge one still runs into old friends and acquaintances. I caught up with Adriana Hidalgo, director of a publishing company in Argentina that bears her name and puts out some of the most interesting and cutting edge novels on the continent; Myrna Ortega from UNAM, director of its killer website descargacultura.unam.mx; Ana Clavel, a Mexican writer whom Aliform has had the privilege of publishing (Desire and Its Shadow, Shipwrecked Body), there to present her new novel, El dibujante de sombras; Trudy Balch, a writer and translator from New York; and other people I bumped into while looking at books or grabbing a glass of wine, or a shot of mezcal.
Besides sitting at the American Delegation's collective table with some of my translations (a special thanks to David Unger, who strongly encouraged me to come when we saw each other at the Americas Society in NY last April), I attended a number of panel discussions and presentations. Two of my favorites were with Cheech Marin (yes, of Cheech and Chong), who talked about how he became an art collector, particularly of work by Chicano painters. He explained how their work juxtaposes "the Mexican experience and the American experience," which in many ways was emblematic of the fair's theme this year, with Los Angeles the guest of honor. My favorite hour of the trip was an often funny conversation between David Kipen of the NEA and Jane Smiley, who in a more serious moment said, "The arts are the social institution that expresses freedom." That's a pretty good way of summarizing the importance of FIL.
["And my life stops on the page of a book."]
"Tres," Claudia Barreda Gaxiola
I just got back from four days at the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL, in its Spanish acronym), the largest book festival in Latin America and the second largest in the world after Frankfort's. This year's highlighted region was the city of Los Angeles (some 53 writers from the city were in attendance) and so the gringo presence was notable. In addition to hundreds of booths and thousands of exhibitors there were lectures and conferences, informal conversations with writers and editors, presentations of books, a film festival, music and theater performances, academic study groups, and being in Jalisco wandering groups of mariachis. And of course muchos escritores, especially from Latin America: Carlos Fuentes, Monica Lavin, Mario Vargas Llosa, Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, as well as political and social figures like Mexico City mayor Marcelo Ebrard, frontrunner for the PRD presidential candidacy in Mexico's 2012 election...perhaps the biggest event within the event was news that the great Mexican poet Jose Emilio Pacheco had won the Cervantes Prize, the most significant literary award in the Spanish language, just weeks after winning another biggie, the Premio Iberoamericano de Poesia Reina Sofia. The day after the announcement I saw Pacheco walking through the international area and though he bears his 70 years, he still eminates a vibrancy that comes from being so in touch with the human condition.
It's amazing how at an event so huge one still runs into old friends and acquaintances. I caught up with Adriana Hidalgo, director of a publishing company in Argentina that bears her name and puts out some of the most interesting and cutting edge novels on the continent; Myrna Ortega from UNAM, director of its killer website descargacultura.unam.mx; Ana Clavel, a Mexican writer whom Aliform has had the privilege of publishing (Desire and Its Shadow, Shipwrecked Body), there to present her new novel, El dibujante de sombras; Trudy Balch, a writer and translator from New York; and other people I bumped into while looking at books or grabbing a glass of wine, or a shot of mezcal.
Besides sitting at the American Delegation's collective table with some of my translations (a special thanks to David Unger, who strongly encouraged me to come when we saw each other at the Americas Society in NY last April), I attended a number of panel discussions and presentations. Two of my favorites were with Cheech Marin (yes, of Cheech and Chong), who talked about how he became an art collector, particularly of work by Chicano painters. He explained how their work juxtaposes "the Mexican experience and the American experience," which in many ways was emblematic of the fair's theme this year, with Los Angeles the guest of honor. My favorite hour of the trip was an often funny conversation between David Kipen of the NEA and Jane Smiley, who in a more serious moment said, "The arts are the social institution that expresses freedom." That's a pretty good way of summarizing the importance of FIL.
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