Casa Tobalá

Oaxaca vistas

2010-06-05T05:07:00.000-07:00

We had our first storm of the rainy season yesterday here at Casa Tobalá, the thunder echoeing back and forth in the valley and lightning striking so close it seemed like we could touch it. The electricity was out for hours and we sat in the candlelight and listened to the storm. And what a thing of beauty to hear the water gushing into our new cistern! Up here in these arid mountains you learn how precious water is.
I saw a couple of deer the other evening while out for a walk; they bounded out of a ravine right near me and ran up into the mountains.
We're teeming with birds now, including a pair of roadrunners, which are huge and awkwardly beautiful.
Up this morning at 5:30 to watch the sunrise; Venus hung just below the fat crescent moon. As my days here tick away I want to capture every moment of daylight I can.

Shout out to my son Jason!

2010-05-07T18:42:00.000-07:00

My son Jason is just finishing today his first year of graduate school in architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. In honor of that I'd like to publish here a text he wrote for a writing prize sponsored by the Art Institute of Chicago:

The Work of Architecture in the Age of Digital Reproduction
[Schiff Foundation Fellowship for Critical Architectural Writing]
By Jason Miskowiec

Step into the world of the modern architecture student and you will realize that he or she has a difficult time drawing a true line on a Mayline or even being imaginative sketching in a Moleskin. More than likely he or she cannot spell Vitruvius or explain why the work of Richard Meier looks like that of Le Corbusier. Students will be versed in building information management software and three-dimensional computer modeling but not be knowledgeable of the legacy that has come before them. What has invaded the mind of the 21st century architecture student isn’t the delicacies of literature and history or the understanding of the senses, but rather the computer and its family of ideals. The array of programs meant to streamline thought and creativity into quick, efficient, and digitally visceral design has changed architectural education’s focus and shifted the priorities of today’s student.

A whole set of tools are available that create the illusion and simulacrum of imagination and creativity. While capable of awe-inspiring imagery, they shallowly represent the state of the contemporary student in the field of architecture. The computer and its relentless and expansive software have driven creative minds into a digital consciousness that dominates today’s economy and industry. The digital process represents not only a more efficient means of production, but also a substitution at times for what used to be done with a pencil and paper; efficient at times, but intellectually lacking at others. The twenty-first century designer is dangerously close to one that doesn’t understand the dimension of a brick, the joinery of lumber or the casting of concrete. His or her reality is based on the abstract matrix of digital fabrication. Although these programs have opened up a descriptive language of form and geometry, the overall concept of these models are hardly ever in intellectual control. At the heart of meaningful artistic work and experience is the relationship established by creator and creation. The consciousness of the digital world is an invented realm, philosophically based on an infinite grid of Cartesian coordinates and little else. The base for human creation is the projection of the mind and its subsequent sensory experiences. Digital design has in actuality hindered human creation and replaced it with digital simulationT
They favor the spectacular image over the logic of construction.

Programs such as 3DS Max and Revit fake the valuable sensory qualities created by touch and memory. In his book The Thinking Hand, Juhani Pallasmaa refers to the architect’s hand as a bridge to its creation. Architecture and design imagined on the computer is reduced into a video game-like solution to vital issues that require understandings of the fundamental concepts of architecture such as humanism, scale and materiality. Although one could argue that computer-rendered imagery has expanded our ability to visualize space, it lacks the utility and soundness in real design and architecture. What inherently digital design processes lack is the understanding and feel of the designer. The geometry and freedom of drawing with pen and paper finds itself in the cognitive, the imagination and the abstract mode of thinking absent in the digital realm. In neglecting the hands-on approach, today’s modern architecture student’s designing processes is in a virtual digital war upon the legacy and sensory qualities of design.

Tools come from the development and refinement of purposeful thinking. Tools have accompanied the existence of humankind as we have learned to mediate the relations between problems and solutions. The tool of a sculptor like the tool of an architect is an extension of his or her thought and conscious. As Pallasmaa states, “A painter paints by means of the unconscious intentionality of the mind rather than the brush as a physical object.”

What a tool crafts becomes the articulation of a vision. The tool in any work helps to articulate the language of the discipline, such as architecture. The tool is also meant to be in direct dialogue with the user. As the paintbrush is to a painter, the hand becomes the greatest asset to the architect. Pallasmaa has found in his research that the hand itself acts at times with its own impulses. Thus the process of transcribing an idea from the brain of the inventor to the wall of an exhibit lies in the edges and boundaries created by the tool itself. The power of design lies within the blood and muscle of very hand we use, while the computer foreshortens these very instincts. The tools of the modern architect that have been realigned with the computer don’t explore the limits of thought, but rather the efficiency of production. Because the computer and the digital exist in a boundless realm, ideas become a derivative of that limitless Cartesian Grid. In trading the lead holder for a computer mouse, current architecture students have aligned their set of tools to placate the demands of the marketplace they will enter, but in many ways have lost the ability, or at least facility, to imagine. They will enter the field with the skills that strip them of their imaginative, personal approach to design. Although that may be sufficient for many young architects, the legacy of this century’s designers should not rest on the aspirations of the digital world.

The architect is a designer of the built environment and the mediator of many professions. An architect is a psychologist, an anthropologist, a historian, an inventor and a construction worker. The task of all architects is to translate ideas and ideals, culture and knowledge into shelter. The architect is the maker of both internal and external conditions. If the values and process of thought of the next generation of architects and architecture students are rooted in the digital-design programs, then the tactility and sensitivity of design will be lost. If we abandon our senses, our most valuable assets as students of the physical environment, then our ability to connect, feel, humanize, and thus design appropriately will be irreversibly damaged.

“Sustainability,” or the Green Movement, makes up part of this generation’s revolution. Sustainability will and already has informed education. The intersection at which digitally-driven design and industry-driven products meet ideas of sustainability is often problematic. The blob-a-tecture arising out from digital fabrications is alien to the notion of efficiency and conservation of energy. Architectural products have undergone substantial growth due to developed technologies over the last centuries. However as a consequence of modern design, innovative building materials married to digital concepts often lose sight of the ultimate purpose of creating an ecological-aware design. Preciously harvested titanium and highly engineered paneling has seen itself, for example, make its way into some of the more highly touted architecture of our day without a real examination of the implication such approaches have on the environment. Lost in the translation of these ideas is the essence of architectural expression as well. Forms are forced, energy is spent, and the computer as a design counter-part to the dialogue of this process is responsible, at times, for turning the buildable reality into something rather disenchanting.

Experimental and digital architecture in many ways have broadened the possibilities of design. The market and appreciation for the monumental has historically always been part of architectural design. The Gothic era saw masonry reach incredible heights thought unattainable then. Today’s architecture possesses the same yearning for the grandiose but sometimes in an unhealthy and unrealistic way. The digital age satisfies the thirst for the new and innovative form, compromising as a result logical and approachable design. Students placate their own thirst for imagery and facile creativity with programs such as Rhinoceros and Grasshopper, but fail to realize the dynamics of programming space and thus, by aligning themselves with the impulses of the computer program, fail to consider the real needs of the human client. The process of design within these programs dangerously avoids issues of scale and human sensitivity. Although the computer is not the sole promoter of monumentally unrealistic design, it has tremendously impacted the philosophy of the digitally saturated world in which we live.

Architecture can be a tool to evaluate culture. Fundamentally it rises from the need for shelter and protection from the natural environment. It becomes more than that as it examines and manifests the values of the people that inhabit it. Technology, computers and everything else that is the post-industrial world have allowed an infinite amount of information to become available. Any child with a computer is an equal to the businessman with his laptop, as both have access to infinite sets of information. Modern man is incessantly connected to the Internet and looking for technology to ameliorate his quality of life. In a sense, that which has supposedly made information more accessible has made life cloudy, abstract and lost. Contemporary design has inherited the same set of problems. The reality of today’s market thrives on speed and efficiency. Although the digital world has made design faster, infinitely more complex problems have emerged from it. Computer technology provides an infinite amount of information accessible to nearly anyone, but how is it being used? Architecture historically has been built on the relationship of design and craft, conceptualized by the human mind and manifested by the human hand.

Work

2010-04-27T05:14:00.000-07:00

My good friend Eduardo García Aguilar scolded me the other day for not having posted anything for a long while on this humble blog, and I have to plead guilty as charged. I've been concentrating on my sabbatical projects (designing a course on the concept of freedom for my college's philosophy department, doing Latin in French, working on a novel), but also working. And I mean work in the purest sense: physical labor. The last couple weeks in particular I have been a chalán, a helper, to a construction crew that has been building a big new water cistern for Casa Tobalá. My contribution has been of the simplest kind--shoveling buckets of sand and gravel for mixing concrete, carrying cement blocks to the mason, holding boards while the molds get pounded into place. Mauro, Marcos and Jaime--the real workers who have such talent and skill--have been good-humored about all my questions about why they're doing what they're doing or showing me again and again how to hoist an 80-pound bucket of wet cement onto my shoulder. The first day I went to help, Mauro handed me a shovel and said, "Just tell me when you're tired." Hell, that was five minutes after I started and I've managed to keep my mouth shut.
That's the thing about work: just because you're tired doesn't mean you stop, just because you're tired doesn't mean that the work is over. As a college teacher the thing I find most frustrating in students is, let's be honest, their endemic laziness. Always an excuse not to have assignments done or for not coming to class. US students (well, our nation as a whole) take for granted the opportunities afforded them, like the very fact of being able to go to college or having computer labs and libraries available. Here in Oaxaca when students don't get into the university they stage demonstrations, they block streets and highways. They never say they're too tired.

The Triumphant Voyage book award finalist

2010-03-20T08:32:00.000-07:00

ALIFORM PUBLISHING
www.aliformgroup.com aliformgroup@gmail.com

Aliform Publishing is pleased to announce that The Triumphant Voyage, by Colombian novelist Eduardo García Aguilar and translated from the Spanish by Jay Miskowiec, has been named a finalist in the translation category of ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Awards. The winner will be announced at Book Expo America in New York on May 25. The Triumphant Voyage was the recipient of the Premio Nacional de Traducción Literaria awarded by the Ministry of Culture of Colombia.

The Triumphant Voyage relates the adventures of the fictional poet Arnaldo Farilla Utrillo as he journeys around the world during the first half of the twentieth century, coming in contact with many of the great writers and artists of the age. As the esteemed translator Gregory Rabassa writes, “The best way to get into literature is to live it. This is precisely what Eduardo García Aguilar lets us do with this peripatetic novel, so much in the spirit of Cortázar, Bolaño and Eça de Queirós, as he leads us through the ways and means of what we have come to call modernism.”

Miskowiec is the translation editor of Aliform Publishing, which specializes in Latin American and world literature. His other translations of García Aguilar include the collection of short stories Luminous Cities, the critical examination of globalism Mexico Madness: Manifesto for a Disenchanted Generation, and the novel Boulevard of Heroes, with an introduction by Gregory Rabassa.

Yankee Invasion (Scarletta Press, 2009), by Mexican author Ignacio Solares and translated by Timothy G. Compton, was edited by Miskowiec and is also a finalist for ForeWord Magazine’s translation award this year.

EL VIAJE TRIUNFAL DE GARCÍA AGUILAR FINALISTA EN PREMIO A MEJOR
TRADUCCIÓN EXTRANJERA DE FICCIÓN EN USA
La novella The Triumphant Voyage/ El viaje triunfal del colombiano Eduardo García Aguilar quedó entre las seis obras finalistas que optan al premio a la major traducción extranjera de ficción en Estados Unidos en 2010 de la revista ForeWord, cuyos premios (Book of the Year Awards) se entregarán en la Book Expo America de Nueva York el próximo 25 de mayo. La obra de García Aguilar, que relata de forma picaresca la vuelta al mundo de un viajero colombiano en la primera mitad del siglo XX hasta el inicio de La Violencia en su país, fue traducida por Jay Miskowiec,
quien obtuvo en 2008 el I Premio Nacional de Traducción Literaria del Ministerio de Cultura de Colombia y fue publicada en 2009 por la editorial Aliform.
Los ganadores en esta y otras categorías de los Book of the Year Awards serán escogidos por un jurado nacional de bibliotecarios y libreros estadounidenses y los premios se anunciarán en un acto especial en la BookExpo America en Nueva York, el próximo 25 de mayo. Los Book of the Year Awards de la revista Foreword son otorgados para destacar libros notables de editores independientes de Estados Unidos
en varios géneros y contribuir a su difusión y publicidad.
García Aguilar, quien reside en París, nació el 7 de septiembre de 1953 en Manizales (Colombia) y ha publicado las novelas Tierra de Leones, Bulevar de los Héroes, El Viaje Triunfal y Tequila Coxis, el
libro de relatos Urbes Luminosas, los poemarios Llanto de la Espada y Animal sin tiempo y el ensayo Delirio de San Cristobal. Manifiesto Para una Generación Desencantada, en su mayoría publicados en México y traducidos al inglés y publicados por Aliform. La primera novela de Garcia Aguilar traducida al inglés por Jay Miskowiec fue Boulevard of Heroes, publicada por Latin American Literary Review Press, con prólogo de Gregory Rabassa.

Wars at the End of the World

2010-02-09T06:01:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading Mario Vargas Llosa's 1981 novel 'La guerra del fin del mundo,' published twenty years before the reckless misadventure started by Bushito. It should be read by every politician who wants to wage war in the Third World. The novel centers around a fundamentalist religous fanatic who believes democracy and small 'r' republicanism to be the work of the devil (we all know capital 'R' Republicans to be so, of course). He takes his followers into the hinterlands of Brazil to set up their own little realm, much to the concern of the rich landowners and royalists who rule their. The central government sends in the troops to eradicate them, but fanaticism turns out to be a bigger weapon than bullets. Maybe when we look at fanatics like Osama bin-Laden or Islamic fundamentalists/terrorists (and let's not be naive:those Islamic fundamentalists--for that matter Christian fundamentalists as well, or any religion fundamentalists--are the enemy of democracy, human rights and humanist values, women's equality, tolerance and freedom of thought and expression; religion and democracy, religion and freedom are in real ways always opposed to each other) we'd be better off letting them wallow in their own shit than trying to show them the light. This novel illustrates so clearly something I've long believed: the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Journey to Ixtlan

2009-12-26T16:04:00.000-08:00

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.

Guadalajara International Book Festival

2009-12-04T05:26:00.000-08:00

"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.

Crossing Borders: the Installation Art of Lourdes Cué

2009-11-17T11:44:00.001-08:00

First of all, in the interest of full disclosure I must say that not only have I been the occasional asistonto of Lourdes Cué for almost twenty years, but her husband for most of that time as well, so I make no pretence about being objective or dispassionate in what I have to say about her work.

Cué has recently finished a large installation,"Endangered Species," in Rice Recreation Center on the east side of St. Paul, Minnesota, under the aegis of Public Art St. Paul and the St. Paul Parks Department. The piece consists of three large earthworks respectively of a polar bear, a loggerhead tortoise, and bactrian (two-humped) camel, with details made of granite and gneiss. Each beast measures about 8 m. long by 3 m. wide by 2 m. high: huge fauna from the far corners of the world that rise out of the park grounds in this working class neighborhood. One of the things that has always amazed me about Lourdes is the time and patience required to finish her work: in an era of instant imagery where everyone with a cell phone or a digital camera can be a producer or a creator, taking literally dozens or hundreds (or thousands)of images in a matter of moments (it's no coincidence that "art" and "artificial" and "artifice" are all related terms),Cué utilized some 6 months (2 in the design phase, which included workshops with area youth, and 4 in construction) to execute this one sole installation, working 8-10 hours a day 5 or 6 days a week. And in the media of the visual arts I don't know what rivals carving stone in terms of pure physical labor. The downside of the computer-driven society (well, one of the MANY downsides), whose primary driving force is speed,is that instant gratification has become such a possibility. I wonder how many artists (let's put filmmakers aside) in their twenties or thirties would work half a year to make one work of art. As Jim Morrison said a while back, more than ever the mantra of today, "We want the world and we want it now." That includes the way art is produced. To create a work that develops over a long period of time, relatively, is a whole other realm of existential, aesthetic experience. Despite working with huge grinders and sanders and hammer drills and chisels, this sculptor's work is very meditative, quiet, introspective. I think it was Sartre who said existence preceeds essence, and that is manifest in the very process of installation art. "Endangered Species" shows this clearly, and I think of other work of hers such as "Windows on the Sea," on the Scottish coast facing the North Sea, or "Water Islands" that sits on the banks of the St. Lawrence River in Montreal: mammoth stone and water works that bare the traces and scars of their creation yet settle with a kind of quietness into the landscape: modern steles and monoliths that show us the memory of the landscape.

Two of the principle visual metaphors Cué has utilized over her career are water and the boat, that great vehicle of movement and transportation/transformation. As Michel Foucault wrote in his essay "Of Other Spaces," the boat is "a floating piece of space, a place without a place that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea...In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up..." For this Mexican artist, boats bring together a variety of themes: crosssing borders, migration, globalism, the commodification and reification of human beings. The boat motif has in recent years--such as work like "Dias liquidos" ["Liquid Days"]in which a huge paper boat made of hundreds of pages of books by Latin American writers rests upon a wave of sand that takes us back to the ocean waters and that first via rupta of the foot upon the land, the sculptural object set before a screen that shows a video of the Mississippi River flowing, accompanied by sounds of the Pacific Ocean the artist recorded on a trip along the coast of the Mexican state of Oaxaca, and "Mar de historias/Historias del mar" ["Sea of Stories/Stories of the Sea"],a tryptich of nets that hang from the ceiling and walls, holding bottles filled with paper boats--this concrete symbol of movement has been readily apparent. In "Water of Stone," a tryptich of full-scale granite canoes (located in Franconia Sculpture Park, just north of the Twin Cities), the improbable contrast between material and represented object reveals the difficulty of the journey, whether real or metaphysical. Tracing her family back to Cuba and the Canary Islands and Spain, and her own life forward to the United States and back to Mexico, the boat is emblematic of her status as a migrant who continually travels between two worlds.

Up here in the mountains at Casa Tobala, Cué continues a long project, another tryptich, of three large-scale container ships entitled "La Nina, la Pinta, y la Santa Maria," each made from hundreds of cans and other metal containers that have been printed on, the elaborate lines and patterns dissolving into Coke cans or bottle caps or old olive oil containers upon closer look. Another piece she contemplates in drawings and models involves hauling wood and carrizo, a heavy cane used for building fences, into the mountains near here and building a ship that would be set in a dry river bed at the edge of what in the rainy season is a roaring cascade we gaze at across the valley. An ephemeral work: destined to be washed away during the first big rains. I'm not sure whether she wants the metaphor to be transcended or destroyed.

To see the installations and sculptors of this artist, go to www.lourdescue.com.

American Gothic: Cormac McCarthy

2009-11-13T06:36:00.000-08:00

My first experience with Cormac McCarthy was All the Pretty Horses, a novel I imagine was the introduction to his work for many readers, a nice romantic story of young cowboys riding the open ranges and meeting swarthy young women south of the border. Part of his "Western Trilogy" that includes the lesser novels The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, All the Pretty Horses utilizes a sparse diction and economy of language perfectly suited to the taciturn young hero. It got made into a mediocre movie directed by Billy Bob Thornton, and even the casting of my heart throb Penelope Cruz didn't raise the work much in my estimation. No Country for Old Men takes place in the US/Mexico border region, with a good old boy sheriff hunting down a Eastern European hitman, who is searching for some poor dope who stumbled upon the aftermath of a shootout between drug dealers and wanders away with a suitcase full of money. The Coen brothers (a shoutout to my paisanos from the Twin Cities) turned it into a film good enough to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Fargo set in the deserts of the Southwest instead of the icy frozen north of Minnesota.

I think you need to read McCarthy's last work, The Road, and a couple of his earlier novels to comprehend the importance of this writer (objectively recognizable: McCarthy has won among other awards a Pulitzer Prize, a fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim and MacArthur grants, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, so I guess he has that going for him).

Blood Meridian (1984) and Suttree (1979), both written before the Western trilogy, manifest a kind of American Gothic that comes directly out of William Faulkner (much as does, say, Toni Morrison's Beloved) or even Mark Twain (in whose work, among the most important literature our country has produced, not far below the ironic humor lurks a brutal world view). I read Blood Meridian last summer, a truly harrowing work about a heart of darkness, or many hearts of darkness, in the scorching sun of the Mexican desert where bounty hunters maraud like a plague of the Apocalypse. McCarthy has said he likes precise declarative sentences and it is the minute, detailed descriptions that render this book so powerful. The cold lens through which we see the violence puts everything into the sharpest focus (Roberto Bolaño uses this stylistic device so successfully in a similar way in 2666). To leave the emotion, the decrying, the breast-pounding, the judgment out of the narrative makes the reader confront precisely reality (whether fictional or not). Joseph Conrad said fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.

Suttree, a novel some twenty years in the writing, takes the author back to the city where he grew up, Knoxville, Tennessee, and the Tennessee River. The protagonist is a fisherman who lives in a wretched shantyboat and wanders among the dregs of society (like that fisher of men, Christ): the homeless, conmen, drifters and grifters, whores and thieves, alcoholics and drug addicts and vagabonds of all kinds, preachers and perverts. He inhabits a narrative world not far from Huck Finn's and his observations of the comedie humaine are not so far different. The flotsam of the river reflects the people he encounters, filthy refuse, stinking and rotting, what Twain would have called the damned human race. But McCarthy, like Twain, always leaves open the possibility of discovering in the end man's humanity to man.

Recommended activity: Today, this lucky Friday the 13th, starts the 29th Feria Internacional del Libro (International Book Fair) of Oaxaca, downtown on the Alameda near the Cathedral, running through November 30. There will be tables with books for sale as well as a wide-ringing calendar of events and discussions. For more information go to http://www.vivelalectura.com.mx/.

Recommended reading: Papeles inesperados, by Julio Cortázar. Hetereoglossia, anyone? A compilation of little known stories, articles, deleted chapters, interviews, letters, and...by one of the masters of modern Latin American literature. A lot of the texts hit and miss, but some true gems ("Manuscrito hallado junto a una mano," "La fe en el Tercer Mundo," "Acerca de Rayuela," "Entrevista ante un espejo"). I'm working on a review of it for the book review Rain Taxi that should be done in the next couple weeks.

a few shots of culture

2009-11-10T08:42:00.000-08:00

Café Tacuba's "Unplugged" playing on this warm Oaxaca morning in the Sierra Juárez. Mexico has a tremendous cultural heritage, music and performance and literature and painting all parts of people's everyday lives. One of the jewels of the nation is the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México (UNAM), located in Mexico City (in fact it is its own "ciudad universitaria"). An ongoing project UNAM is developing is Descarga Cultura (http://www.descargacultura.unam.mx/), a website that offers access to lectures, conferences, music, theater performances, etc., from classic to contemporary works. Especially interesting are authors reading from their own works, like Elena Poniatowska, Monica Lavin, Eduardo Lago, among many others. The site has links to radio stations and programs, the arts and culture magazine Revista de la Universidad de Mexico, as well as a variety of physical and social sciences pages. Check out Descarga Cultura and you'll understand how UNAM was awarded this year the prestigious Prince of Asturias Prize in Communications and Humanities.

Book lovers in Oaxaca, please visit Amate Books, a wonderful independent bookstore downtown on Alcalá. It has a great selection of Latin American literature in English, lots of books on regional and national art, architecture, and cuisine, and many unique titles. Owner Henry Wangeman frequently hosts readings and discussions and was kind enough to let me talk about literary translation a couple weeks ago to a full house (though I imagine most people came for the free mezcal). Amate also has some very cool folk art and handicrafts for sale. There are some kites designed, and signed!, by Francisco Toledo hanging from the walls that are themselves worth the visit.

Recommended reading:
Ficciones de la revolución mexicana, by Ignacio Solares (Mexico City: Alfaguara, 2009).
What would have happened to the nation if some of the great events in Mexico's revolution had turned out differently? Ignacio Solares, author of La invasion (Yankee Invasion, Scarletta Press and Aliform Publishing, 2009), puts figures like Madero, Carranza, Zapata and Huerta in stories that depart startlingly from the official versions. These kinds of parallel universes (Pancho Villa conquers a town in the US, for example) put the heroes and villians of the Mexican Revolution into some new and unexpected lights.

This Sunday, 15 de noviembre, in Oaxaca at the Auditorio Guelagetza, Los Discipulos are going to open for Café Tacuba. Sorry, my beautiful niece Blanqui, who keeps me apprised of culture going around about town, doesn't know what time.

Reading novels

2009-11-08T07:39:00.000-08:00

I'm on sabbatical this year and one of the advantages is the opportunity of reading what I want to, not what I have to (well, there is some of that, too, to complete my sabbatical project). But what's become interesting is not only what I read, but how--the luxury of reading for hours, even days, at a time. It's not the same experience at all to read a half hour here or there, or before going to sleep or sitting on the bus between stops. Things like narrative structure and most importantly style only truly come across once the reader is literally sumberged in the text. I just finished 2666 by Roberto Bolaño (my vote for best world writer born in the second half of the 20th), a thousand-page journey through the violence and corruption of modern Mexico that I finished in 3 days. It's a "page-turner," and the relentless way the author catalogues the murders of young women in Ciudad Juárez (especially pertinent now that the state attorney general whose office proved so apathetic in the investigations has just been named the nation's attorney general) has to be read in a relentless way as well--you can't turn away from what's happening.
[Recommended reading by Roberto Bolaño: The Savage Detectives]
I also read one of the most remarkable works of contemporary US fiction, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, another phonebook-sized novel (with 100 pages of footnotes in tiny font) I read in a short time (about 3 weeks, which must be some kind of world record for that book). Reading is always a kind of "reader response":there is either a connection or not, and that connection is ultimately physical, sensatory, sensual. This book is truly a work of (tortured) genius, so many voices, so many layered trains of narration, so many interruptions, lapses, hollow spaces, empty discourses..it's not hard to understand how a person who wrote such a work could have committed suicide. What a loss for literature, but what gifts left behind.
I've just started a book by my favorite contemporary US writer, Cormac McCarthy, Suttree. Heir to William Faulker (and by extension Gabriel Garcia Marquez) and Joseph Conrad, McCarthy writes the lushest descriptions imaginable, even when that lushness comes from broken glass and rusty metal. Thanks to my beloved sister-in-law Blanca Cue for lending me this work, and so many others.
And as I start this blog (something I never could have imagined doing a year ago, Luddite that I am; but it is this Thoreau-like solitude up here in Casa Tobala in the mountains of southeastern Oaxaca, the Sierra Juarez, that allows for all the time for reflection), I wish to thank a few people who have led me down this path: first of all my father John Miskowiec, the most prolific reader I've ever known, who from the time I was a kid taught me the wonders not only of literature but of books themselves, those precious objects one may hold; Eduardo García Aguilar, my friend and mentor for half my life, and one of Latin America's great writers, who taught me how much literature is a living thing, that it is made from life itself, and has allowed me to translate his work, including The Triumphant Voyage, Mexico Madness, Luminous Cities, and Boulevard of Heroes; Carlos López, director of the independent publishing company Praxis in Mexico, whose generosity has in many ways made possible Aliform Publishing; Gregory Rabassa, professor emeritus, who did as much as anyone to bring modern Latin American literature to a US audience, my dissertation supervisor who became my friend and colleague as I've published to date four of the maestro's translations. And finally to the person who has fed my creativity through all our years together, Lourdes Cué, artista extraordinaria.

CHECK OUT:
http://www.aliformgroup.com/ for the best in contemporary Latin American and world literature in translation
http://www.lourdescue.com/ to see this Mexican installation artist's website

Event with Ignacio Solares

2009-11-08T07:21:00.000-08:00

This past week I spent a few days in the great city of Chicago and participated in an event at Loyola University co-sponsored by its Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and the Consul General of Mexico, that presented Aliform Publishing's newest title, co-published with Scarletta Press, Yankee Invasion. This novel by Mexican author Ignacio Solares recounts the US invasion of Mexico and Mexico City in 1847--highly recommended for those interested in understanding how past history has led to contemporary US/Mexican relations. The next time anyone complains about illegal immigrants from Mexico, remember they didn't cross the border--the border crossed them.

See more about Yankee Invasion at
http://www.aliformgroup.com/
http://www.scarlettapress.com/