Tag: Literature

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

Jose Maria Aguedas (1911-1969) (photo by Jose Gushiken)

I have to begin with Mariategui, the street in Cuzco, Peru, and then the man.

We decided to take a cab to find Don Francisco’s new house in Cuzco, Peru.  He is a Q’ero Shaman.  We wanted to do a shamanic ceremony with him and his wife and eat lunch with them.  We wanted to visit him at his home as he had visited us at ours in the US.  He gave us the address.  He gave us his cell number.  He gave us a land mark. We ended up calling him on the cell phone to say, “We’re parked at the church.  We don’t know where you are.”  He walked down the hill and found us.  Pointing, he said, that street is Mariategui.  That’s where the bus goes into Centro.  That’s where you have to walk.  That’s where the house is.

Did he know who Mariategui was?  Probably not.  I forgot to ask him.  I am quite certain that he never read him.

Please join me in Peru.

A couple days ago, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy — the body that decides who will be the laureate for the Nobel Prize in Literature — stated Europe was the center of the literary world and America was “too isolated, too insular”.

This is what Horace Engdahl said in an interview he gave exclusively to the AP:

“Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world … not the United States.”

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

Wonderful Writers You Might Not Have Heard Of (WWYMNHHO) is an occasional, erratic, idiosyncratic series.  It’s like an island that floods at high tide and migrates in the turquoise sea.  Sometimes it appears.  But I digress.

Adolfo Bioys Casares (1914-1999)

Adlofo Bioys Casares’ 1940 novel The Invention of Morel is a short gem.  Jorge Luis Borges, Bioys’ mentor, wrote in the prologue, “To classify it (the novel) as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole.” And Mexican Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz wrote, “The Invention of Morel may be described, without exaggeration, as a perfect novel.”  Given this kind of praise, it seemed imperative to read it.

I have no intention of spoiling this book by revealing the plot.  I will tell you this much: Morel is a person and not a mushroom, and the invention is his, it is not that he is invented.  This is the kind of thing that happens when better translators than I render La Invencion de Morel as something other than Morel’s Invention.

The narrator has escaped from a crime to an island with peculiar tides.  He hides.  Sometimes there are two suns; sometimes, two moons.  Events appear to repeat on the island; perhaps there is some fatal disease there.  At some point, Faustine appears and without ever talking with her, watching her carefully from a distance, he falls in love with her.  It is a love of the idea of a person, a love for an image of a person, a love of a phantom.  It’s not quite real, but it’s very deeply felt.  And Bioys manages to convey this mystification, if it’s fair to call it that, beautifully.

There is more, much more to this.  But it’s just not fair to give it all away.  If you’re going to read the book, try to avoid the Wiki on the book and the one on Bioys (though I’ve linked to them).

The book is only 103 pages long.  You could gobble it up in an afternoon or evening, or you could read it in small bits over a week, as I did.  There is enough going on to ponder that a slow reading can be especially enjoyable.

Adolfo Bioy Casares was born in Buenos Aires, the grandson of a wealthy landowner and dairy processor. His parents were keen alphabet enthusiasts, which explains their choice of his initials “ABC”. He wrote his first story (“Iris y Margarita”) at the age of 11. He was a friend and frequent collaborator of Jorge Luis Borges and wrote many stories with him under the pseudonym of H. Bustos Domecq. He won the Gran Premio de Honor of SADE (the Argentine Society of Writers, 1975), the French Légion d’honneur (1981), the title of Illustrious Citizen of Buenos Aires (1986), and the Premio Miguel de Cervantes.

Enjoy.

If there were one thing I could get everyone to buy, it would be the annual Best American Essays anthology put out by Houghton Mifflin Company.  I’ve been getting them every year since 1992, and they have some of the best writing in the genre of the personal essay you will ever read.

Some of these clips are funny, some serious.  These are essays that, once read, I have never forgotten.

There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit

And it’s filled with people who are filled with shit

And the vermin of the world inhabit it.

But not for long.

This past week I had the great luck to attend an advance screening of Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, now the third (and a half) major incarnation of Sondheim’s 1979 musical, based on a 19th century pulp slasher.  Sweeney is the greatest of all musicals, combining sophisticated music and well-written characters in an almost impenetrably dark moral fog.  

What’s most interesting from our perspective is the way Sweeney Todd grapples with the problem of capitalism, an issue foregrounded in the classic Broadway staging and to some extent in the new film version.  Let’s take a closer look at a few moments that emphasize this critique.

Note: This essay contains spoilers, and plenty of them.  If you don’t want to know what happens in the musical/film, stop reading now.  

Greetings, literature-loving Dharmiacs!  Last week we sailed to ancient Mesopotamia to search for everlasting life with the great king Gilgamesh, and along the way we learned about ancient Sumeria from the venerable Moonbat.  This week we’ll jump forward to 19th century America, where a journalist with a bitter sense of humor is reshaping the horrors of war into brutally incisive portraits of human nature.

Ambrose Bierce: soldier, journalist, war correspondent.  He fought in the most brutal Civil War battles and waged a one-man war against the entrenched interests of Big Railroad in California.  He moved in all levels of society both here and abroad, then disappeared during the Mexican revolution, possibly killed by Pancho Villa’s forces.  He was suspicious of politicians as of human nature in general, and since his death has become synonymous with acidic misanthropy.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the works of this distinctly American writer…