Despite the fact that Roberto Bolano always considered himself, first and foremost, a poet, I prefer his fiction (I think most people do). These two poems, however, blew me away.
Godzilla in Mexico
Listen carefully, my son: bombs were falling
over Mexico City
but no one even noticed.
The air carried poison through
the streets and open windows.
You'd just finished eating and were watching
cartoons on TV.
I was reading in the bedroom next door
when I realized we were going to die.
Despite the dizziness and nausea I dragged myself
to the kitchen and found you on the floor.
We hugged. You asked what was happening
and I didn't tell you we were on death's program
but instead that we were going on a journey,
one more, together, and that you shouldn't be afraid.
When it left, death didn't even
close our eyes.
What are we? you asked a week or year later,
ants, bees, wrong numbers
in the big rotten soup of chance?
We're human beings, my son, almost birds,
public heroes and secrets.
The Romantic Dogs
Back then, I'd reached the age of twenty
and I was crazy.
I'd lost a country
but won a dream.
As long as I had that dream
nothing else mattered.
Not working, not praying
not studying in morning light
alongside the romantic dogs.
And the dream lived in the void of my spirit.
A wooden bedroom,
cloaked in half-light,
deep in the lungs of the tropics.
And sometimes I'd retreat inside myself
and visit the dream: a statue eternalized
in liquid thoughts,
a white worm writhing
in love.
A runaway love.
A dream within another dream.
And the nightmare telling me: you will grow up.
You'll leave behind the images of pain and of the labyrinth
and you'll forget.
But back then, growing up would have been a crime.
I'm here, I said, with the romantic dogs
and here I'm going to stay.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
Smaller Than Life - B. R. Myers (about Freedom by Jonathan Franzen)
A friend sent this article to me and I couldn't help posting it (thanks Caleb). Although I haven't read anything by Jonathan Franzen, Myers observations echo many of my sentiments about contemporary fiction in general. You can read the full article here.
Smaller Than Life:
One opens a new novel and is promptly introduced to some dull minor characters. Tiring of them, one skims ahead to meet the leads, only to realize: those minor characters are the leads. A common experience for even the occasional reader of contemporary fiction, it never fails to make the heart sink. The problem is not only one of craft or execution. Characters are now conceived as if the whole point of literature were to create plausible likenesses of the folks next door. They have their little worries, but so what? Do writers really believe that every unhappy family is special? If so, Tolstoy has a lot to answer for—including Freedom, Jonathan Franzen’s latest. A suburban comedy-drama about the relationship between cookie-baking Patty, who describes herself as “relatively dumber” than her siblings; red-faced husband Walter, “whose most salient quality … was his niceness”; and Walter’s womanizing college friend, Richard, who plays in an indie band called Walnut Surprise, the novel is a 576-page monument to insignificance.
Granted, nonentities are people too, and a good storyteller can interest us in just about anybody, as Madame Bovary demonstrates. But although the narrator of Freedom tells us on the first page, “There had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds,” one need read only that the local school “sucked” and that Patty was “very into” her teenage son, who in turn was “fucking” the girl next door, to know that whatever is wrong with these people does not matter. The language a writer uses to create a world is that world, and Franzen’s strenuously contemporary and therefore juvenile language is a world in which nothing important can happen. Madame Bovary’s marriage sucked, Heathcliff was into Catherine: these words fail the context not just because they are of our own time. There is no import in things that “suck,” no drama in someone’s being “into” someone else. As for the F word, Anthony Burgess once criticized the notion that to use it in matter-of-fact prose is to hark back to “a golden age of Anglo-Saxon candour”; the word was taboo from the start, because it stands for brutal or at best impersonal sex. “A man can fuck a whore but, unless his wife is a whore, he cannot fuck his wife … There is no love in it.” A writer like Franzen, who describes two lovers as “fucking,” trivializes their relationship accordingly. The result is boredom.
Franzen does not take his story very seriously, but the irony is indiscriminate and directionless; he hints at no frame of reference from which we are to judge his prose critically. Nor are we to imagine that a fool or semiliterate is addressing us. The same narrator who gives us “sucked” and “very into” also deploys compound adjectives, bursts of journalese, and long if syntactically crude sentences. An idiosyncratic mix? Far from it. We find the same insecure style on The Daily Show and in the blogosphere; we overhear it on the subway. It is the style of all who think highly enough of their own brains to worry about being thought “elitist,” not one of the gang. The reassuring vulgarity follows the flight of pseudo-eloquence as the night the day. Like the rest of these people, Franzen should relax. We don’t need to find a naughty word on every page to know that he is one very regular Joe.
But if Freedom is middlebrow, it is so in the sacrosanct Don DeLillo tradition, which our critical establishment considers central to literature today. The apparent logic is that the novel can lure Americans away from their media and entertainment buffet only by becoming more “social,” broader in scope, more up-to-date in focus. This may be the reason we get such boring characters. Instead of portraying an interesting individual or two, and trusting in realism to embed their story naturally in contemporary life, the Social Writer thinks of all the relevant issues he has to stuff in, then conceives a family “typical” enough to hold everything together. The more aspects of our society he can fit between the book’s covers, the more ambitious he is considered to be.
Every big fat new effort to “develop” the DeLillo model is thus hailed as important even before it is read, as happened with Franzen’s last novel, The Corrections (2001). No doubt the rave reviews for Freedom will evince the same reluctance to quote from the text that we saw then. Reviewers gave that book maximum points for sweep and sprawl while subtracting none for its slovenly prose, the short-windedness of each of its thousand “themes,” and the failure of the main story line to generate any momentum. (These flaws, too, were in the great DeLillo tradition.) There was no overlooking a certain determination to be impressed. I especially liked how the author got a pass for the first chapter, a soporific one even by postmodern standards, because a later line seemed to imply it had been a practical joke.
Not surprisingly, Franzen pushes his luck even further in Freedom. Patty’s memoirs start very early on in the book under the separate title Mistakes Were Made: The Autobiography of Patty Berglundby Patty Berglund. It gets worse. Here, referring to herself in the third person, Patty recalls her delayed reaction to having been raped.
"The indignity was that Ethan had considered her such a nothing that he could just rape her and then take her home. And she was not such a nothing. She was, among other things, already, as a junior, the all-time single-season record holder for assists at Horace Greeley High School. A record she would again demolish the following year! She was also first-team All State in a state that included Brooklyn and the Bronx. And yet a golfing boy she hardly even knew had thought it was OK to rape her."
Are we to chuckle at the adult woman for writing this in seriousness, or is she mocking her younger self, the teenage rape victim? Either way, she is too stupid to merit reading about. Mistakes Were Made is of the same subtlety throughout and can thus be easily summarized. Patty has two men in her life, “the great guy she’d married and the sexy one she hadn’t.” In vain does she yearn for husband Walter to “just bend her over the kitchen table some night and have at her from behind.” (And we wonder why young people would rather read about love in vampire fiction.) Their son, Joey, turns out “in the mold of Richard,” the sexy guy, which is why Patty is so “into” the boy. Everything is described in the most hackneyed terms imaginable. When her children leave home, Patty feels “the emptiness of her nest … now that the kids had flown”; and what should we read about when Richard drops by during Walter’s absence but “banging,” “doing the deed,” “scratching the itch.”
Smaller Than Life:
One opens a new novel and is promptly introduced to some dull minor characters. Tiring of them, one skims ahead to meet the leads, only to realize: those minor characters are the leads. A common experience for even the occasional reader of contemporary fiction, it never fails to make the heart sink. The problem is not only one of craft or execution. Characters are now conceived as if the whole point of literature were to create plausible likenesses of the folks next door. They have their little worries, but so what? Do writers really believe that every unhappy family is special? If so, Tolstoy has a lot to answer for—including Freedom, Jonathan Franzen’s latest. A suburban comedy-drama about the relationship between cookie-baking Patty, who describes herself as “relatively dumber” than her siblings; red-faced husband Walter, “whose most salient quality … was his niceness”; and Walter’s womanizing college friend, Richard, who plays in an indie band called Walnut Surprise, the novel is a 576-page monument to insignificance.
Granted, nonentities are people too, and a good storyteller can interest us in just about anybody, as Madame Bovary demonstrates. But although the narrator of Freedom tells us on the first page, “There had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds,” one need read only that the local school “sucked” and that Patty was “very into” her teenage son, who in turn was “fucking” the girl next door, to know that whatever is wrong with these people does not matter. The language a writer uses to create a world is that world, and Franzen’s strenuously contemporary and therefore juvenile language is a world in which nothing important can happen. Madame Bovary’s marriage sucked, Heathcliff was into Catherine: these words fail the context not just because they are of our own time. There is no import in things that “suck,” no drama in someone’s being “into” someone else. As for the F word, Anthony Burgess once criticized the notion that to use it in matter-of-fact prose is to hark back to “a golden age of Anglo-Saxon candour”; the word was taboo from the start, because it stands for brutal or at best impersonal sex. “A man can fuck a whore but, unless his wife is a whore, he cannot fuck his wife … There is no love in it.” A writer like Franzen, who describes two lovers as “fucking,” trivializes their relationship accordingly. The result is boredom.
Franzen does not take his story very seriously, but the irony is indiscriminate and directionless; he hints at no frame of reference from which we are to judge his prose critically. Nor are we to imagine that a fool or semiliterate is addressing us. The same narrator who gives us “sucked” and “very into” also deploys compound adjectives, bursts of journalese, and long if syntactically crude sentences. An idiosyncratic mix? Far from it. We find the same insecure style on The Daily Show and in the blogosphere; we overhear it on the subway. It is the style of all who think highly enough of their own brains to worry about being thought “elitist,” not one of the gang. The reassuring vulgarity follows the flight of pseudo-eloquence as the night the day. Like the rest of these people, Franzen should relax. We don’t need to find a naughty word on every page to know that he is one very regular Joe.
But if Freedom is middlebrow, it is so in the sacrosanct Don DeLillo tradition, which our critical establishment considers central to literature today. The apparent logic is that the novel can lure Americans away from their media and entertainment buffet only by becoming more “social,” broader in scope, more up-to-date in focus. This may be the reason we get such boring characters. Instead of portraying an interesting individual or two, and trusting in realism to embed their story naturally in contemporary life, the Social Writer thinks of all the relevant issues he has to stuff in, then conceives a family “typical” enough to hold everything together. The more aspects of our society he can fit between the book’s covers, the more ambitious he is considered to be.
Every big fat new effort to “develop” the DeLillo model is thus hailed as important even before it is read, as happened with Franzen’s last novel, The Corrections (2001). No doubt the rave reviews for Freedom will evince the same reluctance to quote from the text that we saw then. Reviewers gave that book maximum points for sweep and sprawl while subtracting none for its slovenly prose, the short-windedness of each of its thousand “themes,” and the failure of the main story line to generate any momentum. (These flaws, too, were in the great DeLillo tradition.) There was no overlooking a certain determination to be impressed. I especially liked how the author got a pass for the first chapter, a soporific one even by postmodern standards, because a later line seemed to imply it had been a practical joke.
Not surprisingly, Franzen pushes his luck even further in Freedom. Patty’s memoirs start very early on in the book under the separate title Mistakes Were Made: The Autobiography of Patty Berglundby Patty Berglund. It gets worse. Here, referring to herself in the third person, Patty recalls her delayed reaction to having been raped.
"The indignity was that Ethan had considered her such a nothing that he could just rape her and then take her home. And she was not such a nothing. She was, among other things, already, as a junior, the all-time single-season record holder for assists at Horace Greeley High School. A record she would again demolish the following year! She was also first-team All State in a state that included Brooklyn and the Bronx. And yet a golfing boy she hardly even knew had thought it was OK to rape her."
Are we to chuckle at the adult woman for writing this in seriousness, or is she mocking her younger self, the teenage rape victim? Either way, she is too stupid to merit reading about. Mistakes Were Made is of the same subtlety throughout and can thus be easily summarized. Patty has two men in her life, “the great guy she’d married and the sexy one she hadn’t.” In vain does she yearn for husband Walter to “just bend her over the kitchen table some night and have at her from behind.” (And we wonder why young people would rather read about love in vampire fiction.) Their son, Joey, turns out “in the mold of Richard,” the sexy guy, which is why Patty is so “into” the boy. Everything is described in the most hackneyed terms imaginable. When her children leave home, Patty feels “the emptiness of her nest … now that the kids had flown”; and what should we read about when Richard drops by during Walter’s absence but “banging,” “doing the deed,” “scratching the itch.”
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Comments on Savage Detectives Passage
I'm sure a lot of you aren't surprised to see this passage here, or if you are it's only because it didn't come sooner. This is one of my favorite passages from a book that has almost single handedly sustained my love of books for the last two years.
I've been thinking about this passage and what I want to say about it for the past week, and trying to articulate what I think about it has highlighted the absurdity of this undertaking. This passage comes from a novel that is 648 pages long and is written in forty-eight different voices. This is a four page segment written by one of those forty-eight narrators. There is no way to extract this small piece from its gargantuan host without losing some of its meaning, so i apologize to anyone who's reading this post and hasn't read The Savage Detectives, because to a certain degree, the electric won't flow unless the circuit is complete.
Nevertheless, I'll continue and I'll do my best to focus on what's here, because I think the passage has many intrinsic qualities that everyone can enjoy. One of the most stunning things about this passage is its pacing. It wasn't until after I read The Savage Detectives that I really started paying attention to the pace of the narrative in my own writing. There is one line in particular that sums it up for me: "And somehow all of us felt incredibly happy, I had forgotten all about Cesar, Maria was looking up at the stars that had miraculously appeared in the sky of Mexico City like holographic projections, and even the way we were walking was graceful, our progress incredibly slow, as if we were advancing and retreating to put off the moment at which we would inevitably have to reach the bus stop, all of us walking and looking up at the sky (Maria was naming the stars)." When I first read this passage, I felt exactly like they did as they walked to the bus stop. The narrative moves incredibly fast in sections and slows almost to a halt in others, to the effect that I, as a reader, felt like I was "advancing and retreating to put off the moment" at which everything came into focus. It was like I was alternately running and stumbling through this book while staring at the heavens.
For example, notice how sentences like - "And this went on for months, three or four months or even nine months, and one day I broke up with him." - accelerate the narrative and race through almost a year as if it were nothing, while sentences like - "and then I don't know why but I was sure he'd get lost and I said wait for me at the metro stop and when I went to meet him I found him sitting on some crates of fruit, leaning against a tree, really, the best place possible. You're lucky, I said. Yes, he said, I'm extremely lucky." - settle into a specific moment that couldn't have taken more than a few seconds. The moments that Bolano chooses to focus on make the passage that much more extraordinary, because they are unexpected. There is no way to anticipate when he will gloss over something and when he'll go into full detail, and as a result, you feel a bit disoriented and intoxicated, because you can't wrap your mind around the story or predict where it is heading - all you can do is live each moment at the mercy of the narrator. Which is what makes the final paragraph so powerful, in my opinion. After more than 100 pages of idealizing Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano and buying into Visceral Realism (even though you're skeptical at first, Bolano and his characters win you over), you're given someone's perspective who sees through it all, and it is not a character that you instinctively dislike: "The whole visceral realism thing was a love letter, the demented strutting of a dumb bird in the moonlight, something essentially cheap and meaningless." Just as you expect everything to come into focus, you're left more disoriented than before.
And then there is the wonderful line: "He told me that he'd like to read some of my poems, he told me that he loved the stars of both hemispheres, north and south, and he asked for my number." It reminds me of a line from a BIGGIE song: "Who they attractin' with that line, 'What's your name what's your sign.' Soon as he buy that wine I just creep up from behind and ask what your interests are." I almost feel like I should find it cheesy, but for some reason I don't. Somehow, something that in any other context would be trite, here, is beautiful. How does he do it?
I've been thinking about this passage and what I want to say about it for the past week, and trying to articulate what I think about it has highlighted the absurdity of this undertaking. This passage comes from a novel that is 648 pages long and is written in forty-eight different voices. This is a four page segment written by one of those forty-eight narrators. There is no way to extract this small piece from its gargantuan host without losing some of its meaning, so i apologize to anyone who's reading this post and hasn't read The Savage Detectives, because to a certain degree, the electric won't flow unless the circuit is complete.
Nevertheless, I'll continue and I'll do my best to focus on what's here, because I think the passage has many intrinsic qualities that everyone can enjoy. One of the most stunning things about this passage is its pacing. It wasn't until after I read The Savage Detectives that I really started paying attention to the pace of the narrative in my own writing. There is one line in particular that sums it up for me: "And somehow all of us felt incredibly happy, I had forgotten all about Cesar, Maria was looking up at the stars that had miraculously appeared in the sky of Mexico City like holographic projections, and even the way we were walking was graceful, our progress incredibly slow, as if we were advancing and retreating to put off the moment at which we would inevitably have to reach the bus stop, all of us walking and looking up at the sky (Maria was naming the stars)." When I first read this passage, I felt exactly like they did as they walked to the bus stop. The narrative moves incredibly fast in sections and slows almost to a halt in others, to the effect that I, as a reader, felt like I was "advancing and retreating to put off the moment" at which everything came into focus. It was like I was alternately running and stumbling through this book while staring at the heavens.
For example, notice how sentences like - "And this went on for months, three or four months or even nine months, and one day I broke up with him." - accelerate the narrative and race through almost a year as if it were nothing, while sentences like - "and then I don't know why but I was sure he'd get lost and I said wait for me at the metro stop and when I went to meet him I found him sitting on some crates of fruit, leaning against a tree, really, the best place possible. You're lucky, I said. Yes, he said, I'm extremely lucky." - settle into a specific moment that couldn't have taken more than a few seconds. The moments that Bolano chooses to focus on make the passage that much more extraordinary, because they are unexpected. There is no way to anticipate when he will gloss over something and when he'll go into full detail, and as a result, you feel a bit disoriented and intoxicated, because you can't wrap your mind around the story or predict where it is heading - all you can do is live each moment at the mercy of the narrator. Which is what makes the final paragraph so powerful, in my opinion. After more than 100 pages of idealizing Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano and buying into Visceral Realism (even though you're skeptical at first, Bolano and his characters win you over), you're given someone's perspective who sees through it all, and it is not a character that you instinctively dislike: "The whole visceral realism thing was a love letter, the demented strutting of a dumb bird in the moonlight, something essentially cheap and meaningless." Just as you expect everything to come into focus, you're left more disoriented than before.
And then there is the wonderful line: "He told me that he'd like to read some of my poems, he told me that he loved the stars of both hemispheres, north and south, and he asked for my number." It reminds me of a line from a BIGGIE song: "Who they attractin' with that line, 'What's your name what's your sign.' Soon as he buy that wine I just creep up from behind and ask what your interests are." I almost feel like I should find it cheesy, but for some reason I don't. Somehow, something that in any other context would be trite, here, is beautiful. How does he do it?
Thursday, September 2, 2010
The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano
(Background: The Savage Detectives loosely revolves around two poets, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, from Mexico City who start a literary movement called Visceral Realism. The book is split into two parts. The first part is comprised of journal entries by a third young poet, Juan Garcia Madero, who gets swept up in the Visceral Realist movement, and the second part is a series of anecdotes told by dozens of different narrators that relate to the two protagonists in varying degrees. This passage is from the second part, and the narrator and many of the characters mentioned in the passage are unfamiliar to the reader.)
Laura Jauregui, Tlalpan, Mexico City DF, January 1976. Before I met him I was dating Cesar, Cesar Arriago, and I was introduced to Cesar in the poetry workshop at the Torre De Rectoria at UNAM. That was where I met Maria Font and Rafael Barrios. That's also where I met Ulises Lima. His name wasn't Ulises Lima back then, or I don't know, maybe it already was but we called him by his real name, Alfredo something or other, and I met Cesar too and we fell in love or we thought we'd fallen in love and the two of us wrote poems for Ulises Lima's magazine. This was at the end of 1973, I can't say exactly when. It was at a time when it was raining a lot, I remember, because we were always coming in wet to meetings. And then we put together the magazine, Lee Harvey Oswald, what a name, at the architecture studio where Maria's father worked. Those were gorgeous afternoons, we would drink wine and one of us always brought sandwiches, Sofia or Maria or I. The boys never brought anything, although actually they did, at first they did, but then the ones who brought things, the politer ones, quit the magazine, or at least stopped coming to the meetings, and then Pancho Rodriguez showed up and everything was spoiled, at least as far as I was concerned, but I kept working on the magazine, or anyway I still hung around in that crowd, mostly because Cesar was part of it and mostly because I liked Maria and Sofia (I was never friends with Angelica, not real friends), not because I wanted my poems to be published, none were published in the first issue, though there was supposed to be a poem of mine in the second issue, "Lilith" it was called, but in the end I don't know what happened and it wasn't published after all. It was Cesar who had a poem in Lee Harvey Oswald, a poem called "Laura and Cesar," very sweet, but Ulises changed the title (or convinced Cesar to change it) and in the end it was called "Laura & Cesar." That was the kind of thing Ulises Lima did.
but anyway, first I met Cesar, and Laura & Cesar started dating, or something like that. Poor Cesar. He had light brown hair and he was tall. He lived with his grandmother (his parents lived in Michoacan) and I had my first adult sexual experiences with him. Or actually, my last adolescent sexual experiences. Or second to last, now that I think about it. We would go to the movies and a few times we went to the theater. It was around then that I enrolled at the dance school and sometimes Cesar would go there with me. The rest of the time we spent taking long walks, talking about books we were reading, and doing nothing together. And this went on for months, three or four months or even nine months, and one day I broke up with him. That I know for sure, I was the one who told him it was over, although I can't remember exactly why, and I remember that Cesar took it very well, he agreed that I was right, he was in his second year of medical school then and I had just started at the university, studying literature. That afternoon I didn't go to class, went to Maria's house, I had to talk to a friend, I mean in person, not on the phone, and when I got to Colima, to Maria's house, the gate was open and that surprised me a little, because it was always closed, Maria's mother was paranoid about it, and I went in and rang the bell and the door opened and a guy I'd never seen before asked me who I was looking for. It was Arturo Belano. He was twenty-one then, skinny and long-haired, and he wore classes, horrible glasses, although his eyes weren't especially bad, he was just a little bit nearsighted, but the glasses were still horrible. We only exchanged a few words. He was with Maria and a poet called Anibal who was crazy about Maria back then, but they were on their way out when I got there.
That same day I saw him again. I spent all afternoon talking to Maria and then we went downtown to buy a scarf, I think, and we kept talking (first about Cesar & Laura, then about everything in existence) and we ended up having cappuccinos at Cafe Quito, where Maria was supposed to meet Anibal. And Arturo showed up around nine. This time he was with a seventeen-year-old Chilean called Felipe Muller, his best friend, a tall blond kid who almost never spoke and followed Arturo everywhere. And they sat down with us, of course. And then other poets turned up, poets a little older than Arturo, none of them visceral realists, among other reasons because visceral realism didn't exist yet, poets like Anibal who had been friends with Arturo before he left for Chile and so had known him since he was seventeen. They were actually journalists and government officials, the kind of sad people who never leave downtown, or certain downtown neighborhoods, sovereigns of sadness in the area bounded by Avenida Chapultepec, to the south, and Reforma, to the north, staffers at El Nacional, proofreaders at the Excelsior, pencil pushers at the Secretaria de Gobernacion who headed to Bucareli when they left work and sent out their tentacles or their little green slips. And even though, as I say, they were sad, that night we laughed a lot. In fact we never stopped laughing. And then we went walking to the bus stop, Maria, Anibal, Felipe Muller, Gonzalo Muller (Felipe's brother who was leaving Mexico soon), Arturo, and I. And somehow all of us fel incredibly happy, I had forgotten all about Cesar, Maria was looking up at the stars that had miraculously appeared in the sky of Mexico City like holographic projections, and even the way we were walking was graceful, our progress incredibly slow, as if we were advancing and retreating to put off the moment at which we would inevitably have to reach the bus stop, all of us walking and looking up at the sky (Maria was naming the stars). Much later Arturo told me that he hadn't been looking at the stars but at the lights in some apartments, tiny rooftop apartments on Calle Versalles or Lucerna or Calle Londres, and that was the moment he realized that nothing would make him happier than being with me in one of those apartents, eating a few sandwiches with sour cream from a certain street stall on Bucareli. But he didn't tell me that at the time (I would've thought he was crazy). He told me that he'd like to read some of my poems, he told me that he loved the stars of both hemispheres, north and south, and he asked for my number.
I gave him my number and the next day he called me. And we made a date to meet, but not downtown, I told him I couldn't leave Tlalpan, where I lived, that I had to study and, he said perfect, I'll come visit you, that way I'll get to see Tlalpan, and I said that there was nothing to see, you'll have to take the metro and then a bus and then another bus, and then I don't know why but I was sure he'd get lost and I said wait for me at the metro stop and when I went to meet him I found him sitting on some crates of fruit, leaning against a tree, really, the best place possible. You're lucky, I said. Yes, he said, I'm extremely lucky. And that afernoon he talked to me about Chile, I don't know whether it was because he wanted to or because I asked him about it, although the things he said were mostly incoherent, and he also talked about Guatemala and El Salvador, he'd been all over Latin America, or at least to every country along the Pacific coast, and we kissed for the first time, and then we were together for several months and we moved in together and then what happened happened, or in other words we broke up and I went back to living at my mother's house and I began to study biology (I hope to be a good biologist someday, I want to specialize in biogenetics), and strange things started to happen to Arturo. That was when visceral realism was born. At first we all thought it was a joke, but then we realized it wasn't. And when we realized it wasn't a joke, some of us went along with him and became visceral realists, out of inertia, I think, or because it was so crazy that it seemed plausible, or for the sake of friendship, so as not to lose a whole circle of friends, but deep down no one took it seriously. Not deep down.
At the time I was beginning to make new friends at the university and I saw Arturo and his friends less and less. I think the only one I called or went out with occasionally was Maria, but even my friendship with Maria began to cool. Still, I always more or less kept track of what Arturo was doing, and I though: of all the stupid things to come up with, how can he believe this junk, and suddenly, one night when I couldn't sleep, it occurred to me that it was all a message for me. It was a way of saying don't leave me, see what I'm capable of, stay with me. And then I realized that deep down the guy was a creep. Because it's one thing to fool yourself and another thing entirely to fool everybody else. The whole visceral realism thing was a love letter, the demented strutting of a dumb bird in the moonlight, something essentially cheap and meaningless.
But that wasn't what I meant to say.
Laura Jauregui, Tlalpan, Mexico City DF, January 1976. Before I met him I was dating Cesar, Cesar Arriago, and I was introduced to Cesar in the poetry workshop at the Torre De Rectoria at UNAM. That was where I met Maria Font and Rafael Barrios. That's also where I met Ulises Lima. His name wasn't Ulises Lima back then, or I don't know, maybe it already was but we called him by his real name, Alfredo something or other, and I met Cesar too and we fell in love or we thought we'd fallen in love and the two of us wrote poems for Ulises Lima's magazine. This was at the end of 1973, I can't say exactly when. It was at a time when it was raining a lot, I remember, because we were always coming in wet to meetings. And then we put together the magazine, Lee Harvey Oswald, what a name, at the architecture studio where Maria's father worked. Those were gorgeous afternoons, we would drink wine and one of us always brought sandwiches, Sofia or Maria or I. The boys never brought anything, although actually they did, at first they did, but then the ones who brought things, the politer ones, quit the magazine, or at least stopped coming to the meetings, and then Pancho Rodriguez showed up and everything was spoiled, at least as far as I was concerned, but I kept working on the magazine, or anyway I still hung around in that crowd, mostly because Cesar was part of it and mostly because I liked Maria and Sofia (I was never friends with Angelica, not real friends), not because I wanted my poems to be published, none were published in the first issue, though there was supposed to be a poem of mine in the second issue, "Lilith" it was called, but in the end I don't know what happened and it wasn't published after all. It was Cesar who had a poem in Lee Harvey Oswald, a poem called "Laura and Cesar," very sweet, but Ulises changed the title (or convinced Cesar to change it) and in the end it was called "Laura & Cesar." That was the kind of thing Ulises Lima did.
but anyway, first I met Cesar, and Laura & Cesar started dating, or something like that. Poor Cesar. He had light brown hair and he was tall. He lived with his grandmother (his parents lived in Michoacan) and I had my first adult sexual experiences with him. Or actually, my last adolescent sexual experiences. Or second to last, now that I think about it. We would go to the movies and a few times we went to the theater. It was around then that I enrolled at the dance school and sometimes Cesar would go there with me. The rest of the time we spent taking long walks, talking about books we were reading, and doing nothing together. And this went on for months, three or four months or even nine months, and one day I broke up with him. That I know for sure, I was the one who told him it was over, although I can't remember exactly why, and I remember that Cesar took it very well, he agreed that I was right, he was in his second year of medical school then and I had just started at the university, studying literature. That afternoon I didn't go to class, went to Maria's house, I had to talk to a friend, I mean in person, not on the phone, and when I got to Colima, to Maria's house, the gate was open and that surprised me a little, because it was always closed, Maria's mother was paranoid about it, and I went in and rang the bell and the door opened and a guy I'd never seen before asked me who I was looking for. It was Arturo Belano. He was twenty-one then, skinny and long-haired, and he wore classes, horrible glasses, although his eyes weren't especially bad, he was just a little bit nearsighted, but the glasses were still horrible. We only exchanged a few words. He was with Maria and a poet called Anibal who was crazy about Maria back then, but they were on their way out when I got there.
That same day I saw him again. I spent all afternoon talking to Maria and then we went downtown to buy a scarf, I think, and we kept talking (first about Cesar & Laura, then about everything in existence) and we ended up having cappuccinos at Cafe Quito, where Maria was supposed to meet Anibal. And Arturo showed up around nine. This time he was with a seventeen-year-old Chilean called Felipe Muller, his best friend, a tall blond kid who almost never spoke and followed Arturo everywhere. And they sat down with us, of course. And then other poets turned up, poets a little older than Arturo, none of them visceral realists, among other reasons because visceral realism didn't exist yet, poets like Anibal who had been friends with Arturo before he left for Chile and so had known him since he was seventeen. They were actually journalists and government officials, the kind of sad people who never leave downtown, or certain downtown neighborhoods, sovereigns of sadness in the area bounded by Avenida Chapultepec, to the south, and Reforma, to the north, staffers at El Nacional, proofreaders at the Excelsior, pencil pushers at the Secretaria de Gobernacion who headed to Bucareli when they left work and sent out their tentacles or their little green slips. And even though, as I say, they were sad, that night we laughed a lot. In fact we never stopped laughing. And then we went walking to the bus stop, Maria, Anibal, Felipe Muller, Gonzalo Muller (Felipe's brother who was leaving Mexico soon), Arturo, and I. And somehow all of us fel incredibly happy, I had forgotten all about Cesar, Maria was looking up at the stars that had miraculously appeared in the sky of Mexico City like holographic projections, and even the way we were walking was graceful, our progress incredibly slow, as if we were advancing and retreating to put off the moment at which we would inevitably have to reach the bus stop, all of us walking and looking up at the sky (Maria was naming the stars). Much later Arturo told me that he hadn't been looking at the stars but at the lights in some apartments, tiny rooftop apartments on Calle Versalles or Lucerna or Calle Londres, and that was the moment he realized that nothing would make him happier than being with me in one of those apartents, eating a few sandwiches with sour cream from a certain street stall on Bucareli. But he didn't tell me that at the time (I would've thought he was crazy). He told me that he'd like to read some of my poems, he told me that he loved the stars of both hemispheres, north and south, and he asked for my number.
I gave him my number and the next day he called me. And we made a date to meet, but not downtown, I told him I couldn't leave Tlalpan, where I lived, that I had to study and, he said perfect, I'll come visit you, that way I'll get to see Tlalpan, and I said that there was nothing to see, you'll have to take the metro and then a bus and then another bus, and then I don't know why but I was sure he'd get lost and I said wait for me at the metro stop and when I went to meet him I found him sitting on some crates of fruit, leaning against a tree, really, the best place possible. You're lucky, I said. Yes, he said, I'm extremely lucky. And that afernoon he talked to me about Chile, I don't know whether it was because he wanted to or because I asked him about it, although the things he said were mostly incoherent, and he also talked about Guatemala and El Salvador, he'd been all over Latin America, or at least to every country along the Pacific coast, and we kissed for the first time, and then we were together for several months and we moved in together and then what happened happened, or in other words we broke up and I went back to living at my mother's house and I began to study biology (I hope to be a good biologist someday, I want to specialize in biogenetics), and strange things started to happen to Arturo. That was when visceral realism was born. At first we all thought it was a joke, but then we realized it wasn't. And when we realized it wasn't a joke, some of us went along with him and became visceral realists, out of inertia, I think, or because it was so crazy that it seemed plausible, or for the sake of friendship, so as not to lose a whole circle of friends, but deep down no one took it seriously. Not deep down.
At the time I was beginning to make new friends at the university and I saw Arturo and his friends less and less. I think the only one I called or went out with occasionally was Maria, but even my friendship with Maria began to cool. Still, I always more or less kept track of what Arturo was doing, and I though: of all the stupid things to come up with, how can he believe this junk, and suddenly, one night when I couldn't sleep, it occurred to me that it was all a message for me. It was a way of saying don't leave me, see what I'm capable of, stay with me. And then I realized that deep down the guy was a creep. Because it's one thing to fool yourself and another thing entirely to fool everybody else. The whole visceral realism thing was a love letter, the demented strutting of a dumb bird in the moonlight, something essentially cheap and meaningless.
But that wasn't what I meant to say.
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