The most memorable sentence in his (also favorable review) is about Latin America, of which he asks: “Where else, after all, has interracial sex been a more important source of national identities?”
This 1992 review is in HAHR. As you can see, even while working a festival and spending the entire morning taking tourists around the swamp, I did not forget to do academic work.
Axé.
Filed under Banes, Juegos, What Is A Scholar?
Pérez Galdós has the inglesa speak Spanish like this:
-¡Oooh!… usted… mi quejarme al coachman… usted reventar me for it.
♦
We have read a novella describing a trip on Madrid’s first ever public tram, which started running in 1871 and was horse drawn. The route began in the barrio of Salamanca, went down Serrano to the Cibeles statue, and continued down on Alcalá. Then it turned into the Puerta del Sol and onto the Calle Mayor, and ends up in Pozas where the Corte Inglés now stands.
Now someone is keeping a blog on Madrid railways, and this is a map of my home barrio in elementary school, Madrid 28013. If I had walked up to Pozas, which was entirely possible, I could have gone to school by that very tram route.
♦
I once had a Cuban meteorologist and cartographer take my class for a general education requirement. He was terrified of literature classes, willing to read the books but too petrified to write a traditional paper — or so he insisted. I had him work on weather imagery, mapping, and the representation of space.
He was as grateful as anyone I have ever seen, and kept shaking my hand with both of his. He believed I was letting him slide, but really I was not. He made a historical reconstruction of the routes Luisito in Miau takes through Madrid, with maps and other illustrations.
Now more than ever one can see I was right, since urban studies and urban cultural studies have become fields — and since it has been decided that literature is a part of a revised version of cultural studies.
Axé.
Filed under Juegos, News, What Is A Scholar?
My friend is going to China and staying in this Shanghai hotel when he lands. It has a sauna and a sun deck but for a place at that level I think the China Mansion looks more beautiful.
I, however, would go to the Qinling Mountains, Pingyao, Zhangjiajie, and Kashgar. I have become extremely interested in this country.
Axé.
1. Tokyo, Japan – 32,450,000
2. Seóul, South Korea – 20,550,000
3. Mexico City, Mexico – 20,450,000
4. New York City, USA – 19,750,000
5. Mumbai, India – 19,200,000
6. Jakarta, Indonesia – 18,900,000
7. Sáo Paulo, Brazil – 18,850,000
8. Delhi, India – 18,680,000
9. Õsaka/Kobe, Japan – 17,350,000
10. Shanghai, China – 16,650,000
11. Manila, Philippines – 16,300,000
12. Los Angeles, USA – 15,250,000
13. Calcutta, India – 15,100,000
14. Moscow, Russian Fed. – 15,000,000
15. Cairo, Egypt – 14,450,000
16. Lagos, Nigeria – 13,488,000
17. Buenos Aires, Argentina – 13,170,000
18. London, United Kingdom – 12,875,000
19. Beijing, China – 12,500,000
20. Karachi, Pakistan – 11,800,000
21. Dhaka, Bangladesh – 10,979,000
22. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – 10,556,000
23. Tianjin, China – 10,239,000
24. Paris, France – 9,638,000
25. Istanbul, Turkey – 9,413,000
26. Lima, Peru – 7,443,000
27. Tehran, Iran – 7,380,000
28. Bangkok, Thailand – 7,221,000
29. Chicago, USA – 6,945,000
30. Bogotá, Colombia – 6,834,000
Also note that according to Ethnologue Spanish is now the second most spoken language in the world and is thus ahead of English. How many of the top ten languages have you studied?
1. Chinese
2. Spanish
3. English
4. Arabic
5. Hindi
6. Bengali
7. Portuguese
8. Russian
9. Japanese
10. German
Look at the rest of the list and see what you think of it. Of the other languages I know or can read French is number 16, Italian 19, Catalan 75, Swedish 88, Danish 118, Norwegian 132, Galician 160. I would like to know more languages well, and read more books also.
Axé.
♦Lisa Cohen’s book. Apparently Esther Murphy’s father scorned the children because they would not be able to repeat his trajectory, having been born at a different time. The family climate was a “miasma of depression and fear of withdrawn favor.” (29)
♦ That entire issue of RQ where Hart’s article on Vallejo as optical illusion (a text I now have open) appeared, contains other articles which will add fuel to the fire of demystification to which I am at present subjecting his person.
In Hart’s piece we are reminded it was Xavier Abril who proposed the syphilis theory of Vallejo’s death, to which Georgette responded with the malarial one (and that I find the most logical). Others have suggested tuberculosis, too, but I do not see how. Hart also suggests that the reason for so much confusion about the birth date is that Vallejo was hiding from Peruvian authorities; this explains why his passport says f.n. 6 VI 1893 and Georgette believes it (he told her it was true). Another major optical illusion are his texts themselves, upon whose edition Georgette had such an influence that we are seeing them through “una neblina Georgettiana.” Hart also suggests that if Vallejo projected himself as mysterious it was because he actually saw himself as a mystery or a ghost. I want to read the other articles.
♦What is the Romantic (and I guess the realist) novel about? Writing that I was able to remember how I was going to answer that question years ago: ORIGINS. I was going to use Marthe Robert’s book, now old, Roman d’origines / Origines du roman. And notice how in her other work, she also tolerates fractured subjectivity and even thinks it is good. Maybe this will help me contest the Doris Sommer thesis or add to it. The thing is that we all behave as though the first interesting thing said on this matter that we know of — Sommer’s — were the last. Is it?
♦Weekend activities of the other members of the art studio: going offshore to finish drilling; deer hunting with modern rifles; deer hunting with “primitive” (19th century) rifles; skeet shooting; church. Yes, I am in a foreign culture.
♦Teaching materials on slavery from the Zinn Project. People here say they had nothing to do with slavery and therefore do not have to think about it.
♦I understand them since do not want to think about academic work, or focus on it directly, because I am afraid I will not be able to control, direct, or sort the faucet of thoughts if I just let it go on. Reeducated ideas must stay out, but they come with writing, and are disabling, so I cannot teach easily, which is a bad thing — and to forestall that, I compromise by writing in secret notebooks. I am about to try to coordinate all the notes and write like a grownup so I am terrified. What if Reeducation comes back? On the other hand, what if I do? Life will be much easier then. Clearly one of the Cameron lessons I need involves “the recovery of a sense of safety.”
♦Scheduling life in Maringouin: more of this is required here than anywhere else I have lived. Where the atmosphere is happier and there is more to do, it is easy to just get up and work. I expect to be able to take breaks to do interesting things whenever I want to but here everything must be heavily planned or what there is, you miss. On the other hand work has to be cancelled on the few days of good weather because there are so few and if you do not take them, you must wait until the following year. I am still not used to this but it is true and it must be taken into account. I will now schedule heavily, especially during vacation, and never deviate, even though I am so naturally organized that that kind of rigidity seems excessive.
Axé.
What rakish things have authors you study done?
I have been looking at new tv programs about Vallejo and Arguedas. These are some very famous Peruvians and I would like to discuss some of their less famous, or less worshipped activities. For instance, what do you think Vallejo’s issue was with all those girlfriends? He kept falling in love, but the relationships filled him with anxiety and he attempted suicide over one of them (Zoila Rosa Cuadra). He may have suffered but at the same time he was quite audacious.
He recovered from the suicide attempt, moved to Lima and dated a colleague’s underage sister in law (Otilia, of Trilce). When she got pregnant, he refused to get married. She went off to the chacra and he never saw the child; there may have been an abortion. People wonder at his feelings of guilt and obsession with orfandad but child abandonment could explain some of this.
There are also the reports Vallejo’s activities in Santiago de Chuco before the act of arson he was imprisoned for allegedly instigating. Armed, he strutted about saying ahora sí que me las van a tener que pagar like a soap opera star. After the incident he hid out, hoping to avoid arrest.
Stephen Hart takes this as an indication of guilt; I do not necessarily, but it was extreme and unusual to carry a pistol. Later in Europe, where he lived on potatoes and I have heard, cats, Vallejo and Larrea apparently bonded over drugs and alcohol as well as poetry.
In the more respectable profile Vallejo was a poor mestizo with a difficult life. He was a hungry witness to greater hunger and had intestinal trouble intermingled with emotional pain, and he was sad over the separation from his mother and the death of God. But there is also evidence to construct him as:
◊ hard drinking
◊ gun toting!
◊ drug abusing
◊ parole violating
◊ child abandoning
◊ possibly guilty of his crime!
◊ heavily neurotic
◊ mentally ill.
He got to Paris in 1923 thanks to Julio Gálvez Orrego (later captured at Madrid and shot by nationalist forces). Soon he met Henriette, whom he threw over for Georgette; they spent her inheritance on a months-long voyage. Why did he leave Henriette for Georgette? people wonder. Because he had a preference for teenagers. This is supposed to be a picture of Henriette at the right, Vallejo of course, and Carlos More.
Don’t you think it is more fun to look at him in this way? The Larrea construction of Vallejo has had even more influence than people realize. Indeed, the whole story has been written by men of a certain stripe and era and it so smacks of it. My not being able to handle Vallejo in all periods has really been an inability to handle Vallejo scholars.
What rakish things have authors you study done?
Axé.
Momo came up with a year-in-review concept: look back at the first post of each month. On this blog it is easier to find the last, so that is what I have done. The record shows that at the end of each of the first five months I was happy with what I had accomplished (even in the irritated February 29 post and the worried one at the end of May, I was right in the swing of work).
At the end of the next three I was anxious about managing the month to come, and at the end of October I was in the midst of things, happy to be getting them done. By the end of November I was harried, and at the end of December I was committing to freedom.
What is the meaning of it? The meaning of it is the difference between life teaching service and skills courses out of field, and life teaching in field.
January: Giving brilliant classes.
February: Tired of people sending messages by attachment instead of in body of mail — especially when the attachment has slow loading graphics and one does not have enough information yet to know if one is interested.
March: Reading very interesting book for research purposes.
April: “Joder, Pete, saludos y viva la revolución, carajo.” Obsessed with the border; had taught Yuri Herrera’s new novel and also met Flaco Jiménez, and presented his show with the Texas Tornados.
May: In Córdoba, Ver., Mexico; thought I had broken this computer and was discovering the existence of a solution: the Plaza de la Tecnología in Mexico City, on the eje Lázaro Cárdenas.
June: In Mexico City; packing to leave for Houston in the morning and wishing I could stay. I was so Mexicanized by that point and so much myself.
July: Concerned about getting things ready for the August onslaught of renters.
August: Concerned about getting things ready for the September onslaught of renters.
September: A classic Z post, on the fear of starting work.
October: Hallowe’en, carving pumpkins and feeling united with happy Hallowe’ens of the past.
November: Another classic Z post, on what one needs to be able to work in peace.
December: My theme song for the year, apparently: woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom.
Axé.
Here is an interesting meme post that I cannibalized into a meme: books and projects that interested you before high school. (The original post is much more specific, since its question is what book or experience made one into an intellectual; here I answer that question and say more things.)
My intellectual question while I was acquiring my first language, English, was on the relationship between language and thought. It appeared to me that the acquisition of language was sharpening my mind in certain specific ways, but that I was also losing contact with an entire sensorial world to which I had once had immediate access. (I believe it is my memory of this access which enables me to acquire systems, languages, cultures, as quickly as I do even now.) In any case my question was Whorfian: did thought precede language, or did language form thought? I wanted to believe the former, but I feared the latter was more true. This is why I wanted to do the Ph.D; it was also an important reason why I wanted to acquire additional languages.
Notice how scientifically oriented I am.
Non children’s authors I read very early on and that made a strong enough impression upon me that they fly immediately into mind are James Baldwin and Erich Fromm. Topics of school projects were the Incas, the Panama Canal, the Russian revolution, witchcraft in the Middle Ages, and African-American literature. That last was my first true research project, since I had to find and read primary texts — some of which were brand new at the time, and some of which were quite old and required minor archival work to find.
My interests have not changed a great deal.
Axé.
Filed under Juegos
Here is an actual picture of the actual hacienda where Isaacs’ novel is set. It is wonderful but also quite uncanny to be able to call it up, just like that.
Axé.
....Sondé miroir, O Legba!....
