translated by Carys Evans-Corrales

“What’s wrong here is that we don’t know how to sell ourselves,” your fellow tenants would always complain. But when that guy who really had a handle on it moved into Apartment B, fifth floor, the whole building soon began to stone him from their little balconies.

A cowering disc. Appropriating hens. If all of our imaginary fades away, where then are the organs with which we forget?

To raise, it took multitudes; to demolish: just a handful of folks.

*

PRETENDING THAT THE PAIN SHE FEELS IS PAIN

My looks suggest I like things that I do not.

Everyone speaks through closed lips.

As does this. The walls of a grotto where, ten thousand years ago, someone sullies the natural essence of the stone. Coins, alternating current, a girl born with beauty in her genes, pock-marked by hang-ups. Like an orgasm in Hedy Lamarr, like Nikola Tesla’s eyes. A country where one needn’t be, but can merely appear ... Read More »]]>

translated by Carys Evans-Corrales

“What’s wrong here is that we don’t know
how to sell ourselves,” your fellow tenants
would always complain.
But when that guy who really had a handle on it
moved into Apartment B, fifth floor,
the whole building soon began to stone him from their little
balconies.

A cowering disc. Appropriating hens.
If all of our imaginary fades away, where then
are the organs with which we forget?

To raise, it took multitudes;
to demolish: just a handful of folks.

*

PRETENDING THAT THE PAIN SHE FEELS IS PAIN

My looks suggest I like
things that I do not.

Everyone speaks through
closed lips.

As does this.
The walls of a grotto where, ten thousand years ago,
someone sullies the natural essence of the stone.
Coins, alternating current,
a girl born with beauty in her genes,
pock-marked by hang-ups.
Like an orgasm in Hedy Lamarr, like Nikola Tesla’s eyes.
A country where one needn’t be,
but can merely
appear to.
A peeling away of gloves,
a touch of spice, the most prestigious
of all dubbing schools.

Capital is the nightmare
of being caught in our symbolic capacity.
The most flattering of all: mortuary makeup.
Years of work turned into equestrian granite.
An industry of poverty, wolfram in kitchen gardens.
Like an ardent body, aware but
feigning innocence.
Cheap false eyelashes, an image
identical to itself.

Like political poetry confused
with a selfie in the bathroom mirror.
The metonymy of evil.
The normative wrenched.
A set stage, a menu, an emergency escape from the fires of discourse.
Something whose roots stretch out to the air and longs
to return to the soil, once time
has elapsed since it burst into light—
like the eyes in potatoes.

The poem’s gaze is like this too:
worker ants in single file,
flattened forever
in timeless lines,

shreds of gestures
that look like
something else.

*  *
Read this in Galician
*  *

 Image: “Evita” by Grillo Demo, courtesy of miau miau

by Reinaldo Laddaga translation by Jane Brodie

Ana Longoni put it so well that I will just copy a passage from her introduction to essays by Roberto Jacoby and other documents related to his work collected in an indispensable book published on the occasion of El deseo nace del derrumbe,the Roberto Jacoby retrospective held a few years ago at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. It says:

It’s not easy to come up with even one “avant-garde scene” in Argentine art since the sixties that did not have him at the forefront. RJ has been at the heart (or in the brain?) of countless milestones (many of them now mythical) of Argentine culture and art from the last half century. The list is impressive: in 1966, the Arte de los Medios group, now recognized internationally as ... Read More »]]>

by Reinaldo Laddaga
translation by Jane Brodie

Ana Longoni put it so well that I will just copy a passage from her introduction to essays by Roberto Jacoby and other documents related to his work collected in an indispensable book published on the occasion of El deseo nace del derrumbe,the Roberto Jacoby retrospective held a few years ago at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. It says:

It’s not easy to come up with even one “avant-garde scene” in Argentine art since the sixties that did not have him at the forefront. RJ has been at the heart (or in the brain?) of countless milestones (many of them now mythical) of Argentine culture and art from the last half century. The list is impressive: in 1966, the Arte de los Medios group, now recognized internationally as the beginning of what is called “global conceptualism”; in 1967, Be at Beat Beatles, an event that took place at the Instituto Di Tella where a number of founders of the Argentine rock music movement met; in 1968, Tucumán Arde, a collective action carried out by the Argentine avant-garde in conjunction with the largest nationwide union organization; in 1969, the anti-magazine Sobre, an experiment in agitation and propaganda in times of repression; in 1969, CICSO (Centro de Investigaciones en Ciencias Sociales), a group of Marxist sociologists researching the Cordobazo¹ and growing political violence; in the early 70s, the cultural supplement to the newspaper La Opinión (where RJ worked with Juan Gelman, Enrique Raab, Paco Urondo, and other important writers) and the newspaper Nuevo Hombre, which—after its first director, Silvio Frondizi, was murdered by para-police forces—was produced largely in hiding; in the 80s, the legendary pop-rock band Virus until its leader and singer, Federico Moura, died of AIDS, and the cultural movement that began with the Body Art festival, and the Club Eros nomad parties; in the 90s, the group of artists connected to the Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas; starting in the late 90s, a number of different micro-societies and networks of artists and non-artists, beginning with Bola de Nieve, followed by Chacra99 the following summer , gaining strength with Proyecto Venus from 2001 to 2006, continuing with 101 issues of the magazine ramona² published over the course of ten years, and now the Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas, an artist-run platform for education and debate that is planning to open a center in the Centro Penitenciario de Devoto (the largest jail in the city of Buenos Aires); participation in the Argentine Brigade for Dilma, thirty-some artists and intellectuals who took a position on the Brazilian elections at the 2010 São Paulo Biennial …

All of that: art, music, politics, sociology. And all of it together in a perfectly original constellation always joined by the determination to interrogate, in specific conditions, a certain time and place and its workings, ways of living and experiencing together, zones of light and darkness that come into being when mutable individuals cross paths. Making connections visible and, by making them visible, giving them forms that we would not have been able to anticipate otherwise: that passion runs through the constellation of activities that Roberto Jacoby has persistently undertaken. That’s why it would make little sense to talk about his “work” as if it could be separated from the universe of connections that makes up the trajectory of his experience. This conversation in no way attempts to do that.

Roberto was recently visiting New York with Kiwi Sainz, who has been his constant collaborator for decades. The conversation took place at my house after a hilarious lunch.

Reinaldo Laddaga – Not long ago, Roberto, I was reading your book, and I noticed something that comes up time and again in your interviews and texts: the defense of what you call “the strategy of joy.” You often present that strategy as a response to a certain Argentine reality that you describe as problematic, traumatic, dark. The book made me think of a poem by Borges where, speaking of his relationship to Buenos Aires, he says, “we are not joined by love, but fear.” Your work is so deeply bound to Argentina… Is there an element of fear in that connection?

Roberto Jacoby – Maybe… Yes, that’s right! Though, at least consciously, it is more related to complaining than to fear, those words that you hear from the time you are a kid: “You can’t get anywhere here,”“What are you going to do that for if they’re not going to let you?,”“No one’s going to notice.” I think I’m responding more to that tango-like vision of things. Of course, there was no lack of fear, quite the contrary. And in the early eighties, in connection to Virus, the strategy of joy was directly tied to a superabundance of fear. At that time, I first understood how wonderful it was that there were people dancing and making such joyous music in a basement in the San Telmo section of the city at eleven at night—of course, I mean the San Telmo of back then, not today’s San Telmo. I realized that that’s infectious… It’s like when it’s really hot out and you go somewhere cool and stay for a while, and then when you leave that cool feeling stays with you for a bit. Joy keeps you going when you are in situations steeped in terror, which we had been in, right? The entire population was immersed in terror. I started to realize that joy was political, that making music, singing and dancing were political. At that time, I was working on a very long essay, a research project that I did not finish until 85, and I read some texts that confirmed that idea. One text by Canetti, for example, says that, to his mind, there is nothing more absurd than being in a concert hall: people sitting there, lined up in rows and columns, as if tied to their seats, listening to music even though there is nothing more alien to music than forcing the body to stay still. Music is actually a product of the body and, at the same time, the body moves to the rhythm of music. In Virus’s second album, the idea of not being seated while listening was very explicit, even though what was called “rock” in Argentina was listened to sitting down, like at a classical music concert. So we went against that tendency. What we set out to do at that time was get rid of the seats.

RL – I always have the impression that the reconstruction of the Argentine cultural scene of the late seventies and early eighties is not very precise, especially in the United States. It does not really seem to reflect just how rich what was going on then really was. In the seventies you left the art scene, to a certain extent, and when you came back in the eighties you—unlike most of the people who had come back to the visual arts—were not painting. What led to you to return to art?

RJ – When I left the visual art scene in 68 or 69, I started doing social research, working on conflict theory. My turn away from art was pretty radical. I felt that the art scene had run its course and there was nothing else to do there. It wasn’t limited to a feeling that “such and such an institution, the Di Tella, for instance, is a mess,” or “exhibitions are being censored, so…” Even if there had been no censorship, even if the Di Tella had been at its peak, it was all over as far as I was concerned.

RL – Did you believe art had lost its ability to make a greater cultural impact?

RJ – Partly yes, but it was also worn out intellectually. I had the feeling that we had reached the limits of what could be thought. In the group I was in with Masotta,³ the media group, we had reached a sort of maximum degree of abstraction. On the one hand, I felt that Pop art and Conceptualism, as well as media art, no longer had much to say. On the other, the political situation compelled me to work in that area. I didn’t feel the impulse to join the armed struggle or to be a radical working in the community, but to be a researcher. I decided to get involved in the Center for Research in the Social Sciences, which was supposedly going to help bring about a closer relationship between action and knowledge. But you’re right: there is still no research that really grasps the richness and complexity of what was going on in those years, and even during the dictatorship, right? More has been done about what happened towards the end of the dictatorship. More has been said about Teatro Abierto,⁴ for instance.

RL – There is, outside Argentina, a somewhat caricature-like image of what social and cultural life was like under the dictatorship, one that has little to do with the cultural reality of the country at that time, as is evidenced by everything that surfaced with the return to democracy. It was at that time that you got involved in the pop music scene, and from then on your connection to pop music has been very close. You circulate in the space between pop music and the visual arts. I don’t remember if you were a regular at Café Einstein⁵ in those years.

RJ – I was…

RL – Because the house band at Café Einstein was Sumo,⁶ right?

RJ – Yes, but Sumo was just one of the bands that played there. All kinds of things went on at Einstein. The stuff that Chabán was doing, the performances, Daniel Melero, Vivi Tellas… all that satirical stuff. It was not strictly rock.

RL – And, surprisingly, I think the underlying sensibility of that time still makes itself felt on the Argentine cultural scene. I don’t know if you have the sense as well that, in terms of strategy and sensibility, there is a very strong and unbroken connection between what was going on in the underground cultural scene of the early eighties and what’s going on now. I think there is continuity between, let’s say, Café Einstein and Belleza y Felicidad⁷ in the nineties.

RJ – I would say it’s more a question of affinity than of continuity: people working today see themselves in Belleza, and Belleza saw itself in Rojas,⁸ and Rojas saw itself in Einstein, and so on. A sort of relay race, where the legacy is passed from one runner to the next.

RL – What, in your view, have been the most powerful moments, the turning points, the moments of greatest cultural upheaval, in Argentina in recent decades? Because your interventions, the way you come in and out of the public scene, always seem tied to a strategic vision: it’s as if when you sense that something special is going on you get involved.

RJ – From the outside, it seems a bit more rational than it really is. It’s always a question of groups of friends, actually. We mentioned the return to democracy. And later—from 89 to 1993 or 94, more or less—it was Rojas, with Pablo Suárez, Gordín, Harte, people that I knew from elsewhere (not from Rojas). (I met Pablo, of course, in the sixties, and he was the person most important to getting me involved in the visual arts). But it’s really a question of affinity, friendships that pull people together. I wasn’t a big part of Rojas, for instance. I may have participated in two shows there, that’s it.

Anyway, I think that whole scene came to an end in 94, more or less. That goes for the nightclubs as well.

KS - Maybe the end was the show “Algunos artistas”⁹… which was in 94, right? No, in 1992. The enshrinement of Rojas at Recoleta…

RJ – The Age of Communication closed in 1993 or 94 as well. That was the nightclub that hung on after all the others (Morocco, for example) had become really commercial. It was run by Juan Calcarami, and his group had a more mystical vibe. It was a place for artists. Whether or not an institution or organization is run by artists has a huge impact on what it’s like. That’s been proven time and again, right? A bar run by Sergio De Loof is not the same as a bar run by some bartender. Anything and everything happened at Juan Calcarami’s club: there were even places to sleep, hanging gardens, a library area, and an area where designer clothing was sold…

It closed and there was a hiatus… The cultural scene moved elsewhere. Or it lost steam, in a way, or survived but ceased to be very interesting. Nothing new was happening. Rojas closed and many of the artists who had shown there went on to show at private galleries.

RJ – What did emerge at that time, in around 96, was HIJOS,¹⁰ and I think that was one of the milestones in the cultural scene. Because of their age at the time (they were around twenty), HIJOS began to effect an enormous change in the politics of daily life compared to Madres and Abuelas.¹¹ One of the most obvious things is their relationship with homosexuality and transvestites. If you introduced Hebe de Bonafini¹² or Carlotto¹³ to a transvestite in the eighties, they would have been horrified. HIJOS started to make things happen; they would get together at someone’s house and smoke pot, do everything that young people do. And that led human rights organizations and the most progressive political parties to accept a cultural change or revolution and that, I think, was very important. New groups of radical or activist artists began to emerge between 96 and 2000, until 2004, 2005, when they faced a crisis of institutionalization as well. Those groups started getting invited all over the place, to the Venice Biennale and so forth, and they ended up confused and began fighting amongst themselves, which is nothing new (that’s what always happens). Meanwhile, in the late nineties, another movement began which revolved around Fernanda Laguna and Cecilia Pavón, and their venue Belleza y Felicidad.

RL – Did you work with Fernanda Laguna and Cecilia Pavón when they were starting Belleza y Felicidad?

RJ – No, when they were putting Belleza y Felicidad together (November or December of 99, I mean, of 98) I was working on Bola de Nieve¹⁴ and Chacra 99, an artists’ residency. I was not a friend of Fernanda’s, I didn’t invite her to the residency because I didn’t know her. I did know Pablo Peréz, though, who was friends with Fernanda, and he was at Chacra 99. Another cluster of intercrossing artistic energies formed there. Some people had been around for a while, but there were a great many new people as well.

RL – There was no single nightclub or bar associated with the underground scene at that time, the way Bolivia had been, was there? Am I right that the scene that took shape in 99 was not associated with nightlife the way earlier scenes had been?

KS – That change took place around the world. There were more parties at people’s houses. Belleza was a place where DJs would get together, Panasonic played there. During the day or early in the evening, the dance club would be in the gallery then, later, you would go to clubs. Or sometimes take over places.

You didn’t have to wait until night fell for the party to begin.

RL – And in what exact year did Proyecto Venus¹⁵ begin?

RJ –In 2001, we began something called Plácidos Domingos. There were twelve Plácidos Domingos, which were supposed to be a sort of intellectual and theoretical preparation for what would become Proyecto Venus. I think it was in August 2001 that we started with the computer part, which was a real mess. At that time, computer technology was a lot of trouble… But we found great people who could handle it… We set up at my house. After a while, I had to move.

RL – And your apartment became Fundación START (Sociedad, Tecnología y Arte).¹⁶

RJ – It became Fundación START and housed the office, people, programmers. The Proyecto Venus website (initially www.proyectovenus.org and later www.proyectov.org) was more or less ready to go in March. The bills had been printed, and so the currency was launched in March as well. Everything that had happened on December 19 and 20, 2001¹⁷ was still very fresh. I had an idea about how to generate more interest in joining the project: I found a place where I could buy pretty good wine really cheap, and so I bought two hundred bottles (we kept them under the stage at START); I also got 750 grams of pot that we sold in the Venus currency. That was like the gold standard [laughter]; they say there always has to be something to back up a currency. What backs up money? In our case, it was wine and pot, convertible currency [laughter]… If at a certain point you wanted to change in your bills, you could go and buy some pot.

RJ – The myth was so powerful that years later people would ask me if I could get them some pot [laughter]. “No, that was just for the first two months.” A fairly bizarre economy materialized around a currency with backing, which is unheard of: no currency is backed by anything at all.

RL – So the late nineties, early 2000s, was another powerful moment, another juncture where energies converged.

RJ - Argentina had never been so good.

RJ –The year 2001, when the country seemed to be falling apart, was one of the most interesting moments.

The strange thing is it began in the art world, right? I mean, the things we were doing did not begin in 2001. We didn’t say, “OK, the country is coming apart at the seams, it’s the end of the world, so let’s do something.” I don’t want to repeat that old idea that artists can see what’s going to happen, that they are prophetic, but for some reason, we’re not sure why…

RL – Has there been a moment like that since?

RJ – I don’t know… I don’t think so…

KS – Well, what about what Néstor and Cristina (Kirchner) were able to generate, a different sort of connection with and between young people.

RL – And what’s that?

RJ – It really took off when Néstor died.

It started with people crying desperately in the street. But that turned into joy at a certain point, and then slogans appeared spontaneously in a way I’d never seen before.

RL – And has that had a palpable impact on the more restricted space of the art world?

RJ – Not directly or immediately. There were a number of distinct moments… One was when, in response to the resistance of the large agro-exporters to Resolution 125,¹⁸ an organization called Agrupación de Artistas Visuales con Cristina was started, and that is odd: I can’t remember any time when there was a group of visual artists in support of anyone, not even the Montoneros.¹⁹ And then there were initiatives geared to political action. Not long ago, a group called Artistas Organizados was formed in opposition to certain policies of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. For a long time, they held meetings and assemblies, made statements, studied issues. Everyone was involved. That had never happened before either. But I know you aren’t asking about this sort of thing, but about repercussions in the art world itself. The question of who makes decisions in the art world was formulated more explicitly; it is never artists. This has implications in other areas, like the number of galleries directed by artists, the number of artist-run projects around (dozens). All of this is, to some extent, an outgrowth of things that happened in the early 2000s. Artists opening their own gallery, their own museum, their own academy. There are artists who “copy” the Centro de Investigaciones Artisticas, who come up with their own educational or teaching structure, their own places of reflection.

RL – I want to know what you think about something. In the eighties, a great deal of the new aesthetic was defined in opposition to the cult of the national and a certain notion of the people, which we associated with the old left, the universe of tango bars, etc. But that contrast no longer seems particularly relevant. Or is it?

RJ – I think it’s gotten more complicated. On a cultural level, the policy of a broad Latin American alliance, for instance, has changed everything, all the different perspectives, a great deal. The national and the idea of the people and its culture have become regional, not confined to one country: Caetano Veloso sings Mercedes Sosa; contemporary music is composed on the basis of native chants. At the same time, reclaiming native cultures has great ideological weight not just amongst supporters of the government, but with the opposition as well. Internationally, the role of New York is not what it once was, let alone Paris (I haven’t heard anyone talk about Paris for twenty years)… Everyone goes to biennials in Indonesia, residencies in Thailand… In this context, I think that the national and the idea of the people and its culture mean something else, because Argentina’s position in the world is different, the world itself is different: it’s more polycentric. Artists are no longer combing over Art Forum or Art International. Everyone is concentrated on their own thing and on connections made on the Internet. I think the contrast you mentioned has been done away with; it is no longer relevant.

RL – You were saying that artists study… and that’s true: artists study more these days. There are more studio classes, schools, institutions. Does that mean that in Argentina being an artist is seen as a viable career?

RJ – Yes. I mean, they are kidding themselves [laughter], but that’s what they think. Another strange thing is that the social background of artists has changed. There are more young artists from families that can support them financially as they pursue the idea of being an artist, which was not the case when we were young. You had to make a living anyway you could. There was no way you could make a living as an artist, but that didn’t mean you stopped being an artist.

RL – Exactly, and that is a major change in the identity of the artist: suddenly, being an artist is a viable career option. I want to get back to something, though: it seems like you have never felt a pressing need to identify as an artist, in fact the lack of that identification is one of the things that seems to make your work possible. Is that right?

RJ – That’s right. I have never felt the need to identify as an artist. In the sixties we used that term, but sort of jokingly (I mean amongst the smaller group, with Masotta). And then I would say it was more like… let’s put it this way, when at immigrations they ask you your profession, you don’t say “novelist, writer.” It’s somehow embarrassing, inappropriate. That’s how I feel about saying “I’m an artist.” I say it but just as a formality, even though I don’t really know what it means. If I have to tell you what, deep down, I think an artist is, it is someone who lives like an artist, who is always open, always inventing new things, everything you can imagine that I might say about all that, which is just what you would say. Capturing and responding to what is happening around us, intervening in it… No one is like that all the time, it would be impossible to live that way all the time. But there are people who do it more than others… In any case, one of the things that makes me most suspicious about Argentina today is the number of institutions, of people with influence on groups of young people, who further the idea of the “professional artist,” with emphasis on professional, not on artist. That gives rise to a gap in language that complicates communication.

KS – There are a great many “cultural managers,” that’s for sure. It’s truly alarming.

RL – Your most recent organization-project is CIA. What does CIA set out to add or remedy or change in terms of the things you have done before?

RJ – Let’s take a look at how it began. Gachi Hasper, Diana Aisenberg and Melina Berkenwald wanted to organize a residency, a place for artists to come together… They wanted to get me involved, and I said, “I’ve had my fill of social projects, you guys do it. I’m through. What do you want me for?” And they said, “We promise you won’t have to do a thing, just let us use your name.” So far so good. We didn’t have a place for the residency, so we put an ad in ramona and the owner of the Hotel Ostende, a hotel on the beach, answered. That was perfect. “Great, I’ll do it. Two weeks vacation on the beach.” This was the first time I had been involved in a project that didn’t depend on me. It was a self-run project with others doing the running [laughter]. And it went on like that until 2009, when the material conditions that Judi [Werthein], Gachi [Hasper] and I needed to have a physical space appeared, along with a little money to get started. And at that point we designed a more detailed program of what we wanted to do. The premise was very simple: a space in Argentina for artists regardless of discipline to connect since the visual artist as such has become an abstraction. What difference is there between a visual artist and a filmmaker? Or a dancer or a performer? Or a musician and someone who makes sound works? Those differences are unsustainable, but still visual artists hang out with other visual artists, and dancers with other dancers. We wanted to build and facilitate connections, also between Argentine artists and artists from other places. Especially artists from other countries in Latin America because, unbelievable and absurd though it may be, Latin American countries have always had more contact with a central country than with a neighboring country that might be just an hour away by plane or boat, or just across a bridge.

KS – Connections with artists from other parts of Argentina as well. The first fellowship recipients at CIA, in 2009, were invited, but then there was a call for applications. There are more or less four hundred applications for twenty spots, and the juries have been great. Judi put it well: the category went from “fellowship recipient,” which is passive, to “agent.”

RL – In closing, what is your latest next project? Something we still don’t know a thing about.

RJ – I’m working on another album called Golosina Caníbal, after the experience of Tocame el Rok.²⁰

RL – Give me some background. Tocame el Rok…

RJ – Tocame el Rok began with the exhibition at Reina Sofía. Ana Longoni thought there should be something about my work in pop music. So she proposed a software containing all the songs I had written as well as pertinent information about them (date, where they were written, what was happening in Argentina at the time). At the museum, visitors could see the album covers, photos, and so forth. And then Ana thought there should be a part that was not confined to the past, not already closed off and recorded in an album, but happening in the present. She appointed singer and composer Nacho Marciano musical curator. They studied my files and came upon a ton of songs with no music. Ana’s project entailed producing something new for the show. And we developed the idea of Tocame el Rock, which consisted of working on some of the never-before-released songs from different periods with musician friends or musicians whom I had worked with in the past. We finished thirteen songs, but weren’t sure how to present them. It seemed strange and sort of dated to make a DVD or CD. And that’s how we came up with Tocame el Rok. We made rocks with the words Tocame el Rok printed on them, and you can hear the music through a USB port and cable connected to the rock. We presented the works as music and as art objects. We were trying to find a viable way for music to circulate today, so that we didn’t have to finance it ourselves. And it has worked out great! We were able to cover all the expenses and are paying the artists. Of course, since the rocks are sold as art objects, there is a serial edition of thirteen, each one unique because it is a rock, so no two are alike.

RL - The next project is seven never-before-released songs…

RJ – Sevensongs that have never been released. The title is Golosina Caníbal. They were on hold because, among other things, they were written at Chacra in 99. Leo García wrote the music to all the songs except one, which is by Nacho. Pajarito Ferrari—a twenty-year-old kid with an amazing voice—is the singer… Then, in October, Sebastián Gordín and I are going to have a show at the Nora Fisch Gallery of comics we made in 89 and 90. As you can see, I’m recycling everything I’ve got. As—who was it?—maybe Jayne County in Wayne County and the Electric Chairs said, “There is no junk… Junk doesn’t exist, just things waiting to be recycled.” [Laughter]

KS - The songs are beautiful. Here are four from Golosina… I’m always ready, if the situation arises…

RL – You’ve got the songs there?

KS – Yeah, I do.

RL - Let’s give them a listen and stop here.

**

Photo: Rosana Schoijett.

* *

Roberto Jacoby lives and works in Buenos Aires, where he was born in 1944. He is considered one of the pioneers of conceptual art. Nearly his entire life’s work has been produced collaboratively. In the 60s, he participated in the Di Tella and in Tucumán Arde. He was the song-writer for the pop band Virus and founder of Club Eros, ramona magazine and Proyecto V. In 2011, the Museo Reina Sofía hosted a large retrospective titled Desire Rises from Collapse and published a volume that collected his works, actions and concepts from 1966 to the present. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship and currently directs the Centro de Investigaciones Artisticas.

**

1^ A civil uprising in the city of Córdoba, Argentina in May 1969 in which students and workers joined together to protest the military dictatorship of General Juan Carlos Onganía.

“What,” I said. That was how I answered the phone then. It was a forceful what—scrappy, combative. But combative isn’t quite the word, because my greeting was always followed by the desire to be left alone. The way I answered the phone had to do with a few demoralizing years misspent in Mexico working as a reader for a commercial publishing house, and also with all those sniveling Colombians who say Aló? and then launch into one story after another like idiot nightingales in a cage.

A voice on the other end of the line said hello.

“Yeah, what?” I repeated.

“Hello?” repeated the voice.

This kind of game isn’t my thing. I cut right to the chase.

“Who is this? What do you want?”

“Galvareza?” The voice asked, timidly.

“That’s right.”

“My name is Estela Lara. I’m María José and María del ... Read More »]]>
Juan Álvarez
translated by Heather Cleary

“What,” I said. That was how I answered the phone then. It was a forceful what—scrappy, combative. But combative isn’t quite the word, because my greeting was always followed by the desire to be left alone. The way I answered the phone had to do with a few demoralizing years misspent in Mexico working as a reader for a commercial publishing house, and also with all those sniveling Colombians who say Aló? and then launch into one story after another like idiot nightingales in a cage.

A voice on the other end of the line said hello.

“Yeah, what?” I repeated.

“Hello?” repeated the voice.

This kind of game isn’t my thing. I cut right to the chase.

“Who is this? What do you want?”

“Galvareza?” The voice asked, timidly.

“That’s right.”

“My name is Estela Lara. I’m María José and María del Mar Pizarro’s mother.”

Two years earlier, I had figured out a way to con a bunch of intelligent and enthusiastic young editors. I made them think I had written a good book, a collection of short stories I had researched and worked on for years. A monument to discipline, the kind of book only a mature writer could produce. Two drinks later, we sealed the deal. I asked for a million pesos, which came out to around five hundred dollars, and stressed that they were in a great position. I told them I had asked for so little because I believed in small, independent publishers. I told them that we all had to sacrifice a little in the name of solidarity. We raised our glasses and smiled. I took the money and bought myself the oldest Vespa I could find, then headed for a little town near Bogotá to relax.

I had written the book using Rafael Alberti’s under the sun method, meaning that I grabbed a notebook and filled it with a little bit of everything. I filled it with love and I filled it with politics. To be clear, in one of the stories I did use the figures and imposing surname of the Pizarro girls, whom I had never seen in real life. I only knew that one was a model and the other made jewelry and promoted street artists. The imposing surname? Their father’s, of course, the leader of a Colombian guerrilla group sui generis. By sui generis I mean a democratic, urban, media-savvy guerrilla group that made important symbolic attacks and was militant throughout the seventies and eighties, then integrated itself into mainstream society in the nineties. Handsome and charismatic, the guy even tried to run for president, but was shot in the narrow walkway of an airplane by some poor kid with a machine gun provided for the occasion, just in case the guerrillero had gotten any big ideas. I went over the story quickly in my head. If their mother had called to chew me out, I needed to be prepared. I didn’t remember describing her daughters as slutty, stupid, or cruel, so I calmed down a bit and said hello. As I did, I remembered the words the police had found scrawled on a piece of paper in the young hit man’s pocket: “Please, send the million pesos to my mother.”

“I read the story you wrote about my daughters. I’d like to invite you to coffee,” Mrs. Lara said.

I thought about explaining a few basic principles of literary theory to her, to get her off my back. I racked my brain for the right words. Mrs. Lara, the story isn’t about your daughters. Your daughters are in it because their father’s last name is a perfect hook, politically and commercially… But what if she already knew? After all, how could someone with a model for a daughter not have some insight into this kind of thing? I had to be precise. The last thing I wanted was a repeat of what I went through with my own mother, who also appears in one of my stories—the memoir. The more I explained the trick to my old lady, the more she saw the piece as a catalog of her hardships.

As I ran through these mental calculations, my stomach alerted me to the fact that I was hungry. What if I were to tack a prosciutto sandwich on ciabatta and a mango mousse on to that coffee? It was just a question of going to the right place.

“Mrs. Lara, how would you like to meet right now?”

*

As could have been expected, things went badly at the café. Mrs. Lara rattled off fifteen minutes of enthusiastic and impertinent questions about my life and what she delighted in calling my “commitment to literature.” Trying to avoid any more of a debacle, I cut her off and asked her what she wanted. My sandwich had arrived and I had already wolfed half of it down.

“I want to tell you the real story of my two daughters.”

I might have been a leech back then, but I wasn’t a sucker. I turned her down emphatically.

“Mrs. Lara, don’t take this the wrong way but, to be totally honest, I couldn’t care less about what you call the true story of your daughters.”

I paired the phrase with the movement of getting up from the table. The mother of the Pizarro girls grabbed my arm, squeezed, and said:

“What a son of a bitch you are. I buy you lunch and you can’t even manage to listen to me for a few goddamn minutes more?”

I felt the pressure of her dry hand increase exponentially and remembered the rumors about her years as a guerrilla. What if they were true? What if the old bag really could throw me down on the polished tiles of the café with some crazy ninja move and beat me to a pulp, right then and there? I scanned her eyes, sat back down, and ordered two cocktails. It was happy hour. I wasn’t taking advantage.

*

Going through her daughters’ life story took Mrs. Lara twenty minutes. Each. Somewhere in the course of the torture I lost count of how many times she said Love and Human Rights.

“All the rest is just lies told by the press. María José lives with her daughter Camila in Barcelona. María del Mar is going to college in Puerto Rico. Their days are so much calmer now,” she concluded between sighs, and, fortunately, didn’t speak again.

I went back to my burrow and felt sick all of a sudden. I blamed that damned sandwich. I blamed the cocktails. I blamed myself for not listening to my instincts. Why had I agreed to listen to such a trite, cloying story? How was it possible that for one fucking lunch and two sickly sweet drinks I was willing to subject an organ as noble as the ear to the torture of that maternal epic? It had been easy enough to predict that the Pizarro mother would be riddled with guilt for the kind of childhood—always looking over their shoulders, always on the run—she had forced on her two daughters. But it was worse than that: she entertained the warped idea that, in some way, it had made them stronger.

I felt better after banging my head against the foam matting tacked to the wall next to my desk for a while. The impact cleared my mind. I started to see things how they were: the little box of trifles offered up to me that afternoon had kept me from sniffing out the gold mine right under my nose. I had a love story and the right to use the phrase “human rights” with impunity. I would write the novelization of a pseudo-biography of comandante Pizarro. Good and sensationalist. About him and the women within the orbit of his affections: his wife, his lovers, his strong-willed daughters. One an inveterate hippie and the other the young promise of Colombian modeling. I couldn’t seem to escape all the information about the family, and whatever was missing, well, it had been proven that the mother would talk nonstop if given the chance. What about the lovers? Simple: insinuations that the darkness of the jungle and the hardships of the hills would easily put into perspective. With a female combo like that, on top of the media frenzy that turned the Pizarro name into an icon long ago, someone was sure to invest. In a country full of hummingbirds happy to feed on the nectar of war, drama and romance, there would be no shortage of readers.

After such a productive day, I slept like a baby on pills.

*

The next day I called the office of my friend Armando Torres—a smart young man, good conversationalist, attractive, blue-eyed. Everything a major national producer of stationery and books with an annual gross of around 160 million dollars could want in an editor of fiction and journalism. I tossed my idea out in all its glory.

“But Galvareza, buddy, didn’t you write about all that a few years ago?” the idiot said, thinking his memory was really something. I explained it to him again. I told him to clean out his ears and pay attention this time. He must not have liked that, because as soon as I had gone through the whole thing a second time, he added:

“I’m not interested. The story’s been done to death. I don’t see anything original about it.”

“Don’t be dense, Torres. Who said anything about it being original?” The time had come to go all in with this asshole. I showed him no mercy. “People look at reality and they see it. Words don’t make the invisible visible. Fucking Romanticism, Torres. Is that what you went to college for? Words take things that were already visible, things that everyone looks at but no one can, or knows how to, or wants to see, and makes them visible all over again. These people’s lives were hard, appalling, joined by fate to a society and a murderous, Manichean ruling class, the lives of acrobats whose muscles cramp up mid-air. And all that, for what? You have to have a real set of balls to look that straight on and not close your eyes or take off running, because whoever sees it breaks down or goes crazy. It’s big business, man.”

“I’m not interested. I’m hanging up.”

I threatened him. I said I was going to put a curse on the bullshit imprint he worked for. He sighed, annoyed. I beat him to the punch and hung up. I looked over the three or four other publishing contacts scribbled in my agenda. I’d had a similar conversation with each of them in the last six months. Shit.

It took me two days to feel better. Three to clear my head. By the fourth day, I woke up glowing, without any memory of the name Pizarro, of the deal, of Torres’s bad breath over the phone. None of it.

On the fifth day, my doorbell rang. Bogotá’s western peaks read four o’clock sharp. I opened the door to find the fresh, angular face of a young woman. Short hair, modern bangs. Red boots exposed to halfway up her calves. Those tight jeans probably wrapped up the best part of her personality.

“Hi. I’m María José Pizarro,” said the little surprise.

Son of a bitch. What the hell was going on? Some kind of sick joke, I thought.

“It’s a shame you’re not your sister,” I said quickly. “What do you want? How did you get this address?”

“I have my ways … I don’t want anything. Mamá told me you had a bad attitude. I’m visiting the city. People don’t get together much around here, so I decided to stop by and say hello.”

“You could have called. I would have told you that you weren’t welcome.”

“And my sister would have been?”

“I don’t know. Depends on what she was wearing,” I lied. Doing research for those stories, I’d taken a look at a few photos of the young model. I would have let her in, even if she had only come to work me over with a whip.

“Are you saying you think I’m ugly and badly dressed?”

I looked at her again. The truth is, she wasn’t half bad. Sometimes you lie. But sometimes you don’t.

“No, you manage.”

“I manage to what?”

“Well, you manage to…”

Seeing me at a loss for words, she slid nimbly between my arm and the door, brushing my armpit with the crown of her head. Once she had stormed the living room, she said:

“Don’t close it, my sister’s on her way up.”

“Oh?”

“What? Do models make you nervous?

“Honestly, I’m not in the mood for this today. Submit your complaints in writing and leave me alone.”

“Complaints? Not at all. We just dropped in to have a few beers. Since you’re sort of rude, we assumed you weren’t buying. We left the ones we brought in the cab, so my sister went to get more,” she said, flashing a smile.

The sister appeared on my doorstep wearing a skirt with greenish flowers that fell just above her knees. She stuck out her arm, proudly showing me a bag full of beers. She looked as sweet as a ripe kiwi.

“Is this Galvareza?” she asked her sister as soon as she saw me, belittlingly.

“Go figure,” answered María José.

I said nothing. I was already spent.

“Darling, just a joke,” the model went on, to me this time.

“Your name is a joke. Who in their right mind would baptize someone María del Mar?” I said.

“They were a little crazy, it’s true. That’s probably why we were never baptized,” she said, laughed just like her sister, and headed for the kitchen. When she came back, she was carrying two cans of beer per head. I had to hand it to them: the Pizarro sisters were doing their best to make a good impression. “Do you know what my father thought about Catholicism in Colombia?”

“Why would I know that?”

“He said that it was bullshit, an imperishable weed, a highly corrosive mold. That was how the gentleman guerrilla spoke.”

She opened her can and took a long, gleeful sip. Then she asked if her sister had explained the reason for their visit.

“Yeah, she said there wasn’t one.”

“Exactly. That, and also to see what kind of guy our dear mother has been telling all about what she thinks are our lives. Speaking of which, you’re not naïve enough to believe that mothers know about their daughters’ lives, are you?

“I don’t care. A few days ago I had thought about making some big money off you and your father, but luckily the publishing industry took it upon itself to discourage me from that idiocy.”

“I believe it. This country has a gift for discouragement. That’s probably why we don’t live here. Here the people are faced with a merchant of well processed, well packed cocaine and a thug bastard who goes through life carving up farmers he doesn’t like with a chain saw, and in the end they find one just as horrifying as the other. Degenerates! Cocksuckers!

“Hey, whoa. This is a family joint,” I cut her off. “You’ve got a pretty filthy mouth, for a model.”

“And you haven’t heard her talk about the other girls, or do her imitation of Viena Ruiz, or tell that story about the President’s son,” María José chimed in.

“What story about the President’s son?”

“You haven’t heard? I thought you were in the loop. Tell him, María.”

The model made it clear that said she’d rather shoot herself than waste her time with that. Her older sister made a face at her for being difficult, then said:

“I’ll tell you, then, because it’s important.”

The story she told begins when the President’s family picks up on the strange fact that, for some time, the younger son seems not to want to leave the presidential palace. Unlike the older son, who takes every chance he gets to travel around the country with his father, the younger one is always using his studies or his delicate constitution as an excuse to shut himself in. One day his father comes homes from visiting towns along the Pacific that had been devastated by floods. He’s exhausted because, among other things, he’s had to pose for hours kissing the foreheads of little brown babies abandoned to their luck in the most ferocious poverty. And what does he find? His youngest offspring wailing with pleasure as a dark-skinned soldier from the Presidential guard gives it to him up the ass with his uniform around his knees. The scene takes place in the older brother’s bathroom, from which the President drags them both at once, then beats the crap out of them and throws his son down the stairs of the palace screaming, You disgusting faggot pig!

“No way.”

“Oh, yes.”

“What happened to the soldier?” I asked.

“What happened to the soldier?” María José repeated, sounding surprised.

“Yeah, what happened to him?”

“How the fuck am I supposed to know what happened to the soldier? Galvareza, please.”

“They transferred him or gave him a medal or he became the hero of the National Guard,” María del Mar interrupted. “Who cares? We’re telling you about the fucking tumble President Uribe’s son took down the steps of the Presidential Palace. Three broken ribs, a broken arm, a fractured skull… Jesus, Galvareza, what part of this don’t you understand? Check and you’ll see that for about three months last year, the little darling wasn’t once seen in public.”

I opened my second beer and drank half of it in one gulp.

*

“Hey, handsome,” María del Mar interjected about a half hour later. “It’s time you knew the truth. My sister and I are here to invite you to go for a drive.”

“Are you insane? Terrible stories have started that way in this country.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, we’re not going to do anything to you, you pussy.”

What followed was a proposal that consisted of my joining them the next day at a country estate near Fusa, one of the houses where Commander Pizarro had hidden. They were going now because their mother had just told them about the place. Everything suggested that they would find boxes full of their father’s documents there. Books, photos, notebooks. Even clothes from his guerrilla days. The truth was, they didn’t know exactly what might be there. But whatever it was, it had occurred to them that I was the kind of guy who might be interested. If we found something important, they would let me use it. Publishing, subsidiary rights, all of it. The plan was to leave first thing in the morning.

“There’s a pool, Galvareza. The only danger is that you might tan that pasty skin of yours.”

I admit that I considered it. The idea was tempting, and so were the Pizarro sisters. But it was getting late and it was time to be honest with them. I hadn’t been feeling well, I said, for a while. I’d been to the doctor, who diagnosed me with a minor problem, but one I needed to keep an eye on: perspirative transudation. When I was done talking, the Pizarro sisters moved back a little on the couch.

“Don’t worry. It’s not worth making that face over.”

I went on with my explanation. My reputation was at stake, and I didn’t gamble with my reputation.

“It’s got nothing to do with my ass. They’re chronic secretions that lead to weight loss, through my pores. I’m a bit weak right now and I need to be careful. Going on a trip, crossing a field, discovering documents, getting some sun—pretty much everything about a trip to the country could be harmful to me.

They laughed. The rest of the afternoon passed like a giant’s sigh. No one said human rights or love. No one said politics.

Somewhere in the flood of alcohol the prospect of a sexual escapade did cross my mind, but in the end I didn’t mention it. Perspirative transudation can be fatal.

Fortunately, my Mexican friends never heard about the invasion of the Pizarro sisters. They would have found my lack of initiative in the presence of such sweet little things offensive. They probably would even have spit at me. In my country, those were days of half-blind pelicans, grand birds that used their long, straight beaks only as crutches. I answered the phone with a “What.” It was a forceful what—scrappy, combative. But combative isn’t quite the word.

* *

Artwork: Alejandro Musich, “Lobos II” (2012), courtesy of miau miau

translated by Leah Leone

Diary of Vienna

A young boy carries a bucket of water. Its weight seems somehow lightened by the belief that the desiccated tree will come back to life if watered every day. The end of the story is less important than the image of his persistence—and his faith. I cannot conceive of anything more idiotic than faith, especially with respect to faits accomplis.  The tree is dead. The feeling I have is that death appropriates everything, as if taking something back something that had been his all along.

It is impossible to halt the processes that take over the body, after death. The body stops being a body, after death. Death arrogates the deepest, most intimate spaces. The darkness is complete, the silence, the body that continues but does not go on, after death. I am too ... Read More »]]>

translated by Leah Leone

Diary of Vienna

A young boy carries a bucket of water. Its weight seems somehow lightened by the belief that the desiccated tree will come back to life if watered every day. The end of the story is less important than the image of his persistence—and his faith. I cannot conceive of anything more idiotic than faith, especially with respect to faits accomplis.  The tree is dead. The feeling I have is that death appropriates everything, as if taking something back something that had been his all along.

It is impossible to halt the processes that take over the body, after death. The body stops being a body, after death. Death arrogates the deepest, most intimate spaces. The darkness is complete, the silence, the body that continues but does not go on, after death. I am too modest to speak of all the processes the body undergoes, after death. I feel we shouldn’t know them—or question them. It’s enough to say that, at this very moment, we are already dying.

Love is the only means of reconciliation with death. Opening the body, letting yourself be touched with devotion and integrity. L’amour fou is always reciprocal and unique. A face that endures. A body familiar and unknown. Every touch is a new touch; a step backwards in the process of recognition. First time, first time again. I will not find that body here, in this city, but here is where I must find it. But it is here that I insistently must find it.

Vienna, 14 November 2012.

Ruminations on the Common Man

The common man constructed a series of well-defined values. We could summarize them as follows:

Works: it’s good. Doesn’t work: it’s bad.

The common man divides human beings into those that “work” and those that “don’t work.” These two categories must never bleed over into one another. The common man believes the strong must protect themselves from the weak. And he knows: nature is pragmatic in the elimination of the weak.

The common man sees and accepts things as they are. The common man does not admit that things could be any other way.

The things that exist have value. The things that could not exist do not have value.

The common man has no sense of possibility. The common man is the man of the possible. He does not dream, does not aspire to change anything, or anyone. And he does not aspire, above all, to change himself.

The common man believes that pragmatism and clarity are indispensable qualities.

The common man considers any kind of idealism synonymous with insanity. And insanity synonymous with weakness. The common man is moved by stories of the heroes of daily life, able to pay their bills, raise children and take an annual trip abroad.

The common man abominates heroic acts. Heroic acts are not the acts of heroes, but of weak-minded individuals with no sense of reality.

The common man has no time for melancholy and wants to be left in peace. Peace is synonymous with existing solely in the present, immersed in the routine of work.

The common man lacks nothing. There is enough of everything for the common man.

Fable for remaking people

Upon reading the second paragraph, he was already facing the forest. Trees in even rows, straight. The sketch for an old drawing. In the center of the drawing, a point to which the things and the people were attracted. Precipices.

The forest is impenetrable, as are all things unknown. In the center of the face, the eyes. A forest of lead, abandoned, everything swallowed up.

Standing before the forest, it was like taking back something that had always been his. The sun opening the forest: leaf, fruit, tree, insect, everything was light. Everything always was. And always would be.

There was no escaping those mornings; light that invades, exposes. The points, the eyes like precipices. In the center of the drawing, the soft face, one that might not resist a light touch. Innocent of all.

Sitting before the forest, the saddest man in the world was not sad. The saddest man in the world was dreaming.

* *

Images: Nahuel Vecino “sobre papel”, “Long Champs” (2013), courtesy of miau miau

* *

Diário de Viena

Um garotinho carrega um balde d’água. O peso parece reduzido pela crença de que a árvore seca reviveria, se fosse molhada todos os dias. O fim da história é menos importante do que a imagem de persistência – e de fé. Não consigo imaginar maior estupidez do que ter fé, especialmente contra fatos consumados. A árvore está morta. A sensação que tenho é de que a morte se apropria de tudo, como se tomasse de volta algo que sempre foi dela.

Não é possível parar os processos que se instalam no organismo, após a morte. O corpo deixa de ser corpo, após a morte. A morte toma os espaços mais profundos e mais íntimos. É a escuridão completa, o silêncio, o corpo que continua sem prosseguir, após a morte. Tenho pudor de falar sobre todos os processos que envolvem o corpo, após a morte. Sinto que não devemos conhecê-los – ou questioná-los. Basta repetir que, neste momento, já estamos morrendo.

O amor é a única via de reconciliação com a morte. Abrir o corpo, se deixar tocar com devoção e inteireza. L’amour fou é sempre recíproco e único. Um rosto que persiste. Um corpo familiar e desconhecido. Cada toque é um novo toque; um passo atrás no processo de reconhecimento. Primeira vez, primeira vez de novo.

Não encontrarei este corpo aqui, nesta cidade, mas é aqui que devo procurá-lo. Mas é aqui que devo insistentemente procurá-lo.

Viena, 14 de novembro de 2012.

Considerações sobre o homem comum

O homem comum construiu um conjunto de valores bem definidos. Poderíamos resumi-los da seguinte maneira:

Funciona: é bom. Não funciona: é mau.

O homem comum divide os seres humanos entre funcionais e disfuncionais. Essas duas categorias não podem jamais se misturar. O homem comum acredita que os fortes devem se proteger dos fracos. E sabe: a natureza é pragmática na eliminação dos fracos.

O homem comum vê e aceita as coisas como elas são. O homem comum não admite que as coisas poderiam ser de outra maneira.

As coisas que são têm valor. As coisas que poderiam ser não têm valor.

O homem comum não tem senso de possibilidade. O homem comum é o homem do possível. Não sonha, não pretende modificar nada, nem ninguém. E não pretende, sobretudo, se modificar.

O homem comum acredita que pragmatismo e clareza são qualidades indispensáveis.

O homem comum considera qualquer tipo de idealismo sinônimo de loucura. E loucura, sinônimo de fraqueza. O homem comum se comove com histórias de heróis do cotidiano que são capazes de pagar contas, criar filhos e fazer uma viagem internacional por ano.

O homem comum abomina atos heroicos. Atos heroicos não são atos de heróis, mas de seres de mentalidade débil que não têm senso de realidade.

O homem comum não tem tempo para melancolia e quer ser deixado em paz. Paz é sinônimo de estar unicamente no presente e imerso em sua rotina de trabalho.

Nada falta ao homem comum. Tudo sobra ao homem comum.

Fábula para refazer pessoas

Quando leu o segundo parágrafo, já estava diante da floresta. Árvores alinhadas, retas. Rascunho de um desenho antigo. No centro do desenho, um ponto para o qual as coisas e as pessoas eram atraídas. Precipícios.

A floresta é impenetrável, como tudo que é desconhecido.  No centro da face, os olhos. Floresta de chumbo, desamparo, tudo é tragado.

Quando estava diante dela, era como se tomasse de volta algo que sempre foi seu. O sol abrindo a floresta: folha, fruto, árvore, bicho, tudo era luz. Tudo sempre foi. E seria de novo.

Não havia como escapar daquelas manhãs; luz que invade, expõe. Os pontos, os olhos como precipícios. No centro do desenho, o rosto suave, como se não resistisse a um leve toque. Inocente de tudo.

Sentado diante da floresta o homem mais triste do mundo não estava triste. O homem mais triste do mundo sonhava.

from J’ai perdu tout ce que j’aimais by Sacha Sperling translated by Addie Leak

I had decided that my name would be Sacha Sperling and that my life would be dazzling and spectacular.

I’d understood that the only way to exist was to become someone else.

I’d written a book.

The book was a success.

It was translated into languages I didn’t speak.

For two years, the foreign versions accumulated in my bookcase. My face was on some; on others, young Asian boys in suggestive poses. Most of the covers looked like the anti-tobacco posters stuck to the walls of school infirmaries.

The book was simple. It was a bunch of scenes telling the story of a lost teenager in love with his best friend. A fourteen-year-old boy almost mechanically recounting the dissolute lives of his ... Read More »]]>

from J’ai perdu tout ce que j’aimais by Sacha Sperling
translated by Addie Leak

I had decided that my name would be Sacha Sperling and that my life would be dazzling and spectacular.

I’d understood that the only way to exist was to become someone else.

I’d written a book.

The book was a success.

It was translated into languages I didn’t speak.

For two years, the foreign versions accumulated in my bookcase. My face was on some; on others, young Asian boys in suggestive poses. Most of the covers looked like the anti-tobacco posters stuck to the walls of school infirmaries.

The book was simple. It was a bunch of scenes telling the story of a lost teenager in love with his best friend. A fourteen-year-old boy almost mechanically recounting the dissolute lives of his little band. The book included passages later described as “off-putting,” “pulp,” or “hyper-violent.” (A chapter describing a thirteen-year-old girl at the heart of a three-way had particularly marked readers. Then there was the palace suite orgy, the weekend at Eurodisney on Xanax, a conversation about a man who was set on fire, etc.) It was the picture of lobotomized youth, passive and ecstatic. The portrait of blasé kids during the Sarko years, wandering from fast food joint to fast food joint, from easy pleasures to fast ones, in a sort of semi-coma. In the space of just fifteen minutes (I should say for fifteen minutes), I’d become a small-time literary star. In the space of just fifteen minutes, I found myself living my dream. Everyone wanted to meet me, to interview me. There were pictures of me in jeans in Elle, in a torn t-shirt in Le Grand Journal, wearing my Nikes in L’Express. The titles of the articles were “Hello, Melancholy” or “Monstrous Sacha.” There were pictures of me and my super-cool friends, at my super-cool party, in the super-cool swimming pool of the Hôtel Costes, filmed by the super-cool program Paris Dernière. They asked me questions on the phone, in cafes. And I said things like, “It’s an extraordinary opportunity,” or “It’s an incredible luxury to be able to write.” I was constantly repeating stupid shit like that. Today, I can think of a thousand other phrases just as insincere but much more original. At the time, I wasn’t trying to be original. At the time, I just wanted to “continue to have the chance to meet interesting people.” I’d written all these things that were so shocking, so vulgar, and my responses were so clean and neat that they threw the reader off the scent. The truth is that I didn’t give a damn about the questions or the answers. I was simply fascinated by the noxious golden vapor that seemed to float in the wake of my seduction.

That’s how I became your little sister’s favorite writer.

I remember my editor: “Do you realize, Sacha—they’re ordering a thousand a day!”

“And is that a lot?”

I’d decided that my name would be Sacha Sperling, that my life would be dazzling and spectacular. I made this decision between two mouthfuls of orange juice. One morning, I decided to change my name, and then I went to brush my teeth.

I was eighteen and looked thirteen.

I’d decided that I had to become someone, and fast. I had to exist. Because on one hand were the complications of childhood, shadow, and frustration, and on the other, an infinity of illuminated paths. Street lamps, stars, it didn’t matter… There was something that looked like light. On one hand, endless waiting; on the other, all these people ready to love me.

But after a while, my life was neither dazzling nor spectacular. After a while, the lights went out and there was no longer anybody there to love me. In the blink of an eye, only the journalists and talk show hosts were left, as intrigued, annoyed, or aggressive as I had been in my book, and their interest seemed more and more like contempt. Because in addition to the stories of parties, above and beyond the laundry list of illicit substances, what put readers off was the profound apathy with which the book’s narrator seemed to watch the world burn around him. How could he witness all that without reacting? How could he be so young? That was what they started to reproach me for. As if I’d exaggerated. As if I were laying it on too thick. But when you’re eighteen, you don’t choose to reveal yourself. I was far too young to recognize the immodesty necessary to write. I had no filter. That’s why there was something terrifyingly sincere in the book that excited teenage girls and frightened their parents. On Monday, I was a promising writer; on Wednesday, the idiot puppet of a publicity coup; by Friday it didn’t matter anymore because the book was selling and that was the only thing that never changed, week after week.

For more than a year, they had a photo of me in the Virgin megastore. From the Champs-Élysées, you could see my head inside the store. Eyes that seemed to look you right in the stomach. The poster stayed there for what seemed to me an abnormally long time. Nothing justified it staying there that long. I think the Virgin employees just forgot to take it down. So every time I walked between Monoprix and Quiksilver, I passed Sacha Sperling, and his look said, “This is it, we’ve made it! We exist! That’s what we wanted. Look how bright the path is now. You achieved your dream, dammit, look at us! Come on, don’t screw it up by being moody. You wanted your mug blown up for a photo, well here it is! Order up, buddy!”

And I looked at this rather cute, slightly unpleasant guy with his little smirk. And every time I passed him, he smiled at me. And the more I looked at him, the more the smile scared me. Because it wasn’t mine. It wasn’t me anymore in the photo. It was him. He was the happy one who didn’t want this to end. He was the one who looked like a sated beast. The invisible little boy, made up as an adult, nasty as a kid the day after Christmas. I’d wanted my slice of eternity, the photo of my face blown up, and yet it was his that I saw on the poster. I wasn’t there anymore. In the driver’s seat, an ambitious young man yelled at me to open my eyes. He was saying, “No matter what, don’t stop. No matter what, remember you’re happy, that this is what you want.” But that voice was weaker and weaker, dreamlike, as far away as childhood. I started by scorning that voice, and I finished by completely ignoring it. I was going 200 km/hr in a blazing new muscle car, gleaming, loud, all in the body and nothing in the motor, and I wanted to throw myself out of the car. They talked about Sagan. Sagan, set in the paint and golden dust. Sagan so alone. The phantom that everybody comes across without ever seeing. And me, little Sacha Sperling, nobody, unwitting ersatz, splinter of media quartz. “You’re very Beigbeder, very Ellis, very Minou Drouet, very Minnie Mouse. Have you read Death in Venice? Larry Clark? Is this raincoat a tip of the hat to Houellebecq? Does your haircut look like Zeller’s? Are you gay? Is this a genre? What’s your lucky accessory? Your favorite book? WHO ARE YOU?”

It reeked of sulphur. I had the right face, the right book. The winning horse. Royal flush. And I couldn’t take it anymore.

I’d understood that the only way for me to exist was to become someone else.

I’d written a book.

The book was a success.

It was translated into languages that I didn’t speak.

One day, they took down the poster at the Virgin megastore. One day, I passed by the enormous doors of that old bank, and my photo was gone.

Sacha Sperling wasn’t looking at me anymore.

He had… disappeared.

***
read this in French
***

Artwork: Luciana Rondolini “Justin” (2012), courtesy of miau miau

A circular path is carved through your front yard.

Pink sinkholes gather in your medicine

cabinet. You exalt busted blenders like sophisms

scrawled by retired scholars.

Your life has become a shy puzzle,

a canyon of foreclosures,

an abandoned fish market.

The world has accused you of not being a world,

of loving meaningless songs,

and you have responded by raising your children to unravel

spools of red tape across cities of wax.

The promise ... Read More »]]>

A circular path is carved through your front yard.

Pink sinkholes gather in your medicine

cabinet. You exalt busted blenders like sophisms

scrawled by retired scholars.

Your life has become a shy puzzle,

a canyon of foreclosures,

an abandoned fish market.

The world has accused you of not being a world,

of loving meaningless songs,

and you have responded by raising your children to unravel

spools of red tape across cities of wax.

The promise of a guilt-free purchase

congeals like gum

beneath a wooden school desk.

.

The world has accused you of not being a world.

You retort with an acceptance speech

scripted by beautiful gangsters. You live under

the thumb of contracts hoisted

like minarets. Landslides court you

with a hospice of deserted

checkout counters and comic strip altars.

.

Your young lungs constrict in the presence of cedar and ash.

The world has accused you of not being

a world and you respond by offering your guests

sliced cheese and snow globes.

You prod them about their holiday plans.

Your path is littered

with toll booths and subpoenas.

.

You dig shallow trenches around the kitchen table.

Sub-contractors install a wall of plaster

teeth in your bathtub.    The sea has divorced you

and taken the dog. The world

has accused you of not being a world,

of unhearing the voices

that hold together the seams

.

of your jacket, and you have responded

with despondent sighs, the kind of sigh

that makes orphans of widows.

Soon enough you will inherit

the pollen of a thousand uprooted gardenias

as you wait for the sunlight

to learn your nickname.

.

*

.

Sorta Rican Book of Dreams (Free Sample version)

Computer
-With human hands that poke you when you try to type means you will forgive yourself
for a mistake you never had the sense to make.
-Singing to you like Hector Lavoe means that your oldest daughter will grow up to become
the Director of Shrubbery at a bankrupt amusement park.

Ladybug
-Crawling on the hood of your car means you will inherit a vast collection of incomplete maps.
-Swimming in a bowl of soup means you will forget your wife’s birthday after you forget
that you never married.

Mango
-Eating one while a chimpanzee folds your laundry means the IRS will mistakenly pronounce you dead and offer your mother a tax refund they’ll later ask her to return.
-One with feet that chases you through a botanica means that your wardrobe is outdated.

Pie
-Gigantic blueberry pies that disappear and reappear at random means that a building will be renovated on the south side of your block.
-A pear pie left out in the middle of a superhighway means a dead relative wants back the bottle of Presidente they gave you last Christmas.

Quicksand
-Sinking in quicksand that smells like burnt cauliflower means that on your wedding night the photographer will forget to remove his lens cap while capturing the kiss.

Rooms
-Painted to resemble a city beach means that you will get a big promotion for a job that doesn’t pay you.
-With the furniture on the ceiling means that you will receive an honorary degree for your research on the sleeping patterns of superstar DJ’s.
-A classroom the size of a football field (known by gringos as a soccer field) where the school janitor makes fun of you means that you will win an all expenses paid vacation to Tucumcari, New Mexico.

Squirrel
-A squirrel carrying a balloon with the face of Emma Goldman on it means that a calamity of bow ties will be left in your glove box the evening after next.

Water
-A glass of water means you want to quit your job to become a licensed figment of the imagination.
-A muddy pond means you want to quit your job to become a licensed figment of the imagination.
-An ocean means you want to quit your job to become a licensed figment of the imagination.
-A plastic pool means you want to quit your job to become a licensed figment of the imagination.
-A single teardrop means you want to quit your job to become a licensed figment of the imagination.

.

*

.

Fibonacci ekphrastic for “The Birth of a City” by Angel Rodriguez-Diaz

*

.

panting. sighing. an ankle angled over a thigh. you blush.      a rush. lips spread like wings of a pigeon. skin harvested. fields plowed. a partly cloudy afternoon. a disrobing. an uneasy feeling. an unexpected heat. sweat beads like prayer beads. an imperfect curvature. a voluptuous wall. a matchstick’s red head rubbed on flint. an intent gaze. unattached. a nose entrenched in a chin. lotion applied to a calf.         a calf slaughtered for the feast. a secret drawn in a fleshy fold. a promise unattached. a wrist rotated counterclockwise. a quivering. a trinket falls to the fall. two bells conjugated like a verb. your mercurial poise. a feline pose. lock and key joined. an unhinged door opened twice. oasis. water lapped by a dog’s tongue. silent rhythm. a heartbeat out of synch. an eyelash sculpture like a lone peacock. four legs woven into a wicker basket. sliding. ungraceful pirouettes. buttons sewn onto a turquoise vest. clipped nails and clipped beaks. concurrent currents of parallel streams. a distant pulse. subliminal sucking. breathe from a laugh, resurrected. your cheeks, pillows. a sliding door. a cracked inkwell. a cupped hand mistaken for as a safety net. a fumbling. a rescinding.

a whisper.
a squeeze.
a trembling.

a treble clef. a cleft heart, unattached. a broken circle. a mountain interrupted by
a valley. attached. unattached. attached. unattached. an attaché case stuff with ripe plums. a scent ascending. a symphonic moaning. a phone disconnected. a flexion. affliction. a tension. extension. torque and sweet thunder. a clenched fist. a bit lip. candle wax on a dead victrola. a flood. a flushing. a draught. an opening.      a closing unrelated. cracked eggs on a kitchen floor. a well-timed seizure. a departure. the singed cuff of a smoking jacket. two car radios playing the same station. a refraction. an unfurling. an unmasking. a question left unasked. a contraction. a contradiction. an unveiling. a cleansing. a becoming. a breath, unattached. a death, unattached. a thumbprint on a pelvis. a promise, unattached. a bosom, unattached. a diamond heist hatched. a grape plucked. an orange, peeled. a puddle in the driveway. a pillow wrung. unattached. a fugue hummed. a trail of pink silt. unattached. a torpor. a pelt. a moth and a bruised flask. a singing matroshka. a riddle planted in a blue belly. a summons. a bewilderness. a plate of dried figs. a lost earring. an ebbing. an echo. a tremor.

An oil painting
In the den
Waiting to be hung.

* *

Image: Constanza Alberione, “Chano” (2009), courtesy of miau miau

Rosario Bléfari translated by Hilary Levinson

We’re standing in the plaza, watching the man who makes ashtrays in just a minute or two. The scent of freshly burned wood. The sound of the carving: the impact from the blow that splits the wood into pieces. Wood chips flying. Sawdust accumulating on the pavement. A secret understanding of figure and ground—knowing what needs to be removed in order to read what’s left in relief. The blowtorch used like a paintbrush. It’s nonstop entertainment because it lasts for a minute, and then it starts over again and there is always somebody ready to ask for the next one. I think about what name I would carve into the wood but I don’t smoke enough to have an ashtray with my name, nor do I have a relationship with anyone that is worthy ... Read More »]]>

Rosario Bléfari
translated by Hilary Levinson

We’re standing in the plaza, watching the man who makes ashtrays in just a minute or two. The scent of freshly burned wood. The sound of the carving: the impact from the blow that splits the wood into pieces. Wood chips flying. Sawdust accumulating on the pavement. A secret understanding of figure and ground—knowing what needs to be removed in order to read what’s left in relief. The blowtorch used like a paintbrush. It’s nonstop entertainment because it lasts for a minute, and then it starts over again and there is always somebody ready to ask for the next one. I think about what name I would carve into the wood but I don’t smoke enough to have an ashtray with my name, nor do I have a relationship with anyone that is worthy of having our two names carved together, and I can hardly imagine a bond that would be strengthened by smoking. This thing about the names makes me sad, people coming up with ten pesos in their hand and telling the woodworker what names to carve. How much courage they have, these innocents, and they don’t even know it, saying those names, exposing them to the risk of being joined together on an object—an ashtray—even after nothing else keeps them together. But my companion’s enthusiasm, his admiration for the woodworker, makes me forget these things. This is what happens to me with everything, whenever I am in his company, especially that summer.

Oh, all of the places and things he wants to show me, all of the activities he’s selected and shared with others at some point, these things that he likes and collects. And I’m not just impressed with the itinerary we take through these carefully chosen sights—yes, he wants to take other people to them, too, I know that, one day he told Ezequiel that he was going to bring him to all of them—but also the way in which he coordinates those excursions in the little time that we have, he’s put together a tour with a strict schedule, and I want to comply like a diligent student.

At one time, I would have been bored by these things, or just indifferent, but now I find them charming. I can wait with infinite patience for a table at a pizzeria—who am I?—I’m suddenly hungry enough to try scoops of ice cream, fried dough in the plaza, candies that I’ve never had before, happy to stand at his side and observe while he plays whatever it is on machines with worn-out screens, interested in games of ping-pong at which I turn out to be hopelessly inept. I’m captivated by every comment, every gesture. I’m a wreck. But it’s so lovely, what I’m feeling, this sense of abandon, like a kind of peaceful free fall, and the only thing that nags at me is the fear that this stupid and happy feeling is tremendously addictive, that I am going to need to feel this way again and again, and that later I won’t know how or where to get this intoxicating substance, that it won’t be easy to find because I am difficult, because I can’t help but compare it, and nothing else will ever be as strong or as good as this.

Sure, the trash blowing in the wind over the tables on the boardwalk continues to irritate me, and I start picking up the nylon bags that dance in the eddies when he goes to buy corn on the cob so that he won’t see me; sure, I continue to disparage the knickknacks they sell in the booths on the plaza and what the street musicians are playing, but I ignore all of that, I somehow erase everything that seems vulgar or uninteresting because I still want to get into the water, even though the sun is blazing, even though I don’t have a towel, or a blanket, or anything, and every centimeter of the beach is taken and the water is polluted, I want to dive into the sea just as it is, I know that there are better beaches, he tries to explain this to me, but I don’t care about any of it, because this is how I’m feeling, relentless, and even though at some point this will become uncomfortable and strange, and we will be mutually annoyed with each other because I want to get wet and he doesn’t and my enthusiasm should only be in the service of his desires so as not to cause conflict, in spite of the fact that not even this matters for us even though everything matters to me, still, still I am sure that this is special.

And it’s a complicated thing, even contradictory, and we don’t experience it the same way, we don’t experience anything the same way. This feeling I have has nothing to do with what happens in reality, it has nothing to do with anything that really happens, with what we see or do, it’s not the city or even the sea, it’s me, it’s only me and how I’m feeling. I’ve built up my happiness in this way, believing that everything will be okay so long as I feel this way, and that when I feel this way, I can deal with anything, even when I don’t like the way things turn out, or rather, even when I’m confronted with things that I can’t stand or that don’t matter to me. When I feel this way, I think I can make my way in the world in the way that I am meant to, if indeed I ever knew how that was. It’s there like a muscle memory that comes back to me, something from before, but before everything, even before birth. But then sometimes the sharp edges of this single imperfection trick me and cause me pain. It comes on like symptoms of withdrawal—nothing is enough—, or else like an overdose that leaves me exhausted and occasionally, very occasionally, so much so that it seems I’ve botched the substance in question, made it wrong, and can no longer get it to produce the desired effect.

* *

Image: Constanza Alberione, “Autorretrato con perro” (2011), courtesy of miau miau

Interview and introduction by Pola Oloixarac translated by Heather Cleary

A young professor of literature in Los Angeles collects funding and poems online in order to make his dream a reality: he wants to fly over the territory, dropping poems like bombs. He believes that, in light of the recent history of the United States, cleaving the air with his own drone is the best way to protect poetry: everything else can collapse—NASA can close its doors and employees of the State can fall victim to the shutdown—but military programs remain intact, the drones still carry out their secret missions. By joining with these unmanned vehicles, poetry refuses to capitulate, David muses, twirling his long connoisseur moustache.

The son of preachers from the heart of Texas, David Shook grew up having faith in the spoken word. He studied the ... Read More »]]>

Interview and introduction by Pola Oloixarac
translated by Heather Cleary

A young professor of literature in Los Angeles collects funding and poems online in order to make his dream a reality: he wants to fly over the territory, dropping poems like bombs. He believes that, in light of the recent history of the United States, cleaving the air with his own drone is the best way to protect poetry: everything else can collapse—NASA can close its doors and employees of the State can fall victim to the shutdown—but military programs remain intact, the drones still carry out their secret missions. By joining with these unmanned vehicles, poetry refuses to capitulate, David muses, twirling his long connoisseur moustache.

The son of preachers from the heart of Texas, David Shook grew up having faith in the spoken word. He studied the lost syntax of languages in danger of extinction like Kiowa and Nahuatl, and translates from Isthmus Zapotec and Zoque, the language of Chiapas. He was not able to raise the money he needed (some ten thousand dollars) on the internet, but that didn’t stop him: the song of the drones has attracted private investors, and he expects to be flying over Los Angeles with his poems within a month.

With his drones, David Shook joins the continent’s long tradition of fighting eagles. Among his inspirations he counts Raúl Zurita, who painted his poems in the air (antecedent prosthesis of Carlos Wieder, Bolaño’s fierce poet-pilot), the CasaGrande collective, which made poems rain down over London, and the Russian Futurist Vasily Kamensky, whom Shook translated from Cyrillic and who was a kind of 1930s Kanye West that saw breasts as earthquakes and life as resurrection. The canon (the poetic canons) range from English to Pashto, Saraiki, Somali and Urdu, by authors like Todd Swift, Sam Hamill, Mandy Kahn, Danielle Moody and Víctor Terán. He hopes to be able to publish the poems of Gaariye, the preeminent Somali bard who sang about nuclear weapons in 1970 and whose recorded voice circulates as contraband; the Sudanese poet Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi, a political exile living in London; along with Said Salah, Caasha Lul Mohamud Yusef, Rifat Abbas and the great Urdu poet Noshi Gillani.

He imagines them crossing the sky like geometrical insects, moving slowly 100 feet above our heads, opening their metal bellies, releasing their precious cargo. The wind is an issue, but publishing poetry is always that: tossing bits of paper into the breeze from too far up, without a care for which way it is blowing.

*

Pola Oloixarac: Obama tried to convince Congress and the G20 to bomb Syria. Whom do you have to convince in order to send out poetry drones?

David Shook: The most pressing people to convince are my potential funders, and I’m still working on that. I’d also like to convince my fellow poets that the Poetry Drone is more than just a gimmick, a look-at-me attention grab. To me it’s about more just the novelty of the poems’ distribution. It’s about the symbolism of transformation: the physical transformation of sword into plowshare. That physicality is crucial to the project—it’s as important as the poems themselves.

What’s behind the superposition of the most widespread literary genre in the USA—that is, war—and poetry, which is the most marginal? What are the implications of turning poetry into a geopolitical experience?

I like the conception of War as a literary genre. It certainly has been core to our national mythmaking. Poetry is a subgenre of speech, of language—it’s our least practical form of communication, and as a citizen of a nation often too impatient or too proud for diplomacy, poetry is a radical alternative to both rhetorical and physical political aggression.

I think it’s important to remember that all poetry is political, and that’s because all language is political. I’m not talking about Democrats versus Republicans, about political parties or principles—I think that kind of stuff typically results in some pretty uninteresting poetry. Language is political because it’s how we relate with other people—and I think that’s the important thing, that we relate with other people, people like and unlike us.

Modern warfare has worked hard to facilitate the dehumanization of our enemies—to eliminate the supposed barbarism of hand-to-hand combat, of seeing our enemies up close, of having to recognize their humanity. To recognize that our enemies are people. But drones are a perfect example of contemporary war’s very real barbarism—from the Greek barbaros, or “foreign.” We’re distancing ourselves from murder; since we’ve justified it in theory we ought not endure the ethical complications of carrying out its physical act. I think this conversation is a worthy topic for our poetry.

Do you think the people who do the bombing will read your poems?

The guys doing the bombing? The teenagers and twenty-somethings joy-sticking Predators from their bunkers in Texas/Florida/Nevada? Probably not. I’d like for them to, of course. I’d love for them to write some poems to be dropped from the drone. How amazing would it be to drop some poems over an army base? I don’t know if I’m ready for Guantanamo, though.

War is so interesting as a horizon; we live inside it, and that’s what I love about your drones: the state of poetry is right there, because war is the reality of the case (“case” in the sense of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus). How do you see this case, this war that is so different from the ones with Iraq and Afganistan?

The United States has been at war my entire adult life, my entire professional life as a poet. It’s difficult for me to know experientially how this case is different from others in the past, but I suspect that our displacement of war has reached new levels. War happens in the background, like an open window on your computer that you’ve buried under a thousand Word documents and Chrome tabs. The average American is not affected by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, at least not in terms of their daily living situation. This is somewhat less true for those in lower income brackets, and somewhat more true for those in higher brackets. This displacement of war is dehumanizing to those who suffer its effects. War is dehumanizing, period, but we have developed an unprecedentedly effective method of dehumanizing the objects of our supposedly just wars. But here’s the catch: you can’t dehumanize others without dehumanizing yourself. Drones are a physical manifestation of that idea, an emblem of our times.  Afghanistan and Iraq are conveniently just beyond the visible horizon. I don’t know a United States at peace. I don’t know that one exists. Maybe that’s true of any political state, inherent to the nature of systems, but as an artist and poet I want to be one of those—and here I borrow from the fantastic South African magazine /Chimurenga/—”who no know go know.”

Have the conditions under which poetry is produced come to resemble the conditions of war?

No. We’ve allocated $91.5 billion to the war in Afghanistan this year, and just under $5 billion to drones, which is a little more than we’ve invested in poetry.

I produce most of mine in bed on a MacBook Air, in my Los Angeles studio, with a tiny chihuahua on my stomach and a fan on my face, or on the bus, on my iPhone. Although I guess that’s increasingly what war looks like to the soldiers on our side of the drones, I don’t think I can compare my own experience of writing poems to the experience of war. I’m immensely privileged, and I think that to claim otherwise is offensive. I do aspire to do more than just document the interior life of the privileged, but I think that the ability to do so is a function of my own privilege. Maybe the conditions under which a Twa woman composes an oral poem, or someone like Raúl Rivero writing poems in prison, or Recaredo Silebo Boturu’s veiled political critique of the police state approach the depraved conditions of war, but not the conditions I write in.

Has poetry gone to war against common modes of existence? Is this a challenge it should take on?

I’m not convinced that common modes of existence are all that common themselves. Common to whom?

Poetry is huge, so I’ll speak only for myself: my poems seek to explore and subvert common modes of language, of communication. That sounds very serious, which it is, but not at the expense of pleasure. Like Biko says, “I write what I like.”

I’m not terribly keen on these types of abstractions—they often lead to very romantic and bourgey notions about writing. It feels dramatic to say that poetry is at war with anything. If it is, it’s doing a pretty shit job of it. Have you seen the soldiers? Most poets can’t swim; their feet blister easily; they’re belligerent, get drunk on the job, and are prone to desertion. That’s our charm, but drones don’t fall for it.

If Hollande ultimately supports Obama’s bid to bomb, will you include poems written in French?

I’d love to include French-language poems! So far I have poems from Arabic, English, Pashto, Somali, and Zapotec, but I’d love to include all the languages I can get. There’s an open call for submissions on my website.

In Elio Petri’s La decima vittima, Ursula Andress is chasing after Marcello Mastroianni, trying to kill him. In the end, they get married and flowers sprout from the gun. If we consider the fact that, instead of bombs, your drones drop poems, doesn’t your project end up aestheticizing war? In the context of the USA’s proposed attack on Syria, is it possible that your project depoliticizes war, and is therefore an inversion of Walter Benjamin’s ideas?

I don’t know that I’ve contributed to an aesthetics of war, though I do appreciate some art that I think has done this, like Mahwish Chishty’s visual reappropriation of drones and Yoshua Okón’s re-contextualization of war exercises (Octopus).

The Poetry Drone is an attempt to aestheticize political engagement, to aestheticize protest. It offers a symbolic alternative to my culture’s promulgation of political and economic domination, of empire. I hope.

At the same time the Poetry Drone is more than just an exercise in aesthetics, in aestheticizing protest, or an experiment in the distribution of poetry. That’s the importance of its physicality. Like Pedro Reyes’ instruments and shovels. Reyes is an inspiration; I would love to meet him.

The PoDro repurposes an actual physical object intended to be used to kill people from the safety and comfort of a military installation some 7,000 miles away.

There are some obvious practical differences—I don’t have the millions it would take to control a drone from that distance, but the model I’m hoping to acquire, which is most often used for aerial photography, can be controlled from over a mile away. The poems that the drone deploys do come from that far away—from Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan—and from nearer by.

I’ve joked that if anything, the Poetry Drone might kill children from boredom, but honestly I don’t believe that will be the case. The poems I’ve collected so far are great, and the physical imposition of the drone—a seemingly autonomous machine humming as it hovers in place—will make for an impressive and I hope mildly terrifying display.

I think that Benjamin’s aestheticization of politics applies more broadly to empire, not just to fascist regimes, and thus also describes today’s United States. So sure, the Poetry Drone might politicize aesthetics, but I’m hesitant to say that it does so in the heroic and antidotal mode that Benjamin envisioned. I do think that there is an inherent relationship between aesthetics and politics, but I’m no scholar and I haven’t worked out its exact nature—maybe you, Pola, could help me come up with some wild theories?

* *

Artwork: Rosario Zorraquin, “Guerra” (2013).

* *

David Shook grew up in Mexico City before studying endangered languages in Oklahoma and poetry at Oxford. His collection of poems Our Obsidian Tongues, longlisted for the 2013 Dylan Thomas Prize, is available from Eyewear Publishing. He served as Translator in Residence at the Poetry Parnassus in London, where he premiered his covertly filmed documentary Kilometer Zero, featuring Equatorial Guinean poet Marcelo Ensema Nsang. His translations include Mario Bellatin’s Shiki Nagaoka, Oswald de Andrade’s Cannibal Manifesto, and Roberto Bolaño’s manifesto Leave Everything, Again. He lives in Los Angeles, where he edits molossus and Phoneme Media. (Photo: Crispin Hughes)

Adam Z. Levy

For all the theories of translation one disavows or keeps tacked above the bed, there remain certain unscientific gut-level questions like: Have I gone too far? Have I gone far enough? During the year that I spent working on Hungarian writer Gábor Schein’s first novel, The Book of Mordechai, I approached my author often with such questions. We met on Friday evenings to drink fizzy lemonades at an outdoor café in the Budapest district where we both lived. If it is possible to condense a year’s worth of meetings in a single phrase, it might be most fitting to call them dry interrogations: I pointed to places, in my own text and in the original, and asked whether I had understood the implications of this word or that phrase. It is one of the privileges of ... Read More »]]>

Adam Z. Levy

For all the theories of translation one disavows or keeps tacked above the bed, there remain certain unscientific gut-level questions like: Have I gone too far? Have I gone far enough? During the year that I spent working on Hungarian writer Gábor Schein’s first novel, The Book of Mordechai, I approached my author often with such questions. We met on Friday evenings to drink fizzy lemonades at an outdoor café in the Budapest district where we both lived. If it is possible to condense a year’s worth of meetings in a single phrase, it might be most fitting to call them dry interrogations: I pointed to places, in my own text and in the original, and asked whether I had understood the implications of this word or that phrase. It is one of the privileges of working with a living writer to be able to ask even the most trivial things.

Schein, whose second novel, Lazarus!, was translated by Ottilie Mulzet for Triton in 2010, puts his formal inventiveness on display in The Book of Mordechai: it is a retelling of the biblical Book of Esther, woven into the story of three generations of a twentieth-century Hungarian family. The narrative shifts in time and place from paragraph to paragraph and is filled with anecdotes, family reminiscences, source documents, and meta-narratives on translation that defy easy classification. It is as much about a country’s—and a family’s—difficult history as it is about the limits of language in preserving the memory of it.

At the novel’s center, though in many ways it has more than one, is a young boy named P. who spends the summer learning to read and write under the supervision of his grandmother. The text his grandmother has him read is the Book of Esther. She brings out an old yellowing edition that belonged to his mother, and which was translated at the beginning of the last century by Leopold Blumenfeld, a rabbi from the town where she, P.’s grandmother, was raised. (The Blumenfeld translation is an invention of Schein’s, based on an edition of the Book of Esther that Schein produced at one of our meetings; its translation credits belong to the very real Mór Schwarz.) Blumenfeld’s translation, the one presented in The Book of Mordechai, raises questions about where we draw the line between translation and interpretation: the reader learns early on that “in certain places [he] changed the text”—in one instance, by “arranging the letters of the Hebrew text from an unquestionably hard-to-understand sentence in a way that departed from the original, namely by inserting one letter, a surprising but seemingly-correct reading was attained.”

For Blumenfeld, the manipulation of the text is fact an attempt to stabilize it: his amended version flows—to borrow Péter Pázmány’s phrase from three centuries before—“fluidly, as though it had first been written by a Hungarian, in Hungarian.” Something similar happens when Blumenfeld replaces the stake on which Haman hopes to impale his rival Mordechai with a tree, so as to have him hanged. Blumenfeld goes one step further, changing the unit of measurement in the text from cubits to ell, in effect doubling the height of the tree. With the new measurements, we are told a hanging would have been impossible. The already fable-like tale is taken from the exaggerated to the absurd, since the hanging still takes place. In Schein’s vision of the book, it is necessary that it does: a translation cannot outrun the shadow of its source.

Blumenfeld’s translation of The Book of Esther poses subtler difficulties as well. There are many more modifications to the Schwarz translation than Blumenfeld (or Schein) lets on. Words are omitted or replaced with more modern equivalents; the tone of entire lines is amplified or dampened, leaving their translator to navigate between four texts rather than two. For example:

In the English translation of the Hebrew bible that I used, a section from Esther reads: “Some time afterward, when the anger of King Ahasuerus subsided, he thought of Vashti and what she had done and what had been decreed against her. The king’s servants who attended him said, ‘Let beautiful young virgins be sought out for Your Majesty.’”

The Blumenfeld translation reads: “When King Ahasuerus’ anger subsided, he thought of Vashti. He was reminded of the pleasantness of her touch, the pleasantness of her voice. But the king’s servants said, ‘Let beautiful virgins be sought out for Your Majesty.’” Most notable is Blumenfeld’s insertion of the second sentence: “He was reminded of the pleasantness of her touch, the pleasantness of her voice.” It replaces the juridical with the sentimental, allowing the buffoonish king a moment of nostalgic self-reflection not present in the original: he recognizes what he has lost and what he will not be able to bring back. The tone has also changed as a result: the formality is softened as “the king’s servants who attended him” becomes the more colloquial “the king’s servants.”

In order to match the register of Blumenfeld’s translation I tried to smooth out the edges of the biblical Book of Esther while preserving the integrity of its form. The modifications within the translation metanarrative are, in most cases, intended to go unnoticed. The changes shouldn’t stand in the light of the original; they should remain hidden in the text. And yet, in each section of the book, the intertextual framework, the constant undoing and redoing of language, reveals itself just enough for the reader to watch Schein quietly build the axis on which the novel spins. On each revolution, it asks: What is the language required for the stories we pass on?

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Image: Alejandra Seeber, “Consider not understanding,” courtesy of miau miau

Julián Fuks translated by Sarah Bruni

Call it bookstore anxiety disorder. I know I’m not the first to suffer from this affliction, and I won’t be the last. This particular illness should be described in some list of new pathologies—at once intense and subtle, it can attack anyone wandering amid long shelves of shiny, attractive volumes. Nausea, maybe, an angst whose cause is difficult to name: it’s something in the exaggerated order of the books, their eagerness, something in their obvious hierarchy. The larger the store, the clearer its windows, the stronger the feeling—although even in airport bookstores, this malaise can be unexpectedly intense.

I’m sure that this phenomenon has spread to a hundred countries, but São Paulo is one of its origins. Forced to shop at big chains and impassable megastores, the city’s last remaining literate residents are ... Read More »]]>

Julián Fuks
translated by Sarah Bruni

Call it bookstore anxiety disorder. I know I’m not the first to suffer from this affliction, and I won’t be the last. This particular illness should be described in some list of new pathologies—at once intense and subtle, it can attack anyone wandering amid long shelves of shiny, attractive volumes. Nausea, maybe, an angst whose cause is difficult to name: it’s something in the exaggerated order of the books, their eagerness, something in their obvious hierarchy. The larger the store, the clearer its windows, the stronger the feeling—although even in airport bookstores, this malaise can be unexpectedly intense.

I’m sure that this phenomenon has spread to a hundred countries, but São Paulo is one of its origins. Forced to shop at big chains and impassable megastores, the city’s last remaining literate residents are left without alternatives where they can roam freely between books and browse through their purchases. They have, however, a slight remedy—or a consolation, as the name of the place suggests. Situated under one of the city’s main avenues, “Passagem Literária da Consolação” (Consolation Literary Underpass) offers relief to lungs clogged with glitter, a breath carrying the dust of old forgotten books. No organized inventory, but the disorder of life itself. No striking images and ads, just covers faded by time. No price gouging, just the books’ essential worth going straight into the pockets of a few booksellers who work as a cooperative.

Of course, you won’t find the newest release by the pop writer of the moment there, or the shifting oddities hailed by the critics. Nor is going there a longstanding routine for me: I can’t invent afternoons I spent here, giving in to the pure pleasure of literature, to its indelible instruction. I should be honest: it’s not even one of my usual destinations. But every time I pass through there, I feel something in me unwind, something in me is consoled. I can continue my walk and my day with a greater sense of calm.

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Passagem Literária da Consolação: pedestrian walkway at the corner of Consolação and Paulista Avenue.

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Image credit: Julián Fuks