JSP

The very real tradition of a book that can be dismantled into components or expanded with age. Text of multiplied parts, Rayuela or Pobrecito poeta que era yo as two examples of Latin American postmodernism. In Venezuela, Juan Sánchez Peláez brings a disruption in 1951 with Elena y los elementos. The accelerations of: "Ciudad de inenarrable tristeza: / Perezco en tus navíos fatigados, en tus fatales emboscadas." An acknowledgement of a past language, still partly in use, but eventually discarded, from the first book to the final poems in the early 2000s, texts scaled down to single gestures. Sánchez Peláez also being a poet who brought other cities to Venezuela, whether from Santiago in the 1940s, Paris in the 1950s or Iowa and New York in the early seventies. Poetry with no single city, unwriteable.

PA

"Postmodernism emerged as a cultural dominant in unprecedently rich capitalist societies with very high average levels of consumption. [Fredric] Jameson's first reconnaissance linked it directly to these, and he has since insisted further on its specifically American origins. Would it not therefore be reasonable to think that where levels of consumption were far lower, and the stage of industrial development much less advanced, a configuration closer to modernism - as it once flourished in the West - would be more likely to prevail? This was a hypothesis to which I, at any rate, was drawn. In these conditions, might one not expect to find a pronounced dualism of high and low forms, comparable to the European divide between avant-garde and mass culture, possibly with a still wider gulf between the two? The Indian cinema would appear to offer a case in point: the contrast between Satyajit Ray's films and the avalanche of song-and-dance genres from the Bombay studios looking as stark as any in the developed world. But this, of course, is an example from a highly protected market in the sixties. Today, global communications systems insure an incomparably greater degree of cultural penetration of the former Second and Third Worlds by the First. In these conditions, the influence of postmodern forms becomes inescapable - in the architecture of cities like Shanghai or Kuala Lampur, the art shows of Caracas or Beijing, novels and films from Moscow to Buenos Aires." (121)

{ Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, Verso, 1998 }

CN

Finished for now, a sequence of 52 poems w/ prelude of six texts, divided into three cantos, each of which could be supplemented or rearranged, called Caracas Notebook. Using a chronological sequence in three repeated cycles, summers 2001 and 2002, parallel months. An essay as the second part to the book, its conclusion in 2003. (Fiction & non-fiction.)

The intent is purely autobiographical, ellipsis as the means but confusing political events of that period take place in the poems, becoming the central concern. A few anonymous photographs of the city and a register of conversations, stopped after sound in the hills.

The discovery of Venezuelan and Latin American writers I was reading at the time, by way of bookstores, living rooms and libraries in Caracas. A haphazard list of titles picked up.

Rafael Cadenas
Elizabeth Schön
Vicente Gerbasi
Juan Sánchez Peláez
Antonia Palacios
Luis Alberto Crespo
Alfredo Silva Estrada
Javier Sologuren
Emilio Adolfo Westphalen
César Moro
Jacqueline Goldberg
Martha Kornblith
Rafael Castillo Zapata
Francisco Pérez Perdomo
Arturo Uslar Pietri
Cintio Vitier
Ana Teresa Torres
Yolanda Pantin
Patricia Guzmán
Armando Rojas Guardia
Rosamel del Valle
Fernando Paz Castillo

The texts are not in direct dialogue with any of these writers, though they're sometimes included in epigraphs or allusions. That was inevitable based on the form laid out for this project, two Blueline notebooks, for diary, verse, draft notations. The formlessness of a notebook as a formal device, the sequential ordering of two months repeated thrice.

The list is a partial reconstruction of a library existing in time, avenues marked for referral, the stacks of downtown skyscrapers, walking excursions in el centro, Bellas Artes, Plaza Venezuela, UCV, the length of Sabana Grande, La Florida, Chacaito, Altamira, by subway from Los Cortijos to El Capitolio. Three decades compressed in two months. Numbers and zones on the maps by car, San Bernardino, La Trinidad, Tucacas, Valencia by night, up into mountains for the night over Caracas, breakfast pastoral in the clouds above the Caribbean sea.

*

Concerned with the 'postmodern' city. With that conglomeration of texts, dangers in the criminal endeavors against pedestrians, no English spoken outside the house, the poems in English about a series of languages.

Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (Verso, 1998) and his location of the word in Latin America through Rubén Darío, modernismo's cosmopolitan bearings. But a new millenial frenzy to the violence of the city in early 2000s.

" 'Postmodernism' as term and idea supposes the currency of 'modernism'. Contrary to conventional expectation, both were born in a distant periphery rather than at the centre of the cultural system of the time: they come not from Europe or the United States, but from Hispanic America. We owe the coinage of 'modernism' as an aesthetic movement to a Nicaraguan poet, writing in a Guatemalan journal, of a literary encounter in Peru." (3)

2046

There is a scene in Wong Kar-wai's In The Mood For Love (2000) of Tony Leung closing his door as Maggie Cheung walks back to her apartment, his door has the number 2046 on it, a fast-fwd to the next film, tunnel of time in the form of a science fiction short story about androids on a train. The lighting in both films, indoors, the writer as motif and individual.

*

Likewise the structure of Roque Dalton's novel Pobrecito poeta que era yo uses different time blocks in the 1960s and early 1970s. Book IV ("Mario") is in journal form, with successive dates in diary prose, on a post-it note: "post-Boom mid-1970s novel." Book V is "José La luz del túnel" and adheres to a testimonial format but obviously fictionalized, political intrigue, deadly humor in conversations, the poet turned campesino in the hills outside San Salvador at dawn heading into the city. An exile novel and one steeped in humor as a meaning, G. Cabrera Infante would be one reference point, the hurried, 3-D prose of La Habana para un infante difunto.

His translation with Suzanne Jill-Levine, a re-writing of the memoir-fiction in English as Infante's Inferno. An aesthetic of short stories linked together with an artificial longer narrative, the epic image though falsified from the start, the staged quality of Wong Kar-wai's actors, the chapters Cabrera Infante or Dalton write as a form of exile. So the essay takes as part of its effort the final book of Roberto Bolaño's 2666, from rural Germany of the 1920s to Russia in the 1930s, a book within a book, in journal form, long journey on foot and an episode at Dracula's castle.

*

"Could she have read D.H. Lawrence years ago, like me? I felt a prisoner of that island, Ile du Diable. I understood Juliet now in her firm refusal to follow me to my mythical and literary island: impossible islands, flying Laputas.
"I hate islands," I said, to dissuade her definitively.
"But Cuba is an island!" she protested.
"I don't live in Cuba, I live in Havana."
"Then you could also live in Caracas. It's a modern city with long avenues and high buildings and besides--"


(G. Cabrera Infante, Infante's Inferno, Faber, 1984.)

*

Reading Fulcrum's massive supplement "Give the Sea Change And It Shall Change: Fifty-Six Indian Poets (1951-2005)" edited by Jeet Thayil. The introductory essay by Thayil "One Language, Separated by the Sea" discusses the marginality of poets in India's social landscape and conduits between American and Indian poetics. The supplement includes a poem by Dom Moraes originally published in 1959, "Another Weather."

"Often this weather, when a wind has driven
Insects and dust through air, the landscape moves,
Tilting itself one way, until this wind,
Shifting the world, has purified my mind."

Ithaca 11.12.05

Sobre la barbarie / Rafael Cadenas

On Barbarism

(...) In summary, what education must seek, according to Adorno, is to liberate the human being from that minority of age that sometimes tends to prolong itself until old age and which fertilizes the ground for the emergence of dictators, messianic figures or simply leaders who consider themselves to be the bearers of an historic mission. In his conception there is no room for the grandiosity destined to nourish insatiable egos. A phrase of his seems worthy of rescuing from oblivion and keeping in mind. It is this one: "a democracy demands emancipated individuals," it is worth emphasizing, beings who have reached maturity, truly and not simply by virtue of an accumulation of birthdays, which is crucial in order to avoid collective misplacements.

It is also very important to emphasize that Adorno rejects nationalism, he finds it anachronistic in this age of astonishing international communication and transnational unions, which by the way have developed further since 1970, when his book was published. In Venezuela, by the way, a contradiction bordering on the absurd is seen: a sermon of continental unity with a Bolivarian sign and a rising nationalism that at times becomes offensive in some of its manifestations. That is why such a project of unity between "brother nations" does not go beyond the insubstantial rhetoric of speeches as long as nationalism remains intact. Venezuela will have to take another road, removed from that disease afflicting all nations to such a degree that it might not be an exaggeration to consider it their other religion, which, moreover, carries war within its bosom. Going further, Adorno affirms: "The climate that most favors repetition is resurgent nationalism..." (...)

Actually, barbarism for Adorno is above all the extreme: delirious prejudice, repression, genocide, torture. So then, left outside are manifestations that, widening the spectrum, should be included within the idea of barbarism, which is what people do spontaneously anyways. In Venezuela, we know them well. Barbarism is the crime that has afflicted the country for years now or corruption or mocking the law or harming the environment or police brutality or fiscal deceit or electoral fraud or the scorning of minorities by the majorities or the abuse of women and children, in the end, it would be impossible to list all the acts of barbarism that tend to occur. (...)

The brief journey I've made through the century's hell, omitting many facts, has the sheen of a dance of death whose accompaniment is made up of ideas that have taken root in the collective, and for which there seems to be no end. It can take place anywhere on the planet, but since we never know when or where, we are always surprised by the macabre staging. It is the "black milk" from Paul Celan's poem we drink at all hours, when we read the newspaper, when we watch the TV news, when we listen to the radio: it is the giant shadow of the XX century. (...)

It is evident that all revolutions have been a failure, besides having an incalculable cost in blood, but there are still people, almost always generous, who believe in it for our time. Maybe they think the next one will be different, that the mistakes comitted by the previous ones will be avoided, and that finally the dawn will sing. But in fact what they do is lose the present, life's other name, sacrificing it in the name of a phantasmagoric land. They could opt for evolution, but that is not spectacular, it doesn't possess extraordinary sheens, it doesn't lend itself to the brilliance of the I, it doesn't allow occasions for excessive speeches, it doesn't give breath to that hubris the gods punish. It is modest, it is prudent, it is civic. It suffers from slowness perhaps because it knows that processes need more time than what impatience demands, which sometimes damages what it tries to accomplish through hurrying. Evolution considers the notion that the end justifies the means barbaric, since these are what determine the end; the quality of the means is crucial. It believes more in intrahistory [la intrahistoria] than in history, and unlike revolution which inexplicably, forgetting Marx, worships nationalism, it puts it aside because it hinders friendship between nations, already a difficult task, since up to now national egos have proved more powerful than the survival instinct of humans.

Today, concluding the century and after witnessing its horrors, I only think in terms of the individual, of what occurs within him, of what he might be able to do. I think what is decisive is his inner work, that struggle with his own psyche, his disposition to see himself without lying, his opening up toward mystery.




{ Rafael Cadenas, Verbigracia, El Universal, 12 May 2001 }

La vocación antidemocrática / Oswaldo Barreto

The Antidemocratic Vocation

When we compare Chávez's regime with the regimes in South America that openly call themselves leftist, the trait that most radically differentiates it from them is its systematic effort to build an absolutist power at the expense of the deterioration, if not the frank destruction, of democratic institutions. This effective hoarding of all public powers within himself on the part of Chávez—which correlatively implies the loss of that power in those institutions that constitutionally should exert it—has never been manifested in Argentina, nor in Brazil, nor in Chile, as it is also not seen in the youngest of those leftist social democratic regimes, Tabaré Vásquez's in Uruguay.

In those countries the existence of independent public powers is not only the norm but a reality, as is equally a reality the respect toward other essential principles of a democratic regime, such as alternating leaders, the guarantee of minority rights and the search for consensus when deciding changes in diverse areas of public activity. And, correlatively, none of the presidents of those countries pretends to be the only leader with power, the regime's sole authority.

So now, if we stop for a while to look at this aspect of Chavismo, we find that not only does the antidemocratic behavior differentiate it from those other regimes, but it also gives it its true specificity in our country's political history. And it's not that antidemocratic regimes haven't existed before in Venezuela, since one can say there has never been a fully democratic one. What is radically new about Chavismo in this respect is that the assault against the principles and institutions which Chávez unquestionably leads has found decided and decisive support among wide sectors of the political world, and even an ample tolerance among all social sectors. Veteran political leaders, middle cadres, as they're called in the slang of militants, arrived from all political parties and all tendencies, have been the executors, the authors of this systematic assault against democratic institutions and principles. Without them, without their decisive support, Chávez would not have been able to impose all those measures which have resulted in the impoverishment of the country's democratic life, the permanent uncertainty we inhabit regarding the survival of public liberties and human rights.

And without the worship and the servitude those very polititians have given him, Chávez's pretensions of erecting himself as the sole leader would never have become a sinsiter reality. We find ourselves, in a single word, no longer facing a personal characteristic of Hugo Chávez, but rather the truly antidemocratic vocation of the regime he presides.

And it is worth asking oneself, to return to our point of departure: where could that antidemocratic vocation that characterizes Chavismo, and has not manifested itself in those other regimes, have surged from? A question that not only takes us back to our history, to our past or to our idiosyncrasy as a nation, but opens up uncomfortably toward our future.

Perhaps it is early, too early to consecrate ourselves to the task of answering this crucial question. But we think there is something that already makes itself evident and which can serve us as a guide to expedite our searches: all those regimes to which we have compared Chavismo have sprouted precisely from the ruins of dictatorial regimes, while this one we are living spreads its roots in the ruins of a democratic regime. For Argentines, Brazilians, Chileans and Uruguayans, the dictatorships, the regimes with antidemocratic vocations are very present in the collective memory and they wouldn't want to see them reappear for anything, hiding beneath any type of mask. Here, the immediate past invites us to correct the defects of democracy, even if that means using remedies that will end up killing it.




{ Oswaldo Barreto, TalCual, 14 October 2005 }

Porno Para Ricardo

A few months ago my good friend Simón Bravo told me about the incarceration of one of Cuba's greatest punk rock musicians, Gorki Águila, in 2003 on trumped up drug charges, another victim of the reactionary Cuban regime. Simón had insisted on how brilliant his band Porno Para Ricardo is, but their albums are difficult to find outside Cuba so I didn't have a chance to listen to them.

It turns out Gorki Águila was conditionally released from prison last spring. I was able to watch his band's video for the single "El Cake" tonight at Simón apartment and I was impressed by how good they sound. The video is a brilliant low-budget affair, filmed in a Havana apartment with scantily clad friends and the band carousing for the cameras.

Last August, Miami's El Nuevo Herald published the following article on Águila: "El rock que desafina con Castro."

Simón has recently been in touch with Águila over e-mail and conducted an interview with him: "Gorki Águila: Entre el placer y la felicidad," which El Nuevo Cojo Ilustrado has published in its latest issue. The interview is in Spanish but I translate the following excerpt:

"Just because I hate communism doesn't mean I defend capitalism. I believe the latter is more of the same shit, only with less plague. No matter how much I understand what it is, I will always prefer capitalism. If I were a revolutionary in any system it would be within capitalism. If there's something to be done it's to improve it, not to build communism. For me the left is never an alternative."

Airports

When my grandfather was sent to Texas from Venezuela in the 1920s to study high school, I have no idea how he arrived there from Maracaibo, though I imagine it was probably by ship. It was in Texas that he learned how to speak English, which eventually helped him land a job with Shell Oil when he settled in Caracas some years later. I don't even know where he lived in Texas, though I try to imagine what that must have been like, separated from his family, a brown foreigner in a distant country.

In the 1950s he moved his wife and children to New York City for three years, where they lived in Washington Heights. That's where my father learned how to speak English, among his Italian-American and Jewish friends in elementary school. My father would later fly up to the US again in 1967, to study in New York and Boston.

My first trips out of the US were in the early 1970s, to Venezuela to visit family, though I don't remember these. When we moved to Caracas permanently, we travelled by freight ship, a week-long journey out of New York City I remember vividly, from the expanse of ocean around our ship, the girl my age I befriended, whose family were the only other passengers on board, to our arrival in the summer heat of La Guaira, a blast of green off the cliffs and mountains of the coastline.

I've been passing through airports my entire life, so that along with hotels they feel like familiar and inevitable locations. I've only listened to the collaboration between Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd, In What Language? (Pi Recordings, 2003) a handful of times, but I already like it very much. It seems like a natural precursor to Ladd's brilliant album Negrophilia (Thirsty Ear Records, 2005) in that his poems are given a prominent place in the mix. In this album, however, we hear more of his words, with the unifying theme being the transit of brown bodies through airports all over the world. Brown people passing through airports as a result of privilege, or out of necessity. Who can travel, who must travel and who is deemed suspicious when traveling, especially after 9/11? Latinos, of course, have always been deemed suspicious in this country and we probably always will be, even in states like California, Florida and Texas.

The album opens with a couplet inaugurating the travel motif explored by Ladd's poems & production alongside Iyer's great piano playing, as well as a talented group of collaborators:

"In the delicate distance
of brown, I sit in a bus"

I don't even have enough money for a haircut right now, yet I'll be passing through airports in Texas, Florida and Massachusetts next month, for work or family reasons. There will always be a reason to move or leave whatever place I consider home. The transit imposed by history and by nomadic impulses established years before my birth. I often write when in transit, hoping to maybe fix and archive the places I travel through on my way elsewhere. Boston is my home now but it doesn't feel permanent. Born across the river in Cambridge, I soon left, imitating my grandfather in reverse direction. The echo of my name in Guillermo Alberto Parra Portillo, somewhere in Texas in the 1920s. Which is why Mike Ladd's closing lines coincide with my experiences. Hip-hop being a way of life tied to ancient and current migrations:

"Parts of this bag are older than history
This will outlast our memory"

Grillo

Along with the blessing of an audience and an excellent space to read my poems, one of the things I liked most about last weekend in Ithaca was the chance to speak with fellow writers about a wide variety of topics. The dedication of everyone associated with SOON Productions to making poetry a living and relevant art form is inspiring. Next month’s reading promises to be good, with Anna Moschovakis and Matvei Yankelevich.

Speaking with Josh after the reading, he mentioned how the presence of grillos (crickets) in my Caracas Notebook poems had reminded him of moments in Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos. Although Pound had been on my mind when I was writing and editing that manuscript, I had completely forgotten about the following sections in “Canto LXXVIII”:

“Be welcome, O cricket my grillo, but you must not / sing after taps.”

“Qui suona Wolfgang grillo”

In Caracas Notebook I’m attempting to write about the incessant and beautiful noise of frogs and crickets that sound everywhere in Caracas once the sun goes down. Even when driving in a car, one can hear their songs following through the windows, from tree to tree. But this coincidence with Pound has been an added surprise.

I ended up reading a few translations from texts by Antonia Palacios and Martha Kornblith I’ve been working on for my anthology. I also read my English version of a prose poem by Roque Dalton, “Primavera en Jevani,” from his collection Taberna y otros lugares (1969). As I’ve been writing about Dalton recently (in relation to Roberto Bolaño) I often forget just how funny he can be in his writing. The chuckles his poem elicited from the audience reminded me of his ability to write about the deadliest of matters in a casual and ironic manner. Now I must begin to write the first draft of the essay on Dalton and Bolaño’s final, posthumous novels.

There is also an astonishing Jean-Michel Basquiat painting called “Grillo” (1984), which was included in his show at the Brooklyn Museum a few months ago. It was one of the pieces I spent a long time studying on the day we visited the museum.

House of Shalimar

Thank you, Ithaca friends, for the conversation, poems, broadsides, food, lodging, tours, directions & libations.

Intraducible

Derek Walcott's poetry is often dismissed by certain poets and critics as being too "mainstream," as relying on outmoded and trite techniques and subject matter. Walcott is also accused of being complacent, or not radical enough, on the topic of empire. What this critique misses in Walcott's work is how thoroughly he investigates the interstices of the Black Atlantic consciousness. I read Walcott for some of the same reasons I read poets such as Amiri Baraka, Elizabeth Alexander, Wilson Harris, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Sandra Cisneros, N. Scott Momaday, Eileen Tabios and Thomas Sayers Ellis: because of how they negotiate the inevitable conjunction of language, race and the canon.

I think his recent book, The Prodigal (FSG, 2004), is among his weakest, partly because it suffers from flat lines, many of them weighed down by ineffective metaphors or trite imagery. And yet, Walcott's evocation of a distinctly Caribbean and Latin American condition remains masterful. Walcott's verse often depends on a manipulation of a distinct existential crisis as the central component of a poem. When one is black or brown in the United States or Europe, existence cannot be taken for granted. The field of literature in the US, for instance, is inherently averse to the survival of black or brown writers as anything beyond mere adornment.

This is why colleagues of mine at BU could refer to Walcott's technical proficiency as unsound. They said these types of things with a straight face. I recall one incident in our workshop when someone wasted more than an hour of our time arguing with Walcott over his interpretation of Auden's poem on Freud. Rather than disagree with Walcott on Auden's merits, the student devoted his argument to countering each of Walcott's points in a manner that would have been considered out of place were the professor white. But I don't intend to discuss race right now, or the systemic exclusion of writers of color in the field of literature.

What I am getting at is the notion that Walcott's verse is, in a sense, translated. His constant reference to natural landscapes as correlatives to the act of writing and reading a translated language, reflects his conception of poetry as a form of translation. The moments I find useful in Walcott's work are the ones that expose an uncomfortable and angry silence, a naming that is necessarily incomplete and scarred. Walcott is never fully at ease with English, which is why so much of his work retains an effective violence against the form and intent of this language.

His longer poems ("Omeros," "The Schooner Flight," "Another Life," "The Bounty") succeed by virtue of their use of repetition. To a degree that silence, or perhaps static, begins to shroud the narrative and distort its imagery. It is that distortion I recognize as my own, a language based on suffering and beauty. An acceptance of no future beyond the word and her houses, including the ones we are prohibited from entering. At times, Walcott identifies this unease with English clearly.

"The dialect of the scrub in the dry season
withers the flow of English. Things burn for days
without translation, with the heat
of the scorched pastures and their skeletal cows.
Every noun is a stump with its roots showing,
and the creole language rushes like weeds
until the entire island is overrun,
then the rain begins to come in paragraphs
and hazes this page, hazes the grey of islets,
the grey of eyes, the rain-storm's wild-haired beauty."
("The Prodigal," 11, I)

This unease, this forced cohabitation, this love affair with translation is of course a product of historical, political and economic impositions. One does not choose translation, it is simply there, a reminder of history. What I gain from reading Walcott is an understanding of how translation can be utilized as a method of composition, how the body and mind are already experts at manipulating its demands.

*

The new issue of Letras Libres (free, but registration required) has a feature on Tijuana which includes brilliant texts by Heriberto Yépez and Rafa Saavedra. Again, the issue of translation is suffered and reinvented in these two writers, with marvelous results. While I disagree with Yépez regarding Bhabha's notion of hybridity being too "general and depoliticized," I understand the critique he is making of Tijuana's faux (or pop) hybridity. It is a hybridity marketed by US imperialism in an effort to make Tijuana invisible yet accessible.

Yépez is an essayist whose prose sparkles and confounds with the same intensity of certain poetry. In that sense, his writing reminds me of Wilson Harris, since both use distortion as a starting point for their sentences. Both of them also write a prose that is poetic in its conception of the sentence as capable of carrying a prodigious amount of information, much of it moving in various simultaneous directions. "Prolegómenos a toda tijuanología del peor-venir" will hopefully be translated into English, but when it is it will surely still bear the scars it now enacts, scars that remind the reader of the impossibility of translation.

I've read less of Saavedra's work, most of it through his blog. His contribution is a semi-autobiographical short story, "Foukaka Crew." The story tells of a night out with friends at a club. Each of the friends in the story is presented in snapshot stills, a nightlife glow encapsulating their quick (or is it rushed?) movements through the arc of the plot. Saavedra's story instantly made me think of Salvador Garmendia's evocations of Caracas nightlife in the late 1950s, in the novel Día de ceniza. Like Garmendia, Saavedra understands that leisure is as dramatic and dangerous as any adventure. But what I most appreciate in this short story is the pleasure I get from his language, the precise evocations of a post-1990s sensibility of despair, handled with grace and a tinge of visionary (or psychedelic) faith.

*

My poem "House Made of Dawn" will be printed up as a broadside for the reading I'll be giving this weekend in Ithaca. Nos vemos.

Antonia Palacios

This month at my Antología blog I am posting my English versions of eight prose poems by the poet and novelist Antonia Palacios (Caracas, 1904-2001). This is the opening sequence of poems from her book Textos del desalojo, which she wrote between 1973-1975.

Palacios published her first book, París y tres recuerdos, in 1944. The book recounts her experiences in France in 1936, where she befriended Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo and Luis Aragón. In 1949 she published her novel Ana Isabel, una niña decente, which had appeared in installments in the newspaper El Nacional.

In 1976 she became the first woman to receive Venezuela's Premio Nacional de Literatura. Beginning in 1978, a group of young poets began meeting on a weekly basis in her house in the Altamira neighborhood of Caracas for informal writing workshops. This became the famous Taller Calicanto, from which many of Venezuela's poets from the 1980s generation first emerged.

In 1991 Monte Ávila Editores published her collection of poems Ese oscuro animal del sueño. Upon her death in 2001, El Universal's literary supplement Verbigracia published the following interview with Palacios by María Elena Ramos (originally conducted in 1994).

Alma Guillermoprieto al rescate de Chávez / Oswaldo Barreto

Alma Guillermoprieto to Chávez's Rescue

The encounter, by chance or perfectly premeditated, between a great reporter and a revolutionary process has not been a rare occurrence in our era.

Thus, John Reed continues to move us when he speaks to us about Pancho Villa in Insurgent Mexico (1918) or about the composition of the first Soviet government in Ten Days That Shook The World. And the same thing happens to us with the books by Edward Snow about different phases of the Chinese revolution. Nothing more understandable, in that case, than the interest that has been awakened in the Mexican writer Alma Guillermoprieto, a great reporter who is a mentor to reporters throughout the Americas, by the political situation Venezuela is living, presented to the entire world by Hugo Chávez as the first revolutionary process of the XXI century.

But before speaking about this recent and prodigious encounter, it's worth mentioning that, if Chávez and the government he has imposed on us have been the subject of reports, essays and books by other authors, no less prestigious than Guillermoprieto, these have occurred within the dawning of the regime. This author's essays, on the other hand, are focused on what aligns itself organically with our most recent events, when it is no longer only us Venezuelans but the entire world that questions, between joy and weeping, the regime's true nature.

Ignacio Ramonet, Claude Lemoine or Richard Gott have spoken about what Chávez told them regarding his revolutionary projects, while Alma Guillermoprieto is concerned, in the essays we will comment on, with how much she can help us understand the true nature of Chavismo. Is it a revolutionary, democratic, anti-imperialist process? In what symbols still sunk in the past, or still uncertain or imprecise in the horizon, can we detect what awaits us?

This is what the two pieces AG has published in the American magazine The New York Review of Books speak to us about, "Don't Cry for Me, Venezuela," which appeared in the October 10 edition and was translated by El Nacional on October 30 under the title "No llores por mí Venezuela," and "The Gambler" (El Jugador), which hasn't been published yet in Venezuela.

AG orchestrates her symphony in three movements about Chávez and not about Chavismo and even less about el proceso. In the first, the author reveals herself to be an heir to preceding reporters about Chávez.

She repeats the same melody about Chávez's prodigious capacity to communicate through TV and radio, but already in these initial comments she announces the methodology she will use to untangle the determining or, as it is often said, essential features of the man who governs us. In effect, AG presents the actions of Hugo Chávez that allow her to investigate only those traces in his legal and democratic aspect, which usually only reach the surface of things. As for what exists that is illegal, arbitrary and despotic, what is nothing more than masked violence, she remains silent. In this way, Aló Presidente is produced "for the benefit of his nation" and so that people find out about his immediate plans.Not even a single word about the torture this TV program represents for those who are forced to listen to it. And in the same manner we are told, in a second movement, about Chávez's dreams, about his behavior in the conspiration and in the coup attempt. AG speaks of Chávez's awareness of being a predestined leader, but not a single word that might demonstrate that concern for the poor and for the entire country that he now wants to boast about. However, the strongest movement is that which concerns Chávez's strategy for achieving his supreme objective, which is none other than maintaining himself in power. Conscious that, beyond the electoral triumphs he has obtained, he doesn't actually have a majority of the electorate, he "plays a high risk game: he governs (...) as if he had a national mandate to carry out his Bolivarian Revolution."

We could think that with this dialectical game between the manifested and the hidden, AG reveals to us that Chávez is a tyrant. And that is the case, but only so we know that we will have this tyrant for a long time, as she explains quite well at the end of "Don't Cry for Me, Venezuela," and throughout "The Gambler," the second report which we will comment on after its publication in Venezuela.




{ Oswaldo Barreto, TalCual, 4 November 2005 }

Ithaca

I've never been to Ithaca, NY but I'll be there to give a reading next Saturday, thanks to an invitation from Aaron Tieger. All the information can be found at SOON Productions. I'll be reading with Sean Cole, whose chapbook Itty City (Pressed Wafer, 2003) includes the following great poem:

"Book of Eagles.

Barn-headed girl in a pall. Her brain
full of cops. The grain hikes up its
stagecoach under autumn's fist. What cuneiform
is this on my list? What can I
do you for? If Brad were here the whole hell
would pull the floor up and tout its gunderwear.
Bright girl in a copse. How did your
crumble go?"

I plan on reading mostly recent poems, along with a few translations.

*

I came across this good interview with Brett Easton Ellis in The Independent.

*
On August 12, The Independent also printed this note about Edward Upward, who turned 102 in September:

"Better late than never: aged 101, Edward Upward has been awarded the Royal Society of Literature's Benson Medal, in recognition of a lifetime's service to literature. Upward was the inspirational "fourth man" in the group that also boasted Auden, Isherwood and Spender. He was, like them but more durably, radicalised by the 1930s. Together, Upward and Isherwood invented the surreal imaginary world of "Mortmere", as featured in the former's The Railway Accident and the latter's Lions and Shadows. His autobiographical trilogy of novels, The Spiral Ascent, shows why he moved left and stayed there. More recent work, which includes memorable short stories, has been published by Enitharmon Press. Previous recipients of the medal include Tolkien, Burgess and Strachey."

Crítica de la ilusión pura / Colette Capriles

Critique of Pure Illusion

Socialism is the kingdom of necessity, or better said, of necessities.

The inefficiency displayed by socialism in the production and distribution of wealth is not a secondary effect but rather the result of a deliberate artificial creation of scarcity. The resulting penury is not only material (sharper each time precisely because of the exacerbation of not being able to find necessities): among the scarce goods are liberty (there is only liberty for a few, for the members of the nomenclatura, for the beneficiaries of power's lottery) and the truth (power's privilege; the masses don't deserve the truth; the majority, as Benedetto Croce denounces, "find the un-truth and the mistake convenient").

The agitation of the last few months is different from other paroxysms the government has also provoked, because the macabre announcement of the adoption of socialism is in itself an ideological operation of great significance. Let us examine the roundest metaphor, not too sophisticated, that circulates in the communicational galaxy of the regime: the image of a locomotive that traverses emblematic natural landscapes, or small towns that would represent the deepest Venezuela, under the inclements of the most brutal developmentism, "bound toward socialism" (which is no longer even of the XXI century).

A locomotive composed of a thread of "missions" (that always evade the classification of public politics and maintain the military and militant rhetoric) that plunges into the infinite. Double message: on one hand, the tranquilizer: the "missions" are already themselves the expression of the socialist project (in other words: socialism is nothing different from what you know, nation); on the other, the threat: the impetus of this force takes us to "another" reality, toward the unthought or the unimagined. Socialism is in this way alpha and omega, beginning and end of illusion.

Present, but also inevitable future.

If ambitions for governing once existed, little is left of them.

We have entered the very field of ideological battle, that is, the universe of the representations of reality, and it no longer matters much what the government might do or not do. None want to harvest votes anymore, but wills instead, and this quantum leap supposes the paroxyst development of a double message, fundamentally through a propaganda apparatus whose dimensions seem nearly impossible to quantify. Its purpose, to mask the actual miseries by superimposing on top of them gigantic simulacra of successes: reality is superceded by another reality, a hyperreality that shrinks daily experience and engages in continuing conflicts against it. We will thus be forced to choose between believing what the ideological apparatuses of the State show us or living in perpetual dissonance with them, which requires an uncommon psychological nature.

The locomotive is running and will continue to run outside the central framework: socialism is not being discussed here but instead the most rancid manuals of the Soviet Academy are being dusted off to complete the primer that functionaries repeat, in a postmodern way, in the most servile ignorance as to what they are saying, as is demonstrated by the lamentable intervention by the Minister of the Environment trying to explain the idea of collective property with which she tried to praise, or drastically humiliate, the angered indigenous groups last October 12th.

Or perhaps it wasn't lamentable since it contributes to the general confusion that offers the government such good results.

Reducing political discourse to the mere interpretation of the Great Oracle and his premonitions, trying to decipher what the street vendor's shout of socialism "actually" means, in this manner society's capacity for articulating clear messages is also reduced. There is not a truth in all of this, but instead an infernal kaleidoscope of truths manufactured in the government's situational rooms.

The pre-revocatory outline repeats itself: as soon as the opposition builds an answer less incoherent than usual, the confounding artillery is released, ranging from pinching the ass of property (taking numerous surfaces from it) to the recent episode of the morochas [twin parties], on which they count for disassembling the opposition's electoral strategy and to provoke fissures in the fragile unity accord, consolidating the perception that there is no other future than the one designed by power and once again oxygenating the immature voices of their most fervent allies, those apostles of antipolitics.




{ Colette Capriles*, El Nacional, 20 October 2005 }







_____________________________________________
* Alma Guillermoprieto discusses Colette Capriles's book La Revolución como espectáculo (Random House Mondadori, 2004) in a recent two-part essay for the New York Review of Books: "Don't Cry for Me, Venezuela" and "The Gambler."