Bits
* What is considered perfect cannot be accomplished. What is considered erroneous can be happily completed as long as it’s owned as authentic. The first is the reason for poets. The second, for the powerful.
* Literary fiction commits a double arbitrariness: that of invention itself and the arbitrariness with which it imitates what is essentially arbitrary: reality.
* In literature the invention of realities turns out to be a verbal construction. What’s done that way is only so to the degree that literature can be understood as reality.
There is no escape.
* The subversive poet. How can you be a poet without taking your irreverence everywhere? That’s how society thinks of him. And that’s why it denies him the right to speak.
* (Pessoa) The drama of whoever believes in writing is that he doesn’t believe in anything else. He doesn’t have God, he doesn’t have company. He has no day or night. He has his writing.
* Consider also that the price of poetry includes a certain quota of madness for which the poet must pay with the momentary or permanent derangement of the senses.
{ Juan Calzadilla, Libro de las poéticas, Fundación Editorial el Perro y la Rana, 2006 }
6.15.2009
6.13.2009
El país de Adriano González León / Virginia Riquelme
Adriano González León’s Country
This country is serious as fuck
[Este país es una vaina seria]
– Popular saying
Venezuela has always remained in constant movement. It has been a country that has never settled down. But despite that and any other element, this is what we are, what Adriano González León reveals: a country that has always had its luggage packed as if awaiting a definitive journey. Or more accurately, a “suitcase-metaphor” – as Héctor Torres (2004) points out – that Andrés Barazarte carries with him, that holds Venezuela inside and contains everything that belongs to him, his memories, his family specters, his experiences, the image he has created of his Venezuela, of his origins and of his current life.
Adriano, the Author. País portátil, His Making
To name Adriano González León is to speak of El Techo de la Ballena and vice versa; and among the postulations of that literary group we find the recognition of the country’s values, as well as the position of the writer and the intellectual facing that era’s society. González León would seem to accomplish these postulations right at the moment when País portátil establishes a palpable reality, placing specifically Venezuelan truths and identities on the scene. In a definitive sense, what we are objectively as a country. In the first place, the reference González León makes to past eras, narrating difficult and invaluable episodes from our history, whose “violence [left] its inheritance of ruin and which doesn’t cease even in our own days” (Torres, 2004). Episodes that begin with the struggles for independence, moving through the federal wars, caudillismo, and of course, the sixties, which together constitute the nucleus of the book’s plot. Secondly, by providing a skeptical vision, if you will, of the armed struggle of the sixties: “No one spoke anymore about objective and subjective conditions, apprenticeship was to be found in Molotov cocktails [...]. The matter was to choose, yes. But how could one serve a purpose when one hadn’t even shot a pellet rifle? How could one understand the struggle was no longer that extensive deployment of schemes at the café table, nor the enormous discussions of art for the masses?”
País portátil is a novel that presents itself without unnecessary rhetorical games and revealing a stance that does not locate itself either in favor or against the political events it narrates, it merely shows; while it also includes the quotidian, the regional turns and dialectical speech, an element that suggests a great renovation in the novel’s use of language. Regarding this point, we could say that besides the narrow link that can be established between the criteria it aspires to renovate and political criteria, one can also track in País portátil a renovation of the discourse tied to the postures of El Techo de la Ballena and Sardio, since there is an integration of the narrative text of oral language within the novel, without establishing hierarchical differences between what “inadequate” and “adequate” speech says, thus including dialectical turns in the text, as opposed to Gallegos, for example. It’s also worth noting that, apart from language, Andrés Barazarte is not Gallegos’s reformist hero, on the contrary, he is the exploration of the character with his own existence, his doubts and reasonings. Andrés Barazarte is not Santos Luzardo.
Venezuela: A Portable Country
Adriano González León seems to direct his discourse toward the presentation of a fragmented country, imprecise in its events and its configuration, without negating its truth but rather venturing its affirmation. In this manner achieving the final product and establishing a position regarding what has happened; that because it is so detailed in its formation, it allows its atemporality. Moreover, I would dare to assert that this element represents itself, within the story, in the juxtaposition of temporal planes that the novel accomplishes. Its presentation in a discontinuous form, breaking with the linear nature of events, achieves a worthy reflection on the brusque and transversal cuts our nation’s history has suffered. In the case of the novel, we could understand it as a person fixes their remembrances in their memory, exactly as they come to him at the moment he evokes them. In this very manner the story of the Barazarte family is told and in this manner can Venezuelan history be seen. This is to say, a coming and going of events so that when the hour for a change or the establishment of a supposedly new era is at hand, all we see is a repetition of previous patterns.
Another important element to underline is the configuration País portátil makes of the image of deterioration. The episodes where such an image makes itself present are reiterated. We could recall Papá Salvador eating, the café where Eduardo runs into his schoolteacher, the presence of unpleasant smells throughout the story, all sorts of creatures eating everything ( “the ticks got into our walls, everything was fleas and lice and the astromelia dried up and the wind carried away the zinc from wall”), and in this manner a never ending series of reiterated references to deterioration.
In the end, País portátil opens potential analyses in each one of its pages, but if we must now close these notes, we can find no better guarantee than that of an impeccable writing and a juxtaposed structure that can’t be missed in the reading: the structure that Adriano González León builds so as to tell us a series of stories that superimpose themselves in places and times, that are threaded with a zig-zag point we understand as the pages unfold and which will provide as a result a fascinating story that resounds at every step and booms in its final point.
{ Virginia Riquelme, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 9 February 2008 }
This country is serious as fuck
[Este país es una vaina seria]
– Popular saying
Venezuela has always remained in constant movement. It has been a country that has never settled down. But despite that and any other element, this is what we are, what Adriano González León reveals: a country that has always had its luggage packed as if awaiting a definitive journey. Or more accurately, a “suitcase-metaphor” – as Héctor Torres (2004) points out – that Andrés Barazarte carries with him, that holds Venezuela inside and contains everything that belongs to him, his memories, his family specters, his experiences, the image he has created of his Venezuela, of his origins and of his current life.
Adriano, the Author. País portátil, His Making
To name Adriano González León is to speak of El Techo de la Ballena and vice versa; and among the postulations of that literary group we find the recognition of the country’s values, as well as the position of the writer and the intellectual facing that era’s society. González León would seem to accomplish these postulations right at the moment when País portátil establishes a palpable reality, placing specifically Venezuelan truths and identities on the scene. In a definitive sense, what we are objectively as a country. In the first place, the reference González León makes to past eras, narrating difficult and invaluable episodes from our history, whose “violence [left] its inheritance of ruin and which doesn’t cease even in our own days” (Torres, 2004). Episodes that begin with the struggles for independence, moving through the federal wars, caudillismo, and of course, the sixties, which together constitute the nucleus of the book’s plot. Secondly, by providing a skeptical vision, if you will, of the armed struggle of the sixties: “No one spoke anymore about objective and subjective conditions, apprenticeship was to be found in Molotov cocktails [...]. The matter was to choose, yes. But how could one serve a purpose when one hadn’t even shot a pellet rifle? How could one understand the struggle was no longer that extensive deployment of schemes at the café table, nor the enormous discussions of art for the masses?”
País portátil is a novel that presents itself without unnecessary rhetorical games and revealing a stance that does not locate itself either in favor or against the political events it narrates, it merely shows; while it also includes the quotidian, the regional turns and dialectical speech, an element that suggests a great renovation in the novel’s use of language. Regarding this point, we could say that besides the narrow link that can be established between the criteria it aspires to renovate and political criteria, one can also track in País portátil a renovation of the discourse tied to the postures of El Techo de la Ballena and Sardio, since there is an integration of the narrative text of oral language within the novel, without establishing hierarchical differences between what “inadequate” and “adequate” speech says, thus including dialectical turns in the text, as opposed to Gallegos, for example. It’s also worth noting that, apart from language, Andrés Barazarte is not Gallegos’s reformist hero, on the contrary, he is the exploration of the character with his own existence, his doubts and reasonings. Andrés Barazarte is not Santos Luzardo.
Venezuela: A Portable Country
Adriano González León seems to direct his discourse toward the presentation of a fragmented country, imprecise in its events and its configuration, without negating its truth but rather venturing its affirmation. In this manner achieving the final product and establishing a position regarding what has happened; that because it is so detailed in its formation, it allows its atemporality. Moreover, I would dare to assert that this element represents itself, within the story, in the juxtaposition of temporal planes that the novel accomplishes. Its presentation in a discontinuous form, breaking with the linear nature of events, achieves a worthy reflection on the brusque and transversal cuts our nation’s history has suffered. In the case of the novel, we could understand it as a person fixes their remembrances in their memory, exactly as they come to him at the moment he evokes them. In this very manner the story of the Barazarte family is told and in this manner can Venezuelan history be seen. This is to say, a coming and going of events so that when the hour for a change or the establishment of a supposedly new era is at hand, all we see is a repetition of previous patterns.
Another important element to underline is the configuration País portátil makes of the image of deterioration. The episodes where such an image makes itself present are reiterated. We could recall Papá Salvador eating, the café where Eduardo runs into his schoolteacher, the presence of unpleasant smells throughout the story, all sorts of creatures eating everything ( “the ticks got into our walls, everything was fleas and lice and the astromelia dried up and the wind carried away the zinc from wall”), and in this manner a never ending series of reiterated references to deterioration.
In the end, País portátil opens potential analyses in each one of its pages, but if we must now close these notes, we can find no better guarantee than that of an impeccable writing and a juxtaposed structure that can’t be missed in the reading: the structure that Adriano González León builds so as to tell us a series of stories that superimpose themselves in places and times, that are threaded with a zig-zag point we understand as the pages unfold and which will provide as a result a fascinating story that resounds at every step and booms in its final point.
{ Virginia Riquelme, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 9 February 2008 }
6.10.2009
Una calle llamada Tania / Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez
A Street Named Tania
When the decade of the nineties opens there are at least three tendencies coexisting within Venezuelan literature: the exhausted romantic epic of the sixties; the depressive withdrawal of the short story of the following years and the anecdotal populism of certain fiction writers from the late eighties. It is true that a few fundamental texts had been appearing throughout those years, titles that transcended general panoramas, managing to establish themselves as brilliant and solid proposals. I’m thinking of books such as Confidencias del Cartabón by Iliana Gómez Berbesi (1981); Setecientas palmeras plantadas en el mismo lugar (1974) and Percusión (1982) by José Balza; Los platos del diablo (1985) by Eduardo Liendo, but the general climate evoked was of an oppressive, asphyxiating house, as though Venezuelan fiction were condemned to never surpass the glimpses of projection and acknowledgment it experienced in the sixties with works of great magnitude such as those of Salvador Garmendia and Adriano González León.
Writing during those years seemed a melancholic exercise, a task condemned to incomprehension, to indifference. The word “crisis” seemed to be repeated over and over, as though there were no opening from within critical circles toward the new names that could have been emerging at the time.
But then Calletania appeared, the novel that Ediciones Periférica has now released in Europe.
The positive response was immediate; readers reacted with enthusiasm; critics responded effusively and its author, Israel Centeno, won the prize for best book of fiction published during the year [1992] in that Caribbean country.
Optimistic airs then moved through a generation of authors who understood that the space of their creation needed to have the size of an infinite literary ambition, unconstrained by the claustrophobic limits of Venezuelan literary history, attuned instead to the ensemble of the Spanish language and (why not?) that of world literature. Centeno gathered moments from his country’s tradition: certain atmospheres from Guillermo Meneses; a particular vision of the urban from Salvador Garmendia himself; the constructive precision of Gustavo Díaz Solís; but he also combined them with an intelligent reinterpretation of Raymond Carver, with the viscosity of Onetti’s worlds and Juan Marsé’s expressive force.
Calletania took up once again themes belonging to fiction from the sixties: political struggle, politicized intellectuality, life in marginal zones, but with a new vision. A vision of disenchantment, tenuously parodic, soberly ferocious. Yesterday’s dreams now appeared like a crude masquerade; a circus that resulted in compassion and the ridiculous. The narrative thread was tensed thanks to a succession of blocks where, little by little, the presence of a real but hallucinated world was drawn with precision, a recognizable world that bifurcated between territories of what was lived and dreamed.
With this novel Israel Centeno managed to regain a certain branch of Venezuelan fiction’s own universes and transform them as one might turn a sock inside out. Faced with the unrestricted heroism and kindness of characters with a social conscience, faced with the stone cardboard epic, a more believable, more human texture appeared, uneven and eroded.
But this text did much more than that, because the result of its attempt was the construction of one of the great Latin American novels of recent years; an attempt that when seen today as a global proposal within the Spanish language, rises like a vital fresco suffused with vigor, enchantment and literary virtuosity.
Throughout its 167 pages Calletania draws the din of an urban universe in which its characters are subjected to erosion, to the undermining of its silhouettes, since the city’s frenetic time, the story’s time is a monster that devours (fiercely, but also with pleasure) the totality of the materials it finds in its path.
Perhaps that devouring movement might explain one of the fundamental elements of this narrative piece: its capacity of absorption, its magnetism, as if we readers were also being devoured by the years, by the written city, by the story itself. Calletania’s pages grow from a force of attraction that pushes the reader forward, as if a pole of energy were drawing one closer with slow but sure clarity.
But it’s not an effect achieved with the clichés of those light novels that tie together action-packed televised situations. Calletania propels the rhythms of its actions only in its final pages. The rest of the time the novel moves on two planes: one is the public space, a shantytown where little by little the elements of a great confrontation between drug dealers and far left political activists who have decided to act as a moral phalanx are insinuated; and another is the intimate space of various characters seen within their individuality, outlined through their relationship with their houses: a shanty they call El Faro; the house of shadowy worlds where a girl named Tania will be crushed by time; a Colonel’s house where the ghosts of an ancient military dictatorship remain.
That oscillation gives the novel body and musculature. The complexity of this work of fiction spreads out along its exterior surface and in its subtler intimacy. The actions move from one point to another creating and asphyxiating tension, a potential explosion we intuit at each paragraph.
The close of this novel that up to now has advanced sustained by the continuous unfolding of the characters (phantasmal, historical, mythical revelations) leads toward the unifying condensation of a defeat, of an accepted defeat. And thus we witness a compact, indispensable narrative text; a great moment in the genre of late 20th century fiction.
{ Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez, La Opinión de Tenerife, 8 June 2009 }
When the decade of the nineties opens there are at least three tendencies coexisting within Venezuelan literature: the exhausted romantic epic of the sixties; the depressive withdrawal of the short story of the following years and the anecdotal populism of certain fiction writers from the late eighties. It is true that a few fundamental texts had been appearing throughout those years, titles that transcended general panoramas, managing to establish themselves as brilliant and solid proposals. I’m thinking of books such as Confidencias del Cartabón by Iliana Gómez Berbesi (1981); Setecientas palmeras plantadas en el mismo lugar (1974) and Percusión (1982) by José Balza; Los platos del diablo (1985) by Eduardo Liendo, but the general climate evoked was of an oppressive, asphyxiating house, as though Venezuelan fiction were condemned to never surpass the glimpses of projection and acknowledgment it experienced in the sixties with works of great magnitude such as those of Salvador Garmendia and Adriano González León.
Writing during those years seemed a melancholic exercise, a task condemned to incomprehension, to indifference. The word “crisis” seemed to be repeated over and over, as though there were no opening from within critical circles toward the new names that could have been emerging at the time.
But then Calletania appeared, the novel that Ediciones Periférica has now released in Europe.
The positive response was immediate; readers reacted with enthusiasm; critics responded effusively and its author, Israel Centeno, won the prize for best book of fiction published during the year [1992] in that Caribbean country.
Optimistic airs then moved through a generation of authors who understood that the space of their creation needed to have the size of an infinite literary ambition, unconstrained by the claustrophobic limits of Venezuelan literary history, attuned instead to the ensemble of the Spanish language and (why not?) that of world literature. Centeno gathered moments from his country’s tradition: certain atmospheres from Guillermo Meneses; a particular vision of the urban from Salvador Garmendia himself; the constructive precision of Gustavo Díaz Solís; but he also combined them with an intelligent reinterpretation of Raymond Carver, with the viscosity of Onetti’s worlds and Juan Marsé’s expressive force.
Calletania took up once again themes belonging to fiction from the sixties: political struggle, politicized intellectuality, life in marginal zones, but with a new vision. A vision of disenchantment, tenuously parodic, soberly ferocious. Yesterday’s dreams now appeared like a crude masquerade; a circus that resulted in compassion and the ridiculous. The narrative thread was tensed thanks to a succession of blocks where, little by little, the presence of a real but hallucinated world was drawn with precision, a recognizable world that bifurcated between territories of what was lived and dreamed.
With this novel Israel Centeno managed to regain a certain branch of Venezuelan fiction’s own universes and transform them as one might turn a sock inside out. Faced with the unrestricted heroism and kindness of characters with a social conscience, faced with the stone cardboard epic, a more believable, more human texture appeared, uneven and eroded.
But this text did much more than that, because the result of its attempt was the construction of one of the great Latin American novels of recent years; an attempt that when seen today as a global proposal within the Spanish language, rises like a vital fresco suffused with vigor, enchantment and literary virtuosity.
Throughout its 167 pages Calletania draws the din of an urban universe in which its characters are subjected to erosion, to the undermining of its silhouettes, since the city’s frenetic time, the story’s time is a monster that devours (fiercely, but also with pleasure) the totality of the materials it finds in its path.
Perhaps that devouring movement might explain one of the fundamental elements of this narrative piece: its capacity of absorption, its magnetism, as if we readers were also being devoured by the years, by the written city, by the story itself. Calletania’s pages grow from a force of attraction that pushes the reader forward, as if a pole of energy were drawing one closer with slow but sure clarity.
But it’s not an effect achieved with the clichés of those light novels that tie together action-packed televised situations. Calletania propels the rhythms of its actions only in its final pages. The rest of the time the novel moves on two planes: one is the public space, a shantytown where little by little the elements of a great confrontation between drug dealers and far left political activists who have decided to act as a moral phalanx are insinuated; and another is the intimate space of various characters seen within their individuality, outlined through their relationship with their houses: a shanty they call El Faro; the house of shadowy worlds where a girl named Tania will be crushed by time; a Colonel’s house where the ghosts of an ancient military dictatorship remain.
That oscillation gives the novel body and musculature. The complexity of this work of fiction spreads out along its exterior surface and in its subtler intimacy. The actions move from one point to another creating and asphyxiating tension, a potential explosion we intuit at each paragraph.
The close of this novel that up to now has advanced sustained by the continuous unfolding of the characters (phantasmal, historical, mythical revelations) leads toward the unifying condensation of a defeat, of an accepted defeat. And thus we witness a compact, indispensable narrative text; a great moment in the genre of late 20th century fiction.
{ Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez, La Opinión de Tenerife, 8 June 2009 }
6.06.2009
De la literatura y de las carreteras: Entrevista con Carlos Ávila / Mario Morenza
Of Literature and Roads: An Interview with Carlos Ávila
A writer’s words tend to be solemn, but with Carlos Ávila they acquire the simplicity of phrases worth a thousand images.
On the day I arranged to interview Carlos Ávila I ran into him in one of the elevators of the North Tower of the Centro Simón Bolívar. We were heading to our respective offices like the other ten people in there. It was Monday. And it was 7:50 A.M. “Today’s the interview, right? When do we meet?” “When we get out,” I told him. “At 4:30 on the 12th floor. I’m tired. I’m just getting back from Mérida,” he mentioned. Suddenly, a power outtage. The elevator stopped. Everything stopped, except for the red glow with the word FULL trembling just above the elevator doors. They opened.
Writing without Rituals
– In what state do you get inspired to write.
– In the state of Mérida.* (See inset below.)
– If Caracas were the plot for a collection of short stories or a novel, what would you call it?
– I’d call it Caracas Is Not A Short Story [Caracas no es cuento].
– When do stories come to you?
– When I’m not paying attention, when I drift off and discover myself inside one.
– What Venezuelan author do you admire?
– I admire Armando Rojas Guardia, because it has been through his poetry that I’ve been able to be closer to the unnamable.
– What advice do you give young people who want to engage in literature?
– That they ask themselves if they really want to assume a life from a stance of total questioning and with the only certainty being that you’ll be wrong most of the time.
– Do you remember when you said to yourself for the first time: “I want to be a writer”?
– I think those things haven’t been premeditated; I’ve simply provoked it, I’ve taken a few steps, I’ve stopped taking others and circumstances have taken their own course. Now I’m linked to literature but I think all of this obeys an answer to life itself and not, at least in my case, something planned out in advance.
– Do you have a ritual?
– No.
Ávila Kaleidoscopes
– For Jorge Luis Borges the Aleph was in a basement; for Enrique Vila-Matas (Rómulo Gallegos Prize 2001), in Mérida. For Carlos Ávila, where does he find his own Aleph and what does it contain?
– My own Aleph would be in our voice, and it would be a name, it would be a word that contained all of them.
– What do the sounds of El Silencio [in downtown Caracas] mean for you?
– They mean the murmur of cities: the screams of the walls, the breathing of motors... The screeching of taxis, as Cayayo would say.
Carlos in Motion
– How do you see life, what’s it like from the 21st floor in the offices of El Perro y La Rana [publishers]?
– I see a place where everything is alive, a city where no zombies live, nor specters or any of those dark artifices among which some poets move. Though, to be honest, you can see it better from the 23rd, where there’s fire.
– How do you see life, what’s it like from a bus when you travel?
– I don’t know if it’s because one is always in motion, but crossing a path marked by the repetition of light posts and trees, one after another, always ends up being introspective. The road is reflexive, so that the glance turns inward, toward our memory or toward our imagination, toward things that hurt us and those that heal us, sometimes toward the names and gestures of the people one can’t forget, and almost always toward what we can’t resolve or respond to, all in an incessant and urgent gallery of images that repeat themselves while the landscape outside surges frenetically.
– How do you see life, what’s it like on the subway when you travel through the city?
– It’s active, it’s vertiginous and it’s rushed, it always moves faster; and I don’t know if that makes it all harder for some people, but for me in particular it ends up being defiant and because of that entertaining.
Inset
Fragment from the short story “Desde el monte” from the book Mujeres recién bañadas:
Mérida just beyond the roads. Surrounded by green, by brown and mountain. Way up, where the red-cheeked Chinese live: the sons of muleskinners and frailejón flowers, the grandsons of the Comala fire. Up there on the peak where parsimony and restraint grow. Far from the city noise. In that place, on the very crest of the world’s cathedral, rests Mérida: humid and still, fresh, like recently rained on trees, like a woman just stepping out of the shower, with her hair and crotch wet: smelling of God; of plants.
Legend
A short story writer who moves with and on the road of his stories.
____________________________________
Carlos Ávila (Caracas, 1980) received his undergraduate degree in Literature from the Universidad Central de Venezuela. In 2004 he obtained the Premio Nacional Universitario de Literatura, in fiction; a year later he received an honorable mention in the V edition of the Concurso Nacional de Cuentos SACVEN. He has published two books of short stories, Desde el caleidoscopio de Dios (2007) and Mujeres recién bañadas (2009), which will soon be released.
{ Mario Morenza, El Apéndice de Pablo #6, May 2009 }
A writer’s words tend to be solemn, but with Carlos Ávila they acquire the simplicity of phrases worth a thousand images.
On the day I arranged to interview Carlos Ávila I ran into him in one of the elevators of the North Tower of the Centro Simón Bolívar. We were heading to our respective offices like the other ten people in there. It was Monday. And it was 7:50 A.M. “Today’s the interview, right? When do we meet?” “When we get out,” I told him. “At 4:30 on the 12th floor. I’m tired. I’m just getting back from Mérida,” he mentioned. Suddenly, a power outtage. The elevator stopped. Everything stopped, except for the red glow with the word FULL trembling just above the elevator doors. They opened.
Writing without Rituals
– In what state do you get inspired to write.
– In the state of Mérida.* (See inset below.)
– If Caracas were the plot for a collection of short stories or a novel, what would you call it?
– I’d call it Caracas Is Not A Short Story [Caracas no es cuento].
– When do stories come to you?
– When I’m not paying attention, when I drift off and discover myself inside one.
– What Venezuelan author do you admire?
– I admire Armando Rojas Guardia, because it has been through his poetry that I’ve been able to be closer to the unnamable.
– What advice do you give young people who want to engage in literature?
– That they ask themselves if they really want to assume a life from a stance of total questioning and with the only certainty being that you’ll be wrong most of the time.
– Do you remember when you said to yourself for the first time: “I want to be a writer”?
– I think those things haven’t been premeditated; I’ve simply provoked it, I’ve taken a few steps, I’ve stopped taking others and circumstances have taken their own course. Now I’m linked to literature but I think all of this obeys an answer to life itself and not, at least in my case, something planned out in advance.
– Do you have a ritual?
– No.
Ávila Kaleidoscopes
– For Jorge Luis Borges the Aleph was in a basement; for Enrique Vila-Matas (Rómulo Gallegos Prize 2001), in Mérida. For Carlos Ávila, where does he find his own Aleph and what does it contain?
– My own Aleph would be in our voice, and it would be a name, it would be a word that contained all of them.
– What do the sounds of El Silencio [in downtown Caracas] mean for you?
– They mean the murmur of cities: the screams of the walls, the breathing of motors... The screeching of taxis, as Cayayo would say.
Carlos in Motion
– How do you see life, what’s it like from the 21st floor in the offices of El Perro y La Rana [publishers]?
– I see a place where everything is alive, a city where no zombies live, nor specters or any of those dark artifices among which some poets move. Though, to be honest, you can see it better from the 23rd, where there’s fire.
– How do you see life, what’s it like from a bus when you travel?
– I don’t know if it’s because one is always in motion, but crossing a path marked by the repetition of light posts and trees, one after another, always ends up being introspective. The road is reflexive, so that the glance turns inward, toward our memory or toward our imagination, toward things that hurt us and those that heal us, sometimes toward the names and gestures of the people one can’t forget, and almost always toward what we can’t resolve or respond to, all in an incessant and urgent gallery of images that repeat themselves while the landscape outside surges frenetically.
– How do you see life, what’s it like on the subway when you travel through the city?
– It’s active, it’s vertiginous and it’s rushed, it always moves faster; and I don’t know if that makes it all harder for some people, but for me in particular it ends up being defiant and because of that entertaining.
Inset
Fragment from the short story “Desde el monte” from the book Mujeres recién bañadas:
Mérida just beyond the roads. Surrounded by green, by brown and mountain. Way up, where the red-cheeked Chinese live: the sons of muleskinners and frailejón flowers, the grandsons of the Comala fire. Up there on the peak where parsimony and restraint grow. Far from the city noise. In that place, on the very crest of the world’s cathedral, rests Mérida: humid and still, fresh, like recently rained on trees, like a woman just stepping out of the shower, with her hair and crotch wet: smelling of God; of plants.
Legend
A short story writer who moves with and on the road of his stories.
____________________________________
Carlos Ávila (Caracas, 1980) received his undergraduate degree in Literature from the Universidad Central de Venezuela. In 2004 he obtained the Premio Nacional Universitario de Literatura, in fiction; a year later he received an honorable mention in the V edition of the Concurso Nacional de Cuentos SACVEN. He has published two books of short stories, Desde el caleidoscopio de Dios (2007) and Mujeres recién bañadas (2009), which will soon be released.
{ Mario Morenza, El Apéndice de Pablo #6, May 2009 }
6.03.2009
1989
I dropped out of high school in January of 1989, in the middle of my senior year. Though personally it was a chaotic moment for various reasons, I now realize it was the best way to begin a year that would transform my life in many positive respects. Everything seemed to change drastically for me during those months: how I looked at myself and the world, my decision to live in poetry (whatever that might mean – I still don’t know – and regardless of the consequences), an awareness of music’s transcendental qualities, the acceptance of nomadism as an inheritance and a choice.
1989 provided the necessary space and context I needed to abandon certain patterns and to acquire tools of self-investigation. Which is partly why I’m looking forward to reading Joshua Clover’s book on that year, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About (University of California Press, 2009), that he’s been excerpting recently at his blog. I didn’t try ecstasy until 1992 but I recall the inspiration I received from events in Manchester, mostly through albums like New Order’s Technique and The Stone Roses, or in a more local vein from Paul’s Boutique or Nothing’s Shocking (while I know it was released in 1988, it permeated much of my 1989). 1989 isn’t static, it bends.
I was permanently affected by the images of Tiananmen Square in the late spring and early summer, watching students my age being massacred on TV. It left me with the mistrust and disdain I still feel toward any type of power, from governments on down to my own in the classroom. Oddly enough, the fall of the Berlin wall was a footnote for me at the time, though I now attribute this to my own ignorance as an 18 year-old with scant awareness of the globalized age the planet was entering. The anonymous Chinese student who famously stopped a platoon of tanks by standing in their path, before being taken away to certain imprisonment and death, represents the spirit of that brief age for me. Whatever his dreadful fate might be, I admire and remember his simple, brave actions.
The global, psychic, generational, political, cultural and personal aftershocks of 1989 would influence me for years. For instance, 1989 was when Gregory Corso published his final book, the magnificent selected poems Mindfield (Thunder’s Mouth Press), which I’m happy to see is still in print. I bought the book sometime in 1990, at what was Tampa’s best book shop Three Birds Bookstore and Coffee Room in Ybor City, which could always be counted on to provide excellent new and classic titles (such as Katherine Silver’s translation of Martín Adán’s 1928 novel The Cardboard House, published by Graywolf Press in 1990). So 1989 resonated within me via Corso’s book, as in these lines from his poem “Power”:
“In a playground where I write this poem feeling shot in the back
Wanting to change the old meaning of Power
Wanting to give it new meaning my meaning
I drop my unusual head dumb to the true joy of being good
And I wonder myself now powerless”
POSTCRIPT
A note from Richard Lopez tonight reminds me of a pivotal album for so many of us in 1989 & environs (how could I have forgotten it when I first wrote this?), which is Sonic Youth’s masterpiece, Daydream Nation (1988). The moment I heard that record coming through my speakers for the first time in the summer of 1989 was a psychic hinge (“Spirit desire / We will fall...”). It’s a prophetic work of art that simultaneously registers an age. I was blessed to find it when I did. A season (“O saisons, ô châteaux!”) of personal transformations that happened to coincide with what Richard describes in his e-mail as “... the year that the 20th century was beginning its transformation to the 21st.”
6.01.2009
La gira / Roberto Bolaño
The Tour
My idea was to interview John Malone, the vanished musician. Five years ago, Malone had abandoned that dark region where legends live and now, in actuality, he was no longer newsworthy, though fans didn’t forget his name. In the sixties of the 20th century Malone, along with Jacob Morley and Dan Endycott, was one of the founders of Broken Zoo, one of the era’s most successful rock groups. In 1966 Broken Zoo recorded their first LP. It was a magnificent record, representing the height of what was being done in England at the time, and I’m talking about years when the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were active. Soon the second LP appeared and to the surprise of everyone it was better than the first. Broken Zoo did a European tour and then one of the United States. The North American tour went on for several months. While they traveled from city to city the album rose in the charts until it eventually reached number one. When they returned to London they took a few days off. Morley locked himself in a mansion he had just bought in the outskirts of London where he had a private recording studio. Endycott devoted himself to hooking up with all the beautiful girls who swarmed around the band, until one of these beauties bound herself to him, they bought a house in Belgrade and got married. Malone, on the other hand, seemed more subdued. According to some biographers of Broken Zoo, he attended strange parties, although they never specified what they, the biographers, meant by strange parties. I suppose that in the slang of the era this meant a mixture of sex and drugs. Soon afterward Malone disappeared and following a prudent amount of time, a month?, two months?, the band’s manager gave a press conference where he announced what was already common knowledge: John Malone had left the group without any explanation. Soon afterward Morley and Endycott appeared, along with the drummer, Ronnie Palmer, and another one of the musicians, Corrigan, and gave their version of what happened. Save for Ronnie Palmer, Malone didn’t contact anyone. He called Palmer a few weeks after his disappearance just to tell him he was alright, that they shouldn’t look for him and shouldn’t wait for him because he wasn’t planning on coming back. Many people assumed the band was over. Malone was the best and without him it was hard to imagine the survival of Broken Zoo. But then Morley locked himself for a month or so in his mansion in the outskirts and Endycott spent ten hours a day working at Morley’s house, until they put together the band’s third LP. Against the expectations of critics Broken Zoo’s third album was better than the previous ones. In the first one, seventy percent of the songs were written by Malone. Both the lyrics and the music. In the second one, seventy percent of the songs belong to Malone. The remaining thirty and twenty-five percent, respectively, belong to Morley and Endycott, save for a song on the second LP whose lyrics are co-written by Morley and Palmer and which undoubtedly constitutes an exception. On the third album, on the other hand, ninety percent of the songs belong to Morley and Endycott, and the remaining ten percent are split between Palmer, Morley and Endycott and a new musician, Venable, who joined the band when it became clear that Malone wouldn’t be back. There’s a song dedicated to Malone on the album. There are no recriminations. Only friendship and admiration. It’s titled “When Will You Be Back?” and was released as a single and in less than two weeks it reached first place on the London top ten. Malone, of course, didn’t come back, and although several journalists at the time set out to find him, all attempts were in vain. It was even said that he died in a French city and that his remains were buried in a common grave. As for Broken Zoo, the third album was followed by a fourth one, which was unanimously applauded, and after the fourth came a fifth album and then a sixth, a double, which was the apotheosis, the unsurpassable LP, and then they spent some time without playing, but then they released a seventh LP, quite good, then an eighth one and in the mid-eighties they released their ninth album, once again a double, and it seemed as though Morley and Endycott had made a pact with the devil, because the ninth swept the world, from Japan to Holland, from New Zealand to Canada, storming through Thailand like a tornado, which is already quite a feat. Then the band split up, though from time to time they reunited to play their songs for very special occasions, on specific days. In 1995 a journalist from Rolling Stone discovered where Malone was. The article only caused stupor among die hard fans of Broken Zoo, those who still had copies of the first record on vinyl. Most readers could have cared less about what had happened to a guy most people had written off as dead. Malone’s life, during that time, to a certain degree, seemed like a living death. When he left London what he did was simply go back to his parents’ house. That was it. He stayed there for two years, without doing anything, while his colleagues were launching their conquest of the universe.
{ Roberto Bolaño, El secreto del mal, Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2007 }
My idea was to interview John Malone, the vanished musician. Five years ago, Malone had abandoned that dark region where legends live and now, in actuality, he was no longer newsworthy, though fans didn’t forget his name. In the sixties of the 20th century Malone, along with Jacob Morley and Dan Endycott, was one of the founders of Broken Zoo, one of the era’s most successful rock groups. In 1966 Broken Zoo recorded their first LP. It was a magnificent record, representing the height of what was being done in England at the time, and I’m talking about years when the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were active. Soon the second LP appeared and to the surprise of everyone it was better than the first. Broken Zoo did a European tour and then one of the United States. The North American tour went on for several months. While they traveled from city to city the album rose in the charts until it eventually reached number one. When they returned to London they took a few days off. Morley locked himself in a mansion he had just bought in the outskirts of London where he had a private recording studio. Endycott devoted himself to hooking up with all the beautiful girls who swarmed around the band, until one of these beauties bound herself to him, they bought a house in Belgrade and got married. Malone, on the other hand, seemed more subdued. According to some biographers of Broken Zoo, he attended strange parties, although they never specified what they, the biographers, meant by strange parties. I suppose that in the slang of the era this meant a mixture of sex and drugs. Soon afterward Malone disappeared and following a prudent amount of time, a month?, two months?, the band’s manager gave a press conference where he announced what was already common knowledge: John Malone had left the group without any explanation. Soon afterward Morley and Endycott appeared, along with the drummer, Ronnie Palmer, and another one of the musicians, Corrigan, and gave their version of what happened. Save for Ronnie Palmer, Malone didn’t contact anyone. He called Palmer a few weeks after his disappearance just to tell him he was alright, that they shouldn’t look for him and shouldn’t wait for him because he wasn’t planning on coming back. Many people assumed the band was over. Malone was the best and without him it was hard to imagine the survival of Broken Zoo. But then Morley locked himself for a month or so in his mansion in the outskirts and Endycott spent ten hours a day working at Morley’s house, until they put together the band’s third LP. Against the expectations of critics Broken Zoo’s third album was better than the previous ones. In the first one, seventy percent of the songs were written by Malone. Both the lyrics and the music. In the second one, seventy percent of the songs belong to Malone. The remaining thirty and twenty-five percent, respectively, belong to Morley and Endycott, save for a song on the second LP whose lyrics are co-written by Morley and Palmer and which undoubtedly constitutes an exception. On the third album, on the other hand, ninety percent of the songs belong to Morley and Endycott, and the remaining ten percent are split between Palmer, Morley and Endycott and a new musician, Venable, who joined the band when it became clear that Malone wouldn’t be back. There’s a song dedicated to Malone on the album. There are no recriminations. Only friendship and admiration. It’s titled “When Will You Be Back?” and was released as a single and in less than two weeks it reached first place on the London top ten. Malone, of course, didn’t come back, and although several journalists at the time set out to find him, all attempts were in vain. It was even said that he died in a French city and that his remains were buried in a common grave. As for Broken Zoo, the third album was followed by a fourth one, which was unanimously applauded, and after the fourth came a fifth album and then a sixth, a double, which was the apotheosis, the unsurpassable LP, and then they spent some time without playing, but then they released a seventh LP, quite good, then an eighth one and in the mid-eighties they released their ninth album, once again a double, and it seemed as though Morley and Endycott had made a pact with the devil, because the ninth swept the world, from Japan to Holland, from New Zealand to Canada, storming through Thailand like a tornado, which is already quite a feat. Then the band split up, though from time to time they reunited to play their songs for very special occasions, on specific days. In 1995 a journalist from Rolling Stone discovered where Malone was. The article only caused stupor among die hard fans of Broken Zoo, those who still had copies of the first record on vinyl. Most readers could have cared less about what had happened to a guy most people had written off as dead. Malone’s life, during that time, to a certain degree, seemed like a living death. When he left London what he did was simply go back to his parents’ house. That was it. He stayed there for two years, without doing anything, while his colleagues were launching their conquest of the universe.
{ Roberto Bolaño, El secreto del mal, Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2007 }
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