Why Is Bear Billowing? by Lesser Gonzalez Alvarez

Lesser Gonzalez Alvarez’s first album, Why Is Bear Billowing? (Carpark Records, 2008), is centered on an acoustic guitar, the singer’s marvelous voice and his poetic lyrics, which are sometimes populated by odd things like wizards, narwhal horns, enamored bakers and postmen, or “a lion who’s quite the minstrel,” all without falling into the trap of being weird for the sake of standing out. I suppose we might qualify this debut album as another contribution to that unfortunately-named group of musicians known as “Freak Folk” (which at least is better than the silly name “Naturalismo,” or what could be the worst one I’ve heard yet, “New Weird America”). But Gonzalez Alvarez is doing something unique, paying attention to how he strums his guitar and writing great, funny, romantic, fantastical, heartfelt and even, at times, visionary lyrics.

Born in Havana, Cuba in 1983, Gonzalez Alvarez grew up in Miami and now lives in Baltimore, where he studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art. I was disappointed when I read Pitchfork’s mediocre review of this album last year, though I suspect they simply tried to understand him within the context of Freak Folk (I really hate using that term, but it’s convenient) and thus failed to notice the subtleties of his songwriting. As far as I can tell, his album has gotten some attention around the Internet, none in magazines, and in a note on his web site a few months ago he wrote about being homeless, broke and without a phone. I imagine this album will take a while to reach its listeners, or maybe it will simply remain on the margins like so many other amazing artifacts, waiting for you to pick up on its pleasures.

On his MySpace page Gonzalez Alvarez lists Syd Barrett as one of his musical influences. When I first saw that I realized what it is about Why Is Bear Billowing? that makes me play it over and over again in my car, at home and in my iPod. Like Barrett’s inimitable solo work, Gonzalez Alvarez creates an incredibly full sound with only his voice and an acoustic guitar. Another thing they have in common is their ability to come up with astonishingly beautiful moments in their lyrics. Take, for instance, the opening verses from “Pinecone Eyes”:


“Boy are you a sight for my pinecone eyes
I’ll rest half my head on your fireproof belly
And if the morning should ever come
And the wind is blown from your sails
Down to the waves then in your gypsy dive
Swim out to the rock, tears are merging with my end
And I will sit for you”


When he writes about love, that sentiment is enhanced by the precision of the images in his lyrics, as in the following fragment from “Little Island”:


“Oh come next morning, our wicker basket
Heavy with pearls that I have collected
In hopes you’ll wear them to our grand wedding
Oh ask the songbirds in to sing the chorus of strings”


Or, this moment from “All With Golden Locks,” where Gonzalez Alvarez sings with an infectious joy in his voice. It’s as though he were amazed by the unexpected avenues that open up sometimes in his songs:


“And our ship it flies the highest
Plucked upwards by six ladies
All with golden locks
All with golden locks
All with golden locks”


Those repeated verses are accompanied by a soft organ that’s beautifully mixed alongside his acoustic guitar strumming, and soon afterward we get what could be a harpsichord solo (I’m not sure because the liner notes to the album are minimal.) So far, there’s only one official video by Gonzalez Alvarez available on YouTube (“The Letter B”). There are some clips of him playing in concert available too, with varying degrees of poor to middling sound quality. In one of these, at a concert in his hometown, the audience is heard talking loudly while he thanks them for showing up and proceeds to sing without seeming to be too concerned about their chatter.

Earlier, I mentioned a visionary quality I find in some of his lyrics. This has to do with his affinity for words and phrases that never settle into single meanings, allowing the listener to roam freely through psychic panoramas that are anchored in dreams as much as in the material world. In “Love for Longer” he presents a triptych of related lyrics that also exist independent of each other. The landscape of the song is mythical but it’s lightened by a quirky sense of humor and by what I interpret as faith in the power of individual and collective creation. I transcribe the song in full below:


“Sometimes I wish I could find the wizard
That cast a spell on my poor mother
In the night while she was asleep
And I know that I have been covered in smoke
Just to fix what was wrong with my body
And those lungs that I had are the same lungs that I keep

If there’s a light out at the top of the mountain
We’ll all have to learn how to climb
If there is something that is buried beneath
We will all have to learn how to dig
And blinded by the glow of the great shining rocks
The children will cover their eyes
We shall all build our homes out of these
To stand through the wind, to love for longer

Somewhere in time, a child is convinced
That his little fingers and the space between them
Are rays from the sun, therefore everyone
To fight off the night, to love for longer”


This is one of those albums you’ll want to hear in the comfort of your own home, or in the car, or somewhere that will allow you to listen to the entire thing in one sitting. I like some of the songs more than others, of course, but the whole record really moves me. Like some of Vetiver’s work, Lesser Gonzalez Alvarez seems to be aiming for an acoustic subtlety that unfolds with repeated listening. He allows his guitar playing to frame and mirror the oblique charms of his lyrics. His voice is sweet and he seems like he doesn’t want to be a rock star (“I hope you don’t think I’m some kind of silly bird, oh no / That moves so slow, oh so slow, oh so slow...”). I love this album and maybe you will, too.


[A version of this review was published in Melted: A Rock N’ Roll Fanzine, Issue 1, May 2009, Durham, NC]

Ejercicio ocultable / Emilio Adolfo Westphalen

Concealable Exercise

Inane and absorbed contemplation of our small or medium-sized portable abyss.




{ Emilio Adolfo Westphalen | Peru, 1911-2001 }

“Ciudad escondida...” / Emilo Adolfo Westphalen

“City hidden...”

City hidden between the lips
Venture or tempest or torrent
City the same as a current of air
Between a shaving blade and an abandoned eyelash




{ Emilo Adolfo Westphalen | Peru, 1911-2001 }

“Ansiar que los silencios...” / Emilio Adolfo Westphalen

“Yearning for the silences...”

Yearning for the silences to incorporate and devour space – for time to drown in a puddle of silences.




{ Emilo Adolfo Westphalen | Peru, 1911-2001 }

“Hacer como el mar...” / Emilio Adolfo Westphalen

“To act like the sea...”

To act like the sea – to crash jubilant against your unmovable statue image.




{ Emilio Adolfo Westphalen | Peru, 1911-2001 }

Sombras nada más / Israel Centeno

Nothing but Shadows

To Martha Kornblith

I never knew Martha Kornblith. I’ve known how to deny her three times since her death. Poisoned by inner desolation, I’ve raised a temple where I lead the useless ritual of an intimate certainty versed in the phantasmal signature of people; of the other in her multiple roles, of the afflicted friend reflecting a world that doesn’t reflect her, of the spirit opening the mouth of her face with its vague expressions, my face and those of my friends, all making a stained glass without pigments of Martha’s face, estranged from immediate reality; an unreachable presence had it not been for the texts she read each Wednesday in Rafael Arráiz’s workshop, with that voice that breaks and that tremor of noble substance carved in the word she knew how to build from the solitude we know she suffered.

She endured the illness of abstract entities, of angels and demons. Abraham has called me recently to tell me that not too long ago he saw Martha sitting in a park in La Castellana, he was in his car and as he headed uphill to the Cota Mil highway, she remained sitting on a bench, receiving the leaf storm in a blue reality of fast clouds, there in her autumn, reddened.

One afternoon in the CELARG, Carmen saw her revolve around herself several times. Martha would always visit the Casa de la Poesía, sit in front of the desk next to Luis Gerardo, and smoke, smoke a lot and speak, returning again and again to her topic: yes, she was obsessive, monothematic, she only spoke about the books she wrote or about the painful condition of the task, of the emptiness. Carmen saw her revolve around herself and didn’t understand that she was dancing around her axis, these were the steps of the final exhalation.

Ubiquitous, she could be seen in transit through others, whether in the Escuela de Letras at the Universidad Central or facing the ticket counter at the Margot Benacerraf cinema; a regular at the gatherings of poets at the Consolidado building, an assiduous participant in the meetings for the Eclepsidra group.

The literary world read her avidly. Her voice emerged from the creative void into this void we are becoming each day; with her strong voice she produced arid sounds, a rude voice; authentic in her pretensions of failed exordiums, a voice of the voices in her mind, a voice that gathered its fragments in an unleashed fear, a voice in the acceptance of emptiness as a fate, a creature of the first day, a creature of the last day, an ambiguous presence or absence, her own ambiguity, the voice that has descended to the consistent infernos in the insensitivity of the act of rotating around herself, over and over again around the axis where she orbits, tracing the ellipsis of distance. A voice that has been unique for quite some time; a solo that claims the lives of those who dare to pull it off.

I never knew Martha Kornblith, despite having exchanged a few words with her and sharing the innocent experiences of a literary group. I don’t think anyone will know her except through her three books, two of which will be read posthumously, because we live in Hades and in Hades Ulysses would find only shadows, nothing but shadows.




Translator’s Note: Abraham Abraham, Luis Gerardo Mármol Bosch and Carmen Verde Arocha were members of the Eclepsidra group. The CELARG is the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos.




{ Israel Centeno, El Nacional, 8 June 1997 }

La visita del mar / Javier Sologuren

The Sea’s Visit

I’m a body that flees, a shadow maturing
with a murmur of leaves in your glance
just like the cruel and splendorous midday:
sea, lost wing, snow eyelashes,
chaste sleepwalker amidst corrupted matter,
silk wave in which I flicker sadly.

All words are mine when I stand at the edge
of your eyes, sea, all silence is mine.

Strange host who disturbs me,
an instant I now inhabit slowly
blessed, melancholic, desert, penetrating.

I’m not within me, I’m not mine, wind are my eyes,
sea, now that they watch you, now that your face
lifts me extensively awake in the void,
myself a white horse, immaterial, naked.

Furtive stepping, sea; guide me to you
when the night is a palm leaf within
and my body is merely the blandest snow,
whimpering shadow, triumphant weight of gold.
I open a window in the heights of the night.
In my eyes the dream is an ice toy,
a precious arrow that won’t be able to reach me.

(Visible ear of the star, check me.)

Sea, uncertainty opens its veins from your chest,
the brief fire of single pearls singing,
mute, terrestrial ray burns me all the way to my hair.

The night air, your blind celestial fingers;
your deep satin, sea, burning peacefully.

(The beautiful light is already on it’s way dancing on feet.)

Pure, final beach, sea, where we’re nothing
a ghost amid flowers of dawn.




(Javier Sologuren | Peru, 1921-2004)

Escoges / Juan Sánchez Peláez

You Choose


You choose what vibration to begin

A flame is trembling in the dark alcove

The wheels that swing the sea are geraniums

Green is a gloomy steed

The sun’s open-mouthed step

A blind horizon murmurs orphaned

Presences demand

You select your ubiquitous love

Her bonfires and her vast river’s body

In the being under what cornices protect

You inflate

You deploy the candles

And you drag the uncertain scribble with eyes and hunger.




Rasgos comunes (1975)




{ Juan Sánchez Peláez, Obra poética, Barcelona: Editorial Lumen, 2004 }

Adentrándose en la escritura del borde / Gabriel Payares

Deep into Writing on the Edge

Just as this edition of Papel Literario was reaching its deadline, the country received the ill-fated news of the death of Stefania Mosca, novelist and essayist, who was born in 1957. Recently honored by the IV Feria Internacional del Libro, in 1997 she was awarded the Premio Municipal de Narrativa for her novel Mi pequeño mundo: el burdel nacional visto desde un hueco.


“I feared it from the start: it was late.”
Stefania Mosca, “Tic, Tac…”

“The problem is the real, how we function within this reality,” Stefania Mosca affirmed in an interview on the occasion of being chosen as the honored writer for the IV edition of the Feria Internacional del Libro de Venezuela (Filven), manifesting one of her greatest aesthetic and philosophical preoccupations, which she tackled head on in her essays from El suplicio de los tiempos (1999), to cite one example. Her voice, a national echo of the dilemmas inherited from the 20th century by Western culture, would immerse itself without a second thought in the discourse of the border: that fatal dividing line that declares inside and outside, us and them, and that far from being circumscribed to the flat and innocuous dimension of geography, today is erected more than ever as the instrument from which realities are molded.

In that sense, Mosca assumed her belonging to the place of those “on the outside”: a place of marginal and peripheral enunciation, that is nevertheless not exempt from the existential problems addressed by Sartre and his frequently cited Being and Nothingness, but rather the opposite. Reality, the body, the perception of the other and of the self are all so present in Mosca’s pen that they ended up being the ideal categories for researching the author’s adherence to a continental culture whose voice has been silenced within the symbolic realizations of media hegemony; in her own words, a “marginality of the periphery [that] does not have a story, outside those promoted by the DEA or obscenely typified by Hollywood films” (El hilo de la voz, 612).

Narrating the Margin to Ourselves
There we find the superposition of essay and fiction in Mosca’s work: responding to the need to offer ourselves our own story, of grabbing hold of our subalternity as prime material, through which we can get closer to our truth – our being-in-itself, Sartre would say –, attainable only through “liberational” writing and reading. Mosca’s seemed to be a poetics of approaching the real, in frank disagreement with the market’s so-called “simulacra”: a posture that turns out to be at once a logical consequence and an honest opposition to the global village’s millennial offers.

So her fictional construction of notable characters that conduct themselves in marginal or even alienated social ways is more than understandable – “The Cosmo Girl,” the “Beggar,” “The Sweet Wife” –, those whose voices have been silenced by the system and confined, either to the gym, to the street, to domestic chores, or to the consumerist noise of marketing. And yet, the case of the beggar contains a moment of significant humor, though not any less dark: the assumption of complete lack, the most absolute and pure mendacity, as the greatest state of liberation possible: “There will be no life beyond total lack. Freedom. My own, to be something apart, a ruin. To not have a credit card” (Ibid, 607). Although with marked sarcasm, the narrative of this indigent who has fled from a world that is repugnant to him and that offers no escape – even reaching the point of affirming that “the rural escapes of the sixties are fallacious (Ibid, 608) – contains the seed of the true liberation Mosca pursues: that of the story-teller who assumes her marginality and finds in her naked word, liberated from life – “there will be no more life” – the path to self discovery.

More than what we would call characters, these are fictional instances that allow an almost essayistic reflection on the aforementioned themes; almost excuses to research identity, the female body, love’s incomprehensibility, or the urban construction of the everyday – “six million caraqueños seeing Mount Ávila every morning creates a link” (Ibid, 610) – and memory, understood as the ancestral, inherited and legitimate trace that must be recovered and put back together within the individual: fragments of origin, whether it be national, familial or personal. A group of interests and of questions to which Julio Miranda adds, in El gesto de narrar, “the female complaint, that manages to critique itself as a dependency (…) as well as the concern for the body’s deterioration and aging; and no less, the contrast between the city of freeways and big buildings, of vertigo and violence, and the sea as fullness” (345).

“We’ve made the body Barbie’s territory”
The female condition, however, ends up being one of Mosca’s central interests in her attempt to reach, in this case, the ontological truth of woman. She frequently denounces an “autoinvisibility” of the woman’s body, a more frequent victim – although not the only one – of the demands of fashion, who gets lost in the illusions of a standard for femininity that is more demanding each time. It is “women, chasing after The Echo of Another’s Pleasure (Ana Teresa Torres), sweaty in the gym, or shamed and bruised on operating tables” (El hilo de la voz, 611). Mosca wagers on the body’s awakening, drowsy in its silent existential marginalization; a protest that, even if it might seem commonplace today, nonetheless finds its echoes, perhaps intelligently, in the “central” instances of Western thought, such as Descartes, Faulkner o Diderot, and in much more contemporary intellectuals such as García Canclini and Nelly Richards, or even in the Brazilian Clarice Lispector or the Czechoslovakian Milan Kundera.

In the same vein, these references, placed alongside much more local instances such as Simón Rodríguez, Luis Alberto Crespo and even, in an amusing though significant anecdote about Venezuelanness, the ex-president Luis Herrera Campíns, are used by Mosca to put into practice her own theory, appropriating hegemonic thought in order to force it to engage in dialogue with peripheral voices. Liberation, then, for Mosca is conceived as a staging of a marginal voice, that assuming its mediations narrates, describes and constructs itself all at once by means of pure written exercise: “First comes the tracing of the figure. We should delineate, define the contours, the territory’s forms. In order to know our body, we have the skin that, being an edge, is the sense that joins us to the outside, the other, the universe” (Ibid, 613).

In this way, giving a form to our territory – be this the country, the female body or literature itself – implies a journey towards origin, an inner glance that gains sense as it delineates – “discovers” – the truth that was previously occupied by illusion, simulacrum, phantasmagoria. A philosophical proposal that seems to be nourished by Baudrillard’s polemical theories, with the exception that he would have never accepted the existence of an “authentic” national reality; something that did seem to seduce Mosca, whose faith was invested in the ontological (re)discovery of “what is ours,” or more accurately, in its (re)creation: to fill with writing the void left by the market simulacra that, like a distorting mirror, “erases or assumes in a deformed manner, assimilates and transfigures (Ibid, 612) the countercultural manifestations that take place within its core. The author’s fundamental preoccupation, according to what she said in the interview with which we began this dissertation, is found in the reality’s fatal artificial nature, when man is not integrated with Nature: “…but it’s up to us that it be at least a more welcoming elaboration, that it not make us the victims of objects. Because our desire is no longer a desire for the other but rather a desire for the thing.” Perhaps this is announced by the earthquake that closes the bourgeois gathering of La última cena (1991), proposing through the tremor the necessity of fracturing our artificial social structures, in favor of a more direct relationship with the national “truth.”

Following Mosca, writing on the edge – a word [borde] which she aptly used to title the series of essays we’ve been citing – always turns out to be rewriting, in a palimpsest, in the almost archeological search of a negated truth, by means of the word: “The marks of origin have been diluted. The origin does not exist, or it is everywhere, but we can’t avoid the chimera of putting it back together. We have a birth. The body demands that its source be identified” (Ibid, 614). In this Mosca makes herself a spokesperson of a Latin American symptom, of a desire for a reestablishment very in tune with the majority of our nations, that insist on the urgency of rediscovering themselves, of arriving at their own truth as a nation, digging and digging in the ruins of our failed modernity.

From another perspective, this supposes the assumption of writing as the only possible means of salvation. “We all write. We want to save ourselves, to create our own images,” she affirms in her “Sueño de una noche de verano,” recalling the mythical relationship between the word and the genetic act our tradition attributes to it: the hope of recreating ourselves, this time in our own image and likeness – since our mestizo origin already points to the intervention of others, of those from outside – seems to be a constant element of this particular Latin American mythology, full of paradoxes and contradictions, a faithful reflection of the complexities of our social and political reality. Today, it doesn’t seem to exist for those of us who live on the edge of the possibility of enunciating an “us”; and perhaps that is what sentences us to a constant search for liberation, for the nakedness of the short story’s beggar.




{ Gabriel Payares, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 28 March 2009 }

¿Democracia protagónica revolucionaria? / Javier Biardeau R.

Protagonistic Revolutionary Democracy?

In the Proyecto Nacional Simón Bolívar – Primer Plan Socialista, among the central strategic directions, “protagonistic revolutionary democracy” stands out. For each one of the seven strategic directions there is a methodological enunciation of a focus, objectives, strategies and policies.

It is significant that one of the objectives is: “To irrevocably achieve protagonistic revolutionary democracy, in which the sovereign majority personifies the substantive process of making decisions.” Is this process reduced to the electoral plane? The revolution’s high strategic directory faces the impasse of its own discourse.

We have to debate how the “leader’s moment” seems unbalanced when facing the “moment of popular protagonism.” A democratic and socialist revolution is founded on protagonism “from below,” with intellectual and moral autonomy, as Gramsci would say, for the growing self-government. Something very different from the Jacobin-Blanquist imaginary that is inevitably generated by an irreparable disjunction between democratic revolution and the construction of socialism. The “revolutionary elite” end up being a “political oligarchy,” a new core. It’s one thing to surpass political liberalism, but quite another to destroy the possibility of deepening the social liberty of the people, their self-government and protagonism in making decisions.

Socialist democracy is a radical critique of the inconsistencies of democratic liberalism, of the latter’s deep commitment not to a “libertarian society of equality, substantive justice and the common good,” but rather to a capitalist society of exploitation, coercion, ideological hegemony, cultural negation and social exclusion. But a socialist democracy is a libertarian protagonistic democracy, not a plebiscite democracy under the leadership of a progressive Caesarism. A democratic revolution procures a higher grade of liberty, not its liquidation in the name of the techno-bureaucracy of the party-State. Authoritarian statism and a personalist politics were the ABC of Stalinism. Rosa Luxemburg warned against the mistake of separating “democratic revolution” from “revolutionary democracy,” what eventually became the substitution of the “dominion of the majority” by the “dominion over the majority”; which is to say the reinstallation of the political oligarchy, Milovan Djilas’s “new class.”

That a sovereign majority personifies the process of making decisions does not mean in any way that the personalized incarnation of State power substitutes the majority’s sovereignty. This gives rise to special conditions of state power. The government oscillates between foreign and domestic capital, between the weak national bourgeoisie and the relatively powerful proletariat. This confers on the government a Bonapartist aspect sui generis, a distinctive aspect. It is elevated, to say it in that manner, above classes.

For Gramsci the distinctive quality between regressive Caesarism and progressive Caesarism was its position when facing the dialectic of “revolution-restoration.” It’s true that progressive Caesarism-Bonapartism can be beneficial for national-popular demands; Cárdenas, Perón and Nasser are examples, but that doesn’t mean we should confuse them with democratic participatory socialism. It’s true that popular revolutionary nationalism represents a mechanism of patriotic affirmation when facing tendencies of imperial subordination. But bread for bread, and wine for wine. Without protagonism, initiative, the effective power of popular protagonism there is no socialism.

“It is not the same thing to speak of democratic revolution than to speak of revolutionary democracy. The first concept has a conservative brake; the second one is liberating.” Here we display our substantive difference of criteria. There is no participatory socialism, constituent popular process, without democratic revolution. The history of revolutions serves a purpose. That is why we propose 4Rs: revision, rectification, reimpulse, but above all the renovation of socialist ideas, so that we are not left trapped in any figure of bureaucratic collectivism. For the people what belongs to the people!




Translator’s note: A slightly longer version of this essay was published last month in the original Spanish.




{ Javier Biardeau R., El Nacional, 24 March 2009 }