(New Directions), The She-Devil in the Mirror
(New Directions), and Dance with Snakes (Biblioasis). He lives in exile in Tokyo, Japan, and was interviewed in Guernica’sApril 2009 issue.’
It turns out that Horacio Castellanos Moya, the author of the article in Guernica below, is also the Latin-American novelist whose name I have been trying to remember for months.
‘Born in Honduras in 1957, Horacio Castellanos Moya is the author of nine novels, among them El Asco: Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador, about which Roberto Bolaño once wrote, this novel “threatens the hormonal balance of imbeciles, and those who read it feel the irrepressible desire to hang the author in a public plaza. In truth, there is no higher honor for an author.” His novels available in English include Senselessness
I like Bernal but this is pretty much guaranteed to be a travesty.
This essay addresses the cultural and political agendas that influence the selection of Latin American novels to be translated by U.S. publishers and the reception of these novels by U.S.readers. Focusing on two Latin American writers who have had enormous success in the U.S., the author traces the shift from the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, to the gritty realism of Roberto Bolaño, and asks what these different paradigms can tellus about stereotypical U.S. notions of Latin American cultural and political realities. Although Bolaño’s work ostensibly realigns the coordinates of the Latin American novel, breaking with the model of magical realism, it too foments a (pre)conception of alterity that satisfies the fantasies and collective imagination of U.S. cultural consumers. Citing the extremely low numbers of Latin American works translated and published in the U.S.yearly, she attributes this (pre)conception in part to the very small list of Latin American works available to U.S. readers—a list that comprises only a fraction of the total literary production of the region.
Guernica: Bolaño Inc., by Horacio Castellanos Moya -
It was no casual fact, then, that the majority of articles profiling the author laid the emphasis on the episodes of his tumultuous youth: his decision to drop out of high school and become a poet; his terrestrial odyssey from Mexico to Chile, where he was jailed during the coup d’état; the formation of the failed infrarealist movement with the poet Mario Santiago; his itinerant existence in Europe; his eventual jobs as camp watchman and dishwasher; a presumed drug addiction; and his premature death. “These iconoclastic episodes coupled with Bolaño’s death at fifty,” writes Pollack, “are too tempting to narrate as anything but a tragedy of mythical proportions: here seems to be someone who actually saw his youthful ideals through to their ultimate consequences.” “Meet the Kurt Cobain of Latin American literature,” wrote Daniel Crimmins in Paste magazine.
No North American journalist highlighted the fact, Sarah Pollack warns, that The Savage Detectives and the greater part of Bolaño’s prose work “were written as a sober family man” during the last ten years of his life—and an excellent father, I’d add, whose major preoccupation was his children, and that if he took a lover at the end of his life, he did it in the most conservative Latin American style, without threatening the preservation of his family. Pollack notes that “Bolaño appears to the reader, even before one crosses the novel’s threshold, as a cross between the Beats and Arthur Rimbaud (another reference for his alter ego Arturo Belano), his life already the stuff of legend.” Yet the majority of critics have passed over the fact that Bolaño didn’t die as a result of drug or alcohol abuse, but from a case of poorly cared-for pancreatitis that had destroyed his liver; or that his case was more similar to those of Balzac or Proust, who also died at fifty after a tremendous work effort, than it was to those of North American pop idols.
Artist unknown
This is fucking hot.
[video]
pussy toss - jessica eaton (2009)
Thanks guys… rewind though. 2006 I think - done for the Vice Photo issue when I had a contributor photo request that had to be “nude”. For samples of other people in the issue they sent me Ryan McGinley and some other dudes photos. Not very inspiring when you have breasts.
I’ll take one of everything, please. (via Opening Ceremony)
Apparently Michael Williams of A Continuous Lean is getting into some co-branding. This is his desert boot for Cole, Rood, and Haan. It’s got a really nice low-profile crepe sole, but at $395, I’ll stick with my Clarks, thanks.
Wish I was going to this.