SOMETHING NEW FROM DAGOBERTO GILB
Dagoberto Gilb has a provocative essay (does he write any other kind?) posted at the Barcelona Review, an international online magazine. Entitled The Hexagon of the Conquest, Gilb's article is a complex and questioning foray into concepts such as lost and found history, the clash of technology against artist sentiment, the unrecognized importance of the conquest of the Americas to the conquerors and the conquered, the need for investigation and curiosity, the preservation of the past as a doorway to the future, and why books can save a life. And so much more. Of course, the article also is about none of these.
Before he finishes, the author has taken the reader to pre-colonial Mexico, the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, and on board one of Magellan's ships. He tells the tale of a library romance between a former priest and his overweight lover; he jokes about his busted leg and imagines his own death; he remembers his youth, the Paricutín volcano, and an example of Cortés' strategy. And so much more.
Gilb opens with this paragraph:
I didn't like books when I was young. Or, better said, I didn't play much with books and they didn't play much in my life. I played baseball and football and shot hoops when I could find one. I was good, one of the two who always picked sides on all elementary school teams. I lived in that dirty house in the neighborhood, the one where the yard wasn't mowed or edged, bushes overgrown, the neighborhood where I would learn, especially from other kids' parents, that divorced and Mexican were words that were dirty too and that kept me from having friends in neat houses. Then a new boy from another state moved in near enough when I was around 12. My new friend wasn't athletic. He never talked about sports. I didn't care because at least I got to go over to his house, which was the dirtiest of them all, on a street with a traffic light, a house that was always for sale or rent. They rented. His mom looked like she drank, and his dad was a taxi driver. His dad, who was very quiet, sullen I'd put it now, lost his left arm working for the railroad. His dad could have been the one-armed man from The Fugitive! I never told my new friend how I smiled thinking it, not once, but it was always sort of there, making me feel like I was closer to a TV show world.
Read the entire article here. You can also find the piece in Callaloo.
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2 Comments on Gato and Gilb, last added: 8/14/2010
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totally cool. i'm sad i couldn't get to la bloga until the end of the day, but i'm glad i got to la bloga at the end of the day. grand reading!
mvs
what an intense, awesome read. gilb wrote it like a dreamscape, unreal. so much to admire. i too really like the cuentitos about the huge priest and his girlfriend and the one about cortes' horse but that section about touching the documents and that leading to borges was the most amazing. gilb published an equally awesome short story in harpers (two months ago) at the same time there was another by him in the new yorker. the man is in heat. good post, so glad i looked. thanks.
raul g