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By Andrew Epstein

The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño is of course best-known as a novelist, the author of ambitious, sprawling novels like The Savage Detectives and 2666. But before turning to prose, Bolaño started out as a poet; in fact, he often said he valued poetry more highly than fiction and sometimes claimed he was a better poet than novelist. His work is marked by a deep and abiding fascination with poetry and the people who write, read, and teach it. As Ben Ehrenreich wrote several years ago in an essay for the Poetry Foundation, “through his legions of fictional poets (some more fictional than others), through their political compromises, their self-betrayals, their struggles and feuds both petty and grand, Bolaño built a world.”

Ehrenreich is surely right about the importance of poetry, and fictional poets, to Bolaño’s oeuvre, but the critical discussion of this element of Bolaño’s work thus far has mostly remained on a general plane, instead of connecting his writing to particular poets and poetry movements. However, with the recent publication of his unfinished novel Woes of the True Policeman and of his complete poetry in The Unknown University, Bolaño’s rather surprising links to a specific poetry movement — the New York School of poetry — have come into sharper focus.

It is common for readers to link Bolaño to Latin American and Spanish literary influences, to European avant-garde movements, or to other fiction writers. But Bolaño clearly read and absorbed the New York School of poetry and painting, along with a truly astonishing range of other sources. Although commentators on his work have barely mentioned it thus far, the New York School plays an important role in his work. It flickers just on the margins of Bolaño’s fictional universe, a ghostly example of the kind of poetry — as well as the type of intimate avant-garde community of like-minded others — that continually beckons and frustrates Bolaño and his characters.

Bolaño’s preoccupation with poetry can perhaps be seen best in his wonderful novel The Savage Detectives, which is actually a novel about poets. At its heart is a semi-fictional movement of young poets Bolaño calls the “Visceral Realists” (loosely based upon his own youthful involvement in a coterie called the Infrarealists). Throughout the remarkable opening section of the novel, this group — with all of its subversive energy, its iconoclasm and playfulness, its goofy, idealistic naivete, romanticism, and tragic flaws — reminds one of a host of other avant-garde communities, including the Surrealists, the Beats, and the New York School.

But it is more than just a novel about poets. The Savage Detectives is a moving meditation on poetry as a horizon of possibility and disillusionment. In fact, it’s one of the most exhilarating, devastating, exhausting, and revealing accounts of avant-garde poetry — and the movements and social worlds that sustain it — that I have encountered. It portrays the avant-garde as dream, as tragedy, as farce, as inspiring coterie and impossible community, tantalizing potential and heart-breaking, inevitable failure. In this, Bolaño echoes one of the hallmarks of the New York School itself: an intense, often ironic awareness of the paradoxes inherent in any avant-garde community, both its allure and its limitations.

However, The Savage Detectives contains few direct references to the New York poets themselves (except for a passing reference to poets Ted Berrigan and John Giorno). Traces of the New York School stand out more prominently in the recently published book Woes of the True Policeman, one of the many (and perhaps the last) of Bolaño’s posthumous works that have appeared in recent years. At the novel’s center is a Chilean university professor named Óscar Amalfitano who falls in love with a young Mexican artist whose specialty is making forgeries of paintings by … Larry Rivers, of all people. Rivers, of course, was Frank O’Hara’s close friend, collaborator, and sometime lover, and the painter who is perhaps most closely allied, both socially and aesthetically, with the New York poets. This unusual detail — and the figure of Rivers himself — becomes a significant thread in Bolaño’s novel. The young artist, Castillo, explains that he sells the forgeries to a Texan who “then sells them to other filthy rich Texans.” When Castillo informs Amalfitano that Rivers is “an artist from New York,” he replies “I know Larry Rivers. I know Frank O’Hara, so I know Larry Rivers.”

Soon after, as Amalfitano meditates on the strangeness of this situation — the amateurish Rivers’ forgeries, the Texans who buy them, and the art market in New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas — Bolaño writes:

“he immediately pictured those fake Berdies, those fake camels, and those extremely fake Primo Levis (some of the faces undeniably Mexican) in the private salons and galleries, the living rooms and libraries of modestly prosperous citizens… And then he imagined himself strolling around Castillo’s nearly empty studio, naked like Frank O’Hara, a cup of coffee in his right hand and a whiskey in his left, his heart untroubled, at peace with himself, moving trustingly into the arms of his new lover” (58).

Near the end of the book, the Rivers plot culminates with a strange and funny anecdote about running into Larry Rivers himself at an exhibition of his work.

The novel also features an amusing collection of Amalfitano’s “Notes for a Class in Contemporary Literature: The Role of the Poet.” This takes the form of an almost Buzzfeed-ready list that consists of items like “Happiest: Garcia Lorca,” “Banker of the soul: T.S. Eliot,” and “Strangest wrinkles: Auden.” Among other names cited in this rather crazy, irreverent list, one finds several important figures of the New York School – Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, and Diane Di Prima — getting top honors in some strange categories: “Biggest cock: Frank O’Hara,” “Best movie companion: Elizabeth Bishop, Berrigan, Ted Hughes, José Emilio Pacheco,” and under “Biggest nervous wreck: Diane Di Prima”.

Signs of Bolaño’s interest in poets of the New York School can be found elsewhere across the body of his work, as when Frank O’Hara pops up in a short story collected in Last Evenings on Earth in which two poets meet, share poems with one another, and discuss their influences: “We talked a while longer, about Sanguinetti and Frank O’Hara (I still like Frank O’Hara but I haven’t read Sanguinetti for ages).” In the newly published collection of his complete poetry, The Unknown University, Bolaño’s connection to O’Hara is considerably more substantial. He not only uses a passage by Frank O’Hara as an epigraph to a poem, but the (untitled) poem itself closely echoes O’Hara’s work:

I listen to Barney Kessel
and smoke smoke smoke and drink tea
and try to make myself some toast
with butter and jam
but discover I have no bread and
it’s already twelve thirty at night
and the only thing to eat
is a nearly full bottle
of chicken broth bought this
morning and five eggs and a little
muscatel and Barney Kessel plays
guitar stuck between a
rock and an open socket
I think I’ll make some consommé and
then get into bed
to re-read The Invention of Morel
and think about a blond girl
until I fall asleep and
start dreaming.

(translated by Laura Healey)

With its “I do this, I do that” narrative conjuring up an ordinary but melancholy-tinged everyday moment, its references to listening to music, and jazz at that (Barney Kessel), its intimate and conversational tone, its lack of punctuation and its headlong rush, Bolaño’s poem seems to intentionally evoke O’Hara’s signature style.

In another poem in The Unknown University, Bolaño chronicles his experience of reading Ted Berrigan’s 1963 book The Sonnets.

A Sonnet

16 years ago Ted Berrigan published
his Sonnets. Mario passed the book around
the leprosaria of Paris. Now Mario
is in Mexico and The Sonnets on
a bookshelf I built with my own
hands. I think I found the wood
near Montealegre nursing home
and I built the shelf with Lola. In
the winter of ’78, in Barcelona, when
I still lived with Lola! And now it’s been 16 years
since Ted Berrigan published his book
and maybe 17 or 18 since he wrote it
and some mornings, some afternoons,
lost in a local theatre I try reading it,
when the film ends and they turn on the light.

(translated by Laura Healey)

The poem portrays the speaker’s formative encounter with Berrigan’s ground-breaking collection of experimental sonnets, but also hints at the frustrations or limitations of his exposure to it: the “lost” speaker, who may also have recently lost his lover (Lola), merely tries to read the book. He seems to long for the energy he seems convinced Berrigan must have had so many years ago when he wrote those poems. The poem also underscores both the cosmopolitan nature of Bolaño’s imagination and the international reach of the New York School of poets. Berrigan’s book The Sonnets, like this sonnet itself, crosses time and space, speaking across 16 years, and sliding across boundaries and nationalities: written in New York, circulated around Paris by a Latin American poet who is now in Mexico, read by a young 26 year old Chilean poet in a movie theater in Barcelona.

Bolaño of course read voraciously, immersing himself fully in a wide range of 20th century avant-garde writing and art, but as the final pieces of his work appear in translation, it has become clearer than ever that he seems to have had a special connection to a poetry movement that sprouted from a place far from Santiago, Mexico City, Barcelona, and other key points in his own geography — the world of Frank O’Hara, Larry Rivers, Ted Berrigan, and other New York poets.

Poetry — especially the kind of poetry the New York School produced, and even more so, embodied, in its example and its ambivalent attitudes about community — seemed to exemplify Bolaño’s guiding belief about art in general: that it always promises us shimmering possibilities and perpetual disappointment at the same time.

Andrew Epstein is Associate Professor of English at Florida State University. He is the author of Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry.

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Michael Sedano

In keeping with Daniel Olivas' column on Monday, here is the opening paragraph from Roberto Bolaño's novel The Savage Detectives, as translated by Natasha Wimmer:

"November 2. I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way."

On December 23, the narrator, a 17-year old boy named Juan García Madero, contributes what to me would have been a more cogent opening line:

"Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I'd rather not talk about it, because I didn't understand it."

In a nutshell, there's the sum and tenor of 577 generally tedious pages of adventurous writing. I suspect a plurality of readers will find the opening segment involving, then will get bogged down, or lost, in the abrupt stylistic shift of the middle of the novel, and probably stop reading somewhere in the mid-hundreds. Can't say as I blame them, although I stuck it out to the bitter end, having invested too many hours seeing if I could make sense of what was going on.

The opening segment takes place in 1975 with García Madero abandoning his university studies to join the oddball poets and barmaids of Mexico City. Bolaño creates a sentimental map of the city, the character wandering the various quarters of the city searching the cafés and bars for the twenty-something poets who have opened their clique to the youth. In the process he beds one of two sisters and gets tangled up in the girl's altruistic plan to liberate a whore from her pimp. The girl's father, however, complicates matters when the boy discovers the father has taken the whore as a Sancha, ensconced her in a cheap hotel, but has to flee to the family home when the pimp discovers the love nest. 1975 ends with the boy, the whore, Lima and Belano--two disreputable poet-tipos--fleeing Mexico City after an armed confrontation with the pimp and a corrupt cop.

Exciting and colorful material there. Then the narrative shifts from the diarist story teller to that of a documentary film interviewing a mixed cast of characters. Here the story wends its way back and forth in time, between 1976 to 1996, tracking the movement of the two poet-tipos as they travel about France, Spain, and Israel. Another thread--the detection element--tracks the search for Cesárea Tinajero, the mother, or perhaps chief muse, of this visceral realism literary movement. In subthreads we learn more about the personal lives of the the visceral realists introduced in the opening section, and various gente who come in contact with the mythic Lima and Belano, and Octavio Paz' secretary. Much of this actually has interest and delight as Bolaño uses it for sketches of a certain mode of literary life in Mexico City. But it's long and could easily benefit from a liberal paring, especially as a character remembers the name of a poet, then another, then another, another, another, another...

The novel wraps up reverting to 1976, with the fleeing quartet arriving in northern Mexico, pursued by the vengeful pimp and his cop enforcer. The detectives finally find the mother of visceral realism in a remote Sonoran village. In a fatal confrontation with the pimp, Cesárea Tinajero saves their lives but is shot dead in the process. One of the poet-tipos knifes the pimp, and the cop is gut-shot and will die a slow, painful death. As I note, I suspect many readers will abandon the novel and won't ever get to this climactic desert confrontation, so this is not a spoiler revelation.

I actually felt a bit sorry for the translator, saddled with what must have been a rich variety of colorfully abusive language that ends up in English as fuck this and fuck that. After numerous such linguistic devolutions, I was reminded of the scene in the film El Norte, when the Guatemalteco elder counsels the about-to-be emigrants that, in order to sound like a Mexican, they have to pepper their speech with liberal uses of "chingado" this and "chingada" that. Aside from a bit of French verse, little is untranslatable, except for a moment of fun at the end of the novel. The insufferable García Madero quizzes the falso poets about classical poetic schemes and tropes, none of which the street girl and the two tipos understand. To turn the tables, they quiz García Madero on a unique idiom they speak. Early, early in the novel, a character complains that Lima and Belano speak this language--it has a name though I cannot cite it--and finally on the 532 page, we're treated to a sample that runs two pages:

"All right, Mr. Know-It-All, can you tell me what a prix is?"
"A toke of weed," said Belano without turning around.
"And what is muy carranza?"
"Something very old," said Belano.
"And lurias?"
"Let me answer," I said, because all the questions were really for me.
"All right," said Belano.
"I don't know," I said after thinking for a while.

I was surprised to find Bolaño's novel so tedious. I glanced at the blurbs on the back cover and noted the breathless praise heaped upon it. "Powerful and sophisticated." "premier Latin American writer." "The great Mexican novel of its generation." Maybe it's just me, as despite my problems, I wasn't entirely bored with it. I suspect the difference is similar to the differences that stretch between, yet link, the music of Beethoven to Dvorak and Stravinsky, then on to Suk and Schoenberg and beyond into the 21st century. The new stuff is somewhat interesting, musically tolerable, and more so because it often is quite short. Bolaños sets that model on its head with 577 pages, some filled out with nearly interminable lists that, like December 23, either have nothing happening, or I didn't understand them.

mvs

La Bloga welcomes your comments here, particularly if you have a more solid footing to go on for The Savage Detectives. I'd dearly love to learn your appreciation of Bolaño's effort. La Bloga welcomes guest columnists. If you'd enjoy becoming our guest, click here, or when you've got a mind to share, drop us a comment on the day's post.

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Manuel Ramos

LA BLOGA CROSSWORD
I must have had some time on my hands because I came up with a crossword puzzle for La Bloga readers. It's all about the literature, of course, so if you are a regular visitor to La Bloga or have more than a passing interest in Chicana/o and Latina/o stories, characters, writers, publishers, and reviewers, you should breeze through this puzzle.

I can't figure out how to paste the puzzle directly onto the La Bloga pages, so you are going to have to click on another link to see the grid and the questions. There are two versions: the first looks oversized on my screen but loads up quickly, the second version fits better on my screen but it may have too much black for some printers and it takes a bit more time to load. The questions are the same in either version.

In any event, if you have the inclination, check out the puzzle of your choice, print it, solve it, and let me know what you think about this diversion. I hear that solving crosswords is good for keeping the brain cells young and vigorous; too bad I can't do crosswords with my back. I think I killed a few thousand brain cells putting the puzzle together so it's a trade off for me. Here are the links:

La Bloga Puzzle Version 1

La Bloga Puzzle Version 2

And the answers are here.

BOOK AND WRITING NEWS
NEWN is now open for submissions. Visit the website for complete guidelines:

http://www.newnmag.net/guidelines

NEWN accepts submissions in all categories ONLY between January 1 through March 31.

Fiction: Open to all genres and types of previously unpublished fiction up to 3,000 words. NEWN encourages submissions of novel excerpts. NEWN will note that the excerpt is out of context and requires a little more understanding from the reader. Pick no more than 3,000 words of your novel that can semi-stand alone and show off your novel.

Pay: $10 and one copy for short stories or novel excerpts.

NEW STUFF
Quotes from the publishers

The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño
Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux - April

"New Year’s Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.

...The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.

... The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century."

Lost City Radio, Daniel Alarcón
HarperCollins - February

"For ten years, Norma has been the voice of consolation for a people broken by violence. She hosts Lost City Radio, the most popular program in their nameless South American country, gripped in the aftermath of war. Every week, the Indians in the mountains and the poor from the barrios listen as she reads the names of those who have gone missing, those whom the furiously expanding city has swallowed. Loved ones are reunited and the lost are found. Each week, she returns to the airwaves while hiding her own personal loss: her husband disappeared at the end of the war.

But the life she has become accustomed to is forever changed when a young boy arrives from the jungle and provides a clue to the fate of her long-missing husband.

Stunning, timely, and absolutely mesmerizing, Lost City Radio probes the deepest questions of war and its meaning: from its devastating impact on a society transformed by violence to the emotional scarring each participant, observer, and survivor carries for years after. This tender debut marks Alarcón's emergence as a major new voice in American fiction."

, Alex Espinoza
Random House - February

"Still Water Saints chronicles a momentous year in the life of Agua Mansa, a largely Latino town beyond the fringes of Los Angeles and home to the Botánica Oshún, where people come seeking charms, herbs, and candles. Above all, they seek the guidance of Perla Portillo, the shop’s owner. Perla has served the community for years, arming her clients with the tools to overcome all manner of crises, large and small. There is Juan, a man coming to terms with the death of his father; Nancy, a recently married schoolteacher; Shawn, an addict looking for peace in his chaotic life; and Rosa, a teenager trying to lose weight and find herself. But when a customer with a troubled and mysterious past arrives, Perla struggles to help and must confront both her unfulfilled hopes and doubts about her place in a rapidly changing world.

Imaginative, inspiring, lyrical, and beautifully written, Still Water Saints evokes the unpredictability of life and the resilience of the spirit through the journeys of the people of Agua Mansa, and especially of the one woman at the center of it all. Theirs are stories of faith and betrayal, love and loss, the bonds of family and community, and the constancy of change."

Flight, Sherman Alexie
Grove Atlantic - April

"[Alexie's] first novel since Indian Killer is a powerful, fast, and timely story of a troubled foster teenager—a boy who is not a legal Indian because he was never claimed by his father—who learns the true meaning of terror.

The journey for this young hero begins as he’s about to commit a massive act of violence. At the moment of decision, he finds himself shot back through time and resurfaced in the body of an FBI agent during the civil rights era. Here he will be forced to see just why Hell is Red River, Idaho, in the 1970s. Red River is only the first stop in a shocking sojourn through moments of violence in American history. He will continue traveling back to inhabit the body of an Indian child during the battle at Little Bighorn and then ride with an Indian tracker in the nineteenth century before materializing as an airline pilot jetting through the skies today. During these frantic trips through time, his refrain grows: Who’s to judge? and I don’t understand humans. When finally, blessedly, our young warrior comes to rest again in his own contemporary body, he is mightily transformed by all he’s seen."
, Mayra Montero
Farrar, Straus and Giroux - January

"Havana, 1957. On the same day that the Mafia capo Umberto Anastasia is assassinated in a barber's chair in New York, a hippopotamus escapes from the zoo and is shot and killed by its pursuers. Assigned to cover the zoo story, Joaquín Porrata, a young Cuban journalist, finds himself embroiled in the mysterious connections between the hippo's death and the mobster's when a secretive zookeeper whispers that he knows too much. In exchange for a promise to introduce the keeper to his idol, the film star George Raft, now the host of the Capri casino, Joaquín gets information that ensnares him in an ever-thickening plot of murder, mobsters, and finally, love.

The love story is another mystery. Told by Yolanda, a beautiful ex-circus performer now working for Havana's famed Sans Souci cabaret, it is interwoven with Joaquín's underworld investigations, eventually revealing a family secret deeper even than Havana's brilliantly evoked enigmas. In Dancing to "Almendra," Mayra Montero has created an ardent and thrilling tale of innocence lost, of Havana’s secret world that was the basis for the clamor of the city, and of the end of a violent era of fantastic characters and extravagant crimes. Based on the true history of a bewitching city and its denizens ... ."

Man, all of those sound good.

Later.

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Manuel Ramos

DISTANT STAR BY ROBERTO BOLAÑO
I confess my frustration when I read something by Roberto Bolaño. Last year I wrote about his collection of short stories, Last Evenings on Earth (New Directions, 2006); check out the October 6, 2006, La Bloga archives here. I thought the anthology was good, obviously worth reading, but even in that post I mentioned Bolaño’s puzzling creativity, what I now refer to as his "style" – sorry, I cannot come up with a better word although I understand that style in the context of writing does not mean all that much; but Bolaño’s writing strikes me as very stylized, even self-conscious – and the reader’s responsibility to contribute to the narrative. My latest excursion with Bolaño, Distant Star (originally published by Editorial Anagrama as Estrella distante in 1996; published in English by New Directions in 2004, translation by Chris Andrews) confirmed my first impressions and added to my level of exasperation, but did not lessen my admiration for this writer.

Distant Star is a novel centered on the unraveling of the mystery of Carlos Weider: Chilean poet, officer in Pinochet’s air force, torturer, serial killer. Weider’s first claim to fame, garnered when he was a university student using the name Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, is the assumption made by the Chilean literary scene that he will "revolutionize Chilean poetry" despite the lack of any meaningful poetry produced by Weider. Eventually, he "writes" poetry with his airplane. Here is how Bolaño describes the narrator’s first witnessing of such poetry, observed as the narrator waits in prison, a victim of the Pinochet roundups of suspected threats to the new regime:

There, high above the city, it began to write a poem in the sky. At first I thought the pilot had gone mad and I wasn’t surprised. Madness was not exceptional at the time. I thought he was looping around in a fit of desperation and would crash into a building or a square in the city. But then, suddenly, the letters appeared, as if the sky itself had secreted them. Perfectly formed letters of grey-black smoke on the sky’s enormous screen of rose-tinged blue, chilling the eyes of those who saw them.

Weider becomes the darling of the intelligentsia, that is, the darling of the academics, writers, and other artists who survive the early years of Pinochet.

The narrator is exiled from Chile as Weider’s star rises. However, that star dims drastically when Weider exhibits a collection of photographs (the "art of the future") that embarrasses the leaders. Although the photographs document the brutality and corruption of the regime, and Weider’s own insanity, nothing comes of the revelation except that he slips away, also in exile, to continue to do whatever it is that he does, including contributing poetry and articles to various neo-Nazi and fascist magazines and journals. Inevitably, the narrator becomes obsessed with finding Weider, and the novel ends with an ambiguous but symbolic closure to that search.

Bolaño’s book dares to suggest that there is a direct connection between Pinochet’s destruction of the Allende government and society, and the fascination of Chilean writers – poets in particular – with the superficial trappings of art for art’s sake, of artistic expression nurtured in a social and political vacuum. Weider’s first victims are his fellow poets, and that is no accident. They are students who fell in love with his image, with his "potential," with his mysterious attitude, but who did not really know him or his poetry. As it turns out, Weider is unknowable. His lack of humanity makes him a shadowless enigma, a deadly and terrible ghost who found himself in a society where he was tolerated, then worshiped, much to the agony of the Chilean people.

Bolaño says in a preface that he initially wrote a short piece in another book about Nazi Literature in the Americas, then he realized that he had much more to say. And, indeed, there is much more in Distant Star about far right poetics and art. But there also is considerable information about numerous poets (left and right) who were admired or ignored; and about the generation of Chileans who came of age when the Allende fairy tale ended violently. Bolaño includes several anecdotes about such people. In the same vein as the characters in Last Evenings on Earth, these exiles, for the most part, are adrift in guilt and despair. They are constantly searching but do not always know what it is they search for. The poet Soto is a good example. And the Soto chapter is a good example of why Bolaño’s writing is frustrating for me. In the middle of the Weider story, the reader is taken into Soto’s world in exile. I had to wonder, "where is Bolaño going with this?" Pero, sabes qué, I kept reading. I could not stop even though I wanted Bolaño to get back to the main story line. As I read the story of the doomed Soto I shook my head when Bolaño described Soto as "happy" and, yet, when he met his destiny, Soto’s eyes filled with tears of self-pity. That contradiction explains much about Bolaño’s writing.

The book is fiction and, as far as I know, the Weider character is not based on any one specific person. Certainly, though, the book provides revealing insight about the mind-set of the Chilean people during the Pinochet years. In the simplest terms, Weider is those people, and those people are the ones who love then revile Weider, who praise then condemn him. Near the end of the book, an elderly witness to one of Weider’s crimes gives the following testimony:

In her memory, the night of the crime was one episode in a long history of killing and injustice. Her account of the events was swept up in a cyclical, epic poem, which, as her dumbfounded listeners came to realize, was partly her story ... and partly the story of the Chilean nation. A story of terror. When she spoke of Weider, she seemed to be talking about several different people: an invader, a lover, a warrior, a demon. When she spoke of [the victims], she likened them to the air, to garden plants or puppies. Remembering the black night of the crime, she said she had heard the music of the Spanish. When asked to clarify what she meant by "the music of the Spanish," she replied, "Rage, sir, sheer, futile rage."

FIVE EASY PIECES
1. Now Appearing -- On The Road


Jack Kerouac's connection to Denver is celebrated by the Denver Public Library with an exhibition of the original rolled scroll of teletype paper on which he wrote On The Road. This book is an acknowledged American classic, written in three weeks in1951 and published in 1957, and I have to say that looking at the original manuscript was a gas. Denver is all over the book and Kerouac spent a lot of time in the city, diggin' the vibe. The 120-foot scroll is on display until March 31, 2007. I had the pleasure on opening night of the exhibit of listening to readings from the book by students and professors, as well as by Carolyn and John Cassady, wife and son of Neal Cassady, the model for Dean Moriarty, the novel's central character. Westword has a large spread in its January 4th issue on Kerouac and his ties to Denver, including excerpts from several writers who have also used Denver in their work. If you look closely you can find a quote from one of my books, Brown-on-Brown, that pays homage to Chubby's on West 38th.

2. Another Denver Classic
El Chapultepec is a 50-year old bar on Larimer in Denver, famous for live jazz and standing room only ambience. I've seen many great musicians in that bar, on the stage and in the booths. The Pec is the last real bar in downtown Denver. Now, right here in my own neighborhood (West 38th again), the historic club opens Chapultepec Too with a weekend of jazz celebrations beginning January 19. Chapultepec Too can be found at 3930 W. 38th in Denver.

3. A Land Full of Stories
The Story Circle Network, in conjunction with the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University in San Marcos, is sponsoring a writers conference with the theme A Land Full of Stories, June 8-9, 2007. The conference is now accepting workshop proposals on topics related to writing about place (January 22 deadline). Full information about the conference, including a page where workshop proposals may be submitted, is available here.

4. Klail City Death Trip Series
Giuliana Arcidiacono from the University of Catania (Italy) recently wrote to Rolando Hinjosa announcing the completion of her Ph.D. thesis on The Klail City Death Trip Series. Cool.

5. NALWA
I've seen an announcement for a "Proposal" for a National Latino Writers' Association. Could this be the beginning of something? For more info, contact Valerie Martinez: valmatz AT comcast DOT net.

Later.

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