Exchange: Maldonado vs. Bisama
From June to July 2013, Mexican writer Tryno Maldonado and Chilean writer Álvaro Bisama exchanged emails. Among other things, they spoke about the internet and new (and old) ways of reading, the musicians they would send to the firing squad without a second thought, and the different ways in which fiction can speak about violence. Read their correspondence here.
Photos of the authors by Carla McKay
From: Tryno Maldonado
Sent: June 10th, 2013, 18:27
To: Álvaro Bisama
Subject: Oaxaca
Great Álvaro,
How’s everything going there? I hope you and Carla are doing wonderfully. Here in Oaxaca we miss you already. Our friends in common say hi. However, the parties with live heavy-metal bands and mezcal –like that last one, oof– are not the same without you. Please thank Carla for the picture she took of me on the day you left. It worked very well for the article in Gatopardo on Julieta Venegas, the one I was working on those days. Thank you. Did you finally get tickets to Nick Cave? How was it?
I’m sorry for not writing until now. I’m a rotten correspondent. It’s been at least four years since I’ve had an internet connection at my home. Otherwise, I wouldn’t write a single line ever. I greatly admire people capable of having an internet connection at their workplace without utterly failing. I, on the other hand, tend to cheat. For every paragraph of consecutive prose that I write, I reward myself with a “quick” hour-long visit to news portals which, mysteriously, lead me to Facebook and, soon after and without variation, in YouPorn.com. So I’d rather pass. I know that, for example, Jonathan Franzen once asked a friend to disable the modem from the computer he writes on so as not to get distracted. I’m not so hipster: it was enough to stop paying the cable bills. They took care of the rest using giant forceps the following month. Someone has given me, however, an iPhone with connection and I’m fearing that my good writing streak (especially now that I’m starting a new novel) is going to hell. Perhaps I’ll sell it or give it away. I’m an addict. Facebook and Twitter are rancid waters ever since obnoxious writers started using them to “make literature”; but I recognize I could no longer live without Instagram: the iPhone is the first camera I’ve had in my life and I’m incapable of not using it. It’s one of the few remaining free spaces left online before writers come and claim it too as a literary bastion. (By the way: I’m attaching the picture of a satanic piece made by my friend Efraín, one I uploaded yesterday during a party with my noise-metal band; also another portrait of yours which I’ve titled “Bisama vs. the Oaxacan tlayuda”).
I write to you for many reasons which require more than the habitual 140 characters. The first one has to do with music. While I tell you this, I’ve been enduring a kind of public stoning. I’ve been receiving tons of emails, tweets, and Facebook comments with insults and threats. The reason? You’ll shit yourself laughing. It didn’t even have to do with politics this time, as it did when they censored one of my stories for comparing the ex-president of Mexico with a certain kind of cockroach. None of that. In my most recent column I got into something which in Mexico strangely seems to be more sacred than the abnegated maternal figure and the Virgin of Guadalupe: the Beatles.
After rereading High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, it seemed like a good idea to publish my own list of "Five Bands Which Should Be Eliminated from the Face of the Earth.” I swear I tried to be self-critical: the inclusion of Metallica thanks to that pathetic business of Ulrich vs. Napster is proof enough. Nevertheless, messing with the Beatles in this country brought about my lynching; this only further entrenches the prejudices I have about what I consider to be the most overvalued band of all time (not to speak of the annoyance factor in many of their fans). I plan on carrying out a new strategy–a kind of addendum–in a future text, and I’d like to ask you which would be your five bands to eliminate from the face of the planet. (I won’t ask you about the five writers you’d eliminate from the face of the planet so that I don’t also get you into trouble. Although I sense who they’d be, and if you’re up for ranking them I promise to rank in the next email my own five).
Please remind me of the title of the documentary on Los Reynolds. A friend, Carlos Velásquez, has a story about a rock band whose drummer has Down syndrome. I’m sure it’s based on the Reynolds, but I forgot the documentary’s title when I wanted to tell him. Can you send me the info?
By the way, I checked out a documentary on heavy metal: A Headbanger’s Journey. The idea is as stupid as it is fun. A Canadian headbanger trained in anthropology tries to conduct a “serious study” of metal’s genealogical tree. It goes without saying that everything ends in chaos and a huge orgy at the Wacken Festival in Germany. It’s like graduating with a PhD in heavy metal granted by Jack Black. The documentarian attributes the origins of metal to Black Sabbath. I disagree. I’ve always thought that all of heavy metal’s elements were already present in some of the songs on Led Zeppelin’s first album. Including satanism. However, what I wanted to tell you was how surprised I was when it was the turn of Chile’s most renowned headbanger, Tom Araya, to speak in the part dedicated to satanism. I found Araya’s answers (I saw Slayer live here in Mexico) disconcerting: when asked about the satanic content of his lyrics, Araya pulled back, visibly contrite: “I wrote God hates us all because the phrase sounded cool, not because I really believe it. In fact I’m a practicing Catholic.” Look at that! That and the scene you told me about in which one of your friends bumped into Tom Araya while dancing salsa at a family party in Chile have put an end to the image I had of him. Too similar to accidentally finding one of your favorite uncles masturbating in the bathroom. One day you should write about Araya and his Catholic, salsa side. Your text on the book on Chilean heavy metal history of Patricio Jara on Dorso, to go no farther, is magnificent. Remind me of the real names of the Chilean bands that show up in your novel Ruido. I’m looking forward to listening to them. I’ll also download something by Dorso. Send me some link (I already listened to what you previously recommended, Mostro, and it’s great).
Speaking of metal and satanism, I was thinking of something we’ve spoken about a lot. What did you mean that one time when you said that what Chilean literature needed was satanism? I think I can guess. But if I said that openly with regard to the literature produced in Mexico today I’d be lapidated almost as scandalously as I am being lapidated now that I’ve written that the Beatles were the first boy band in history.
Big hug to you and Carla,
Tryno
PD.: Lots of people ask me about our band. We should have a rehearsal soon. Rodrigo Hasbún has been composing new material and suggests we meet now. We haven’t played again since that time in Santiago. An independent producer who somehow got to listen to our first demo is very interested. (I’ll tell you and Hasbún about it in greater detail on Twitter). With the sale of my new book I bought a PRS guitar. It’s not original. It’s a Korean replica, but it’s in good shape and I got it for a good price. We have everything ready. We just need to try it out. Give us a date. (Here’s the picture they took of us in Santiago after our last concert.)
From: Álvaro Bisama
Sent: June 13th, 2013, 19:01
To: Tryno Maldonado
Subject: Re: Oaxaca
Hi dear. Everything’s fine here. Carla says hi and yes, while you were with Julieta Venegas, we went to see Nick Cave. We got press passes and Carla took pictures of him from the pit and told me he waved with his hand before a roadie threw her out at the end of the first song. Cave, of course, looked like Cave and it was strange to see him live for the first time after so many years. I wrote some of my impressions here and, in a way, it was a kind of a return home, or a return to youth (we never stop being young, it seems) with the difference that I was seeing him in La Condesa, far from the ruinous landscapes –or those I wanted to see as ruinous– where I heard him for the first time. Carla posted her pictures on Facebook, there are a couple great ones. In truth, that was a symbolic farewell to Mexico DF and our friends in Santiago hated us because when Cave came here, in ‘97 or ‘98, he played a show with Cypress Hill and the audience insulted him.
But I digress. I’ve been thinking about what you said about Instagram. I don’t think it’s about pictures. Yes, they’re pictures, but really they’re something else. Instagram –like blogs or tumblr once were– is a kind of diary, a registration system, a way of leaving a record. There are days when I think the internet has taken us back to the XIX century, back to memoirs, travelogues, diaries, a literature of the “I” that replaces fiction. Instagram is the latest version of that, a way of keeping a diary without writing, a more or less open alphabet of images made up of filters as signs. To me, the most interesting part is the idea of the non-photo: the idea that you don’t capture a memorable moment but rather just any moment, as if you were keeping an eye out with every step you took. That is, you go in for the vintage and crash against the quotidian. On the other hand, there’s the levity of the camera: the phone becomes something else, a kind of ghost pencil, a journal. You can understand someone by their filters, by the framing, by what is left, which are layers of skin peeled off in public. I take pictures of the TV, for example, I shoot screens of screens and I like that sullied image, out of focus, like a low def YouTube video.
About Los Reynols. Tell your friend the video is here. I hope he likes it. According to the myth, Sonic Youth are fans of these guys. I find them marvelous and unsettling. In Frutos extraños, Leila Guerriero has a nonfiction text about them called “Rock down.” I haven’t forgotten the moment someone first told me about Miguel Tomasín and his band: I had bumped into a postrock musician from Valparaíso on a bus (Valparaíso was full of postrock when we lived there with Carla), and he told me about Los Reynols, of that band where the drummer/vocalist had Down Syndrome. The postrock musician was with his mother and they carried with them some sacks full of vegetables. I was coming from Santiago, pretty exhausted and standing in the bus, and the postrock musician was telling me about these guys. His mom just looked on, as if she were used to it, as if this was something that happened every day.
Thanks for the pictures. Sometimes I dream about the tlayuda, that Mexican pizza. Send a hug to Efraín from me: satanism is in. Here it’s something that happens every day. Even New Age sects make sacrifices: a couple of months ago it came to light that some idiots burned a two-day-old baby because their leader told them it was the Antichrist. The guy ended up hanging himself in Cuzco and before that, he would punish the sect members by hitting them fifty times with a stick, while they kept silent. In my case I use it for literature: I finished a kind of black metal novel that right now is resting, fermenting.
I understand the hatred the community has subjected you to because of your taste. I agree with your list of bands. Including Metallica seems right, and same goes for Radiohead. After “OK Computer” they became artistic and profound and left us—and no one judges them for that, no one reproaches that—things like Coldplay, which I remember was one of the reasons that Vila Matas’ Dublinesca seemed artificial and forced to me, a caricature of its own tricks. With regard to The Beatles, I think they’ve ended up being a kind of background sound which will last until the end of the world, and where before there was something similar to light, today there’s tedium and elevator music. My Argentinian friends, who know a thing or two about this, have cured themselves of Beatlemania by listening to the Rolling Stones and, in truth, I find them to be right. The other day I was listening to “Street Fighting Man” all morning and it seemed essential and perfect in its revolutionary claim. I would add more to the list: I’d include Maná, Manu Chao and Depeche Mode. About Maná, there’s not much to say, they’re the standard by which pub bands from all over Latin America measure themselves, it’s what they dream of, the wet nightmare that keeps them up at night. Same with Manu Chao, which is another redeemer of Latin American slum tourism. Regarding Depeche Mode, it’s more complicated, I listened to them too much and they wound up annoying me. Now they sound dried up, like a parody of themselves, empty pop whose anguish is only an illusion, whose announcement of a mechanical utopia full of loud-speakers is only the furnishing for a dance floor that wants to seem deeper than it is.
I saw the documentary you mention. Pato Jara gave it to me, it’s great. Tom Araya is the man. Carla and I saw Slayer a couple of years ago and it was good. Carla had already seen them a couple of times. The anecdote was told to me by Macha, the vocalist of Floripondio and Chico Trujillo and someone had told him. It’s one of Valparaíso and its surroundings’ urban myths, and said that you could bump into Tom Araya on the street because he had relatives in Chile. In fact, when they played in Viña del Mar some years ago, the municipality gave him an award –named Tom Araya an illustrious son of the city— which was crazy, only because the Pinochetist mayor likes self-publicity.
You’ll find the bands and the YouTube links below: Villalemana Rok!, La Floripondio, Sonora de Llegar and Belial. Ruido plays with them, mixes them and cites them in passing. With regard to whether Chilean literature needs a bit more satanism, I think so. It needs satanism and a lot of other things. More reading, for example. Some of those things are clear to me: it needs to break with its masters, to abandon the writing of little stories that work like clockwork, and to drop the idea of literature as a career than can aid in one’s social ascent, or something like that. But I don’t know if that’s just a problem of contemporary Chilean literature. In fact, reading Teoría de las catástrofes made me think of that political articulation of fiction that I miss in the Chilean books I read: to take charge of the present, read it directly, with the possibility of failing. I always remember what you said about the narco novel, that to you it seemed morally questionable to write one because it was pure exploitation of Zacatecas, where you grew up, and that you’d rather talk about Oaxaca, where you now live.
I don’t know. I’ve thought about all this because I’ve been kind of obsessed with Neruda these past months —taking notes for something I might not write because I wrote the black metal novel— and I thought about Neruda’s hypertrophy, and how he was a pop star when he died forty years ago. I was reading the Neruda from age 30 to his 50s and I though he was something, without going too far, similar to a superstar, total nonsense, a character—like Michael Jackson, or Bono— capable of containing the world. I was thinking of those houses where all the rubble and rarities of the universe can fit, or those memories from a century in which, for instance, Stalin knew him, knew of his name. But I also looked at old images from his funeral, days from the coup, and they seemed incredibly sad, everything gray, a procession of scared people walking through the city, crying almost on their own, raising a hand and exhausted from so much violence, watched over by soldiers outside the frame’s field of vision.
That. I’ll say goodbye for now. Carla sends kisses: she’s happy you used her photograph on Gatopardo. Oaxaca rulez! Say hi to Efra and Guille. I look forward to your answer.
PS: the band stuff is not so crazy. Remember Sinatra recorded with Bono by phone. Skypenoise, or something like that, I like the idea. Let’s see what Hasbún says. As for me, I bought a T-shirt from one of Mario Baba’s horror movies, and it would look awesome in the picture.
From: Tryno Maldonado
Sent: June 19th, 2013, 18:33
To: Álvaro Bisama
Subject: Oaxaca 2
Great Álvaro.
It’s great to hear from you. I’m glad you and Carla enjoyed your stay in Mexico. Good text on Nick Cave (although I must confess that I’ve never been one of his followers).
Thanks for the band links. The Floripondio is great! I now declare myself a fan. And I’d readily apply the lyrics from “Si es necesario matar al presidente” [“If it’s necessary to kill the president”] (great!) to this country at this time.
I was disconnected for a bit. Some friends from Oaxaca visited me: Hello Seahorse, a Mexican band. They came here to play and we went around and drank some mezcal for some days, so as not to lose the habit. Here’s a link of them live, so that you get to know them:
You won’t believe what happened this week. It has to do with your Estrellas muertas and the influence it’s had on certain people. I’ll try to explain it, even at the risk it sounds like fiction. I swear every word is true.
You know –I’ve said it at least a hundred times on Twitter— that I greatly envy your books’ titles. I’d love to have at least a Death metal, a Ruido, or an Estrellas muertas in my bibliographic credentials (just because of that my next book will be called Metales pesados). Well, beyond that, of course, I’m a great fan of your novels, not just of the titles. And what follows has to do with that.
Thanks to our correspondence I felt like reading Estrellas muertas again in order to ask you some things about which I’ve always been curious (for example, if Javiera is somewhat based on Camila Vallejo or if cough syrup produces the devastating effects your narrator describes: the last time I used it I had one of the worst trips of my life; I began seeing and hearing dead people outside my house talking about me). Anyway. I was looking for it all week, without success. I tend to give away my books. I’ve never been a book collector or a lover of the book as an object. In any case I’d rather collect guitars (if I had a senator’s or congressman’s salary, of course). However, when the books have been signed by my friends, I tend to be quite possessive of them. I never lend them out or let curious people lay a hand on them. And there you have me, looking for my Estrellas muertas that I brought from Santiago. But nothing. I called my friends, the guys from a workshop where I used to spend my Saturday mornings, with whom I’d pretend to know who the hell Imre Kertész, Peter Handke and Danilo Kis are (I invariably tend to confuse the latter with Gene Simmons thinking that maybe he’s another member of KISS), and even my housekeeper. But there was no trace of Estrellas muertas. Maybe you saw that I posted a status on Facebook reporting the disappearance of the book. I had the candid hope that the thief of my Estrellas muertas would suddenly suffer from an act of contrition when appearing publicly on Facebook. Unfortunately nothing happened either. Defeated, today I was ready to confess to you that I’d lost it (besides being a rotten correspondent I’d be the rotten friend who loses the books his friends sign for him), when someone came knocking at my apartment. I don’t have a buzzer. There’s nothing I hate more than being interrupted when I’m working. But there he was: someone knocking and buzzing the apartment’s door for almost half an hour. I had no other option than to open the door. I almost shit my pants when I saw, by the door, my edition of Estrellas muertas! On the cover was a post-it that said, “Thanks for the loan.” I looked in both directions of the alley. It was deserted. There were no signs of who had returned the lost book. Except one: when I wanted to open the book to confirm that, in fact, it was mine and not someone else’s –I mean, with your signature— I couldn’t. The pages where all stuck together with a pink substance. It smelled a lot like cherries. Someone –whoever stole and returned my Estrellas muertas— had spilled at least half a bottle of cough syrup on it. You have to see it to believe it!
[…]
In the meantime, here’s the video of “Niño sicario”:
I absolutely agree with what you say about Instagram. I see it exactly the same way. Some ten years ago people thought blogs and online publications would change literature. I was always skeptical. Let’s see: we’re still making our characters speak in between two long lines just like Flaubert did. Didn’t the modernists, like a friend says, fill out whole pages with odes to the steam engine as much as the defenders of twit-lit, fascinated with “social networks,” do today? I prefer the other. The writing or the length of the text on Instagram. Precisely some months ago I did something like it with Mario Bellatin. For the presentation of his Libro uruguayo de los muertos I showed a series of my pictures on Instagram. I’m attaching some here. In his novel, Mario offers 23 precepts in order to use a plastic camera (he believes the traditional book is not enough of a platform to contain his text and tends to expand it in a thousand ways); so I just followed said precepts and applied them to the images of my presentation. It seems Mario was happy with the result. I’m transcribing them here. You’ll see that some of them coincide with your own way of taking pictures on your Instagram account.
1. Don’t take pictures with this camera just for the sake of it.
2. Make sure that the light truly illuminates the objects.
3. Make sure there are always intense blue and red colors in the frame.
4. Try to understand how the light coils.
5. Abstract scenes should only come up when the sky is photographed.
6. Search for marked points of reference in close landscapes.
7. Don’t force the instructions that come in the camera.
8. Know that “a little cloudy” –or the obvious non-presence of the sun—already means cloudy.
9. Never improvise a photograph. Always remember that the surprise must not occur in reality but rather in front of the developed copy.
10. Develop thematic lines of work as soon as possible. Even if it’s just two.
11. The first of these lines can have as a referent those images where Perezvon appears in vague landscapes which seem beyond time; and the second one with something related to portraits.
12. You can always continue photographing “on the road” sequences but always keeping Perezvon or the black Chevey as a reference.
13. Another thing has to do with taking “kitsch” photographs, which should be printed on glossy paper. A personal search of the popular. Without ever forgetting the red or the blue.
14. Never change the format. Photographs will always be square.
15. Try to get on the ground to take advantage of the floor.
16. Create shapes based on distortion.
17. Take pictures of the greatest possible amount of glass cabinets and mockups.
18. Contents –if they don’t have that flotation line that tends to happen when the photographer gets on the floor– should be saturated with objects. This camera becomes saddened if there’s nothing alive or luminous to capture.
19. The mid-distance can or cannot work. One must position oneself at a smaller point than mid-distance and then resort to extreme distances, both forward and backward.
20. The ASA of the film never matters. Neither does the quality, the expiration date or the state of the reel.
21. One should always carry a black bag to manipulate the reel.
22. Look for the photograph inside the camera. If possible, it’s recommended to walk while holding the camera in front of the eyes.
23. I repeat. Never take a neutral or anecdotic photograph.
Big hug, I await your email,
Tryno.
PS: several musician friends have carried out band projects like the one you mention, via Skype. Let’s do it. And if Alfaguara pays for the world tour of the HBM Project (Hasbún-Bisama-Maldonado), I’m all for it!
From: Álvaro Bisama
Sent: July 9th, 2013, 14:43
To: Tryno Maldonado
Subject: here’s the answer
Dear Tryno, I’m answering your email late because these have been intense days: the end of the semester at the university and this piece I wrote on Marcelo Mellado and a text I’ll tell you more about later on the Chilean dictatorship, for a book that a friend is editing. Thanks for the Hello Seahorse! They’re great. I send your way a local band, Protistas, which Carla and I like a lot and which we saw in the last Lollapalooza in a secret and perfect show.
[…]
In fact, I was thinking about how to write about the dictatorship right now: a friend asked me to write a text for an anthology where guys our age write their memories of Pinochet’s dictatorship. The truth is that since I didn’t know how to structure it, I wrote it by hand: scribbles on a notebook, dispersed notes, fragments of my memory which could well be false. While I was doing it, I realized that I didn’t want it to be linear, to speak directly, that I’d rather get lost in digressions. I realized I was writing about the meaning of time, instead of referring to a particular account, to something that would seem like a story. I’ll send it to you when I’m done with it. The book will be published, of course, for September and the 40 years of the fucking coup.
The interesting part is that while I was writing it I was left thinking about the Chilean dictatorship novel, which is still an obsession or the white whale of Chilean fiction, with the difference that Pinochet, contrary to Perón or Castro, is an opaque monster, actually indecipherable. There has never been a good novel about Pinochet because it doesn’t fit in the canons of magical realism nor in the excessive esthetic of horror exploitation. I can’t imagine a neo-baroque novel about Pinochet and the narrative works from the times of military dictatorship I’m most interested in are the ones that question the very idea of making a novel on the subject, such as Lumpérica, by Diamela Eltit, for instance. I think it must be easy to write about torturers but not about Pinochet, Latin American detective fiction is based on that, on a novela negra of the State’s assassins. In the case of Pinochet, no one described it like the people did. No one has written a decent novel (and here I think of Latin American novels on power, which are a kind of tradition: the original ones by Fuentes, the Vargas Llosa of Conversación en la Catedral, the Fogwill of Los Pichiciegos, Palacio Quemado by Paz Soldán, etc.). There’s not one book on Pinochet that is worth it. It’s like fiction just avoids him, doesn’t want to touch him. I think there’s something classist going on: speaking of Pinochet means speaking of social climbing, of that huaso with high-pitched voice and his horrible wife. Of something inhabited by poor taste. Writing of Pinochet, for Chileans, means to degrade literature, something which has a fragile and idiotic prestige, but prestige nonetheless. Writing about Pinochet means to sink in a horror which is rather gray, which is similar to mediocrity, which has the substance of the known, of that which is close, which has the deformed color of the banal. Some time, years ago, while having lunch in a university where I worked, a writer born in the 70s told me that if you put together three of his novels, you could envision a great account of the dictatorship. That answer made me laugh for being so stupid, opportunistic and conformist. For this writer, Pinochet was a coat which was too big for him. Or terrified him. The terror before a subject which brought together all the issues he’d exploited in his complete works (exile, happy or unhappy life at the UP, institutional violence, the democratic hangover) because he didn’t know how to look into its own gaps, because penetrating those meant opening the door to images or ideas which were real (La Moneda in flames, personality cult, dark eyeglasses, kitsch, the horror of power) but also allegorical, close, inexplicable. But there’s salvation, it seems: in fact, right now I’m reading the manuscript of a friend who finished a novel about Pinochet in London. Alfredo Sepúlveda, my friend, is a journalist and previously wrote a biography on O’Higgins and several nonfiction pieces on the heroes of Independence, always questioning the darker, deformed sides of the supposed heroes’ identities. Seen from that vantage point, it almost seems natural he’d write about Pinochet. His novel, the one I’m currently reading, is a long text about the dictator and his fictitious biographer: it’s the excuse to enter his consciousness but above all the dictator’s way of speaking, asking up to what extent that manner of speaking is similar to ours, is similar to that of the imagined community in which we live or believe we live. I think I’m a bit obsessed with the topic of speech. Not in terms of register but in its possibility of inhabiting the novels it conjures up. Novels of mine such as Estrellas muertas and Ruido are written, I think, based on how a certain speech functions. I think they’re sad books because of it: there’s a point where fiction simply becomes the confirmation of an anachronism, the certainty that the novel’s language is similar to ruins, to an abandoned theme park, a strip mall people no longer go to. Maybe I exaggerate but that’s why I’m interested in Bellatin’s work. I read El libro uruguayo de los muertos thinking it was about a work made up of pure present, a work which strains to create its own twisted code of the present: as if that anachronism I’d mentioned was constantly updated. I guess that condition does not belong to Bellatín but is also found in other authors: Aira, for instance. Or, at a greater distance, J.G. Ballard, who perhaps came before almost everything: Atrocity exhibition is an old Joy Division song, but also a novel by Ballard on celebrities, surgeries and psychiatric reports. There’s an aspect of his work in which I was always interested even though not many referred to it: collages and photographic interventions, installations and the investigation into them. In this manner, he always worked thinking about the limit, trying to ask himself what the novel entails as a horizon. I think he must be read again. Things like Nip/Tuck are Walt Disney next to him. I was impressed when I read him and I’ve never understood why they haven’t published new editions beyond the ones by Minotauro. Every time I read Ballard I try to find him in that strange family which includes Ballard and the Japanese and Arguedas, even if that mix seems undecipherable to me.
That would be it. I think I’ve overextended myself. I promise to answer more expediently next time so that Hasbún doesn’t end up with an ulcer. It’s winter here and there are viruses all over and we’re having fun days, as if we were coming out of a Chinese curse. Carla says hi and sends kisses.
Big hug.
Previous entries:
[Ignacio Echeverría vs. Damián Tabarovksy]
[Mario Bellatín vs. Edmundo Paz Soldán]
[Patricio Pron vs. Rafael Gumucio]
[Lina Meruane vs. Cristina Rivera Garza]
Photos of the authors by Carla McKay
From: Tryno Maldonado
Sent: June 10th, 2013, 18:27
To: Álvaro Bisama
Subject: Oaxaca
Great Álvaro,
How’s everything going there? I hope you and Carla are doing wonderfully. Here in Oaxaca we miss you already. Our friends in common say hi. However, the parties with live heavy-metal bands and mezcal –like that last one, oof– are not the same without you. Please thank Carla for the picture she took of me on the day you left. It worked very well for the article in Gatopardo on Julieta Venegas, the one I was working on those days. Thank you. Did you finally get tickets to Nick Cave? How was it?
I’m sorry for not writing until now. I’m a rotten correspondent. It’s been at least four years since I’ve had an internet connection at my home. Otherwise, I wouldn’t write a single line ever. I greatly admire people capable of having an internet connection at their workplace without utterly failing. I, on the other hand, tend to cheat. For every paragraph of consecutive prose that I write, I reward myself with a “quick” hour-long visit to news portals which, mysteriously, lead me to Facebook and, soon after and without variation, in YouPorn.com. So I’d rather pass. I know that, for example, Jonathan Franzen once asked a friend to disable the modem from the computer he writes on so as not to get distracted. I’m not so hipster: it was enough to stop paying the cable bills. They took care of the rest using giant forceps the following month. Someone has given me, however, an iPhone with connection and I’m fearing that my good writing streak (especially now that I’m starting a new novel) is going to hell. Perhaps I’ll sell it or give it away. I’m an addict. Facebook and Twitter are rancid waters ever since obnoxious writers started using them to “make literature”; but I recognize I could no longer live without Instagram: the iPhone is the first camera I’ve had in my life and I’m incapable of not using it. It’s one of the few remaining free spaces left online before writers come and claim it too as a literary bastion. (By the way: I’m attaching the picture of a satanic piece made by my friend Efraín, one I uploaded yesterday during a party with my noise-metal band; also another portrait of yours which I’ve titled “Bisama vs. the Oaxacan tlayuda”).
I write to you for many reasons which require more than the habitual 140 characters. The first one has to do with music. While I tell you this, I’ve been enduring a kind of public stoning. I’ve been receiving tons of emails, tweets, and Facebook comments with insults and threats. The reason? You’ll shit yourself laughing. It didn’t even have to do with politics this time, as it did when they censored one of my stories for comparing the ex-president of Mexico with a certain kind of cockroach. None of that. In my most recent column I got into something which in Mexico strangely seems to be more sacred than the abnegated maternal figure and the Virgin of Guadalupe: the Beatles.
After rereading High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, it seemed like a good idea to publish my own list of "Five Bands Which Should Be Eliminated from the Face of the Earth.” I swear I tried to be self-critical: the inclusion of Metallica thanks to that pathetic business of Ulrich vs. Napster is proof enough. Nevertheless, messing with the Beatles in this country brought about my lynching; this only further entrenches the prejudices I have about what I consider to be the most overvalued band of all time (not to speak of the annoyance factor in many of their fans). I plan on carrying out a new strategy–a kind of addendum–in a future text, and I’d like to ask you which would be your five bands to eliminate from the face of the planet. (I won’t ask you about the five writers you’d eliminate from the face of the planet so that I don’t also get you into trouble. Although I sense who they’d be, and if you’re up for ranking them I promise to rank in the next email my own five).
Please remind me of the title of the documentary on Los Reynolds. A friend, Carlos Velásquez, has a story about a rock band whose drummer has Down syndrome. I’m sure it’s based on the Reynolds, but I forgot the documentary’s title when I wanted to tell him. Can you send me the info?
By the way, I checked out a documentary on heavy metal: A Headbanger’s Journey. The idea is as stupid as it is fun. A Canadian headbanger trained in anthropology tries to conduct a “serious study” of metal’s genealogical tree. It goes without saying that everything ends in chaos and a huge orgy at the Wacken Festival in Germany. It’s like graduating with a PhD in heavy metal granted by Jack Black. The documentarian attributes the origins of metal to Black Sabbath. I disagree. I’ve always thought that all of heavy metal’s elements were already present in some of the songs on Led Zeppelin’s first album. Including satanism. However, what I wanted to tell you was how surprised I was when it was the turn of Chile’s most renowned headbanger, Tom Araya, to speak in the part dedicated to satanism. I found Araya’s answers (I saw Slayer live here in Mexico) disconcerting: when asked about the satanic content of his lyrics, Araya pulled back, visibly contrite: “I wrote God hates us all because the phrase sounded cool, not because I really believe it. In fact I’m a practicing Catholic.” Look at that! That and the scene you told me about in which one of your friends bumped into Tom Araya while dancing salsa at a family party in Chile have put an end to the image I had of him. Too similar to accidentally finding one of your favorite uncles masturbating in the bathroom. One day you should write about Araya and his Catholic, salsa side. Your text on the book on Chilean heavy metal history of Patricio Jara on Dorso, to go no farther, is magnificent. Remind me of the real names of the Chilean bands that show up in your novel Ruido. I’m looking forward to listening to them. I’ll also download something by Dorso. Send me some link (I already listened to what you previously recommended, Mostro, and it’s great).
Speaking of metal and satanism, I was thinking of something we’ve spoken about a lot. What did you mean that one time when you said that what Chilean literature needed was satanism? I think I can guess. But if I said that openly with regard to the literature produced in Mexico today I’d be lapidated almost as scandalously as I am being lapidated now that I’ve written that the Beatles were the first boy band in history.
Big hug to you and Carla,
Tryno
PD.: Lots of people ask me about our band. We should have a rehearsal soon. Rodrigo Hasbún has been composing new material and suggests we meet now. We haven’t played again since that time in Santiago. An independent producer who somehow got to listen to our first demo is very interested. (I’ll tell you and Hasbún about it in greater detail on Twitter). With the sale of my new book I bought a PRS guitar. It’s not original. It’s a Korean replica, but it’s in good shape and I got it for a good price. We have everything ready. We just need to try it out. Give us a date. (Here’s the picture they took of us in Santiago after our last concert.)
From: Álvaro Bisama
Sent: June 13th, 2013, 19:01
To: Tryno Maldonado
Subject: Re: Oaxaca
Hi dear. Everything’s fine here. Carla says hi and yes, while you were with Julieta Venegas, we went to see Nick Cave. We got press passes and Carla took pictures of him from the pit and told me he waved with his hand before a roadie threw her out at the end of the first song. Cave, of course, looked like Cave and it was strange to see him live for the first time after so many years. I wrote some of my impressions here and, in a way, it was a kind of a return home, or a return to youth (we never stop being young, it seems) with the difference that I was seeing him in La Condesa, far from the ruinous landscapes –or those I wanted to see as ruinous– where I heard him for the first time. Carla posted her pictures on Facebook, there are a couple great ones. In truth, that was a symbolic farewell to Mexico DF and our friends in Santiago hated us because when Cave came here, in ‘97 or ‘98, he played a show with Cypress Hill and the audience insulted him.
But I digress. I’ve been thinking about what you said about Instagram. I don’t think it’s about pictures. Yes, they’re pictures, but really they’re something else. Instagram –like blogs or tumblr once were– is a kind of diary, a registration system, a way of leaving a record. There are days when I think the internet has taken us back to the XIX century, back to memoirs, travelogues, diaries, a literature of the “I” that replaces fiction. Instagram is the latest version of that, a way of keeping a diary without writing, a more or less open alphabet of images made up of filters as signs. To me, the most interesting part is the idea of the non-photo: the idea that you don’t capture a memorable moment but rather just any moment, as if you were keeping an eye out with every step you took. That is, you go in for the vintage and crash against the quotidian. On the other hand, there’s the levity of the camera: the phone becomes something else, a kind of ghost pencil, a journal. You can understand someone by their filters, by the framing, by what is left, which are layers of skin peeled off in public. I take pictures of the TV, for example, I shoot screens of screens and I like that sullied image, out of focus, like a low def YouTube video.
About Los Reynols. Tell your friend the video is here. I hope he likes it. According to the myth, Sonic Youth are fans of these guys. I find them marvelous and unsettling. In Frutos extraños, Leila Guerriero has a nonfiction text about them called “Rock down.” I haven’t forgotten the moment someone first told me about Miguel Tomasín and his band: I had bumped into a postrock musician from Valparaíso on a bus (Valparaíso was full of postrock when we lived there with Carla), and he told me about Los Reynols, of that band where the drummer/vocalist had Down Syndrome. The postrock musician was with his mother and they carried with them some sacks full of vegetables. I was coming from Santiago, pretty exhausted and standing in the bus, and the postrock musician was telling me about these guys. His mom just looked on, as if she were used to it, as if this was something that happened every day.
Thanks for the pictures. Sometimes I dream about the tlayuda, that Mexican pizza. Send a hug to Efraín from me: satanism is in. Here it’s something that happens every day. Even New Age sects make sacrifices: a couple of months ago it came to light that some idiots burned a two-day-old baby because their leader told them it was the Antichrist. The guy ended up hanging himself in Cuzco and before that, he would punish the sect members by hitting them fifty times with a stick, while they kept silent. In my case I use it for literature: I finished a kind of black metal novel that right now is resting, fermenting.
I understand the hatred the community has subjected you to because of your taste. I agree with your list of bands. Including Metallica seems right, and same goes for Radiohead. After “OK Computer” they became artistic and profound and left us—and no one judges them for that, no one reproaches that—things like Coldplay, which I remember was one of the reasons that Vila Matas’ Dublinesca seemed artificial and forced to me, a caricature of its own tricks. With regard to The Beatles, I think they’ve ended up being a kind of background sound which will last until the end of the world, and where before there was something similar to light, today there’s tedium and elevator music. My Argentinian friends, who know a thing or two about this, have cured themselves of Beatlemania by listening to the Rolling Stones and, in truth, I find them to be right. The other day I was listening to “Street Fighting Man” all morning and it seemed essential and perfect in its revolutionary claim. I would add more to the list: I’d include Maná, Manu Chao and Depeche Mode. About Maná, there’s not much to say, they’re the standard by which pub bands from all over Latin America measure themselves, it’s what they dream of, the wet nightmare that keeps them up at night. Same with Manu Chao, which is another redeemer of Latin American slum tourism. Regarding Depeche Mode, it’s more complicated, I listened to them too much and they wound up annoying me. Now they sound dried up, like a parody of themselves, empty pop whose anguish is only an illusion, whose announcement of a mechanical utopia full of loud-speakers is only the furnishing for a dance floor that wants to seem deeper than it is.
I saw the documentary you mention. Pato Jara gave it to me, it’s great. Tom Araya is the man. Carla and I saw Slayer a couple of years ago and it was good. Carla had already seen them a couple of times. The anecdote was told to me by Macha, the vocalist of Floripondio and Chico Trujillo and someone had told him. It’s one of Valparaíso and its surroundings’ urban myths, and said that you could bump into Tom Araya on the street because he had relatives in Chile. In fact, when they played in Viña del Mar some years ago, the municipality gave him an award –named Tom Araya an illustrious son of the city— which was crazy, only because the Pinochetist mayor likes self-publicity.
You’ll find the bands and the YouTube links below: Villalemana Rok!, La Floripondio, Sonora de Llegar and Belial. Ruido plays with them, mixes them and cites them in passing. With regard to whether Chilean literature needs a bit more satanism, I think so. It needs satanism and a lot of other things. More reading, for example. Some of those things are clear to me: it needs to break with its masters, to abandon the writing of little stories that work like clockwork, and to drop the idea of literature as a career than can aid in one’s social ascent, or something like that. But I don’t know if that’s just a problem of contemporary Chilean literature. In fact, reading Teoría de las catástrofes made me think of that political articulation of fiction that I miss in the Chilean books I read: to take charge of the present, read it directly, with the possibility of failing. I always remember what you said about the narco novel, that to you it seemed morally questionable to write one because it was pure exploitation of Zacatecas, where you grew up, and that you’d rather talk about Oaxaca, where you now live.
I don’t know. I’ve thought about all this because I’ve been kind of obsessed with Neruda these past months —taking notes for something I might not write because I wrote the black metal novel— and I thought about Neruda’s hypertrophy, and how he was a pop star when he died forty years ago. I was reading the Neruda from age 30 to his 50s and I though he was something, without going too far, similar to a superstar, total nonsense, a character—like Michael Jackson, or Bono— capable of containing the world. I was thinking of those houses where all the rubble and rarities of the universe can fit, or those memories from a century in which, for instance, Stalin knew him, knew of his name. But I also looked at old images from his funeral, days from the coup, and they seemed incredibly sad, everything gray, a procession of scared people walking through the city, crying almost on their own, raising a hand and exhausted from so much violence, watched over by soldiers outside the frame’s field of vision.
That. I’ll say goodbye for now. Carla sends kisses: she’s happy you used her photograph on Gatopardo. Oaxaca rulez! Say hi to Efra and Guille. I look forward to your answer.
PS: the band stuff is not so crazy. Remember Sinatra recorded with Bono by phone. Skypenoise, or something like that, I like the idea. Let’s see what Hasbún says. As for me, I bought a T-shirt from one of Mario Baba’s horror movies, and it would look awesome in the picture.
From: Tryno Maldonado
Sent: June 19th, 2013, 18:33
To: Álvaro Bisama
Subject: Oaxaca 2
Great Álvaro.
It’s great to hear from you. I’m glad you and Carla enjoyed your stay in Mexico. Good text on Nick Cave (although I must confess that I’ve never been one of his followers).
Thanks for the band links. The Floripondio is great! I now declare myself a fan. And I’d readily apply the lyrics from “Si es necesario matar al presidente” [“If it’s necessary to kill the president”] (great!) to this country at this time.
I was disconnected for a bit. Some friends from Oaxaca visited me: Hello Seahorse, a Mexican band. They came here to play and we went around and drank some mezcal for some days, so as not to lose the habit. Here’s a link of them live, so that you get to know them:
You won’t believe what happened this week. It has to do with your Estrellas muertas and the influence it’s had on certain people. I’ll try to explain it, even at the risk it sounds like fiction. I swear every word is true.
You know –I’ve said it at least a hundred times on Twitter— that I greatly envy your books’ titles. I’d love to have at least a Death metal, a Ruido, or an Estrellas muertas in my bibliographic credentials (just because of that my next book will be called Metales pesados). Well, beyond that, of course, I’m a great fan of your novels, not just of the titles. And what follows has to do with that.
Thanks to our correspondence I felt like reading Estrellas muertas again in order to ask you some things about which I’ve always been curious (for example, if Javiera is somewhat based on Camila Vallejo or if cough syrup produces the devastating effects your narrator describes: the last time I used it I had one of the worst trips of my life; I began seeing and hearing dead people outside my house talking about me). Anyway. I was looking for it all week, without success. I tend to give away my books. I’ve never been a book collector or a lover of the book as an object. In any case I’d rather collect guitars (if I had a senator’s or congressman’s salary, of course). However, when the books have been signed by my friends, I tend to be quite possessive of them. I never lend them out or let curious people lay a hand on them. And there you have me, looking for my Estrellas muertas that I brought from Santiago. But nothing. I called my friends, the guys from a workshop where I used to spend my Saturday mornings, with whom I’d pretend to know who the hell Imre Kertész, Peter Handke and Danilo Kis are (I invariably tend to confuse the latter with Gene Simmons thinking that maybe he’s another member of KISS), and even my housekeeper. But there was no trace of Estrellas muertas. Maybe you saw that I posted a status on Facebook reporting the disappearance of the book. I had the candid hope that the thief of my Estrellas muertas would suddenly suffer from an act of contrition when appearing publicly on Facebook. Unfortunately nothing happened either. Defeated, today I was ready to confess to you that I’d lost it (besides being a rotten correspondent I’d be the rotten friend who loses the books his friends sign for him), when someone came knocking at my apartment. I don’t have a buzzer. There’s nothing I hate more than being interrupted when I’m working. But there he was: someone knocking and buzzing the apartment’s door for almost half an hour. I had no other option than to open the door. I almost shit my pants when I saw, by the door, my edition of Estrellas muertas! On the cover was a post-it that said, “Thanks for the loan.” I looked in both directions of the alley. It was deserted. There were no signs of who had returned the lost book. Except one: when I wanted to open the book to confirm that, in fact, it was mine and not someone else’s –I mean, with your signature— I couldn’t. The pages where all stuck together with a pink substance. It smelled a lot like cherries. Someone –whoever stole and returned my Estrellas muertas— had spilled at least half a bottle of cough syrup on it. You have to see it to believe it!
[…]
In the meantime, here’s the video of “Niño sicario”:
I absolutely agree with what you say about Instagram. I see it exactly the same way. Some ten years ago people thought blogs and online publications would change literature. I was always skeptical. Let’s see: we’re still making our characters speak in between two long lines just like Flaubert did. Didn’t the modernists, like a friend says, fill out whole pages with odes to the steam engine as much as the defenders of twit-lit, fascinated with “social networks,” do today? I prefer the other. The writing or the length of the text on Instagram. Precisely some months ago I did something like it with Mario Bellatin. For the presentation of his Libro uruguayo de los muertos I showed a series of my pictures on Instagram. I’m attaching some here. In his novel, Mario offers 23 precepts in order to use a plastic camera (he believes the traditional book is not enough of a platform to contain his text and tends to expand it in a thousand ways); so I just followed said precepts and applied them to the images of my presentation. It seems Mario was happy with the result. I’m transcribing them here. You’ll see that some of them coincide with your own way of taking pictures on your Instagram account.
1. Don’t take pictures with this camera just for the sake of it.
2. Make sure that the light truly illuminates the objects.
3. Make sure there are always intense blue and red colors in the frame.
4. Try to understand how the light coils.
5. Abstract scenes should only come up when the sky is photographed.
6. Search for marked points of reference in close landscapes.
7. Don’t force the instructions that come in the camera.
8. Know that “a little cloudy” –or the obvious non-presence of the sun—already means cloudy.
9. Never improvise a photograph. Always remember that the surprise must not occur in reality but rather in front of the developed copy.
10. Develop thematic lines of work as soon as possible. Even if it’s just two.
11. The first of these lines can have as a referent those images where Perezvon appears in vague landscapes which seem beyond time; and the second one with something related to portraits.
12. You can always continue photographing “on the road” sequences but always keeping Perezvon or the black Chevey as a reference.
13. Another thing has to do with taking “kitsch” photographs, which should be printed on glossy paper. A personal search of the popular. Without ever forgetting the red or the blue.
14. Never change the format. Photographs will always be square.
15. Try to get on the ground to take advantage of the floor.
16. Create shapes based on distortion.
17. Take pictures of the greatest possible amount of glass cabinets and mockups.
18. Contents –if they don’t have that flotation line that tends to happen when the photographer gets on the floor– should be saturated with objects. This camera becomes saddened if there’s nothing alive or luminous to capture.
19. The mid-distance can or cannot work. One must position oneself at a smaller point than mid-distance and then resort to extreme distances, both forward and backward.
20. The ASA of the film never matters. Neither does the quality, the expiration date or the state of the reel.
21. One should always carry a black bag to manipulate the reel.
22. Look for the photograph inside the camera. If possible, it’s recommended to walk while holding the camera in front of the eyes.
23. I repeat. Never take a neutral or anecdotic photograph.
Big hug, I await your email,
Tryno.
PS: several musician friends have carried out band projects like the one you mention, via Skype. Let’s do it. And if Alfaguara pays for the world tour of the HBM Project (Hasbún-Bisama-Maldonado), I’m all for it!
From: Álvaro Bisama
Sent: July 9th, 2013, 14:43
To: Tryno Maldonado
Subject: here’s the answer
Dear Tryno, I’m answering your email late because these have been intense days: the end of the semester at the university and this piece I wrote on Marcelo Mellado and a text I’ll tell you more about later on the Chilean dictatorship, for a book that a friend is editing. Thanks for the Hello Seahorse! They’re great. I send your way a local band, Protistas, which Carla and I like a lot and which we saw in the last Lollapalooza in a secret and perfect show.
[…]
In fact, I was thinking about how to write about the dictatorship right now: a friend asked me to write a text for an anthology where guys our age write their memories of Pinochet’s dictatorship. The truth is that since I didn’t know how to structure it, I wrote it by hand: scribbles on a notebook, dispersed notes, fragments of my memory which could well be false. While I was doing it, I realized that I didn’t want it to be linear, to speak directly, that I’d rather get lost in digressions. I realized I was writing about the meaning of time, instead of referring to a particular account, to something that would seem like a story. I’ll send it to you when I’m done with it. The book will be published, of course, for September and the 40 years of the fucking coup.
The interesting part is that while I was writing it I was left thinking about the Chilean dictatorship novel, which is still an obsession or the white whale of Chilean fiction, with the difference that Pinochet, contrary to Perón or Castro, is an opaque monster, actually indecipherable. There has never been a good novel about Pinochet because it doesn’t fit in the canons of magical realism nor in the excessive esthetic of horror exploitation. I can’t imagine a neo-baroque novel about Pinochet and the narrative works from the times of military dictatorship I’m most interested in are the ones that question the very idea of making a novel on the subject, such as Lumpérica, by Diamela Eltit, for instance. I think it must be easy to write about torturers but not about Pinochet, Latin American detective fiction is based on that, on a novela negra of the State’s assassins. In the case of Pinochet, no one described it like the people did. No one has written a decent novel (and here I think of Latin American novels on power, which are a kind of tradition: the original ones by Fuentes, the Vargas Llosa of Conversación en la Catedral, the Fogwill of Los Pichiciegos, Palacio Quemado by Paz Soldán, etc.). There’s not one book on Pinochet that is worth it. It’s like fiction just avoids him, doesn’t want to touch him. I think there’s something classist going on: speaking of Pinochet means speaking of social climbing, of that huaso with high-pitched voice and his horrible wife. Of something inhabited by poor taste. Writing of Pinochet, for Chileans, means to degrade literature, something which has a fragile and idiotic prestige, but prestige nonetheless. Writing about Pinochet means to sink in a horror which is rather gray, which is similar to mediocrity, which has the substance of the known, of that which is close, which has the deformed color of the banal. Some time, years ago, while having lunch in a university where I worked, a writer born in the 70s told me that if you put together three of his novels, you could envision a great account of the dictatorship. That answer made me laugh for being so stupid, opportunistic and conformist. For this writer, Pinochet was a coat which was too big for him. Or terrified him. The terror before a subject which brought together all the issues he’d exploited in his complete works (exile, happy or unhappy life at the UP, institutional violence, the democratic hangover) because he didn’t know how to look into its own gaps, because penetrating those meant opening the door to images or ideas which were real (La Moneda in flames, personality cult, dark eyeglasses, kitsch, the horror of power) but also allegorical, close, inexplicable. But there’s salvation, it seems: in fact, right now I’m reading the manuscript of a friend who finished a novel about Pinochet in London. Alfredo Sepúlveda, my friend, is a journalist and previously wrote a biography on O’Higgins and several nonfiction pieces on the heroes of Independence, always questioning the darker, deformed sides of the supposed heroes’ identities. Seen from that vantage point, it almost seems natural he’d write about Pinochet. His novel, the one I’m currently reading, is a long text about the dictator and his fictitious biographer: it’s the excuse to enter his consciousness but above all the dictator’s way of speaking, asking up to what extent that manner of speaking is similar to ours, is similar to that of the imagined community in which we live or believe we live. I think I’m a bit obsessed with the topic of speech. Not in terms of register but in its possibility of inhabiting the novels it conjures up. Novels of mine such as Estrellas muertas and Ruido are written, I think, based on how a certain speech functions. I think they’re sad books because of it: there’s a point where fiction simply becomes the confirmation of an anachronism, the certainty that the novel’s language is similar to ruins, to an abandoned theme park, a strip mall people no longer go to. Maybe I exaggerate but that’s why I’m interested in Bellatin’s work. I read El libro uruguayo de los muertos thinking it was about a work made up of pure present, a work which strains to create its own twisted code of the present: as if that anachronism I’d mentioned was constantly updated. I guess that condition does not belong to Bellatín but is also found in other authors: Aira, for instance. Or, at a greater distance, J.G. Ballard, who perhaps came before almost everything: Atrocity exhibition is an old Joy Division song, but also a novel by Ballard on celebrities, surgeries and psychiatric reports. There’s an aspect of his work in which I was always interested even though not many referred to it: collages and photographic interventions, installations and the investigation into them. In this manner, he always worked thinking about the limit, trying to ask himself what the novel entails as a horizon. I think he must be read again. Things like Nip/Tuck are Walt Disney next to him. I was impressed when I read him and I’ve never understood why they haven’t published new editions beyond the ones by Minotauro. Every time I read Ballard I try to find him in that strange family which includes Ballard and the Japanese and Arguedas, even if that mix seems undecipherable to me.
That would be it. I think I’ve overextended myself. I promise to answer more expediently next time so that Hasbún doesn’t end up with an ulcer. It’s winter here and there are viruses all over and we’re having fun days, as if we were coming out of a Chinese curse. Carla says hi and sends kisses.
Big hug.
Previous entries:
[Ignacio Echeverría vs. Damián Tabarovksy]
[Mario Bellatín vs. Edmundo Paz Soldán]
[Patricio Pron vs. Rafael Gumucio]
[Lina Meruane vs. Cristina Rivera Garza]
