v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Killers on the Loose

From Mother Jones:

On Monday, Guatemala's Constitutional Court overturned the conviction of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, an army general who ruled as de facto president from 1982 to 1983. On May 10, Ríos Montt, 86, was found guilty by a three-panel tribunal on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, and sentenced to 80 years in the slammer; he is the first former head of state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide. But less than two weeks later, Guatemala's highest court threw out all proceedings in the case dating back to April 19, in part thanks to an aggressive lobbying effort by the nation's most influential business federation. Due to the court's 3-2 decision, the way forward—for Ríos Montt's opponents, for his supporters—has been thrown into question. After Monday's ruling, Ríos Montt was sent back to house arrest, where he had been since the case started in January 2012.

Here's a quick reminder of who Efraín Ríos Montt is, and what he did.

1. During his 17-month stint as military dictator, he oversaw the genocide by his armed forces of at least 1,771 members of the indigenous Maya Ixil population. Roughly 100 survivors testified during the course of his trial.

2. Along with the mass murder, his military regime carried out a policy of forced displacement, forced assimilation, torture, systematic rape and sexual assault, starvation, and arbitrary execution against those labeled as political opponents.

3. Due to his staunchly anti-communist attitudes during the Guatemalan Civil War, the general received plenty of financial, military, and political support from President Ronald Reagan's administration and friends in the United States. (Ríos Montt is an alumnus of the School of the Americas, a Department of Defense-owned institute and notorious tyrant-mill at Fort Benning, Georgia that taught torture, blackmail, death-squad tactics, and counter-insurgency to numerous Latin American strongmen and human rights abusers.)

Here's Reagan speaking to reporters following his meeting with Ríos Montt in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, on December 4, 1982:

Well, ladies and gentlemen, President Ríos Montt and I have just had a useful exchange of ideas on the problems of the region and on our bilateral relations...I know that President Ríos Montt is a man of great personal integrity and commitment. His country is confronting a brutal challenge from guerrillas armed and supported by others outside Guatemala. I have assured the president that the United States is committed to support his efforts to restore democracy and to address the root causes of this violent insurgency. I know he wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice. My administration will do all it can to support his progressive efforts.

For all the accusations of obscene human rights violations, Reagan maintained that Ríos Montt was simply getting a "bum rap" from naïve activists.

Marco Arcaya Pizarro

Vallejo Nocturno 2013 -in Polanco

29.-
en los instantes del exceso
del descentramiento más radical
en la segunda fase de la discusión de
mi experiencia trágica en los límites
con algo así como un periscopio
o un ojo parecido a un poste de luz
espié la pena desnuda de estos arenales
vidrio/concreto
y acero fundido

from las afinidades electivas blog

Patricio Pron on Ben Lerner and Teju Cole

From writer Patricio Pron's blog, El Boomeran(G):

Quizás el enorme éxito crítico de Saliendo de la estación de Atocha pueda atribuirse al lirismo de su prosa, que recuerda al lector cuán buen poeta es Ben Lerner, no menos que a la inteligencia de sus reflexiones sobre la literatura y la vida. Parece evidente, sin embargo, que el principal mérito de la obra es su ligereza, lo que señala una debilidad del libro, en particular si se lo compara con otra novela reciente de un escritor norteamericano joven y tema similar: Ciudad abierta de Teju Cole. De forma nada complaciente, Cole se ocupaba de "las intersecciones del arte y la realidad en la vida contemporánea" (John Ashbery sobre el libro de Ben Lerner), reflexionando acerca de cómo las ciudades modernas, y en particular Nueva York tras el 11 de setiembre, no son ya la culminación de un proyecto moral y estético sino el escenario de unas existencias rotas; en Saliendo de la estación de Atocha, por el contrario, la ciudad es la superficie de proyección de los deseos del turista. En la novela de Cole, nada nos permitía recordar que estábamos en la misma ciudad narrada por Woody Allen en sus mejores filmes; en la de Lerner, Madrid es (incluso durante los atentados del 11 de marzo) un sitio placentero donde la gente bebe cervezas y participa en manifestaciones pacíficas que siempre concluyen con alguna fiesta privada. Si la novela de Cole incomodaba al visitante a Nueva York, la de Lerner empuja a sus lectores a comprar un pasaje a Madrid: está bellamente narrada, tiene reflexiones originales y potentes sobre el arte y la vida, un poco de testimonio político, algo de drogas y una historia de amor, al punto de que la mezcla acaba pareciendo al lector tan tramposa como los poemas de Adam Gordon, su protagonista, el joven escritor estadounidense que pretende escribir "un largo poema de investigación" sobre la Guerra Civil española y hace trampas: compone sonrisas ambiguas cuando se le habla en español y no entiende, miente sobre filmes que no ha visto, hace pasar por propios los poemas de Federico García Lorca que traduce al español de una edición en inglés para luego volver a traducirlos, con las pérdidas y transformaciones del caso. Por supuesto, la literatura consiste en trampas. No es precisamente esto lo que se le debe reprochar a Ben Lerner, sino el haber olvidado que la literatura debería proponerse algo más que satisfacer unas audiencias a las que, no habiéndoseles prometido nada, reciben más de lo que podían esperar.

 

 

Marosa Di Giorgio - Misales

Misales

Marosa Di Giorgio. El ruedo en flor

Marosa Di Giorgio. El ruedo en flor from Los Pájaros Ocultos on Vimeo.

Marosa Di Giorgio Poemas

Los hongos nacen en silencio

Los hongos nacen en silencio; algunos nacen en silencio; otros con un breve alarido, un leve trueno. Unos son blancos, otros rosados, ése es gris y parece una paloma, la estatua a una paloma, la estatua a una paloma; otros son dorados o morados. Cada uno trae -y eso es lo terrible- la inicial del muerto de donde procede. Yo no me atrevo a devorarlos; esa carne levísima es pariente nuestra. Pero, aparece en la tarde el comprador de hongos y empieza la siega. Mi madre da permiso. Él elige como un águila. Ese blanco como el azúcar, uno rosado, uno gris. Mamá no se da cuenta que vende a su raza.

Read by Marosa Di Giorgio

Underground Lovers . . .Weekend

From Beat Magazine, a review of an interesting and worthy rock album:

Underground Lovers achieved a degree of fame in Melbourne with their electronic groove music before it all slowly dried up and they disappeared. Save for a 'best off' compilation last year the band members have worked on separate projects and eked out their own carreers since. Seemingly, the Underground Lovers were laid to rest. No so! "Weekend" sees the reincarnation of the cherished Leaves Me Blind era lineup of the band. Aside from new member Emma Portignon, all band members from that period are present. Andrew, Argiro, Bennie, Giarrusso and Nihill all answer the roll call.

Listening to Weekend it is hard to comprehend that this lineup has not recorded together for over two decades. And whilst it would be fallacious to believe the band is stuck in a time warp, Weekend is firmly early period Undies. Produced by the axis of the band that is Glen Bennie and Vincent Giarrusso, this record continues their search for the eternal dreamscape. Spaces is sugary in the Saint Etienne way and it is as if everything that has taken place since this lineup has recorded together has been left by the wayside. So have the Undies stagnated? Not entirely because Weekend is quite a sophisticated and heady collection.

Can For Now could only be the Undies. It is like putting on the undergarments to stop the chaffing. The fuzz, the bleeps, the not quite there vocals, the desire for innovation. They sound like they are still adrift in their own universe and we all the better for it. Like all their records, they are best appreciated as whole in one sitting because in isolation the songs lose a lot of meaning.

More

Interview with Alejandro Zambra

From The Millions, back in 2011;

The Millions: Now that you’ve received a fair amount of attention for your books, do you worry more during the act of writing about how it will be received?  Or does the recognition validate you, give you a sense of freedom?

Alejandro Zambra: At the moment of writing, I feel completely free.  I really don’t think you can write anything genuine when you are under any kind of pressure. What’s more, publishing a book isn’t like giving birth to it; when you publish a book you feel what a father must feel when his son leaves home: you wish him well, you delight in or suffer with his successes and failures, but you can’t do anything more for him.  And your daily work is more interesting: the next book, the child you are starting to rear.

TM: Recognizing that any list like Granta’s will be subjective, is there anyone you feel strongly should have been included, but wasn’t?

AZ: Such lists are always arbitrary, and I suppose there are a lot of authors who were worth including in Granta’s, and in the end were not.  The truth is it’s an uncomfortable subject for me, because I really don’t believe in lists or rankings.  In any case I’d like to highlight the work that younger people have been doing, such as the Chilean Diego Zúñiga or the Mexican Valeria Luiselli (the author of Papeles falsos, one of the best books I’ve read recently).

TM: Not many authors have their books published more or less simultaneously in Spanish and in English, but both La vida privada and Bonsai were.  I’m curious about how the experience is different in Chile and the U.S. How does your status as a native or foreigner affect how people read you, do you think?  Do you feel more pressure to be “representative” in some way when you are outside of Chile?

AZ: I think both novels are very Chilean, so I’m sometimes surprised that they can be read in other languages.  To me, it’s a beautiful thing that readers so distant and different can connect with a book of mine.  It’s like sending out thousands of letters, and little by little receiving replies you never expected.  I guess some readers in the U.S. or in France want to confirm some prior idea they had about Chile or about Latin America.  But books aren’t made to confirm ideas; they’re made to refute them, to question them, to put other images out there where we thought everything had already been said.

TM: Tell us a little about Formas de volver a casa—is it much of a departure from your first two books?

AZ: It’s a book about memory, about parents, about Chile.  It’s about the 80s, about the years when we children were secondary characters in the literature of our parents.  It’s about the dictatorship, as well, I guess.  And about literature, intimacy, the construction of intimacy.  I don’t know if it’s very different from my previous books; the truth is I feel like it’s close to The Private Lives of Trees.  In fact it starts from there, from some of the intuitions or images of the past that were in that book.  Maybe the main difference is that it’s in large part narrated in the first person.  It also includes a writer’s diary, a kind of center or heart in which the fiction breaks, and the only thing left is the writer’s voice searching for its origins.  It’s my most personal book, without a doubt, although the others were that as well.

More

Morning in Sao Paulo

Vallejo Nocturno 2013 - 6am from hotel

Shivkumar Sharma and Hariprasad Chaurasia - The Valley Recalls

Elliott Ripper House

From Christopher Polly site:

The project presents an appropriately simple and direct extrapolation of an existing archetypal form within a sustainably modest footprint. It provides a significantly expanded series of connected interior volumes that harness access to sunlight, ventilation and strengthened links to tree canopies and sky, with extension of key existing materials and finishes to retain some memory of its previous incarnation.

An inserted ground floor open living volume is generated by extension of the original envelope and internal levels to an averaged plan footprint of former lean-to’s, followed by a rear first floor addition that extrudes the previous floor plate and gable-ended roof form over the new ground floor. The cathedral volume is retained within the new first floor room arrangement and an extrapolated ceiling-to-wall junction scribes the wrapped alignment of all element heights, lightly bridged to raked ceiling planes by opalescent polycarbonate - while a generous carved void and open stair vertically expands the relationship between two previously unrelated floors.

Fine steel plate elements contrast rusticated weatherboards and expanses of fixed glass and western red cedar external-face sliding doors & pivot windows offer varying degrees of openness and enclosure to temper light and air, strengthening connections to its setting. Two living spaces reflect contemporary patterns of use to enable separation of adult and children functions when required. The ground floor area provides a ‘day’ space for meals preparation, dining and expansive enjoyment of rear gardens, while the upper living room provides an ‘evening’ space for relaxation, separation from utilities and enjoyment of district views - with an adaptable third bedroom providing flexibility for future use as a study.