March 6, 2019 Arts & Culture When Mario Vargas Llosa Punched Gabriel García Márquez By Silvana Paternostro In 1976, Mario Vargas Llosa hit Gabriel García Márquez with a right hook and promptly ended their friendship. Below, Gabo’s friends recall the incident and its aftermath. Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. Vargas Llosa photo: Arild Vågen. RODRIGO MOYA It was about eleven or twelve in the morning and I was in my house in Colonia Nápoles, where I had an office, a big house with an editorial office in one part, and in the other part I lived with my girlfriend and my two children. There’s a knock at the door and it’s Gabo and Mercedes. I was very happy and very surprised to see him. Gabo was already a friend of mine, but there are hierarchies in friendships. It was a friendship of guarded proportions. I was a newspaper photographer and he was what he is. Back then I didn’t presume to call him Gabo. Calling him Gabito was for me like calling Cervantes “Miguelito.” For me, he’s Gabriel García Márquez. They came for the photographs. He told me, “I want you to take some pictures of my black eye.” They came to my house because they trust me. He wore a jacket. It wasn’t the plaid one. It was another one. And she was in black with large sunglasses. And I said to him, “What happened?” He made a joke, like, “I was boxing and I lost.” The one who spoke up was Mercedes. She said that Vargas Llosa had sucker punched him. “And why was that?” “I don’t know. I went up to him with my arms wide open to greet him. We hadn’t seen each other for some time.” I already knew they had been very good friends in Barcelona and everything, and the two couples got along because he had talked about that with our mutual friend Guillermo Angulo. I mean, it was something everybody knew; when I found out it was Mario Vargas Llosa who had hit him, I was very surprised. They sat down in the living room and began to talk to me. Read More
March 6, 2019 Arts & Culture How I Began to Write By Gabriel García Márquez Gabriel García Márquez delivered the following speech at the Athenaeum of Caracas, in Venezuela, on May 3, 1970. Gabriel García Márquez. Photo: Patrick Curry. First of all, forgive me for speaking to you seated, but the truth is that if I stand, I run the risk of collapsing with fear. Really. I always thought I was fated to spend the most terrible five minutes of my life on a plane, before twenty or thirty people, and not like this, before two hundred friends. Fortunately, what is happening to me right now allows me to begin to speak about my literature, since I was thinking that I began to be a writer in the same way I climbed up on this platform: I was coerced. I confess I did all I could not to attend this assembly: I tried to get sick, I attempted to catch pneumonia, I went to the barber, hoping he’d slit my throat, and, finally, it occurred to me to come here without a jacket and tie so they wouldn’t let me into a meeting as serious as this one, but I forgot I was in Venezuela, where you can go anywhere in shirtsleeves. The result: here I am, and I don’t know where to start. But I can tell you, for example, how I began to write. It had never occurred to me that I could be a writer, but in my student days Eduardo Zalamea Borda, editor of the literary supplement of El Espectador, in Bogotá, published a note in which he said that the younger generation of writers had nothing to offer, that a new short-story writer, a new novelist, could not be seen anywhere. And he concluded by declaring that he was often reproached because his paper published only the very well-known names of old writers and nothing by the young, whereas the truth, he said, was that no young people were writing. Then a feeling of solidarity with my generational companions arose in me, and I resolved to write a story simply to shut the mouth of Eduardo Zalamea Borda, who was my great friend or, at least, became my great friend later. I sat down, wrote the story, and sent it to El Espectador. I had my second shock the following Sunday when I opened the paper and there was my full-page story with a note in which Eduardo Zalamea Borda acknowledged that he had been wrong, because obviously with “that story the genius of Colombian literature had emerged,” or something along those lines. Read More
February 28, 2019 Arts & Culture The Wayward Life of Gladys Bentley By Saidiya Hartman Gladys Bentley. Public domain. If Gladys Bentley’s life were an Oscar Micheaux film, it might open with a shot of the three-story tenement house in Philadelphia in which the entertainer grew up. Four boys play in the alley behind the house. The camera settles on the eldest, distinguishing him from the others as the film’s protagonist, but not exaggerating any difference between him and the other boys. Nothing about the way he jumps from the top of the stairs to the bottom of the landing or shoves his young brother aside, which causes him to fall and to cry “Mama,” establishes or fixes the categories “boy” or “girl,” “brother” or “sister.” Or the story might start earlier, with a pair of empty hands filling the frame, but cut off from the body and suspended in the air, expectant. Then a shot of the young mother staring indifferently at an infant she cannot love and refuses to embrace, the rejection would be punctuated or underscored with dramatic music that would announce that this failed embrace is an event, a significant moment, a nodal point in the story to unfold. A melodramatic gesture like the mother’s downcast eyes, averted gaze, or forehead cradled in her palms as she sobs would telegraph her anguish. Or a long take of the mother as she retreats from the baby nestled in her husband’s extended arms. The self-loathing would be apparent on her face as she turns her back to the infant, her firstborn, but the child she would never be able to love. The one who would remind her always that she was not a good enough mother. It would hurt too much to say the words bad mother, even when the fact couldn’t be avoided. The next scene might be shot in deep shadow, and we would struggle to make out the dark figure in the even darker room, until the door was thrown open and the harsh light from the hallway flooded the windowless room, and the fourteen-year-old androgyne resting on the narrow cot wearing his brother’s Sunday suit and lost in a daydream about the third-grade teacher whom he still loves madly. Before he could open his eyes and pull himself from the fantasy of her arms, her kisses, and return to the dark stuffy room, he would be exposed and berated. Next scene, extreme close-up of the letter written by the distraught sixteen-year-old in the early hours of the morning, addressed to his mother and father, explaining that he was heading to New York, that he could not live at home anymore; he could not pretend to be the daughter his mother could never love, she could love only a son and he became one. Yet she failed to love him. The long objective stare of the camera as he walks down the hallway and creeps out of the house with everything he owns, which isn’t much, packed in a satchel, and pulls the door closed very quietly behind him. Or the story might open in a cabaret, with a close-up of Bentley as the Bad Nigger, as the flashy gentleman (the physiognomy or a gesture would signal to the audience his tragic flaw, his moral defect). Read More
February 27, 2019 Arts & Culture The Strange Things I’ve Found inside Books By Jane Stern I read like a buzz saw cuts wood. A book a day is not unusual, and my discard pile is always bigger than the unread pile. Because new books are expensive, I buy my books online, at Goodwill, and at library sales. I seldom have to pay more than a few dollars. In the past few years I have discovered an added benefit, besides not bankrupting myself, to acquiring books secondhand. Many of the used books I buy have something left inside of them by their former owners. Here are some things I have found: a Seattle traffic ticket for jaywalking, the luggage slip for a first class flight to Paris, to-do lists with some very curious items like “pick up the whip” or “explain cremation.” Often I find ticket stubs (Hamilton!). Once I found a check fully made out for $375.15 that was never given away, and just today I found a yellow card from Pacific Photo Express that offered to transform my images into a “photo fun button.” I am not sure I want such a pin: the illustration shows a creepy little girl getting cozy with Frankenstein’s monster. I can’t quite imagine the right occasion on which to wear that. I no longer get excited when I find something as simple as a grocery store receipt, but I still try to match the book with what the person eats. Twelve boxes of red Kool-Aid in an Oliver Sacks book on migraines was simply confusing, but cage-free eggs seemed appropriate in a book about prison reform. Read More
February 27, 2019 Arts & Culture Who Was the “Female Byron”? By Lucasta Miller Artist, Henry William Pickersgill; Engraved by D. H. Robinson, L.E.L., 1852 Not many people know what happened to English literature between the end of the Romantics and the beginning of the Victorians. This troubling era in British cultural history has never been given a name; it’s been called a “strange pause” and an “indeterminate borderland,” and dismissed as a tedious “flat calm” during which nothing much happened. It was certainly strange, and its literary voices were indeed indeterminate—often calculatedly so, making their tone hard for the modern reader to pin down. But the one thing British publishing culture was decidedly not during the 1820s and 1830s was calm, as is demonstrated in the rise and fall of the prolific poet and novelist Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Known by her initials “L.E.L.” and called the “female Byron” in her day, she was born in London in 1802, and found dead in 1838, a bottle of prussic acid in her hand, a few weeks after arriving at Cape Coast Castle in West Africa. It was a fittingly dramatic end to a short but tumultuous life as one of London’s most talked about literary phenomenons. Her career coincided exactly with the strange pause. When she published her first poem as a teenager, the second generation of Romantics were still alive: Keats (died 1821), Shelley (1822), and Byron (1824). But by the end of her life, Dickens’s Oliver Twist was the new literary sensation, and the world of Regency rakes and Romantic rebels had been swept away by the new Victorian values. Symbolically enough, her last public appearance in London was on a balcony overlooking Queen Victoria’s coronation procession. It was as if she simply could not survive under the incoming regime. Read More
February 25, 2019 Arts & Culture The Beauty of Invisibility By Jennifer Wilson Modified from John Singer Sargent’s Lady Agnew Of Lochnaw, 1892 Akiko Busch is a writer and a swimmer. She teaches environmental writing at Bennington College and seems to live as off the grid as one can in 2019. Much of her writing feels drawn from understated encounters with nature and the pastoral sublime, such as observing water eels in a brook or chopping vegetables in a Hudson Valley home. Her 2009 book The Uncommon Life of Common Objects has an entire chapter devoted to vegetable-peelers. So when her new essay collection, How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency, touches on things like Barbie dolls that can connect to WiFi and smart refrigerators, the reader begins to worry that no one, not even Aniko Busch, can order a new vegetable-peeler online without worrying who’s tracking her and why. In How to Disappear, Busch contemplates how government surveillance, smart technology, and our own desire to be seen have all contributed to a perhaps irrevocable loss of personal privacy. She does this circuitously, eschewing the alarmist and Luddite tropes that encumber many studies of our technology-dependent culture. Instead, Busch meanders across a broad cultural landscape to locate the source of our beliefs, fears, and desires about invisibility. She looks at the role of invisibility in children’s stories (from imaginary friends to Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak) and the Huldufólk, the invisible people who are thought to live inside Iceland’s lava rocks. She visits a physics lab at the University of Rochester where scientists study “transformation optics,” the practice of bending light waves around things to render them invisible. Another essay reconsiders Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway to think through aging, and the invisibility of older women. Busch explores camouflage, anonymity and unsigned works of art, and police surveillance of minorities. By drawing from natural science, children’s literature, folklore, art history, and more, Busch takes the timely issue of privacy and makes it timeless. Read More