MURDER CITY

Everyday I pray for the people of Juárez. Literally, I pray. I light a stick of incense and pray for peace, good health and spiritual well-being for the people of Juárez. If you pay attention to the news, you know my praying does nothing, but it keeps the city and its people in my mind and heart. Like most everybody else I’m overwhelmed by the bloodshed. I don’t go over there much anymore and I don’t write much here on my blog about the city. Other people do the writing much better that I ever could. Especially the journalist Charles Bowden. I emphatically suggest you read his new book Murder City:  Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (Nation Books). Juárez has become his tar baby. He’s slapped it across the head a couple of times (see Note 1) and each time his fist gets stuck deeper in the goo. The bloody mess of flesh and bones. And the River Styx washes away the names of the dead. Violence, Bowden shows us, doesn’t work, no matter its scale. The citizens of Juárez must repeat this truth everyday of their lives, but the sicarios, the killers, they aren’t listening. Nor would they care if they were listening. As I write this well over five thousand people have been killed since the bloody reign terror began in 2008, over 800 have been killed in 2010 alone, and the homicides in April have been approximated at 205--more than double the number of 90 registered in April 2009 and four times the number of 55 cases in the same period in 2008. The month of May is keeping pace (Note 2). A few weeks ago, on just one day the killers found 22 more souls to dispatch to the other side. The governments and the mainstream media want to ascribe causes to the carnage. They are either liars, or they still believe in solutions. They certainly don’t look deeply into their mirrors. But the violence in Juárez is proving to be more like a viral epidemic, like AIDS or the Black Plague, except the host body is culture and government. There is no cure, no silver bullet. Its beginning is hypothesis, its end will not be found in the blather of politicians and talking heads, and certainly not by more violence--whether sanctioned by the government or not.

Murder City documents the year 2008, the year that the murdering began. It coincides, of course, with Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s infamous and duplicitous declaration of war against the cartels. Bowden, like Alice, does decide to walk into the mirror and see what awaits him. More than ever now, he becomes a subject of his writing as he wanders the streets of death with his list of names and places, trying to catch hold of some sort of understanding. Some theory to serve as anchor in the flood. Factual school-learned journalism doesn’t work. Statistics, names of the dead and descriptions of murder scenes don’t carve real substance into the readers’ heart. They don’t or won’t listen sincerely, the statistics become mottos for cocktail parties and e-chatter, the kind of abstractions that remain arms-length from the human heart. But Bowden wants his reader to feel the terror and inhuman evil of the epidemic. It’s the conundrum, although contrary, that a religious mystic confronts—how do you explain the experience of God to somebody who hasn’t experienced God? Bowden is pointing his finger at the blackest of moons. He finds us real live people to create a four-headed Virgil to guide him through this 21st Century inferno, these peculiar buoys that float up almost unbidden in the muck to direct him toward the deepest ring of hell:

Miss Sinaloa: a beauty queen from the state of Sinaloa. Her story begins as the archetypical story of the beautiful Mexican woman, but because of the glories of her body, she becomes trapped in the web of the narcotraficantes. She goes to a party in Juárez to have a good time, she's fed drugs and booze, she’s raped and sodomized for three days and then she finally re-surfaces at the “crazy place” where El Pastor looks after her. She becomes Bowden’s imaginary, but very real, companion in the City of Juárez. She’s a vision of lost beauty, she whispers truths in his ear and she understands the needs of the human heart and body.

El Pastor: the rehabilitated drug addict who went out into the desert and finds Christ (Note 3). On his return he builds “the crazy place” from the rubble of Juárez and there he houses and cares for the lost souls of the city, the lepers and untouchables of Juárez, people like Miss Sinaloa. He teaches Bowden about compassion and the meaning of love. He is no romantic. He is afraid. He knows he might die. In fact, as I write this, he might already be dead.

El Sicario, the hired killer: as far as I know, this is the first extended recorded interview with a Mexican narcotraficante since Terrence Poppa interviewed Pablo Acosta and documented it in Drug Lord. It’s a frightening interview. Not only the interview itself, but the details of finally getting in touch with this man who, because he has felt the presence of God, wants somehow to find a little bit of peace. Like with El Pastor, the discovery of God has found him some relief but the residue of his many murders still armors his body and mind.

El Reportero: Emilio Gutiérrez Soto, a reporter from Ascensión, Chihuahua (Note 4). He fled with his son to the U.S because the Mexican army was looking for him. They wanted to kill him. In 2005 he had reported about a specific incident of an Army patrol walking into a hotel where migrants stayed before their journey north in search of work. Migrants carry money and valuables, their tickets through their illegal passage. The Army knew this, and they robbed each and every one of them. Now the Army had threatened to kill Emilio. He fled for the border. He hoped he would get asylum, but what he got was a jail cell and a seven month separation from his son. Listen to what Emilio teaches Bowden:

It is possible to see his imprisonment as simply the normal by-product of bureaucratic blindness and indifference. But I don’t think that is true. No Mexican reporter has ever been given political asylum, because if the U.S. government honestly faced facts, it would have to admit that Mexico is not a society that respects human rights. Just as the United Stataes would be hard pressed, if it faced facts, to explain to its own citizens how it can justify giving the Mexican army $1.4 billion under Plan Merida, a piece of black humor that is supposed to fight a way on drugs. But then, the American press is the chorus in this comedy since it continues to report that the Mexican army is in a war to the death with the drug cartels. There are two errors in these accounts. One is simple: The war in Mexico is for drugs and the enormous money to be made by supplying American habits, a torrent of cash that the army, the police, the government, and the cartels all lust for. Second, the Mexican army is a government-financed criminal organization, a fact most Mexicans learn as children (page 202).

And Bowden plays himself, a reporter, a character like Dante who is really no longer Charles Bowden, but the character who he must stand up in his place. As a poet, I find Bowden’s personal improvisations riffing off the confrontations and conversations with these four persons the most interesting writing in the book. Sure, Murder City is full of facts and first-person accounts and description, but he employs the methods of novelists and storytellers, and, even more radical, of poets to tell the fractured stories of Juárez.

The only other writer to come close to Bowden’s writing about Juárez is Roberto Bolaño. The great novelist, like Bowden, came to see the city of Juárez as emblematic of our new world. Of course, Bolaño doesn’t write about Juárez. He writes instead about the city Santa Teresa that he invents from the cloth of his imagination in “The Part about the Crimes” in his epic 2666: A Novel. In fact, Bolaño wrote from Spain as his own life was running to its conclusion. He used as source material El Huesos en el Desierto by Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez, as well as a long correspondence with Gonzalez, who appears in a fictional role in 2666. I’m pretty certain that Bowden used El Huesos also (Note 5). Bowden and Bolaño tell all this much better than I, so I’m going to shut up soon. I do want to emphasize to you to read Murder City. When you’re done, read 2666. These are not only important texts for now, but for the years to come, even those years when the killing fields move from Juárez to the next place. They will still be the same killing fields. The same ignorant federal laws of prohibition and the human greed which capitalizes (as in “Capitalism”) on those laws will still be feeding the global killing fields. I wish I could say differently, but I can’t. These killing fields are one of the by-products of the Age of Globalization—our brave new world, a world of centralized corporatization and governmental regulation that segregates us further and further from a real understanding of ourselves and our planet.

I will continue to light my stick of incense for the people of La Ciudad Juárez. And for us all.

●

Note 1. Juarez: A Laboratory of the Future and Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family.
Note 2. I get my figures from the Frontera List Serve. Molly Molloy at the New Mexico State Library monitors newspapers on both sides of the border and daily tabulates the ever-growing figures. I also recommend following Frontera del Sur, which also originates at NMSU through the Center for Latin American and Border Studies, especially the work of Kent Patterson. Thanks to all you guys. You do important work.
Note 3. People who write or talk about Bowden and his work rarely mention his ability to let others do their own talking. Both the Pastor and the sicario have had experiences of God. Those experiences are the foundations of their conversations with him. Bowden, on the other hand, is a big gregarious and hard-headed intellectual who did his apprenticeship with the likes of Ed Abbey deep in the outback, and he carries around a large backpack full of doubt like the rest of us in the intellectual community who read his books. Yet, he reports faithfully on these two men’s experiences of God without remark. And he likewise gives the late Esther Chavez Cano, an atheist, full voice in his description of her. Indeed, I think his writing on Chavez Cano is truly the greatest eulogy to this great lady that I have read  Bowden understood her like he understood Miss Sinaloa and El Pastor and El Sicario and El Reportero. I applaud him. I applaud them all. And I might add, it’s almost impossible to write about Mexico without letting its peculiar and very complex spirituality seep into your writing.   
Note 4. To read about Emilio in particular, you can read Bowden’s article online in Mother Jones: “We Bring Fear: A Reporter Flees the Biggest Cartel of all, the Mexican Army.”
Note 5. Maybe I’m wrong but I bet $10 that the woman Heidi Slauquet (page 31, Murder City) is the same party-hostess for the rich and famous who turns pimp for the narco-traficantes that Bolaño describes. She eventually ends up one more dead body on a road leaving Juarez.

The Savage Detectives

I just finished Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. It’s a wonderful book, truly. I got wrapped up in those 577 dense pages on a personal level. Bolaño recording of all those voices was like he was talking about friends of mine, or would have been friends of mine if I had been wandering around the Mexico City poetry scene in the around 1975-1976. An experience somehow akin to the emotions I felt reading On the Road in 1959(Note 1). This experience, however, was a revisiting (like Bolaño was doing in the heavily autobiographical telling) the turmoil of my growing up into poetry. In years to come I suppose critics will hail it a masterpiece of Latin American literature (Bolaño was born in Chile but his family moved to DF when he was 15). I don’t call books masterpieces. I enjoy thinking of writers as friends if I especially feel an empathy for their work, and if I’m a friend, I won’t call a friend’s work “a masterpiece.” It’s like a kiss of death. Of course, Bolaño is dead already so he doesn’t care who kisses him. 2003. He slid off the planet at the age of 50. Poor guy. His liver went south. I wish I had known him. But that’s okay. He seems alive to me. Like he’s a friend wandering around in that large book.


Savage Detectives is an odyssey with a peculiar sandwich-like structure. Part 1 (November 2 to New Year’s Eve, 1975) and Part 3 (January 1, 1976 to February 13th) are diary entries by 17-year-old Juan García Madero, a wannabe poet in his first year of university who falls (luckily/unluckily) into the circle of “visceral realist” poets whose leaders are Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima (2). These two poets/intellectuals are indeed “the savage detectives.” The meat of the novel, between these two slices of diary, is a confusing cornucopia of interviews of people who knew Belano and Lima as they wandered around Mexico, Israel, Africa, Spain and France. The irony: neither Belano or Lima is ever interviewed. The reader only learns about them second hand and third hand through the myriad of interviews that stretch between 1976 to 1996—poets, dilettantes, admirers, lovers, enemies, fathers of friends. For example, the wonderfully obsessed Joaquin “Quim” Font(3)--the half-mad, half-wise architect father of two visceral realist poets, Maria and Angélica(4), who spend much of their time in bed with fellow visceral realist poets .

But really, the 403 pages of Part 2 are a complex reflection, like looking into a crystal, of Belano and Lima and therefore what possessed them and how they changed in those four months (11/75 to 2/76) recorded in García Madero’s diary. The first part of the diary records his initiation into the bizarre sexually and intellectually charged scene surrounding Belano and Lima and centered at the house of Quim and his daughters. In the second part García Madero, along with Belano, Lima and the prostitute Lupe flee Mexico City in Quim’s Impala. Lupe’s pimp Alberto--famed for measuring his schlong with the massive blade of his dagger--and a policeman, both armed and dangerous, are chasing them. The three poets and prostitute are fleeing harm but they are also going north to Sonora and the border, chasing the ghost of Cesárea Tinajero, a poet from the 1920s who was considered the Mother of Visceral Realism. It’s a wonderful story. I wonder if Bolaño wrote the complete diary first, then went back and inserted the commentary of all the voices who came across the Savage Detectives between 1976 and 1996. A fan of both Borges and Cortazar, it’s like he realized somewhere in the process, “All must be remembered. How else will I know who I was?” All the while realizing that Arturo Belano is not and will never be Arturo Bolaño. A mysterious book, indeed.

Last week in the midst of reading the book, I wrote a Mexican friend, a poet who is a little bit younger than me. I told him that I’ve been reading Los detectives salvajes, and I think that’s where I must have met him--a meeting in the ether--wandering around inside that book somewhere. I was too old to be a Visceral Realist, but my friend must have been tempted by the shadowy ideology of visceral realism, whatever it was. 1970-something, Mexico City—and this goofy guy Ulises Lima invited me to a party in la Zona Rosa. Or was it Coyoacán? Yes, it was Coyoacán. I had walked by Trotsky’s house. I was thinking about ice picks in the skull. Lima had his friend with him, Arturo Belano who had a blank stare. They mostly ignored me. They kept talking about “visceral realism.” They were visceral realists. “What is visceral realism?” I wanted to know. “Well, it’s not Paz,” Belano blurted out before he reoccupied the space of his blank stare. That was okay. The women at the party were beautiful. My friend, who I would meet in Guadalajara around 2002, was there smoking cigarettes and being the life of the party. He was witty. Poets were crowded around him laughing. Except for Belano and Lima. They kept up their intense discussion in a corner. I was drinking tequila y Dos Equis Oscura and standing in another corner and smoking a Delicado. The smoke was clawing at my throat. That was okay. I was wishing I was a Mexican poet. Even an Argentine or Chilean poet. My Spanish is so lousy. I was a poet from Memphis, for God’s sake. “Can a poet from Memphis be a visceral realist too?” That’s what I wanted to ask but I was never had the courage.

Oh well.

Or as they say in Mexico: Ni modo.

*
For mainstream reviews of Savage Detectives, one lukewarm and the other very favorable, see two from the New York Times, one with Richard Eder holding his breath, and the other, James Wood’s long one praising the novel and giving an overview of the place of Bolaño in Latin American letters. Problem with both is that they sound like interviews out of the novel. A couple of professional academics grandly weighing in with the exegesis of New York intellectual media. Happily for them, neither Belano or Lima or their real-life counterparts will dirty their thresholds. Of course, the same could be said for me. Except I live in El Paso. I'm going to walk over to Juarez for dinner tonight. I hope the feds let me come back across.

*
Footnotes
Note 1. It’s so sweet to have an important novel concerned with the culture of poets and writers, especially what would be called back then the avant-garde. But, if you read the book, remember that poets are generally accorded more respect in Mexico than in the U.S. In 1992 I read in Mexico at the Casa de Poeta with John Simon Oliver and three television news teams and two reporters showed up to interview me. The house was packed. Nobody knew anything about my poetry. They just wanted to hear what the gringo had to say. My good friend poet Bernardo Ruiz translated my work and read with me. Everybody smoking and drinking. I wonder if any of the visceral realists were there. It was a glorious evening. Bernardo, where are you?
Note 2. Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima are, [according to wikipedia] thinly veiled standups for the author and likewise his buddy and fellow visceral realist poet is Bolaño’s friend Mario Santiago Papasquiaro. They had both been associated with the 1970s poetry movement infrarealismo.
Note 3. The translator, Natasha Wimmer, obviously understands the sexual innuendo of “quim.” By the way, Wimmer seems to have done a very fine job although she’s not the usual translator associated with Bolaño’s work. According to an interview on amazon.com, she was the 2nd choice after Chris Andrews who had done all the previous translations for New Directions. Andrews had a plate full when the job was available. She was at the right place at the right time.
Note 4. María and Angélica had belonged to a radical feminist movement called Mexican Women on the Warpath (p86).

Roberto Bolaño & the Poetics of Visceral Realism

The Latin American novelist and poet Roberto Bolaño is hot right now. And dead. “So it goes,” as Billy Pilgrim taught us. Anyway, needing a novel to read for a journey, I scanned the New York Times 2007 Best Books List (something I usually don’t do, being an elitist in a proletarian sort of way) and picked up his book The Savage Detectives. An incredibly lucky pick. The novel affected me like no other novel has done in a long time. So much so that I’m writing a longer piece which I’ll append above.

But, since the book is at least partially about poetry, in particular the internecine warfare between poets and their (our) various congregations, I wanted to paste in its entirety a rambunctious tongue-in-cheek riff (see note at the end) about the Great Mexican Poetry Wars, circa 1975. Although Mexican in nature, it spreads to include much of western poetry--Whitman, Vallejo, Neruda, French poets, Italian poets, etcetera. The venue for the rant is a wild party of “Visceral Realists,” that group of angry young Mexican poets (fictional) who revolt against the Mexican poetry establishment of government grants, the tenured academy, Octavio Paz and his disciples, and all institutionalized poetics. Reading it I couldn’t help but think of Ron Silliman’s discussions and definitions of the poetics and poets of the School of Quietude in American poetry versus the rawer and certainly less institutionalized poetry of the New Americans and their gregarious cohorts. Or to put it more simply, the Mexican battle was akin to the 1950s battle occurring in the U.S. when the New Critics were scandalized by the antics of the Beats with their anarchic sense of poetics. I agree generally with Silliman’s categories. Indeed, I was happy to discover Silliman making these distinctions. I’m not a fan of the SoQ and I could never put a finger on my antipathy until I paid more attention to Silliman. But I must listen to my friend JB Bryan when he accuses me of elitism and snobbery. Thus, I was happy to find a rant that makes a mockery of the civil wars of poetry but at the same time takes the arguments very seriously

Visceral Realism is a fictional counterpart of the infrarealismo movement of the same time period of Mexican poetics. Its adherents, of whom Bolaño was one, were feared as a rowdy bunch of barbarians known for disrupting readings and being decidedly loud-mouthed rabble rousers. This remarkable speech comes to us third hand. The first part of the novel is the diary of 17-year-old Juan García Madero, a wannabe poet in his first year of university. He has fallen (luckily/unluckily) into the circle of the “visceral realists.” One morning García Madero, after a particular wild and drunken party, reconstructs the speech as it flowed from the mouth of Ernesto San Epifanio. San Epifanio is gay, a card-carrying member of the Visceral Realists, as well as the founder of the first Homosexual Communist Party of Mexico and the first Mexican Homosexual Proletarian Commune. The wonderfully witty and wild harangue reminds me, in its berserk crazy energy, of Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech in Romeo and Juliet. Or better yet, the rants and curses that New Mexico intellectuals Gus Blaisdell and Bill Pearlman used to hurl at each other late on drunken Saturday nights at those forever lost historical landmark of radical 1960s New Mexico culture: the Thunderbird Bar in Placitas, NM, or Okie Joe’s on the corner of University and Central in Albuquerque. You had to be there.

The selection from the young poet's diary is taken from pages 71-73 of the novel.

▲

November 22

I woke up at Catalina O’Hara’s house. As I was having breakfast, very early, with Catalina and her son, Davy, who had to be taken to nursery school (María wasn’t there, everyone else was asleep), I remembered that the night before, when there were just a few of us left, Ernesto San Epifanio had said that all literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual, whereas poetry was completely homosexual; I guess short stories were bisexual, although he didn’t say so.

Within the vast ocean of poetry he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs and philenes. But the two main currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was faggot poet. Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer. Borges was a philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next. Rubén Darío was a freak, in fact, the queen freak, the prototypical freak.

“In our language, of course,” he clarified. “In the wider world the reigning freak is still Verlaine the Generous.”

Freaks, according to San Epifanio, were closer to madhouse flamboyance and naked hallucination, while faggots and queers wandered in stagger-step from ethics to aesthetics and back again. Cernuda, dear Cernuda, was a nymph, and at moments of great bitterness, a faggot, whereas Guillén, Aleixandre, and Alberti could be considered a sissy, a butch, and a queer respectively. As a general rule, poets like Carlos Pellicer were butches, while poets like Tablada, Novo, and Renato Leduc were sissies. In fact, there was a dearth of faggots in Mexican poetry, although some optimists might point to López Velarde and Efraín Huerta. There were a lot of queers, on the other hand, from the mauler (although for a second I heard mobster) Días Mirón to the illustrious Homero Aridjis. It was necessary to go all the way back to Amado Nervo (whistles) to find a real poet, a faggot poet, this is, and not a philene like the resurrected and now renowned Manuel José Othón from San Luis Potosí, a bore if ever there was one. And speaking of bores: Manuel Acuña was a fairy and José Joaquín Pesado was a Grecian wood nymph, both longtime pimps of a certain kind of Mexican lyrical verse.

“And Efrén Rebolledo?” I asked.

“An extremely minor queer. His only virtue is that he was the first, if not the only, Mexican poet to publish a book in Tokyo: Japanese Poems, 1909. He was a diplomat, of course.”

Anyway, the poetry scene was essentially an (underground) battle, the result of the struggle between faggots and queer poets to seize control of the word. Sissies, according to San Epifanio, were faggot poets by birth, who out of weakness or for comfort’s sake lived within the accepted--most of the time--the aesthetic and personal parameters of the queers. In Spain, France, and Italy, queer poets have always been legion, he said, although a superficial reader might never guess. What happens is that a faggot poet like Leopardi, for example, somehow reconstructs queers like Ungaretti, Montale, and Quasimodo, the deadly trio.

“In the same way, Pasolini redraws contemporary Italian queerdom. Take the case of the poor Sanguinetti (I won’t start with Pavese, who was a sad freak, the only one of his kind, or Dino Campana, who dines at a separate table, the table of the hopeless freaks). Not to mention France, great country of devouring mouths, where one hundred faggot poets, from Villon to our beloved Sophie Podolski, have nurtured, still nurture, and will nurture with the blood of their tits ten thousand queer poets with their entourage of philenes, nymphs, butches, and sissies, lofty editors of literary magazines, great translators, petty bureaucrats, and grand diplomats of the Kingdom of Letters (see, if you must, the shameful and malicious reflections of the Tel Quel poets). And the less said the better about the faggotry of the Russian Revolution, which, if we’re to be honest, gave us just one faggot poet, a single one.”

“Who?” they asked him. “Mayakovsky?”

“No.”

“Esenin?”

“No.”

“Pasternak? Blok? Mandelstam? Akhmatova?”

“Hardly.”

“Come on, Ernesto, tell us, the suspense is killing us.”

“There was only one,” said San Epifanio, “and now I’ll tell you who it was, but he was the real thing, a steppes-and-snow faggot, a faggot from head to toe: Khlebnikov.”
There was an opinion for every taste.

“And in Latin America, how many true faggots do we find? Vallejo and Martín Adan. Period. New Paragraph. Macedonio Fernández, (although some of his poems are authentically faggotty), butches like León de Greiff, butch nymphs like Pablo de Rokha (with bursts of freakishness that would’ve driven Lecan crazy), sissies like Lezama Lima, a guided reader of Góngora, and, along with Lezama, all the poets of the Cuban Revolution (Diego, Vitier, horrible Retamar, pathetic Guillén, inconsolable Fina Garcia) except for Rogelio Nogueras, who is a darling an a nymph with the spirit of a playful faggot. But moving on. In Nicaragua most poets are fairies like Coronel Urtecho or queers who wish they were philenes, like Ernesto Cardenal. The Mexican Contemporaries are queers too…”

“No!” shouted Belano. “Not Gilberto Owen!”

“In fact,” San Epifanio continued unruffled, “Gorotiza’s Death Without End, along with the poetry of Paz, is the ‘Marseillaise’ of the highly nervous and sedentary Mexican Queer Poets. More names:Gelman, nymph; Bendetti, queer; Nacanor Parra, fairy with a hint of faggot; Wesphalen, freak; Enrique Lihn, sissy; Girondo, fairy; Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, fairy butch; Sabines, butchy butch; our beloved, untouchable Josemilio P., freak;. And back to Spain, back to the beginning”—whistles—“Gongora and Quevedo, queers; san Juan de la Cruz and Fray Luis de León, faggots. End of story. And now, some differences between queers and faggots. Even in their sleep, the former beg for a twelve-inch cock to plow and fertilize them, but at the moment of truth, mountains must be moved to get them into bed with the pimps they love. Faggots, on the other hand, live as if a stake is permanently churning their insides and they look at themselves in the mirror (something they both love and hate to do with all their heart), they see the Pimp of Death in their own sunken eyes. For faggots and queers, pimp is the one word that can cross unscathed through the realms of nothingness (or silence or otherness). But then, too, nothing prevents queers and faggots from being good friends if they so desire, from neatly ripping one another off, criticizing or praising one another, publishing or burying one another in the frantic and moribund world of letters.”

“And what about Cesárea Tinajero? Is she a faggot or queer?” someone asked. I didn’t recognize the voice.

“Oh, Cesárea Tinajero is horror itself,” said San Epifanio.

Copyright © 2006 by Roberto Bolaño; translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. Published in April 2007 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

NOTE: As a publisher, I thought long and hard about inserting this harangue into my blog because of copyright issues, but I believe that putting it here can only help the sales of the book. If somebody from FS&G contacts me, I will be happy to delete this post.