My fall class is extravagantly called States of Ruin: Violence and Identity in Latin American Literature 1810-1930 and I cannot find the abstract or the reading list, so must reconstruct. It is being given under a culture rubric and I think it is being cross listed with several programs, such that it has to be … More Háblenme
For the rain there is nothing like huaynos. If I were to be in Mexico City this summer, which I now apparently am not, I would go Sunday mornings to the market in Santa María la Ribera. I would have herbs and shrimp and wine and blast charango music through the courtyard while cooking, impressing … More La magia del vinyl
Our Mexico program did not make, so my summer in Mexico funded by three weeks of intensive teaching at the beginning is not going to take place in the planned form. I am disappointed because I want to make being in the DF a regular activity. I just lost a long post due to a … More Summer
I must also post to the reading class website, instructions for their assignment. They know the assignment but they will need very specific instructions. For Valentine’s Day they are each presenting on a love song, and identifying rhetorical situations and techniques in love songs. But they must have step by step instructions or they will … More On Spain
Modernism in literature is (often) the effort of a national elite to develop a theory of national identity that is both modern and traditionalist, that negotiates claims of exceptionalism / universality. Modernism is distinctively peripheral, not prototypically metropolitan, in that it is interested in those romantic notions of identity that are more distinctive around the … More Wir sind soweit
→ Kraniauskas essay in the Archivos edition of El Señor Presidente. This book is not about the origins of the state but its nationalization. I have never read it but now want to. It is avant-garde and about the state, so I cannot lose. → Misplaced ideas. Roberto Schwarz came up with this term and … More Fragments, and a proto-theory of Spain
Are triangulation, encroachment and enmeshment particularly Latin, or are they just epiphenomena of any patriarchal system? Man 1, at work: wants me to ally with him against Woman 1. I refuse so I am a “Puritan.” Man 2, at work: wants me to ally with him against Man 1 and with Woman 1. I refuse … More A serious question
Did Dr. Phil send a memo saying men have to call women every day? I do not mean the obsessive calling of controlling types. In old Latin America you had to be home to be visited briefly each evening, and current phone customs remind me of this. My phone is lost, though, and I tend … More On helicopter people
Is the Brazilian racial situation anomalous, exceptional, unique? I say no and I would also suggest that at least some of the insistence on the mutability of race and the multiplicity of the ways in which racial meaning is and is not created, is a hedging device intended to screen racist practices from view. I … More Punch
These are new things I have invented to eat, and which I can make in less time than it would take to write out: →grilled salmon salad with soy and balsamic vinegar →calf’s liver in tomato pesto I am a genius but I have never learned to cook beans, which is what I want. Mine … More La cuisine
coldhearted scientist وداد 