Am thinking of some of the stuff that i've read. My mom was sort of into history based fiction, mostly romance theme, which I mostly shunned. But, she did hook me into 'The Clan of the Cave Bear' series, as well as a series of the early deep south USA(which probably are banned in places). Shogun, King Rat. Neither parents finished high school, but were very avid readers. Tried some 'westerns', but just couldn't get into three pages of a damn sunrise description(really like the old movies, tho!) Usually, nothing too deep. I sort of laugh at the self help books that i've read over the years. Have totally enjoyed reading ancient history/cultures/religion lately.
-
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any rabid readers on here ???
- Thread starter armedoldhippy
- Start date
I liked the Clan of the Cave Bear stuff except woward the end. If you like Clavell, try Tai Pan.
Eltitoguay
Well-known member
How beautiful are the provinces of Málaga and Granada, right?...
Very vey interesting, although I have been able to read almost everything it explains in previous authors, whether from Science, Philosophy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowds_and_Power)
, or "fictional" Narrative Literature itself (for example, on the use of "scapegoats" by totalitarianism):
The black sheep
Augusto MonterrosoIn a far away country there was a black sheep many years ago. It was shot.
A century later, the repentant flock erected an equestrian statue that looked great in the park.
Thus, from then on, whenever black sheep appeared, they were quickly put to death so that future generations of ordinary sheep could also practice sculpture.END
I do not agree with his definition, handling and judgments about the term "rationalism"; Being rationalist is not pretending that the universe and existence are governed by the dictates of our mind, but rather using our mind to try to understand it: In fact, the author ignores that those Chaos Theories and Quantum Physics, which he uses as opposition/criticism to "rationalism", we were only able to know thanks to that same rationalism.
And I think the author also ignores everything religious-mystical-mythological-legendary-fantasy, present in ideologies-regimes like those of Hitler or Franco.
Finally, the references to Miguel de Cervantes and Eleno (or Elena, the author seems to prefer(?)) of Céspedes, will deserve a next post in the future:
For Cervantes, because the video's one is the first message in which the inventor of the Novel and the pinnacle of Narrative (sharing that of Literature with Sheakespeare) is explicitly cited.
(Although without citing it, there is a clear reference to The One-Armed Man of The Battle of Lepanto, in the story "How I got rid of 500 books", by A. Monterroso, reproduced in a previous message; specifically to the "book purge" carried out by the priest and Don Quixote's niece).
For Eleno or Elena de Céspedes (I think cited in the video as the first "transsexual" reflected in History (?)), because I don't understand the controversy over her name, when she or he called himself Eleno and signed as such, although I think that my little knowledge of English makes this last issue unclear to me. : (from Wikipedia):
Eleno de Céspedes:
(Spanish surgeon and transgender person of the 16th century):
Eleno de Céspedes ( Alhama de Granada , 1545 - ?), initially known as Elena de Céspedes , was an Afro-Spanish surgeon and soldier of the 16th century . Of humble origins, he held various jobs before changing his identity from female to male, after which he served militarily in the Alpujarras Rebellion under the command of Juan de Austria and obtained the title of surgeon.
Signature:
Last edited:
Eltitoguay
Well-known member
(Text extracted and abbreviated-modicated by me, from the article: https://www.ideal.es/granada/cervantes-descubrimiento-primera-20180821215540-ntvo.html?ref=https://www.ideal.es/granada/cervantes-descubrimiento-primera-20180821215540-ntvo.html , by Jesús Lens;
all photos are from the Alhama de Granada town, including the ancient Hispanic-Arabic Bath, mentioned in his chronicles by the legendary traveler Ibn Batuta) :
-"My name is Zenotia, I am a native of Spain, born and raised in Alhama, a city in the kingdom of Granada; known by my name throughout Spain, and even among many others... You should also know that in that city of Alhama there has always been a woman with my name, who with the surname Zenotia inherits this science, which does not teach us to be sorceresses, as some call us, but to be enchanters and magicians, names that are more appropriate to us"...
It is not as well known as Don Quixote, but Cervantes' posthumous work, The Labours of Persiles and Sigismunda, is a travel novel whose protagonists experience a thousand and one adventures and have the most unusual encounters.
With the sorceress Zenotia (or Cenotia), for example, expelled from Spain by the Inquisition and turned into a fortune-teller.
Let's go back to 1594 and let our imaginations run wild. Let's suppose that, tired from the jostling journey and after taking a room at the inn, Cervantes enters one of the inns in what is now the Plaza de la Constitución. El Tigre, Casa Ochoa, La Placeta or El Andaluz, for example.
He orders a local wine and starts chatting with the innkeeper and some other customers. The conversation begins with the sudden chill and with complaints about how bad the roads are, abandoned by God.
The people continue talking about how expensive life is and someone tells a joke about a fashionable bullfighter. Then, when the conversation is winding down and Cervantes is about to go to sleep, the waiter asks him if he knows the story of Eleno de Céspedes, a famous man from Alhama. He wants to keep the customer a little longer, to keep him drinking, because it is obvious that his pocket is ringing...
-"Eleno? What kind of name is Eleno?"- Cervantes will ask.
And the innkeeper will tell him the story of a girl called Elena, born out from an African slave woman and a white free man in 1545. Freed at the age of eight, she learned various trades and, after a failed marriage in her teens, left home and travelled throughout Andalusia. It was then that she began to dress as a man. She enlisted as a soldier and fought against the Moriscos in the Alpujarra Rebellion, where her expertise as a medic was discovered.
-"Sanitary"?
A health worker, indeed: at that point in her life, Elena had changed her name to Eleno and was doing everything possible - and even impossible - to pass as a man.
After the war, Eleno settled in Madrid and, while practicing on his own, he trained to be a surgeon. He completed his studies, passed the corresponding exam and obtained his license. In this way, Elena de Céspedes became the first Spanish surgeon in the history of medicine... even if she had to lie to do so.
To silence rumours and gossip, Eleno married María del Caño, but a year later he was denounced by a former comrade in arms. The couple was arrested in Ocaña and put on trial by the Holy Inquisition, whose trial is documented in a file of more than 300 pages whose level of detail is shocking: Eleno had compressed her breasts in such a way and had forced her sex with such arts - there is even talk of vaginal obturation and an alleged self-implantation of a corpse's penis, taking advantage of his knowledge of surgery - that he suffered severe malformations in his body.
(The last one was false):
www.pikaramagazine.com
Sentenced to 200 lashes and 10 years of confinement in a hospital, where she worked for free in the infirmary during that time:
"Céspedes — Elena or Eleno:
A native of Alama, a slave and later free, she married a man and had a son; later, after her husband died, she dressed as a man and was in the War of the Moriscos in Granada, she took the exam to become a surgeon and married a woman: she was arrested in Ocaña and taken to the Inquisition where she was accused and condemned for contempt of marriage and having a pact with the Devil.
Sentenced to appear at the public Auto-da-fé held in the Plaza del Zocodover in Toledo on Sunday, December 18, 1588; to which she appeared in the form of a penitent with a coronet and insignia that manifested her crime; she renounced her right to Levi; and was given one hundred lashes in the public streets of Toledo and another hundred in those of Ciempozuelos; ten years' confinement in a Hospital to serve without pay in the infirmaries."
( AHN : Inquisición, leg. 234 exp. 24, f. 1);
Elen@ de Céspedes became a celebrity, so it is not surprising that Cervantes used her as inspiration for his Zenotia, as reads on the plaque located on a wall in Alhama de Granada, paradoxically located just a few meters from the House of the Inquisition:
"To the mulatt@ from Alhama Elena/Eleno de Céspedes, the first female surgeon and transsexual in history..."
all photos are from the Alhama de Granada town, including the ancient Hispanic-Arabic Bath, mentioned in his chronicles by the legendary traveler Ibn Batuta) :
Cervantes and his discovery of "the first Spanish female surgeon" :
September 1594 is the end of the year when a tax collector named Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, enters Alhama de Granada.
He comes from Vélez-Málaga and his plan is to continue on to Loja and Granada. A month later he will make his way back and, at the end of his journey through Andalusia, the discrepancies in the accounts will land him in jail in Seville. But that does not interest us right now, as today we are going to talk about a woman...who called herself/himself, a man :
-"My name is Zenotia, I am a native of Spain, born and raised in Alhama, a city in the kingdom of Granada; known by my name throughout Spain, and even among many others... You should also know that in that city of Alhama there has always been a woman with my name, who with the surname Zenotia inherits this science, which does not teach us to be sorceresses, as some call us, but to be enchanters and magicians, names that are more appropriate to us"...
It is not as well known as Don Quixote, but Cervantes' posthumous work, The Labours of Persiles and Sigismunda, is a travel novel whose protagonists experience a thousand and one adventures and have the most unusual encounters.
With the sorceress Zenotia (or Cenotia), for example, expelled from Spain by the Inquisition and turned into a fortune-teller.
Let's go back to 1594 and let our imaginations run wild. Let's suppose that, tired from the jostling journey and after taking a room at the inn, Cervantes enters one of the inns in what is now the Plaza de la Constitución. El Tigre, Casa Ochoa, La Placeta or El Andaluz, for example.
He orders a local wine and starts chatting with the innkeeper and some other customers. The conversation begins with the sudden chill and with complaints about how bad the roads are, abandoned by God.
The people continue talking about how expensive life is and someone tells a joke about a fashionable bullfighter. Then, when the conversation is winding down and Cervantes is about to go to sleep, the waiter asks him if he knows the story of Eleno de Céspedes, a famous man from Alhama. He wants to keep the customer a little longer, to keep him drinking, because it is obvious that his pocket is ringing...
-"Eleno? What kind of name is Eleno?"- Cervantes will ask.
And the innkeeper will tell him the story of a girl called Elena, born out from an African slave woman and a white free man in 1545. Freed at the age of eight, she learned various trades and, after a failed marriage in her teens, left home and travelled throughout Andalusia. It was then that she began to dress as a man. She enlisted as a soldier and fought against the Moriscos in the Alpujarra Rebellion, where her expertise as a medic was discovered.
-"Sanitary"?
A health worker, indeed: at that point in her life, Elena had changed her name to Eleno and was doing everything possible - and even impossible - to pass as a man.
After the war, Eleno settled in Madrid and, while practicing on his own, he trained to be a surgeon. He completed his studies, passed the corresponding exam and obtained his license. In this way, Elena de Céspedes became the first Spanish surgeon in the history of medicine... even if she had to lie to do so.
To silence rumours and gossip, Eleno married María del Caño, but a year later he was denounced by a former comrade in arms. The couple was arrested in Ocaña and put on trial by the Holy Inquisition, whose trial is documented in a file of more than 300 pages whose level of detail is shocking: Eleno had compressed her breasts in such a way and had forced her sex with such arts - there is even talk of vaginal obturation and an alleged self-implantation of a corpse's penis, taking advantage of his knowledge of surgery - that he suffered severe malformations in his body.
(The last one was false):
El universo disidente de Eleno de Céspedes
Miguel de Cervantes generó el personaje de la Bruja Zenotia que era, en realidad, Eleno de Céspedes, Un hombre trans y afroandaluz
www.pikaramagazine.com
CVC. Elena de Céspedes: ¿Hermafroditismo o engaño?. José Luis Luna Ramírez y M.ª Aránzazu Luna Díaz.
Sentenced to 200 lashes and 10 years of confinement in a hospital, where she worked for free in the infirmary during that time:
"Céspedes — Elena or Eleno:
A native of Alama, a slave and later free, she married a man and had a son; later, after her husband died, she dressed as a man and was in the War of the Moriscos in Granada, she took the exam to become a surgeon and married a woman: she was arrested in Ocaña and taken to the Inquisition where she was accused and condemned for contempt of marriage and having a pact with the Devil.
Sentenced to appear at the public Auto-da-fé held in the Plaza del Zocodover in Toledo on Sunday, December 18, 1588; to which she appeared in the form of a penitent with a coronet and insignia that manifested her crime; she renounced her right to Levi; and was given one hundred lashes in the public streets of Toledo and another hundred in those of Ciempozuelos; ten years' confinement in a Hospital to serve without pay in the infirmaries."
( AHN : Inquisición, leg. 234 exp. 24, f. 1);
Elen@ de Céspedes became a celebrity, so it is not surprising that Cervantes used her as inspiration for his Zenotia, as reads on the plaque located on a wall in Alhama de Granada, paradoxically located just a few meters from the House of the Inquisition:
"To the mulatt@ from Alhama Elena/Eleno de Céspedes, the first female surgeon and transsexual in history..."
Last edited:
Eltitoguay
Well-known member
Opus 1:
Alice woke up from her wonderful journey because some lips, covered by a fine mustache, lightly touched hers:
"-The rabbit!" -Alice shouted in alarm.
The rabbit in question looked from one side to the other of the meadow, and as he saw no one in the vicinity, he whispered mischievously:
-"If you want to know the real wonderland, I invite you to my apartment, beautiful...Are you coming?..."
Armando José Sequera
Armando José Sequera - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
Eltitoguay
Well-known member
Je, je, je...:
Cuando la vista es la que trabaja:
Había sido un lector empedernido durante toda su vida, pero la vista comenzó a fallarle más de la cuenta y decidió ir al oculista, que le mandó unas gafas para leer de lejos y otras para leer de cerca; sin embargo, poco después de la primera visita, se presentó nuevamente en la consulta del especialista y le dijo que, en realidad, lo que él necesitaba eran unas gafas para leer entre líneas, porque en la entrelínea está el secreto de la escritura y, entre los versos de un poema, se puede encontrar una novela de aventuras.
(Anónimo, siguiendo el estilo de Augusto Monterroso)
When the view is the one that works
He had been an avid reader all his life, but his eyesight began to fail him more than usual and he decided to go to the optician, who prescribed him glasses for reading from a distance and others for reading up close; however, shortly after the first visit, he went back to the specialist's office and was told that, in reality, what he needed were glasses for reading between the lines, because between the lines lies the secret of writing and, between the verses of a poem, one can find an adventure novel.
(Anonymous, following the style of Augusto Monterroso)
es.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
After 20 years, Monterroso is still here :
(12/06/2023 - José González Núñez)
When the meteorite hit the Earth, only one dinosaur was saved: the one that managed to take refuge under a line in Augusto Monterroso's notebook.
On February 7th 2023, 20 years have passed since the death of Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso (1921 – 2003), born in Tegucigalpa as a Central American citizen and trained in Mexico as a writer. Monterroso, Tito to his friends, was an undisputed master of the short story, and his piece The Dinosaur has served as a guide for hyper-short narrative for more than 60 years; there is even an “annotated” edition of it with variations written by other authors (Lauro Zavala, 2002).
The deepest roots of the micro-story must surely be found in the short and very short narratives that were born almost at the same time as writing or even before, at the beginning, when it was then the verb. However, its birth can be dated to the mid-nineteenth century, while its development and consolidation as an independent genre took place in the second half of the last century. Since then, we have witnessed its globalization and popularization, a phenomenon due in large part to the explosion of social networks and also to the appearance of numerous readers eager to write.
The first is the fantastic collection of Cuentos breves y ejemplares (Short and Extraordinary Stories) by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, published in 1953, in which both authors “interrogate texts from different periods, without omitting the ancient and generous oriental sources” to offer entertainment to readers through anecdotes, parables and stories, which “find hospitality here, provided they are brief”; the second is the Obras completas (and other stories) by Augusto Monterroso (Complete Works (and other stories), published in 1959, which contains the short story El dinosaurio ( The Dinosaur) : “Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba ahí” (When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there). According to the writer Rosa Montero, The Dinosaur has all the ingredients of a story (time, backroom, action) and is also full of echoes and nooks: “We can intuit an infinite number of explanations for those seven words, a roar of meanings and metaphors.”
However, Monterroso’s work does not end with The Dinosaur . In The Black Sheep and Other Fables (1969) he makes a true reinvention of the genre through texts that have often been used as examples of micronarrative creativity; among them is The Dreaming Cockroach : “Once upon a time there was a Cockroach called Gregor Samsa who dreamed that he was a Cockroach called Franz Kafka who dreamed that he was a writer who wrote about an employee called Gregor Samsa who dreamed that he was a Cockroach.”
For its part, the essay, in its literary reflection variant, as a “story that even becomes a poem,” is the predominant form in Movimiento perpetuo (1972), which includes the priceless Fecundidad (Fecundity ): “Today I feel good, a Balzac; I am finishing a line . ” His only novel, Lo demás es silencio (1978), is a fictional autobiography loaded with humor, containing pages full of wit and irony about the writer’s craft. Viaje al centro de la fábula (1981), a compendium of dialogues that he explores in his previous works, reveals his desire for “the search for perfection that is not noticeable” and raises the dilemma of whether the interview is not another literary genre born from Monterroso’s imagination.
There is more: The Magic Word (1983) is a miscellany of texts sprinkled with humor aimed at paying homage to authors who had influenced him in one way or another and at addressing literary genres; The Letter E (Fragments of a Diary) (1987) is a kind of travel diary that shows Monterrosian ethics and aesthetics, in which brevity predominates, understood not as a term of rhetoric but of good education, agile fragmentation, ingenuity, density of content under an appearance of lightness, and, among his various works of literary theory, Literature and Life (2003) occupies a prominent place.
Despite his great influence on later authors, Monterroso never tried to explain or establish what a story should be like, regardless of its length: “the truth is that nobody knows what a story should be like,” although he did leave some clues: “a good law would be that the story is not a novel or a poem or an essay and that at the same time it is an essay and a novel and a poem as long as it remains that mysterious thing called a story.”
Personally, he was curious and determined to take things from others, mix them together and make them his own, but not for himself, but to provide his readers with a place where they could look at the world in a different way, stripping it of all solemnity: “There are three themes: love, death and flies.” He confessed that he did not seek perfection, but rather preferred to write with imperfections, because it was the most human thing to do.
According to Carlos Fuentes, his writing was “a distillation of the best prose written in 20th century Latin America: “What took us 100 pages took him one sentence.” Sergio Ramírez says of him that “just like his ancestors, who waded into the river currents to sift sand in search of gold nuggets, Monterroso did it with words. A lot of sifted sand and little gold.” Luis Landero calls attention to his “literary deception,” alerting the reader: “… this old fox has sold me as brief prose what is really an endless book. And in the mornings, when I wake up, I see that Monterroso is still there.” In short, Enrique Vila-Matas, apart from emphasizing his narrative mastery, affirms that he had that “third ear” of which Nietzsche speaks: “The one that listens to the higher harmonies.”
Those who knew him say that he was reserved in his speech, attentive in his listening, shy and sensitive, with a certain tendency towards melancholy, he had a calm sense of humor and always showed compassionate judgment towards others. He never resorted to playing the victim, but rather to irony, even in difficult moments, as exemplified by one of his protests against the dictator Jorge Ubico: he displayed a banner that read “I don’t understand.”
Monterroso's writing masks black humor, parody or the depth of a thought in an apparent simplicity and naivety of language, which is sometimes only detected after a second reading.
Although he used all genres (story, fable, novel, essay, critique, diary, epigram, satire, chronicle, interview…), he considered himself a simple storyteller whose ultimate ideal was “to occupy half a page in the reader of a primary school in my country”. As such, he never stopped keeping in mind the foundations of good storytelling: narrativity ( there is no story if there is nothing to tell); fictionality (a story only becomes a story if it is fiction or, at least, has fictional elements); brevity , taken to the extreme in the micro-story: “All literary work must always be corrected and reduced (…), it cancels out a line every day” ( Physiology of literary taste ).
www.hoyesarte.com
Cuando la vista es la que trabaja:
Había sido un lector empedernido durante toda su vida, pero la vista comenzó a fallarle más de la cuenta y decidió ir al oculista, que le mandó unas gafas para leer de lejos y otras para leer de cerca; sin embargo, poco después de la primera visita, se presentó nuevamente en la consulta del especialista y le dijo que, en realidad, lo que él necesitaba eran unas gafas para leer entre líneas, porque en la entrelínea está el secreto de la escritura y, entre los versos de un poema, se puede encontrar una novela de aventuras.
(Anónimo, siguiendo el estilo de Augusto Monterroso)
When the view is the one that works
He had been an avid reader all his life, but his eyesight began to fail him more than usual and he decided to go to the optician, who prescribed him glasses for reading from a distance and others for reading up close; however, shortly after the first visit, he went back to the specialist's office and was told that, in reality, what he needed were glasses for reading between the lines, because between the lines lies the secret of writing and, between the verses of a poem, one can find an adventure novel.
(Anonymous, following the style of Augusto Monterroso)
Augusto Monterroso - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
Augusto Monterroso - Wikipedia
After 20 years, Monterroso is still here :
(12/06/2023 - José González Núñez)
When the meteorite hit the Earth, only one dinosaur was saved: the one that managed to take refuge under a line in Augusto Monterroso's notebook.
On February 7th 2023, 20 years have passed since the death of Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso (1921 – 2003), born in Tegucigalpa as a Central American citizen and trained in Mexico as a writer. Monterroso, Tito to his friends, was an undisputed master of the short story, and his piece The Dinosaur has served as a guide for hyper-short narrative for more than 60 years; there is even an “annotated” edition of it with variations written by other authors (Lauro Zavala, 2002).
The deepest roots of the micro-story must surely be found in the short and very short narratives that were born almost at the same time as writing or even before, at the beginning, when it was then the verb. However, its birth can be dated to the mid-nineteenth century, while its development and consolidation as an independent genre took place in the second half of the last century. Since then, we have witnessed its globalization and popularization, a phenomenon due in large part to the explosion of social networks and also to the appearance of numerous readers eager to write.
The first is the fantastic collection of Cuentos breves y ejemplares (Short and Extraordinary Stories) by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, published in 1953, in which both authors “interrogate texts from different periods, without omitting the ancient and generous oriental sources” to offer entertainment to readers through anecdotes, parables and stories, which “find hospitality here, provided they are brief”; the second is the Obras completas (and other stories) by Augusto Monterroso (Complete Works (and other stories), published in 1959, which contains the short story El dinosaurio ( The Dinosaur) : “Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba ahí” (When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there). According to the writer Rosa Montero, The Dinosaur has all the ingredients of a story (time, backroom, action) and is also full of echoes and nooks: “We can intuit an infinite number of explanations for those seven words, a roar of meanings and metaphors.”
However, Monterroso’s work does not end with The Dinosaur . In The Black Sheep and Other Fables (1969) he makes a true reinvention of the genre through texts that have often been used as examples of micronarrative creativity; among them is The Dreaming Cockroach : “Once upon a time there was a Cockroach called Gregor Samsa who dreamed that he was a Cockroach called Franz Kafka who dreamed that he was a writer who wrote about an employee called Gregor Samsa who dreamed that he was a Cockroach.”
For its part, the essay, in its literary reflection variant, as a “story that even becomes a poem,” is the predominant form in Movimiento perpetuo (1972), which includes the priceless Fecundidad (Fecundity ): “Today I feel good, a Balzac; I am finishing a line . ” His only novel, Lo demás es silencio (1978), is a fictional autobiography loaded with humor, containing pages full of wit and irony about the writer’s craft. Viaje al centro de la fábula (1981), a compendium of dialogues that he explores in his previous works, reveals his desire for “the search for perfection that is not noticeable” and raises the dilemma of whether the interview is not another literary genre born from Monterroso’s imagination.
There is more: The Magic Word (1983) is a miscellany of texts sprinkled with humor aimed at paying homage to authors who had influenced him in one way or another and at addressing literary genres; The Letter E (Fragments of a Diary) (1987) is a kind of travel diary that shows Monterrosian ethics and aesthetics, in which brevity predominates, understood not as a term of rhetoric but of good education, agile fragmentation, ingenuity, density of content under an appearance of lightness, and, among his various works of literary theory, Literature and Life (2003) occupies a prominent place.
Despite his great influence on later authors, Monterroso never tried to explain or establish what a story should be like, regardless of its length: “the truth is that nobody knows what a story should be like,” although he did leave some clues: “a good law would be that the story is not a novel or a poem or an essay and that at the same time it is an essay and a novel and a poem as long as it remains that mysterious thing called a story.”
Personally, he was curious and determined to take things from others, mix them together and make them his own, but not for himself, but to provide his readers with a place where they could look at the world in a different way, stripping it of all solemnity: “There are three themes: love, death and flies.” He confessed that he did not seek perfection, but rather preferred to write with imperfections, because it was the most human thing to do.
According to Carlos Fuentes, his writing was “a distillation of the best prose written in 20th century Latin America: “What took us 100 pages took him one sentence.” Sergio Ramírez says of him that “just like his ancestors, who waded into the river currents to sift sand in search of gold nuggets, Monterroso did it with words. A lot of sifted sand and little gold.” Luis Landero calls attention to his “literary deception,” alerting the reader: “… this old fox has sold me as brief prose what is really an endless book. And in the mornings, when I wake up, I see that Monterroso is still there.” In short, Enrique Vila-Matas, apart from emphasizing his narrative mastery, affirms that he had that “third ear” of which Nietzsche speaks: “The one that listens to the higher harmonies.”
Those who knew him say that he was reserved in his speech, attentive in his listening, shy and sensitive, with a certain tendency towards melancholy, he had a calm sense of humor and always showed compassionate judgment towards others. He never resorted to playing the victim, but rather to irony, even in difficult moments, as exemplified by one of his protests against the dictator Jorge Ubico: he displayed a banner that read “I don’t understand.”
Monterroso's writing masks black humor, parody or the depth of a thought in an apparent simplicity and naivety of language, which is sometimes only detected after a second reading.
Although he used all genres (story, fable, novel, essay, critique, diary, epigram, satire, chronicle, interview…), he considered himself a simple storyteller whose ultimate ideal was “to occupy half a page in the reader of a primary school in my country”. As such, he never stopped keeping in mind the foundations of good storytelling: narrativity ( there is no story if there is nothing to tell); fictionality (a story only becomes a story if it is fiction or, at least, has fictional elements); brevity , taken to the extreme in the micro-story: “All literary work must always be corrected and reduced (…), it cancels out a line every day” ( Physiology of literary taste ).
Después de 20 años, Monterroso sigue aquí - hoyesarte.com
Cuando el meteorito impactó contra la Tierra, tan solo pudo salvarse un único dinosaurio: el que logró refugiarse bajo una línea del cuaderno de Augusto Monterroso.
www.hoyesarte.com
Last edited:
Eltitoguay
Well-known member
Horacio Quiroga (18878-1937):
"Decalogue of the perfect storyteller"
es.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
"Decalogue of the perfect storyteller"
Horacio Quiroga - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
Horacio Quiroga - Wikipedia
1. Believe in the master (Poe, Maupassant, Kipling, Chekhov) as in God himself.
2. Believe that your art is an inaccessible peak. Do not dream of mastering it. When you can do it, you will achieve it without even knowing it.
3. Resist imitation as much as possible, but imitate if the influence is too strong. More than anything else, the development of personality is a matter of long patience.
4. Have blind faith, not in your capacity for success but in the ardor with which you desire it. Love your art as your sweetheart, giving it all your heart.
5. Don't start writing without knowing where you're going from the first line. In a well-written story, the first three lines are almost always as important as the last three.
6. If you want to express with concern this circumstance “A cold wind blew from the river”, there are no words in human language other than those expressed to express it. Once you have mastered the words, do not worry about observing whether they are consonants or assonants.
7. Do not use unnecessary adjectives. Useless will be all the glues you attach to a weak noun. If you find the one that is necessary, it alone will have an incomparable color. But you have to find it.
8. Take the characters by the hand and lead them firmly to the end, seeing nothing but the path you have laid out for them. Don't distract yourself by seeing what they can't or don't care to see. Don't abuse the reader. A short story is a novel stripped of all rubble. Take this for an absolute truth, even if it isn't.
9. Don't write under the influence of emotion. Let it die and evoke it. If you are able to revive it as it was, you are halfway there.
10. Do not think of friends when writing, nor of the impression your story will make. Tell as if the story were of no interest except to the small surroundings of your characters, of which you could have been one. There is no other way to obtain life in a story.
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Eltitoguay
Well-known member
Time and again, critics have accused Horacio Quiroga of being sloppy in his prose. They have called him dirty, careless and negligent. The Spaniard Guillermo de Torre, in a conversation with the Uruguayan, took the opportunity to reproach him for his “negligent” style. Quiroga, stroking his beard, replied sharply: “I am not interested in the language.” In several interviews, the short story writer has assured – some say ironically and others that he is genuinely irritated – that he was not concerned about the rules dictated by the Royal Spanish Academy.
Quiroga ─according to his most reactionary detractors─ wanted to promote a literature based on ruralism. They even accused him of being a country bumpkin.
Although he wrote with a certain modernist influence, he was not a stylist of the language. He did not polish his statements and, in general, his style was sloppy. Guillermo de Torre ─who abhorred his work─ once again, this time in a virulent article, reproached him: “He wrote, at times, a prose that was confusing because of its conciseness; because of its sloppiness, clumsy and vitiated.”
One thing is certain: the linguistic roughness of his creatures, the crude expressions of his characters - crude and unpoetic beings - rejected all lyricism. His style was - or seemed to be - the negation of an art that, at all costs, claimed to be "pure."
Despite everything, his stories contain something more than the chronicle of a village and jungle environment. In reality, they are stories ─tragic or comic─ emanating from a sinister and, often, twisted world. They are pieces that descend into the abysses of human reality, told by a man who, through literature, learned to free himself from the horrible ─and often tragic─ of his existence, marked by abandonment, death and suicide.
His atmospheres were wild: violent and oppressive spaces, inhabited by fatal passions. His settings were, invariably, characterized by decadent families or uprooted people who fought ─both in the jungle and in the heart of the pampas─ in desolate spaces, where misfortune and existential conflicts pulled the strings. The author ─obstinate in practicing an enunciative aridity that did not admit metaphors or comparative links─ displayed before the reader scenes described with a verbal nudity that contradicted the aesthetic exoticism imposed by the prevailing trend at that time: modernism.
There were those who predicted that his art would not prosper. However, to the surprise of those who were suspicious, this was not the case. In Spain, for example, Quiroga was well received and began to be published and, shortly after, republished. In Madrid, the highly influential publishing house Espasa-Calpe ─the first, outside its country, to receive his work with enormous approval─ decided to include him in a select collection of authors that included, among others, Julien Benda, Jean Giraudoux, Marcel Proust and Thomas Hardy.
Quiroga was an avid reader. He delved with equal passion into the works of Shakespeare, Heinrich Heine and Leopoldo Lugones, who would become one of his closest friends. But the austerity he practiced ─the economy of means that his critics so often admonished him for─ was a legacy he took from his favorite author: Edgar Allan Poe, who, of all his literary idols, was the writer who influenced him the most.
His first book, The Coral Reefs , published in 1902, was fueled by a dose of eroticism and decadence that attempted to match the qualities of his masters: D'Annunzio, Maupassant and, above all, Poe. However, it was an immature work of his youth where farrago and stridency still reigned.
His second book, The Other's Crime , a collection of 13 macabre stories dominated by suffocating atmospheres and nondescript characters, exuded the influence of the Bostonian writer from all sides.
However, Poe's influence is most evident - and most carefully crafted - in a work written exactly one hundred years ago: Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte (1917), a collection of 18 maddening stories where Quiroga would reach the pinnacle of his art, through the repeated use of suspense; that is, the extremely careful handling of tension and primary emotion, the effects of which were concentrated on reaching a dramatic moment or a tragic outcome.
In this book, where the most finished pieces are, without a doubt, “The Beheaded Hen,” “The Feather Pillow,” and “The Barbed Wire,” horror and misfortune go hand in hand. Confusing and floating hallucinations, characters who live mired in a gloomy lethargy, and terrifying idiotic children dripping with glutinous drool, are the background of this work whose elements aim to be, at all times, delirious and apocalyptic.
His descriptions, although they use sober metaphors, are accurate: “His honeymoon was a long shiver”; and the house “produced an autumnal impression of an enchanted palace,” he notes there; “the silence was so funereal for his ever-terrified heart that his back froze with horrible foreboding,” he notes there. And if Quiroga was not a model of style, he was, on the other hand, a master of tight synthesis and verbal economy.
In the “Manual of the Perfect Storyteller” ─where Quiroga asks his followers to believe in the “masters” Maupassant, Kipling, Chekhov and Poe as in “God himself”─, the narrator born in Salto, Uruguay, in 1878, gathered his judgments on literary creation. There, in that small decalogue, among other recipes, he exhorts not to use unnecessary adjectives: “Any glue you attach to a weak noun will be useless,” he advises.
His stylistic austerities, his disdain for the cult of form and his uncouth characters, caused certain authors of the new generation ─Ricardo Güiraldes and Jorge Luis Borges, among others─ to disdain him. And he did not care. He wholeheartedly rejected aestheticism. “Once you have mastered the words, do not worry about observing whether they are assonant or consonant,” he suggests. And later he warns them: “Do not abuse the reader. A story is a novel purged of rubble.”
Paradoxically ─or rather: thanks to that─, few Hispanic American authors have portrayed as starkly as he has, disillusionment, loneliness, incompatibility of characters and failure. Perhaps for that reason, in 1987, the writer Juan Carlos Onetti ─on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the suicide of his fellow countryman─ wrote: “Born as a result of a mysteriously fertile cross between two old prostitutes called envy and ambition, dozens of dwarves declared Quiroga's art obsolete.”
And he was right: following in the great wake left by Horacio Quiroga, later came Felisberto Hernández, Onetti, Rulfo, Arreola, Cortázar, García Márquez, Bioy Casares, Monterroso, Ribeyro, Virgilio Piñera and even Borges himself, eagerly seeking the verbal economy and concreteness that would ultimately characterize their works. Eighty years after the suicide of the great master of the Latin American short story, there is no doubt that the fascination with the pathological and the inclemency of life offered in a style that is at once plain and sharp continue to seduce his readers.
Quiroga: maestro de la austeridad
A 80 años del suicidio del uruguayo, un texto que recuerda su impronta como cuentista.
www.latempestad.mx
"The Deaths of Quiroga" by Augusto Monterroso :
In the book "The Magic Word" Monterroso tells us: "Horacio Quiroga was born in El Salto, Uruguay, on the last day of 1878 and died in Buenos Aires on February 19, 1937, so he shared one of the richest periods of Latin American literature: his contemporaries include, among others: Leopoldo Lugones, José Enrique Rodó, Rubén Darío, Julio Herrera y Reissig, Vicente Huidobro, Ramón López Velarde..."
Deaths accompany Quiroga, whether by his own choice or not, we will never know.
Monterroso continues: "...these absurd deaths will be present in almost all of his work, in which horror predominates, in which strange beings, alcoholics, madmen, or, what is worse, entirely sane, can appear alive at any moment behind each page. Except in a few moments, his stories are united by a common thread: most of them share fatality or ingratitude. There is in all of them, a deep human sense, a grandeur, a virile love for things, for animals, for men, a love for life whose roots we should perhaps seek in that confusion of gunshots and cyanide, in those deaths with which Quiroga greeted each other every day. Quiroga gave very good advice or rules on the best way to write stories, not to live life."
HORACIO QUIROGA, The dead man and other stories :
"A collection of stories whose central theme is death, which masterfully describe situations that show human beings facing the hostility of nature, between terror, irrationality and grotesque chance. These stories reveal his confessed admiration for the masters Poe, Kipling, Maupassant and Chekhov.
Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937). He is valued as one of the best cultivators of the short story in Spanish. His life was full of dramatic episodes, economic and marital problems, aggravated by drugs and the threat of suicide, which he finally committed, like other members of his family. This turbulent personal world and the influence of Edgar Allan Poe leave a mark on his narrative, full of hallucination, violence and delirium."
English: Text: Horacio Quiroga
Illustrations: Manuel Marsol (2012-2013)
Publisher: El Ángel Caído (2018)
ISBN: 978-84-947301-1-5
Number of pages: 80
Dimensions: 150x210mm
«Horacio Quiroga. This gaunt, lanky, and stubborn man knew jeers and applause, wealth and poverty, snakes, small rivers and huge rivers, uncontrollable ants and poisonous honey, and many men trapped in the city or the jungle. But above all, he knew tragedy up close. His life is one long tragic dream. These senseless deaths will be present in almost all of his work, in which horror predominates, in which strange beings, alcoholics, crazy people, or, worse still, entirely sane people, can appear alive at any moment behind each page. Except for a few moments, his stories are linked by a common thread: most of them share fate or ungratefulness. There is in all of them a deep human sense, a grandeur, a virile love for things, for animals, for men, a love for life, whose roots we should perhaps seek in that confusion of gunshots and cyanide, in those deaths with which Quiroga greeted himself every day» Augusto Monterroso
«Quiroga wrote tensely, he showed intensely. There is no other way for a story to be effective, to hit the reader and stick in his memory» Julio Cortázar
«Quiroga must be read» Roberto Bolaño
Manuel Marsol
Manuel Marsol illustrator picturebooks album ilustrado ilustración
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Eltitoguay
Well-known member
...And Bolaño must be read, too...
Roberto Bolaño Ávalos was a Chilean writer and poet, resident in Spain, author of more than twenty books, among which stand out his novels The Savage Detectives, winner of the Herralde Prize in 1998 and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1999, and the posthumous 2666.
Since his death, he has become one of the most influential writers in the Spanish language, as demonstrated by the numerous publications devoted to his work and the fact that three novels—in addition to the two already mentioned and the short Estrella lejano —figure in the first fifteen places on the list compiled in 2007 by eighty-one Latin American and Spanish writers and critics, with the best hundred books in the Spanish language of the last twenty-five years.
His work has been translated into numerous languages, including English, French, German, Italian and Dutch, and at the time of his death he had thirty-seven publishing contracts in ten countries, and posthumously extended to others, including the United States. In addition, the author enjoys excellent reviews from both contemporary writers and literary critics, being considered one of the great Latin American authors of the twentieth century, along with other writers of the stature of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, with whom he is often compared.
( Source: Wikipedia )
(A wink to Quiroga):
12 TIPS ON THE ART OF WRITING STORIES, or TWIDECALOGUE OF THE PERFECT STORYTELLER, by Roberto Bolaño:
Since I am already 44 years old, I am going to give some advice on the art of writing stories.
1. Never approach stories one at a time. Honestly, you can write the same story until the day you die.
2. It is best to write stories three at a time, or five at a time.
If you feel energetic enough, write them down nine or fifteen at a time.
3. Be careful: the temptation to write them two by two is as dangerous as writing them one by one, but it carries within it the same dirty and sticky game of the loving mirrors.
4. You have to read Quiroga, you have to read Felisberto Hernández and you have to read Borges. You have to read Rulfo, Monterroso, García Márquez...
A short story writer who has a little appreciation for his work will never read Cela or Umbral.
He will read Cortázar and Bioy Casares, but not Cela and Umbral.
5. I repeat it once more in case it is not clear: Cela and Umbral, not even in painting ("ni en pintura").
6. A storyteller must be brave. It is sad to admit it, but it is true.
7. Short story writers often boast of having read Petrus Borel. In fact, it is well known that many short story writers try to imitate Petrus Borel.
Big mistake: they should imitate Petrus Borel in dress! But the truth is that Petrus Borel knows almost nothing! Neither about Gautier, nor about Nerval!
8. Okay, let's come to an agreement. Read Petrus Borel, dress like Petrus Borel..., but also read Jules Renard and Marcel Schwob, above all read Marcel Schwob and from him move on to Alfonso Reyes and from there to Borges.
9. The truth is that with Edgar Allan Poe we would all have more than enough.
10. Think of point number nine. One must think of point number nine. If possible, on one's knees.
11.Highly recommended books and authors: "On the Sublime", by Pseudo Longinus; the sonnets of the unfortunate and brave Philip Sidney, whose biography was written by Lord Brooke; "The Spoon River Anthology", by Edgar Lee Masters; "Exemplary Suicides", by Enrique Vila-Matas...
12. Read these books and also read Chekhov and Raymond Carver; one of whom is the best short story writer this century has produced.
|
| Santiago de Chile, 1953 - Barcelona, 2003 |
Roberto Bolaño Ávalos was a Chilean writer and poet, resident in Spain, author of more than twenty books, among which stand out his novels The Savage Detectives, winner of the Herralde Prize in 1998 and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1999, and the posthumous 2666.
Since his death, he has become one of the most influential writers in the Spanish language, as demonstrated by the numerous publications devoted to his work and the fact that three novels—in addition to the two already mentioned and the short Estrella lejano —figure in the first fifteen places on the list compiled in 2007 by eighty-one Latin American and Spanish writers and critics, with the best hundred books in the Spanish language of the last twenty-five years.
His work has been translated into numerous languages, including English, French, German, Italian and Dutch, and at the time of his death he had thirty-seven publishing contracts in ten countries, and posthumously extended to others, including the United States. In addition, the author enjoys excellent reviews from both contemporary writers and literary critics, being considered one of the great Latin American authors of the twentieth century, along with other writers of the stature of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, with whom he is often compared.
( Source: Wikipedia )
(A wink to Quiroga):
12 TIPS ON THE ART OF WRITING STORIES, or TWIDECALOGUE OF THE PERFECT STORYTELLER, by Roberto Bolaño:
Since I am already 44 years old, I am going to give some advice on the art of writing stories.
1. Never approach stories one at a time. Honestly, you can write the same story until the day you die.
2. It is best to write stories three at a time, or five at a time.
If you feel energetic enough, write them down nine or fifteen at a time.
3. Be careful: the temptation to write them two by two is as dangerous as writing them one by one, but it carries within it the same dirty and sticky game of the loving mirrors.
4. You have to read Quiroga, you have to read Felisberto Hernández and you have to read Borges. You have to read Rulfo, Monterroso, García Márquez...
A short story writer who has a little appreciation for his work will never read Cela or Umbral.
He will read Cortázar and Bioy Casares, but not Cela and Umbral.
5. I repeat it once more in case it is not clear: Cela and Umbral, not even in painting ("ni en pintura").
6. A storyteller must be brave. It is sad to admit it, but it is true.
7. Short story writers often boast of having read Petrus Borel. In fact, it is well known that many short story writers try to imitate Petrus Borel.
Big mistake: they should imitate Petrus Borel in dress! But the truth is that Petrus Borel knows almost nothing! Neither about Gautier, nor about Nerval!
8. Okay, let's come to an agreement. Read Petrus Borel, dress like Petrus Borel..., but also read Jules Renard and Marcel Schwob, above all read Marcel Schwob and from him move on to Alfonso Reyes and from there to Borges.
9. The truth is that with Edgar Allan Poe we would all have more than enough.
10. Think of point number nine. One must think of point number nine. If possible, on one's knees.
11.Highly recommended books and authors: "On the Sublime", by Pseudo Longinus; the sonnets of the unfortunate and brave Philip Sidney, whose biography was written by Lord Brooke; "The Spoon River Anthology", by Edgar Lee Masters; "Exemplary Suicides", by Enrique Vila-Matas...
12. Read these books and also read Chekhov and Raymond Carver; one of whom is the best short story writer this century has produced.
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Since we're quoting books, here's the 'opening of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good-
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good-
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
aCBD
Well-known member
I have no prime, knowing me i would end up ordering more and watching more tv.
Ordered 'Greg Green Cannabis Breeder's Bible' and the other book is from Mike M, former breeder of the extinct swiss seedbank Alpine Seeds. Pretty excited to gain new and detailed knowledge.
oh you read the smart people booksI have no prime, knowing me i would end up ordering more and watching more tv.
Ordered 'Greg Green Cannabis Breeder's Bible' and the other book is from Mike M, former breeder of the extinct swiss seedbank Alpine Seeds. Pretty excited to gain new and detailed knowledge.
i found this the other night in one of those book box things and the person i was with said it was a good book
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (novel) - Wikipedia
aCBD
Well-known member
That seems to be a pretty good read. What a great find!oh you read the smart people books
i found this the other night in one of those book box things and the person i was with said it was a good book
its a pretty good bookA Tree Grows in Brooklyn (novel) - Wikipedia
Those book boxes always have and hold something special.
