Reading: Need for the Bike by Paul Fournel

There is nothing about Paul Fournel's meditative little volume on his lifelong addiction to bicycles that smacks of avant-garde literature. Reading it, I was reminded of an episode from my college days in which a bunch of us, fanatical devotees of experimental cinema, attended the premiere screening of an eminent vanguardist's new work. The film proved to be a remarkably normal documentary about the filmmaker's other passion. I think it was on the restoration of wooden toy train sets or dancing nutcrackers, or something along those lines (but I've forgotten, just as I've forgotten his name). It was a perfectly beautiful and simple documentary, but I was so desperate to locate deep metaphorical and formal subversions of the genre between its frames that I scarcely appreciated it.

But I've aged, and mellowed. I read Need for the Bike with pleasure, neither looking for nor noticing even one example of Oulippian technique. For Fournel is, according to Wikipedia, the president and also the "Provisionally Definitive Secretary" of Oulipo, a French group of mathematically interested writers who set up rigid constraints and then attempt to write literature within them. For instance, from the Wiki:

"S+7, sometimes called N+7 

Replace every noun in a text with the noun seven entries after it in a dictionary. For example, "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago..." (from Moby-Dick) becomes "Call me islander. Some yeggs ago...". Results will vary depending upon the dictionary used. This technique can also be performed on other lexical classes, such as verbs."

 
Only the French could turn Mad Libs, the mildly amusing children's word replacement game booklets we used to fill out on long pre-teen car rides, into an avant-garde literary movement. But the sense one gets from Fournel's book about cycling is that in describing the many roads he's taken on his bicycle, he's also meditating on the road not taken. Deep into this short book of short chapters he writes "for a long time I wondered why I wasn't a racer." He then answers his own musing: "the objective reasons are many: I had 'better things' to do, and at the age when one tries to become a racer, I had set off on other adventures."

Wherever he has been, whatever he has been doing, Fournel has always had a bicycle to turn to, for exercise, escape, meandering, socializing. "I've only owned beautiful bikes," he writes. "I prefer rigid but supple steel, which isn't really so heavy...." Fournel writes about crashing, about the absurd tan that results from thousands of miles cycled in shorts, jersey and ankle socks. He writes of scaling the most notorious mountain roads made famous by the savageries of the Tour de France, and the sense of ownership of the landscape that comes from pedaling urgently through it. Before they even get on their bikes he knows from the look of his companion's legs what sort of a ride they will have together, how much competitive potential is there. He fondly describes the state of permanent, dull ache the rider feels in his calves and quads for the duration of the cycling season. The bike is his barometer of all things: "I know that if I succomb to depression, it will start with a breakdown in my thighs. It will start with cycling sluggishness, and the rest will follow."

This, you may have gathered, is not a book for everyone. If hearing the word "Campagnolo" doesn't trigger a flutter of acquisitive adrenaline at your temples, if you're uninterested in having a peek at the cutouts in my bottom bracket, if you find nothing romantic about a velodrome, or don't even know what one is, if you object to spandex shorts, if your legs aren't sore and you're scarless, if you've never heard of the Paris-Roubaix, you may not find this book as charming as I do.

Reading: Imajine by Claudel Casseus

In Port au Prince, before the earthquake, living on the brink of disaster was the status quo for countless Haitians. Now, almost fifteen months after the disaster, life among the ruins is the new normal. The media tells us that half of the 1.5 million people made homeless have now returned to their former homes, or have found new ones, but wherever we drove in the capital last month it seemed that every vacant lot and public space was still crammed with tent cities. No major roads remained blocked with rubble, but I saw many buildings in a state of near-collapse, tilted and slanted, their poorly engineered concrete slabs jutting into the sky at all angles. They look, these former buildings, as if the earthquake had only happened last week.

Not so the tent cities, which are developing a sense of permanence. The once grand, open expanse of the Champ de Mars, directly in front of the as-yet still undemolished, collapsed and impotent national palace, is full of tents, some now with reinforced walls of plywood and metal. It looks as if every last rusted tin corrugation, ersatz television antenna, tattered blue polytarp and urine-stained alleyway of a Rio de Janeiro favela had been teleported here and dropped in front of the equivalent of the White House. This is no longer a refugee camp, it is a community, complete with restaurants, bars in which to gather and watch television, hair salons, hookers, fried plantain salesmen, midwives, neighbors and hoodlums. It is all too easy to imagine that unless presented with a pleasant alternative, nobody is going nowhere no time soon. At the moment neither options pleasant nor unpleasant seem to be presenting themselves, despite the hundreds (thousands?) of NGOs that have flooded the city with housing schemes, feasibility studies, risk assessments and white SUVs.

It is an unfulfilled cliché of development and aid work that the population being aided should, for best results, be consulted, involved in the process and invited to help shape its own destiny. But a recent literary project showcases, for me, just how rare it is for a Haitian perspective on the earthquake to take center stage. Imajine, by Claudel Casseus, is not a prescription for relief or reconstruction, it is a personal narrative of how one Haitian man experienced the earthquake and its aftermath. Reading it makes one realize that our comprehension of what the quake was like is based on images, and on a few quotes from traumatized citizens collected and selected by foreign reporters in the days immediately following the catastrophe. It showcases, by extension, the limitations of the very narrow lens through which we view most international events, despite the potential of the internet to bring us direct reports from those affected.

Imajine is essentially a work-for-hire, produced, enabled and published by conceptual artist and musician Bill Drummond. But the words in it are those of Claudel Casseus, perhaps a typical underemployed, eager, brilliant and sometimes desperate Haitian young man. There are many like him in Port au Prince, people with vast unrealized potential, their creative possibilities and dreams squelched by racism, borders, corruption, politics and poverty. Nobody else, however, could have written Imajine.

As a participant in the December 2009 Ghetto Biennale, Bill Drummond painted the provocative and uncomfortably prescient slogan "imagine you wake up tomorrow and music has disappeared" on a wall in the Grand Rue of Port-au-Prince. Claudel Casseus steadied the ladder for him. In the days after the earthquake, less than a month after the triumphant finale of the biennale, participating artists, now back at their homes all over the globe, set up a master list and an email network to exchange news and reports of how their newly made Haitian friends and collaborators had fared in the earthquake. Nobody knew anything of Casseus' whereabouts, nor what might have happened to him.

"Imagine you wake up tomorrow and music has disappeared."

Some two weeks later Bill Drummond's cellphone rang. Through the electronic fog he recognized Casseus' voice, but the connection was too bad and the language barrier too great for him to understand much more than the simple fact that his former ladder-holder was alive. He wondered how he could help, for surely that transatlantic telephone call represented a request for assistance. Drummond's answer to this question continues to elude many of the NGOs working in Port-au-Prince, despite its simplicity: if you want to help a Haitian in this nightmarish time, give him or her a job. Drummond proposed a work-for-hire, commissioning Casseus to write a five-thousand word account of how he had experienced the earthquake. Imajine is the result of Casseus seizing this opportunity by the horns; he spent countless hours in an internet café pouring out his memories in emails to Drummond. Ultimately, his account ran to some sixty pages.

The Grand Rue on runoff election day, March 20th.

Casseus' descriptions of the psychological effects of the earthquake demonstrate the shortcomings of journalistic accounts, so often written by observers arriving on the scene after a catastrophe has already occurred. I remember reading in various stories that Haitians were traumatized and that many "refused to set foot in any building," and that this was complicating efforts to get people to return to their homes, but I didn't really understand the emotional depth of their sentiment until I read Casseus: "It was impossible to walk by a collapsed building without having the illusion that there might be someone under the rubble screaming for help. Sometimes it might be true and sometimes it might be just a vision that got stuck in your head. If you walked by a building, you can't help but think it is about to fall down on you or that you could have been dead under there if it wasn't for the grace of God and the Spirits."

The power of Imajine lies in the raw, unpolished delivery of Casseus' memories. Typing directly into a terminal in an internet café, the author had neither the means nor the technology to review and edit his own work. He simply let the words flow onto the screen and then pressed SEND, making this book the Zapruder film of earthquake memoirs. It is full of elliptical meanderings, digressions and repetitions, none of which manage to diminish the visceral quality of the writing. Profound truths and painful observations await the reader with each turn of the page. This gives Imajine a unique mode of narrative tension; you continue to read because at almost any moment you may stumble across a surprising thought or illuminating sentence. "This tragedy made me come to the understanding that we human beings are nothing," Casseus writes early on, "and that we should make good use of our time because we do not know when we are going to die."

The deservedly proud author, Claudel Casseus, in the Grand Rue two weeks ago.

I got my copy of Imajine the best way one can acquire a book: I bought it directly from the author, who autographed it for me. It is available directly from Penkiln Burn, and also from Amazon.co.uk, but there are very few copies for sale in Haiti. I'm hoping on my next visit it will be available in every gift boutique in the airport. Ask for it, when you are there buying your duty-free rum.

I, and Rigoberta Menchú

In Solola, Guatemala

Photo: Melle Von Essen

Walking to Williamsburg

Ben Anastas and I will be reading on Thursday, April 29th, at the fabulous Pete's Candy Store, at 709 Lorimer Street in beyond-trendy Williamsburg, Brooklyn. This is my first area appearance in some time, and since I have fantasies of disappearing soon to begin another project almost as unlikely as walking across Cuba, it would be wonderful if you could join me.

Pete's is a comfortable and conveniently located bar that has been hosting one of Brooklyn's very best reading series for over nine years. Cold beer and good books guaranteed. That's at 7:30 PM.

If you are the rare person who is reading this blog and still has no idea that I wrote a book called Walking to Guantánamo, I have a website about the book HERE.

Reading: William Christenberry by William Christenberry (Aperture)

Some regular readers of this blog may have begun to wonder whether its temporary transformation into a clearinghouse for updates on the grave situation in Haiti risks becoming permanent. Although I will do my best to continue the flow of Haiti news, especially once the major media has inevitably turned away from what will certainly be a very long story, I want to assure you that I will never abandon antarcticiana's core mission, which consists in large part of posting long and generally unread reviews and remarks about books I'm reading, regardless of their publication date.

It is always a delight to discover a great artist about whom you were totally ignorant, despite the embarrassment. For instance, I keep wondering how a cultured fellow like myself, interested in photography and sculpture, can have lived forty-six years without the name William Christenberry ever having registered in my consciousness? It's mortifying.

On the drive to New Orleans, Laura and I made a detour, a sort of pilgrimage, through Hale County, Alabama, a couple of counties south of Tuscaloosa, off the interstate. It is one of the state's poorest, and Alabama is one of the poorest states. In a couple of arenas Hale County might even be considered an icon of American underdevelopment. Many of Walker Evan's photographs for his depression-era collaboration with James Agee, Let us now Praise Famous Men, were taken there, of malnourished back-country folks living in grinding poverty. Christenberry's work in Hale County, so near his home town, was in part inspired by his discovery of that book when it was reprinted in 1960.

And in the 1990s, Hale County became the favored petri-dish for the late MacArthur genius architect Samuel Mockbee's Rural Studio, a unique effort to put cutting-edge avant-garde architecture at the service of the poor. Our intention was to go and see some of the houses his students have built there, at extraordinarily low cost, for marginalized families more accustomed to living in rotting single-wide trailers than in Dwell-Magazine-like splendor.

I'm now working on a story about what we can learn from Mockbee about architecture, so often an elitist profession (how many in the middle class, let alone the poor, have the resources to hire architects?). It was while researching that I discovered Christenberry, who was born in Tuscaloosa in 1936 and began taking strangely intimate photographs of buildings, trees and objects in Hale County in the early 1960s. A multi-disciplinary artist, Christenberry first began using photography as a kind of notational system to feed his other work, but fifty years into his career, the photograph seems to me to be at the center of his enterprise.

Returning to Hale County again and again, perhaps annually, he has photographed and rephotographed structures and locations and vistas in decline, evolution and transformation. His work also sums collectively into a kind of catalog of vernacular typologies, of farm structures, churches, and collapsing houses. (This links his work directly to the aesthetic and approach of the Rural Studio. The small green barnlike structure on this page--I coincidentally took this photograph of it before I had come across Christenberry via Google, a day or so after arriving in New Orleans--is one of his favorite and most photographed structures. It is right next door to the patchwork of rusted tin roofs that make up the cladding of an adjacent Rural Studio building).

Christenberry's images are in some ways conceptually similar to the work of other photographers I number among my favorites: Bernd and Hilla Becher, Camilo José Vergara, and Eduardo del Valle and Mirta Gómez. I've written here about the Bechers, whose rigorous (dare I say Germanic?) adherence to consistent, repetitive compositional strictures is essentially clinical. There is nothing elegiac or emotional about their collections of dozens and dozens of water towers, framework facades, or grain elevators. Considering their choices of subject matter as a whole it seems clear that they are interested in artifacts of human endeavor and industry that will one day inevitably fade into obsolescence, but there is no lament to be found in their clean compositions. In Christenberry's work, however, I sense a deep and abiding longing for the landscape. His revisitations are not an exploration of architectural form so much as a plumbing of his own memory and imagination. He returns again and again to Hale County, to dip his bucket into the well of inspiration.

In a project with comparable elements, José Vergara photographs the same stretches of inner-city blight again and again, over years. Camden, Detroit, Newark and Harlem are some of his favorite haunts. He has, I sense, a love-hate relationship with his subjects. He cannot live without his beloved ghettoized landscapes of collapsing, humble buildings and transitional shopfronts, for they are his constant inspiration. But taken as a whole, his photographic catalog of devastation is as incisive a critique of racist political attitudes, unequal resource distribution and failed urban policy as any written sociology. He is little concerned with lighting and composition and the other niceties of the medium, all of which would distract from his rush to capture the enormity of the wasted landscape, lest we continue to forget it, continue to avoid it. No one single Vergara image stands alone as an artistic masterpiece; instead, his work's power resides in its breadth and totality. The website Invincible Cities presents only three of Vergara's subject communities, but contains hundreds of images of each, like a personalized google map charting decades of wanderings in the ghettos of America. There is nothing relaxed, or relaxing, about this, in contrast to the work of Christenberry, which finds the author returning to the spiritual home of his imagined and remembered landscape. In the Hale County revisitations the maniacal creepings of the kudzu are like the fond but suffocating embrace of an old friend. The slowly collapsing sheds and old barns have a humanity to them, a sedate and tranquil mortality. His objects and structures slide over the years into a dignified decline. Their destiny is a gracious death by natural causes.

Del Valle and Gómez are more directly concerned with death and decay, primarily in Mexico. Their multiple photographs of the same modest Yucatecan structures document an evolution from wattle and daub Mayan building techniques to the supremacy of the economical and convenient but aesthetically inferior cinderblock. This work isn't about architectural progress or regression, however, so much as it is a meditation on the passing of culture. (Had the palm-frond huts of Haiti never been "improved" by cement, the loss of life there would have been diminished by magnitudes). The Cuban-born couple also owe something to Hollis Frampton, who once filled a developing tray with Spaghetti-O's and photographed it daily as the strands mouldered, shriveled, and dessicated, an experiment much more sublime than it sounds. In contrast to Del Valle and Gómez, when Christenberry goes back again and again to Hale County, he often chooses different angles and vantage points from which to capture his subjects. Rather than documenting change, it seems to me that he is always trying to find something new in those familiar places, something he missed before.

I'll be leaving New Orleans soon, and I'm thinking I'll pass back through Hale County myself, to see what else I might find.

Let's be clear: I took all the photographs here before I had even come across Christenberry, so at best they are an idiot savant's homage.

Reading: Pacific Agony by Bruce Benderson

One positive legacy to emerge out of several decades of over-infatuation with post-modern critical theory is the ongoing debate over the blurry line between fact and fiction. The subject came up during the recent conference on Alexander von Humboldt and travel writing at the British Academy in London, in which I took part.

A kind of memoir, travelogue as a genre floats in the subjective space somewhere between journalism and literary fiction; it isn't always clear the extent to which the employment of novelistic techniques or the shortcomings of the working method divert the reader, and the writer, from a factually accurate presentation of events. During the Cuban travels that became Walking to Guantánamo, for instance, I never pulled out a notebook and started jotting down my interactions with Cubans right in the very moment of speaking with them, as a reporter might; instead I did my best to remember the substance of conversations that evening, or the next day over breakfast, jotting down the turns of phrase and perspectives I thought most intriguing. Much later, those skeletal notes of distant conversations were fleshed out into scenes. It wasn't that I was trying to conceal my intentions from the people I met, it simply seemed intrusive.

Certainly my intention was always to be as true to my experience of events as I could manage, but there can be no doubt that this kind of working method operates in a murky and subjective realm, where the influence of my preconceptions and even state of mind on a given day can neither be known, nor discounted.

The boggy rainforests of the Pacific northwest make a good metaphor for this squooshy literary territory, which may be one reason Bruce Benderson set his novel, Pacific Agony, in the region. By pure coincidence, I was in the midst of reading it when I came to London. The front cover announces "a novel," but the text is pure travelogue. Whether invented or not, Pacific Agony recounts an author's commissioned journey through Washington, Oregon and British Columbia. Think of it as a fiction that employs travelogian techniques.

As a narrator, the jaded and overeducated Reginald Fortiphton has more than his parodic north-eastern liberal-elitist name to overcome, should he hope to weasel his way into the reader's sympathies. He is a dissolute, substance-abusing, convicted pedophile, wallowing in the sordid dregs of an unpurposed life. However brilliant and acidic and witty, his unremittingly bitter and cynical pose has grown stale. Our antihero is near bottom, but somehow he has bluffed his way, perhaps with a few well-crafted sentences, into a contract to write an outsider's meditation on the renegade heritage and splendor of the moist and dripping northwest.

Ooh, he is a noxious and tortured fellow, this pill-popping squalor-seeker. So what does it mean that I secretly agree with his every criticism of our tragic, misguided society? I, too, am seduced by the earth-firsters; I downloaded and read the Unabomber's manifesto with fascination and interest, and was sympathetic to the cause, despite thinking Ted's terrorist tactics repugnant. I am as overwhelmed as Fortiphton by the cancerous creep of the strip-mall and the mind-deadening homogeneity of our franchised culture, and at least as ambivalent about the illusory benefits of choice. I hate cars but, oops, still ride in them. "Nowadays," writes Benderson-Fortiphton, "the term 'increased mobility' had become a ruse. It was about the movement of the next generation from one curtailed space into another, eating at a Denny's or a mammalian Hooters that is exactly the same but in another location, producing a new family unit in another town bound by the same suspicion, resentment, and fear."

Fortiphton dismissively deconstructs the pillars of Oregonian and Washingtonian identity, making snide remarks about supposed regional characteristics like spunkiness, frontier grit, expansiveness of spirit and a firm sense of independence. These platitudinous qualities are defended by a reader, one Narcissa Whitman Applegate, who footnotes and attacks the passages in Fortiphton's manuscript that most offend her sensibilities. The conceit, essentially, is that we are reading her annotated copy, sent by the publisher for her comments and fact-checkery. Benderson's inclusion of the Applegate notes is a crafty device, but Applegate is so shrill, pinched and literal-minded that for most of the book she operates as a sort of self-satisfied caricature of the prim librarian rather than as a fully-realized foil for the decrepit and indecent Fortiphton.

Somewhere along the guided tour Fortiphton discovers, or thinks he discovers, a kind of eco-terrorist conspiracy and game-changing revolutionary spirit personified by his elusive love-interest, an unwashed crusty youth named Judas. "How much I wanted to be a part of their imagined doomsday scenario," he muses about Judas' crew of "ragged marginals, fueled by deep resentment," intent on the overthrow of a "seamless, corporatized hegemenony." Fortiphton spirals into paranoid delusion, and begins to believe that the sponsors of his journey are persecuting and manipulating him. He flees his itinerary, and his per diem, taking shelter in the anonymity of a Vancouver encampment of homeless. At last Applegate shows her usefulness. As she doggedly fact-checks Fortiphton's more and more obscure meanderings her antagonism intensifies, but a seed of doubt begins to germinate in the mind of the reader. "Bizarre that F's references actually are in accordance with known Pacific coast Native American rituals," says footnote #87, "or would be if this were happening more than eighty years ago...."

When her contempt for Fortiphton confronts his recounting of the sorts of trivial historical fact that she perhaps believes only herself qualified to know, she becomes the narrator's unwitting collaborator in the battle between fact and fiction. Despite all his paranoid rantings he is writing a travelogue, and he wants you to subscribe to his version. When Applegate wonders how it is that this derelict could possibly know so much about Quileute folklore we have no choice but understand that he speaks the truth, and sign up.

I like to think it runs in the family dept.

Watch my erudite father discussing his new book, The Anti-Communist Manifestos, on C-Span.

From A Brooklynite on the Ice

Reading: An Episode in the life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira

When the great scientific-minded explorer, Baron Alexander von Humboldt, set out across the globe hoping to discover and understand every last plant, insect and mountain range, his arduous journeys were broken by interludes of genteel luxury. His title and erudition preceded him, and he moved bearing letters of commendation and introduction to the cream of new world society, bedding down in the mansions of the aristocracy of colonialism, rich planters and ranchers pleased to host eminent thinkers from the old world. And eager to hear their news. The combination of adventure and hospitality must have made the early nineteenth century an amazing time to travel. Von Humboldt displayed a fearless and multidisciplinary optimism, examining everything from the geology, botany, topography and astronomy of the places he visited to the agriculture, social structure and psychological characteristics of their inhabitants.

An important part of this immense chronicling, in the age before photography, was visually to represent these distant landscapes and cultures, and von Humboldt traveled to the New World accompanied by a variety of contract painters mandated to capture scenes of nature and life in as faithful a manner as possible. His travels inspired other artists.

One friend and acolyte of von Humboldt's was the German artist Johan Moritz Rugendas, who seems to have spent a melancholic and almost loveless life moving steadily through latin America, painting abundantly. When he wasn't, he was pacing, impotent, in Europe, wishing only to cross the Atlantic once more and rejoin his subject matter. My meager research has revealed no biography of Rugendas, but when I discovered a novel based on his travels, blurbed and introduced by Roberto Bolaño and written by an Argentine writer, César Aira, I ordered a copy immediately.

I was shocked when Aira's novella, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, arrived in the mail from Amazon; the paperback was little more than a flimsy pamphlet. Picture the instruction booklet that comes with an electric coffee grinder, or a hair dryer. Reading it took me less than two hours from start to finish. I found it profoundly weird and not only literally thought it lightweight.

Now, some few weeks later, I'm trying to understand why Aira's imagery is so persistent, even in translation. It won't leave my head. I am almost obsessed with the gigantic two wheeled carts, "contraptions of monstrous size, as if built to give the impression that no natural force could make them budge." The shafts by which these could be hitched to a full ten teams of oxen were so long that they "seemed to disappear among the clouds." Their cargo "sometimes comprised all the goods and chattel of a magnate," and they moved at a glacial pace: 200 meters per day. Rugendas, Aira writes, felt that following them "would be like traveling in time: proceeding rapidly on horseback along the same route, they would catch up with carts that had set off in other geological eras...." Philosophically, Rugendas is fixated on the intense flatnesses of the pampas; he seems to think that reaching the flattest place on earth, something like the umbilical of the planet, will help him to reveal great pictorial truths. In retrospect this seems a bizarre metaphorical anticipation of the concerns of modernist painting, the fixation on the flatness of the canvas itself. Are these things and notions Aira's invention, like his recreation of Rugendas' emotional state? This was precisely my problem with the novel; it is such an infuriating, surreal and seamless blend of fact, fancy and imagination that I never once found myself standing on solid ground. The whole tiny book is one quaking, boggy, postmodern uncertainty.

And yet I can't rid myself of vivid visions of Rugendas, trapped in a hellish lightning storm in the pan-flat wastes of the Argentine plains, dragged face down by one stirrup behind his own horse on a black night full of thunder. I can't forget his disfigured retreat back to the comfortable hospitality of Mendoza, and his earnest friend and disciple Krause, who can barely look him in his ruined face. The Indian cattle-rustlers he painted, charging out of the southern mountains, persist in charging through my daydreams. César Aira is a master conjurer, and like a stubborn teenager at a magic show, I won't rest until I have worked out the tricks.

Reading: Long After Midnight at the El Niño Bien by Brian Winter

For some time now the idea has been swirling around in my brain that Argentina is a country poorly served by the travel literature. There are of course the usual plethora of Lonely Planet guides influencing the movements of gringo visitors through the country. That's not what I'm referring to. Such books have become tired caricatures of themselves, and lately I have more than once caught myself using them for guidance on precisely where not to go, in hopes of avoiding the backpacker hordes. No, what I mean is that I've been searching in vain for a travelogue that lays bare the soul of the vast Argentine nation. After all, Chile, a much smaller and narrower strip of land to the west of the Andes, has one in Sarah Wheeler's excellent Travels in a Thin Country. Tales of Argentina do fill most of In Patagonia, indubitably one of the towering skyscrapers of the genre, but Bruce Chatwin's account rarely ranges farther afield than the boggy wastelands of the remote deep south. It is no more a book about Argentina than an account of frontier life in Alaska could encapsulate life in the United States. What's more, as I've already pointed out, there are scarcely any Argentines to be found between its covers.

I'm still looking, even if Brian Winter makes a gaucho's stab in the right direction with his Long After Midnight at the El Niño Bien. This account of learning to dance the tango in the wee hours of the morning is resolutely focused on Buenos Aires, a city that resembles New York in the sense that, as Winter says, it ought really to be a completely separate country from the rest of Argentina. Nonetheless, both the tango and gaucho culture are right up there with Malbec on the list of things most foreigners would identify as essentially Argentine, and Long After Midnight does a decent job with each. The book is less convincing at forging a link between the two. When he asks where the dance comes from, Winter stirs up an ancient, troublesome debate amongst the group of cronies he frequents in the milongas, as tango halls are known. He apparently sides with "El Dandy," who attributes the origins of the tango to the gauchos, but I say apparently only because the opposing theories are never outlined with comparable clarity. (Winter's posse, always happy to be stood a round by the young Reuters Argentina financial correspondent, are referred to throughout by nicknames like El Tigre, El Chino and El Griego, and for me none of them really emerged from behind these masks of anonymity to become individual characters.)

Mi Buenos Aires, Querido

Winter makes a lot of jokes early in the book about learning to tango in order to meet women and relieve his lonely life in a distant city. He then falls in love with his tango teacher, something he cops to as a major cliché, but it is a savagely unrequited love affair that goes nowhere, and it ultimately feels a bit contrived, a convenient bit of plot paste to glue his milonga adventures together. There are lovely moments of self-deprecation here, however, as when Brian believes his foxy instructress has given him a unique whispered invitation to meet up after class for some serious partnering. Arriving at the dance he discovers only a table full of clumsy dweebs from every corner of the planet, a sort of kaffeeklatsch made up from the lovely Mariela's client list. It's my belief that making fun of oneself is the most effective route to humor in travel writing, and Winter comes up with some zingers. I particularly liked the opening to his epilogue: After I left Buenos Aires, I spent a year living in Mexico City, where I was the most grotesque creature imaginable--a Texan with an Argentine accent. I wore too many sweaters, I couldn't hold my tequila, I insisted on saying ciao instead of adios, and I had a strong urge to kiss everyone I met on the cheek, including men.

Winter dips into Argentine history, giving us Perón and populism, but he glances over the dictadura's more recent decades of horror, which he argues were less fertile ground for the tango. This is unfortunately akin to ignoring the holocaust in a consideration of the two Germanies, circa 1960. He argues that "the parallels between the fortunes of the tango and Argentine politics throughout history are truly striking," and goes on to say that the dark and melancholic tango "rose to prominence amid a time of prosperity almost unprecedented in the world; and then it nearly disappeared during the country's darkest hour." It is an elegant thought, but one which Winter promptly contradicts on the very next page, when he notes that between 2000 and 2004, "the worst years of the Argentine crisis...the number of milongas in Buenos Aires doubled."

A poster in front of the Casa Rosada demands justice

It is cruel but irresistible to point out that Winter, the Reuters financial correspondent covering one of the largest economic meltdowns of all time (at least prior to the United States of the last two years), demonstrates his perfect qualifications for a subsequent job as deputy foreign editor at USA Today when he opts to abandon the "astonishing sight" of thousands of demonstrators banging on pots and pans at 4 o'clock in the morning in the grand plaza in front of Argentina's Casa Rosada, the pink white house. Caught up in history, he succumbs to peer pressure and rushes off with his milongüero cohorts to visit a whorehouse.

Demonstration? There's a football game on...

Reading: Just Like Us by Helen Thorpe

About a decade ago my father predicted, in an entirely non-judgmental way, that by the year 2025 the USA would become a bilingual country, and that soon those unable to speak both English and Spanish will find themselves at a severe disadvantage. This demographic transformation began decades ago and shows no signs of slowing. In cities like Los Angeles and Miami bilingualism has been a functional reality for a long while already; the most enormous shift of the last decade has been the spread of the Hispanic immigrant presence from big city enclaves and the labor-intensive segments of the agricultural sector into every corner of the United States, from villages in Oregon to cities in Maine and horse farms in Kentucky. I view this vast hidden and spreading underclass of Mayan and Incan and Olmec descendants as just the latest of the many waves of immigrants to arrive, struggle, be exploited and dismissed, then ultimately integrate and finally be recognized for helping "to make this nation great." However, the reactionary forces today aligned against them suggest that the Ellis Island paradigm has been definitively abandoned. The country is too full, argue our governors and congressional leaders, some only one or two generations removed from Napolitan gardeners, Polish masons and Irish canal-diggers. The Mexicans, Salvadorans and Ecuadorians are not like our parents were, they say, they don't want to learn English, they don't want to integrate.


Current policy amounts to little more than a war on immigration, particularly the illegal kind. What we have now is an expensive disincentive program based on the notion that if we make it sufficiently difficult to cross the border, live, and work here, by building real as well as administrative fences, people will stop coming. At its most extreme this means that as a nation we now seem to be comfortable provoking aspirant immigrants to more and more dangerous crossings, in the asphyxiating bowels of automobiles, locked in shipping containers, or on foot across the most parched and forbidding corners of the desert, where many routinely die of thirst and exposure. But, like the war on drugs, this war on immigration is doomed to fail, and for some of the same reasons. Like cocaine users, we create the demand. Our comfortable cost of living is subsidized at every level by illegal immigrant labor, kept conveniently inexpensive by its very illegality. The undocumented underpaid have little recourse to collective bargaining and impose less of the costs of taxation and compliance with labor law on employers. Any urge to agitate for better pay or an improved situation is overshadowed by the threat of discovery and deportation. In order for our tomatoes and our remodeling projects and our lawn-mowing to cost us so little (so much less than they do in Europe, for instance) requires both the presence of the illegal immigrant and his lack of status. Furthermore, it is in our interest that wages stay low in the home countries, so that the tee-shirts, bananas, and auto-parts we import from down south will remain almost risibly affordable. It may be a Marxist platitude, but NAFTA removed barriers to the free flow of capital at the same time we were clamping down harder and harder on the free flow of labor. Given institutionalized inequalities like those that see garment manufacturers in Central American free trade zones paying their assembly workers as little as twenty cents an hour, labor will continue to take matters into its own hands, or feet.


We need them desperately. Without this army of Tyson chicken parts packers, Le Cirque pot-scrubbers, country club fairway manicurists and warehouse pallet-loaders, many of America's last remnant industries would grind to a halt. But many of us seem to feel we don't want any more of them, and we don't want to legalize the ones who are already here, and our culture is being eroded, and the other day I went into a grocery store and, goddammit, the whole place, from customers to clerks, was full of latinos gabbling away at one another in Spanish. Let's send them all back.

The raging national debate over immigration, and the public policy to match it, is as self-contradictory and bi-polar as that last paragraph.


In Just Like Us, Helen Thorpe has written a deft and compelling investigation of the current, messy, state of affairs. Her account of the trajectories of four inseparable Latina high-school students, two legal and two illegal, quickly leads us into a zone completely alien to that of the typical complacent Anglo citizen. It is a world in which every time a person gets into a car they need to worry what might happen if they should be stopped; one where inter-state travel is forbidding and dangerous, and international travel out of the question; one in which talented students, the country's future engineers, doctors and inventors--the exact same people who are meant to be innovating us right out of our current crisis and into a sustainable green economy--are stopped dead in their educational tracks for want of a social security card. Imagine a life in which any of the countless situations in which we are asked to show identification, from entering large office buildings, to renting apartments and buying used cars, is freighted with anxiety. No wonder the Spanish-speaking immigrant community turns inward and looks to its own for goods, services, and culture. Since I've never met a Latino laborer, legal or illegal, who didn't intuitively grasp that learning to speak better English would immediately translate into higher wages and better opportunities, it seems clear that right-wing complaints about the failure to integrate ignore the perpetual fear and justifiable paranoia that go along with being undocumented in post 9/11 America. I was reminded more than once of my own harrowing bus journeys in third-world countries, of arbitrary roadblocks where a request for papers might easily degrade into unpleasantness. I had thought such things only happened in countries I visited, not the one where I live. Just Like Us exposes a parallel United States many of us willfully ignore.

The clash between the embracing support system of insular immigrant life and a yearning for access to the opportunities outside it is central to the identity crisis faced by Yadira and Marisela, the undocumented duo who are the heroines of the book. Illegal most of their young lives, they are desperate to assimilate and to integrate, if those ideas include having the same possibilities as the fellow college students from whom they must hide their status. Both of them are strivers who ultimately succeed in attending college in their hometown of Denver, albeit as "international students" (an irony indeed) able to pay out-of-state rates only thanks to scholarship support from various sympathizers. They are, in other words, the elite of their particular underclass, fluent in English and willing to explore every avenue and lead that might help them advance. We realize that these are not representative illegal migrants. The fate of those many others in the same situation who might find the obstacles overwhelming is left implicit. While Yadira and Marisela ultimately graduate, this does nothing to change their situation; they consider going on to law school, but Thorpe suggests that, particularly for Yadira, this is simply a way of putting off the unpleasantness of facing the job market without any documents.


Thorpe spent countless hours hanging out with the girls, their associates and their families over five years, a dedicated, long-term journalistic commitment all the more remarkable because she had to sneak out of the side door of the Mayor of Denver's residence every time she wanted to visit the barrio. That may be an exaggeration, but even after writing this book Thorpe remains married to John Hickenlooper, Denver's popular liberal mayor. Despite his popularity he is far from immune to the political mudslinging that spatters the topic of immigration. He may even be particularly vulnerable to it, given that before going into politics he was a restauranteur. His restaurant company, now in a blind trust, apparently owns most of the eateries and venues in which illegal Denverites (once) wash(ed) dishes and legal ones pass their free time. Thorpe struggles to keep her home life of charity galas and formal receptions separate from her inner-city journalistic endeavors, until mid-way through the project. When an off-duty police officer moonlighting as a bouncer at a Latino disco is murdered by an illegal alien once employed in one of the mayor's restaurants, her worlds collide. I cringed to imagine the pillow talk that must have ensued in the mayoral mansion, although Thorpe swears in her acknowledgments that her husband never wavered in his support for her work, striking out only one word in the finished manuscript. If true it would have been as unsporting of her not to comply as it is rude of me to wonder what the word was.

In the context of blogging, the notion of offering "full disclosure" has a ring of pretension to it, but even though we haven't spent much time in the same social circles in the last fifteen years I will nonetheless mention that Ms. Thorpe is a very old friend of mine. When I knew her well there was no doubt as to her liberal political persuasion; nothing in this book suggests that she has altered course. But Helen is the farthest thing imaginable from a knee-jerker, and in search of journalistic balance she spends far more time than I would have hanging out with the sorts of people who want to build a razor-wire fence between Brownsville and San Diego. There are moments when she almost seems to warm to Congressman Tom Tancredo as he drives her around his old neighborhood, cracking mafioso jokes and telling fuzzy stories about North Denver's version of the San Gennaro festival. Meanwhile, he was plotting the closest thing our most recent elections saw to a single-issue presidential campaign. If it did nothing else, Tancredo's short-lived bid for the Republican nomination forced most of the rest of the candidates further to the right on the immigration issue. And even while the Democrats wrinkled up their noses in disgust they were sticking them in the air to gauge which way the wind was blowing.


With official national joblessness hovering somewhere around the ten percent mark you don't have to be an unemployed rocket scientist to figure out that anti-immigrant populism has a bright future. This is one of the grim lessons of Just Like Us, a book that ought to have a happy ending but instead concludes with its protagonists in much the same place they were at its beginning; after five years of senatorial hand-wringing and congressional pussy-footing, Yadira and Marisela haven't come any closer to being welcomed as productive, legal members of our society, despite their hard-won college degrees. The only really good news I have is to tell you what a pleasure it was to read their stories. Like a well-crafted Hollywood blockbuster, this book anticipates, nay, demands a part dos, and I'm eagerly awaiting the sequel, which I hope will be written in Spanish. Or at least available in a bilingual edition.