- Do you know Carlos Monsivais?
"Not at all.
"But his friend has been for fifty years.
"True, but that eternity does not entitle me to say that I know. Opportunities not missed: during adolescence and youth, huge night walks through the city of Mexico, after long air travel, long stays in other countries shared. I do not mean anything to the intimate life around it is essential data that ignored altogether or just learn from them.
- what?
"Something as important as the place of his birth. Literary Guide for Historic Center Pavel Granados did, I knew that Monsivais was born in the building where Rosales was the Workers' University and later the Teatro del Caballito I remember as the first headquarters of the group Poetry Out Loud.
- Is there?
He disappeared in 1964 when the then ruler Uruchurtu demolished without any need to open that whole block Walk of the Counter Reformation. It lost the old building of Foreign Affairs, where we visited Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes and one day we were introduced to José Gorostiza, the PAN headquarters, a former hotel which had been the headquarters of Álvaro Obregón, and the house that under the mandate of Henry Lane Wilson, Huerta, Felix Diaz and Manuel Mondragon, Nahui Olin's father, signed the Covenant of the Citadel and the death sentence of Madero and Pino Suarez.
To Monsivais, Sergio Pitol and for me that place was an important place because it was the coffee front and the old bookstore Kikos El Caballito. But we never Monsivais said: "I was born here."
Tolerances and intolerances
- What about your childhood?
"I know even less. I would have liked to ask, but I never gave a chance on something that appears in two lines of his autobiography allegedly humorous 1966. Next to the incessant atrocities of our time, there is an awareness that did not exist before by Jose Emilio Pacheco about issues as serious as sexual abuse and bullying and the irreparable damage they cause. Monsivais smiling and talking as if in passing of what it meant for him to be the only Protestant child in a secular school where his classmates yet all-here I can not use the term "partners" - were Catholic.
You can not imagine the virulence of bigotry in those years. And at the same time were considered as something worthwhile and fun as we now see as real crimes. For example, a college professor, decentísimo Christian gentleman, a father of many children and a pillar of society, invited us to eat to boast sporting students before us of how, under another identity and promise of marriage, seduced teens and young girls in maids popular secondary schools. It was like the hunter who boasts hares or birds slaughtered in his last hunting trip. I always thought something terrible, but I do not blame the cowardice and I repent too late.
"So you think the work is a long Monsivais reckoning the boy who was with that Mexico and all that mean?
He pointed to the fact, for now I dare not make interpretations. Nothing else I say that this situation had its flip side: the marginal does not participate in the amusements of his age is the reader and viewer born, so to speak. Moreover, and this itself has pointed out, that child is formed in the Bible of Cassiodorus de Reina and Cipriano de Valera, a masterpiece of the Golden Age which is never taken into account as an essential part of great literature English, while for most of his contemporaries Castilian prose was what they read in the fastest and sloppy translations, paid to one cent per line.
- Did you also read the Bible Reina Valera?
"Yes, but later, thanks to Monsivais. I did not even had approached the Catholic Bibles, except of course the Gospels. Instead of direct reading, which discouraged us almost as an invitation to Lutheranism, had classes of "sacred history" that told us the stories of Adam and Eve and the Flood and the Tower of Babel. Last polygraph
"But Monsivais did not address anything more than religious texts.
"No, when I met her nineteen years, nobody in our age as much as he had read. It is often forgotten that reading is time and we can not take what you read or browsed only peck. Monsivais at that age already had a lot of books perfect and critically assimilated.
"And now, with an activity as intense as yours, what time reading?
I do not know, I can not explain. I think that never sleeps. Monsivais walked around him in English what they call a red herring, ie a red herring that confuses the crawlers. Posed by disorganized and chaotic and, on the contrary, is a brutal discipline and a superhuman capacity for work. Otherwise do not understand how much and how well written.
- Has written more than Alfonso Reyes?
"More than anyone in contemporary Mexico. Compile his works require forty volumes as those of Guillermo Prieto. He is our great man of letters, the last polygraph can write (and talk) about all things. I say talking because their ancestors gave lectures and had no television or radio, no interviews or statements. To all this we must now add internet. How many dozens of couriers dispatch Monsivais day?
- Is that good?
-La hyperproductivity has the disadvantage that prevents the full and finished, as no one can cover the whole work, judge the whole for the part. I swear I'm a real reader Monsivais, I read endlessly during the past fifty years. And seeing the list you presented to me I do not cheat and I confess something much know: The crime film, urban culture and intellectual creation, does the lawyer laughs, the epistolary genre, WLT, Space-constrained, Faces of Mexican cinema and gallery
Luneta, Bolero, Julio Ruelas, Modernist and many more books.
"We have to do an anthology.
"You can do a lot and yet I'm afraid the same thing happen about Reyes. As good as the anthology, and there are excellent, you end up feeling that you are not represented: the meaning of the work is in the variety and the boundless expanse. Each writer is unique and may require more than you can give. Oh yes: we can sue other than him, but in this case the loss will be for us.
"Now give back what he said one day: You need a scholarship to read Monsivais.
"And not just any award, only the MacArthur lasts for five years and is nothing more to Anglo-American writers. Yes, in the rest of my life I love to read what we know of Monsivais.
The Art of Memory
- Why do not you write her memoirs Monsivais in those years?
"You did superbly Sergio Pitol in The Art of Fugue. Theirs is the classic version and the only reality. Things did not exist until there is a text that set. The rest is hazy rang and confusion in which we are immersed.
What happened is what is in the book, not what happened in the real world and in pictures. But remember invented by force. Sergio and Carlos were very surprised when I showed them the facts summarized in one day, as is the privilege of literature, took place over several years. The test-
Pitol story begins in 1957. Sergio I never knew until the following year. Excelsior Monsivais his column delivery of television "the idiot box." Of course, take centuries for us to collaborate in Excelsior. The section was published only in The Culture in Mexico five years later, in 1962. From there go to the home of Juan José Arreola where I losestoy Arreola waiting because we will publish our first title: Victorio Ferri yarns and the blood of Medusa. All this is true but in 1957 I did not know not to Arreola, the Journal of the unicorn did not begin until 1958 and not published our Juan José but later that year.
- care about these details?
"No, really care what they both meant to me as reading guides and fierce critics of my first jobs. What is worth recreating the cultural atmosphere of those years. Seem to distance of several centuries. You can not imagine a world without the internet let alone neither Google nor Wikipedia or cell phones with cameras or iPods, but devoid of photocopiers, tape recorders and even landline telephones. A to communicate with Monsivais had to call a general store to look for him at home. Before us was unthinkable anything but public transportation. Even think about buying a car. Only in cases of extreme urgency is taking taxis or long distance calls made. However, the letters were more of what is now the email. One was written at any time. And for those who began his literary work were unthinkable terms like "market", "scholarships", "awards", "agents."
Half
century - How were the first texts Monsivais?
"There's a Monsiváis
not know. I've heard of three chronic preparatorianas: one on the protest against the invasion of Guatemala, one on the wake of Frida Kahlo and a third on the Cuban pianist and singer Bola de Nieve. The first thing I read it, and I'm tired of praise since, was the essay "On Literature" police in the Half Century magazine.
- In 1953! At fourteen years!
"No, in 1957, at nineteen, but a footnote says that this is a lecture at the Faculty of Arts, 6 July 1956. I understand your confusion because there were two half-century, and three Magazine Mexicana de Literatura, an Sources and Carballo, another Alatorre and Segovia, the third of García Ponce and a fluctuating group because almost invariably were fighting.
"There are big debates on how to call this generation: the half-century, the fifties, the Casa del Lago? What do you think?
"I think there are several promotions
perhaps cast in a single generation: 1) A, in 1950, grouped around the magazine America: Juan Rulfo (but not Arreola), Rosario Castellanos, Jaime Sabines, Rubén Bonifaz Nuño Ricardo Garibay, Dolores Castro, Enriqueta Ochoa, and playwrights: Emilio Carballido, Luisa Josefina Hernandez, Sergio Magana. 2) Another of the first Revista Mexicana de Literatura with some that had already appeared in the First Half Century: Carlos Fuentes, Marco Antonio Montes de Oca. 3) The Lake House is not at all from the fifties: it begins as such in 1961 with Tomas Segovia, already well past half a century, and has its splendor under Juan Vicente Melo between 1962 and 1967, when it ends tragically like so much in Mexico. The Lake House is the hub of the sixty Mexicans.
"I do not see it very clearly.
"Of course not. The scheme for cracks: Where do you put the English of Mexico: Jose de la Colina, Tomás Segovia, Ramon Xirau that are present in several of these magazines? What we do with Monsivais, born in 1938, twenty years after Rulfo and Arreola (originally from 1918 as Chumacero which has its niche in the promotion of Newfoundland, part of the generation of Workshop) and six years later in 1932 that that seems to have come into the world something like half of the Mexican writers? (But not Zaid and Del Paso, among many others).
- What about us women?
"If you will permit me, I beg forgiveness and make a pact to say that the word" writing "includes, in extreme close-up, women. It is very well have noticed injustice and exclusion, but after watching Fox protected the Cetacean and Sea of \u200b\u200bCortez, I think we should reflect on the case and not perpetuate horrors as "l @ s poets of both sexes," "l @ s Monsivais s comrades. " The height of the correction in some manuals I find Americans in their title the word writer. Inside, the writer invariably spoken as she.
Benítez Excluding
"I was born in 1983 and therefore contemplate the landscape as if seeing the pyramids of Egypt, with his forgiveness. My knowledge is hemerographic, ie archaeological. I have no the passions of the living and so I hasten to claim an injustice: why have excluded Fernando Benítez and supplements Mexico in Culture (1949-1951) and Culture in Mexico (1962-1971)? The supplement addresses Monsiváis from 1972 is a very different thing, is not it? And the seventies are not in any way the sixties.
"You're right. We have been a radical ingratitude Fernando Benítez. The supplement was our secular Bible. Sergio Pitol has told how Borges discovered in the bus station due to Mexico's Tehuacán in Culture had published "The House of Asterion. I personal examples I can name you twenty regard. Monsivais many others. And in the supplements themselves all worked together.
"You worked hard on them right?
"I was deputy editor of the former in his last year and the second editor for nine (except the 68 that I played in England and France, as shown by Jorge Volpi). However, this does not appear anywhere. I have completely disappeared as editor or deputy editor of supplements. Monsivais himself never mentioned me to make their stories of Culture in Mexico.
I would ask in any way or charge accounts role, my work was very consistent and very difficult but very secondary to the importance of Benitez and Vicente Rojo. I did talacha anonymous notes and translations autopubliqué although I very rarely. My poems in magazines out of my generation. Regarding the ethics of all this, I never said in a text without signature or pseudonym had not said anything under my name.
"That I did not know.
"I do not think that there was a Stalinist conspiracy to delete, or prune the family portrait. The supplement has become identified almost entirely with Monsivais because he was with Radio Universidad, the true field takeoff. Many of the chronicles of days to save appeared there. He played a very prominent during the 68 and in 1971, when Benitez left in my hands Culture in Mexico, chose to resign and ask Monsiváis who was in London to come and take over the supplement, a decision which I regret. It was the best for everyone.
Fog and steel-
has not said anything Station.
-Was the first of my many jobs together with Monsivais. My teacher Enrique Moreno de Tagle, who was for many other Mexican writers: Jaime Garcia Terres, Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Ibargüengoitia, Montes de Oca, Xavier Wimer and probably many more, took me to the poet Elias Nandino, which was a very generous and he opened a space for young people but not for adolescents: none of us had yet reached twenty. As Monsivais met asked us to do together these pages.
- What is most remarkable that there Monsivais published?
"His first story and the one before the New Catechism for Indians loitering. "Steel Fine Mist" is overwhelmed by rhetoric poetizante then great but it seemed too soon grown old and very sadly:
tried to sink into the breath that flowed in the escape of himself through his body; creating situations to get into them avoiding his face. A coffin with no doors, a breeze arose out of hand. Mist tarnished voice.
I was as confused as him. Listen to this short paragraph:
January spills over collective thalamus of cats. The roof suffers the cold winter and welcomes visitors with indifference ... In the last cat away, the stars are slipping through the pipes and will dispose into sewers.
But "steel Fine Mist" is perhaps the first story that appears to juvenile delinquency in the time and then Mexican Newspeak. It's like a slight sign of the Wave. If the fog was in our child prose no editing, finesse and steel were in the ear of Monsiváis to collect and transform what was heard in the streets:
"So you're backing. When everything is ready. And you what you said, for them and they are loaded. Well, you failed, asshole. If you are fan or not that old and giving them go, you'll pull, it's your move. Pray you rub. Or will you pull or rub.
This story began training as the narrator, unlike the essayist, who owe the best stories in his chronicles.
Contemporaries
the future - what about the essays?
-shoots with amazing ease. Here there there seems to be learning in public. In eleven pages Monsivais can speak a hundred books and propose a thesis that became dominant in Mexico there was no crime novel (unlike the detective novel, unexpected or unnamed then) because we have always distrusted the police. The trial
writes for example: Edgar Allan Poe
, initiator of the genre, is also signaling elements that will later be invited almost mandatory crime fiction: the researcher of great ability and outstanding ability and extraordinary power of reason and domain in the use of analytical and deductive methods, his assistant, admirer and shipper of intelligence the detective is free from this, representatives of official scaffolding almost all researchers who have to put on evidence showing their inability and lack of resources to find a criminal, the problem of the locked room, the prosecution of the innocent, the surprise outcome, the least suspect's guilt, the emergence of Butler and others who also will be repeated.
Reyes and Enrique González Martínez had respectable reading of gender, Jose Luis Martinez had written a seminal paper. However, I know of no earlier Mexican Monsivais gender you have installed that "popular" in the halls of so-called high culture.
More value is needed to make the object of literary study of science fiction. A few months after Sputnik that would change the world to take us to the satellite era, Monsivais he did in his 1958 essay "The contemporaries of the future", perhaps the first Mexican account of the genre from its roots in Lucian of Samosata and Johannes Kepler to Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke.
- Are there other significant texts from this period?
-Many more. I have limited the space that goes between the publication of two books critical for us: Sunstone in October 1957 and the region more transparent in April 1958. By choice and by necessity filled small magazines, the marginal publications, articles and notes, incredibly bad as I'm concerned. Unwittingly contributed to the legend that one group had taken control of all Mexican publications. Not so: we were the first generation that tried to live only on their work without holding any administrative position.
- And the mafia?
"It's a great term, a model of the art of insult that is attributed either to Margarita Michelena and Luis Spota to speak of a literary group as conspiracy, organized crime. Since 1880 at least be infamous in Mexico to the "society of mutual praise." Like everything in this world, real or alleged mafia should be subjected to relentless criticism. Undoubtedly made huge blunders and injustices. But also gave a lot. The excluded have every right in the world to protest against it and attack it posthumously. What I find absurd is that some of the beneficiaries when the injury is still a long ceased to exist.
is also talk of an elite cerradísima. Had it done so we would never have found no chance and I Monsivais (Pitol left for Europe), simple middle-class students did not have any support or belonged powerful families. But the ultimate justification is in the books we read half a century after Sunstone and the Air is Clear, and continue reading and Sergio Pitol Carlos Monsivais.
"Thanks for everything I said.
"On the contrary, thanks for your generosity archaeological to listen.
(Published in Nexus Magazine, May 2008.)
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