estoy tímida pero todo está bien!

It's good for me to experience being shy. It's not like it happens that often. Plus, I can have more empathy for Squid's daughter in her new immersion 1st grade.

Anyway I was *terrified* of this class. I was afraid the prof would fire off some complicated question about my degree requirements or adding the class and I'd freeze up and not be able to answer, and he'd throw me out of the classroom!

Nearly everyone was a native speaker and the prof talked incredibly fast. I'd say for the first half hour I was just desperately concentrating on:

a) being invisible so he wouldn't call on me
b) not fleeing to the bathroom to burst into tears

But then like magic I began following what he was talking about or maybe it's just that he stopped talking about registering, waiting lists (lista de espera...okay that one wasn't so hard...) and how the class will be graded, and started talking about the books. Now, waffly-ass crap about universalismo I can get. As soon as I started understanding him I realized I disagreed painfully hard about everything said. But I think that will be okay.

I got it that he is old school new criticism, latinamerican style, which means (to me) you can ramble on forever without defining your terms and just say anything as long as you make it sound highfalutin'. Also, old school automatic sexist, but not a mean sexist: literature can be feminist and feminine, and feminine lit flowered in the 20th century, and the best woman writer is M.L. Bombal because she is guapissima.

And yes. I must be tormented by 100 yrs of Solitude. Arrrrr matey! But I can take it. Yes! I am tough! El profe then wrote the 5 main points up on the board: We must notice (and talk and write about) how 100 Yrs. is:

1) a perfect expression of creative tropicalism. (which means...?! nada)
2) the expression of perfect musical language.
3) It shows the personal development of the characters. Which makes it so that women are important.
4) something I forgot
5) It's regionalism that is also universalism.

I thought this was hilariously meaningless. In the middle of writing the 5 points, the prof told us lots of stories about medicinal uses of pot, and what his favorite cumb1a is, and what it was like in Berkeley in the 60s, and how he got diarrhea in the airport once. Fortunately I understood that all this was his personal life and didn't take notes on it as having anything to do with Garc1a Marquez.

Oh- there's more. The exemplary Lat. Am. novel - which is (can you guess which novel it is?) is exemplary because:

- it's universal
- it expresses a regional tradition that is timeless
- it is pioneering
- it's the triumph of the ultimate expression of the pure, true language
- it creates a sort of sacred mythical voice of a region
- it has universal themes that are tied to the geography of Lat. Amer.
- it has a voice that's utterly independent of the author

This was all outlined on the board as if it were meaningful...

Um. Yeah. Can you hear my stage-whisper mutter of "whatEVER" from where you're sitting?

There WAS one interesting point which is that 100 Yrs. is very much like C0lombian v@llenato music. And that actually made sense. Yay! I can write a paper on that without wincing too hard. And I will lamely translate that paper into spanish and make my dad correct my awful grammar.

Comments

[zellar]

That's both pathetic and hilarious, but surely you must be joking. I believe I suffered through that same lecture --and isn't *that* (lecture) one of the great ironic word uses of all time--nearly 20 years ago. Good fucking luck.

[Prentiss Riddle]

So did your prof transfer from UT? And does he chain smoke in class? He sounds so familiar!

But I lurved lurved lurved Cien años and am old-school enough to understand and agree with his points. Regional yet universal, timeless yet groundbreaking -- that's exactly right. What's so hard to get? Why does that sound vague? I'm sure I'm just showing off my naive fogey-ness, stuck on what was hip 30+ years ago. Oh, well.

Perhaps you would enjoy the McOndo movement, a group of young turks united in their distaste for GGM. I haven't tracked down any of their books yet and I'm not sure whether they're neo-realists, neo-noir or something else, but they're definitely not magical realists.

If you want to provoke your prof, try out on him my pet theory that García Márquez stole the whole historico-magical-realism thing from Günther Grass. Which was then re-stolen by Salman Rushdie. The latter point I'm completely confident of, the former is a stretch. You could do a decent paper on The Tin Drum, Cien años and Midnight's Children.

Does the tropicalismo your prof talks about relate explicitly to the tropicalismo in Brazilian music? That was the generation kicked off by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, open to rock&roll and Stockhausen and lots of other global influences but also rooted in Brazilian music, very political but in veiled terms because of the Brazilian dictatorship. And terrific music! I'm sure they read GGM and other writers of the boom but I don't know whether they borrowed the term from them.

[badgerbag]

I suffered through it too at UT in what... 1986... 87... I lied that 100 yrs is my least favorite of "those books". G@briela Cl0ve and C1nnamon is much, much more irritating. Oddly I can deal happily with Fl0rida vs. B0edo or blatant modern1sm which I'm constantly translating and enjoying just as romanticism is not irritating though I bet it was at the time.

McCondo totally made my day! It's not like I don't appreciate the grand 100, but it wears thin after too much handling.

[Prentiss Riddle]

I still haven't read any Jorge Amado -- probably holding out till my Portuguese is up to the task -- but yeah, he deals a little too much in folkloric stereotypes for some people's taste. I've heard him referred to as "literature for tourists".

Wow! I'm impressed at your quick read of this prof's inadequacy. I had a prof like that at Stanford in LatAm history that elaborated at length about why indigenous women found the white conquerors irresistible ...all that power, you know. In a roomful of white men, I was absolutely horrified and too intimidated to say anything, unfortunately.

Live and learn.

[Prentiss Riddle]

[Name withheld], I guess what you're alluding to is that conquerors used force, not allure. Very true, I'm sure.

But my understanding is that there were some first contacts at which both sides did find each other quite attractive. Sailors are probably always horny after months at sea and people from materially more limited cultures can find trade goods very sexy, but I'm romantic enough to believe that sometimes opposites do attract.

[Susana]

>>I guess what you're alluding to is that conquerors used force, not allure. Very true, I'm sure. But my understanding is
Uh, no, not even close. I'm talking about the absolutely incredible ethnocentrism, and egocentrism that puts his (your?) dick in the middle of our discussion; the 'personalization' (read, trivialization) of structural forces like colonialism, colonial economies, genocide and oh yeah, rape; and finally, like Badger says, the fuzzy thinking and bland terms that disguise any meaningful intellectual substance.

But I digress.
s.