Redlining

Redlining was the once-common practice in which banks would draw a red line on a map—often along a natural barrier like a highway or river—to designate neighborhoods where they would not invest. Stigmatized and denied access to loans and other resources, redlined communities, populated by African-Americans and other people of color, often became places that lacked businesses, jobs, grocery stores and other services, and thus could not retain a thriving middle class. Redlining produced and reinforced a vicious cycle of decline for which residents themselves were typically blamed.

This is how I think my main subunit was treated for years. My younger colleague blames himself for not having gotten more done, but I disagree.

An interesting book to read

Enrique Krauze, Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America, reviewed by Jorge Volpi.

Krauze’s contradictions are not those of his contemporaries or his masters. Although he was immune to the Marxist virus, his ideological consistency is admirable. Yet his books, especially Redeemers, exhibit an intense fascination with people who burned with the passionate intensities of the twentieth century. In his political essays—starting with Por una democracia sin adjetivos (For a Democracy Without Adjectives), published in 1984—Krauze set himself the task of fighting this trend, whereas in his historical work he shows a certain approval bordering on admiration of men with impetuous and dyspeptic temperaments, so different from his own, such as José Martí, José Vasconcelos, José Carlos Mariátegui and even Paz. Perhaps this explains why his portraits of them are the most brilliant ones in Redeemers. It almost doesn’t matter that he then starts throwing darts at Che, Evita Perón, Subcomandante Marcos and even Hugo Chávez. After all, they are simply politicians: men, and one woman, with ideas, not of ideas, to use his rather tortured formulation.

Once again in the company of Aguilar Camín, the editor of Nexos, Krauze has become one of the last surviving members of his species. If someone were to write a sequel to “Four Seasons of Mexican Culture,” they would discover that contemporary writers are behaving quite differently. The traditional path to achieving recognition—by founding a magazine, forming an ideologically coherent group, being on good terms with various power players, publishing articles about current events and appearing frequently in the media—has become impractical and even irrelevant for the generations of 1985 and 2000. That Krauze’s Letras Libres and Aguilar Camín’s Nexos are currently the only journals of record in Mexico is the best proof of this change; nobody younger has founded a print or electronic publication that’s even remotely equivalent.

Starting with the transition to democracy in 2000, the Mexican cultural world began to break apart and lose the influence it enjoyed under the PRI. The job of political commentary has passed from intellectuals to political scientists and pundits, and the privilege of creating literary prestige has moved from magazines to blogs and social media networks. Within this chaotic and unstable scenario, Krauze and Aguilar Camín—and maybe one or two others—are survivors, living witnesses to an era in which intellectuals tried to be men of ideas as well as men of action. Redeemers is a lucid and moving homage—a swan song—to that tradition by one of its last protagonists.

Praça Saens Pena

Limite (another film I would like to see)

“Limite” doesn’t exactly belong in the Museum of Modern Art’s New Directors/New Films series, because it was first released almost 50 years ago and was directed by a Brazilian, Mario Peixoto, who is now almost 70 years old. However, its inclusion in the series can be explained by its relative obscurity, the praise it received from Sergei Eisenstein and its extraordinarily youthful energies. “Limite” is feverishly beautiful and desperately ambitious, even when it isn’t clear.

La hora de los hornos

Among other characteristics, a gorgeous film.

La guerra del Chaco, documental boliviano

Words Without Borders

Here it is, and I am working on other just-right places to send some of my left-handed stuff.

New Cortázar

From the Observatory. On eels and much more. I would like to read this book.

On Space and Time

I have already said that it is not time I need, but psychic space. I’m happier working in longer stretches of time than shorter ones, but I am happy with shorter ones, too. And with all the academic advisors going on about how you can work in 15 minutes, 25, and so on, as though this were a new idea, I hasten to agree although it is not my point.

I need a couple of hours to get the 15 or 25 minutes because I need time to become the person who does academic work and time again to become the person who meets the world. To start I have to first look at the papers, breathe, call my mind back to me, remember that I have a valid mind, convince myself of it. To finish I have to pack these things up so that, as I go about the world wherein I am told I do not have a valid mind, the mind I will want to use later is not damaged.

If I had a situation where I could be myself all the time, I could easily slip in and out
of work, as I did in other times and places. But without that, I have to have buffer time
around all work time.

Dwight Macdonald

This article explains a great deal about life before the postmodern mixing of high and low and numerous other things that existed before my time.

It is vacation and I have indulged in some perhaps low and middlebrow culture. I have read James Lee Burke, Jolie Blon’s Bounce, set in the bayous; Dedra Johnson, Sandrine’s Letter to Tomorrow, set in Mississippi and New Orleans; and Jonathan Kellerman, Mystery, set in Los Angeles.

Now I am rereading Roland Barthes, La Tour Eiffel, and starting Leonardo Padura, El hombre que amaba a los perros and also the essays in the catalogue for Olmec. All of these current readings are serious, but they do not seem like work.

Films I would like to see before the vacation ends are Herzog, Into the Abyss, and the new edition of The Gold Rush.