Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Carta a una escritora

Querida Pola,

te escribo aquí porque no encuentro tu perfil en Facebook. Me agregaste como amiga, tras yo pedírtelo, y una semana después has desaparecido. Me pregunto si la razón de ese hacer mutis por el foro no está directa u oblicuamente relacionada con la actitud de Johan Van Vliet en tu novela sobre sus Transmisiones Yoicas. Quiero decir si no habrá sido la amigable ferocidad de tus miles de agregados lo que te haya empujado a tomar la decisión radical de borrarte del mapa, o de interponer entre tú y ellos —entre tú y nosotros— la negrura de un telón de scripts administrados por los nerds de Palo Alto. O quizá sólo sea una estrategia cinegética tuya: huir a una selva tropical que te sirva de atalaya para desde allí, oculta entre la espesura, observarnos, analizarnos, investigarnos: teorizarnos. Pero me atrevo a decir que tienes miedo, Pola. Miedo de que uno de estos días cualquier taxista que haya leído decenas de veces El guardián entre el centeno te recoja en una esquina lluviosa de una ciudad del cono norte del mundo. Así los taxistas, así la fama.

Puede que hayas mantenido con ese mundo una actitud equívoca. O quizá el mundo se haya formado una imagen errónea de Pola Oloixarac, por culpa del reflejo público que emanan tus actividades de savant disfrazada de aterpoppy cultural. El canto, la antropología, la escritura, la filosofía, tu argentinidad no eran razones suficientes para catapultarte al Hall Of Fame en que te encuentras. Pero si a ésas les unimos tu condición femenina, tu inteligencia y tu natural belleza, Pola, obtenemos para el terreno artístico lo que para el fútbol es Diego Forlán (Messi es mejor, pero algo más feo). Algo muy injusto, desde luego. Injusto para los hombres, para las feas, para las otras guapas, para quienes escriben y para quienes leen, para los auténticos nerds, para los que no leen ni escriben ni lo harán en toda su vida, para toda esa alteridad insignificante. Injusto también para ti, Pola. Porque leo críticas de tu novela y en todas ellas sus redactores no han evitado la tentación de significarte en alguna o varias de las categorías que he mencionado. No pueden valorar solamente tu libro: también tienen que sopesarte a ti o algún aspecto tuyo, alguna característica o aptitud extraliteraria, la que sea. La envidia los define y mueve. Dijo Montaigne —tantas cosas dijo—: “Se ha de rebajar el oro mediante algún otro material para adaptarlo a nuestro servicio”. ¡Oh, Pola, son tan predecibles!

Cuando te editaron en España y leí las primeras reseñas de Las teorías salvajes (que tú abreviabas en tu espacio de Facebook con un encantador LTS), fui corriendo a comprar el libro. Lo devoré en una noche insomne en la que eché en falta la costumbre del mate y los puchos. Tan inmenso es, Pola. Tan bestia cabría decir. Me enamoré de inmediato de la teoría sobre la que armas la narrativa y las disquisiciones ensayísticas insertas en LTS. Tú, en un libro de bolsillo —un hardcover de luxe con tamaño de paperback—, zanjas las motivaciones que me hicieron caer rendida a los pies de mi profesor de Estética en la facultad, y otorgas por fin, a través de Kamtchowsky, un sólido sentido poético al Ser nerd, sin los lloriqueos portuarios de Junot Díaz ni la carga peyorativa implícita en las torsiones de cuello post-universitarias —prosa/prosaica—. Por cierto, ya que estoy déjame que te diga qué grandes veo los nombres adjudicados a los personajes de tu novela. Ese Pabst, con su estar-a-un-lado onanista, interviniendo dialéctica pero no materialmente, cual director de cine que se apropia escenas ajenas (en tanto creaciones espontáneas por él incontrolables) a las que su mera observación sesgada dota de sentido crítico. La propia Kamtchowsky, que fusiona las nociones del empirismo kantiano con la faceta de activista político del otro Chomsky; y que también trae a la memoria la inhabitabilidad de la capital de Kamchatka. Andy y Mara, reciclando la Arcadia en impasses lisérgicos de trascendencia adulterada. Rosa Ostreech, cuyo apellido, como contraposición entre la belleza descrita del personaje (y de su nombre propio) y la fealdad canónica atribuida a las avestruces, funciona como un oxímoron terrible. Qué decir de Van Vliet, siendo éste uno de los más reputados comerciantes mundiales de flores, y conociéndose tu amor por las orquídeas. Nada es casual en LTS. A cada detalle le has transmitido tus afinidades, tus conocimientos, tus teorías, tu estar-en-el-mundo, tu yo. Diría que nada es arbitrario en ti —y perdóname si crees que estoy cayendo en lo mismo que critico en los demás: en el secuestro del sujeto con la excusa de analizar el objeto; sigue leyendo y verás que no es así—, pues hasta el nombre de tu blog, que existe fuera de la ficción y mencionas en LTS, tiene resonancias asociadas a las atribuciones con que la alteridad cincela tu imagen: el magazine de Melpómene —cortazarianos cogotudos—, la mujer que lo tenía todo pero no era feliz. ¿Qué es necesario, pues, para ser feliz? ¿Que nos falte (de) algo? ¿Algo alcanzable con cierto esfuerzo pero que, cuando se consiga, el premio adherido al código de barras, su bonus, sea la pérdida de parte de lo que ya se tenía o el establecimiento de nuevas metas? Toda ganancia implica una pérdida, dijo un Anónimo. Puede que tú hayas perdido una intimidad que no sabías que tenías, que nadie sabe que posee hasta que ésta desaparece por inundación de los otros. Consuélate con el mal ajeno: yo, a causa de Las teorías salvajes, he perdido mi trabajo.




(sigue)


[special thanks a Eduardo Sobico, ingeniero lector que me mandó el link]

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Estilo Islam Fundamental


I'm becoming a Muslim (*)
and my friend Ghada, to the left, is taking me under her wing

this is the fundamental style when you go to a rodeo on September Eleven, and there are priests in Florida burning Qurans. The word from the organization was "we can't protect you", and Ghada thought that, worst case scenario (burning her alive?), it would give her something to write about. A terrorist strategy ensued: Here's Ghada with my NASA cap + American Apparel hoodie... suddenly a redneck in style!


alas, we wanted to dance, and hence, the prospect of a gay bar (the one and only in iowa city?) was our immediate Grial. lovely Farangis practically threw away ahmadinejad just by swinging her hips
the Iranian revolution

and this young man approached us, to greet us for my conversion into Islam,
style American dollars protruding from his zunga, he squealed: You guys! You were last night at Jimmy Sandwich, I work there! Veggie club, right??

(*) the image was cut to support the cause of the Iconoclasts

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Hackathon de Gobierno Abierto

Top nerds invitan a:

1) Sumar esfuerzos para disponibilizar datos públicos, modelarlos, y visualizarlos.

2) Unir capacidades complementarias entre desarrolladores, expertos en visualización, y profesionales de las ciencias políticas y de la administración pública, con el objetivo de diseñar y resolver problemas de acceso a la información pública.

Método:

La propuesta es armar equipos con estos distintos perfiles y encarar proyectos que, basados en fuentes de datos públicos, puedan mostrar por ejempo las compras y gastos de un municipio o ministerio, analizar la ejecución presupuestaria de una repartición pública, interpretar las votaciones históricas de una cámara legislativa o encontrar patrones de análisis en las audiencias mantenidas por distintos funcionarios.

Organización:
El evento comenzará a las 10am. El primer día se presentarán todos los proyectos para que cada uno elija en cuál desea trabajar. Durante los dos días habrá charlas informales y presentaciones que ayudarán a entender mejor los problemas que se intentan resolver. Al final del segundo día se mostrarán los proyectos finalizados y se
subirán a un servidor para que puedan ser de libre acceso.

Para inscribirse, sólo hay que enviar un e-mail a contact.garagelab@gmail.com


Estarán presentes en este Hackathon, entre otros :

Desarrollo, Modelado y Visualización

Manuel Aristarán, Programador, Músico, y creador de gastopublicobahiense.org.
Gerardo Richarte, Programador, CoFundador de Core Security Technologies
Mat Travizano, CEO de Binaria Labs
José Orlicki, Programador, PhD Candidate en ITBA
Renzo Carbonara, Programador en The Whuffie Bank

Eduardo Mercovich, Fundador de Inspiro y Manager de Usabilidad en Mercado Libre
Ernesto Mislej, Fundador de 7puentes, experto en visualización de información.
Enrique Stanziola, Coordinador del Taller de Diseño Interactivo
Juan Lanus, Desarrollador y experto en usabilidad.

Politica y Administración Pública

Diego Pando, Director del Programa de Gobierno Electrónico UdeSA.
Germán Stalker, Consultor en temas de Transparencia Gubernamental.
Gonzalo Iglesias, Consultor en Políticas Públicas.
Marina Calamari, Miembro del Programa de Gobierno Electrónico UdeSA
Marcelo Leiras, Director de la Carrera de Ciencia Política y Relaciones Internacionales, UdeSA.
Alejandro Artopoulos, Profesor/Investigador, Depto de Administración, Escuela de Educación, UdeSA

@San Francisco State University

Confesiones topérrimas



esta nuit mis queridísimos Evelyn Galiazo, Mariano Dorr y Ariel Schettini comparecen ante mi amiga la princesa Cecilia Szperling. Soy absolutamente fan por númeras razones y todas ellas literarias in extremis, es decir, amorosas. Baste mencionar que me vine a USA prácticamente para poder conseguir el libro de poemas de Ariel, Estados Unidos, que en el río de la plata ha sido devorado en su integridad. Predigo mucho paparazzi en la puerta, pero no os dejéis amedrentar.


Confesionario + Música-
martes 21 de sept. CCRRojas. 21hs.gratis
müsica: Juan Ravioli
confiesan: Evelyn Galiazo + Mariano Dorr + Ariel Schettini

Friday, September 17, 2010

Mackie Messer Czech

Satire as Hacking

by Pola Oloixarac for Iowa Library City Library Reading: IWP Panel Series

The matter of comedy has deserved very serious treatment throughout the life of books. This of course includes cinema as well, and I'd like to share with you a 20th century definition, by the American comedian Woody Allen.

The horse, channeling Alan Alda's voice, brings it forth: If it bends it's funny, if it breaks it isn't. Woody was hired to depict this grand man, yet by making a comedy out of a comedian, he breaks the pact, and ultimately gets fired. We may suppose Alan Alda was asking for the bending quality of representation, to get the kind of self he was looking for. Instead, in Woody's book, the definition reverts: If it breaks it's funny, if it bends... well, it just makes Alan Alda happy, and where's the fun in that?

Mutable, ever-changing definitions of funny can vary violently across eras and authors, can twirl against each other and even take themselves as their laughable target. However, the viral power of comedy holds a particular strain, satire, whose almost romantic build-up is closer to timeless epic. For satire is the genre of the little people against the giants (or the place where Giants and little people live together, as in Swift's Gulliver’s Travels). It's also the classical genre for narrating the rebellion of women: Shakespeare's comic heroines and Cervantes' difficult ladies are escaping marriage, are playing with men's minds, and trying to have a life (if not a room) of their own. Satire has also starred in roles as morality's bravest ally, more often than it has befriended libertines. Before society grew accustomed, or trained, in finding aesthetic pleasure in the tale of its own perversities and excesses (that is, before the trend of social realism came to embed the moral finesse of the culturati), satire was probably the most powerful technology for twisting the arm of the contemporaries. You could only get away with your pungent criticism to society by way of bringing tones of fun. You needed to make them laugh to get your point across. Satire, and her mischievous little sister, Parody, have gone a long way, and have always shaped themselves by following the contours of power –in order to break it. They are experts in finding the vulnerabilities of power and breaking into it, filling the gaps with new meaning. Moreover, as a master satirist may attest, only imminent breakage is proof of worthy writing. Thomas De Quincey considers, in Murder as one of the fine arts, that “and against Locke's philosophy in particular, I think it an unanswerable objection (if we needed any), that, although he carried his throat about with him in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it.”

Yet, with all its manifold richness, there is method in its madness. Take a look at a classical Marx brothers bit. A molecule of their humour shows the gap, the cut between worlds. A says give me a break! And B pulls a brake out of his pocket. Comedy shows the gap between language and the world, between ego and its mirrors. It shows that there's nothing natural in what we take for granted, and that the consolidated powers we've grown to consider part of the natural landscape are artificial, and therefore, because their engineered whims are reflections of men, can be bitterly comical. It comes to show that the norm is made of disjunctures, mistakes, discrepancies, the ruins of old wars that have become naturalized. And then suddenly you are part of the scene, staring at the invisible carrot that had been hanging right between your eyes. By breaking the pact with the status quo, comedy ultimately reveals the political and ideological.

But perhaps this is an all-too-romantic definition, a hard one to maintain these days. Because today, the ideological norm is to be happy. Cheerfulness is encouraged, and spiritual darkness frowned upon. Laughter is even part of the medical discourse, and a saturnine character, a sign that something is wrong. Laughter (like sex) is empowering, the sign of a healthy, successful, morally valuable person; sadness is bad for you (and probably causes cancer). Comedy is, therefore, the underlying ideology, the global script with the mandate. The proliferation of comedies of all sorts gives us an idea of a certain soothing quality of comedy that blatantly flatters the hidden rules that we don't question, to help people live with a number of acceptable problems and to provide them with a script of possibilities. Romantic comedies, office comedies, teen comedies, terror comedies, are the hysterical flavors of the American ideology that always need to turn things into a smile, into a “positive” attitude.

At the same time, our times favour the proliferation of a newborn class of humour and communication. Parodies: we see them all over, breaking into previous representations, breaking out into viral swarms: a moving, living form that takes on the electronic lives of online joie de vivre. Walter Benjamin (born under the sign of Saturn, as Susan Sontag described him) held that, in the era of massive reproduction, “copy” meant the loss of the aura; that mass-ification of works of art ultimately kills whatever traces of the author lingered in them. Walter Benjamin was, of course, making a critical point about American capitalism, and it's not difficult to see how the battle turned out. Eventually, copy seems to have gained an aura, by way of parody. Every person could repeat, mimic, the former representation, and hence attach his or her own subjectivity to the parodied object. So, OK, the Author with capital letters got lost in copy, but now the parody-maker could turn into an author by the thousands. In a way, it's as if parody had taken a Greek turn. Aristotle defined tragedy as the opposite of comedy, as the ongoing staging of known facts that happens to noble people. So people in Greece went to the theater to see Oedipus, and everybody knew how the story went, everybody knew he was going to turn out blind, yet they would scream to the actors in the stage: “Don't go there Oedipus! She's you mom!” only to watch how the dreaded ending inevitably, took place, to the repeated shock and awe of the viewers. And the same happens with the most widely watched genres of our times: pornography and parody. In parody, we see the endless list of people repeating patterns, and taking pleasure at mocking others. In pornography, we see the on and on unfolding of the same events, the infinite series of imperceptible variations on the same mythical scene, drawn to the limits of exhaustion, until the crucial ending: inevitably crowned by the money shot. Pornography admits no surprises; and parody, no real subjectivity. There might be juissance, but no further attempt against the ruling powers.

So, the question I'd like to ask you and myself on the topic of satire's global reach could be: how do we keep comedy a critical endeavor, without losing a sharp edge? Is it possible to be defiant to powers without being an intellectual clown? Or: which is the all encompassing narrative that hasn't been hacked by literature? Is it possible to create “pure” satire, to work directly on the level of the syntax, to operate directly on the signs –in order to break them?

In my novel, “The Wild Theories”, there's a special attack designed to hack Google Earth. The characters throw a party to launch their attack, and include specific instructions for anyone who wants to partake in the breakage. (So as to avoid legal charges of inciting criminal behavior, I, as an author, am one of the guests to the party: I, the author, didn't make the hack). The hack is called DNS cache poisoning, and exploits a pretty interesting vulnerability of the architecture of the internet. There is a flaw in this architecture that lies, precisely, in ideology. The openness of the internet, or what we call openness, lies in a few computers that later translate the number of other computers into addresses (IP addresses). These few computers centralize information, and can easily track it: there is a chain of command of the authority that gives each computer one name for all to follow. If the web had, say, a different architecture where all the nodes connected with each other, a true peer to peer connection, information would not be hosted somewhere for scrutiny, the packets would just flow horizontally from person to person. There would not be pyramidal powers that oversee the packets, the subjects. If this were this case, Google Earth would remained unhacked by literature, but this is not the case. Vint Cerf, also known as one of the founding fathers of the internet, has said that this vulnerability is one of the things that the founders didn't see coming and that they can't fix. In the literature of hacking, this flaw had been duly noted on an advisory written by EK and Wari in 1997; however, the exploitation of the flaw, that is, the re-writing of the procedure specifically for the maps came ten years later. DNS cache poisoning is about the poisoning of images. In the technological side, it allows the hackers to fill up the landscape screen with all the sentimental/historic/trivial garbage they can think of; ultimately, the representation of chaos and memory in a fluid present hacked the objective, quantified, all-encompassing narrative of Google.

Our interactions are based on this architecture marked by ideology, which only becomes visible once you break it, once you show the gap. It was ideological matter I was hacking into. Operating on signs, breaking their syntax and meaning, the mutation of literature into informatic code, literally executed by the end of the book, remained political. To poison the tissue of constructed reality had mighty predecessors: the imps, the little creatures of Saxon folk that enjoyed creating chaos in the world of men, and that live on in the root of impish, and in the rootkit of power hacks and every code that revives the ancient promise of language: to utter words, that later happen and become real. In the strain of epic satire, it wasn't merely a way to tag an EPIC FAIL to the biggest giant; it was about words and their meaning, and what ultimately makes writing.

This essay is dedicated to the lovely Clara Masnatta.

Today: Satire's Global Reach

Iowa City Public Library Panel Series
Fridays Noon - 12 hs

09/17 "Satire's Global Reach"
• David Hill. New Zealand
• Pola Oloixarac, Argentina
• Maryia Martysevich, Belarus
• Farhad A.K. Sulliman Khoyratty, Mauritius
• Najwan Darwish, Palestine

Correo de lectores

Begin forwarded message:

From: amibatar
Date: September 16, 2010 5:18:54 PM CDT
Subject: hola

Hola Pola, hay una actriz porno (Jennifer White) de eeuu que es igual a vos, saludos y disculpa que te joda.


*Fan mail: Hi pola there's a porn actress who looks just like you her name is Jennifer White, have a good day and sorry to bother you.

Etián en Telenuit!

Mi amiguísimo el maestro Etián Insinger (mi pal en Lady Cavendish) está reversionando el himno argentino con su Laptork band, en cahoots con herr Fabián Kessler, en la obra HNA. La obra tiene sonidos preprogramados que se activan con el movimiento: aquí, el robot de Laura Santillán se activa con una reflexión recursiva sobre el fenómeno de *la compubanda*:

Friday, September 10, 2010

Meet the Iowans



a few quick notes:
1- Islam rocks
2- pakistanis drink
3- small cities rule
now off to harvard for a few days, birthday included :D

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

In plot we trust

In plot we trust
Taller de lectura de cuentos estadounidenses (1914-2009)

Coordinado por Santiago Llach
***

Programa

0. Cuento, Estados Unidos

Novela, nouvelle, relato, cuento. La short story: un formato para la invención de un imperio. Los estados anímicos de la unión. La pax filmada. Los founding fathers de la madre literatura.

Cuentos de Katherine Anne Porter, Ernest Hemingway, Billy Faulkner, Francis Scott Fitzgerald.

1. Trenes, autos, teléfonos (1914-1945)

El fin de algo. Los paisajes, las ciudades: la literatura, industria de la nostalgia para una economía de los servicios. Cross a la mandíbula: maquinando la sociedad del espectáculo. Euforia y depresión en la cultura: psicoanálisis de una nación. Los fantasmas que vinieron del sur. Aborto, menstruación y otras cosas de mujeres. Héroes venidos a menos en una democracia policial.

Cuentos de Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Thomas Wolfe, Ring Lardner, Flannery O’Connor, Dorothy Parker, Carson McCullers, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett.


2. Americanos a las cosas (1946-1975)

Cómo escribir después de Pearl Harbor: estrés postraumático y literatura. La trama descompuesta de un barroco electrodoméstico. Los rusos y los otros: nervios en las centrales de la información. El lado sucio de la Edad de Oro. Literatura de exportación: soldados confederales en las industrias culturales. Una ficción para la televisión. All you need is pop.

Cuentos de Jerome David Salinger, John Cheever, Flannery O’Connor, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Charles Bukoswki, Grace Paley, Eudora Welty y Truman Capote.


3. Megáfonos vietnamitas para la derrota cultural (1975-1989)

Literatura del recorte impositivo. Fantasías de la guerra en las galaxias. La contrarrevolución de las costumbres. La guerra fría interior: adicciones, tramas del suburbio y sociedades anónimas de la vida moral. Jesús es mi superhéroe. Relatos de material plástico y chaquetas militares. Personajes viajando por autopistas.

Cuentos de Raymond Carver, Tobbias Wolff, Hunter Thompson, Ann Beattie, John Updike, William Gibson, Russell Banks, Alice Walker, Joyce Carol Oates, Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Alice Munro y Lucia Berlin.


4. Cantos de las guerras del Golfo (1990-2009)

Traigan a los chicos a casa: sin guerra no hay literatura. Minorías absolutas. El desierto de lo real y el desierto de lo reality. Literatura becaria: sensibilidades de la era Bush y documentos en la basura de Google. Milenarismo petrolero, gendarmería y retaliación.

Cuentos de Denis Johnson, Chuck Palahniuk, Lorrie Moore, Richard Ford, Elizabeth McCracken, Rick Moody, Miranda July, Gish Jen, David Foster Wallace, David Leavitt, Junot Diaz, Daniel Alarcón y Tao Lin.

Duración: tres meses, del 14, 18 y 19 de septiembre hasta la segunda semana de diciembre
Horario 1: Sábados de 11 a 13
Lugar: Crack-up Libros, Costa Rica 4767, Palermo
Informes e inscripción: libros@crackup.com.ar / 4831-3502

Horarios 2 y 3: Martes a las 19 o domingos a las 19:30
Lugar: Talcahuano y Corrientes
Informes e inscripción: santiago.llach@gmail.com

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

September!


via gg

My first reading in America!


Friday Sept 3rd: A reading by Brazilian fiction writer Amilcar Bettega and Argentine fiction writer Pola Oloixarac at 5 p.m. Friday in the Shambaugh House, 430 N. Clinton St.


It's only been 3 days here at Iowa, and I'm overwhelmed by delight. I feel I'm in a David Lynch dream.

More readings of my fellow IWP writers