Things have been slow enough at dig­i­tal emu­nc­tion of late that I don’t expect it will sur­prise many of you to hear that I’ve decided to put this here web­site on per­ma­nent hiatus.* My rea­sons for clos­ing down the site are mostly personal—I fin­ished my Ph.D., am now living in Uganda, and hope to spend more time on other kinds of writing—so I’ll spare you any long-​winded hul­la­baloo about the state of blog­ging, poetry, etc. But I would like to thank every­one who has read and com­mented at the site over the years. I’d also and espe­cially like to thank the con­trib­u­tors, who turned the site into the kind of smart, sharp, and occa­sion­ally hilar­i­ous place I’d have latched onto even if I were entirely alien to its production.

I first expanded DE from a per­sonal bill­board to a group blog because there were a number of writ­ers whose work I wanted to be read­ing more of. I’m happy to report that in this sense the site has out­lived its use­ful­ness, since most of those folks have gone on to much bigger and much better things. Joshua Adams and Joel Cala­han are, respec­tively, the incom­ing and out­go­ing edi­tors of Chicago Review. Oren Izen­berg’s Being Numer­ous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life is coming out in Feb­ru­ary from Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Press. Joshua Bald­win (whose Poems and Fake Book Reviews is still avail­able!) will pub­lish a novella called The Wilshire Sun with Turtle Point Press next fall. Open a mag­a­zine that cares any­thing about good writ­ing and you’ll have a better than even chance of read­ing some­thing by Ange Mlinko. (For those few times you don’t you can and should keep a copy of her ter­rific Shoul­der Season nearby.) As reported below, Michael Rob­bins will pub­lish Alien vs. Preda­tor, a book of poems, with Pen­guin in the spring of 2012. Until then we expect his heroic crit­i­cal cam­paign against sen­ti­men­tal­ity in all its forms will con­tinue to ravage fine pub­li­ca­tions across the land.

Since I started dig­i­tal emu­nc­tion as a per­sonal pro­mo­tion vehi­cle almost four years ago, it seems appro­pri­ate (and appro­pri­ately self-​serving) to go out on the pair of Adver­tise­ments for Myself that pre­cede this post. In the future you can keep track of my work at robertpbaird.com, and I’ll almost cer­tainly con­tinue run­ning my mouth on Twit­ter, if that kind of thing is your kind of thing. (If not you can always hit me on email.)

Thanks again to every­one who par­tic­i­pated in the site. We’ll see you around…

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* The “permanent” part of that equa­tion means we’re effec­tively done, as of today, while the “hiatus” means that I have no imme­di­ate plans to pull the site offline. Any­thing up now will almost cer­tainly stay up for another six months, and maybe longer. Still and all, if there are any posts or com­ments that you’d be espe­cially sad to live with­out, con­sider this fair warn­ing that you should start copy­ing and past­ing pronto.

This final DE post took a few days longer than I expected, but I couldn’t let myself leave with­out pimp­ing “The Hidden Tor­ture Cells of Bolivia,” a long arti­cle I’ve been work­ing on for well over a year, which has now been pre-​released in Narrative’s Back­stage sec­tion and will be pub­lished in the magazine’s Spring 2011 issue.

The arti­cle tracks the his­tory and legacy of the Boli­vian dic­ta­tor­ships through the story of Marcos Farfán. As a teenager in the 1970s, Farfán joined the National Lib­er­a­tion Army (ELN), a rev­o­lu­tion­ary orga­ni­za­tion founded by Che Gue­vara. Farfán’s pre­co­cious mil­i­tancy got him arrested and tor­tured by the right­ist regime of Hugo Banzer Suárez, about whom I’ve writ­ten here before. In 2007 Farfán was appointed a deputy min­is­ter in the Gov­ern­ment Min­istry, and one of the first things he did after claim­ing his office was to visit the building’s base­ment, the same base­ment where he and his mother had been tor­tured thirty-​five years earlier.

It’ll cost you $4 to read the arti­cle now, but since Nar­ra­tive footed my report­ing expenses, I’d be thrilled if you paid. Here’s the open­ing of the piece:

THEY WERE about to let him go. After ten days of tor­ture in a cir­cuit of secret pris­ons, they were about to let him go. The first night they had taken him to the base­ment of the Inte­rior Min­istry and had beaten him with boards and rifle butts until he couldn’t see, until he could no longer remem­ber what they wanted or why he was there. The second night they had locked him in a cell on the third floor with a tiny window that looked down on the roof of the United Nations build­ing next door. They had jammed nee­dles under his fin­ger­nails and shocked his teeth and tes­ti­cles with a cattle prod. The third night they had taken him to the Depart­ment of Polit­i­cal Order and beat him some more, as they would each suc­ces­sive night. Edit­ing was his crime: the ministry’s civil­ian agents had dis­cov­ered his hand­writ­ten cor­rec­tions in the mar­gins of a sub­ver­sive type­script. But ten days of what you might call enhanced inter­ro­ga­tion tech­niques had sat­is­fied the agents that Marcos Farfán was a naive stu­dent, a small fish, some­one they could safely toss back. After all, they must have fig­ured, how much could he really know? He was only sixteen.

In the spring of 2003, my friend and mentor Annie Dil­lard invited me to take a six-​month job work­ing for her and her hus­band Bob, better known to the world as the biog­ra­pher Robert D. Richard­son, Jr. The invi­ta­tion was nei­ther the first, the last, nor the most dra­matic instance of Annie’s immense gen­eros­ity, but it was remark­able nonethe­less, and I accepted, as you might imag­ine, with­out blinking.

My only prob­lem was that I still lacked a few classes to com­plete my Master’s degree at the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago. For­tu­nately a number of pro­fes­sors at the U. of C. were will­ing to accom­mo­date my phys­i­cal absence from the campus, includ­ing Bernard McGinn, the emi­nent his­to­rian of Chris­t­ian mys­ti­cism whose two-quarter-long sequence on early modern mys­ti­cism I had half-​completed. McGinn sug­gested that a trans­la­tion might be a good and useful way to com­plete the course require­ments while out­side strik­ing dis­tance of an aca­d­e­mic library, and so I decided to trans­late Miguel de Molinos’s Spir­i­tual Guide.

Now, nearly eight years later, that trans­la­tion—with a his­tor­i­cal intro­duc­tion by me and a the­o­log­i­cal intro­duc­tion by McGinn—is being pub­lished in Paulist Press’s Clas­sics of West­ern Spir­i­tu­al­ity series. The stuff of the Spir­i­tual Guide is pretty far out­side the normal ambit of dig­i­tal emu­nc­tion, but it’s my first book and the last day of DE, so I’m taking liberties.

You can buy a copy of the book at Amazon and prob­a­bly sev­eral other places besides. If you need more rea­sons why you should buy one, here’s the first part of my his­tor­i­cal introduction:

The cover of the new Vil­lage Voice “Best of NYC 2010” issue is pretty hilarious—the ridicu­lous image of a yellow cab with mon­ster truck wheels made me laugh.  But I really started to laugh, I got pretty happy in fact, when I looked at the build­ings in the background.  See the pizza joint?  That’s Cor­leone Pizza. I remem­ber the place.  It’s in freak­ing Los Ange­les! Down­town, in the jew­elry dis­trict. I walked passed it the last time I was in town.  I guess the ques­tion here is why is there a pic­ture of Los Ange­les on the cover of the Vil­lage Voice’s “Best of NYC 2010” issue? Good one, Voice!  I’m outta here!