An essay by the Sal­vado­ran nov­el­ist Hora­cio Castel­lanos Moya that I trans­lated with Wes Enzinna is up today at Guer­nica Mag­a­zine. Moya is an old friend of Roberto Bolaño’s, but his essay takes on the darker side of the Bolaño myth in the U.S.:

Albert Fianelli, an Ital­ian fellow jour­nal­ist, par­o­dies a quote often attrib­uted to Herman Goer­ing and says that every time some­one men­tions the word “market,” he reaches for his revolver. I’m not so extreme, but nei­ther do I believe the story that the market is some kind of deity that moves on its own accord­ing to mys­te­ri­ous laws. The market has its land­lords, like every­thing on this infected planet, and it’s the land­lords of the market who decide the mambo that you dance, whether it’s sell­ing cheap con­doms or Latin Amer­i­can novels in the U.S. I say this because the cen­tral idea of [Sarah] Pollack’s work is that behind the con­struc­tion of the Bolaño myth was not only a publisher’s mar­ket­ing oper­a­tion but also a rede­f­i­n­i­tion of the image of Latin Amer­i­can cul­ture and lit­er­a­ture that the North Amer­i­can cul­tural estab­lish­ment is now sell­ing to the public.

An ear­lier inter­view Wes did with Moya can be found here.

[Ed. note: dig­i­tal emu­nc­tion is pleased to wel­come Kent John­son to the wild world of blog­ging. Here­with, his inau­gural post.]

The New Chicago School

My pro­posal: That the clos­est thing we presently have to a “School” of younger, rig­or­ously inno­v­a­tive poets in the U.S. (one that stands clos­est chance of being ret­ro­spec­tively seen as akin in sig­nif­i­cance to the NY School in its first-​generation, proto-​formation years–and when I say “School” I mean in that sense of for­tu­itous con­stel­la­tion, some­thing very dif­fer­ent from a self-​identified ten­dency or “movement”) is what I’ll call the New Chicago School. It’s a list of accom­plished, exper­i­men­tal writ­ers, more poet­i­cally focused as a col­lec­tive, per­haps, than the con­tents list of the City Vis­i­ble anthol­ogy of a couple years back, and more geo­graph­i­cally focused, too, inas­much as all the poets have roots in the city, even though a few of them have recently moved else­where (though in most cases still nearby), and one now lives abroad:

I’ve got a review of Walter Bagehot’s Lom­bard Street, his 1873 book about the British money market, up at Yves Smith’s Naked Cap­i­tal­ism blog today. Check it out…

A short story of mine called “Still Life with New York” has appeared in the new issue of BRAND, a British lit­er­ary mag­a­zine. Check it out…