MCONDO LETTERS
A Guy I Know
I’m Not A Gay Magic Realist
Miami Vice
Love, Death, Blood Money
Calamites in the Tea Room
McOndo Lit
_________________
A Guy I Know
He has a condo—
He goes to clubs every
Night then comes home.
He’s from Cuba.
His lovers’ pics—
On the dresser floating
Like a boat flotilla
Drifting forever.
I’m Not A Gay Magic Realist
"To write in Latin America
is a drama (whether conscious
or not), played out beneath the
eternal double curse of—
underdevelopment & exoticism."
—Reinaldo Arenas
Reinaldo Arenas—
The fag writer & Cuban exile,
Nailed to the cross by Castro
Murdered by American Aids…
Latino magic realism—
Doubly cursed by poverty &
Narco-exoticism, whores for
Magic-starved Anglo str8ts.
Miami Vice version—
Thick, sweet, humid nights,
Rotten mangos, iguana boyz,
Death tied up in a hammock.
Gimme a fuckin break—
Márquez's imaginary Macondo,
A crummy "McOndo" dump:
McDonald's, cellphones, coke.
Miami Vice
It’s a short text—
Live on TV, amphetamines
McOndo Miami Vice
Bends like the moon.
A pretty boyz smile—
Goes to bed with a gun
Doesn’t trust anybody
Especially gay gringos.
Lorca thru the window—
Moon over Miami
Lummus Park evenings
Ocean Drive condo.
Smokes on balcony—
Stench of gay sex
More like a trashy movie
Rough trade, coke, cum.
Ocean Drive below—
Thighs between thighs
I’m just as bad, twice, three
Times getting him off.
Love, Death, Blood Money
“tyranny of past loves, the
villainy of inconsequential
casual writers, or the rule of
blood money”—Alberto Fuguet,
McOndo Novels, Giving Up the Ghosts
I’m not there anymore—
Not in Miss Garcia Marquez’s
Magic Macondo Tea Room
Anymore, my dear, ho-hum.
“Unavoidable Violences”—
Since Dallas up to Allende
And beyond, for those of us
Born during the 1950s.
Enter new failed writers—
Str8t poets in a kind of literary
Hell, only gay poets and old
Whores can appreciate the times.
Middle class, well educated—
Respectable queens, downwardly
Mobile and short of money,
New versions of Bolaño in drag.
Reinventing the novel—
Only to find out it’s all a fake,
Highly overrated and exaggerated
Something like Herpes on your dick.
It doesn’t really, my dear—
Take a Savage Detective to realize
The continent is rich with Storytellers
Thick as Calamites in a Tea Room.
Calamites in the Tea Room
What remains—
Amidst all this Poverty & Promise
The most Effective Way of Presenting
Unpalatable Naked Truths?
For one thing—
Forget about former Chilean
President Salvador Allende's death,
Everyone else has, my dear.
The lesson gleamed—
From Miss Bolaño's work is that
“The little world of letters is just
As Terrible as it is Ridiculous.”
Naturally, my dears—
We’re all Nobel writers since it
Takes bad poets with uncritical
Tenacity to give it all away.
Exaggerated claims—
Reinvent the novel since obviously
The McOndo Movements have only
One guiding spirit: The Joker.
It’s easy as a piece of cake—
Becoming a Poster Boy for McOndo,
Globetrotting, sex-loving, love-crazy,
Cosmopolitan, apolitical, narcissistic.
All you have to do is—
Ditch all those sepia-tinted notions,
Toss Miss García Márquez in the trash
And snort lots of Columbian cocaine.
Just like with Argentina—
Decades of Military Dictatorship and
Financial Crises simply come & go,
Simply gloss over it like Evita Peron!
Get into the usual addictions—
Drugs certainly & the voluptuousness
Of Language and art, but also Love:
Its unabashed tremors, aftershocks.
Those subterranean wells—
Full of jealousy, disgust and elation,
Let yourself be astonished by just
How far you can sink on your knees.
Have Great Expectations—
Don’t translate anything, just speak
The Evil Twisted Tongue that Speaks
Inside Your Stupid Little Head.
May I suggest simple Delirium—
As an easy compromise to the somewhat
Tiring Chaos, Carnage & Willful Oblivion
That hints too much of Magic Realism?
The hardest part it seems—
Is accepting the stretch between
Madness and sanity and learning
To straddle it in a graceful manner?
It can be exceedingly vexing—
As we descend into this vortex of nasty
Paramilitary attacks, guerrilla strikes,
Kidnappings and bloodshed everywhere.
Yet contemporary McOndo novelists—
Have managed to depict such Urgency
With just the right amount of Kitsch,
Pastiche and Ubiquitous Hypocrisy.
McOndo Lit
“It was a hardcore sci-fi
and fantasy, that’s the
kind of story we’re all
living in. What’s more
sci-fi than the Santo
Domingo? What more
fantasy than the Antilles?
It used to be more popular
in the old days, bigger, so
to speak, in Macondo than
in McOndo.”—Junot Diaz,
The Brief Wondrous Life
of Oscar Wao
The Literature of Lunacy—
It’s worse than the unsavory details
Of what Former Boyfriends do to make
Life miserable for innocent queens like us.
Rather than worn-out old fascist—
Magic Realism, I’ve turned lately in my
Fashionable Discomfort to the Parisian style
Of Sapphic Modernism a la Gertrude Stein.
She’s gracefully fragmented—
And disconcertingly unreliable just as
Miss Márquez is classically omniscient and
Muy macho forcefully dirty & linear.
Surely there’s another way—
Of chronicling disenchantment with the
All-encompassing, drug traffic delirium
Engulfing Mexico & American borders?
Márquez's dissection of Delirium:
Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981)
About an Honor Killing in a small
Colombian town is notable.
But Jorge Franco’s Rosario Tijeras—
Moves away from magical realist design
Encumbered by just simply a single
Murder, replaced by thousands!
Jettisoning folksy regionalism—
A generational shift with surprising
Directions, but capable of making
Writers to see what was coming?
Not just a world of McDonald’s—
Shopping malls and high-rise condos,
But instead the melancholy ghost malls
And detritus of a Failed Future?
A Guy I Know
I’m Not A Gay Magic Realist
Miami Vice
Love, Death, Blood Money
Calamites in the Tea Room
McOndo Lit
_________________
A Guy I Know
He has a condo—
He goes to clubs every
Night then comes home.
He’s from Cuba.
His lovers’ pics—
On the dresser floating
Like a boat flotilla
Drifting forever.
I’m Not A Gay Magic Realist
"To write in Latin America
is a drama (whether conscious
or not), played out beneath the
eternal double curse of—
underdevelopment & exoticism."
—Reinaldo Arenas
Reinaldo Arenas—
The fag writer & Cuban exile,
Nailed to the cross by Castro
Murdered by American Aids…
Latino magic realism—
Doubly cursed by poverty &
Narco-exoticism, whores for
Magic-starved Anglo str8ts.
Miami Vice version—
Thick, sweet, humid nights,
Rotten mangos, iguana boyz,
Death tied up in a hammock.
Gimme a fuckin break—
Márquez's imaginary Macondo,
A crummy "McOndo" dump:
McDonald's, cellphones, coke.
Miami Vice
It’s a short text—
Live on TV, amphetamines
McOndo Miami Vice
Bends like the moon.
A pretty boyz smile—
Goes to bed with a gun
Doesn’t trust anybody
Especially gay gringos.
Lorca thru the window—
Moon over Miami
Lummus Park evenings
Ocean Drive condo.
Smokes on balcony—
Stench of gay sex
More like a trashy movie
Rough trade, coke, cum.
Ocean Drive below—
Thighs between thighs
I’m just as bad, twice, three
Times getting him off.
Love, Death, Blood Money
“tyranny of past loves, the
villainy of inconsequential
casual writers, or the rule of
blood money”—Alberto Fuguet,
McOndo Novels, Giving Up the Ghosts
I’m not there anymore—
Not in Miss Garcia Marquez’s
Magic Macondo Tea Room
Anymore, my dear, ho-hum.
“Unavoidable Violences”—
Since Dallas up to Allende
And beyond, for those of us
Born during the 1950s.
Enter new failed writers—
Str8t poets in a kind of literary
Hell, only gay poets and old
Whores can appreciate the times.
Middle class, well educated—
Respectable queens, downwardly
Mobile and short of money,
New versions of Bolaño in drag.
Reinventing the novel—
Only to find out it’s all a fake,
Highly overrated and exaggerated
Something like Herpes on your dick.
It doesn’t really, my dear—
Take a Savage Detective to realize
The continent is rich with Storytellers
Thick as Calamites in a Tea Room.
Calamites in the Tea Room
What remains—
Amidst all this Poverty & Promise
The most Effective Way of Presenting
Unpalatable Naked Truths?
For one thing—
Forget about former Chilean
President Salvador Allende's death,
Everyone else has, my dear.
The lesson gleamed—
From Miss Bolaño's work is that
“The little world of letters is just
As Terrible as it is Ridiculous.”
Naturally, my dears—
We’re all Nobel writers since it
Takes bad poets with uncritical
Tenacity to give it all away.
Exaggerated claims—
Reinvent the novel since obviously
The McOndo Movements have only
One guiding spirit: The Joker.
It’s easy as a piece of cake—
Becoming a Poster Boy for McOndo,
Globetrotting, sex-loving, love-crazy,
Cosmopolitan, apolitical, narcissistic.
All you have to do is—
Ditch all those sepia-tinted notions,
Toss Miss García Márquez in the trash
And snort lots of Columbian cocaine.
Just like with Argentina—
Decades of Military Dictatorship and
Financial Crises simply come & go,
Simply gloss over it like Evita Peron!
Get into the usual addictions—
Drugs certainly & the voluptuousness
Of Language and art, but also Love:
Its unabashed tremors, aftershocks.
Those subterranean wells—
Full of jealousy, disgust and elation,
Let yourself be astonished by just
How far you can sink on your knees.
Have Great Expectations—
Don’t translate anything, just speak
The Evil Twisted Tongue that Speaks
Inside Your Stupid Little Head.
May I suggest simple Delirium—
As an easy compromise to the somewhat
Tiring Chaos, Carnage & Willful Oblivion
That hints too much of Magic Realism?
The hardest part it seems—
Is accepting the stretch between
Madness and sanity and learning
To straddle it in a graceful manner?
It can be exceedingly vexing—
As we descend into this vortex of nasty
Paramilitary attacks, guerrilla strikes,
Kidnappings and bloodshed everywhere.
Yet contemporary McOndo novelists—
Have managed to depict such Urgency
With just the right amount of Kitsch,
Pastiche and Ubiquitous Hypocrisy.
McOndo Lit
“It was a hardcore sci-fi
and fantasy, that’s the
kind of story we’re all
living in. What’s more
sci-fi than the Santo
Domingo? What more
fantasy than the Antilles?
It used to be more popular
in the old days, bigger, so
to speak, in Macondo than
in McOndo.”—Junot Diaz,
The Brief Wondrous Life
of Oscar Wao
The Literature of Lunacy—
It’s worse than the unsavory details
Of what Former Boyfriends do to make
Life miserable for innocent queens like us.
Rather than worn-out old fascist—
Magic Realism, I’ve turned lately in my
Fashionable Discomfort to the Parisian style
Of Sapphic Modernism a la Gertrude Stein.
She’s gracefully fragmented—
And disconcertingly unreliable just as
Miss Márquez is classically omniscient and
Muy macho forcefully dirty & linear.
Surely there’s another way—
Of chronicling disenchantment with the
All-encompassing, drug traffic delirium
Engulfing Mexico & American borders?
Márquez's dissection of Delirium:
Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981)
About an Honor Killing in a small
Colombian town is notable.
But Jorge Franco’s Rosario Tijeras—
Moves away from magical realist design
Encumbered by just simply a single
Murder, replaced by thousands!
Jettisoning folksy regionalism—
A generational shift with surprising
Directions, but capable of making
Writers to see what was coming?
Not just a world of McDonald’s—
Shopping malls and high-rise condos,
But instead the melancholy ghost malls
And detritus of a Failed Future?
Just as McOndo was the setting—
For One Hundred Years of Solitude,
McOndo is the sly design & paradigm
For an approaching Third World USA.
The shift from rural to urban—
Has already happened… now comes
The shift from Narco-Magic Realism
To McOndo Literature.
For One Hundred Years of Solitude,
McOndo is the sly design & paradigm
For an approaching Third World USA.
The shift from rural to urban—
Has already happened… now comes
The shift from Narco-Magic Realism
To McOndo Literature.
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