SPECIAL DIA DE LOS MUERTOS REPOST: CARLOS FUENTES

I am just processing the news that one of my dearest mentors, the great Mexican author and public intellectual Carlos Fuentes, has passed away--the latest links will be appearing here.

During the 1980s, I worked as a research and graduate teaching assistant for Carlos at Cornell University--it was there that we formed a friendship and a collaboration that changed my life forever. I have documented some of this here on the Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog in these postings.

Among the many amazing and magical things that happened during the incredible semester (including the never-to-be-forgotten memory of dancing alongside Carlos at a Latina/o party, downtown Ithaca, at an American Legion Hall {picture it!}), was that I made a lifelong friendship with the talented American playwright, Oliver Mayer--now an Associate Professor in Theatre @ USC.  He and talked the other day about our friendship with Carlos--our shared loss, sadness, and memories.  It was good to talk to Oliver; he's like the brother I never had.

In any event, Oliver posted something on his No Passport Yahoo Groups site that I would like to share it with you here:

Carlos Fuentes was my teacher and friend at Cornell in the mid 80s. He taught me so much about being a writer and being an educator. The man was ferocious with life, dashing, brilliant, curious, and constantly engaged in the politics and culture of our times. I loved him and his family--his beautiful wife and his two children, now tragically both dead before their time. The Nobel Prize should have gone to Carlos many times over. Another artist would have shut down or grown bitter, but Carlos always chose the higher road in his work. His prize is his body of writing, his enormous artistic compassion, and the legion of young artists who learned from his example -- not only as a writer but as a man.

Love, Oliver

Oliver Mayer
Associate Professor
USC School of Theatre
Faculty Master
Parkside International Residential College
Affiliated Faculty: Dept of American Studies and Ethnicity
olivermayer.com

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A posting of Fuentes family pictures has appeared here.

* * *

Here's a recent BBC Mundo piece and streaming interview with Fuentes from December 2011--the streaming video appears below the imagelink.

UPDATED: Carlos Fuentes Has Died

I am just processing the news that one of my dearest mentors, the great Mexican author and public intellectual Carlos Fuentes, has passed away--the latest links will be appearing here.

During the 1980s, I worked as a research and graduate teaching assistant for Carlos at Cornell University--it was there that we formed a friendship and a collaboration that changed my life forever. I have documented some of this here on the Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog in these postings.

Among the many amazing and magical things that happened during the incredible semester (including the never-to-be-forgotten memory of dancing alongside Carlos at a Latina/o party, downtown Ithaca, at an American Legion Hall {picture it!}), was that I made a lifelong friendship with the talented American playwright, Oliver Mayer--now an Associate Professor in Theatre @ USC.  He and talked the other day about our friendship with Carlos--our shared loss, sadness, and memories.  It was good to talk to Oliver; he's like the brother I never had.

In any event, Oliver posted something on his No Passport Yahoo Groups site that I would like to share it with you here:

Carlos Fuentes was my teacher and friend at Cornell in the mid 80s. He taught me so much about being a writer and being an educator. The man was ferocious with life, dashing, brilliant, curious, and constantly engaged in the politics and culture of our times. I loved him and his family--his beautiful wife and his two children, now tragically both dead before their time. The Nobel Prize should have gone to Carlos many times over. Another artist would have shut down or grown bitter, but Carlos always chose the higher road in his work. His prize is his body of writing, his enormous artistic compassion, and the legion of young artists who learned from his example -- not only as a writer but as a man.

Love, Oliver

Oliver Mayer
Associate Professor
USC School of Theatre
Faculty Master
Parkside International Residential College
Affiliated Faculty: Dept of American Studies and Ethnicity
olivermayer.com

* * *

A posting of Fuentes family pictures has appeared here.

* * *

Here's a recent BBC Mundo piece and streaming interview with Fuentes from December 2011--the streaming video appears below the imagelink.

Carlos Fuentes at 82

I know he is not every reader's cup of tea, but my life in the arts would never be the same without having worked as Carlos Fuentes's TA at Cornell back in 1985; here's a great piece on the generous mensch without whose encouragement, the icy shores of Ithaca might have been a disaster; hit the image for the link...

Thanks to Eduardo Santacruz for the links...

Carlos on Carlos: Fuentes on Monsiváis, RIP!

Hitting the graphic above sends you to a Spanish-language piece from El Universal--Daniel Hernandez's piece here, from the LATimes is in English (and is superb).

Thanks to regular contributor Daphne Strassmann for the initial headsup on this!

Sick Culture: Ewen, Lotringer, Fuentes, Gates AND Rend[er]ing LC Back in Print

Two articles I published back in the day with Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture and The Review of Contemporary Fiction are back online. Here are the references--hit the cover images for the direct links:



William A. Nericcio, "Sick Culture: Reading Across the Disciplines With Carlos Fuentes, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Sylvère Lotringer and Stuart Ewen." Spring 50 (1990): 159-173.



Willam A. Nericcio, "Rend(er)ing 'L.C.': Susan Daitch Meets Borges & Borges, Delacroix, Marx, Derrida, Daumier, and Other Textualized Bodies" The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 13, (1993).

Carlos Fuentes Wins the Don Quixote Prize in Spain

More here; and in Spanish, here--a big abrazo to new KCR DJ Eduardo Santacruz for the links. Lots of pictures from the Award ceremony by hitting the image above!

Once a Latin Americanist, Always a Latin Americanist

Back in the day, (1988 to 1999), I was a full-on, licensed, practicing Latin Americanist literary critic publishing essays on Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz*, a dissertation on alienation in Latin American Literature† and so on y so on. 

These days, visual media cultural studies take up a lot of my plate and I find my old school Latin Americanist roots melding with my new school semiotic obsessions--hence this quick link to boston.com's cool new Big Picture blog and an entry on Brazil. Amazing photography and more.



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*Siglo XX/20th Century: Critique & Cultural Discourse, 10:1-2 1992-93
†The Politics of Solitude: Alienation in the Literatures of America. Ph.D. Dissertation, Cornell University, 1989. Abstract in Dissertation Abstracts International (June 1990), 50(12):3943-A.

Carlos Fuentes and the Debt that Cannot be Paid

Here, below these lines, is a page torn from the acknowledgments section of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America--diverse, name-filled pages in which I valiantly strive to thank all of the amazing people (and, two scoundrels) who made my 16-year odyssey of authorship possible. First on the list of folks that crossed my path and traced my psyche at Cornell University, in freezer-like Ithaca, New York, is the guapo Mexican novelist, diplomat, and public intellectual, Carlos Fuentes:


Fuentes, one of the best living, internationally-acclaimed writers still WITHOUT a Nobel Prize, is at the top of my list because of his patience, generosity, and lively wit--there was no reason a writer and university professor of his stature should have taken the time he did to guide a callow Laredense, wet behind the ears and all, but he did. Fuentes just spoke at UCSD last week and I was able to catch up with him. Read Aura if you have a chance; you won't regret it.