El Txupinazo!

El Txupinazo

Just a little over 12 hours left to the Txupinazo and the official beginning to the mother of all parties, la Fiesta de San Fermín.

I'm in Pamplona, Spain and this year, because it's the fiftieth anniversary of the last time my grandfather was here for the famous "running of the bulls", I've been invited to see the opening ceremony from one of the balconies of the town's City Hall. Last year I didn't see anything of the rocket they launch, because I was standing in front of the Ayuntamiento and wedged in between a zillion other people and trying (without much luck) not to get soaked with the wine and champagne that was being sprayed in industrial quantities.

This time I'm sure that the view will be better, but not the energy and the excitement that I'll feel. That's guaranteed for everyone.

The Saturday Evening Post

A word to all you short fiction fans out there, The Saturday Evening Post is publishing "Uncle Gus", a story I wrote for the inaugural edition of their newly revamped magazine. After many years this historic publication, founded by Benjamin Franklin, has decided to reintroduce the short story to its format.
It should be in newsstands now, for those of you in North America, but you'll also be able to read it on their website.

A father remembered

To celebrate father's day here's another poem from John Lyons.

A father remembered

Age passes
Until one day
We become ageless
Unlike the rocks or stones
Unlike the clouds or the stars
That pan out across distant skies,
Unlike ocean depths or mountains
Or forests in constant redefinition.
Your love I remember,
Your reflective smile, the kindness
Of your semantics that fed each one
Of us with hopes and dreams;
To feel the rugged skin
Of your weathered face
Was to touch tenderness,
You who had been somebody’s
Blue-eyed boy, who extolled
The virtues of silence and spoke
Softly to those who lived
Within the calm arena of your affections.
Poetry ran within your veins
And energized the fingers
That danced to the beat
Of the music that vibrated
In the hollow shell of your violin.
Our achievement, if any, is to pass
As you did, from the tentative
To the accomplished, and so attain
The truth of the undying rose,
The definitive heart of the matter,
To embody the indestructible soul
With its slow accumulation of minor
Perfections that only come together
Once we land upon that other shore.
You were father, brother, son
And husband, uncle and nephew,
Friend par excellence to be counted
Among the beloved few:
What is birth but the death
Of annihilation, oblivion put
To the sword, eternal snapshot,
And first taste of infinity.

John Lyons 10 June 2009

The New Caudillo

Barack Obama has been our President for almost five months now, and while the new chief executive is still quite popular in the US and around the world, nothing lasts forever. Which is to say that, sooner or later, the “Prince of Hope” will have to show that, in fact, things are better in the US and that he has maintained his many campaign promises to change the status quo. But with close to half a million people losing their jobs every month in the US alone that could be a tough sell. People tend to vote with their wallets and if all that anyone can see is a president who continues to bend over backwards to bail out the big banks and Wall Street (while at the same time gutting the pensions and benefits of GM autoworkers, just to give one example of his anti-labor bias) what kind of credibility will the man have six months from now?

Not much, I’d imagine, and this is what makes me think that Obama won’t be around for long. He’ll be lucky if he gets to the end of his four-year term. The people who voted him into office are a fairly forgiving bunch, but there is a limit to everything. As far as I can tell no one seems to mind much that his administration doesn’t have a serious plan to pull us out of Iraq or that he has actually ramped up the American war effort in Afghanistan. Likewise, most of his supporters haven’t lost any sleep over the fact that the unconstitutional Military Commission tribunals, the infamous kangaroo courts that the Bushmen set up in Guantanamo are still there, albeit with a bit of typically Obama-esque window dressing. Nor did anyone really care when Obama promised that he would never prosecute those who ordered or physically carried out the “enhanced interrogation” techniques of the previous administration.

Prisoners at Guantanamo

Americans can condone torture, the death of Habeas Corpus and even endless imperial war, but when you don’t fix the economy or appear as if you’re one sided in supporting the nation’s oligarchy at the expense of the common man then you’re asking for trouble. Heads will roll and the party that appeared irredeemably disgraced when W left office is now optimistic about its chances. The Republicans, under the leadership of ex-congressman Newt Gingrich are plotting their comeback and declaring that Obama has failed. Which, of course, is true.

The President, with his complete and total submission to the wishes of Wall Street, is leading the nation down the road to ruin. Just about every state is in danger of defaulting, home foreclosures show no sign of abating, GM has been forced into bankruptcy and all Obama can think of is discovering even more ways of propping up the nation’s insolvent banking system with trillions in taxpayers’ money. Yes, the Republicans are right, the President has failed in every sense of the word, but that doesn’t mean that John McCain and Sarah Palin would have done anything different. They supported the initial bailout of the Banksters just as Obama did. McCain was in favor or a strong military and a continuing presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, just as Obama is in favor of these things. Perhaps only with torture would McCain have been different. Having been tortured himself as a POW during the Vietnam War he must know that it doesn’t work as an intelligence tool (prisoners will say anything you want them to say to stop the pain).

But as the economy continues to worsen who will remember these similarities? Everything will be blamed on Obama and the Republicans will find themselves back in the White House after having waged a ferociously populist campaign against the elitist president and his Wall Street masters. We’ll have a new caudillo to finish the job that Bush and Obama began, seamlessly integrating state and corporate interests into a totalitarian whole.

Leaves falling

Here's a poem from John Lyons in honor of Mario Benedetti.

In memoriam

Leaves falling from
Mangoes that line
These suburban streets
In Caracas – 1977 –
The fruit falling
And the leaves falling,
Swept into the gutter
Along with El Universal
The daily news
And the discarded wrappers
The peel of an orange
Tossed in the dust
Where yesterday fell
And the still falling snow
Gently falling on the grave
Of Michael Furey, and throughout
This literate universe, fallen poets
Along with fallen lovers
Each behind the battlelines
Of their own making, Mario
Benedetti, in the years of exile
Reading from his proudly
Proletarian poetry
One sweltering afternoon
In the Venezuelan capital
His gentle words softly
Spoken into the fading light
Of day, night falling
All those years ago,
The modesty of life’s warmth
That disarms the coldness of death.

Pastime

The great Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti died today in Montevideo at the age of 88. Below is one of his poems and my translation of it.

Pasatiempo

Cuando éramos niños
los viejos tenían como treinta
un charco era un océano
la muerte lisa y llana
no existía.

Luego cuando muchachos
los viejos eran gente de cuarenta
un estanque un océano
la muerte solamente
una palabra.

Ya cuando nos casamos
los ancianos estaban en cincuenta
un lago era un océano
la muerte era la muerte
de los otros.

Ahora veteranos
ya le dimos alcance a la verdad
el océano es por fin el océano
pero la muerte empieza a ser
la nuestra.

Pastime

When we were very young
old people were thirty
a puddle was an ocean
death, smooth and plain
didn’t exist.

Later as children
old people were forty
a pond was an ocean
death but
a word.

Already when we married
the elderly were fifty
a lake was an ocean
and death was the death
of others.

Now as old hands
we are within reach of the truth
the ocean is finally the ocean
but death has started to resemble
our own.

Les, Marty and Ernie

Here's a photo from 1940 of my great-uncle, Leicester Hemingway, standing with a beer in his hand on his schooner in Havana with Ernest and my grandfather's third wife Martha Gellhorn.

Happy Hour in Havana