Nailed to the Wound... Tales by Jose Manuel Di Bella

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Nailed to the wound

There are books, titles, works , and so on that deal with a "peculiar" literary technique that seems to have fallen into an awkward void. People seem to constantly put anything from William Faulkner to Joyce on their reading list, the title of which might read "'Summer books...' I need to read to seem more cultured, but won't understand," otherwise known as Stream-of-Conscious. And it is ok! I have authored such a list as well, and cannot begin to comment how many times I have to had re-read a page of The Sound and The Fury, at this point I should just re-read the whole book.

But by far the most moving piece I have encountered, and I recommend for anyone who wants to start maneuvering and breaking into a pair of new stream-of-consciousness reads is Carlos Fuentes "La Raya del Olvido" or "The Line of Oblivion," found in his novel of short stories La Frontera de Cristal or The Crystal Frontier. The reason why, its complexity veiled in simplicity. The language and sentence structures will not take a toll on many, but yet reveal a dramatic mentally savage end. It's also short, for those of us that say we have no time.

If yiu want to get a taste of Carlos Fuentes, this link will take you to a Dance performance video Arturo Fuentes did based off Carlos Fuentes "The Line of Oblivion." Go ahead and click on it and peer a little into the Crystal Frontier

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pEWxjAES40

Somwhere on this path do I find myself with Jose Manuel Di Bella's Nailed to the Womb. 

His sentence lines move with controlled swiftness and dissonance. For example, in his short story "The Card," which involves a translator, who takes the role of narrator, illustrates his last interactions with his lost  friend. This quote highlights their friendship and the beginning of the end..

I had thought to call Lucia to have her invite Magui, but soon this idea dissipated, too far away, on hearing the first thing he said: 'Time only exists for those who dare to measure it. I have no beginning or end.' and he cackled impressively. Used to his phrases, I also started to laugh and added somewhat uncertainly: 'If you hide a minute in a box, and then open it after 20 years the minute will still be there.' his response left me cold: 'yes, but you have to be very careful about hiding it. It can be the minute of your recapitulation.' And he again cackled, which now didn't last as long, and with that naturalness he asked me how the matter of the translations was going...

This should also provide a taste to Jose Manuel Di Bella's caliber by impressively creating vivid characters through not only the eyes of others but the characters own internal experiences in a few concentrated pages. Which perfectly portrays the power of a stream of conscious. This is as close as we can get into someone else's skin before losing ourselves. 

Another example of Jose Manuel Di Bella's narrative power resonates in each character's boundary breaking voice tearing through the pages and our atmosphere. In the main titles story "Nailed to the Wound" the narrator begins:

Well I'll tell you. I don't worry too much. As long as you don't interfere with what I want to do, good luck and good-bye. It happens that suddenly you adopt high integrator flights of dispersed masses and want- really it's a reverend ingenuity- feel yourself the inspiration of something that transcends us...but the truth is that you have an authentic leader complex.

Each ending also brands a picture of longing. I would give you a quote to peak, but I think 1) that would ruin the ending 2) you need to find out by yourself 3) if I gave you any more passages I might end up showing you the whole book. And you need to read this. It is a beautiful mental piece without the surgical price or deathly scavenge.

Just click here to get the whole text…

Jose Manuel Di Bella
if you want to know more about him visit this site, hopefully you can read spanish... http://larc.sdsu.edu/baja/autores/di_bella_jose.html

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You Know Where You Are Now: A Look Inside Border Lives

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There is no faster or more effective way to mainline the feeling of existential vertigo than spending time along the borderlands dividing Mexico from the United States of America. Life along this border is an incongruous, sensory-overloading experience: visions of ludicrous corporate wealth propelled by extreme social poverty; floating, malleable identities and competing histories; no fixed addresses; no clear, concise version of any one lasting truth to tie it all together.

It’s a psychically battering experience, but a rewarding one as well, in terms of expanded insight and cross-cultural empathy, and SDSU Press’s essay collection Border Lives: Personal Essay on the U.S.-Mexico Border/Vidas Fronterizas: La Crónica en la Frontera México-Estados Unidos , has all three—the battery, the insight, and the empathy—in spades.

The ten essays collected in Border Lives (each one presented back-to-back in Spanish and English translations) offer deeply personal and haunting snapshots of life and death along the border, but amidst the varying tones, backgrounds, and approaches employed by the writers here assembled, some common narrative threads emerge to provide the reader with an explosively visceral experience of life along this interzone of cultural, political, and economic conflict.

Strongest amongst these commonalities is the feeling that to live a border life is to experience a sense of disconnect on a daily basis, but a disconnect one cannot disassociate from. It’s always present, a source code of freeway signs and graffiti tags, bible verses and rock lyrics, corporate sloganeering and calls for la revolución, Prozac prescriptions and cocaine addictions, that constantly throw off one’s effort to express a thought as simply cogent as “This is who I am and this is where I’m from.”

In the end, this disconnect is what renders the essay as the perfect literary form to explore the vast complexities of life on the border. As SDSU Press Director Harry Polkinhorn puts it in the collection’s opening piece, essays “provide us with a unique blend of philosophical meditation, travel impressions, character sketch, autobiographical reference, and journalistic observation, all inflected by the wit, irony, or lofty sentiments which color the quality of their writer’s lives.”

The writers of Border Lives present the reader with stories both intimate in emotion and all-encompassing in scale: Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz undertakes a time-traveling dissection of his youth in northern Mexico and coming-of-age as a rock & roll-loving medical student in Jalisco; William Nericcio questions the tenets of memory and truth while exploring the contrast between border towns like Laredo, Texas, where class, not race, is the dominant factor in the social fabric of society, and San Diego, California, where ethnic and political prejudices assign class to each race; Emily Hicks injects a flair of performance art into her story of betrayal, breakdowns, and single motherhood; and James Bradley, amidst his own personal reflections of border life, ruminates on the United States’ shameful history of land-grabs, political power plays, and military interventions in Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador.

Border Lives is an excellent resource for anyone hoping to gain a more comprehensive perspective on life along the U.S-Mexico border, but be warned: You may be thrown off by what you find when you get here. The landscape is jarring, jagged, much of it an industrial wasteland bled dry by corporate interests. People here travel through time-loops and commune with ghosts. The weight of history, and the desperate efforts of those who wish to re-write or wish it away, makes it nearly impossible to know where you’ve been, where you’re going, or who you even are anymore. The only thing that can be known along the border is where you are right now; the rest is up for grabs.

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Gómez Montero is considered one of the most important thinkers in northern Mexico. Director of the National University of Education in Mexicali, he's known for his work in linguistics, cultural anthropology, political economy and cultural criticism.

The Border: The Future of Postmodernity is one of his best books. It contrasts regional and national culture, explores the relationship of indigenous sources to the cultural politics of a centrist state, and critiques the tradition of the literary essay.

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BORDER LIVES: PERSONAL ESSAYS ON THE U.S./MEXICO BORDER