#Argentina 1955

[milliondollarbaby87]

Awards: Golden Globes 2023 - Winners

Awards: Golden Globes 2023 – Winners

[vintagef1]

"Entering Victory Lane in 1955 – Juan Manuel Fangio winning his home race in Buenos Aires. Do you recognize the model? 🕵️‍♂️" - february 13, 2024 📷 @.mercedesamgmotorsport / instagram

[phantom-retrospective]

El Fantasma de la Opereta (1955) is now available subbed from the Phantom Retrospective channel.

Please note that this isn't a Phantom Retrospective original translation. Not to be confused with the 1960 Mexican film of the same name starring Tin-Tan.

For more Phantom-y goodness join the Phantom Retrospective discord server: https://discord.gg/3z9tXsJWJ8

[cinemedios]

Reseña | ‘Santa Evita', Miniserie

[federer7]

Abra Pampa, Argentina, 1955

Photo: Grete Stern

[talomacblog]

[rabbitcoolcars]

1955 Kaiser Manhattan

1955 was the end of the line for the Kaiser brand domestically. Only 270 Manhattans were produced for 1955. They were actually updated 1954s with small fins added to the hood scoop and updated body-style codes.

Kaiser's virtues were better appreciated outside of the United States, particularly in Latin America. In the spring of 1955, Kaiser shipped its body dies to Argentina, where Industrias Kaiser Argentina produced the ``Carabella'' into the early 1960s.

[queerism1969]

Atrocity created by CAPITALISM

Irish Famine (1845-1852)

Indian Famines during British colonial rule (Various, 18th-20th centuries)

Indigenous Genocide (Ongoing since colonization)

Slavery (16th-19th centuries)

Indonesian Genocide (1965-1966)

Pinochet Dictatorship (1973-1990)

Argentina Dictatorship (1976-1983)

Brazilian Dictatorship (1964-1985)

Pakistan Incident (Bangladesh Genocide, 1971)

The Gilded Age (Late 19th century)

The Great Depression (1929-1939)

Operation Condor (1960s-1980s)

Banana Wars (Early 20th century)

Batista Dictatorship (1952-1959)

Guantanamo Bay (Ongoing since 2002)

Vietnam War (1955-1975)

My Lai Massacre (1968)

Sinchon Massacre (Korean War, 1950-1953)

Kent State Massacre (1970)

Patriot Act (2001)

Red Summer (1919)

Jim Crow (Late 19th-20th centuries)

MK Ultra (1950s-1970s)

1985 MOVE bombing (1985)

1921 Battle of Blair Mountain (1921)

Malayan Emergency (1948-1960)

Mau Mau Rebellion (1952-1960)

Covert war in Yemen (Ongoing)

Stanley Meyer incident (1998)

Genocide in Turkey (Armenian Genocide and others, WWI era)

Congolese Genocide (Late 19th-20th centuries)

Greek Civil War (1946-1949)

Invasion of Cyprus by Turkey (1974)

Washita River Massacre (1868)

Minamata Disaster (1950s-1960s)

Bhopal Disaster (1984)

Kentler Project (1960s-2003)

Thomas Midgley Jr. and leaded gasoline (Early 20th century)

Forced labor in private US prisons (Ongoing)

Collateral murder in Iraq (2010)

Julian Assange and leaks (Ongoing)

US drone strikes (Ongoing)

US sanctions (Ongoing)

US support for dictatorships (Ongoing)

Korean War and civilian casualties (Korean War, 1950-1953)

Nazi funding and collaboration (WWII era)

Hitler and "Judeo-Bolshevism" (WWII era)

[wheelsgoroundincircles]

1955 Kaiser Manhattan

1955 Kaiser Manhattan . . . The end of the line for the Kaiser brand domestically. Only 270 Manhattans were produced for 1955. They were actually updated 1954s with small fins added to the hood scoop and updated body-style codes.

Kaiser's virtues were better appreciated outside of the United States, particularly in Latin America. In the spring of 1955, Kaiser shipped its body dies to Argentina, where Industrias Kaiser Argentina produced the ``Carabella'' into the early 1960s.

[er1chartmann]

Adolf Eichmann

This is Adolf Eichmann, the empty man, timeline:

1906: He was born.

1914: The First World War began

1914: He  and his family move to Linz, Austria.

1916: His mother died.

1918: The First World War ended

1925: He works in the sales division of the Upper Austrian Electrical Construction Company.

1927: He started working as a traveling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company in Upper Austria. He left his job in 1933

1932:  He enters the Austrian National Socialist (Nazi) Party and the SS at the suggestion of an acquaintance, Ernst Kaltenbrunner.

1933: Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany

1933: The Austrian government suppresses the Austrian Nazi Party 

1933: He leaves Austria for Germany, where he joins the “Austrian Legion” and engages in military training.

1934: He joins the Security Service Main Office (Sicherheitsdienst (SD) Hauptamt) with the rank of SS-Scharführer (Sergeant).

1935: He married Veronika (Vera) Liebl.

1936: His first son, Klaus Eichmann, was born.

1937: He is assigned to a section of the SD dealing with Zionist activities.

1937: He negotiates with Zionist functionaries and makes an inspection tour of Palestine in order to assess the possibility of large-scale voluntary Jewish emigration to Palestine.

1938: The Central Office for Jewish Emigration officially opens in Vienna.

1939: He becomes responsible for promoting the expulsion of Czech Jews from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia 

1939: The Second World War began.

1939: He creates a Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Prague.

1939: He leads the Reich-wide Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Berlin

1940: He becomes director of Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) section IV D 4 “Emigration and Evacuation” 

1940: His second son, Horst Adolf Eichmann, was born.

1940: He organizes the deportation of nearly 7,000 Jews from Baden and Saarpfalz to areas of unoccupied France.

1941: He becomes director of RSHA section IV B 4 (Jewish Affairs, or Judenreferat). 

1941: He is appointed SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel)

1941: He takes part in discussions in which Nazi leaders plan the annihilation of the European Jews.

1941-1942: Eichmann's Section IV B 4 coordinates the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews from the so-called Greater German Reich to ghettos and killing sites in the German-occupied Soviet Union.

1942: Reinhard Heydrich convenes the Wannsee Conference

1942: His third son,  Dieter Helmut Eichmann, was born.

1942-1943: He and his aides organize the deportation of Jews from the so-called Greater German Reich, Slovakia, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, and Croatia to killing centers in German-occupied Poland, primarily Auschwitz-Birkenau.

1943-1944: He nd his aides organize the deportation of Jews from Greece, northern Italy, and Hungary, primarily to the killing center Auschwitz-Birkenau.

1944: He personally direct the deportation of Hungarian Jewry.

1945: Hitler commits suicide.

1945: The Second World War ended

1946: He  escapes from US custody and flees to Argentina with the assistance of some Vatican officials.

1955: His fourth son, Ricardo Francisco Eichmann, was born.

1960: Agents of the Mossad abduct Eichmann from Argentina and bring him to Israel to stand trial.

 1961: He is found guilty of crimes against the Jewish people.

1962: He died.

Sources:

Military Wiki: Adolf Eichmann

Wikipedia: Adolf Eichmann

Holocaust Encyclopedia: Adolf Eichmann

I DON'T SUPPORT NAZISM,FASCISM OR ZIONISM IN ANY WAY, THIS IS AN EDUCATIONAL POST

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Racing is life. Anything before or after is just waiting.

Steve McQueen

In his lifetime Juan Manuel Fangio was called 'El Maestro' and was rightly considered as one of the greatest Formula One drivers of all time.

In seven full Formula One seasons (he missed one recovering from a nearly fatal injury) he was World Champion five times (with four different teams) and runner-up twice. In his 51 championship Grands Prix he started from the front row 48 times (including 29 pole positions) and set 23 fastest race laps en route to 35 podium finishes, 24 of them victories. His superlative track record was achieved by some of the greatest displays of skill and daring ever seen. Fangio did it all with style, grace, nobility and a sense of honour never seen before or since.

Fangio flourished in Formula One racing when the world championship was in its infancy and he was a comparatively 'Old Man' - which is what his admiring rivals called the aging genius who won his last driving title in 1957, when he was 46 years old.

Most of his challengers were young enough to be his sons, and nearly all of them came from privileged backgrounds far removed from Fangio's humble origins in a remote corner of Argentina, in the dusty frontier town of Balcarce. His father and mother, hard-working immigrants from the Abruzzi region of Italy to whom Fangio was deeply devoted, raised their six children (three boys and three girls) to believe in God and the dignity of labour.

Juan Manuel Fangio credited his parents with instilling in him the virtues of honesty and integrity, self-discipline, respect for others and the sense of responsibility that characterised his approach to life. 

Fangio’s legacy in the world of motorsport is immense. He set a standard of excellence that has inspired generations of racers, and his smooth driving style and strategic mastery have been studied and emulated by countless drivers. He was also a pioneer in the sport, helping to popularize Formula One in South America and paving the way for future generations of drivers from the region.

A notable victory came in the 1955 Monaco Grand Prix, where Fangio overcame a 50-second deficit to win the race by just over three seconds. The race is remembered for Fangio’s heroic performance, as he pushed his car to the limit and overtook several competitors in the closing laps.

[navybrat817]

now that I sae you talking about What If...?, let's talk about why they decided to choose Peggy as the one who will bring back Steve from the whole HYDRA thing???? and not his best friend for life, the one who last saw him too in that mission in Argentina??? sorry but that, for me at least, was lame, dumb and EVERYTHING BAD

also, when I hear that he died in Argentina in 1953, for a moment I thought that it's mean Steve was the one who throw a coup against president Juan Domingo Perón 😅 but no, that was in 1955, I was laughing my ass off for the idea

I just want to point out real quick how good old man Barnes looks because wouldn't he be 97 years old or something along those lines?

Anyway. 😂 Some thoughts under the cut.

I'm in agreement with you, nonnie, and I think that's part of my issue with the series. I get that these are supposed to be different takes, but it did come across in many ways that elements of Stucky (whether you ship them or just view them as friends) were given to push Steggy. With Steve trying to break through to Bucky in TWS, it made sense. With Peggy, it felt shoehorned and wasn't executed well.

Peggy and Nat felt natural.

And Peggy making heart eyes at 1602 Steve. Did she expect to stay there with him when she had Hydra Stomper Steve in her world? Rogers Hood and his Merry Men were fun.

We also saw how upset Peggy was when they didn't tell her about Steve. Yet in episode 2 after recognizing Bucky immediately, Howard says he had heard the rumors and that the man they knew was gone. Why not look into it when the rumors started? And Howard brings up Steve to get in touch with Bucky's humanity, but then they don't even try to help him at the end of the episode.

I wonder what Steve would've said to them had he been around...

Bahaha. Wouldn't that have been something in Argentina? 😂

Love and thanks! ❤️

[kudzucataclysm]

SE Timeline Rough Draft

Early 1800s - Martians arrive on Earth after a century of observation. They either land in central Siberia or the Alps. Over the course of a couple years, the Martians split up to infiltrate human society. They are extremely successful.

1868 - Computers are invented.

1889 - Lupe Altena is born.

1897 - Personal computers invented. Sold to the general public.

1904 - Hammond is created.

1909 - There are over 500 webpages on the world wide web. This is the start of the internet.

1914 - WW1.

1917 - Carmine Keller is born.

1922 - WW1 ends in a “stalemate” with the establishment of multiple European DMZs. 

1925 - The first man in space. A political party, “The Machine”, takes the majority of power in congress.

1930s - Britain goes to war with Japan. Superscience race begins, leading to the invention of the atomic bomb. Lupe splits from The Machine (The New Machine) and funds the creation of the Martian hunting team known as ATLAS. First mutant powers begin to emerge.

1940s - Economic stagnation as conflicts at the European DMZs begin to escalate. America looks to profit as it appears another outbreak of total war may occur in Europe. Hammond and Azelfafage meet; Lupe catches ADP. Friday joins ATLAS.

1951 - Yellowstone Incident. Global atomic war begins 7 hours later. The winter of that year lasts for almost a decade.

1951-1969 - Famine. Plague. Civil war. Nuclear, broken weather. Superpowered chaos. Tall tales emerging from the wastes of red creatures with a hundred eyes… 

1955? - Lupe Altena establishes the Promethean Society and headquarters The New Machine in the outskirts of the former city of Chicago.

1958 - The construction of what will eventually be known as “The NEC” begins.

1960s - Countries not as devastated by the atomic war (such as Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Switzerland, Argentina, etc) attempt peacekeeping operations in the United States with little to no success. The Disincorporated United States of America is established, and a corporate committee of “superheroes” acts as its sword.

1970? - Martians reveal themselves to the world, promising aid and support in exchange for Earth’s resources. They soon begin terraforming Earth’s atmosphere in order to ensure a major ice age.

1971 - Intersolar Protocol is signed. A new species, known as “Chimera”, explodes across the world.

1973 - Maya Fontaine is born.

1974 - Carson Keller is born.

1980s - Necropolis turns into a tower of Babel, a megacity of stacked/layered cities, out in the middle of Lake Michigan due to the Martian King Azelfafage. The city’s population grows to the size of a country, and is unofficially regarded as such (to the ire of DUSA). It becomes a free economic zone, influenced largely by foreign capital.

1990 - Lupe Altena disappears. The authority of the NEC falls into feudalism between cities and layers. Francis Mueller is born.

1991 - Outbreak of firestorms across the southern states. Desmond Arkady is born.

1995 - Hammond disappears.

1999 - Francis experiences a “medical incident”. She develops a form of amnesia.

2000 - Francis and Vincent meet.

2003 - Sloane Arkady abandons the family. Francis is handed over to alleged crime lord Carmine Keller.

2004 - The remnants of the Arkady family move to the NEC.

2005 - Desmond is inducted into the Promethean School of Science.

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Round Four: Kholumolumo vs Bajadasaurus

Kholumolumo ellenbergerorum

Artwork by @alphynix, written by @i-draws-dinosaurs

Name meaning: Kholumolumo (giant reptilian dragon from Sotho folklore) named for Paul and François Ellenberger (the original excavators of the fossils)

Time: 210 million years ago (Norian stage of the Late Triassic)

Location: Lower Elliot Formation, Lesotho

Kholumolumo is an old friend with a new name. Its previous informal name, “Thotobolosaurus” meaning “trash heap reptile”, was truly magnificent and became one of the great memes of Ye Olde 2010s Palaeo Tumblr! Needless to say it was a bittersweet moment to see our old buddy finally published but lose its iconic name in the process. Rest in peace, Trash Heap Lizard.

The reason it wound up with that name is because the fossils were in fact found basically right next to the local rubbish dump of the village of Maphutseng in 1955. The trash pile turned out to be sitting on a bone bed of around five to ten animals, and over the course of several years they were excavated and moved to the University of Cape Town. Unfortunately, and perhaps appropriately to the name, the subsequent study of these fossils ended up being a complete trash fire. Specimens went missing that have never been found, professional relationships fell apart, and the animal itself wasn’t mentioned in the literature until 1970 when it was dropped into a discussion on the stratigraphy of the Elliot formation and named “Thotobolosaurus mabeatae” without any description of the fossils. This made the name “Thotobolosaurus” a nomen nudum (naked name) and thus invalid.

Finally in 2020 all the tribulation paid off and it received a proper initial description, although many fossils that weren’t lost in the chaos still remain under study and could be the subject of future papers. It’s nice to see our beloved trash heap of a dinosaur finally coming into its own!

Bajadasaurus pronuspinax

Artwork by @i-draws-dinosaurs, written by @i-draws-dinosaurs

Name meaning: Downhill reptile with forward-bent spines

Time: 145 to 132.9 million years ago (Berriasian to Valanginian stages of the Early Cretaceous)

Location: Bajada Colorado Formation, Argentina

Initially published in 2019, Bajadasaurus became pretty much instantly popular because of its bizarre, forward-pointing double mohawk of spines on its neck. The only other dinosaur like it is Amargasaurus, a dicraeosaurid sauropod that was thought to be entirely unique in its neck spines. The initial hypothesis in the paper describing Bajadasaurus was that the front-facing spines would have been passive defense structures that could impale predators that tried to make a charge at the otherwise-vulnerable head. However, a recent paper on Amargasaurus in 2022 has potentially turned that idea on its spiny head, suggesting that based on the interior bone histology of the spines as well as the outer texture Amargasaurus’ multi-pronged neck actually supported some sort of fleshy sail instead! The study didn’t include Bajadasaurus in its analysis, but based on its similarities to Amargasaurus it’s reasonable to assume that this forward-swept spine was also more of a sail, turning a deadly defensive fortification into a showy display feature!

[justforbooks]

César Aira

He has published more than 100 novels, gives his work away, and his surrealist books have a massive cult following. Now Argentina’s favourite rule-breaker is tipped for the Nobel prize

Afew years ago when Patti Smith played at a cultural festival in Denmark, she told the crowd that she was happy to be playing in the presence of one of her favourite authors. It was said she had only agreed to play the festival because the author, César Aira, would be in the audience. Aira, although celebrated in his home country, Argentina, was little known outside Latin America until he was discovered in 2002 by the Berlin-based literary agent Michael Gaeb, who was enchanted by his unconventional, surrealist books, which shift atmosphere, and even genre, from one page to another.

At first it proved difficult to sell Aira’s novels to a wider audience. “The fundamental problem when promoting César’s work is that the editor always asks: ‘What is the novel about?’” Gaeb told me. “And in the case of César, it’s not easy to answer that question.”

Gaeb has since sold Aira’s books in 37 languages. At the start of October last year, the English betting site Nicer Odds named Aira as a favourite for the Nobel prize in literature, slightly ahead of candidates such as Haruki Murakami and Salman Rushdie, who have appeared more regularly on such lists.

“I already know that every October, until my death, I’m going to have to put up with that.” Said by any other writer, this would come across as a humble brag. But Aira doesn’t seem to be the kind of person who appreciates disrupting events. “Sometimes the candidacy is useful to me,” he said, laughing. “For instance, now we live in a more luxurious apartment, one a little beyond my circumstances. And they rent to me because they see that I am a candidate for the Nobel.”

His apartment is located just five blocks from his office, which in its turn was the house where he lived for more than 40 years with his two children and his wife, Liliana Ponce, a poet and a scholar of Japanese literature. The recent move took place because Ponce has an illness that affects her mobility, and the new building has an elevator.

Aira, who does not speak to the local press and whose interviews with foreign media are usually short and conducted via email, rarely leaves Flores, a lower-middle-class neighbourhood that’s best known today as a textile hub for the clothing stores in wealthier areas of the city. Early in his career, Aira developed a method called the fuga hacia adelante (something like “forward flight”), which consists of writing a few hours a day and never looking back to edit until he reaches the end of a tale. “I revise much more than I did before,” casually demystifying what is perhaps the fact most repeated about his work. “I think that I’ve become more demanding. Or else I’m writing worse than before.”

The novels were – and sometimes still are – written in neighbourhood bars, cafes and even fast-food joints, such as McDonald’s or Pumper Nic, a now-extinct Buenos Aires chain. “It began when my children were small,” he said. “If I had a bit of time, I escaped, and I went to write. But after the pandemic, the bars and cafes started to fill up a lot. And there’s the issue of the telephones. If at a neighbouring table two people are conversing, it’s possible to ignore them. But if there’s just one person talking on the phone, it’s as if they’re speaking with you. It’s horrible!”

Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, in a small town in the south of the province, 300 miles from the capital. “I was thinking just now of my first memories of childhood because they are of the revolution of 1955,” he said – the year Juan Perón was removed from power by a coup for the first time. There was only one cinema, and television had not yet caught on. But the town had two well-stocked public libraries. “When I was still a teenager, I was already reading Joyce, Proust and Kafka,” Aira said. His precocity was also stimulated by an amateur public education in which classes were taught not by specialised professors but by volunteers with gigantic private collections of books. There were doctors who taught philosophy classes (“in those days, doctors were humanists”) and lawyers who taught history. “I didn’t have that kind of bureaucratic education where the teacher knows more,” he said. “It was something a lot freer.”

When he was about 14 years old, Aira met Arturo Carrera, a friend who, like him, would become a nationally recognised writer. Aira dedicated himself to prose; Carrera, poetry. The friends tried to stay up to date with the literary world by getting hold of magazines that were based in the capital. One of those publications, Testigo (Witness), held a contest. Carrera sent a few poems, and Aira sent a story. They both came out winners.

At the time, the majority of promising secondary school students in Coronel Pringles continued their university studies in Bahía Blanca, a city 75 miles away. “Law was the only graduate course they didn’t have,” Aira said. He told his parents he was interested in a law degree and moved to the capital. “I wanted to come for the art galleries, the cinemas,” he said. For two years, he studied law at the University of Buenos Aires, and then he transferred to the department of literature.

Testigo folded before it could publish Aira’s winning story. But one of the judges of the award, the novelist Abelardo Arias, wrote to congratulate him. Aira and Arias began a correspondence, and soon Aira showed Arias a manuscript. Arias loved it and passed it on to the publisher Galerna, which agreed to print it.

“It was a big thing, even more so for a young person of that age,” Aira said.

One day, walking aimlessly through the streets of the city with a friend, he came across a building he knew. “Here, in this building, an editor wants to publish a novel of mine,” he told her. “Let’s go up.” When he arrived, he asked to speak with the person responsible for his book. Then he asked for the manuscript back: “I don’t want to publish it any more.” The editor was astonished.

I asked Aira why he’d acted like that. “Just because,” he said. He shrugged and laughed. “I wanted to impress her.”

To write all day long without revising until you reach the end of a story produces an obscene quantity of books. Nobody I met in Buenos Aires ventured to pin down exactly how many volumes Aira has published. César Aira, un catálogo (César Aira: A Catalogue), organised by the writer and lawyer Ricardo Strafacce, is the most notable effort to itemise his work. Launched in 2018 with the aim of helping the uninitiated, the catalogue reprints one page from each of Aira’s books. The catalogue was commissioned by his publisher in part to commemorate his 100th book (Aira likes round numbers), but in the time the catalogue took to reach the printer, Aira had already written two more.

When I sat with Strafacce in the Varela-Varelita bar in Buenos Aires at the end of a November afternoon, he was still indignant with the catalogue’s publisher, who he said had made changes without telling him. For instance, the publisher had edited the date of publication for the Aira story El hornero (The Ovenbird). “I’m furious,” he said. “You can talk to [the editor]. I don’t give a shit.” He complained about another small modification: in the biographical information for one of the titles, to his mention of Madrid, the editor had added “Spain”. In Strafacce’s eyes, the detail made him seem like an idiot, a “boludo”.

“Don’t writers get worked up about the most incredible minutiae?” said Francisco Garamona, the editor in question. With a cigarette in one hand and a glass of soda in the other, he explained that he’d merely used the version of El hornero that Aira himself had authorised, rather than the one in circulation, which was pirated. He was sitting on a sofa in La Internacional Argentina, his bookshop, where he also operates his publishing house, Mansalva. Today, Mansalva probably publishes the most titles by Aira. “There he is, and here are more, here’s another, and here,” Garamona said as he counted the shelves in the bookshop. “One, two, three … seven. Seven niches of just Aira.”

In a way, the decor reflected Garamona’s multifaceted career; in addition to being an editor and a bookshop owner, he is a musician, a film-maker, a poet and the former owner of an art gallery. Today he is also one of two editors whom Aira defined for me as “official”. The other is Damián Ríos, from the publisher Blatt & Ríos.

The honour of “official” editors must inspire some pride in Ríos and Garamona, because Aira has worked with more than a few. His extensive body of work is decentralised in dozens of editorial houses, the vast majority of them tiny, which makes him an author at once ubiquitous and elusive. In this context, it’s not difficult to understand how a controversy like the one with El hornero came about. Aira must be one of the few writers in the world, maybe the only one, to sell 25,000 copies of one title and at the same time launch other titles in much smaller print runs. He has never charged royalties or advances for the small publishing houses in Argentina. “That was the agreement I made with Michael [Gaeb],” Aira said. “I don’t meddle with the world. And he doesn’t meddle with Argentina. In Argentina, everything is free.”

Aira’s strong cultural presence today conceals the stuttering start of his career. “For many years, this was the only proof I was a writer,” he said, showing a handful of yellowing pages, the nucleus of a book without a cover. His voice shook, this time, emotion had truly moved him. In his hands was a copy of Moreira, considered by some to be his first published novel. In the background, an atmospheric combination of dissonant chords and piano notes faded away. “I only listen to Morton Feldman these days,” Aira said. He added that he’d recently made an exception to listen to Now and Then, a “new” song by the Beatles completed thanks to help from artificial intelligence.

After going up to the office of the publishing house Galerna in 1969, in that half-impulsive gesture to ask for his manuscript back, some years went by before Aira had a chance to publish again. Moreira was supposed to come out in 1975, but was delayed. The editor of the book was Aira’s friend Horacio Achával, owner of the publishing house Achával Solo. In 1976, there was another military coup in Argentina. “Horacio was a political militant and had to go away,” Aira said. “He took off. He went to Uruguay.” The copies of Moreira, still without a cover, were left stranded in a warehouse. Years later, Achával returned to the country and finalised the cover. The book was officially launched in December 1981, just weeks after Ema, la cautiva (Ema, the Captive), which came out from another publishing house in November 1981 and today disputes with Moreira the title of Aira’s official debut.

Strafacce told a different story. “Moreira was printed in June 1975,” he said. “The money ran out, and there wasn’t enough to print the cover because in the same month, there was a financial crisis and a bank run here in Argentina.”

Aira published a few books in the 80s, but according to Sandra Contreras, who founded a small publishing house that published him throughout the 90s and 2000s, it was not until 1990’s Los fantasmas (Ghosts) that he accelerated his production. At the time, she said, he also spoke more explicitly of a new phase, “the beginning of the regular publication of his novelas and novelitas”. Aira was the first author to be published not only by Contreras’s publishing house but also by Mansalva and Blatt & Ríos in the early 00s.

In the 90s, small publishers like these were rare. Garamona said that this began to change in 2001, when after almost a decade of one-to-one parity between the Argentine peso and the US dollar, the local economy went through one of the worst recessions in Latin American history. Importing books became expensive. And so, after spending years favouring authors from Spain, local bookshop owners finally had eyes for Argentine literature.

When Gaeb first encountered Aira’s work in Guadalajara, in 2002, Aira had already begun to occupy his paradoxical central position at the margins of the culture. “He is a writer who exists in different fields, at different levels,” the fiction writer and critic Alan Pauls says, from his Berlin study, in a conversation over Zoom. “On the one hand, he has quite a lot of popularity. And on the other, he remains a niche writer, a cult writer. We still think of him as a writer of the avant garde, a manufacturer of very sophisticated objects. He’s someone who occupies the centre to his regret, not because he looked for it.”

To get hold of Moreira today isn’t easy – on the site Mercado Libre Argentina, in mid-December, there was a copy going for about $1,200 (£950). On the cover that for years remained unfinished, there is a monstrous, saturnine figure riding a yellow horse. Beneath the image, the first sentence of the novel prominently appears: Un día, de madrugada, por las lomas inmóviles del Pensamiento bajaba montado en potro amarillo un horrible gaucho (“One day at dawn, through the unmoving hills of Thought, mounted upon a yellow colt, there descended a horrible gaucho”).

In Spanish, El Pensamiento can refer to both the abstract noun, and the village close to where Aira was born and spent his childhood. The phrase gives a taste of the kind of mixture harboured within the novel. Evoking Juan Moreira, a folkloric knife-fighting hero of the Argentine Pampas, the book narrates a gaucho-esque pantomime, shot through with philosophical allusions and images from dreams. In Moreira, one can already recognise the multifaceted and frenetically imaginative style for which Aira would later be known. But the Airean machine still seems to just be getting started: there is a heavy self-consciousness that is absent from the books that follow. In these later works, his prose is limpid and inviting. Here is the start of El mago (The Magician), published almost exactly 20 years after Moreira:

In March this year, the Argentine magician Hans Chans (his real name was Pedro María Gregorini) participated in a convention of illusionists in Panamá; the event, just as the invitation and promotional leaflet described, was a regional meeting of prestigious professionals, a preparation for the great world congress the following year, which was celebrated every 10 years and this time would take place in Hong Kong. The previous one had been in Chicago, and he had not gone. Now he planned not only to participate, but also to establish himself as Best Magician in the World. The idea was not crazy or megalomaniacal. It had a foundation as reasonable as it was curious: Hans Chans was a genuine magician.

Aira takes this magical premise seriously, drawing from the dilemma a tale both comic and – in its exploration of the complex relations between being and seeming – densely philosophical. Hans Chans has the gift to be an illusionist, but not the vocation. He is too self-indulgent to dedicate himself to the profession. The narrator writes: “Maybe, paradoxically, the advantage he had played against him and condemned him to mediocrity.” Without patience for the theatre of magic, Chans limits himself to drawing handkerchiefs from wine glasses, and things of that sort.

It would not be unfair to read El mago as an allegory for the career of Aira himself: of someone who has the gift of writing but for whom the most deeply rooted conventions of the profession seem meaningless. Just like Hans Chans, the author is aware of his gift. Aira is affable and courteous, but he is far from being modest. (Modesty, faked or not, is another convention of the profession.) About the manuscript he asked to take back from Galerna in 1969, he said: “It was better than anything else that was published at the time.”

He has never been afraid to throw darts at other writers. When we spoke, he was disdainful of Roberto Bolaño, saying he had read only one novel by the Chilean author, which he found “terrible”. Aira also said that the great Argentine novelist Juan José Saer had once warmed to him, when he was young and starting out, but then became envious when Aira started getting more attention. In 1981, shortly before Moreira was finally published, Aira wrote an essay titled Novela argentina: nada más que una idea (The Argentine Novel: Nothing But an Idea), which mounts a general attack on literature of the period. The essay begins:

The current Argentine novel, beyond a doubt, is a stunted, ill-fated species. In general terms, what defines a poor novelistic product is the poor use, crude and opportunistic, of the available mythical-social material. In other words, the meanings that dictate how a society lives at a given historical moment. But the literary transposition of a reality demands the existence of a very exact passion: that of literature. And a rapid, provisional survey, not at all exhaustive, of Argentine novelists reveals that they have not read deeply, and show a complete absence of that passion along with its epiphenomenon, talent.

Aira, who had not even published a novel at that time, sticks his scalpel swiftly and mercilessly into a series of authors, most of whom have been more or less forgotten. The essay, though, is remembered these days for Aira’s attack on Ricardo Piglia, who, until his death in 2017, was a kind of public rival to Aira, at least in terms of the very different literary forms they espoused.

Pauls linked Aira’s attacks at the start of his career to his ambition to reconfigure the Argentine novel. “When he emerges in the literary environment, he knows perfectly well the writers he has to tussle with,” he said. For Pauls, Aira disturbed the paradigm of a certain progressive Argentinian literature, a literature of the left, very masculine and politically committed. “Something that literary school could not stand, for example, was a certain kind of work with frivolity, with the banal, with the superficial,” Pauls said.

Aira’s style crystallised very early on. Even if Moreira is not at the level of his next books, there is no clear sense of progression in Aira’s trajectory. Maybe for that reason, none of the readers could point to a favourite work.

Aira said he will have two new novelitas ready soon. He said he plans to give one to Ríos and the other to Garamona. “And now I’ve been thinking, because one of them came out better than the other, more imaginative – who will I give that one to?” he said, laughing.

Aira rejects great theorising about his decision to give away books free or publish the majority with small publishing houses. “His form of publishing is part of his poetics, his resistance to editorial capitalism, his punk attitude,” Gaeb said.

Contreras classified the hyperproduction of little books for small publishers as an aesthetic decision. “Something like: it’s enough for a tale to be imagined to make it necessary to publish,” she said. “There is also a fascination for the book as a unique object.”

Pauls said he interprets this decision as an avant garde way of thinking: “If the kind of literature I make is never going to have hundreds of thousands of readers, what happens if I inundate the market with books?”

When Aira was asked if he was edited nowadays, first he said that “nobody revises anything”. Then he conceded that Ríos sometimes makes one comment or another. Ríos corroborated this, but found it hard to define the exact nature of his comments, and he made it clear that they weren’t about anything structural. Contreras said that in her day, she at most corrected the odd typo.

Garamona laughed at the notion of editing or revising a text by Aira. “He has written since he was a teenager without stopping, and has such a mastery of form and content that in the end there isn’t much left to do,” he said. “You just have to pick it up, make a good cover with a pretty design, correct two or three errata.”

Los hombrecitos con sobretodo (The Little Men in Overcoats) is the title of the novel Aira defined as the most imaginative of the two he recently finished. “What happens is that here in the neighbourhood, two blocks away, where the fire station is located, men pop out at night,” he said. “At midnight they come popping out of the ceiling. Little men suddenly appear like that, really tiny men, they all wear overcoats. And at night, I go and watch them.”

He spoke as if he were beginning a fairytale. The low, tremulous voice transiting between fine irony and rapture; the sense of humour; the erudition; the sedentary life in a dark house in the neighbourhood where he’d lived for decades, from which he generates cosmopolitan, compact stories full of metafictional layers – all of it reminds us a bit of Jorge Luis Borges.

For an Argentinian, to say a great local writer seems like or is influenced by Borges must sound absurdly lazy. But both authors start their brief, densely packed books with literary anecdotes or memories written in crisp prose. In the works of both, there are frequent essayistic digressions. Both persistently turn to the literary technique of ekphrasis. There are metafictional and metaliterary games, references to other works.

The main difference is perhaps in the intensity and direction of the narrative swerves, and Aira’s greater comfort with pop culture and genre literature. Whereas a story by Borges might take up a lost 19th-century Persian manuscript, a novel by Aira might locate it behind the balcony of a McDonald’s in Flores, pored over by an adolescent with an acne problem.

Borges was almost infantile in his complete dedication as a reader, distant from the mundane hustle and bustle of the world. Nobody had anything substantial to say about Aira’s private life either. “He likes to drink coffee and talk about literature,” Ríos said. Gaeb said that Aira sometimes seems to get along better with children. (In fact, the person about whom Aira spoke with the greatest passion, albeit briefly, was Arturito, his only grandson.)

Strafacce, his friend for more than 20 years, said he found it easier to explain what Aira doesn’t talk about. “We’re used to not speaking about politics because I’m Trotskyist,” he said. “And César is not.”

It was the week of the second round of the presidential election. A few days later, the Peronist Sergio Massa, a member of the centre-left governing coalition at the time, would be defeated by the far-right Javier Milei. “Milei is worse than Bolsonaro,” said Aira, in his only comment about politics.

That day, before going to the cafe, Aira passed through the Museo Barrio de Flores. Earlier, he had been irritated at a package from one of his foreign publishers: a box containing copies of one of his novels in Dutch translation. “They keep sending me those here,” he complained, as if sending books to the author himself were a kind of gaffe. Aira handles books with the avidity of a collector. He was mesmerised for a good while that afternoon by an edition of the French author Raymond Roussel, one of his surrealist idols, and he showed us a little purple box the size of a pack of cigarettes: a tiny special edition the Biblioteca Nacional had made of El ilustre mago (The Famous Magician), another novel of his. But for some reason, he wanted to rid himself of the box with the Dutch edition.

The Museo Barrio de Flores does exactly what its name suggests, displaying all kinds of memorabilia – old calculators and radios, paintings, newspaper clippings, political propaganda – related in some way to famous inhabitants of the neighbourhood. The definition of “famous” is broad, ranging from Perón – who lived there with his first wife – to the two preteen nieces of the museum’s director, who created a children’s library during the pandemic and appeared on the front page of the newspaper Clarín. Aira seemed at ease there. His name occupies one of the steps on the staircase by the front door. On the step above is the name of the great writer Roberto Arlt; on the one below, an advertisement for a real-estate broker.

Aira left the box of books with an employee and continued through the museum. At one point he dwelt on a framed letter written by Pope Francis, another former inhabitant of the neighbourhood. “Did you see how pretty the pope’s handwriting is? They don’t teach that in school any more, no.” He went to another room, where there was a showcase with some of Aira’s books.

When he opened the door, there was a group of ladies sitting around a big table. A class was in session. They all smiled pleasantly, focusing their attention on the author. Only the instructor of the course seemed to be younger than 65.

“What is the name of the little plane that flies near the ground?” one of the ladies asked.

“The what?” said Aira.

“The little plane,” the lady repeated, with a certain impatience, lowering her open palm toward the floor. “The one that flies near the ground.”

For a while, everyone stared at Aira, waiting for an answer. “An unexpected question,” joked the instructor awkwardly.

Aira shrugged, and we went to the corner to look at his showcase.

✔ This is an edited version of César Aira’s Magic, published in the Dial. The article originally appeared in the Brazilian magazine Piauí

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[talomacblog]

Tres autores correntinos escribiendo sobre las tres dictaduras militares argentinas: 1955, 1966, 1976. Una "Carta Abierta" de Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz durante la dictadura de Aramburu. La novela periodística de María Laura Riba "Che, mataron al enano" sobre la dictadura de Onganía y "Culpa de los muertos", novela sobre la dictadura del '76. EDICIONES DE LA PAZ, 2022 www.libreriadelapazediciones.com.ar/

Envíos a todo el país. No es un libro caro, es un libro valioso, especialmente hoy que tendemos a olvidar el pasado como si nada.