Literature
Argentina's 95 percent literacy rate is one of the highest in the world and its many bookshops, especially the splendidly monumental ones in Buenos Aires, are a reflection of the considerable interest in what is written in both Argentina and the outside world. While Argentine nationals have won the Nobel prizes for chemistry, medicine and peace, none of the country's outstanding writers has ever been rewarded with the prize for literature - all the more galling for Argentines, given that two Chileans have been. Borges is the giant of Argentine literature, but he by no means dwarfs the country's other extremely original novelists and poets, many of whose works have been translated into English and make for highly readable companions during a visit to the country. For much of the twentieth century Argentina's rich and varied literary production was dominated, for the outside world at least, by the country's greatest ever writer, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). Borges is inextricably linked with Buenos Aires - a kind of anthropomorphic protagonist in much of his highly original prose and poetry. Like many of his compatriots, he was both fascinated and frustrated by the notion of the Argentine identity as a kind of extension of Europe, apparently incapable of throwing off the shackles of its immigrant past. Even now Argentine literature - mirroring general social concerns - often seems obsessed with the dichotomy between an archaic, thinly populated rural economy and one of the continent's biggest, most densely populated and modern cities, Buenos Aires. Ever since the country's independence in the early nineteenth century, there has been an ongoing civil war of sorts, between the provinces seeking more and more decentralized power, led in the early days by General Rosas and later by Peron, and a sophisticated metropolis apparently more interested in what is going on in Paris, London and Madrid, or more recently in New York, Miami and San Francisco, than in its vast and seemingly primitive hinterland. The writer who first seems to have grasped this phenomenon is nineteenth-century Renaissance man Domingo Sarmiento (1811-88), Rosas' arch enemy and president of Argentina from 1868 to 1874. A no-nonsense autodidact from San Juan, he was almost obsessed with the idea that Argentina was condemned to backwater status and economic ruin unless it invested in education, overthrew the Federalists like Rosas (which he helped to bring about) and introduced elements of North American society, including what he saw as a proper democracy. His classic Facundo, or Civilization and Barbarism , written while he was exiled in Chile in 1845, is a compendium of impressions about Argentina in the form of the romantic biography of a gaucho thug named Facundo Quiroga. A leitmotiv of the novel-cum-essay is the fact that Argentina's size is a curse rather than a blessing, hampering communications and making it possible for local strongmen like Quiroga (and Rosas) to flourish. An even greater classic, regarded by many as Argentina's national literary work, is Jose Hernandez 's Martin Fierro (1872), a novel in verse of epic proportions and traditionally learned by heart by many Argentines. Written as a protest against the corrupt authorities, it features a highly likeable gaucho outlaw on the run, who rails against the country's weak institutional structures and dictatorial rulers. One of the highlights is a lurid description of the hero's visit to an encomienda . Hernandez (1834-86) published a second part, The Return of Martin Fierro , in 1879 but it lacked the drama of the earlier work. Written just before Martin Fierro , in 1870, is the equally gripping A Visit to the Ranquel Indians , by Lucio Mansilla (1831-1913). Taking the form of letters home to Buenos Aires, its anthropological descriptions are mingled with personal insights of a Porteno exposed for the first time to the realities of the country's far-flung outposts and indigenous peoples. Jose Marmol's (1818-71) rambling Amalia: a Romance of the Argentine (Gordon Press, New York, 1977), written in exile, is a love story centred on the young heroine Amalia, while dealing with political intrigues under Rosas in the 1850s; while The Slaughter House (Las Americas, New York, 1959), was also written in exile and published posthumously in 1871 by an opponent of Rosas, the socialist poet Esteban Echeverria (1805-51) is a parable of the unspeakable brutality exacted by Rosas and his henchmen on a sensitive young man. These preoccupations did not go away in the twentieth century. In 1926 Ricardo Guiraldes (1886-1927) was still writing about the gaucho way of life and the remoteness of rural Argentina in his elegiac Don Segundo Sombra: Shadows on the Pampa , whose eponymous hero is a guru-like figure and whose narrator is initiated in a range of manual and ethical skills to help him survive in the outback. Argentina's Edgar Allen Poe, Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937), wrote some vivid and at times lurid short stories set in Misiones province - The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories (University of Texas Press, 1976). More recent still is leading writer Manuel Puig's (1932-1990) Heartbreak Tango: A Serial (1982), a mordant anatomy of a provincial mind seduced by the apparent glamour of Buenos Aires, with more musings about living in Argentina's extensive flat wilderness. Puig is best known for his superb Kiss of the Spiderwoman (1984), a convincing albeit surreal portrait of a political militant sharing a prison cell with a homosexual obsessed with Hollywood starlets and romantic movies, itself turned into a brilliant film directed by Hector Babenco in 1985, starring William Hurt and Raul Julia. Set during the military dictatorship of the 1970s, the novel shows how the two forge an ever-closer relationship, exploited ruthlessly by the thuggish authorities. Juan Jose Saer (born 1937) has written a number of modernist works set in and around his native Santa Fe, such as The Event (Serpent's Tail, 1998), in which the light and landscape condition the minds of his aimless characters. By the beginning of the twentieth century the phenomenal urban explosion in the capital had sparked off some of Argentina's most intriguing and original fiction. Several writers vie for the accolade of the city's bard. Leopoldo Marechal (1900-70) self-consciously titled his mock epic of daily life in Porteno suburbia Adan Buenosayres (1948), with a gallery of bohemian poets and larger-than-life story-tellers as its cast. Until his tragically early death, Roberto Arlt (1900-42) captured the lot of the poor immigrant, with his gripping if idiosyncratic novels about anarchists, investors, whores and other marginal characters in the mean streets of 1920s Buenos Aires, most pleasingly portrayed in The Seven Madmen (1972). Published in 1933, X-ray of the Pampa by essayist and poet Ezequiel Martinez Estrada (1895-1964) again examines, in a quirky way, the mutual ignorance of the capital and the cattle-country stretching for hundreds of kilometres to the west. His contemporary Eduardo Mallea (1903-82) wrote somewhat ponderous fiction along similar lines, of which the best example is his 1941 novel All Green Shall Perish . Buenos Aires in the 1950s was conjured up poignantly by Ernesto Sabato (born 1911) a physicist by profession whose writings explore the city's nostalgia and feeling of utter alienation in three seminal works, The Tunnel (Cape, 1980), On Heroes and Tombs (Cape, 1982) and The Angel of Darkness , (Cape, 1992). Julio Cortazar (1914-84) spent much of his career in Europe, but his 1966 novel Hopscotch , albeit manifestly influenced by the French existentialist movement led by Sartre and Camus, features unmistakably Porteno characters; his later short stories, some of them collected as Bestiary: Short Stories , continue to dramatize the tense relationship between the Europe of Argentina's human origins and the construction of a new country on an alien continent - his stories are one of the highpoints of twentieth-century literature. While Borges' friend, confidante and collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914-99) should not be overlooked - seek out his weird novella The Invention of Morel (1985) or the equally off-the-wall The Dlary of the War of the Pig (1972) - it is Borges himself who put Argentine letters on the world map. Born in Buenos Aires, he spent his youth in Europe, mostly in Switzerland (where he died and is buried), and "rediscovered" Buenos Aires and its barrios upon his return in the 1920s. He started out as an avant-garde poet, translator, journalist and literary critic, but soon turned to quirky parables, with sardonic or provocative overtones and unexpected twists that had him described as a magic realist. His early poetry turns Buenos Aires and many of its sights - like La Recoleta cemetery and the Botanical Gardens - into semi-mythical beings, but his work as a whole sets up the city as a perplexing labyrinth. Another recurring theme is the idea of (national) identity as illusory, and he used his subtly allegorical style to criticize Peron's chauvinistic demagoguery - he had nothing but loathing for the president and the deified Evita. His teasing and certainly baffling Fictions and The Aleph are as good an introduction to his oeuvre as any; start with his own favourite story, The South .
your food is yummyisabella says "i think yalls food is super dooper yummy keep up the good work
" whatsamanth says "nothing. you can survive on your own. dont go there its a horrible place." what you needkatie says "bring lots of food and water. try to bring non perishable food. and bring warm and cold clothes. you will need it." Buenos Aires City of DesignBob Frassinetti says "In August 2005 Buenos Aires was appointed City of Design by the UNESCO. This is recognition the city of “good airs” shares with other top notch design areas of the world such as Berlin, Montreal.
This appointment evidences recognition towards what Buenos Aires is doing in this particular area, and it cannot be understood if not put in perspective to the recent boom that took place in this area recently. BA features a constant flow of movement in terms of design, from mind-blowing creations to average regular, items the broadness of the design movement in the Argentine capital provides a wide rainbow of options featuring something for every taste.
Buenos Aires has been among the firsts of the American Continent to take upon the challenge of design together with Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and Mendoza in Argentina –as well-. The turning point in contemporary design in South America can be dated at the end of the 1950s and all throughout the 60s. The decade of 1960 was a strong decade for innovation, creation and design in the deepest sense of the words. The Arts in general had a strong input back then, and design was not an exception, from aesthetics to usefulness, Argentina has been taking upon the challenge of designing new and innovative objects ever since. After a couple of decades of ups and downs, ins and outs, always in tune with the general panorama of what was going on in our country, today, Buenos Aires is breeding and furthering some interesting aesthetic and conceptual approaches to objects.
In terms of industrial design today in Argentina, there are at several different disciplines working in an avant-garde creations and innovating in theory and practice in this sense. The range goes from industrial products to vehicles, furniture and lighting, making of Buenos Aires a design spot pretty much hyper-comprehensive in terms of design for the visitors.
An interesting insight on design in Buenos Aires is provided by worldly known Argentine architect and designer Ricardo Blanco in his book entitled Crónicas del diseño industrial en la Argentina – Chronicles of the Industrial Design in Argentina-, where he reconstructs the path of evolution thru means of a particular historical perspective and journey. Not aiming to cover the entire historical process, but more in the sense of providing an organized insight into the world of useful aesthetics, Blanco attest to evidence the intention and cultural bases of the Argentine design path.
Thru means of the current literature and the ever growing production of industrial design objects Buenos Aires takes upon new airs of discovery, as it mutates from the traditional city of beef and tango to a much more interesting and amusing spot of arts, design and aesthetics… And all in all, in the meantime we explore the new inputs of design we can always stop to enjoy the delightful Argentine cuisine and culture, but now in a broader and richer way.
Bob Frassinetti, Buenos Aires, Argentina" GanjaFaith says "look for ganja at all times"
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