{"id":2361,"date":"2021-01-10T20:16:23","date_gmt":"2021-01-10T20:16:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=2361"},"modified":"2021-01-10T20:20:34","modified_gmt":"2021-01-10T20:20:34","slug":"stuck-in-the-stalls-of-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=2361","title":{"rendered":"Stuck in the Stalls of History"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In Roberto Bola\u00f1o\u2019s Savage Detectives<\/em>, his sprawling novel of poets, revolutionaries and Pinochet, I remember most vividly the scene of a poet trapped in a stall of the bathroom as riot police entered her university. \u00a0 Where else would she be?\u00a0 She is Auxilio Lacouture, poet and auxiliary individual, manic monologuist.\u00a0 She is bound by the ordinary, which becomes extra-ordinary, in spite of and because she’s a minor actor in the stream of history.\u00a0 She missed megaphone calls to evacuate because she was reading poetry in the can. Thus she becomes part of the surreality of reality overlaid on the streets and in her own vivid consciousness, as public and private eruptions, of multiple narratives over several days of her own obsessive confinement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lacouture recalls: \u201cI lifted my feet like a Renoir ballerina, my underwear dangling down around my skinny ankles and snagging on a pair of shoes\u2026I saw the soldier who was staring entranced into the mirror, the two of us still as statues in the women\u2019s bathroom\u2026I heard the door close\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I saw the wind sweeping the university as if it was delighting in the last light of day.  And I knew what I had to do.  I knew.  I had to resist.  So I sat on the tiled floor of the women\u2019s bathroom and in the last rays of light I read three more poems by Pedro Garfias and then I closed the book and closed my eyes and said to myself: Auxilio Lacouture, citizen of Uruguay, Latin American, poet and traveler, stand your ground.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My daughter and I were burning onions for a French onion soup the day the insurrection took place.  We witnessed the coup by play-by-play accounts, by a torrent of words as we were darkening onions.  We were pouring broth over heaps of caramelized onions stuck to the bottom of the dutch over, scraping up the brown bits when the coup was going down.  We are part of a river and it\u2019s going somewhere and we don\u2019t know whether we\u2019ll be judged for some other bit of goodness that we did, or didn\u2019t do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where were you? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Roberto Bola\u00f1o\u2019s Savage Detectives, his sprawling novel of poets, revolutionaries and Pinochet, I remember most vividly the scene of a poet trapped in a stall of the bathroom as riot police entered her university. \u00a0 Where else would she … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1062,1059,138,1060,1061],"class_list":["post-2361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-auxilio-lacouture","tag-insurrection-capitol-attack-trump","tag-poetry","tag-roberto-bolano","tag-savage-detectives"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4D5qU-C5","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2361"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2361\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2369,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2361\/revisions\/2369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}