What: Club Bolaño
When: April 2, Tuesday, 8-9:30 pm
Where: Lucky Dog Books, 633 West Davis in Oak Cliff
Hosted by: Joe Milazzo
Admission: WS Members FREE, Donation suggested for non members
Contact: wordspace@wordspace.us, 214-838-3554
Club Bolaño is not a formerly luxuriant resort gone a little to pot and decadence. It’s a monthly program designed by Joe Milazzo for the obsessed fans of Roberto Bolaño, (28 April 1953 – 15 July 2003), a Chilean novelist and poet. In 1999, Bolaño won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives), and in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666.
We will be starting “cold”, i.e., as far as we know, no one has done any reading in advance, the program for this inaugural discussion focuses on RB’s bio and a basic critical background for his work (his place in Latin American literature and his “vogue” here in the English-speaking world especially).The remainder of the meeting would then be dedicated to reading and discussing a few of Bolano’s poems. RB was a poet first and so some consideration of this work is on orer. It also provides a gateway to the fiction. Joe has photocopied about 6 poems (from THE ROMANTIC DOGS) which he will distribute at the meeting. The other virtue of the poems is that they can be read cold.
From there, in successive meetings, we will work through at least one example of the short fiction — ” A Literary Adventure” or the title story from LAST EVENINGS ON EARTH — then shift to NAZI LITERATURE IN THE AMERICAS, and then plunge into the big books: SAVAGE DETECTIVES and 2666.
For most of his early adulthood, Bolaño was a vagabond, living at one time or another in Chile, Mexico, El Salvador, France, and Spain. He was a founding member of infrarrealismo, a minor poetic movement. He affectionately parodied aspects of the movement in The Savage Detectives. In Mexico, living as a bohemian poet and literary enfant terrible, “a professional provocateur feared at all the publishing houses even though he was a nobody, bursting into literary presentations and reading”.
Joe Milazzo facilitates Club Bolaño, beginning the journey with stories in LAST EVENINGS ON EARTH, followed with the interconnected shorts in NAZI LITERATURE IN THE AMERICAS, and then we dive into THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES, taking us through 2013, if not further.. and hope to eventually arrive at 2666.
Milazzo is the author of The Terraces (Das Arquibancadas) (Little Red Leaves textile Series, 2012). His writings have appeared in H_NGM_N, The Collagist, Drunken Boat, Black Clock, and elsewhere. Along with Janice Lee and Eric Lindley, he edits the online interdisciplinary arts journal [out of nothing] (http://www.outofnothing.org). Joe lives and works in Dallas, TX, and his virtual location ishttp://www.slowstudies.net/jmilazzo.