I had some time to kill this afternoon on Florida street so I wandered into a few bookstores. One of the most bizarre guidebooks to Argentina that caught my eye was titled Bariloche Nazi. Perhaps the highlight of the book is that it reveals the purported location of the Bariloche home of Adolph Hitler and Eva Braun after they escaped from post-World War II Germany….. Uh, yeah.

That’s not really the kind of thing I want to spend my money on…but on the topic of Nazis in Argentina, I do recommend The Real Odessa: Smuggling the Nazis to Peron’s Argentina

Okay, I’m trying to keep my posts to a fairly low word count…saving you, dear reader, precious reading time. So, my next odd encounter will be posted tomorrow.

This afternoon at the café I read a book review which proceeded to tell me way more than I wanted to know about the book prior to reading it. I immediately remembered why I seldom read reviews of books that I want to read. And long ago I’ve learned never to read movie reviews. I rather approach things like this without much prior knowledge, just arming myself with only a vague notion of the story.

The amount you know about something beforehand certainly impacts your experience. But does it enhance or hinder your experience?

Likewise, what about the ways we experience a place, a city such as Buenos Aires?

Obviously the parallels are not the same. But I’m curious as to what type of reading, what type of learning experience, enhances our travels? And what type of reading actually hinders our experience?

I’ve spent the last few weeks working with fellow Buenos Aires resident Peter Robertson to produce the latest issue of The International Literary Quarterly. I think the highlight of this issue is an interview with Gao Xingjian, whose novel Soul Mountain I’ve also been slowly reading this year.

As I’m walking around Buenos Aires, thinking about the city’s history and my own writing, these words by Gao Xingjian stay with me:

… when artists die what is left behind, literature, is the history of human beings, is the interaction between the individual and the condition of history, that trace of history left behind, that is literature. It is the witness, it is the evidence of the individual’s interaction, connection, with history, and that is the trace, that is much more important and significant than the official discourse, the official history.

That is the meaning of literature, the meaning of the writer. That is, the writer, in spite of his or her insignificance, has left that trace that reflects the relationship between the individual and the condition of being alive. That trace itself is timeless, that is the meaning of literature. And that is far more important than the official history of political discourse. That is the real meaning of literature.

There’s a nice loft apartment for sale in my building on Av Caseros. It’s a nice, quiet place to live.

Priced at $160,000.

…at the computer. Actually, I’ve never been much to write at the keyboard (even though I’m an excellent typist). Anything thoughtful always meant pen to paper. I don’t mind. I prefer the slow way of writing.

But it’s a style that doesn’t make for very good blogging…that tat tat tat of fingers against keys that signals the processor to emit pixels forming one shape or another on the monitor while concurrently encoding data strings for manipulation by scripts on a server. Where’s my spontaneity?

When I’m at the PC I rather be working than blogging. There’s something about freelance work that keeps you more focused than a salaried position. Besides, my best thoughts about Buenos Aires come while I’m out in the city. For those moments, which seemed to have been rare lately, I carry a small notebook and pen for scribbling thoughts, fragments that later form posts on this blog about Buenos Aires.

…more posts to follow…I’m not stopping yet…

…for now, a photo for you…from the mercado in San Telmo…

Perhaps my friends in Miami at the Cuban Heritage Collection would be disappointed in me….yesterday while I was reading in Bar Britanico a deaf man, who sells pendants or stickers, came by my table … the last time I saw him in the Britanico I had no extra cash … I vowed to myself that I would buy from him the next time he came around … whatever he was selling … I expected something related to Boca Jrs or River football teams…rather, now, I have a set of Che Guevara stickers to adorn my belongings…

Live in the city long enough and you may cease to notice its core: a collective living and working environment for as many people as possible.

I stayed up till early morning watching the Argentine senate debate and subsequent vote on the agricultural retenciones. Since I generally stay awake till 3am anyway and I’ve always been a news junkie, not falling asleep wasn’t difficult. Besides, it certainly was dramatic, finishing at 4:30am.

The VP Cobos, who had to cast the deciding vote in a tie-breaker, definitely looked like he wanted to be anyplace but in that position. It’s not often that a Vice President votes against his President, so the political fallout should be interesting to watch over the next few days. Of course, Argentina is a constitutional republic and not a parliamentary republic, so Cristina has several more years left as president. Next year’s mid-term elections should be fascinating. Despite Argentina’s checkered history of insurrections in the last century, the great thing about republics is that – over time – they survive political divides and unpopular presidents.

During this year’s political crisis in Argentina I tried to stay away from blogging about politics, and work demands kept me away from Tuesday’s massive demonstrations. Somehow, though, a part of me does wish that hundreds of thousands of people would gather in support of improved education, health care, or fighting prejudice and discrimination. (But that doesn’t happen in my own country either, though Obama is turning out good crowds). Ultimately, politics does so much come down to economics.

The other night I had a dream

…..I had gone into the small grocery in my neighborhood…you know, one of those Chinese-managed supermercados all over Buenos Aires. I brought my bread, eggs, salchichas, & Coke up to the counter. The cashier, rather than being Chinese, was Cristina Fernández de Kirchner….she rang up the prices on the register, which all seemed much more expensive than my last visit to the market, and passed the items on down the counter to the bag boy, who turned out to be Néstor Kirchner….but as he sacked my groceries, Néstor kept breaking the eggs……..I’ll let that image sit with you for a moment……………for those readers who don’t know… eggs, huevos, in Spanish has a double meaning.

That’s a true dream, seriously…..though I guess now it’s Cobos who is doing some egg breaking.

So, if I’m dreaming about this, then what do Argentines dream?

Browsing around the stalls at the mercado de San Telmo reveals some enchanting relics buried amidst an exhausting range of junk. On Saturday we came away with a set of old music scores, partituras. Not unexpectedly in Buenos Aires, much of the sheet music is tango though an occasional opera score is intermixed with the tango.

Never having learned to play any instruments, we’re more interested in the cover art rather than the actual sheet music. Some of the graphic design is really very good. The archivist in me wants to hope that somewhere there is a collection preserving all this stuff. These images didn’t come out very good since the sheet music covers are too large for our scanner, so these are just a few poorly done snapshots.

Depending upon the vendor, you might pay 25 pesos and up for one of these scores from the 1920s.

But if you search around some of the junkier booths, you can find some for only 5 pesos.

The typography is outstanding. I’m sure these can be found at a lot of places around Buenos Aires and not just the mercado de San Telmo. That’s just the closes place to where I live.

I’m really trying to post more often, after being mostly absent from this blog last month. But today, I’ve not even gotten out of the house. So I decided to scan through the tons of photos that I’ve been intending to post about….

Early last month while walking down Azcuenaga street next to Recoleta Cemetery I saw another building demolition almost completed.

Particularly, I was intrigued by that window on the very back wall. I was half surprised that the demolition crew had enough sense not knock it out completely. I’ve not been back by that block in a few weeks, so I guess it’s completely gone now, salvaged and sold off. I don’t have a very good zoom on my little camera, so this is the best close-up I could get of the window.

As I often do when I encounter these demolished buildings, I started wondering about the building that was there before. Obviously, from the looks of this window it appears that the previous house must have been quite nice at one time, right?

A good resource to check photos for every parcel of land in Buenos Aires is the city’s map site. But guess what a photo from March 2007 showed was on this lot:

Cabaret show?…I really had to examine the photo closely to make sure that it was the same lot of land, but yep that appears to be the same place…..well, that strip of Azcuenaga is filled with clubs of a dubious nature.

I always tell people that you never know what is behind the facade of buildings in Buenos Aires. And this is a case where one certainly never knew what was behind the walls of the cabaret show.