The Chronicles of Bustos Domecq
Crawford, Alan
I believe it is no exaggeration to state that the next quarter-century may well determine whether this nation in fact survives; yet it was Reagan alone, speaking just a few moments after...
...Paladion, we learn, "granted his name" to such works as The Pathfinder, Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Eclectic Reader (2nd Series), and a rendering in Latin of De Divinatione...
...As long as there are writers such as Borges whose erudition, wisdom, and cultivation prevefit their even envisioning the last gasps of the Humanist tradition, all is not lost...
...The New York Times says it's "indispensable...
...Loomis, a poet whose entire works consist of six oneword poems...
...But no matter...
...Thus did Oscar Wilde disclose the dark secret of the Modernist aberration in the arts...
...the ineffable silence of John Cage...
...the early films of Andy Warhol...
...What, I ask you, would H. Bustos Domecq make of him...
...BOOK REVIEW The Chronicles of Bustos Domecq byJorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares / Dutton / $7.95 Alan Crawford "To be intelligible today is to be found out...
...If you aren't afraid of being right too soon, give it a try...
...Our case against social security was made two years before Harper's...
...If I don t like it, I'll simply write "cancel" across the bill and that will be | that...
...the refried fiction of William S. Burroughs...
...m m m ~ n m m m m ~ n m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m n m mm m m m m m m m ! ! r e e copy o f f e r a, .i I II give it a t r y Please send meafree copy of your latest issue If I like it I I will receive a one-year subscription for only $8-half the reguiar price...
...If Chris Burden did not exist, I would defy Borges (or anyone, for that matter) to invent him...
...Now I did not and do not regard Ronatd Reagan as some kind of savior...
...It was the first to reveal the Nixon impoundments, the first to report why Congress didn't investigate Watergate before the election, and in so doing, became the first monthly magazine to do original reporting about Watergate...
...In either case, the complimentary copy is mine to keep...
...What phantasm from this, Borges' second Book of Imaginary Beings, can compete with Chris Burden, who has nailed himself to the hood of a Volkswagen, had himself shot at, stuffed into a foot locker, and immersed in water until he fainted, and has crawled bellydown through a street strewn with shattered glassmall in the name of Art...
...Such a critic is H. Bustos Domecq, the alleged author of these Chronicles, a diverting collection of self-serious essays on mock artistes...
...thunders Domecq...
...and I confess to a certain wistful regret that Ronald Reagan will not be on the ballot this November...
...Nor am I particularly despondent about the choices that remain at the polls this year, and I retain a residual faith both in our citizenry and in the workings of our system...
...Domecq has slight reservations about one of them, "Beret," which "suffers from a certain coldness,...perhaps attributable to the demand it makes on the reader of having to learn French...
...Domecq sings comparable dithyrambs to Hitario Lambkin Formento, the author of a lengthy treatise on Dante, who "after Alan Crawford is special assistant to Senator James L. Buckley of New York...
...Composed by the Argentine master Borges and his longtime friend and collaborator Bioy-Casares, this riotous spoof explodes the purveyors of Modernist nonsense in literature, painting, sculpture, and architecture as well as the deluded pundits who lend them respectability...
...It was the first magazine to reveal the political contributions of the dairy lobby, and in an article that won two of journalism's most distinguished awards, the first to tell of the Army's spying on civilian politics...
...We then questioned the high salaries and pensions enjoyed by civil servants and warned of the growing power of public employees' unions...
...And The Washington Post says it "does its specialty-government and politics-better than any other magazine around...
...A spoof of this kind is thus impossible, and therein lies the failure of this book...
...And two years before Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s The Imperial Presidency, we published "The Prince and His Courtiers at the White House, the Kremlin, and the Reichschancellery...
...32 The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1976 Five years before the near-bankruptcy of New York, The Washington Monthly, the liberal magazine that questions liberal orthodoxy, began its attack on the swollen bureaucracies with articles called "We're All Working for the Penn Central" and "America the Featherbedded...
...This act, Domecq is quick to remind us, constitutes no mere theft but the greatest work of descriptive criticism ever penned...
...Nonetheless, one fears that Borges and Bioy-Casares have undertaken the impossible...
...m Name [-~ Payment enclosed D B i l l me - - - ~| Address ~_ I i y ~ :state .. zip...
...All of this precious befuddlement Borges and Bioy-Casares serve up with a superb sense of irony: allusions to imaginary artists abound, insufferable pedantry is played upon with admirable delicacy...
...Each of the illegitimate sons of Dada whom Domecq praises is inadvertently proven a fraud, and, as the reader makes his way through this little book, Domecq's own repugnant character--literary hanger-on, press agent for the avant-garde, eager of drinks, and windy bore--is devastatingl} revealed...
...L The Washington Monthly I _9 -- - - - - - - . - - m --- ,-- -= 10 2 8 Con n___ect i..c u t A..v eI NW ,~' ash i nmgt on , ~ . C B 2J 0 3m6 - m...
...Where, indeed, we might ask, is the place for Bustos Domecq when we already have the likes of Parker Tyler, Jonas Mekas, and Andrew Porter...
...for Adalberto Vilaseco, who published the same poem repeatedly under different titles...
...It is this which I hope to remember of the 1976 campaign...
...No spasm of the avant-garde escapes Domecq's attention," none is unworthy of his praise...
...Where is the place for Antarctica A. Garay when, in our colleges and universities, students create "environmental sculpture"--piles of dirt which wash away with the rain...
...For no sooner have they penned these witty little essays than the objects of their derision, the mock artistes of their wildest imaginings, have become hopelessly obsolete...
...for Jose Tafas who, with photographic fidelity, painted cityscapes of Buenos Aires, only to blacken them completely with shoe polish...
...And that, of course, is the problem of satire today...
...In an article that won yet another award, it told "Why the White House Press Didn't Get the Watergate Story...
...As Goldsmith reminds us, every absurdity may now have a champion...
...Time says The Washington Monthly is "must reading...
...We can take solace in the fact that Borges is not one of them...
...and it is this for which I personally wish to express my gratitude to the man my party chose not to nominate...
...But I believe Richard Schweiker may well have been right in saying, on the morning following Gerald Ford's nomination, that Americans had lost their chance to have the best leader ever presented to this generation...
...m - - . i l The Ahernatwe: An American Spectator October 1976 3...
...And so, as the contemporary artist has descended deeper and deeper into obscurity and incoherence, there have arisen the arbitores inelegantiarum, critical middlemen whose function is to inform the Great Unwashed why they should revere trash...
...Our age is so overflowing with absurdity," Malcolm Muggeridge once observed, "that it defies mockery...
...The contemporary painter, composer, filmmaker, and novelist, ever jealous of his privileged position, has increasingly excluded the public from his bizarre rites...
...Our article on the dangers of nuclear hijacking was a year ahead of The New Yorker's...
...yet it was Reagan alone, speaking just a few moments after Gerald Ford had accepted the Republican nomination, who reminded the nation in the most graceful and elegant language of the campaign that the question of survival is precisely what confronts it...
...and for Antarctica A. Garay, whose "concave sculpture" consists of rubbish configurations to be appreciated by contemplating the spaces between them...
...Theirs--the idea seems to be--is not to reason why, theirs is just to buy, buy, buy...
...But no superlatives can adequately convey Domecq's adoration for Santiago Ginsberg, who imparts special connotations to everyday words ("mailbox" in a Ginsberg poem means "accidental, fortuitous, incompatible with a cosmos...
...Then there is F.J.C...
...Of Domecq's Universal Theater when there exist the Happenings of Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg...
...Cicero's...
...For Ronald Reagan spoke to this nation, with an eloquence that springs only from the deepest and most serious conviction, about those issues which I believe should be the first concern of civilized and responsible men...
...There is one Cesar Paladion, who "reaching into the depths of his soul...published a series of books that expressed him utterly--without over-burdening the already unwieldy corpus of bibliography or falling into the alI-too-easy vanity of writing a single new line...
...The Washington Monthly has been ahead of its time in many other ways...
...And what Latin it was...
...When everything that appears in the Times is so hilarious, he asked, where is there room, or need, for Punch...
...mature reflection...did away with the introduction, notes, index, publisher's name and address, and gave to the printer Dante's work...
Vol. 10 • October 1976 • No. 1
