Status Updates From Salvador

The US is sadly looking more and more like authoritarian El Salvador in the 80s

Read this in college for a Cold War in Latin America class and rereading because i remember very little/it feels pertinent

Really not used to this type of writing but I can confidently say it’s improving my reading comprehension
Slay Joan

If any word can describe Didion’s prose in this essay, it’s distant. In many ways, the daily violence and terror of El Salvador’s civil war is unimaginable for Americans. Didion articulates this thoroughly, making piles of corpses and disappearances monotonous. The reader feels far away from the violence of the place, even when steeped within it.

It’s time for my one Didion a year!!!! Could squeal I’m so excited to be back with my girl :)

"The only enemy is totalitarianism, in any guise: communistic, socialistic, capitalistic or militaristic. Man is unique because he has free will and the capacity to choose. When this is he is no longer a man but an animal."
—Mario Rosenthal, editor of the El Salvador News Gazette, in his June 14-20 1982 column, "A Great Day."

"Don't say I said this, but there are no issues here," I was told by a high-placed Salvadoran. "There are only ambitions." He meant of course not that there were no ideas in conflict but that the conflicting ideas were held exclusively by people he knew, that, whatever the outcome of any fighting or negotiation or coup or countercoup, the Casa Presidencial would ultimately be occupied [...] by the already entitled...

Clear, vivid tone. Can feel the monotony of body piles and warfare.

In such a climate the fact of being in El Salvador comes to seem a sentence of indeterminate length, and the prospect of leaving doubtful.

This book is heartbreaking.

this one is intense OMG

i picked this up at a used bookstore because i hadn’t heard of it. i had no idea what it was about, went into it blind. 20 pages in and it could be a contender for my favorite of her works

The amount of content here is comparable to a few magazine articles and still feels shallow even given the dearth of pages. It is an extremely limited account and of seemingly limited use. But Didion's prose is remarkable and this may still be worth a read if you are a fan.

Starting my Joan Didion era again. Life is good yk what I mean?

I have owned, and been meaning to read this, for literally decades. I don't think it was assigned reading, but it was talked about in an English class in high school. Weird that the Didion work most familiar to me is one of her least.

“Man is unique because he has free will and the capacity to choose. When this is suppressed he is no longer a man but an animal. That is why I say that despite differing points of view, we are none of us enemies.”

— Mario Rosenthal (editor of the El Salvador News Gazette)

café literario + curricula vitae

..I began to see Gabriel García Márquez in a new light, as a social realist.

*on The Autumn of Patriarch

(Desaparecer, or "disappear," is in Spanish both an intransitive and a transitive verb, and this flexibility has been adopted by those speaking English in El Salvador, as in John Sullivan was disappeared from the Sheraton; the government disappeared the students, there being no equivalent situation, and so no equivalent word, in English-speaking cultures.)

..if it is taken for granted in Salvador that the government kills, it is also taken for granted that the other side kills; that everyone has killed, everyone kills now, and, if the history of the place suggests any pattern, every. one will continue to kill.

…In the absence of the headlights the candle on our table provided the only light, and I fought the impulse to blow it out. We continued talking, carefully. Nothing came of this, but I did not forget the sensation of having been in a single instant demoralized, undone, humiliated by fear, which is what I meant when I said that I came to understand in El Salvador the mechanism of terror.

..in Escalón, the presence of the Sheraton itself, a hotel that has figured rather too prominently in certain local stories involving the disappearance and death of Americans. The Sheraton always seems brighter and more mildly festive than either the Camino Real or the Presidente, with children in the pool and flowers and pretty women in pastel dresses, but there are usually several bulletproofed Cherokee Chiefs..

their walls, walls built upon walls, walls stripped of the usual copa de oro and bougainvillea, walls that reflect successive generations of violence: the original stone, the additional five or six or ten feet of brick, and finally the barbed wire, sometimes concertina, sometimes electrified; walls with watch towers, gun ports, closed-circuit television cameras, walls now reaching twenty and thirty feet.

One learns that hair deteriorates less rapidly than flesh, and that a skull surrounded by a perfect corona of hair is a not uncommon sight in the body dumps.

In El Salvador one learns that vultures go first for the soft tissue, for the eyes, the exposed genitalia, the open mouth. One learns that an open mouth can be used to make a specific point, can be stuffed with something emblematic; stuffed, say, with a penis, or, if the point has to do with land title, stuffed with some of the dirt in question.

These are the details the models and colors of armored vehicles, the makes and calibers of weapons, the particular methods of dismemberment and decapitation used in particular instances—on which the visitor to Salvador learns immediately to concentrate, to the exclusion of past or future concerns, as in a prolonged amnesiac fugue.

Language as it is now used in El Salvador is the language of advertising, of persuasion, the product being one or another of the soluciones crafted in Washington or Panama or Mexico, which is part of the place's pervasive obscenity.

watch me take days to finish this 100 page book because im reading it for a reading challenge prompt where u can only read it outside and i never go there

Mystifying

Still trying to fathom it. Not sure I have an opinion of it yet.