Death of a good, sometimes foolish friend

This is my first post in over two and a half years. I don't much see the need for posting. There are plenty of other ways to hurl one's words into the void.

But I was reminded of my existing account for a very sad reason. I have spent the last three days, in my spare time, reading the e-mails of my friend Charles Horecker, who died last Friday. I didn't bother to listen to the details of his death, when his brother called up to give me the news. He was driving alone late at night and the car went off a road and did a couple of turns on the way into a ditch. I don't even know if it was near St. Louis, where he was planning to relocate, or in southern Illinois, where he had been living for the last two years helping out his aged grandfather (93) and girlfriend (65 or so, but she had had to have hip replacement surgery).

Charles lived an amazing life in the eight and a half years after his graduation from U Chicago in 2001 , apparently not always on the side of the law, and if he "never amounted to anything," that probably suited him just fine. It satisfies some bitter ironical side of me that if he should have had to die young --I think he just turned thirty-- it should not have been in the squalor of Chicago's South Side in 2003, where he went after dropping out of grad school in Classics in Yale and where he did some very dangerous things in order to make money; nor was it in his two long sojourns in Asia (financed in part by ridiculous stints of on-line poker play), which included being on hand for the big tsunami of 2005 although it also involved two stints of teaching computers and English in Beijing (a city he hated passionately) as well as a few semiserious and unsuccessful attempts to sneak into Tibet; nor was it from all the STDs he kept on threatening to acquire; but rather it was from a typical drunk (presumably) driving incident in the hinterlands of the Midwest, at the tail end of a just angelic two-year-stint being cook, chauffeur, and handyman for his grandfather and working in the labs of SIU-Carbondale so that he would be able to take science classes on the cheap.

I told him once that the only time I could be sure that he was taking care of himself was when I heard that he was taking care of somebody else, an absurd facet of his character for someone who never married and had no children that he was sure about. But he kept one of our mutual friends from dying of substance abuse in Asia in 2006, he cleaned up in order to escort his mother and a nephew in long trips throughout Asia, and his mother a second time, I believe, and his last visit to me in Oberlin, just two months ago, came after he had decided that he couldn't take care of his grandfather any longer because his grandfather's health problems were affecting his memory and his personality, and (my interpretation) he could deal with physical health issues but was frustrated with mental health issues, for which the grandfather's girlfriend was competent enough in any case. But no doubt the kind of sad, dumb, tragic way that Charles died could have happened on any weekend in Illinois, even while he was taking care of the grandfather.

Charles left an almost empty on-line paper trail, so it is with a small feeling of betrayal that I post this here, deliberately in case some idle ex-girlfriend or ex-friend (he alienated almost everyone he was ever friends with, except me; I think it's a self-esteem thing --he never said anything to me meaner than the things I say to myself) decides to google-stalk him to see how he is doing. I can imagine all sorts of people saying to themselves, "Gee, I wonder if Charles is dead yet," and so now they know.

My first post, I think

Or maybe this is my first post. I wanted to call the blog "Facundo," but the name was taken. Or maybe it isn't: there it is on the main page. I don't understand computers very well.

The name is a doubly lame joke: the word means "glib" in Spanish (I am a Spanish professor), and most Spanish professors would assume that it is a reference either to the 19th century Argentine caudillo Facundo or to the wide-ranging biography-sociology of Facundo and 19th century Argentina by the politician and writer Sarmiento.

But it is neither: One of my favorite obscure 20th century writers is the Uruguayan Felisberto Hernandez (1902-1964), author of small fictions and non-fictions about provincial pianists and other small losers with day-dreamy personalities; in his most ambitious novella, Las Hortensias, there is a mannequin-maker named Facundo, hired by the rich protagonist so that he can stage life-sized tableaus in his house for himself. Eventually he asks Facundo to make a mannequin that resembles his wife Hortensia; eventually he falls in love with the doll; he asks Facundo to have the doll made anatomically correct; he starts cheating on his wife with the doll. It all gets out of hand. And meanwhile Facundo mass-produces his anatomically correct dolls. I like the idea that my simulacrum of myself should be named after a hearty but also mildly sinister dollmaker.

And yet the machine told me the name was taken, so I hastily took the name "http://laciudadletrada.blogspot.com" for the address. This was a mental slip of the tongue: I should have remembered that this is more or less the domain name of a wonderful Uruguayan in New York City named Javier Molea, a genuine cultural mover and shaker in New York City. Javier currently works at McNally Robinson, a new bookstore in Soho, and he is doing a number of very interesting side projects for the Spanish-language literati of the U.S., especially in New York City, especially among those biculturals who don't really have a place in America's typical identity politics discourse.

Así que para Javier quiero enfatizar que el nombre del blog fue una imitación por error, no deliberado, y que el Facundo en la portada de este blog se refiere específicamente a un uruguayo que ejerce gran poder entre bambalinas seduciendo a la gente que pasa por los escaparates de la gran ciudad.

My first post, I think.

In order for me to send a post to William Nericcio of UCSD, Blogspot wanted me to create a blog. Everyone wants me to create a blog. So I have created a blog. This is the first post of my blog, I think.

Hello from Oberlin and thanks again for the engaging talk, Memo.

Concerning your use of César Romero in your talk, you collage and your book: I don't have a reliable source for the rumor that César Romero declared that he was the bastard grandson of José Martí, I have the most unreliable source of them all, Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesar_Romero

You'll note that according to that Wikipedia "trivia section" at the bottom, the Simpsons made the César Romero/ César Chávez connection also. Did you steal it subconsciously from them, or did your sister go out to dinner with somebody on the staff of the show and leak your ideas? I smell a lucrative lawsuit....

I read the rumor in an excellent novel by Guatemalan-American novelist Francisco Goldman, The Divine Husband (2004), sort of about José Martí, more about two girls in the Guatemala of the 1870s, one who becomes the wife of theLiberal Dictator, the other a novice before the dictator closes the convents, and then a bilingual secretary; eventually both emigrate to New York City. It is full of good stuff; the more direct and affecting novel about Guatemala and America is Goldman's first book, The Long Night of White Chickens (1992), in which a mixed-blood family in Boston gets a servant girl from a Guatemala orphanage; she grows up to attend Harvard and to return to Guatemala to start up her own orphanages, but is murdered during the guerrilla period. I like them both, in part because Goldman complicates the definition of "U.S.Latino" with his characters, without being an idiot like Rodríguez.

Thanks again for the talk!

Patrick O'Connor