Literary Citizen of the Andes: Gabriela Alemán and Quito 3 Next-Generation Robotic Cockroach Can Explore Under Water Environmen
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Literary Citizen of the Andes: Gabriela Alemán and Quito 3 Next-generation robotic cockroach can explore under water environments 8 Extreme weather 'potentially catastrophic' for bats 11 Mistletoe Lacks Key Energy-Generating Complex 13 An Exoplanet First! Helium Spotted on Bizarre Comet-Like World 15 Nanoparticles could help rescue malnourished crops 19 Wireless 'RoboFly' Looks Like an Insect, Gets Its Power from Lasers 22 Ancient Chinese farmers sowed literal seeds of change in Southeast Asia 24 New Data: Hurricanes Will Get Worse 26 Lizards’ Green Blood Evolved Four Times 29 Zika virus may pose greater threat of miscarriages than previously thought 31 Forgotten Feminisms: Johnnie Tillmon’s Battle Against ‘The Man’ 34 Little Panic: A Literary Laboratory Exploring What It Is Like to Live in the Stranglehold of Anxiety and 47 What It Takes to Break Free Neanderthals practiced close-range hunting 120,000 years ago 55 Forgotten Feminisms: An Appeal Against ‘Domestic Despotism’ 57 Remarks on Moduli Spaces and String Theory 64 After the Fall 69 Sound-waves: Making opaque materials totally transparent 79 Toy Stories: Portraits of Children and their Toys Around the World 81 Rilke on the Lonely Patience of Creative Work 96 Smoking Ocean Vents Found in Surprisingly Shallow Water 99 Air pollution contributes significantly to diabetes globally 103 A Keith Haring Mural Painted in 1986 and Under Wraps for 30 Years Has Been Revealed in Amsterdam 106 Amanda Palmer and The Decomposers Cover Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” in Tribute to Rachel 108 Carson Kate Millett: ‘Sexual Politics’ & Family Values 111 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila Dreamlike Landscapes Grow from Sculptural Portraits by Yuanxing Liang 116 How Does the Summer Solstice Affect Animals? 125 Compounds found in green tea and red wine may block formation of toxic metabolites 128 Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives 131 New Glowing Dichroic Glass Installations by Chris Wood are Activated by Sunlight 144 First confirmed image of newborn planet caught with ESO's VLT 154 Whatever’s Happening to Interracial Love? 157 Alzheimer's: 'Strong evidence' of virus involvement 162 Magnetic skyrmions: Not the only ones of their class 165 Two Hundred Years of Blue 167 A Quiet Novel Turned into a Forceful Performance 188 Astronomers observe the magnetic field of the remains of supernova 1987A 192 What if we knew when and how we'd die? 195 2 Infoteca’s E-Journal No. 451 august 2018 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila Literary Citizen of the Andes: Gabriela Alemán and Quito By Dick Cluster LITERARY CITIES COTOPAXI, FROM QUITO 3 Infoteca’s E-Journal No. 451 august 2018 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila Quito, the capital of Ecuador, is an Andean city 9,300 feet above sea level, squeezed into a narrow valley fifteen miles south of the equator. On the west side, you can take the Teleférico up to the shoulder of the Pichincha volcano and step out of your gondola onto an alpine landscape at an elevation of more than 13,000 feet. Looking down at the urban area from above the tree line reminds me of cities closer to the poles than to the equator—Bergen, Cape Town, or even Anchorage. But unlike those other locations, Quito is not a port, and its cityscape is not set against a background of bright blue. Rather, the city spreads like an elongated flow of white and beige concrete poured between green ridges that hem it in. It’s a low-slung city, in which tallest spire is still the steeple of the cathedral built at the turn of the twentieth-century. It all looks diminutive from above. Across the valley rises Parque Metropolitano, the city’s green, forested lung. If the clouds permit, you can also see a series of snowcapped conical volcanoes in the distance. Those cones remind you that you are standing on an active volcano. In 1660, the last major eruption of Pichincha spewed a massive column of ash into the air, plunging Quito—which was founded in the previous century by Spanish conquistadors on an earlier Inca site—into darkness and blanketing it with more than a foot of debris. After centuries of dormancy, Pichincha stirred again in 1981, and again in 1999, both times raining ash on the capital. So too, to a lesser degree, did a 2015 eruption of Cotopaxi, a volcano fifty miles distant, one of the peaks visible from the top of the Teleférico. “One hundred miles from the snows of Cotopaxi” is where H.G. Wells set his 1904 short story “The Country of the Blind,” the tale of a pristine, fertile valley sealed off from the rest of Ecuador by a huge fictional eruption, “the stupendous outbreak of Mindobamba, when it was night in Quito for seventeen days.” Wells’ text gets a sizable nod in Poso Wells, the second novel by Quito-based Ecuadorian writer Gabriela Alemán. Near the end of Poso Wells, a similar volcano threatens to erupt. Birds fall from the sky, sulphurous gases emerge from the peak. Key characters in the story—four aged men from an ancient civilization whose members have all gone blind—fall to the ground and wait for the end of the world. The blind men are refugees from Wells’s story, but in Alemán’s imagination, the creations of the English writer are no longer isolated or exotic, rather they roam Ecuadorian countryside, always up to no good. The malevolent refugees are connected to the disappearance of a series of several women from a squatter settlement, and to attempts by a multinational mining interest, in league with corrupt Ecuadorian politicians, to despoil the lush landscape from which their ancestors came. In this “mouth of the fucking devil,” forgotten by authorities, except during election years, a demagogic presidential candidate and his closest lieutenants perish in a freak accident involving a campaign speech, a microphone, an electric spark, and the candidate’s bladder overflowing with urine from too much whiskey and beer. When his surviving top-level acolyte, a millionaire next in line for the presidency, vanishes, legions of soldiers, police, and journalists are dispatched to look for him. In contrast, no official attention is paid to the disappearances of poor women in the same settlement, though they’ve been disappearing for years. Reports of the disappearances molder, untouched in the archives of the police. This scandal lying at the heart of the book, counterpoised to the high-level intrigue—a puzzle that one principled reporter and one determined local woman in Poso Wells set out to solve. But Poso Wells also offers scenes set in the country’s cloud forest, in between the lowlands and the volcanic massifs, where golden crowed quetzals survive in what is left of their habitat, where even the cuyes (domestic guinea pigs raised as food) can sense the evil of certain visitors, and where the local villagers defend their lands. Interspersed with the narrative are fragments of poetry, not poetic description but poems in several genres, long and short. They are declaimed by a pair of characters on a bed, or found on discarded scraps of paper, palimpsests of verse and soda-bottle stains. The mashup of genres and geographies is typical of Gabriela 4 Infoteca’s E-Journal No. 451 august 2018 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila Alemán, about whom the Argentine writer Pedro Mairal has said, “In Bogotá, where I met her over mojitos and spiced canelazos, I watched her dance. I saw right away that within the harmony of her movements there was something that threatened to come apart. She looked like she’d fall flat on her back but she didn’t, she kept on dancing. Sometimes she writes like that—she does something unexpected, things fly apart, she leaps into the void, and you think there’s no way she can pull this off – but no, everything fits together, falls into place, flows.” In 2007, Alemán was chosen as one of the thirty-nine Latin American writers under thirty-nine that everyone should read, the selection was based on her first novel, Body Time (set in New Orleans, where she studied for a doctorate in Latin American film), Poso Wells, and three books of short stories. Since then she has published two more books of short stories and another novel, edited several anthologies, and co-founded a print and digital press in Quito, Ediciones Fakir. GABRIELA ALEMÁN Ediciones Fakir has its office in the historic center of the city and its mission is to explore how to identify audiences for Ecuadorian writing in the twenty-first century. As Alemán explains, “Ecuador is not a country that prides itself on its reading habits, so one of our main concerns is ‘spreading’ the love of books. To do that we try to make very affordable books and tap into established genres whose Ecuadorian practitioners aren’t well known. Last year we put out an anthology of horror stories from the nineteenth century, and this year it’s going to be Ecuadorian sci-fi. Ecuador doesn’t have a tradition of graphic novels, so one of our collections concentrates on those. There are also a number of very good books that are out of print or have disappeared from the canon, and we are doing an archeology of sorts to attempt to rewrite it.” These include the work of the poet and short story writer César Dávila Andrade (1918-1967), whom they consider to be the preeminent Ecuadorian writer of the 20th Century, though he is far from a household name.