It’s Friday again!

And what a fucked up week it’s been for Argentina.

So this week’s column is going to be rather grim, because that’s just the way it is.

You have probably heard all about it by now, but just in case you don’t give a damn, which trust me, is possible, here’s what you need to know about the latest tragic train accident:

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  This photo illustrates what TBA considers should be an "acceptable" service. Fuck them. (Photo/Beatrice Murch)

  At 8:32 AM on Wednesday, a train from the Sarmiento line entering the Once railway station failed to break as it reached the platform and hit the track bumper at 20 km/hour, leaving 51 people dead and over 700 people injured (click here for footage from the security cameras at the moment of the crash). After such a strong impact, the second car was plunged “about six meters into the first,” which is where most of the victims were found. In case you haven’t noticed, most commuters usually enter the first car in order to get off first and save time, so you can imagine how packed it gets in there during rush hour. Most of the people inside the first car were killed instantly.

• Even though the reasons for the accident remain unknown and forensic authorities have begun analyzing every aspect of it in order to figure out what went wrong, the tragedy has once again sparked a long-standing debate about the poor state of the trains that millions of people take every day to go to work. However, a representative from Trenes de Buenos Aires (TBA, the company running the train system) showed up at the station to defend the service saying that he considers it to be “acceptable.” Yeah, that’s right. This is “acceptable” to him. Or this. Or this. I shiver to think what it is he would consider “bad” service. Fucker.

• A few hours after the accident, Transportation Secretary Juan Pablo Schiavi gave an unfortunate press conference, which he opened by saying that accidents like this happen all over the world (“so don’t blame us!” *hint, hint*) and then said that had this happened on Tuesday, which was a holiday, the tragedy would have been a lot less serious. In response to what you’re probably wondering: no, he has not resigned nor has he been fired.

• President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner issued a statement, saying she was deeply saddened by the tragedy and announced two days of national mourning. Then no one has any idea what happened to her but she’s been MIA ever since.

• She also cancelled carnival celebrations, which were scheduled to take place this weekend on 9 de Julio Av. This kind of makes sense since I don’t think shaking your naked ass on a float in front of thousands of people on a day of national mourning is a great idea.

• As the death toll and the amount of injured passengers continued to rise, the international media got ahold of the news and heads of state from all over the world began sending their messages of support to the Argentine population. Mexico, Chile, the United States and Spain were some of the first nations to send their condolences in light of this tragic incident. But imagine the population’s surprise when suddenly the United Kingdom, whose relationship with Argentina has been more than tense in the last few months due to the Malvinas/Falklands controversy, was among the first to say that “their thoughts were with the families of the victims and with the emergency services still trying to help those involved.” See, people? This is what true diplomacy is all about. Sure, both countries may sound like they are about to kill each other, but in the face of tragedy, you leave your differences aside and you help whoever is in need. Had this happened in the UK, would you have had a similar attitude (I’m talking to you, Argentines)? If your answer was “I would have said they deserved it for stealing our islands,” then let me just say you, my friend, are an idiot.

• Speaking of the Malvinas/Falklands, a group of Argentine journalists, philosophers and other hard-to-pinpoint professions sent an open letter to the media in which they said that they had had it with all this bullshit and surprisingly had decided to side with the islanders and their right to self-determination. Can you imagine? Traitors! So the President charged them with heresy and ordered to have them burned at the stake, to which the populace hastily complied.

• Ha! No, of course they were not burned. But everyone pretty much told them to go fuck themselves. Here’s the letter in case you want to read it in Spanish, even though I know you couldn’t care less.

• Mark your calendars: the National Day against Mining Exploitation is coming. And no, this is not another holiday that the Government just pulled out of its ass. Apparently it’s gonna be this nation-wide protest against mining activities in the north-western provinces. You’re disappointed, aren’t you? You thought this was going to be another day off, didn’t you? Well it’s not. Deal with it.

• Prestigious London-based magazine “The Economist” has had it with the local Government trying to sugarcoat inflation and announced it would stop using Argentina’s official inflation statistics. In other non-related news, I also expect them to announce soon that Darth Vader is Luke’s father, Mili Vanilli were really lip-synching all along and Bruce Willis is dead.

• In another heavy blow to the cruise industry (which is already in hot water after the Costa Concordia fuck up incident), a waitress working in the MSC Armonia died of Influenzavirus B after being hospitalized in critical condition in Santos, Brazil. Several people in the cruise, which arrived in Buenos Aires on Wednesday, started showing similar symptoms and everyone started freaking out, but then the local Government said there was no threat so everyone decided to overcome the tragic death of the waitress by going shopping in Palermo Soho. See? And they didn’t even need Dr. House for this one.

• Did you click on that “Influenzavirus B” link? You didn’t, did you? That’s OK, it’s not like you would have understood a single word of it. Let’s just call it a really bad flu, period.

• Socialite, philanthropist, Argentina’s wealthiest person in the entire
  

  No one you know. (Photo/Wikipedia)

  universe and old person Amelia “Amelita” Fortabat passed away last weekend at the age of 90 (not that you care since you never heard of her). However, she was a prominent figure who inspired Andy Warhol to paint a portrait of her. And that makes her a thousand times cooler than you (unless you’re Marilyn Monroe) and worthy of being mentioned on this column.

• And finally: here’s a video that has been making the rounds on Facebook and Twitter, that at first makes you laugh and a few minutes later it keeps resonating in the echo chamber of your brain until you come to understand that there is really nothing funny about it. Maybe it’s the decadent state of that centuries-old, unusable blackboard in some God-forsaken school in Catamarca. Maybe it’s the finger-painted wall, collecting digital signatures since who knows how many years back, displaying signs of neglect. Maybe it’s the teacher’s attempt to conceal the fact that she just doesn’t know how to multiply while her students blatantly laugh at her ignorance. But mostly, I’m sure it’s the realization that this is the standard of education we’re offering future generations. Children who in a few years will be in charge of keeping society afloat while we hope to live with whatever shitty pension we’re entitled to. So yeah, that’s right. We’re fucked.

• Also, in her defense, I don’t think I’ve multiplied anything without a calculator since 1997, so I’m sure I wouldn’t know how to do it either. Give her a break.

Have a great weekend everyone!

The third in our ‘Beyond Borges‘ series, the poet, playwright and novelist José Mármol follows hot on the heels of August’s Esteban Echeverría and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, completing a trio of prominent mid-19th century romantics.

Jose Mármol

Mármol is most known for his semi-autobiographical fiction ‘Amalia’ which, when it was published in its entirety in 1854, constituted the first full-length Argentine novel.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1818, he’d grown up to be a vehement opposer of ruling federalist politician Juan Manuel de Rosas and had abandoned his university studies amidst the flurry of a growing opposition movement.

Mármol fled Argentina in 1840 at the height of Rosas’ regime. He lived in exile in Montevideo alongside several other Argentine authors, including fellow romantic writer Echeverría. Having been arrested a year before for distributing anti-Rosas literature, he claims he wrote his first poetry against the dictator from his prison cell.

Like his contemporaries, Mármol had similar ideas of what could be expressed through literature, and took advantage of the freer climate which existed in Uruguay to write from exile. There he founded several journals – among them ‘La Semana’ – through which he launched scathing attacks on Rosas and earned himself the nickname “the poetic hangman”.

His journalism and poetry took a no-holds-barred approach, as demonstrated in his poem ‘A Rosas, el 25 de Mayo de 1843′, which directly and strongly denounced the Argentine ruler. The poem is noted for its 14 syllable alexandrine lines, a structure which was at that time more commonly associated with the 12 syllable equivalent of the French and English poets.

Although chronologically Echeverría was the forerunner to romanticism in Argentina, the influence of the European romantics was evident not only in Mármol’s poetry but also in his plays ‘El poeta’ and ‘El cruzado’. His celebrated autobiographical poem ‘El peregrino’ for example, spans 12 cantos and draws comparisons with the narrative poetry of leading English romantic Lord Byron, as well as the poetry of some Argentine contemporaries.

Mármol took Echeverría’s same sordid vision of Argentina under Rosas, and expanded and deepened it in the realistic fiction ‘Amalia’ – a tragic tale of two young lovers caught up in the anti-Rosas movement.

The heroine of the story is an indigenous woman living in Buenos Aires, whose life transpires between the polarisation of barbarism and civilisation. She falls for Eduardo while she and her cousin Daniel are sheltering him from military persecution, but before the trio can make their escape, Rosas’ federalist henchmen arrive.

The combined use of costumbrismo alongside romanticism paints a detailed picture of life under a violent dictatorship, resulting in ‘Amalia’ being held up as an early example of social romanticism. Because the novel mixes fictional characters with several living figures, it can also be labelled a historical novel, and along with Sarmiento’s ‘Facundo’ it is considered a precursor to the important genre of ‘dictator novel’ which would later appear in Latin American literature.

Juan Manuel de Rosas

Mármol started writing ‘Amalia’ in Uruguay in 1844 and, as Sarmiento had done with ‘Facundo’, began publishing it as a feuilleton inside ‘La semana’ review in 1851. The serials were discontinued following the fall of Rosas in 1852, when Mármol returned to live in Argentina after a period of more than 12 years in exile.

The first edition of ‘Amalia’ as a complete novel appeared in Argentina in 1854 and was immediately adopted as Argentina’s national novel. Although the love story which ran through it accounted for a large portion of its appeal, the book respected certain traits of the serial format and didn’t come together especially well as a single novel.

Mármol’s literary style has since come under fire for borrowing too much from European writers of the time, and for lacking the quality of Sarmiento’s ‘Facundo’ and the authenticity of Echeverría’s ‘El matadero’. Renowned Argentine critic David Viñas observed that his greatest aesthetic achievements came when he wrote about barbarism in crude realistic terms, and when writing about his protagonist Amalia, his writing became too ornamental and rhetorical.

Contemporary reviews occasionally draw comparison with Scottish romantic novelist Sir Walter Scott, and whilst nowadays the novel finds its reader base mostly among students of romantic or 19th-century literature, it enjoyed enormous popularity for over a century in Argentina.

In 1914 the book was adapted for silent film – making ‘Amalia’ not only Argentina’s first full-length novel, but also the first feature-length Argentine film production.

Mármol’s career as an author ended with ‘Amalia’, as though his inspiration to write left along with Rosas, and while a succession of anti-Rosas novels followed in its footsteps, none were as well received as this landmark first novel. Shortly thereafter, he assumed the position of director of Argentina’s National Library, joining the likes of Marcos Sastre, whose bookstore provided the setting of the Generation of 37′s literary salon 20 years earlier, in an impressive line-up of directors considered crucial in the makeup of Argentina’s intellectual and historical fabric.