Drinking mate
I began drinking mate six years ago, on my first trip to Argentina, and liked it immediately, even though many find it rather bitter. The picture, Mate, in which the woman drinks from the gourd while two gauchos… Read More
Montaigne and the acceptance of uncertainty
The essay, we are being told, is back. An editorial in The Guardian on 5 May celebrates the alleged event and announces a new specialist publisher, Notting Hill Editions, which has released a range of cloth-covered hardbacks, ranging… Read More
Thoughts of Che in Rosario
There’s no point in being sentimental about these things, I realize. Music that, when it first appears, seems to say something new, gets murdered with repetition, besides being absorbed into the great maw of consumer culture. I remember… Read More
Mood Music
I find it incredible that Manu Chao is used as hotel lobby music in the Ibis Hotel, Montevideo (a stone’s throw from the American Embassy). Manu, who stands for everything that a global hotel chain opposes – the… Read More
Scattergun Rant
This extraordinarily helpful poster can be found, not in a hospital or a school, but in the men’s washroom in the MALBA museum in Buenos Aires. I applaud the administrators of this institution for their interest in my… Read More
A visit to the islands and ‘mal del sauce’
No sooner had I finished writing yesterday’s blog, than I walked into the hotel dining room (earlier than usual, as I had planned an excursion) and the first person I see is Coetzee himself, sitting in the corner… Read More
J.M. Coetzee in Buenos Aires
Coetzee came to Buenos Aires to deliver the final reading of the festival last night. I am not really authorized to write at length about Coetzee, having only read two of his novels, which I found admirable, and… Read More
Cándido Lopez
A walk down to the Museo de Bellas Artes here in Buenos Aires and a discovery that leaves a deep mark of weirdness on the Blanco brain. Cándido Lopez (1840-1902) was an Argentinian painter who took part in… Read More
The last hundred days
Within weeks of publication Patrick McGuinness’s debut novel, The Last Hundred Days found itself on the Man Booker long list, and deservedly so, although it failed to make the shortlist on the 5th September. Whatever. Set in… Read More
Dissolving
It’s always an education to read in unusual locations. The organizers of FILBA appear to be steering me towards a socially engaged role that I am not normally associated with back in the UK. But that’s fine… Read More
Villa Miseria
In immaculate contrast to yesterday’s trip to the rarefied air of Villa Ocampo, today I visited a slum (or a Villa Miseria) to the south of the city in the barrio of Barracas 21/24. It is an… Read More
Ricardo Blanco’s Blog
- Poems for staying at home (Day 40)Quarantine means forty days, so Poems for staying at home is coming to an end, for now. Nearly all of the poems published here since April 20th can be found in The Other Tiger: Recent Poetry... Read More
- Poems for staying at home (Day 39)In these dark times many people are unable to bury their dead, or even attend to their dying relatives. Fabio Morábito’s devastating poem captures the irony of grief and loss through the eyes of one mourner, whose... Read More
- Poems for staying at home (Day 38)This great and terrible poem of witness is now ten years old. The poem has become a symbol of resistance to state and narco gang violence and has in turn brought death threats to its author, María Rivera.... Read More
- Poems for staying at home (Day 37)For some of us, life during lockdown has sometimes seemed like one continuous screen session, interacting virtually with people we barely know. How strange, then, to read Paula Piedra’s poem about coming home to a TV screen... Read More
- Poems for staying at home (Day 36)We know that feeling, of stepping out into the street in flames, and without ourselves. The peculiarity of drinking tequila or mescal in some darkened den, followed by that lurch into sunlight – or as here –... Read More
Ricardo Blanco, Citizen of Nowhere
