Valeria Luiselli - The Story of My Teeth

6. UGO RONDINONE, WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE

© La Colección Jumex, México

Fancioulle made me see that the intoxicating powers of Art are more effective than any others for shrouding the terrors of the abyss; that genius can represent a comedy while standing on the edge of the tomb, with a joy that prevents it from seeing that tomb, lost as it is in a Paradise, which refuses to admit any idea of death and destruction.

— CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

7. NEUROTICS ANON. & GUN REPAIRS

© Javier Rivero and El Perro

Neurasthenia / is a gift that came to me with my earliest work.

— RUBÉN DARÍO

8. SECRET OF NIGHT

© Javier Rivero and El Perro

Originality is nothing more than judicious imitation; the most original writers borrowed one from another.

— VOLTAIRE

9. PACHUCA MEDIAN STRIP & FIBERGLASS DINOSAURS

© El Pulque

You take nothing with you when you go.

— JOSÉ MARÍA NAPOLEÓN

1938President Lázao Cárdenas announces the nationalization of Mexico’s petroleum reserves.

May 7, 1945War ends in Europe.

1945Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy is published.

Circa 1945

Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, better known as “Highway,” is born in Pachuca, the Beautiful Windy City.

His family moves to Ecatepec de Morelos.

1940Production at the United States Smelting, Refining & Mining Company in Pachuca declines, causing many residents to leave in search of employment.

Circa 1945Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus passes into the care of Theodor Adorno after its owner, Walter Benjamin, commits suicide in Portbou.

1945Fifty years since Mr. Hoopdriver set out on a cycling tour of southeast England in H. G. Wells’s The Wheels of Chance.

1950Virginia Woolf’s essay “Gas,” which details her experience of having several teeth extracted in 1922 and 1923, is published in The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays.

1948Centennial of the birth of German logician and philosopher Gottlob Frege.

1954Author Francisco Goldman is born in Boston, Massachusetts.

1956Julio Cortázar meditates on the metamorphosis of an axolotl in the Jardin des Plantes, Paris, in his short story “Axolotl.”

Circa 1953

Highway starts his first job in Rubén Darío’s newspaper stand and begins a collection of straws.

1951 Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse is first published in the United States and later helps inspire the hippie generation.

1955Fifty years since Miguel de Unamuno, upon receiving the Gran Cruz de Alfonso x, said to Alfonso xiii, “I am honored, Your Majesty, to receive this cross, which I so justly deserve.”

1957Penguin publishes Robert Graves’s translations of Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars.

1962Centennial of the publication of the first fifty prose poems of Le Spleen de París by Charles Baudelaire, which includes an account of the heroic death of the court jester Fancioulle.

1962In her biography of Robert de Montesquiou, Cornelia Otis Skinner reports that Marcel Proust often copied Montesquiou’s laugh and his habit of not showing his teeth.

1965Work begins on the construction of Mexico’s first Volkswagen plant.

1962The first Scribe notebooks are manufactured in Mexico.

1966Five hundred fifty years ago, Poggio Bracciolini discovered an edition of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria in an old tower at the Abbey of St. Gall in Switzerland.

1967U.S. country singer Leroy Van Dyke stars in the film What Am I Bid?

1968Possibly the 50th anniversary of the invention of the Chinese fortune cookie by Donald Lau in Los Angeles.

October 12, 1968The Olympic Games open in Mexico.

1968Multimedia artist Doug Aitken is born in Redondo Beach, California.

1966

Highway is employed as a security guard at the Jumex factory in Ecatepec de Morelos.

He continues collecting.

1967The Beatles release Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with an album sleeve designed by Peter Blake and Jann Haworth.

1967Sol LeWitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” is published in Artforum.

1967The 150th anniversary of the publication of The Round Table, a collection of essays by William Hazlitt.

October 2, 1968Protesting students are massacred in Tlatelolco Square, Mexico City.

1970Mexican American author and editor David Miklos is born in San Antonio, Texas.

1971Four hundred years since Michel de Montaigne, weary of active life, retired to his father’s château at age thirty-seven.

1971Essayist, poet, and editor Luigi Amara is born in Mexico City.

1971Miguel Calderón, the enfant terrible of Mexican art, is born in Mexico City.

1973Jorge Luis Borges resigns as director of the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires after being awarded the first Premio Internacional Alfonso Reyes.

1973Centennial of the publication of John Stuart Mill’s autobiography, which includes comments on how Quintilian influenced his thinking.

July 2, 1976Saigon renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

1976The Voltaire Foundation is inaugurated at the University of Oxford.

1978Carlos Velázquez, writer of norteña literature, is born in Coahuila, Mexico.

Early 1970sSpanish author Enrique Vila-Matas first reads about the artist Raymond Roussel in the works of Marcel Duchamp.

1970Bicentennial of the first scholarly translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives from the original Greek into English.

October 1, 1970Janis Joplin records “Mercedes Benz” at the Sunset Sound recording studio in Los Angeles.

1971Approximately 1,600 years since a young Augustine of Hippo prayed, “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”