Valeria Luiselli - The Story of My Teeth

1971Three-dimensional artist Fernando Ortega is born in Mexico City.

1971Part I of Allan Kaprow’s “The Education of the Un-Artist” is published in Art News 69. In 2011, Mexican author and poet Daniel Saldaña París uploads Kaprow’s essay to Scribd.

1974Poet, essayist, and editor Luis Felipe Fabre is born in Mexico City: Pisces, Libra ascendant, moon in Aries.

1975–1982Fifty years since the serial-format publication of Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin.

1976The 350th anniversary of the death of Francis Bacon, the father of empiricism, who suffered pneumonia after conducting an experiment on the effects of freezing meat, which involved stuffing a fowl with snow.

April 15, 1980Tens of thousands join Jean-Paul Sartre’s funeral precession to his burial plot in Montparnasse.

1982Bicentennial of the publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire .

1982In the introduction to a collection of stories by Robert Walser, Susan Sontag compares Walser’s prose to the art of Paul Klee.

Circa 1980

Highway is promoted to Crisis Manager.

He begins collecting courses.

1980Pablo Duarte, editor of the Letras Libres website, is born in Mexico City.

1981An asteroid is discovered and named 3453 Dostoevsky.

1982In Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke introduces Kripkenstein, a fictional character who holds views based on Wittgenstein’s writings.

1983Mexican short-story writer, novelist, and playwright Jorge Ibargüengoitia is buried in Antillón Park beneath a plaque that reads: “Here lies Jorge Ibargüengoitia, in the park of his great-grandfather who fought against the French.”

June 25, 1984Michel Foucault dies at age fifty-seven in the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris.

1984

Highway marries Flaca.

1983Five hundredth anniversary of the publication of Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, Caxton edition, which recounts the lives of the saints.

1984Mexican singer José María Napoleón, often called the poet of melody, releases the single “Nunca cambies.”

September 19, 1985Massive earthquake under Mexico City leaves at least ten thousand people dead.

1986Jean Baudrillard writes America, an account of his travels in the United States.

September 19, 1985

Siddhartha Sánchez Tostado is born.

September 1985“Highwayman” is number one on the U.S. country music charts.

1985Carlos Fuentes publishes Gringo viejo.

June 8, 1987Singer-songwriter Juan Cirerol — Mexico’s Johnny Cash — is born in Mexicali. His second album includes the track “Clonazepam Blues.”

1987Mexican writer Mario Bellatin travels to Cuba to study screenwriting.

1986–1987

Highway attends an auctioneering course given by Master Oklahoma.

He meets Leroy Van Dyke at the Missouri Auction School.

Flaca leaves Highway, taking Siddhartha with her.

1987Mexican author Guillermo Fadanelli lives in Berlin for a year and is surprised to find that the beer is not served cold.

July 1988Centennial of the first-edition publication of Rubén Darío’s Azul.

1989Josefina Vicens’s short story “Petrita” is published posthumously. The story is based on a painting entitled La niña muerta, which was given to Vicens by the artist Juan Soriano.

1988–2000

Highway becomes a successful auctioneer and travels widely. He begins to develop his allegoric auctioning method.

1989A Yoko Ono retrospective is held at a Whitney Museum branch.

1991The 650th anniversary of the appointment of Petrarch as the first poet laureate since the classical era.

1992Sam Durant has his first solo exhibition at the Bliss Gallery in Pasadena.

1995The 300th anniversary of the death of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, whose writings are said to show the influence of the classical rhetoric of Aristotle, Quintilian, and Plato.

1991Serpent’s Tail publishes Susan Bassnett’s translation of Margo Glantz’s The Family Tree: An Illustrated Novel in the United Kingdom.

August 3, 1992Five hundred years since Christopher Columbus set out to find a westward passage to the Orient and accidentally discovered the Caribbean islands.

1998Bicentennial of the publication of Charles Lamb’s poem “The Old Familiar Faces,” in which describes his “day of horrors.”

Circa 1998Fifteen-year-old Valeria Luiselli buys a copy of Sergio Pitol’s Vals de mefisto in a bookstore in San Cristóbal de las Casas and imagines him to be a dead Eastern European or Russian writer.

October 27 and 28, 1999Christie’s auctions Marilyn Monroe’s personal property, including a collection of eleven assorted Mexican soda glass tumblers.

2000Approximately 2,400 years since the Greek dramatist Euripides, who depicted mythical characters as ordinary people, retired to a cave on the island of Salamis to write his tragedies.

December 3, 2001Mexican experimental short-story writer Juan José Arreola dies.

2002The number of undocumented Mexicans living in the United States is estimated to be 5.3 million.

2002Visual artist Terence Gower installs Bicycle Pavilion in the grounds of the Fundación/Colección Jumex in Ecatepec, Mexico City.

2003Olafur Eliasson represents Denmark in the Venice Biennale.

2004Short-story writer and essayist Vivian Abenshushan is inspired by a piece of stencil art in Buenos Aires that reads, “Kill your boss: resign.”

Circa 2000

Highway buys Marilyn Monroe’s teeth in an auction in Miami.

2000Approximately 3,000 years since Cadmus, son of Telephassa, sowed a dragon’s tooth and was surprised to see armed warriors spring from the earth.

2000The United Nations launches its eight Millennium Development Goals to be achieved by 2015.

2002The 150th anniversary of the death of Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol.

2002Approximately 1,900 years since Tacitus wrote Dialogus de oratoribus.

2004Posthumous publication of Uruguayan author Mario Levrero’s La novela luminosa, which includes a 450-page prologue recounting how the writer spent the grant awarded to him by the Guggenheim Foundation.

2005One hundred years since the Russian absurdist writer Daniil Kharms was born twice; the author claims that his father and the midwife tried to push him back into the womb when he appeared four months prematurely.

2006Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra’s novel Bonsái is published in Spain by Anagrama.

2007Mexican critic Guillermo Sheridan begins to write his blog El minutario, hosted by Letras Libres.

2007Yuri Herrera-Gutiérrez becomes editor of the literary magazine El perro.

2009El Dinoparque opens in the Museo El Rehilete in Pachuca.

2010Author Carlos Yushimito is described by Granta as “a Peruvian of Japanese forbears who lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and who writes about Brazil.”