Mister T
Pretentious Asshole
Joined: 25 Aug 2005
Posts: 1956
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 Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2010 6:18 pm Post subject: El Monstruo by John Ross |
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"John Ross—poet, journalist, and globetrotting troublemaker—has lived in what the Aztec-Mexicas described as "the umbilicus of the universe" since the great Mexico City earthquake of 1985 crushed out as many as 30,000 lives. Over the years, he has watched the city—El Monstruo—pick itself up, bury its dead, and come battling back. But he is filled with a gnawing unease that Mexico City's days as the most gargantuan, chaotic, crime-ridden, toxically contaminated urban stain in the Western world is doomed, that the monster he has grown to know and love through a quarter of a century of reporting on its foibles and tragedies and festering blight will be globalized into one more McCity.
Covering 4,000,000,000 years of history from the primal broth that first spewed out the monster to the Aztec-Mexica oblivion through centuries of rapine and revolution all the way to the Great Swine Flu Panic of 2009, El Monstruo is a phantasmagoric retelling of the story of Mexico City, with which Ross's own history has become hopelessly entwined.
In the tradition of Suketu Mehta's Maximum City, Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives and Joseph Mitchell's Up At The Old Hotel, Ross's El Monstruo is a unique exploration of the mother of all mega-cities. Never before has anyone told from ground level the gritty, vibrant histories of this left city of 23 million faceless, fearless souls, listened to the stories of those who have not been crushed by the Monster, deconstructed the Monstruo's very monstrousness and lived to tell its secrets."
"Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto first called my attention to the distinction between residence and citizenship, pointing out that in France, living in Paris makes you Parisian, not French. I am almost tempted to say the same about residents of New York: New Yorkers first, United States citizens second.
Such is the evolution of urbanization in the post-national world, and as modernity couples with globalization, metropoli are in danger of losing their distinguishing character. Now comes another paean to Mexico City (after First Stop in the New World by David Lida, a decidedly different view). Unrepentant warrior for social justice, poet, peripatetic journalist John Ross (Murdered By Capitalism—150 Years of Life and Death on the American Left), a resident of the marvel that is Mexico City for nearly 30 years and an off and on visitor for 50 years, expresses such concerns in his new tome, El Monstruo Dread and Redemption in Mexico City (Nation Books). El Monstruo refers to proud Mexico’s capitol city, home to 23,000,000 people, or as Ross characterizes, “There are 23,000,000 stories in Mexico City, 22,999,997 busted dreams, and two or three tales of overweening ambition and craven success.”
And Ross’s book (ignore the cover, which is a graphic mongoloid) is a memoir of his life in the city arriving there just one week after the devastating earthquake of 1985, which killed 30,000 people. It’s a people’s history from prehistoric times through the Aztec-Mexicas era when the city was viewed as the umbilicus of the universe, to the 1968 massacre at Tlatelolco, to the roiling and precarious present. Finally, it is also an homage to the mega-city that Ross and untold others love.
John Ross’s prose is wonderfully lucid and laden with history and story—it seems as almost every sentence contains a fact or a germ of a story—you do begin to see this geography as a pulsating, living thing. Even if you have not had the pleasure of visiting Mexico City, John Ross’s El Monstruo is an extraordinary conveyance and a powerfully riveting experience. —Robert Birnbaum, Dec. 15, 2009"
Video/Radio interview with John Ross: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IswoDVEWtYQ&feature=player_embedded
I had to pick up this book when I found out this fool had lived for 25 years in the hotel room right next to room I stayed in in Mexico City.[/u]
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