The recent game between Real Madrid vs. Barcelona: ninety minutes of top quality. I’m not thinking about soccer quality, obviously; I’m thinking of that phrase from The Hobbit designating a battle: “Far and over.” Over, literally, the clouds, like Qatar Airways and Fly Emirates: airlines advertised on the ¨azulgrana¨ and ¨merengue¨ super and multi-sold-shirts of Barça and Madrid, respectively.
I wonder how it will be seen the ¨Clasico¨ from the offices and mansions of the executives back in Doha, Dubai. The money is neither created nor destroyed but, among other things, transforms into soccer; global and tribal at the same time (nomads from the Persian Gulf with Ray Ban and apps and whiskeys), The Clasico is, already was, a giant dance of petro-euros.
And although the players seem in fact airplanes (some more than others), the ground in which they were playing was the center of the ubiquitous deployment of brands: Iberdrola, Nivea, Sanitas, Samsung, Audi, Adidas, BBVA…
That is nothing new . Marketing is like the wild vegetation: it is focused on occupying the larger amount of space, growing in all directions, proliferating, becoming jungle.
Apropos of this, I remember a novel by Spanish writer Antonio Orejudo where one of the characters, Helga Pato, is a literary agent who thinks of i ntroducing advertising on novels, and she wants to take the idea into practice by using white spaces between the pages of Lobotomy, work by a young Basque writer named Ander Alkarria .
“… Ander imagine how will the critics literary people and purists be if you publish a novel that is interrupted to include ads which otherwise is very logical as your narrator is a telly addict I mean it would be perfectly justified and thereby we kill two birds with one shot do not you think because it would continue being fragmentary as you want and at the same time there would be some continuity also like the publishing houses want text ad text ad not to mention that you will take ten percent of what they pay which is too much but well that’s another topic perhaps less important the kind of advertising that we would include does not matter either what really matters is the subversion that gesture contains the subversion Ander subversion’s more perturbing and annoying than writing without punctuation marks… “We read in the hilarious ¨ ¨Ventajas de viajar en tren¨ (A dvantages of traveling by train), published in Cuba in 2008 by Arte y Literatura Publishing House.
(By the way, now that the hundred percent subsidized publishing houses will apparently no longer exist, it would be useful to take stock of what has been published by Arte y Literatura in recent times , specifically in regard to contemporary fiction. If we think that the normal procedure includes minimal hierarchy or at least certain lines, certain literary directions, we will find a curious laughable catalog. Anything can enter ; it seems they do not reject anything. There is, for example, Margaret Atwood with a Chinese bestseller. and an Angolan thriller, Fogwill and Rubem Fonseca on one side and on the other one a dozen Latin American and Caribbean authors of third, fourth, fifth category; there is a lot by Belen Gopegui and Vicente Battista -¡¡ … ??!! -while almost all current cardinal writers and those from the past forty years are conspicuous by their absence… Publishing just for publishing, simply anything; like a living statue of Havana historic center, never better said, it gives the impression that Arte y Literatura reacts to anyone who passes in front of it with a friendly face and generous attitude.)
It must be said that Cuban literature has taken a step beyond the idea told by Antonio Orejudo. In Garbageland [Mondadori, 2001], Juan Abreu inserts directly his own advertising. At footer he disposes text boxes that advertise different products that parade through the plot (in which we also find characters with neon signs on their clothing): Science fiction product placement. Things like this:
You can now have the singer at your disposal whenever you like! It is ideal to liven up feast s. Order now it to Universalclon. We have a comprehensive catalog of Cuban star clones: Benny Moré, Celia Cruz, Panchito Riset, Maria Teresa Vera, Olga Guillot, Elena Burke, Matamoros Trio, among others. Natural or pocket size. Request a singer now!
And:
The creators of the clone hamburger now put at your disposal the new and succulent fleshly-virtual hamburger. Order it at any of our web-stores: Swift & co.com. Swift & Co … the new flesh!
“Paid literary ad”, the author ironically explains at the end of each of these advertising windows.
In the post-apocalyptic string the novel imagines a future where the island of Cuba has become the picturesque Garbageland: a big dump “full of recycling units, huge warehouses, tunnels that end at superhighways and bridges running toward Florida, on-shore “. A legend circulates among the few inhabitants of this land: there is somewhere, in a parallel dimension perhaps, a place called the Mount, where vegetation is powerful and knows no bounds.
Genuine tribute to Lydia Cabrera -“She took me in and loved me, without I deserve it”, Juan Abreu states in her dedication-, Garbageland is also one of the best books ever written, if not the best, on José Marti’s campaign diary.
In the end, two characters manage to reach that sort of mythical bush. And once there, in a small community that keeps the memory of the maroons, they see a young writing. “A boy with curly hair who writes on the trunks of trees”, we can read. It is Reinaldo Arenas, of course, as Celestino in “Celestino antes del alba” ( Celestino before dawn).
The jungle of neon. And the space invaded by the unbridled, anarchic writing that blends with nature (writing as those “growing lianas” of ¨El palacio de las blanquisimas mofetas ¨ (The Palace of the White Skunks ). There is also a tension there, the intricacies of another battle. What does that wild boy writes in the trunks of the trees? We do not know. The agent Helga Pato would say: this is not important.
