The Story of My Teeth (18 page)
Read The Story of My Teeth Online
Authors: Valeria Luiselli
BY CHRISTINA MACSWEENEY
1938
President Lázao Cárdenas announces the nationalization of Mexico’s petroleum reserves.
May 7, 1945
War ends in Europe.
1945
Bertrand 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.
1940
Production at the United States Smelting, Refining & Mining Company in Pachuca declines, causing many residents to leave in search of employment.
Circa 1945
Paul Klee’s painting
Angelus Novus
passes into the care of Theodor Adorno after its owner, Walter Benjamin, commits suicide in Portbou.
1945
Fifty years since Mr. Hoopdriver set out on a cycling tour of southeast England in H. G. Wells’s
The Wheels of Chance.
1950
Virginia 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.
1948
Centennial of the birth of German logician and philosopher Gottlob Frege.
1954
Author Francisco Goldman is born in Boston, Massachusetts.
1956
Julio 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.
1955
Fifty 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.”
1957
Penguin publishes Robert Graves’s translations of Suetonius’s
The Twelve Caesars.
1962
Centennial 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.
1962
In 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.
1965
Work begins on the construction of Mexico’s first Volkswagen plant.
1962
The first Scribe notebooks are manufactured in Mexico.
1966
Five 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.
1967
U.S
. country singer Leroy Van Dyke stars in the film
What Am I Bid?
1968
Possibly the 50th anniversary of the invention of the Chinese fortune cookie by Donald Lau in Los Angeles.
October 12, 1968
The Olympic Games open in Mexico.
1968
Multimedia 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.
1967
The Beatles release
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
with an album sleeve designed by Peter Blake and Jann Haworth.
1967
Sol LeWitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” is published in
Artforum.
1967
The 150th anniversary of the publication of
The Round Table,
a collection of essays by William Hazlitt.
October 2, 1968
Protesting students are massacred in Tlatelolco Square, Mexico City.
1970
Mexican American author and editor David Miklos is born in San Antonio, Texas.
1971
Four hundred years since Michel de Montaigne, weary of active life, retired to his father’s château at age thirty-seven.
1971
Essayist, poet, and editor Luigi Amara is born in Mexico City.
1971
Miguel Calderón, the enfant terrible of Mexican art, is born in Mexico City.
1973
Jorge Luis Borges resigns as director of the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires after being awarded the first Premio Internacional Alfonso Reyes.
1973
Centennial of the publication of John Stuart Mill’s autobiography, which includes comments on how Quintilian influenced his thinking.
July 2, 1976
Saigon renamed Ho Chi Minh City.
1976
The Voltaire Foundation is inaugurated at the University of Oxford.
1978
Carlos Velázquez, writer of norteña literature, is born in Coahuila, Mexico.
Early 1970s
Spanish author Enrique Vila-Matas first reads about the artist Raymond Roussel in the works of Marcel Duchamp.
1970
Bicentennial of the first scholarly translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives from the original Greek into English.
October 1, 1970
Janis Joplin records “Mercedes Benz” at the Sunset Sound recording studio in Los Angeles.
1971
Approximately 1,600 years since a young Augustine of Hippo prayed, “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”
1971
Three-dimensional artist Fernando Ortega is born in Mexico City.
1971
Part
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.
1974
Poet, essayist, and editor Luis Felipe Fabre is born in Mexico City: Pisces, Libra ascendant, moon in Aries.
1975–1982
Fifty years since the serial-format publication of Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin’s novel in verse,
Eugene Onegin.
1976
The 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, 1980
Tens of thousands join Jean-Paul Sartre’s funeral precession to his burial plot in Montparnasse.
1982
Bicentennial of the publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire
.
1982
In 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.
1980
Pablo Duarte, editor of the Letras Libres website, is born in Mexico City.
1981
An asteroid is discovered and named 3453 Dostoevsky.
1982
In
Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language,
Saul Kripke introduces Kripkenstein, a fictional character who holds views based on Wittgenstein’s writings.
1983
Mexican 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, 1984
Michel Foucault dies at age fifty-seven in the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris.
1984
Highway marries Flaca.
1983
Five hundredth anniversary of the publication of Jacobus de Voragine’s
Golden Legend,
Caxton edition, which recounts the lives of the saints.
1984
Mexican singer José María Napoleón, often called the poet of melody, releases the single “Nunca cambies.”
September 19, 1985
Massive earthquake under Mexico City leaves at least ten thousand people dead.
1986
Jean 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.
1985
Carlos Fuentes publishes
Gringo viejo.
June 8, 1987
Singer-songwriter Juan Cirerol—Mexico’s Johnny Cash—is born in Mexicali. His second album includes the track “Clonazepam Blues.”
1987
Mexican 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.
1987
Mexican author Guillermo Fadanelli lives in Berlin for a year and is surprised to find that the beer is not served cold.
July 1988
Centennial of the first-edition publication of Rubén Darío’s
Azul.
1989
Josefina 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.
1989
A Yoko Ono retrospective is held at a Whitney Museum branch.
1991
The 650th anniversary of the appointment of Petrarch as the first poet laureate since the classical era.
1992
Sam Durant has his first solo exhibition at the Bliss Gallery in Pasadena.
1995
The 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.
1991
Serpent’s Tail publishes Susan Bassnett’s translation of Margo Glantz’s
The Family Tree: An Illustrated Novel
in the United Kingdom.