## discussion: part 1 - Mexicans in Mexico
Add in your favorite lines, questions, irritations, moments to remember for later. Sign off on your posts if you want people to know who's thinking what you're thinking!

Notes from our discussion 7/28 at Claire's apartment:

- Juan Garcia Madero 
   -> he serves the purpose of a lens/viewpoint for us to understand the scene; he himself really isn't that important, but he allows us inside the world of the visceral realists; his willingness to become a visceral realist and throw himself into their world is what we need to understand it.
   -> at his core, he's a 17 year old boy, and Bolaño captures that pretty accurately. He's horny, he's literarily ambitious, he's insecure about how he interacts with almost anyone, he's trying to understand this scene that he's entered, etc

- Mexico City
   -> amazing portrait of the city, wandering around the cafés, bars, and bookstores looking for the visceral realists/Ulises and Arturo
-> all the names of streets and businesses
-> love when Juan Garcia runs into someone and ends up spending a whole day(s) with them, mostly wandering around the city

- the visceral realists
->never get to read anyone's poetry; most of them don't seem to read at all - they just steal books and give them to the one guy who reads

- Quim

- are the sex scenes gratuitous, or are they representative of Juan Garcia's life as a 17 year old who has joined a literary scene, left behind his family and schooling, and lost his virginity?


- some favorite scenes:
* when Juan Garcia meets Ulises and Arturo in the bathroom - their eyes beaming out from the smoke/mist
* María painting a watercolor, practicing dance, reading, listening to music
* when Juan Garcia finally runs into Ulises and Arturo and faints
* making a sandwich in the Font kitchen late at night (tall glass of milk, ham and cheese sandwich with oyster sauce and Dijon another sandwich of mustard, cheese, lettuce, and pickles bottled with two or three kinds of chilies, leftover chicken mole, bottle of strawberry Lulú, dinner)

- favorite lines

"NOVEMBER 2
I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way.

NOVEMBER 3

I'm not really sure what visceral realism is. I'm seventeen years old, my name is Juan Garcia Madero, and I'm in my first semester of law school. I wanted to study literature, not law, but my uncle insisted, and in the end I gave in. I'm an orphan, and someday I'll be a lawyer. That's what I told my aunt and uncle, and then I shut myself in my room and cried all night. Or anyway for a long time."

"Visceral realists were swarming everywhere although more than half of them were just university students in disguise."

"We found her standing in the middle of the room, practicing dance steps, reading Sor Juan Inés de la Cruz, listening to a Billie Holiday record, and absentmindedly painting a watercolor of two women holding hands at the foot of a volcano, surrounded by streams of lava."

"Suddenly I felt trapped. The waters, who were about to die at any minute, María's indifference, as if she'd already had enough of me, San Epifanio's distant, ironic smile, and even Angélica, who was the same as always – it all seemed like a trap, a humorous commentary on my own existence."

"María was in a red nightgown, which I mistook for a dress at first, with a volcano, a river of lava, and a village on the verge of destruction embroidered in white on the bodice."

"I hugged Belano and Lima and asked them what would happen to visceral realism. The didn't answer me."

"I saw my right fist (the only one I had free since my books were in my other hand) hurtling into the pimp's body and this time I saw him fall."