Abandoned Havana eBook Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo Mary Jo Porter
Download As PDF : Abandoned Havana eBook Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo Mary Jo Porter 
Dissident Cuban writer, photographer, and pioneering blogger Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo presents a collection of surreal, irony-laden photos and texts from his native city. His “diary of dystopia”—an unexpected fusion of images and words—brings us closer to Havana’s scaffolded and crumbling facades, ramshackle waterfronts, and teeming human bodies. In this book, as beautiful and bleak as Havana itself, Pardo guides us through the relics and fables of an exhausted Revolution in the waning days of Castro’s Cuba.
Praise for Abandoned Havana
“It is difficult to capture in images the soul of a landscape or a city, perhaps because they don’t have one alone but many. Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo’s photographs, and the commentaries they are accompanied with, capture whirlwinds of souls and offer them to us in such way that our own soul is transformed. They teach us how to see inside out and toward the depth of things, without slipping on the surface of things.”
—Fernando Savater, author of Amador and winner of the Octavio Paz Prize
“Some [photographs] have a sly humor, others an abstract beauty...Mr. Pardo Lazo resists any easy categorization.”
—David González, The New York Times Lens Blog
“He is giving us the poetics of the city that is not touristy, nostalgic, or exotic...He is giving people a way to read the politics of daily occurrences...He juxtaposes the eternal beauty of the city and the real political urgencies of the moment.”
—Ana M. Dopico, New York University
Photographer and writer Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo was born in Havana, Cuba in 1971. Trained as a molecular biochemist, he is the webmaster for the blogs Lunes de Post-Revolución and Boring Home Utopics. His writing has appeared in Sampsonia Way Magazine, Diario De Cuba, CubaEncuentro, Penúltimos Días, All Voices, In These Times, Qué Pasa, and many other international publications. As an editor, he has compiled two anthologies of contemporary Cuban fiction translated into English and worked for the cultural magazine Extramuros as well as several independent Cuban digital magazines, including Cacharro(s), The Revolution Evening Post, and Voces. In 2012, he organized País de Píxeles, the first independent photodocumentary festival in Cuba. In 2013 his photographic work was profiled by David González of The New York Times. A resident of Havana, he visits the United States to give university lectures about social activism and Cuban civic society using new media.
Mary Jo Porter is an American who lives in Seattle devoted to helping Cuban dissidents on the island, especially the independent bloggers. Mary Jo, or “Maria” as her Cuban friends know her, is responsible for the English translation of Yoani Sanchez’s world renowned blog, Generation Y. She also translates for Claudia Cadelo’s Octavo Cerco, Reinaldo Escobar’s Desde Aqui, and many others. Together with friends and volunteers, Maria has help set up Hemos Oido, a website that posts the blogs of members of the alternative Cuban blogosphere and allows anyone who wishes to volunteer to translate these bloggers into other languages.
Abandoned Havana eBook Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo Mary Jo Porter
A bracing reminder of the cost of utopian visions.Product details
|
Tags : Buy Abandoned Havana: Read 3 Books Reviews - Amazon.com,ebook,Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, Mary Jo Porter,Abandoned Havana,Restless Books,PHOTOGRAPHY Photoessays & Documentaries,POLITICAL SCIENCE World Caribbean & Latin American
People also read other books :
- A Holistic Approach to Dog Health Bernadette Ancog 9781524591694 Books
- Pictures from Italy Charles Dickens 9781141044665 Books
- Dynamic Memory Revisited Roger C Schank Books
- The Heart Revolution Breakthrough for a New World by Annie Marquier Annie Marquier Editions Valinor 9782923228105 Books
- KP27 Bastien Theory Boosters More! Lines and Spaces Note Speller Theory Boosters Series Lisa Bastien and Lori Bastien 9780849773822 Books
Abandoned Havana eBook Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo Mary Jo Porter Reviews
Here's a vision of Cuba from the inside, as much a psychological portrait as a political takedown of communism and the Castros. OLPL's love of the capital city hums in every word, and it is the tension between this warmth and the author's dismay over what the country has become that serves as the book's central conflict. What is it about these Cubans and their outsized love for their country? Take a flip through "Abandoned Havana," and you might start to understand.
This book is enigmatic and impossible to classify. The prose is almost saturated with wordplay, puns, and the likening of unlike things. It seethes with paranoid (but not always unfounded) speculation and allusions to classic sci-fi and Cuban literary texts. The intertextuality is just as appropriate for the Internet Age (which, in finally reaching the quarantined Cuba, has allowed this book and the resistance that preceded it to happen) as the blog post-like, self-contained passages of text paired with the photos. These aren't "descriptions" of the images, per se, but they nonetheless "go" together quite well. My favorite images here are rich in symbolism, using the iconography of the Revolution to underscore the ironies of its later stage a vertical framing of a beach in which the ocean (OLPL calls it the "Water Curtain," like the Iron Curtain) overwhelms the crowd; another in which a young blond glances behind her, surprised at the sight of an elderly woman in an identical red dress (in Cuba, the future is just a dressed up past, "a fossilized future"); and a spray-painted Che face (of course lifted from the Korda photo) fading from a crumbling wall, whose owners have done their best to fortify it with brick.
Like fellow dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez, OLPL is a brave voice (and eye!) in the face of repression. Unlike Sanchez, though, OLPL, who is currently a writer-in-residence at Brown, does not seem ready to return to the country, and his prose thus seems to take on an even more unabashedly polemical tone.
(Lo leí en español también. Los ambos son muy buenos.)
Expecting to see photos of old bldgs., but they were none. Maybe I did not look in the right place.
A bracing reminder of the cost of utopian visions.
0 Response to "∎ Read Abandoned Havana eBook Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo Mary Jo Porter"
Post a Comment