“..in this period in the 1950s and early ’60s? You were there with all these people I’ve already mentioned along with Oscar Zàrate and so many others. From reading about it, it feels like this was a really creative and dynamic time.”
– “Yes, it was a paradise. There were different languages, backgrounds, cultural viewpoints that were circulating around and trading funny and/or tragic stories with each other. The stories mixed together fluidly, spontaneously, through films, historietas, literature, and radio. There, reality and imaginative fiction and other fantastical stories came together to produce an intimate mix that, it seems to me, encouraged us greatly. We lived near, and in, the wide open spaces of the Argentine pampa lowlands, something that needed us to fill it with stories. I and others believed that everything that we read, watched, and listened to was happening to us, was happening there. Parallel realities leapt out from the pages and the screens into our surroundings, into our souls. Argentina tried, but did not fully succeed, in making immigrants forget their pasts. And Buenos Aires was infused with a cosmopolitan atmosphere; we were and we could be, anywhere. Calé, Arlt, Ferro, Borges, Solano López, Hudson, Dickens, Bradbury, Monicelli, Bergman, Bioy Casares, Oesterheld, Breccia, Pratt, Roume, Chandler – they all spoke to us of Buenos Aires, of Argentina, and of the world that surrounded us from the pampa to Irkutsk, being everywhere all at once. I suppose it was the same in New York. I imagine it that way as well, feverish.”
Paul Greer 